What I'm reading... July 1, 2025

Only 1,299 days to go...

Jul 01, 2025

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

~John F. Kennedy

Trump Insults America—Again

Of course, Trump’s only consistent foreign-policy principle during the past 10 years has been to side with Russia whenever possible. But leaving aside his obsession with Putin, the president’s smears on his own country are not the result of a deeply considered moral position, or even some kind of strategic big-think. Principles are inconvenient, and if they get in the way of winning the moment—the news cycle, a trade negotiation, an argument with a reporter—then they are of no use.
Indeed, Trump has shown, over and over, that he has no real ability to make moral distinctions about anything. Perhaps nothing illustrates this vacuousness more than Bob Woodward’s report that when Trump decided to run for president, an aide told him that his previous pro-choice stances and donations to Democrats would be a problem. “That can be fixed,” Trump said. “I’m—what do you call it? Pro-life.”

Sen. Thom Tillis won't run for reelection in 2026

"In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species," Tillis said in a statement.

Roy Cooper leans toward N.C. Senate bid, potential Trump showdown

North Carolina Democrats are getting closer to the gift they've have been asking for all year, with former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) leaning toward a Senate run in the state President Trump has won three times.
Why it matters: The field is essentially frozen until Cooper and Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, decide if they want to be their party's nominees.

Trump’s America Is Beginning to Look More Like China

What neither Americans nor Chinese imagined was how much this would become a two-way street.
In the great contest of ideas and influence between the two countries, the pendulum seems as if it’s swinging back the other way. Donald Trump’s return to office has made clear that in important respects — democratic erosion, the fixation on strong borders, the curbing of free speech and numerous other examples — America is starting to look a bit more like China.

Trump's clean-energy grenade rattles high-tech industries

Critics say President Trump's megabill amounts to an abject surrender in the battle for the future of energy. The consequences for U.S. jobs, electricity prices and the AI arms race could reverberate for decades.
The "One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act," which would gut key Biden-era clean energy subsidies and potentially impose new taxes on solar and wind projects, could reach Trump's desk as soon as this week.
"A massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar/battery that will leave America extremely vulnerable in the future," Musk tweeted Sunday, after the Senate unveiled new changes to the bill.

Obama and Bush fault Trump’s gutting of USAID, in tributes marking independent agency’s last day

Obama called President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development “inexplicable” and “a colossal mistake.”
Bush addressed Trump cuts and rule changes to PEPFAR, an AIDS and HIV prevention and care program credited with saving 25 million lives around the world.
“Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is,” Bush said.

SCOTUS Wraps a High-Profile Term

The Supreme Court handed down its final decisions on several major cases on Friday, capping off a 2024-25 term that addressed issues ranging from religious freedom to reverse discrimination to judicial overreach. Here’s a look at the most important rulings to come out of the high court’s busy docket.

The (Gaudy) Tie That Binds Trump and Bezos

Who needs a press secretary or a briefing room when you have superlatives, the caps lock key and your own Truth Social account? That seemed to be President Trump’s thinking last week as he took it upon himself to provide celebratory bulletins of dubious accuracy about his administration’s military strikes against Iran.
The damage, Trump announced, was “monumental.” It achieved the “Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities,” then a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.” Political analysts marveled at the real-time rawness of his narration — no intermediaries, no filter. Just the American president talking directly to the American people.
Or, rather, crowing. That’s what struck me — not the novelty of the communications strategy but the nakedness of the bragging. Boast upon boast upon boast. War is a grave business; must it, like every aspect of Trump’s presidency, be reduced to yet another stage for him to strut across?
I suppose so, given the pathologies of the man. The crudeness of the times.

The Dark Poetry of the Bezos Wedding

Modern Venice is “an amusement park,” ... It’s a living museum of obscene wealth. It’s whatever the opposite of quiet luxury is. It’s big and literal, unapologetic and unrestrained, a type of old-world vulgarity newly back in style, at least among people so powerful that they don’t need to care about taste. (Should Ivanka Trump, a wedding guest, have happened to look up while killing an afternoon at the Gallerie dell’Accademia this past weekend, she might have recognized something: The gold-leaf ceiling in the living room at Mar-a-Lago was explicitly modeled after one at the art museum.)

Thought for the day in honor of her birthday…

“Our life isn’t how much we can take out, but how much we can put in.”

~ Estée Lauder

Quote of the day:

"In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species."

~ Thom Tillis