Rare rebuke

Senate votes to limit Trump’s Iran war powers in rare rebuke

By Morgan Rimmer

The Senate adopted a resolution on Tuesday directing the president to remove military forces from the conflict with Iran, a significant rebuke to Donald Trump and a strong message that the war lacks support in Congress.

Democrats have repeatedly forced votes to limit Trump’s war powers in both the House and the Senate – a campaign that has gradually picked up more GOP support in recent weeks, drawing the president’s ire.

GOP Sens. Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy joined Democrats in voting for the resolution, while Democratic Sen. John Fetterman voted against it. The final tally was 50-48.

The measure passed the House earlier this month. But because it is what’s known as a concurrent resolution, it does not require the president’s signature and, by definition, does not carry the force of law.

A House Democratic aide who has been involved in the effort to pass the war powers resolution told CNN earlier this month, however, that they believe the measure would be binding and it would be a legal matter to work out.

This is the 10th time the Senate has voted on an Iran war powers measure since the beginning of the year. An earlier Senate-led resolution advanced last month, but has not had a follow-up vote yet as Democrats work to ensure they have the support needed to pass it.

The House passed the concurrent resolution 215-208, with four House Republicans voting with Democrats and immediately facing the president’s anger. Trump called the four members “GRANDSTANDERS” and their action “unpatriotic” in a post on Truth Social after the vote.

Some Democratic senators, including Tim Kaine, have argued that passage of a war powers resolution is necessary, even after the US reached an agreement with Iran and amid ongoing negotiations with Tehran.

“I think it’s a good time to have the vote to say, ‘Hey, if we’re really in a period of maybe some stability here, let’s not just allow it to start up again without Congress being involved in that decision,” he told reporters last week.

Mess in Iran, a Mess of Money........

Jared Kushner Helped Make This Mess in Iran While Making a Mess of Money

Let’s not forget how America’s humiliation began.

Casey Michel

It was clear, almost from the start, that President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran would be his greatest strategic blunder yet. Nearly four months later, Tehran’s repressive regime remains entrenched and more radical than ever. The mullahs still have their enriched uranium and plenty of drones and missiles, and now they’ve shown the world they have a kill switch for the Strait of Hormuz—and much of the global economy.

If the current peace negotiations stick, they likely will leave us where we were before, only at the cost of more than $100 billion, thousands of Middle Eastern lives—and 13 American ones, plus hundreds injured—and whatever bit of our allies’ goodwill Trump hadn’t squandered already.

Yet Trump isn’t the sole owner of this fiasco. There was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who helped cajole him into greenlighting the attacks. And closer to home, there were the two inexperienced US envoys who led the pre-war negotiations with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, whose bumbling talking points accelerated America’s lurch into armed conflict—and strategic calamity.

Kushner and Witkoff’s starring role has been nearly forgotten in the months since Iran backed the United States into a corner by closing the strait. Kushner in particular brought epic conflicts of interest to the negotiations, not only because of the billions of dollars he was soliciting from Iran’s regional foes for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, but also because of his cozy, decades-long relationship with Netanyahu, who even visited the Kushner family’s home when Jared was a kid. (Here’s a timeline.)

Kushner proselytized Bibi’s claim that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from building a nuclear weapon—a view widely dismissed by nuclear experts—and appeared naive as to how the Iranians negotiate. His antipathy toward Tehran was no secret. According to author Andrea Bernstein, Kushner bonded with the dictator of the United Arab Emirates over their mutual loathing of Iran long before the UAE began bankrolling his firm. But Trump wasn’t troubled by his team’s inexperience, ineptness, or conflicts of interest. Kushner, Netanyahu, and the other Iran hawks got their way, resulting in America’s greatest humiliation on the global stage since the Iraq War.

The widely discussed Memorandum of Understanding has only confirmed this defeat. Among its 14 points are assurances that the United States will begin lifting its punishing sanctions on Iran—which it just did, at least temporarily—and that Tehran will regain access to frozen funds worth at least $24 billion. The MOU also says that US and regional allies will develop a “definitive, mutually agreed plan” for Iranian reconstruction that’s worth at least $300 billion.

This leaves questions aplenty: Who will cover the $300 billion tab? How will that money be dispensed and to whom? What restrictions will be placed on the funds? How much of it will be shouldered by the US public, which has already paid at least $132 billion, per Moody’s Analytics, for Trump’s unnecessary war?

Kushner has kept largely mum about the MOU, even amid suggestions that he could profit personally from the deal. But experts familiar with his role in pre-war negotiations had some thoughts. “I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism, if we can talk about Kushnerism,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. “The way I’d conceptualize it is sort of this mix of pro-Israel policies and corporate transactionalism…It shows the catastrophe of this war, and the failure of the negotiations that he and Witkoff were pursuing with the Iranians.”

The lead-up to the war helped make Kushner, now a billionaire, even richer, but the outbreak of armed conflict, and its outcome, has dealt a blow to Kushner’s geopolitical worldview. “If you go back to Breaking History, his memoir, one of the core arguments is that Iran is a bad actor that can’t be dealt with, and we have to muster this coalition against them,” Guyer said. “That’s why I think this is really a strategic defeat, because all these ideas that Kushner has been putting across since Trump’s first term have been totally shown to be not workable.”

The memo, notably, does nothing to lessen Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon in the future. It “kicks the most difficult nuclear issues down the road,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “The scope of Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, there is no defined process for eliminating the highly enriched uranium, and there is little detail about US priorities for verification. The United States and Iran still need to overcome significant gaps to reach a deal.”

The US lifted sanctions against Iran temporarily on Monday as high-level talks continued in Switzerland, the New York Times reported. The status of the talks remains unclear; Kushner is present, but has refrained from commenting on negotiations, while Vice President JD Vance and the regime were sending opposing public signals on Iran’s willingness to allow UN inspectors into their nuclear facilities. (“Progress on Nuclear Issues is Muddy,” the headline noted.)

There’s a two-month timeline set for the negotiations, and with Kushner still deeply involved, no telling whether they will succeed. “It is possible to get an effective nuclear deal in the next 60 days, but it will require the Trump administration to rethink its negotiating process,” Davenport said. “Witkoff and Kushner need to engage in direct, sustained negotiations and listen to nuclear experts who understand what is necessary for an effective nonproliferation agreement. In past talks, Witkoff and Kushner’s technical incompetence led the Trump administration to miss critical opportunities to engage Iran and recognize where Tehran was demonstrating flexibility.”

The bungled negotiations, with Kushner at center stage, were but the latest in a litany of failures attached to him. As I wrote in an excerpt of my upcoming book for Mother Jones, Kushner has a knack for failing up. He flopped as a media owner and made a badly timed bet on a New York City office tower that became a financial albatross around his family’s neck for more than a decade.

Indeed, his attempts to bail his family out of that reckless investment helped seed the foreign financial entanglements that have made his role as a US diplomat so problematic. Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

Kushner’s sole diplomatic achievement during Trump’s first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. But the accords sidelined Palestinian interests and thus have been cited, alongside normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, as a primary factor in Hamas’s catastrophic attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Even Trump’s Board of Peace, with Kushner as an executive board member, has been little more than a pay-to-play racket for foreign regimes to remain in the administration’s good graces.

With the Iran War, Kushner has unleashed yet another costly failure—this time, for all of us. The only shock is that anyone familiar with his story would be surprised by the outcome.

War On Algae

Trump Is Losing His War On Algae

A weird weekend of pond scum, lots of cops, and no antifa at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has exposed the limits of American power: President Donald Trump is also losing his war against algae.

In the face of thriving algal blooms and peeling “American flag blue” paint, the National Park Service on Monday began draining the pool for repairs. A contractor performing the work told E&E News that those repairs would not be done by July 4. The prior rehab, which Trump rushed to complete via no-bid contracts and more than $14 million in spending so far, has failed.

Trump, though, has blamed the problems on vandalism. And he has dispatched a hodgepodge army of law enforcement to protect the pool from “Radical Left Lunatics,” who he has said should face “Years in jail!”

Observing the action at the pool over much of the long weekend, we did not spot any antifa dumping algae, as MAGA conspiracy theorists allege. The hot temperature, shallow water and flawed filtration system means the green Scenedesmus algae can conquer the pool without human help.

There were, however, lots of cops. Walking around the pool at about 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, we counted at least seven US Marshals, some in “fugitive task force” tactical gear. They were supported by around 30 local police officers, volunteers who said they had been deputized for 30 days by the Marshals Service to help provide security for 250th anniversary celebrations. They came from Oklahoma City; Idaho Falls; Sarpy County, Nebraska; as well as Ontario, Monroe and Wayne counties in New York. They were mostly standing in the shade, and friendly. Some were hoping to catch a Nationals game on a day off. They seemed sort of bored.

The cops were coordinating with Park Police officers and maybe a dozen National Guard troops from Georgia and Louisiana, who were patrolling the pool in small groups. Over the last few days, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have also appeared poolside.

On Saturday, there were issues with radio frequency connections, so a mounted Park Police officer rode a white horse between groups of officers to share information on potential threats to the pool. He was less chatty than the volunteer officers, but he said that the horse’s name was Delilah, and that she was 21 years old.

In the pool, seven or so Park Service employees, wearing boots, waterproof overalls and NPS hoodies for the sun—it was about 86 degrees and sunny—were vacuuming up algae using pumps attached to long poles. (They had by then given up pouring in hydrogen peroxide.) Machines were pushing what looked like white foam into the water: the “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that the administration has claimed would kill the algae. Generators powering the pumps hummed loudly as green-tinted water poured out into drains on the Mall.

Another dozen or so uniformed Park Service employees looked on from the shade. On the north side of the pool, a duck and eight ducklings sat on the edge of the water. A park ranger sitting nearby said neither the algae nor cleaning efforts would hurt them.

From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, tourists took pictures of the scene. A band, in traditional Polish garb, prepared to play folk music for a holiday marking the summer solstice. A tourist shop nearby sold $18 water bottles with stickers advertising Freedom 250, the semi-private group Trump is using to organize highly personal celebrations linked to the 250th anniversary.

By the pool, a person in a pink frog costume brandished a “Team Algae” sign and heckled two National Guard troops. “Let’s go algae, let’s go,” the frog chanted, along with something about “pond scum.”

A small boy, in an ice cream cone shirt, asked his mother if the critics were protesting the algae. “No,” she answered. “They’re mad at the president.”

“Did he mean to grow the algae?” the boy asked. “No,” she said. Then they went to get ice cream.

Near one of the drains, an older couple, maybe in their sixties, picked through the grass nearby for loose pieces of blue paint, having first checked with the Park Police that doing so was permissible.  

The officers explained that visitors were allowed to put their hands in the water. They could even take paint chips that were already detached. But peeling the paint still attached to the pool was forbidden.

The administration said Monday that Park Police have made five arrests and issued five citations for alleged vandalism. But an officer on the scene Friday evening said that they had also detained more than 20 people, in many cases without further action, for suspected pool tampering.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted that he had “just inspected the pool” and decried the vandalism he said he observed.

“WOW, who would do such a thing?,” Trump wrote. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!”

The president, though, didn’t view the pool from the ground. He appears to have formed his impression from a helicopter as he returned to the White House from Camp David.

Down below, one of the ducklings was photographed floating dead in water. (Experts note that most ducklings in the wild die before reaching maturity, so it’s not clear whether the algae or chemicals used to clean the pool were to blame.)

On Saturday around 5:30 p.m., the radios of some marshals nearby barked. “One male, black shoes, white socks, currently being detained,” someone said. “Eleven Charlie moved to intercept.” Two officers sped away in a golf cart.

Across the pool, Delilah galloped toward a group of National Guard troops surrounding a young man, in white socks, seated with his ankles crossed on the grass by the north side of the pool. A Park Police cruiser, siren on, pulled up.

By the time we made it around, a half dozen of the local police, seven National Guard troops and a couple Park Police officers surrounded the suspected vandal in a semi-circle, facing a small crowd of onlookers.

After a few minutes, they let the guy go. He declined to give his name. But he said he was from Indiana, and that he had stuck his hand in the water and pulled out a piece of floating paint. The officers had suspected that he pulled it off. He received a citation, he said. He walked off with his family, looking embarrassed.

The cops dispersed. There was a big pile of poop where Delilah had stood. In the water, the feds kept vacuuming the algae.

Risky and uncoordinated

House Republicans slam Trump’s ‘risky and uncoordinated’ military funding strategy

The Trump administration is trying to fund “critical” military efforts along “entirely separate tracks,” lawmakers lament.

By Leo Shane III and Connor O'Brien

House Republican appropriators are publicly rebuking the Trump administration for seeking must-have military cash through a party-line reconciliation bill that’s not guaranteed to clear Congress.

In a report they plan to release later this week, obtained by POLITICO, House appropriators warn that the White House is trying to fund “critical efforts” like weapons and military equipment through the party-line process, rather than using it to “scale up” military dollars beyond Congress’ regular government funding bills.

“This approach is risky and uncoordinated,” reads the report, an official addendum that goes along with the chamber’s defense funding bill for the fiscal year that starts in October.

In particular, appropriators criticized President Donald Trump’s budget request for splitting funding for the F-35 fighter, the most expensive program in Pentagon history, between the two bills.

The annual government funding bills and the reconciliation process are “entirely separate tracks, with different timelines, committees of jurisdiction, and approval processes,” the report notes.

Many Republican lawmakers are also doubtful GOP leaders will succeed in enacting another party-line package this year.

Reality check

Senate Republicans say it’s time to give Trump a reality check

A Wednesday lunch could bring weeks of interbranch tensions to a head.

By Jordain Carney

Donald Trump is about to come face to face with one of his frequent punching bags: Senate Republicans.

They might just be in a mood to punch back.

The president was invited to GOP senators’ Wednesday lunch to push for his No. 1 priority, the GOP election bill known as the SAVE America Act. But several outgoing Republicans who have clashed with Trump said Monday they will be there to deliver a reality check: The bill isn’t passing, and it’s time to move on.

“I’m going to be there front and center,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters. “It will be important if it actually is a constructive exchange of different opinions, and hopefully we can all get on the same page. Right now, we’re not in a great place.”

Cornyn, who recently lost his bid for a fifth term to a Trump-endorsed challenger, reiterated the votes just aren’t there to pass the elections bill: “I’ve been around here long enough and been through enough battles and counted enough votes to know that it doesn’t just magically occur, no matter how much you wish it would happen.”

Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — who are also departing the Senate in part due to Trump — said Monday they, too, will be at the closed-door lunch and urged Trump to turn the page on the SAVE America Act.

“I’m a co-sponsor, but it doesn’t have the votes, and so it’s time to talk about something else,” said Cassidy, who also lost to a Trump-backed primary opponent.

Trump was invited to the Wednesday lunch by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who oversees the weekly gathering as GOP steering committee chair, at a tenuous moment. Senate Republicans have grown frustrated with Trump’s fixation on the elections bill, are openly questioning parts of his Iran deal and worry that his habit of blindsiding them with sudden policy U-turns is making it harder to preserve their majority in November.

Scott’s invitation comes as the elections bill has emerged as a perennial headache for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whom Scott informed of the invite after it was extended. Thune and other members of the GOP conference insist it doesn’t have the votes to pass and have begged Trump to focus on more attainable priorities.

Same goes, they say, for other Trump demands — killing the 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation, for instance, and ending the “blue slip” practice of giving home-state senators a say on some presidential nominees.

“None of those are going to happen here, and we need to be honest with the president,” Tillis said. “So why don’t we spend more time being productive about how we communicate, when we communicate, and get some of these very pressing issues done?”

But Trump has shown he will not relent, especially on the SAVE America Act — a bill that would impose new proof-of-citizenship and identification requirements for U.S. voters in its base form, with the president demanding still other controversial provisions added on top of that.

In a Truth Social post late last week, Trump name-checked Thune and urged the Senate to nix the filibuster and approve the bill: “Anybody who doesn’t want to Terminate the Filibuster is a FOOL, a very stupid one, at that!”

Several GOP senators, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have objected to the precedent the bill would set by nationalizing election procedures. Test votes on the bill have not garnered more than 48 supporters, though a narrower bill focused on voter ID won 50 votes. That’s still far short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a certain Democratic filibuster.

Asked late last week about Trump’s comments, Thune said a majority of Senate Republicans have long-held views against nixing the filibuster.

“It’s not a question of what I want to do or don’t want to do,” he said. “It does always come back to the math. And … there just aren’t the votes to do it.”

Thune said Monday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the election bill comes up but predicted it would be a “back and forth” between Trump and GOP senators over multiple subjects, including the brewing Iran deal and the stalemate over a key surveillance law and future of the director of national intelligence post.

He added that “hopefully” the discussion would include “celebrating some of our successes, talking about the path forward.”

The GOP election bill has become a consistent friction point within the party and within the Senate GOP conference. Senate Republicans largely support the bill but believe the party needs to turn its focus to Democrats, rather than fighting each other, with just months to go until the midterms.

Republican senators have kvetched for months about how they believe Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is setting unrealistic expectations for the bill’s passage. Lee posted on X over the weekend that he spoke with Trump and “he’s as convinced as I am that we can get this done if the Senate’s willing to do the hard work.”

Cornyn called out Lee Monday, saying that he “is contributing to this fantasy that somehow it’s going to happen.”

Lee responded that the election bill isn’t a fantasy but “a plan to avoid a nightmare — one that’s coming soon unless we act.”

Senate Republicans agreed to take up the voting bill earlier this year, in part after leaders privately reassured wary GOP senators that the debate wouldn’t result in an attempt to skirt the 60-vote filibuster. But the weekslong debate failed to break the stalemate on the bill, and Senate Republicans ultimately placed it on the back burner as other legislative deadlines piled up.

Conservatives, however, hadn’t forgotten about the bill, and now they want the Senate to continue to vote on it.

Scott — who came in third in the leadership contest Thune won after the 2024 election— sent a letter to his fellow Senate Republicans Monday, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, saying that he wanted to have “robust conversations” this week about what the party should be focused on before the midterms. That, he said, should include voting on the SAVE America Act or narrower voter ID legislation.

“We need to make a clear distinction as to who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” Scott wrote in the letter. “We need to show voters that we are listening to them and will fight for their priorities whether any Democrats vote with us or not.”

American reckoning

Giorgia Meloni’s American reckoning

With its low defense spending and trade surplus with America, Italy was always bound to clash with Trump. Their spat can now help Meloni’s re-election hopes.

By Hannah Roberts

U.S. President Donald Trump’s America First agenda was always going to set him on a collision course with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Although the transatlanticist right-wing Meloni had traded for years on the idea that she was Trump’s most natural European ally and could act as intermediary for his relations with the EU, Italy had no way to avoid MAGA’s blacklist.

Meloni aligned with Trump on topics such as migration and the culture war, but it was only a question of time until MAGA cried foul over Italy’s low defense spending and major trade surplus with the U.S.

In fact, Italy was precisely the sort of country Trump habitually complains about for free-riding on U.S. security guarantees. “Given the radical collision of U.S. and European interests, a clash was always on the cards,” said Daniele Albertazzi, professor at the University of Surrey and author of several books on Europe’s radical right.

Although the fight was always coming, it was uncertain how Meloni would respond. Unlike most world leaders who have brushed off Trump’s personal slights, the pugnacious Italian premier ultimately took the unusual step of escalating the dispute, skewering the American leader for impugning Italy’s national dignity.

After Trump mocked Meloni on Friday for allegedly “begging” him for a photograph at a recent meeting of the G7 leading economies, and accused her of exploiting their relationship for domestic political gain, she shot back that he had invented the incident and said her own popularity was suffering because of her friendship with him.

The intensity of her response was carefully politically calibrated in a country where Trump is roundly hated, and where Meloni faces re-election next year.  An Ipsos survey in May found 77 percent of Italians had a negative view of Trump.

Her coalition partners in the center-right Forza Italia party have supported her, seeing the compelling political logic of standing up to Trump.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, leader of Forza Italia, called Trump’s words “grave and offensive” and cancelled a trip to the U.S. scheduled for early this week.

That doesn’t mean Meloni is escaping criticism. The opposition center-left Democratic Party said she was wrong to think she could ever harness Trump.

For Lia Quartapelle, a foreign affairs spokesperson for the Democratic Party, the dispute has exposed the folly of relying on a privileged relationship with an unpredictable Washington that “weaponizes our dependence on the U.S. against us.”

The incident should prompt Meloni to invest more heavily in European alliances, she added.  The Italian leader “didn’t understand that Trump doesn’t have allies; he thinks of the world as a place of great powers and their subjects.”

Quartapelle continued that the clash signaled a broader shift in relations between the Italian right and MAGA, which could now look to “very dangerous” figures such as extreme-right General Roberto Vannacci as a more natural ally. 

The turning point: Iran

After Trump’s re-election, Meloni cultivated ties with the White House and was presented as a bridge between Washington and Brussels. 

The Iran war changed that mood music.

Trump’s decision in February to launch military action against Tehran proved deeply unpopular in Italy, where voters worried about rising energy prices and the risk of a wider conflict, making Meloni’s perceived closeness to the White House “a huge liability,” Albertazzi said.

Trump’s attack came after Meloni had already begun putting distance between herself and Washington, refusing access to Italian bases for U.S. bombers.

From the perspective of Trump’s supporters, the problems run deeper than Italy’s trade surplus.

Ben Harnwell, the international editor for Steve Bannon’s War Room TV show, said the White House had been increasingly irritated by Meloni’s efforts to present herself as an intermediary between Washington and Europe.

“What really upset those around the president was that she was spinning herself as a bridge between the U.S. and Europe,” Harnwell said. Trump “doesn’t need an interlocutor. He can make a phone call to anyone who matters, without Giorgia Meloni’s help.”

Harnwell said Meloni’s positions on defense spending and her defense of Pope Leo XIV — another of Trump’s sparring partners — would also have been noted in MAGA circles. Trump’s public attack, he argued, was intended to send a message.

By speaking to an Italian network, “Trump clearly wanted to humiliate her in front of her own people,” he said.

The attack was too demeaning to ignore, Albertazzi said. “She had to push back because I think the political price [of not reacting] would have been too high.” Trump had treated her “as frivolous, like a fan. As a nationalist she needs to preserve an image of somebody with dignity and strength.”

Yet Harnwell cautioned against interpreting the dispute as a permanent break.

Meloni, whose efforts to present herself as an intermediary between Washington and Europe are also seen as an irritant to the White House, is pictured in Paris with fellow leaders Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Merz after talks on the war in Iran in April 2026. | Michel Euler/AFP via Getty Images

“Trump doesn’t bear grudges,” he said. “You can fall out with him and come back in the tent as long as you recognize he is the alpha.”

Even so, he suggested Italy’s importance inside the White House should not be overstated.

“They don’t spend much time thinking about Italy in the White House or about any country other than America,” he said. “If the prime minister of a middling European power won’t take his calls, he’ll get by.”

No other option

Despite the potential electoral advantages to Meloni of a high-profile bust-up with Trump, Rome is showing little genuine sign of abandoning its broader strategic alignment with Washington.

Despite canceling this week’s trip to America, Tajani insisted he will still attend America’s 250th anniversary July 4 party in Rome — celebrations that are highly important to Trump.

Claudio Borghi, senator for the far-right League party in Meloni’s coalition, argued that Rome should have aligned more closely with Trump’s goals for Europe from the outset, including by pursuing bilateral tariff negotiations with Washington rather than acting through Brussels.

He advised the government to “make every effort from today to diplomatically overcome this unfortunate situation.”

Leo Goretti, political scientist and associate dean of the Rome Business School, said that behind the public rhetoric, Italy was as reliant on the transatlantic alliance as ever.

Meloni’s “very tough initial response doesn’t affect Italy’s policy, which is still trying to cling to the transatlantic relationship,” he said.

“The government tried to play tough but realized it can’t play tough.”

Future headaches

Jeffries gets preview of his future headaches

Progressive wins would deliver an immediate blow to Jeffries’ credibility as a powerbroker in his own backyard.

Riley Rogerson

Trouble for Hakeem Jeffries is brewing close to home.

New Yorkers will decide Tuesday whether to support a slate of insurgent progressive candidates who are bullish about bucking the party establishment: Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez.

The Zohran Mamdani-backed trio are taking on incumbent, leadership allies: Rep. Dan Goldman, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat as well as outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who endorsed a different successor.

The progressive challengers are positioning themselves as firebrands willing to play hardball to force the Democratic Caucus leftward. Take Chevalier, a Democratic Socialists of America member who told Vox last week that “all deportations are wrong” including for people who have been convicted of breaking U.S. law. Neither she nor Valdez have said if they would back Jeffries as speaker should Democrats take the majority.

In addition to presenting a long-term headache for a potential Jeffries speakership, progressive challenger wins would deliver an immediate blow to Jeffries’ credibility as a power broker in his own backyard. He endorsed Goldman and Espaillat.

As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer weighs a 2028 reelection bid, he too will be paying close attention to the depth of lefty, anti-incumbent fervor among voters in his state.

Democratic leadership’s old guard will also be on watch Tuesday evening as Maryland decides who will replace former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer: his preferred successor Adrian Boafo or his old frenemy Nancy Pelosi’s pick of former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn.

Democrats have been divided on the race from the jump, with Gov. Wes Moore and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks also backing Boafo. Fellow Marylander — and maybe 2028 presidential candidate — Sen. Chris Van Hollen got in on the action last month by knocking Boafo for taking AIPAC and crypto money.

And a PSA: The many, many self-funded campaign ads from warring Democratic millionaires Rep. April McClain Delaney and her predecessor David Trone — who is trying to win his seat back after losing a Senate bid in 2024 — will come to an end Tuesday night.

Republicans won’t escape the messy primary day.

In Utah, House GOP leadership member Rep. Blake Moore will attempt to beat challenger Karianne Lisonbee who is taking him to task for once opposing partisan gerrymandering. An AI proxy war is also playing out in Rep. Celeste Maloy’s district where former state Rep. Phil Lyman is attacking the congressmember — who has received nearly $1 million from an Anthropic-funded super PAC — over data center construction.

Yet, at least one House Republican is pulling for a Democrat Tuesday evening.

Vulnerable GOP Rep. Mike Lawler has meddled in the Democratic primary to run against him. Jason Beeferman reports that Lawler has tried to tear down Army vet Cait Conley via a covert text blast, among other tactics, seeming to prefer that he get to run against her opponent Beth Davidson.

Read also: Mamdani called AIPAC dark money ‘monsters.’ None of the congressional candidates he’s backing seem to care.

Scale of Trump’s political blunder......

The scale of Trump’s political blunder in Iran is coming into focus

Analysis by Aaron Blake

The first major poll conducted since the Trump administration signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran has a point that seems like good news for Trump: Americans overwhelmingly agree he should end the war rather than push for more concessions.

But it’s not because they actually like the agreement; it’s because they think the war is a debacle, and they just want to be done with it.

A new CBS News-YouGov poll shows that even as Americans get their first glimpse — however tentative — of the finish line, it hasn’t improved their views of the war one iota.

And as the administration enters a new phase in this process, it’s worth a check-in on where the politics stand and how they could impact what comes next.

Americans think it’s a bad deal

The poll shows 78% of Americans said they’d prefer to end the war now, while just 22% wanted to hold out — to “continue … until Iran gives up more.”

At least one Trump political adviser was celebrating that finding on Sunday. He suggested it showed the American people were on Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s side on the accord with Iran.

But the rest of the poll makes it abundantly clear that’s not true.

When asked to actually review the agreement, just 22% of Americans said it’s better for the United States than Iran, while significantly more — 37% — said it’s better for Iran. (The other 41% said it was about equal.)

The percentage who said it’s better for the US included just 39% of Republicans. So just to underscore, only about 4 in 10 members of Trump’s own party think his administration negotiated a win here.

Americans also said 45%-29% that the war hasn’t been successful from a strategic standpoint.

They’re accepting a strategic loss

But that last finding might undersell how much of a strategic defeat Americans see this as.

Perhaps nothing drives that home like polling on the nuclear issue — Trump’s most critical goal.

While Trump has repeatedly asserted his aim was to permanently stop Iran’s nuclear program, the CBS poll shows 69% of Americans and even 45% of Republicans said this agreement, if finalized to bring the war to a conclusion, won’t accomplish that.

This echoes a Fox News poll conducted the weekend the framework was being negotiated in mid-June. It showed registered voters said 64%-35% that it was unlikely a peace agreement would stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

Notably, the agreement leaves many details for later, so there are still plenty of issues to iron out on the nuclear front.

But the Trump administration appears to be walking back some of its goals, and these findings get at the rank pessimism that exists in the American public.

The new CBS poll also shows:

• 68% said the agreement, if finalized, won’t have stopped Iran from threatening other countries. Nearly half (48%) of polled Republicans agreed with that statement.
• 79% said it hasn’t made Iran’s leaders more pro-US.
• 74% said it hasn’t made Iran’s people safe and free, which Trump had said was one of his goals earlier this year.

They think the war was counterproductive

A striking and consistent detail in polling on the Iran war are findings that suggest the war is not only viewed as a failure, but as counterproductive.

And that continues today.

Trump claims the war has destroyed Iran militarily and pulverized its nuclear program. But just 37% of Americans say Iran is weaker today than before the war began.

More than 6 in 10 say Iran is as strong as it was before (38%) or stronger (25%).

While Iran has surely suffered major military losses, it has also demonstrated significant leverage via its now-proven ability to lock down the Strait of Hormuz and jeopardize the world economy.

Speaking of which, Americans think the war is likely to continue exacting a toll in the months and years to come.

A clear 57% majority said the war has actually “created more problems than it solved.” That’s nearly three times the 21% who said it had solved more problems than it created.

They think Trump was caught off-guard

And when it comes to that impact, Americans seem to think Trump simply didn’t understand what he was getting himself into.

The poll asked whether people thought the Trump administration understood the impact the war would have on the world economy.

Fully 64% thought the war impacted the world economy more than the administration expected. That includes 51% of polled Republicans.

Of course, there’s plenty to back that up — both from Trump’s own public comments as well as reporting. CNN reported in March that the administration underestimated Iran’s willingness to try and close the Strait of Hormuz.

Americans are just anxious for it to be over — and think Trump is, too

The last big lesson is that Americans are on the same page with Trump in a way: They just want it to be over, and they think Trump does, too.

The Fox News poll in mid-June had shown 70% of registered voters said they were concerned the war would become a long-term commitment. And 87% said it was important to avoid a prolonged war.

That likely helps explain why people might be willing to accept a suboptimal agreement. The administration said the war was likely to last about four to six weeks, and it’s now dragged on for nearly four months.

Americans haven’t seen many deliverables during that time. And given they didn’t see much reason to go to war in the first place, it’s not a big logical leap that they would decide to cut bait.

And perhaps most tellingly, that’s what they think Trump is doing right now — trying to cut bait.

The CBS poll asked whether Americans thought the Trump administration was reaching this agreement because it had met all of its goals, or because it “wants the conflict to be over.”

Two-thirds of Americans said it was because the administration just wants to wrap it up.

Battery Storage

Why GM Is Betting on a Future With Sodium-Ion Battery Storage

The automaker and Peak Energy are developing a safer alternative to lithium-ion tech.

Dan Gearino

Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.

The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.

I spoke last week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.

“It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt. It’s an abundant element.”

A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.

“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.

But there are downsides. Lithium-ion batteries use rare and expensive materials such as lithium and cobalt, and they are highly flammable.

Sodium-ion is a sister technology, he said. The main difference is that it uses sodium to carry the charge inside the battery, rather than lithium. “It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt,” Dales said. “It’s an abundant element.”

Also, fire risk is much lower.

The main downside is that a sodium-ion battery has lower energy density than a lithium-ion one, so an energy storage project requires a larger battery or batteries to achieve the same capacity.

But what about the cost?

Right now, sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium-ion because the latter has economies of scale from being the dominant technology and companies have spent decades honing the manufacturing process. But companies such as Peak are confident that sodium-ion batteries will be less expensive, and eventually much less expensive, as the product moves from the fringes of the market to the mainstream.

The world’s leading battery-maker, CATL of China, has invested in developing sodium-ion batteries for cars and energy storage, citing cost and safety advantages.

In the United States, Peak is one of about a dozen companies working on the technology. One of its peers, Natron Energy, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Peak, which is based in Burlingame, California, in the Bay Area, has about 125 employees. It also has a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Peak was founded in 2023 by Landon Mossberg, the CEO, who came from the battery maker Northvolt and had prior experience at Tesla, and Dales, who previously was at the battery maker Enovix. 

Under the partnership with GM, the automaker will develop sodium-ion batteries in its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems.

The agreement helps GM build an energy business that includes electric vehicles, charging and stationary energy storage. Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that his company believes “sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems.”

GM is one of several automakers branching out into energy storage systems. One reason for this is that the companies built battery manufacturing capacity that exceeds current EV demand, so they are looking to new markets.

Based on manufacturing capacity, sodium-ion battery market share is essentially zero in North America, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It will still be less than 1 percent in 2030, according to the research firm’s forecast.

In China, sodium-ion’s market share is 1 percent and on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment,” said Anya Sidhu, a battery analyst for Benchmark, in an email.

Sidhu said sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

“The partnership between GM and Peak Energy signals growing commercial confidence, particularly for stationary energy storage, where cost and supply chain resilience matter more than energy density,” she said.

Dales said the market is large and diverse enough that several, if not many, battery technologies will be major contributors. For example, analysts and battery scientists have long made the case that solid-state batteries—with a solid instead of a liquid or gel as a key component—are the future because of high energy densities.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world,” he said. “There’s no reason why a single solution should be the thing that works best for every single application.”

Who is in charge???????

Trump Threatens Iran as JD Vance Announces “Great Progress” on Ceasefire

“You close it, and you won’t have a country.”

Sophie Hurwitz

This morning, Vice President JD Vance touched down in Switzerland for the first round of talks with Iran. The stated goal: extending last week’s interim mediated ceasefire and the Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Donald Trump into a more permanent peace in the 110-day US-Israeli war on Iran. But as those talks continued, Trump lost no time in taking to social media and Fox News to threaten Iran.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social Sunday morning. “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Lebanon’s civil defense reported that Israeli strikes had killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. In response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz shipping pathway, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in the Bürgenstock resort near Lake Lucerne where the talks are being held, Vance said that “great progress” was being made, without being explicit about the steps that had been taken. He noted that the gathering would “allow us to sit together as teams for the first time in history,” with the goal of turning “over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand.” 

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a lead negotiator, said Iran’s military is prepared to react to Trump’s verbal aggression. “They better be careful with their statements; our armed forces are ready to respond in a different way,” he wrote on X. Iranian officials reportedly walked out of Sunday’s talks, protesting Trump’s threats.

A Washington Post report today reveals the devastating human toll of the war. “Months after the war began with a wave of US and Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the scale of civilian casualties and destruction in Iran remains difficult to measure,” Post reporters Dylan Moriarty and N. Kirkpatrick wrote. 

In a single airstrike, 100 buildings were damaged in one civilian neighborhood in Tehran. Almost a third of the city has been hit by US and Israeli missiles. One report on civilian harm puts the death toll from late February to mid-April at 1,701 civilians, including 307 children. Across both Iran and Lebanon, over 7,000 people have been killed since mid-February, according to official casualty figures. 

In a Sunday morning phone interview with Fox News, Trump expressed some willingness to continue the carnage. “You close it, and you won’t have a country,” he warned. Fox News reporter Trey Yingst said the president told him that he told Iranian officials. “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country,” if they did not open the essential transportation lanes for oil in the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has repeatedly referred to himself as the “Guardian Angel” of this particular body of water. “We may take over the Strait, if we have to,” Trump told Yingst.

Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are pushing in that same direction. Graham reportedly spent over four hours with the President on Friday, outlining a plan to “take the Strait of Hormuz over by force” even as the clock starts on a 60-day negotiating period. On Face the Nation Sunday, Graham told host Margaret Brennan, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.” He added, “Let’s try a diplomatic solution. I think it’s going to fail. What happens next?” 

They are all crazy....

The Southern Baptist Convention Was Going Mainstream. Then the Christian Nationalists Weighed In.

The SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack.

Kiera Butler

With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”

Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.'”

Because of the SBC’s size, it’s also extremely influential politically—which is where the Center for Baptist Leadership, which Wolfe created with a handful of fellow SBC members, comes in. “The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks,” he says. “We don’t want to let them do that.”

“The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks. We don’t want to let them do that.”

There are signs that Wolfe and his allies are succeeding. Earlier this month, when tens of thousands of representatives from SBC churches met in Orlando for the annual conference, the group voted in favor of codifying an official ban on women pastors (though most SBC churches already allow only male pastors), affirmed robust immigration enforcement, and acknowledged the United States’ history of “sins such as slavery, racism, abortion, injustice, and sexual immorality.”

The group also elected a new president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, who is theologically and politically conservative, and has railed against critical race theory and decried the “woke riptide” in the denomination. The Center for Baptist Leadership endorsed Rice for SBC president; Rice has appeared on Center for Baptist Leadership podcasts and at events hosted by the group. Shortly after the meeting, on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast, the group’s president, William Wolfe, hailed Rice’s victory as “the end of the SBC being steered by weaponized empathy.”

Indeed, the SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack—a major victory for Wolfe and his small but vocal group of right-wing leaders within the SBC, some of whom have ties to an ascendant movement of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists.

The Center for Baptist Leadership emerged in early 2024 from what Wolfe and his colleagues see as a dangerous departure in the SBC from the conservative values—traditional family structures, clearly defined gender roles, a belief in the infallibility of the Bible—that have grounded the denomination since its founding. Over the last decade, the SBC moved toward the center, influenced by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement to expose sexual abuse and harassment.

Wolfe and his colleagues oppose SBC leaders whom they see as “caught up in the spirit of the worldly ‘MeToo’ movement, DEI ideology, and social justice signaling,” according to the group’s website. Those misguided aims, the Center for Baptist Leadership claims, have led to a scourge of problems, including women pastors, financial secrecy, and an obsession with blaming the SBC as a whole for the sex abuse scandals in individual churches, thereby bringing “perverse, anti-Christian standards of justice to judge claims of abuse.”

But it isn’t just church matters that the SBC seeks to influence—it’s also national politics, a goal that Wolfe is well qualified to achieve. As I wrote two years ago:

Wolfe served in the first Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

Wolfe told me he believes that SBC members would largely agree with those sentiments. “It’s something Baptists historically believe, that we should be involved in politics and we should be unashamed about bringing our Christian beliefs and presuppositions into the political square,” he said. He said he could imagine a version of a Christian America where people of other faiths held office, though he noted that some Baptist founders “thought that only Christians should be able to hold elected office.” On the issue of women voting, he declined to weigh in, stating only, “I think that the 19th amendment was duly enacted and is the law of the land.”

On X, where he has 96,000 followers, Wolfe is a firebrand, regularly arguing against religious tolerance and multiculturalism: “The idea that ‘all religions deserve equal respect’ is one of the most disastrous lies of the modern age,” he fumed last week. On the same day, in another tweet, he wrote, “Mass migration is biological warfare waged by secular globalist elites against the native Christian peoples of the West.”

In our phone call, Wolfe stressed that his tweets don’t necessarily reflect the work of the Center for Baptist Leadership. But he also reaffirmed his social media statements, calling religious pluralism a “recipe for disaster” and arguing that “there are people who want to see native Christian Western populations diminished and negatively impacted by third-world migration.” He said he saw Hungary as an example of a country that has successfully handled immigration. “Hungary is a spiritually dead country in many ways, but it’s preserved its Christian heritage,” he said. “It’s preserved its people—they’ve not allowed their people to be replaced by millions of migrants.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

When I asked Wolfe what he meant by the statement about Christians being called to arms, he said it was more general than specific. “It was just sort of a basic point of Christians have been in that situation before many times throughout the centuries,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves in a position like that again.”

Wolfe isn’t the Center for Baptist Leadership’s only powerful connection to the Christian right. The fiscal sponsor of the group is American Reformer, an online magazine founded by Josh Abbotoy, an entrepreneur who also runs a venture capital firm that aims to build a Christian techno-utopian community in rural Appalachia. Abbotoy, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the Center for Baptist Leadership, told me via email that he sees the recent votes at SBC as indicative of a sea change in how Christians are beginning to relate to the broader culture. “I think we are starting to see a shift toward a cultural insurgency model,” he wrote to me, “in which evangelical leaders strategically adjust to the reality that broader society has become less amenable to Christian values.”

Michael Clary, a Kentucky pastor and Christian nationalist who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Baptist Leadership, also sees the SBC as needing a more muscular faith. In an email to me, he bemoaned a modern, excessively passive Christian culture, in thrall to a “loser theology” that demanded that the church “retreat into pietistic ghettos while we watch the world burn.” Instead, he wrote, Christians “should bring their convictions into public life, including their votes, their advocacy, and their cultural engagement.”

And there are signs that the SBC’s ties to Christian nationalists extend beyond the Center for Baptist Leadership. Consider Al Mohler, a prominent SBC leader who has served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky since 1993. He has witnessed decades of social change, but put forth this year’s amendment to ban women pastors. He appeared last week on the podcast of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor—though not a member of the SBC—who presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. Mohler expressed frustration with what he considered a misconception that Baptist forefathers were “some kind of strict separationist when it came to Christian morality and the society.” Baptists, he said, actually had a lot in common with Christian nationalists like Wilson. “I have been calling for maximum Christian influence in the public square my whole life,” he said.

Smietana, the religion reporter, noted that the Center for Baptist Leadership’s contingent at the annual meeting, “didn’t have huge numbers.” The group’s budget isn’t publicly available because they exist under the financial umbrella of American Reformer, though Wolfe told me the organization is run “on a shoestring.” Still, Smietana said, “the group has really influenced the narrative and the public relations,” he said, through its social media presence, podcasts, and relationships its leaders have built with influential SBC members. The election of Rice and the other conservative victories, he said, “are a real win for them,” and a signal that the broader SBC may be open to their agenda.

Nathan Finn, a religion professor who leads the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, was careful not to overstate the Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence on the SBC. But he did acknowledge that it reflected a growing movement within the larger denomination toward a “populist distrust of institutions and elites.” 

The amendment that Mohler proposed to officially ban women pastors hasn’t been adopted yet; SBC leaders will hold the final vote at next year’s convention in Indianapolis. For Wolfe, this year’s meeting was confirmation of Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence—and a sign to continue the crusade. “Conservative reformers in the SBC aren’t the fringe,” he tweeted. “We are the representatives of what the broad base of grassroots Southern Baptists think & want. We are the center. Time to assume it and act accordingly.”

Spot on the Moon

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the evening star emerged beyond the bright lunar limb.

Unraveling

The Quiet Unraveling of America’s Food Safety Net

Maine had a plan to feed its hungry. Then came Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill.”

By Marcia Brown

As spring hit Maine and the lobstermen prepared for the summer season by repairing their traps and replacing their rope, state lawmakers set out to mend a widening hole in the American social-safety net.

Last year’s passage of the massive federal tax-and-spending One Big Beautiful Bill Act has set in motion one of the biggest transformations of the welfare state that the United States has seen in decades. For more than a generation, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which provides roughly 40 million Americans with money for groceries — has served as the country’s dominant vector for direct payments to people struggling to eat. But SNAP’s era as arguably the nation’s preeminent anti-poverty program may be ending. Already 3.5 million people nationwide have been booted from the program and, as the law’s new eligibility terms take effect this year, more are likely to follow, while others will be abruptly sent back into a workforce for which they are unprepared. Parents of teenage children and adults in their 60s will now be expected to find a job and prove they are working. Roughly 45,000 people in Maine, including veterans and homeless adults — briefly granted a reprieve from work requirements during the Biden administration — will be newly required to work or volunteer. Costs to states will balloon, as they are expected to kick in more funds to administer the program and for the first time pay part of the cost of benefits themselves.

In few places has the response been as swift as in Maine, where Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, legislative leaders and state nonprofits seven years ago committed to a 2030 goal of ensuring Mainers always have enough to eat. Now that ambitious objective — one that officials and activists believed was within reach for a small state with a motivated government, even after pandemic-era setbacks — seems even further away.

Instead, lawmakers, nonprofits and bureaucrats now see themselves spending the remainder of the decade trying to manage the impact of a federal law that will make it harder for millions of people to obtain federal nutrition assistance and health care while passing significant costs onto states. The Maine legislature passed a $500 million supplemental budget this spring that will raise revenue through a new tax on millionaires, fund increased staffing to administer SNAP and create a $30 million contingency fund to keep federal food assistance running in the event the program lapses as it did during last year’s record-setting government shutdown.

“What makes it difficult is knowing it’s not sustainable,” said Maine Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau at the state house, bleary-eyed in a worn long-sleeve tee and vest after presiding over several days of late-night sessions in April to deliver the budget and other priorities.

The new federal requirements are aimed at eliminating fraud and ensuring that adults capable of working attempt to do so. But state officials who actually administer the programs say that most real-life situations are far more complex — that those Americans who struggle to feed themselves often have health challenges or work histories or family responsibilities or transportation problems that make finding work difficult.

“What people who make these decisions in Washington don’t understand is there is constantly something that goes wrong when you’re poor,” said Fecteau, whose family relied on SNAP when he was a child.

Fecteau did not get everything he wanted in that bill, which was signed into law by Mills, and he knows lawmakers will have to come back to the table later this year to find yet more funding. Maine will have to decide whether it can afford to keep a widely used food assistance program that was birthed and sustained by the federal government afloat on a state budget — and if so, how it will have to change.

“What I find most frustrating is knowing that this is not the end,” said Fecteau. “This is likely just the beginning.”

Jeri and Mario Montes had been receiving SNAP benefits for several months before Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services told them that the grocery money materializing monthly on debit cards — covering their entire food budget — would disappear because they were not meeting the program’s work requirements.

The couple, 61 and 60, first met at their Bay Area high school in California. The two attended the same prom in 1983, but with different dates, and both served in the military shortly after high school. But it took 30 years for them to reconnect, as Jeri found work as a police officer and earned her master’s degree in public administration, and Mario worked as a grocery butcher. In 2017, they married in a backyard celebration at Mario’s mother’s house.

But loss soon interrupted their joy at finding each other later in life. Since an on-the-job accident as a police officer, Jeri has suffered from chronic pain and PTSD that kept her from full-time work. Mario injured his knee on the job and took a settlement offer from his supermarket employer to try his hand at a stand-up comedy career in California. But when the Covid-19 pandemic began, comedy clubs closed their doors, Jeri lost her mother and Mario his sister to cancer.

The two decided to start over in a new place without the loss they associated with their home state.

“’You can’t heal where you’ve been hurt,’” Mario recalled Jeri saying at the time.

With a bit of money from selling Jeri’s mom’s house, they packed their belongings into a Jeep Compass and began driving cross country. A stop in Las Vegas didn’t stick. New York City wasn’t accommodating. They landed in New Jersey, where Mario, relying on his butcher experience, opened a deli with a friend — a partnership, and the Montes’ investment in the venture, that soon soured. Jeri suffered a heart attack and a stroke, piling up new medical bills; their apartment was condemned, and they lost months of rent they had paid up front. They had nowhere to go.

“We had a plan, we had money, and then it was gone,” Jeri recalled.

They started driving again, as far north and east as roads would take them. They parked at an I-95 truck stop in coastal Maine — which Mario read once in a book was beautiful and the tap water drinkable — and began sleeping in their car. They survived on Jeri’s monthly $1,258.90 police pension: car insurance, gas and phone bills consumed much of the budget, two $15 a month Planet Fitness memberships paid for showers. Eventually they turned to their friends, starting a GoFundMe to make ends meet. When their money dwindled at the end of the month, they practiced fasting and cut down on gas.

As autumn took hold and the temperatures dropped, Jeri began applying to every shelter she could find on her phone — but they were full or didn’t accept couples. She applied online for SNAP, but never heard back from the state department that administers the program, a modern descendant of food stamps. Then Jeri learned about an event for veterans experiencing homelessness that connected them to a decades-old Portland anti-poverty nonprofit named Preble Street.

A Preble caseworker found them new winter coats, sleeping bags, boxes of food and applications for SNAP benefits. Shortly thereafter, they were given keys to a hotel room before moving into a one-room unit in a transitional housing complex for veterans.

The Montes soon began seeing $292 automatically loaded onto a debit card that they could spend at supermarkets and big-box stores that accept SNAP. While red meat and some processed foods were out of reach for the couple, Mario has refined a vegetable soup recipe and a scratch-cooked tomato sauce to top a lentil pasta that accommodates Jeri’s gluten intolerance. They could still afford just two meals a day, but no longer had to fast to stretch their budget.

The Montes did not know that just months earlier President Donald Trump had signed a law that would jeopardize the tentative stability they had found after months of living out of their car.

H.R. 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act upon its passage by Congress in July 2025, was a collection of tax cuts, new spending on immigration enforcement and aid for struggling farmers, jammed together into a single bill so it could pass the Senate under budget-reconciliation rules that require only 51 votes. When House leadership demanded spending cuts to finance it, Agriculture Committee lawmakers looked to food benefits, whose cost had ballooned during the Biden administration.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Agriculture Department had loosened the red tape around SNAP sign-ups, making it easier for states, which administer program funds, to add people to their rolls and temporarily offered additional benefit increases during the economic downturn. The Biden administration also made the first permanent update in more than 40 years to SNAP benefit calculations, adjusting them to dietary guidelines and modern eating habits as food prices spiked.

When congressional Republicans set out to slash social spending in 2025, SNAP stood as one of the most obvious targets. They looked to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich negotiated a transformation of what was then America’s foundational welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to impose work requirements and time limits on recipients. The reimagined Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program now serves a fraction of the eligible families who once relied on welfare, and economists have found the changes did press some people into the workforce. The 1996 law also instituted the first requirement that able-bodied SNAP participants find work after three months or risk losing benefits.

The experience also provided a model for Republicans who wanted to tighten that bootstraps orientation around a program they argue is too permissive and lacks incentives for the states to rein in spending. “Too many able-bodied adults on welfare are not working at all,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote with other Trump cabinet officials in a May 2025 op-ed urging Congress to impose expanded work requirements in SNAP and, for the first time, Medicaid. “Too often we don’t even ask them to. For many, welfare is no longer a lifeline to self-sufficiency but a lifelong trap of dependency.”

Clinton’s welfare reform also left food benefits — which was formally rebranded as SNAP via the 2008 Farm Bill after a decadelong transition from stigmatized food stamps to innocuous debit cards — as the most widely used anti-poverty in-kind benefit still standing. More than two-thirds of people receiving SNAP benefits are not expected to work because they are children, elderly or disabled, according to a pre-One Big Beautiful Bill analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But others must prove they are meeting the SNAP work requirement: 80 hours a month in a paying job, a similar number of volunteer hours, or enrollment in a state-approved job training program.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes these same work requirements on a much broader group of participants, including parents of teenagers, adults over the age of 55, veterans, youth aging out of the foster care system, people who are homeless. The law also tightened eligibility standards for some lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and Afghans who helped the U.S. military in the war.

“When you have a program like SNAP after H.R.1, that essentially demands that you work almost every month or get cut off, people are going to get cut off,” explained David Super, a welfare expert at Georgetown University Law Center. “The application process to SNAP is quite burdensome, quite difficult, and ironically, interferes with one’s ability to work. Once you throw someone off, they stay off.”

The Agriculture Department also allows states and counties to waive work requirements in areas where there’s a lack of sufficient jobs, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act significantly raised the threshold for doing so. California and Illinois lost statewide waivers.

For those who remain in the program, Congress did not decrease the benefit amount — known as a SNAP allotment — but did change how benefits are calculated. That is likely to shrink monthly allotments for millions of people, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

These changes cut SNAP spending by roughly 20 percent over a decade, a significant portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s total savings. The CBO estimates these changes to SNAP will save the federal government $187 billion over a decade, including $69 billion specifically from tightened work requirements. The law also creates nationwide Medicaid work requirements for the first time, changes that are expected to save an additional $326 billion over a decade by removing millions from that program.

The Montes began learning about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s impact on SNAP through frequent letters from Maine’s Department of Health about their eligibility. The categories on which the couple had relied for exemptions to work requirements — older, military veterans, and in an unstable housing situation — were disappearing, and they had to figure out what it would mean for them.

Preble Street is named for a short thoroughfare in downtown Portland, too far from the water to see the city’s bustling harbor but close enough that seagulls fly overhead. The neighborhood is gentrifying, and the nonprofit’s primary office and one of its shelters are just steps from popular neighborhood cafes and new-build high-rises welcoming home transplants who have moved to Maine since the pandemic.

While those like the Montes who receive its services still line up near the Preble Street Chapel, where the organization first operated, the anti-poverty nonprofit has expanded its footprint in the city over the last 50 years, adding shelters, housing and anti-trafficking services and moving into a larger office space around the corner. There, caseworkers are guided by the words of Progressive Era social reformer Jane Addams stenciled onto walls: “...much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to a lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experience of other people.”

Preble’s staff has been preparing since last August for the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to wash ashore. The nonprofit has dramatically increased private fundraising efforts to support an expansion of its meal service and food pantry options. A new food security hub, as the organization refers to its combined commercial kitchen, storage site and distribution center, opened last fall and is already serving more than 50,000 meals and distributing 15,000 food boxes.

The organization has led hundreds of hours of training on SNAP’s changes for its roughly 200 social workers, educating them about the new eligibility requirements so they can prove to Maine’s health department that clients qualify for food assistance and health care. Caseworkers tally on a whiteboard how many hours they have waited on hold with Maine’s health department. “My heart is just breaking for all of the people who don’t have caseworkers, which is the vast majority of people on SNAP,” said Preble Street advocacy supervisor Annika Moore, who has been training social workers on the new law. “I do not know how someone could really navigate these changes without help.”

That effort became much more complex last fall. The Agriculture Department first sent work requirements implementation guidance to states during a record-setting government shutdown last October and set a compliance deadline for weeks later — an unprecedentedly brief timeline compared to other program changes of similar significance. When benefits lapsed for the first time in SNAP’s history, low-income Mainers struggled to find adequate groceries and some pantries ran out of food entirely. State administrators scrambled to understand if they could send out partial benefits or none at all.

Even after the shutdown ended, the Agriculture Department offered inconsistent or belated answers to the state’s questions. Wrongly interpreting the law when it comes to SNAP will have severe consequences for states, which will have to contribute to the cost of benefits for the first time next year if the federal government calculates they have paid beneficiaries too much or too little. Such so-called payment error rate calculations could lead Maine to pay as much as 15 percent of the cost of benefits, or about $53 million annually.

“Maine should encourage financial independence and contribution to community,” said department spokesperson Harry Fones. “Recipients of any welfare program are not victims, they are capable people who at times, need a helping hand, not a government or leftist organizations telling them to stay idle and disengaged.”

In a mobile-home community in Bangor, where many residents are income-eligible but are failing to meet the work requirements, Suzy Young, a paralegal for the legal services nonprofit Maine Equal Justice, is struggling to get people to apply. One client, she recalled, left a decision letter from Maine’s health department sitting on her table for weeks, afraid to learn she’d been denied benefits.

“’Why do I bother? Why do I put myself through this review and the three-hour wait on the phone for DHHS just to hear I’m not eligible? I can’t work, I don’t have transportation to volunteer,’” Young, once a SNAP recipient herself, recalled being told.

For people like the Montes, the benefits landscape is a maze. After hours of phone calls to the state and her caseworkers from Preble Street, and reams of paperwork, Jeri was assured that she had successfully proven to the health department that her disabilities qualify her for an exemption from the work requirements.

But Mario had not, and caseworkers explained that to keep receiving benefits the 60-year-old would have to secure a job he can do on a bum knee.

In 2019, just months into her first term as governor, Mills signed a bipartisan resolution setting a goal to end hunger in her state by 2030. The federal government has been an unsteady partner in the project. During the pandemic, expanded federal benefits for low-income families helped drive down child poverty and hunger rates. Mills oversaw investments in a new statewide free school meals program and expanded state procurement from Maine farmers, along with efforts to streamline the application process and expand outreach to eligible residents.

“No matter how dedicated we are here in the state, no matter what our political climate is like here in Maine, we are very much at the whim of the federal government,” said Anna Korsen, who co-chairs the Ending Hunger Advisory Committee established by the 2019 resolution.

Now as she enters the final months of her second term, Mills — who ended a campaign for U.S. Senate in April — finds herself facing a very different hunger challenge. Food costs are skyrocketing just as the federal government is cutting various forms of social-welfare spending even beyond SNAP. The Trump administration slashed $1 billion in federal funding for schools and food banks to buy from local farms, and cut another roughly $500 million in federal funding for food banks promised by the Biden administration.

Korsen, who also heads the Brunswick-based nonprofit Full Plates Full Potential, said that while no formal decisions have been made, the One Big Beautiful Bill has made the self-imposed 2030 deadline “unrealistic.”

In January, when Maine will be expected to take on even more of the costs associated with running the SNAP program, a different governor could decide to drop out of the program altogether if the state can’t come up with the funds. Bobby Charles, the Republican candidate for governor, has pledged to eliminate the state income tax, jeopardizing revenue necessary for social programs.

Even if Maine can come up with the funding to pay for part of the cost of SNAP benefits required by the new law, it likely will not be able to fund the program at the level that allowed the Montes to participate. State supplementary programs, like one that gives SNAP participants extra dollars to buy fruits and vegetables, might be on the chopping block if state legislators are forced to find the funds to keep the program running, explained Fecteau.

“If we face a scenario where we’re choosing between the foundational program, and these bonus programs, I mean, we know what that choice looks like,” he said. “These are the choices that Washington is trying to force us into.”

When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, some states moved to change their programs before the deadline, anticipating costs that they just can’t shoulder. In Arizona, that has meant a near-50 percent drop in SNAP participants as the state slashed administrative staff, choking up application reviews and effectively forcing people out of the program.

Maine has taken the opposite tack, passing millions in new funding as the state works to keep eligible people in the SNAP program despite the bigger bill from the federal government. Last year, Mills’ government began preparing employees to process the newly-complicated SNAP applications and, with the supplemental budget funding, plans to hire more staff and upgrade technology. The state also partnered closely with community organizations to help more income-eligible people navigate the increasingly convoluted benefits landscape.

The supplemental budget passed this spring is the latest effort from state Democratic leadership to insulate Mainers from federal policy changes, but even the budget’s supporters acknowledge its limits. Preble Street is now planning an expansion of its lobbying work from the statehouse to Washington.

“We’re ramping up as we’re realizing that that is where our clients are being honestly affected the most,” said Moore.

Still, Maine’s SNAP rolls have declined by more than 15,000 since work requirements took effect, an 8.7 percent decline. But some anti-hunger experts say that participation could drop even lower than initial estimates.

Under Mills, Maine’s budget has grown more than 40 percent over the last decade as she advances popular but expensive policies like universal school meals. While the state legislature has passed tax increases on the wealthy, lawmakers are realistic about how much more they can raise taxes, even on wealthy Mainers.

“We’re a state of 1.4 million people,” said Fecteau. “We’re the oldest state in the nation. We have a great deal of poverty. We have older adults who have a lot of needs. We have a lot of people with disabilities. We have a lot of veterans.”

The Montes moved into their new home near Portland in early May. For their one-bedroom apartment in a mixed income housing complex for older adults, they will pay 30 percent of their income, derived entirely from Jeri’s pension. With car insurance and phone bills, that leaves them with less than $600 a month for other expenses like wifi, gas and groceries. The couple said they usually run out of money halfway through the month.

In May, the Montes began receiving $24 in SNAP benefits, a 92 percent decrease. Unless he can find work that he is physically able to do and prove that he is working 80 hours a month, Mario no longer meets the requirements for the SNAP program, and Jeri’s benefits are tied to her pension income.

Mario’s kitchen skills have helped him land two catering gigs in June. But the days he spends chopping and seasoning and preparing food, as well as his time serving it, won’t be enough for him to meet the work requirements to continue receiving SNAP benefits.

The couple plans to supplement SNAP benefits with a twice-monthly visit — all they are allowed — to a nearby food pantry and help from other Portland-area nonprofits. And they’ve decided to apply for Social Security early.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, you have a master’s degree. Why aren’t you kicking ass?’ Jeri said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t still struggle.”

Totally Bonkers

The Totally Bonkers Race to Replace Elise Stefanik

The chaotic congressional battle pits a traditional Republican against a first-time candidate whose campaign embodies the spectacle, grievance and combativeness of the MAGA movement.

By Nick Reisman

At first blush, the vibes at the warehouse where Republican House hopeful Anthony Constantino was holding his campaign rally were decidedly wholesome. American flags bedecked the walls of the cavernous space, which smelled of free pizza. Constantino — a 43-year-old who bears a passing resemblance to tough-guy actor Tom Hardy — led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to his campaign manager. A local minor league team official praised him for his help refurbishing the baseball stadium in this rust belt city.

Constantino’s backers, decked out in black and white t-shirts touting his recent endorsement from President Trump, cheered as their candidate name-dropped the MAGA leader and his assorted disciples, from Rudy Giuliani to Elon Musk to Roger Stone.

But the energy shifted as Constantino — a local businessman whose previous political experience includes a rap video dissing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — got more and more worked up as he aired grievances about his political enemies, namely Democrats (“They’re evil”) and his primary opponent State Assemblymember Robert Smullen (“A very dishonest person”).

And then, when the boxer-turned-politician opened up the floor to questions, things turned combative.

At the mic was a man who’d sparred with Constantino on Facebook over immigration nearly a year before — and who seemed intent on reliving that online confrontation. Constantino’s views on immigration align closely with Trump’s deportation agenda. The attendee argues closing borders will only exacerbate human trafficking.

“When I brought that up,” the man said, “you challenged me to a fight and said that I was a fake gangster.”

Constantino, standing in front of dozens of balloons fashioned into the American flag, hit back.

“It’s clearly illegal, human trafficking,” Constantino said, leaning forward. “And anyone who supports that, maybe you do need to get beat up a little bit.”

Security swarmed the man and he was soon ejected from the rally. And as the man was being led away, the candidate got the final word.

“There’s something about getting into the ring that changes the way people think,” Constantino said, waxing philosophical about his past boxing career. “He might benefit from that experience. I don’t know if words otherwise are going to get to him.”

The boxing metaphor is apt: Constantino is waist-deep in a bristling Republican primary to replace GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik in a sprawling upstate House district that borders Canada. And the primary, which will take place on Tuesday and lacks any independent polling, is pitting the first-time candidate against someone who also loves a good fight.

His foe, Smullen, a retired Marine colonel who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan, has launched broadsides dinging him for his past Democratic Party enrollment, disparaging his at-times profane hip hop lyrics and generally painting him as deeply unfit to represent the region in Congress.

In turn, Constantino, who owns the Sticker Mule factory that makes custom stickers, threatened to sue Smullen over the attacks and sent him a text message calling him “an evil person” who must be stopped.

So it should come as no surprise that the raucous, bitter battle to succeed Stefanik has become a circus, tearing Empire State Republicans asunder — and offering a crystal ball look, albeit cloudy, into a GOP future centered exclusively around Trump-accented spectacle. The spiraling brawl even has its own collateral damage, including a defamation suit from New York Conservative Party Chair Jerry Kassar against Constantino, heated confrontations with local officials and social media feuds.

The race is testing whether Smullen, a stalwart Republican with sterling GOP credentials, can compete against someone born wholly out of the MAGA movement. Shell-shocked New York Republican leaders aren’t quite sure what to make of Constantino and his sharp-elbowed battle against the alternative, who has endorsements from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle Association. Privately they wonder if Constantino, who has never run for public office until now, is up to the task of representing the district in Washington.

Yet what some Republicans won’t publicly acknowledge is Constantino represents a climax of the MAGA era, the logical conclusion of Trump’s sweeping impact on American politics manifesting all the way down to the House level. His candidacy might also be inevitable in a district where Stefanik herself has evolved from a moderate Paul Ryan aide to a MAGA stalwart. (Stefanik, for her part, has declined to endorse in this high-stakes race to succeed her, and did not comment for this story.)

The race is a potential window into the Republican Party’s future, a coming era in which first-time candidates like Constantino in New York or reality TV star Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles can capture attention by distilling Trumpism’s essence down to performance, pageantry — and an eagerness to fight.

Pratt lost his bid for mayor in deep blue LA. And Trump’s support doesn’t always translate to electoral success. It underscores that whoever wins the fight for MAGA now will control the future of the Republican Party as it braces for a post-Trump world.

Either way, Constantino’s candidacy offers a test case for just how far a MAGA candidate can go as Trump winds down his time in the Oval Office.

“All my attacks are honest and things that people need to know,” Constantino told me inside his factory. “President Trump changed a lot of norms. Why don’t you want politicians talking to citizens?”

Republicans, including those who have quietly coveted the Stefanik seat, are happy to not be Smullen.

The state lawmaker is a traditional Republican whose compelling background — combat experience and legislative record — would normally make him a shoe-in for this ruby red seat, but he is now withstanding daily pummelings from his opponent. In turn, Smullen has attacked Constantino in often personal terms, calling him “mentally unfit” to be in Congress. What has chafed Smullen the most, though, is an attack on his bravery and the implication from a Constantino supporter that he politically leveraged his 14-year-old son’s death after he was struck by a car.

“My opponent calls me a ‘fucking coward’,” Smullen told me in an interview. “Utterly ridiculous. Certainly I’m no coward by any stretch of the imagination.”

Armed with a selfie stick, he’d just shot a short video outside the state Capitol in Albany and was slightly out of breath when he settled into a leather upholstered chair to unspool his complaints with Constantino in the lounge outside of the ornate Assembly chamber.

“Beyond the pale.” “Unfit.”

These are fighting words in any Republican-on-Republican feud and Smullen uses them freely to blast back at Constantino. Perhaps the most devastating punch Smullen wants to land on Constantino is this charge:

“He’s no Donald Trump.”

This is a district that went hard for Trump in 2024 — 60 percent of voters here cast their lot with the then-former president. And in many ways, voters here fit the profile of the traditional MAGA voter: Overwhelmingly white, predominantly blue collar and weary of status quo politics.

In some parts, the rural expanses of New York’s North Country resemble Alaska or western Maine. Forbidding in the winter and capable of becoming blisteringly hot in the summer, the Adirondack Park has been shedding population for generations and struggles with housing affordability. Battles over land use in the protected area are legion. Towns that line the border have reported declining business with Canada after Trump’s expansive tariff program. And the Mohawk Valley is where the nation’s rustbelt begins — home to decaying factories and farms that are increasingly likely to be turned over to solar panel companies.

Fighting is in the historical DNA. Abolitionist John Brown would work his farm outside Lake Placid when he wasn’t fomenting a violent overthrow of the South’s slaveholding elite. There is an overriding libertarian streak that runs through this region — a don’t-tread-on-me ethos that’s entwined with a strong distrust of strangers and government officials.

“That suspicion of outsiderism is larger than the forces of political allegiance or ideology,” said Aaron Wolf, a 2014 Democratic House candidate who unsuccessfully ran against Stefanik.

These rough-and-tumble crosscurrents make the district an amalgam of the nation’s political duels, with self-sufficiency a common throughline. While Trump has been successful in the district, Barack Obama also won a prior version of this seat.

“I think that being an outsider is worse than being a Democrat sometimes, and that’s not because we’re not open-minded,” Wolf said. “This is a place whose decision making has often been in the hands of outsiders. Going back to the British and the French warring over the Champlain Valley and the North Country, and determining the fate of the indigenous population as well, and then you have, in another era, the environmentalists versus the timber interests.”

Stefanik has represented versions of the district for more than a decade. She framed herself as a pragmatist, touting bipartisan efforts on anodyne concerns like dairy prices. Initially the youngest woman elected to the House — a distinction she held until Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory — Stefanik set out to help elect more GOP women.

Then the Trump era hit, scrambling the nation’s politics and the trajectory of Stefanik’s district.

She morphed into an ardent Trump supporter — “ultra MAGA” in her words — a shift that was in keeping with any ambitious Republican who could spot where the party’s voters were headed. Trump-skeptical Republicans lost their seats; Stefanik was elevated to House GOP leadership.

Now as she prepares to leave after the twin disappointments of losing her bid to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a scuttled run for governor, Stefanik’s presence looms largest — perhaps more so than Trump’s — over the district.

“At the end of the day Elise Stefanik has the biggest voice in the entire room,” Saratoga County GOP Chair Joe Shurada told me. “She has a megaphone no one else has. I don’t know if she’s going to make an endorsement. But if she did, her opinion counts the most.”

The stakes are high for Republicans — even in a blood red district.

National Democrats have not shown a public interest in a race for a district Trump has won handily in three elections. That may change if Constantino wins the primary and Smullen remains in the general election on the Conservative Party’s ballot line. That’s a scenario that haunts Republican Party leaders.

Appearing on the Conservative Party ballot line can be a boon for Republicans — especially in New York’s red pockets.

New York’s Conservative Party was formed in 1962 — a William F. Buckley-infused answer to Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s liberalism. Over the decades as the state became a deeper shade of Democratic blue, the Conservative Party has tried to pull New York Republicans to the right. It’s now in an unofficial partnership with the New York GOP, often cross-endorsing the Republicans’ preferred candidates and reinforcing establishment support.

Sometimes, though, that relationship breaks down.

Smullen has the backing of the Conservative Party and is currently slated to remain on the November ballot. He hasn’t committed to dropping out if he loses the June 23 primary. If both men continue to duke it out through the summer and fall, Democrats would have a significantly better chance of flipping the seat — a state of affairs the party would have considered unimaginable if Stefanik was seeking another term.

Complicating matters is Conservative Party Chair Jerry Kassar’s defamation suit against Constantino. The case is working its way through the state Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

A year ago, Constantino told supporters Kassar threatened to kill him and implied the party leader ordered the campaign’s press aide to be murdered. Constantino recorded a phone call with Kassar, in which the chair is heard warning the candidate against challenging a Republican incumbent in 2026 and that doing so “is just a bigger reason why we intend to kill you,” he said. In an interview, Constantino said Kassar was among those he considers a “swamp creature” — part of a broader problem for candidates like him trying to break into politics.

“Mr. Constantino made false claims against Mr. Kassar that he widely publicized, accusing Mr. Kassar of orchestrating a plot to murder Mr. Constantino,” said Kassar attorney Christian Browne. “Mr. Kassar is suing Mr. Constantino to hold him accountable for his false and reckless conduct and to protect Mr. Kassar’s unblemished reputation after nearly five decades in political and public life. The fact that Mr. Constantino is presently running for office is irrelevant to Mr. Kassar’s case.”

I asked Constantino if it was possible Kassar may have not meant this threat “to kill you” literally.

“It’s a strange word choice, and sometimes people let things slip,” Constantino said. Kassar, he added, did clarify that “I’ll do everything in my power to destroy you.”

It remains to be seen if all this intra-party combat will provide an opening for Democrats in the fall. The last time a Democrat represented a version of the district came in 2009 as the Tea Party movement gained steam. Republicans picked then-Assemblymember Dede Scozzafava to succeed Rep. John McHugh, who had joined the Obama administration. The Conservative Party, believing Scozzafava wasn’t sufficiently to the right, picked a local accountant, Doug Hoffman. The ensuing race became a disaster for Republicans and a gift for Democrats, who took advantage of the split. Democratic Rep. Bill Owens won a special election and held the seat until January 2015.

Republicans, fighting to retain control of the narrowly divided House in what’s shaping up to be a tough election year, desperately need to avoid a replay of 2009 this November.

In many ways, Smullen’s pedigree fits the Old School, GOP mold. He’s got degrees from elite institutions like The Citadel and Georgetown University. He’s a high-ranking military officer who’s seen action. (He prefers to speak in person, rather than the phone, after “too many bangs and booms” during training and combat damaged his hearing.) He served as a White House fellow during the George W. Bush era. He’s clocked in a seven-year tenure in the New York State Assembly. And he fits the mold of an upstate New York Republican: Attuned to rural issues with a fiscal conservative streak.

But he’s sometimes been out of step with his own party, even as the New York GOP took the rare step of endorsing him in the contentious House primary.

He’s feuded with Stefanik’s political allies in upstate New York — a potentially fateful series of interactions that stand to make an endorsement from the powerful outgoing lawmaker highly unlikely. Smullen sued the chair of the Fulton County Republican Committee Sue McNeil, who is close with Stefanik, in a bid to remove her from the leadership post and install his own ally. The legal challenge was ultimately unsuccessful and Stefanik endorsed McNeil’s push to remain the head of the local party.

Then there was a 2021 incident in Stefanik’s Washington, DC office in which he threatened to launch a primary bid against her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the exchange and granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation. (The alleged threat came as the current district lines were in doubt ahead of the 2022 district redrawing.) Smullen’s campaign has denied he ever planned to challenge Stefanik; he insists he has a positive relationship with the outgoing House lawmaker, who attended his son’s funeral and wake. (Stefanik’s team declined to comment.)

He’s also had a much-publicized run-in with the law: He was arrested in 2018 after claiming a property tax exemption for veterans on a non-primary residence. Smullen paid a reimbursement to the local government; the charge was reduced to a violation. He’s dismissed the incident as a paperwork error.

Despite these instances, Smullen’s political tenure has overall been predictable, even staid. He’s willing to work across the aisle on non-ideological issues, like rural safety or getting a bipartisan organ donation bill passed after his son was killed.

Indeed, Smullen is running on a traditional Republican platform of growing the economy, securing the border and supporting the Trump administration’s agenda. Yet much of his campaign has been spent responding to Constantino’s barrage of attacks.

He’s had enough. In May, after the conclusion of their only televised debate, Smullen refused to shake Constantino’s outstretched hand.

Four days later, Smullen called reporters down to a windowless, air conditioned Albany hotel conference room to explain why. After the press assembled, he quietly placed posters on easels arrayed around him.

The “evil” text message on one poster. The Facebook post by a Vermont-based Constantino supporter accusing Smullen of politicizing his son’s death blown up on another. A Sticker Mule sticker that said, “Kill the police.”

“Let it sink in,” Smullen said. “This is the temperament of the lifelong Democrat asking you to send him to Congress as a Republican.” (Constantino says he previously registered as a Democrat to support a friend running for Albany mayor.)

His voice cracked.

“Would you shake hands with someone who believes that you’re an evil person?”

Later, I asked Smullen if he will endorse Constantino if he’s the Republican nominee.

“You know, he’s threatened me and tried to intimidate me and called me evil,” said Smullen, adding that he is confident he will prevail in the primary. “You know, his team have said the things that they’ve said about my son and so I’ll leave it at that.”

When I pointed out to Smullen that his answer was neither a “yes” nor a “no,” his voice went quieter.

“I’ll leave it at that,” he said.

In 2024, after an assasination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pa., Constantino erected an illuminated 12-foot-tall “Vote for Trump” sign on his warehouse roof.

That act of adulation served to jump-start an improbable candidacy.

His Trump sign caught Roger Stone’s attention, who reached out to the youngish CEO. Over dinner, the infamous political operative, whose 40-month prison term for seven felony charges was commuted by Trump, convinced Constantino to run for Congress. (Trump later pardoned Stone.) Since then, the candidate has been embraced by MAGA, receiving warm endorsements from Giuliani and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and he was invited to stand in line with Musk at Trump’s inauguration.

Constantino was born in Albany and attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the prestigious university in nearby Troy and studied economics. He never finished. When he was 7, his Navy veteran dad died and his father’s business struggled after his death. So, at 19, Constantino dropped out of college to take over his father’s former photo envelope company. In 2010, he launched his own firm, Sticker Mule, with the motto, “Custom printing that kicks ass.” It’s now a 90,000-square-foot factory with 1,000-employees.

In his late 30s, he became a boxer — a risky venture for anyone approaching middle age. One video posted online shows Constantino unleashing a quick, violent barrage of punches on his opponent. He wins in the second round after his foe dropped to one knee and the referee ended the fight. And he’s dabbled in music, some of it rap, some gospel or country-inspired, much of it fitting in the growing genre of MAGA praise music.

“Can’t fuck with America, bitch,” Constantino raps in a diss track aimed at Mamdani. “This is New York City, home of Donald Trump, Tupac and Biggie.” Another song, which Trump shared on Truth Social, ends with Constantino winkingly suggesting he would run for president one day. He insisted to me that line was meant to be broadly aspirational: Anyone, including a guy like Trump, can become president one day.

A political generation ago his candidacy would have been dismissed as a gadfly effort by a local crank.

Yet Constantino has excelled at wielding the current coin of the realm: an uncanny ability to capture voters’ attention and stoke their support. He’s pledged to give his congressional salary away to a local veteran’s family. He stages block party-style events at his sticker factory. He gifted Trump with a giant bronze statue depicting him raising his fist in defiance after he survived an assasination attempt. The shooting in Butler, he has said, is what propelled him to get involved in politics and endorse Trump.

Self-funding his campaign with $10 million, Constantino has spent more than $3.8 million on TV and digital ads, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. He’s spending at a fast clip, with some of that cash plowed back into Sticker Mule. The campaign has reported spending money on “donor mementos” as well as merchandise, design and marketing, according to federal campaign finance records. By contrast, Smullen’s campaign recorded just over $500,000 in ads, which often air back-to-back with Constantino. Smullen has also loaned his campaign money — $1 million, a tenth of what Constantino has poured into the race.

His campaign hires have come under scrutiny. That includes Alec Flores, a Nevada man who was brought on as a “support agent” last year and is set to face a murder charge in November. He faces a Nevada-specific “open murder” charge, leaving it up to a jury to determine if Flores is guilty of first or second-degree murder or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. (Flores, who Constantino has said briefly worked for the campaign and soon left, did not respond to a request for comment.) Constantino, who has not met the man, told me he would “put a better structure in place” if his campaign hires again.

A “Vote for Trump” sign on top of a building owned by Anthony Constantino on Thursday, June 18, 2026, in Amsterdam, N.Y. Mr. Constantino is hoping to be the Republican party’s nominee to run in the general election for New York’s 21st Congressional District.  Cindy Schultz for POLITICO

A “Vote for Trump” sign on top of a building owned by Constantino in Amsterdam, N.Y.

In keeping with his confrontational zeal, Constantino earlier this year was removed from a local Republican meeting, escorted out of the room by the county sheriff. The ejection came after Constantino repeatedly claimed Smullen was “lying” about his business. The New York Republican establishment took stock of Constantino’s antics and endorsed Smullen, who also has the backing of the state’s GOP House delegation, save for Stefanik.

Constantino believes the rejection by the state party is a blessing for how he’s framed the campaign.

“If we win, it’s a victory for the forces of good,” he told me. “If it goes the other way, it would be a victory for the corrupt swamp people protecting their power, entrenching themselves more and scaring out outsiders.”

In this insiders vs. outsiders race, anything seems possible.