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A new Penn Live poll in Pennsylvania finds President Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 34%, his lowest on record.
Key finding: The poll found 71% of Pennsylvanians believing that Trump’s tariffs are hurting them, an 11-point increase from April. Only 9% of Pennsylvania voters now believe the President’s signature economic policy is helping them.
Quinta Jurecic: “The NDAs would ostensibly forbid federal workers from sharing ‘non-public, confidential, or proprietary information’ outside the government, including with the press. Exactly what constitutes such information remains unclear, as does the proposal’s legal validity.”
Andrew Egger: “If you’re a Democrat, it’s certainly not unreasonable to look at a guy like Platner and say: Okay, so he’s a cheater—now explain to me exactly why I should think that means Republicans should control the Senate?”
“I don’t have a convenient moral to the story here. It’s not like the answer is just for the parties to keep running the same old colorless senior-citizen career politicians. Voters don’t like them, and they shouldn’t. If Maine Gov. Janet Mills hadn’t been such an uninspiring establishment Senate candidate, Platner would never have found a populist wave to catch in the first place.”
“But I do worry that the path we’re on is one that makes it easier and easier for Democrats to follow Republicans into just abandoning character-related assessments of their candidates altogether. We’re currently in the midst of a long, painful education in how badly that can go on the GOP side of the aisle. Once you decide moral fiber in your leaders is a luxury your party can no longer afford, it’s amazing how quickly things can get out of hand.”
New York Times: “A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future.”
“The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent.”
“The UK government released a vast trove of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, in a move that threatens to cause fresh damage to Keir Starmer’s faltering premiership,” Bloomberg reports.
“The release resurfaces a saga that has weakened and embarrassed Starmer over the nine months since Bloomberg News exposed the extent of Mandelson’s ties with the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.”
“After years in the political wilderness, Iowa Democrats are feeling a new sensation — hope,” Bloomberg reports.
“Once seen as a bellwether, the Midwestern state of 3.2 million people has over the past decade served as a microcosm for national politics, lurching to the right as President Donald Trump solidified his grasp on White and rural voters. But Democrats see an opportunity to reverse those trends, buoyed by broad dissatisfaction with the economy and a group of well-liked, centrist candidates expected to prevail in Tuesday’s party primaries.”
“Trump’s aggressive tariff agenda has turbocharged voter frustrations with the state’s heavily agricultural economy, squeezing the fertilizer supply chain. The Iran war has driven up fuel prices. The president’s recent trip to China didn’t yield specific guarantees of new row crop purchases. Sweeping policy changes in education and healthcare alienated some Iowans, while longtime Republican incumbents are retiring.”
Matt Viser: “Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House.”
“The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?”
Semafor: “GOP senators are rebelling against a $1.8 billion Trump-backed ‘slush fund’ to compensate people allegedly victimized by the government, including 2021 Capitol rioters, and refusing to pass an immigration enforcement funding bill as a result.”
“To add to Trump’s woes, he is 20 points underwater in polls — far more unpopular than Joe Biden at this point in his term — and a judge struck down his move to put his own name on the Kennedy Center, saying Congress must be consulted.”
“Trump has also angered Republicans by undermining establishment favorites in recent primaries, creating a “wounded bear caucus” of outgoing congresspeople,”
“Two Democrats running for an open Senate seat in Iowa are testing whether the way to win a state that President Donald Trump carried three times is a moderate message — or a fiery indictment of the Democratic establishment,” the Washington Post reports.
“Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and his allies view state Rep. Josh Turek as the party’s best shot at flipping Iowa in November and helping Democrats recapture the Senate.”
“Meanwhile, state Sen. Zach Wahls, who is running against Turek in Tuesday’s primary, sees Schumer as part of the problem.”
New York Times: “Emails and records in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department indicate that Mr. Epstein had been banking his sperm for at least several years before his death, and that he did not want the cryobank to discard it if he died.”
New York Times: “Back in 2010, California created something many good government advocates had encouraged and many political incumbents feared: a nonpartisan redistricting commission. The people appointed to the panel were charged with drawing political maps in a way that did not favor one party over the other…”
“Then, last year, partisan redistricting wars ignited across the country. After Texas legislators redrew their state’s congressional districts to favor Republicans, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed for voters to approve a plan that would allow California Democrats to do the same. They did, by a wide margin.”
“As a result, there are just four competitive congressional districts in the state and just four seats considered safe for Republicans. The rest of the state’s 52 members of Congress are all but certain to be Democrats.”
“This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand—that our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race, we’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions, and that is what makes us exceptional.”
— Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), at a campaign speech.
Marc Novicoff: “t’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.”
“But the similarities mostly end there. In New York, an inspiring young leftist competed against a boorish, but experienced, former governor to replace a corrupt mayor. In Los Angeles, the leftist insurgent isn’t inspiring, and the boorish challenger—the former reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt—is inexperienced. The incumbent isn’t corrupt, just feckless. Despite their overwhelming weaknesses, two of these candidates will advance from Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, and one will win in the November general election. Los Angeles is unlikely to be better off.”
David Frum: “You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.”
“In a speech that dwelled on lofty civic themes, former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell grew conspicuously specific about one thing on Sunday night: that the central bank cannot survive if any administration finds a way to remove its officials over policy disagreements,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Powell, now a Fed governor, accepted an award recognizing political courage from the family of former President John F. Kennedy at a ceremony in Boston. Speaking in generalities about institutions, the rule of law and the inheritance of American democracy, he named no president and aired no specific grievance.”
“But on the structure that keeps monetary policy out of a president’s hands, he was exact.”
CNN: “Iran is poised to fire far more long-range missiles at Israel and other Middle Eastern nations after rapidly digging out its buried arsenals – an effort that highlights the limits to US bombing strategy.”
President Trump in an early morning post complained that Democrats and some Republicans make negotiating with Iran harder by “negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before… that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
He added: “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end – It always does!”
Politico: “The Trump administration is approaching hurricane season with the smallest disaster workforce since 2021, a huge backlog of state aid requests and 15 vacancies in top emergency management jobs.”
“President Donald Trump’s cuts to agencies that help with everything from clearing roads to finding emergency lodging are raising fears that a catastrophic hurricane could overwhelm the government’s ability to help desperate people and demolished communities.”
“Overall, that could mean the U.S. is less prepared for this hurricane season, beginning Monday, than it was at the start of last year’s unusually quiet summer and fall, said several emergency managers.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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