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The company is also eliminating a production shift at its Arizona factory to align "production plans with anticipated demand."

After 18 years of focusing on Europe, early-stage investor Seedcamp said that it has raised $320 million for its latest fund which will see it expanding its presence in the United States.

Huntress, HackerOne, Jamf, Recorded Future, and Tanium are among the cybersecurity companies that had data stolen following an earlier breach at market research firm Klue.

President Donald Trump furiously accused The New York Times of supposedly “treasonous” reporting about his disastrous peace deal with Iran.

In a series of posts on Truth Social Sunday, Trump ranted about the Times after it published an analysis of the president’s war in Iran: “What Changed After Almost 4 Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.” The article highlighted that Trump’s deal failed to achieve any of his war’s objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile stockpile, annihilating Iran’s navy and security infrastructure, and installing a new regime.

The president disagreed.

“Their Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE, their Launching Pads, Missiles, Drones and Manufacturing of same, is almost GONE, their top two sets of Leaders are GONE, their Inflation is at 250%, their Economy is BROKEN, their Soldiers aren’t being paid, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN, THE OIL IS GUSHING, and the U.S. Stock Market and Jobs are at record HIGHS,” Trump wrote. “That’s what’s CHANGED, you corrupt and unethical cowards, and MORE!!!”

In reality, Iran shuttered trade through Strait of Hormuz yet again over the weekend, citing Israel’s ceasefire violations in Lebanon.

But Trump didn’t care about any of that. Instead, he shared a post by Senator Lindsey Graham, who echoed the president’s claim that the reporting had revealed the outlet’s “bias.”

“The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS,’” Trump wrote in yet another post.

“I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”

In October, Trump refiled an abridged version of his dismissed $15 billion defamation suit against the Times, alleging that reporters at the paper had sought to undermine his reputation as an entrepreneur and reality television star.

What began as a restoration project for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has resulted in multiple arrests.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In a post on Truth Social the same day, President Donald Trump said that the monument would likely have to be drained another time in order to address the damage, which he said included the use of a “knife or blade” to put a “250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade.” He also claimed that individuals that participated in the destruction poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the pool. He said that all those caught participating deserved “years in jail.”

“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote in a separate post on Sunday. “I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”

The White House has so far spent nearly $15 million to rid the Reflecting Pool of algae ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, but the multimillion-dollar project appears to be another dud. Within days of refilling the pool earlier this month, the algae was back.

The Department of the Interior blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes, which were apparently neglected during the cleaning process. CNN also found abnormally high phosphate levels in the pool after sampling its water. An algae researcher at the Smithsonian described the chemical imbalance as a “field day” for algal growth.

Park workers have tried to address the endemic issue with a smattering of different solutions. On Tuesday, park workers in hi-vis vests were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds. One dead baby duck was caught floating in the pool over the weekend, though the cause of death was unclear.

Long have we known that technology speeds up everything, and it's no different with British prime ministers. In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six. Nonetheless, Sir Keir Starmer had hoped to make an impact on the UK tech industry and the government's use of technology during his tenure. Given the results, it may be a mixed blessing that, after nearly two years, he has achieved little. The signs were not good from the start. Desperate to invest without raising taxes, his government claimed it could find £45 billion in efficiency savings by applying AI and automation in the public sector. It even gave the cutesy Humphrey moniker to one AI bot in a reference to the much-loved sitcom Yes Minister. No Chance Minister would have been more accurate, as experts poured scorn on the estimate and, just a few weeks ago, a committee of MPs warned that such hype hinders effective digitization of government services. The botched announcement, which had little impact, set a precedent for how the Starmer government's technology policies would unfold: grand promises, too little thought, and contradictory priorities. Take another high-profile announcement. In July last year, then-technology secretary Peter Kyle signed a pact with Google Cloud with the promise to "upskill" as many as 100,000 civil servants in the latest tech by 2030. The agreement, announced at the Google Cloud Summit London, promised to help meet the government's target of having one in ten public officials designated "tech experts" to implement civil service reform. Google DeepMind would also work with technical experts in government to support them in "deploying and diffusing" emerging technologies. But the government later clarified that its deal with the Chocolate Factory "doesn't comprise any specific commercial agreement" and there was no payment schedule from the government. Google's apparent deal was just one tied to a $42 billion (£31 billion) trade pact announced to coincide with a visit from US President Trump. Just a year later, the government now wants to focus £400 billion in public spending power on UK sovereignty and innovation, including investment in tech. Nonetheless, the government has shown repeatedly that it is unable to hold its largest tech suppliers to account, as the supplier at the heart of the historic Horizon scandal – Fujitsu – has yet to contribute to compensation for victims of one of the nation's worst miscarriages of justice, one that, in fairness, predates Starmer's time in office by more than a decade. Also demonstrating the government's tendency to promote conflicting priorities is its so-called pro-growth approach to regulation. Yet, in March this year, the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority's cloud inquiry quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025. As if to demonstrate its inability to resist the temptation to introduce more regulation when it gets a good headline, the government has set out plans to ban under-16s from social media platforms. In 2024, the finance minister promised the NHS £3.4 billion in IT investment, claiming it would unlock £35 billion in efficiency savings by the end of the decade. But the investment is under scrutiny from His Majesty's Treasury and requires an act of Parliament to remove the role of NHS England in implementing health tech policy. Starmer will perhaps be best known in tech circles for resurrecting the idea of digital ID cards, a classic in the solution-looking-for-a-problem genre. In September last year, the Starmer-backed policy promised that all legal residents would use digital identity to prove their right to work by the end of the current Parliament, which could run until August 2029. But by May this year, the plan, which leaves questions over its funding unanswered, was slammed by MPs as a poorly planned "fiasco." In the next few weeks, or possibly days, the UK will get some clarity on the identity of the next prime minister. Front-runner Andy Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards, suggesting plans might be nixed if he wins power. Nonetheless, UK citizens can look forward to another ride on the government tech hype cycle. The next prime minister will be caught in the trap between unwanted tax rises and much-needed public investment, just like the last. A politician in a tight spot seldom keeps their hands out of the cookie jar of tech promises for long. ®

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents   ▼︎ long-term incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on June 22

• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This closure will last until August 31.
   
• There will be alternating lane closures on Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. This will continue until April 30 at 6:59 a.m.
   
• A lane on westbound SR-152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville/Pajaro is closed for asphalt paving. The closure will last until 5:59 a.m. on July 3.
   
• North Highway 17 at Pasatiempo in Eastside / Live Oak is facing closures for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to end at 6:01 a.m. today.
   
• CHP helped with construction at 10395 Soquel Dr in Aptos. At 9:13 p.m., a traffic break happened northbound at Morrissey, and lanes 2 and 3 were closed at Pasa. The incident was reported on June 21.
   
• A traffic hazard was reported at the intersection of San Juan Rd and Porter Dr in Watsonville / Pajaro at 5:56 a.m. today.
   

Long-term projects

These have been going on for a while, but are still worth keeping in mind.

• Mill St. between Main St. and Highway 9 in Ben Lomond will be closed to vehicles from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on 6/6, 7/4, 8/1, 9/5, and 10/3 for the Ben Lomond Village Market event. Traffic control and detour signs will be posted.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Monday morning traffic: Highway 9 one-way traffic, SR-152 & Hwy 17 lane closures appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

In a report shared first with The 19th, three top Senate Democrats say Trump and Republicans have ‘taken a wrecking ball’ to childcare. By Grace Panetta for The 19th Three top Senate Democrats are accusing the Trump administration and Republicans of “taking a wrecking ball” to childcare programs, highlighting the issue in a midterm year where many Democrats are running on inflation…

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Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump inserted himself into a Utah GOP primary by endorsing incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) for Congress. “Celeste has a strong Record of Success, and resounding support from her Community,” he wrote on Truth Social. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”

Maloy’s opponent, however, former state legislator Phil Lyman, has his own MAGA cred. In 2020, Trump pardoned him for an old conviction for illegally riding an ATV on public lands. And in this mostly rural district full of Sagebrush Rebellion supporters, the pardon might be more of a selling point.

“He absolutely could win,” says Bryan Schott, founder of the online news site Utah Political Watch who has been closely tracking the under-the-radar race. “He is a true iconoclast. His supporters are very passionate.”

Back in May 2014, Lyman, then a San Juan County commissioner, organized a protest against the Bureau of Land Management for banning motorized vehicles in Utah’s Recapture Canyon. The canyon had been closed since 2007 to protect prehistoric archeological sites, but just weeks before the protest, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had led an armed standoff with the BLM after it attempted to impound his cows that were illegally grazing on federal land. The standoff set off a wave of anti-government activism across the West, including in Utah.

During their protest, Lyman and others, including Bundy’s son Ryan, illegally rode ATVs through the fragile canyon, a brazen move that got Lyman prosecuted for riding off-road vehicles on closed roads. A federal jury convicted him of two misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution.

The prosecution turned an unrepentant Lyman into something of a local folk hero for facing off with the federal government, which owns 64 percent of the land in Utah. Utah Republicans of all stripes, including then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, tripped over each other to show their support for him. Gov. Gary Herbert even tried to use $100,000 in state tax money to pay for Lyman’s appeal.

When that failed, Republican politicians pledged thousands of dollars of their own money to pay Lyman’s legal fees. “We are proud to support one of our own,” Cox said, after adding $1,000 to a pile of cash collected by lawmakers at a meeting in the state capitol. “Commissioner Lyman is one of the finest individuals I know.”

“We are proud to support one of our own.”

Lyman lost his appeal, but in 2020, after urging from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Trump pardoned him, suggesting he’d been a victim of selective prosecution. “Mr. Lyman is known to be a man of integrity and character,” White House officials wrote.

In 2018, his notoriety propelled him into the state legislature, where he was a member of the Yellowcake Caucus, a group of conservative legislators from rural counties known for uranium mining. During the extreme drought in 2022, when many state Republicans were taking steps to keep Great Salt Lake from drying up, Lyman organized a meeting at the state Capitol to expose what the caucus considered the real culprit behind the lake’s plight. “Trees are the enemy,” said one of the witnesses, suggesting that trees sucked up too much water. Lyman had been lobbying legislators to devote money to tree-thinning projects rather than forcing alfalfa farmers to conserve.

Then, in 2024, Lyman launched an upstart campaign to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who only a few years earlier had been chipping in for Lyman’s legal defense. During the campaign, he took aim at Cox’s signature initiatives: Disagree Better, a program he’d created as head of the National Governors Association to urge people to dial back exactly the sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in. It won Cox plaudits nationally, but in Utah, Lyman found “Disagree Better” a rich source of campaign punchlines. At an event I attended in 2024:

Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me, or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”

Lyman ultimately lost the GOP primary but ran as a write-in candidate in the November general election, which he also lost. Undeterred, he filed challenges and lawsuits against various state officials, trying to prove that Cox had stolen the election. He had some familiarity with this strategy, having been active in the “election integrity” movement kicked off by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Lyman even appeared at events with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell that promoted fraudulent election conspiracy theories.

Politically, there’s not a whole lot of distance between Lyman’s views and those of his much better-funded opponent, Celeste Maloy, particularly when it comes to federal control of public lands—a hot-button issue in the district. In fact, while Lyman protested in Recapture Canyon with the Bundys in 2014, Maloy is actually related to them. She’s Cliven Bundy’s niece by marriage and cousin of the far-right militant Ammon Bundy, Cliven’s son who staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

Maloy’s ties to Utah don’t run particularly deep. She grew up in a small town in Nevada but did attend college and law school in Utah. She was first elected in a special election in 2023 to fill the remaining term of retiring Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), for whom she’d worked as an attorney. Stewart backed her campaign, but even then, Maloy barely made it through the three-way primary.

A challenger unsuccessfully sued to get her off the primary ballot, arguing that she was ineligible to run because her voter registration in Utah was inactive before she filed as a candidate, and she hadn’t voted in the state in 2020 or 2022. As a Hill staffer, she’d been living in Virginia, but Maloy had claimed her sister’s address in Cedar City as her permanent residence. She ultimately prevailed and remained on the ballot. But even cousin Ammon endorsed someone else in the race.

When Maloy ran for her first full term in 2024, Trump backed her, as did most of the Utah congressional delegation—except Sen. Mike Lee, who supported one of her opponents. Even with the support of the state’s Republican establishment, she won the GOP primary by just 176 votes—less than one percent and hardly a sign of a deep well of support. This year, she’s had an 8-1 fundraising advantage over Lyman. Yet Maloy barely bested him at the GOP nominating convention in April.

Utah candidates have two paths for getting on a primary ballot. They can collect petition signatures or win enough delegate votes at a state nominating convention. Lyman has been wildly popular with convention delegates, who tend to be more MAGA than other Republicans. When he ran for governor in 2024, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted for him over Cox, whom they booed.

Lyman ultimately lost that primary—but by less than 9 points, which was far closer than anyone expected him to get. (Democrats are such a nonfactor in Utah that the winner of the GOP primary generally wins in November, a problem that prompts many Democrats to register as Republicans so they can influence the process—even a little.) This year, Maloy beat Lyman at the convention, but by a razor-thin margin: 50.9 to 49.09 percent. Both of them advanced to the June 23rd primary.

The 3rd district congressional race may be surprisingly close because the district is new, redrawn this year in response to a court order ending partisan gerrymandering. Maloy had previously represented the 2nd district but switched to run in the new 3rd after redistricting. The 3rd district includes a lot more counties that Lyman won handily in his statewide race against Cox. According to Schott’s math, 60 percent of registered Republicans in the district have never seen Maloy on a ballot, even though this will be her fifth election in three years. If Lyman wins the congressional primary, says Schott, “it’s because people know him.”

There’s little polling in the race. Prediction markets suggest Maloy will crush Lyman. Yet the ultimate results will rest on turnout, and Lyman is “a partisan warrior. She’s a technocrat,” Schott says. “Partisan warriors inspire people to vote.”

Maloy hasn’t made much effort to counter Lyman’s base by reaching out to more moderate voters—and there are some. In this rural, red Utah district, tourism has become a growth industry since President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 30 years ago over objections from many local officials, who to this day would prefer to see it turned into a coal mine.

Blake Spalding is one of the two founding executive chefs of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-owner of Boulder Mountain Lodge next door. Located inside the monument, the operation is one of the largest private employers in Garfield County, which is in Maloy’s district. Spalding says Maloy has never been there. She’s voting for Lyman.

“It’s not like I love Phil Lyman,” she explained. “And he has definitely never eaten in my restaurant.” As a longtime public lands advocate, Spalding is well aware that both Lyman and Maloy are hostile to federal protections for Grand Staircase. But she believes “it’s better not to vote for Trump- endorsed candidates, and Trump endorsed Celeste.”

That said, she’ll be voting for a Democrat in November. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is going to do the best job for the hummingbirds.”

The Brazilian National Secretariat for Civil Protection and Defense (SEDEC) and Federal Police (PF) are investigating a suspected hack of the country's emergency alert system after an unauthorized "extreme" alert pinged devices across the country. Defesa Civil Nacional confirmed that its dispatch platform, often used to inform the public about severe weather events, was taken offline in the early hours of Saturday, June 20, after Brazilians reported the alert, which read: "Alerta extremo - Defesa Civil:misantropi4." "Misantropia" is Portuguese for misanthropy, hatred of humankind. The message reached an unknown number of devices, with reports coming from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, and the Federal District. Civil defense authorities in all four areas confirmed the alerts were bogus and likely stemmed from an attack on the system overseen by Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency, Anatel. "Anatel clarifies that the alert messages received by mobile phone users during the early hours of this Saturday were not issued by the competent authorities responsible for the population alert system," it said in a statement. "There is currently no reason for concern on the part of the population as a result of the messages received." The agency went on to say that it remained confident in the alert broadcast system's capability to help save lives during periods of disaster. National Civil Defense officials have not confirmed whether anyone responsible for the suspected breach has been identified or apprehended, although they are not believed to be part of government staff. "The Defesa Civil Alerta dispatch platform was taken offline at 01:30 this Saturday (6/20), after suffering a breach and issuing an alert to various regions of the country, remotely ordered by someone outside the National System of Protection and Civil Defense," the department stated. "The message issued was of the Extreme Alert type and contained the word 'misanthropy' – which means hatred of humanity. It is likely a hacker attack." A Defesa Civil Nacional chief said in a press conference that a new dispatch system was already under development that would place greater emphasis on security and preventing unauthorized intrusions. The agency also committed to relaunching the affected system as soon as possible after ensuring it is properly secured. ®

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | Republicans only like an Iran deal if Trump’s name is…

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Microsoft has managed to break a very basic Outlook function – the ability to include the previous email in a reply. The issue, which afflicts Outlook for Mac, was introduced in version 16.110, build 26061317, which rolled out to users last week. Before the update, the original message appeared in the reply window. After the update, nothing. One affected user said: "It makes it impossible to have a proper email thread because the recipient can't see the conversation history." Another remarked: "This is an extremely frustrating bug in this last update, and I hope a fix is on the way. This is frankly quite disappointing that something major like this completely evaded the software testing process before it was being rolled out." The solution, according to one of Microsoft's forum moderators, is to roll back to a previous version and turn off auto-updating until a fix is released. Great for users in full control of their devices – not so good for anyone with a managed device. Administrators with fleets of Macs running Outlook should brace for helpdesk tickets. In some instances, having a user copy and paste the salient bits of the email they are responding to might not be such a bad thing. We've all had emails that required epic amounts of scrolling to find what started the conversation, so forcing users to think about what they actually need to include is no bad thing. However, disrupting user workflows without warning – well, that is undoubtedly a bad thing. This is, after all, one of the most basic things an email client needs to do, so shipping a product with a bug that breaks this functionality says more about Microsoft's approach to quality than anything else. The Register asked Microsoft for its take on the matter, but the tech behemoth has yet to respond. Microsoft has already delivered a kicking to Apple hardware users in recent weeks. Office 2019 will cease to be useful on the platform in July, or enter a "reduced functionality mode" in Microspeak, with the only option available to users keen to remain Office customers being an upgrade. However, as this latest bug demonstrates, running Microsoft's latest and greatest carries its own risks. ®

A dispute between the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission and property owners in Aptos Village about who owns a portion of land along the rail line is moving forward, with a trial expected to begin no earlier than the week of July 13.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

It’s now becoming clear that Donald Trump’s failed war in Iran will have far-reaching consequences for our country, and geopolitically as well. We’re only just beginning to get our heads around how disastrous this war and this presidency could very well prove over time. It’s a deeply consequential moment, and Trump is spending his nights tweeting crazed demands for adulation, insisting that his war was a world-historical triumph, and seething about the prospects for finishing his ballroom.

This gap between what Trump is doing to this country and the world on one side and his megalomaniacal trivial obsessions on the other is really jarring and unnerving to witness. Paul Krugman has been writing really well on his excellent Substack about both sides of this divide, so we’re talking to him about how to make sense of it all. Paul, nice to have you back on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be back on, although I wish the times were better, but anyway, yeah.

Sargent: Exactly. So let’s start with the easy stuff. At 4:32 in the morning, Donald Trump posted this:

“These fools who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran when the stock market just hit a record high and oil prices are tumbling down are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Paul, Trump is very angry that he’s not getting more worshipful praise for the world-historical triumph that was his ceasefire with Iran, which basically just put a stop to the disaster he created. So we might as well start here. What did you think of the, quote-unquote, deal?

Krugman: Obviously, it’s horrible. Iran won. Iran is in a much stronger position and the U.S. in a much weaker position than before the war started. And of course, the deal is vastly inferior to the Obama JCPOA that Trump ripped up in his first term—all of this at the cost of enormous outlays of money, depletion of weapons stocks, killed a lot of people. Basically, we’ve just shown the whole world that we’re maybe not quite a paper tiger, but a lot less of a power than we were supposed to be. So all of this is an enormous diminution of the United States.

The hawks saying, why is Trump giving in, why isn’t he following up on his victory—but there was no victory. This is actually the best you could do given how the war has gone. In fact, he should have made this deal about a week in when it became clear that the whole premise of his enterprise was not going to work.

Sargent: He could have made a better deal before the war started.

Krugman: Of course. He could have just done nothing—that would have been better. And going back in time, he could have kept that Obama agreement, which was doing a much better job of containing Iran.

But it tells you something about where we are that there are apparently a substantial number of at least until recently pro-Trump people who really believe that we were winning the war or we had won the war. Which just shows you how detached from reality they are.

Sargent: Well, they’re all in the same information bubble. Trump did another missive that was in all caps, saying this:

“OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE!), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY!). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ‘YOU’RE WELCOME!’”

OK, Paul. He got nothing significant on Iran’s nukes and our country is weaker, less safe, and less respected. But I think we should step back. He’s making a bigger argument there, isn’t he? It’s that in every way the nation is booming, strong, and leading decisively in the world. What do you make of that bigger argument?

Krugman: OK, so the stock market is up. No question about that. Although the stock market rose a lot under Joe Biden too. Trump would like you to put that down the memory hole. And stocks are up, by the way, around the world. There’s a stock market boom. I haven’t checked the numbers lately, but I believe that they’re up substantially more outside the United States than inside the United States. So this is stuff that is not really reflecting U.S.-specific developments and certainly not Trump-specific developments. Presidents do not control the stock market.

But leaving that aside, the economy—it’s not booming. We basically have had slower job growth than we did in the last two years of Biden, and basically flat unemployment. So that’s not great. It’s not a catastrophe, it’s not great. Real wages are lower than they were when Trump took office because we’ve had a lot of inflation.

By the way, one of the things with this corruption of how we do stuff—click on pretty much any information site. I’ve been only looking at the ones that have to do with economic policy, but federal government information sites, which are traditionally just sort of just the facts, here’s what’s happening, maybe discreetly touting administration policies—you click on any site and you get a pop-up that has a picture of Trump and says, “Welcome to the Golden Age,” which is all part of this incredible dingbat cult of personality.

Sargent: He corrupts everything. It just seeps into every last corner of public life, basically.

Krugman: I think it’s worth pointing out that this incredible personalized cult of personality for Trump, while it’s at an absolutely ludicrous level now, actually started ways back. There was a fair bit of it under Reagan, and let’s not forget George Bush and the flight suit.

So this kind of the-president-is-a-comic-book-hero thing is something that appears to go along with modern Republican governance. But of course, it’s reached a level of absurdity with Trump, both because of the extremeness of the cult of personality and because the reality is that—there has to be a better way to put it, he’s a f-ck up, basically—everything Trump touches turns to crud. And so it’s really insane.

Sargent: Yeah, there are a lot of dimensions to it. If you look at some of those late-night tweets, the tweets we’re talking about here, you kind of get hit by a real dose of somebody in very steep mental decline, I think. It’s sort of two-layered.

On the one hand, it’s the sheer nakedness of the demand for adulation, which is just completely crazy. Somebody who’s sunsetting very plainly in plain sight, who knows he’s on his way out and is desperate to sort of have something that he can call a legacy. That’s what we see there.

But at the same time, you also see him completely detached from the reality of what he’s actually done to us. What he’s done to you and me, to liberal America, to blue America, even to red America, even to MAGA country.

Krugman: And in some ways especially to MAGA country. But yeah.

Sargent: Two dimensions here of someone in steep mental decline, don’t you think?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I’m not a psychologist, but it’s my understanding that when you’re sundowning, when you’re in this dissociation that does, among other things, tend to come with age, you in some ways become more like yourself. Those aspects of your personality that were disagreeable and unpleasant and dysfunctional, but which you were able to at least police when you were still more there, now just come out. It’s a little bit like getting drunk.

But anyway, there’s a complete lack of a filter now. Presumably Trump always was a person who lived just for external adulation. It must be awful to be him. There’s no inside at all, I think. But 10 years ago he was canny enough to keep it at least somewhat under wraps. And now he’s just out of control. It all gets blurted out at 4 in the morning.

Sargent: Indeed. You had this video where you went very big picture, kind of assessing where we really are right now. I want to try to summarize your argument briefly. Basically it’s that the United States is no longer seen by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation. Our military can’t do what we thought it could—can’t force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding, or Trump’s bidding. That due to Trump’s tariff fiascos, we have less leverage in trade wars than we thought. That China has unexpected leverage over supply chains and important goods and important resources. That in part due to our abandonment of Ukraine, our onetime allies are looking past us to a post-American world. Etc, etc. Is that the basic argument?

Krugman: Yeah, it’s the basic argument. It is worth saying that even things that I find somewhat encouraging, like the fact that Ukraine is holding despite Trump having cut them off completely—the United States just stopped sending money and basically stopped the flow of arms, we won’t even allow the Europeans to buy arms for Ukraine—and yet Ukraine seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is telling you that they don’t need us. The world doesn’t need us.

And that’s part of what’s happened in Iran as well. It turns out that if there was one thing we thought America really had, it was, well, we had the world’s greatest military and we had the world’s best weapons and nobody else could manage without us. And well, it turns out that we were completely flat-footed in the face of Iranian drones and that Ukraine is holding its own without American weapons.

So who are we? We’re becoming bystanders in world events. America is a rogue power, it does crazy things, it can’t even impose its will on a third-rate military power like Iran, and we don’t seem to actually be necessary for the defense of Europe. So we’re a kind of a shadow of our former selves on the world stage.

Sargent: Is this inexorable decline, do you think? Can it be turned around?

Krugman: Some of it is probably irreversible, and some of it would have happened anyway. The truth is, to a large extent, America as it seemed to be as Trump took office was an outmoded vision. And I think we didn’t fully understand that. But there was still a reflexive tendency on much of the world to think that, well, you have to accommodate, you have to give in, allow yourself to be bullied by an American president no matter what. And the truth is the fundamentals had already shifted against the United States in the global power game.

But then there’s a lot that has obviously been made much worse by Trump screwups. And what the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from the stage, is, well, then who’s the next guy? And how do we know that we won’t have another Trump-like figure? Does an agreement with America mean anything, since we’ve just seen an American president rip up every agreement that we had? Does a threat from America mean anything, because we’ve just seen that same guy cave totally? And after all, this guy was—sorry to say—elected fairly by the American people. So what does that say about America?

And we don’t get that back. It took generations to build the reputation of America. And you don’t get that back unless you give us three generations of good governance from here on in.

Sargent: Well, I want to highlight another aspect of our self-inflicted wounds. You brought up Spain as an example of a country that weathered the energy shock from Iran well because it’s transitioning to renewables quickly. Here’s another area where Trump has set back our country tremendously. He’s on two fronts trying to strangle the transition to clean energy in every way he can. It’s like a whole-of-government approach to strangling the clean energy transition.

And at the same time, he’s delivering a big oil shock with the Iran war. I guess that’ll lessen a bit, but it’ll take time. But we have learned that being dependent on oil is a problem. The lesson here is that making this transition is even more imperative. And at the same time, we’re lagging behind by choice. How bad is this self-inflicted wound? And what can be done about it?

Krugman: Well, yeah. On Wednesday, the Interior Department announced that it was paying another $765 million to an energy company not to build wind farms. We’re actually not only refusing to follow pro–green energy policies, but actually spending taxpayer money to block it. The Pentagon is using spurious national security concerns to block development of wind farms. So this is an aggressively anti–renewable energy administration. I will be talking shortly on Substack about the motivations.

And now at a fundamental level, again, this is one of these things where U.S. influence was kind of fated to decline. The U.S. does have oil and gas in a way that other advanced countries do not. And so that gave us something of a special position. But with the incredible progress in renewable energy, that matters a lot less than it used to.

But then on top of that, the U.S. is—we are basically alone. Everyone else is marching towards an energy transition, and we’re trying to go back to coal. And to the extent that countries might have wanted to rely on us a bit, it’s actually—even more than oil—it’s liquefied natural gas. And there was a possible future we seemed to be heading for in which, at least to a certain extent, the world would be relying on U.S. LNG as at least a transitional source of power on the way to the green revolution.

But instead, if you were dependent on the United States for LNG, wouldn’t you worry that Trump might get mad at you because you won’t hand over Greenland or something like that, and cut it off? And are you sure that America won’t again be led by somebody like that? So the U.S. is—on top of everything else, we’re risky. We’re not trustworthy. So nobody is going to rely on us for energy.

Sargent: Well, Trump’s focused on the important things here. At 2:51 a.m. he went on a rampage about his ballroom. He insisted it’s coming along brilliantly and effectively demanded more adulation for how great it’s going to be—it’s going to be outfitted with all this powerful military security, et cetera. Then he raged about the legal travails he’s still facing over this, even though he tore down the White House East Wing unilaterally and probably illegally.

In another tweet, he celebrated the gilding of some statues. In a third, he posted a picture of himself on the cover of a magazine in India, as if we’re supposed to marvel at that in some way: Look, Trump is the cover guy on a magazine in India.

What’s striking to me here, and you wrote about this, is just this kind of relentless desecration and degradation of everything. He’s desecrating the ways in which our capital is supposed to embody small-r republicanism. He’s turning it into a crass imperial court, basically.

Krugman: Yeah. Washington, D.C. was designed very much with classical models in mind. The Founding Fathers were very much into ancient Roman history, but they were into the history of the Roman Republic, not the Empire. They wanted—and we have all of this grand monumental architecture in D.C., but it’s all celebrating the people, the republic. It’s not personal glory. And certainly you would never exalt a currently living president that way.

So yeah, I actually live in New York, not too far from—there’s, along Riverside Drive along the West Side of Manhattan, a series of monuments. There’s Grant’s Tomb, there’s the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and so on. And they’re all very impressive. They’re kind of like Washington, D.C. in a way.

But notably, there’s no personal glorification. Even Grant’s Tomb—it’s not a monumental statue of Grant. It’s a celebration of defense of the republic. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument has the names of generals, but they’re in plain type. And names and battles which include the defeats as well as the victories, because this is the republic: We are stoic, we are modest.

And now we have Trump gilding everything, wanting to erect a gigantic arch of triumph in the capital, and filling the reflecting pool with algae—which is just showing that the gods have a sense of humor.

Sargent: Yeah, that is perfect. The Drain the Swamp guy is filling the reflecting pool with algae. I just want to try to pull this all together. I guess what really bothers me about this moment is that Trump and JD Vance don’t feel a shred of obligation to speak to the country with even minimal candor at all about what just happened. Everything is all about false glorification of Trump, and it’s always just about using the most cynical lies they can to insulate him from any accountability for this calamity.

It’s always all about him, no matter what. There’s no sense of obligation on their part to function as real leaders or statesmen who care about the nation and its future and have a conception of what’s in the interests of the American people.

How do you put all this together in your mind?

Krugman: Well, it’s about them, but I think the real question is what has happened to us—or at least to the Republican Party, but I think maybe it’s even broader than that—that this can happen. I remember there was a time when people used to think of Marco Rubio as a sort of reformist Republican, “reformicon,” whatever. And now here he is walking around in oversized shoes because Trump bought them for him and he’s afraid to take them off, and acting as a lickspittle for all of this crazy ego demonstration. My God.

There will probably be many future books written about the downward spiral that everyone who deals with Trump seems to go into. But we always knew that there were people like Trump. The idea that the world’s basically oldest republic—the nation that invented republican values and democratic norms—puts up with it. That’s what really shocks me.

Sargent: Well, let me just close out this way. It’s my feeling a little bit that Democrats, while they’re functioning more as an opposition than maybe they were at the outset of Trump’s second term—when they were clearly snakebit and just terrified, and on some level Democrats had widely concluded that Trump had put his finger on some sort of real popular sentiment that everybody missed. I think that was never true. He won by a point and a half and it was at a time of inflation and post-COVID shock and so forth. But that’s where Democrats were.

Now they’re functioning more as an opposition. But still, I feel like there’s a smallness to their politics, Paul. And you’ve been writing about the big problems here—the desecration plus the decline, those two sides that I talked about.

Should Democrats be making a bigger argument? What might something like that look like? Some kind of argument which essentially says, let’s be real about what this guy is doing to us? An argument that says, let’s face reality about what this man and his movement have done to our country, and really setting forth a new direction. Is there some way to do that for Democrats?

Krugman: I think that at some level, corruption is the theme. And corruption of various kinds, but I think that all ties together. And if we want to talk about kitchen-table issues, you can make that part of it: The reason that you can’t afford your electricity is because of the corruption. The reason that you can’t afford health insurance is because of the corruption.

And look, one of the happiest things politically that’s happened in the world was the overturn of the Orbán regime in Hungary, which was very much something that MAGA people viewed as a role model: This is how you subvert a democracy. And it turns out that yeah, but with enough people, mad enough, you can flood across all of the barriers they’ve created. And the central theme of the Magyar campaign was corruption. These guys are corrupt.

There were zebras on the Orbán family estate in the countryside, apparently, and the zebras—stuffed zebras—became an image for the opposition, because it was all about corruption. That seems to me like—people may not think in terms of abstract—they certainly won’t think in terms of republican norms. But to make it just, well, I can shave 15 percent off the price of gasoline if you elect me—that is not how to stop this horrifying situation. To say, these people are utterly corrupt, self-centered, and you are paying the price—that sounds like a movement that can work.

Sargent: Yes, and I like the idea of using corruption to sort of open the door to an argument about moral corruption and degradation, which I think people sense is happening. The reflecting pool and the algae, the tearing down of the White House East Wing and the replacement of it with a ballroom, the arch—those are things that really resonate for people. And I think it’s because of what we’re talking about here.

There was a point at which Democrats said something like, the ballroom’s a distraction. But it’s clear that these things have profound resonance for people for these reasons—that there’s a sense that our common life, or something like that, is just being fundamentally degraded at a very profound level. And I think the corruption argument opens the door there.

I’d point out, by the way, just to close out, that the Magyar campaign was also about what this man, Orbán, and his movement, Orbanism, did to us. Look what he did to us. And that seems like—you’ve been writing about what Donald Trump is doing to us. And it seems like some Democrats need to step up and grab that mantle in some way, I guess.

Krugman: Yeah. And I think fire some of the consultants. I’m a numbers guy. I like to live—I view the world through spreadsheets. But it’s not about the numbers. If there’s $300 million of taxpayer funds going to the ballroom, whatever, in the scale of the federal budget, that’s not big. But it’s a symbol of this horrible thing that’s happening. And I think it’s something people can relate to.

Sargent: Paul Krugman, thank you so much for writing your Substack. I learn from it all the time, really. I’m not exaggerating. I learn from it every day. And Paul, thanks for coming on with us.

Krugman: Well, thank you.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.

The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.

I spoke last week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.

“It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt. It’s an abundant element.”

A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.

“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.

But there are downsides. Lithium-ion batteries use rare and expensive materials such as lithium and cobalt, and they are highly flammable.

Sodium-ion is a sister technology, he said. The main difference is that it uses sodium to carry the charge inside the battery, rather than lithium. “It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt,” Dales said. “It’s an abundant element.”

Also, fire risk is much lower.

The main downside is that a sodium-ion battery has lower energy density than a lithium-ion one, so an energy storage project requires a larger battery or batteries to achieve the same capacity.

But what about the cost?

Right now, sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium-ion because the latter has economies of scale from being the dominant technology and companies have spent decades honing the manufacturing process. But companies such as Peak are confident that sodium-ion batteries will be less expensive, and eventually much less expensive, as the product moves from the fringes of the market to the mainstream.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment.”

The world’s leading battery-maker, CATL of China, has invested in developing sodium-ion batteries for cars and energy storage, citing cost and safety advantages.

In the United States, Peak is one of about a dozen companies working on the technology. One of its peers, Natron Energy, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Peak, which is based in Burlingame, California, in the Bay Area, has about 125 employees. It also has a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Peak was founded in 2023 by Landon Mossberg, the CEO, who came from the battery maker Northvolt and had prior experience at Tesla, and Dales, who previously was at the battery maker Enovix. 

Under the partnership with GM, the automaker will develop sodium-ion batteries in its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems.

The agreement helps GM build an energy business that includes electric vehicles, charging and stationary energy storage. Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that his company believes “sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems.”

GM is one of several automakers branching out into energy storage systems. One reason for this is that the companies built battery manufacturing capacity that exceeds current EV demand, so they are looking to new markets.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world.”

Based on manufacturing capacity, sodium-ion battery market share is essentially zero in North America, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It will still be less than 1 percent in 2030, according to the research firm’s forecast.

In China, sodium-ion’s market share is 1 percent and on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment,” said Anya Sidhu, a battery analyst for Benchmark, in an email.

Sidhu said sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

“The partnership between GM and Peak Energy signals growing commercial confidence, particularly for stationary energy storage, where cost and supply chain resilience matter more than energy density,” she said.

Dales said the market is large and diverse enough that several, if not many, battery technologies will be major contributors. For example, analysts and battery scientists have long made the case that solid-state batteries—with a solid instead of a liquid or gel as a key component—are the future because of high energy densities.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world,” he said. “There’s no reason why a single solution should be the thing that works best for every single application.”

A Canadian healthcare organization has apologized after its IT team carried out a phishing test falsely offering staff an additional paid day off work. Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services said the phishing test was sent to employees and physicians, acknowledging the theme was inappropriate. "We acknowledge the approach taken in this particular exercise was not appropriate, and we sincerely apologize to employees, physicians, and union representatives," said Ron Johnson, interim CEO at NL Health Services. "We value the feedback and are reviewing how future awareness exercises are developed and communicated. It is important they reflect employee and physician perspectives, as well as our organizational values, to foster a respectful and supportive workplace culture." The test came during an already fractious period for healthcare staff, who had recently worked long hours to launch the new software system CorCare across the organization. NL Health Services referenced CorCare in the test email, thanking staff for their hard work on the launch. The email contained a button to click to redeem an additional paid vacation day, but clicking the button resulted in a fail mark. The Registered Nurses Union (RNU) in Newfoundland and Labrador said the test was especially insensitive since nurses and other healthcare professionals were already struggling to secure paid time off. Burnout and staffing shortages are rife in the healthcare sector – two factors referenced by RNU president Yvette Coffey in her response to the news. "Yes, we have heard concerns from members about this, and frankly, I understand why they are upset," she said. "Nurses and other healthcare professionals have worked through enormous pressure over the last number of years, including ongoing staffing shortages, burnout, organizational restructuring, and the challenges connected to the rollout of CorCare. To use the promise of an additional paid day off as the hook for a phishing exercise was in very poor taste." Coffey added: "Cybersecurity education is important, but it needs to be done with judgment and respect. There are many ways to test phishing awareness without exploiting the very real stress, fatigue, and frustration healthcare workers are experiencing." Johnson told reporters at a press conference that the test "missed a mark," and promised to investigate how it was allowed to be sent. "What happened here, obviously, is that all the lenses that were required to review the scenario weren't placed on it," he said. "It's not reflective of how we value our employees." With cybersecurity awareness being incredibly important in critical infrastructure organizations, some IT experts would argue that these kinds of tests are valuable. Cyberattacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities can lead to devastating consequences, including vital procedures being canceled, service downtime, and in the rarest cases, death. However, as others have previously pointed out, there isn't much evidence linking fire-drill-style tests to improvements in organizational security. ®

INTERVIEW On August 5, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage is expected to crash into the Moon. Humanity has not done a great job of looking after the space around Earth. What could be done differently around the Moon? How about lunar scrapyards? Chiara Manfletti, CEO of satellite collision avoidance business Neuraspace, reckons one option could be to pick specific locations on the Moon's surface as dumping grounds where material can be deposited, collected, and recycled. "I think it's actually more sustainable than, for example, re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Because, in the end, they are resources that we could reuse." Manfletti is looking into the future, but in a few decades – if the plans of space agencies and their commercial partners are realized – the space around the Moon could rapidly become crowded. Neuraspace is all too aware of the situation around Earth, making the CEO well-placed to comment on what has and hasn't worked well in Earth's orbit and how things could be done differently around the Moon. Around Earth, some orbits are protected and some are not, "which I think was never a good approach," says Manfletti, "because with the amount of objects going up, each and every orbit should be seen as protected." There are graveyard orbits, where spacecraft can be placed as an alternative to a controlled re-entry, although Manfletti says the approach is not particularly sustainable. "Maybe one day we can reuse the material there." The problem is how to persuade governments and industry to work together. "We don't have a single body," says Manfletti, "that can speak, and then everybody says: 'Oh, fantastic! They have spoken, and we shall do it!' It's not how it works." When we spoke to Manfletti in 2024 about the state of the space around the Earth, she wasn't keen on regulations, partly because getting every nation and company to follow the same rules would be nearly impossible. A similar situation applies to the Moon, though there is an opportunity to do things differently. "I think there are soft ways of going about it, where you see strong stakeholders that don't actually have legal power to impose. They can move things in the right direction. "And all of a sudden, there's more of a demand for sustainable activities in orbit. And I think that around the Moon, in a sense, one could go that way. "So who are the bigger players? It's the US, obviously, China… India is also starting to have a strong Moon program, Europe. So it's questionable whether China will put those requirements in, but I could imagine that Europe, the US, and India could. "And that would certainly raise the bar as to what should be done." Neuraspace uses AI and ML models to predict and compute the probabilities of collisions between satellites and other objects in Earth orbit. The number of objects has increased rapidly since we spoke to Manfletti in 2024, but it isn't the increase that took her by surprise. It was the sudden public awareness of space infrastructure. "I think one of the things that perhaps was most surprising was the interfacing between space activities and the Ukraine war, which really raised awareness in terms of the importance of space. "Everybody was talking about the spoofing and jamming of Galileo as von der Leyen was traveling, and the importance of space infrastructure became something that everyone was talking about. "That, for me, was surprising. You always hope that people will understand the importance of space, but it just happened!" As traffic to the Moon is set to increase, there is an opportunity to examine traffic management around Earth and consider what worked, what didn't, and what could be improved this time around. ®

A Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge scheduled a November trial date for Leif Ames, who faces murder charges in the killing of his friend Hubert Cross in Live Oak in 2020. The trial has been delayed on at least eight occasions.

For the past 18 months, nearly all of the efforts to demolish America’s anti-corruption architecture have come from one source: the White House. Under President Trump, it was the White House that announced both the elimination of task forces specifically tasked with tackling kleptocracy and a pause on enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Trump administration has also transformed everything from white-collar prosecutions to presidential pardons into an open-air feast of corruption. And all the while, the president and his family have watched their net worth explode, thanks to billions in ill-gotten gains streaming in from around the world.

It goes without saying that Trump now oversees the most corrupt White House the U.S. has ever seen. But it would be a mistake to say that he and his White House are acting alone. Indeed, in the latest assault on America’s anti-corruption edifice—perhaps the most destructive effort yet—the White House is taking a back seat, and is instead looking to Republican allies in Congress to undo the single most important anti-corruption step the U.S. has taken in years.

First, a bit of history. For decades, until the early 2020s, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance. While places like Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other smaller locales got most of the headlines regarding offshore secrecy, in reality it was the U.S. that dominated the world of laundering illicit wealth, attracting billions (and potentially more) from narco-traffickers, arms dealers, kleptocrats, and others looking to wash their wealth clean.

Many industries accelerated America’s transformation into an offshore behemoth, including real estate and private equity, both of which enjoyed decades-long loopholes in basic anti–money laundering provisions. But there was one industry in particular that served as the bedrock for all of these laundering networks: shell companies. Thanks to America’s fractured corporate formation landscape, the federal government had no say in how U.S. shell companies were formed—or what kind of information was needed when setting up a shell company.

As a result, states like Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, and others provided all of the secrecy and legal protections that cartel heads, dictators, human smugglers, and others needed to hide their financial tracks. In a matter of minutes, anyone around the world could set up a U.S. shell company and immediately access their own bespoke U.S. money-laundering network—all of it perfectly legally. Time and again, investigators both domestic and foreign could track a dirty money trail, only to watch their efforts collapse in the face of a Delaware or Nevada shell company.

It wasn’t simply autocrats and their oligarchic proxies who benefited from these anonymous shells. Wealthy Americans, those looking to secretly influence American politics, those searching for ways to covertly inject finance into U.S. elections—all of them profited from this rank secrecy.

Efforts to bring the barest transparency to U.S. shell companies stretch back to at least 2008. But it wasn’t until the early 2020s that legislators finally passed something called the Corporate Transparency Act. The bill was hardly partisan; remarkably, a slate of legislators from both sides of the aisle passed the bill over President Trump’s veto. Nor was the bill onerous. Instead of a public registry of corporate owners, as seen in places like the United Kingdom, America’s new shell company database would remain private, accessible only to federal authorities and other officials tracking illicit and looted wealth.

It’s difficult to overstate just how momentous this new legislation was. For the first time in decades, the U.S. was no longer the leading font of anonymous shell companies. The best days of U.S. offshoring appeared behind us.

How much can change in just a few short years. Unsurprisingly, the opening salvo against the Corporate Transparency Act came from the politician who’s benefited from anonymous shells perhaps more than anyone else: Trump. Barely a month into his second term, Trump announced that the Corporate Transparency Act was an “absolute disaster,” an “economic menace” that would “soon be no more.” He announced that his administration would no longer be enforcing the law for U.S. shell companies—and that no one would need to worry about prosecution for breaking the law. A few months later, Trump’s Treasury Department announced that it was destroying all of the filings the registry had compiled thus far, torching the database entirely.

Still, the law technically remained, as did the related statutes of limitations—and the potential for a future administration to go after malefactors still setting up anonymous shells. Trump could announce that the law was a dead letter, but that didn’t mean he could repeal it fully.

Enter Congress. In late April, Trump’s allies on the House Financial Services Committee pushed through legislation by a one-vote margin to formally repeal the requirement that U.S. shells divulge their true owners. Claiming that the transparency requirement—which requires that company managers take approximately five minutes to fill out a form disclosing company ownership—was an onerous burden, the new bill, dubbed the Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act and sponsored by Ohio Republican Representative Warren Davidson, will restore America’s status as the leading offshore haven. Last month, Senate colleagues introduced similar legislation, aiming to attach it to the broader defense bill set to be passed later this year.

All of this is a staggering gift to cartels, Chinese money-laundering networks, Iranian proxies, and others who have relied on anonymous U.S. shells—all of whom Republicans supposedly stand against. The repeal effort “ignores clear warnings from American national security and law enforcement officials,” as Transparency International’s Gary Kalman said, all of which “risks turning the United States back into a place where criminals and foreign adversaries can more easily fund their networks and hide dirty money in plain sight.”

It’s not difficult to see where this new momentum for effective repeal is coming from. Trump, saturated as he is in rampaging anonymity and international financing, has gone as far as he can to flip the U.S. from an opponent of corruption to a confederate of kleptocrats around the world. But he needs his allies in Congress to help him achieve all of his pro-kleptocracy aims—and to help all of their wealthy, oligarchic benefactors continue to benefit from anonymous U.S. shell companies, as well.

In the service of aiding those wealthy donors, Republicans pushing for the bill’s effective repeal are willing to aid Russian gun-runners, terrorist financiers, transnational criminal syndicates, and others who need all of the anonymity that states like Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and others perfected. “Introducing this bill isn’t about lowering costs for small businesses: it’s about Congress choosing to protect the interests of wealthy donors over the safety of their communities,” Erica Hanichak, deputy director of the FACT Coalition, said.

All of which is to say: Trump may be the leading wrecking ball destroying America’s anti-corruption credentials. But he is hardly alone. Thanks to congressional Republicans, Trump—and corrupt actors around the world, salivating at the chance to turn the U.S. back into their own personal dirty-money laundromat, can finally restore an American kleptocracy in which only oligarchs, grifters, and criminal kingpins benefit, while everyone else pays the price.

Add David Hearn to Donald Trump’s ever-growing list of enemies of the state. The Bethesda man was out for a bike ride in Washington, D.C., last Friday and decided to spin over to the Reflecting Pool see how its new, Trump-ordained “American flag blue” color struck him. He noticed that a piece of the new blue liner was partly detached from the pool’s bottom (it’s only 18 inches deep at the edges), and he reached down to see what it felt like, he told The Washington Post.

According to ESPN, Hearn said that he “briefly touched a chunk that was still attached to the side of the pool, then let go shortly after a park worker told him to.” Unhappily, a conservative journalist named Emily Miller—surely you haven’t forgotten her 2013 classic Emily Gets Her Gun: But Obama Wants to Take Yours—was on the scene, and she took a two-minute video of the 67-year-old Hearn, a former U.S. Olympic team canoe racer. Before he knew it, Park Police officers arrested him and charged him with destruction of government property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn said. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

Trump posted on Saturday night about arrests of “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations [sic] magnificent Reflecting Pool.” The Post sought comment on this point from the Park Police but got no response.

You’d think a guy who just lost a war would have bigger matters on his mind, but to Trump, matters don’t come any bigger than the Reflecting Pool and the Kennedy Center, because they are about the thing that is most important to him: his monstrously large but porcelain-fragile ego. I don’t condone vandalism of government property, so if anyone did that, fine, arrest them (though it sounds like Hearn, whose hearing is slated for July 9, didn’t). But I submit to you that the real vandalism here is being committed by Trump.

Apparently, the Reflecting Pool had—still has—very serious drainage issues. So fine. Fix those. But the idea that the color of the pool was somehow inadequate never occurred to anyone until Trump came along. I’d imagine that over on Newsmax and One America News Network (Miller’s former employer, for what it’s worth), they’re selling the makeover as another shimmering example of Trump’s courageous patriotism that drives the woke liberals insane. But the design change is really chiefly about his vanity. He just aches to leave monuments to and reminders of himself across the nation’s capital. Or maybe, like Narcissus, he wants to visit the pool and stare endlessly at his own reflection.

In any case, this is roughly the 10,362nd matter that, in any other administration, would be a huge scandal. Trump told us it would cost $1.3 billion. Current records show that contracts the government has signed for work on the pool now total $14.8 million. One contract, for the water purification system, was made to a vendor on a no-bid basis who happened to be a Trump donor. In addition to contributing to Trump, John Cafaro also happens to have a mansion in Palm Beach near Mar-a-Lago. He also seems to have decided that “oily Dick Tracy villain” should be his personal aesthetic.

Another no-bid contract went to a company that did work on a swimming pool at Trump’s Virginia golf club. That company, Atlantic Industrial Holdings, had never before received a contract from the federal government and according to records obtained by The New York Times is charging a 20 percent profit margin, when such margins typically run 6 to 12 percent.

Rigged contracts, donors, ridiculous cost overruns. But that’s not even the worst of it. There are concerns that the workers who did the resurfacing may have been exposed to hazardous chemicals, and that the masks they wore were inadequate to protect them from the tiny particulates in the air. The Guardian reported on this back in May, when an official from the union that represents the workers said, “The chemicals are hazardous. My concern is usually the level of risk when it’s rushed. Are workers taking the rightful steps to protect themselves?”

The next Democratic (God willing) president will have quite a lot on his or her plate, goodness knows, and there will be more “important” matters to attend to than what Trump is trying to do to our nation’s capital. But the Reflecting Pool and the Kennedy Center and the proposed arch at Arlington Cemetery and the White House ballroom—and don’t forget the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, formerly known rather boringly as the United States Institute of Peace, rebranded by the State Department last year—are plenty important. These are corrupt actions (remember that the ballroom went through none of the usual required processes), and they’re grotesque, Third-World dictator moves that are completely inappropriate for a democracy.

So the Democratic presidential contenders will need to be asked at their candidate forums and debates: What are you going to do about the ballroom? The arch, if it’s being built by then? Will you tear these things down? Will you return the Institute of Peace to its old name? Will you pressure Congress to pass a law stipulating that the Kennedy Center will be named for John F. Kennedy, and for him only, for all time?

These might not sound like the biggest priorities, and in fact, they’re not. Last week, I wrote about how the key litmus test for Democratic presidential contenders was ending the stranglehold of billionaires over our politics. That’s a big priority. Still the Democratic candidates’ answers to these questions about Trump’s vandalism of the District is a test in itself. It will tell us a lot about their character, their disposition, and how hard they’re willing to fight on the big stuff. In the meantime, keep the Reflecting Pool green. And free David Hearn.