The decision removes legal holds on implementing the president's executive order.

More than 15 politicians from across the country have signed on to the AI Pact, vowing to regulate data centers and AI. “We’ve got to get this right,” says Senate candidate Dan Osborn of Nebraska.

NASA, NIH, HHS, DOJ and other agencies were targeted, the FBI said.

The death of country music legend, actor, and philanthropist Dolly Parton has prompted a rare moment of bipartisanship, with tributes pouring in from both sides of the political aisle.

Parton, who died at the age of 80 on Tuesday, was widely loved and celebrated around the world and leaves behind a life that touched the lives of millions of Americans.

“Dolly Parton’s legacy is one of love, compassion, and resilience. With a seven-decade career, she inspired multiple generations of artists and fans with her music and an unwavering commitment to making the world a better place,” read a statement shared on Parton’s social media page.

Read More: Dolly Parton Dies at 80

President Donald Trump ordered U.S. flags at the White House and other federal facilities to be flown at half-staff through Sept. 1.

Trump called Parton an "amazing" person who and "to lose her is like to lose her a member of the family."

"She wasn't a very political person," Trump said during a live radio interview Wednesday morning with conservative host Glenn Beck.

Despite her grand public presence and persona, Parton often chose to stay out of political discourse.

“Everybody knows I don't do politics because my mother was a Democrat, my daddy was a Republican, so I'm a hypocrat,” she joked in 2017 when asked on Fox & Friends why she had not joined Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin’s anti-Trump remarks at the Emmys.

“I've got as many Republican fans as Democrats, and I don't want to make any of them mad at me, so I don't play politics. Plus, I'm an entertainer, I don’t usually voice my opinion in a situation like that,” Parton added.

Parton reiterated her apolitical stance during an interview with ABC's David Wright in 2018, where she again repeated, “I'm not being political.”

“I don't do politics. I'm not getting into any of that because I have a lot of fans out there, and I don't want to offend anybody,” she said.

When pressed to answer questions about Trump, who at the time was just over a year into his first term as President, Parton said: “I have my opinion about everybody and everything, but I learned a long time ago: Keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business.”

“I'm not in politics. I'm an entertainer,” she said.

That broad appeal was reflected in tributes from across the political spectrum.

How Democrats are remembering Parton’s advocacy

Major Democratic figures have cast Parton as a progressive figure who advocated for minority rights through her music, philanthropy, and public comments.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and is a leading voice of the progressive movement, said Parton “was one of the great entertainers of our era” whose “music and humanity touched millions.”

“She was not only a talented musician & songwriter, but a lifelong philanthropist and advocate for literacy, education, LGBTQ+ rights, healthcare and disaster relief,” he said.

Despite Parton’s desire to remain politically neutral, her reputation as an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights stems from both her public comments and her work.

When asked in an interview aired in 2009 with Joy Behar whether she supported gay marriage, Parton said: “I always say, sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do.”

At the time, the statement was politically significant, with same-sex marriage not becoming legal nationwide in the U.S. until 2015 and the issue still a source of intense political division.

Again in 2016, Parton underscored her support for the community, saying: “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people.”

“I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God's children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are,” she told Larry King during an interview.

Similarly, Tennessee Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerri Green said Parton was one of "Tennessee's finest," noting that Parton "always used her platform to lift others up."

"She was also an unapologetic advocate for the most marginalized, including our LGBTQ+ neighbors. The world is brighter and better simply because she existed,” she added.

Asked in 2023 about Tennessee’s anti-trans legislation, Parton said she wanted “everybody to be treated good,” described the queer and transgender people in her life, and said their identities were as intrinsic to them as hers was to her.

“That’s who they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me. If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Former President Joe Biden also reflected on Parton’s legacy, describing her as “an American original” who “was an inspiration to millions” and “a relentless advocate for women and for equality.”

Rep. Ro Khanna of California said Parton “chose to continue her life pursuing the arts, and pushing boundaries to advocate for inclusion, women’s rights, children’s literacy, and more.”

The Country Music Hall of Fame credits Parton and her female contemporaries with revolutionizing country music through their “strong feminine stances.”

In 1995, Parton began her Imagination Library project, which sent an age-appropriate book to children in the U.S. every month until they turned 5. The program has since expanded to multiple countries around the world and delivered more than 300 million books to over 3 million children from all backgrounds.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called Parton “an extraordinary person and an irreplaceable champion of the working class.”

How Republicans are honoring Parton as an American icon

On the other side of the political aisle, Republicans have sought to highlight Parton as a symbol of American and Appalachian identity.

“Today our nation lost an American icon. Dolly Parton stood on the global stage for many decades and helped define the cultural image of our nation,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Dolly was an Ambassador for American music and entertainment. She will be missed, but her legacy will continue.”

House Republicans, in a statement, described Parton as an “unmistakable voice” and “joyful presence” whose “deep love of country made her a national treasure.”

Parton was one of 12 children and was raised in poverty in rural Tennessee amid church music and a strong extended-family tradition. Rather than leaving the region behind, she invested heavily in East Tennessee with the opening of the Dollywood amusement park, which became a major tourism and employment engine, while the separate Dollywood Foundation funded scholarship opportunities.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said that all Tennesseans feel “the loss of Dolly Parton.”

“Dolly’s life and career are forever woven into Tennessee’s music, culture, and history. Her extraordinary talent, generosity, and love for the Volunteer State (the nickname for Tennessee) touched hearts around the world and will continue to inspire generations to come. Tennessee will forever be grateful for Dolly,” she added.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger, who represents East Tennessee's 1st Congressional District, where Parton was born and raised, said the singer “never forgot where she came from” and praised her ability to appeal to people across the political aisle.

“She was so apolitical. She did not want to be on one side or the other, and that made people love her,” she said. “She remained true to who she was, she was a genuine person. She was authentic as all get out, and nothing could sway her.”

President Donald Trump has been engaged in an ongoing legal battle to attach his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—and a new court filing warns that the building could eventually face demolition if his renovation plans do not proceed.

In the filing, Justice Department lawyers representing the center argued that Trump’s proposed renovations were necessary to prevent what they called "a financial and structural death spiral." They described the building as ‘structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital’ and warned that without the work, it could deteriorate to the point that it would need to be demolished.

The filing suggested that the building could be replaced by a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River. The lawyers said that “such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”

The filing marks an unusually explicit reference by the Trump Administration to the possibility of demolishing the venue, which first opened its doors in 1971 as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.

How the fight over the Kennedy Center escalated to demolition threats

At the start of Trump’s second term, he overhauled the center’s governing board and replaced several members with allies. That board voted in December 2025 to rename the venue as the “Trump Kennedy Center.” In February, he also ordered the center to close for two years to make way for renovations.

In May, a judge ruled that only Congress could rename the center and temporarily blocked both the name change and the planned closure. The judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the building.

Earlier this month, the board voted to rename the building “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” setting up a new test of the court’s ruling.

Internal records obtained byThe Washington Post showed that ticket revenue and fundraising fell sharply after Trump’s name was added to the building.

The reference to demolition comes as Trump has pursued major changes to other Washington landmarks. His Administration demolished the White House’s East Wing to make way for a ballroom costing hundreds of millions of dollars—a project facing its own legal challenges.

In a statement Tuesday, lawyers for Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the center’s board, called the Justice Department’s threat “unconscionable.” 

“This is a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if the President doesn’t get his way,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said. “This is unconscionable, it is unbecoming of the Department of Justice to even put this in a filing, and we will answer in court.”

A hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27, on Beatty’s emergency motion seeking to block the board’s latest attempt to add Trump’s name to the center.

TIME has reached out to the Justice Department and the Kennedy Center for comment.

LONDON, Ontario — President Donald Trump seems dead set on escalating his trade war with Canada. And no one is really sure why.

On Monday, Trump threatened another round of 50 percent tariffs on top of the ones he just implemented — this one targeting Canada’s auto industry, which is so deeply integrated with its American counterpart that large duties would do major damage on both sides of the border. By Tuesday morning, he had begun musing about renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” to spite Canadians. And throughout all of this, he and Vice President JD Vance had renewed their “jokes” about absorbing Canada as the 51st state.

But who is this even for? While the White House’s behavior infuriates Canadians — it is palpable on the ground here in Canada — it’s unusual by Trump standards in that nobody seems to want this conflict but him. 

Even the most fringe, or unpopular, foreign policy ideas he’s pursued typically have think tanks devoted to pushing them, or a loyal ally to please, or a voting bloc to rile up before the midterms. But unlike, say, Trump’s conflicts with Iran, or Cuba, or China, it’s hard to find a highly visible corner of conservatism that’s the driving force behind a nationalist campaign against Canada. 

When I reached out to trade experts, political scientists, and in-the-know Republicans of the pro- and anti- Trump persuasion to try to trace the origins of Trump’s trade war, they had trouble pointing to anything solid. As one veteran GOP lobbyist put it, there doesn’t seem to be any ideological, business, or congressional coalition devoted to egging on the trade fight. 

Even people sympathetic to Trump’s economic nationalism seem confused: Michael Lind, a populist pundit who last year penned a piece titled “Why tariffs are good,” has just written a follow-up titled “The madness of Trump’s Canada trade war.” And while there are some affected industries — autos, steel — they don’t seem to be main characters: United Auto Workers, which backed some prior tariffs, came out strongly against the proposed auto tariffs.

The politics don’t make much sense either. American voters have long disapproved of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian-made goods, and the current escalation threatens to be the largest and most economically damaging yet. Republicans sound anxious about its impact on the midterms; several key Senate races are in states right on the Canadian border, and any tariff-related price spike there could supercharge Democrats’ core midterm message about affordability. 

“This has never been a particularly well-thought strategy. I think that the biggest, most coherent explanation is that this is about power.”

Kim Clausing, UCLA trade economist

“If I were [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune, I’d be very pissed at Trump right now,” says Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster at Zenith Research.

So why are we at (economic) war?

The best answer is deceptively simple: because Trump, and Trump alone, wants to be. 

There is no good strategic rationale for the way Trump has gone about badgering America’s northern neighbor, even if you share his broadly nationalist view about trade. Rather, Trump has become fixated on dominating or even possessing Canada. And his top deputies are backfilling his fixation, including by offering terms of surrender the Canadians simply couldn’t accept. 

“This has never been a particularly well-thought strategy,” says Kim Clausing, a trade economist at UCLA. “I think that the biggest, most coherent explanation is that this is about power.”

It’s the latest example of the risks of governance by one man’s whims — one that could both damage America’s economy and burn its relationship with its staunchest ally before it resolves.

Trump’s northern power trip

Typically, when you try to explain the policy of any government, you look at two main factors: interests and ideology. In this case, neither is close to sufficient to explain the intensity of Trump’s war on Canada.

It is true that, for decades, the United States has had meaningful trade disputes with Canada over issues like lumber and dairy. But these issues never boiled over into a massive trade war, for the simple reason that they simply aren’t that large as a percentage of GDP. There’s a reason that every administration prior to this one — including Trump’s first — handled these issues through normal negotiating processes rather than loud bullying.

On the ideology front, it is true that Trump’s 2016 victory has revived conservative interest in economic nationalism — leading to the creation of groups like American Compass, a think tank dedicated to putting policy meat on the bones of the right’s nationalist spirit. But these nationalists largely converged on China as their principal economic enemy. While Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro is helping run Canada policy now, there was no sign in his essay in Project 2025 — or from other allies — that anyone was contemplating a full-on trade war with Canada beforehand. And American Compass does not appear to be involved in the current fight, offering no official comment on its press page or founder Oren Cass’s X feed.

“I really do think it is Trump’s idiosyncrasies that caused him to settle on Canada,” says Phil Magness, an economic historian who closely tracks intra-right economic disputes. “Others in the admin are going along with it.”

The timeline backs up Magness’s assessment.

In November 2024, shortly after winning the election, Trump began feuding with then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — calling him “governor” and beginning his talk of Canada as the 51st state. Less than two months after taking office, Trump targeted Canada with (at that point) historically high 25 percent across-the-board tariffs.

When the Washington Post investigated the rationale behind these tariffs at the time, they found a void. There was no policy paper behind the Canadian tariffs, nor any clear intellectual godfather or industry backer. People inside the administration put all the credit (or blame?) solely at the president’s feet. Within MAGA media, the closest to radical anti-Canada sentiment might have been Tucker Carlson’s trollish musing about “regime change” in 2023.

After Mark Carney replaced Trudeau as prime minister, and won the general election primarily on an anti-Trump platform, tensions cooled to a somewhat surprising degree, at least when it came to trade talks. Prior to this week, the 51st state rhetoric had declined dramatically; negotiations on trade looked like they had a real chance of success. Indeed, just this Tuesday, Trump himself declared they had reached a deal and postponed tariff implementation as a result. The Friday breakdown thus felt like a bit of a shock.

But reading detailed accounts of the negotiation collapse, including a brand-new ticktock from the New York Times, it’s clear that overweening American conditions were a major part of the failure. Most strikingly, and relevant, were US demands that it have control over Canada’s tariff rates with other countries and that it be able to reimpose American tariffs on Canada at will.

The key point here is that the Trump administration was not, and never has been, interested in a reciprocal trade deal between allies based on clear and cogent principles. Instead, they want to vassalize Canada — to bully it into surrendering elements of its sovereignty, or even its sovereign existence altogether. It is clear that this is the direct result of the president’s personal fixation.

Why exactly Trump has become so obsessed with controlling Canada is harder to say. Per the Post, there are theories ranging from bitterness around a legal battle over Trump Tower Toronto to his friendship with Kevin O’Leary, Canadian entrepreneur and host of the reality show Shark Tank. Certainly, his more recent rivalry with Carney hasn’t helped: “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared, menacingly, after the prime minister delivered a critical foreign policy speech in January.

My own personal theory is that it’s of a piece with Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland, another cause that’s largely unique to him. He is looking toward his presidential legacy, and nothing makes a real estate developer think “legacy” more than literally enlarging the size of the United States on the map.

But in practical terms, the reason may be immaterial. Whatever the roots of Trump’s Canada fixation, we know that it is real and a major driver in US foreign policy — one so important, in fact, that he is willing to jeopardize his party’s all-important Senate majority in order to pursue it.

South Carolina Republicans voted to try to keep one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats in the Graham family, as Darline Graham Nordone, who was appointed to fill it temporarily, has won the runoff for the special Republican primary election to replace her late brother Lindsey Graham on the ballot in the November general election.

The Associated Press called the race at 9:01 p.m. ET, as Nordone led with about 52.5% of the vote.

Nordone said in a speech after securing the nomination that she has mixed emotions about her primary victory and that she misses her brother.

“There is still a big hole in my heart,” Nordone told supporters at a rally, “but I know he’s looking down right now very proud of everyone in this room.”

She then added that her nomination is merely “the starting line for an even bigger fight which lies ahead.”

Nordone will next face off against the Democratic candidate Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who won her primary in June. The upper chamber seat, though, is unlikely to flip in Democrats’ favor; the Cook Political Report rates the race as “Solid Republican.”

In June, Graham won the Republican primary race to compete for his fifth term as Senator, but after his death the following month, a special primary election was called for Aug. 11. While Nordone, who was appointed by South Carolina’s Governor to serve out the remainder of her brother’s term, earned the highest share of the vote on Aug. 11, she fell short of the majority she needed to win the race, triggering the runoff. Nordone earned nearly 33% of the vote on Aug. 11, while her opponent, U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, came in second, with nearly 25%, sending both candidates to the runoff race.

President Donald Trump had championed Nordone in the race, publicly encouraging her to run for a full term before she had even announced her plans to do so. In a Truth Social post in July, Trump called Nordone “a spectacular person, and a true American Patriot.”

“Lindsey was one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, and his sister shares his deep love of our Country, and the State of South Carolina,” Trump said in his post. He added that he asked Nordone to run for a full term, saying, “I hope Darline does this, in that there would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey. Darline, who comes from an absolutely incredible family, has been a WINNER all of her life and, should she accept, has my Complete and Total Endorsement in the Special Election for U.S. Senate in South Carolina.”

Although Nordone was a strong supporter of her brother’s political career over the years, she had never before held elected office. Her lack of political experience was the subject of scrutiny during her campaign, particularly after a debate against Norman leading up to Tuesday’s runoff. When asked during the debate if Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues for the U.S., Nordone replied: “I’m just going to be honest here … I’m not that informed on national security, so.”

Her opponents were quick to criticize her for the remark. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. who endorsed Norman in the race, shared a clip of Nordone’s response to the debate question on X, saying, “Lindsey Graham was well informed on the United States’ national security. Darline Graham admits she’s not. This is not something you inherit. And it’s critical in the U.S. Senate.”

Nordone responded to the backlash in an interview on Fox News.

“I tripped up on one question last night,” she said. “But you know, I’ve said many times, I’m not a politician, certainly not a career politician. I don’t speak politician. You know, I was just honest, and I think that’s kind of a foreign concept.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is threatening that if he can’t have the Kennedy Center, no one can. 

What’s going on? Trump has been trying to get his name back on the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts since June, when it was removed in response to a court order. On Monday night, the Justice Department revealed its latest ploy to make that happen. 

In a court filing, the DOJ argued that if its renovation plans for the Kennedy Center aren’t allowed to go forward, “the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down” and replaced by another structure, “such as a large outdoor amphitheater.”

Tied up in the proposed $250 million renovation are three new tributes to Trump, which the Kennedy Center board (stacked with Trump appointees) voted to add earlier this month: the text “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” and “endowed by The Trump Kennedy Center Fund” on the building’s facade, and the renaming of the Kennedy Center grounds as “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

Those changes are currently being challenged in court by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who successfully sued to undo Trump’s first renaming of the center. But the Trump administration claims her suit endangers the entire project.

What does Trump’s name have to do with the renovations? According to the DOJ filing, “an order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop.” 

“There will simply not be the expertise or funding necessary to rebuild and renovate this decimated structure,” it adds. 

Is that true? No. Congress already approved $257 million for the renovation last year, which the Kennedy Center board touted in a press release crediting Trump. 

And far from being a draw, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, Trump’s previous renaming of the Kennedy Center caused ticket sales and donations to plummet, creating a $23 million deficit even after deep spending cuts. 

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Universally beloved country music star Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at age 80. Here’s one song to remember her, and a story about what she described as “one of the greatest things that I’ve ever done in my life”: a literacy program that, as of this year, has gifted more than 332 million books to children.

Plus, from my editor: This Radiolab podcast series, Dolly Parton’s America.

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Anthony Ralphs was frustrated by the San Diego City Council's support for Flock. He decided it would take something more than reasoned argument to get their attention.

Not even a year ago, state leaders of all stripes were clamoring for data centers, the A.I.-warehouses of the future. Incentives here. Promises of infrastructure there. Sweetheart deals all around. But as voters started to view the centers as a resource suck and potentially job killers, sentiment moved quicker than a ChatGPT prompt; between March and July, public opinion shifted 12 points against new data centers, according to one national poll. 

The result has been a massive reset of assumptions about the wisdom of these campuses of computing power. The backlash is stealthily turning midterm elections across the country into referendums on anxieties about an economy overrun by A.I., and specifically the role of those data centers that appear to be sending both electricity bills and NIMBY-ism spiking. The shift also sets in motion a messy collision between the GOP candidates adjusting to voter sentiment and the parochial whims of their party leader.

In Texas, Republican Ken Paxton rolled out a proposal on Monday to block data centers that could use Chinese technology and hold data centers responsible if those automated A.I. bots “undermine children’s safety.” It was the latest sign this month of Republicans in the red state recalibrating on the issue, following Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement of a pause on new data centers—after calling his state the “epicenter of AI development” in November.

In Michigan, GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers last week called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers after earlier supporting their construction. His opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has called for data centers to cover their own power costs, limit water consumption, and work with local communities to give them a “meaningful say.” El-Sayed previously said Michigan shouldn’t move forward with such projects until there were “federal-level guardrails.”

And in Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, widely seen as the state’s next Governor after winning this month’s Republican primary, dumped more than $2 million on just one ad in his primary promising to “protect” the state from data centers. It was a stunning reversal from just a few weeks earlier, when Donalds mocked opponents of the data centers as yesteryear nostalgists. “There ain’t no bans coming,” he said. 

You’re not imagining the whiplash. President Donald Trump has remained a cheerleader for the data centers, seeing the prospect of high-powered computer chips cementing U.S. dominance across all industries. It also hasn’t hurt that the Trump administration has extracted ownership stakes in semiconductor companies in exchange for funds allocated during President Joe Biden’s term.

"Communities that don't take a data center, they're making a mistake,” Trump said of the swelling number of localities banning such sites during an interview last week.

It usually goes poorly for Republican candidates running counter to Trump. But on this issue, Trump's position will only make it tougher for Republicans to convince voters that they are really willing to push back on the A.I. buildout.

But it’s not just Republicans facing heat on the issue. In Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for Governor, Rep. Tom Tiffany, has labeled his Democratic opponent “Data Center David Crowley” and has been highlighting his own opposition to Wisconsin’s tax incentives for data centers. Crowley has tried to underscore the need for a balanced approach to the issue. As Crowley told me just this month before he won his primary: “All data centers are not all created equal.”

And in Pennsylvania, Republican Stacy Garrity, the state Treasurer running for Governor, recently backed a temporary moratorium on new data centers, after saying earlier this year that Pennsylvania should welcome more of them. Garrity’s new approach is actually a click further than incumbent Gov. Josh Shapiro, who last year touted an Amazon data center as the largest investment in state history, but has since revoked fast-track approval for new data warehouses. Garrity is now hitting Shapiro for welcoming “data centers in our backyards.”

A warning from Ohio

Ohio may be where the data center backlash is playing the most visible role in a topline Senate race, as Sen. Jon Husted is trailing the Democrat, former Sen. Sherrod Brown.

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” Senate Republicans’ campaign arm wrote in a memo last week first reported by Axios.  

In one ad, Brown casts the data-center spree as a consequence of Husted’s advocacy when he worked as the state’s Lieutenant Governor. “Husted is a chief reason Ohio has so many of those centers,” the ad says. “He force-fed the massive energy-sucking facilities.”

Brown’s strategy here dovetails neatly into his long-standing reputation as a working-class champion, with data centers serving as physical manifestations of an A.I. revolution that is poised to cost workers’ jobs, concentrate power in the hands of the elite, and feed tech oligarchs who do not have middle-class worries at the fore.

The memo continues: “Brown is using it because it works.” 

In the Senate, Husted has introduced legislation to encourage states to require companies to pay for their own power and ensure that the cost of new transmission infrastructure is not passed on to consumers. 

To be clear, the leaked memo was the campaign equivalent of putting out a Bat Signal to deep-pocketed and influential A.I. players to do something, and fast, to counteract this backlash. If the industry doesn’t get the message, it may find itself fighting this with far fewer allies heading into the 2028 presidential cycle. 

"If [Husted] loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notices—and they will not go near the next one," the memo warns.

It’s not just the Senate race where data centers are dominating Ohio politics. In an unexpectedly close contest for Governor, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has adopted a tough stance against free-riding data centers and thrown in one more populist proposal: “If a data center is built in your community, then … you will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity.” The tech investor is running against Amy Acton, a former state health chief who has her own raft of demands for tech centers, including mandatory union workers.

The Data Center Backlash, By the Numbers

The speed with which the tech industry has moved to build out their computing power is quickly bumping up against the speed of communities now banning them. Last month alone saw 150 localities banning such data centers, bringing the total north of 500, according to the tracking project by The Information.

There are roughly 1,600 data centers in the United States these days by one count. They consume 4% of total U.S. electric consumption. The biggest hub is Virginia, with 184 sites—using enough electricity to serve 2.3 million homes, according to a Tyler, Texas,-based consulting firm that tracks the industry. Eisenbach Consulting’s tracking estimates a full 25% of Virginia’s energy now goes to data centers. 

The math gets fuzzy fast, though. Some counts put it at more than 3,000 data centers nationally with another 1,500 on deck. It’s that uncertainty that has helped make the murky topic even more potent for those who view the data center buildout as akin to a virus spreading across the heartland. (If one company has two warehouses on the same street, are they even separate?) 

Faced with the combined threats of resource depletion, higher energy costs, and potential job losses to motherboards, it’s no wonder this tech revolution has voters seeing a scary future. 

In politics, it’s seldom a bad instinct to find a villain and throw everything against it. But candidates doing a total 180 in the span of weeks may leave voters questioning its sincerity, especially when Trump has shown no willingness to join the spin.

The Supreme Court has removed one roadblock from the Trump administration’s attempts to impose severe restrictions on voting.

The Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump a victory in his efforts to restrict mail-in voting ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections. 

In an unsigned 6-3 ruling, with the court’s liberal justices dissenting, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s June block on the President’s Executive Order targeting mail-in voting after 23 Democratic states and Washington D.C. sued the Administration for the order’s alleged unconstitutionality and presidential overreach.

Democrat lawmakers have responded furiously to Monday’s decision. “Another day, another Trump attempt to rig elections and destroy democracy,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom on social media. “We can stop this. Vote this November.”

Trump, in his push to remake American elections, has repeatedly blamed mail-in voting for widespread electoral fraud. He claimed that mail-in ballots helped him lose in the 2020 election despite audits already refuting those claims, and his own voting by mail in recent elections.

The ruling does not settle whether the Executive Order will proceed ahead of the November midterms, where the Republican Party needs to defend its narrow majority in Congress. Part of the order covering the U.S. Postal Service remains blocked under a separate injunction in August, which still needs to be resolved.

The Supreme Court also did not outright rule on the legality of Trump’s order—only on the timing of the challenges to it—and left it open to future lawsuits, which critics have signaled they will file.

Here’s how other Democrats, as well as some Republicans, have responded to the decision, and what it means for November’s pivotal midterms. 

Democrats vow legal challenges against “terrible” Supreme Court decision 

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said Monday that the legal battle against Trump’s Executive Order would continue, after a previous challenge put a temporary halt on the directive. 

“Not so fast. Today’s SCOTUS decision does not deal with the substance of Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order and does not mean his illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting will go forward,” argued Shapiro. “We’ll see the Trump Administration in court.”

Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also vowed a response to the decision. “This is a terrible decision from Trump’s Supreme Court,” she said. “States run elections, not Donald Trump. I will do everything I can to protect New Jerseyans’ right to vote – by mail and in person.”

Newsom built upon his condemnation on Monday. “California will be suing again to block these Orwellian rules from being implemented,” he said. 

“This decision is a painful setback,” Attorney General Letitia James of New York, one of the plaintiff states from June’s challenge against the Order, said in a statement. “But it will not be the final word.”

More widely, other Democrat lawmakers criticized the Supreme Court’s decision and the impact it could have on the upcoming midterms. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “It’s a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to put a dagger into the heart of our democracy,” following the decision. 

Schumer argued the Order was “blatantly unconstitutional,” and that “his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward.”

Hitting out at the President more broadly, the lawmaker continued: “[Trump] wants to make it harder for Americans to vote so they don’t hold him accountable for the skyrocketing costs, illegal war, and rampant corruption that are a hallmark of his administration.”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada issued another direct response at the President himself. “Trump voted by mail eleven days ago. Apparently it’s good enough for him, but he wants to take away your right to vote in the same way,” she said. 

“Trump’s voter suppression order is about making it harder for Americans to hold him accountable - it is shameful that the Supreme Court is enabling it,” the lawmaker continued. 

Sen. Maria Cantwell also expressed concerns over the privacy of voters. “Today’s Supreme Court decision gets the Trump Administration one step closer to implementing its voter suppression order and forcing states to hand over personal voter data to the federal government,” she said. 

Republicans celebrate Supreme Court decision

“With today’s SCOTUS ruling, President Trump has made a giant leap forward in securing our 2026 elections,” said Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a long-standing supporter of Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting. 

“Congress must still pass the SAVE America Act to secure future elections. We should’ve passed it months ago,” he continued in reference to the Act which is still awaiting approval in the Senate. 

Lee also responded to Gov. Shapiro’s commitment to continue legal challenges against the President’s Executive Order. “Why are you so determined to let non-citizens vote?” he said. 

“Bravo! Glad to see the Supreme Court get this one right. Election integrity is nonnegotiable,” said Rep. Keith Self of Texas, also pushing the Senate to approve the SAVE Act. 

“This is a major win for the security of American elections,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis in a statement to TIME. “These are commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders.

What does the ruling mean for federal elections, and how did we get here?

On June 25, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston ordered an injunction on provisions of Trump’s March Executive Order. Those provisions direct the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create “state citizenship lists” that cover eligible voters, and the Postal Service to create rules that would end sending absentee ballots to individuals not on a state’s mail-in or absentee participation list.

Talwani’s block covered the 23 plaintiff states and Washington, D.C. On July 25, the First Circuit rejected the Trump Administration’s request to block Talwani’s order pending appeal.

The Trump Administration sought the Supreme Court’s intervention in July, arguing that the lower court “lacked jurisdiction” to resolve the dispute, as implementing rules based on the President’s Order haven’t been finalized.

In the Monday ruling, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed with the Trump Administration and paused Talwani’s injunction.

The top court said that Trump’s order regarding state citizenship lists was “an internal directive from the President to a subordinate” and that it “imposes no obligations on the States,” which in turn “suffer no concrete harm.”

It added that, in the case of Trump directing the Postal Service to propose rules on mail-in ballots, the legal challenge was premature and lacked standing. When states filed the suit, the Postal Service had not issued a final rule.

The Supreme Court’s majority said the district court had to engage in a “string of speculations” to arrive at its June injunction: “Federal courts review final rules, not proposed rules—and certainly not antecedent internal directives to propose a rule.”

What the ruling did not cover

While the Supreme Court’s majority paused Talwani’s June injunction for being premature, it does not cover a separate injunction—also from Talwani—on Aug. 11. Ruling on another suit, Talwani barred the Postal Service from implementing the same Executive Order for the November midterms nationwide.

The Supreme Court ruling also simply granted the Trump Administration’s emergency request to pause Talwani’s June injunction. The case on Trump’s Executive Order is still pending before the First Circuit.

It also explicitly left room for challenges on the legality of the rules stemming from Trump’s order, especially with the Postal Service’s final rule.

Norm Eisen, a voting-rights advocate leading one of several legal challenges to Trump’s order, downplayed the Supreme Court’s decision. “Please don’t overreact to Roberts Court decision on the contemplated [Postal Service] ballot moves,” Eisen posted on microblogging platform Bluesky Monday. “They simply held that the injunction came too early in the process, before there was a final rule.”

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: The data center backlash is a democracy story

This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged a small hurdle in his quest to integrate artificial intelligence into all parts of human life and the economy: the rest of us. 

In an episode of the Founders podcast with David Senra, Altman confronted the growing public backlash against tech leaders and their AI tools, conceding that he’d overrated the speed at which they’d be adopted across the economy and that the industry hasn’t made its case to the public.

“We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated,” Altman said. He added that “it’s probably a good feature of human society that we have some built-in inertia, some skepticism of rapid change.”

You think?

Survey after survey shows how deep — and how bipartisan — the backlash against AI, and specifically data centers, already runs. The pressure has been building all year: A Gallup poll in March) found that 71 percent of Americans said they oppose building AI data centers in their area — 48 percent of them strongly. That opposition runs across the aisle: 75 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents, and 63 percent of Republicans. For perspective, Americans are more opposed to a data center going up near them than a nuclear power plant (53 percent). This is not some fringe opposition. It is a consensus. 

The shift is already scrambling candidates’ positions ahead of the midterms, where data centers, artificial intelligence, and the future of work will be front and center. Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s refusal to back a data center moratorium (which he reiterated on America, Actually) has given Republicans an opportunity. His opponent in Michigan, GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers, recently came out for a one-year moratorium — an attempt to get to the left of El-Sayed (!). The shift reflects our new political reality. At this point, being pro-data center isn’t just a minority position overrepresented among C-suite executives — it’s become a moral and cultural signal. An us-vs.-them litmus test in an age of elite distrust.

The political world did not see this coming. A year ago — before Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, before DSA congressional wins in New York and Colorado, before El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida — the Democratic establishment was all about Abundance, the 2025 Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson book that had become something like an electoral manual for Washington Democrats and the press that covers them. But Abundance was (and is) powered by advanced technology and its mass adoption — the book says so on its first pages — and, like Altman, its proponents may have underestimated how unwilling neighbors would be to hand still more of their lives over to our Silicon Valley overlords. In a recent piece, my colleague Andrew Prokop wrote that Abundance flopped among voters because leftists adopted their best ideas, and issues like Israel became more of a motivating force among primary voters. But I’d also add that it replicated the same mistake tech leaders made: reveling in the benefits of a transformed economy before building consensus among the people who must live with it. 

We’ve been covering this issue throughout the year, including attending an early-summer town hall in New Jersey over a proposed data-center expansion in the state’s poorest county. But even I have been surprised at how much we hear about AI and data centers from voters on America, Actually — and how tied those fears are to a larger anxiety about the future of work and a growing resentment of tech CEOs like Altman and Elon Musk. If the 2020 election was defined by both parties’ silence on AI, the years since have been defined by elites telling the underclass that they have no agency in the disruption to come.

Based on our reporting this year, here are four things that I think explain the shift in sentiment — and forecast where this goes in the midterms and the presidential race to come.

1. It’s about agency, not “the environment” 

The thing that comes through loudest on the ground isn’t a technical objection to server farms, or even a concern with their potential impact on the environment. It’s the feeling that this change was done to communities — not in consultation with them. At the New Jersey town hall, one resident put it this way: “Folks feel unheard. And we don’t feel that way — we are unheard.” Another related it to a broader anxiety about artificial intelligence, which she said felt imposed on society from the upper class: “Everything relates from the top down, and what we’re getting from the top has spread all the way to the local level. And it isn’t good.” 

Sen. Ruben Gallego — no AI opponent himself — suggested the resentment often came from how the industry picks its targets. “They’re gonna put a data center all because it’s cheap land, and also because they think it’s a Black and brown area, so they’re gonna have less pushback,” he said. And that feeling of powerlessness is not only amplified in the absence of federal regulation, but by the knowledge that most elected officials don’t even understand the technology themselves. 

In New Jersey, residents suspected the game was rigged against the people with the least power to say no, and it often is. One word in particular, from a data center developer, had enraged them. The developer had called the project an “experiment.” That means  “we’re the guinea pigs,” the resident said. 

2. These are not all Luddites

Recently, I’ve seen the data center backlash dismissed as a “psyop” — a foreign plot to undermine the US economy — or a symptom of technophobia. Simpletons who can’t understand what’s to come. 

But that’s a convenient and self-serving misread. In New Jersey, one of the most striking voices at the town hall was a man who runs a civic-tech project: “I use AI all the time — for project management. If you use it responsibly, you can leverage it to get real-world tasks done.” He was still, firmly, against the data center. And he’s not alone: Gallup also finds concerns about the local impact of data centers are much bigger drivers of opposition than more general anti-tech ideas, as does Fox News’ polling. People weren’t rejecting the tools altogether — there were plenty of ChatGPT users in that room. They were rejecting the pace, and the secrecy, of a project reshaping their community. 

3. The costs are visible. The benefits are a pitch.

A resident in New Jersey pointed out something important: “A couple hundred jobs for two and a half million square feet? How can that possibly be supported with today’s grid? There’s no plan for the future. … Who benefits with that building? It’s not the people of this town.” 

I think this speaks to one of the challenges the pro-data center crowd has faced. Once the construction jobs leave, the noise, the water draw, the rising electricity bills, the fear about home values, and the sheer brutalist ugliness of the structure all stay. One homeowner told us: “I can’t sell my house — it’s been for sale since February. A woman came back twice, had cash, then realized it was near the data center. Her kids said, ‘Mom—’ and she said, ‘I just can’t do this.’”

And even if local concerns are the dominant issue, AI isn’t offering much of a bigger-picture national argument to overcome them. As Gallego put it to me, “there is no massive-scale benefit to society when it comes to AI” that voters see in their lives so far, and they have competing concerns about tech’s impact on children, privacy, and job losses. 

Rep. Greg Casar, the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, told me this is the reason the left has found success tying anxiety about artificial intelligence to their broader message of affordability. 

A lot of the establishment traditional Democratic politics…are telling candidates, ‘Don’t even say the words AI.’ And if you do, say there needs to be safety but innovation — and then shut up…because maybe AI lobbyists are gonna spend tons of money against you.

Being progressive means uniting all the people getting their costs jacked up and having them vote for a politician even if the AI industry spends against them.

4. The left has their answer. What’s the center’s? 

As I wrote previously, I think a defining characteristic of this ongoing ideological battle in the Democratic Party is the collapse of the center — even more than the rise of the left. And on artificial intelligence and data centers, I think you see that crumble clearly. 

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna have made clear cases for the need for a data center moratorium to prioritize the potential impact of AI on workers. And candidates like El-Sayed have laid out a proposed regulatory framework even if they don’t support a moratorium. 

But the most shocking answers on the topic that I’ve heard have both been from elected officials more representative of the liberal center. Gallego called data centers a “necessary evil” — quite possibly the least inspiring words in American politics. Rep. Jim Clyburn’s answer on artificial intelligence was even worse. He told me he hadn’t heard about ChatGPT until recently and that he’s never used an LLM or visited a data center. 

“I have a great staff,” he told me. “I know how to legislate, I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game.” It’s a fine answer for most of governing. It is a terrifying one for a technology moving this fast.

In examining the public backlash against data centers, it’s important to remember statements like these. People don’t want to feel like they’re guinea pigs in an experiment, and it’s not just Sam Altman who has contributed to that feeling. It’s also the politicians who have treated technological change as something they retroactively legislate after a crisis arrives, whether it’s in the economy, or the environment, or society. You can’t govern a revolution you refuse to understand. 

What I’m hearing

This week, I called Adrian Walker, longtime political columnist at the Boston Globe and one of the moderators of the recent debate between Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), the 47-year-old member of Congress who’s challenging him in a September 1 primary election. The debate also featured a viral moment from Markey on artificial intelligence, where the 80-year-old incumbent did not seem to fully grasp the technology. You can watch that exchange here. 

So is this all about age? What have been the lines of division beyond that? 

You know, it’s surprising that when you poll people, and you ask them about age, they have concerns about Markey being 80 (and 86 potentially at the end of this next term). But it’s not what’s really driving votes. It’s really kind of become more of a race about who’s more progressive, and Markey has successfully, I think, pitched himself as the more progressive candidate.

What are the ways in which they are both seeking to prove their progressive credentials?

Markey constantly touts the Green New Deal, and he talks a lot about his endorsements from AOC and Ayanna Pressley and people like that. It’s basically the same playbook he ran six years ago when he beat Joe Kennedy, when he also did better than anybody expected among young voters.

So he’s still riding that Green New Deal/AOC connection.

He’s running the exact same campaign. And Moulton came in with a lot of skepticism. People are still mad about him going against Pelosi (in 2018). And he had this very high-profile attack about trans kids in youth sports — and people have been skeptical about him as a progressive. So he’s sort of trying to reinvent himself while Markey, you know, kind of rides the same thing that got him a little success. 

So is there a reason we should be watching this beyond just the question of age? 

I think the AI question really speaks to something very fundamental in this debate. I think people really have concerns about the fact that the whole Senate seems to be in their 70s and 80s, and I think it was reflected in that question. You have Markey up there saying, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Siri or Claude or whatever. And people walk away thinking this is not the dude who should be regulating AI; they think “Yeah, you know, the 47-year-old actually understands this, and the 80-year-old pretty clearly does not.”

And it kind of speaks to, I think, the sort of hunger I think a lot of people are feeling for generational change in the Senate: You watch Senate hearings, you watch congressional hearings about things like AI, but they’re really not that impressive. It really does look like a bunch of people who don’t really understand this at a very deep level. And that’s driving this frustration. 

Less than two months after the Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors — a move that would have allowed him to seize control over the nation’s central bank if it had succeeded — Trump is once again trying to fire the very same member.

Earlier this month, Trump sent a letter to Lisa Cook, a Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve, demanding that she respond to exceedingly flimsy allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. This is the first step in a process that is likely to end in Trump attempting to remove her from the Federal Reserve’s board a second time — which means that the courts will inevitably have to get involved once again.

Cook has until Wednesday to respond to Trump’s allegations.

It’s tempting to blame this bout of déjà vu on Trump, but the Supreme Court is at least as responsible for his actions as the president itself. If the Court didn’t want Trump to thumb its nose at their decision in Trump v. Cook (2026), they should have written that decision clearly enough that lawyers could actually figure out what the president is and is not allowed to do.

This is a perennial issue with the Court’s current majority, which is unusually bad at explaining themselves. They invent bold new doctrines that give them a near-complete veto power over the executive branch, then only apply this doctrine to Democratic presidents. They once handed down an anti-abortion decision that, if taken seriously, would allow any state to nullify literally any constitutional right. Every single one of their Second Amendment decisions are so incoherent that it is impossible for lower court judges to figure out how to apply them.

The Cook decision, which involved Trump’s first attempt to fire Cook, is similarly incomprehensible. It was handed down the same morning as Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which seems to hold that Trump can fire anyone who leads a federal agency. But Cook does not even cite the Slaughter decision, much less explain why the two cases are different.

Slaughter was grounded in the “unitary executive,” a theory shared by all six of the Court’s Republicans which claims that the president must have full control over federal agencies, including the power to fire their leaders — and thus agencies that have some ability to act independently of the president, such as the Federal Reserve, are unconstitutional. Cook suggests that there’s a Federal Reserve exception to this theory, although the opinion does not offer a clear explanation of why this exception exists.

There are very good policy reasons why Trump should not be able to fire Cook, or any other member of the Federal Reserve’s board. The Fed has the power to inject cocaine into the US economy, temporarily giving it a boost at the price of much greater turmoil and higher inflation down the road. If presidents are allowed to fire the Fed’s leaders, they can remove anyone who refuses to give the economy a bump during an election year — boosting the president or his party’s reelection chances, and triggering consequences that won’t be felt until after the election is over.

But the fact that preserving the Fed’s independence from the president is a good idea does not mean that the Constitution permits it. And, in Slaughter and several related cases, the Court’s Republican majority endorsed an interpretation of the Constitution that is completely incompatible with the idea of an independent Federal Reserve.

That means that, until the Court resolves this tension between Slaughter and Cook, there’s likely to be a great deal of confusion about who really controls the Fed — Trump or its current board — and whether Trump may effectively order the Fed to take actions that benefit him, but that could cause lasting harm to the US economy.

The unitary executive, briefly explained

The issue at the heart of Cook was whether the president is able to fire a member of the Federal Reserve.

Federal law provides that the Federal Reserve’s governors may only be fired “for cause,” and not simply because the president does not like them or disagrees with their policy views. The Republican justices have also long argued that Congress is forbidden from limiting the president’s power to fire federal agency leaders, because this would give the president less than full control over the federal government’s executive branch.

These justices point to a line in the Constitution that states that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” According to the Court’s Republican majority, this means that the president must have full control over any federal agency that wields power that is “executive” in nature, including the power to fire that agency’s leaders for any reason whatsoever. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an influential 1988 dissenting opinion, this constitutional provision “does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power” is held by the president.

There are numerous problems with this unitary executive theory. The biggest one is that, while the Constitution does say that there is something called the “executive power” that belongs to the president, it does not define what this power is, and the Court’s decisions embracing the idea of a unitary executive often rely on dubious historical claims.

But, regardless of whether the unitary executive rests on a sound reading of the Constitution, it is now the law. And Slaughter suggests that this Court’s definition of the term “executive power” is quite expansive. In that case, the Court indicated that any agency leader who “enforces and administers” a federal statute wields “executive” power, and thus must be fireable at will by the president. 

But then, almost immediately after the Court handed down Slaughter, it ruled in Cook that Trump could not fire one of the Fed’s leaders — or, at least, that he could not do so right away. 

The Cook decision is word salad

Under the Republican justices’ definition of which officials wield executive power, and thus must be fireable at will by the president, Cook clearly should qualify. But five justices, the three Democrats plus Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined a majority opinion by Roberts that, at least, temporarily delayed Trump’s ability to fire Cook. Three other justices took the coward’s way out, arguing in dissent that Trump should win on narrow procedural grounds that would have allowed him to fire Cook, but that also might permit a court to reinstate her at some point in the future.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to fully embrace the unitary executive theory, in Cook, and with it the idea that firing Cook is well within Trump’s power. 

As Thomas wrote in his dissent, the Federal Reserve enforces or administers numerous federal statutes. It can “change the fees on consumer debit-card transactions,” or “impose monetary penalties, levy assessments, and examine private books and records.” Its power to set interest rates flows from federal statutes requiring it to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” 

Thus, if Slaughter is correct that an agency leader who “enforces and administers” a federal statute must be fireable at will by the president, Trump should have the power to fire Cook.

Roberts’s majority opinion doesn’t really make a legal argument. But it does make a couple of  historical and policy claims that point in the direction of allowing an independent Federal Reserve to exist. Roberts begins his opinion with a history of nationally chartered banks, noting that the first such bank “predates even our Constitution “And he alludes to a “‘long tradition’ of ‘monetary policy … exercised independent of … executive influence.’” 

But it’s hard to tell why this tradition matters, at least in a world where every other federal agency is subject to the unitary executive. The Republican justices have previously claimed, for example, that the president must have full control over all federal prosecutions. But historical evidence suggests that, at the founding, prosecutions were often led by private attorneys or by judicial appointees — that is, not by the president or his appointees. So why doesn’t this historical evidence exempt the Justice Department from the unitary executive?

And, if the legal reasoning in Cook is thin, the decision’s actual holding is largely toothless. After laying out his half-baked argument for why the Federal Reserve is unlike any other federal agency, Roberts doesn’t actually write that Trump may not fire Cook. He simply says that “Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond prior to her termination” — although Roberts also writes that, once Cook has a chance to respond to the allegations against her, “only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges.”

So, by sending a letter to Cook informing her of the allegations against her and giving her a little bit of time to respond, Trump has complied with the Supreme Court’s decision. He will likely then attempt to fire her no matter what she says in response, and then there will be another round of litigation where some poor trial judge will have to “assess the validity and sufficiency” of the allegations against Cook without any guidance from the Supreme Court regarding how strong those allegations must be.

That said, it is likely that when Cook does respond to Trump’s allegations, those allegations will prove quite flimsy indeed. Trump alleges that Cook committed mortgage fraud by claiming two separate properties as her principal residence in bank documents. But Reuters examined those bank documents and discovered that she disclosed to the lender that one of those properties would be used as a vacation home. So it appears that no fraud actually occurred.

Will that be enough for Cook to keep her job? The short answer is “probably” — why would the Supreme Court have handed down such an incoherent opinion in Cook if it intended to apply the unitary executive to her anyway? But the Cook opinion itself offers little guidance to the judges who will need to sort through this mess.

Archeologists are confronting an “unfathomable” loss as border wall construction is set to cut across ranches that are home to unique historical sites, many of which haven’t been fully studied.

In March, President Donald Trump issued a blatantly illegal executive order claiming that he had the power to unilaterally rewrite US election law. The order threatens prosecutions against state officials who allow certain people to vote, and it also requires states to include several federally mandated design elements in the envelopes that they use to mail ballots to voters. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority allowed that order to go into effect. All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.

Yet while the Court’s new decision in Trump v. California is troubling, it’s not necessarily a sign that the justices will permit Trump’s illegal order to take full effect. The Court’s actual holding in California is that two lower federal courts moved too quickly when they blocked the executive order. But California does not opine on whether the order is actually legal.

The Supreme Court’s decision reinstates Trump’s order for now, but there are several active cases challenging this order in the lower courts. So it is likely that a judge will issue a new decision blocking the executive order again very soon.

Still, the Court’s decision to reinstate this order, even temporarily, is likely to confuse state election officials who are racing to prepare for an upcoming election. And the provision threatening prosecutions might deter these officials from doing their jobs until that provision is blocked by another court.

The Court is divided on whether Trump’s threat targeting state elections officials is actually a threat

The case concerns two sections of Trump’s March order, one of which threatens state election officials with prosecution if they allow the wrong people to vote, and the other which appears to be an attempt to sabotage voting by mail during the 2026 midterms.

The first one of these, Section 2, itself contains two provisions, one of which orders the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”

This simple command to compile a list would be unproblematic, except that the second provision of Section 2 orders the attorney general to prioritize prosecutions against “State and local officials or any others involved in the administration of Federal elections who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” Thus, when both provisions of Section 2 are read together, they threaten prosecutions against any state official who issues a ballot to a voter whose name does not appear on Trump’s list of approved voters.

Such a threat is unconstitutional, as the Constitution gives states, and not the federal government, the power to decide who may vote in congressional and presidential elections. The justices, however, primarily split on whether to give Trump’s order a hyperliteral reading.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argues the two clauses are clearly connected and she cites a previous Supreme Court decision warning that “[p]eople do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” 

But the majority ignores Section 2’s purpose, and instead notes that Trump’s executive order does not explicitly require states to use Trump’s list of approved voters. They also note that the executive order’s call for the Justice Department to prosecute state officials does not include any reference to Trump’s list.

In any event, even the Republican justices do not hold that the Constitution permits Trump to create a list of approved voters and prosecute state officials who depart from that list. Instead, the Republicans hold that it is too soon to block Section 2. DHS must first compile its list of approved voters, or DOJ must actually prosecute someone, before a challenge to Trump’s new policy can proceed.

The effect of the Republican justices’ decision, in other words, is to leave Trump’s threat in place, but also water it down considerably: The Court does state that Trump’s executive order does not actually require states to use Trump’s approved voter list. So that may be a sign that, if Trump actually did try to prosecute someone for allowing someone not on DHS’s list to vote, the justices would reject that prosecution — but for now, there’s little standing in the way of him doing it. 

The rest of the Court’s decision was obsolete the minute it was handed down

The remainder of the Court’s decision deals with Section 3 of Trump’s executive order, which orders the United States Postal Service (USPS) to design an envelope which states must use when they mail ballots to voters. It also forbids USPS from delivering ballots that do not comply with this new design.

The Republican justices conclude that the lower court decisions blocking Section 3 were also premature because, at the time when those courts handed down their decisions, USPS had not yet formally issued a rule that announces the new mandatory envelope design. But USPS issued that rule on Friday. So the Supreme Court’s decision was out of date days before the justices decided it, but that does nothing to change the immediate effect of the decision.

Among other things, the Trump administration’s new rule requires states to mail ballots in envelopes that include several federally mandated design elements, including a mandatory logo and a unique identifier for each voter. If the new rule takes effect, USPS will refuse to deliver any ballots that do not comply with these new, Trump-approved design requirements.

Democrats are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. So the Trump administration’s new rule is likely to skew the 2026 election towards his political party if it is allowed to take effect.

If Section 3 is eventually allowed to take effect, that will be a catastrophe for US democracy, and may even make it impossible for many states to hold midterm elections. That’s because the states couldn’t possibly have known what specific design requirements the Trump administration would impose on them until USPS issued its rule. Many states have already purchased envelopes that do not comply with the new federal mandate. And it’s not like new envelopes can simply be printed on the fly.

In some states, millions or even tens of millions of voters will vote by mail, which means that, in order to comply with the Trump administration’s new order, these states will somehow need to obtain truckloads of envelopes in time for this November’s election, comply with the considerable procedural requirements laid out in Trump’s order, and distribute these ballots to voters fast enough for them to actually return them by the deadline.

Several US states, moreover, conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. While these states often set up voting centers where voters can also vote in person, these in-person voting centers are merely a backup. And these states are unlikely to have the infrastructure, voting machines, or network of election workers that are required to run an entirely in-person election if mail-in voting fails.

So Trump wants to impose impossible deadlines on many states. But Monday’s decision does not actually hold that it is legal for him to do so. Indeed, the federal judge who initially blocked Trump’s executive order has already signaled that she is likely to block the USPS’s new rule. We will find out if the Supreme Court will allow Trump to sabotage voting by mail after that new decision makes its way back to the justices.

The Trump administration’s legal argument for the new USPS rule is quite thin

Trump’s lawyers only barely make a legal argument in favor of the new rule. After the USPS issued its new rule, Trump’s Justice Department did file a supplemental brief in the Supreme Court arguing that the new rule is lawful. But that brief is only three pages long, and its legal analysis is exceedingly thin. 

As Indira Talwani, one of the judges who blocked Trump’s executive order, noted in her opinion, there is no federal law that explicitly “delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS.” So the Trump administration must rely instead on broadly worded statutes that simply state that the Postal Service may deliver mail and take related steps that are necessary to deliver the mail.

One permits USPS to adopt rules “as may be necessary in the execution of its functions.” The other permits it to “provide for the collection, handling, transportation, delivery, forwarding, returning, and holding of mail, and for the disposition of undeliverable mail.”

And, even if these vague statutes could authorize the Trump administration to impose granular restrictions on voting by mail, the fact remains that it is impossible for many states to comply with these restrictions in 2026. Some states, such as North Carolina, are supposed to start mailing ballots at the end of next week.

It would be one thing if Trump tried to impose new envelope design requirements that will take effect in future elections. But there’s simply no time for states to design compliant envelopes, get those designs approved by USPS order dozens of pallets worth of these envelopes, and distribute them to voters in time for the 2026 midterm elections.

So the stakes in this dispute remain quite high. Trump has literally issued an executive order that, if implemented, might prevent many states from holding the midterm elections in the first place. But it is still unclear if this Supreme Court will allow that to happen.

Vice President J.D. Vance on Monday called Canada a “state,” before claiming it was an accident.

“We have to remember, Canada is a state—sorry, Freudian slip,” Vance said during a political event in Maine, after being asked about the recent heated trade talks between the U.S. and its northern neighbor. “That was actually an accident.”

He went on to say that “Canada is a country that has underinvested in its military that quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America.”

Vance’s slip-up comes after President Donald Trump has hurled a number of barbs at Canada and its political leaders since he took office for a second term. The President has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st state,” suggesting that the U.S. should annex its northern neighbor. In March, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future Governor of Canada.” 

Carney has repeatedly and firmly pushed back on Trump’s comments; last year, the Canadian Prime Minister said of the suggestion of annexing Canada: “As I’ve said to anyone who’s raised this issue in private or in public, including the President, it will never happen.”

When TIME asked Trump last year whether he was “trolling a little bit” when he speaks about making Canada a U.S. state, Trump replied, “Actually, no, I’m not.”

Trump: ‘Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive’

In a Truth Social post on Monday afternoon, Trump continued to fling digs at Canada.

“America has been carrying Canada for decades, but no longer!” Trump said in his post. “The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada. Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive — It’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States — Their key to survival.”

Trump referred to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been a vocal critic of the tariffs that the Trump Administration has imposed or threatened to impose on Canadian goods. In addition to calling Ford Carney’s “Flunky,” Trump said the Premier was “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford,” a former mayor of Ontario’s capital, Toronto.

Tensions between the allied countries have escalated in recent days. Trump claimed earlier last week that, “subject to the finalization of documents,” the two nations had reached a deal, but trade negotiations between the two broke down on Friday, and both sides have pointed the finger at the other.

In a statement shared late on Friday, Carney said that “progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians” and so he “decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S.” He accused the U.S. of proposing “last-minute changes” that he called “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal."

On Monday, Trump said that he plans to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% starting on Jan. 1, 2027. His 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of goods imported into the U.S. from Canada went into effect over the weekend, and Carney said that Canada would respond with retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods that will take effect on Sept. 8.

At a press conference on Monday, Carney said that Canada was still open to trade talks, but that any deal would have to “be one that respects Canada’s sovereignty.”

“When the Americans go to the negotiation table first with the right attitude towards our industries and a true partnership, of course we’ll come to the negotiating table,” he said.

“An attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” he continued, “that’s not something we’re going to accept.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada is back in full force. 

What’s happening? Remember last week, when Trump said that the US and Canada had a trade deal in place? It turns out they do not. After negotiations fell through on Friday, Trump responded with a 50 percent tariff on some $20 billion in Canadian goods, plus threats of higher tariffs on cars, car parts, and steel to come in 2027. 

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other administration officials are also leaning into ever more inflammatory rhetoric, with Vance taunting Canada on Monday as “a state” that “quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America.” 

How is Canada responding? With outrage, as my colleague Caitlin Dewey explains, and with tariffs of their own: On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that his country would match US tariffs “dollar for dollar,” starting early next month. 

“We cannot accept what the U.S. has offered,” he wrote, “and we will not give what they have asked.”

In addition to trade terms, the US allegedly made requests to weaken Canada’s French-language protections, which Carney said would have infringed on Canadian “sovereignty.”

Why does this matter? Immediately speaking, tariffs make things more expensive at a time when voters are already incensed over prices and the Iran war is making inflation worse; their impact could be especially felt in border states like Maine and Michigan, which also happen to have high-stakes, closely contested Senate races coming up in 72 days. 

On a longer timeline, the Trump administration is doing damage to the US-Canada relationship that goes far deeper than specific tariffs and will be far harder to reverse. Already, in January, Carney delivered a speech charting a plan to move past relying on the US as a global partner; Trump’s latest trade war will only accelerate that rupture.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Violent crime rates in the US are falling across the board, according to new 2025 statistics released by the FBI, including the murder rate, which just hit a 70-year low — tied for the lowest ever recorded. That’s good news in any context, but if you want to learn more, my colleague Bryan Walsh took a crack at explaining how it happened. You can read his article here with a gift link. 

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump is putting the “war” in “trade war.” Or so his senior officials really want you to believe. 

“At dawn begins an economic D-Day,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Sunday night, previewing the latest round of sanctions against Iran. 

“It’s a country that doesn’t have a military,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, incorrectly, of Canada over the weekend. “To think that they’re going to go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war…is foolish.”

The war with Iran is literal, of course. The war with Canada, slightly less so. But in both cases, the Trump administration is trying to weaponize America’s economic might to get its way in otherwise stalled negotiations. 

Iran and the US have been locked in on-again, off-again talks for almost the entire six months since the US-Israeli strikes began. And last week, trade negotiations between the US and Canada collapsed amid disputes over tariffs on key Canadian industries, as well as US demands that Canada weaken protections for its culture and the French language. Now, both countries are promising steep retaliatory tariffs on goods ranging from cars and steel to anoraks. 

Trump is betting that economic pain will produce the concessions diplomacy hasn’t. But Americans also suffer the fallout from these kinds of tactics. 

Go a little deeper

I am one such American. Hello! Bonjour! I am planning to visit Montreal over Labor Day weekend…and have begun to fear that my New York plates might provoke some patriotic ne’er-do-well to key my car. 

As someone who grew up on the Canadian border, with Canadian friends and Canadian radio stations and Canadian flags on most every pole, the notion that I might be newly unwelcome — or, quelle horreur, despised — in Canada is a new and unpleasant one.

Not to fear, said my colleague Zack Beauchamp. (Zack lives 90 minutes northwest of me in Ontario, and is Vox’s go-to expert on Canadian concerns.) Most Canadians “are actually quite chill toward individual Americans,” he said, and he therefore rates it “unlikely” that anyone will vandalize my vehicle. 

At the same time, Zack said, most Americans fail to realize how dramatically, and perhaps permanently, Canadians have turned on the US as a country. To many of us, the trade war is a tedious or incomprehensible policy dispute. To Canadians, it’s seen as a real threat to their sovereignty. 

Zack shared this example from his own family, which — existential stakes notwithstanding — kind of cracked me up. His wife, who is Canadian, is participating in a popular boycott movement and has “shifted literally everything she purchases” to avoid American products.

That includes buying terrible Canadian-made dishwasher pods whose wrapping doesn’t dissolve in the machine. Or purchasing him a deodorant from the puzzlingly named brand Green Beaver, which is “somewhat worse at repelling smell,” Zack said. 

“Whenever I ask her about why she does these things, she points to those World War II posters about reducing gas use — carpooling so you aren’t riding with Hitler,” Zack said. “Because that is literally how Canadians think about these things: as a war for their survival.”

The rupture is existential for Americans, too, I think — albeit in a different and less urgent way. It has to do with what American identity represents in the world today. 

That’s more abstract than something like the cost of a car (which, by the way, will likely rise dramatically if Trump implements the tariffs he threatened this morning on Truth Social). But the way the world sees America also matters.

One link for later

➨ Hold the eggs. A new study found that raising cage-free hens generates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional egg farming. If you don’t want to choose between animal welfare and climate change…may we suggest switching your eggs out for tofu or beans? (Sorry, sorry! But not every tip in this newsletter can be uplifting.)

Before you go…

• Did you know…that researchers believe young children’s brains don’t record permanent memories because they’re busy prioritizing other patterns and skills? It’s a phenomenon called “infantile amnesia,” and we’re still a long way from fully understanding it. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the traditional, three-letter nickname for students and graduates of Yale? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the insect stage after the larva. That would be the pupa or pupal stage — basically, insect adolescence. 

President Donald Trump threatened to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% as the trade rift and political slanging match between the neighboring nations escalated.

Trump announced Monday morning that U.S. tariffs on all Canadian cars and trucks, automotive parts, and steel will increase to 50% starting Jan. 1, 2027.

“Build in the U.S. and there are zero tariffs. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst nations in the world to deal with,” he said on social media.

Trump’s comments came after trade talks between the two countries broke down, with each side accusing the other of making eleventh-hour demands that derailed negotiations.

“They feel entitled, and yet, we don’t need Canada, they need us!” the President said, repeating his accusation that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years.”

Trump previously touted the nearly finished deal between the two countries last Tuesday.

However, negotiations broke down on Friday, and the Administration's 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Canada took effect Saturday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match the U.S.’s tariffs “dollar for dollar.”

“We are stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, and more ambitious,” Carney said during a press conference Saturday, referring to the year-long trade rift that has come to affect both countries.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And promised: “That will never, ever happen.” We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.”

Both sides have since blamed the other for making unreasonable demands late in the negotiating process.

“While we believed, earlier this week, that we were moving toward a mutually beneficial agreement, in recent days, the U.S. proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada, calling into question the reliability of any deal,” Carney said on Saturday. “In short, they asked too much and offered too little.”

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, meanwhile, framed the breakdown in negotiations as leaving the U.S. with little choice but to retaliate against Canada.

“We’ve said enough, and so we’ve taken countermeasures. Our interest is in protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains,” he told "Fox & Friends" on Saturday.

Greer said the Republican Administration had offered to cut tariffs on steel, autos, and lumber, “things that are sensitive for them. And they’ve always had the best deal, and they still would have an even better deal, but they didn’t want that.”

As a result, he said, “We’re moving forward with measures that respond to Canadian retaliation.”

The broader 50% tariffs that took effect Saturday were initially announced in July, and would affect around 5% of trade between the U.S.-Canada.

Shortly after the collapse of the talks, Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday and said that Canada “wants the benefits of being a State, without being one” and that it has “also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of tariffs. No more!!!”

Despite not being clear what the President meant, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly rejected.

Canada retaliates as U.S. lawmakers warn of higher costs

The collapse of the deal and escalating trade tensions between Washington and Ottawa have been met with both praise and criticism on either side of the border.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford praised Carney for standing firm and refusing to accept what he described as a “bad deal.”

“It was a bad deal for Ontario. It was a bad deal for the auto sector, the steel sector and manufacturing sector,” he said. “We never started this fight, but I can assure you we're going to win.”

On the U.S. side, Trump has faced criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Trump’s tariffs “have created higher costs and chaos.”

“His 50% tariffs on Canadian goods will raise prices. And now Canada is retaliating dollar for dollar, which will hurt Minnesota farmers, businesses, and workers,” she said Monday of the newly announced tariffs.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine similarly warned that the “on-again/off-again trade talks between the U.S. and Canada lead to higher costs, risk, and uncertainty for Maine businesses.”

“If the Administration proceeds with these tariffs, they will increase costs for Maine families, as most businesses will have no choice but to pass on the tariffs to their customers through higher prices,” she said Saturday after trade talks broke down, urging “both sides to return to the negotiating table.”

Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia warned that this latest round of automobile tariffs will have “devastating consequences.”  

“President Trump’s new 50% tariffs on Canada will disrupt supply chains and raise costs for Virginia businesses of every size and in every industry, and retaliatory tariffs will hurt Virginians,” she said Monday.