Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem.
• The US economy added just 22,000 jobs last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% from 4.2%.
• Friday’s report is the first data under a new leader at the BLS, after President Donald Trump fired the previous one for producing data that Trump baselessly claimed must be “a scam.” Just 73,000 positions were added in July and previous monthly totals were substantially revised down.
• Friday’s data was far worse than expected, with economists having forecast around 76,500 jobs added in August.
• It’s the latest snapshot of the US economy under Trump’s aggressive trade agenda, as inflation continues to tick up and there are now more unemployed people than jobs for them.
Dubious military action can also pose a problem.
Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Edward Wong at NYT:
The Trump administration declared the start of a new and potentially violent campaign against Venezuelan cartels on Wednesday, defending a deadly U.S. military strike on a boat that officials said was carrying drugs even as specialists in the law of war questioned the legality of the attack.
The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.
The administration has said 11 people were aboard the vessel. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States attacked.
The Trump administration has not offered any legal rationale. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” although he did not offer evidence.
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Congress has not authorized any armed conflict against Tren de Aragua or Venezuela, and several legal experts said they were unaware of any precedent for claiming that a country could invoke self-defense as a basis to target drug trafficking suspects with lethal force.
