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  • ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They want you to be apathetic. Don’t be.

    ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They want you to be apathetic. Don’t be.

    Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up at 5 a.m. Tuesday and started his day like almost every other one for the last 35 years since he came to Houston from Mexico and built his own American dream brick by brick — sending his three sons to top universities on the foundation he’d constructed through years of backbreaking labor.

    His wife also got up to make him a hearty meal before he put on his work boots, fired up his van, and picked up three coworkers in Houston’s heavily Latino East End to build new homes on the city’s outskirts. But it proved to be Salgado’s last drive.

    Just a short time later, the 52-year-old Salgado was lying face down outside of his van on a city sidewalk, surrounded by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as blood poured from a bullet wound on the right side of his stomach. He was recorded screaming in pain: “Help me! They shot me! … ¡Me están matando!”

    Translation: “They are killing me!”

    He died a short time later in a nearby hospital. ICE said the fatal shooting occurred after officers tried to arrest Salgado in what it called “a targeted enforcement operation” — even though Salgado apparently had no criminal record and for more than a year had been steadily making progress toward securing a work permit that would resolve his immigration status.

    “We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment,” his tearful son, 29-year-old teacher Ronaldo Salgado, said in a news conference on Wednesday. Afterward, the younger Salgado told the Bulwark: “I love our dad; he worked hard. He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”

    Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, wipes away tears while speaking during a news conference Wednesday in Houston.

    The killing of Salgado — family man, essential worker, and American dreamer who was doing everything the right way after joining the 1990s mass migration of undocumented Mexicans — is a crime against humanity that makes anyone who still has a functioning moral compass want to scream in outrage.

    Still, what happened after Salgado was gunned down is deeply troubling in a different way. America seemed to mostly shrug at a killing no less senseless than this winter’s Minneapolis ICE fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, let alone other law enforcement murders like George Floyd in 2020, which sparked days of nationwide protest.

    The implosion of now ex-Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner or Donald Trump’s inane prattle at a NATO summit took up most of the hour on cable-TV news, with reporting on yet another ICE killing squeezed in at the end. A fascist regime cutting down our law-abiding neighbors in the streets is becoming background noise.

    Just how they want it.

    To be sure, there are differences between what happened Tuesday in Texas and the Minneapolis killings that grabbed so much attention six months ago. A large activist community in the Twin Cities was out in the streets at the time of the Good and Pretti shootings, with whistles and cell phones, producing a flood of video evidence that exposed ICE’s lies and inspired massive demonstrations.

    In contrast, Salgado was killed in a low-income neighborhood, and while there is video of the wounded laborer on the ground, there’s not yet been definitive footage revealing how or why he was shot. That doesn’t alleviate the nagging concern that the media and some corners of the public and the body politic care more when the victims are white U.S. citizens — which, if true, is morally unconscionable.

    A makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer Tuesday, is shown Wednesday in Houston.

    Americans should be alarmed at the bigger picture that’s slowly unfolding before us. After briefly pressing the pause button in the furor over the Good and Pretti killings — pulling back from its federal assault on Minnesota, firing the flamboyant and infuriating Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, and drastically scaling back its plan for warehouse concentration camps — ICE is back, and more dangerous than ever.

    After an era of waving a red flag before an activated, engaged, and angry citizenry it didn’t see coming, by naming operations like the “Catahoula Crunch” or “Charlotte’s Web,” and with Bovino mugging for the TV cameras, ICE has resumed working toward its inhumane target of one million deportations per year, but with a much lower profile.

    There are thousands of new immigration agents on the streets, fueled by Congress giving two massive funding infusions totaling about $240 billion, and with Homeland Security and ICE under new management, they are hoping to terrorize immigrant communities without generating headlines or protests. “ICE is making record arrests right now,” Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News. “We turned the heat up …”

    The New York Times reported last week that with no press releases or hoopla, daily immigration arrests had doubled over a five-day period to a total of roughly 10,000, or 2,000 per day, with immigrants arrested during required government check-ins, but also during traffic stops like the one in which Salgado was killed.

    This is a human rights nightmare in the making. The stepped-up arrests are all but certain to lead to more dangerous and potentially fatal encounters like the one that occurred on Houston’s Canal Street, but the other impacts are equally pernicious.

    Fear levels in big-city neighborhoods with large immigrant communities are spiking yet again — keeping countless kids home from school and essential workers off the job, crimping an already strained economy. The Trump regime’s squalid gulag archipelago of immigration detention centers — whose crisis of overcrowding had eased slightly with the spring enforcement slowdown — is seeing a surge again, and that will also lead to catastrophe.

    Afghan national Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, who died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 14, is pictured in this undated family photo.

    Detention deaths are soaring to record levels — more than 50 since Trump returned to office in January 2025. We are learning troubling details, for example, about the March death of an Afghan national who came to the United States after working with U.S. Special Forces and who died after just one day in ICE custody. Relatives of Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, said he was not allowed to bring his asthma inhaler into detention; officials say he died of an “adverse drug reaction” that brought on an attack.

    In Houston, there’s no evidence to support ICE’s initial claim that Salgado was resisting arrest, but — given what we are learning about the horrors of detention — it’s not surprising that immigrants facing an arrest are terrified at what might happen next. Meanwhile, ICE and other agencies are going to extreme lengths to avoid accountability.

    The U.S. welcomed this child of the Vietnam War. Why did he die in ICE custody? | Will Bunch

    In California, ICE — overflowing with our tax dollars — is spending an astronomical $1.5 billion to buy two large privately run immigration prisons from the corporation CoreCivic, for the purpose of preventing state and local inspectors from monitoring what happens there. WIRED recently reported that ICE’s internal watchdog agency is focusing its attention not on agent misconduct but on tracking down outside critics.

    What are they trying to hide?

    In the killing of Salgado, we don’t know the answer — yet. ICE claims Salgado, whom it dehumanized as an “illegal alien,” “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent who was arresting him, and that the agent then fired the fatal bullet.

    We don’t know if there’s any truth here. But what we do know is that in every similar situation during the Trump regime — including Good and Pretti and others like Chicago nonfatal shooting victim Marimar Martinez — the initial ICE version of what happened proved to be a lie, and often a brazen one. It takes a willing moral blindness to automatically accept ICE’s story about what happened to Salgado.

    And yet, we are seeing that not only from the local FBI — which is not investigating the officer’s action, but the alleged crime of resisting arrest — but also from Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who said he trusts the federal government to do a thorough investigation, as if he’d been living in a cave these last 15 months.

    In their anguished news conference on Wednesday, family members and local Democratic officials called for the release of any ICE body-cam footage and an independent investigation into what really went down in Houston’s Magnolia Park section.

    They need our help, though. ICE’s new summer assault on immigrant communities, and its ability to get away with its many crimes, is counting on an exhausted or apathetic American public to not demand action as so many of us did with Pretti or Good or Floyd.

    Please say his name — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — and take to the streets and demand justice. His death is just as deserving of our time and our moral outrage, if not more so.

    On Wednesday night, about 1,000 Houstonians came out to keep that flickering flame alive.

    “This is the exact spot that Lorenzo took his final breath,” Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant rights group FIEL Houston, told the protest marchers. “And in the spirit of solidarity, I don’t know about you, but I say, if they come for one of us, they come for all of us.”

  • Graham Platner and the Democrats’ war on expertise

    Graham Platner and the Democrats’ war on expertise

    Let’s suppose you’re the kind of Democrat who — like me — derides Republicans for declaring war on expertise. From vaccines and climate change to tariffs and foreign aid, we say, the GOP has discarded professional knowledge in its quest for power.

    Why, then, do we support candidates who lack expertise — and experience — themselves?

    That’s the question we should be asking about Graham Platner, whose campaign for the Senate is on the ropes following a former girlfriend’s claim that he had sexually assaulted her. Platner has never held elected office; his only political experience was a stint on his town planning board.

    How can we be OK with that? If we value expertise in government, we should want leaders who have demonstrated it. But Democratic voters seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

    In the recent New York primary, they chose Darializa Avila Chevalier to replace five-term, 71-year-old Rep. Adriano Espaillat. The first Dominican American — and the first formerly undocumented immigrant — to be elected to Congress, Espaillat helped win measures protecting delivery drivers and home-based childcare providers. But he lost to a 32-year-old graduate student who has zero political experience.

    Darializa Avila Chevalier (center), alongside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (left), greets supporters after winning the Democratic nomination for New York’s 13th Congressional District.

    Neither does Melat Kiros, 29, who unseated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, in the Democratic primary in Colorado. She has worked as a lawyer and — more recently — as a barista. But when it comes to politics, she is a complete novice.

    Then there’s Platner. A combat veteran and oyster farmer, he ran as an aw-shucks common man. That meant eschewing what he called “the establishment,” including experienced political consultants and pollsters.

    But guess what? It turns out experience matters. The young Democratic operative who recruited Platner to run for Senate bypassed the standard background check, which usually takes a few weeks. He opted instead for a three-day “investigation” by a firm that didn’t even bother to interview Platner or solicit a questionnaire from him.

    To its credit, the firm flagged some of Platner’s controversial Reddit posts. But a more thorough — and, yes, professional — background check would surely have uncovered his “unsettling” behavior around women, which former girlfriend Jenny Racicot described to reporters last month.

    And earlier this week, Racicot said Platner had shown up drunk at her house — after she asked him to stay away — and forcibly had sex with her. Platner denied the charge, but he said he was “mindful of the political reality it would inflict” and that he was taking time to “reflect” on how to proceed.

    Leading Democrats — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — called on Platner to quit the race, and I agree with them. But I also think the party should reflect on why we continue to elevate candidates who lack any real political experience.

    To defenders of these outsiders, their inexperience is a selling point. If you want to challenge the establishment, the argument goes, you need people who aren’t tainted by it — which was a major sentiment behind then-29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset in New York’s 14th Congressional District in 2018. Ever since, some have argued, that’s the only way to get progressives into power.

    Nonsense. Here in Philadelphia, Chris Rabb scored a stunning victory in the May primary race to replace Rep. Dwight Evans. Like Chevalier and Kiros, Rabb calls himself a democratic socialist. But he also has significant experience in government.

    Jonathan Zimmerman wonders how voters can be OK with supporting Graham Platner, a Senate candidate who has never held elected office.

    Rabb served for five terms in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty and to promote restorative justice in criminal sentencing. He knows his way around Washington, too. Earlier in his career, he worked as an aide to Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman in the U.S. Senate.

    Whatever you think of Rabb’s politics, he is qualified for the job. And we should care about that. Just like we shouldn’t make a housing official the director of national intelligence, we shouldn’t make an oysterman a member of Congress. To serve effectively in government — like any other professional role — you need knowledge and experience.

    And if you think otherwise, just look at the guy in the White House. America elected 44 presidents before Donald Trump. Forty-one of them had held prior political office; the other three (Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower) were victorious U.S. war generals.

    By contrast, Trump was a failed real estate baron and a successful reality TV figure. His two presidencies have been monuments to incompetence because he doesn’t believe in expertise. Or in anything, really, except himself. Remember “I alone can fix it”? He didn’t, and he won’t.

    Experts don’t know everything, of course, and they can be wrong (see: COVID-19 lockdowns). But they do know more than the rest of us about what they do. In choosing candidates like Graham Platner, Democrats turned their backs on that principle. Let’s hope they rediscover it before it’s too late.

    Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by American Philosophical Society Press.

  • Holiday lessons about ‘patriotic values’ from Folarin Balogun, Pope Leo XIV, and JD Vance

    Holiday lessons about ‘patriotic values’ from Folarin Balogun, Pope Leo XIV, and JD Vance

    I never thought I’d be writing a column that led off with an analysis of soccer.

    I’d planned to write about the lessons our nation’s 250th birthday party provided for Americans about the real meaning of “patriotic values.” But as it turns out, an examination of the scandal that ensued after President Donald Trump’s shameful World Cup intervention provides the perfect example of what those values are and what they are not.

    Before getting to the game, it’s important to revisit what Thomas Jefferson meant in 1776 when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the Creator had endowed all men equally with “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Although honored in the breach when it came to slavery and women’s rights, these ideals have been the goal toward which America has gradually, but consistently, aspired — until now.

    Many probably assume that “pursuit of happiness” means material success or personal pleasure. But for the Founding Fathers, educated in the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, the phrase reflected the classical emphasis on civic duty and character development. In other words, the concept of patriotism was tied to the pursuit of an honorable and civic-minded life.

    Now back to soccer.

    Until the July Fourth weekend, the World Cup matches had provided a brilliant exhibition of the best of America, with cities across the land and fans in every stadium effusively welcoming teams of every race and color. In an incredible burst of U.S. soft power, the global image of Trump’s America as overtly racist, corrupt, and violent gave way before the warmth of ordinary Americans.

    But Trump could not refrain from popping that wonderful bubble. After America’s star striker, Folarin Balogun, received a red penalty card during the team’s 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina — which would force him to sit out a critical match against Belgium — POTUS phoned FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino.

    A Trump sycophant who had previously awarded him FIFA’s first medal of peace, Infantino gave the president what he wanted: a reversal of a red card ban during a World Cup game (for the first time since 1962).

    In one move — based on his philosophy that only winners count — Trump cast a pall over the World Cup. He reversed all the goodwill the matches had generated for America at a time when his erratic behavior had sunk global attitudes toward the U.S. to astonishing new lows.

    Yes, Balogun’s violation was accidental, and the red card undeserved, but how many times have we all witnessed wrong calls by referees or umpires that drove us insane? However, under FIFA rules, there is no appeal after a game is over. Imagine if every world leader copied Trump’s utter disdain for rules in sports as well as domestic and international laws, a disdain which is already causing global chaos.

    On Monday, the U.S. team lost 4-1 to Belgium. But Trump’s interference made that defeat more painful by precipitating a wave of global scorn that poured down on an undeserving team. Nor has Trump had one word of praise for this terrific team after their loss.

    However, the lesson from Trump’s soccer debacle is not all negative. Americans should take pride in the achievements of the U.S. team and be inspired by the overall atmosphere of the games before Trump’s ugly intervention.

    And the country should unite in praise for the patriotic virtue displayed by Balogun.

    A day after receiving his red card, the star striker told an interviewer: “It’s been surreal, to be honest. But for me, I think it was just important to stay calm. I never want to react out of anger and out of emotion.

    “There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”

    What a hero! And what an example of patriotic virtue by someone who, under Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, wouldn’t even qualify to play for Team USA, being born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents visiting from London.

    Furthermore, the president’s negative example over the holiday — turning the Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself, even as news broke of the incredible billions POTUS and his family have raked in off his presidency, and even as he upped his efforts to rig the midterm elections — should goad us all to revisit the meaning of “pursuit of happiness” in civic terms.

    Two critiques of Trump over the weekend — one indirect, one powerfully direct — can serve as further inspiration.

    The first comes from Pope Leo XIV, in his powerful livestreamed speech on July 3 at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center while accepting the prestigious Liberty Medal. “The principles that inspired America’s founders,” he said, “brought them together in … a common dream. Unity lent strength to that dream … E pluribus unum — out of many, one. In order for a nation to flourish, it must be truly united, not by goals bound to momentary endeavors, but by ideals that do not fade with the passing of time.”

    These words need to be taken to heart, to my thinking, especially by progressive Democrats. Their anger is understandable, but in the final instance, they must work together with all those who appreciate the need to curb Trump’s desecration of the founders’ values. That includes all Democrats as well as independents and moderate Republicans who appreciate the need for checks and balances on presidential power.

    As Benjamin Franklin famously said at the signing of the declaration, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”

    And finally, some inspiring words from Vice President JD Vance, written in 2016 for the Atlantic before he turned against the values of the founders, and republished by the site on July 4.

    The title of the essay: “Opioid of the Masses.”

    “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain,” he wrote. “To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

    “The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real … Yet so long as people rely on that quick high … the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria.

    “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.”

    In memory of the Founding Fathers, who pursued their principles when the struggle seemed impossible, let us hope such a realization starts this fall.

  • Climate denial is what history will remember about July 4, 2026 | Will Bunch Newsletter

    Over the last decade, I’ve grown used to waking up before dawn and writing about a soul-crushing defeat from the night before. Usually it’s on a Wednesday, but somehow Donald Trump is always involved. Monday’s 4-1 demolition of the U.S. men’s national soccer team by Belgium pretty much confirmed that I won’t live to see Americans win the World Cup in my lifetime, so it’s time for acceptance. But these last three weeks have been a blast, and the party isn’t over. Sometimes the tritest words are also the truest: Maybe the real World Cup was the friends we made along the way.

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    Future generations will remember America’s 250th for its state of denial

    Visitors experiencing excessive heat sit on the ground at the National Mall in Washington during Independence Day events honoring the nation’s 250th anniversary on Saturday.

    The long-awaited arrival of the 250th birthday of the United States inspired a lot of talk about everything that’s changed since July 4, 1776, especially as “the man on a hobby horse” sinks to the founders’ worst fears about democracy and demagoguery.

    But historians of the future may dwell on another huge difference between the day the ink started drying on the American Declaration of Independence and July 4, 2026.

    The thermometer.

    Thomas Jefferson — his work as chief author of the nation’s founding document wrapped up — bought a new thermometer that morning and recorded the temperature in Philadelphia three times in his diaries that day, including a temperate 1 p.m. reading of 76 degrees.

    Jefferson’s thermometer might not have been up to the task of keeping up with Philadelphia’s climate 250 years later. On Saturday’s Semiquincentennial, temperatures maxed out at 101 degrees — the third straight day that the mercury reached that mark, which had never happened since records began in 1870. But with the fetid, humid air, it felt more like 110 degrees for anyone brave enough to celebrate America’s birthday outside.

    Philly should have seen this train coming. I mean, literally. Two days earlier, officials just outside of Reading, nearly two hours northwest of America’s founding city, plowed ahead with a welcoming party for Union Pacific’s Big Boy No. 4014, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive — even as the railway relic ran an hour late, with some thermometers posting 106 degrees.

    The result was what local officials called “a mass casualty event” — no one died, but rescue teams were summoned from neighboring counties to help revive more than 100 people suffering from heat exhaustion, in desperate need of water or an IV. Some 35 of the would-be train spotters were rushed to the hospital.

    “It was a little bit chaotic,” an EMS director told the local TV station in Reading. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the weather or the volume of crowds.”

    But they should have seen it coming. The Big Boy heat fiasco was almost too spot on as a metaphor for the slow train wreck of climate change, as the locomotive would spur on the Industrial Revolution that then triggered the rise of greenhouse gas pollution. To the extent that anyone out there still listens to scientists, they were quick to say this weekend: We warned you.

    The scientific group World Weather Attribution, which tracks the impact of human-made global warming, said last week’s heat dome over the Eastern Seaboard was indeed a rare event, yet — without the contribution of burning fossil fuels to a warming planet — it “would have been so extreme as to be virtually impossible.”

    Heat waves aren’t new. I was just 7 but still remember the July Fourth week of 1966 — exactly six decades ago — when it also topped 100 degrees. It’s one of the few things I remember from that grade-school time because it was so incredibly rare. Today, “once-in-a-century” heat waves are routine all over the planet. In June and looming again this week, Western Europe — where few homes are air-conditioned — has sweltered under temperatures that climate scientists weren’t expecting until around 2050.

    This suffocating July Fourth could have been — to steal a phrase from the multiplex marquee — America’s “disclosure day,” exposing the truth of a threat to humankind that’s been hiding in plain sight. Instead, it was our “denial day,” led by our planet’s denier-in-chief, Donald Trump, whose 250th birthday card to America only read: “Don’t look up.”

    The denial was immediate, as the president insisted — ignoring the experts who warned that the triple-digit temperatures and intense, gathering thunderstorms might spark a much bigger “mass casualty event” in Washington, D.C. — on going ahead with his bombastic and self-serving speech and a fireworks show that lasted well into the early morning hours of July 5.

    Our modern-day seersucker-wearing mayor of Jaws might as well have told the broiled holiday weekend throng, “But, as you see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time” — as ominous John Williams music swelled in the background.

    The denial was also metaphorical to the max — and not just when those predicted storms arrived and panicked MAGA Trump supporters were forced to take refuge at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the history and culture their movement is so eager to erase.

    In New York Harbor, U.S. Coast Guard vessels forced the storied environmental sloop Clearwater — which took part in the historic Bicentennial tall ships parade back in 1976 — to leave the July 4 Parade of Ships because of two anodyne political banners taped to its sails: “Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions.” Don’t look up, not even at a tall ship.

    Hours later, during the fireworks show, the Brooklyn Bridge caught fire, which had nothing to do with climate change, yet felt like a coded message from the overheated planet nonetheless.

    But maybe we shouldn’t wade too deeply into the metaphors when the worst denial is the all-too-real policy stuff. Every day, some nightmare headline about killer floods or disappearing glaciers is met with some nonsensical action from the U.S. government based on Earth 2, where none of this is happening.

    As the climate-change-intensified heat dome settled in over the Eastern United States, Trump issued pardons for nine people — and you really can’t make this stuff up — who’d been convicted of felony violations of the Clean Air Act by selling or installing devices for diesel trucks that defeated their emissions controls, because polluting our spacious skies is no longer a crime in Trump’s America.

    It cuts much deeper than this. Trump actually chose the July 4 peak of the heat wave to announce a massive cut in federal subsidies for wind and solar projects, a move that was expected under legislation passed last year. This was just one more layer to a sweeping agenda that has massively relaxed pollution regulations and even wasted taxpayer dollars to make sure clean energy projects aren’t built.

    America continues to get a whopping 82% of its energy from polluting fossil fuels, and that’s unlikely to drop over the next 30 months, regardless of how many Trump voters can cheat death on looming “mass casualty events.” But POTUS 47 warned voters he planned to set the world on fire if he returned to the White House.

    What’s harder to understand, frankly, is why the people who should be fighting Trump on climate change are running away from the front lines. Yes, I’m talking about Democratic Party leaders who’ve tossed climate action down the memory hole in the 2026 campaign — either terrified that any mention of climate will undercut their single-minded focus on affordability, or distract from fighting Trump’s brand of autocracy.

    And ditto for newsroom leaders who seem to have decided that environmental journalists are the first people to lay off, not to mention the other world chieftains who ought to be challenging Trump’s destructive policies, but are meeting the moment with a shrug. Even Canada’s center-left prime minister, Mark Carney, is now backing away from the aggressive climate action he once supported, claiming, “It’s too expensive.”

    That’s a lot of malarkey, as the president who just four years ago passed the largest climate action bill in U.S. history might say. Clean energy continues to rise elsewhere in the world because the alternatives, like wind and solar, are ultimately cheaper and also a source of desperately needed job creation. The fossil-fuel-boosted heat wave of July 4, 2026, proved that inaction is a threat not only to our lives and our liberty but also to the pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to celebrate 250 years of American democracy when climate denial is exposing that system as so badly broken.

    Yo, do this!

    • Did I mention the World Cup isn’t over? If you are a true fan of the Beautiful Game, you’ll brush off the quadrennial disappointment of the U.S. men’s team and get excited to watch one of the greatest generations of international soccer superstars we’ve ever seen. One of the more intriguing of the four quarterfinal matchups this weekend will occur when Harry Kane and his English squad face Erling Haaland and his Norwegian upstarts in the Miami heat. The match kicks off at 5 p.m. Saturday on Fox.
    • The new movie scene for the July Fourth holiday was a disappointment, so the heat wave was a perfect opportunity for revisiting the classics of the 1970s and ’80s with the generation that had not been born yet. We went back to the late Rob Reiner’s first great serious film, the coming-of-age saga Stand By Me. It’s hard not to feel nostalgia today for a time when 12-year-olds had to entertain themselves without iPhones and could disappear into the woods overnight, which felt less strange in 1986 when the movie was first released. It felt truly like a faint signal from a lost planet.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Talk about Mitch McConnell’s demise. — Wendy (@wensilver.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: Well, Wendy, that’s not exactly a question, and while the New York Times is reporting that the Kentucky senator and former majority leader was unconscious and in cardiac arrest when paramedics found him on June 14, his staff insists McConnell is still alive. That hasn’t stopped conspiracy theories that McConnell is on life support until August, when his replacement, named by GOP lawmakers, could avoid a messy November election. I don’t know about that, and I agree that it’s very poor form to speak ill of the dead. So the fact that he’s still alive is an ideal moment to remind everyone that his hijacking of the U.S. Supreme Court and his cowardice during Donald Trump’s second impeachment both started America on the path toward tyranny. So get well soon, senator. You still have a lot to answer for.

    What you’re saying about …

    Last week’s question about whether you are happy or concerned about progressive Democrats doing well in the 2026 primaries brought a mix of interesting responses that aren’t easy to categorize. Most of you want Dems who will fight harder than the current crew. “I have been voting since 1968, always for Democrats, but seldom with enthusiasm,” wrote Stephen Boone. “Finally, in my old age, there are a few decent politicians. I want more AOCs! More Zohran Mamdanis! …” Others felt more cautious. Wrote Thomas Desmond: “I think the progressive candidates are fine in deep blue seats, but may not be a great idea in purple or light-red seats that could prove winnable this year.”

    📮 This week’s question: It may be water under the bridge next week, but Donald Trump’s personal role in overturning the arguably wrongly given red card to U.S. star Folarin Balogun has sparked a heated debate. Was the red card an injustice to be reversed by any means necessary? Or did Trump’s involvement ruin the World Cup? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump Balogun” in the subject line.

    Backstory on Trump ruining the World Cup like everything else

    President Donald Trump holds up a red card during a meeting with FIFA president Gianni Infantino in the Oval Office of the White House in August 2018.

    If the big-screen tragedy of the U.S. men’s soccer team’s same-as-it-ever-was Round of 16 exit from the 2026 World Cup on Monday night had a theme song, it should have been John Lennon’s “Instant Karma.” For its first four (mostly) exhilarating matches, the USMNT gave a nation that was desperate for both an escape from relentless bad news — but also a connection to a wider world — the good vibes it desired. It truly felt like the Americans could go further than ever before (in modern times) in the planet’s greatest sporting event. TV ratings soared. Watch parties were packed. A broken land was coming together.

    Then Donald Trump showed up.

    To longtime soccer fans, the red card handed out last Wednesday to the U.S.’s top goal scorer, Folarin Balogun, for stepping (seemingly unintentionally) on the ankle of a Bosnian player during a 2-0 victory — a harsh punishment that meant not only his ejection from the pitch but a suspension for the upcoming Belgium match — was the essence of our love/hate relationship with soccer. It may be a beautiful game, but it’s the ugly calls that we debate for decades. For a non-soccer fan and malignant narcissist like Trump, for whom anything that goes against his desired outcome is proof of the world’s unfairness toward him, the looming loss of America’s star striker was an opportunity to act like the strutting strongman of a personalist dictatorship.

    The Trump White House called in the lawyers, treating soccer like it was a bad story about the president in the New York Times, or like trying to reverse the 2020 election. And POTUS got on the phone and called up a fellow dictator, Gianni Infantino, the president of the notoriously corrupt FIFA — a man who even invented a FIFA Peace Prize and gave it to Trump as protection so that his $13 billion soccer tournament wouldn’t get hurt. By Sunday, FIFA announced — without any effort at justification — that Balogun’s suspension was lifted and he was cleared to play. This had not happened during a World Cup since 1962. The raw power play cemented the world’s bitter opinion about today’s United States: a nation that refuses to play by the rules, whether it’s blowing up fishing boats or fixing a soccer tournament.

    There were too many ironies to bear — especially the fact that Trump had just gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight to strip U.S. citizenship from people like Balogun, who was born to British-Nigerian parents in 2001 during an American visit, and millions of other immigrants who aren’t as talented with their feet. But the other irony was that — like so many corrupt schemes, whether from the mafia or the Trump White House — the president’s soccer coup failed. It felt like Trump had attacked the positive zeitgeist around U.S. men’s soccer with a neutron bomb. Balogun rarely even touched the ball. We’ll never know how much of Belgium’s 4-1 rout of the mistake-prone U.S. was simply a European powerhouse outclassing the Americans, as has happened so many times before, and how much was Trump destroying the juju.

    It did seem fitting that this sordid affair played out over the weekend of America’s 250th birthday, as it was more confirmation that Trump, in spite of what the hat says, actually has no clue what makes America great. If any one principle stood out from the founders’ 1776 and 1787 experiments, it is that the United States was to be based on fairness and following the rules, with no king imposing his will. The single greatest thing about America’s presidential elections was not who won, but the fact that the loser accepted the results, and there was a peaceful transfer of power — until Jan. 6, 2021. Likewise, nothing could ruin the often unbridled joy of the World Cup faster than a rigged competition.

    I’m still looking forward to the next 12 days, to watching the pinpoint passing of Argentina’s Lionel Messi or the raw power of Norway’s Erling Haaland, and to seeing who can actually win the World Cup on the pitch, and not in a back room. We already know the tournament’s biggest loser: Donald Trump.

    What I wrote on this date in 2014

    Looking back on this Attytood blog post from 12 years ago today is a reminder of how debates can evolve over time. My short piece on July 7, 2014, was a riff on an op-ed that called newspapers’ online comment sections in those early internet years “a hate crime” that should be cordoned off because of the vitriol spewed at immigrants or others outside the traditional American hierarchies. Back then, I disagreed, taking the side of free speech absolutism. “These are people who shouldn’t be censored … just set straight,” I argued. “The one true powerful weapon against offensive free speech … is your free speech, and mine.” Time proved me wrong: The Inquirer now avoids comments on most articles, including my columns. It turned out that “the wisdom of the crowd” that newsroom reformers once hailed was fatally infected with racism, sexism, and other forms of hate.

    Read the rest: “‘Newspaper Comment Sections Become Cordoned-Off Hate Crime Scenes.’”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Only one column last week, as I enjoyed the July Fourth holiday by spending time with family and watching countless hours of soccer. In that piece, I wrote about an American 250th birthday that should have been a meditation on what makes our nation great, and where we so desperately need to improve — but which Donald Trump used as an excuse to rob the cash register when no one was looking. The president’s staggering $2.2 billion-plus payday during his first full year back in office — accomplished with a mix of crypto flimflammery, informed stock trading, and dealings with foreign dictators — is a five-alarm fire for the rule of law.
    • One final thought about the 250th birthday of the United States as the moment recedes into the rearview mirror. It’s true that 2026 has been a lousy year, economically, for newsrooms, but you would never know that from reading The Inquirer’s remarkable coverage of such an eventful time. I’ve already praised our world-class World Cup coverage, but our overworked staff also went out and covered a July Fourth party that happened despite killer heat, biblical storms, and a plague of locusts (not really, but it felt that way). This included some real accountability journalism, such as the Trump regime’s efforts to twist the truth around George Washington and slavery, as well as questioning the cost of the big day for city taxpayers. It was also a reminder that Philadelphia has been a hotbed for journalism and the rugged practice of bringing the First Amendment to life since the early days of the republic. Help keep it going another 250 years by subscribing to The Inquirer.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • I visited the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in D.C. It wasn’t great.

    I visited the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in D.C. It wasn’t great.

    WASHINGTON — It was blisteringly hot when I showed up at President Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed Great American State Fair on the National Mall in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday.

    As I headed off to check in as a member of the media, a friend who’d accompanied me decided to wait at a lemonade stand.

    At first, I was a little concerned, wondering how I was ever going to find her. A lemonade stand on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was bound to be mobbed on a scorcher of a day like the one we had on Monday.

    I needn’t have worried. It wasn’t that kind of party. Crowds were so thin that I quickly spotted her standing alone and eating a snow cone that cost a whopping $8. “Even on a hot day, there was no line at the lemonade stand,” pointed out my friend, Pamela Thomas of Pathfinders Travel, who had taken the train from Philadelphia with me.

    That should give you a pretty good idea of how it was at the so-called Great American State Fair, brought to us by Freedom 250, an organization created by President Donald Trump.

    Low crowds.

    High food prices.

    Lots of walking.

    The Great American State Fair was downright boring.

    Oh, there was an 110-foot Ferris wheel borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution. I watched people stand unsheltered under the blazing sun as they waited for their turn. But that’s the only carnival ride I saw.

    This wasn’t like any state fair I’d ever attended. Where was the merry-go-round? Where was the roller coaster? The cotton candy? The local beauty queens? The fair could use a quilting demonstration and band performances. I saw only one cornhole game.

    A mockup of President Donald Trump’s proposed Triumphal Arch stands at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on June 29.

    The so-called Great American State Fair needs a whole lot more fun and a whole lot less Trump.

    There wasn’t much for children to do besides have souvenir replicas of their new Trump passports stamped.

    I managed to find some shade while sitting on a folding chair inside an area called David’s Tent. As I cooled off, I listened to a woman onstage sing religious songs. Behind me was an aboveground swimming pool set up, ostensibly, for on-the-spot baptisms. In the spirit of inclusivity, there was also a candle-filled menorah positioned in the front of the tent.

    At one point, we made our way over to the Hawaii booth. Inside, all we saw was a large mural of the Aloha State that included a picture of former President Barack Obama that someone had defaced.

    A smiling woman offered to stamp our “passports.” There was nothing else going on in that booth. Not a flowered lei or macadamia nut in sight. No hula dance demonstration. No ukulele performance.

    Same thing with the neighboring Alaska booth.

    I made a point of checking out the North Carolina booth, which had been criticized for having images of Confederate flags on display on TV monitors. This one was a bit more inviting, with its colorful NASCAR displays. I didn’t see anything resembling a rebel flag — but I did see a bale of cotton just sitting on the floor, which can be seen as offensive because of its slavery connotations. The setup had been organized by private donors. One company, Mt. Olive Pickles, has since pulled out of the fair.

    The D.C. booth had some upbeat music playing, a fake cherry blossom tree, and a giant map of the mall that attendees stuck pins into to represent where they lived. “No go-go music?” I asked an attendant, who assured me that some was in the playlist.

    Pennsylvania’s pavilion showcases state history and memorabilia at the Great American State Fair on June 30 in Washington, D.C.

    Pennsylvania had initially opted out of participating, but its booth opened the day after I was there, funded by private sponsors and pulled together by U.S. Sens. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) and John Fetterman (D., Pa.) after Gov. Josh Shapiro passed on participating.

    Cape May County, a Republican stronghold, sponsored the New Jersey booth and brought in an impressive-looking eight-foot sand castle. But I noticed one small red plastic bucket of saltwater taffy that a kid was rummaging through. For an area as rich and diverse as the Garden State, the display felt incomplete.

    Soon, I had had enough.

    We stopped by the media table again on our way out and asked about what was on the schedule for later. The answer? A rodeo demonstration at 7 p.m. That was it.

    I was stunned. America deserved more and better for its 250th birthday celebration.

    So, if you decide to go experience the Great American State Fair before it is dismantled on July 10, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  • For the World Cup or the Fourth of July, Philadelphia shows it’s the place to be | Shackamaxon

    Welcome to Shackamaxon, a weekly politics column focused on what’s happening at City Hall and in Harrisburg. It is named for the place where the Lenape chiefs would meet to conduct the people’s business, which is now known as Penn Treaty Park. This week’s edition looks at the ways Philadelphia has changed for the better since the Bicentennial — and the ways things have stayed the same.

    The U.S. Capitol and a mock-up of President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch are seen from the ferris wheel at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in June.

    D.C. dud

    My fellow columnists Trudy Rubin and Jenice Armstrong have both pointed out how disappointing Washington’s celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary have been. My advice? Skip the city that didn’t even exist in 1776 and visit Philadelphia instead. Skip Boston, the small town with the tall tales, as well. If you are healthy and hydrated enough to withstand the brutal heat wave, the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection is the best place to celebrate the Fourth.

    Philadelphia embodies the story of America. Our city was founded by William Penn, a Quaker idealist who staunchly defended religious liberty. It was fostered by Ben Franklin, a writer and inventor who embodies our nation’s ingenuity and ambition. Octavius V. Catto, himself a Black man born free, fought for the rights of the enslaved, both before and after the passage of the 13th Amendment.

    A century before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Catto became a martyr when he was shot and killed on Election Day in 1871 as part of a broader campaign of political violence against Black voters. Catto’s fiancée, Caroline LeCount, desegregated this city’s streetcars long before Rosa Parks did the same for buses across the country. Siegmund Lubin started one of the first movie empires, right here in the city. The iconic Stetson hat, long associated with cowboys and the Wild West? Another product from the city known as the “Workshop of the World.”

    There’s a case to be made that not only did America start here, but our city is the most American of them all. Everything that our country is known for, both for good and for bad, has happened here, as well.

    Ecuadorian soccer fans attend a flag waving event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, ahead of their first round World Cup match against the Ivory Coast, on June 13.

    New narrative

    It always bothered me that our city’s greatest draw seems to be Rocky Balboa, the fictional boxer from the eponymous film. Beyond the fact that this city is where America began, Rocky also memorializes a very specific era of our city’s history, one of decline. The first movie was released in 1976, during a decade when Philadelphia lost over a quarter million residents. Crime, trash, and disorder dominated the city’s streets.

    It’s also worth noting that the film was released in the year of America’s Bicentennial. The celebrations that year were largely a misfire. Then-Mayor Frank Rizzo scared many potential visitors away, and there was an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

    That’s not to say Rocky, or the city he inhabited, was without charm. Despite the challenges, Philadelphians were still full of heart and grit, qualities Sylvester Stallone’s creation exemplified well. But the place shown in the movie doesn’t capture the full spectrum of what Philadelphia had to offer, even during the tumultuous ’70s. Rocky may have run up the Art Museum steps, but he never stepped inside.

    Today’s Philadelphia is a dramatically different city. While the white working-class communities Rocky represented remain an important part of the city, they no longer dominate it. Rizzo would garner very few votes if he were on the ballot today. Philadelphia is now a multicultural, multiracial city on the rise. Rather than repelling visitors and residents, the city welcomes them.

    According to Sports Business Journal, the city’s FIFA Fan Festival is a pacesetter, leading the 13 other public World Cup viewing areas in North America in both single-day and overall attendance. Social media feeds are filled with international visitors praising the city’s culture and cuisine. Some Brazilian fans called it the most beautiful city they have ever seen.

    Throughout the year, city officials have expressed confidence in Philadelphia’s ability to recoup the investment made in hosting the World Cup and other events. The state tourism office has told The Inquirer that early indicators are positive, with flight bookings, Amtrak arrivals, and Airbnb rentals exceeding expectations. While the initial projections were for 500,000 World Cup visitors, we may end up seeing closer to 800,000.

    Beyond the number-crunching, however, there’s a more important goal at stake: changing people’s perceptions of our city.

    That’s something impossible to set a price tag on.

    Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. and his wife, Jazelle Jones. The couple stand to collect up to $752,000 in combined retirement payouts while keeping their six-figure jobs.

    Same old problems

    So far, one of the biggest reasons to be skeptical about Philadelphia’s future is City Hall. The city’s leaders too often serve their own interests, rather than those of the public.

    Take Curtis Jones Jr., who represents the 4th District on City Council. Jones is certainly capable of being an insightful public official. Since his colleagues passed him over as Council president, however, he’s displayed increasingly questionable behavior.

    Earlier this year, Jones asked Streets Department officials to consider delaying crucial bridge repairs until after his reelection, citing concerns that the public might blame him for their inconvenience.

    Jones, however, ignored the impact of public opinion when it came to his own personal finances. Both he and his wife, Jazelle Jones, who serves as city representative, are planning to take payments through DROP, a retirement program that was never meant to accommodate elected officials. The pair stands to collect up to $750,000 by retiring for a day — and then returning to their six-figure jobs. This may be a rounding error in a city that is planning to spend $7.1 billion in the next fiscal year, but it is also more than 10 times Philadelphia’s median household income.

    Asked about Jazelle Jones’ retention, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker cited the need to stay the course as a factor in making an exception for the city representative. Left unspoken was the fact that if Parker had blocked this payday, it would have likely complicated her relationship with Curtis Jones — one of the mayor’s most reliable supporters on City Council.

    This kind of cronyism only reinforces negative perceptions of the city. Anyone looking for evidence that Philadelphia is the same old parochial, self-dealing city it was known for being in the past has only to try to keep up with the Joneses.

    The Pennsylvania State Capitol on Commonwealth Avenue in Harrisburg. Another year, another blown budget deadline by state legislators.

    Harrisburg holdups

    To be fair, City Hall isn’t the only place that seems like it’s having a hard time getting its act together. Harrisburg has yet again missed its budget deadline.

    While local governments, school districts, and SEPTA are expected to submit their own spending plans in a timely manner, legislators have apparently decided that deadlines don’t apply to them. The Pennsylvania Senate went home early rather than finish negotiations that its own leaders have said are productive.

    Last year, the impasse went on into the fall, forcing some state services to grind to a halt and schools to take out loans in order to pay their bills. The commonwealth simply can’t afford to do that again.

    This year, rising revenues from existing taxes and a potential influx of money from so-called skill games have made the process easier. Still, it is July, and there’s no budget deal.

    What we need is a way to hold legislators accountable for failing to do their jobs. In the past, withholding pay was suggested as a leverage point. State Rep. Natalie Mihalek, a Republican from Western Pennsylvania, has said that failing to pass a budget should lead to a special election, a nod to the concept of “confidence votes” in Westminster parliaments.

    Maybe that will get the General Assembly to take its job seriously.

  • The America-turns-250 column Donald Trump doesn’t want me to write

    The America-turns-250 column Donald Trump doesn’t want me to write

    It was right after birthright citizen Folarin Balogun tapped in another game-winning goal for U.S. men’s soccer in the World Cup Wednesday night that I had a moment of clarity about where things are in America as our nation turns 250.

    I’d gone to Union Yards, the outdoorsy beer hall adjacent to Chester’s soccer palace, Subaru Park, not only to catch the game but also a vibe that I’d wanted to turn into this column.

    The euphoria after Balogun’s goal — a red-bearded man in a colonial tri-corner hat and the two older veterans who’ve saluted through all of the prematch “Star-Spangled Banner” jumping to their feet, as a little girl in cornrows danced on a table — was the bucket-list moment I’d come there for.

    I saw a beer-recipe melting pot of Americans cheering the immigrant-heavy rainbow coalition of U.S. soccer, showing yet again — just as we did in 1976, when I was 17 — that the people instinctively know how to celebrate what’s actually great about our country no matter how much our leaders try to muck it up.

    I’d joked with my editors earlier in the week that I might lose my columnist license (not an actual thing, although maybe it should be) if my piece that runs on the weekend of the United States Semiquincentennial wasn’t a Big Think essay on what the American Experiment all means — to the extent that anyone can actually think through the fireworks, traffic jams, and 100-degree temperatures.

    That’s when it hit me. That was exactly the column Donald Trump was counting on from me and every other opinion writer in America ahead of Independence Day. The 47th president needed a week when the pundits put on their wide-angle lenses and put away the magnifying glasses, while his “forgotten Americans” headed off to the beach or the fireworks show, or gorged themselves on six hours of World Cup soccer every day, and stopped watching the news.

    An international jewel thief needs to create a distraction. Because if you’d been paying attention during the nation’s summer vacation week, you’d have seen that Trump is robbing us blind.

    The July Fourth holiday gave the Trump regime an opportunity for the ultimate Friday news dump, the now time-honored tradition of releasing the worst stuff when people will be unplugged for a few days. In this case, the dump was a federally mandated financial disclosure form that revealed the stunning extent to which Trump has cashed in on his power and influence as president since taking office in January 2025.

    The top-line numbers defy belief. Trump, who reported earning at least $622 million in 2024, his last year as an out-of-power businessman, revealed that he made at least $2.2 billion in 2025, and it’s hard not to see a lot of this as coming from turning the institution of the American presidency into a cash cow.

    Consider the $636 million Trump made by releasing a so-called meme coin — an asset whose value is tied to nothing beyond its own hype — that depicted his fist-pumping reaction to the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., and which was released literally hours before he took the oath of office again. Not only is this a staggering amount, but Trump pocketed this cash by fleecing thousands of middle-class folks who voted for him.

    Publicly available information from last year showed that some 764,000 individuals who bought the Trump meme coin after its launch lost money. How many investors profited from the $TRUMP coin? Just 58 — and no one got nearly as rich as the man pictured on the coin.

    Yet, Trump’s other sources of wealth are almost as troubling — especially the real estate and crypto deals with foreign nations that have an enormous stake in the president’s policy decisions. That’s especially true when the investment arm of the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, contributing to his at least $1.4 billion in crypto-related earnings. The U.S. and the UAE are (or were) key allies in the war-torn Persian Gulf.

    But the important thing to understand about Trump’s money: It’s not a case in which the issue is that these deals are a lot shadier than the financial profiteering by, say, Jimmy Carter or Warren G. Harding or whomever. None of Trump’s 44 White House predecessors seriously profited from the presidency while they were still in office.

    Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust. On the flip side, Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a felony charge for accepting just a few thousand dollars in the White House — not billions. There is absolutely no precedent for Trump’s naked greed and for how he trades on his office for personal profit.

    Yet, the president thinks that by declaring his crimes on a public document, voters will think it isn’t a crime — even if he releases that form over July Fourth to hedge his bets.

    Indeed, the scale and scope of the president’s grift is vast and overwhelming, which is the point. I’m just now getting to a different Trump family scandal, in which the president approved a lucrative tungsten mining deal with Kazakhstan whereby his sons are key investors, propped up with up to $1.6 billion in loans from Trump’s Pentagon.

    Trump took questions about his family’s 2025 cash bonanza as — and you can’t make this up — he prepared to fly for the first time in the $400 million luxury jet that was gifted by Qatar and which, after a brief stint as Air Force One, is slated to go to Trump’s presidential library (a.k.a. Trump) in 2029.

    President Donald Trump delivers remarks next to the new red, white, and blue Boeing 747 jetliner donated by the government of Qatar that will be used as Air Force One, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., in June.

    Still, the national media — and a lot of social media, as well — gave more attention to the Trump disasters that are easier to visualize, including troops guarding his green algae swamp at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and empty fields at his Freedom 250’s disastrous Great American State Fair, which sits nearly empty while thousands pack bars for the international joy of the World Cup, or line the rainbow-colored routes of Pride Month parades.

    One of the many ironies here is that Trump is inadvertently doing America a July Fourth favor by highlighting a key part of the flawed wisdom of the nation’s founders. In declaring independence in 1776 and creating a government that aimed for people-powered democracy with checks and balances on unbridled autocracy, the mad scientists of the American Experiment also expressed their fears for our future.

    “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1790. “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

    This Fourth of July week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1770s, but also the 1970s. For the second-half baby boomers like myself, it’s impossible not to experience the nation’s 250th anniversary without sepia-toned memories of July 4, 1976 — the U.S. Bicentennial.

    Things were both so similar and so different.

    Just as democracy stares into the abyss now, the assassinations, riots, and bombings of the late 1960s and early ’70s felt like the apocalypse to those who lived through it. But the Watergate scandal — yes, the very thing JD Vance and others on the far-right are dismissive of now — and the way courts and newsrooms and members of Congress responded had created a new hopeful yearning in the summer of 1976.

    Ships participate in Operation Sail between the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial in New York on July 4, 1976.

    That feeling is what made the day I enjoyed with my family as a 17-year-old a half-century ago — watching those glorious tall ships glide down the Hudson River from my dad’s high-rise office on 10th Avenue, then cramming into a subway to get to the fireworks over the Statue of Liberty — still bring back chills today. There was an unexpected sense of togetherness — and, naively in hindsight, that a storm had passed.

    It’s different in 2026. The whirlwind that Hamilton warned us about is directly overhead, and the man is still riding, however clumsily, the hobby horse. The institutions that saved us ahead of 1976 are shells of their former selves, as if a neutron bomb had struck.

    And yet, the fundamental essence of what can make America actually great someday remains intact: its people. This summer, millions of us are showing that Americans want things that can bring us together, and also to celebrate what makes us all different and all special, whether on a soccer pitch or a parade route laced with pink.

    The question is, how do we take this positive energy and stop the whirlwind? How do we celebrate a 250-year slow-bending of the arc of the moral universe without losing our focus on the ongoing crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

    When the president’s Freedom 250 sets off 850,000 fireworks over Washington on Saturday, think of every single blast as about $2,000 that Trump pocketed for himself, and then it might be possible to comprehend the scope of his crime against our citizenry.

    Don’t let the president hijack the Fourth of July to rob the focus from what matters most, the things we need to write and discuss and march against every week: his unprecedented criminality. The bombs are bursting in air, but only when we unleash our people power and seek justice will we see the dawn’s early light of a new nation again.

    Happy birthday, America.

  • Trump’s Great American State Fair reveals how he has turned the Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself

    Trump’s Great American State Fair reveals how he has turned the Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself

    WASHINGTON — The Great American State Fair on the National Mall should have been the rousing centerpiece of America’s 250th birthday celebration. Instead, it is a perfect tribute to President Donald Trump.

    With its cheap, slapdash imagining of Trump’s America and its constant political homage to POTUS and MAGA, the exhibit has little to do with commemorating the Declaration of Independence, U.S. history, or American culture. The exhibits lack even the delicious, tacky, lively atmosphere of state fairs (the few visible animals I saw were all fake).

    With few exceptions, it is a vapid, empty insult to the best aspects of this nation.

    When I remember the Semiquincentennial, I will be thinking more about scenes of Brazilian soccer fans visiting Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and warm interactions between locals across the country and visiting World Cup tourists. These personal exchanges may offset some of the hostility so many countries feel about Trump’s foreign policy.

    And yet, I’m glad I visited the fair on Monday because it reminds me of how different the president’s vision is from the real America that is ignored in this tribute to Trump.

    A true celebration could have displayed the best of this country, what the United States has gotten right, while providing the moment for serious reflection on what has gone wrong — and what needs desperately to be remedied at home and in our foreign relations. No matter how uphill that struggle seems under Trump.

    Instead, the Great American State Fair mainly consists of several long, white, one-story buildings fronted by fake Greek columns and punctuated by closed doors. The structures extend on either side of large expanses of mall greenery which were almost empty, as the 88-degree heat sent the scant numbers of visitors inside in in search of air-conditioning.

    The state of Delaware’s pavilion at the Great American State Fair Thursday in Washington, D.C.

    Behind those doors are small exhibits by each state (11 of which, including Pennsylvania, opted out due to the politicization of the fair or cost concerns), or by U.S. government departments (including “WAR”) and agencies and religious groups. Most state exhibits are tourism displays with posters, literature, or videos, with a few exceptions like South Dakota, whose state historic commission mounted excellent posters about the vivid characters, including women and Sioux leaders, who settled its land.

    Towering over the few attendees out in the sun is a 110-foot Ferris wheel (which has been mostly stationary because of electrical problems) and a small mock-up of Trump’s planned and controversial Arch of Triumph topped by gold angels.

    The image portrayed is of a country isolated from its own people and the world.

    I’ve seen struggles for democracy around the world. It’s painful to see that battle come home | Trudy Rubin

    However, visitors can collect Trump literature from AMAC (the Association of Mature American Citizens), listen to a Bible lecture, and hear how “America shall be saved” from a group called “The Great Awakening.” They can bid for a $700 “marriage getaway,” sign up their children for a Trump savings account, or fill out a recruitment form for the U.S. military or U.S. Secret Service. They can also view a copy of the limited edition “Patriot Passport” with Trump’s photo on it inside a glass case at the U.S. Department of State exhibit and get a free paper copy.

    Trump, Trump, and more Trump. The Washington celebration of our 250th birthday wasn’t supposed to look this way.

    The U.S. Capitol and a mock-up of President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch are seen from the ferris wheel at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall.

    Congress started planning for this anniversary in 2016, when it created America250, a bipartisan commission that was supposed to program nonpartisan events for all Americans. The idea was to unify the country in celebration.

    Its original plans were focused on a parade through the capital with “diverse floats” and marching bands, along with an energetic festival of the nation’s cultural diversity on the mall organized by the Smithsonian.

    Anyone who has ever attended the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the mall can imagine how wonderful this could have been. On one occasion when I was there, one side of the mall was celebrating the culture of India and the other Louisiana and Cajun culture, with bands of old-timers and their acolytes playing washboards, banjos, and accordions, while tents dished out Cajun food.

    This year, one side of the mall might have hosted cultures of the immigrants who have built America, and the other could have presented tributes to the Declaration of Independence, its impact around the world, and how its flaws regarding slavery and women were remediated by law.

    Instead, Trump squeezed out America250 by virtually replacing it with Freedom 250, which is partly funded with taxpayer money and partly by donors. The New York Times has detailed how donors were offered access to Trump for million-dollar contributions.

    People dance with a U.S. Army robotic dog at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, Sunday.

    Instead of funding projects connected to key moments in the fight for American independence, Trump’s group focused on his MAGA agenda, his love for spectacle, and his person. Thus, his vision of America’s 250th birthday celebration has centered on his arch, on a $60 million UFC match on the White House lawn, and on an IndyCar race through the capital scheduled for August. As for the fair on the mall, it has been focused on an opening (political) speech by Trump (after most planned musical acts withdrew due to the fair’s partisan nature), and another rally on July Fourth.

    Unity out. Division in. Who cares about celebrating our founding document and the aspirational values on which the country has been built, when Trump can have circuses that celebrate only him?

    Failure of Iran war reveals Trump’s inability to deal with America’s security needs | Trudy Rubin

    And that is why I point to the World Cup games as a sign that Americans still know how to display their best qualities as a people. What particularly moved me was watching the huge kilted Scottish contingent break through sometimes insular Bostonians’ reserve when it belted out John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at Fenway Park.

    Americans are so much better than this sterile exhibition on the mall. In the warmth displayed across the country to World Cup visitors they have shown a welcoming nature still unsullied by Trump’s efforts to make people hate the other.

    Back in the states and cities, many celebrations of July Fourth will probably still capture that warmth. It still exists. In Philadelphia, history museums are doing a terrific job of commemorating the declaration.

    But you can certainly skip visiting Trump’s Great American State Fair, which reveals his total disdain for what this holiday really means.

  • The Ben Franklin Bridge turns 100. Don’t wait to walk it like I did.

    The Ben Franklin Bridge turns 100. Don’t wait to walk it like I did.

    I’ve driven across the Ben Franklin Bridge countless times but until last week I’d never walked across it, and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge once, so I’ve quietly carried that shame with me for years.

    When I received a news release about the bridge turning 100 on July 1 and a subsequent anniversary party on July 11 that will close it to vehicles for public use for the first time since Pope Francis’ visit in 2015, I wanted to finally check walking across it off my Philly bucket list before the event.

    Fans cross the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia on the morning of the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade in 2018.

    I was going to go it alone, but I decided to reach out to Mike Williams, spokesperson for the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA), which manages the bridge, and he offered to schedule a walkway tour of it for me with DRPA principal engineer Michael Howard.

    I met both men at Fifth and Race Streets at the base of the bridge on the Philly side, but as luck would have it, we showed up on opposite sides of the heavily-trafficked span. We waved at each other across the cars and as I tried to figure out how to Frogger my way over to them, Howard and Williams disappeared.

    The men popped up out of a stairwell right next to me, having used the Fifth Street pedestrian tunnel under the bridge.

    The entrance to the Fifth Street pedestrian tunnel on the south side of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia.

    “This was one of the original things that we incorporated into the bridge because we didn’t want people to try to walk across the traffic — because they would, you know,” Howard said, and I agreed.

    Obviously, it was the first place I wanted to check out.

    The “Building Connections through Time” mural inside of the Fifth Street pedestrian tunnel on the Philadelphia side of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

    The entire length of the 91-foot-long tunnel was painted with a vibrant Mural Arts Philadelphia work by Brad Carney and Melissa Mandel. Created in 2018, Building Connections through Time shows people using the bridge, the building of it, and images of its early years. There are also paintings of Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin, and other bridges that span the Delaware River.

    Finding one of the city’s most secluded murals felt like finding one of those wonderful Philly secrets the city gives sometimes, if you never stop exploring it.

    Come along with me as I explore one of Philly’s most secluded murals.

    [image or embed]

    — Stephanie Farr (@farfarraway.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 11:38 AM

    Mere feet

    Back on the surface, Howard said that while the bridge has two pedestrian walkways, for operational reasons, only one side is open at a time and it’s usually the south side. The walkway has restricted hours, so be sure to check the signs (currently, it’s open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.).

    Howard pointed out the old Wilbur Chocolate factory on Third Street and explained that a part was sliced off to make way for the bridge.

    “One of the things that we had to do when we were constructing was kind of take a surgeon’s scalpel to the area because you know with Old City, everything’s tightly packed and we wanted to make sure we took the bare minimum of structures,” he said.

    A piece of the former Wilbur’s Chocolate Factory had to be sliced off to make way for the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

    Also under threat when the bridge was built was nearby St. George’s United Methodist Church on Fourth Street. Opened in 1769, it’s the country’s oldest Methodist church in continuous service.

    “Luckily, the engineers were able to just adjust the angle of the approach ever so slightly to avoid encountering the building,” Howard said.

    I marveled as I looked at the mere 14 feet that still separates St. George’s from Philly’s big Ben. The engineers left just enough room for the Holy Spirit.

    ‘Bridge angels’

    As we began our journey across the bridge, Howard said it took about four-and-a-half years to build and it was designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret, who also designed Philly’s Rodin Museum. The bridge was constructed with eight lanes — six for traffic and two for trolleys, as well as two tracks for heavy rail.

    But in the time it took to build it, trolleys went out of fashion and buses came in. The trolley tracks sat unused until the 1940s, when they were paved over. A vast, empty space for a never-opened trolley station remains under the Bolt of Lightning sculpture near the base of the bridge.

    Sailboats pass under the Ben Franklin Bridge in 2020.

    Another original component lost when the trolley tracks were paved over were four 75-foot-tall pylons — two on either side of the bridge — that were topped with bronze angel statues called Winged Victory.

    One of the angel statues is in the lobby of DRPA’s headquarters and three are in storage, but one will be displayed at the upcoming 100th anniversary celebration, according to Williams.

    One of the four “Winged Victory” statues that used to decorate the Ben Franklin Bridge is now on display at the Delaware River Port Authority’s headquarters.

    ‘A living beast’

    Shortly after we began our trek on the 1.3-mile walkway, I felt a PATCO train speeding beneath my feet and the bridge move ever so slightly.

    “The bridge is dynamic, almost like a living beast because the steel expands when it gets warm out and with traffic, it bounces,” Howard said.

    A PATCO train travels from Philadelphia to Camden underneath the pedestrian walkway of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

    I got used to the sensations within minutes. That being said, I’m not afraid of heights. It could be unnerving if you are.

    It took $36 million and 1,300 people to build the 376-foot-tall bridge that extends an additional 100 feet or so below the river, Howard said. Guys known as “sand hogs” worked in submerged watertight structures called caissons where temps sweltered into the 90s, even in winter, to dig down to the bedrock of the Delaware River.

    In a photo dated 1922, men known as “sand hogs” work in a submerged watertight structure called a caisson to dig down to the bedrock of the Delaware River during the construction of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

    Fifteen workers died in the construction of the bridge. We passed a circular plaque in their memory as we walked. I wondered who they were, how they died, and how they lived.

    “Unfortunately, the rule of thumb at the time was for every million dollars you’re spending, you expect to lose a life … so by that rationale you could have had 36 fatalities.” Howard said. “Nowadays, you know, one injury is unacceptable.”

    A plaque on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge is dedicated in memory of those who lost their lives while building it.

    Unique elements

    Our pace was a steady stroll, so we were often passed by runners, walkers, and cyclists. Some appeared to be having a good time, and others looked like they were going through tough times. Some talked to themselves and some stopped to take photos. It was a microcosm of Philly and Camden, suspended high above the river.

    Howard said when the bridge was built, its chief engineer believed the walkways wouldn’t be used “in an increasingly or completely motorized age.”

    A photo dating from 1924 shows the first official crossing of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge’s pedestrian walkway prior to the 1926 opening of the bridge.

    “But you see today the amount of people that are using this walkway and it’s one of the unique elements of this bridge,” he said.

    I looked ahead to Camden and then back to Philly. I was so grateful for this walkway and this view. I couldn’t imagine not having it and I couldn’t believe it took me so long to see the city from this new perspective.

    Spectators watch from the Ben Franklin Bridge pedestrian walkway as the Picton Castle sails up the Delaware River in 2015 during the Parade of Tall Ships.

    The only thing I found worrisome and the thing that kept all three of us looking over our shoulders, were the e-bike and e-scooter riders we didn’t always hear zooming behind us. Skateboards and rollerblades aren’t allowed, but certain classes of e-bikes and e-scooters are. Gas-powered vehicles are also prohibited on the walkway, but a guy on a dirt bike definitely zoomed by at one point.

    In the bridge’s early days, horses and carriages were allowed on the main span alongside cars, according to Howard, but their slow pace proved dangerous and their excrement, troublesome, so they were banned in the 1940s.

    A rainbow appears behind the Camden anchorage of the Ben Franklin Bridge after an early evening rainstorm passes through.

    We stopped at one of the Philadelphia anchorages, the massive concrete-and-granite structures where the bridge’s cables are anchored.

    These structures were made to house elevators for the trolleys. Alas, the anchorages are off-limits spaces, but Howard told me that each of the four have the same seven artistic tiles inside commemorating milestones in transportation, from one of a Conestoga wagon to one of the USS Shenandoah, the ill-fated dirigible that crashed before the bridge even opened.

    One of the anchorages on the Philadelphia side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge as seen from the pedestrian walkway.

    Another name

    The Ben Franklin Bridge was the longest suspension span in the world, with a distance of 1,750 feet between the two towers, when it opened on July 1, 1926.

    In a front-page Inquirer report, journalist Richard J. Beamish noted 250,000 people crossed the bridge on foot opening day and that the structure was “beautiful as gossamer web and seemingly as frail.”

    Pedestrian cross the Delaware River Bridge on its opening day in 1926.

    Howard, who quoted that report to me, then asked: “When do you think our first accident was?”

    I guessed July 2, 1926. I guessed wrong.

    “It was the day it opened,” he said. “People were jockeying to be one of the first to cross the bridge, and over in Camden, you had a fender bender.”

    Back then, the span also had a different name — the Delaware River Bridge. It was rechristened in 1956 to avoid confusion when the Walt Whitman Bridge was also built over the Delaware River.

    A view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in the 1950s.

    The Ben Franklin Bridge wasn’t always blue, either. It was originally gray and was repainted to its current color just ahead of the Bicentennial, Howard said.

    ‘Calm and serene’

    As we stood talking, a man jogging by in Rocky Run T-shirt asked if we’d take a photo of him with the Philly skyline.

    Jim Bach of Voorhees works in Camden and likes to run the bridge during his lunch break.

    “It’s fantastic. I mean the views that you get when you’re up here, it’s just calm and serene,” he said.

    I too felt serene. It was quiet and peaceful on the bridge and being atop it helped me see the city I love in a new way.

    A jogger runs across the Ben Franklin Bridge in an Inquirer file photo.

    Howard also helped me to see something else — the Betsy Ross, Walt Whitman, and Commodore Barry Bridges are all visible from the top of the Ben Franklin.

    “All bridges essentially become monuments to the area,” he said. This was most true of the one we were standing on.

    We talked about the Ben Franklin’s many appearances in television and movies, from Blow Out to 12 Monkeys.

    The sun sets behind the Ben Franklin Bridge, seen from Cooper’s Poynt Park on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025 in Camden, NJ.

    “Last year they kept coming back from commercial breaks during Monday Night Football and they showed one of three things — the Liberty Bell, someone making cheesesteaks, or the bridge,” Howard said.

    In its 100 years, the bridge has become a visual touchstone for the region. You see it and you know you’re in Philly, whether you’re watching a movie or coming back from a road trip. It’s given Philly its sense of place as much as the LOVE sculpture or Independence Hall.

    A great connector

    When we got to Camden, we walked through the pedestrian tunnel on that end, too. It doesn’t have a mural, but the exterior is decorated with a bright mosaic of birds and animals created by Camden schoolchildren in the early 2000s.

    A mosaic created by Camden schoolchildren decorates the exterior of the pedestrian tunnel on the Camden side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

    On our return walk, I asked Howard if he had a moment on the bridge that’s stuck with him. He said a few years ago, while he was leading a tour, there was a commotion on the Philly side. A kitten found its way onto the bridge and police were called. The feline then crawled into the engine compartment of a police cruiser, which had to be taken apart to get it freed.

    “I was like, ‘Yeah, so I gotta go adopt it,’” Howard said.

    And so he did, and he named the furry little girl Beanie.

    I thought of a poignant moment I had once on the bridge. I was a passenger in a vehicle years ago, when I looked over and saw that the car I was in was traveling at relatively the same speed as the PATCO train next to us.

    The sun sets over the Philadelphia Skyline behind the Benjamin Franklin Bridge looking southwest from Cooper’s Point Waterfront Park in Camden in this Inquirer file photo.

    I locked eyes with a woman on the train, who looked a lot like me. We smiled at each other and I waved and she waved back. It’s a brief moment that’s always stuck with me. Maybe it’s because I felt like I could have been her in another life, or she could have been me.

    Walking the bridge and hearing its stories, I realized that it connects so much more than just Camden and Philly. It connects all of us to each other — in big and small ways — and it connects our future with our history.

    Today, I have a new story about the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the day I walked across it. If you haven’t done so yet, I encourage you to walk it, too, and make a new memory with one of Philadelphia’s great old structures.

    A man walks across the Ben Franklin Bridge towards Camden in an Inquirer file photo.

    The anniversary celebration for the Ben Franklin Bridge will take place from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. July 11. Details can be found at drpa.org/bfb100/.

  • Another Jan. 6 coup? Trump is screaming it out loud. | Will Bunch Newsletter

    What amazes me about the fact that America turns 250 on Saturday is that I’ve been alive now for 27% of U.S. history. When I was 17 and watched the Bicentennial parade of tall ships down the Hudson River from my dad’s conveniently located Manhattan skyscraper office on July 4, 1976, I thought I was celebrating ancient history. I was wrong. In a big, diverse world, the United States remains a young adult among nations. Like most young adults, we have a lot of issues.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Trump thinks anything besides stealing the election is ‘a big yawn’

    Voting booths are set up at a polling place in Newtown in 2024.

    Donald Trump gets a lot of flak, and deservedly so, for telling so many lies. On Monday, he held an Oval Office press availability, and much of what he said — false claims that other nations don’t have birthright citizenship or mail-in voting — was flat-out untrue.

    But nothing is scarier than when the 47th president speaks the truth about what’s really on his mind. Because the only thing that’s in Trump’s brain right now is stealing the November midterm election by changing the rules in his favor … or worse. If Trump’s vocal cords were not so weak and diminished, he’d have been screaming the quiet part out loud.

    A reporter asked the president about last week’s abrupt cancellation of a ceremony to sign a popular and surprisingly bipartisan bill to lower the cost of housing. Trump tied that move to an extortionary threat that Congress must pass his bill, which is called the SAVE America Act, but which could ruin democracy by suppressing votes.

    “Here’s what I would like to say,” Trump said of the still-unsigned housing bill, which passed in the House by a 396-13 vote. “It’s a yawn. Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”

    In quainter times, Trump’s disrespect for the housing bill — a grab bag of measures all geared toward encouraging contractors to build more units, which would lower both purchase prices and rents — might be the political gaffe of the year. Currently, only 29% of Americans think it’s a good time to buy a house, and nearly two-thirds are more likely to vote for a Congress member who helped lower prices. Republicans who voted for the bill are desperate for a win.

    Trump doesn’t care. He’s forgotten his “forgotten Americans” who think the rent is too damn high, not to mention the GOP members of Congress who’ve followed him off the cliff. But that’s not even close to the most alarming thing about Trump’s Oval Office moment of truth.

    The president says the only thing he cares about — even with his conflict in Iran becoming another “forever war,” and with the economy down the toilet for everyone who’s not a tech trillionaire — is a bill that critics say would be a disaster for free and fair U.S. elections. One report found that some 12 million people who fairly and successfully voted in the 2020 presidential election don’t have the documentation — such as a birth certificate or passport — that the bill requires.

    We don’t know how such a massive drop in turnout would change the election results, or whether a weakened Trump can pressure the GOP to find a way to pass a bill with zero Democratic support. But we do know this: The president’s maneuvers are not even the worst thing Trump has done this month on the steal-this-election front. Not by a long shot.

    The Trump regime has been signaling for months that it sees the U.S. intelligence community — spy agencies like the CIA — not as a tool for finding out what comes next in the Persian Gulf, or if or when China is invading Taiwan, or when Vladimir Putin’s Russian empire will fall. No, Trump wants secret agents who can creatively invent theories of foreign-born election fraud that would demand a strongman response.

    We saw this coming back in January, when the regime dispatched Trump 47’s first director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to Fulton County, Ga., to oversee an FBI raid of voting materials from the 2020 election that Trump, with no evidence, continues to dispute. That link made it clear the regime is looking to create links to foreign actors.

    When Gabbard left the administration this spring, Trump named a temporary replacement who can serve through the November election: Bill Pulte, who also continues to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte lacks a key prerequisite for his new job — any experience in intelligence whatsoever — but has the only quality that matters to Trump: undying loyalty. Pulte’s main focus in the housing job has been combing through the mortgage records of the president’s political enemies, looking for undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s that could be used to manufacture criminal charges from nothing.

    In just a few days at intelligence, Pulte has not disappointed his boss. He showed up Monday and immediately began firing current staffers, with a rumored list of hundreds. The steep reduction in eyeballs on the world’s trouble spots is disturbing, but what’s even more alarming is the one person Pulte has hired.

    The newsletter SpyTalk described Pulte’s new chief of staff, Christina Norton, as “a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues but who last year boasted of running ‘the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen’ …”

    The pairing of Pulte and Norton is an alarm bell that the national intelligence team under Trump will have one job: investigating fantastical “foreign election plots” that will be cited to justify radical measures like sending troops to polling places, seizing voting machines, or worse.

    SpyTalk noted that Norton, in her active Instagram feed, “talks about supervising more than 200,000 Republican poll watchers ‘standing guard’ at polling booths and vote-counting stations across the country” during her 2024 stint at the Republican National Committee.

    Yet, intelligence is just one of many tools in the federal government that the obsessive Trump is working to activate ahead of a November election that polls suggest will be a “blue wave” for Democrats hoping to retake Capitol Hill. Trump has issued several executive orders seeking to assert federal control over voting, which has been a state and local function throughout 250 years of American history.

    That effort suffered a bit of a setback Monday, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can continue to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after the polls have closed. But that will not stop the Trump regime from politicizing the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November.

    Last week, Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress that USPS plans not to deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t turn their voter rolls over to the Trump regime, a demand many governors have resisted so far. “President Trump does not believe that elections he loses are valid,” Democratic Michigan Sen. Elisa Slotkin said after the hearing. “It’s all part of his authoritarian playbook.”

    This all feels very familiar. In the lame-duck days after Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the 45th president — instead of packing up to return to Mar-a-Lago — got busy putting in a new team at the Pentagon, ordering the U.S. Department of Justice to probe alleged voter fraud, challenging vote count certifications in court, and urging state lawmakers to seat rival slates of electors. Most pundits laughed this off, but I wrote a column — “So, is President Trump staging a coup, or what?” — that ran on Nov. 10, 2020, nearly two months before the actual attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.

    Now Trump is not only staging another coup, but he is yelling about it, in your face. There is nothing he won’t try over the next five months to prevent a Democratic Congress from investigating how he and his family have made billions of dollars off the American presidency.

    When Trump says anything that’s not election meddling is a “big yawn,” this should be our wake-up call. The time for a full-court press — lawsuits, public hearings, and investigative journalism — can’t wait until after the election. The new putsch has already begun.

    Yo, do this!

    • If you didn’t think I raced to download the new audiobook of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s tale of growing up in the radical Weather Underground in the 1970s and ’80s — Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground — then you must be new around these parts. Dohrn had already used his unique access to his parents — Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, revolutionary royalty — and their friends to tell a history of that era’s far left in 2022’s award-winning podcast, Mother Country Radicals. His new book aims to go deeper into the psychology of what it was like to be raised as a toddler on the run from the FBI, or whether bombings and bank robberies can change the world. That’s a question — also explored in this viral essay — with new resonance in the Trump era.
    • A few weeks ago, I suggested that folks see the new movie The Sheep Detectives. The film is already streaming on Amazon Prime (which produced it), and Sunday’s rare night off for the World Cup offered the excuse to finally watch. I can now highly recommend it. The movie — with an adapted script by the acclaimed showrunner of HBO’s Chernobyl, Craig Mazin — manages to merge police procedural cliches with moving thoughts about prejudice, existentialism, and what it means to belong to a flock. Even a flock of talking sheep.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Is Markwayne [Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary and former Oklahoma senator] the least qualified cabinet level official in American history? — Richard McGovern (@richardmcgovern.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: Good question from Richard, a fellow long-suffering Philadelphia Union fan. Not because I know the answer, when there are rivals for the title like Donald Trump’s war-losing “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, to name just one. But Mullin is now behind a move so outlandish that it showed me I haven’t lost my capacity for shock after all. This weekend, Trump nominated a previously unknown former Oklahoma state trooper named Lance Schroyer to run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a powerful agency with 22,000 agents and a budget of around $30 billion a year. It turns out that just recently, Schroyer was heading a security detail for Mullin in Washington, D.C., and has become a close enough friend that he is an occasional dinner guest. Yes, he hired his bodyguard to run the equivalent of a large corporation. Stay tuned for all of this to unravel.

    What you’re saying about …

    I guess we’re not as close as we thought, as very few of you were eager to share your July Fourth plans with me or discuss what America’s 250th birthday means at such a dark moment. The ones who did reply are looking forward to spending time with family and friends, but all that patriotic jazz, not so much. “Probably, we will have our usual picnic and take the grandkids to see the local fireworks, but I have no intention to watch any special programming or parades, etc.” Marianne Zollers wrote. “It will just make me sad. Such a different feeling compared with the Bicentennial which was such a joyous and happy occasion for my entire family.”

    📮 This week’s question: One of the big stories of 2026 that’s finally getting a lot of attention is the success of more progressive Democrats, including democratic socialists, in key primary races against party moderates. Is this a good thing, lifting up candidates who’ll fight against Trump and for the working class? Or do you worry Republicans will capitalize against their opponents with more left-wing views? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “2026 progressive Democrats” in the subject line.

    Backstory on crossing the World Cup off my bucket list

    The Ivory Coast team celebrates their win in the middle of the field against Curaçao with a score of 2-0 for the FIFA World Cup at the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on Thursday.

    I can’t say exactly when, but at some point during my first-ever in-person World Cup match between Côte d’Ivoire and Curaçao, watching from the thin air of the top deck of the temporarily renamed Philadelphia Stadium, it struck me: My decades-long dream of being there for the world’s greatest sporting event was not like what I’d imagined.

    And yet, in some weird, quasi-religious acid test kind of way, it was even better.

    I’ve been to countless sporting events going back to 1968, but never one where the vibe was basically: So happy to be here. I’ve certainly never been to a game where the PA announcer uttered something before the match about giving a big hand to both teams — and the sold-out crowd obliged. Fans would have burned down Section 220, Row 27, where I was sitting, if this had happened during an Eagles-Cowboys game. During a tense match with a place in the Round of 32 on the line, the gathering repeatedly did the wave and threw their vocal cords more behind the halftime singalong of the Bruce Channel 1961 oldie “Hey! Baby” than either of the two decisive goals by Côte d’Ivoire’s Les Éléphants.

    Up in nosebleed country, many of the fans repped soccer jerseys, but they were for club teams like Liverpool or Christian Pulisic’s USA No. 10, joined by me in my Philadelphia Union T-shirt. We were Philly’s soccer aficionados, desperate to be a part of maybe the only time in our lives the World Cup would take place in the City of Brotherly Love. A match pitting the smallest nation to ever qualify for the FIFA tourney (Curaçao, population 158,000) and an African underdog was pretty much the only way to crash the party without a bank loan. (Full disclosure: I paid about $280 apiece for two seats on StubHub — much like buying a stock, it could have been more or less, depending on how one timed it.)

    No, this wasn’t much like the Eagles games played here, where excitement merges with pins and needles of anxiety. On a picture-perfect late afternoon in June, bookended by the Philadelphia skyline and a lazy Delaware River, it felt more like a rock concert. It wouldn’t have seemed out of place if folks had started batting a beachball around at this soccer Woodstock. There was a mind-meld of the faithful, who saw FIFA and its commercialization as the devil, with the loudest boos for the TV-ad-laden “hydration breaks,” but with — I swear to God — a loud roar for the announcement of the attendance: 68,324. In a city where a 1976 Bicentennial match of some of the world’s best players took place in a mostly empty stadium, soccer is indisputably here to stay.

    Fans walked out of Philadelphia Stadium beaming less over the final score and more about the instant karma of the afternoon. After years of tavern taunts and ridicule from sports-talk radio, local soccer die-hards lived long enough to see America’s founding city become the world’s co-capital of the sport that, for its true believers, passes all understanding. It was all too beautiful. If I can somehow make it to Spain or Portugal or Morocco in 2030 (because, hey, I need a new bucket list now), I will be sure to wear some flowers in my hair. Soccer time will be a love-in there.

    What I wrote on this date in 2019

    I’ve been writing about the topic of journalism reform since the mid-2000s, or around the time it became clear to me and a lot of other folks that newsrooms needed to change or die. My fear, circa 2006 or so, was that we’d start seeing entire communities without newspapers or the accountability journalism that flows from that — which is exactly what happened in Youngstown, Ohio, when its paper closed seven years ago. I wrote: “The loss of the Youngstown Vindicator every morning doesn’t mean that the region’s 200,000 people will no longer be getting information. It just increases the likelihood they’ll be getting bad information — intentionally manipulated, and sometimes out-and-out fakery.”

    Read the rest: “How the first U.S. city with no daily newspaper will help Trump in 2020.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Only one column this week, as I took a well-deserved day off to attend the World Cup. In that piece, I looked at the sorry state of justice in America on the eve of its 250th birthday, with an emphasis on the outrageous sentences — ranging from 30 to 100 years — handed down to left-wing anti-ICE protesters convicted of rioting in North Texas. The U.S. Department of Justice that pushed these virtual life sentences is also pardoning the right-wing rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as billionaire fraudsters who donate money to MAGA players and causes. They’ve made a mockery of liberty and justice for all.
    • Let’s be honest: People — not to mention sheep (see above) — can’t get enough of a murder mystery, especially a real-life true crime. It’s been a while since a crime saga has riveted Philadelphia readers as much as the stench of possible foul play that is growing at a home on West Chew Avenue in the city’s Olney section that police have branded a crime scene as they search for clues in the disappearance of two local women. Since the case broke open last week, nearly a dozen Inquirer reporters have produced riveting articles about the discovery of drugs, chemicals, and “a significant amount of blood” at the Horsch family residence, profiles of the two missing women — Amy McHale and Blair Tonzelli — and interviews with neighbors who talked about living next door to “a house from a scary movie.” The backstory here is that — whatever you may have heard about AI — it still takes a lot of human shoe-leather to get to the bottom of a story like this. Subscribing to The Inquirer is a twofer: You get to hurdle the paywall to read compelling journalism and feel good about being a supporter.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.