TODD BLANCHE WAS DONALD TRUMP’S personal attorney, so it was natural that, when he was elevated to attorney general, a journalist asked whether he would “pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?”

The correct answer to such a question is obvious. The Justice Department and I are committed to the impartial administration of justice. We will always make prosecution decisions based solely upon the facts and the law after a fair evaluation of the evidence.

But Blanche said something a little different.

No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. The president, I mean, if I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, ‘I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,’ which is what he has said, what you’re saying to me is I should say, ‘No, sir, I’m not going to do it.’

What jumps out first about Blanche’s answer is the blithe refusal even to mouth (however disingenuously) the expected platitude. This is the Trumpian way. They don’t just break the rules behind closed doors; they shatter the rules in broad daylight. It’s not enough, for example, that the Trump Justice Department is denying resources to the team that investigates and prosecutes foreign corrupt practices; Trump issued an executive order pausing all such prosecutions. So it’s not news that Trump’s new attorney general will fail to seek impartial justice, but the refusal to even feign regard for impartial justice is new.

The substance of Blanche’s justification is also fatuous. Pledging to act independently of the White House doesn’t mean acting in every instance in direct opposition to the president. That’s absurd, and it’s not what independence requires. Nor could the president order the attorney general to “go after every violent criminal in this country,” since more than 98 percent of violent crimes are state offenses, not federal ones, and in any case the combined forces of the state and federal governments don’t have the resources to go after every violent criminal.

So much for deflection. The coffee-spitting moment came later, when Blanche was asked whether he would carry out an order that “crossed a legal or ethical line” and he proclaimed that “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal—or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

Let’s let the Freudian slip pass, but in fact the president had demanded that the Justice Department do something unethical that very week—namely, reconsider the decision to drop spurious vandalism charges against David Hearn. Jeanine Pirro’s own motion to the court acknowledged that the original indictment was based upon false information provided by the Department of the Interior. Nevertheless, President Trump fumed that Pirro had “choked.” This week we learned that she was convening a special grand jury for some unknown purpose. If I were Hearn, I’d keep my lawyer close.

And that perversion of justice is only a ripple in the flood of plainly politicized acts and forbearances by this administration. This is a president who sent a DM to his previous attorney general demanding the prosecution of his political opponents. It’s hard to think of how you could more comprehensively upend the idea of blind justice.

Trump’s apologists do have a valid point when they note that the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump in the Stormy Daniels case was also a form of lawfare. I said at the time that the case was flimsy and almost certainly would never have been brought if Trump were not the target. Trump’s flagrant lawbreaking did present a quandary: How do you hold him responsible for his crimes without unintentionally validating the idea in the minds of his supporters that all justice is corruptly motivated?

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There are no easy answers. Still, the Bragg prosecution was a local case, not the federal government seeking to punish a political foe. Ditto for the civil case Letitia James brought. At the federal level, Attorney General Merrick Garland was actually extremely reluctant to pursue federal charges against Trump despite the gravity of his conduct before and on January 6th. It was only after Trump announced his re-election bid that Garland felt compelled to appoint a special prosecutor (precisely to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest).

Nor is it the case that President Biden’s administration used the Justice Department to settle political scores. To repeat, Garland was widely criticized for moving slowly against Trump’s obvious lawbreaking in the Mar-a-Lago documents case as well as the January 6th insurrection. One can understand his hesitation. One administration prosecuting another opens the possibility of a dangerous tit-for-tat, but whatever your view about the wisdom of going slow against Trump, it’s preposterous to “whatabout” this. Under Garland’s leadership, the Department brought indictments against Rep. Henry Cuellar, Sen. Bob Menendez, former Rep. TJ Cox, Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan, Mayor Eric Adams (and we know how that turned out when Trump returned), former Mayor Andrew Gillum, and Hunter Biden—Democrats all.

Trump’s second-term Department of Justice, by contrast, has been a nonstop cavalcade of corruption, featuring blatantly political prosecutions, attempted prosecutions, or investigations of Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, “sandwich guy,” Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Kilmar Ábrego García, Alex Padilla, John Brennan, John Bolton, Sean Dunn, Ras Baraka, Jacob Frey, anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, including the widow of Renée Good, and many more.

Biden made poor decisions in pardoning his family at the end, but that was trivial compared with Trump’s mass pardons for the January 6th criminals; his pardons for cronies, donors, and other corrupt public figures; his firings of any official who participated in the January 6th or Mar-a-Lago investigations; his kid-glove treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell; and of course, his putrid attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for so-called “victims of lawfare” along with a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump and his insatiable family regarding past tax evasion.

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The aptly named Blanche (because he should, but doesn’t, blush) was along for all of it. He personally visited Maxwell in prison and has yet to provide an explanation for that highly unusual visit, nor for her promotion to a more comfortable prison. He was at the Department of Justice as 3,400 lawyers resigned in protest rather than engage in the kinds of unethical and unprofessional conduct Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche were demanding. He has defended with a straight face James Comey’s indictment for threatening the president with an Instagram photo of seashells.

This ethical flexibility was enough to make even some Republican senators hesitate about confirming him. But in the end, all but Collins and Murkowski voted yes, presumably because they fear that if it’s not Blanche it will be someone even worse. Thus does Trump extort his party—by threatening to get even dirtier. But this tactic only succeeds because of learned helplessness by Republican officeholders. In fact, when Trump gets pushback, he backs down. Ask Iran. Or consider the first utterly horrific attorney general candidate he proposed after winning the 2024 election, Matt Gaetz. Enough Republicans balked that Trump withdrew his name. He didn’t nominate someone even worse after that (admittedly a tall order). He went with Pam Bondi, a smidge less awful.

It seems the tactic of standing up to Trump is just crazy enough to work. But, no, the GOP has not learned that lesson. Republicans have chosen spinelessness instead. Even after a decade of this, I still cannot understand why.

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LIKE THE UNITED STATES, Russia is having national elections this fall. From September 18 to 20, voters will cast ballots for (but not necessarily choose) members of the lower house of the federal legislature, the Duma. So far, the only party worthy of the label “opposition,” Yabloko, has been struck from the ballot, in a decision affirmed on Monday by the appellate college of Russia’s Supreme Court. On the same day, one of the same party’s most recognizable political figures, a former member of a regional assembly, was handed a prison sentence of eleven years and one month on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian army. Earlier, another politician who had announced his Duma candidacy on an antiwar, pro-freedom platform had fled the country after a clear signal that he had to choose between emigration and prison.

It is, in other words, the sort of election you’d expect in Vladimir Putin’s Russia as the war in Ukraine creeps closer to the five-year mark.

But does the ruthless crackdown attest to the Kremlin’s totalitarian might or to its fragility—or both? And could it energize a new generation of young pro-freedom activists, hundreds of whom braved the police in Moscow to support Yabloko?

YABLOKO, FOUNDED IN 1993—its name, Russian for “apple,” is also a portmanteau of the names of three founders, of whom only one, Grigory Yavlinsky, is still sort of on the political scene—has long been regarded as a quaint relic of the 1990s and as a pathetic symbol of impotent liberalism, or even faux liberalism. It has also been perceived as Putin’s pet opposition: Not affirmatively cooperative like the “establishment opposition” parties (Just Russia, Liberal Democratic Party, and even the Communists) but nonetheless tame, toothless, and permitted to exist as long as it knew its place. A former Yabloko member, blogger and activist Maxim Katz, accused the party of “self-castration” five years ago, citing such displays of cowardice as a 2019 post on the party’s Twitter account discouraging people from attending peaceful protests.

Until recently, other opposition activists generally despised Yabloko—which hasn’t had a caucus in the Duma since 2003 and has typically received less than 1.5 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections—as an officially approved spoiler deployed against genuine opposition forces. (Yavlinsky’s former personal friendship with Putin didn’t help.) In 2015, Yabloko sued Alexei Navalny, the late anti-corruption activist, over a post charging that a regional Yabloko chapter had been “bought” by an oligarch with ties to the ruling United Russia party. In February 2021, Yavlinsky shocked many people by writing an article assailing Navalny, then already imprisoned after an attempted poisoning by Russian special services, as a nationalist and populist with his own autocratic tendencies.1

Even so, Yabloko was Russia’s only officially registered political party to oppose the Crimea annexation in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It also had a few highly visible and genuinely brave activists—among them Lev Shlosberg, a former member of the Pskov regional assembly who, back in 2015, publicized evidence of Russia’s covert involvement in the war in Eastern Ukraine. That’s the man who just got an eleven-year sentence for supposed fake news about the Russian armed forces. At least four other Yabloko members and activists, including the Deputy Chairman Maxim Kruglov, are already serving sentences on the same spurious charge.

Despite the official hounding, Yabloko’s registration for September’s Duma elections was approved by Russia’s Central Elections Commission in late July. It still faced some major handicaps. It was denied registration in several localities including St. Petersburg, where it enjoys relatively high popularity. In addition, over a dozen relatively high-profile Yabloko members, including Chairman Nikolai Rybakov, were disqualified from running because of typically absurd political charges such as posting “extremist imagery” online. In Rybakov’s case, the extremist image was a photo of Navalny in a condolence message on his death.

Still, Yabloko was on the ballot, with a slate of mostly young candidates and with the slogan, “For peace and freedom—for life without fear.”

That didn’t last long. Within days, Yabloko’s registration was challenged by the small, hawkish party Rodina (“Motherland”). Yabloko’s call for the immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, Rodina charged, was extremist and unconstitutional because it meant leaving “Russian territory”—i.e., Ukrainian territories annexed by Putin in September 2022 and written into the Russian Constitution, but still under Ukrainian control—in the hands of “the Kiev Nazi regime.” Other allegations had to do with foreign funding, specifically donations from Russian citizens who had income from foreign sources; illegal campaign expenditures, on the assumption that social media posts and podcasts publicizing Yabloko were (or amounted to) paid advertising; and copyright violations in campaign materials.

The copyright charges were especially Kafkaesque. Initially, Yabloko was accused of the unauthorized use of a photo from the Kommersant newspaper (a tank in a sunflower field) in its campaign materials, but it turned out that the photo had been legally purchased and properly credited. When that charge fell apart, the complaint had to fall back on far more esoteric claims. Yabloko’s logo was accused of suspicious resemblance to an image from a 1920 Soviet poster by avant-garde artist El Lissitsky: both feature a triangle piercing a circle. Also flagged were a U.S. army photo of the ruins of Hiroshima (which is in the public domain) and an image made with ChatGPT without OpenAI’s permission. And then there was a podcast host’s utterance, in an interview with Yavlinsky that was later posted on the Yabloko website, of two Soviet-era antiwar quotes that have long been part of the common language: “Anything but war,” a slightly altered line from the 1959 play Five Evenings, and “May there always be sunshine,” from a famous 1962 children’s song. (The American analogues might be “War is hell” and “What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”) To compound the absurdity, the son of the song’s composer publicly stated that his heirs had no objection to Yabloko using the line in any way it wanted.

But whether the accusations made any sense never really mattered: On August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered Yabloko struck off the ballot. An appeal was filed; but, given that the Central Election Commission and the General Prosecutor’s Office supported the decision, the chances of it being reversed on were roughly the same as Putin publicly apologizing to Ukraine for the invasion. On Monday, the disqualification was upheld, after a supposedly “open” hearing where only six members of the public were allowed inside the courtroom and no audio or video feed was permitted. (Someone still managed to smuggle out an audio recording.) A final appeal to the presidium of the Supreme Court is a simple formality.

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SO, WHAT IS THE MEANING of this charade? Why was Yabloko registered? Why was it booted from the ballot when, even if it miraculously won a majority of the vote nationwide, the Kremlin could have easily rigged the results—particularly now that Russia’s electoral districts include the annexed and partially occupied provinces of Ukraine, where United Russia can freely give itself 99.9 of the vote if needed?

The consensus among Russia’s independent, mostly exiled pundits and political activists is that giving Yabloko its moment in the electoral sandbox was intended primarily to demonstrate that antiwar sentiment in Russia is pathetically marginal—between one and two percent of the electorate. There’s also a view that Yabloko was meant to split the “tame liberal” vote and weaken New People (Noviye Lyudi), a six-year-old party which backs the war in Ukraine but opposes censorship and supports more democratic elections.2 While New People is basically a Kremlin project meant to appeal to young voters, the Kremlin may feel that it shouldn’t be allowed to get too big.

But something funny happened on the way to the voting booth: Support for Yabloko started to surge. The presence of an antiwar, pro-freedom party on the ballot galvanized large number of young Russians online. The party’s fruity name proved useful: Suddenly, merely posting a clip discussing one’s love for apples, or happily munching on one, became a sly act of political defiance. Apple memes and emojis multiplied, as did Internet searches for Yabloko. “Closed” government polls reportedly showed about 10 percent of voters expressing an intent to vote for Yabloko before it had even started campaigning. The threshold for representation in the Duma is five percent. (Yes, vote-rigging is a given—but too large a gap between the actual vote and the reported results could annoy enough of the populace to give the Kremlin a headache.) Meanwhile, even official and public polls have been showing United Russia’s rating at a record low of about 32 percent. And while majorities still profess approval of Russia’s actions in Ukraine—whether out of fear, passive conformism, or sincere conviction—recent polls find that nearly two-thirds of Russians support peace talks, while one in four favor immediate concessions for peace.

What’s more, it’s likely that the regime’s real fear was not so much the actual voting as the campaign. As former Duma member Dmitry Gudkov told Radio Liberty: “There are no elections in Russia—it’s a scam, the house always wins. But if we got six weeks of a legal antiwar campaign in Russia, that could have gotten a lot of traction. There would have been hundreds of thousands of activist volunteers all over the country distributing leaflets and so on.” Not to mention at least some access to mainstream media including federal television channels, guaranteed to every party on the ballot. Perhaps, by election time, the share of Russians who want peace now—even on Ukraine-friendly terms—would have risen from a sizable minority to a majority.

Many believe that the Kremlin’s strategists made another miscalculation, counting on the Russian opposition in exile—which still has an underground following in Russia, including on banned but widely accessed platforms like YouTube and Telegram—to join in a pile-on against Yabloko. Instead, there was remarkable consolidation behind it: Even activists from Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, including his widow Yulia Navalnaya, set old grudges aside and urged voting for the only antiwar and pro-freedom party on the ballot.

TV-RAIN host and analyst Yekaterina Kotrikadze has said that the most dramatic effect of Yabloko’s campaign was its appeal to young people who had largely withdrawn from the political into the personal, only to see their personal world invaded by the war and the state: Ukrainian drone strikes at online retail warehouses, gas lines caused by strikes at oil refineries, moves to throttle the Internet. In Kotrikadze’s words, “People realized that they don’t want to live like this.” Hundreds of young people showed up to support Yabloko outside the Supreme Court offices, both for the initial hearing and for the appeal—braving dozens of arrests, as well as police warnings to young men that protesting would get the draft board’s attention. Dmitry Medevedev, former fake president and current Putin attack dog, was sufficiently rattled to gripe about young pridurki (“retards,” basically) who, he suggested, are either lured by promised benefits or want to show off their rebellion.

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POLITICAL SCIENTIST EKATERINA SHULMAN told TV-RAIN that the rash decision to greenlight Yabloko’s run, followed by a scramble to block it, was not only a “massive embarrassment in two acts” but a sign of “dysfunction” in the regime’s upper echelons. Some see it as a sign of intensifying conflict between Kremlin factions—the legendary hawks vs. doves, or quasi-liberal technocrats vs. siloviki, hardliners from the military and security structures that represent brute force. (We could call it “technocrats vs. jackboots.”) Others agree with political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky that the warring “Kremlin towers” are largely a myth, and Putin is the only decider.

Whoever (besides Putin) may have played a role in the Yabloko two-step blunder, Russian dissidents in exile have widely viewed it as an encouraging sign of the regime’s weakness: as ex-party member Maxim Katz put it in a recent video, “from ‘Kyiv in three days’ to being scared of Yabloko.” A similar fragility can be seen in the response to onetime Duma member Boris Nadezhdin’s aborted campaign. Like Yabloko, Nadezhdin was once seen as a reliable “house liberal,” known mainly as a token dissident/whipping boy on Russian propaganda shows. In early 2024, he was allowed to register as a candidate for the presidential elections; after thousands lined up to sign his nomination forms, enough signatures were invalidated to keep him off the actual ballot. This time, 63-year-old Nadezhdin was handled far more harshly: Shortly after declaring his Duma candidacy last month, he was branded a “foreign agent,” making him ineligible to hold public office, and then arrested and fined for display of “extremist imagery.” (The offense? Once again, a Navalny photo.) When a foreign travel ban notice appeared on Nadezhdin’s electronic account for government services and then disappeared, he got the message: He is now in Paris.

Displays of weakness? In a sense, yes; but these are also displays of ruthless power. That’s why, for opposition veterans like former TV journalist Viktor Shenderovich, the signs of a new generation’s awakening are both heartening and terrifying. “We see that life goes on—there are sane people, wonderful people,” Shenderovich said in an interview on a Russian-language Polish channel. “But then I remember Iran and realize that in the next round, when Putin gets scared for real, they’ll start shooting people. For now, they’ll be throwing them in jail.”

It’s tempting to believe, with former political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza, that the regime’s collapse could happen soon and very suddenly. One can certainly see signs of hope in the fact that Russian troops are stuck in Ukraine and that Ukrainian long-range missiles are hitting more and more Russian strategic targets. But for the moment, Putin and his totalitarian machine are still more than capable of inflicting horrific damage—on Ukrainians and on Russian resisters.

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A PRESS RELEASE ABOUT KIDS AND VACCINES that the CDC distributed on Monday had just three sentences. But wow, those three sentences said a lot—about how we are backsliding on vaccination, and how the Trump administration is about to make things even worse.

The first two sentences initially seemed innocuous, maybe even a little encouraging. They explained that vaccination rates for kindergarteners “remain high,” with just a tiny drop-off between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 school years. But if you clicked through to the data, you learned that there has been a substantial rise in exemptions—that is, families opting out of school vaccination mandates, citing either medical necessity or, in states that allow it, personal beliefs.

Overall, 4.2 percent of kindergarteners had exemptions for at least one vaccine normally required for school attendance. That was up from 3.6 percent the previous year. The jump of 0.6 percent might not seem like much, but keep in mind that it is a national average, meaning that it masks wide variation among the states.1 The highest exemption rate was in Idaho, where 17 percent of parents opted out of the requirements.

Statewide vaccination rates also had that kind of variation. In many states, more than 98 percent of kindergartners had gotten the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. But in the states with the lowest rates, far fewer did: Idaho, again at the bottom, saw just 75 percent of kindergartners get it.

The scientific term for that is “yikes.”

And just as the national numbers mask variation among the states, the statewide numbers mask variation within their borders. MMR rates in some communities are well below the 95 percent level that’s become the scientific shorthand for “herd immunity,” meaning protection sufficient to stop sustained transmission when isolated cases appear. It is in these communities that outbreaks have driven this year’s measles count past 2,500, the highest in thirty-five years, with more than four months of calendar still to go.

And it’s not just measles. Although pertussis case numbers were down in 2025 from a year earlier, the tally remains higher than before the pandemic, with falling vaccination rates believed to be a significant factor.2 And last year there were sixteen related deaths. Babies are also dying from brain bleeds after their parents spurned vitamin K shots that would have prevented them, as ProPublica reported earlier this year.3

Against that backdrop, Monday’s data release would have been an obvious opportunity for the CDC to encourage vaccination, as part of a broader and aggressive public relations push. But there has been no such push from administration officials, including new CDC director Erica Schwartz, and the only advisory in Monday’s press release was its bland final sentence: “CDC continues to encourage parents to discuss vaccination options with their doctors.”

That mantra should sound familiar. It has been the agency’s party line under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been undermining federal support for vaccines ever since taking over as health and human services secretary last February. And he’s been doing so with the full support of President Donald Trump, whose own medically illiterate skepticism of vaccines was on full display last week during an Oval Office ceremony to sign an executive order.

An underappreciated element of that order is an instruction to federal agencies, calling on them to scrutinize and pressure states that make it difficult for parents to take exemptions—yes, the very trend that Monday’s press release documents. Among the agencies the order mentioned was the Justice Department, in what has been widely interpreted as a promise to start or join litigation against states that, in the Trump administration’s view, don’t make exemptions appropriately easy to obtain.

California is almost certainly one of those states, because exemptions there are especially tough for parents to get. But that wasn’t always the case. California’s vaccine rules are stringent because lawmakers made them that way. And they did so following a measles outbreak a decade ago—one that offers a preview of what’s in store for the rest of the country if the Trump administration’s latest effort succeeds.

IN EARLY JANUARY 2015, California’s state health department started getting reports of suspected measles cases from doctors and clinics. First it was one, then a half dozen, then dozens. Public health investigators got to work and quickly found a common element: All of the initially affected people had been to the happiest place on earth—i.e., Disneyland—just before Christmas.

The resort’s theme parks were a perfect environment for the disease to spread, as a subsequent Los Angeles Times article detailed, especially with the peak crowds from the holiday season. Standing in packed indoor queues for rides and shows, kids and adults were swapping breath and droplets for long enough to pick up a virus that can linger in the air for up to two hours, and that infects about nine of ten susceptible people who encounter it.

Except, that is, when they are vaccinated. The full, two-dose MMR vaccine is 97 percent effective at preventing measles, and symptoms in the breakthrough cases tend to be milder. The overwhelming majority of cases in the 2015 outbreak—both those who picked up the disease in Disneyland and those who got it afterward through secondary transmission—either had not been vaccinated or had unknown vaccination status.

California lawmakers responded quickly, in part because they were already paying attention. In 2012, following a decade in which the number of non-medical exemptions had risen from 4,000 to nearly 15,000, the legislature had passed a law making the process of obtaining an exemption a bit more complex: Instead of simply signing a piece of paper saying they had a principled reason for objecting, parents had to show they’d gotten information from a health provider about the risks and benefits of immunization (like avoiding the possibility of disability or death from measles).

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To lawmakers like Democratic state senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician, the Disneyland outbreak was proof that California needed to do more. Pan cosponsored a bill eliminating non-medical exemptions altogether, arguing—in a neat reversal of anti-vaxxers’ libertarian rhetoric—that the legislation was “about freedom; freedom from deadly contagions that are now preventable because of vaccines.” The bill drew plenty of angry opposition, enough that Pan got extra security. But the bill passed and became law with the signature of Jerry Brown, California’s Democratic governor.4

Four years later, following reports that some doctors were signing exemption forms without good clinical reason and sometimes without even seeing patients, lawmakers passed a bill tightening the medical exemption standard. Under the new legislation, which Democrat Gavin Newsom signed and is still in force today, the state tracks medical exemptions through a central system that requires doctors to attest that they’ve evaluated the patient and have a clinical basis for the exemption.

There’s solid evidence the laws had the effect their champions had hoped for. Before 2015, the MMR vaccination rate for California kindergartners was just above 92 percent, according to official state data. Since 2016, it has been at or above 95 percent for every year.

That’s not 100 percent, obviously. And the rate has actually declined by nearly a percentage point over the past few years, in a reminder that official requirements are just one of the factors determining vaccine takeup.5 But at least some of the parents opting out of vaccines for non-medical reasons are homeschooling their children, reducing the opportunities for spread within schools. And the state’s overall high vaccination rates are making outbreaks less likely.

That sounds a lot like a successful public health effort. Now the Trump administration seems bent on undermining it, possibly through the courts.

FOUR OTHER STATES also have no religious exemption for school vaccine requirements. And like those four states, California has faced litigation from anti-vaccination groups, religious freedom advocates, and parents who say that’s illegal. The Justice Department could join those lawsuits, or launch new ones.6

To date, lower federal courts have issued inconsistent, sometimes conflicting rulings in cases before them, University of California, San Francisco law professor Dorit Reiss told me in a phone interview. And the Supreme Court has so far declined to take up the issue directly.

But Reiss said that could change, noting that the justices have already vacated a lower court decision backing New York’s strict vaccine laws. In that 2025 ruling, the Court’s conservative majority instructed the lower court to take up the case again, this time taking into account a recent decision recognizing parents’ rights to pull their kids out of LGBTQ-inclusive lessons for reasons of religious faith.

And Justice isn’t the only cabinet department that Trump commanded to focus on vaccine exemptions. Under the executive order, the Department of Education can withhold grants to states that don’t allow exemptions easily enough to meet the administration’s standards. And while any attempt to cut off funds would likely provoke legal challenges from states like California, it might push other states with strict vaccine requirements in the other direction.

West Virginia is a perfect example. It is one of the four other states with no current religious exemptions and, as of the 2025–26 school year, it had the nation’s highest MMR vaccination rate: almost 99 percent. But bills that would reinstitute religious exemptions or roll back vaccine mandates in other ways have been gaining strength in the legislature. And the governor has already tried to introduce religious exemptions via executive order, though a federal court has for the moment blocked him.

The threat of litigation or lost funds, not to mention anti-vaccination lobbying from the Trump administration, could help the sponsors of those bills rally majority support.

“I know that my immunization colleagues in red states are worried,” said Reiss, who is a widely cited expert on vaccination law. “They expect legislation to be brought—and they expect pressure to pass it—that would either weaken vaccine mandates or weaken vaccine recommendations following the federal guidance.”

A glimpse of what could be in store for West Virginia comes from Mississippi, where MMR vaccination rates have fallen from 99 percent in 2023 (then the highest in the nation, just above West Virginia) to 97 percent (sixth highest). One reason is the introduction of religious exemptions, after a federal judge sided with plaintiffs who said the state’s lack of faith-based exemptions violated their freedom of religion. More than 3,500 students received the exemptions last year, nearly six times the number claiming medical exemptions.

State Health Officer Dan Edney told Mississippi Today that more measles outbreaks are “inevitable” as vaccination rates fall. That’s true for the rest of the country, as well. Evidently that trend is just fine with the Trump administration, where the only alternative to doing nothing is making the vaccination situation worse.

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Tim, JVL, and Andrew Egger discuss:
-(Yet another) story of a former Trump voter seeing a loved one run into the immigration policies he voted for.
-The faux outrage from MAGA-world at Sen. Jon Ossoff pointing out that Donald Trump and Natalie Harp travel together a lot.
-Karoline Leavitt leaving the White House, and who might come next.
-The Florida primary, and how Florida could become competitive in the fall.
-Pete Hegseth traveling to Iowa. Is HE running?

Plus:
-Andrew breaks down the latest weird trend on right wing twitter: Postpartum Depression truthers.
-Tim welcomes Nancy Mace to the YouTube content game.

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Get your tickets to Sarah's How to Eat an Elephant book tour in September! Her Chicago stop with Axe is on sale now.

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Trump is flailing so badly on Iran. He dispatched Jared Kushner to negotiate with the regime but then denies that any talks are happening at all. He also threatened to bomb one ally and hammered another for not helping him fight his war. And somehow, in all of this, Kushner—a private businessman and a consultant for the Saudis—is meeting with Hamas officials and Netanyahu while also looking out for his own financial interests. Plus: a primer on why we keep troops in South Korea, Hegseth may be mulling a presidential run, and Gen Alpha may save us all.

Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller.

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show notes:

• "The Next Level" podcast—out later on Tuesday

• Tim on another family being held at the Dilley detention facility

• The Gen Alpha TikTok video Tim mentioned

Bulwark LIVE: GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21. Bulwark+ members get early access via our presale NOW. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events for details and to get your tickets.

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Tim Miller is back in DC and it's somehow crazier than he left it. With National Guard troops patrolling Dupont Circle, Tim recruits Will Sommer for a scavenger hunt through Trump's Washington: a $500K-to-join MAGA club co-founded by Don Jr., the bar where Rand Paul's son got into it with Rep. Mike Lawler, the strip mall club where Bessent allegedly threatened to punch out Bill Pulte, and a visit to Mitch McConnell's house, where nobody's quite sure who's home.

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1. Shameful. Joyous.

What is it we say about bad things happening to bad people?

Meet Brent Jindra, a California tech salesman who voted for Donald Trump three times because of his promises to rid America of immigrants. Last year Brent met Galina Bobreneva, a nice Russian girl. They got married.

In July the couple took a domestic flight from San Francisco to Burbank. When they got off the plane government agents were waiting for Galina. First, they told her she had been selected for a “secondary screening.” Then, after getting her to a back room, she was handcuffed and hustled off to an unmarked vehicle. She spent the night on the floor of a jail cell in Los Angeles and was eventually sent to an internment camp in the Mojave desert.

And now Brent is upset because his wife isn’t that kind of immigrant. “She did not jump a wall, she did not swim a river,” he says.

This story has so many layers that I don’t even know what metaphor to use. It’s like watching a guy at the zoo jumping the fence and running full-speed toward a hot stove inside the leopard enclosure. It’s terrible. It’s karmic. And you can’t take your eyes off of it.

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Andrew Egger and Ben Parker went live to cover the Republican election deniers in 2020 now running for office, the company that put out a bogus poll on purpose, Trump’s latest threats against an American ally, and the White House response to a question about Natalie Harp.

Read Morning Shots: https://www.thebulwark.com/s/morningshots

The Good Fight Tour: h…

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It’s a tough year to run for governor of a swing state as a Republican. The folks elected this year will supervise their state’s elections in 2028, and many voters reasonably wonder: What did you do last time Donald Trump tried to steal an election? If he tries to do it again, will you stand in his way?

At least some candidates are plainly feeling the pressure. In 2020, Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, now Republican nominee for governor, strongly supported Trump’s efforts, backing a lawsuit to overturn the election results and voting against certifying them on January 6th. Last year, he said he supported the Trump FBI’s muckraking efforts into finding “improprieties” in the 2020 election; earlier this year, he refused to answer the question of if Biden had won in 2020.

Now, though, Tiffany’s had an apparent change of heart. “Joe Biden won,” he told CNN in a statement. “I’ll cooperate with law enforcement on investigations because Wisconsinites deserve full transparency and the ability to see the facts. . . . In 2028, I’ll certify whoever wins the most votes in Wisconsin.” In 2026, admitting Trump lost and insisting you’ll do your job if elected is apparently how you pivot to the general. Happy Tuesday.

Busy morning here at Bulwark HQ. Our Bulwark+ presale for members for The Good Fight Tour stops in Columbia, Charlotte, and Atlanta opens at 10 a.m. in the East. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events to get early access to tickets. General admission sales open on Friday.

Morning Shots Live: Andrew Egger and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube starting at 10:00 a.m. EDT. A replay will be posted on the site and the Bulwark Takes feed.

Who Would Want to Be Friends with America Now?

by Mark Hertling

Over the weekend, President Trump made a point of complimenting our enemy, North Korea, and antagonizing our ally, South Korea. Continuing the pattern, yesterday he threatened to bomb another longtime American security partner, Oman.

Asked about Oman’s talks with Iran concerning the Strait of Hormuz, which borders both countries, President Trump reportedly told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” He seemed to double down on the threat later yesterday in the Oval Office.

The president is threatening to bomb a country that for nearly half a century has quietly provided the United States with military access, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, and something increasingly rare in the Middle East: the ability to communicate with friends as well as enemies. For decades, Oman hasn’t been in the way, it has often been the way.

The modern Omani–American military relationship dates to 1980, when Oman became the first Persian Gulf state to sign a formal agreement allowing American forces access to its military facilities. That access was particularly valuable during the “Tanker War” of the 1980s. When the Reagan administration launched Operation Earnest Will in 1987 to protect reflagged Kuwaiti tankers from Iranian attack, Oman was one of the few Gulf countries with agreements already in place for military access and prepositioning.

That cooperation continued through Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In 2019, Washington and Muscat expanded the relationship again, giving American forces access to the ports at Salalah and Duqm. The latter is especially important in the Gulf: Duqm is a deep-water port capable of handling large American warships and sits outside the Strait of Hormuz.

That close cooperation in no way means that Oman is an American puppet. Oman is friendly with the United States while maintaining relations with Iran. That balancing act sometimes frustrates Washington and Oman’s Arab neighbors, but it has also made Muscat a useful intermediary when Americans and Iranians cannot—or will not—talk to one another.

Oman helped establish the secret channel between Washington and Tehran during the negotiations that produced the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, and it has helped secure the release of Americans held hostage by Iran. When Washington and Tehran needed an intermediary during the current crisis, Oman stepped forward again.

Which makes Trump’s threat especially bizarre. Just one day earlier, Trump ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea, criticizing Seoul for failing to support his Iran policy while again emphasizing his relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Meanwhile, NATO countries in Europe have been confronting increasingly brazen drone activity and suspected Russian provocations, without any kind of presidential threat directed toward Moscow. An emerging pattern is taking shape, and America’s friends are certainly noticing it.

Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and other Indo-Pacific partners will watch what happens to South Korea and wonder what it says about America’s commitments to them. So will leaders in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and Kuwait City. Those governments have spent decades building relationships with Washington, have cooperated with American administrations of both parties, and all understand that partnerships sometimes involve disagreements. But alliances and partnerships depend on something more fundamental than agreement. They depend on predictability and trust.

No nation expects the United States to agree with it on everything. What nations must be able to expect is that a disagreement with Washington will remain a disagreement—not suddenly become the dissolution of an alliance or even a threat of military attack.

A larger lesson here is about American leadership. Alliances are relationships built over years, administrations, wars, crises, and disagreements. Presidents inherit them from their predecessors, sustain them for their successors, and occasionally strengthen them through careful diplomacy.

But presidents can also destroy them. That destruction rarely occurs with a formal announcement. More often, trust corrodes incrementally. An exercise is canceled. An ally is publicly berated. An adversary is praised. A partner wonders whether Washington will respond to help during a crisis. Another begins looking elsewhere for security or diplomatic support.

And America loses a partner, an ally, or a friend.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Baseball Marks the Time… The seasons change. Children grow up. Years fly by. Yet somehow you can still remember exactly where you were when the ball cleared the wall, writes MARK HERTLING.

• Trump Explodes at CNN Reporter During Wild Press Conference… On Bulwark Takes, JVL and ANDREW EGGER give their takes on Donald Trump’s latest chaotic press conference, from his bizarre claims about talking with Kim Jong Un to his demand that South Korea pay up for U.S. military exercises.

• A 7-Year-Old Trapped in Hell Is Begging Senator Katie Britt for Help… TIM MILLER shares the story of a Venezuelan family who have spent weeks detained at the Dilley detention facility in Texas, despite doing everything the Trump administration has asked of immigrants seeking to leave the country.

Quick Hits

THE REAL FAKE POLLS: Political polling is in dire straits for a bunch of reasons. Nobody can figure out how to get surveys in front of representative samples of voters now that people don’t pick up cold calls from unknown numbers anymore. And with reliable results seeming out of reach, fewer and fewer outfits are even trying to run high-quality polls—which leaves narrative gaps for poorer and more partisan polls to influence public perceptions of a race.

Or even downright frauds. A group calling themselves Median Polling supposedly conducted a couple polls this month, including one in Wisconsin supposedly showing Francesca Hong up 20-plus points on David Crowley and another in the L.A. mayoral race showing incumbent Karen Bass leading challenger Nithya Raman by double digits. But with skeptical reporters digging into them, the group admitted yesterday that the polls were fakes.

“All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data,” it said in a statement. “Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

In fact, Median’s “experiment” had raised red flags from the start, at least among polling experts. But their hoaxed information did make it into broader ecosystem here and there: Bass shared Median’s bogus poll showing her comfortably in the lead on social media, even whipping up an infographic to help it pop. “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum,” Bass tweeted. “Let’s do this, LA!”

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NATALIE IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Donald Trump’s personal aide Natalie Harp has always been a strange figure in Trump’s orbit—a worshipful assistant dubbed the “human printer” who seems to serve as the president’s security blanket, keeping him well-supplied with printouts of flattering tweets and news clippings as well as personal letters left around his quarters. On Sunday, Sen. Jon Ossoff took a shot at the pair’s relationship, saying in one of his now-routine campaign speeches that Trump, instead of doing his job, “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Republicans fumed that Ossoff was smearing a young aide with baseless insinuations. And the White House went berserk. After CNN’s Kristen Holmes asked Trump if he wanted to respond to Ossoff’s comments yesterday, Trump’s “Rapid Response 47” account called her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged procession.”

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the account spluttered. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.”

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Cheap Shots

Folks, keep your head on a swivel:

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ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT WRIGLEY FIELD, a 23-year-old named Joshua Báez stepped to the plate for the St. Louis Cardinals for the first time in his major-league career. The very first pitch he saw, he belted 449 feet into the center-field seats. That was in the first inning. In the fourth inning, he did it again, this time to the left-field bleachers. And then, impossibly, in the sixth, he did it a third time, to right field.

Three home runs in his first three major-league at-bats. No player in the long history of Major League Baseball had ever done that before. Báez drove in five runs as the Cardinals beat the Cubs, 8–4, and somewhere along the way, a baseball game in August became something people will remember.

I certainly will.

Maybe I am especially susceptible to baseball nostalgia at the moment because the “Field of Dreams” game had been played in Iowa last week, and my wife and I once again watched the 1989 movie that inspired it. Like many baseball fans, I’ve seen that film more times than I can count. And every time, James Earl Jones’s magnificent speech gets me: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.” America changes, he says, but baseball “has marked the time.”

For me, that time has been marked by being a fan of the team with the birds on the bat. I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I was a boy, and when I think about my life, I can mark parts of it by home runs.

I was listening on KMOX radio as a boy of 11 in 1964 when Ken Boyer hit his grand slam against the Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series, turning a 3–0 deficit into a 4–3 Cardinals victory. Three years later, Bob Gibson—my boyhood hero—did something that somehow seemed perfectly normal for Bob Gibson: He pitched a complete-game victory in Game 7 of the World Series at Fenway Park, struck out ten, and hit a home run, too.

By 1982, I was an Army officer, married with children, when rookie Willie McGee hit two home runs in Game 3 of the World Series—and robbed Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas of one. Baseball had marked the time.

Then came Mark McGwire. Any baseball fan old enough to remember 1998 will recall the anticipation as he and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa approached Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs, and the explosion at Busch Stadium when McGwire’s number 62 barely cleared the left-field wall. Today we know much more about baseball’s steroids era, and that complicates the record. But it doesn’t erase the memory of that night—or the extraordinary summer when seemingly everyone was watching baseball, and the game had been reborn in American society.

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Another unique event, and still a major-league record, happened in 1999 at Dodger Stadium: The Cards’ Fernando Tatís (senior) became the first—and still the only—player in Major League history to hit two grand slams in the same inning. Both came off the same pitcher, Dodgers starter Chan Ho Park.

Who can forget Albert Pujols, nicknamed “El Hombre” as a nod to Cards legend Stan “The Man” Musial from a half-century earlier. Albert was a master, but when he hit an almost unbelievable home run off Brad Lidge in Houston—two outs in the ninth, with the Cardinals facing elimination—he became a legend. The ball landed above the train tracks at Minute Maid Park. One of the most intimidating HRs I’ve ever seen. Then his three home runs in Game 3 of the 2011 World Series, a feat previously accomplished in the Series only by Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson.

All Cardinals fans remember David Freese’s two-out, two-strike triple in the ninth inning of a later game in that same 2011 World Series in which Pujols worked his magic. And then, in the eleventh inning, Freese came up again and this time drove the ball over the center-field wall, winning the game. Joe Buck’s call echoed his father’s famous 1991 World Series call: “We will see you tomorrow night.” The Cardinals won Game 7 and their eleventh championship.

There have been so many other great memories. Fan favorite Adam Wainwright homering on the first pitch of his first major-league at-bat at the start of a masterful pitching career. Yadier Molina breaking a ninth-inning tie against the Mets in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS. Pujols—who had left the Cardinals for the Angels—returning in 2022 for one final, magical season and reaching 703. Each is connected in my mind not simply with where the ball landed but with where I was in life when it did. Like the changing of the seasons, like the birthdays and anniversaries and holidays that dot the calendar, the pacing of baseball—the pitches and outs, the games and series, the seasons and careers—mark a life over time.

That’s the magic of Field of Dreams, too. The movie isn’t really about Shoeless Joe Jackson, or a crazy ballfield in an Iowa cornfield, or even, ultimately, baseball. It’s about fathers and sons, growing older, memory, reconciliation, and the things that somehow remain constant while everything in America changes.

Saturday, Joshua Báez added another marker.

I don’t know what kind of career he will have. That’s another of the beautiful things about baseball: There are no guarantees. But I know that decades from now, some Cardinals fan will remember the Saturday afternoon at Wrigley when a 23-year-old rookie, making his major-league debut, swung at the first pitch he ever saw—and started making history.

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Tim Miller shares the story of a Venezuelan family — a pregnant mother, father, and their 7-year-old daughter — who have spent weeks detained at the Dilley detention facility in Texas, despite doing everything the Trump administration has asked of immigrants seeking to leave the country. The family followed every legal step: they applied for asylum, never missed an ICE check-in, and when they decided to return to Venezuela, they went through the official self-deportation process. Instead of being sent home, they were arrested and detained.

For more on the Texas Immigration Law Council: https://txilc.org/

Call Sen. Katie Britt: 202-224-5744

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JVL and Andrew Egger give their takes on Donald Trump’s latest chaotic press conference, from his bizarre claims about talking with Kim Jong Un to his demand that South Korea pay up for U.S. protection. They also look at Trump’s latest comments on the Iran war, the state of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and his increasingly strange defense of his White House ballroom. Plus: Trump lashes out at a CNN reporter, calls the press “fake news,” and insists his ballroom will be bulletproof and missile-proof.

Read more from JVL: https://www.thebulwark.com/s/thetriad

Read more from Andrew: https://www.thebulwark.com/s/morningshots

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Thanks to a shrewdly-timed Jon Ossoff campaign event, a lot more people are suddenly learning about young and blonde Trump confidante Natalie Harp AKA ‘the human printer’—and one of only three aides who accompanied POTUS on his catering truck-secret flight escape. Meanwhile, Trump is lending a hand to white-collar criminals and expanding his extortion and bribery options with his crypto firm. Plus: the flat-out lies about Fauci and miscarriages, Andrew loves the Great Lakes, the tariffs have done so much damage that even Sherrod Brown is against them, and Tim has some choice words about the primary challenge against Jared Moskowitz in Florida.

Andrew Egger joins Tim Miller.

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show notes:

• Catherine's piece on Trump trying to destroy the shell company registry

• Tim on crazy, stupid Republicans running in the miderms. First up: Mike Collins

• Andrew's critique of Politico's piece on Trump's tariffs in "Morning Shots"

• Bulwark LIVE: GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21. Bulwark+ members get early access via our presale starting August 18. Watch your inbox for details. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events for details and to get your tickets.

As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

Ad-free editions of The Bulwark Daily are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Tim Miller’s Bulwark Daily is available wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube. New shows drop each weekday afternoon. If you like the show, leave a comment and ⭐⭐⭐⭐ wherever you listen. Add The Bulwark Daily to your player of choice, here.

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Jonathan Cohn gives his take on the viral “puppy killer” attack against Abdul El-Sayed—and explains how a misleading story about Detroit’s animal control department became a powerful piece of political misinformation. The reality is far different from the headline. El-Sayed inherited an animal control system plagued by neglect and abuse, and the department improved significantly after he took over. Jonathan breaks down how the Daily Mail, right-wing influencers, Republican candidates and Fox News helped spread the story and why this episode is a warning about how easily misinformation can overwhelm the truth.

Read more from Jonathan: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/debunking-maga-puppy-killer-smear-against-abdul-el-sayed

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1. Sides

Over the weekend Hakeem Jeffries was asked if he endorsed the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. He said no.

“I don’t support the DSA agenda, as has been articulated by the DSA itself,” Jeffries said. This makes sense. Jeffries is a Democrat, not a member of the DSA. If he endorsed the entire DSA agenda, then he’s be a member of the DSA.

As you might expect, this made some people on the internet mad.

But you know what? They can suck it. Because the DSA—by which I mean the official organ that controls the infrastructure of the Democratic Socialists of America—is forking nuts. So nuts that if you told me that the DSA was a false flag operation run by the Heritage Foundation in order to discredit the Democratic party, it would make sense.

Individual DSA politicians might be closet normies (like Mamdani) but the organization itself? Guys, buckle up. We’re going on a tour of crazy.

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Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) and Ben Parker went live to cover Trump threatening to bomb Oman, an ally, as a deal to end the war in Iran remains elusive. Plus, Trump praised North Korea over the weekend and cancelled our military drills with South Korea.

Read more from Mark: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/canceling-military-exercises-hurts-us-south-korea…

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Today marks the end of the sixty-day negotiating period set forth in the memorandum of understanding the Trump administration signed with Iran. By now, we were supposed to have agreements on the status of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program. And we do! We can all agree that the Trump administration doesn’t know what to do about either problem. Happy Monday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post today at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

The Other War We Aren’t Winning

by Andrew Egger

I am not, as a rule, a big-time media critic. Journalism’s a tough job in a dying industry, and writing about writing can get a little navel-gazy—life’s too short!

Still, sometimes in life our principles are tested. So it was this weekend, when I found myself unable to stop thinking about a remarkable new Politico article: “TACO No More: How Trump Won On Tariffs.”

The headline alone was fascinating. Until I read it, I personally had been unaware not only how Trump had won on tariffs, but that he had won on them at all. I had been laboring under the delusion that Trump’s tariffs were actually treating us pretty badly: slowing economic growth, pushing up prices, annihilating small businesses, failing to deliver the resurgence of manufacturing that Trump promised. Plus they’ve been losing in court: The Supreme Court crushed his “Liberation Day” tariffs as unconstitutional this year, forcing Trump both to refund billions in collected tariffs and to scramble to reconstitute his tariff regime on other statutory pretexts.

I’d even been harboring suspicions that the tariffs were a major political loser: Only 33 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s trade and tariff policies, with nearly 59 percent disapproving, per the Silver Bulletin polling average on the question. Americans have soured on tariffs so much that even the most tariff-friendly Democrats are starting to run against them: A recent ad for Ohio’s Sherrod Brown quotes a local farmer saying that Sen. Jon Husted “supports the tariffs which have driven the prices down which we can sell our crops.”

In what sense, then, does Politico argue that Trump “won” on tariffs? Simple: Last year, many worried that his tariffs would actually crash the global economy, and so far, they haven’t:

After all, for all his swerves and concessions, the president has not abandoned a global trade war that has fueled inflation or a stalemated conflict with Iran that has rattled oil markets.

And financial markets have become pretty zen about all of it. . . . tariffs, which have upended supply chains, raised costs for businesses and fueled tension with foreign allies and adversaries alike? These days, they mostly just warrant a shrug from investors.

Trump often gets graded on a curve, but this is just grade inflation. What other president has been lucky enough to find their major economic policies graded on a scale of “if it didn’t spark a once-in-a-century depression, it’s a win”?

There are two major reasons why Trump’s tariffs have “merely” resulted in slow-motion economic damage rather than spectacular market disaster. One is simple: Trump himself backed away from the most self-evidently insane ones. In April 2025, we were staring down the barrel of tariffs on China that would have forced a total decoupling between the two economies. The resulting bond-market panic spooked Trump into reversal and gave us the concept of the TACO trade; he hasn’t dared reach for anything like the same level of tariffs since. To call his remaining tariffs a “win” simply because they weren’t as disastrous as the ones originally proposed is ridiculous—why should we praise someone for hitting us in the face with a hammer just because it feels better when he stops?

The other major factor is that the effects of Trump’s trade wars have been partially obscured by the bigger economic story of the past two years: the economic sugar rush of our artificial intelligence boom and the corresponding mammoth data center buildout. Ironically, as Bloomberg News noted this month, that buildout has been taking place on a different trade-policy planet than the rest of the economy: “The deep-pocketed tech firms racing to build data centers have largely gotten a pass” from Trump’s tariffs while importing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI infrastructure. “In effect, they’ve been protected from Trump’s protectionism.”

And at the same time, Trump’s other economic calamity—the Iran war—has been so self-evidently counterproductive that it distracts attention from his other economic blunders.

If Trump’s trade philosophy worked, then allowing giant economic drivers like AI manufacturing to short-circuit his tariffs would be a policy disaster. Instead, Trump has quietly let this status quo continue, both as a favor to the tech megadonors in his political coalition and to avoid interfering with the only thing driving the stock market into the stratosphere.

In Trump’s gimmicky, art-of-the-deal-addled mind, all this might add up to a “win.” Apparently, there’s even a Politico writer out there who’d agree. Fortunately, convincing the public will be a much taller order.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Canceling Military Exercises Hurts Us, Not Our Enemies... Since President Trump all but gutted the U.S.–South Korean maneuvers, MARK HERTLING asks if American forces in Korea will still be ready to “fight tonight.”

• ‘Negotiations’ Aren’t the Answer in Iran or Ukraine... “Gentlemen may cry, ‘Peace, peace!’ But there is no peace”, writes BRYNN TANNEHILL.

• Trump’s New AG Just Made a Stunning Admission on Meet the Press… WILL SALETAN takes on Kristen Welker’s Meet the Press interview with Todd Blanche, arguing that Blanche’s evasions on Justice Department independence, Trump’s influence over prosecutions, January 6th pardons, and a proposed compensation fund expose him as a loyalist ready to do the president’s bidding.

• Frank Kendall and the Weapons of Tomorrow… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the administration’s stripping former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall of his security clearance for innocuous comments about Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.

Quick Hits

KIM JONG UN-BELIEVABLE: The president posted this yesterday:

There are so many things that are stupid or wrong about this post—let’s see if we can find them all:

• Trump habitually fails to distinguish between his own personal interests and those of the country, and maybe he doesn’t feel like North Korea is a threat to him. But just last year, then-director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Jeffrey Kruse told Congress that “North Korea is in its strongest strategic position in decades, possessing the military means to hold at risk U.S. forces and U.S. allies in Northeast Asia, while continuing to improve its capability to threaten the U.S. Homeland.” (Maybe that ballistic missile test they fired off a couple weeks ago was “unthreatening and respectful”?)

• Trump is complaining about the costs of exercising our own forces, who are scheduled to train with about 18,000 South Korean troops.

• Did last year’s version of the same exercise send a “totally inappropriate and hostile signal”?

• Trump’s narration of the timeline is excellent. “I’ve hated these exercises forever, but I forgot to get them canceled and now of course it’s too late.”

• “Somewhat unrelated”? Yeah, right.

ARE YOU REASSURED?: Finally, someone is paying some attention to the fate of the USS Lincoln besides the sailors onboard and their worried families back home. Central Command Commander Adm. Brad Cooper visited the ship, which has been at sea since November and is facing a morale and mental health crisis so extreme that at least one sailor has jumped overboard. Adm. Cooper urged perspective: “Of the U.S. Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers, the Lincoln currently has among the lowest number of cases related to mental health.”

So, the others are worse?

I HAVE THE WORST F—ING ATTORNEYS: Todd Blanche, upon being sworn in as attorney general, promised that under his leadership, the Justice Department would not be independent of the president. On Meet the Press yesterday, he said: “Will I take the president of the United States’ view on something into consideration? Yes, of course.”

Trump would be better off if he hired better lawyers. As Paul Rosenzweig wrote in The Bulwark in December 2024,

Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police is (perhaps apocryphally) remembered for saying, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” That chilling phrase is the very definition of what, in American law, we call a vindictive prosecution—the claim that a prosecution is being brought as retribution against a person for acts that are unrelated to the crime being charged.

So now any federal defendant whom Trump has insulted, feuded with, denounced, demeaned, declared an enemy of the people, or even so much as looked at sideways can add to their defense the claim that they’re not being prosecuted because the government believes they committed a crime, but because they’re a personal or political enemy of the president. Here’s the history of Donald Trump disliking me, your honor, and here’s the attorney general promising to consider Trump’s views. The argument will be stronger in some cases than in others—but even still, it’s a freebie that no competent prosecutor would want to hand a defendant.

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Cheap Shots

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP announced Sunday that he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce U.S. military exercises with South Korea, just as American and South Korean forces were preparing to begin one of their most important annual training events. Trump complained about the cost, suggested the exercises were unnecessarily provocative toward North Korea, and, astonishingly, connected his decision to South Korea’s refusal to support his administration’s effort to denuclearize Iran.

It is difficult to imagine a more thorough misunderstanding of the purpose of a military exercise—or an alliance.

The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise begins Monday—otherwise Trump suggested he might have canceled this year’s event. But his direction raises questions about future exercises and, more importantly, about his understanding of why American forces train with allies. These exercises aren’t diplomatic favors Washington grants. They are part of the preparation required to deter—and, if necessary, defeat—an attack by North Korea.

The Korean Peninsula remains one of the most dangerous military environments in the world. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea, facing a North Korean regime with a massive conventional military, nuclear weapons, sophisticated ballistic missiles, and forces that have gained recent battlefield experience alongside Russia in Ukraine. North Korea continues testing missiles and improving its nuclear capabilities while repeatedly threatening South Korea and the United States. That’s why generations of American soldiers have trained in Korea—including me.

IN THE LATE 1990s, I commanded an Army brigade at Fort Lewis, Washington, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Our brigade was part of the reinforcement plan for the 2nd Infantry Division in case war broke out on the Korean Peninsula. That mission meant much more than putting soldiers and equipment on airplanes and ships and deploying them west across the Pacific. We had to understand how we would get there, what we would do when we arrived, and how we would fight alongside the South Korean forces already defending their country.

We repeatedly rehearsed the enormously complicated logistical undertaking of moving an armored brigade 5,000 miles across the Pacific and unloading our equipment at the ports, and we practiced gunnery and maneuver on Korean ranges and training areas. We designed our missions around the Korean terrain—dominated by mountains with tight maneuver corridors, speckled with dense population centers, connected by limited road networks—and even the extremes of Korean weather.

But some of the most valuable training involved something harder to measure on a readiness chart: learning how to operate with our Korean allies.

American and Korean soldiers have different languages, military traditions, equipment, procedures, and ways of approaching problems. Those differences don’t disappear when governments sign a treaty. They must be worked through on training fields, in command posts, during planning sessions, and through repeated exercises. We learned how Korean commanders operated, and they learned how we operated. We developed relationships that allowed soldiers and leaders to understand one another before people were shooting at them.

The Korean Augmentation to the United States Army program was particularly important. Korean soldiers (“KATUSAs”) served inside American formations, providing capabilities and cultural understanding while strengthening the bonds between the two armies. To Americans who served in Korea or trained with Korean forces, KATUSAs were fellow soldiers and part of our team, just as we were part of theirs.

That experience taught me something applicable to every military alliance: Interoperability doesn’t happen because politicians announce it. It must be practiced.

Exercises and training expose what doesn’t work. Communications systems fail to connect. Logistics plans prove unrealistic. Units arrive late. Intelligence doesn’t move quickly enough between headquarters. Ammunition, fuel, maintenance, medical support, and transportation become bottlenecks. Commanders discover that assumptions made while looking at maps don’t hold up when they meet actual terrain. It’s far better to discover those problems during an exercise than under a North Korean artillery barrage.

Today’s American–South Korean military relationship is even more integrated than it was when my brigade trained for Korea. The 2nd Infantry Division is now the 2nd Infantry Division/ROK-U.S. Combined Division, the Army’s only multinational division. American and Korean forces operate through command arrangements refined over decades, and their mission is captured in the phrase familiar to virtually every American soldier who has served on the peninsula: “Fight Tonight.”

That’s not just a slogan. North Korean artillery, missiles, special operations forces, cyber capabilities, and nuclear weapons don’t allow for the luxury of spending several weeks figuring out command relationships after a crisis begins.

That is why exercises such as Ulchi Freedom Shield matter. They rehearse command and control, intelligence, logistics, maneuver, air and missile defense, medical support, cyber operations, and reinforcement. Increasingly, they also address drones, GPS jamming, electronic warfare, and other aspects of a rapidly changing battlefield.

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TRUMP HAS LONG VIEWED these exercises differently, describing them as expensive and provocative. Following his 2018 Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un, his administration suspended the old exercise, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, and curtailed other exercises in hopes that reducing American military activity would encourage progress toward denuclearization. It didn’t. North Korea continued developing nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated missiles.

Sometimes modifying an exercise makes strategic sense. Military exercises send signals, and presidents can adjust those signals as part of diplomacy. If reducing or postponing an exercise produces a meaningful and verifiable security concession from an adversary, that is legitimate statecraft.

But that isn’t what Trump announced Sunday. Instead, he connected military readiness on the Korean Peninsula to South Korea’s unwillingness to support an American policy toward Iran. That transforms an important military exercise from an instrument of deterrence into a political bargaining chip.

South Korea is an ally, not an American subcontractor. Allies share interests, but they don’t always share policies. Seoul has its own political considerations, regional security concerns, and responsibilities to its citizens. Washington can disagree with a South Korean decision concerning Iran without threatening military cooperation necessary to deter North Korea.

The danger extends beyond Seoul. Japan, Australia, and all our allies around the world will watch how the United States treats South Korea. China and Russia will watch, too. And Kim Jong Un will watch most carefully of all, because deterrence depends not simply on American military capability but on an adversary’s belief that the alliance confronting him is capable, prepared, and politically cohesive.

Trump often says America has the greatest military in the world, and in many respects he is right. What he doesn’t seem to understand is how that military became so capable.

Military effectiveness comes from people knowing how to fight under extraordinary pressure. It comes from commanders and staffs practicing difficult missions, pilots flying complex sorties, sailors providing a logistics lifeline to an ally’s peninsula, soldiers conducting gunnery and maneuver training, maintenance crews keeping equipment functioning, and logisticians figuring out how to move fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and medical supplies across oceans. When America expects to fight alongside allies, it trains with those allies until cooperation becomes routine.

That was what our brigade was doing more than twenty-five years ago when we practiced deploying from Fort Lewis to Korea. We weren’t preparing because we wanted a war with North Korea. We were preparing because being ready was one of the best ways to prevent a war. We wanted North Korean commanders to understand that if they attacked south, American reinforcements would be standing strong next to their Korean counterparts. We would arrive knowing the mission, understanding the command structure, and prepared to fight alongside an ally with whom we had already trained.

America does have an extraordinarily capable military. But military excellence isn’t an inheritance that automatically passes from one administration to another. It must be rebuilt every day through training, maintenance, logistics, discipline, leadership, and exercises that cost money and inevitably create friction with potential adversaries.

The purpose of Ulchi Freedom Shield isn’t to make Kim Jong Un comfortable; it is to convince him that starting a war would be a catastrophic mistake. If Trump wants to keep boasting that America has the best military in the world, he needs to understand what made it that way.

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IT’S EASY TO START WARS, and far harder to end them. This is a lesson that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are discovering, for a lot of the same reasons. Both began wars of choice on the assumption that they could conduct decapitation strikes, achieve favorable leadership changes, and end up in control of a puppet state. Trump clearly had Venezuela in mind; Putin probably had a situation more like Chechnya or Belarus. Instead, both ended up trapped in quagmires that they cannot negotiate their way out of.

Nonetheless, the instinct of many Western analysts is to call for negotiations in both cases. That’s a foolish mistake. It assumes that an outcome favorable to everyone is possible, and the logic runs backward from that flawed assumption. In the Iran war and the Russia–Ukraine war, conditions on the battlefield will decide when and how the war ends, and if and when there are negotiations at all—not the other way around.

To understand why, it helps to consider why wars end. There are generally five reasons, any one of which can be sufficient: One side is no longer capable of resistance; one side achieves its objectives; one side decides that the cost of conceding is less than the cost of continuing to fight; one side simply loses the will to fight; or both sides conclude there is no path to victory.

As long as both sides maintain the ability and will to fight, the war will continue. If either side believes it has a plausible theory of victory, it won’t want to make any significant concessions at the bargaining table. The stronger and more plausible the theory of victory, the more comprehensive and inflexible the demands will be.

In modern times, the losing side is rarely completely overwhelmed and no longer able to fight. In the case of the United States and democracies in general, wars either end when a limited but well-defined set of objectives is achieved (e.g., retaking Kuwait, seizing Maduro or Noriega) or when public opinion turns against the war and politicians decide it’s time to stop fighting—for strategic reasons, political reasons, or often both.

Whether and when a country chooses to stop fighting depends on whether the war is one of survival or one of choice. It also depends on who is making that determination: Often a war of survival for an authoritarian ruler or clique can be a war of choice for the nation, so whether the country in question is democratic or autocratic also influences how it makes peace. When democracies fight a war of choice, public support tends to erode quickly. When a democracy is fighting a war for national survival, on the other hand, its people will hang on to any thread of hope and keep fighting.

Autocracies are a bit different: When they fight a war of choice, they can press on regardless of whether the war is popular or not. Such is the case in Russia’s continuing conflict with Ukraine. If an autocrat perceives that losing the war will cost him his position, he can continue to throw old men and boys at the front until victory or collapse. In an autocracy, the fate of the ruler or ruling elite is treated as tantamount to the fate of the country, so even a war of choice can be fought as if it’s a war of national survival, as in Saddam Hussein’s long, bloody, devastating war against Iran.

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THIS IS A LOT OF THEORY, but it’s necessary to explain where Russia and Ukraine, and the United States and Iran, are today. The two situations are similar, but with some crucial differences.

Fundamentally, the United States and Russia have both launched wars of choice from which they cannot easily extricate themselves. In Russia there is a history of very bad things happening to rulers who lose wars, and Putin is reportedly considering another mass mobilization, despite the disruption and discontent it will cause. Trump is facing the loss of both the House and the Senate, and is open to declaring a national emergency to rule by fiat and rewrite election rules to rig the elections.

In other words, both Russian and American leaders are enmeshed in a war they can’t seem to win, and to stave off the consequences of losing, both are willing to take steps that will produce massive unrest. The key difference between the countries is that Russia still has a semi-plausible path to victory. It could deploy a massive number of glide bombs and ballistic missiles to pummel cities, infrastructure, and fortifications along with an extra 300,000 to 500,000 mobilized troops. This would overwhelm Ukrainian defenses, albeit with a horrific number of Russian casualties. It might allow them to achieve their territorial goals of capturing Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. This slim possibility is the basis for Russia’s intransigent negotiating position.

The United States doesn’t have as clear a path to victory. Trump is operating not as an autocrat nor as a democratic leader, but as something in the middle: He started a war of choice without identifying clear aims or winning political support for it, but his options are limited as long as he still has to care about support for the war among members of his party (and Americans in general). The American arsenal of some critical weapons is depleted, and the American economy and military aren’t set up to launch a ground invasion of Iran—seemingly one of the only solutions that would secure the Strait of Hormuz outside of using WMDs, albeit at enormous cost. Aside from the use of nuclear weapons, there’s no level of aerial campaign pressure that can persuade the Iranians to open the strait. This is why the United States has been indicating that it might accept demands from Iran that would have been unthinkable before the war started, like letting Iran control the flow of ships into the Persian Gulf and charge a toll for passage.

On the other sides of the conflicts, both Ukraine and Iran are in wars of survival. Ukraine’s is one of national, cultural, and political survival, not merely the survival of the ruling regime. Both countries are fighting on their home turf (so to speak) and are willing to endure extreme privation to win a victory, and both have their own theories of how that victory can be achieved.

The Ukrainian plan involves killing Russian troops and causing horrific casualties for every meter of ground captured. It also involves disrupting the Russian economy and forcing the Russian government to resort to mass mobilization. These strategic goals will force Putin to break the social contract he had with the Russian people, in which they traded liberty for a higher standard of living and international prestige. There may be a limit to how much war Russian society will tolerate; that’s the reason why Putin has been so hesitant to order another mobilization, to send draftees to Ukraine, or even to call the war a war.

Both Russia and Ukraine think they can win, and there is no real overlap between their demands. Thus, a negotiated settlement is impossible at this time. The best thing the West can do to achieve peace is to ensure Ukraine makes as much progress as possible toward victory over the next year.

For Iran’s part, its plan for victory is simple: keep the strait closed for the rest of President Trump’s term (at least) and watch him twist in the wind. Trump can’t do anything about it militarily, and is unwilling to meet their maximalist demands. Heads, Iran wins; tails, Trump loses.

Iran has a theory of victory and will pursue it as long as it seems viable, insisting on its extravagant demands as long as Trump is in office. But the United States has no good way out of the mess it made; dramatic escalation or humiliating concessions are the only options left.

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Austin, Texas
BARELY A FEW HOURS INTO THE ANNUAL summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee, chair Ken Martin made one thing abundantly clear: that he has read all of the stories about himself. The one about how he threw a phone in a rage. The one about how he put the DNC’s headquarters up for collateral. The pieces about his struggle to raise money and his mishandling of the 2024 autopsy report.

“You see all these stories about Democrats in disarray and Ken Martin this and Ken Martin that, and all the bullshit they want to focus on,” Martin said at the DNC’s Labor Council meeting. “You know who’s not focused on it? Me! And you shouldn’t be, either.”

At the Rural Council meeting the next day, Martin told the crowd: “You can believe all the bullshit you want about me. I just let it all roll off my back.”

Martin repeated that message throughout the week as he made his way from council meeting to council meeting and privately met with DNC members on the sidelines. And he was hardly alone in his effort to project a sense of above-the-fray confidence.

When I arrived at the Hilton Austin on Thursday morning, Donna Brazile—the former DNC interim chair who recently published an op-ed urging Democrats to stop publicly fantasizing about ousting Martin this close to an election—was holding court with a clutch of young Democrats, exhorting them to stay focused and “do the work!” On her way into Friday’s meeting, Minyon Moore, a longtime Democratic strategist and influential DNC member, told me “everything is wonderful!” and encouraged me to “find the good!” to write about.

Seated at a U-shaped conference table in a cavernous ballroom at the executive committee meeting on Friday, finance chair Chris Korge proclaimed that “in spite of spin that comes out from all kinds of people . . . I want to assure you all that our fundraising efforts are really, quite frankly, on track.” Vice chair Reyna Walters-Morgan stressed that “voters don’t care about the internal squabbles.” And as vice chair Malcolm Kenyatta worked the crowd before the Saturday session, he told me: “Anything good you’ve heard is true, and anything bad you’ve heard is all lies!”

The Austin meeting, the DNC’s last big gathering before the midterms, was full of official business. Most significantly, members approved the new 2028 primary calendar that puts South Carolina’s primary first on January 22, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia. But the meeting also felt like a giant morale-boosting event intended to rally the troops and quell a nascent rebellion among a minority of DNC members who believe Martin is failing at his job.

Former DNC chair and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe even rescheduled a family golf trip to Ireland to give a rah-rah speech at Saturday’s general session, opening his remarks by talking about his dad, Jack, who he said had a word for when “people spend too much time complaining in our party.”

“He called them ‘lemon suckers.’ His point was: Stop complaining, get up, and actually go do something.”

“I have a message for all of those geniuses and political geniuses out there who constantly go on TV and Twitter—Democrats trashing fellow Democrats, I got a simple message for you: knock it off, or get off the playing field, ’cause we have too much work to do,” McAuliffe continued, as the room of a couple hundred DNC members erupted in applause.

IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP to the Austin meeting, DNC members told me that the gathering would serve as a gut check on Martin’s future. Assuming Martin does not resign voluntarily—something no one expects he will do—the only way to force him out would be for a majority of the DNC’s roughly 450 members to vote in favor of removing him. And if the reaction to Martin’s defiant “bullshit” lines and McAuliffe’s impassioned calls to quit the complaining are any indication, Martin’s chairmanship is safe.

After a summer marked by turmoil within the party—and not just DNC drama, but the Graham Platner episode, Michigan’s ugly Senate primary, ongoing fights over Israel and AIPAC, panic about the rise of the DSA—it’s clear that there’s a real desire among Democratic leadership to unify and focus their unruly coalition on November.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone bought Martin’s can-do spirit. One DNC member described the Austin gathering to me as giving “North Korean parade vibes.”

Many DNC members and party officials continue to be deeply concerned about the DNC’s financial situation. In private, they worry that there will not be a real coordinated campaign this cycle and lament that the DNC can’t give other party committees financial support, a standard practice in a midterm year. Some top party operatives have told me that they don’t even trust Martin to run a functional voter-protection program. Nor do they have much confidence in his ability to organize the 2028 presidential primary, when there are sure to be thorny intraparty fights on such issues as who makes the debate stage. They often emphasize that Martin has driven the DNC to a place of irrelevance.

But the Austin meeting made clear that those existential questions about the utility and purpose of the DNC would have to wait until after November. The DNC members in attendance had their marching orders.

“Full speed ahead,” Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California, told me as he roamed the maze of the Hilton conference rooms in flip-flops and a t-shirt.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— When Kamala Harris’s super PAC sent out a fundraising email last week in support of Mary Peltola, who is running for Senate in Alaska, they likely thought they were doing her a favor in a tight race that has become one of Democrats’ best pickup opportunities of the cycle. But the New York Times reports that Peltola’s campaign is now distancing itself from Harris, clarifying that it did not seek her endorsement or have any knowledge of the email before it was sent out. Reminder: Harris lost the state in 2024 by 14 percentage points.

There’s been a lot of chatter in Democratic circles lately about how Kamala Harris continues to be the frontrunner in the 2028 presidential primary, especially with South Carolina leading the primary calendar—a state where older black women make up a significant segment of the primary electorate. But the Alaska episode is a reminder of the limitations of Harris’s appeal in states where Democrats are hoping to be more competitive.

— Senate Majority PAC, the party’s most influential super PAC, which is aligned with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on Friday released a new poll pushing back on the narrative that Abdul El-Sayed has a major electability issue. In the poll of likely voters, El-Sayed leads Republican Mike Rogers by 6 points (50 to 44). The survey credits El-Sayed’s lead to his support among independents (49 points, compared to 40 for Rogers) and Donald Trump’s unpopularity.

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— We’re down to the last few weeks of primary contests, with the most-watched races taking place this week in Florida. Rep. Jared Moskowitz is facing a primary challenge from DSA candidate Oliver Larkin in Florida’s newly drawn 25th district. And in the 20th district, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has caused a stir with her decision to seek the nomination for a seat that has been represented by black lawmakers for more than thirty years—a choice she made after the district she lives in and currently represents was broken into five during redistricting.

“It’s a painful situation,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, the Congressional Black Caucus chair, told Politico’s Kimberly Leonard. “To have a beloved colleague who made a decision basically to run in a district where historically there’s been CBC representation, and I know that the community has been really disrupted by it.”

My open tabs:

— A Democrat in Name Only

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— A playboy NFL agent was in line to run the Seahawks. Then came the crossbow killing