How long will the Grateful Dead's songs survive? by Headshot of Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

 

Bob Weir believed that the songs of the Grateful Dead had a life of their own.

"It's my firm belief that these songs are visitors, that they're living critters," the band's co-founder and rhythm guitarist told NPR in 2022. "They're visitors from another world, another dimension or whatever you want to call it, that come through the artists to visit this world, have a look around, tell their stories."

 Weir described his philosophy as "hippie metaphysics" and his notion that the Grateful Dead acted as a vessel for the music, rather than its starting point, helps explain the band's longevity. The Grateful Dead endured an original run of 30 years, and by this point, its appeal has survived just as long in a world where the band itself no longer exists. The Dead's legacy is one that came to be defined, broadly, by collective ownership and responsibility — a sprawling, decentralized network of musicians, dancers and tapers (more on that later) that were all literally playing in the band, as the song goes. It's no wonder, then, that Weir always pictured the Dead's "critters" sticking around far longer than anybody on stage.

 "I can't help but think, after doing this work, that there's a good chance that these songs are going to be around in 200 or 300 years," he said during that 2022 interview. "That people will be talking about them and working off of them."

Weir spoke of this vision frequently, and it's one many fans continue to reference. He died earlier this year, which marked a devastating loss for Deadheads. Weir had spent the three decades since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 shepherding the Grateful Dead's music to younger generations of fans and players alike, most notably alongside John Mayer in the group Dead & Company. Now, the Dead community faces a new phase, one without as many links to the original band. Bassist Phil Lesh, former vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux and Weir have all departed in recent years. Without them, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart have been laying low.

 Going into the Grateful Dead's 61st summer, a clear question has emerged: not whether the music would continue, but how? Who would play it forward for the centuries to come?

 Some fans found one answer to that question off a winding road called the Bohemian Highway in Sonoma County, Calif., at a modest festival hosted by the family of Phil Lesh. On a sunny May weekend, thousands of Deadheads assembled in a clearing of redwood trees for The Terrapin Roadshow. Out in the parking lot, a few people set up tables to sell hand-dyed bamboo socks and quartz necklaces, holding up signs asking to be "miracled" into the show (a.k.a. the traditional Deadhead request to be gifted a ticket). Inside, patchwork quilts and rainbow-colored shirts dotted the grassy field. At the top of the hill, a kids' area was informally set up with play pens and bubble wands. Generations of families sprawled out on the lawn together, waiting for the music to begin. 

 Nicole Lauricella laid out a picnic blanket with help from her husband and children. Sporting a sizable Jerry Garcia tattoo on her shoulder, Lauricella watched her young granddaughter, Luna, twirl in the sun in a tie-dye dress. The Grateful Dead has long been a soundtrack to their family life, she said, and this moment feels like a new page in that lineage.

"It's nice when I can wrangle them all in and we can be together at an event," she said. "Now that [Lesh and Weir] have passed away, something like this is what we're trying to hold on to."

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The Terrapin Roadshow is set to make several stops across the West Coast and in Colorado this summer. It features Lesh's son, Grahame Lesh, playing the Grateful Dead songbook with a rotating roster of musicians. In Monte Rio, Calif., he was joined by the Wolfpack, a string and horn section that often accompanied Weir. Lesh is currently the only child of an original band member performing and touring the Dead's music, but he explained that he doesn't see himself as a solitary keeper of the band's legacy.

 "My sense, in terms of the music continuing, is someone is going to be playing it. I don't necessarily feel any added pressure because of who my dad was to do that," Lesh said. There are, he pointed out, Dead cover bands in virtually every city in America. "What we can do is bring all these other musicians in and provide a place for them to be in the band and to take the music and then go out and spread the good word to their fans and the people that they play with."

 This approach follows the map charted by the Grateful Dead's original members. After Garcia's death, the "core four" — Weir, Lesh, plus drummers Kreutzmann and Hart — continued performing the band's songbook in a number of configurations with each other, and with other artists. This included many younger musicians like Billy Strings, Joe Russo and Mikaela Davis. The surviving members also sat in with tribute bands, including Dark Star Orchestra (DSO).

 In a typical situation, that wouldn't happen — the guys go hang out with the cover band. But we made friends with them," says Tim Walther, manager of DSO and promoter of several jam band festivals. "[DSO] is not trying to say they are the Grateful Dead. They're carrying the torch, so to speak."

DSO has been playing since 1997, but Walther says 2026 has been one of the group's busiest seasons yet. He says without a formal iteration of the Dead this summer, people are looking for a place to gather and hear their favorite songs. Producer and bassist Don Was, who performed with Weir in a trio called the Wolf Bros, says there's a special quality to the Dead's music that feels larger than life.

"There's something in there that really speaks to people and helps them deal with the craziness of life, the unpredictability of life, the chaos of life," Was says. "Conversational language doesn't begin to convey the depth of inner emotions that we have going on, but songs like the Grateful Dead's really help you sort through it all."

 On the night of Weir's passing, Was and his group the Pan-Detroit Ensemble had just begun their winter tour, which included a 50th anniversary tribute to the Dead's seminal jazz-inspired album Blues for Allah. Was says although he was shaken up by the news, he knew Weir would want him to go through with the performance and use music as a way to process both his and the audience's grief. So he did, both on that night and for the remainder of the tour.

"[Weir] felt that this was music that transcended fashion or a particular moment in time in San Francisco — the themes of the songs were relevant to the human condition," Was says. "He wanted people to continue to play these songs and relate to them. I really believe that'll happen just because they're such great songs to play and they mean something to the people on the receiving end."

 At the Terrapin Roadshow in Monte Rio, Lesh tapped into the grassroots northern California scene that his father built for the last decades of his life. For several years, the family operated a venue and restaurant in San Rafael named Terrapin Crossroads, where the legendary bassist and composer could often be seen jamming with local musicians or eating a burger and fries at the next table over. The fans here, his son says, are a lot of familiar faces from that scene.

"My dad and our family were doing smaller things by choice, but there was always the bigger thing happening at the same time. Now that there's not all the voices — Bob and my dad and Donna — it's up to everyone individually," Lesh says. "We'll see. Maybe there's not a big centralized stadium tour for everyone to follow, but 800 to a thousand people will come to this each day, and another few thousand will go see [cover band] Joe Russo's Almost Dead. It'll spread that way."

 Out in the crowd, many of the Deadheads said that improvising through this unknown moment is part of the fun. Susan Justice went to her first Grateful Dead show in 1976, though she saw Jerry Garcia Band play before that. She says for her, the important thing is that every performance follows the unpredictable spirit of the Dead.

 "We like to hear people play the Dead material with their own personalities," she said. "It's nice to hear other people play their own style of the music, as opposed to just trying to imitate."

 

Through two sets of songs, including "They Love Each Other," and a roaring rendition of the sequence known as "Help On the Way" > "Slipknot!" > "Franklin's Tower," just one solitary taper stood in the audience. The Grateful Dead famously allowed concertgoers to record performances; they would then trade those tapes with other fans, a sort of pre-internet marketing strategy that drew more and more people to concerts. Eventually, it led to entire taper sections at shows. John Chandler, who started seeing the Dead in the 1980s, said he feels a responsibility to keep that tradition going.

"There's a lot of people that are not taping anymore, which is unfortunate," he said. "But this stuff right now that we're getting — you can't let it slip away. You've got to preserve it, capture it and share it.

 For Lesh, this show is symbolic of a larger ethos around not just the music, but the entire culture that it spawned. In the heart of Dead country, just down the road from where lyricist Robert Hunter penned the words to "Dark Star," Lesh looked contemplatively at the forest surrounding the stage.

"My folks described the Grateful Dead as a big old oak tree. The roots were the jazz and the blues. You know, Jerry was a big banjo player and my dad [had] classical roots," he said. "The trunk is the band members, and the branches and the leaves are everyone inspired by them. That's what I am — all of us. It'll grow and grow. And, you know, not every tree lives forever, but it outlives all of us."

How Trump’s claims of vandalism at the renovated Reflecting Pool crumbled by Dan Diamond,Liam Bowman,Salvador Rizzo and Jake Spring,

 

Standing on the basin of the Lincoln Memorial's Reflecting Pool in early May, President Donald Trump promised to fix the leaks and other problems that had long plagued one of the capital's most recognizable landmarks.

"It's going to last, I would say 50 years," he said. "It'll last, it's going to last a long time."

 

Trump vowed to finish the job in time for July Fourth celebrations on the National Mall. He and his aides cast the project, launched with a multimillion-dollar no-bid contract and without the normal review process, as a demonstration of how quickly the longtime real estate magnate could transform Washington.

Trump's changes instead lasted a few days. The basin's coating began to visibly peel, with chunks of Trump's new pool liner, tinted "American Flag Blue," littering the surface and algae blooms clouding the water.

Since then, the administration's response - to blame "vandals" for the damage - has morphed into a political headache, raising questions about what leaders in the administration knew as the government pursued criminal charges against four people, including former U.S. Olympian David Hearn.

The president is furious at one of his most ardent supporters, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the nation's capital, for dropping vandalism charges against the four people in recent days. Prosecutors in a Friday court filing blamed the damage on flawed installation work and said the Interior Department had not shared critical information in a timely manner.

Trump lashed out at Pirro on social media and delivered a "very pointed" message in a phone call Saturday, a White House official said. On Monday, he renewed the criticism from the Oval Office, saying she had "folded like an umbrella."

The Reflecting Pool project, intended as a showcase for Trump's ability to quickly get things done, has instead become a speed bump in his second term. Its problem-riddled rollout comes as Trump presses ahead with larger and more complex projects that would remake Washington's skyline, including a new White House ballroom and a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch.

The pool was drained again July 10 for more repairs.

Government records "strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation by AIC, the primary contractor," led to the visible damage in the pool's new liner, Pirro and one of her deputies wrote in the filing Friday. Pirro accused the Interior Department of withholding relevant documents that would have scuttled the investigation.

 The pool's problems had sparked tirades from Trump inside the White House, and the president soon grew angry for another reason: Pirro did not give the White House a heads-up about dropping the charges, a White House official said. The president spoke with her by phone Saturday to discuss the decision, a call first reported by CNN.

 

Trump publicly turned his ire on Pirro too, saying on social media he disagreed "100%" with her decision and again insisting that vandals were to blame. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chimed in to agree that vandals "repeatedly" damaged the site, claiming the acts were caught on camera and insisting his agency had been forthcoming with Justice Department lawyers.

The White House and Interior Department declined further comment, referring to Trump and Burgum's posts. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Outside observers for weeks had dismissed claims of widespread vandalism. A Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery and photos and videos taken in June during the renovation concluded that the basin's peeling was probably caused by application errors. Waterproofing experts who reviewed the evidence reached the same conclusion.

The administration publicly disputed that the coating had been improperly applied, but on Monday, Trump acknowledged some frustration with contractors' work.

"I'm not saying I was 100 percent thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing," he said in the Oval Office, noting that workers had a tight deadline. He saved his sharpest words for Pirro.

"I guess she choked. I don't know what the hell happened," he said.

Pirro, a former Fox News host, had been a staunch defender of the president before joining his administration, and in her current role had pursued several claims of wrongdoing involving Trump's perceived political foes - having setbacks in court along the way, including a failed attempt to prosecute a D.C. man for misdemeanor assault after throwing a sandwich at a federal agent last year.

 

The 20-page filing by prosecutors to drop Hearn's case was extraordinary not only because it contradicted what Trump and Pirro had said publicly about charges, but because it painstakingly outlined Interior Department documents showing problems with the liner's installation and how prosecutors came to feel deceived. Pirro reviewed and signed off on the motion after speaking with Michael Spence, the chief of the unit handling Superior Court cases in the U.S. attorney's office, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, said he did not accept the claim that the Justice Department was unaware of evidence indicating Hearn's innocence. Eisen cited public photographs and reports demonstrating that the damage probably stemmed from contractor errors.

"The idea that Jeanine Pirro and her office were somehow hornswoggled by Interior is not credible," Eisen said.

This account is drawn from interviews with Justice, Interior and White House officials as well as public statements and documents disclosed by the Trump administration in legal battles over the Reflecting Pool. Some of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss matters publicly.

Trump decided to revamp the century-old pool early this year, saying that friends had criticized the historic site's appearance and smell.

"I was getting complaints from people saying that it wasn't good," Trump told reporters. "I called Doug [Burgum] and he agreed."

The pool's last significant renovation began during the Obama administration, took several years and cost $34 million. Trump concluded he could do it much faster and far cheaper.

The president also believed he could personally drive the project, having transformed the relationship between the White House and National Park Service staff. Trump had torn down the White House's East Wing to build a planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom addition, begun planning a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and envisioned other major projects on federal parkland, such as renovating several golf courses. The pool, in comparison, felt straightforward, Trump would tell allies.

The administration had also stripped away layers between on-the-ground Park Service employees and senior Interior and White House officials. Many senior Park Service employees left amid U.S. DOGE Service cuts last year that reduced the agency's staff by about a quarter, leaving fewer experienced officials between junior staff and political appointees.

Officials with little historic preservation experience wound up making construction decisions while Park Service staff with experience renovating the Mall would end up being sidelined.

By March, the National Park Service was fast-tracking the pool project at the White House's direction. The changes, which included applying a new tinted epoxy to its basin, did not undergo the normally required reviews because "there is no option other" than to speed the project to meet the administration's timeline, a Park Service official wrote in a March 30 document.

Trump unveiled the project in the Oval Office on April 23, releasing an accompanying promotional video later that day and calling it a "business study."

"It will look far more beautiful, more beautiful than it did in 1922 when they built it," Trump said. Rather than spend years and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, he said, his renovation would cost less than $2 million and take less than two weeks. That cost would later balloon.

Almost immediately, historic preservationists and past administration officials cautioned Trump was moving too quickly.

Charles A. Birnbaum, who heads the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization focused on historic sites, said after Trump's announcement that he didn't understand how "something so important could be changed without testing" the new materials.

"The notion has been, do the work and ask questions later," Birnbaum said, referencing Trump's other local construction projects, such as his demolition of the White House's East Wing to build a new ballroom. Birnbaum's group also sued to stop the pool project, although a judge rejected an injunction.

The work on the pool began May 5, as contractors cleaned the site and began spraying a specialized protective coating, Rhino 406, on a portion of the basin, according to the Justice Department. Then on May 6 it rained, forcing workers to pause for a day.

Behind the scenes, warning signs came quickly.

"It appears AIC is significantly behind schedule," an employee with a contractor responsible for monitoring AIC's progress wrote in an email shared with Interior Department officials on May 7, according to the Justice Department.

More delays followed. Rain repeatedly halted work, and contractors ran out of Rhino 406 on May 18, forcing another pause until more supplies arrived, according to the Justice Department.

The job was largely complete by June 7, and workers began refilling the pool. A final inspection was held June 9, the Justice Department wrote, as the pool officially opened - one month later, and costing more than $12 million more than Trump had originally promised.

The cleaned-up pool initially won some bipartisan praise, and the president posted a flurry of photos to his social media account. Trump also shared images of the pool looking grimy and filled with trash - saying that was its appearance under predecessor Joe Biden - compared with a pristine pool that he said was due to his leadership.

"Everybody's looking at that reflecting pool; they can't believe it reflects," Trump said in the Oval Office the following day. "When I'm here, it'll be perfect."

The next day, a Park Service engineer concluded that the pool's new liner had already begun to peel, blaming contractor error, according to documents released Friday by the Justice Department.

Soon, passersby noticed the peeling too. Hearn told The Post that when he visited the pool on June 19, he saw a piece of liner that was already partially detached from the pool bottom and reached into the water to see what it felt like.

He was quickly arrested by U.S. Park Police officers and charged with vandalizing the site. More arrests followed.

The charges gave administration officials cover for their claim that the pool's problems stemmed from deliberate damage. But none of those arrested were accused of the most serious conduct that Trump publicly alleged - using blades or chemicals to damage the liner.

"They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool," Trump wrote on Truth Social on June 20, increasing the length of the gash to 300 and then 350 feet in subsequent posts.

Frank Lands, the Park Service's deputy director, also told a federal judge in a separate case on June 24 that foam sealant on the pool had been "cut with a sharp knife or razor." Lands, a former Army deputy garrison commander who joined the Park Service in 2021, had become a central figure in carrying out Trump's policies in Washington. He declined to comment to The Post.

Pirro, whose office handles prosecutions of both local and federal crimes in D.C., initially framed the alleged vandalism as an assault on Americans' shared heritage. She visited the pool on July 1 to inspect the damage, according to court records. When a grand jury indicted Hearn the next day on a felony charge of destruction of property - the sole felony vandalism charge pursued in connection with the pool - Pirro gave a news conference and later a Fox News interview in which she described him "forcefully and violently" tugging at the liner with both hands and shouting at a Park Service employee who told him to stop.

"I didn't charge anything harshly," she told reporters at the time, adding that "there was tremendous damage."

But inside the U.S. attorney's office, frustration was building with Interior officials, who had yet to furnish the information prosecutors were requesting about the damage to the pool. All the prosecutors had were a set of "bare-bones" police reports from the Park Service officers who had arrested Hearn and three other defendants who were charged with misdemeanor offenses, according to a Justice Department filing.

When Hearn's defense team toured the site on July 17, Pirro visited again. With the pool drained, prosecutors could see the damage more clearly, according to her office's court filing. The peeling wasn't just around the edges, court papers say, but in the middle of the pool too - spots that would have been very difficult for vandals to reach.

Pirro said her office immediately requested Interior Department records about the liner installation process.

"These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool," Pirro's office said in the court filing. The records included emails and reports documenting the liner's installation flaws, rain-related setbacks, blistering and peeling - all of it in writing before the charges had been filed in court.

"Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment," the filing said.

Prosecutors also dropped the charges against the three people facing misdemeanors.

One of them, Justin Carreno, lost his job as a government contractor because of the case and suffered reputational damage, according to his lawyer David Benowitz.

"The charge never should have been brought in the first place," Benowitz said.

The Justice Department could try to charge the cases again, but it would be difficult given prosecutors' conclusions in the filing.

Trump has seemingly continued his own investigation.

On Saturday, the president shared security footage on Truth Social that showed people with their hands in the reflecting pool. "Look for yourselves at the VANDALISM that took place at The Reflecting Pool," he wrote. "The material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!" The video shows three people reaching into the water along the north edge of the pool, but it is not clear whether anyone is holding a knife or a box cutter.

The video appears to be a longer version of a clip previously shared by the U.S. Park Police on June 24 seeking the public's help identifying a person in the footage. Police said it was recorded on June 19 at 3:36 p.m., roughly an hour before Hearn was approached by officers.

The saga has angered congressional Democrats, who have launched investigations into Trump's project and say that passersby never should have been arrested, and left some Republican lawmakers bemused and befuddled.

"It's pretty close to a textbook definition of kakistocracy," said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), the top Democrat on a House committee that oversees the national parkland where the Reflecting Pool is located. "Pirro is between the proverbial rock and a hard place - getting fired if she tells the truth, or getting disbarred if she continues to lie."

Among the Republicans struggling to make sense of the episode was Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana).

"The whole thing is a multiple vehicle pileup," he said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," musing about Trump and Pirro's motivations. "I don't know why she filed the suit without doing a full investigation. She says she relied on the Department of Interior. But she was smart to pull it back."

The pool is closed until Aug. 10 for more renovations, the administration has said in court filings.

Exclusive-US has used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say By Erin Banco, Mike Stone and Jonathan Landay

 

The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military's readiness for future conflicts.

The missiles are principally the Army's surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used "virtually ‌all" of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

The degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported.

The long-range munitions – which cost more than $1 million each – are ‌an important part of the military's arsenal, allowing accurate strikes from a safe distance. U.S.-supplied ATACMS have played a key role in the war in Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to attack targets inside Russia. The PrSM is a newer, more advanced generation that will replace the ATACMS, which have a shorter range.

The dramatic ​rundown in precision, long-range missiles means U.S. President Donald Trump may have to rely more on riskier, piloted bombing missions if he relaunches large-scale attacks on Iran.

The sources declined to say how many of each munition the U.S. had left.

Trump launched the Iran war jointly with Israel in February, predicting that the conflict would last a short time.

But as the war drags on, the three people familiar with the matter expressed worry that the falling missile supplies could limit the U.S. ability to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.

A fourth person familiar with the matter said that while Central Command — which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East — has nearly used up the land-based missiles it had before the war began, it has been able to reload from U.S. military supplies elsewhere in the world.

The sources interviewed ‌for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked for comment on the stockpile ⁠data, the White House issued a statement from Trump, saying the U.S. had "far more munitions than anyone in the world" and "far more than we need."

 

Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels," Trump said.

Analysts agree that certain munitions, including artillery shells and several types of missiles, are being ⁠produced at record levels but caution that supplies might fall short of what is needed for a prolonged war.

Lockheed Martin, which makes the ATACMS and PrSMs, along with the anti-ballistic missile THAAD system, did not immediately respond to questions about Trump's statements or about supply levels. Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, two important U.S. weapons, also did not immediately respond.

Responding to a request for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: "America's military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President's ​choosing. ​We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and ​our interests."

The supply figures have circulated inside the federal government over the last week during tense ‌conversations inside the Trump administration about how much longer the U.S. can continue striking Iran without drawing down the stockpile to levels that would limit the military's ability to respond to crises elsewhere.

WARNINGS OVER WEAPONS SUPPLIES

One of the sources said the drawdown of the ATACMS and PrSM stockpiles reflected a decision by the Trump administration to avoid riskier ways of attacking Iranian targets, such as by using piloted aircraft to drop bombs.

Because these weapons allow the military to attack targets from a distance, analysts say they would be valuable in a war against an adversary with strong air defenses, such as China. They have been used to strike targets inside Iran, according to a March report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

According to the report, PrSM stockpiles were low to start with, since it is a relatively new munition, but the U.S. military has ordered a large number of them for 2027. The Army has said that ATACMS are being phased out and that production is shifting to the newer PrSM missiles.

Military ‌leaders have for weeks warned the president that stockpiles of defensive weapons — including Patriot interceptors, which are effective against ballistic missiles — were dwindling, said ​two of the sources. Last week, several media outlets reported Trump had decided not to launch another massive offensive inside Iran in part because his ​military advisers had warned about the U.S. stockpile.

A U.S. official disputed those accounts, saying Trump chose not to move forward ​with another attack because of pressure from Gulf states.

The Middle East conflict has sparked intense debate about Trump's authority to prosecute hostilities against Iran without congressional authorization. No request for a declaration of war ‌or an authorization to use military force has been submitted to Congress.

DEFENSIVE WEAPON STOCKS ARE ALSO ​DIMINISHED

Last week, CSIS published a report estimating that between February and ​July about 65% of Patriot interceptors had been expended and that the number of THAAD ballistic missile interceptors in U.S. stockpiles was at least 38% lower than at the start of the war. Patriots and THAADs are systems that detect and destroy incoming missiles and are among the most effective in the country's arsenal.

While Reuters has not seen the supply figures, those numbers match internal U.S. data, two of the sources said.

The U.S. also burned through a little ​less than half of its global supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are generally launched from ‌ships, since the start of the war, one of the sources said.

Reuters could not independently verify that number.

The Tomahawk is a Navy weapon, launched from destroyers, cruisers and submarines, and has long served as the sea ​service's principal means of striking heavily defended targets without risking pilots.

Raytheon, a unit of RTX, has reached a tentative multi-year agreement with the Pentagon aimed at boosting Tomahawk production, alongside increases in other munitions, as ​Washington races to rebuild stockpiles.

58 years of attacks on the media by powerful leaders trying to deflect criticism, from Nixon to Trump by Heather Hendershot

 

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In his White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026, President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the “failing” New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn’t smile enough. He dismissed the award she received at the dinner as “fake” and celebrated the recent firing of top CBS News employees.

Such ongoing extreme hostility from the president has contributed to Americans’ loss of faith in the news media, which has plummeted to an all-time low.

While the situation is in many ways unique to this moment, a perceived crisis around the very notion of “objective reporting” – and presidential use of that idea to denigrate and delegitimize the press – has a long history.

Nixon administration played hardball

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, for example, attacked coverage of police brutality at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention as one-sided in favor of antiwar protestors. Once in office, Nixon deployed Vice President Spiro Agnew to verbally assault journalists for their putative bias and elitism.

In an infamous 1969 speech, Agnew denounced TV newsmen – they were, indeed, mostly men – as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” hostile to the president and therefore out of touch with average Americans. Agnew singled out NBC anchorman David Brinkley for his claim that “objectivity is impossible” and that “fairness” was a more reasonable objective. Like many journalists, Brinkley understood “objectivity” as implying an almost mechanical delivery of pure facts, while “fairness” was more realistic, an earnest effort to be judicious. 

 

Agnew concluded with a challenge: People should “let the networks know that they want their news straight and objective.” He framed this populist turn as an alternative to government interference. But journalists felt the looming threat of censorship.

Brinkley’s statement was not impudent. It was realistic: an acknowledgment that journalists are humans with preconceptions and values, but that their professional mandate is to strive for impartiality.

Carefully balanced reporting was not only the baseline of journalists’ training but also a business imperative. There were only three national nightly news shows, all seeking the widest possible audience. Moderation was more profitable than swinging hard left or right.

Although frustrated with journalism in general, Agnew zeroed in on TV in his speech because it had displaced print as Americans’ leading news source. And the reality of Federal Communications Commission licensing, whereby a federal agency determined who could use publicly owned airwaves, made broadcasters vulnerable to the actions of a vengeful president

 

The licensing issue still resonates. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel, a frequent Trump critic, had his show briefly suspended by ABC after angering the president’s supporters.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” FCC chair Brandon Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Kimmel survived this attack largely because public support surged, and he continues to satirize the White House. Others have been less fortunate.

Journalists fought back

Struggling to compete, newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s could have easily downplayed Agnew’s criticisms of a rival medium.

Instead, they stood up for TV. In the course of my research, I’ve found that not only in publicly accessible material but also in unpublished archival papers both broadcasters and newspapers consistently understood an attack on one media outlet as an attack on all, a lesson that holds true in 2026.

One of Agnew’s “snobs” was the liberal New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Wicker was on Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he voiced concerns about not just Nixon and Agnew but also more generally about the very notion of objectivity.

Agnew raised hackles across the American journalism community. But Wicker’s reactions stand out in particular, because he was employed by what was then known as “the paper of record,” whose grandiose credo had long been “To Give the News Impartially, Without Fear or Favor.” 

 

In a column published on Nov. 16, 1969, Wicker granted that it was legitimate for Agnew to ask “how the power of that extraordinary medium (TV) can be most equitably controlled and exercised in the general public interest.”

But Wicker underscored that Agnew “couched his argument in direct political attack on those who differed with Mr. Nixon” and “came close to claiming immunity from criticism for Presidential utterance.”

Taking on ‘objectivity’

Two years after Agnew’s “effete snobs” speech, Wicker wrote an essay for Columbia Journalism Review objecting to journalism’s “tradition of objectivity” and “orientation toward nationalism in politics and toward establishmentarianism in other areas of society.”

The consequence, he wrote, was a heavy and generally uncritical reliance on official sources, all in the name of a spurious notion of objectivity.

Deeply offended, New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal sent a confidential memo to publisher Punch Sulzberger.

“In essence,” Rosenthal wrote, “what Tom’s piece adds up to is a public statement by … a well-known columnist of the Times … that objectivity and comprehensiveness, the journalistic foundations of this paper, are no longer valid and that the kind of paper the Times is now is no longer meaningful.”

Rosenthal said Wicker’s public expression of these thoughts was “bad for the paper” externally and “bad for morale” internally.

Regardless, such disputes at The New York Times were always waged behind the scenes. The gold standard for journalism was – and remains, whenever possible – to tell the story, not be the story.

Denouncing bias as deflection

Today, by contrast, it is widely known that the CBS News division “is on fire,” as longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley said, shortly after he was sacked.

Newly installed CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, who has no broadcast experience, positions herself as an advocate for “free speech and free thinking” and her Free Press newsletter as a reclamation of objective reporting. Yet at CBS she has made editorial choices, including killing a story highly critical of the Trump administration, that consistently favor the White House.

Like Agnew, in other words, Weiss appears to cloak uncritical acceptance of presidential positions as a battle against “bias.”

Denouncing “bias” is usually an attempt by those in power to deflect from what reporters have uncovered – from Vietnam to Watergate to Iraq. It is thus startling for someone within journalism to use the establishment’s word – bias – to self-censor.

The apparently deliberate imploding of CBS News and its flagship investigative journalism program “60 Minutes” is all the more shocking when you consider the network’s past triumphs in serving the public interest while angering politicians and presidents. 

 Holding government accountable

In 1971, for example, the Army and the Nixon administration attacked “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a CBS documentary about military public relations activities. Officials charged that the editing had been misleading and malicious, and the U.S. House of Representatives subpoenaed CBS journalists’ raw footage.

This congressional investigation ended as a victory for the press and the public’s right to know. CBS refused to share its outtakes, and the network’s president risked going to jail for contempt of Congress.

In his column, Wicker declared the documentary excellent, and he correctly painted the subpoena of CBS materials as resulting from White House pressure.

That same year, The New York Times and The Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers, revealing that the government had been misleading Americans for years regarding Vietnam. The two newspapers were briefly silenced by the White House, which persuaded the courts to order them to cease releasing the documents, and then were vindicated when the Supreme Court barred the government from restraining publication.

Wicker argued that “no statute exists that says government officials must be protected from the exposure of their follies or misdeeds,” and that the Pentagon Papers’ culprit was the government, not the newspapers.

How an 1876 massacre of Black men in South Carolina turned racial terror into political power by Jacob Ware

 

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, its citizens commemorate a democracy more diverse, free and inclusive than it’s ever been. The path to this milestone was imperfect and paved in blood and suffering. Still, few of the revelers will likely pay heed to the anniversary of another historic event: the 150th anniversary of the July 1876 Hamburg massacre.

The massacre, which took place in Hamburg, South Carolina, began as a dispute between a local Black militia and two white citizens over whether the latter could cross the group’s centennial Fourth of July parade. The militia leader, Doc Adams, was later charged with blocking a public highway.

At his court hearing, Adams was met with a white militia – part of the white supremacist Red Shirts – which then pursued the Black militia on their retreat to their weapons arsenal. After a firefight, the Red Shirts captured several Black militiamen, marched them to a nearby site and executed at least four people.

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Union veteran Daniel Henry Chamberlain, described the event as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.” Yet no one was convicted after the attack. In fact, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders would instead rise to the highest offices in the state.

Corey Rogers, an organizer of the 150th anniversary Hamburg commemoration, recently called this massacre “the seminal event that began to change the trajectory of African Americans.” The repression and inequality that would define the next 100 years of U.S. history, in other words, was born at Hamburg.

As a scholar of domestic terrorism, I study the long history of white supremacist and far-right violence in the U.S. My research shows that the Hamburg massacre was not just characteristic of a broader violent moment, but also that the echoes of such violence ring loudly today. 

 

From Hamburg, across the South

According to one estimate, the 12 years of the Reconstruction era, during which the Union attempted to construct a racially diverse democracy in the wake of the Civil War, saw over 2,000 Black citizens murdered in “racial terror lynchings.” Another estimate, from 1895, more starkly claimed that as many as 53,000 Black Americans had been murdered in the 30 years following the Civil War.

By intimidating Black voters and galvanizing white Democrats who sought to undo the results of the Civil War, this violence served to effectively kill Reconstruction and the tangible promises of Black emancipation.

What happened in Hamburg provides a particularly egregious example of such racial terrorism catapulting political triumph. After that tragedy, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders went on to successful political careers, with two of them becoming U.S. senators – one of whom, Benjamin Tillman, also served as South Carolina governor.

As Jenny Heckel, then a Clemson University graduate student, noted in her 2016 master’s thesis, it was “not in spite of the white Carolinians’ participation in the murder of six black men, but because of it, they won election to political offices.”

In South Carolina’s 1876 gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Confederate veteran Wade Hampton III, emerged triumphant and reinstated white supremacy as the fulcrum of state governance. His name had been put forward by former Confederate major general Matthew Butler, who had represented the two white farmers before the Hamburg attack and who himself went on to serve in the U.S. Senate.

In 1895, South Carolina held a constitutional convention, spearheaded by the aforementioned Hamburg massacre ringleader Tillman, and adopted a new constitution that effectively ended the Black vote in the state.

An enduring threat

In the 1890s, renowned abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white vigilantes offered three justifications for the lynchings of Black Americans: stamping out alleged race riots, protecting the white vote share and protecting white women from alleged sexual crimes by Black men.

The first two were front and center in the Hamburg massacre. In fact, as Heckel reflected a decade ago, “white Carolinians blamed the black militia for starting the riot, and Southern white newspapers created images of riotous blacks to contest black descriptions.”

 

Since the massacre, racial violence has had a long echo in the United States. And in many cases, the same justifications elucidated by Douglass remain.

Both the Tulsa race massacre and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, for instance, were sparked by false accusations of sexual harassment or assault made against young Black men.

The violence persists today. In June 2015, just 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Hamburg, a white supremacist gunman entered the historically Black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

In May 2022, a white supremacist killed 10 Black Americans at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.

Both gunmen made multiple references to the same conspiracy theories Douglass identified, with the Charleston domestic terrorist going as far as to praise segregation as “a defensive measure” while criticizing the “historical lies, exaggerations and myths” of the historical record of slavery and its aftermath. 

 

Still, there are key differences between the attacks at Charleston and Buffalo and their Reconstruction predecessors. The political violence that tainted the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era clashes with traditional definitions of terrorism, which typically targets a power structure that such violence seeks to upend.

Instead, attacks like the one in Hamburg, which sought to proactively protect the rights and power of white Americans – and which were often endorsed by state and local governments – have more in common with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not only did the scale of the broader violence across the South indicate a campaign to mass-murder an ethnic subgroup for political purposes, but Tillman, perhaps the most infamous of the Hamburg murderers, never denied the attack’s goals.

“We are not sorry for it,” he would proudly recall before the U.S. Senate in 1900. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”

‘A painful duty’

Attempting to commemorate all such anniversaries is an impossible task, simply because of the sheer volume. For example, September marks the 150th anniversary of the Ellenton Riot. In that massacre, Black South Carolinians were systematically hunted throughout their community over an alleged attack on a white elderly woman, which was later proved false. The death toll may have eclipsed 100.

Countless similar incidents have plagued U.S. history.

In my view, to tell the story of America’s founding without referencing these profound scars is akin to deceit, if not complicity. Civil rights leader and journalist Ida B. Wells put it this way in 1895: “It becomes a painful duty … to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.”

Or, as a local retired pastor said of Hamburg commemorations, “We want to keep it burning so people won’t forget what transpired.”

Capital One says it closed Trump Organization's accounts after anti-money laundering probe By Kenrick Cai Sat, August 1, 2026

 

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its decision to close the Trump Organization's bank accounts years ago, stating that it did ‌so after a review by anti-money laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has ‌formally tied money laundering concerns to U.S. President Donald Trump's family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss the case by casting doubt on ​claims of illegally debanking — or denying services on religious or political grounds — the Trump Organization.

The Trump Organization and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of illegal money laundering. But Friday's filing argues that "documents and Plaintiffs' own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs' accounts for anti-money laundering ("AML") reasons. The ‌closures were the result of months of ⁠analysis and a careful review by Capital One's AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance."

Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated ⁠bank accounts in March 2021. The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president's son, filed a lawsuit in March 2025 in a Florida federal court, alleging the accounts were closed because of Capital One's "woke" beliefs and its desire to benefit from the ​political ​mood after the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. ​Capitol.

 

'MISGUIDED' ALLEGATIONS: CAPITAL ONE

The federal court in Miami ‌has tossed two complaints in the Capital One case, but gave the plaintiffs opportunities each time to submit an amended complaint. Capital One said that the latest version, filed in July, "suffers from the same fundamental flaws as their prior two pleadings."

Capital One said in Friday's filing that the Trump Organization's allegations of political pretext were "misguided" and "based on cherry-picked quotations unsupported by the full context" of documents submitted to the court.

"The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among ‌the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance," the filing ​said.

Since the start of Trump's second term, his administration has put ​pressure on some large banks, echoing conservative complaints ​that the institutions are deliberately targeting the political right.

Trump signed an executive order in August ‌2025 barring discriminatory debanking. In January, Trump filed a ​suit against JPMorgan Chase on ​the same grounds, underscoring the fraught policy environment Wall Street is navigating during the president's second term.

 In 2019, during his first term, Trump sued Capital One and Deutsche Bank in an attempt to prevent them ​from sharing financial records with Congress as ‌part of a probe led by Democratic lawmakers. Anti-money laundering professionals at Deutsche Bank reportedly flagged ​a set of transactions, but executives ignored them; Deutsche Bank denied the report at the time.

 

Here’s why new fronts seem to be opening up across the Middle East by SUZAN FRASER and JOSEPH KRAUSS

 

Houthi rebels in Yemen said they attacked Saudi oil facilities. The Saudis blamed militias in Iraq and joined the United States in bombing them. Iran fired missiles at Jordan. Drones set ships ablaze in Egypt.

But it’s not actually as complicated as it sounds, and it’s all related to the broader war between the United States and Iran, currently focused on the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran supports armed groups across the Middle East that allow it to project power far beyond its borders. The U.S. has thousands of troops based in allied Arab countries that have been targets of Iran’s retaliation.

Here’s a look at why so many fronts seem to be heating up at once.

 

A struggle over the strait

The epicenter of the latest violence is the Strait of Hormuz, an elbow-shaped passage running between Iran and Oman that carried a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas before the war.

Iran says it controls the waterway and has attacked ships attempting to use an alternative route overseen by the U.S. military along the coast of Oman.

The U.S. has struck Iran in response, saying the strait should be open to all international traffic, as it was before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. When the U.S. strikes Iran, Iran retaliates by firing missiles and drones against Arab countries hosting U.S. forces, like Jordan and Kuwait.

The exchanges of fire in recent weeks led to the collapse of an interim agreement aimed at winding down the war. That has deepened mistrust on both sides. At this point, Iran appears to be more interested in cementing its control over the strait than in making a deal with the U.S. to lift international sanctions.

 

Yemen’s Houthis are wading in

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, who stayed on the sidelines during the initial phase of the war, have declared a blockade on Saudi Arabia, threatening shipping through another major trade route leading through the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Red Sea up to Egypt’s Suez Canal.

The Houthis also claim to have attacked Saudi oil infrastructure near an East-West pipeline that the kingdom has used to ship millions of barrels of oil since the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed.

The Houthi-Saudi tensions are rooted in a separate but related conflict going back more than a decade that seems to be reigniting. But it also presents a new front on which Iran could pressure a key U.S. ally and potentially choke off more of the world’s energy supplies, with effects far beyond the region.

ِAmbrey, a maritime security firm, has recorded over 10 transits that U-turned in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since the Houthi naval blockade against Saudi Arabia was announced. Bab al-Mandeb transits have been down 30% since July 21 compared to June, according to the latest Ambrey data.

 

The Saudis take aim at Iran-backed groups in Iraq

Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia accused Iran-backed militias in Iraq of launching drone attacks on its oil facilities for two straight days. In response, U.S. and Saudi fighter aircraft bombed militia sites in Iraq, killing at least 20 fighters and six Iranian advisers.

Iraq has close ties to both the U.S. and Iran and has long struggled to balance them. Since the start of the war, it has been in a literal crossfire. The government condemned the U.S.-Saudi strikes, saying they came as it was trying to investigate what had happened.

 

The Popular Mobilization Forces, a collection of armed groups close to Iran, are officially part of Iraq’s security forces but often act autonomously, including by attacking U.S. forces stationed in Iraq.

American forces are due to finish their withdrawal from the country at the end of September, and the Iraqi government has vowed to disarm nonstate actors or incorporate them into the military. But those efforts could stall as the wider war rages.

The remaining U.S. forces are based in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, which is also home to armed Iranian Kurdish dissident groups. Iran has attacked both over the course of the war

 

Drone attack on Egypt signals a possible widening of the war

On Wednesday, a drone attack on Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta set two natural gas vessels ablaze, including a U.S.-owned floating storage facility.

No one has claimed the attack, and the Houthis have denied responsibility.

Egypt, a close U.S. ally and regional mediator, is one of the only countries in the Middle East to have avoided military involvement in the war.

 

Israel is on the sidelines, for now

Israel, which took part in the initial weekslong bombardment of Iran and was repeatedly targeted by Iranian missiles earlier in the conflict, has remained on the sidelines since the interim peace deal.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group fired rockets into northern Israel shortly after the outbreak of the war. Israel responded with aerial bombardment and a ground invasion. It has since occupied, depopulated and destroyed large parts of southern Lebanon, saying such measures are necessary to root out militants.

A June 20 truce has largely held. Israel and Lebanon’s government are currently implementing the initial stages of an agreement in which Israeli forces would withdraw and Lebanon’s army would move in. The deal also states that Hezbollah must be disarmed. The group has rejected the deal and could violently resist any attempt to forcibly disarm it.

Any attack by Iran, Hezbollah or Israel could reignite those hostilities, reopening yet another front.

 

Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service by JOHN HANNA

 

Roughly six weeks before the first midterm ballots are mailed out, the U.S. Postal Service is emerging as a pivotal player in an election season that will determine control of Congress.

President Donald Trump is seeking greater control over mail balloting through an executive order while a change to how the agency processes mail is leading to criticism that it’s failing to deliver ballots on time.

Democratic officials have raised concerns over the past week about how quickly the Postal Service will process ballots after tens of thousands of them in California and hundreds in Wisconsin arrived at local election offices too late to be counted in elections earlier this year. The top election offices in Kansas and Michigan are urging voters who want to cast their ballots early to avoid the mail and instead drop them off in person.

 The Postal Service replied to those concerns by saying it remains “committed to fulfilling our role in the electoral process.”

“We provide a secure, efficient, and effective way for citizens to participate when policymakers decide to use mail as part of their elections,” it said in a statement Tuesday.

 Trump’s order puts more focus on mail ballots

The Postal Service faced similar questions about mail delivery in 2024, but the scrutiny this year is heightened because of an executive order Trump issued in March that seeks to create a national voter list to guide the Postal Service in deciding who gets a mail ballot.

 Trump has lied for years about voter fraud to try to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, and mail balloting is a favorite target, even though he has used the method himself. During a recent stop in Michigan, he falsely characterized mail balloting as “inherently corrupt” and added, “Hopefully there will be no mail-in ballots.”

A 2025 report from the research group Brookings identified about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Despite Trump’s attacks, the method remains popular with voters of both major parties. In 2024, nearly 30% of U.S. voters cast their ballots by mail, according to federal data. In Michigan, where competitive U.S. House and Senate races could help determine the balance of power in Congress, the state said it has sent out more than 2 million absentee ballots for the state’s Aug. 4 primary.

“We want to keep vote by mail. We want to protect it. We want to expand it,” said Jonathan Smith, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, which launched a campaign in April promoting it and is opposed to turning the Postal Service into an election administrator. “Why? Because it works.”

The order has sparked multiple lawsuits and federal court orders, leading to a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the administration is asking the justices to allow it to impose its restrictions on mail balloting.

 

Legal battles intensify over Trump’s order

The Postal Service proposed a rule in June in line with Trump’s executive order that would create a national list of eligible voters, based on databases kept by other federal agencies. Only those on the list would be eligible to receive mail ballots.

Democratic officials in nearly two dozen states filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts. A federal judge there blocked Trump’s order last month, and an appeals court upheld that ruling, prompting Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court. But the appeals court for the District of Columbia refused Tuesday to block the order in a separate case, calling a legal challenge premature.

Democratic senators and governors have written to the Postal Service urging it to abandon efforts to implement Trump’s order.

 

“Donald Trump has shown he’ll stop at nothing to meddle in our upcoming elections,” Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement to The Associated Press. “At best, this new push will exacerbate already severe delays for mail-in voters and at worst, it will stop eligible Americans from casting their ballots.”

In a letter to Democratic senators earlier this month, the heads of the Postal Service said they were abiding by the court rulings that had halted the executive order. But Smith, of the postal workers union, told the AP on Tuesday that USPS information technology staffers who are union members are working on a planned portal for the list of eligible voters “behind the scenes.”

The Postal Service declined to respond to Smith’s statements and said it could not comment about whether it’s moving forward with work related to Trump’s order because of the litigation.

The postal workers’ union opposes the plan for a portal, a national list of eligible voters and using that list to determine who can receive a mail ballot. Smith said it shouldn’t be postal workers’ responsibility “to decide who can vote and who can’t vote.” 

 A plan to consolidate mail processing centers upsets officials

The Postal Service has been under financial stress for years and has been consolidating mail processing into fewer regional centers. Mail travels an average of 139 miles (224 kilometers) to reach one and sometimes 500 miles (805 kilometers), according to a recent Brookings report.

 

California officials said the change was a factor in the state rejecting more than 148,000 ballots from its June primary, with 63% of them arriving too late despite a seven-day grace period. Officials worried that some ballots were postmarked at processing facilities the day after they were dropped off at a post office, possibly invalidating them. Wisconsin officials also said hundreds of ballots from an election in April arrived late.

The Postal Service said postmarks generally are being applied with automated equipment at processing centers, “in the same manner and to the same extent as before.” It said someone who wants to make sure their ballot envelope gets a timely postmark can get a free one applied by a postal worker.

A report on the 2024 election by the USPS Office of Inspector General said the Postal Service handled more than 59 million pieces of ballot mail from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15 that year and that 97.3% arrived on time.

Some state election officials advise voters to avoid the mail

The Michigan secretary of state’s office is advising voters to hand-deliver ballots to their local clerk’s office or a drop box.

“We’ve seen these issues over a number of election cycles now — they’re always concerning, and that’s why we’ve put out that guidance,” said Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie.

The Postal Service said its Michigan centers are not seeing processing delays.

In Kansas, concerns about late ballot deliveries in the state’s 2024 primary election prompted a quip on the social platform X from Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican: “The Pony Express is more efficient at this point.” Asked his view now, spokesperson Whitney Tempel said Schwab still believes “keeping your ballot out of the hands of the federal government is best.”

Jamie Shew, a Democrat elected to oversee elections in Douglas County, home to the main University of Kansas campus, said his office is trying to change voters’ perceptions.

“I think voters are used to, you can drop it off on Friday and we’re going to receive it by Election Day,” Shew said Tuesday. “That’s just not the reality.”

California’s state budget includes $10 million for social media campaigns and other efforts to discourage last-minute ballot mailings.

And the Postal Service said it hasn’t changed its own longstanding advice for voters: They should get their ballots in the mail at least a week before their state’s deadline for receiving them.

___

In January, a group of mostly Democratic senators said it was concerned about a decision to end twice-daily mail dispatches from local post offices to regional processing centers. The result is that mail arriving after the only daily dispatch would go out the next day.

Lindsey Graham didn’t just flatter Trump. He smooth-talked him by Zeeshan Aleem

 Influence ran two ways between Trump and Graham — and had disastrous consequences

 

The late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose funeral services begin Tuesday in Washington, has been praised by his supporters as a man of conviction who never shied away from his belief that America had a duty to project its strength worldwide. Conversely, critics will remember Graham as an ally of President Donald Trump who abandoned his stated principles in order to be closer to the seat of power.

But these accounts miss something vital about the South Carolina lawmaker’s legacy: Graham was an operator who used his carefully cultivated proximity to the president to have a better chance of persuading Trump to adopt his own ultra-hawkish foreign policy goals. Their relationship was a two-way street, one that culminated in Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war with Iran.

 Graham and Trump formed a marriage of convenience based on their distinct but overlapping ideological worldviews

 The consequences of the Graham-Trump collaboration were vividly captured in a recent report by The Wall Street Journal based on unreleased footage from a documentary about Graham that was being filmed before he died. In one scene reported on by the Journal, Graham is outright giddy after Trump started the Iran war:

 “Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” [Graham] tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”

He then tells the crew that Trump was equally happy about the war. “I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘Best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”

 

Graham also goes on to boast about how his view prevailed over those of the isolationists in the Trump administration.

“You know, there’s a lot of people inside didn’t [sic] want to do it, so I’ve had my challenges, but President Trump, when he gets into the zone, he listens,” Graham says. He also describes Trump as “a great wartime president.”

The footage, some of which is clipped in the Journal article, is disturbing: Graham is openly joyful about helping to spark a war of aggression. He’s not talking about nearly crying over lives that will be lost, but tears of happiness after getting a war he had lobbied for — or floated as an option — for the better part of two decades.

 The clip also distills how Graham and Trump formed a marriage of convenience based on their distinct but overlapping ideological worldviews. Graham, a neoconservative ideologue, believed in preventive warfare against Iran. Meanwhile Trump, a militaristic right-wing nationalist, loves “blowing stuff” up and looks for what he perceives as quick and simple opportunities to demonstrate American power and imperialism. Graham glories in sidelining the parts of Trump’s inner circle who counseled restraint.

 

It was widely reported this year that Graham played an instrumental role in convincing Trump to attack Iran. In March, Sen. Rand Paul, R- Ky., described Graham’s effort to lobby for Iranian regime change as “the quintessential political maneuvering beyond all political maneuvering” and quipped there should be a law restricting how often they golf together.

This was a relationship that was built over many years. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine published in 2019, Graham said, “I have never been called this much by a president in my life.”

He added, “It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”

Graham seemed to handle that pressure well, insofar as he was able to maintain immense power in Washington until his last days. And he certainly made the most of  the opportunity — he got his war, even if it didn’t go the way he may have expected it to.

 

How the G.O.P. Turned Olive Garden Into a Voter ID Talking Point by Michael Gold

 Republicans claim that Olive Garden polices its Never-Ending Pasta Bowl more tightly than the United States does its elections. It’s not that simple.

 

Last week, President Trump gave a speech at the White House in which he made exaggerated claims about election vulnerabilities to pressure the Senate to push through a stalled voting restriction bill that would impose strict new voter identification requirements nationwide.

That same week, the pasta behemoth Olive Garden brought back its popular Never-Ending Pasta Pass, and informed customers that a photo ID would be needed to use it.

Thanks to a social media post — what else? — these two separate, seemingly unrelated events became intertwined, as Republicans spun up a buzzy but misleading talking point claiming that Olive Garden polices its bottomless pasta deal more tightly than the United States does its elections.

The claim misrepresents both voter ID laws and the multibillion-dollar casual dining chain’s rules surrounding unlimited breadsticks and limitless spaghetti. But it has nevertheless circulated wildly online, at the Capitol and at the White House, in the latest example of a corroded political discourse that often trivializes the weightiest topics, like comparing voting rights to fettuccine.

 

Olive Garden’s passes allow the 10,000 Americans lucky enough to purchase one to enjoy 13 weeks of unlimited pasta for 100 bucks. Given those economics, a social media user asked the chain whether families could share a pasta pass. The answer was no; passes could be used only by the individuals who bought them.

“Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering,” Olive Garden wrote on social media.

And just like that, Republicans had their latest and perhaps most appetizing talking point in their campaign to shame Democrats for opposing strict new measures that would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and limited forms of identification at the polls.

After Congress returned to session on Monday, Olive Garden and its endless pasta deal were invoked seven times in what is a normally dry House committee hearing and once on the Senate floor.

“We are protecting our breadsticks more than our ballots,” said Representative Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican who is the chairman of the Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over election legislation, and the author of a strict voter ID bill. As it happens, he also worked at the Janesville, Wis., Olive Garden during his senior year in high school.

 

The comparison is highly misleading. Three dozen states require voters to show identification to vote in person, including 23 that require a photo ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The remaining 14 states and Washington, D.C., use other methods to verify voters’ identities, such as requiring a signature on an affidavit or personal information to be provided at the polls.

The Republican bill, known as the SAVE America Act, would establish strict federal limits around what forms of photo identification could be used to verify a voter’s identity at every polling place in the country. It also would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Only five states issue photo identification that indicates American citizenship, meaning that in most places, individuals would have to produce a passport or a birth certificate — documents that studies have shown a substantial number of Americans do not have readily at hand — along with their photo ID to be eligible to vote at all under the bill.

Olive Garden would be hard-pressed to sell its bottomless pasta bowl were such documentation required.

Democrats have scoffed, arguing that Republicans are revealing how little they value Americans’ constitutional right to vote by equating it to a promotional card available to customers with cash to spare and the fortune to log onto a restaurant’s website at the right time.

“Voting is not pasta,” said Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, Democrat of New Mexico.

Still, the pasta discourse has even spread to the White House, where a spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, brought it up in a Newsmax interview the morning after Mr. Trump’s speech.

 

“I thought, that’s weird,” Ms. Jackson said. “Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more serious than Democrats are taking election security.”

The comparison then simmered on social media all weekend before Republican lawmakers brought it to the halls of the Capitol (which, incidentally, is six miles from the nearest Olive Garden).

Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, invoked the restaurant at the start of a hearing on Monday about the bills that House G.O.P. leaders are trying to bring to the floor this week.

“Heck,” Ms. Foxx said. “You even need to present a photo ID to utilize the Olive Garden Never-Ending Pasta Pass.”

The restaurant’s promotion also made its way to the Senate floor, where Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio and a close Trump ally, brought it up to hammer Democrats for blocking the SAVE America Act.

 

Democrats have denounced Republicans’ proposed legislation as overly burdensome, arguing that the requirements would make it more difficult for eligible Americans to vote.

They have also dismissed the Olive Garden comparison as overly simplistic, especially given that most Americans can still purchase a standard meal there without showing any identification at all.

“Voting is a constitutional right,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “It is not a lunch special. You have a constitutional right to vote; you don’t have a constitutional right to a breadstick or a bowl of pasta.”

A representative for Olive Garden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.