by Julia Jester | Aug 6, 2026 | Iran, News, World
Despite President Donald Trump insisting in public that the U.S. weapons stockpile is just fine, his rant Thursday on Truth Social saying he would “hunt down” those who leaked “treasonous” information about the reduced U.S. munitions exposed the president’s underlying concern.
New analysis shows the ongoing Iran war has depleted U.S. supplies of missiles — especially those that can hit other incoming missiles.
Those types of expensive munitions have been used to defend U.S. bases in the Middle East from Iranian bombardments in recent months, as well as by allies protecting themselves from incoming Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research center in Washington, D.C., shows the U.S. renewing or escalating the Iran conflict would test severely diminished inventories of interceptors.
According to the CSIS data — based on the Defense Department’s 2027 budget and publicly released information — the U.S. has roughly between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors and around 250 THAAD interceptors remaining, down from 2,300 and 452 before the war, respectively.
In practice, that means the U.S. and Gulf allies must take more risks with interceptions, letting some Iranian projectiles through if they do not threaten personnel or assets, NBC News previously reported.
And while the U.S. has systems that can compensate for depleted long-range attack missiles, there are no viable replacements for critical Patriot and THAAD missile defenses, said Mark Cancian, senior adviser with the CSIS Defense and Security Department and former chief of the Force Structure and Investment Division within the Office of Management and Budget.
“They are not as effective or entail more risk, but they’re there. We would not
by The Associated Press | Aug 4, 2026 | Business, News, White House, World
Twenty-five states sued the Trump administration Monday over its latest tariffs, calling them a pretext for replacing import taxes the Supreme Court struck down in February.
The United States last month imposed double-digit tariffs on 59 countries and the European Union, charging that they had not done enough to crack down on imports produced by forced labor. The new tariffs took effect just as the clock ran out on temporary tariffs President Donald Trump had turned to after the Supreme Court defeat.
“After losing at the Supreme Court, the administration is once again trying to illegally raise taxes on families and businesses with a new round of tariffs,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Joining New York in the lawsuit announced Monday are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Trump, who argues that high tariffs will revive American manufacturing, last year overturned decades of U.S. policy that favored lower tariffs and ever-freer trade. Invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, he imposed double-digit tariffs on imports from almost every country, saying America’s longstanding trade deficit amounted to a national emergency.
But the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA did not authorize tariffs. The decision forced the administration to send refunds to importers who’d paid the tariffs. Eager to make up the lost revenue, Trump turned to temporary 10% worldwide tariffs. But they expired at midnight July 24.
Now he’s tapping more durable tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits the president to impose import taxes and
by Ja'han Jones | Aug 3, 2026 | Opinion, White House, World
President Donald Trump’s deadly war with Iran, which he vowed would be quick and easy, is not going according to plan.
As of yet, aside from Trump’s public tantrums, one of the clearest signs of this failure is that the Pentagon is reportedly opening its suggestion box in search of “creative and unconventional” ideas to help end the war.
According to CNN, U.S. Central Command sent an email last week to military analysts soliciting feedback. From the outlet:
The request from a senior officer at the US military command carrying out President Donald Trump’s war with Iran came in an email: We need ideas.
“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.
The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited — and potentially unpalatable — options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms.
MS NOW hasn’t independently confirmed the email, but the Pentagon isn’t denying it. Here’s what CENTCOM told CNN:
“U.S. Central Command has a long history of thinking and working in innovative ways,” Capt. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesperson for CENTCOM, said in a statement. “Admiral Cooper, in particular, reaches out to members of our great team, regardless of rank, to achieve the highest levels of operational performance possible.”
Keep in mind that
by Ja'han Jones | Aug 1, 2026 | Opinion, White House, World
Donald Trump’s war on education, and intelligence in general, is ramping up with a xenophobic edge.
The president — who has said he loves “the poorly educated” — has launched a crusade on American universities in an effort to bring them under his control.
In his second term, Trump’s anti-intellectual campaign has intersected with his anti-immigrant agenda. A prime example of this came last year, when his administration suspended and canceled research grants and sought to revoke some student visas — which has led to a so-called brain drain from scientific fields.
And on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is considering a $100,000 fee for foreign students looking to work in the U.S. after graduation. According to the Journal:
The Trump administration is considering attaching a $100,000 price tag on international students’ ability to work in the U.S. after they graduate from an American university, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would make it much less attractive for foreigners to study in the U.S.
If enacted, the fee would significantly advance President Trump’s efforts to restrict nearly all forms of legal immigration. It would particularly harm universities, which rely on recruiting international students as a reliable source of revenue, as well as top Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms, which disproportionately hire international college graduates to fill technical roles.
A DHS spokeswoman told the Journal: “No policies should be considered final until formally announced. At DHS we are always having conversations about how to use all tools in our arsenal to protect the integrity of our legal immigration system.”
To be clear, I’ve seen nothing that suggests this proposal
by Steve Benen | Jul 31, 2026 | Iran, Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, World
Roughly a week into the U.S. war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press briefing and took a moment to push back against reporting he disagreed with. The beleaguered Pentagon chief specifically said he’d seen coverage that suggested the war in Iran “might be expanding” beyond Iranian borders.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.
A week later, the former Fox News host tried to re-emphasize the same argument, telling reporters, “It’s worth underscoring, I see in the media banners that say, ‘War expanding,’ or ‘War spreading. It’s actually the opposite. It’s actually quite contained.”
Even at the time, the rhetoric was difficult to take seriously. On the first day of the military offensive, the conflict involved three countries: The United States, Israel and Iran. By the sixth day of the war, The Washington Post noted that the violence had “touched 12 countries across the Middle East.”
This week, nearly five months after Hegseth insisted that the conflict was “actually quite contained,” neither “expanding” nor “spreading,” the secretary’s arguments from March appear tragically absurd. The New York Times reported:
A resurgence of fighting in the war with Iran is expanding the scope of the conflict across the Middle East and further threatening shipments of oil and other products crucial to the global economy.
With little sign of peace talks resuming, a series of attacks, including two consecutive nights of strikes between Iran and the United States, ended a short period of relative calm — and entangled a growing list of U.S. allies in the conflict.
Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for example, have been targeted and are moving forward with plans to create a
by Steve Benen | Jul 31, 2026 | Maddowblog, World
The Trump administration didn’t need another example of rank incompetence, but it’s stumbled onto one anyway. Reuters reported:
A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.
The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the “unfortunate error” and blamed an unnamed staffer who “hastily altered” a slide deck before the event.
Part of the problem with this is the underlying circumstances: This was an international AIDS conference held as the United States is moving backwards on the issue, to the detriment of countless Africans.
As The New York Times reported, “The Trump administration’s cuts to the largest global H.I.V. program last year have resulted in drastic drops in both prevention efforts and treatment. The program, known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, supported treatment for about 77,000 fewer children in 2025 than it had the previous year, a 14 percent decline, according to a study, the results of which are expected to be presented at the conference this week.”
Facing accusations of callousness and brutal indifference, the Trump administration managed to display a map that reinforced its critics’ worst fears.
Journalist and AIDS expert Emily Bass wrote on Substack, “The U.S. government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world,
