Ukraine May Be Just the Ally America Needs

By Michael Weiss

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv.

 

“It’s a very extraordinary weapon,” Trump said of the Patriot system in an interview with the Financial Times, and “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.” The implication was that Ukraine was not to be trusted.

 

Then, in another seeming reversal on August 8, Zelensky suggested in a post on X that Trump had agreed to grant the license: “We have now reached an agreement with President Trump that he will grant the licenses, but imagine if we had received them four years ago. By now, we would already be producing Patriots for everyone.” As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.

 

Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine has never been favorable, but every once in a while, he seems to be ready to do something positive for it. Then a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or a visit by Trump’s plenipotentiary Steve Witkoff to Moscow, appears to rekindle his hostility toward the embattled country, along with his wishful thinking that Putin is serious about pursuing peace. (U.S. intelligence consistently assesses that he isn’t.) Before the talk of a Patriot license, there was a much-hyped Ukrainian request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which Trump publicly weighed before unceremoniously declining during another Zelensky visit to the White House, in October.

 

But this time around, something has changed. The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.

 

These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a “model ally,” to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.

 

The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.

 

***

 

The past year has brought an encouraging turnaround in the war in Ukraine. Russia still terrorizes Ukrainian cities with ballistic-missile attacks, which grow deadlier as Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors dwindle. But Kyiv has successfully used drones to block major Russian offensive operations on the front lines. Moscow has opted for infiltration tactics instead, sending small groups of two to four soldiers through the gaps in Ukraine’s defenses to occupy abandoned trenches, buildings, or other positions from which to harass the defending army.

 

Ukraine is giving as good as it gets. It has struck oil refineries and export terminals as far away as Siberia—also air bases and strategic Russian industries, including Wildberries, an Amazon-style online retailer, some of whose inventory can be put to military as well as civilian use. These drone strikes have left smoking wreckage thousands of miles from Kyiv. They have also produced fuel rationing, pump closures, and long, snaking queues all over Russia, which is facing its worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow had to close its airports temporarily due to nightly Ukrainian-drone swarms, leading Zelensky to joke to reporters that the Russian capital was an unsafe venue for any peace talks.

 

On its own territory, Ukraine’s situation has gone from dire to manageable. Despite shortages of personnel and some shuffling of the military command, Ukraine has blunted the Russian advance in the Donbas, the eastern region that Witkoff, J.D. Vance, and Trump once urged Kyiv to consider lost. Russia’s rate of territorial advance has slowed in the past year. Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitor, calculated that Russian forces captured “nearly five times as much territory” last July as they did this July, and actually lost more ground than they seized in February and June of this year.

 

Russian logistics in southern Ukraine, particularly the transportation of fuel, weapons, and other combustible material, have been so disrupted that the Ukrainians have dubbed the main artery connecting Russia to occupied Crimea the “Highway of Death.” Ukrainian drones have intercepted maritime traffic to the peninsula as well, hitting 129 vessels associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and another 72 in the Black Sea in the past month of overnight strikes. Twenty-four-hour blackouts are now commonplace in Crimea because of Ukrainian attacks on substations and the regional energy grid.

 

Ukraine has gotten savvier about communications as well. Since last year, it has been deliberately delaying reporting its territorial gains, to avoid drawing Russian resources to parts of the front line that may be softening. Kyiv has similarly become more strategic in its approach to Trump. A Ukrainian official, who asked for his name to be withheld because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me that Kyiv now understands Trump as a transactional player, and its outreach aims to keep the American president from upending a status quo that’s working rather than appeal to humanitarian or moral imperatives.

 

***

 

If Trump once had the leverage to force a dismal peace on Ukraine, he has since relinquished it. The United States doesn’t pay for the war anymore—Europe does. Trump reduced new commitments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine by 99 percent in his first year back in office, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy determined. NATO has a mechanism that allows member states to fund the purchase of U.S. weapons for Ukrainian use, but this has so far accounted for only $6.7 billion in assistance, a fraction of the $127 billion that the Biden administration and Congress allocated to Ukraine.

 

The shortfall has become less salient as the dynamics of the war have changed, and as Ukraine has developed the capacity to manufacture its own weapons at scale. Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me that more than 80 percent of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, the bulk of which Ukraine produces itself. Last month, the Ukrainian government approved exporting weapons and defense tech for the first time since the full-scale invasion began, in February 2022. The reason, according to Politico, is that the country now produces more weapons than it can afford to buy from its own companies. Forty to 70 percent of what’s manufactured sits unused in warehouses.

 

Ukraine has become a global epicenter for military robotics. A single team of about 10 Ukrainians “eliminated” two mechanized NATO battalions in one day in an exercise in Estonia in May 2025, and “destroyed Sweden’s troops” in a war game on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea a year later. Zelensky estimates that Ukraine currently produces about 10 million drones a year; contrast that with the United States’ 100,000. Some of these munitions, such as Darts, cost as little as $1,000 to make but have taken out Russian targets worth millions.

 

Ukrainian technicians have upgraded some American products to achieve all of this. The Hornet is a $5,000 drone developed by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It carries an 11-pound warhead and can travel 124 miles. Ukraine’s Azov Corps MacGyvered the Hornet, the Kyiv Independent reported, by using commercial Starlink satellite terminals to expand its range and lower its susceptibility to Russian jamming.

 

So formidable is Ukraine’s drone game that even the country’s onetime detractors now want in on the action. One Florida-based drone company, Powerus, is looking for Ukrainian hardware and licenses and includes two noteworthy investors: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

 

Ukraine is only too happy to share its inventions and know-how. It came to America’s defense in a war of choice against Iran that many NATO allies have wanted little to do with. Early in the war, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf sustained significant damage from Iranian drone attacks, and Ukraine reportedly sent technical advisers to the region to install and operate Kyiv’s cutting-edge Sky Map system, which uses acoustics and AI to detect and down incoming drones. Ukraine has since signed security- and defense-cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

America’s offensive drone campaign against Iran now involves repurposing civilian technology for military use, much as Ukraine has done. One U.S. military officer who was deployed to the Persian Gulf until recently told me that the U.S. military has been buying Starlink terminals from local shopping malls and affixing them to aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels. The reason? They’re cheaper and easier to use than SpaceX’s “hard” Pentagon-controlled variant, Starshield.

 

As new reporting in The Atlantic disclosed on July 30, Zelensky has prevailed on Trump to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink when striking deep into Russia. The Ukrainians aren’t seeking anything that will cost U.S. taxpayers: just the go-ahead to use their homegrown munitions to greater effect and, in the absence of interceptors, take out Russian missile launchers before they fire their payloads. Granting this request could even bring a windfall to the Pentagon and the CIA.

 

The one thing the United States still provides free of charge, according to both American and Ukrainian sources, is intelligence, including the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia. Credit for this policy goes to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is said to impress the president on the golf links with eye-popping data about Russian losses on the battlefield, now in excess of 40,000 a month. Ratcliffe’s explanation for his success, one Western intelligence official told me, is that “Trump doesn’t like losers.” So long as Ukraine is seen to be winning and defying the conventional wisdom of those who insist it can’t, the president’s inclination to cut and run is mitigated.

 

Trump should also welcome the toll that Ukrainian strikes are taking on Russia’s energy economy. Moscow’s reduction in oil exports could leave countries such as India and China more vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. And the president has begged Europeans to end their dependency on Russian oil and gas since his first term in office, going so far as to sanction the Nord Stream pipeline. Zelensky calls his nightly salvos on Russian refineries “long-range sanctions.” Trump may even view bombing as a prelude to negotiations, much as he has in Iran. “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” he said of Ukraine’s deep strikes at the NATO summit in Ankara last month.

 

***

 

The intertwining of the wars in Iran and Ukraine has demonstrated that a recipient of U.S. security assistance can also be a provider of security assistance to the United States. But the one thing Ukraine can’t yet source domestically in sufficient quantities is ballistic-missile defense, and U.S. supplies of the Patriot systems used for this purpose are also strained.

 

The United States has burned through about two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot systems in the Middle East in the past six months, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia, which has been giving the Iranians targeting packages for use against U.S. soldiers in the region, knows this and continues to bombard Ukrainians with missiles, killing civilians in their homes. Last month, it fired 376 missiles, more than twice as many as it did in June, many of them aimed at Kyiv. Almost all are getting through, as Patriot batteries—most numerous around the capital—run out of interceptors.

 

“The Ukrainians have active development programs for almost everything they need, and their intention is to be totally self-sufficient in the future,” Colby Badhwar, an independent security analyst, told me. However, he said, “right now they are still almost entirely reliant on allies for interceptors.”

 

Even if the U.S. were to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, doing so at scale would take Ukraine years. That’s why Zelensky has been pursuing immediate resupplies of Patriot missiles in tandem with longer-term solutions. Zelensky reportedly asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at the Oval Office meeting on July 28; Trump refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks and U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

 

The Ukrainian journalist Tim Zadorozhnyy has reported that Zelensky first broached a Patriot license in the waning months of the Biden administration. Senior Ukrainian officials evidently put the proposal to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary at the time, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, but were rebuffed without explanation. (Zelensky has now claimed that he also requested a license from Biden in the first year of the war.)

 

Granting the license would make Washington both a guarantor of Ukraine’s security and a beneficiary of its productive capacity. The former industrial hub of the Soviet Union would pay good money to become a helpmeet to the U.S. defense industry. It’s one of the few nations in Europe still lining up to do so. When its war is over, Ukraine could manufacture surplus Patriots for U.S. use or for resale to U.S. allies and partners. Given its track record, Ukraine might even be able to produce surpluses while the war rages on. And that might be the problem.

 

Zelensky’s post on X on August 8 suggested that the main hold-up with the Trump administration was bureaucracy and “paperwork.” On the Hill_, one Republican official in favor of the license told me about an unreported hiccup in the deal. Raytheon and Lockheed, the makers of the Patriot system, “will officially frame their concerns around IP theft and tech transfer,” he said, but “their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do.

The Palestinian Authority Holds a Gun to Its Own Head

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

The Palestinian Authority has lost its latest challenge at the Supreme Court in a sign that the “pay-for-slay” policy of promoting terrorism may yet have real consequences. Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied a request by the PA and Palestine Liberation Organization to freeze a $655 million judgment against the PLO for its role in terror attacks against Americans during the Second Intifada.

 

The plaintiffs were granted the initial judgment but it was overturned by an appeals court that argued the civil case wasn’t in the court’s jurisdiction. Congress then wrote legislation specifically addressing the jurisdictional question and, according to subsequent court decisions, that question is now resolved.

 

But especially relevant is the argument that was used by the Palestinians to attempt to suppress enforcement of the judgment. Paying out the judgment could cause the Palestinian Authority to collapse, they said, quoting comments that then-State Department official Antony Blinken (who would later become secretary of state under Joe Biden) made in 2015: “The instability and violence that would result from the loss of the PA’s governing authority would likely fuel anger and frustration, and could lead to widespread violence in the West Bank. In such a political environment, it would be extremely difficult for any Palestinian leader to marshal domestic political support to enter into and sustain peace negotiations.”

 

So the Palestinian government’s argument is as follows: If you hold us accountable for violence we either caused or supported, much more violence will follow.

 

I don’t necessarily consider this analysis incorrect, for the record. If the PA were to collapse, disorder would follow. But that is a choice the PA made knowingly when it decided to keep rewarding terrorists even after Congress changed the law that had thus far shielded the Palestinians from certain penalties.

 

That bill was put through in 2019. It closed a loophole that had been protecting Ramallah from civil suits over its pay-for-slay program, in which the government awards payments to the families of terrorists who kill Jews. Should the PA keep its policy of rewarding terrorists for killing or maiming Americans after the passing of this legislation, Congress said, it would be considered a form of jurisdictional consent in American courts, and the victims and their estates could be entitled to relief. The PA continued anyway.

 

If the Palestinian government needs the money so much, it probably can’t afford to pay terrorists. Quite aside from the moral problem with pay-for-slay, it isn’t exactly fiscally responsible. And that was before it was given formal warning that continuing the policy would make U.S. civil judgments enforceable against it.

 

It is also a form of hostage-taking. The only way to prevent the Palestinian Authority from collapsing entirely, according to the Palestinian Authority itself, is to give the Palestinian government immunity to carry out or materially aid terrorism against the United States.

 

For obvious reasons, the United States simply cannot do that.

 

So what can be done instead? Well, the PA could stop supporting terrorism.

 

But it clearly doesn’t want to, because it is contesting jurisdiction entirely rather than, say, trying to settle with the families or negotiating down the judgment. The latter two options would make sense if the PA weren’t committed to terrorism forever. A request for blanket immunity, on the other hand, is a promise and a threat.

 

The collapse of the Palestinian Authority would be terrible. But it cannot be allowed to rob the U.S. by holding a gun to its own head. And any government that does is eventually going to collapse anyway.

 

No one gets to kill Americans with impunity. The fact that the PA is even asking for the privilege to do so means the Washington-Ramallah relationship badly needs a reset. Until that happens, even entertaining the handing off of parts of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority is absurd.

Trump Is the Real Vaccine Skeptic in His Administration

By Grayson Logue

Monday, August 10, 2026

 

President Donald Trump held his most recent televised Cabinet meeting at Camp David last month, going around the room to hear updates from department secretaries on various policy fronts. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s turn to speak came, he talked up the progress the administration had made on drug pricing policies. The president nodded along, but after his health and human services secretary finished, he inquired about progress on another issue. “How are you doing on the autism research? Because that’s so important,” Trump asked. “We will have an answer for you,” Kennedy replied.

 

“We’ll be talking about that—we’ll be having something of interest,” Trump added.   

 

Much scrutiny and reporting has rightfully focused on how Kennedy has used his position at the Department of Health and Human Services to promote vaccine skepticism and to try to roll back long-standing immunization recommendations. But the man who tapped Kennedy for the post has long maintained his own strain of vaccine skepticism, which seems to have reemerged in recent weeks as a force driving policy.

 

The Cabinet meeting exchange followed reporting from the Wall Street Journal a few days earlier that Trump had begun pressuring Kennedy to do more to try to establish a connection between vaccines and autism—numerous studies over decades have found no link—as well as reduce the number of vaccines that children receive, and the secretary appeared to confirm the reporting in an interview with CNN earlier this month. During a May meeting at one of his golf courses, Trump reportedly ribbed Kennedy for the lack of progress on eliminating vaccines, telling him that he had the yips. Last Thursday, several media outlets reported that the White House is preparing a new executive order on childhood vaccines and autism, though the details are not yet clear.

 

Throughout last year, Kennedy appeared to have free rein to pursue his own anti-vaccine agenda, and at times, Trump joined in the effort, including last September when the president went even further than Kennedy in misrepresenting the science around possible associations between Tylenol taken during pregnancy and autism. The president also endorsed Kennedy’s effort in January to unilaterally rewrite the childhood vaccine schedule under the guise of mirroring other peer nations’ recommendations. The resulting cuts to routine vaccine recommendations did not, in fact, approximate other peer countries.

 

But by the beginning of this year, senior advisers in the White House had reportedly put the brakes on Kennedy’s efforts, worried about polling showing that vaccine skepticism would hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. A court decision in March froze the changes to vaccine recommendations and the childhood shot schedule that Kennedy had carried out unilaterally and pushed through an advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Throughout the spring, Kennedy largely stopped talking about vaccine issues in public and emphasized less controversial aspects of his MAHA agenda like healthy eating, even launching his own cooking show.   

 

Trump’s reengagement on issues related to vaccines suggests that attempts to restrain Kennedy came from White House staff but not the president. In late May, the same month Trump reportedly started pressuring Kennedy on vaccines, the president issued an executive order taking another swing at the peer-country shift that the court had put on hold for failing to consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In December, the president issued a brief presidential memorandum directing Kennedy to align the childhood schedule with peer-countries’ recommendations. The May order seemed structured to provide a more solid legal footing for the administration to make a second attempt at cutting the number of routine vaccine recommendations.

 

The president is not as broadly anti-vaccine as Kennedy and often says he’s generally supportive of vaccines, particularly the polio vaccine—an immunization the HHS secretary has falsely claimed killed more people than the disease itself. “No, I believe in vaccines,” Trump said in a May interview. “But I don’t believe you have to have a mandate for all of them. The polio vaccine [is] amazing, you know—wiped it out.”

 

But Trump has maintained for decades that the concentration and total number of vaccines recommended for children are unnecessary and cause autism. In that same May interview, Trump detailed his feelings:

 

I believe in vaccines, but I think we’re up to 88 vaccines, and I really feel that vaccines, if they were given in smaller quantities. …  They want to cut some out, and that’s good too, I agree with that. Eighty-two is too many. If you look at Denmark and other countries, you have 12, 14, I think 17, and we have like 82. But I look at these beautiful little babies and they get like a vat, a big glass of stuff pumped into their bodies, and I think it’s a very negative thing to do.

 

He added that his beliefs are independent of Kennedy’s vaccine views: “I’m not doing that in terms of Bobby or not. I hope they agree with that, but that’s just my opinion. I would love to see much smaller shots, like four visits to the doctor, and I think you would have a much better result with the autism.”

 

Trump incorrectly conflated the number of diseases targeted by routine immunization—18 in the U.S.—with the total number of vaccine doses a child is recommended to receive in the first 18 years of life. The White House has promoted the false claim that the U.S. vaccine schedule recommends that babies receive 72 injections. You can arrive at that number by totaling doses—getting a COVID and flu shot every year until age 18 accounts for half of that total—but not injections, since some vaccines are delivered via combination shots. None of the peer countries highlighted by the administration, including Denmark, recommend fewer than 30 total doses. Public health observers have argued that fearmongering about injections harming babies has contributed to a decline in infants receiving vitamin K shots at birth. Those injections are not vaccines and are administered to eliminate the risk of severe bleeding from vitamin K deficiency.

 

What’s more, the number of diseases protected against by the childhood schedule has increased over the decades, but improvements in vaccine technology have resulted in a significant decrease in the number of proteins and molecules, known as antigens, required to trigger a sufficient immune response. Put simply, today’s shots are easier on the immune system. The entire modern vaccine schedule includes a total of 165 antigens, lower than the number in a single vaccine of previous eras. For comparison, babies and young children encounter anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 antigens in their natural environments every day.

 

A mountain of studies has failed to establish a link between childhood vaccines and autism, or the idea that combination shots like the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine cause autism. A study published last month examined a cohort of 2.5 million American children and found that receiving an MMR vaccine dose before age 2 had no association with autism.

 

The idea of spreading out the vaccines a child receives has gained acceptance among some parents because it sounds intuitively safer, even though the scientific data indicate that delaying immunizations increases the risks of a child contracting potentially harmful diseases. It’s also the kind of gut, intuitive belief that Trump is known for, not unlike his belief that tariffs benefit the U.S. economy. As far back as 2007, Trump promoted the belief that the quantity of injections caused autism. “When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” he said. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve [been] giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

 

In 2014, he posted on social media, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!” He also wrote at the time, “If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take - AUTISM.”

 

While Kennedy has been the face of the modern anti-vaccine movement, the vaccine skepticism flowing from the administration is not simply the result of Trump installing an attorney whose career centered on suing vaccine manufacturers as the federal government’s top health official. It’s also emanating from the president’s proclivities and his insistence on risking the country’s health in an attempt to validate his personal opinions.

Duke Law Defies the Supreme Court on Affirmative Action

National Review Online

Monday, August 10, 2026

 

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard prohibited race-conscious admissions, but apparently the leadership at Duke University’s law school took that as a challenge to discriminate in less obvious ways.

 

The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that its investigation concluded Duke’s law school intentionally discriminated to the benefit of black and Hispanic applicants by using racial proxies when admitting the classes since the SFFA decision.

 

The DOJ’s investigation found damning internal communications and documents that explain how the law school developed mechanisms to identify minority applicants and craft a more racially diverse student body, despite its purportedly race-neutral policies and lack of racial data on applicants. The law school’s staff emphasized “DEI” as “one of [their] most important values” in 2023, while they further committed to “work even harder” towards achieving “a racially diverse class.” After the SFFA ruling, the law school revised its official mission statement so that it emphasized building a “legal profession that embodies a commitment” to values such as equal justice and a “diversity of perspective and experience.” The law school prompted applicants to submit a short essay discussing how they would advance the mission statement; admissions staff had a “Diversity/Services” tag for labeling an applicant’s characteristics that strongly correlated with particular racial backgrounds.

 

The data are revealing: Black and Hispanic students were admitted with noticeably lower test scores. In 2025, for example, the admitted median LSAT scores for black and Hispanic applicants were 166 and 171, respectively, while the admitted median scores for Asian and white applicants were both 173, out of the maximum 180. The DOJ notes that the median LSAT scores of Asian and white applicants who were rejected in 2024–25 were two points higher than those of black students who were admitted. The DOJ calculated that Duke Law School’s consideration of race gave a “black applicant a roughly 3.5x higher probability of admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.” While that is statistically significant, the DOJ notes that the advantage was even greater prior to the SFFA decision.

 

In plain terms, Duke used proxies to distinguish and accept its preferred minorities, then sent rejection letters to more-qualified students of disfavored races. “The applicant-level data produced by Duke Law indicate that a black or Hispanic student has a substantially higher likelihood of being offered admission than a white or Asian student with the same academic credentials,” says the DOJ in its findings letter.

 

When the Supreme Court said it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions, it meant that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions. It is particularly concerning that one of the most prestigious law schools in the country refuses to follow the law. But as we know from previous DOJ investigations under the second Trump administration, Duke University isn’t the only institution of higher education that has refused to comply with SFFA; reviews found that both Yale’s and UCLA’s medical schools similarly evaded the law.

 

As recipients of taxpayer funds through federal grants, these universities cannot treat Title VI as optional guidance or mere suggestion, or ignore crystal-clear SCOTUS decisions that they dislike. While proponents of affirmative action — a long-running euphemism for discrimination — insist on the supposed virtues of “diversity” in a classroom and “equitable” outcomes, the Civil Rights Act doesn’t have a clause exempting university admissions staff who believe they are acting for a righteous cause.

 

More fundamentally, disadvantaging qualified white and Asian students for the sake of optics is a morally backward practice that shouldn’t require unceasing legal and administrative effort to extricate.

Don’t Blame the Iran War for the Awful Jobs Report

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

“US employers unexpectedly cut 23,000 jobs amid strain from the Iran war,” said one headline that exemplified what seems to be the consensus in newsrooms from coast to coast. The article itself, however, failed to mention Iran even once. And that’s appropriate, because there is little to connect the conflict with Iran and the July jobs report save the political media’s desire to draw a connection between the two.

 

A visualization of the job-growth data via the Washington Post’s Heather Long tells the tale:

 

 

Ironically, the first two months of the war with Iran were some of the strongest job-growth periods in Donald Trump’s second term. But otherwise, the majority of this presidency has been defined by anemic job growth. And it all began around the spring of 2025, coinciding with the start of the president’s trade war with just about every nation on earth.

 

Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. While there is some “uncertainty” around its conclusions, the Kansas City Fed warned at the end of last year that “tariffs may have weighed on employment.”

 

The report’s authors are quick to note that the employment landscape is complex, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence may be having an impact. Yet “the relationship between relative job growth and the import share” is hard to ignore.

 

As for AI, while the technology may have put downward pressure on some sector-specific industries, particularly for newer entrants into the labor market, the data is inconclusive. Moreover, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted, the AI boom is to thank for a significant portion of the jobs that were created last month.

 

Via NBC News:

 

The agency’s data also showed a 5,000 payroll gain in the manufacturing sector in July and an additional 22,000 roles in construction. These bright spots come as the AI data center boom has benefited some industries, but deeply divided many communities where the centers are located.

 

It would be a stretch to contend that sluggish hiring in America last month is attributable to the spike in fuel prices that accompanied Iran’s efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps that’s why media outlets that apparently want you to blame the Iran war for America’s hiring woes don’t even bother to make the case.

The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading grifter in chief and don the con.

 

But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”

 

Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

 

This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.

 

That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.

 

Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had fired 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.

 

“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”

 

The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.

 

But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.

 

This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”

 

***

 

Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s first term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.

 

What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.

 

A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPost calculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.

 

A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.

 

One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although they won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.

 

Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.

 

Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with maga, gulf of america, and trump 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.

 

But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUS reported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.

 

For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.

The Common Good

By Dan Hugger

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

On June 19, the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Its museum, featuring exhibits across four floors, is organized around four themes that shaped the Obamas, the Obama presidency, and the American people. They include “Toward a More Perfect Union,” “The People’s House,” “We the People,” and “Working for the Common Good.” The common good theme shaped the Obama administration from the very beginning. On January 20, 2009, President Obama would invoke the common good in his inaugural address:

 

The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

 

The nation was then still in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, which had come to a head with the bankruptcy of the financial services company Lehman Brothers in September of that year and would become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential campaign. The George W. Bush administration, the Federal Reserve, and Congress would pursue a series of costly interventions to mitigate the crisis and stimulate an economic recovery. Most controversially were government interventions such as loans, asset purchases, and injections of equity to save private corporations judged “too big to fail.” This struck many Americans at the time, on both the left and the right, as favoring the prosperous over the populace, and economic metrics over human need.

 

It was an ideal time for the recovery of the language of the common good.

 

A decade and a half later, we are now in the midst of a new attempt to recover the same language on the American right, and the New York Times has noticed. Elisabeth Zerofsky, writing on the recent ideological struggles within the Heritage Foundation, reported:

 

According to [Richard] Stern [former director of Heritage’s budget center], [Heritage President Kevin] Roberts began to talk, around the office, not about individual liberty but about the “common good” — not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you “ought.” Roberts adopted what Stern described as a “policy sweep,” a push not for smaller but for larger government, with more regulatory powers. One of his former chiefs of staff, Stern recalled, liked to say that the most appropriate limit on the government was no limit.

 

Andrew T. Walker, dean of the School of Theology and professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at Southern Seminary, while declining to comment on Zerofsky’s reporting, argued on X that this passage:

 

seems to helpfully capture the entire “fight on the right” as a fundamental, zero-sum dispute: whether there is such a thing as the “common good”—and, if so, what its substance and scope are. How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today’s conservative spectrum. The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.

 

On a superficial level, it seems that Walker’s assertion could be right, but as Lord Acton said, “Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality, as the initiated know it.” Employing the language of the common good, even doing so with great frequency, is not actually the same as having a thick conception of the common good. Obama, for example, would steer the nation through the 2008 financial crisis using government interventions like those of his predecessor. The Affordable Care Act, a signature achievement of his administration, required employers to provide no-cost birth control coverage to employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who would spend over a decade fighting this mandate to preserve their religious freedom, would surely have a word to say about whether the mandate really did further the common good.

 

Just as there are reasons to suspect the thickness of Obama’s commitment to the common good, so with many figures on the “new right” who loudly proclaim themselves its defender. In his 2023 book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, makes the case for using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Chris Rufo, senior fellow and director of the Logos Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, has argued that politics requires holding a tension between Aristotelian virtue and Machiavellian virtù. Such frank admissions open the possibility that the use of the language of the “common good” by the new right is cynical.

 

Cynical or not, the definitions of the common good offered by many on the new right as the controversy unfurled across X for the past week were both minimal and elastic. The political commentator Michael Knowles offered up the following definition: “It’s the kind of good that is not diminished when shared.” This definition has its roots in the classical world but has three deficiencies. First, it is a definition of a kind of good and not the common good as such. Second, it is essentially the same as what in modern economics is known as a “public good.” These goods and services, because of their non-excludable and non-rivalrous nature, are usually, although not always, provided by the government and paid for by taxation. The classic example is the lighthouse whose light is seen and shared by all. But the most damning of all, Knowles’ definition ignores more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection on the common good in the Christian West.

 

While no institution or tradition has a monopoly on the common good, the Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years, developing and extending its conception of it and bridging the gap between the reflections of the ancients and application in the modern world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes, defines the common good as, “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (section 1906).

 

The catechism further explains that the common good consists of three essential elements. First, respect for “the person as such” which obligates public authorities “to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person” ( section 1907). Second, “the social well-being and development of the group itself,” which obligates public authorities “to arbitrate … between various particular interests … [and] make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (section 1908). Lastly, to secure peace “the stability and security of a just order” which “presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defence” (section 1909).

 

Taking this mature, theologically informed perspective dissolves the “zero-sum dispute” that seemed so clear to Walker. If a thick conception of the common good includes “respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person,” the critics of the new right appropriation of the language of the common good are not necessarily enemies of the common good itself.

 

The language Stern heard Roberts employ at Heritage “not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you ought,” is another key to dissolving seeming tension. The turn of phrase is originally Lord Acton’s, truncated to obscure its true meaning:

 

The Catholic notion, defining liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought, denies that general interests can supersede individual rights. It condemns, therefore, the theory of the ancient as well as of the modern state.

 

Debates about the common good should not be framed as the common good versus the individual. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to the realization of the common good. Writing for the Daily Wire days later, Walker, on further reflection, acknowledged this reality. “We must assert what no healthy society can do without: a true account of the human person, the priority of the family, respect for human rights, and the rule of law,” he wrote. This rejection of the zero-sum new right and postliberal framing of the debate is the first step to the restoration of the common good.

 

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church lists the four permanent principles at the heart of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. It does so for good reason. None of them can be realized without the others. When postliberals and others in the new right devalue the dignity of the human person by celebrating the violent clerical fascist regime of Francisco Franco, undermine subsidiarity by arguing for the military occupation of American cities, and deny the demands of solidarity by devaluing and dismissing the concerns of their fellow citizens with their political program, they discredit the common good they claim to want to uphold.