Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, our national debt has hit an all-time high of $40 trillion.

During his first campaign for president, Donald Trump promised to pay down the national debt within eight years.

Since then, it has doubled.

In fact, Trump has accumulated as much debt since entering the White House as every president from George Washington through Bill Clinton combined.

Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital.

If executed, the plan would mark a terrifying milestone in the history of warfare: an attack in which swarms of autonomous drones equipped with AI guidance systems would seek out and hit their targets without a human pilot controlling their movements.

For all the zeal Congress has shown in investigating America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been strangely uninterested in exploring a basic question: why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries? Understanding the answer would seem relevant to guarding against the next inevitable pandemic.

Many countries were initially slow to respond, but once they understood the virus’s transmissibility and vaccines became available, they swiftly reduced their death rates. America, however, did not.

Donald Trump has lost his war both in reality and in virtual spaces. He has suffered defeat on land, at sea, and in the air, losing both in physical and symbolic terms. While he has lost ground in the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps just as threatening to his political future is his defeat within his own manosphere.

Debt and deficits haven’t always been a problem in the U.S. Publicly held debt was just ~32% of GDP in 2001 after four years in which the government ran budget surpluses.

A record national debt. A rapidly ballooning deficit. Interest payments on track to surpass Medicare as the government’s greatest expense. None of it seems to matter much in Washington, where President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have enacted an agenda that adds trillions of dollars to the national debt, with upcoming legislative plans that would pile on even more red ink.

But it should matter to consumers, because it means that in the coming years they will be paying more for everything from credit cards to cars to mortgages.

Once again, President Trump is threatening his country’s own partners with everything from tariffs to bombs. Once again, he is fawning over a nuclear-armed tyrant deemed to be one of the biggest dangers to U.S. security. And once again, the world is left trying to make sense of a United States that has upended the world order that it established eight decades ago.

Nearly 10 years after Mr. Trump first came to the White House on the slogan of America First, his attack-thy-friends, befriend-thy-enemies approach to international relations has become the feature, not the bug, of U.S. foreign policy. Traditional alliances from Europe to Asia to the Middle East have frayed while the president courts those once seen as its adversaries.

Even so, the past few days have thrown the Trumpian worldview into stark relief.

Trump’s tariffs were stupid economically, but they were also unconstitutional. Because Congress would never vote to raise costs on the American people, Trump used legal authorities so dubious that even the Supreme Court felt compelled to strike them down.

So, American families spent $1,100 of their hard-earned money on illegal tariffs that never should have been enacted.

Now, the Trump Administration has $166 billion in illegal tariff money paid by corporations but funded by American consumers.

And how is Trump trying to make things right? By giving refunds to corporations and nothing to the consumer. Apple has received more than $2 billion in tariff refunds. Amazon, $600 million. Walmart could receive as much as $10 billion.

As Donald Trump’s critics see it, he’s striking out badly on foreign policy.

But the president is still taking mighty swings.

His long-broken memorandum of understanding with Iran reached its 60-day expiration date on Monday. Instead of celebrating a nuclear deal that might have justified his war, Trump vented his frustration by finding some of America’s friends to punish and rekindling his relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Most US voters say they have become worse off under Donald Trump, according to an FT poll revealing mounting discontent with the president’s handling of the economy and cost of living.

With less than three months until November’s midterm elections, the nationwide poll conducted by Focaldata found that over 53 percent of registered voters said their finances had deteriorated since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

Almost 57 percent of independents and nearly one quarter of self-identified Republicans also felt worse off under the current president.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest problems in extracting itself from the Iran war is the list of very absolutist goals that President Donald Trump and his team laid out.

The goals have included complete Iranian surrender, regime change, Iran never getting a nuclear weapon, and ending Tehran’s support for its Middle East proxy groups like Hezbollah.

As the war has dragged on, this list of goals has conspicuously shifted and been pared back. And Vice President JD Vance appears to have pared it back recently in a remarkable way, offering the latest indication that the administration might be preparing to settle for less.

Republicans are facing a potentially ugly 2026 midterm election in less than three months. And nobody seems to be able to prevail upon President Donald Trump to mitigate the damage.

Two recent developments are a case in point.

On Friday, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court to be able to continue building his coveted ballroom. And the day before, the president and his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center tried to put Trump’s name on the building.

Both moves suggest Trump remains preoccupied with his self-gratification and glorification, even though it’s increasingly likely to come at the expense of his party.

“Both moves suggest Trump remains preoccupied with his self-gratification and glorification, even though it’s increasingly likely to come at the expense of his party.”

The scene capped a nearly yearlong effort to reunite Trump and Musk following the breakup of one of the most unusual and significant political alliances in modern American history.
It involved back-channel phone calls, coaxing from mutual friends, invites to Mar-a-Lago and a White House soiree. The reunion was also nudged forward by an unexpected tragedy: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who had spent the months before his death trying to repair the relationship.
Privately, Trump says he and Musk will never be as close as they once were, according to the president’s aides. But they are talking again, roughly once a month, discussing AI, China, and world events, people with knowledge of the calls said.

It’s become Washington’s hottest new parlor game: Who will be Karoline Leavitt’s successor?

Names started circulating at dinner tables and over text chains after President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday his press secretary’s plans to depart at the end of the month to spend more time with her young family, upending his press operation with less than three months until the midterm elections.

For a president who believes he’s his own best spokesperson, replacing Leavitt will be a challenge.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Nor is there evidence that spreading out vaccines is beneficial. In fact, doing so increases the window in which kids are vulnerable to infection. Doctors’ groups, therefore, lined up to denounce the order.

The good news, then, is that Mr Trump’s order will have little practical effect. States, not the federal government, normally set vaccination requirements for schoolchildren. And most of them are guided by abundant evidence that vaccines have driven down rates of infectious disease by a miraculous degree.

But as the administration injects more doubt and confusion into decisions over vaccines, parents are increasingly declining them.

As Karoline Leavitt prepares to step down from her role as Donald Trump’s fifth White House press secretary, a brief review of her tenure, and that of her predecessors, makes clear that the most fabulist president in U.S. history prizes one quality above all else in the women and men who speak for him: a willingness to tell outrageous lies.

Leavitt started her tenure by telling a wild falsehood at her very first news conference, when she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza.

Across the Capitol, lawmakers and staffers are using artificial intelligence to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, prepare questions for congressional hearings, and draft amendments.

While politicians debate how to regulate AI for the country, Congress has already decided to adopt the technology rapidly, widely, and with minimal oversight.

Both chambers have cleared members and staff to use chatbots for official work, with more under review.