Politico Nightly has a very interesting observation tied to Trump’s latest fever-dream about a tariff on movies produced outside the United States. Studios are spooked about it and the idea even pushed down entertainment stocks. (As I’ve noted a few times, the current hiatus on the law mattering has a lot of people jumpy.) I’m pretty sure this is yet another idea the President more or less randomly came up with on his own. There are a few problems with it, not the least of which is that movies aren’t physical goods. They are intellectual property. To put it in different terms you might put a tariff on physical books produced in the Philippines and shipped on a boat to the US. But you couldn’t easily put a tariff on the ideas in the book or the text itself. I actually heard in one conversation that there is a specific law preventing any effort to place tariffs on intellectual property in this way. Regardless of all that, the Politico Nightly piece makes a different and really interesting point. It’s been widely discussed that the notional statutory basis of all Trump’s tariffs is quite weak. There’s a small business lawsuit challenging them which is backed by Koch and Leonard Leo-funded groups, interestingly enough. There’s also a state attorneys general challenge. There have been recent signs that the court in question is looking very seriously at this challenge. And Politico notes that a threatened movie tariff, based on the same weak statutory basis and now claiming a national security threat based on “imported” movies might be flaunting the legal absurdity of the President’s actions at just the wrong time.

Governor Brian Kemp (R) just formally announced he’s not going to run for Senate next year against Senator Jon Ossoff (D). It’s difficult to convey how big a coup this is for Democrats and how big a setback it is for Republicans for the 2026 midterms. Candidate choice is always important but seldom decisive. This is an exception. Ossoff was (and is) a favorite against everyone but Kemp. Kemp is a popular two-term governor who has managed what has eluded virtually every other Republican in the country: not being labeled “Never Trump” or anti-Trump and yet defying Trump at a critical moment. You don’t need to valorize that to recognize that that is a big selling point in what remains a tipping point state like Georgia. My own read is that Kemp recognizes the political power of that needle-threading and wants to keep it intact to run for President in 2028 or possibly even 2032.

This is something I’m still trying to get my head around — both the technical legislative details as well as how all this plays in political terms. The details are still fuzzy to me, but I want to get the outlines in front of you. At the end of the summer we’ll be coming to the end of the fiscal year. DOGE has canceled tons of NIH grants and done various other things to make it really hard for NIH and other grant-making parts of HHS to do their work and spend the congressionally appropriated money. So by late August a very large pot of money will have built up and you will be coming to the end of the fiscal year in which Congress mandated that it be spent.

I had not seen that David Horowitz died. He was 86. I have said many harsh things about Horowitz over the years, going back to one of my earliest pieces in The American Prospect in the late 90s. I even had a few personal run-ins with him. I stand by all the stuff I wrote but it’s not the moment to rehash the specifics. You can peruse our archives. Horowitz was actually the first person, very early in my career, who was verbally confrontational with me in person. I wasn’t a victim here: He was reacting to highly critical and dismissive things I’d written about him in that Prospect article. I note it because it was just my first experience with fights you pick in print coming to life in person. He seemed to seek out those confrontations. That acidic and aggressive personality you saw on TV was him off camera too.

When I got word this morning that Mike Waltz was making his final swirl around the National Security Advising bowl I set myself to thinking: what’s the stupidest way this could play out. I tried, readers, and I failed as we’ve now learned that Marco Rubio will be taking over as interim National Security Advisor. I should point out that Marco Rubio is now Secretary of State, Administrator of USAID, National Security Advisor and Archivist of the United States (head of the National Archives). I’m not at all joking about any of that. It’s possibly there are yet other jobs I’ve forgotten.

Yesterday I excoriated Politico for a deeply ingenuous report on GOP Medicaid cuts, now presenting the matter as something congressional Republicans are trying to foist on a skeptical Trump. I also said that they were making up the idea that Trump has repeatedly pledged never to touch Medicaid as he has repeatedly promised not to tamper with Social Security and Medicare.

I found this new piece in Politico about Medicaid politics genuinely jarring. Reporters Rachel Bade et al. concoct this alternative reality in which House Republicans are pressuring Trump to cut Medicaid while he’s deeply “wary” of doing so. As you’d expect, this story comes from “six White House officials and top allies of the president.”