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Three-quarters of Americans said in a recent poll that they oppose datacenters being built next to their homes

Donald Trump has criticized communities pushing back against datacenter projects across the US amid a growing backlash, warning those that reject them risk becoming “backwards and poor”.

As controversy surrounding local datacenter plans continues to swirl around election campaigns nationwide ahead of November’s midterm elections, the US president declared Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they are canceled.

Washington says it acted after observing Iran was planning to deploy fresh mines in strait of Hormuz

The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.

The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks on Iranian missile launchers and radars.

The president’s deportation machine is creating a class of people inside the US who have fewer protections against the power of the state

Is the Trump administration creating a group in the US with fewer protections against executive power owing to their immigration status? Its often openly racist actions suggest so. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to target “the worst of the worst” – undocumented migrants who commit violent crimes. Yet the Guardian reported that over half of those arrested in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges. That month, ICE made record arrests and deportations, apprehending 1,500 people and removing 1,100 daily.

When campaigning, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitians were “eating the pets”. In office, his administration moved to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians. In June, the supreme court let the protection expire, leaving about 350,000 people at risk of deportation to a country gripped by violence and instability. The court’s decision means more than 1 million TPS holders from 13 nations previously considered too unsafe to return to are now at risk of deportation. Many have lived and worked legally in the US for years.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast is expected to push many Iranians into deeper poverty as food inflation soars

For many Iranians, the new US sanctions campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, seems superfluous given the grim economic situation in their country.

Iranians are facing runaway food inflation, closed petrol stations and a seemingly never-ending depreciation of the nation’s currency caused by a lack of foreign exchange reserves.

WaPo had a blockbuster story yesterday, revealing that — back on August 14 — the heads of USEUCOMM, SOUTHCOM, USPACOM, and the Navy’s top Admiral warned the Secretary of Defense (who insists on being called the Secretary of War) that it would be a bad idea to follow his orders to leave some troops (probably the Lincoln carrier group) in the Middle East into September and leave more (possibly the 82nd Airborne) into next year because — among other things — it would mean they were unprepared to protect the US.

The story is important by itself. But it’s even crazier when you see what Whiskey Pete did in the wake of that dire warning. He did do two things — a trip to Oshkosh and award a new contract to Raytheon, to claim DOD was dealing with its missile shortages.

But he also went to campaign in Iowa as his associates floated a presidential run.

And he took time away from dealing with this resource crisis to help negotiate a deal to steal Venezuela’s oil, a deal that comes with its own resource requirements.

The Generals and Admirals warned Hegseth we’re dangerously overstretched. And his response primarily consisted of trolling and culture wars.

As you read what happened, note how much of his primary Tweeting happens on his personal account, which makes me wonder whether he’s not in the same location as his designated Tweeter.

August 11

Some of this no doubt pertains to the plight of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Three days before the memo reported by WaPo, at a public meeting in San Diego, multiple family members raised concerns about the mental health support aboard the aircraft carrier, which at that point, had not touched land for 266 days.

Stars and Stripes reported it that same day.

Family members and sailors say months at sea with no end in sight to a grueling Middle East deployment have intensified worries about mental health and the risk of self-harm aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Those concerns were brought directly to Navy leadership Thursday, when family members spoke to Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao and other senior officials during intense town hall meetings, according to two spouses who attended.

In one case, a spouse tearfully told officials that she received a message that same day from her husband saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow,” according to one of the estimated 200 attendees at the San Diego town hall meeting.

Officials presiding over the meeting didn’t directly respond to that or similar statements but stressed that sailors aboard the ship had access to mental health workers, as well as chaplains and doctors, the spouse said.

Deep in the story it described one suicide attempt and a more general fear of the same.

“My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” one worried parent wrote to Stars and Stripes in July. “We are all tucked in at night in our beds at night meanwhile our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”

Sailors aboard Lincoln separately described an incident in which a crew member was prevented from jumping from the ship.

“We already had an instance where watch standers had to stop someone from jumping,” one sailor said. The ship’s crew was informed about the incident, which occurred a few months ago, during a ship-wide announcement, sailors said.

August 12

The next day, the Military Times added details from the San Diego meeting, describing two more suicide attempts on the USS Lincoln.

Annabelle Loma has spoken with her husband only a few times since he attempted to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during his current deployment.

Communication has been difficult to come by, and he is now on medical hold.

Loma, who lives in San Diego, said her husband had been repeatedly overextended before he tried to jump from the carrier.

“He’s scared,” Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”

Loma said she initially received a call from the ship’s ombudsman after the incident but has not heard from anyone with the Navy in recent weeks.

All three of these attempts are different from the one, which happened on August 3, that would get a 19-year old referred for discipline later in the month, meaning at least four incidences had occurred by August 13.

August 13

Whiskey Pete posted a video to his personal account in response. Filmed on a ship, probably in Panama (but not the Lincoln), and looking like a slob, Hegseth insisted he knew what it was like not to touch land for over eight months.

He posted a bunch from his official account that day from an exercise in Panama, which included one of his favorite kinds of videos, showing himself doing pushups with the troops.

August 14

Per the WaPo story, the military brass told Hegseth that sustaining the commitment to Iran will make the US less safe elsewhere. Hegseth had ordered troops to stay in the Middle East, but four top leaders told him that — while they will follow his orders — they did not agree with them, a non-concur.

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

[snip]

The Aug. 14 orders book directs some troops deployed in the Middle East to remain there through September and some others into 2027, said those familiar with the document. The prospect of extending those forces further compelled military leaders to voice their concern, these people said.

Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.

The geographic combatant commands overseeing U.S. operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America have had their ships, aircraft and other equipment pulled away to support the Iran conflict. This has limited their ability to conduct missions and ensure proper training, those familiar with the assessment said. The Navy, in particular, has had to stretch its capacity to keep up with wartime demands.

Army and Air Force leadership concurred with Hegseth’s desire to extend their deployed forces, but each emphasized that doing so would come with significant risk, these people said.

That day, Whiskey Pete first posted — to his official account — a post about hearing directly from service members. He then reposted it to his personal account with added bitching about the “reckless & shameless ‘American’ media,” claiming it debunked the claims about the USS Lincoln.

Publicly, NYT explained part of the problem with the USS Lincoln: Iran had destroyed much of the Fifth Fleet Command in Bahrain.

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.

The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.

The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports.

With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.

The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.

The same day,  Hegseth reposted a spot from Hung Cao announcing what Cao claimed was a planned rotation with the USS Lincoln. The sailors were, after nine months, coming home (but don’t think that’s because people are jumping overboard, that was always the plan! Cao claimed).

In reposting Cao, Hegseth again attacked the “American-hating news.”

August 15

The next day, Whiskey Pete proudly posted an AP story about how DOD is rolling out a course on Christianity at base schools.

August 16

On April 16, Hegseth posted a WSJ column by CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper about a visit he made to the USS Abraham Lincoln the previous day.

Cooper claimed that stories of mental health challenges — stories that had come less than a week earlier from sailors’ families!! — were old news.

Recent media reporting has portrayed varying perspectives on operational tempo, crew morale and the realities facing our deployed forces. What I found aboard the Lincoln is that many elements of those stories are old news.

I chatted with junior enlisted personnel and junior officers in small groups. Issues related to food, hot water and other concerns raised months ago were addressed by leadership and resolved.

The crew is tired, but they continue to fire on all cylinders. History will record this deployment as one of the most operationally intense and consequential of the modern era.

August 17

On August 17, as sailors were jumping off aircraft carriers and days after his top brass told him the military was overstretched, Whiskey Pete tested a Presidential run in Iowa.

The visit, reported earlier by CBS News, comes five months after Hegseth was scheduled to appear at a political rally and fundraising event with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who is running for reelection this year. That trip was postponed after several U.S. troops from Iowa were killed early in the war with Iran.

In response to questions, the Pentagon said in a statement that it does “not proactively announce events” that Hegseth attends “in his personal capacity.”

Hegseth will take a U.S.-funded military aircraft to Iowa, the Pentagon said. He is doing so because he is “designated as a ‘required use’ traveler” by the U.S. government “and is mandated to use military aircraft for all travel, both official and unofficial, due to the continuous need for secure communications and responsive transportation for national security.”

While in Iowa campaigning for President, Whiskey Pete lied about Obama and Biden and engaged in casual transphobia.

In DC, Trump snapped at Kristen Holmes when she asked about the Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the publisher of Stars and Stripes resigned rather than fire the editor-in-chief and a reporter who had spoken in favor of independence, who he was ordered to fire on August 12.

9. Mr. [Max] Lederer did not immediately comply. On August 17, 2026, Mr. Lederer contacted Defendant Brey by email to request clarification of a few points in the notices. That same day, Defendant Brey replied, ignoring Mr. Lederer’s request and stating instead: “Thank you Max. I appreciate your response. However, please deliver the notices as instructed.”

10. Mr. Lederer did not deliver the notices. Instead, he decided then and there to retire, and informed the Stripes’ staff via email. Mr. Lederer took this step because he did not want to be part of Defendants’ scheme to illegally punish Mr. Slavin and Ms. Korte for exercising their First Amendment rights.

August 18

The next day, Hegseth posted a Raytheon announcement about a contract to make Tomahawks to his personal account.

He also reposted Trump claiming the Strait was open

August 19

On August 19, he posted a link to what purports to be the Strategic Direction for the Army, from General Christopher LaNeve, the guy Hegseth wants to install as Secretary of the Army, but whom Joni Ernst refuses to support. The document is empty platitudes.

The NYT posted a story reminding that Hegseth’s top advisor is his wife, who has to babysit him so he doesn’t get drunk or fuck another lady.

Mrs. Hegseth has also encouraged Mr. Hegseth’s adversarial relationship with the news media, the administration official said, and although she was a journalist for two decades, she has worked with her husband to bar reporters from the building. (The New York Times is suing the Defense Department over its restrictions on reporters who cover the Pentagon.)

Her involvement in the Defense Department is so unusual that it has led to questions about Mr. Hegseth’s leadership. He is already under pressure for the high cost of the Iran war, shrinking munitions stockpiles, poor conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during an eight-and-a-half-month deployment in the Middle East, firings of senior military leaders, and blocking the promotions of women and minorities.

“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Mr. Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”

That evening (just after midnight my time), Hegseth posted Trump’s latest attempt to scold Iran into submission, announcing what purport to be new sanctions.

August 20

On August 20, amid all the posts about official business posted to his personal account, Whiskey Pete posted from his monthly prayer meeting on his official account.

August 21

In the middle of this, Hegseth’s trolling headache started. It started when Data Republican (AKA Jennica Pounds) narced herself out and in the process ruined a propaganda effort far right State Official Sarah Rogers tried to place.

PRO-TRUMP INTERNET SLEUTH Jennica Pounds—better known as “Data Republican” to her nearly one million followers on X—made a grim announcement on Friday. Deep-state operatives embedded within the Trump administration had tried to entrap her into committing treason.

“It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime,” she wrote in a now-deleted thread. “I have never been more angry in my life.”

[snip]

Rogers chimed in on X to—more or less—politely explain that Pounds was a dunce.

“lol, these are my text messages and documents,” Rogers wrote on X to Pounds, seemingly amused. “The ‘markings’ are FOIA redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn’t a ‘trap,’ I will happily disclose the documents myself.” She did so, defusing the situation by basically sacrificing her attempt at an orchestrated leak.

[snip]

Part of the problem is also that Pounds is herself a Trump administration employee. On Monday, a Defense Department spokesperson confirmed to me that Pounds is employed there as a “special government employee”—the same temporary status that Solomon has been hired under at the White House, and that Musk once used to work for DOGE.

Pounds’s exact job duties at the Defense Department are unclear. Curiously, she left her Defense job out of a list of her official affiliations in a Sunday post on X. When her position was confirmed by the Pentagon on Monday, Pounds said on X that she had joined “to serve the country in a more hands-on way,” without explaining what that means in practice.

August 24

On Monday, August 24, Scott Bessent announced what he claimed were economic D-Day sanctions on Iran, an announcement that was clear dick-wagging, since the US was not going to sanction China and Trump won’t sanction Russia.

August 25

Overnight that day, John Ratcliffe went on an unannounced visit to Moscow to meet with his counterpart.

On August 25, Whiskey Pete went to Oshkosh, WI to celebrate efforts to accelerate missile production, which is one of the few things he posted on his official account.

That day, NYT described how “rudderless” DOD is under his leadership, focusing closely on the battle over the Army Secretary position and what we now know are the overstretched resources reported on August 14.

A series of firings and feuds initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East.

The Army has not had a chief of staff, the service’s top officer, since Mr. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George without explanation in April, and there are no signs that he is close to filling the position, said current and former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Hegseth has forced out at least three senior officers who had been viewed as potential successors to General George.

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, is also expected to leave the administration in the next few months and has already moved out of the large family house that he was renting in Fort Myer, outside Washington, officials said.

The turmoil comes as the Army, the military’s largest service, faces its busiest period since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Army air defense soldiers are playing the leading role in defending U.S. troops in the Middle East from increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile attacks. The Army’s command in Europe is providing critical intelligence and other support to Ukraine as it fights to hold off a larger Russian force.

August 26

On August 26, Whiskey Pete posted a tribute to those who passed in the Abbeygate attack on his official account.

The same day Hegseth paid that tribute to a war ended five years ago, MS-Now reported that DOD was disciplining one of the people — the 19-year old — who jumped off the USS Lincoln.

August 27

In the wake of John Ratcliffe’s sudden, secretive trip to Moscow, WaPo provided an explanation beyond the one being publicly given: The US had intelligence that Russia believed the US to be weak and the US wanted to warn Putin not to do anything stupid.

The classified intelligence suggesting that Putin sees the U.S. as weakened by the six-month-old war in Iran follows reports of diminished troop readiness and munitions shortfalls as a result of the extended campaign against Tehran.

U.S. military stockpiles of key weapons have been severely depleted, including Patriot and other air-defense platforms, as well as sophisticated offensive weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles and the short-range Army Tactical Missile System, which is also in demand in Ukraine.

The Post previously reported that the U.S. has lost roughly a quarter of its Reaper drones, which cost between $30 million and $50 million apiece and are used for surveillance and targeting.

The weapons shortages have alarmed allies in Asia, raising questions about Washington’s ability to deter a potential confrontation with China.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials have publicly denied that there are serious munitions shortages, even as they have pressed arms producers to rapidly build more weapons.

August 28

Whiskey Pete posted a CentCom video announcing they had — 6 months after the start of the war — succeeded in demining the shipping lanes in Hormuz.

He later posted Trump’s announcement of a deal with Venezuela money launderer, complete with lies about it being “free” and doing anything to lower gas prices anytime soon.

Nineteen paragraphs into a story about the DOD role in this published the next day, WSJ described that the announcement was prematurely rolled out to try to distract from the Iran debacle.

Faced with an unpopular and grinding war with Iran, which has squeezed global energy supplies, the Trump administration felt a sense of urgency to announce it had secured a long-term source of crude in the Western Hemisphere, people involved in the talks said. Trump also sought a political win in portraying the Venezuela deal as a way to insulate Americans from the costs of the turmoil in the Middle East ahead of November’s midterm elections, they added.

August 29

Having let the Iowa story sit there for more than a week, Whiskey Pete aggressively denied it on a Saturday news hole.

August 30

WaPo reports about the Orders Book. In response to a Dan Lamothe post about it, Hegseth’s chief propagandist attempted to rebut it.

It didn’t go well.

Parnell confirmed the information was highly classified — and so therefore authentic. A community note explained Parnell’s claims about the law were wrong (Trump has attempted to charge some people, including Jim Baker and James Comey, for confirming classified information, meaning Parnell technically committed a crime but WaPo did not.)

And by saying that non-concurs from the Generals are “routine,” Parnell asserted that the uniformed military “constantly” tells Whiskey Pete his orders are dangerous but they’ll follow orders.

That same day, General Brandon Tegtmeier sent families of those in the 82nd Airborne a letter informing them the unit would remain in the Middle East through next March.

The extended deployment was announced by division commander Maj. Gen. Brandon R. Tegtmeier in a letter to military families, thanking them for their support of the deployed troops. Task & Purpose reviewed the letter, dated Aug. 30 and shared to social media including the Army’s unofficial subreddit. The Army confirmed the authenticity of the letter. The division’s headquarters as well as members of artillery units, the sustainment brigade and air defense troops will be in the region for a full year, while paratroopers and the division’s combat aviation brigade have had their tours extended for up to a year.

“We now know that operational requirements will keep the Division Headquarters and elements of DIVARTY, ADSB, 3-4 ADA, and 307th Division Engineer Battalion forward for twelve total months,” Tegtmeier wrote. “Paratroopers of 1st BCT and the CAB will serve forward for up to twelve months in total as well. We do not share that lightly, and we understand that a longer tour weighs heavily on every household, including our own.”

Roughly 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division deployed to U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility in March.

And to cap it off, as Sean Parnell was attacking Lamothe for WaPo’s story about the warning from August 14, Lamothe (and Tara Copp, also bylined on the earlier story) revealed that Whiskey Pete’s secret troll program was wider than known.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever.

The post Three Days after Learning He Had Lost the Empire, Whiskey Pete Hegseth Campaigned To Be President appeared first on emptywheel.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer has a level-headed reputation but commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and White House adviser Peter Navarro also have key roles

Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.

But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.

In a 5-4 decision, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court ruling that would have prevented work from being done on the ballroom

• US supreme court allows Trump to keep building $400m White House ballroom

• Sign up for US Breaking News emails

Chris Hippensteel

We’re watching today as Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and Kevin Warsh, the chair of the Federal Reserve, deliver their opening remarks at the G20 meetings in Asheville, North Carolina.

Yes, Virginia, we do take time off—and this is one of them.

Due to the press of events since late February, I’d pretty much given up my annual late summer truck north to my ancestral home of sorts in Rhode Island. I’d lived in the Ocean State for only two years as a kid in the late 1950s, but I’d come back constantly over the decades to see my late sister and her family, who lived on there for another 40 years—until yet another late-March sleet and an empty nest propelled them to Gulf Shores, Ala.

Then were the other things: I got my first teen kiss on the rocks at Second Beach in Middletown, abutting Newport, in 1960, and in 1991, I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in the waters there. I like to take a dip in the exact same spot. (Yes, it’s strange.)

This year, though, with two wars threatening to go wide and the administration’s authoritarian crackdowns in high gear, I felt pinned to my chair. Around Washington, moreover, there was a growing chorus of angry and alarmed former CIA, NSA, DIA and State Department officials, offloaded in repeated DOGE/MAGA political purges, to talk to. I snuck off the New Hampshire for a rye days around the 4th of July, but that was it.

But burnout finally came about 10 days ago. At the last moment, I decided couldn’t very well handle September if I didn’t bolt north at the end of this month and find solace, with a firm plan to hit the beach with my books for a week and try very hard to disconnect from the incessant, demanding internet.

So by the time you read this, I should be well gone, with my feet folded in the Second Beach sand, the Sawx on the radio, a cup of Del’s frozen lemonade in my hand, a linguica sandwich in my lap, and a few great new books to haul from my beach bag. (Leading candidates: Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, and two forthcoming titles, Mark Riebling’s The Soldier Spy, about the late Patrick Lang, an Army colonel I knew quite well, and David McCloskey’s latest thriller, London Station.)

(By the way, SpyTalk’s Year Seven begins August 31. How ‘bout that?!)

And that’s principally because of you, dear readers—you and the incredibly accomplished writers who continue to do great work for SpyTalk. So everybody involved should take a bow. Thank you, thank you, thank you, all.

Catch you on the rebound. I’m headed down the road—listening to The Warmth of the Sun.

Don’t miss the latest SpyTalk podcast, with former CIA Chief Learning Officer Steve Hirsch on how Russia, China, and Iran exploit the cracks in US intelligence.

Thank you for reading this. SpyTalk is an entirely reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the work of all of us here, please consider taking out a paid subscription. We can’t do it without you. Just click below for a no-obligation free trial.

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Washington DC—Thousands returned to the Lincoln Memorial on Friday morning in a referendum of government for failing to honor its commitment to equal rights for everyone. The March On Washington 2026 was held 63 years to the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. His impassioned message helped usher the civil rights movement from a footnote into prime time, and supercharged the movement which is still going today. It set the standard for what social and economic equality should look like. Friday’s march revived Dr. King’s call to social and economic equality.

As a deep blue sky shadowed the background of a bright white Lincoln Memorial, the speakers told how they would not allow the selfless sacrifices of 1960s civil rights leaders to be swept away.

One after another, speakers said that the nation had failed to keep its promise of equality. They spoke with the same rhythm and reason as Martin Luther King Jr. near the footprints he left 63 years ago. Their words contrasted the country’s 1963 legislative promises against its failed delivery of social and economic access. They concluded that legislative changes to civil rights promises in 2026 were giant steps backwards.

As one solution, speakers urged voters to “have a plan” by registering to vote and taking someone along with them. But there is a point that wrestling executive branch power back into service for those for which it was intended requires more than just voting, especially if the power of the vote is being subverted by executive branch policies that suppress that voting.

For even as they spoke, a new post office rule restricting mailed voting ballots as well as presidential orders demanding States’ voting lists, were being challenged in the courts. Many speakers railed against the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais which overturned a lower court ruling and codified partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate government purpose. The recent decision allows States to tilt the balance of power in the legislature more favorably toward White majority districts. It has already resulted in the erasure of Black voting power in Tennessee and Alabama. In those States there are no longer any Black majority voting blocks. The decision further split Black majority voting blocksin six States altogether, severely muting the voices millions of Black voters in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina. The Supreme Court decision was a major blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Speakers Set Tone For November Elections

Chief among the speakers critical of the Supreme Court decision was Revered Al Sharpton, President and Founder of National Action Network, and organizer of the March on Washington 2026. The elder civil rights leader railed against Trump’s attacks on civil rights without mentioning him by name, but he did not need to mention who was behind the attacks.

“The Callais decision by the Supreme Court put a bullet in the heart of voting rights,” he said. Casting the Supreme Court as ruling from a pre-1963 mindset, he said, “But they don’t understand, we’re not going back. We will not let them turn back the hand of time. They can turn back the clock but they can’t turn back time. And if we go home and organize like they did in 1963, we can put a handicap on the most biased, bigoted presidency that we’ve seen in a long time.”

The march was joined by labor, faith, Latino, voting rights and community organizations. The group leaders spoke from the podium on the Lincoln Memorial steps as well. Many leaders who spoke followed in the footsteps of the same labor, clergy, and civil rights leaders of their organization predecessors who spoke in 1963.

“If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be working so hard to take it away from you,” said Everette Kelly, National President of the American Federation of Government Employees, which is the largest union representing federal and D.C. government employees. Kelly condemned the Doge takeover of government agencies and removal of tens of thousands of government employees who had kept the country operating safely with oversight needed for basic functions such as food inspections, weather forecasting, and air traffic control.

“Our ancestors didn’t pay the price for us to stand here quiet[ly],” he said. “There’s power in ‘We’ and in 10 weeks this election day will show them what a bad mistake that was.”

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke about how the civil right leaders of 1963 were not handed a movement but had to build one. “The civil rights movement is the foundation for a Great Society,” she said. “We are living in the legacy of it today. But their vision went further than their victory. America may have agreed to open the lunch counter but it never committed to us affording the meal.”

Ocasio-Cortez argued, “America is wealthier than it has ever been. Yet millions of Americans work every day to afford the basics. It is not simply an economic failure, it is a moral and structural failure. We must work to fix it.”

Marcos Smyth, an artist working with Third Act-DMV, spoke about the march after he returned home that day. “Minorities and Blacks have been marginalized,” he said. This administration is trying to turn its back on Black people by making it more difficult to vote.”

Smyth brought a paper mache caricature of Trump on a wheeled cart he built. He originally designed and helped other artists build the puppet for the No Kings II rally in March of this year, and refashioned it for the March on Washington. But he didn’t want the caricature of Trump to be anything near the overarching reason the March on Washington was returning to the Lincoln Memorial. But so many people liked the puppet he was delayed by the many requests from participants asking to take a photo with him and the puppet.

“It’s not intended as a get out the vote message,” he said. But it couldn’t be helped to presume it was an inspiration for people to vote because it was Trump that was behind many of their rights being taken away.

Civil Rights Gains of 1963 Are Being Erased

After the 1963 march the nation has made significant progress by 1965, passing legislation codifying equal rights in many sectors which have been retracted in the last 2 years. In 1965, the birth of the great society, equal rights gains finally began to align with forefathers’ visions af a nation of equality and justice for all.. the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, .

But the dozens of speakers assembled warned that rights previously gained and the survival of democracy hung in a balance and was weighted down by the willful efforts of the wealthy and powerful influences to diminish it.

Under the policies of the most wealthy president the nation has ever elected, the viability of democracy was at stake, the speakers argued. This is because the wealthy are responsible for the loss of democratic norms by funding its demise. Elon Musk gave $200 million to the Trump presidential reelection campaign in 2019. He also offered voters a lottery of a million dollars if they voted for Trump. It was a lottery which turned out to be a fake ploy to gain votes for Trump. He never paid anyone a million dollars for voting for Trump because it was illegal to do so. Still, many fell for his ploy.

Trump is the nations first multi-billionaire president, leveraging the power of his office to form policy to his personal benefit and self enrichment. No other president has come anywhere close to the amount of wealth accumulated in office while president. The Supreme Court effectively crowned him as an untouchable from prosecution for official acts as president with its ruling in Trump v. United States, so that any official act he takes cannot lead to trial conviction. Further, the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor in nearly every case brought before it. This has in effect green-lighted many of the undoings of the constitutional order, and will make more difficult reversing the damage he has done to civil rights.

The Hart–Celler Act, or Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, was a federal law passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The law abolished the National Origins Formula, which had been the basis of U.S. immigration policy since the 1920s.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, nearly blown the Immigration and Nationality Act out of existence. The draconian immigration policies under Trump’s White House have led to death of U.S. citizens, immigrants, and mass chaos across the country. The resulting chaos from ICE has enabled kidnapping, disappearance, and unlawful abuse in detention camps of thousands of migrants and immigrants without due process, pending deportation.

ICE “Ha[s] adopted methods and routine tactics that frequently lead to serious civil rights violations. They are committing these violations at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history,” according to the ACLU in a July published report documenting 1200 incidents.

In 1965, the Social Security Amendments Act was also signed into law by President Johnson. It was also a part of the vision of the Great Society. It created Medicare and Medicaid, health insurance for those over 65. With the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” legislation, ugly in both application and scope, it would cause the suffering and sickness of millions unable to afford rising costs of medical care in their retirement years. Billions will be cut from the provisions of this 1965 Act in order to afford tax breaks for the wealthy which go into effect in January 2027.

Video contributed by Marcos Smyth with editing by John Zangas.

The post March On Washington Returns To Lincoln Memorial 63 Years After Iconic MLK Speech appeared first on DCMediaGroup.

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

Twenty years ago today, on August 30, 2006, I launched Above the Law. This anniversary led me to reflect on how the world of legal media has changed dramatically over the past two decades—ATL included.

If you look back at my inaugural post on Above the Law, you’ll see my initial vision for the outlet was focused heavily on gossip and humor. And while there are still traces of that DNA at ATL—hello, Biglaw Biter1—it’s fair to say the Above the Law of 2026 is a more serious and substantive publication than the self-described “legal tabloid” of 2006. For instance, I doubt the original ATL would have been the subject of a 1,600-word feature by Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Times (gift link).

As for me, I left ATL in 2019, tried out legal recruiting, and almost died of COVID. That near-death experience made me realize I wanted to return to full-time writing—which I did in May 2021, by activating paid subscriptions here at Original Jurisdiction.

When I launched OJ, I felt the same anxiety I did when I started ATL: Will this flop? Fortunately, like ATL, OJ thrived—and I owe it all to you, my subscribers and sponsors.

Today, I do four things for a living: publish this newsletter, write a Bloomberg Law column, host a podcast, and do some paid speaking. I’m professionally happier than I’ve ever been, and for the first time, I’m not looking for “the next big thing.” My current plan is to keep doing exactly what I’m doing—until I retire, die, or get replaced by AI. To my readers, listeners, and sponsors, I have just two words: thank you.

A programming note: the next OJ podcast episode will air on September 9, instead of September 2 (because of having to schedule the recording around the crazy schedule of my next guest, one of the busiest lawyers in America). But I’ll still have plenty of content for you, possibly including a Supreme Court clerk hiring post; if you’re aware of any hires not included in my last report, please drop me a line.

Now, on to the news—ridiculously busy for the last full week of August.

Lawyer of the Week: Beth Wilkinson.

In a podcast interview I recorded last week with Jacob Robinson for Law of Code (teaser here), he asked me if I’d ever return to practicing law. Although I keep my New York law license active—mostly to keep my mother honest when she tells people, “My son is a lawyer”—I no longer practice, and I have no desire to return to practice.

There are, however, two things I’d be willing to return for, on a temporary basis: to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, or—more realistically—to try a case to a jury, all the way to verdict (even a boring case, and even as the most junior person on the trial team). And if I drew up a short list of the litigators I’d want to work for, it would include Beth Wilkinson of Wilkinson Stekloff, trial lawyer extraordinaire.

Oh, you want to work with Beth Wilkinson? Take a number. Right now she’s handling three of the biggest litigations in the country, as noted in Jessica Toonkel’s recent profile of Wilkinson in The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Wilkinson has successfully defended the National Football League and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, as well as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh against accusations of sexual assault in his confirmation hearings, making her a go-to trial lawyer in high-stakes cases. She has won about 60 cases and lost four jury verdicts, two of which were set aside and one settled. She has never had a client pay a judgment.

She is now in the middle of the three most high-stakes media battles in years…. In addition to working for Paramount [in its litigation against state attorneys general trying to block its $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery], Wilkinson is also representing TV station operator Nexstar Media Group in defending its $6.2 billion acquisition of competitor Tegna, a deal state attorneys general have also sued to block, and Walt Disney Co. ABC in its fight with the Federal Communications Commission over the network’s broadcast licenses.

If ABC v. FCC rings a bell, it should: filed by Wilkinson and leading Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement, it was last week’s Litigation of the Week.

Given the many famous cases she has handled over her long career, some of which we discussed in our podcast interview—including, of course, her successful prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers—Wilkinson has many individual wins to celebrate. But as she told me in our conversation (and later wrote in a Bloomberg Law piece), what excites her most at this point in her career is mentoring and developing younger colleagues, then sitting back and watching them thrive.

In that sense, one of the biggest signs of Wilkinson’s success is a fourth case in the headlines, People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms Inc. This litigation settled in the middle of trial, for $17 billion—which many analysts see as an excellent outcome for the defense (for reasons discussed below, under Litigation of the Week).

Wilkinson Stekloff was trial counsel for Meta, alongside Covington & Burling and Davis Polk—but Wilkinson wasn’t her firm’s main courtroom lawyer. Instead, if you look at Meta’s written filings and news stories about key cross-examinations, you’ll see mention of colleagues like Brian Stekloff and Moira Penza. And that is, in my view, a testament to the team that Beth Wilkinson has helped build at Wilkinson Stekloff: a firm so formidable that clients like Meta will trust it with matters of existential importance—whether or not Beth Wilkinson herself is personally involved.2

Other lawyers in the news:

• Speaking of legendary litigators who have appeared on my podcast, David Boies, still going strong at 85, had a good week:

  • On Thursday, Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) approved Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Jeffrey Epstein victims who alleged that B of A aided in Epstein’s sex trafficking. Judge Rakoff also signed off on a 30% fee request for the lawyers—including Boies, Sigrid McCawley, and Andrew Villacastin, of Boies Schiller Flexner, and Brad Edwards, of Edwards Henderson.

  • On Friday, Judge Richard Seeborg (N.D. Cal.) awarded almost $147 million in attorneys’ fees to Boies and his co-counsel in a privacy class action against Google that covered 98 million people and resulted in a $425 million jury verdict. Judge Seeborg said the one-third fee was high but justified, given counsel’s “exemplary performance.” The lawyers included David Boies, Alexander Boies, and Mark Mao of BSF; Bill Carmody, Amanda Bonn, and Shawn Rabin of Susman Godfrey; and Ryan McGee of Morgan & Morgan.

• Will Scharf, who will assume the role of White House counsel on September 1, was profiled by Luke Broadwater for The New York Times (gift link via Howard Bashman’s How Appealing). The article struck me as neutral to positive, maybe 6/10; ChatGPT agreed (6.5/10), while Claude dissented (4/10).

• Who’s replacing Will Scharf in the influential role of White House staff secretary? A fellow lawyer: current deputy staff secretary Benjamin “Ben” Moss, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and previously served as general counsel to then-senator JD Vance (R-Ohio).

• Speaking of job changes, Kerry Abrams will step down as dean of Duke Law after more than eight years in the role. Query whether she can resolve the DOJ investigation into alleged racial discrimination in Duke’s admissions before she departs at the end of the 2026-27 academic year.

• Abrams is leaving the deanship voluntarily, while staying on at Duke as a member of the faculty. In contrast, Nathaniel Cullerton—the Wachtell Lipton partner caught making out with an associate in Central Park, in a viral video—“is being forced out by the elite law firm,” per The New York Post.

• In the August 23 edition of Judicial Notice, I discussed Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival, his thread on X criticizing four judges who ruled against DHS, and an ethics complaint filed against Percival by 128 retired judges, including Nancy Gertner and J. Michael Luttig. In a reader poll that drew almost 600 votes, 65% of you expressed support for the complaint. For additional views, see (or hear) Sarah Isgur of Advisory Opinions, who criticized the complaint as “barfare” (weaponization of the attorney ethics process), or Professor Steve Vladeck of One First, who argued that the real issue isn’t the ethics complaint, but the “abominable” nature of Percival’s conduct.3

In memoriam: assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Haden (S.D. Cal.) passed away on August 19, at 48. Initial reports didn’t specify the cause of death, but last week, the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that he died by suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental-health crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988) or contact a lawyer assistance program in your state. As someone who is all too familiar with the devastating toll of suicide,4 I encourage you to donate to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or a similar charity focused on suicide prevention.

Judges of the Week: Judges Rita Lin and Noël Wise.

Last week, I wrote that the Northern District of California is one of the five most important district courts in the country right now, thanks to its popularity as a venue for (1) big-ticket cases involving Big Tech and (2) challenges to Trump administration policies. I picked Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers (N.D. Cal.) as the most recent Judge of the Week based on her handling of a major tech case, People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms Inc. (discussed below). And now I’m bestowing Judge of the Week honors on two of her colleagues, Judges Rita Lin and Noël Wise, based on their benchslaps of the Trump administration: In the span of roughly 24 hours, these two relatively new Biden appointees ruled against the federal government in a pair of high-profile cases, both based on the First Amendment.

On Thursday, in Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, Judge Lin blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic. After the AI giant refused to allow its Claude AI models ​to be used by the U.S. military for surveillance or autonomous weapons and publicly criticized the government’s views on AI safety, the government took action against Anthropic—including designating the company “a supply chain risk.” Represented by WilmerHale, Anthropic sued, alleging it was retaliated against for its speech in violation of the First Amendment. In a 59-page opinion, Judge Lin agreed, declaring that the Trump administration’s actions were “illegal and baseless.” In one of the opinion’s most widely quoted lines, she wrote, “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

On Friday, in Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation v. Rubio, Judge Wise ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students for expressing pro-Palestine views. In a 90-page ruling that Reuters described as “blistering,” she wrote that “in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people” and “is not the government’s to take.” As Conor Fitzpatrick of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, counsel to the plaintiffs, told The Times (gift link), “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.”

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• Josh Morrow, a partner at Lehotsky Cohn, conducted an interesting analysis (posted by Professor Eugene Volokh on the Volokh Conspiracy). Morrow ran 2,250 published opinions from federal appellate courts from 2026 through Pangram, an AI-detection tool, and found that more than 50 showed signs of AI authorship. He then took roughly 300 opinions published in January 2022 by federal circuit courts and fed them into Pangram—and found no signs of AI-generated text. Some folks I discussed this study with were troubled by its findings, but I wasn’t. First, 50 opinions out of 2,250 is a shade over 2%, a tiny percentage. Second, signs of AI authorship simply suggest that AI generated the prose; they don’t denote the presence of hallucinations or other errors.

• Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito overlapped at Yale Law School for two years. Why weren’t they friends? As Thomas recounted to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on his podcast, Alito said to Thomas, “Clarence, you were scary.” What did he mean by that? During their YLS years, Alito was the introverted, nerdy conservative that he still is today—while Thomas was “a left-wing radical,” in Cruz’s words, who wore bib overalls and combat boots around 127 Wall Street.

• If you’re trying to get rid of your Indiana state criminal case by forging a dismissal order signed by a judge, pick a jurist other than Chief Justice John Roberts. A Colorado man named Joshua Culver learned this the hard way—and now he faces federal charges of impersonation and forgery as well.

In memoriam:

• Judith Kreeger, who served as a judge in Miami-Dade’s 11th Judicial Circuit Family Division for more than 25 years, passed away at 85.

• Barbara McDermott—who served for almost 14 years as a judge in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, spending a majority of that time handling homicide cases—passed away at 71.

May they rest in peace.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for an of counsel in trademark litigation.

Lateral Link is working with a global IP practice seeking an exceptional litigator (6+ years) to join as of counsel, handling sophisticated trademark disputes. This is a fantastic opportunity for experienced litigators looking to join a top trademark practice. Prior trademark experience is not required—strong general commercial or IP litigation experience is welcome, provided the candidate has outstanding writing skills and the ability to take a meaningful first-chair role. Candidates from top litigation boutiques or Am Law 100 firms are of particular interest. This role requires proximity to one of the firm’s offices and is not intended to be fully remote. Compensation ranges from $196,000–$350,000, depending on hours, experience, qualifications, and location. To be considered, please send your résumé to Steven Rushing at srushing@laterallink.com.

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Today’s Report

1. Overview

2. White House News

3. Truth Social Posts

4. Government Department News

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

6. AI & Tech Company News

7. Congressional Watch

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

1. Overview

President Trump utilized Truth Social to advocate for a protectionist trade policy, specifically targeting Canada. He argued that the U.S. has suffered financial losses and urged Canadian companies to relocate operations domestically to avoid new tariffs. Asserting that his tariff strategy has “revived” the automotive sector, he stated he no longer wishes to rely on Canadian parts or vehicles.

The President also announced a new oil agreement with Venezuela intended to refill the Strategic National Reserve. Regarding cultural and domestic concerns, he criticized New York Governor Kathy Hochul regarding the release of criminals and pledged to restore the World War II Monument after reports of vandalism. Furthermore, he expressed an intention to renovate the “decrepit” Kennedy Center and shared an anecdote regarding Google Maps’ labeling of Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

Trump initiated a public conflict with media figures, specifically challenging Kristen Welker of *Meet the Press*. He claimed a 99% success rate for his political endorsements and warned he would report the journalist for “purposeful inaccuracy.” Additionally, the State Dept issued two formal statements: one acknowledging the results of Iceland’s recent referendum on EU accession negotiations, and another extending congratulations to Malaysia on its 69th independence anniversary. These updates emphasized the ongoing U.S. commitment to maintaining bilateral partnerships and promoting regional stability.

Forced reshoring initiatives driven by the threat of steep tariffs introduce significant cost headwinds for manufacturing firms with deep cross-border dependencies, potentially dismantling established supply chain efficiencies. Simultaneously, aggressive regulatory intervention in agriculture and media aims to decentralize market power, creating substantial operational volatility for consolidated food processors and communication entities facing heightened political scrutiny. Conversely, strategic efforts to realign energy and aerospace trade flows through state-led partnerships offer new growth avenues, though these “politically-driven” deals risk displacing long-standing commercial arrangements and inviting retaliatory trade friction.

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2. White House News

No White House news found.

3. Truth Social Posts

Trump focused heavily on economic and trade policy, specifically regarding Canada, asserting that the United States has lost billions annually and must incentivize companies to return stateside to avoid tariffs. He urged Canadian companies to relocate immediately, arguing that domestic manufacturing—including the automotive sector—has been “revived” and “saved” through his aggressive tariff strategy. He stated that he no longer wants Canadian parts or cars, labeling the country a poor trade partner. Additionally, he announced plans to refill the Strategic National Reserve using oil from a new deal with Venezuela. These economic efforts were highlighted by an aide who praised his job creation record and a recent aircraft deal with Bangladesh. Other administration actions included breaking the grip of major meat processors, securing the aforementioned oil agreement, and considering legal pathways for Jewish Canadians.

Regarding domestic and cultural issues, Trump criticized New York Governor Kathy Hochul for the release of criminals and vowed to restore the Reflecting Pool and grounds at the World War II Monument following acts of vandalism. He expressed a desire to renovate the “decrepit” Kennedy Center, celebrated a successful NASA launch, and recommended Ted Cruz’s new book about Justice Clarence Thomas. In separate posts, he shared news regarding Google Maps labeling Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

Trump also launched a sharp offensive against the media, calling for FCC intervention against what he described as “fake polls” and biased reporting. He singled out Kristen Welker of Meet the Press, challenging her characterization of his endorsement success rate. Trump insisted that his record, which he claimed includes a 99% success rate and 100% in Senatorial contests, represents “the strongest Endorsement in the History of Politics,” and he warned that he would report her for “purposeful inaccuracy.”

Reference: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump

4. Government Department News

State Department (state.gov)

United States Response to Iceland’s EU Accession Referendum

The United States acknowledges Iceland’s August 29 referendum regarding the potential resumption of EU accession negotiations. The U.S. government respects the sovereign choice of the Icelandic people and reaffirms its confidence in Iceland’s ongoing role as a vital NATO ally. The State Department remains committed to enhancing the bilateral partnership with Iceland across security, energy, innovation, and economic sectors to promote mutual peace and prosperity.

United States Congratulates Malaysia on 69th Independence Anniversary

Secretary of State Marco Rubio extended congratulations to the people of Malaysia on the 69th anniversary of the nation’s independence. The United States highlights the enduring partnership between the two countries, emphasized by robust economic ties and a mutual commitment to maintaining freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific. As a primary investor and trading partner, the U.S. seeks to further deepen cooperation with Malaysia to ensure continued peace and prosperity in the region.

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

This analysis is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

Impact on Market

Based on today’s policy developments, our analysis identifies the following market impact themes:

THEME 1. PROTECTIONIST TRADE FRICTION

Trade policy is shifting toward forced reshoring of North American manufacturing through the threat of steep tariffs. This policy forces firms with heavy Canadian dependencies to evaluate costly supply chain migrations. Opposition groups warn that these actions dismantle efficient cross-border trade networks and invite retaliatory measures from key partners.

THEME 2. REGULATORY INTERVENTION IN FOOD AND MEDIA

The administration is expanding its oversight reach to dismantle established market structures in agriculture and media. By breaking the concentration of meat processors, the government aims to empower smaller producers at the expense of consolidated firms. Concurrently, using the FCC to target media outlets creates a volatile environment for communication companies facing political scrutiny.

THEME 3. STRATEGIC COMMODITY REALIGNMENT

The administration is leveraging foreign partnerships to secure vital energy reserves and manufacturing contracts. By tapping Venezuelan supply and securing new aerospace orders from Bangladesh, the government is actively altering trade flows. Observers remain concerned that these specific, politically-driven deals could displace long-standing commercial arrangements.

Policy Impact Heatmap with Market Direction

Each cell shows an estimated impact score on a fixed scale of -10 to +10, reflecting how today’s policy developments may affect each market sector. Positive scores (green, ▲) suggest bullish impact; negative scores (red, ▼) suggest bearish pressure. Rows and columns are sorted by impact strength, and sectors and policy events with no meaningful impact are omitted. The heatmap, the analysis below, and the Impact on Market themes above are produced from a single unified analysis: the heatmap visualizes the magnitudes, while the text explains the causal reasoning behind them.

Policy developments today center on aggressive protectionist shifts and tactical commodity procurement. The escalation of tariff threats against Canadian manufacturing creates significant supply chain uncertainty for the automotive and industrial sectors, forcing firms to weigh higher operational costs against relocation risks. Critics argue these “reckless” trade barriers threaten cross-border integrated manufacturing, potentially spiking consumer prices.

Simultaneously, the administration’s deal with Venezuela to fill the Strategic National Reserves serves as a bullish catalyst for domestic energy market stability, though it disrupts established OPEC supply dynamics. Meanwhile, the directive targeting “big four” meat processors introduces regulatory risk for major food conglomerates, as antitrust intervention seeks to reconfigure supply chains in favor of independent ranchers. The administration’s pursuit of media entities via the FCC introduces a new layer of political risk premium for the communication services sector. These maneuvers reflect a broader transition toward state-directed economic outcomes, where administrative pressure is increasingly prioritized over traditional market equilibrium.

KRSM, company that supplied fuel to Freedom Fuel Network, stole millions worth of gas, Mansfield Oil alleges

The company that supplied fuel to the discount gas stations praised by Donald Trump is being sued for allegedly stealing nearly $4m worth of gas.

Mansfield Oil Company of Gainesville sued KRSM and its president, Syed Kazmi, for allegedly picking up about 1.1m gallons of fuel from 21 May to 7 July, worth more than $3,998,000, and not paying for it.

On Thursday, Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting was once again blocked by a federal judge.

This follows days after the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration on a procedural point, which was rendered moot once USPS issued its final rule on how it would implement Trump’s order.

Judge Talwani’s ruling makes the important point that with mail ballots going out as soon as next week in some states, there simply isn’t enough time for the administration to implement its rule for this year’s midterms.

This new ruling is likely to go back to the Supreme Court.

In other positive legal news, a judge has blocked the Justice Department’s request to drop the case against Steve Bannon, who was found to be in contempt of Congress.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s bid to be released from prison has been rejected.

ICE’s mass detention policy got smacked down once again.

And getting tired of all this losing, Donnie?

And as the midterm elections approach, Donald Trump continues to hit new lows in approval.

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Trump’s threat comes after host described success record of candidates whom president had endorsed as ‘mixed’

Donald Trump ⁠on Sunday said NBC’s Kristen ‌Welker – host of Meet the Press – should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Welker, during a live segment for a local Washington DC affiliate, described the success record of political candidates whom the president had endorsed as “mixed”. The segment aired before Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.

Outsourcing the industry to China cannot continue, but Europe knows it can no longer count on the US for a solution

The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing.

Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade war – not with its retaliatory tariffs, but the curbing of rare-earth exports. A scramble for new supplies began in earnest. The year-long trade truce is due to expire in November. The price of erbium, an element essential to communications infrastructure, has already jumped because of fears that export controls will soon be renewed.

Foreign-born citizens | A heartwarming visitor | United States of Trump | What’s in a name? | Against the odds

Our first child was born in Singapore, 30 years ago, through no fault of their own. As UK citizens, we briefly lived there, came back to the UK, had two more children and have lived here ever since. Yet Reform UK would make it harder for our first child to get social housing than their siblings, who were born here (Reform says it would put foreign-born UK citizens lower on social housing list, 23 August). How does that make sense?
Ian Bourne
London

• Re birds’ association with death (Letters, 26 August), in the eight years since the death of my wife, Victoria, a robin has been popping in most days to say hello and pick up stray crumbs from the dog’s biscuits. It can’t be the same robin over all that time as they have such a short lifespan. Is it a message of love from Victoria? No. Is it welcome and heartwarming? Yes.
Denis Nightingale
Stithians, Cornwall

Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.

Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.

Back when LOLGOP and I were doing Ball of Thread — our podcast explaining how Trump trained Republicans to despise rule of law — there was one post and one episode we never got around to.

I wanted to explain how I’ve come to think of corruption not just as a thing — “corruption strips countries of their assets” — or an adjective — “Trump is the most corrupt president, ever” — but as a process.

That process not only acquires a momentum of its own that is difficult to reverse, which is one of the things you always hear about corruption. But the process can be used as a tool. The process of corruption can be useful for powerful people for more than just the immediate exchange (and the relationships of secrecy) it creates, but also because corrupt institutions and countries are weaker and easier to manipulate.

I don’t think this is any great insight. It is consistent with all the far more scholarly work on corruption, particularly Brian Klaas’ Corruptible and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc, both of which I highly recommend. It is just the lens through which I have viewed the process by which Trump thoroughly corrupted the Republican Party, and in so doing, largely destroyed the country.

And because Trump’s whack bid to steal Venezuela’s oil involves the corrupt Venezuelan who played a role in Trump’s 2019 impeachment, now’s a great time to finally write that post.

Counterfactuals are never 20/20. We can never be sure what might have happened but for certain decisions, but for certain events.

But fuck it — let’s try it here.

Do this: Take a minute to think about what would have happened if a whistleblower had not narced out Trump’s bid to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy on that July 25, 2019 Perfect Phone Call? What would have happened if Adam Schiff hadn’t found a way to make it go public? What would have happened if Trump had not released the Perfect Phone Call transcript on September 25, 2019, just before the two men would meet publicly at the UNGA, in an absolutely astonishing meeting given everything that has happened since?

What would have happened if it had all remained secret, if Zelenskyy had done … we don’t know what … in response to Trump’s demand and Trump had simply given Ukraine the security support Congress had ordered him to give?

Go ahead — go think about that for a minute!

Before I explain how I have thought about that question, let me first note that that call — a call between the predictably corrupt Donald Trump and his fellow celebrity President — was carefully orchestrated. Seven years later will still don’t know all the ways that it was orchestrated, except that Rudy Giuliani and his ability to bypass the professional bureaucracy that no longer exists in Trump 2.0 was at the center of it. We know that Rudy was led down that path by two grifters who had bought access to Trump starting with payments to Brian Ballard. Or rather — according to Lev Parnas’ selectively honest memoir — one mobbed-up grifter, Igor Fruman (who by the way was represented by Todd Blanche in his criminal case) sought out Parnas because he knew Parnas (who had prior ties to Ivana Trump) had already bought his way into Trump’s inner circle.

I knew Igor Fruman through common friends. Born in Belarus, his family emigrated to Detroit when the USSR was shedding even more Jews, Igor was six years older than me and had moved to South Florida, where the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian communities were tight. Still, he spent most of his time in Ukraine where he made his money.

I knew about Igor from various Jewish charities we were both involved in and mutual friends, but we weren’t really friends at the time. Igor became interested in me because of the pictures I was posting of myself with Trump on social media and because I was hosting events for Russians for Trump. Igor wanted to get deals done in the petroleum industry and thought I could help.

He owned two popular nightclubs in Kyiv, Mafia Rave and the more upscale Buddha Bar. Both places were very popular with well-heeled men from both the West and East. They mingled at Buddha Bar, got to know each other and made deals, often huge deals.

And after Fruman latched onto the access to Trump that Parnas had paid for, the two of them ended up leading Rudy on a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel seeking dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden, reaching out to one (Viktor Shokin) after another (Yuriy Lutsenko) after another (Dmitry Firtash) after another (Andrii Derkach) corrupt Ukrainian offering to deal that dirt.

The adventure started, at least according to Parnas’ telling, when Rudy’s former prosecutor buddy Bart Schwartz passed on a tip claiming Ukrainian corruption. And can you believe your luck? Rudy got that tip while he was sitting right there in the Grand Havana Room where, just a few years earlier, Paul Manafort (who would also be represented by Todd Blanche, in his New York case) had shared campaign strategy with Konstantin Kilimnik, just hours after a meeting with Rudy and Trump!

Rudy was sitting there in the Grand Havana Room with a different Ukrainian, one who could act as Rudy’s guide to hunt this piece of dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden.

It was one of those days when Giuliani and I were just hanging out at our favorite place, The Grand Havana Room. Operating under the belief that Giuliani would deliver on his promises, I was still very friendly with Trump’s sidekick. There was nothing like The Grand Havana. A private club with a panoramic view of Manhattan, it had the best food, the best drinks and, of course, the finest cigars. He could stay there all day, just doing nothing and shooting the breeze.

But that’s not my style. I have to work. And that’s exactly what I was doing. Giuliani and I might have been friends, but I also knew that he was the key to my future success. So, we were talking about ways to get my business off the ground when he excused himself for an important phone call.

It was Bart Schwartz. I didn’t know him personally, but I did know that he used to be a prosecutor under Giuliani at the SDNY and the two had stayed in touch for years. Schwartz was then acting as a receiver for a hedge fund (a post that would later end with him in big trouble with the SEC), but still kept his eyes and ears open. He had a tip that he thought Giuliani might be interested in.

Giuliani told me that Schwartz had heard that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, had been involved in something perhaps a bit shadier than mere conflict of interest in Ukraine. Apparently, there had been a couple of letters, whistle blower complaints.

Giuliani was alive with excitement. I had never seen him so happy. He’s a man of strong emotions, but none more pressing than hate. He had no time for Democrats, especially the country club type he considered the Bidens to be. Making it all the sweeter, Biden was the Democrats’ most likely pick to run against Trump in 2020.

And it was Ukraine! He was sitting right beside a well-connected expert on that very country. Giuliani could not believe his luck.

And that’s how it happened that Lev and Igor, with the help of Rudy, got the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who supported anti-corruption efforts, fired. And that’s how Trump came to be on the phone with the newly elected President of Ukraine — elected on a strong anti-corruption platform! — making asks that Rudy and Lev and Igor had led Trump to believe would hit paydirt.

“If it’s what you say I love it, especially later in the summer.”

When the story of that Perfect Phone Call gets told, it is always a story about what Trump did. The story, told that way, hides all the work that went into it, the purchased access, the perfectly cultivated mob ties, the appeals to both Rudy and Trump’s known venality.

But if you look at it from the perspective of the mob ties that orchestrated that phone call, then you see that the call was at least in part an attempt to use Trump’s corruption to corrupt the newly elected President of Ukraine, the guy who had been elected on a platform of fighting corruption but who was also desperate to protect his country against Russia. That the whole scheme was an attempt to capitalize on the failed attempt to use Hunter Biden’s corruption, a process that started in 2014 and leveraged Hunter’s addiction and financial needs, against his father, who also was fighting corruption in Ukraine, that was just gravy.

Once you corrupt someone, you can find any number of ways to exploit that corruption in the future.

I have three opinions about what would have happened if that whistleblower had not spoken up, had not risked his career and freedom to reveal how Trump was using funds appropriated by Congress to make a corrupt demand of the Ukrainian President elected on a platform of fighting corruption.

First, that whistleblower’s ethical decision had absolutely no effect on Trump’s corrupt purpose (except, perhaps, for Lev and Igor). Rudy Giuliani kept up his pursuit of corrupt dirt on Joe Biden. Even in the middle of impeachment, the White House did not stop Rudy from traveling to visit suspected Russian spy Andrii Derkach in December 2019. According to Chuck Grassley, DOJ performed what looks like its end of a quid pro quo in that same month, shutting down an investigation of Burisma that had been started in 2016, shutting down an investigation of Burisma’s corruption smack dab in the middle of an impeachment defense that purported to be interested in corruption at Burisma. Worse still, Bill Barr set up an entire side channel that exonerated Rudy for his knowing outreach to a Russian spy and served as the vehicle via which a different corrupt Ukrainian, Alexander Smirnov, criminally framed Hunter and Joe Biden.

The whistleblower’s sacrifice did not change a fucking thing about the effort, with participation from both Trump’s personal lawyer and his Attorney General (since merged as one in the person of Todd Blanche), to frame Joe and Hunter Biden to help Trump’s election. All that still happened.

It’s even worse though, and this is what Democrats need to both understand and prepare for as they map out how to rein in Trump’s corruption if and when they win back the House. Not only didn’t impeachment slow the corrupt effort kicked off in that meeting in The Grand Havana Room, but I firmly believe that Trump exploited the polarization of the country to use impeachment as a means to demand loyalty from virtually every Republican save Justin Amash in the House and Mitt Romney in the Senate, the latter of whom had the money to pay for private security that gave him the courage to vote for one but not both articles of impeachment.

Romney confessed that he’d spent much of the impeachment trial hoping a way out would present itself: “I did not want to get here.” In fact, that was part of the reason he wanted former National Security Adviser John Bolton to testify about what Trump had told him. “I had the hope that he would be able to say something exculpatory and create reasonable doubt, so I wouldn’t have to vote to convict,” Romney said.

[snip]

When I asked Romney why none of his fellow Republicans had reached the same conclusion, he attempted diplomacy. “I’m not going to try and determine the thinking or motives of my colleagues,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake for any senator to try and get in the head of another senator and judge them.” But as he discussed the various rationalizations put forth by other Republican senators, he seemed to grow exasperated. He took particular issue with the idea—currently quite trendy in his caucus—that Trump’s fate should be decided at the ballot box, not in the Senate.

“I would have liked to have abdicated my responsibility as I understood it under the Constitution and under the writing of the Founders by saying, ‘Let’s leave this to the voters.’” But, he said, “I’m subject to my own conscience.”

When I asked how it felt to be formally disinvited from this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he laughed and noted that he hadn’t attended the conference since 2013. But it seems clear that his journey from GOP standard-bearer to party supervillain has been jarring.

Remember: The two articles of impeachment were, first, that Trump corruptly asked a foreign country for election help and, second, that Trump ordered his government — including, among others, current CBO head Russ Vought, current DOJ head of National Security John Eisenberg, current Deputy Director of CIA Mike Ellis, and Brian McCormack — who carried out Trump’s purge of the National Security Council before being purged himself (possibly as a scapegoat for Signalgate)  — to defy subpoenas from Congress.

Every single Republican Senator, save Mitt, was willing to claim to believe that Trump was chasing corruption, not acting on his own corruption. Or perhaps for many Republicans, they just did not give a shit what Trump did to stay in power, they were perfectly cool using taxpayer dollars to extort election help. But one way or another, every single Republican Senator but Mitt — including Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey, all of whom would later go on to vote for Trump’s 2021 impeachment, for which Cassidy has since paid with his seat — every single Senator bought into the bullshit Trump was selling. And every Republican Senator, including Mitt, were cool with Trump blowing off Congress’ sacred duty of impeachment.

And that’s one of the values of corruption, as a process. I can’t tell you how many of the GOP Senators were already so venal, so polarized, they were going to be cool with what Trump did one way or another. Some of them — people like Marsha Blackburn and Ron Johnson and Rick Scott — they were already so corrupt they were bound to applaud Trump’s extortion. But for a good number, they were pushed by partisanship and cowardice and the cover provided by Trump’s lies to do something that they might not have done before Donald Trump came along. This process made them into far worse people than they had been before Trump came along. And few of them — perhaps only John Bolton, who was too cowardly to testify truthfully — have acknowledged since how they debased themselves. I don’t think even Liz Cheney has come clean with her corrupt vote against impeachment in 2019.

Impeachment was a tool Trump used to make every single Republican (save Amash and Mitt) into far worse people. From that point forward they were going to be, and have been, for the most part, far easier to manipulate, far easier to buy off. Trump used impeachment to make corruption the price of admission to the MAGAt Republican Party, that corruption is a tool he has exploited over and over ever since, and that corruption is what has prevented Republicans from standing up against Trump’s destruction of the United States.

But then there’s Zelenskyy, the real mystery in this game of second guessing.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if that call were not made public (frankly, I’m not convinced we know all that happened until it was made public). On the call, Zelenskyy slathers Trump with flattery, parroting Trump’s favorite words back to him.

I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use .it as an example for our elections and yes it is true that these were unique elections.

[snip]

we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country

But Zelenskyy still does that. Seven years later, with the exception of that famous meeting in the White House where Trump tried to sell Zelenskyy out, Zelenskyy still butters everyone up, on a near daily basis. It’s one thing that makes him successful. And that still includes Trump.

Often forgot, though, Zelenskyy agreed to Trump’s asks, both for an investigation into the server and for an investigation of Burisma.

For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to· open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your  confidence and have personal relations·with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have. friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.

[snip]

[Zelenskyy’s new prosecutor] will look. into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. [my emphasis]

To be sure, Zelenskyy caveated his answers, especially regarding the Burisma investigation, with language about transparency (and remember, part of this, where it says “the company,” was edited in the transcription process to protect Trump), and so we can’t tell how far he would have gone to feed Trump’s demands for a Burisma investigation if this call had not been made public.

But there were reports that Zelenskyy intended to do a CNN interview on September 13 to announce that investigation, just days after Trump released the aid.

He was going to do it.

And what we do know is that Zelensky backed Trump’s attack on Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador who, like Joe Biden, had been helping Ukraine fight corruption.

On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%.

In the expected secrecy of that phone call, Zelenskyy joined Trump in his attack on Yovanovitch.

And while Zelenskyy began that joint appearance on September 25 with a comment about how much better it is to discuss corrupt investigations on TV than it is on a secret phone call, he nevertheless played his part, denying that Trump had pressured him, an important denial in Trump’s ultimately weathering of an impeachment.

Reporter: Have you felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?

Zelenskyy: I think you read everything. I think you read text. I’m sorry but I don’t want to be involved to democratic, open [asks how to say вибори in English] elections, elections of USA. No, you heard that we had, I think, good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things. And I [shrugs] so, I think think, and you read it, that nobody push it, push me.

Trump: In other words, no pressure.

I’ll be honest: We can’t know but I think if this all hadn’t blown up, Zelenskyy would have given Trump what he wanted. I think it would have taken him down a path where his efforts to defend Ukraine against corruption — and therefore his efforts to defend against Russian dominance — would have failed.

Instead, Zelenskyy has evolved into perhaps most sophisticated leader of our time — still fighting efforts to compromise him with corruption, and fighting even more persistent efforts to defeat Russian-backed disinformation claiming he was corrupt. I think the exposure of that Perfect Phone Call changed the course of history, but via Zelenskyy, not Trump.

The whistleblower’s effort to expose Trump’s corruption failed to have any meaningful effect in the US. If anything, Trump used it as an opportunity to corrupt Republicans who would once have (and who did, in the case of 2016 and Russia) object to foreign interference in US elections. Trump used it as an tool to demand that Republicans sell out their own institutional prerogatives, appropriations (which never even made it into impeachment) and subpoena power, to protect Trump and with him the Republican Party.

Corruption is a process, and by orchestrating that Perfect Phone Call, whatever mobsters were behind the effort got Trump to corrupt almost every single Republican member of Congress, lowering the bar for the next corrupt demand.

But I do suspect that everything would have been different, the entire course of Ukrainian history and with it the history of Europe, would have been different if that call had not been exposed, because it forced Zelenskyy and gave him the means of distancing himself from Trump’s efforts to corrupt him.

It is easy to say that Trump is corrupt, the most corrupt President ever, that his corruption steals from Americans and destroys the country. It is easy to correctly describe the corruption that has always been a key part of Trump’s success.

But if you understand that corruption is a process, the tool by which Trump is easily manipulated, and the tool by which Trump himself has debased virtually every single Republican and coerced them to cede their institutional prerogatives, you understand how it happened and how the corruption he demanded years ago still prevents Republicans from standing up to Trump to save the country.

The post “It’s Better to Be on TV than by Phone:” Corruption Is a Process appeared first on emptywheel.

Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign

Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.

Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.

The Jeffrey Epstein associate’s apparent last hope would be a Hail Mary from Donald Trump – a presidential pardon

Ghislaine Maxwell seems to be all but guaranteed to have run out of legal avenues to challenge her conviction for her involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women with perhaps her lingering hopes of freedom resting on a pardon from the Trump administration.

Paul Engelmayer, a Manhattan federal court judge, last week rejected Maxwell’s contention that her constitutional rights were violated at trial and sentencing for her crimes. “Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” Engelmayer wrote in his ruling on the former British socialite’s legal gambit.

The Canadian province's premier, Doug Ford, installed a billboard-sized sign on the lake's shoreline after the US president signed an executive order on Thursday directing US federal agencies to change the lake's name on US maps, documents and databases to 'Lake America'. Ford told reporters that the lake's name, which is more than 400 years old, would remain unchanged. Trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed last week, with each side ‌blaming the ⁠other for derailing three days of intensive negotiations

• Trump signs executive order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America

As Americans face an affordability crisis and war with Iran, the president is focused on … changing the names of things

Is it a key policy move which will “recognize the extraordinary contributions of the American people”? Or “real foolishness”?

Whatever the impact of Donald Trump unusual decision to retitle Lake Ontario as Lake America, days after Canada’s prime minister refused to be cowed by Trump’s punitive tariffs, it has certainly divided opinion – but perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Inside the US state department, critics are still attacking a shuttered office established to counter foreign propaganda. Now, some of its work is also being resumed

A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.

Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.

As with its approach to Hormuz, the US has mistaken applying pressure for an actual strategy. But Tehran has chips of its own to play

Donald Trump has found a new way to promise victory over Iran. After months of war have failed to force Iran’s capitulation or collapse, his administration has unveiled what the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, calls Operation Economic Outcast: an effort to cut it off from what remains of the global economy and threaten foreign governments, banks and companies with sanctions if they continue doing business with Tehran.

There is no question that Iran is vulnerable. Its economy has been battered by years of sanctions, war and a months-long US naval blockade. Iranian officials acknowledge that oil exports and access to foreign currency have been severely constrained. Ordinary Iranians are already enduring high inflation, currency depreciation and worsening living standards. Further economic strangulation will inflict significant additional hardship.

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues

The Canadian PM is one of the few world leaders to stand up to the US president. Former colleagues say they are not surprised

Mark Carney stood before a walnut-veneered lectern, his face drawn tight, as he announced that talks with Canada’s biggest trading partner had collapsed. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” he said. “And I promised: that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise.”

For years, the former central bank governor had worked hard to calm markets. Now, he was asking Canadians to accept uncertainty and confrontation.

Today’s Report

1. Overview

2. White House News

3. Truth Social Posts

4. Government Department News

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

6. AI & Tech Company News

7. Congressional Watch

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

1. Overview

President Trump visited the Kennedy Space Center alongside NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, and media personalities Stephanie McMahon and Triple H. He documented the visit by sharing images from Mission Control and highlighting the facility’s operations. Additionally, Trump accepted the role of Honorary Chairman for the upcoming Presidents Cup in Chicago, expressing excitement to meet the participating athletes.

Regarding international affairs, Trump shared an op-ed arguing he is “winning the Iran war” and urged his administration to “stay the course.” He also engaged in media criticism, labeling CNN and MSNBC as being in a “DEATH SPIRAL” due to low viewership. Citing pollster Harry Enten, Trump claimed he possesses more popularity than past presidents such as Washington and Lincoln, asserting that Enten has “Credibility.”

The State Dept issued a formal statement from Spokesman Tommy Pigott expressing condolences following the death of King Harald V of Norway. The statement honored the King as a “close friend of the United States” and emphasized the enduring partnership between the two nations. It specifically referenced the historical bond forged when Norway provided refuge to the royal family during World War II.

Governor Gavin Newsom announced a compromise on Senate Bill 492, which seeks to mitigate wildfire risks and implement stricter accountability for utility companies. Describing the bill as “real progress,” Newsom noted that the state still requires “full structural reform” to address the long-term stability of the Wildfire Fund. He also highlighted state-level infrastructure and health initiatives, including $44 million for biodiversity projects and the signing of AB 1956 to expand suicide prevention efforts for men and boys.

California’s new legislative framework creates operational headwinds for the utility sector by tying executive compensation to environmental safety mandates, a shift that threatens to curtail capital expenditure and limit management flexibility. Simultaneously, public sector rhetoric targeting legacy broadcast networks undermines advertising stability, as increased scrutiny accelerates the ongoing migration of viewership toward alternative digital platforms. Conversely, heightened government-industrial partnerships for space exploration provide a bullish tailwind for aerospace participants, though this reliance on public funding leaves the sector vulnerable to shifting administrative priorities and potential “political interference in the information marketplace.” These developments illustrate a complex landscape where intensified regulatory oversight weighs on utilities and traditional media while public-private coordination bolsters the industrial aerospace complex.

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2. White House News

No White House news found.

3. Truth Social Posts

President Trump highlighted his visit to the Kennedy Space Center alongside NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Stephanie McMahon, and Triple H, while also sharing images of Isaacman at NASA Mission Control and posting additional scenes from the facility. In the realm of sports, he accepted an invitation to serve as the Honorary Chairman of the upcoming Presidents Cup in Chicago, describing the teams as “loaded” with talent and expressing his enthusiasm to greet the participating athletes.

Regarding foreign policy, Trump shared an op-ed asserting that he is “winning the Iran war” and advising that the administration should “stay the course.”

Turning to the media landscape, Trump claimed that CNN and MSNBC are in a “DEATH SPIRAL” with low viewership. He praised CNN pollster Harry Enten for reporting that Trump is “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President,” remarking that Enten has “Credibility.” Trump suggested that while CNN could be rehabilitated under new leadership, MSNBC cannot be saved.

Reference: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump

4. Government Department News

State Department (state.gov)

Statement by Spokesman Tommy Pigott on the Passing of His Majesty King Harald V of Norway

Spokesman Tommy Pigott issued a statement extending condolences to Queen Sonja, the Royal Family, and the Norwegian people following the death of King Harald V. The statement highlights the King’s status as a close friend of the United States and acknowledges his commitment to the U.S.-Norway relationship. It notes historical ties, including the refuge provided to the royal family during World War II, and praises the King’s efforts to honor the heritage of Norwegian-Americans and the enduring kinship between the two nations.

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Gavin Newsom (gov.ca.gov)

Governor Newsom statement on compromise to address wildfire risk, support fire survivors, and create stronger accountability

Governor Newsom announced a compromise on Senate Bill 492, which aims to reduce wildfire risks, prohibit utility executives from receiving bonuses following utility-ignited fires, and prevent hedge fund profiteering from fire survivors. The legislation also creates a Statewide Community Wildfire Strategy to improve prevention coordination. Newsom described the bill as “real progress” but stated the system requires “full structural reform.” He urged the Legislature to address the long-term durability of the Wildfire Fund and stabilize electricity rates in upcoming sessions.

California invests $44 million in 15 projects to protect biodiversity and expand nature access

Governor Newsom announced $44 million in funding for 15 projects aimed at conserving California’s lands and coastal waters. This initiative supports the state’s goal to conserve 30% of its land and coastal areas by 2030. The projects are designed to enhance biodiversity and increase public access to natural spaces throughout the state.

Governor Newsom signs AB 1956 to expand suicide prevention efforts for boys and men

Governor Newsom signed AB 1956, which formally designates boys and men as a specific group of focus for the California Office of Suicide Prevention. This action builds upon existing state efforts to address behavioral health challenges and suicide risks specifically affecting this demographic.

California invests $2.7 billion in over 150 transportation and infrastructure projects

The state is investing $2.7 billion into more than 150 transportation projects. These initiatives are designed to improve safety across the state highway system, bolster infrastructure resilience against extreme climate-driven weather, and enhance general access to transportation networks throughout California.

JB Pritzker (gov.illinois.gov)

Daily Public Schedule: Saturday, August 29, 2026

Governor Pritzker has no public events scheduled for Saturday, August 29, 2026.

6. AI & Tech Company News

No relevant AI & tech company updates found for this date.

7. Congressional Watch

Covers the 2026-08-28 session — the Congressional Record is published with a one-day delay.

No Congressional Record found for 2026-08-28.

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

This analysis is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

Impact on Market

Based on today’s policy developments, our analysis identifies the following market impact themes:

THEME 1. REGULATORY PRESSURE ON UTILITIES

California’s new legislative framework intensifies accountability mandates for power companies. By linking executive compensation to environmental safety records, the state is curbing management flexibility. Opposition figures argue this limits the ability to attract top-tier leadership. The long-term risk remains a reduction in utility capital expenditure due to increased operational uncertainty.

THEME 2. MEDIA SECTOR VOLATILITY

Public scrutiny of legacy broadcast networks threatens to undermine advertising revenue and long-term brand valuation. Increased rhetoric from the executive branch encourages market skepticism toward traditional media outlets. Critics view this as political interference in the information marketplace. The primary bearish risk involves a sustained decline in viewership and accelerated shifts toward alternative digital platforms.

THEME 3. GOVERNMENT-INDUSTRIAL SPACE PARTNERSHIPS

Visible support for space exploration activities points to sustained contract flows for specialized industrial and aerospace participants. This development encourages long-term infrastructure investment through public-private coordination. Some skeptics worry that heavy reliance on political backing creates potential for future funding shocks. The primary risk is sector sensitivity to changing administrative priorities.

Policy Impact Heatmap with Market Direction

Each cell shows an estimated impact score on a fixed scale of -10 to +10, reflecting how today’s policy developments may affect each market sector. Positive scores (green, ▲) suggest bullish impact; negative scores (red, ▼) suggest bearish pressure. Rows and columns are sorted by impact strength, and sectors and policy events with no meaningful impact are omitted. The heatmap, the analysis below, and the Impact on Market themes above are produced from a single unified analysis: the heatmap visualizes the magnitudes, while the text explains the causal reasoning behind them.

State-level intervention in California marks a significant shift in utility regulation. SB 492 directly impacts the profitability and incentive structures of major energy providers. By banning executive bonuses linked to fire-related incidents, regulators are creating new operational friction. Financial firms face similar headwinds as the bill restricts their ability to extract value from legal settlements. This creates a challenging environment for capital allocation in the utility sector.

Simultaneously, rhetoric targeting the media landscape introduces volatility for broadcasting companies. Declining public sentiment for legacy networks, framed as a “death spiral” by the administration, heightens regulatory and reputational risk. These developments prioritize populist oversight over traditional market incentives. Industry critics argue that such aggressive measures could stifle necessary private investment. Meanwhile, renewed federal attention to space operations offers potential tailwinds for industrial contractors. These signals suggest a complex environment where sector-specific regulation and political narrative dictate market performance.

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen receive Congressional Space Medal of Honor

The Artemis II astronauts who flew around the moon in April received the US’s highest space honor on Friday.

Donald Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the three Americans and one Canadian whose lunar flyby for the US space agency Nasa set a new distance record for humanity.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Gabriel Perez wagered on Kalshi about words president used in speeches

A White House teleprompter operator who left his post amid accusations that he used inside knowledge to make bets on Donald Trump’s speeches on an online prediction market has been fined $172,000, according to federal regulators.

Gabriel Perez illicitly exploited “material, nonpublic information” that he gathered through his work for the president in order to place wagers on the Kalshi platform “for his personal benefit”, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) maintained in a news release on Friday.

In deep red South Carolina, the president helped stoke apprehension of a deeper red surge ahead of November’s US midterm elections

After casting his vote in South Carolina, a man who introduced himself as Chestnut was unwilling to give his full name. “You don’t have a need to know,” the air force veteran declared. He was, however, happy to share his views.

“I’m a true American. I believe in the USA,” said the man, outside Christ the Servant Lutheran church in Conway. “And I don’t believe in communism or socialism.”

There’s little optimism about treasury secretary’s ability to handle Trump’s tariffs, Iran sanctions and colossal US debt

History remembers Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe during the second world war, for his role in the D-day invasion of Normandy. Whether Scott Bessent will achieve similar posterity as the face of the “economic D-day” in Iran remains to be seen.

The US treasury secretary, already trying to manage a $40tn national debt pile, this week took charge of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse-engineer his war of choice. Whereas the US would typically take on an adversary with diplomacy, sanctions and military force, in that order, the US president started with a six-month bombing campaign and now hopes that economic isolation can finish the job.

Ignore Iran, the Epstein files, and your wallet – not to mention Trump’s plummeting approval ratings

Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or “affordability”, which, as Donald Trump recently said at a rally, is a word that was “never used” by the media before he took office. Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people or embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Searching for exoplanets and clues on planet formation, the Roman telescope begins million-mile journey from Florida launchpad

A $4.3bn space telescope that Donald Trump tried to kill has lifted off from Florida as Nasa embarks on the next stage of its quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope survived two rounds of proposed White House budget cuts, and began a million-mile journey into deep space from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday morning. .

In its report on Trump’s social media claim that the US,

through a partnership with private business, [has] secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer

The WaPo provides details about how fucking stupid this deal is.

But deal points reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with people who were close to negotiations as the deal came together suggest that for the plan to succeed in producing oil in the amounts the administration projects, the U.S. government may ultimately need to invest significant amounts.

A list shared with The Post before the deal was announced noted 17 oil fields in which the U.S. would take a stake. Several of the fields lack any infrastructure or access to transport hubs to treat and move the crude. Those where such infrastructure does exist have fallen victim to years of neglect and theft of machinery.

Pumping oil from the fields could require investments of many billions of dollars and costly security plans to protect oil workers and production facilities in lawless and violent regions. The deal points reviewed by The Post say the U.S. government stake in the newly formed oil company will be split between equity ownership and guarantees that it will purchase oil produced by it at cost to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The US:

• Has to make and keep Venezuela secure enough to develop this oil, relying on partners who themselves rely on brutal oppression
• Must invest billions to develop the fields
• Thinks all this will refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which Trump has rapidly emptied because he fucked up the Iran war, in time to matter

And that’s before you consider how renewables will have replaced petroleum by the time any of this can be developed.

WaPo also links their story, from Thursday, that hinted all this was coming. It describes how the US (including Colin McDonald, who playacts as Trump’s Fraud Task Force head), has cajoled multiple countries to drop money laundering investigations into their primary partner to make this happen, Alejandro Betancourt, and catalogs the several US cases where Betancourt has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in money laundering and bribery.

Senior U.S. officials intervened in an international criminal investigation into a Venezuelan businessman who was enlisted by the Trump administration to help assert control over Venezuela’s government and oil industries, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The officials lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, and they have not acted on a Swiss arrest warrant against him, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Instead, the United States has allowed Betancourt to enter the country repeatedly for meetings with the Trump administration, other people familiar with his travel said.

Betancourt, 46, in the past decade has faced multiple investigations, in Switzerland, Spain and the United States, into alleged money laundering, including whether he had a role in a loan arrangement that U.S. prosecutors say embezzled more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

As good as WaPo’s background story is, it doesn’t mention a few salient facts laid out in an earlier WaPo story, from 2019: Betancourt was financially floating Rudy Giuliani during the period when Rudy was working with corrupt Ukrainians and Russian spies to frame Joe and Hunter Biden.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Madrid in August to confer with a top aide to the Ukrainian president and press for political investigations sought by President Trump, he also met with a previously unidentified client with very different interests.

While in Spain, Giuliani stayed at a historic estate belonging to Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt López, who had hired Trump’s personal attorney to help him contend with a Justice Department investigation of alleged money laundering and bribery, according to people familiar with the situation.

A month later, Giuliani was one of several lawyers representing Betancourt in Washington. The lawyers met with the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division and other government attorneys to argue that the wealthy Venezuelan should not face criminal charges as part of a $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Florida last year, said the people, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The criminal complaint alleges that top officials of the Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, elite business leaders and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes.

Betancourt is not one of the eight men charged in the case, a group that includes his cousin. But two people familiar with the matter said that he is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator, as previously reported by the Miami Herald.

And since, unsurprisingly, Trump credits his Secretary of State (along with the Fox News host running the Pentagon, yikes!) with negotiating this deal, you should remember that Marco Rubio was the target of corrupt plans for a similar deal in 2017, a scheme for which his one-time best friend is going to prison.

This deal does nothing to help Americans.

Indeed, it sucks Americans deeper into the Venezuelan swamp, without doing anything to help your average Venezuelan.

Worse still, it continues to redefine what used to be a country that aspired to serve the common good into a kleptocracy serving a few cronies propped up by repression.

The post Shocked, Shocked! To Find that Corruption Is Going on in a Trump Casino! appeared first on emptywheel.