Trump's weekend meltdown

The Iran ceasefire is officially dead: Vance left Islamabad empty-handed, Trump spent the weekend at UFC and posting threats, and the U.S. is now moving to blockade the Strait of Hormuz — with oil prices already rising and allies bailing. And the Pope said he has “no intention” to debate Trump over the war.

Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán just got voted out of power in Hungary — and JD Vance, who tried to prop him up, is eating the humiliation.

At home, the Swalwell collapse is complete, Trump's budget drops a 12% healthcare cut alongside a 42% military increase, and Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance at Zohran’s First 100 Days rally to tell crowds the worst is yet to come.

Since our last briefing, the Pakistan negotiations have produced exactly nothing and the situation has escalated sharply. Vance left Islamabad without a deal (AP Politics), Trump responded by threatening to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges (The Guardian US), and the U.S. has now announced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz beginning today (Huffington Post News). Oil prices are already spiking in early trading (AP Politics) — which matters because Trump himself admitted on Fox News that gas prices could be "a little bit higher" by November midterms (The Daily Beast). Maria Bartiromo visibly winced. He also posted the same threat to blow Iranians "to hell" three times in a row (The Daily Beast) while ringside at a UFC fight — a detail that prompted former CIA Director John Brennan to go on record calling for invoking the 25th Amendment, saying Trump "is clearly unhinged" and that the amendment "was written with him in mind" (The Guardian US). The Iran war is now diverting military attention and resources from Asia, raising serious strategic questions about U.S. posture toward China (AP Politics) — a story that's getting almost no coverage amid the daily chaos. And, the Pope just responded to Trump’s weekend meltdown accusing him of “catering to the radical left” (The Guardian US).

This is a genuine piece of good news with real stakes. Hungarian voters turned out in historic numbers Sunday to end Viktor Orbán's 16-year authoritarian rule (AP Politics). Orbán was Trump and Vance's favorite foreign leader, their proof-of-concept that authoritarian populism is a permanent governing model. Vance had publicly tried to intervene in the campaign on Orbán's behalf — and voters rejected his preferred outcome decisively (The Daily Beast). U.S. allies, already furious over Vance's repeated attempts to meddle in European politics, are openly celebrating (The Daily Beast). This is the story to tell people who think MAGA-style authoritarianism is inevitable: it isn't, and one of its founding examples just got thrown out by voters.

The budget proposal that landed this week is exactly as brutal as you'd expect but deserves its own headline: a 12% cut to health department programs alongside a 42% increase — $1.5 trillion — in military spending (The Guardian US). This is the clearest single document showing the administration's actual priorities. People are losing food stamps, Medicaid is under attack, and the budget makes the trade-off explicit: dying Americans are the line item, the war machine is the growth sector. This isn't a policy disagreement, it's a choice about whose lives count.

Swalwell has now officially quit the California governor's race (The Guardian US), fellow Democrats are calling for him to resign his congressional seat as well (AP Politics), and Republicans are now pushing to expel him from Congress entirely (The Guardian US). Adding a layer of bad faith to the pile: DHS is simultaneously "investigating" a claim about Swalwell's Brazilian nanny — a complaint filed by a known conspiracy theorist who mailed anti-Obama DVDs to voters in 2012 (The Guardian US). The underlying sexual assault allegations are serious and the accountability is warranted; the Republican opportunism layered on top of it is predictable but worth naming separately.

Bernie Sanders appeared at a Manhattan rally Sunday alongside NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani (complete with an iconic entrance), warning that "the worst is yet to come" and training his fire directly on billionaires (The Guardian US). Separately, a sharp piece in The New Republic makes the case that "affordability" has replaced "abundance" as the key Democratic economic buzzword — and that policy experts say Americans are more animated by corporate greed than by wonky housing debates (The New Republic). These two signals together point at something important: the left's economic message is sharpening in real time, and the framing that moves voters is explicitly anti-corporate, not technocratic.

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What the algorithm buried:

In our Sunday edition, we asked, Should Trump have been at UFC while Vance was negotiating peace talks?

EXACTLY 100% OF YOU SAID NO, IT WAS EMBARRASSING AND RECKLESS:

Until next time,