Is Donald Trump over? Can we all now relax and move on to the next thing?

That’s the message from a significant portion of Democratic primary voters. Just as Trump is bored with Iran and the economy and wants to play with monuments and gilding, so too are many Democratic primary voters in Florida and elsewhere bored with Trump and eager to play factional politics instead.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.”

America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump. The resistance, it seems, is out.

The far left of the Democratic Party has never been as energized as the party’s center about Trump and democracy. A 2017 analysis in The Washington Post suggested that between 6 and 12 percent of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. With many careful caveats, the analysis observed that these voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.

[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]

In 2024, likewise, some leaders of the activist left noisily defected from the Harris-Walz ticket. For many of them, opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza mattered more than stopping a Trump presidency at home. The effect of this mobilization on the left is hard to measure, but The Nation was quick to insist that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy likely cost the party Michigan, because many Arabs and Muslims swung toward Trump. The article did not seriously consider whether culture politics, such as Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights, influenced socially conservative Arab and Muslim voters, even though the city of Dearborn has long been a locus of anti-gay grassroots politics in the state. The claim that Harris lost to Trump because of Gaza may well be activist self-medication, but this kind of story about the election is telling.

This year, the dulling of anti-Trump impetus on the left is even more visible and consequential. Again and again, primary voters have made choices that subordinate general-election concerns to factional power-seeking. Democratic leaders—the dreaded “Establishment”—have promoted highly plausible candidates for statewide office in North Carolina, Texas, and other suddenly competitive states. But the insurgent left has again and again upset leadership plans with high-risk choices to serve its own factional agenda, putting at risk once-probable Senate victories in Maine, Michigan, and some House seats too.

That agenda seems to argue as follows:

Donald Trump is not that important. His attacks on the rule of law, on free and peaceful elections, on U.S. alliances, on trade and markets—those are all mere symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. Political energy should be focused on treating the deeper problems of which Trump is a mere passing expression, even at the risk of losing the Senate in 2026 and forfeiting the presidency in 2028. “Winning” with Chuck Schumer–approved candidates is no win at all. Better to risk losing than to “win” on Schumer’s terms.

[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing democratic about these socialists]

The Democratic left is making a complicated—and quite ironic—internal gamble here. The faction’s efforts to hijack the larger party to their own unpopular causes will work only if they can convince Democratic voters that Trump is not the most important and urgent problem facing Americans. Yet the only reason Democratic centrists would coalesce around the party’s leftist candidates in November is if they believe in the absolute urgency of stopping Trump.

Many of the far-left candidates are aggressively obnoxious from a centrist’s point of view. Centrist Democrats are not socialists, not revolutionaries, and not disposed to blame Zionist conspiracies for every trouble in American life, including police brutality and urban gentrification. Why on earth would centrist Democrats in Michigan vote for a radical leftist who calls most Democrats hypocrites when the other choice on the ballot is a Republican campaigning on reducing housing costs by simplifying the government-approval process?

In Florida last night, Democrats rejected Alex Vindman, the former national-security official who at immense personal and career risk blew the whistle on Trump’s 2019 plot to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into fabricating campaign dirt against Joe Biden. Voters chose instead Angie Nixon, who campaigned as an explicit “socialist” in a state that is home to hundreds of thousands of Cuban American and Venezuelan American refugees from socialism, and who ran alongside anti-Israel figures such as Oliver Larkin and Rashida Tlaib in a state with the nation’s third-biggest Jewish population.  

From a Democratic-centrist point of view, if Trump’s attacks on the rule of law are not a supreme and imperative threat, then a Republican Senate majority led by John Thune is an endurable nuisance. Far-left candidates have a chance in the general election only if Democrats believe that Trump is the supreme and imperative threat.

The remains of the suddenly unfashionable Democratic resistance can only hope that Democrats in Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, and elsewhere will rise above the factional politics and remember in November what, and who, remains the most pressing danger to the nation’s law and democracy.  

© Joe Raedle / Getty

Is Donald Trump over? Can we all now relax and move on to the next thing?

That’s the message from a significant portion of Democratic primary voters. Just as Trump is bored with Iran and the economy and wants to play with monuments and gilding, so too are many Democratic primary voters in Florida and elsewhere bored with Trump and eager to play factional politics instead.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.”

America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump. The resistance, it seems, is out.

The far left of the Democratic Party has never been as energized as the party’s center about Trump and democracy. A 2017 analysis in The Washington Post suggested that between 6 and 12 percent of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. With many careful caveats, the analysis observed that these voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.

[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]

In 2024, likewise, some leaders of the activist left noisily defected from the Harris-Walz ticket. For many of them, opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza mattered more than stopping a Trump presidency at home. The effect of this mobilization on the left is hard to measure, but The Nation was quick to insist that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy likely cost the party Michigan, because many Arabs and Muslims swung toward Trump. The article did not seriously consider whether culture politics, such as Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights, influenced socially conservative Arab and Muslim voters, even though the city of Dearborn has long been a locus of anti-gay grassroots politics in the state. The claim that Harris lost to Trump because of Gaza may well be activist self-medication, but this kind of story about the election is telling.

This year, the dulling of anti-Trump impetus on the left is even more visible and consequential. Again and again, primary voters have made choices that subordinate general-election concerns to factional power-seeking. Democratic leaders—the dreaded “Establishment”—have promoted highly plausible candidates for statewide office in North Carolina, Texas, and other suddenly competitive states. But the insurgent left has again and again upset leadership plans with high-risk choices to serve its own factional agenda, putting at risk once-probable Senate victories in Maine, Michigan, and some House seats too.

That agenda seems to argue as follows:

Donald Trump is not that important. His attacks on the rule of law, on free and peaceful elections, on U.S. alliances, on trade and markets—those are all mere symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. Political energy should be focused on treating the deeper problems of which Trump is a mere passing expression, even at the risk of losing the Senate in 2026 and forfeiting the presidency in 2028. “Winning” with Chuck Schumer–approved candidates is no win at all. Better to risk losing than to “win” on Schumer’s terms.

[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing democratic about these socialists]

The Democratic left is making a complicated—and quite ironic—internal gamble here. The faction’s efforts to hijack the larger party to their own unpopular causes will work only if they can convince Democratic voters that Trump is not the most important and urgent problem facing Americans. Yet the only reason Democratic centrists would coalesce around the party’s leftist candidates in November is if they believe in the absolute urgency of stopping Trump.

Many of the far-left candidates are aggressively obnoxious from a centrist’s point of view. Centrist Democrats are not socialists, not revolutionaries, and not disposed to blame Zionist conspiracies for every trouble in American life, including police brutality and urban gentrification. Why on earth would centrist Democrats in Michigan vote for a radical leftist who calls most Democrats hypocrites when the other choice on the ballot is a Republican campaigning on reducing housing costs by simplifying the government-approval process?

In Florida last night, Democrats rejected Alex Vindman, the former national-security official who at immense personal and career risk blew the whistle on Trump’s 2019 plot to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into fabricating campaign dirt against Joe Biden. Voters chose instead Angie Nixon, who campaigned as an explicit “socialist” in a state that is home to hundreds of thousands of Cuban American and Venezuelan American refugees from socialism, and who ran alongside anti-Israel figures such as Oliver Larkin and Rashida Tlaib in a state with the nation’s third-biggest Jewish population.  

From a Democratic-centrist point of view, if Trump’s attacks on the rule of law are not a supreme and imperative threat, then a Republican Senate majority led by John Thune is an endurable nuisance. Far-left candidates have a chance in the general election only if Democrats believe that Trump is the supreme and imperative threat.

The remains of the suddenly unfashionable Democratic resistance can only hope that Democrats in Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, and elsewhere will rise above the factional politics and remember in November what, and who, remains the most pressing danger to the nation’s law and democracy.  

© Joe Raedle / Getty

Google is trying to get you off your phone. The Pixel 11 Pro is "A Phone Designed to Help You Use It Less," the company promises. It can proactively help you book restaurant reservations, take the best frames from a video, and help you voice-text significantly faster. The pitch is that the new features bundled with the Pixel 11 series of phones can help fix your relationship with technology - one that Google knows has badly degraded in recent years.

But the hardware of the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL is very similar to last year's models - and in at least one case, a downgrade - so those software features are pretty much the entire pitch.

…

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Long Tail of Operation Metro Surge

The mostly below-the-radar effort to block Minnesota’s effort to prosecute federal agents for alleged crimes committed during Operation Metro Surge finally burst into public view yesterday.

On behalf of Minnesota, state Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has refused to extradite ICE agent Christian Castro to face states charges arising from his pursuit of an undocumented immigrant that ended with him allegedly shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in Minneapolis. Castro allegedly lied about the incident, claiming Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an ICE agent with a snow shovel and broom. Surveillance video later undermined that account, and the ICE agents involved have been under internal investigation by DHS.

The Jan. 14 non-fatal shooting of Sosa-Celis was sandwiched between the fatal ICE shootings that month of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. No one has been charged yet in those killings, but Minnesota continues to investigate and has succeeded in breaking through the Trump administration’s long-standing refusal to turn over evidence it gathered in those two shootings.

Castro was arrested in May in Texas on a nationwide warrant for the Minnesota charges. The new three-count lawsuit (which names as a co-defendant the sheriff of Cameron County, Texas, who has Castro in custody) filed in federal court in Brownsville seeks Castro’s extradition under the Constitution’s Extradition Clause, the federal Extradition Act, and the Texas Uniform Criminal Extradition Act.

Minnesota has been working since early June to secure Abbott’s sign-off on Castro’s extradition, according to the lawsuit. Repeated efforts to move the extradition paperwork off the governor’s desk have been slow rolled for more than two months now, Minnesota alleges. Meanwhile, extraditions of other defendants from Texas to Minnesota have proceeded as normal while the Castro extradition has languished.

But there’s more …

Trump DOJ Jumps In …

Meanwhile, in a separate case in which Minnesota is attempting to prosecute a federal agent for alleged misconduct, the Trump DOJ has leaped in to muddy the waters on behalf of ICE agent Gregory Morgan, Jr. of Maryland.

Morgan, who was charged in April with brandishing his service weapon in a road-rage-style incident, has sought to move the case against him from Minnesota state court to federal court. Under certain circumstances, federal law entitles federal officers to have their state criminal cases heard in federal court, though state prosecutors would still handle the case and it would be tried under Minnesota law.

The removal fight in the Morgan case has been bubbling for several weeks. There is a hot dispute between Morgan and Minnesota prosecutors over whether he is entitled to removal to federal court, mostly centered on whether Morgan was acting under color of his office at the time of the Feb. 5 incident in which he was driving in an unmarked rental vehicle back to the Whipple Federal Building with his partner at the end of their shift.

Into the middle of this dispute jumped the Trump DOJ last month, filing a Statement of Interest of the United States that weighed in on Morgan’s side to urge the removal of his case to federal court. But what really set things on a different course was that in its filing, the Trump DOJ alleged that the driver at whom Morgan brandished his weapon may have been guilty of criminal conduct for allegedly swerving to prevent Morgan from passing him illegally on the right shoulder of the roadway:

Given the probable cause to believe the driver committed a federal crime and may well have intended to do so again, Officer Morgan was justified in making a show of force.

The prospect of federal criminal prosecution of the driver prompted him and his passenger to assert their Fifth Amendment rights not to testify at the removal hearing without a grant of immunity. That has raised the prospect that the two victims won’t testify at trial either, which would undermine Minnesota’s ability to make its case.

Minnesota sought immunity for the victims to overcome their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves, but the Trump DOJ declined to provide them with immunity. Minnesota is now asking the federal court to grant use immunity. It’s a complicated legal dispute over whose immunity it is to give: Minnesota’s or the federal government’s. The underlying removal question is arguable, too. The removal hearing has been cancelled twice. It has not yet been rescheduled.

The complexity of the legal questions and the slow pace of the proceedings makes this hard to capture with banner headlines and 24/7 coverage. But if you’re looking for accountability for the worst abuses during Operation Metro Surge, this below-the-radar fight to prevent it is where to focus.

The Deportation-Surveillance Complex

Greg Sargent:

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive, covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

Midterms Watch

Florida-Senate: A stunning win in the Democratic primary by longshot state Rep. Angie Nixon, a newly converted Democratic Socialist who was outspent 16-1 by Alex Vindman and did not run a single TV ad in the state, but still prevailed 56%-44%. Nixon will seek to unseat appointed Sen. Ashley Moody (R) in the special general election to finish Marco Rubio’s term.

Florida-07: Rep. Cory Mills was too sleazy even for Republicans, losing 47%-34% to former local TV news anchor Ryan Elijah in the GOP primary.

Alaska-Senate: In the unusual top-four-advance primary, former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK) outdrew incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) 48%-43% in a preview of the general election. The other Dan Sullivan drew 2%.

2 Dan Sullivans Prompts Criminal Probe?

With the news that federal grand jury subpoenas have been issued over the campaign of the other Dan Sullivan to unseat incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) in the Alaska Senate race, election law expert Rick Hasen cautions about the First Amendment implications of criminalizing this kind of election finagling which, as he notes, happens all the time:

I don’t see how the government could criminalize his running for office for having impure motives. And if it could do so, then it could be a crime every time that the Republican Party backs a Green Party candidate, or Democrats support a MAGA candidate in a primary in the hopes that the candidate would be weaker against a Democrat in the general election. This stuff happens all the time.

To put a blunter point on all of this: The Alaska Senate seat is key to Democrats’ difficult quest to win the Senate. Sen. Sullivan losing votes to the other Sullivan imperils that seat and puts President Trump at greater risk of facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the rest of his term. Trump controls the DOJ with an iron fist. The DOJ is now investigating the matter.

Ipso Facto Collusion

Elaborating on many of themes from last Thursday’s Morning Memo, Harry Litman explains the inanity of the Trump DOJ suddenly parachuting into the anti-weaponization slush fund/IRS immunity case:

The best way for the Department to support Trump while being nominally opposed was to stay out of the fray. It worked for a time, until its very absence became a factor in the determination that the case was a collusive fraud on the court. Now it has to execute an impossible two-step: supporting Trump in every particular while feigning opposition to him.

DOJ Whistleblower Calls Out Ivy League Attack

Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is blowing the whistle on what everyone already knew: The Trump administration’s Title VI investigation into alleged antisemitism on Ivy League campuses was pretextual.

Van Erem’s allegations are detailed in a letter that her attorneys sent to Congress while seeking whistleblower protection.

As the WaPo notes:

Her disclosures Tuesday could bolster concerns raised by critics that the administration’s self-proclaimed push to combat antisemitism on campus was in fact an effort to punish schools it deemed ideologically opposed to its agenda. Van Erem’s account raised questions about past settlements the administration has struck with universities under investigation as well as pending probes that have yet to be resolved.

Van Erem says she resigned from the Justice Department in May 2025 rather than participate in politically motivated investigations.

Face Palm of the Day

The head of the once-famed DOJ Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, is openly galavanting in DC with Tina Peters, the convicted election denier from Colorado:

Colorado’s Tina Peters and I had a lovely lunch and discussion on Capitol Hill! She is an inspiring lady! @realtinapeters pic.twitter.com/h3Mkq42XVE

— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) August 18, 2026

Quote of the Day

“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not that informed on national security.”—Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), during a TV debate ahead of next week’s runoff in the GOP primary to fill her late brother’s seat

The video:

Darlene Graham just bumbled through one of the worst responses to a question during a political debate you'll ever see

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-19T03:05:31.905Z

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

It’s All Part of Retribution on Blue States

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that disqualified Sigal Chattah as the purported top prosecutor in the Nevada United States Attorney’s Office.

The ruling deals a blow to the Trump scheme of bypassing Senate confirmation to install poorly qualified loyalists as top federal prosecutors in blue states — a key element of Trump’s campaign of retribution.

The particular element of the broader scheme at issue here was whether the attorney general can dole out the “first assistant U.S. attorney” designation to just anyone and install acting U.S. attorneys of its choosing in already-vacant positions.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the first assistant U.S. attorney automatically assumes the role of acting U.S. attorney when that post becomes vacant. The Trump DOJ took that provision and ran with it, using the first assistant designation on people like Chattah to circumvent both Senate confirmation and the law allowing federal judges to name interim U.S. attorneys.

What the the three-judge 9th Circuit panel (two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee) unanimously decided is that the first assistant must have been serving in that role at the time of the vacancy in the U.S. attorney position in order to automatically ascend. Someone like Chattah, who was designated first assistant after the fact of the vacancy, is not eligible to serve as acting U.S. attorney on the basis of that designation.

The “rule of automatic succession applies only to a first assistant who held that position at the time the vacancy arose; it does not apply to a first assistant who never served under a validly appointed official,” the appeal court decided.

The appeals court also rejected the attempts by Trump attorneys general to “create a de facto Acting U.S. Attorney by delegating all of the functions and duties of the U.S. Attorney to someone else.”

Chattah’s case is instructive because of how many elements of manipulation and scheming are involved. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi properly named Chattah to the statutorily mandated 120-day term as acting U.S. attorney on April 1, 2025. Then things got weird.

Chattah is a Trump loyalist with no prior prosecutorial experience who has reportedly abused the office for personal and political gain. The federal judges in Nevada did not move to retain her in the role, which they have the power to do under statute.

Just before Chattah’s 120-day term ended, she resigned and Bond designated her as first assistant U.S. attorney. Bondi’s order declared that by law Chattah automatically ascended back into the acting role she had just resigned. In a belt-and-suspenders move, Bondi also made Chattah a special U.S. attorney and purported to delegate all the powers of the Nevada U.S. attorney to her.

The appeals court rejected both moves as unlawful.

It’s important to note that these challenges to the unlawful appointments of U.S. attorneys — like the similarly successful challenges of Alina Habba’s appointment in New Jersey — are coming from criminal defendants seeking to have their indictments thrown out. (The lower court in the consolidated cases brought by multiple criminal defendants had declined to dismiss the indictments, and the appeals court yesterday said it lacked jurisdiction at this stage to consider whether dismissal of the indictments was an appropriate remedy).

So not only is the Trump DOJ engaged in squirrelly workarounds to install loyalists in blue states and bypass the Senate, but it’s risking having legitimate criminal prosecutions thrown out in order to do so.

Keep an Eye on This

I know this seems even more in the weeds, but the precise mechanism has been finalized for running one portion of the Justice Department directly out of the White House to target what it euphemistically calls “fraud” but really means elected Democrats in blue states.

The move — reported by Bloomberg’s Ben Penn — shifts bureaucratic power from Main Justice’s Criminal Division to the new National Fraud Enforcement Division, which is being closely overseen at the White House by Vice President JD Vance and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

“The regulation also creates leeway for the new operation to take on a vast array of unspecified other cases,” Penn notes.

All indications are that this will be a new tool of retribution even more directly wielded by the White House than Attorney General Todd Blanche is. Also, as I mentioned yesterday, these White House-driven investigations don’t have to yield prosecutions in order to be beneficial to Trump and damaging to his targets. Wide-ranging subpoenas on spurious claims of fraud gives the White House access to documents, communications, personal information, and other potentially useful fodder to use against Democrats and other Trump foes.

A Match Made in MAGA Heaven?

Shasta County, California — which has been a hotbed (or petri dish, as we once called it) of Big Lie boosterism — may be hiring Tina Peters, the convicted former Colorado county elections official newly freed from prison, to help run its elections.

Clint Curtis, the outgoing Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said in an interview with a conservative radio host that he’s bringing Peters on next month as the new assistant registrar of voters. “She has experience,” he said. “And she’s able to take the rocks and arrows.”

Some words of caution about the absurdity of all this, from the New York Times:

It was unclear how real Mr. Curtis’s job offer actually was or whether Ms. Peters would accept it. Ms. Peters’s prison sentence was commuted, but the terms of her parole limit her ability to leave Colorado. And Mr. Curtis will only be in office until January, after losing the June election to a former elections official whom he had fired.

So to summarize, Curtis was just voted out of office and he’s now claiming that for his last hurrah he will bring in Peters to help him run the midterms, but she might violate her parole by going to California. Got it.

The 9th Circuit Giveth and Taketh

In a 2-1 opinion, a 9th Circuit panel last week upheld one of the controversial administrative subpoenas targeting providers of transgender care and seeking invasive patient information, Chris Geidner reports in Law Dork. The majority consisted of a Bush II and Trump appointee; a Clinton appointee dissented.

Quote of the Day: Doth Protest Too Loudly

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”—the Trump White House, in a post on X, attacking CNN reporter Kristen Holmes for asking the president an anodyne question about Natalie Harp

E. Jean Carroll Gets to Keep Trump’s $5M

The Supreme Court rejected for the second time President Trump’s bid to challenge E. Jean Carroll’s $5 million judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse.

Construction Work Halted in Big Bend

Amid rising opposition, including from Republican elected officials in Texas, the head of Customs and Border Protection announced Monday a pause in the controversial construction underway in Big Bend National Park to deter illegal immigration.

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A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.

The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.

With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally is still shocking.

This kind of public conflict with allies has become typical. Over the weekend, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who has no official government post—met with Hamas officials in an attempt to revitalize an administration plan to disarm the group and rebuild Gaza. That plan is struggling for several reasons, including a flat rejection from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been close to Trump and reportedly talked him into the Iran war.

Meanwhile, Trump announced yesterday that he was curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” This supposed friendship has produced a splashy 2018 summit and flattering correspondence that Trump purloined from the White House after he lost the 2020 election, but it has done nothing to advance American interests. Most important, it has done nothing to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. At the same time that Trump is fighting a war in Iran that he claims will prevent nuclear proliferation, he’s bestowing a favor on North Korea, which has offered no concessions and many threats. But Trump also gave another reason for his snub, noting that South Korea—like every other major U.S. ally—has declined to get involved in the Iran quagmire.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, many analysts have sought to discern some sort of guiding doctrine to his foreign policy. The incoherence of his actions in the past week alone should provide further evidence that looking for a framework is futile. Earlier this year, my colleagues Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker reported that the White House’s foreign-affairs philosophy was “Fuck around and find out.” Administration officials meant this as a warning to the leaders of other countries. But as the current crisis festers, they, too, are finding out.

Related:

• The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency
• Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation.

---

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Julia Curlee: “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
• Jonathan Chait on what Trump officials mean by “never”
• Even college students have stopped hanging out.
• NATO’s nightmare

---

Today’s News

1. A 60-day window for the United States and Iran to negotiate an end to the war expired today without a final agreement. The June framework laid out terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, easing some financial restrictions on Iran, and addressing its nuclear program, but talks have stalled as both sides have traded attacks and accusations of violations.
2. Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss President Trump’s plan for Gaza after Israel said it refuses to pull back its military from Gaza until Hamas fully disarms.
3. The Supreme Court declined for a second time to review Trump’s appeal of a $5 million civil judgment awarded to E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; Trump paid the $5 million award last month.

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Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what the last weeks of summer can offer.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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Evening Read

The Problem With Child-Led Potty Training

By Stephanie H. Murray

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue …

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Radio Atlantic: The Trump administration wanted her expertise, just not her.
• Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail
• Why learn something that a machine can do for you?
• How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks
• David Frum on Trump’s last loyal constituency

---

Culture Break

Watch. The masked web-slinger has been setting box-office records for decades, even as the popularity of superhero movies wanes, David Sims writes. And this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel (out now in theaters) has broken nearly every record imaginable.

Explore. Poetry critics didn’t always think much of Mary Oliver, whose work could sometimes read like self-help—but they didn’t give her enough credit, Hillary Kelly argues.

Play our daily crossword.

---

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

© Anna Moneymaker / Getty

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.

The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.

With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally is still shocking.

This kind of public conflict with allies has become typical. Over the weekend, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who has no official government post—met with Hamas officials in an attempt to revitalize an administration plan to disarm the group and rebuild Gaza. That plan is struggling for several reasons, including a flat rejection from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been close to Trump and reportedly talked him into the Iran war.

Meanwhile, Trump announced yesterday that he was curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” This supposed friendship has produced a splashy 2018 summit and flattering correspondence that Trump purloined from the White House after he lost the 2020 election, but it has done nothing to advance American interests. Most important, it has done nothing to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. At the same time that Trump is fighting a war in Iran that he claims will prevent nuclear proliferation, he’s bestowing a favor on North Korea, which has offered no concessions and many threats. But Trump also gave another reason for his snub, noting that South Korea—like every other major U.S. ally—has declined to get involved in the Iran quagmire.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, many analysts have sought to discern some sort of guiding doctrine to his foreign policy. The incoherence of his actions in the past week alone should provide further evidence that looking for a framework is futile. Earlier this year, my colleagues Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker reported that the White House’s foreign-affairs philosophy was “Fuck around and find out.” Administration officials meant this as a warning to the leaders of other countries. But as the current crisis festers, they, too, are finding out.

Related:

• The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency
• Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation.

---

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Julia Curlee: “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
• Jonathan Chait on what Trump officials mean by “never”
• Even college students have stopped hanging out.
• NATO’s nightmare

---

Today’s News

1. A 60-day window for the United States and Iran to negotiate an end to the war expired today without a final agreement. The June framework laid out terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, easing some financial restrictions on Iran, and addressing its nuclear program, but talks have stalled as both sides have traded attacks and accusations of violations.
2. Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss President Trump’s plan for Gaza after Israel said it refuses to pull back its military from Gaza until Hamas fully disarms.
3. The Supreme Court declined for a second time to review Trump’s appeal of a $5 million civil judgment awarded to E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; Trump paid the $5 million award last month.

---

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what the last weeks of summer can offer.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

---

Evening Read

The Problem With Child-Led Potty Training

By Stephanie H. Murray

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue …

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Radio Atlantic: The Trump administration wanted her expertise, just not her.
• Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail
• Why learn something that a machine can do for you?
• How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks
• David Frum on Trump’s last loyal constituency

---

Culture Break

Watch. The masked web-slinger has been setting box-office records for decades, even as the popularity of superhero movies wanes, David Sims writes. And this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel (out now in theaters) has broken nearly every record imaginable.

Explore. Poetry critics didn’t always think much of Mary Oliver, whose work could sometimes read like self-help—but they didn’t give her enough credit, Hillary Kelly argues.

Play our daily crossword.

---

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

© Anna Moneymaker / Getty

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

In February, the United States Department of Defense threatened to designate the AI firm Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” after a dispute over the military’s use of the company’s Claude models.

The Family Values Party

We know that Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution against anyone he perceives to have wronged him — political foes, investigators, prosecutors, and judges — has no bounds. He abuses his office. He coopts government departments and agencies into his retributive schemes. He seeks vengeance without regard to the facts, the law, or common decency.

But in addition to that unprecedented malfeasance, Trump regularly subjects the family members of his targets to the same array of abuses.

Spouses have been a Trump rhetorical target since his first administration, when former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife was a frequent target of Trump abuse. While out of office, he attacked the wife of state Judge Arthur Engoron in the New York civil fraud case. In this term, he’s attacked the wife of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of D.C., the judge in the Kennedy Center case.

Children are not above the fray either. Trump’s DoJ fired Maurene Comey, a well-respected federal prosecutor whose only transgression was being the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Now comes new reporting from the NYT that the Trump DOJ opened an investigation last August into the fund-raising firm that had been co-owned by the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Trump. Loren Merchan, already a subject of Trump rhetorical attacks, was a VP at the firm, Authentic Campaigns, Inc., as recently as 2024, the same year Trump was convicted in the hush money case.

The year-long investigation is being run by Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros, whose mishandling of the Broadview Six case has prompted extraordinary judicial scrutiny of his office’s conduct in front of grand juries. The same two prosecutors who signed a grand jury subpoena targeting Merchan’s daughter were later involved in key aspects of the Broadview Six case.

In a grand jury subpoena reviewed by the NYT, Boutros sought the firm’s internal communications with a list of Democratic clients that includes former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), and the Democratic National Committee:

Prosecutors eventually modified the subpoena, narrowing it to focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.

In a now-familiar pattern, the politicized investigation was ostensibly spawned by a “criminal referral” targeting the Merchans from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. The current status of the DOJ investigation is not clear.

Beyond the obvious abuse of power involved in targeting the daughter of the judge who presided over Trump’s conviction, there’s the added abuse of the Justice Department using grand jury subpoenas to sift through the communications between a political firm and its Democratic clients.

At this point, it seems like only a matter of time before we learn that evidence gathered in Trump’s vindictive investigations — even if they never result in prosecutions — is being funneled back to the White House for use as political fodder, payback, pressure, and blackmail, similar to the notorious files kept by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Retribution: Colorado Edition

It was already abundantly clear that the Trump administration had targeted Colorado for retribution for imprisoning Big Lie proponent Tina Peters and for its use of mail-in ballots. A federal judge had already determined that the pattern of retribution was real. But now a smoking gun email, first reported by the Denver Post, shows the Trump White House held a “brainstorm call” over how exactly to punish Colorado.

The email hasn’t yet been made public, but was read in open court last week during a hearing and the NYT reviewed the court transcript:

The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec. 15.

“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” Ms. Underwood added.

The next day, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

After the revelation in court, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered the administration to turn over additional Trump White House communications and offered this real-time reaction:

The executive office of the president and the president himself are elected to serve all the people and all the states, not just the states that voted for one side or the other, not just the states that line up perfectly with priorities, but all the people. In fact, there’s an oath that’s taken to that effect.

In a related case in June, Jackson had already found strong evidence of retaliation by the Trump White House, writing: “The inference that retaliation played at least some role … is considerably strengthened by the fact that the federal government simultaneously undertook several other actions adverse to Colorado.”

The smoking-gun email moved the dial from strong inference to proof.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Just days before trial was set to begin, the Trump DOJ quietly dropped charges against a California man accused of sending threatening texts to federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, conceding that it lacked conclusive evidence that the man had committed a crime.
• Attorney General Todd Blanche — who refused this weekend to pledge that the DOJ would always act independently of the White House — and FBI Director Kash Patel openly campaigned for Republican candidates in New York at a rally with President Trump:

Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche is speaking at a Trump rally to endorse Bruce Blakeman

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-14T18:55:58.325Z

RIP Posse Comitatus Act

In a new memo, the Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel purports to expand the military’s power to arrest undocumented immigrants even outside of the designated “National Defense Areas” that it was already using along the border as way of expanding the military’s domestic police powers.

An Extremely Unsatisfying Outcome

I confess that it had not occurred to me that the Alien Enemies Act litigation may be at an end point after the 5th Circuit last week dismissed the appeal in the leading case challenging President Trump’s invocation of the wartime statute. But Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck suggests that the administration may have permanently succeeded in avoiding a substantive ruling against it:

And yet, for as unsatisfying as the AEA litigation has been substantively, it’s worth coming back to the practical bottom line: procedurally, it has been wildly successful from the perspective of the countless non-citizens who might otherwise have been subject to AEA removals.

It is significant that no AEA deportations (that we know of) have been carried out since March 2025, but the administration’s success in deporting the original AEA detainees to CECOT in El Salvador in violation of court orders and the lack of any meaningful consequence for that lawlessness — either in the contempt proceedings before Judge Boasberg or in legal recourse for the wrongfully deported Venezuelan nationals sent to the Salvadoran gulag — does make this result extremely unsatisfying.

Trump’s Ballroom Bait and Switch

The WSJ has a nice rundown of how Trump has longed for a White House ballroom for more than a decade — but only recently, after being sued over it, began to couch the project as a “military complex” in order to avoid court scrutiny. It was a critical distinction in Trump’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday to allow construction of the ballroom to continue.

Reflections on Musk and X/Twitter

• Vincent Bevins: “He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists.”
• John Ganz: “The X-ing of Twitter made the Trump administration and right-wingers more broadly think they had a mandate for their most extreme ideas because they only saw a world of chuds staring back at them. The opposition also risks becoming demoralized because they also see this world of total idiocy.”

THANK YOU!

Over the weekend, we hit our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund annual drive. Thanks to all who contributed! We are all deeply grateful for your willingness to contribute in this way. We don’t take it for granted. It fires us up and propels us to dig a little faster and a little better.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

From threats to the safety of poll workers to voters who can’t distinguish between odds and results, prediction markets are already scrambling the political process.

The SAVE America Act is just one part of a package that includes an executive order and threats of prosecution, all in an effort to make Trump’s math work.

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

[Read: A green light for crooks]

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.

The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.

For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.

To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise.

[David A. Graham: The evolution of Trump’s corruption]

The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition estimates that the Treasury’s action reduces the number of enterprises required to report their true ownership from 32.6 million to 11,667.

The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.

© Andrew Harnik / Getty

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

[Read: A green light for crooks]

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.

The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.

For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.

To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise.

[David A. Graham: The evolution of Trump’s corruption]

The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition estimates that the Treasury’s action reduces the number of enterprises required to report their true ownership from 32.6 million to 11,667.

The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.

© Andrew Harnik / Getty

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 140, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about Will Ferrell and Fabrizio Romano and Heather Cox Richardson, scrolling and scrolling through Ordinary Abundance, watching Avatar Aang (which is as good as you said it was), finally getting proficient in CapCut, obsessing over the latest scandal unearthed by PTFO, rewatching Tires now that the third season is out, trying Spark's AI tools for solving my inbox (so far… meh), revisiting …

Read the full story at The Verge.

New fonts, better customization, and a whole new layout all make it worth dusting off your Instapaper account.

This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

© Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

© Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

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Read the full story at The Verge.

The Vermont senator co-sponsored a bill that calls for a moratorium on building data centers. He discusses the environmental and economic concerns, and what the government can do.

Instagram's wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn't look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn't even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay start by discussing the new logo, the executive urge to redesign everything all the time, and whether new is always better. After that, they get into the other big Meta release of the week: Mark Zuckerberg's many-thousand-word missive on the future of AI. There are a lot of ideas and proposals …

Read the full story at The Verge.