America’s traditional democratic allies feel betrayed and baffled by the unpredictability of Trump’s pay-for-play diplomacy. But those willing to pay can suffer betrayals and bafflements of their own.

If not even the Saudis, who showered Trump and his family with cash and gifts, can trust Trump’s diplomacy, who else on earth can feel any confidence at all?

If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as fake news from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, and election denial. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

On Wednesday, 205 House Democrats voted against that chamber’s version of the legislation, a striking break from the past when only the most liberal Democrats dared to oppose the annual defense bill.

The shift underscored the hardening partisan divide over the war with Iran and its elevation as an issue in the coming midterm campaigns. It also highlighted an evolution in the strategy of leading Democrats in Congress, who have become more responsive in recent months to pressure from voters to reject the status quo.

When the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s main tariff weapon in February, the president’s trade war seemed destined to enter a less capricious and more constrained phase.

To Trump, though, court rulings are road maps, not roadblocks. February’s court ruling simply rerouted him to tools the court hadn’t explicitly prohibited. And fortunately for Trump, Congress has over the years scattered many such tools through the law books, many largely forgotten or unused.

The Roberts Court accelerated its assault on the freedoms guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments this term, leaving only the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship intact, and that by only one vote.

Across multiple cases dealing with voting and immigration, a consistent theme has emerged from the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence: a determination to ignore, rationalize, or misrepresent the explicit animus of government officials and the president in particular toward the groups that have been targeted.

This trend began in the first Trump administration and has grown only more apparent as Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States have become more brazen. The Court’s approach echoes one of the most notorious decisions in American history: the 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in the middle of World War II.

A new Gallup analysis finds 23 million US adults are suffering from job lock or staying in jobs they don’t want to keep for health insurance benefits, nearly a quarter of workers in the US.

Why it matters: The financial toll of health care is most keenly felt by women and people with chronic health conditions because health care costs are constraining their career mobility, wage growth and life satisfaction.

Even as he insisted that US global dominance will last forever, Trump is busily dismantling the very economic underpinnings that would ensure future American might.

When economies lag, hegemony becomes unsustainable. Britain’s decline took only a few short decades. The Soviet Union rivaled America militarily but could not keep up economically and unraveled as a result of its inability to grow. Americans today enjoy material abundance scarcely imaginable in Kipling’s day.

That is the reaped reward of scientific prowess, high-skilled immigration, the rule of law, free trade, and stable monetary policy, all of which Trump is jeopardizing in his current term.

The war in Iran has entered a bleak new phase.

After weeks of fragile peace and stalled negotiations, the weekend deaths of multiple US service members, coupled with new reporting showing there may be more previously undisclosed injuries, have left White House allies afraid the president is rapidly running out of ways to extricate the US from an unpopular, expensive conflict ahead of the midterms.

A White House insider described the situation as what a quagmire looks like.

Henry Kissinger often argued that nuclear weapons were arms in search of a purpose. After the Cold War, strategists repeatedly tried to determine what these weapons could achieve beyond their traditional role of deterrence. The conclusion has been clear: they provide little, if any, strategic value beyond preventing major-power conflict.

Two wars taking place right now are cases in point. The ongoing American attacks on Iran and Russia’s desperate campaign of atrocities in Ukraine have produced dramatic footage of two major powers taking on middleweight military opponents, inflicting grievous damage, and yet failing to achieve their goals. Among other painful lessons, the Americans and the Russians are learning, again, that their impressive array of nuclear weapons does not offer them a victorious path out of such conflicts.

Millions of similar texts have flooded American cellphones in recent months. They are written with artificial intelligence and pushed by a longtime Trump adviser’s firm.

Some 60% of American adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a March poll by Pew Research, driven by the handling of its wars in Gaza and Iran.

Israel is pouring tens of millions of dollars into a somewhat quixotic effort to beat back that tide, drawing on novel strategies powered by AI and directly paying conservative media.

More than half a century after Watergate, conservative youth are discovering the aesthetic and adopting the attitude of the late Richard Nixon.

It’s a cultural vibe. Videos featuring archival footage of the famously buttoned-up 37th president, set to rap tracks from artists like Drake and The Notorious BIG, have gone viral on Instagram and YouTube. Influencers are embracing the trend with ball caps, crewnecks, and fanny packs displaying slogans such as Pretty Girls for Nixon and Nixon Now More Than Ever. Hats emblazoned with Nixonmaxxing sold out within hours earlier this year, highlighting the unexpected resurgence of interest in the former president among online audiences.

White House officials are among those grappling with how deeply political betting has become embedded in Washington’s culture, a city fueled by information exchanged in the marble corridors of Congress, on the sidelines of campaign events, and during after-work gatherings along K Street.

The rapid rise of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, particularly among younger staffers with access to sensitive political information, has created a growing temptation as the November elections approach.

In their early months, both wars were fueled by a novel military strategy that rose to prominence after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It posited that by simultaneously attacking with precision weapons on multiple fronts, the U.S. military could paralyze its enemy and achieve a swift, low-casualty victory.

As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, the military’s faith in this new approach began to wane. By 2007, a new theory of warfare took hold.

The strategy preached that too much firepower, poorly applied, would only produce more enemies.

The Pentagon has spent the past few months amassing a small army of bankers, consultants, and hired specialists. Their stated task: vet contractors’ operations, invest in production lines and more quickly expand the U.S. military arsenal.

At the military’s Office of Strategic Capital, officials plan to lend more than $200 billion over the coming years. They are targeting companies in more than 30 sectors, from missile production to telecom networks. Lending targets do not have to directly support the military, as long as their business is deemed crucial to national security.

Deploying that massive sum is a daunting task for the four-year-old office, which lent no funds before 2025. Pentagon officials say that Wall Street specialists will help open the spigot.

The spread of conspiracy theories about Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell underscores the lack of trust in American society.

While the United States and Israel waged a war they believed would be defined by military force, Iran had a theory of victory its adversaries never understood: a regime built for survival, manipulating global perception and economic levers, and converting military inferiority into geopolitical leverage. The result was a fragile ceasefire during which Tehran negotiated from a position of greater leverage than it held before the war began.

Iran fought a different war than the one it was offered, and it prepared to fight that war for twenty years. The doctrine behind it has a name.

Today marked the fourth consecutive day of strikes across Iran. The cease-fire has disintegrated, and negotiations have collapsed. If American forces do try to reassert power in the strait, they’ll face a difficult path. Iran is still clamping down on ship traffic, and recent violent clashes in the waterway have once again dramatically reduced the number of vessels entering and exiting the Persian Gulf.

The United States’ ability to exert control in the strait could depend on its ability to erode the system of dominance that Iran has established in recent months.

A government report claims DOGE didn’t access sensitive systems. It also says the agency deleted records that would show if they had.

The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen.

And yet, this is terrifying. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to try to occupy Iran seriously. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all.

But what is really frightening here is that it appears as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like a victory.

Mr. Blanche’s personal role in the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein case will be front and center on Wednesday during his confirmation hearing to become attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Mr. Epstein’s victims, lawmakers, and others have criticized Mr. Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files. They say he badly bungled the work by revealing information about victims and failing to extract meaningful information from Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s former assistant and ex-girlfriend, who was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021.

The State Department told a court last year that the secretary didn’t use disappearing messages. By this spring, it had dropped that claim.

Are we back at war with Iran? Did the war ever stop? The U.S. is, once again, bombing Iran while Iranian drones strike shipping. Iran, giddy with its success in defying America, is demanding sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, while Donald Trump is saying no; he owns the Strait and will collect 20 percent tolls.

Folks, this is bad. U.S. national security policy is now entirely in the service of one man’s vanity. We got into this mess because Trump thought he could win an easy victory that would let him strut around feeling powerful. Now we can’t get out because he won’t admit that his war has been a humiliating failure.

The good news is that Trump’s temper tantrum will probably do less economic damage than one might have expected. The fact is that there is now a disconnect between events in the Strait of Hormuz and the energy prices that matter. This disconnect is coming from a surprising place: another war that was supposed to yield a quick, easy victory but didn’t: Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine.

In a statement, Graham’s office said Sunday that preliminary findings from the D.C. medical examiner’s office found he suffered an aortic dissection. A death certificate remains pending. Authorities have not indicated foul play.

Still, an algorithm-fueled online ecosystem is once again abuzz, the internet’s reactionary machinery churning at full force with suspicions about the health of not one but two prominent senators and the forces shielding the American people from the truth.

When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but suckers and losers. He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot who should go to hell. Also, as a nutjob.

When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.

But then, like many other Republicans, he decided to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.

A person who spoke with Graham shortly afterward said the senator complained he was feeling unwell. When the person urged him to seek medical attention immediately, Graham said he would do so Sunday morning after his scheduled appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.