* Artless dealing: Trump and Putin met in Alaska to try and reach an agreement to end—or even pause–the war in Ukraine. The only winner in a high-profile, non-deal summit: Putin. Even though he didn’t get Alaska back.
* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, monthly jobs figures showed hiring slowed in July and was weaker in May and June than previously reported. Trump’s unsurprising post response: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he fired the BLS director, to look even worse. Another day at the blame-the-messenger Orifice.
* Seems like part of next year’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday will include a mixed martial arts fight card at the White House. Somehow, caged fights at the WH seem appropriate.
* Trump’s presidential model: No, it’s not Abraham Lincoln or even Ronald Reagan. It’s William McKinley, “the Tariff King.”
* “When was America great?” rhetorically asked billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “At the turn of the century. Our economy was rocking…125 years ago. We had no income tax and all we had was tariffs.” Yeah, those were the days.
* “Eventually, Americans will end up paying most of the cost of these tariffs.”–Harvard economist Alberto Cavallo.
* Trump had nearly 15 million followers on TikTok on his inauguration. The platform helped him spread his MAGA message. Hardly a coincidence that the Trump administration hasn’t been enforcing a bill passed by Congress that required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it.
* Donald Trump doesn’t just bluster and bully about non-MAGA partisans, he also applies this odious approach to foreign leaders who do not please him. Recent exhibit A: Brazil. He’s has threatened to impose steep tariffs on Brazil for—among other things—its prosecution of right-wing, former president Jair Bolsonaro, AKA “the Trump of the Tropics.” He’s facing criminal charges for trying to hold on to power (sound familiar?) after his electoral defeat in 2022. So Trump fired off a letter to Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The pointed rhetoric was all too familiar. “This Trial should not be taking place,” he wrote. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY.”
* House GOPsters voted to name the Kennedy Center opera house after Melania Trump. Seriously. Two takeaways: This is another insult. But it could be worse; think: “Epstein Center.”
* “Thanks to President Trump, the days of political correctness and cancel culture are over.” That was whitewashing, White House spokesman Davis Ingle.
* “GO TO HELL!”: That was the Trumpian directive to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the Senate left for its August recess sans a deal to advance dozens of Trump nominees.
* Sen. Schumer’s rationale: “We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now.”
* Deep-State quandary: “If Mr. Trump is to satisfy his base and put the (Epstein files) issue behind him, he will need to deliver on what he promised as an outsider now that he’s on the inside.”–Republican pollster and author Kristen Soltis Anderson.
* “We’re going to take our capital back.” That was President Trump, on placing Washington police under federal control and activating the National Guard—not on Jan. 6.
* “Bending the knee to Trump”: What Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Paramount Global, law firms and universities are doing, according to former Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas. “But he doesn’t understand, in Texas, our knees do not bend.”
* The ACLU sued the first Trump Administration 413 times.