29 US States vs Meta

 

The sight of Mark Zuckerberg testifying in defense of his tech platforms has become so familiar in recent years, it feels like a social media meme in itself. But when Meta’s chief executive takes the stand in the coming weeks, as part of a landmark trial that began in California on Tuesday, he won’t be able to brush it off as just another legal or congressional inconvenience. As our global technology reporter Aisha Down wrote, the case could prove as consequential for big tech as the settlement that brought big tobacco to heel in the 1990s.

This is partly because of the sheer size of the damages being sought. The 29 US states that brought this week’s case against Meta are seeking up to $200bn (£146bn), alleging that the owner of Facebook and Instagram deliberately designed addictive products that led to young people being harmed, as well as violating child privacy laws. Meta denies all allegations.

More fundamentally, the case reflects a broader shift in efforts to hold social media companies to account, with the focus on addictiveness by design and young people’s wellbeing proving a gamechanger. It comes as countries including the UK and France have followed Australia’s lead in moving to ban social media for children under 16. Last month, the EU pledged its own ban.

Tech companies have so far managed to largely avoid responsibility for the content posted on their social networks by claiming that they are platforms rather than publishers. 

This distinction hasn’t just sheltered them from legal liabilities, it has arguably helped shape the world we live in today, with its crises of disinformation, social division and toxic discourse. But by focusing on the addictiveness of those platforms rather than the content, this week’s federal lawsuit helps to flip the script.

As Dara Kerr reported for us on Wednesday, the trial’s first witness, former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, discussed potentially addictive features such as infinite scrolling.

The case is just one of many the Guardian has been reporting on. In March, a Los Angeles jury found both Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products that had affected the mental health of a single young claimant. 

A New Mexico court recently ordered Meta to pay a total of $942bn after a jury found it was aware of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and failed to prevent it. That lawsuit cited a 2023 Guardian investigation that exposed child sex trafficking on Facebook and Instagram. 

The reporter Katie McQue has recounted how it took a lot of perseverance before the full impact of our investigation became clear. Meta says it plans to appeal against the ruling. Meanwhile, thousands of coordinated cases have been filed in a California state court against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.

This week, Johana Bhuiyan reported on how Meta has tapped an army of influencers to promote its safety tools for teens. Some of its other defensive strategies have felt less benevolent. For instance, we have been following allegations that Meta has sought to punish the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, which contains claims about its platforms’ negative impacts on teenagers. An order secured by Meta prevents Wynn-Williams from speaking about her book and she risks a fine every time if she breaches it.

Another Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, was behind the 2021 leak of a cache of damaging internal documents that contained revelations about Instagram’s impact on the mental health and wellbeing of teenage girls. Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming film is partly based on the leak, starring Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg. Its title, The Social Reckoning, certainly speaks to the moment.

-Owen Gibson, The Guardian

 

Name the Aircraft Carrier after a Real Hero!

What Do We Know About Doris Miller?

Miller served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and is famous for using an anti-aircraft gun to defend against the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite not being trained to use the weapon, Miller is believed to have shot down at least one Japanese plane and carried several wounded soldiers to safety. The citation for his Navy Cross medal notes he is receiving the award for “distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces.” The citation notes that Miller assisted in moving his mortally wounded captain to safety despite facing serious fire and he continued firing the machine gun at Japanese planes until he was ordered to leave the bridge.

Trump administration cuts to healthcare, food inspections, and Medicaid

 

On Saturday August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.

The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.

But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.

The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.

They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%.

For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.

Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.

But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.

They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care; they will mean lost jobs.

As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.

New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than 25% or who exercise “significant control” over the company, as Congress required in the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act. Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses.

In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was: nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard. Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Not only was it unfair to make “the industrious and the prudent” responsible for such shiftless men, but he also wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.

At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”

The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner’s belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest.

As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry.

This seems to explain why he has claimed—without evidence—that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished and that “[w]e don’t know what was killing” the 83 Samoans who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there. It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins.

And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots, requiring two doctor’s visits, the vaccine series would require six. Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk.

If overall health can fight off germs and illness, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary.

The U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness. It’s driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scaled back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly.

Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the U.S. has reported about 10,500 cases of foodborne illness. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual average was about 1,500 cases. At least 9,481 people in 17 states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated. It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.

It’s not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli; fresh jalapeños from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella; 1.5 million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. 

Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls “a steady stream of recalls” that includes “prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items and ready-to-eat products,” potentially contaminated with salmonella, Listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.

As former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, “You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you’re being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.” 

He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant. He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective.

In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety. Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day, and what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery.

In the early twentieth century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"Revealing healthcare histories could have serious consequences"

 

What Happened: Citing reporting by ProPublica, eight Democratic U.S. senators have criticized the Trump administration’s demands to access the health data of millions of people as a condition of giving lifesaving aid to other countries. In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the senators, including minority leader Chuck Schumer, said the U.S. demands were “unprecedented and at odds with U.S. policy concerning the data of American citizens.”

The inquiry into the administration’s approach to foreign health data referred to a ProPublica story published in June about agreements the U.S. struck with African countries — and the risks they posed to people there. Experts told ProPublica that the deals are vague and lack language used in most data-sharing agreements to adequately limit what information is collected and how it can be used. As a result, they said, there is an increased risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.

The senators — who include Tim Kaine of Virginia; Chris Van Hollen of Maryland; Brian Schatz of Hawaii; Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Christopher Coons of Delaware; Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who led the effort — requested a briefing on the healthcare agreements’ data requirements. They also asked Rubio to respond in writing to a list of questions by the end of August.

What They Said: In the letter, which was sent last week, the senators expressed concern that the requirement to access foreign health data might reverberate beyond the countries where the aid agreements were struck and “set international precedents that ultimately harm Americans.” They noted that the demands for data appear to be at odds with the Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy, which emphasizes the right to privacy for Americans and their data.

“These new demands set an alarming precedent that is seemingly contrary to the Administration’s longstanding support for the privacy of U.S. citizens’ data,” they wrote.

The senators also laid out the details of a data-sharing agreement between the U.S. and Uganda that were first reported by ProPublica. The deal demanded that Uganda provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the nation’s health data systems.

“While global health programs have historically included data sharing components,” the senators wrote, “they have never required direct access to privileged electronic systems for U.S. government representatives.”

The letter ends with more than a dozen questions for Rubio, including why the State Department has not made the health care agreements public, as federal law requires, and whether any of the data will be shared with “U.S.-based third parties for any commercial purpose, including to train any artificial intelligence models.”

The senators also asked what privacy rights foreign citizens will have over data that is transferred to the U.S. and how those rights will be enforced in the case of a data breach or another unethical use of their personal information.

Background: After the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing foreign aid. The State Department has since faced the challenge of finding new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics. The task has been especially challenging because the administration cut ties with most of the international partners and fired staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work.

In the past, PEPFAR, the U.S. program that provides aid for treating and preventing HIV around the world, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from foreign government health records. In contrast, the Ugandan agreement provides the U.S. with direct access to the government’s own health data systems.

Through separate agreements, the U.S. has also arranged for countries to provide it with specimens of pathogens that could cause pandemics, along with related information. The effort to establish these new aid arrangements was led by Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who founded three healthcare companies, one of which sold for a reported $2.7 billion. Before joining the State Department, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become the Department of Government Efficiency and oversaw some $67 billion in cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The U.S. agreement with Uganda provides up to $1.7 billion in aid for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, among other diseases. As a condition, the deal calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed and specifies that the information should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. But experts told ProPublica that it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized.

The shift in the approach to health data is part of the America First Global Health Strategy, which is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations.” Rubio explained in September that under this new strategy, aid will be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest.”

Why It Matters: Privacy experts say that, if health data is mishandled under the agreements, it could have serious consequences. Revealing healthcare histories, including whether someone has had an abortion, a mental health condition, substance-use treatment or a sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence.

In the age of artificial intelligence, health data has become especially valuable. But the agreements reviewed by ProPublica provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in how their data is used or whether they would receive any potential financial benefits.

Response: The State Department declined to answer specific questions about the senators’ letter, saying that it does not respond to questions about congressional correspondence. 

In a statement sent to ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson defended the data requirements in the health agreements. “Neither the U.S. government nor any private American companies receive or review any personally identifiable information (PII) under these data sharing agreements,” the statement said, going on to note that the new deals “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals.” The spokesperson also said no country has been coerced to sign the agreements with the U.S.

-Sharon Lerner and Anna Maria Barry-Jester for ProPublica

 

American Plutocracy

 

Donald Trump has assembled an administration with an unprecedented concentration of wealth, with 57 senior officials worth at least $100 million each, more than four times the combined number found in the administrations of his three immediate predecessors, according to a new analysis.

The report, released by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, identified eight billionaires among Trump's appointees and found ultra-wealthy officials throughout the Cabinet, diplomatic corps, and federal agencies responsible for everything from financial markets and Social Security to education and housing.

The 57-person count excludes Trump himself and Elon Musk, who previously served as a special government employee during Trump's second term. By comparison, Public Citizen identified only 13 officials worth at least $100 million across the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administrations combined. Bush and Biden each had five, while Obama had three.

Eight of the 23 members of Trump's Cabinet meet the $100 million threshold.

Among the most prominent are Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the former chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince McMahon. Both are billionaires.

The list also includes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager; Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, a former U.S. senator and business executive; and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-founder of private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.

Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor who has become one of Trump's most important international envoys, is also among the administration's wealthiest members.

But Trump's ultra-rich appointees extend far beyond Washington.

Seventeen of the 57 identified by Public Citizen are U.S. ambassadors, while another 40 serve in senior executive branch positions. The administration's wealthy officials hold positions across agencies including the Treasury, Commerce and Education departments, the Securities and Exchange Commission, NASA, Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration and Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Public Citizen argues that the extraordinary concentration of wealth raises questions about conflicts of interest and whose priorities influence government decision-making. "It is deeply concerning to see people with extraordinary wealth controlling the levers of power in our government," Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said in announcing the findings.

Being wealthy does not prevent someone from serving in government, and affluent donors have long been appointed to presidential administrations, particularly as ambassadors. Trump has also openly defended selecting wealthy people for government positions, portraying their financial success as evidence of their competence and ability to negotiate.

The scale of his second administration, however, sets it apart. Public Citizen also examined the officials' political giving. It found that 30 of the 57 people on its list contributed more than $65 million between 2022 and 2025 to political committees affiliated with Trump, with most of the money donated during the 2024 election cycle. The finding does not establish that contributions resulted in appointments, but the advocacy group argues the overlap warrants scrutiny.

One example highlighted in the report is Warren Stephens, Trump's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Public Citizen found Stephens made millions of dollars in contributions to Trump-related political and inaugural committees around the period in which he was nominated.

Another is Tilman Fertitta, the billionaire businessman appointed ambassador to Italy, whose family has been a longtime source of political contributions to Trump. Public Citizen reported Fertitta contributed $1.4 million to Trump committees during the 2024 presidential election cycle.

The findings arrive at a politically sensitive moment for the White House.

Trump won the 2024 election in part by expanding Republican support among working-class voters, but dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy has grown as Americans continue to struggle with prices. Only 32% of Americans currently approve of Trump's handling of the economy, according to polling cited by The Associated Press.

That creates a striking contrast heading toward the November midterms: a president who built his political comeback around economic frustration among ordinary voters now presides over an administration containing a historically large group of centimillionaires and billionaires.

 -NewsBreak

"Doing the president's political bidding"

Newly anointed Attorney General Todd Blanche has been busy. But instead of doing justice, he’s been doing the president’s political bidding. A violation of the Hatch Act, if anyone believes the Attorney General should follow the law. One of the Act’s major prohibitions is against using a federal job to influence an election. Although federal employees can, technically, campaign on their own time, the Attorney General is on the clock 24/7. Presidentially appointed, Senate confirmed officials like Blanche can only participate in partisan political activity in a purely personal (not official) capacity.  

But here Blanche is, speaking at a Trump rally in New York yesterday. He endorsed Bruce Blakeman, the Republican County executive for Nassau County, New York, who is running against Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul to be New York’s next Governor. Donald Trump has also endorsed Blakeman, and he was there yesterday too.

It’s hard to see what Blanche’s endorsement adds to Trump’s or why he thought it was an appropriate thing for an Attorney General to do. When the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI (yes, he was there too), and the President of the United States are all at a campaign event, standing in front of a backdrop of law enforcement officers, talking about their government jobs, that’s hardly personal time. Blanche spoke about “his” Justice Department, saying, “In my Department of Justice, if anybody touches a federal law enforcement officer in any way inappropriate, we will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.” (If only he felt that way about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.)

Congrats to all of the Republican Senators who voted for Blanche. He showed you who he was from the outset, and you confirmed him anyhow. Blanche has also been busy overseeing a Justice Department that continues to persecute the president's political enemies, in the best tradition of dictators everywhere. 

A report this morning said the U.S. Attorney in Chicago has been looking into a political consulting business where Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter once worked. Merchan is the Judge who oversaw the New York State hush money prosecution connected to Trump’s liaison with Stormy Daniels that resulted in Trump’s conviction on multiple felony charges. 

Trump targeted the Judge and his family throughout the trial, making unsupported allegations Merchan’s daughter benefited financially from the trial. The U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Andrew Boutrous, was also involved in the Broadview 6 debacle that resulted in his being forced to dismiss charges against anti-ICE protestors after evidence of grand jury abuse came to light. He works directly for Blanche. The reporting suggests the case against Merchan’s daughter may have come up empty-handed, but that hasn’t stopped Blanche’s DOJ from seeking indictments in the past, when the President wants revenge.

Then there’s Ka$h Patel. Not to be outdone by Todd Blanche’s infamous “I love you, sir” paean to Trump, Patel had this to say at the same rally Blanche participated in: “Thanks to President Trump’s brilliant leadership, the American dream is not a dream anymore. It is a reality. I’m living it….”

The Solicitor General, too, although he managed to avoid the rally, is in full-on worshipful mode. You would think that the so-called “10th justice,” the Senate confirmed, fourth ranking official at DOJ, wouldn’t need to kowtow to the President, but in his brief trying to get Trump a better decision from the Supreme Court on the now-disallowed construction of the White House ballroom, John Sauer quoted an unnamed White House official who thinks Trump’s boondoggle “is already being adjudged to be one of the most beautiful of its kind, anywhere in the country,” before attempting flattery with the Court, based on its architecture of all things: “its magnificent Corinthian columns—considered the highest column order in architecture—have served as the inspiration for the monumental columns that front the military/ballroom complex.” And Sauer put all of that in his brief. It must have been music to Trump’s ears.

There is no case-related reason for the Solicitor General’s Office to scrape and bow like this, any more than there is legitimate reason for Blanche and Patel to be on the campaign trail with the President. But Trump makes it explicit, expressing mock “surprise” to see Blanche, as though there isn’t a formal plan in advance around both the President and the Attorney General’s movements. And coming in for the reputational kill shot, he admonishes Blanche that he will be great “if he remains tough.” We all know what tough means. It means doing Donald Trump’s bidding in all things.

The behavior of the three top Justice Department officials, Blanche, Patel, and Sauer, confirms that they understand the rules they are operating under: Trump rules, not the rule of law. 

After Pam Bondi’s demise as Attorney General and the forced departures of Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis from the Senate after falling out of favor with Trump, they know that if they want to keep their jobs, they must keep currying favor with the president. Shamefully, they’re willing to do that.

We will not forget. We will keep following what happens at this Justice Department, even when stories disappear from the headlines. People who have been entrusted with power must be accountable for how they use it. Without knowledge and memory, that’s not possible. 

Paid subscribers let me keep doing this work while keeping the newsletter free for everyone. If you can subscribe, I hope you will. If you already do, thank you. You make it possible for hundreds of thousands of people to have access to independent legal analysis without a paywall.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"From Friday through Sunday, Trump continued his now-habitual weekend flooding of social media with fantasies that he is smart, beloved, and powerful"

The post closest to reality on Friday touted the story by Steve Thompson, Federica Cocco, and Christoper Rowland of the Washington Post on Thursday, August 13, reporting that prescription drug prices have fallen 3.1% this year, the biggest rate of price decrease since 1963. While that drop is real, the journalists note, much of the drop reflects the falling price of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, whose price has dropped dramatically because of competition from generic versions.

For other drugs, experts say the price drop comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote in 2022, during the Biden administration. That law permitted the government to begin negotiations with drug companies for lower prices on ten commonly prescribed drugs, with the lower prices going into effect this year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that taxpayers would save $6 billion from those first changes.

Health policy scholar Stacie Dusetzina told the journalists that Trump’s TrumpRx program covers “a limited number of branded drugs” that “may not be high enough volume to be included” in the new figures. The desire to claim Biden’s success as his own may have been behind Trump’s resurrection of accusations that Biden was corrupt.

Trump’s morass in Iran also turned into fantasy on social media when he claimed the U.S. has built a “WALL OF STEEL,” complete with an AI wall through the water, of a blockade of Iranian ports. Trump then veered to declaring that “Pocahontas and ‘Abdul’”—Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom he portrayed in stereotypical Indigenous garb, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Michigan, “want to take your stuff, and Crash the Economy!!!” and that El-Sayed and women in hijab “are coming for your home and your belongings!”

Since an appeals court found that construction must stop, Trump has harped on the idea that the ballroom is crucial for national security. But as Will Hobson and Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, Trump began suggesting a ballroom back in 2010 for reasons of aesthetics and space. The national security argument, the journalists note, didn’t arrive until January 2026, after legal challenges to his authority to demolish the East Wing and build his ballroom.

Trump’s weekend fantasies put him in the same category as framers of the Constitution as he showed an AI-finished ballroom to George Washington, at one point writing: “Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!” In real life, Washington staunchly opposed royal luxury for the president.

By equating himself with George Washington, Trump appeared to entertain the fantasy that he is leading the country toward a second American Revolution, much as Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in 2024. Trump’s vision for the country is literally dark: on Saturday his social media account posted a dark black-and-white image of him wearing a Trump 2028 hat, with the caption, in a German-style typeface echoing that of the Nazis, saying: “We are going to win.” In another post, he boasted that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “get along GREAT!”

Sunday evening, Trump declared that “[b]ased on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean dictator, he had ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” traditional military exercises with key U.S. ally South Korea. The joint drills were scheduled to begin today.

Trump wrote that such exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.” Trump suggested the change was retaliation for the refusal of South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung to help the U.S. in Iran, but as political scientist Norm Ornstein noted, the decision comes just as North Korea is sending 50,000 troops to help Russian president Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.

The idea that Trump is a powerful dictator making a victorious alliance with North Korea and Russia presents a darkly threatening posture but, like the rest of Trump’s social media dump, portrays a world different from reality.

Today is the day that the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that Trump signed on June 17 expires. Rather than ushering in a permanent agreement that opens the Strait of Hormuz and stops Iran’s nuclear ambitions, today shows just how badly Trump is flailing.

This morning he lashed out, telling Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel “that Iran should ‘put up the white flag of surrender.’ I have no time schedule,” Trump told Yingst. “I’m not in a hurry...the midterms have nothing to do with my thinking.” As for talks between Iran and Oman over control of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump told Yingst: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Oman is a key U.S. ally in the region.

For Iran’s part, an Iranian leader told Reuters that if diplomacy fails, Tehran will shift from defense to offense. Benoit Faucon and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Iranian hard-liners have spent the past two months planning to widen the war and raise the cost for the U.S., inflicting enough pain that Iran can deter future attacks. Today Reuters reported that Iran-backed Houthis launched missiles at Saudi ships near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another key international shipping route.

Meanwhile, Trump is caught in a domestic scandal over the condition of the U.S. military. In early August, news broke that the U.S. was running low on precision missiles after using the expensive weapons to shoot down inexpensive Iranian drones. 

Then we heard about the appalling conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier kept overseas without adequate resupply and with maintenance issues, including overflowing toilets. Multiple outlets have reported that despondent service members, months past the scheduled end of their deployment, have attempted self-harm. The U.S. is moving the USS George Washington from the western Pacific to replace the USS Lincoln, leaving the region near China without a U.S. carrier.

When a reporter began a question to Trump on Friday with, “Family members of U.S. service members are concerned about the conditions on board the USS Lincoln,” Trump interrupted to say: “No they’re not.” When the reporter followed up with “Has the deployment gone on too long? Are you worried about their mental health?” he blustered: “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.”

Families of sailors reacted with fury, telling Ed Pilkington of The Guardian that sailors have bad water and so little food they have lost up to 30 pounds (13.6 kg). There is little mental health counseling despite the extended deployment. “Keep praying for us,” one sailor texted home. “We are doing our best to make sure we protect our country and our families.”

On Saturday, Aaron Parnas in MeidasNews reported on a supply crisis on the USS Boxer, as well, and today Brad Lendon of CNN reported that sailors on a U.S. guided missile destroyer spent four days in blistering heat last month without working toilets, cooked food, or air conditioning after the vessel lost power.

Trump’s contribution to military plans has been to order the U.S. Navy to alter the construction of new aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller—named for a Pearl Harbor hero—ordering the designers to replace the modern electromagnetic launch system for planes with an older, steam-powered catapult system. Kaanita Iyer of CNN reports the change will delay production of the craft for several years and could cost billions.

Noah Robertson and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Navy is also considering redesigning the aircraft carrier fleet to reflect Trump’s preference for ships that look like those from World War II. That change, too, could cost billions.

On Sunday night, a social media user posted a video of Trump at a party at his Bedminster club blasting “Y.M.C.A.” on his iPad for the crowd. National security scholar Tom Nichols responded: “We’re losing a war to Iran, we’re alienating our allies, we’re emboldening our enemies, our stalwart service people are being subjected to deprivations...and this is what the Commander in Chief is doing.”

But, in fact, that’s not all Trump is doing.

Late Friday night, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leader Trump appointed, approved a preliminary charter for World Liberty Financial (WLF) to become a bank. As Lawrence Delevingne and Pete Schroeder of Reuters report, the charter would permit WLF to issue USD1, a stablecoin tied to the dollar, and to manage and hold assets for customers and settle payments faster.

WLF is the cryptocurrency venture launched by the Trump family and their close allies the Witkoff family. Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and WLF has done at least one major deal with a national security advisor for the United Arab Emirates. Reuters estimates that as of April 2026, WLF had “funneled more than $1.6 billion to the U.S. president and his family.”

Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wrote: “They are going to steal everything they can while they have power.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said: “President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen—and Congress cannot allow it to stand.” She and nine other senators are introducing a bill to guarantee “that no President, Vice President, their immediate families or other senior government officials can exploit their positions to own or control a bank, which could serve as a major vehicle for corrupt dealings.”

At 4:09 this afternoon, Trump posted on social media an image of Kim Jong Un outside with several men standing around him, talking on a landline telephone. The caption read: “HEY DONALD, WE COOL… RIGHT?”

—Heather Cox Richardson