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Polls

Washington Post -  Young adults are more likely to be spectators than participants in the political process, according to a new Pew Research Center survey on news, politics, religion and civil life.  The poll found that while older adults are more likely to vote, donate money or join groups, nearly half of young people under the age of 30 prefer to engage politically by liking or sharing news content online.

Older adults — especially those over the age of 50 — were more likely to read or watch the news, but young people still have high rates of news consumption. More than 6-in-10 U.S. adults ages 18 to 29 say they follow national news and have liked or saved posts about news online in the past week.

Student loan defaults hit record highs

CBS News -  Defaults on student loans have surged across the United States, reaching record levels as borrowers struggle to keep up with payments. The numbers have spiked since payments came due again following a lengthy pause intended to provide relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, around 9.5 million people - 1 in 5 federal student loan borrowers - are in default, meaning they are more than nine months behind on their payments.

While credit scores can suffer when borrowers are just a few months behind, entering default brings the possibility of more serious consequences, including garnished wages or Social Security payments. For now, the Trump administration has held off on such involuntary collections.

"Folks are struggling to make ends meet and cover all the rising costs of everything else. The growing student loan bills are making things worse and folks are falling behind," said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for the advocacy group Protect Borrowers.

Climate

Newsweek -   Poor air quality has spread across multiple U.S. states in recent days as smoke from Canadian wildfires, regional wildfires and summer ozone pollution combine to create potentially unhealthy conditions for millions of people.

The recent alerts are not being driven by one single factor. Smoke from wildfires in Canada has drifted south into parts of the Midwest and Northeast, while wildfires burning in the western U.S. are also producing localized smoke.

As of July 19, 2026, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported 40,560 wildfires in the U.S. so far this year. These fires have torched more than 3.8 million acres.

At the same time, hot, stagnant air can worsen ground-level ozone pollution, which forms when sunlight and heat react with pollutants from vehicles, industrial activity, and other sources. Light winds can then prevent that pollution from dispersing, allowing ozone and fine particles to build up near the ground

National Weather Service (NWS) Air Quality Alerts, which were issued around July 19 and July 20, and show air quality warnings or advisories across parts of several states, including: 

Indiana
Illinois
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Colorado
Idaho
Washington
West Virginia
Michigan
Minnesota
Iowa
Wisconsin
Oregon

Health

The Free Press - For 125 years, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have cared for the dying poor at Rosary Hill Home, north of New York City—never charging a patient and never accepting a dollar of government money. On Friday, they filed suit against New York State over its new assisted dying law, which would require assisted dying counseling to take place on their premises. For a congregation that believes human life is sacred from beginning to natural end, the new law leaves no room for compromise. Madeleine Long reports on what this case means for the sisters, their patients, and the future of religious healthcare in New York.

Best and worst public school systems

WalltetHub - WalletHub today released its report on the States with the Best & Worst School Systems in 2026, to help parents find the most worthwhile places to enroll their children.

WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 32 key measures of quality and safety. The data set ranges from the pupil-teacher ratio and dropout rate to median standardized-test scores.
 

States with the Best School Systems	States with the Worst School Systems
1. Massachusetts	42. Hawaii
2. Connecticut	43. Alabama
3. New Jersey	44. Louisiana
4. New Hampshire	45. Nevada
5. Wisconsin	46. Arizona
6. Virginia	47. West Virginia
7. Vermont	48. Oregon
8. New York	49. Oklahoma
9. Rhode Island	50. Alaska
10. North Dakota	51. New Mexico

Best vs. Worst

• Mississippi and New Jersey have the lowest dropout rate, which is 12.4 times lower than in the District of Columbia, the highest.
   
• Vermont has the lowest pupil-teacher ratio, which is 2.1 times lower than in California, the highest.
   
• Delaware has the lowest share of high school students who reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property, which is 2.1 times lower than in Louisiana, the highest.
   
• The District of Columbia has the lowest share of high school students who were bullied online, which is three times lower than in New Hampshire, the highest.

To view the full report and your state or the District’s rankz
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335

Middle East

NPR _ Jordan, a small but strategically important U.S. security partner, doesn't want to be involved in the conflict, NPR’s Jane Arraf tells Up First. The country hosts a large but low-profile U.S. military presence and also has a peace treaty with Israel. On Sunday, the U.S. Embassy warned of threats to the Aqaba tourist resort. Jordan denied Aqaba had been threatened, but Iranian missiles struck its airport shortly afterward. Iran said it hit U.S. transport and command aircraft.

Meanwhile. . .

MSN - Garbage trucks could soon do more than collect trash—they may also help identify code violations using artificial intelligence.   Officials in Cape Coral, Florida, recently considered equipping sanitation trucks with AI-powered cameras that would photograph properties as crews complete their normal collection routes. The system would have been designed to identify potential issues such as overgrown lawns, peeling paint, and illegal dumping, and to flag violations so the city staff can review them later before taking enforcement action. 

Bloomberg  - US gasoline prices climbed back over the $4-a-gallon mark on average at the pump but Brent crude fell back from its highest level since the first half of June as Iran said it received proposals from mediators. With global supply buffers worn thin, the risk of another price spike is growing.

Time - Trump Administration Scales Back Endangered Species Protections—Again  The Trump Administration has dismantled one of the key provisions of the Endangered Species Act, a move that experts say will erode protections for plants and animals that are threatened with extinction. 

NBC - Andy Burnham, the latest in a revolving door of U.K. leaders, will attempt to halt a decade of political turbulence and economic stagnation. Burnham, 56, known as the “King of the North,” was appointed unchallenged after incumbent Keir Starmer agreed to step down last month following a series of election defeats, U-turns and scandals. Both Starmer and Burnham come from the same center-left Labour Party, and in the United Kingdom ruling parties can change leaders — and therefore the prime minister — in the middle of an election cycle without the public voting.

NPR - The House has one week before lawmakers leave for the August recess. During that time, House Speaker Mike Johnson is aiming to secure more defense funding, advance the president’s election-integrity bill, implement a stock-trading ban for lawmakers and extend federal funding beyond the November election. 

Tales from the attic: Graduation speech

From our overstocked archives,  a graduation speech delivered at Washington's John Eaton public elementary school in 1977. At the time, the school, where I had led the PTA,  went through the 8th grade.]

Sam Smith, 1977 – The title of my speech is “The Future Lies Ahead.” This pretty much sums up what people are meant to say at graduations, so I thought I would take care of it in the title and move on to some other business. It has always seemed to me that graduation was a little late to be giving advice but perhaps a few random notes may be of some assistance.

First of all, parents: they’re middle-aged, right? And Peter Ustinov says that the trouble with middle-aged people is that they’re too far away from either of the most important mysteries of life: birth and death. My father used to say that the reason that grandparents and grandchildren got on so well was because they had a common enemy. For myself, I think one of the problems with parents is that they can never decide whether you should be in the White House or in jail. They exaggerate both their expectations and their disappointments. But remember that most of this exaggeration comes from two sources; hope and love. They have higher hopes for you than anyone other than yourself and this is nice. But you know your hopes often disappoint you and that’s hard enough. It’s even harder sometimes to deal with someone else who has high hopes for you, and I’m sorry to say it doesn’t end when you leave your parents. At 39, I still find dealing with other people’s expectations difficult. John Cage, the experimental composer, once said that when people finally approved of what he did, all they wanted him to do was repeat it. He wanted to try something new, but the pressure was to just do it over again. This kind of dilemma will follow you to your grave, so relax and learn to live with it.

Love is also a two-edged blade. It provides warmth, humanity, and comfort, but it also demands and takes. Remember that Mr. Spock didn’t understand love because it wasn’t’ logical. In fact, especially with your parents, its manifestations sometimes seem to border mental illness. Which is why, perhaps, so many people go to psychiatrists looking for love.

I can’t tell you how to deal with this conflict except to recognize the unavailability of the free lunch. If you want to go through life with complete freedom, unimpeded self-expression, then you also have to be ready to go through life lonely. If you want to share in love and community and mutual support then you have to be willing to give up something of yourself in return. Parents offer love and hope but in the process become like that definition of the English House of Lords – indefensible and indispensable.

Second, a note on being a teenager: Adults conform just as much as teenagers do. The problem is that teenagers are asked to conform to both adult and teenager values at the same time. This can be a little confusing. But there’s something else wrong with the setup. Adults tend to regard your age as the ragged, unruly end of childhood, rather than the beginning of adulthood. Go back a couple of centuries and you’ll find 16-year olds who were captains of ships and 14 year olds who were serving as apprentices or doing a full day’s adult work on the farm.

You are capable of it, but if you were to drop out of school and try to find a job in what we adults strangely called the ‘real’ world, you wouldn’t have much luck. Why? The truth is that we need people to stay in school as long as they can in order to keep the unemployment rate down. It is not our social system but our economy that has determined that there be no useful role for teenagers. Adults don’t want you to discover this so when you start demanding something meaningful, they may give you freedom rather than responsibility, and when the sort of aimless freedom that adults sometimes grant young people backfires in a car accident or a drug bust, we blame the teenager. It is, of course, stupid to ask young people to find purpose in life when the system is specifically designed to deny them a useful function.

Well, pretty much. If we ever get in a war again, you’ll find the country suddenly finding a place for you – on the front lines. I would think a country that can trust its teenagers to defend it in time of war could find more useful roles for them in time of peace.

But we adults won’t fight this battle for you, although we have taken a few steps, like lowering the voting age. You’ve got to figure it out for yourselves and make us listen. And, you only have a few years in which to do it. Then, you, too, will be too old and may begin to stop caring.

Third, a note on failure: Everyone tells you how to succeed, but I bet you get damn little advice on succeeding. Try to learn the difference between the failure that comes from laziness, indifference, or stupidity and that which comes from other sources.

For example, there’s the failure that comes with trying to do something that you won’t be able to do right until tomorrow or the next day or next year. Those of you who took part in the musical yesterday know what I’m talking about.

It took many hours of voluntary failure to produce one hour of success. And now that you’ve succeeded, you perhaps have the courage to fail again so, you can succeed at something even harder next time.

Then there’s the failure of the just cause. Most good causes started out as lost causes. If no one had been willing to fail at a just cause, we would still be fighting in Vietnam, eating at segregated lunch counters and the women in the Eaton class of ’77 would not be expected to go to college.

Finally there is the failure that is not yours; .but the judgment of other people Don’t let other people tell you when you’ve failed. Listen to them but not at the exclusion of your heart or own judgment. Other people are poor judges of your success or failure.

One last note: I’m sure people have asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There are two things wrong with that question.

First, I know and you know that you are right now. If you put off being until you’re fully grown you may discover that it’s passed you by.

Second, adults usually want you to respond with a noun: I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an investigative reporter. You can fool them by answering with adjectives like I want to be warm, useful, and happy. It is, after all, those sorts of wants that will matter most in the long run. If what you want to be is only a noun, you’ll probably end up like that and the sadder for it. But if you pick the right adjectives, you can end up like Frank Skeffington, the political boss hero of The Last Hurrah. In the last scene he lies on his deathbed and an unctious Roger Sugrue intones, “Well, the one thing we all know is that if Frank had to do it all over again, he would have done it differently.” Frank Skeffington raises himself from his bed, looks the guy in the eye and says, “Like hell I would,” and dies. Happy.

Critics mount offensive against change to federal grant rules

Roll Call - Opposition is building to a sweeping government-wide crackdown on federal grant awards, with opponents threatening litigation over a proposed rule that would put the grant approval process into the hands of political appointees.

A request for public comment on the rule by the Office of Management and Budget triggered almost half a million responses, most of them opposed to the changes.

Stand Up for Science, a nonprofit advocacy group that organized opposition to the proposed rule, said it was “prepping with our partners for the legal battles to fight OMB in the federal court system” and “doubling down on the pressure it will take to get this Congress to stand up and stop the OMB rule from being implemented.”

Trump's war on democracy

Occupy Democrats - In a stunning and deeply alarming move, the Postmaster General has announced that the USPS will refuse to deliver mail-in ballots for the 2026 midterm elections to any state that does not comply with Donald Trump's so-called "election integrity" executive order.

This is a direct attack on voting rights and a blatant attempt to strong-arm states into submission by threatening Americans' access to the ballot box. 

The Postal Service….an institution meant to serve everyone-is now being weaponized to influence elections. Democracy is not optional. Voting is not conditional. And no president gets to decide who can and cannot participate in our elections. 

This should outrage every American, regardless of party.

Oil prices

NPR - The war in Iran has sent oil prices higher, boosting profits for many oil companies while production costs remain largely unchanged. These excess funds are considered windfall profits. Now, some U.S. lawmakers want to introduce a windfall oil tax, something that the U.K. and the European Union have implemented since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here’s what you need to know about the proposal. 

Polls

The Guardian - About 61% of likely American voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years, the survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found. That includes 72% of Democrats, 63% of Independents, and nearly half – 46% – of all Republicans.

Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator who has long criticized Democrats for quieting their talk of global warming – or “climate-hushing” – said the new data “adds to the mountain of evidence that the public is way ahead of the politicians on the dire consequences of climate change”.

“Climate hushers who ignore this righteous fight should take note,” he told the Guardian.

Health

The Hill - Taylor Farms has expanded a voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce that was distributed to 27 states after federal health officials linked the lettuce from its supplier in central Mexico to the spread of an “explosive diarrhea” parasite.

Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) linked shredded iceberg lettuce from a single supplier in Mexico to a multistate cyclospora outbreak that has sickened at least 1,600 people this year.

The California-based produce company said Friday that it is recalling 25 shredded lettuce and salad mix products sourced from the contaminated lot in central Mexico, saying it stopped purchasing lettuce from the source while it works to remove the products from the market.

The Hill -  Derek Griffith, the director of the program for research on men’s health at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Hill that as only 2 percent of the male population suffers from low testosterone, it doesn’t “suggest that this is a major problem” in the military — a group of relatively younger, fitter men and women.

ICE

NY Times - Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the F.B.I. would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.

If enacted, such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers. In the last two weeks, two fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas and Maine have thrust the government’s tactics back into the spotlight.

F.B.I. managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change on Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their F.B.I. counterparts.

Meanwhile. . .

“About one third of the total personal wealth in the United States is held by the top 1 percent of households, while the bottom half of Americans holds less than 3 percent, according to Federal Reserve data,” wrote The Washington Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin and Shira Ovide wrote on Sunday.

Middle East

  New Republic -  Why did Trump restart the war? As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in their new book, Regime Change, “Unlike recent Presidents, Trump had shown he was entirely comfortable using extraordinary presidential powers on a whim.”

Those extraordinary powers include the ability to launch waves of destructive attacks solely on his order. But these attacks, now numbering hundreds of sorties, are pointless. If it were possible to bomb Iran into submission, it would have worked the first time.

Trump has been stewing over his loss. He accomplished none of the objectives he repeatedly promised, including:

·       Overthrowing the Iranian regime. The government is likely stronger than before the war and certainly more hardline.

·       Obliterating Iran’s nuclear program. Trump and Israel failed last July to destroy the program and failed again this year. Though it is damaged, Iran retains significant quantities of enriched uranium and can rebuild its production facilities.

·       Destroying Iran’s missile fleet. Iran retained 70 percent of its missile capabilities after the war, according to U.S. intelligence, and is rebuilding the rest. Its drone fleet is also intact and perhaps more capable than its missiles.

·       Ending support for regional militias. A key goal for Israel, Iran’s network of regional militants is substantially weaker, but much of this happened before the war (Israel’s post–October 7 decapitation of Hezbollah, notably), and in any case, Iran shows no sign of ending its support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.

·       Destroying Iran’s navy. Much of Iran’s surface fleet was destroyed, but hundreds of fast patrol boats remain capable of executing their main mission: interdicting shipping through the strait.

·       Demonstrating U.S. power and resolve. The U.S. has lost credibility regionally and globally and weakened its alliances, the greatest source of U.S. global power. Persian Gulf states are reassessing the U.S. bases built on their territory since the 1991 Iraq War. Once seen as security assets, they now appear to be a security liability.

As with his 2020 election loss, Trump now seeks to bend reality. He didn’t lose the war, he claims, he won it. He achieved all his objectives, he says.

My two Americas

Sam Smith – Growing up in a comfortable and well-situated family I was first introduced to the real division in American culture when I was 12 years old - stuffing envelopes in a campaign that ended 68 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. It was my first political event and the first occasion when I was directed by black and labor union guys.

I had no idea that I had been introduced to what I would come to regard as the two Americas: one consisting of the wealthy and powerful and the other represented by neighborhoods, communities and real people.  I would live in DC as an adult for over four decades and soon found myself not only with powerful national political figures but also with a  black community that would rise to over 70 percent of the population. In the early 1960s I started a neighborhood newspaper within blocks of the Capitol building, in a community that  would also include two of the city’s major 1968 riot strips. In my 20s I was helping the black activist Marion Barry make some headway, while living in a  multicultural city whose local stories were largely ignored by the mainstream media. And in my first job at WWDC, an all news radio station, I could expect to cover a presidential press conference on the same day as a fire or a murder.

The current lack of interest in the highly varied communities that truly characterize America is an important reason why the country does not work better these days. We have come to accept a nation divided by great economic and cultural differences with many not even trying much to deal with it. Fortunately, I was an anthropology major in college and learned to see it differently.

One of the factors that is seldom discussed, for example,  is how television helped to remove community from our lives. These days we  give less importance to  our neighborhoods and more to  the figures who  appear on TV.  I initially noticed this in part because my father was in the pre-television New Deal administration and my parents, by the time I was nine, had started an organic farm in Maine. I was raised to function in communities as well as sitting before a screen. But it is telling that when I think of my parents one  the images that quickly comes forth is the television set in their bedroom. 

Because I had a brother and four sisters, I learned in early childhood that the rest of the world wasn’t like me. I had other experiences such as playing in bands for decades. Playing in a band includes your solo but most of the time you are backing someone else up.

For seven years I also went to a Quaker school. Its message to others included this:

Germantown Friends is a Quaker school …. Friends, of course, have no exclusive claim to those principles which inform our school, but out of Friends' faith and practice, with its belief that there is that of God in everyone, flow simplicity, self-discipline, honesty, community responsibility, non-violent resolution of differences, and unreserved respect for every individual. We must constantly affirm these principles, teach them, and protect them.

I recently asked some friends and relatives who had gone to GFS: if they had to choose between their college and their high school, which would they pick and all said Germantown Friends. I had gone to Harvard and agreed.

Throughout my journalism career I have willingly covered both the national and the local (I even have a Maine blog). My view of America is that it is run much like a household with bossy and ambitious parents. We are the children in a national family run by people like Donald Trump but we can still create a mutual life with others that is kind, fair and fun. Our problems remain but a lifestyle blended with others keeps us smiling and doing good things.

The crooked, selfish and mean powerful are like the weather.  We have to live with them but not let them define us.

Fear of socalism

Guns

Newsweek -   A federal appeals court on Friday struck down New Jersey's decades-old ban on assault weapons, becoming the first federal appellate court in the country to rule that a state prohibition on semiautomatic rifles such as the AR-15 violates the Second Amendment.

The decision from the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to weigh in on the constitutionality of similar state-level assault weapons bans, setting the stage for what could become one of the most consequential Second Amendment rulings in years.

ICE

Independent  -    Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are making arrests at a record pace, averaging over 1,400 people daily in the first 12 days of July.

…The current arrest rate has seen ICE hit a target of at least 2,000 arrests a day multiple times this month.

The increase in arrests comes amid new controversy, including two fatal shootings of motorists by ICE agents in Texas and Maine, and the death of a man struck by a tractor-trailer while fleeing authorities in Florida.

The Trump administration had previously set a goal of deporting 1 million migrants annually, which would require an average of almost 2,800 arrests per day

Climate

Newsweek -  Three U.S. cities rose to the top of a global ranking for worst air quality on Friday amid widespread smoke from Canadian wildfires across the Midwest and Northeast.

Detroit recorded a "very unhealthy" (201-300) U.S. Air Quality Index reading of 240 between 1 and 2 p.m. ET, placing it first (worst) among the major cities tracked by Swiss air-quality company IQAir. Chicago followed with an “unhealthy” (151-200) reading of 199, followed by Washington, D.C., at 172. New York City placed eighth at 131.

The three worst cities outside the U.S. were Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at 186, Delhi, India (the world's most polluted city in 2025), at 163, and Jakarta, Indonesia, at 144, which is considered "unhealthy for sensitive groups" (101-150).

Supreme Court

Transcend -  The Supreme Court of the United States, the most powerful court in the country, operates under no binding code of ethics.

Federal judges at every other level of the judiciary are bound by ethics rules. Members of Congress are bound by financial disclosure requirements.

But the nine justices who sit on the highest court in the land — who decide the future of reproductive rights, voting rights, and the boundaries of presidential power — answer to no one.

When a justice has an obvious conflict of interest – or accepts lavish trips, gifts, or favors from the very people whose cases later land on their desk – they face no consequences.

This isn’t an accident or an oversight. It is the direct result of decades of Republican obstruction — every serious attempt at Supreme Court ethics reform blocked, stalled, or filibustered before it could become law.

Health

Newsweek - As summer heats up, tiny ticks are busy spreading diseases that most Americans have never even heard of, with doctors calling one of them almost akin to Lyme disease in public health risk.

"It is true that both mosquito and tick-borne illness reports, more inclusively called 'vector-borne' illnesses, are increasing, in part possibly due to regional climate changes and expanding insect and tick habitats," Dr. Natasha Wyndham Hanners, infectious disease specialist at Children’s Health and Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, told Newsweek. "It is also true that ease of worldwide travel along with more advanced diagnostic techniques are revealing emergence of previously unknown organisms or organisms new to an area."

The Hill -  A one-year ban on abortion providers being able to bill Medicaid for non-abortion services, which was included in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed last year, expired on July 5.

Anti-abortion activists have for months been calling for such a provision to be included in another bill that could go through the same special budget reconciliation process that bypasses the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, allowing Republicans to push partisan legislation through both chambers.

Republicans’ second shot at a reconciliation bill, however, was a “skinny” package aimed at restoring funding for immigration enforcement and Border Patrol. And this week, House Republicans released a $95 billion reconciliation 3.0 framework teeing up money for defense, farm aid, and grants to encourage voting restrictions — omitting any measures to offset that new spending, or any other special provisions, including the measure to restrict Medicaid funds from going to abortion providers.

Donald Trump

Independent -   President Donald Trump said American television networks that didn’t air a speech he gave on 16 July night should lose their licences.

Speaking during his address to the nation, which focused on election security, Trump also said that TV networks that did not air his speech were engaged in a "plot".

“They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason,” he said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licences”.

Two of the three major US television networks, NBC and ABC, as well as CNN did not broadcast the primetime address by Trump on their primary platforms, risking the ire of the administration.

Networks enjoy broad First Amendment rights to decide what to broadcast, experts say. Historically, though, broadcasters carried most such speeches on the grounds that they provided information of public importance.

5 things to know about Trump’s election claims

Alternet -  While Americans are dealing with higher gas prices, high grocery prices and less healthcare, President Donald Trump is living his best life, says Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, with fellow New York Times writer Maggie Haberman.

“[In his first term], there was always a feeling he felt under siege,” Swan told John Dickerson, host of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. “He was under investigation. He was reactive. He was surrounded by people who — whatever you think about Donald Trump, he’s not stupid when it comes to reading people — he understood that many of them had contempt for him and thought that he was dangerous and whatever. So I think it was just generally a stressful, unpleasant experience. This time around, he comes in with a sweeping immunity decision from the Supreme Court and with, especially last year, total command over his own party.”

Swan pointed out that never has he seen a president command his own party and force them to do things they don’t want to do like Trump did last year.

“We haven’t seen that before,” said Swan. “He’s richer than he’s ever been. His family’s making just inordinate sums of money from the presidency. He’s using power in the ways that he wants to without much pushback. He’s entirely surrounded by flatterers. He’s basically housebound. He doesn’t really travel around. He’s not really doing events. He goes from people flattering him in the Oval Office to people on the Mar-a-Lago patio.

Polls

Trump approval Ratings

Ballotpedia has Trump with a 43.5% approval rating.

RealClearPolitics has Trump with a 40.9% approval rating.

Quinnipiac University has Trump with a 39% approval rating.

The Economist/YouGov has Trump with a 37% approval rating.

ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos has Trump with a 37% approval rating.

Emerson College has Trump with a 39% approval rating.

CNBC POLL: Net Favorability Ratings

Sep 2018 Capitalism: +37 Socialism: -33 July 2026 Capitalism: +23 Socialism: -20 (new high

InteractivePolls

Middle East

The Hill -  A senior Iranian adviser threatened on Friday to launch a wider war in the Middle East following days of intense fighting, warning that “full-scale offensive operations” could resume if U.S. military strikes do not cease.

“Iran will no longer limit itself to retaliatory, like-for-like responses…and no political border will be safe,” Major-General Mohsen Rezaei, an adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said, according to several outlets, citing Iranian news agency IRIB.

U.S. forces launched a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Friday, hitting bridges around Bandar Abbas, a port city in the Persian Gulf where the Iranian Navy is headquartered. 

The fresh wave of strikes, which ended around 9:30 p.m. EDT, also targeted surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities, according to U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

National Guard takes control of DC

 The Guardian -   For months, roughly 2,000-2,500 national guard troops have been patrolling metro stations, parks, city streets, neighborhoods and tourist attractions throughout Washington DC. In July, that number doubled to more than 5,000 troops from more than a dozen states as part of the federal government’s “summer surge” of law enforcement surrounding major events for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.

District of Columbia officials are pushing for the troops’ withdrawal, but they have limited control because the nation’s capital isn’t a state and the mayor, Muriel Bowser, doesn’t have the authority to call up the DC national guard, only to request them. City officials also don’t have any control over the troop deployments from other states.

”The national guard is not contributing to law enforcement,” said the DC council chair, Phil Mendelson. “The presence of armed soldiers on our streets is unnecessary, hurts potential visitors to the district, creates the wrong impression about safety, and that’s not helpful.”

DC councilwoman Janeese Lewis George is the presumptive Democratic nominee for DC’s mayor and will probably secure the top spot after November’s general election. She has pledged to work with the federal government and the Trump administration to improve conditions for DC residents.

“Governors across the country have been bullied, bribed and misled into misusing their national guard for armed patrols of DC neighborhoods that result in harm to the troops themselves and our community in DC,” Lewis George said. “It’s been almost a year, and we must not normalize this.”

Immigration

In These Times -  The Trump administration unleashed federal immigration enforcement agents on states around the nation, including those with relatively miniscule immigrant populations. This includes Maine, the whitest state in the country, where a mere 4 percent of the population is of immigrant origin. ICE agents wreaked havoc on the state in early 2026. Even after Republican Senator Susan Collins requested an end to the operations, tensions remained high and ICE sightings continued.

Earthquakes

The Congresional Insider  - A powerful 7.3 earthquake off southern Mexico’s coast shook four countries and triggered a tsunami alert, raising fresh questions about how prepared everyday people really are when nature hits harder than government plans.

A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck off the Pacific coast of Chiapas near the Guatemala border, with shaking felt as far as El Salvador. U.S. and Mexican agencies issued a tsunami threat for parts of the coasts of Mexico and Guatemala, warning of waves up to about 1 meter.

Officials reported no immediate deaths and no serious damage, but confirmed several injuries and localized structural problems. The quake revived memories of past Mexican earthquakes and exposed how people in the region still depend on strained public systems when disaster strikes.