VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump snaps in unhinged weekend announcement
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down Donald Trump’s frantic and desperate declaration of even more legally tenuous global tariffs, which he has also decided to increase to 15%…as if we haven’t lost enough money to this nonsense already.

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Trump’s epic loss on tariffs is even worse for him than you think
Greg Sargent, The New Republic: “The Supreme Court’s stunning decision invalidating Donald Trump’s tariffs isn’t just a major legal setback, though it certainly is that. The loss before the high court is also another sign that the pillars of Trump’s right-wing nationalist agenda are crumbling in a much broader and deeper sense—so much so that it’s posing a serious threat to the long-term durability of the ideology known as Trumpism. If you had to name the two most essential pillars of Trumpian populist nationalism, you’d probably single out his sweeping tariffs and his campaign to deport all undocumented immigrants.

The tariffs are supposed to unleash a domestic manufacturing renaissance, and the mass expulsions are designed to ethnically and culturally purify the nation. Together they make up much of the foundation of Trumpism’s fantasy version of nationalist renewal. Both of those are now in crisis. The tariffs have been broadly invalidated. And in the aftermath of ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, the deportations of noncriminal undocumented immigrants—while still proceeding—have been widely discredited in the minds of all but the molten MAGA core, and face determined resistance all across American culture and society. It’s notable that some of Trump’s worst abuses of power have been employed toward those twin pillars of economic nationalism—tariffs and deportations.

The tariffs constituted a virtually unconstrained usurpation of authority that the Constitution grants to Congress. The expulsions have involved all sorts of authoritarian abuses, from extralegal expulsions to foreign gulags to efforts to suspend due process on a mass scale to the building out of a massive archipelago of prison camps to the illegal deployment of the military in American cities to the murder of pro-immigrant U.S. citizens on the streets of Minneapolis. After Trump’s 2024 win, many commentators discerned in the results a deep, durable national shift toward Trumpist populist nationalism. But as it turns out, two of that ideology’s most critical elements are driving his biggest policy fiascos and his cratering standing with the public alike—in short, they constitute perhaps the most important reasons that his entire presidency is sinking deeper and deeper into utter, monumental failure.”

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MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson’s Congressional majority is down to just ONE VOTE.
Flip the House: We have a very real opportunity to flip the house and finally put some clamps on Donald Trump’s reign of terror and chaos this November, but it’s not going to be easy. Trump has made it clear that there’s nothing he won’t do to try to tilt the scales in his favor, so we need to win by a decisive enough majority that there’s no way he can pull any shenanigans. We’ve put together a donation page that will split any gifts between a group of Democratic candidates all locked in close, winnable House races, and every dollar might mean the difference between democracy or fascism. Will you chip in to help retake our country and stop Trump in his tracks?

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AOC is channeling FDR
David Sirota, Jacobin: “In 2021, Academy Award–winning director Alex Gibney and I published a desperate plea. In a Rolling Stone essay, we implored Democrats then in power to heed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) long-forgotten warning about the link between economic hardship and authoritarianism. Five years later, it appears that at least one prospective Democratic presidential candidate understands the warning — and is using her platform to amplify it. Back in 2021, many liberals had gone back to brunch, assuming that the “democracy crisis” was over and that Donald Trump would never reemerge. Instead of mimicking FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign by casting themselves as unhappy with the economy and welcoming the hatred of oligarchs, Democrats seeking another presidential term allowed themselves to be portrayed as apologists for the problem and allowed Trump to depict himself as the solution. And now here we are, mired in a democracy crisis being engineered by an authoritarian — just as Roosevelt warned. But this is not the end of the story.

Today comes Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). In an appearance at the Munich Security Conference that has the chattering classes buzzing about a 2028 presidential bid, she, too, channeled Roosevelt’s warning. She suggested that her party had betrayed working-class politics and that ending such betrayals is required to stave off the continued march toward authoritarianism.

What’s new here is not the moral case for working-class economic populism and all of the attendant policies that AOC mentioned. That moral case has been there for decades — we’ve long known that too many people are suffering and that such suffering can be alleviated. What’s new and newsworthy here is that, finally, we have some new Democratic leaders who are making FDR’s political argument that working-class economic populism is not just morally right but also necessary for both Democrats’ electoral success and for the defense of democracy itself.”

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This Ramadan in Gaza we pray for mercy, share what we have and light a single candle for hope
Majdoleen Abu Assi, The Guardian: “Every year, Ramadan comes as a sanctuary for the soul. For Muslims like me, it is a sacred pause in the chaos of life. But this year, as a woman displaced from the familiar streets of Gaza City to a rented room in Al-Zawayda, I am searching for a peace that feels like a ghost. The world calls this a ‘ceasefire’, yet from my window the silence feels heavy. We are holding our breath because the fear of death has not disappeared, it has just become unpredictable. I did not welcome Ramadan this year with the golden lanterns that once adorned our balconies.

I welcomed it to the roar of bulldozers clearing the bones of neighbouring houses and with the constant buzz of the zanana, the Israeli surveillance drones, overhead. Even as we stand in prayer, that metallic humming drowns out the adhan, the call to prayer, reminding us that we are still watched and that our ‘calm’ rests at the mercy of a sudden strike. Today, we stand in cramped rooms, our ears tilted toward the sky. We pray for mercy and listen for the whistle of a missile that may decide our ‘truce’ has expired. Displacement has turned every ritual into a mountain to climb. The cost of food and drink for the entire month of Ramadan used to be no more than 1,000 shekels, while today it is easily 3,500 shekels without even fully meeting basic needs. Ramadan for the children is the hardest part. They have learned the language of war, and can hear the difference between a shell and an explosion, even before they have learned the songs of Ramadan. When they ask “Will the bombing return tomorrow?” they are really asking if they have a future. Something we can’t answer – for them or ourselves.

Yet when I see them hanging a torn decoration on the side of a tent, I understand something essential: in Gaza, hope is not a feeling. It is a decision. Please understand, while you at home may hear that it is quiet here – with fewer stories in the news about us and a fragile “ceasefire” reported – quiet is not peace. Real peace is the right to the ordinary. To walk to a market that still exists and hasn’t been turned to rubble, to pray in a mosque that has not been desecrated, to go home to a neighbourhood that hasn’t been flattened, to sleep without wondering whether silence is merely the prelude to another nightmare. This Ramadan in Gaza comes with a different spirit. As the adhan sounds tonight, I feel a flicker of tranquility. Not because the world is just or we can see an end to our suffering, but because we are still here, weaving hope from threads of ruin. We fast, we pray and we remain – not out of habit, but as an act of reclaiming our souls from the wreckage.”

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Food for thought

The Sunday Wrap-up

Hope…

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