News & Politics

A Republican strategist warned a Fox News host that Iran may try to hurt President Donald Trump during the upcoming midterm elections.

“Look, we’re not the only ones who know this. We’re not the only ones paying attention to oil prices,” former President George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove told journalist Paul Gigot on Monday. “Remember, all of these negotiations with Iran need to be completed by the middle of August. The Iranians are not dumb. They know that the fall campaign starts in earnest on Labor Day. I would not be surprised to see them attempt to have an influence on the outcome by creating problems in mid-August, and causing oil prices to rise and uncertainty to grow.”

Earlier in the conversation, Rove cited an upcoming poll by The Reagan Institute which found that the American people want the Iran War to result in Iran having limits imposed on its nuclear weapons programs and regime change that is favorable to the United States. Neither of those things have occurred, and although Iran is currently allowing oil prices to fall through its policies in the Strait of Hormuz, there is no guarantee that they will maintain that policy.

“The president also has been hailing lower oil prices, right?” Gigot said when questioning Rove. “Which means lower gasoline prices. And I think he thinks that that’s going to create a better economic environment on inflation and going into the midterms, and that that will compensate in public opinion for any doubts about how well this Iran war has gone or what the settlement terms are.” Rove then replied to Gigot’s observation by predicting Iran will act in a way to raise oil prices in order to hurt Trump politically.

In May, Rove wrote for The Wall Street Journal that Trump needs “better White House message discipline on the Iran war,” a subject he can understand as he worked for the Bush administration when they prosecuted the unpopular Iraq War. He also argued that the Iran War is hurting Trump in the polls, along with other domestic issues like the economy.

“The GOP’s chances will get worse if President Trump’s approval numbers keep declining,” Rove said. “They’re already dangerously low. Wednesday, his approval hit 39.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, the lowest of his second term so far.”

He added, “Making things worse are Mr. Trump’s erratic late-night missives. The president comes across more as a heckler at a UFC match than as a reassuring wartime commander in chief.”

Also in May, Rove warned Fox News that Trump’s and the Republican Party’s attempts to gerrymandering all over America to guarantee that they win elections could potentially boomerang.

“You could in essence take … like here in Texas, take big cities, which are typically Democrat, and split them up among several sort of suburban and rural Republicans and thereby reduce their margin and make [House Republicans] more vulnerable in an election year,” Rove said on “Sunday Night in America” to Fox News host and former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC). After describing how breaking up predominantly Black districts might not even help Republicans in the House of Representatives, Rove added that “nothing ever plays out exactly in politics as we think it does.”

Meanwhile in February, Rove told The Wall Street Journal that “almost everything the president said energized his MAGA hard core. But they aren’t enough to stave off a shellacking this fall.”

He added, “Mr. Trump should have fixated more on those of his 2024 voters who have since become disenchanted: Those represented by his approval rating’s almost 8-point slide in the RealClearPolitics average since re-entering office. That isn’t a large slice of the electorate, but those swing voters will decide which party controls Congress for Mr. Trump’s final two years in the White House.”

A Kentucky pastor posted a video on Monday defending teaching a group of children to be “Commandos for Christ” by participating in a firing squad.

The young children and adults at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington sat in the pews while individuals dressed as soldiers marched down the center aisle of the church so they could face a character representing the devil on the church’s altar. The children were then encouraged to chant “take him out, blow him up” while the soldiers pretended to open fire with air-soft rifles on the devil. The devil character then pretended to be dead while the mock soldiers dragged him out of the room. Afterward the pastor, Dewayne Walker, began counting up until an explosion was heard at the eight second mark. The children loudly cheered.

“I want to address this firestorm concerning the clip that's been sent, I guess, everywhere,” Walker said in a video later uploaded to Facebook and circulated by media outlets like TMZ. “I'm quite frankly befuddled. The misinformation out there is sad, and I guess it's a part of what this generation has become.”

He added, “Concerning the clip that has been shared, it was nothing more than a small part of our vacation Bible school. For 32 years — vacation Bible school — we have characters every year that represent good and right and God, and we have characters that represent evil and wrong and that which should be avoided. Every year, through skits and songs and games and just a lot of fun, we make church a fun place, a happy place — a place where we hate sin but we love the sinner, a place where we exalt Jesus and we hate the devil.”

Walker continued, “I think you'd be in agreement that we shouldn't love the devil. I think we're all in agreement that there's such a thing as spiritual warfare — a battle going on behind the scenes that we can't see with physical eyes. We here have a very serious addiction ministry, have for years, reaching those that have been broken by drugs, alcohol, some horrible addiction that's taken from them everything that's good. And we welcome them to come, and we give them the truth that Jesus loves them, that the devil does hate them, that they can be forgiven, can get a new life, can start over.”

The pastor concluded by saying that he views Satan as the cause of miseries and hopes to alleviate the suffering of those afflicted by his influence.

“Every year for 32 years we've had this evil-against-good theme in our vacation Bible school,” Walker said. “The last several years we've had the Commandos for Christ, which has the gospel gun. It's the answer for the devil — the gospel and the word of God. It's the answer. The clip you saw was simply killing the devil. And I'll be honest with you, if I could kill the devil every day and raise him up and kill him again, I'd do it. He's the one we hate.”

The alarm at the violence displayed by the Christian church could perhaps be explained by the Christian Right’s growing influence in American politics, as well as its increasing control over denominations like evangelical Protestants. They are also well-known for supporting President Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump plans on pardoning advisors who helped him engage in allegedly criminal activity as a way of consolidating power, according to the co-author of a book based on inside information about the White House.

"Trump is essentially beyond the reach of the law in terms of actions,” Jonathan Swan, who with Maggie Haberman co-authored the book “Regime Change,” told Peter Slen from C-SPAN on Monday. “Trump has told senior advisers in the Oval Office that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. I don't think they feel any real concern about illegality."

Trump has undertaken a number of actions that cause people to worry he plans on becoming a dictator. The Atlantic assistant editor Marc Novicoff explained in April that Trump has acted like a dictator in that he “prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants … to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.”

Trump has renamed government buildings and institutions including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Trump Coin, Trump Accounts, TrumpRX, the Trump Gold Card and future U.S. paper currency. He has also unfurled banners with his image over the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor and urged lawmakers to pass a bill to carve his image onto Mount Rushmore.

"Dictators, once they've secured their grip on near-absolute power — and often once they start to get older — have a tendency to lose touch with reality, which often manifests in the form of grandiosity," UK-based i Paper journalist James Ball said in April. "Stalin was still relatively young when he renamed the city of Tsaritsyn as 'Stalingrad,' but building monuments and renaming things is very much the stereotypical out-of-control dictator move: Saddam Hussein had endless statues and monuments built in his image, while Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan renamed months, animal breeds, days of the weeks and cities…. The combination of endless flattery from courtiers, unbridled ego, lack of restraint from constitutional processes — and, quite often, the effects of an increasingly superannuated brain — drives many despots in this direction."

Ball added, "Democratically elected leaders are usually immune: they're not in office for long enough, they have to worry about what voters think — and as a result, they just don't get the chance to become so unmoored from reality. Donald Trump is spectacularly bucking that trend. Trump has only been back in office for 15 months, but he has managed to check off almost every item on the bucket list of the late-era autocrat."

A surrogate for President Donald Trump was met with laughter when he tried to defend the Republican leader’s recent statement that an affordable housing bill is a “big yawn.”

“Look, just for perspective: does it take a while to count ballots in certain places? Yes,” Jamie Gangel, a journalist appearing on MS NOW with Georgetown Law Professor Michele Goodwin and host Kasie Hunt, said on Monday. Gangel was describing how Trump said he does not care about the housing bill, and considers it a “big yawn,” because he wants to pass the SAVE Act to give him more control over elections.

Gangel added, “And let's remember the degree to which the president is focused on this. There is a massive bipartisan bill aimed at driving down housing costs — or at least limiting how fast housing costs are going up. It has been sent to his desk, and we still do not know if he's going to sign it, because he so wants the elections overhaul bill, called the SAVE Act, that he's been pushing."

After playing a clip of the president speaking with reporters, Hunt then turned to Hogan Gidley, a former White House deputy press secretary for Trump, who defended the president’s dismissive remarks about affordable housing.

“It is a political win, and I think he is going to take the victory lap in some form or fashion,” Gidley said of the housing bill. “I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades. You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”

When Hunt asked Gidley if that was Trump’s fault, he pivoted away from the question, prompting laughter from his fellow panelists. Later when Gidley insisted Trump is “not obsessed” with voter regulation, further laughs were heard.

Gidley’s comments, and the subsequent laughter, came after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to regulate mail-in ballots on Monday. Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, argued that Trump’s attempt to regulate mail-in voting is part of a larger pattern to try to suppress voting.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña explained to AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added that Trump’s attempts to federalize elections could also be illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña explained. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

President Donald Trump’s sometimes-ally in Congress, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), was just blasted in an op-ed from a major Maine newspaper for her role in overturning abortion rights.

“Mainers cannot and will not forget Sen. Susan Collins’ critical role in dismantling the nearly half-century-old constitutional right, causing cruelty and chaos to ensue,” wrote civil rights attorney Azaleea Carlea in the Portland Press Herald on Monday. “Either she was foolish or a hypocritical [sic]. Either way, she is not fit to serve another term in the U.S. Senate.”

Carlea detailed how Collins, despite promising to not vote in favor of confirming a Supreme Court Justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade, accepted Brett Kavanaugh’s word that he accepted the abortion rights ruling as “settled law.” After being confirmed, Kavanaugh joined four other judges to overturn Roe v. Wade in a 5-to-4 ruling. Three of those judges — Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — were appointed by Trump.

“Either she fell for it, or she secretly wanted the end result, but either way Americans across the country suffered and continue to live with this catastrophic attack on reproductive justice,” Carlea explained. “When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, it opened the floodgates to abortion bans across the country. Currently, 63 million women live in states with bans. Sen. Collins was crucial to the process for ensuring that SCOTUS was in a position to overturn Roe and for the subsequent fact that now 20 states have banned or significantly restricted abortions.”

In addition to reversing the right to abortion, the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization also made it easier for states to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that told hospitals to provide emergency care to all who require and seek it.

“Because of Susan Collins, women in the United States have been left to ‘bleed out’ in parking lots,” Carlea wrote. “They have been airlifted out of state to get the care they urgently needed and they have been left to deteriorate to the point where their health, future fertility, organ function was in grave danger.”

Carlea added, “Collins has also placed even greater barriers in the way of survivors of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence in accessing this form of healthcare. With reproductive coercion on the rise, abortion bans and reproductive healthcare restrictions make it even harder for victims to exert agency over their own lives, their own bodies and leave abusive relationships.”

The attorney reviewed how abortion restrictions have exacerbated America’s maternal health crisis and widened racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes.

“All this because Sen. Collins cast a critical vote to appoint Kavanaugh to the court,” Carlea wrote. “Four years later, in the wake of the devastation, suffering, cruelty and confusion she helped set into motion, she doubled down and said she did not regret voting the way she did. On Monday, June 22, she went on national television, dodged accountability for her vote and lied about how many Supreme Court justices overturned Roe.”

Because of Collins’ decisive vote and refusal to accept accountability for it, Carlea concluded that “Mainers deserve a senator who will take accountability, and fight for what two-thirds of Mainers are asking for — the right to an abortion. Graham Platner will do just that and more, all with a spine to stand up to the Trump administration’s attacks on bodily autonomy and our healthcare system. It’s well past time for Susan Collins to go. Mainers deserve better.”

This is not the first criticism Collins has received in June 2026 for her seeming ability to cozy up to Trump without wanting to take full responsibility for doing so. Even though many Senate Republicans came out to oppose Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding, which proposed to end the Iran War on terms perceived as favorable to Iran, Collins claimed she had not even read the 14-point agreement. It had been available for nearly 24 hours at that point and Collins is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She has also been criticized for, like Trump, being too close to billionaires, with at least 79 billionaires donating to Collins’ network between January 2025 and May 20, 2026.

Despite these potential political liabilities, Collins could benefit from the presence of oysterman Graham Platner as her Democratic opponent in the general election. Platner has been accused of multiple infidelities toward his wife and exaggerating his working class background. He also had a Tottenkopf tattoo on his chest, which he claimed to not know was a Nazi symbol, although he has since gotten it covered up.

Economics and politics columnist John Cassidy thinks he knows why President Donald Trump keeps throwing a wrench in the plans of his own administration.

Writing for the New Yorker on Monday, Cassidy said that he thinks Trump has lost touch with the financial realities of the average American.

Last week, Trump was set to sign a bipartisan housing bill that would have been the perfect combination to help both homebuilders and homebuyers.

"Although the bill seemed unlikely to have much immediate impact on the housing crisis, affordable-housing advocates and business groups alike said that it could have a significant impact over the longer term. In political terms, the message would be sent to voters that Washington isn’t oblivious to their concerns," wrote Cassidy.

All Trump had to do was sign it. He even declared June "National Homeownership Month."

Republicans were excited, patting themselves on the back during a press conference, not knowing that Trump had just blown up their legislation in a Truth Social post.

But as Cassidy explained, it's part of a pattern with Trump in his second term. He is growing increasingly detached from the issues that matter to most Americans while being more focused on symbolic fights, loyalty tests and short-term political theater. So, instead of taking the "win" of a bipartisan success, he torpedoed it in another example of self-sabotage.

"The larger context is that the President seems to be losing the plot," Cassidy said. "This year, he’s been confronted by a series of political setbacks and disasters — the Supreme Court striking down his blanket tariffs; widespread revulsion at ICE’s actions in Minnesota and elsewhere; a furor over the delayed release of the Epstein files; an ill-conceived war in the Middle East that caused gas prices to surge; and, lately, an algae-infested reflecting pool, which sends the message that he’s not even an effective builder. The obvious response to Trump’s woes — one that some of his aides have been urging upon him since last year — is to focus relentlessly on the issue that got him reelected: the affordability crisis."

There are a few cases in which Trump's populism peeks out, like the accusation that oil companies were price gouging Americans by jacking up fuel prices and refusing to cut them when crude oil fell.

"But consistency and focus seem to be beyond him," bashed the columnist.

He recalled that in December, Trump mocked the "affordability crisis" as nothing more than a Democratic "hoax." Earlier this month, he cheered, "I love inflation!" So, refusing to sign a housing affordability bill that he supported only "demonstrate[s] anew his inability to maintain a constant course and present[s] another gift to his political rivals."

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he would send the bill to Trump on Monday. It starts the clock on the ten-day rule. If a bill isn't signed in ten days and Congress remains in session, then the bill automatically becomes law. If Trump vetoes it, he runs the risk of having a veto-override vote that would pit his own GOP members against him and against their constituents.

The U.S. Supreme Court has “declared war” on American democracy, on “modern society,” and on “everything it takes to function in the 21st century,” warns Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, after the court expanded presidential powers once again. Six of the court’s members, presumably the conservative wing, “are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.”

Krugman scorches the court for ruling that presidents can fire, without cause, the heads of independent federal agencies (except the Federal Reserve). In doing so, the court overturned a 91-year-old precedent.

He explains that in a modern society, “the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.”

Krugman says that the court has now given “essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House,” while also making it extremely difficult for the economy and for society to function.

He explains that in today’s complicated world, ground rules are necessary. Offering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an example, Krugman says that producers need to know that their products will be approved based on merit, and not on “spurious grounds.”

“And what would cause those decisions to happen?” he asks. “Well, how about the fact that some businesses are better at the business of bribing the president and his family than others. And if you think that this is outlandish — you know, a few years ago you might have said this was outlandish, things like that wouldn’t really happen — well, as we speak, these things are happening all the time.”

Ultimately, Krugman says, America cannot continue on this path — and he calls for some form of restructuring or constraining of the Supreme Court.

“This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen.”

Professor of law Barb McQuade, commenting on the court’s opinion, wrote, “Today’s decision in Slaughter will destroy the independence of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which will have a cascading effect on all federal employees, who have been free from political interference for 150 years. The spoils system is back, baby!”

A startling exposé revealed that President Donald Trump helped his sons score a billion-dollar mining deal in Kazakhstan.

The bombshell New York Times report Sunday revealed shocking details of self-dealing, ethical violations and major profits using the power of the United States presidency.

"It was not only Trump and [Howard] Lutnick who saw an opportunity," the report said about the mining deal for the metal tungsten. "Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history."

"Within weeks of St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project," the report continued.

"Right in front of our faces. Zero attempt to hide or conceal it. Absolute, total self-enrichment at a magnitude we have never really seen. And every week brings a new story just like it. They're getting richer at every opportunity," wrote Isaac Saul, the founder of Tangle News, about the report.

Reporter Ryan Grim, who runs Drop Site News, commented, "The level of criminality here is breathtaking. I don’t wanna hear MAGA claim they love this country and are deep patriots when Trump is robbing the country blind. You don’t do this to a country you love."

Co-host of "The Blocked and Reported" podcast, Jesse Singal, posted an excerpt and commented, "Really helpless feeling about where we're at. There's a historic (by American standards) level of corruption and looting going on right now and the party that could stop it is fine with it. And since it is cult of personality his supporters cheer it!"

He added, "Trump's an all-time evil genius, in his way. He exploited a legitimate sentiment held by many Americans, which is that the richest inhabit a corrupt world, hidden from view, in which different rules apply, and won office despite being the very embodiment of that problem. The stuff that has gone on since his reelection is way more important than most of the stuff that gets attention on social media."

The "problem," he said, is that the average person can't do much other than say it's "bad."

New York Times columnist David French lamented, "And to add to the injustice and absurdity, Trump is likely to pardon everyone involved, including himself. And we've barely even begun to talk about the national security implications of Trump's international graft."

History professor Salim Yaqub noted that one way to help would be "restoring the ability of one or both houses of Congress to investigate and hold hearings[.]"

President Donald Trump has exhibited a worrisome months-long "pattern" of memory decline, as highlighted by one professional pathologist, consistently struggling to remember certain people, even ones from his own family.

Hilary Shae is a speech-language pathologist specializing in concussion recovery and treatment. She is also a prolific political creator, sharing numerous professional insights into the potential signs of Trump's cognitive and physical health decline, often theorizing that he is grappling with dementia and has possibly suffered one or more strokes in recent years.

In her latest video from Monday, Shae highlighted the ongoing pattern of Trump "not knowing who people are when he looks at them, or sees pictures of them," starting with a recent Truth Social post in which he shared a photo of a young blonde woman at the Camp David presidential country retreat in Maryland. Trump claimed that the woman was his "daughter," despite the fact that she was neither Ivanka Trump nor Tiffany Trump. Shae also noted that the quality of the photo appeared to suggest it was taken in the "Bill Clinton era," making it even more unlikely that any of Trump's children would be at Camp David.

"There was no connection to say, 'Hmm, I don't think that actually is one of my daughters,'" Shae said. "And again, this is just the most recent time."

Shae further highlighted other instances in which Trump showed similar lapses in memory. When presented with a photo of his abuse accuser, E. Jean Carroll, during a deposition hearing, he claimed under oath that it was his ex-wife and had to be corrected. Trump has also, at times, claimed that his father immigrated to the U.S. from Germany, despite the fact that it was his paternal grandparents who did that.

Shae also noted how, on many occasions, Trump has asked where certain administration officials are, when they were right behind him at the time.

"When you look at it one time, it can be a mistake, it can be an error," Shae added. "When you see it over and over and over again, it becomes a pattern, and this pattern is consistent with declining and progressing dementia, or some other brain disease or disorder."

She continued: "It is not a good sign that in the last couple of months, I have had to make multiple videos of Donald Trump not knowing who he was looking at in either a picture or in real life, and not being able to find that person if it was in real life. It's a problem. Can you imagine if this was your own father and you were in your house and he was looking at a picture, and he said, 'oh, that's my daughter,' and it was his granddaughter? You would be concerned as well."

During World War 2 in 1944, the Bretton Woods Agreement made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency. And 82 years later, it still enjoys that status. But liberal economist Paul Krugman, in a late June Substack column, lays out some problems the U.S. dollar is facing during Donald Trump's second presidency.

"We are now four months into a war that was supposed to last a couple of weeks," Krugman argues. "There is no end in sight as strikes and counterstrikes continue despite Trump's farcical proclamations of American victory and Iranian surrender. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump has squandered all of America's credibility with the rest of the world. So let me add one more item to the tally of destruction: the supremacy of the dollar, the pre-eminent tool in America's toolbox of global financial power, has been seriously damaged by the rise of alternative payment systems — a rise that was greatly hastened by the Iran war."

Krugman explains exactly what he means when he speaks of the U.S. dollar's "supremacy" being "seriously damaged." And he cites Trump's "stunning failure" with the Iran war as a key factor.

"Let me be clear that I don’t mean that the dollar is close to losing its dominant role in global business," Krugman writes. "And I am definitely not claiming that the dollar's weakened status will make the United States substantially poorer. Instead, what I am talking about is the loss of a non-military tool of coercion — the power to punish that the dominant role of the dollar in international financial transactions gave the United States. That power is now greatly diminished because Trump's Iran war demonstrated to other nations that they can bypass the dollar-centered world payments system — largely thanks to China."

Krugman notes that the U.S. dollar's "importance in international financial transactions far outweighs the U.S. economy's global importance."

"America is by no means a dominant force in world trade or world GDP," Krugman observes. "There are, in fact, three roughly comparable-sized economic superpowers in today’s world: China, the United States, and the European Union. However, the U.S. dollar does play a dominant role in world finance…. Why does everyone use dollars? Because so many other people and businesses use dollars, which makes markets in dollars far more liquid and efficient than markets in any other currency…. What dollar dominance does do…. is give America a powerful economic weapon against other nations."

Krugman continues, "Transactions that involve dollar payments normally require transferring money between U.S. banks — which means that they are visible to and can be blocked by U.S. authorities…. The Iran debacle has demonstrated that using dollars and retaining access to the U.S. banking system, while convenient, aren't necessary. Iran's ability to withstand American pressure has demonstrated that U.S. sanctions are a lot less effective than in the past given that rogue actors can use the yuan and CIPS as a work-around. And as the Gulf States' actions show, even countries that are U.S. allies are now considering signing onto the Chinese payment system."

CNN host Pamela Brown clashed with Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Monday during a debate over several political issues, from the Justice Department's botched release of files related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein to the president's alternative July 4th celebration.

The debate began when Comer was making excuses for the lack of accountability around Epstein, saying that there were so many states involved in an investigation and that they weren't coordinating with each other. The FBI generally manages multi-state investigations under the Department of Justice.

Brown pivoted to the America 250 events and Trump's more partisan "Freedom 250." In the latter, Brown noted that Trump is profiting personally by selling coins for thousands and even by allowing donors access for top dollar. The Freedom 250 isn't supposed to be a political organization, but there's also no oversight to explore whether there is any self-dealing.

Is this something you would be willing to investigate as the head of oversight, whether the president is profiting off of the presidency, the president and his family?” Brown asked Comer.

“Well, there’s a ... story almost on a weekly basis that would, you know, imply that there’s some ... profiteering taking place from members of the president’s family,” Comer confessed. “But, you know, they said, well, you need to investigate. Well, you reported it. We investigated Biden because —"

But Brown cut in again as Comer tried to change the subject and filibustered over the top of her.

“So, because it’s transparent — Okay, so hold on. Let me just make sure I understand,” Brown interrupted. “So, because they’re open about it, it’s okay? But if they’re not open about it, it’s not okay?"

Comer claimed he "tried" to pass an ethics bill, but he said that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) "killed it because he thought Kamala Harris was going to be president."

"Okay..." Brown cut in again as Comer rambled.

"I think that there needs to be — there’s nothing I’ve seen that President Trump or his family done illegal. If people don’t like it, I think that’s a political debate," Comer claimed. Brown was trying to get at the idea that there hasn't been any investigation into whether Trump or his family did anything illegal regarding the Freedom 250 events.

Comer said that "voters can decide at the polls" what they think.

"But the bottom line is you won’t investigate, correct? Just to make sure," Brown clarified.

"Well, everything that — you know, the deals that they’re in! You may not like them. I’ve not seen any law that says anything’s illegal. Now, do I like them? I think that that answer is pretty clear," Comer claimed.

Brown noted that Comer had raised previous concerns about influence peddling under the previous administration, but doesn't seem interested in giving the Trump administration equal treatment.

"So, you previously raised those concerns. I just wondered if you had the same concerns. We have to run, but I’ll give you the final word here," she said.

"Yeah, well, the concerns with Biden are because he said he wasn’t taking money from China and these other countries. When we subpoenaed the bank records, they were," Comer said. Former President Joe Biden never took money from China. The company that his son was working for had a contract with a Chinese company.

Comer explained his logic is that Trump's behavior is fine because he's not denying it.

"So, Biden said he wasn’t doing this stuff. Trump acknowledges that he is. Now, should some of this be illegal? I —" Comer said before Brown cut him off again to note that Trump hasn't revealed his tax returns.

"But the tax returns didn't show all this money from China or other places," Comer said. Trump hasn't revealed those tax returns. He said that the U.S. has never had a "businessman" as a president, so it's a unique situation. In fact, several presidents have owned private businesses, including the first president.

In light of bombshell new corruption allegations against President Donald Trump and his family, a former Republican tore into his past colleagues for being asleep at the wheel in the face of "utterly obscene" abuses of the presidency.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a report detailing how the president's sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are poised to profit from a new deal the federal government just reached with Kazakhstan, granting the U.S. access to key tungsten mines. The deal also appears set to financially enrich the family of Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.

"According to the lengthy Times report, published Sunday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump personally helped secure Kazakhstan’s agreement to grant mining rights to a U.S.-backed company, Kaz Resources," Mediaite explained in a piece about the Times' finding. The administration also approved preliminary applications for up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for the project, though the funding still requires additional approvals."

It added: "Within weeks of those negotiations, investors linked to Dominari Securities, a financial firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, acquired a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity connected to the Kazakhstan venture. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, controlled by the Lutnick family and overseen by Howard Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, helped raise $210 million for a related company involved in the transaction."

Responding to a post sharing this Mediaite coverage, Joe Walsh, an ex-Republican and outspoken conservative critic of Trump, lashed out against his past colleagues in Congress for letting such corrupt abuses take place.

"Public corruption, utterly obscene, at a scale we’ve never seen," Walsh wrote on X. "Why do they do it? [Because] they don’t believe their supporters give a damn about it, and they know the Republican-led Congress won’t do a damn thing about it."

Walsh previously served as a Republican representative in Congress from Illinois, between 2011 and 2013. In light of Trump's ascendance in the party, he became a prominent conservative opponent of his agenda, ultimately leaving the party to become an independent in 2020. In 2025, he went a step further and began referring to himself as a "conservative Democrat."

Operating a food truck is highly competitive in large northeastern U.S. cities, from New York to Philadelphia to Boston. According to the Washingtonian's Jessica Sidman, the competition among food truck owners around Washington D.C.'s National Mall is so intense that residents of the city are jokingly comparing it to the "Mad Max" movies of the late 1970s and 1980s.

"The pirates have commandeered Constitution Avenue," Sidman explains in the Washingtonian. "Hawking neon snow cones and chicken shawarma, their food trucks are squished so close together that, in some cases, the bumpers are literally touching. A few are blocking fire hydrants in front of the National Museum of American History. One of the first trucks we approach has no prices listed. Actually, none of them do. But this one looks particularly suspect, with a janky, rusted pipe jutting from its roof."

According to Zack Graybill, owner of the pizza food truck DC Slices, many of his competitors around the National Mall are not licensed.

Graybill told The Washingtonian, "I think they're 'Mad Max'-ing it. That's exhaust from the generator. We can start with the fact that this is not legal vending.”

The "Mad Max" action movies, starring Mel Gibson, took place in Australia and depicted a dystopian future in the Land Down Under. The third Max Max movie, "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" in 1985, famously featured Tina Turner's mega-hit "We Don't Need Another Hero." And by jokingly comparing DC's food truck wars to "Mad Max" films, Graybill is saying that they have truly gone off the rails.

Graybill noted that a competing food truck was spilling gasoline on the street, telling The Washingtonian, "If this was a hot summer day and he was doing that, the chances of a fire actually happening is high. The number-one potential cause of food trucks catching fire is from refilling the generator with gasoline."

The Washingtonian also interviewed Jackie, a Tunisian immigrant who operates a food truck near Constitution Avenue. When Jackie and a competitor got into an argument over a parking space, the person attacked him with a screwdriver and try to stab him in the eye with it.

According to Brisa Valentin, who owns the Fly Pizza food trucks in DC, violence among unlicensed food truck operators is not uncommon in the U.S. capital.

Valentin told The Washingtonian, "I used to tell my husband, 'Those are the food-truck mafia.' They look out for each other. They're a clique. They don't like outsiders, they really don't. They're cutthroat. They're ruthless."

President Donald Trump is firmly in decline as a "flailing lame-duck," and according to one Fox News analyst, his high-profile feud with Pope Leo XIV has contributed significantly to his loss of support from all but his most devoted base.

Juan Williams is a longtime political analyst for Fox News, serving as one of the highly conservative network's few Democratic voices, and one who is not shy about speaking out critically against Trump. In a Monday morning piece for The Hill, Williams wrote that Trump is "sinking deep into disapproval with voters outside his far-right base," with his numbers sinking into "negative territory on the war in Iran, on the economy, and on immigration."

Amid that decline, Williams argued that there has been "a surprise political player" contributing to Trump's lame-duck downfall: "Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV."

"With the midterms approaching, the first American pope’s defiant opposition to Trump is coming into view as contributing to Trump’s status as a flailing lame-duck," Williams wrote. "Pope Leo is clear in saying Trump is out of step with Christianity’s core teachings: concern for the poor, skepticism of the rich, embrace of the refugees, and love for thy neighbor. These teachings are diametrically opposed to Trump starting war with Iran."

Williams further highlighted an April social media post from the Pope's official X account: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Despite initially attempting to celebrate and take credit for the first-ever American Pope, Trump has since been engaged in a bitter and often one-sided feud with the Catholic leader, taking personal offense to his remarks calling for immigrants to be treated with dignity and opposing war. In response, the Pope has continued to issue statements construed as direct attacks against Trump's rhetoric, while mostly avoiding ever directly referring to the president.

"While Trump slides in the polls, the pope has climbed to be the most popular leader among Americans with a 57 percent favorability, according to Gallup," Williams added. "The Economist-YouGov polling has the pope with a net favorability of plus 32 while Trump has a rating of negative 22. Most Catholics, regardless of religious observance or demographic group, view Pope Leo favorably. That includes Catholics who regularly attend Mass and those who seldom or never do, according to Pew."

He contined: "When asked about Trump’s approach to Pope Leo in a June survey by the Pew Research Center, far more Catholics say Trump has been too critical of Leo (51 percent) than say he hasn’t been critical enough (4 percent). Trump’s response to the pontiff is to share offensive memes on social media suggesting he should be pope. He also falsely claimed that Pope Leo wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. That’s not true, Mr. President."

Williams concluded with an argument that, in a political age "focused on the high cost of daily life, the rising power of super-rich autocrats and the dominance of artificial intelligence," voters in the U.S. are beginning to yearn for "the pope’s old-school Catholic teachings," as opposed to Trump's way of doing things.

"That hunger is far greater than support for Trump’s new wing on the White House, his bumbling renovation of the reflecting pool or building a golden archway entrance to Washington," he wrote. "Trump seems to have met his judgment day courtesy of the Chicago kid who became pope."

President Donald Trump has had close to a singular focus on his vision for the country's 250th anniversary celebration, but according to an in-depth new report from Time, the plans for this year's Fourth of July have become a "chaotic" mess, with two separate entities vying for control of the festivities.

"This Saturday, on America’s 250th birthday, the U.S. government will host two marquee events on opposite coasts," the report detailed. "One on the National Mall in Washington will feature President Donald Trump, who is billing it as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” The other will be in Los Angeles, with Queen Latifah hosting, and Chris Stapleton, Chaka Khan, and the Smashing Pumpkins performing. The two events are as different tonally as they are geographically. Both are the work of separate federally-aligned groups that are barely acknowledging one another in the run up to the big day. It’s a far cry from what anyone was imagining years ago, when lawmakers began getting serious about preparing for this milestone."

This unorthodox situation is the result of two different entities being established for the purpose of organizing the celebration events. In 2016, Congress formally established America250, a nonpartisan entity committed to planning for the nation's 250th birthday. Upon his return to office in 2025, Trump ordered the creation of Freedom 250, an explicitly White House- and MAGA-affiliated entity tasked with planning anniversary events to the president's liking.

Citing conversations with sources close to each entity, as well as internal documents, Time revealed that a "strained relationship between two committees with dramatically different visions and a lack of willingness to coordinate with each other. The result is a chaotic mix of celebrations that together feel less a celebration of America’s unity and history than the latest reflection of its partisan divide."

"America250’s original plans for the Fourth of July celebration in Washington [were] far less focused on the President," Time detailed. "There was supposed to be a roaring parade weaving through Washington, D.C. with 'diverse floats' and marching bands, a jubilant cultural festival organized by the Smithsonian at the National Mall, and multiple concerts from coast to coast celebrating 'the nation’s cultural diversity.' These were some of the events originally outlined in a September 2024 playbook created by America250 and obtained by TIME."

It continued: "Once Freedom 250 took over, all that changed. The Smithsonian cultural festival, a version which had been hosted at the National Mall every year in late June, was replaced with Trump’s Great American State Fair, At least nine states declined to directly participate in it. On the surface, neither group publicly acknowledges the tension. A spokesperson for America250 rejected the notion that there was any competition between the two, and the latest playbook published on America250’s website praised the Trump administration’s commitment and its vision for the historic milestone. But behind closed doors, grievances are simmering over programming, budgets, and dueling marketing campaigns that befuddled the American public. Freedom250 did not respond to a request for comment from TIME."

Time also noted that tensions became particularly severe after Trump appointed Ariel Abergel, "a former Fox News producer and former aide to First Lady Melania Trump," to serve as executive director for America250. Abergel threw a wrench into the committee's plans, preferring to take a "maximalist approach" and pursue "large-scale, made-for-TV” events that would be difficult to pull off in time. Reports indicated that he was later fired "unilaterally" after committee leaders found his decision to use America250's social media accounts to honor Charlie Kirk in a way that was deemed "inappropriate."