The Last Jobs Report Before the Election Is In. It Missed.
The number is 29,000. That is how many jobs the economy added in September, against a forecast of 84,000 and an August that had been reported at 162,000. The unemployment rate moved up to 4.2 percent after sitting at 4.1 for three straight months. And the calendar...
Washington Is Mailing 500 Dollar Checks. Here Is Who Gets One.
The envelope is real, and it started moving Wednesday. The Treasury Department is mailing 500 dollar checks to more than 950,000 people who bought health insurance through HealthCare.gov, with a letter from President Trump folded inside. The administration calls it a...
Trump Banned a Billion in Canadian Goods. Nobody Collects a Dime.
At one minute past midnight Tuesday, the United States switched on a trade weapon it has never used in the modern era. Nearly a billion dollars a year in Canadian goods are now barred from entering the country outright. Most Canadian liquor. A slice of the dairy...
Trump’s Press Ban Got Blocked. The White House Enforced It Anyway.
The request landed on the docket late Monday night, 42 pages asking Judge Timothy Kelly for the thing his restraining order already does, but for longer. CNN, MS NOW and Politico want a preliminary injunction, a court order keeping their White House access alive until...
Trump Ran This Ad in 2024. Now the Fine Print Bills You.
The video is the same one. Black and white, President Trump walking down a hallway, his voice promising that this is the final battle, that we will demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers, cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists, rout the fake news media...
The Policy Said Don’t Ask If They’re Afraid. Trump Wants It Back.
The instruction is written into the government's own deportation policy, and a federal appeals court quoted it in full last week. Before removing someone to a country not named in their removal order, DHS's guidance says, "Immigration officers will not affirmatively...
He Screamed That He Was a Citizen. The Ambulance Came Anyway.
On a Sunday morning in Evanston, Illinois, a man walked to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Five federal vehicles were in the neighborhood hunting a fugitive with a Chicago address, and the agents decided this man, a Black U.S. citizen out on foot just before...
You Paid for This Ad. It Says So in the Fine Print.
The ad looks like every Republican campaign spot you will see between now and November. Images of President Trump fill the screen for 30 seconds while singers croon the words love me in the background. "America will never be a communist country," it declares, and...
The Ban on the Free Press Lasted Six Days
Early this morning, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the White House press passes of CNN, MS NOW and Politico, immediately. Six days after three reporters' badges died at the security gates, the badges come back on. And...
ICE Quietly Unlisted Thousands of Detainees. Their Lawyers Cannot Find Them.
On September 15, with no announcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement switched off part of its public detainee locator: everyone in its custody who has a final order of removal simply stopped appearing. Lawyers discovered it the way you would expect, by searching...
Even Fox Said No. And the Judge Is the One From the Acosta Case.
On Monday afternoon, President Trump cut the ribbon on his new White House helipad, and almost nobody heard a word of it. There was no audio feed, because there were no pool cameras, because the network assigned to film the president had been banned from the grounds...
He Called It a Ban on the Free Press. His Words, Not Ours.
On Saturday morning, MS NOW correspondent Akayla Gardner passed through two security gates at the White House before her badge stopped working. An officer asked her to hand it over and told her the decision came from, in his words, above him. CNN's Betsy Klein found...
Europe Offered Canada a Seat. Trump Called It Hostile.
On Wednesday, in her State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed something that has never existed: associate membership in the European Union, and she named the country she wants to hold it first. Canada. By Thursday,...
Four Seats Decide the Senate. Here Is the Whole Board.
Thirty five Senate seats are on ballots this fall, counting the special elections in Florida and Ohio. Republicans are defending 22 of them, Democrats 13. For control of the chamber to change hands, Democrats need a net gain of four. Every argument about this election...
Voting Started This Morning, and the Rules Held
This morning, somewhere in Idaho, Minnesota, South Dakota or Virginia, a voter walked into an election office and cast the first early in person ballot of the 2026 midterms. Those four states opened early voting today, the earliest in the nation. North Carolina has...
The Calls Did Not Work. The Fed Hiked, 12 to 0.
At 2 p.m. Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. It is the first increase since July 2023. The vote was unanimous, 12 to 0, and the twelve included Kevin Warsh, the chairman President...
Trump Called His Fed Chair All Summer. At 2 P.M., We Learn If It Worked.
At 2 p.m. Eastern this afternoon, the Federal Reserve announces whether it is raising interest rates for the first time since July 2023. Futures markets put the odds of a quarter point hike at 93 percent, which would lift the benchmark rate to a range of 3.75 to 4...
The EPA Freed 1.5 Billion Tons of Carbon, Then Tried to Burn the Key
On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency did two things at once, and the second is the one to watch. First, it finalized the repeal of the 2024 carbon pollution standards for power plants, the rules covering the coal and gas fleet responsible for more than 1.5...
Trump Asked the Supreme Court Three Times. Monday Night, It Said No.
Mail voting in the 2026 election will work the way it always has. That is the plain meaning of a brief, unsigned order the Supreme Court issued Monday night, rejecting the administration's request to switch on the Postal Service's mail ballot rule while its appeal...
They Halved the Disaster Agency, Deleted the Messages, and Lost in Court
In the middle of hurricane season, a federal judge has ruled that the administration broke the law when it ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce roughly in half. The decision, issued late Friday by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in...
The Election Ends November 3. The Cliff Comes in December.
Everyone's calendar says the big date is Tuesday, November 3. This newsletter would like to direct your attention seven weeks past it, because the largest concentration of consequential deadlines in this political year sits not on Election Day but in the five weeks...
They Ran 67 Million Voters Through a Benefits Database. Now They Want It Back On.
While the mail ballot fight holds the spotlight, a second emergency application about your right to vote is sitting at the Supreme Court, and it may be the more consequential one. On Tuesday, September 8, the Justice Department asked the justices to lift a lower court...
Missouri Folds: The Gerrymander Is Dead, and the Contempt Finding Stands
The Missouri map war ended Thursday, in the right order and just barely. In the morning, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the federal court order that had briefly revived the state's Trump-backed congressional gerrymander, effectively throwing the map out for November....
Two Courts, Two Maps, and a Secretary of State Summoned This Morning
Missouri does not currently know what its congressional districts are. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the literal legal situation 54 days before the election, produced by one of the strangest afternoons in modern election law. On Tuesday at about 4:30 p.m.,...
The Counter Tariffs Are Live. Here Is Who Pays.
At one minute past midnight on Tuesday, Canada's retaliation went into effect: tariffs of 15 to 50 percent on 27.6 billion Canadian dollars' worth of American goods, covering hundreds of product lines from milk and cheese to steel, furniture, appliances, farm...
Blocked Through November. Appealed by Sunday.
The mail voting fight we have tracked for three months reached its most decisive ruling on Friday evening, and its most telling response by Sunday. In a 49 page decision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Postal Service's...
Labor Day, By the Numbers: What a Year Did to the American Worker
Labor Day is the one holiday with a thesis: that the people who do the work deserve a share of what the work produces. So today, instead of speeches, this newsletter offers a ledger. Every number below is from federal data or named researchers, most of it published in...
The Medicaid Letters Are in the Mail. The First 200 People Are Already Gone.
Sometime this month, roughly 20 million Americans will get a letter about their health insurance. Federal law requires it: states must warn Medicaid expansion enrollees, no later than September, that starting January 1, 2027 they will have to document 80 hours a month...
A Genuinely Good Jobs Report. Here Is What It Buys You: A Rate Hike.
The August jobs report, released Friday morning, was better than almost anyone predicted. Employers added 162,000 jobs, roughly triple the consensus forecast of about 56,000. July, which the government initially reported as a loss of 23,000 jobs, was revised to a gain...
They Skipped a Court. The First Ballots Move at Noon.
On Thursday morning, a Justice Department lawyer stood in a Boston courtroom and could not tell a federal judge whether the Postal Service's system for screening mail ballots is ready to run. On Thursday afternoon, before that judge could rule and before the appeals...