The White House Correspondents Dinner must have been surreal last night. There was Trump, with his “I’m not having a good time” face, sitting among people who have exposed many of his mis-doings, people he has insulted, people he has called “fake,” people he has sued. And then he watched while people got awards for some of the very reporting he called “treason” (somebody please explain to him what “treason” is) and filed suits about. And this:

One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”

Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

Good for you, Wolf! It’s been reported that Trump just shrugged.

Trump’s hour-long speech at the dinner sounds fairly dreadful. See Trump’s insult-laden speech to press dinner draws mostly stunned silence by Michael Birnbaum at WaPo and Trump bombs in WHCD return and then unleashes on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and media in jaw-dropping hour-long rant by Josh Marcus at The Independent.

Just a quick word on the indictments of New York Times reporters that were dismissed this week — I wasn’t too worried about the Times reporters, because I do know the law pertaining to news reporting pretty well. Truth is an absolute defense, and Trump himself admitted that his fancy new Air Force One was nixed for the return trip from the NATO summit because of security reasons, which is what the Times reported. And journalists have long been protected from revealing their sources. The government cannot punish news sources for publishing material obtained from a third party who may have broken laws to obtain it; see the Pentagon Papers.

Oh, and here’s the newest NY Times reporting on the Air Force One fiasco — Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One by Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman.

The big headline today is that the Trump Administration has admitted to canceling grants going to states that didn’t vote for Trump. Another impeachable offense. There’s at least one every day, I believe.

Another good read for today is by David Frum at The Atlantic, The Saudis Learn the Truth About Trump. This is about the nuclear deal Trump allegedly made earlier this week with the Saudis, and then within hours began changing the terms.

On July 22, United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart signed an agreement for a Saudi-U.S. civilian nuclear partnership. The multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal allows American companies to develop and operate commercial nuclear power plants on Saudi soil, potentially including a uranium-enrichment facility. The Saudis have sought such a deal for almost 20 years. United States presidents from Barack Obama onward have expressed openness to it, but on two conditions: Any deal must include safeguards against Saudi use of enrichment for nuclear weapons and also a normalization of relations with Israel. …

… The Saudis, essentially, had got everything they wanted, with little sacrifice in return. But no sooner was the deal signed than the reneging began. In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump insisted that the deal did not, in fact, include uranium enrichment and that it is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords”—that is, to normalized relations with Israel. Utter chaos and confusion duly erupted over what Trump meant to accomplish with these words. Is Trump attempting to blow up the freshly inked deal after hearing Republicans criticize it on Fox News and elsewhere, as CNN suggests? Or was the outburst simply Trump bluster without real-world consequences?

Whichever. It’s not clear if the deal is still viable. But this is a pattern that goes back to Trump’s pre-politics days. He was notorious for not honoring contracts if he didn’t feel like it. Frum concludes,

America’s traditional democratic allies feel betrayed and baffled by the unpredictability of Trump’s pay-for-play diplomacy. But those willing to pay can suffer betrayals and bafflements of their own. If not even the Saudis, who showered Trump and his family with cash and gifts, can trust Trump’s diplomacy, who else on earth can feel any confidence at all?

This all goes back to the fact that much of news media, television news especially, have been “sanewashing” and normalizing Trump since he first ran for POTUS in 2015. And to this day I’m sure many people still believe he was a successful businessman because he played one on The Apprentice. But his actual record as a businessman is terrible. He inherited a successful real estate business from his father, but nearly every business venture Trump initiated himself either bombed or was shut down by courts for being fraudulent. Before The Apprentice he was over his head in debt and close to being ruined. The Apprentice saved him, and made him look more competent than he ever was, and here we are.

I remember the New York Times publishing some in -depth reports on Trump’s failures and shady business practices, but I didn’t see any of that on television news. And that’s where people get most of their information, on television news. Maybe they’ve learned a lesson by now. If it’s not too late.

Warfighter Pete testified to the Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday, and from what I saw he was mostly being an asshole. He also appears to have way lowballed how much money has been spent on the Iran War even as he was asking for more money for the war. And he can’t say what “winning” would look like. But this isn’t really news to anybody.

The chair of the committee is Susan Collins. Yes, she’s head of the committee that will most likely vote to approve more money for the increasingly unpopular war. Even the MAGA Trump fan base is souring on it. Collins probably wishes she were a tad less visible on this issue. I understand Fox News wasn’t covering the hearings yesterday. Tells you something.

The iron law of midterms says that if people are pissed at the President, the President’s party will lose votes. And at this point even Republicans are admitting they’re doing worse under Trump’s economy.

It’s as if Trump is doing everything he can do to help the Democrats. Even his bomb of a speech on “election integrity” might possibly have discouraged his base from turning out in November. Why bother to vote if they think the elections are rigged by the Democrats? (See also David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party.)

It’s hard to know how much Trump himself is aware of this. I question how many working brain cells he has left. Trump keeps saying he doesn’t want to be the next Herbert Hoover. I say he’s worse than Hoover already. Poor Hoover was inaugurated POTUS in March 1929, a few short months before the infamous stock market crash of 1929. But the economic conditions that set up the crash and the Great Depression were all aligned during Calvin Coolidge’s administration. Hoover hadn’t done anything to change the direction of the economy. Trump’s economy is all Trump’s doing. And with the Iran War escalating I don’t see any possibility for it getting better before the midterms.

And speaking of the Great Depression, yesterday Paul Krugman wrote that Trump’s is actually citing a provision in the Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, for authority to slam more tariffs on Canada. Seriously.

Update: This is juicy. Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic asks, What Did Trump Do With the Billions He Collected From Venezuelan Oil?

The Trump administration has raked in about $13 billion after taking over Venezuela’s oil exports in the wake of their kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, according to a Financial Times analysis. But six months later, and one month after two devastating earthquakes, that money is nowhere to be found.

Various claims have been made about what happened to the money, but reporting by the Financial Times says the claims have not checked out. But also, “In January Semafor reported that Trump would be keeping proceeds from the first $500 million sale of Venezuelan oil in an offshore bank account based in Qatar. It might be worth checking up on that account.”

Update: I bet I’m not the only one here who remembers the Edsel. Well, now the ugly Tesla cybertruck is officially a bigger sales flop than the Edsel was.

One of my Facebook friends posted this —

Yes, Trump wants to open this protected wilderness to oil drilling.  Canada is burning, but we need more oil. Meanwhile the Trump Administration is paying billions to abandon wind farm projects, because he hates wind farms.

I thought of this when I read Paul Krugman’s latest Substack column, Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition. Krugman discusses a digital payment system initiated by the government of Brazil called Pix that is very popular among Brazilians. It works like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but Pix payments are official currency and not transfers from private accounts. It’s free to use, and it sounds like Pix payments that you can make from your phone are the same as cash. I can see why that would be very handy. So when do we get something like that here?

Oops, not anytime soon, because Trump doesn’t like it. Krugman writes that “the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter ‘unfair trade practices.'”

This doesn’t sound like any of our business, frankly. If this is working for Brazilians, I’m happy for them. Krugman says that what should worry us is if the European Union established a similar system for euros. Goodbye supremacy of the U.S. dollar.

But let’s be clear: the reason people might switch to digital euros will be because the US won’t be offering an equally good means of payment. Why won’t there be a digital dollar? Not because it’s a bad idea — as Brazil has shown, it would be a very good idea. But there are powerful special interests that oppose any such move.

Last year Republicans in the House passed a bill that didn’t just forbid the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency; it prohibited any study of the issue by the Federal Reserve. “Don’t even think about parking here creating a digital dollar.”

Proponents of this ban claimed to have concerns about how a central bank digital currency would work. But it’s obvious that their real concern is that it would work too well. Crypto interests, in particular, are very worried that consumers who had access to digital dollars would lose interest in stablecoins and other cryptocurrency products, because these products, being risky and awkward to use, would not be competitive with a system that simply lets people make electronic payments in dollars.

And, gee, who was it who took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year? Some guy. It’ll come to me, I’m sure. Oh, yeah …

Finally, the furious opposition to central bank digital currencies reminds me of the Trump administration’s all-out efforts to block development of wind and solar power. In both cases we see political players beholden to special interests — crypto when it comes to money, fossil fuels when it comes to energy — who claim to favor technological progress, but scream “not like that” when a superior technology doesn’t take the economy where they want it to go.

This reminds me also of Trump’s canceling of policies that encouraged people to buy EVs, like the tax credits for EV purchases and leases. Yes, let’s let China get way ahead of us in EV development. If this were 1903 I can see trump trying to kill off automobiles to protect the horse and buggy industry (which made a big contribution to his presidential “library”).

As Krugman writes, “The Trump Administration has declared war on the future.” Well, he’s declared war on a future that is hospitable to humans, anyway. The future he’s taking us too may not be.

The forests that are burning in Canada are a section of the boreal forest. The boreal forest is the world’s largest land biome. It circles the northern hemisphere across Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Scandinavia. Fires are a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, but what’s going on in Canada isn’t normal. Millions of acres, in Northwestern Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia are on fire. It’s an area the size of the entire U.S. south. You could probably send every wildfire crew on the planet to Canada and they would still be helpless to slow the burn. And, of course, this is the result of climate change.  See Canada’s Forests Will Burn and Burn by Joshua Partlow at The Atlantic.

As you’ve probably heard, the jet stream is carrying the smoke into the upper Midwest U.S. and on to the mid-Atlantic region, slamming New York City especially hard. Where I’m living north of the city it hasn’t been too bad, although I’ve smelled smoke all week. I think it’s worse in New York because the smoke fills up the concrete canyons and doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Where I’m living there are more open spaces and trees and such. But I understand the smoke is all up and down the mid-Atlantic, including Washington DC.

So our idiot president has decided to hit Canada with more tariffs to retaliate for the smoke. He thinks Canada isn’t properly managing its forests and needs to send crews in to rake up the dead leaves or something so their aren’t any fires. Some Republicans in Congress want to sanction Canada for not dealing with the smoke. I’m assuming these bozos are all climate change denialists. In truth, Canada should sanction the U.S. for pulling back climate change measures because our president is an idiot.

In other news, the House has passed a reconciliation budget bill that contains several elements of the SAVE America Act. And now it goes to the Senate, where it will hit some roadblocks. It’s very possible the Parliamentarian will remove SAVE America Act provisions, and I’m reading that the same Republican senators who opposed the bill in previous votes still oppose it now. One of those senators is Mitch McConnell, who is still absent, so that’s one less no vote. But I understand that it’s more than likely most if not all of the SAVE America provisions won’t make it into the final Senate bill. Fingers crossed.

In war news, two more U.S. service members have been killed, and one is missing.

On a more positive note, see They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling. by a team of reporters at the New York Times.

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them. …

…The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”

A few people  have been convicted, but most of the cases brought against protesters have fallen apart.

By all accounts the speech, which I didn’t watch, was a flop. Certainly the hard-right sites like Breitbart reported Trump’s claims as gospel. Fox News — having had to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems — reported it carefully and with a notable lack of enthusiasm. The rest of media tore it apart. There was a lot of real-time fact checking, I understand.

Today’s follow up from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin was nonetheless disturbing. Mullin is threatening states that don’t comply with Trump’s “election security” measures, which includes a demand that states run their voter rolls through a federal database maintained by DHS to determine which voters are and are not allowed to vote. Today he ramped up the pressure:

“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mr. Mullin said.

The speech may have been a joke, but the plans are not.

One of the most interesting takes on the speech is from David Frum at The Atlantic, Trump Dooms His Own Party.

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

Frum recalls that a few years ago Trump’s incessant whining about the “fake” and “rigged” 2020 elections helped hand both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats to Democrats. And Trump’s speech last night was entirely about Trump and his own grievances. It did the Republican candidates facing the midterms no good at all. In Trump’s mind he possibly thought his speech might get the SAVE America Act passed, but I still don’t think it has the votes in the Senate. Frum concludes,

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

There are a lot of things Trump could do to help his party win the midterm elections. He could talk about issues voters care about. He might even have allowed the Republicans to have their big signing ceremony over the housing bill that quietly became law last week without Trump’s signature. Instead, he called it a “yawn.” But Trump can’t be bothered. Yet he’s frantic to get the SAVE America Act passed because he thinks it will win the midterms for Republicans (I have questions about that, but let’s go on).

Something Chris Hayes has said several times is that Trump would rather cheat than win. I dimly remember Mary Trump saying something along those lines, too. Basically, he doesn’t see why he should have to do the work when he can find a way to cheat and get what he wants. It’s a lifelong pattern with him. Campaigning was fun for him in 2016, especially the big rallies, but those don’t seem to work for him as well any more. Whether he will have campaign rallies with candidates as we get closer to the November election I cannot say.  Whether Republican candidates want him to rally with them I cannot say, either.

Now he just wants to stuff his pockets and build monuments to himself and not be bothered with the governing thing.  One would think he’s paying attention to his war in Iran, but it’s hard to say. There are reports today that the U.S. has escalating bombing, destroying bridges and an airport. Oh, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed.  I assume Trump has signed off on the bombing. But he’s not saying what he hopes to gain. The ever-shifting reasons he started the war in the first place seem to have fallen away. He’s stuck in it because he doesn’t know how to get out of it without looking like a loser.

And because oil prices will no doubt go up, the economy will be screwed for the foreseeable future. And into the midterms. Republicans must see this.

And some of them may see that the SAVE America Act would suppress Republican votes as well as Democratic ones. A few of them anyway.

David Graham also wrote about the speech at The Atlantic. See Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing.

The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans.

He’s not desperate enough to do his job as President, of course. That’s probably just as well. It’s way over his head,

I understand the networks are still deciding whether they’re going to carry Trump’s speech tonight. I have seen claims on social media that they are refusing, but I haven’t found corroboration for that in news media sources. But as of this writing none of the networks have listed it on their online schedule of tonight’s programming.  So we’ll see. I will not be watching, wherever it is.

I want to follow up a bit on what I wrote yesterday.  Poor Markwayne Mullin, current Homeland Security Secretary, is catching hell for his temporary suspension of ICE traffic stops. This is from WaPo:

Mullin’s attempt to quell the uproar over the shootings this week — ordering a temporary moratorium on ICE officers from making vehicle-stop arrests — has exposed the precarious position he is in while trying to comply with President Donald Trump’s demands. Within less than 48 hours of issuing the directive on traffic stops, a White House official confirmed that it had been reversed. …

… Trump abruptly undercut Mullin on Wednesday by praising vehicle stops as one of ICE’s most important tools, and Trump’s far-right base revolted over Mullin’s leadership on enforcement, calling him weak and ineffective. After the policy was reversed, Mullin wrote on social media that there was no conflict between himself and the president.

And we have always been at war with Eastasia. But I’ve learned from this that Mullin has jacked up numbers of immigrants arrested by about 40 percent over last year, when The Gnome was in charge. He’s also attempted to be more low-key about it. No more rappelling from  helicopters with flashbang grenades, I guess.

But here is another case in which Trump and his base are out of touch with the majority of the electorate.  Mullin’s order to at least temporarily halt traffic stops pending review was actually sensible. MAGA doesn’t do sensible.

Remember back when Trump kicked off the Gerrymander War by demanding redistricting in Texas? That was just over a year ago. The Texas gerrymander was based on the results of the 2024 election, when there was a big swing of Texas Latino voters to Trump. And even then some pundits were saying that the Texas Latino voters were swinging back away from Trump. They may be swinging even further from Trump now.

Last week’s murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents has roiled Houston Latino neighborhoods, per the Texas Tribune.  See “ICE is everywhere”: In Houston, fear and grief permeate Latino neighborhoods after fatal shooting by Alejandro Santos Cid.

By Friday, rage and grief were boiling in East Houston. Residents with American citizenship or their papers in order gathered on Canal Street and improvised an altar to honor Salgado Araujo. They organized vigils, lit candles, mourned together and urged ICE to free the witnesses of Salgado Araujo’s shooting, among them his brother.

James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has spoken about the shooting of Salgado Araujo.

I can find no statement at all from Ken Paxton. The Texas GOP as a whole is currently being slammed for ignoring the shooting.

I can’t say I am intimately acquainted with what’s going on in Texas, but I have a hard time believing Texas Latinos are feeling warm fuzzies for the GOP right now. Note that approximately 40 percent of the population of Texas is Latino. And it’s not beyond belief that some of the not-Latino population is upset about the shooting also.

Now let’s look at Maine, another state with a contested Senate seat going into the midterms. Maine voters are being reminded of Susan Collins’s votes to fund ICE. And in the hours after the shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, protesters swarmed Collins’s office in Biddeford, some chanting “vote her out.” Susan Collins’s reaction to the shooting was very Susan Collins. She says that she asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt ICE-initiated traffic stops. (Yesterday there were reports that traffic stops would be paused for a while, but now Trump is asking they be resumed, so who knows?)  Also:

Collins has rejected protestors’ demands, telling Fox News after the fatal shooting that “there’s no doubt that ICE needs to improve its performance,” but that “those who are calling for ICE to be abolished are ignoring absolutely vital safety work that ICE does.”

I mean, is that Susan Collins, or what? I am not following the Maine re-nomination process closely, but I understand some candidates have put themselves forward for the Senate nomination, and all of them are slamming Collins on this issue.

And yes, today Trump really did call for ICE traffic stops to continue. So they probably will continue. Nothing will change. Current polls show about 60 percent of Americans disapprove of ICE, and about 50 percent want it abolished.

Of course, it’s possible that if ICE can manage to not murder any more innocent people in the streets between now and the midterms it won’t be that much of a factor. But it is potentially a huge factor in Texas and Maine, and possibly other places. Trump appears to be oblivious to this.

In other ICE news — and this was a big surprise to me — evidence in the Renee Good and Alex Pretti shootings in January has been released to prosecutors in Minnesota, finally. I figured the feds would sit on that stuff until Trump was out of office, at least. I don’t know what changed. The newly released evidence includes Renee Good’s car, body cam videos, and witness statements. And other stuff, I understand. So maybe prosecutors can go ahead and prosecute.

Minneapolis is in Hennepin County, Minnesota. In May, Hennepin County prosecutors charged an ICE agent named Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. Castro was arrested in Texas and shipped to Minnesota, where I understand he is being held without bail. So they’re fired up to do some prosecutin’ in Minneapolis. 

Minnesota hasn’t had its primaries yet. The governor’s seat and one U.S. senate seat are up for grabs. One of the people running for the Republican nomination for governor is Mike Lindell. This morning Trump endorsed Mike Lindell. It’s not like Lindell has a shot at ever being elected governor, but in Minnesota I would think an endorsement from Trump would be a kiss of death.

Just for fun a few days ago I looked up what was going on with Lindell’s pillow business. It’s close to dead, as you might imagine, although I don’t know that it’s entirely dead. It was a lucrative company at one time, but its revenues have dropped by about 95 percent, He’s been unable to pay vendors and shippers and is behind on property taxes. I remember saying a few years ago that Lindell’s adult children should probate the guy and take the company away from him before he kills it, but too late now.

So however bad a day you’re having, just remind yourself, At least I’m not Mike Lindell.

There’s been another fatal ICE shooting this morning, this time in Maine. No details yet.

Update: Here’s an eyewitness account from the Portland Press Herald. Sounds like another government-sponsored homicide.

Mitch appears to be alive, although lots of folks are saying the photo released of Mitch and his wife as “proof of life” is just AI. Could be. This, of course, is legit:

The conspiracy theory regarding Mitch is that Republicans don’t want to hold the special election because they’re afraid a Democrat (or GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, who is not fond of Trump) will win it. But this is Kentucky; Democrats tend to be long shots. And, anyway, an absent Mitch leaves the Senate one short of Republican votes.

And Lindsey Graham is gone, leaving the Senate short two Republicans at the moment. I’m seeing news stories saying this will slow down Trump’s agenda. The problem is that the governor of South Carolina can appoint a replacement to fill the seat until January, and that can happen any minute now. So I’m not celebrating.

Here is the best retrospective on Miz Lindsey I’ve seen so far — Tom Schaller at Public Notice, Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism.

The so-called cease fire with Iran never existed except in theory, considering that the U.S. and Iran never actually stopped shooting at each other. And now Trump has restored the naval blockade of Iranian ports. I understand some peace talks are still going on somewhere, with somebody, but nobody seems to care.

And now we have Trump Being Trump:

President Donald Trump on Monday said the U.S. will take over the Strait of Hormuz — and will be reimbursed “at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” for overseeing one of the world’s most critical oil passageways that has been at the center of the U.S.’s re-escalating war with Iran.

“We will become guardians of the strait,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning. “We’re going to hit [Iran] very hard and keep the strait, and probably run it.”

This could be a skit on Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Trump said the “process and formation will begin immediately.”

“We guarded the strait for 50 years and never got paid for it,” Trump said on Fox. “We want to be reimbursed for this, for putting our people in danger.”

Trump wants everything to be a protection racket that he’s running.

Iranian state media declared the strait closed “until further notice” on Saturday — a claim that Trump later rebuffed, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the waterway was “open” and the U.S. “bombed the hell out of them last night.”

To remember what the world was like when there were real leaders running things — if you get the History Channel, do look up the World War II series narrated by Tom Hanks. It’s quite good. I’ve been watching and learned a few details I’d never heard before. Overall I’d say it’s better than the World War II series by Ken Burns, which was a bit overstuffed and confusing. They’ve released most of the episodes of the Tom Hanks series, although roughly the last year or so of the war has yet to be covered.

Finally, Trump’s tribute to Miz Lindsey is, of course, really about himself.

I haven’t yet weighed in on the Mitch McConnell Mystery. Is he alive, or not?  Either is possible, but I’m increasingly leaning toward not. Notwithstanding the handful of people who claim to have talked to him, if he’s conscious and able to communicate I don’t understand why the hospital would not be allowed to release that information. It’s very possible he’s in a coma, but if there is still some brain activity and a chance he could come out of it, again, why wouldn’t the hospital  be allowed to say so?

McConnell is/was retiring, and people already were campaigning to replace him in the November general election before his heart attack. But under Kentucky state law, if he dies before August 3 the state has to have a special election to find someone to finish his term. And the rumor is that Trump is terrified that Rep. Thomas Massie could win. You’ll remember that Massie, who was critical of Trump, lost his primary to a Trump endorsee. So it’s now widely expected the Senator will succumb on August 4.

Yesterday morning’s news informed us that Trump had fired the remaining three commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. It’s not clear to me how much of a threat this is. The EAC mostly distributes funding and provides election security support for states. But I’m still really, really worried about the elections. The Regi8me had already threatened states with a loss of FEMA anti-terrorism support if they didn’t surrender to Trump’s election demands. I believe some states have already declined.

The more I learn about the shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, the more heartbreaking it is. And the government of Mexico says it will file criminal complaints in the United States over the death of Lorenzo Salgado and several other Mexican nationals who have died in ICE custody.

Of course, ICE released it’s standard lie to excuse the shooting.

ICE officials released a statement on Tuesday afternoon, hours after the shooting in the predominantly Latino East End neighborhood. They said they were performing a “targeted enforcement operation” and alleged Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle,” rammed it into an ICE car and attempted to run over an ICE officer, who then shot Salgado Araujo in self-defense, according to ICE.

Last night on All In, Chris Hayes showed a photo of the van he said was taken after the incident. The front of the van, including the grill, were completely undamaged and showed no sign of having impacted anything. Big surprise.

We don’t have the benefit of independent videos of what happened on July 7 when Salgado Araujo was shot. And the ICE agents were not wearing body cams, or at least claimed they weren’t. ICE blamed Democrats and the most recent government shutdown in spite of the billions of dollars Congress has given ICE to fund it.

We do have eyewitnesses. There were three other men in the car, who gave the same story when questioned independently.

The three other men in the van told a lawyer that Salgado Araujo never veered toward federal agents and that a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle, the Washington Post reports. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said he met with the three men individually while they were in detention and they separately gave similar accounts. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

ICE immediately pressured the three witnesses to “self-deport,” according to several news stories.

This is from the New York Times:

I guess the much-ballyhooed cease fire is over. And the price of oil just shot up again. Maybe the oil execs should pay Trump another visit.

Trump is at the NATO conference and has apparently decided the U.S. must cut trade with Spain, and the rest of NATO should, too.

President Trump lashed out at Spain early Wednesday during remarks from the NATO summit, urging the U.S. to cut off all trade with the European country over what he called a lack of contributions to defense spending. 

“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore by the way,” Trump said, sitting alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the group’s summit in Ankara, Turkey. 

“Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate. They don’t pay,” the president continued. “I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits,” he said.  

“Watch them come running back. Oh they’ll come running back,” he added.

Trump also accused Madrid of treating Rutte “terribly,” telling the NATO chief he “shouldn’t carry” Spain. 

I don’t know exactly why he’s pissed at Spain in particular. And I don’t much care. Trump still doesn’t understand what NATO even is and how it’s funded, and why contributions from nations are not equal (because they are based on GDP per capita).

But of course it’s also the case that presidents don’t have the constitutional authority to unilaterally decide to cut off trade with another nation. Only Congress can do that. We’ll see if Congress even responds, though. Most likely we’ll go through more rounds of Trump issuing orders and courts canceling them. I’m sure the other NATO countries realize this.

How is the rest of the conference going? Let’s ask Paul Krugman.

Yesterday, soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously. …

…The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.

It’s extremely unlikely that anything substantive will come out of this NATO meeting. And a year ago the prospect of a failed summit would have been a source of deep concern. Now it will be met with a shrug: Nobody expects anything but chaotic bluster from Trump, and what he does matters less and less.

Do read the whole thing. I especially appreciate what Trump says about Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to his buddy Putin.

I understand Trump flew to the NATO summit in his luxury “gift” plane from Qatar. I’ve read in several places that it took in the neighborhood of $1 billion of the taxpayers’ money to retrofit the thing to make it suitable to serve as Air Force One. Trump still expects to take it with him when he leaves office in 2029 (if not sooner). I say no, unless he reimburses the $1 billion back to the Treasury. Maybe not even then.

Update: Edith Olsmsted at The New Republic reports that Trump will be leaving the new plane in Europe and getting home some other way, presumably on some other plane. (The headline of the article says “England” but the article says “Europe.”) Trump’s excuse for this is that it’s being left on one of the big military bases so that “people can see it.” There is speculation that somebody discovered a security problem on the plane, even after spending $1 billion on it.

“The most likely reason for this is that the ‘new’ ex-Qatari jet doesn’t have the self-defense capabilities needed when flying from Turkey while in a shooting war with Iran,” The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg wrote on X. “The actual VC-25 aircraft does have those capabilities.”

George Conway, an anti-Trump activist, suggested that perhaps the plane hadn’t received all the necessary security capabilities “because Trump wants to keep it if he leaves office.”

As the world continues to frustrate him, Trump is turning to his chief source of comfort, remodeling. Scaffolding had been erected around the White House columns. Officially this is supposed to be for “standard restoration work,” but it’s widely believed Trump plans to replace the columns with fancier ones that would clash with the architectural style of the rest of the building. If we’re lucky maybe he’ll just decorate them with gold doo-dads that can be removed later.

There also are persistent rumors/reports that Trump wants to cut down  the cherry trees along the Potomac that were a gift from Japan in 1912 to make room for a luxury golf course that nobody really needs. He is putting in a new helipad. Apparently he doesn’t like having to walk on grass. Sometimes grass is wet. Such a trial.

Update: I am just hearing Graham Platner has suspended his campaign. So Dems can choose a replacement to take on Susan Collins. I hope they don’t screw it up.