Bread and Butter, War and Peace

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.

 CNN:

• 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.

...

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.

Musk Leaves a Trail

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Neal Rothschild at Axios:

The big picture: Elon Musk claims that his DOGE team saved $175 billion in taxpayer spending, though an outside analysis estimates the verified savings are closer to $16 billion.The "One Big, Beautiful Bill," which passed the House last week, is projected to add $3 trillion to 5 trillion to budget deficits over the next 10 years. Even using Musk's most generous estimate, those DOGE savings would amount to just 6% of the projected increase to the deficit from the bill.

Coral Davenport and Stacy Cowley at NYT:

DOGE promotes the purported savings on an “Agency Deregulation Leaderboard,” posted this month, where it claims that the Trump administration has saved Americans $29.4 billion as a result of reversing regulations in health insurance, bank fees, appliance efficiency standards and other areas.

But many of those regulatory reversals will actually pile more costs on to individual Americans in the form of higher bank fees, electric and water bills, and health insurance payments, according to experts and government analyses. The New York Times examined 10 of the largest claims on the leaderboard and concluded that several did not show evidence of savings to households.

Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey at NYT:

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.