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James Eagle:
Voters disapprove of Trump

…
The only area he is breaking even is immigration and border security, traditionally one of Trump’s strongest issues. Here, 42 approve and 45 disapprove. That’s basically neck and neck.

There’s also an interesting wrinkle with AI. The blue and red bars don’t add up to 100 because people who answered “unsure” aren’t shown in this chart. That group is tiny for all the other categories, but on AI it is huge: 38 in every 100 voters are unsure. Basically people haven’t decided on whether Trump is doing well or not on that issue.

Lauren Fedor, Ian Hodgson @ Financial Times:
Most US voters say they are worse off under Trump — FT poll

Paul Krugman:
Demography, Deportations and the Trump Stall

Why the American jobs machine is sputtering

Nicholas Casey @ NY Times:
He Was Deported to a Country He’d Never Heard Of. He May Never Go Free.

As the Trump administration sends a growing number of immigrants to countries they have no connection to, some find themselves imprisoned with no way out.

Mary Papenfuss @ DailyBeast:
Trump, 80, Fantasizes About Dead President in Bizarre Posting Spree

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Broad Daylight News:
Who Pays When Washington Forces Coal Plants to Stay Alive

At first this looked like a strange energy policy story. The Trump administration says the country is heading into an electricity emergency, and there’s real substance behind that claim. AI is devouring power, data centers are multiplying, manufacturing is growing, and electricity demand is rising for the first time in years after a long stretch of flat consumption. Trump’s own Department of Energy said as much in July, warning of a “pressing need for additional electric transmission infrastructure.”

Then, barely a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright canceled three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors covering parts of Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas, dismissing them as leftovers from the previous administration’s climate agenda. That explanation runs into a basic problem. Power lines aren’t Democratic or Republican. They don’t care whether the electricity moving across them came from coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, wind or solar. Transmission is just the highway that gets electricity from where it’s cheap to where it’s needed, and more of it usually means more competition and lower prices for consumers.

That detail makes what the administration is doing with coal a lot more interesting, because while Washington is making transmission harder to build, it’s simultaneously using federal emergency powers to keep aging coal plants running, even ones the utilities that own them had already scheduled for retirement. And in more than one case, the utilities themselves have said out loud that this isn’t a good deal for their customers.
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Chris Geidner:
Trump is calling the organization suing him — the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States — “TREASONISTS.“

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 14, 2026

Today the Trump administration asked the United States Supreme Court to let it build Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be. Trump ignored Congress and its authority over government building projects when he tore down the East Wing and began construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the site. He claimed initially that there would be no cost to taxpayers for what he estimated to be a $200 million project; already estimates have risen to at least $900 million to be “covered primarily by taxpayers.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop construction, and lower courts have agreed, … On August 7 an appeals court wrote: “We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.”
…

The timing of Trump’s request that the Supreme Court allow him to ignore Congress and the law in order to spend taxpayer money on a vanity project provides a dramatic contrast to the actions of the government ninety-one years ago.

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. …
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Nick Turse @ Intercept:
New Pentagon Report Claims U.S. Killed No Civilians in Boat Strikes

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Shockingly, the Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes, according to the officials, despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder. The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were “narcoterrorists.” In a classified briefing last fall, a high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that some of the people killed in the initial September 2, 2025, attack may have been the victims of human trafficking, according to an Intercept investigation.

“They have absolutely no credibility,” the second official told The Intercept about the boat strike claims, adding that the report was “sickening.”
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 12, 2026

In Minnesota yesterday, close Trump ally Mike Lindell, the former chief executive officer of MyPillow, lost the Republican primary for governor to Republican state house speaker Lisa Demuth. This loss comes after Trump ally Representative Andy Ogles lost his primary in Tennessee. As Andrew Howard of Politico noted, Trump had endorsed both of them.

Trump continues to insist that voters are angry not at him…

As Margie Cullen of the USA Today network reports, 60% of Americans think the president is “not honest and trustworthy,” and 69% feel that things in the country these days are “out of control.” Fifty-three percent of those polled think Trump is too old to be president.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, shares that concern. In a New York Times op-ed today, he noted that the president “has not looked well” at times this year. … Reiner listed a number of questions the White House should address to reassure Americans that Trump is able to perform the duties of the presidency.
…

As if to underscore Reiner’s concerns, Trump appeared to be asleep at a White House event yesterday.

The Iran war appears to have undercut Trump’s power internationally, as well.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV:
We didn’t have Avenger air defense missiles in Kuwait and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but Trump has them at his Bedminster golf club

This is a photo of Donald Trump playing golf at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey on Sunday, defended by an Army Avenger anti-missile system in case of an attack by an Iranian drone or missile. …

There were no Avenger anti-missile systems present in Kuwait on the second day of Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran. Six Army soldiers were killed and 20 more were seriously wounded when an Iranian drone struck a logistics headquarters on an army base in Kuwait. …
…

In all, since Trump’s war began, 642 soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines have been seriously wounded, and eighteen have been killed. These figures have had to be dragged out of the Pentagon by a Freedom of Information request …

Here is something the Pentagon does not supply with its casualty figures. None of the soldiers were killed or wounded in what we think of as combat operations in the forward area of a war. All the casualties occurred in places that in previous wars would have been referred to as rear areas, behind the front lines of a war. In Trump’s war, there are no front lines, because he chose from the beginning to fight Iran exclusively from the air with missiles and bombs.
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Miles Taylor:
Donald Trump is a communist.

… If Americans are looking for a militant radical who wants the government to control the economy, silence dissent, and glorify the supreme leader, they can find one. He currently works out of the Oval Office. …

Donald Trump himself is a communist, or at least as close to the rulers of past communist regimes as anyone we’ve ever seen hold power in America. I don’t say that in jest. I say it as a former Republican who spent two-and-a-half years inside Trump’s first administration, watching his rule trend away from democracy and toward something darker yet familiar to any student of history. If you strip away the flag pins and look at how Trump actually governs, you find something closer to a Soviet general secretary than to any American president of either party.

Let’s start with what happened this week. …
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Chris Geidner:
If DC had statehood, armed soldiers wouldn’t be patrolling our cat cafes

One year in, Trump’s troop deployment in D.C. is ongoing, unending, pointless — and very bad

The “America 250” flags are a particularly empty emblem on the uniforms of troops deployed on the streets of the nation’s capital.

On Tuesday, it will be one year since President Donald Trump called up the National Guard to be deployed in Washington, D.C., “to address the epidemic of crime in our Nation’s capital.“

It was a lie then, it’s a lie now, but here we are. And here they are. And here they are to remain through 2029, if Trump has his way.

On Sunday, like clockwork, moments after I saw a sign about the armed troops’ presence in D.C., a group of National Guard troops walked by.

The sign proclaims, “If DC had statehood, armed soldiers wouldn’t be patrolling our cat cat cafes.“

Although that is likely correct, I do want to add two notes. First, some Republican governors (in Tennessee and Louisiana) have made it possible for there to be National Guard deployment in Democratic-led cities — with deployments in Memphis and New Orleans. Second, even without statehood, the D.C. deployment still is likely illegal. A district court judge ruled as much last November, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit allowed the deployment to continue during litigation (which is moving slowly at the D.C. Circuit).

Returning to the bigger picture, though, the legal case aside, what Donald Trump has done — and what Congress and the courts have thus far allowed — is appalling.

There is no plan for this deployment to end. At this point, it basically involves National Guard troops who are deployed within D.C. or sent away from their homes to patrol D.C. with no real purpose for their deployment beyond showing Donald Trump that he has troops and showing D.C.’s residents that Trump can use those troops to attempt to intimidate us.
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Justin Glawe, Ava Shook:
How everyday Americans are forced to fund Trump’s corruption

On top of his self-dealing, taxpayers are spending billions on his vanity projects.
…

The line from giving Trump money to receiving favorable treatment from his administration is straight and short, according to the Wall Street Journal. “If a company encounters an issue with the federal government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported on July 30.

The private sector money flowing into Trump’s vanity projects is also costing taxpayers. His ballroom is funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as well as private donations. …

A Public Notice-American Doom analysis shows that Trump is spending nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund his many renovation projects. Meanwhile, Trump and his family’s digital currency companies have raked in more than $2.25 billion during Trump’s second term, including as much as $600 million from foreign interests, …

Mary Papenfuss @ Daily Beast: Trump, 80, Sets Sights on New Government Office He Plans to Loot

The president would love to get his hands on the State Department’s chandeliers, Corinthian columns, and a painting or two.
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Paul Krugman:
News of the Weak (Labor Market)

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The surprise fall in employment — 23,000 jobs lost, when the consensus forecast was for around 80,000 gained — made headlines. … this report also revised data for several earlier months down, so the broader picture of job growth in Trump’s “golden age” is significantly worse than it seemed.

Now, very low job growth — around 26,000 a month over the past year — doesn’t mean the same thing it would have a few years ago. Why? Because anti-immigrant policies have drastically slowed the growth of the pool of potential workers. …

On the other hand, the fact that job growth has slowed so sharply puts the lie to claims that anti-immigration policies would free up jobs for the native-born. …

… Wage growth keeps falling, suggesting weak worker bargaining power:

Malcolm Ferguson @ TNR: Fox News Struggles to Spin Yet Another Bad Jobs Report

Matt Grossman @ WSJ: … fewer people were actively looking for work

Lauren Almeida, Alicia Chen @ Guardian: Trump orders new 15% tariff on key material for solar panels and microchips

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