Arp 78

Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries. Some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy, the island universe is an enormous 200,000 light-years across. Also known as NGC 772, it sports a prominent, outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's overdeveloped spiral arm is pumped-up by galactic-scale gravitational tides. Interactions with its brightest companion galaxy, the more compact NGC 770 seen directly below the larger spiral, are likely responsible. Embedded in faint star streams revealed in the deep telescopic exposure, NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with spiky foreground Milky Way stars.

How fucking crazy are they??

What to Know About Hegseth’s New Office of Religious Affairs

“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

Kiera Butler

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”  

A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:

At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of War, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished. 

Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.

Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture:

On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic [produced by Doug Wilson’s Canon Press] that aired shortly before Hegseth became Secretary of War, he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”

Among the funding priorities listed in the Department of War memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”

As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:

Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.

Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”

The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

Will make your mind bleed........

Think Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Request Is Outrageous? This’ll Blow Your Mind.

We already spend at least that much on the US military each year, and maybe a lot more.

David Vine

On April 3, four weeks after Donald Trump claimed the Iran War would be over in four to five weeks, and with his approval ratings in reputable polls dipping below 40 percent, the president made a wildly audacious ask: Congress, he said, should approve a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion.

Such a number was unheard of. Congress gave the military an official budget of nearly $1.1 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year—more than the next five runners up (China, Russia, Germany, India, and the UK) combined. Now, counting supplemental funding for the War in Iran, which is entering its eighth month, Trump wants US taxpayers to shell out just under $1.6 trillion ($1,570,000,000,000) to a “Department of War” that’s so un-auditable it probably doesn’t know where it left the car keys.

That’s an increase of almost 50 percent for things that go boom.

As much as we Americans may value our military readiness, 65 percent of US adults polled by the Washington Post in late April opposed Trump’s unprecedented funding request, and two-thirds disapproved of his “little excursion” in Iran. (They still do.) The disapproval numbers would be higher still, no doubt, if those people were aware of a dirty little secret: We’re already spending more—way more—than what the Pentagon reports, and most media outlets dutifully parrot.

A recent report I helped coauthor for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) estimates that, properly accounted for, US military expenditures last year were at least $1.5 trillion, and possibly a lot more. If Congress grants Trump’s requests, we’ll be spending $2 trillion to $3 trillion on the military and its wars.

This isn’t just about Trump, but rather the DC establishment. For decades, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon have been obfuscating military spending by means of arcane bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. And yet most journalists and experts quote the official numbers, which are profoundly incomplete.

Consider, for example, that the Treasury Department covers about $100 billion of the annual cost of supporting retired military personnel. And that the $7.3 billion the State Department shelled out for “global health programs” in fiscal 2025, according to data from USASpending.gov, is actually controlled by the Pentagon. (The money, as I point out in my book Base Nation, is used for military intelligence gathering and gaining strategic access to locations around the world.) Sometimes it’s smaller sums, like the $385 million the Justice Department shelled out that fiscal year to settle old Vietnam War claims and compensate people harmed by radiation from nuclear weapons testing.

If the routine concealment of hundreds of billions in military spending doesn’t feel scandalous to you, imagine the uproar were the Wall Street Journal to suddenly reveal that federal officials were secretly spending almost a half-trillion beyond what Congress budgeted for Medicaid, affordable housing, education, childcare, climate programs, or food assistance. This fuzzy accounting “is not a new phenomenon. It has been a bipartisan effort spanning years,” Air Force veteran and former military budget analyst Christian Sorensen told me in an email. “When the sheer size of the figures revealed in [the] accounting sinks into public consciousness, the body politic will be even more furious.”

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” concurs Heidi Peltier, an economist and budget expert with Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This overlooked spending raises the total, she says, by “50 percent to 130 percent higher than is usually reported, a figure likely to stun most Americans.” 

Quantifying miliary expenditures should be a relatively easy task for journalists and researchers. It is not. “The non-obvious costs” of what budget expert Stephen Semler, a fellow at the progressive Center for International Policy, calls “status quo” military spending are “so vast that it’s difficult to take [their] measure,” he told me.

The POGO report details how military expenditures are spread across a host of federal departments beyond the Pentagon. And how, taken together, those amounts may exceed the total of what those agencies receive for nonmilitary purposes. This is not the result of some single diabolical plan, but rather the product of obscure bureaucratic processes wherein the Pentagon, over time, has taken control of money Congress appropriates to other agencies, as a Senate Budget Committee staffer told me on condition of anonymity. While lawmakers’ actions and motivations in some cases may demand further investigation, their collective complacency has allowed the military to claim a significantly larger share of the federal budget than the public is aware of.

Using five methodologies and data from three government sources, we calculated how much money the government really spent on the military. For fiscal 2025, depending on the methodology used and how one defines military spending, that number ranged from $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion. For example, most of the $33.5 billion in nuclear weapons spending tracked by USASpending.gov was tucked into the Department of Energy budget. And most of the $393.3 billion cost of military pensions, veterans’ benefits, and related retirement expenditures were found on the ledger of the Department of Veterans Affairs, thus relieving the Pentagon of a substantial long-term expense. The USASpending.gov data allowed us to identify billions more in the budgets of at least 15 other agencies, expenses that don’t make it into commonly reported military spending totals.

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from San Diego, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of military personnel, said in a statement. And without the accounting to prove the money is properly spent, she added, “we shouldn’t keep footing a bill that gets bigger every year.”

Even our estimates are likely undercounts, thanks to spotty federal budget transparency, classified funding, and Pentagon accounting failures. Indeed, the Department of Defense remains the only federal agency, as Jacobs noted, that has never passed a financial audit.

We taxpayers don’t get to choose everything our money is used for, and that’s part of the grand bargain. Progressives would rather not see their tax dollars supporting Trump’s deportation machine. And plenty of conservatives would repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow if they could. But even as we bicker over priorities, whatever our politics, an accurate accounting of where our money goes is indispensable to an honest debate.

That’s where Congress comes in. Lawmakers could stop putting military spending in budgets beyond that of the “Department of War.” They could also, for example, order the Congressional Research Service to compile an annual “total military” roundup that details everything in one place. Until that time, journalists and analysts might want to include a large asterisk whenever they cite the Pentagon’s official numbers.

The concealment of our true military budget, wittingly or unwittingly—as many members of Congress may not even realize this subterfuge is happening—shows just how out of control Pentagon spending has become, and how wildly disproportionate it is to the military threats we face. Because the reality is, we’re not merely spending more on our military than the five runners-up, but likely more than every other nation on Earth combined.

Why does this matter? Several reasons. Trump and his “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth have purged military leaders who put the Constitution first and stacked the Pentagon with loyalists. The president has dispatched National Guard troops to US cities and hasn’t ruled out ordering them to the polls during the elections, which would be in clear defiance of the Constitution. For people around the world, US military spending is a life and death matter, given the debacle in Iran—which Trump recently threatened to annihilate—and the president’s periodic threats to wage war on Cuba, Greenland, and Colombia, despite campaign promises that he would be the president who didn’t get the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts.

Put bluntly, a larger military budget means more war. It also means a bigger deficit, which pressures Congress to further slash funding for health care, Social Security, climate resilience, food safety, and all manner of domestic programs people depend upon. If Congress gave Trump what he asked for, our military spending would gobble up some 75 percent of discretionary federal funds.

In this light, his budget request should be treated as the sick joke that it is—an opportunity for the people and their representatives to insist on a different path.

Democrats and even some Republicans who claim to be concerned about our $40 trillion-plus national debt, have so far resisted Trump’s request for a Pentagon bump. In early September, the president signed a bill that extends current military funding levels into December. Both chambers of Congress are now in recess until after the midterms, so the matter may not even be resolved until after new members are seated in January 2027.

In the meantime, “federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late,” Sorensen said.

That would mean reining in runaway military spending before laying a finger on the domestic programs that already help accomplish what should be the US military’s most fundamental purpose: keeping Americans alive and well.

Federal investigation into Trump PSA’s

Raskin leads calls for federal investigation into Trump PSA’s

The Maryland Democrat could lead the House Judiciary Committee in the next Congress.

Chris Marquette

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee is demanding federal inquiries into the amount of taxpayer money used to furnish a television ad blitz propping up President Donald Trump ahead of the midterms.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is poised to lead the panel if Democrats win the majority in November, joined California Democratic Rep. George Whitesides in sending a letter to the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Special Counsel. It asks the GAO to investigate the “source, accounts, and total amount of taxpayer funds used by the Executive Office of the President to produce and distribute this advertisement across major television markets and official White House social media channels.”

The lawmakers also asked the Office of Special Counsel to investigate whether the ads “paid for by millions of dollars of taxpayer funds, constitute a violation of the Hatch Act, and determine who should be held accountable.”

The ads, which so far have run during NFL games and flagship Sunday news shows, depict Trump in a powerful and effective light, with glimpses of him posing for the camera, denigrating the free press and denouncing communism. Each includes the phrase, “paid for by the U.S. government.”

“These ads constitute an illegal use of taxpayer funds, perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that they are virtually identical to the ones Donald Trump used during his 2024 presidential campaign, and in fact use the same footage and the same inept ideological messaging,” Raskin and Whitesides contend.

Other congressional Democrats have also reached out to the administration in recent days to express outrage and ask basic questions about how the ads were derived and funded.

Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Murphy of Connecticut — the top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee and the appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security, respectively — have written to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin regarding reports that the agency has redirected $20 million in funding originally intended for Customs and Border Protection to “bankroll the obscene political ads.”

A White House spokesperson called the TV spots “public service announcements” and said they are designed to remind “Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

A spokesperson for DHS said the agency “follows all applicable rules for contracting decisions and keeps all decision makers informed” and that “all contracting decisions are made in accordance with applicable law.”

The Office of the Special Counsel confirmed it received the letter and declined comment.

A spokesperson for GAO did not respond to a request for comment.

Data center bills

Bipartisan Senate duo drops new data center bills

It’s not clear whether Democrats will support measures not guaranteed to rein in costs.

Kelsey Brugger

A bipartisan Senate duo is rolling out two new data center bills one day after Democrats rejected a House-passed measure designed to shield ratepayers from costs associated with the facilities.

The measures from Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) would aim to provide people with more information about the data centers being built in their backyards amid growing backlash against the nationwide proliferation brought on by the artificial intelligence industry boom.

One bill would establish a program within the Department of Energy to give communities access to technical expertise to better understand the costs and benefits of proposed data center developments. The other would require federal reporting on the environmental impacts of large data centers that consume at least 50 megawatts of power every day.

“Americans are rightly skeptical when a large company tells them not to worry about the impacts of a new data center in their community,” Curtis said in a statement, shared first with POLITICO. “The answer to that distrust is transparency.”

Blunt Rochester added in a separate statement that people have “legitimate concerns” about energy and water usage coming from data centers, and that her bills with Curtis would “ensure communities have a say in how these projects affect their quality of life.”

Curtis and Blunt Rochester, who both serve on the Senate Commerce Committee, recently teamed up on a letter to Chair Ted Cruz calling for hearings and forums to discuss the perils of rapidly-advancing AI technology. They have not yet received a response.

It’s not clear what the path might be for their new data center bills in the current Congress. While support from members of both parties could bolster the effort, neither measure would contain forcing mechanisms to bring down costs passed on from data centers to consumers — a rallying cry for Democrats ahead of the midterms.

Most Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act, legislation that passed overwhelmingly in the House earlier in September, from going to President Donald Trump’s desk because it would simply encourage tech companies to pay for data center infrastructure.

Democrats said the bill, championed in the Senate by vulnerable GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, was ultimately “toothless” in failing to go far enough to ensure energy prices were curbed for consumers.

Revamp

Centrist Dems’ Supreme Court plan boosts momentum for revamp

Third Way wants term limits for justices and an enforceable ethics code to be part of the party’s 2028 presidential discussions.

Calen Razor

Democratic efforts to revamp the Supreme Court gained momentum Thursday as an influential center-left think tank released a plan to limit justices’ terms and misconduct.

Third Way’s proposal, shared first with POLITICO, highlights growing unity across the ideological spectrum in the Democratic Party for significant changes to the high court as Americans’ trust in the institution hovers at historic lows.

The group says it also wants to inject ideas to overhaul the court — including legislation to set an 18-year term limit and an enforceable ethics code — into the party’s conversations leading up to the 2028 presidential race.

“This is one of those things that we think can and should be a part of the 2028 discussion, and those folks who are running should be asked about whether they would champion Supreme Court reform,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, said in an interview.

Key Democratic groups have increasingly been coalescing around ideas to overhaul the court’s structure and policing in light of accusations of growing partisanship and corruption among justices. In June, a number of key Democratic House caucus leaders, including the Congressional Progressive Caucus, released their own resolution calling for term limits for justices and a code of ethics.

“We think that the center left has been remiss in not being forward enough on reform proposals that would make our system work better for people, which is why some folks have gone to the further left,” Erickson said.

Third Way cited public opinion polling from both the Brennan Center for Justice and FOX News indicating more than 70% of respondents favored term limits for justices. An 18-year cycle would ensure the appointment of two justices every presidential term.

The group also wants legislation to hold justices accountable for ethics violations. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month he supports “dramatic reform” on the Supreme Court starting with an ethics code so justices don’t act “above the law.”

The court in 2023 adopted its own formal ethics code for the first time in history, but that policy largely lacks some of the teeth that advocates have proposed.

One idea supported by some Democrats that Third Way is not endorsing: upping the number of justices on the bench. Erickson said that idea seems more like “a mutually assured destruction path,” as parties could go back and forth adding more justices.

The path forward for any court-focused legislation in Congress in the near future, however, is very slim without majorities in both chambers and control of the White House — something Third Way acknowledged.

Still, the group’s recommendations are meant “to show that the center left can also be bold and be addressing systemic problems to appeal to voters and their level of anxiety and anger about what’s happening right now,” Erickson said.

Name Names.....

Newsom orders California to say AI after Trump’s ‘superintelligence’ decree

The governor’s executive order comes as Trump tries to make the “superintelligence” rebrand stick.

By Tyler Katzenberger

Donald Trump’s quest to rebrand AI has a new opponent.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Wednesday requiring state agencies to refer to the technology only as “artificial intelligence” or AI. The directive came a day after Trump issued his own decree pushing the name “superintelligence” and recruited top tech executives to back his move.

“Super intelligence is clearly not coming from the White House — that’s why California continues to lead,” Newsom said in a statement accompanying his order, which asserted the decree was “informed by common sense.”

Newsom paired his announcement with a series of bill signings that impose new policies aimed at protecting workers against AI, such as layoff notices and limits on the technology’s use in disciplinary and firing decisions.

Trump told reporters Tuesday that he’s directing the federal government to use the term “superintelligence” because AI is “not artificial, we all agree on that.” Tech executives who attended a Tuesday luncheon at the White House used the term when speaking to reporters after.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang all signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” on Tuesday that encourages companies to closely monitor their AI models’ capabilities and stand up internal teams that ensure models don’t carry out unintended hacks. The document notably misspelled the U.S. as the “Unites States” in a line under Trump’s signature.

NATO meeting

Pentagon excludes key allies from NATO meeting

Some of Europe’s biggest defense spenders — and U.S. allies — were not invited to a Pentagon-led meeting to discuss the alliance.

By Paul McLeary, Stefanie Bolzen and Jack Detsch

The Trump administration is excluding several major allies from a gathering of NATO members next month — after previous threats to deploy a “naughty and nice list” against governments that have run afoul of the president’s priorities.

The planned meeting in Poland, which Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has spearheaded, is essentially a working group focused on NATO’s future, according to six diplomats familiar with the planning. But many of the countries who didn’t receive an invite — such as the United Kingdom, France and the Baltic countries — are big defense spenders and play key roles in the alliance, leaving their diplomats wondering why they’re being frozen out.

They question whether the administration is playing favorites in a way that could further splinter an alliance already struggling with increasing Russian aggression and depleted weapons stockpiles.

“We’re doing everything that is being asked of us,” said an official from an excluded ally nation. “We’re trying to understand what the criteria is and what the purpose of these meetings are. Not much has been passed on to us yet.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, and the Pentagon declined to comment.

President Donald Trump and his top lieutenants have relentlessly criticized NATO since returning to power, on everything from members’ refusal to back the Iran war to the failure of some countries to spend 5% of their GDP on defense.

“I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” Trump railed in a Truth Social post this year. Last month, he snubbed another ally — South Korea — by abruptly scaling back a planned joint military exercise while complaining about Seoul’s refusal to join the war against Iran.

In April, as POLITICO first reported, the White House came up with something akin to a who’s-in-and-who’s-out list while it looked for ways to punish allies who didn’t adhere to Trump’s wishes.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has echoed that vision. He has encouraged “model allies” and warned that those that do not support U.S. interests will suffer consequences.

While details on the new NATO working group are still vague, it follows the threat of rewarding some at the expense of others.

Colby has held two similar meetings with invitees Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. The countries involved in the meeting — known as the Bergen Group format — insist it’s not meant to rupture the alliance, said a diplomat from one of the invited nations, who like others, was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Instead, the group intends to come up with ideas it can bring to the full alliance for more stress-testing.

“This can be an engine for transformation,” for the whole alliance, the diplomat said. The person acknowledged that some allies are frustrated by the exclusion, especially since many have hit or surpassed the spending targets demanded by the Trump administration.

The U.S. might add Denmark to the exclusive club next given the agreement reached between the two countries to expand the American military footprint in Greenland, according to another person familiar with the planning.

Colby, who has been the catalyst for the initiative, held a first meeting of its kind in Bergen, Norway, in June and invited the six favored allies. “NATO allies that are rapidly meeting their Hague spending commitments, have the scale to contribute, and are ready to get down to practical business,” he wrote on social media after the meeting.

He noted this month at a conference in Washington that “the idea is to pull the whole alliance along,” adding that it “will be a better and stronger NATO that is more durable” and give Europe more military capacity.

Colby has taken a longtime interest in smaller format talks between NATO nations. He has focused in previous years on reviving Germany as a military power to contain Russia and dedicating American troops to deal with China’s rise.

But even invited allies question why Colby and other defense officials have cherry-picked attendees and left out some of the continent’s largest defense powers, such as Britain.

“If they try splitting NATO into the good ones and the bad ones, it is dangerous for the U.S.,” said another of the six diplomats. “But for Europe, this is existential.”

No they are screwed...

‘These guys are in a pickle’: Some Republicans spurn Trump on the campaign trail

Republicans are counting on Trump to energize the voters they need in November, even as some candidates fear his unpopularity could alienate the persuadable voters they also need to win.

By Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson and Meredith Lee Hill

Republicans know President Donald Trump’s unpopularity poses a big problem for them in November. They also recognize he may be their only option to avoid a wipeout.

Five weeks before Election Day, many Republicans are facing a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t dilemma. Some candidates in close races are wary of alienating undecided voters by campaigning alongside Trump and the baggage that comes with him: high gas prices, voters’ persistent economic concerns and the prolonged war in Iran.

But keeping the president at arm’s length could make it harder to turn out the low-propensity base voters they need — voters that only Trump has been able to bring to the polls.

“These guys are in a pickle,” said one national GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape, like others in this article. “They may not want Trump to come to the district, but there are still things that Trump can do to help.”

Asked what would happen if Trump campaigned in a battleground state where their candidates were running, another GOP operative working on midterm races said: “I suspect my candidates would come down with COVID.”

But the candidates may not have much of a choice. Trump is increasingly inserting himself into the election in the closing stretch, ramping up his campaign travel with a slate of stops scheduled in red states, repeatedly imploring voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot and, most recently, appearing in taxpayer-funded campaign-style ads that the White House has claimed are public service announcements.

Some Republicans have encouraged Trump’s team not to send the president to a blue-leaning Omaha district and other key districts where his approval rating is underwater ahead of Election Day, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Brinker Harding is running in the Omaha seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.); his campaign didn’t respond when asked if he’ll attend Trump’s upcoming rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, about a two-hour drive away.

Others have said similar things.

“They’ve called me four times now to see if we want him to come, and I’ve said no,” one senior Republican involved in a House GOP battleground race in a district Trump safely won in 2024 told POLITICO.

Another Republican operative familiar with Republican midterm strategy said the party views its role — and Trump’s — primarily as driving GOP turnout, while the work of persuading moderates, independents and other swing voters falls more heavily on individual candidates.

“Where the president is going is being decided very strategically, to areas where we are trying to boost turnout among Republican voters,” the operative said. “We’re not going to be sending him into areas where it would necessarily be hurtful to our candidates.”

Others in red states that are increasingly competitive acknowledge that if they want to rally the MAGA base to the degree necessary to hold onto key seats, no one can deliver like Trump.

“He’s a turnout machine for the Republican Party, the president is,” said Ohio GOP Chair Alex Triantafilou, who will welcome Trump to his state Saturday. “I certainly know what some of the national polling and some of the pundits have to say about this. But he is always welcome to Ohio because we know that he fires our people up.”

Not everyone thinks Trump is a net-positive even in places he comfortably won.

A national GOP operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said there are “no indications that there are enough turn out voters to overcome dropping some persuasion voters.”

Outgoing North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he doesn’t think it would be helpful for Trump to campaign in his state — which the president won in all three of his presidential runs, and where former RNC Chair Michael Whatley is struggling to tighten the race against former Gov. Roy Cooper (D).

“Not in my opinion — just if you take a look at the votes — you take a look at the independents. I don’t think he’s the one who’s going to get them out,” he told POLITICO.

“I think [Trump’s] job is to get the people out who traditionally vote for him and don’t show up in off-year elections,” he added. “Our job [as candidates] is to then … create some separation. It’s not like you’re breaking your loyalty to the president. ... So there are states I think he should go to, there are states I don’t think he should go to.”

The Whatley campaign, however, feels differently. “Who drives R turnout right now in NC — Trump or Tillis? We would welcome Trump back to NC,” said Whatley’s senior adviser, Jonathan Felts. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been to North Carolina to campaign with Whatley in recent weeks.

Trump’s upcoming stop in a red corner of Ohio outside Dayton is part of a broader campaign swing that reflects the political bind. Other stops scheduled include in deep-red states like Oklahoma and Alabama, as well as in red states with key Senate contests including Ohio, Nebraska and Alaska.

Ironically, the expanding battleground map could make Trump more useful to Republicans in some of the places they are most worried about. As the fight has spread into states and districts he won by double digits, simply turning out more of his base may be enough to make a difference.

The White House argued Trump is the “unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party.”

“No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement, and the President understands how to communicate with them,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said.

The Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee also said Trump is still a valuable turnout tool, and their candidates are eager to have the president visit their districts and to appear with him on the campaign trail. The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

But some of the voters Republicans most need Trump to activate — especially blue-collar white voters in rural areas who came out to vote for him but often skip voting in the midterms — are themselves unhappy with his presidency.

Recent POLITICO polling found that even some of Trump’s strongest supporters — those who identify as MAGA — are souring on his handling of key issues. A POLITICO Poll in August found that a 44% plurality of MAGA Trump voters said the Iran war has made things more expensive for them, while 38% said the war has had no real impact on their costs.

“It’s really Trump’s voting base that’s feeling the pain of Trump the most,” said another Republican operative involved in several battleground races across the country, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape.“They have to turn those people out. But those people are pissed at Trump, so it’s this weird dynamic of like: ‘Does he help? Does he hurt? Can he go and encourage the disenfranchised, the really pissed off Republican Trump voter?’” the operative said. “That’s really going to be what decides the outcome of this election.”

It’s noteworthy which GOP candidates are enthusiastically coming out to Trump’s rallies — and which are sitting out or staying mum on their plans.

A spokesperson confirmed that Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), who is locked in a tough race in a state Trump won by double-digits, will attend Trump’s upcoming rally outside of Dayton; a spokesperson for Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, did not respond to an inquiry about Ramaswamy’s attendance plans, nor did spokespeople for the trio of GOP House candidates running in Ohio’s competitive 1st, 7th and 9th districts.

Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate candidate in Iowa, recently said the Iran war needs to be “brought to a successful and immediate end,” in a rare public break with Trump. Hinson also did not attend a campaign rally Vance held in western Iowa in mid-September. She did, however, appear in the Oval Office behind Trump earlier this week when he announced a plan to build a $15 billion steel plant in Iowa.

But with an ever-darkening environment, some Republicans see any efforts to reverse course as better than nothing.

“Everybody sees the polling,” said Daniel Garza, a Texas Republican strategist and president of the conservative LIBRE Initiative. “Is the polling accurate? I have no idea. All I know is that turnout is going to be key to this, and anything helps right now, at this point.”

And the answer is.......

Trump’s energy chief asked Europe to release more than a third of its diesel reserves

Chris Wright’s detailed proposal is being sold as a way to bring down fuel prices without banning U.S. exports.

By Joana Lehner, Josh Groeneveld and Ben Munster

The Trump administration has circulated a proposal to European governments asking them to release a large portion of the bloc’s strategic diesel reserves to ease soaring fuel costs, according to four officials in European and U.S. governments.

The plan, put forward by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, was pitched as an alternative to President Donald Trump's threat of a blanket ban on diesel exports from the U.S.

Under the proposal, EU governments would release 120 million barrels of diesel from their national strategic reserves over 180 days, a government official from a European country told POLITICO. The official, like others in this story, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the proposal's details publicly.

That would account for well over a third of the approximately 315 million barrels of diesel EU countries held in reserve as of June this year, according to Eurostat figures. Among EU countries, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland hold the largest reserves of the essential transport fuel.

POLITICO reported Tuesday that the White House was floating the idea of asking the EU to use its diesel reserves to bolster global supply and thus lower prices. A German government official on Thursday confirmed that the United States had contacted Berlin in the matter. 

Multiple countries in Europe were approached for a coordinated release, according to a person familiar with the Trump administration's plans. One major EU member was approached bilaterally in the U.S. last week, according to a senior European energy official.

"It was very hypothetical: ‘What do you think about Europe releasing some of the reserves in order to decrease prices, put pressure on supplies?'" the official said. "'It could also help our government not to continue the discussion on the export ban.'"

Wright, along with the U.S. oil and gas industry, opposes an export ban on one of the world's most in-demand petroleum products, and the proposal is seen as an attempt to find an alternative to such a drastic measure.

At a press conference Thursday, Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen wouldn’t confirm whether the EU had received Wright’s request but said that any stock releases would only be agreed through the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based institution which coordinates energy policy among rich countries and oversaw an earlier stock release this year. She added that the Commission was in close contact with EU member countries and Washington.  

Meanwhile, President Trump on Wednesday confirmed that a diesel export ban by his administration was still on the table. “I’m thinking about it,” Trump said of the export ban at an Oval Office event. “I speak to [Energy Secretary] Chris [Wright] and [Interior Secretary] Doug [Burgum] about it a lot — they sort of think it’ll help diesel, but it might raise the price of other things.”

Trump declined to rule out restricting diesel shipments. “It’s something that we think about and we talk about every day,” he said. “But it just seems that it would have a negative impact on gasoline, so that would go up a little bit, and diesel would come down a little bit.”

Wright, who was with Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, said the administration would soon announce measures aimed at bringing down diesel prices. Europe would also be announcing moves to add supply to the market, he said.

“You will hear announcements from our friends in Europe about new diesel supplies that’ll come to the market that’ll meaningfully push diesel prices down,” Wright said.

Everyone knows he is full of shit...........

Trump threatens to 'blow up' Iran as talks stall

Iran says a formal reply came days after the U.S. president called its terms unacceptable.

By Milena Wälde

U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would decide “very soon” whether to “blow up” Iran, as Tehran said it had received Washington’s formal response to its proposal to end the seven-month war.

“We have to make that decision: We blow them up or make a deal,” Trump told reporters at an Oval Office press briefing. Asked how he planned to negotiate with Iranian officials, Trump replied: “Maybe you blow them up.”

Iran’s plan, conveyed during last week’s United Nations General Assembly, called for reopening the Strait of Hormuz within a week and restarting nuclear talks. In return, Tehran wanted the U.S. to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports, waive sanctions on Iranian oil sales and release frozen Iranian assets. Iran also called for a ceasefire on all fronts.

But Trump publicly rejected the proposal Saturday, saying Iran wanted a deal because it was “losing so badly.” He added: “They want to make a deal and I think that’s fine. I’d like to make a deal, too. But that deal would not be acceptable.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran had seen Trump’s initial reaction but was still waiting for Washington’s position to be communicated formally through mediators. Qatar and Pakistan have continued efforts to revive negotiations.

The war began Feb. 28, when the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran. On April 7, Trump threatened to destroy Iranian power plants and bridges, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Hours later, after Pakistan mediated, he agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow time for negotiations.

Trump then declared the ceasefire “over” on July 8, though he said talks could continue. The two parties have not yet found an agreement.