Monday, July 12 — the alliance unravels

0:00 Today, we have to talk about the alliances that are supposed to keep this country safe — and what happens when the commander in chief treats them as bargaining chips.

0:10 Because while a major housing bill became law without the president's signature, a different story was unfolding overseas: the United States threatening to cut all trade with a NATO ally. Let's start in Spain.

0:25 This past week at the NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump reportedly threatened to sever all trade with Spain unless it meets a new military spending target.

0:36 That threat isn't a negotiating tactic — it's a direct assault on the trust that makes collective defense work.

0:45 When the biggest military in the alliance conditions its security commitments on trade tariffs, every other ally has to ask: is Article Five still real?

0:55 The Atlantic recently ran a piece arguing NATO is going strong, but that piece conflated two different summits — last year's meeting in The Hague, where allies made a spending pledge, and this year's meeting in Ankara, where Trump made a threat.

1:13 Those are not the same thing. Meanwhile, the housing bill that passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support — the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — is now law.

1:26 President Trump refused to sign it, but under the Constitution, it became law anyway. The bill expands Section 8 vouchers and low-income housing tax credits, two of the most proven tools for reducing homelessness.

1:42 But the agencies that run those programs — HUD and Treasury — haven't issued the guidance states need to actually start using the money.

1:52 The administration is holding implementation hostage, demanding that Congress first pass the SAVE America Act, a restrictive voter-ID measure that the Brennan Center says could block over twenty-one million eligible citizens from registering to vote.

2:09 In the meantime, nearly two million renter households sit on Section 8 waiting lists. Veterans, seniors, working families just waiting. Then there's the airstrikes. On June 26th, U.S.

2:25 Central Command bombed Iranian missile and drone storage facilities and coastal radar positions, in response to an Iranian drone attack on a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

2:37 The strikes happened just days after the U.S. and Iran signed a ceasefire agreement mediated by Pakistan — a fourteen-point memorandum that included a sixty-day window for final negotiations.

2:51 The research we have does not show the administration sought prior congressional authorization for the strikes, or cited any existing Authorization for Use of Military Force.

3:03 That means the strikes bypassed the War Powers Resolution, the law that requires the president to report to Congress within forty-eight hours of introducing forces into hostilities.

3:15 The Costs of War project has documented for years what happens when that check is ignored. And if you want to see the playbook for the next ninety days, look at what happened to the Election Assistance Commission.

3:28 On July 9th and 10th, President Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners and pressured the Republican to resign, leaving the four-member bipartisan agency with zero sitting commissioners — just months before the 2026 midterms.

3:44 The EAC certifies voting machines, sets voluntary voting-system standards, and distributes federal election security funds to states. Without a quorum, it cannot do any of that.

3:59 This follows the Supreme Court's June ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down for-cause removal protections for independent agencies. The administration is now applying that ruling to election administration.

4:13 State and local election officials are left without federal guidance on ballot-marking devices or paper-verification requirements, at a moment when election deniers already control key state offices.

4:26 Across the country, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick attacked Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett for joining the Court's Democratic appointees in blocking Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship.

4:41 That order directly contradicted over a hundred and twenty-five years of settled law, going back to the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898.

4:54 Patrick's argument that the justices should have voted along party lines isn't a legal debate — it's a political project to redefine who counts as an American citizen.

5:05 And there's a quieter risk that's harder to see: media self-censorship through regulatory threat.

5:13 A documented playbook from the first Trump administration shows how the government used postal-rate reviews, DOJ enforcement actions, press-access restrictions, and broadcast-license threats to punish journalists.

5:28 Project 2025 proposes structural reforms to the FCC and DOJ antitrust division that could create new avenues for political pressure on broadcast licenses.

5:41 The insidious thing about self-censorship is you can't measure its full impact. You just see what stories don't get reported.

5:49 On the economy, Darrick Hamilton's congressional testimony documents what the data shows: the racial wealth gap is not an accident of the market; it is the result of deliberate policy choices, from slavery and redlining to the foreclosure crisis.

6:06 Trump's agenda — extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulating finance, slashing consumer protections — attacks the enforcement mechanisms that have helped narrow, but never close, that gap.

6:22 Without strong CFPB oversight, predatory lending returns. Without federal contracting equity programs, Black-owned businesses lose access to capital. Two other items worth noting on your radar.

6:37 First: California Attorney General Rob Bonta is actively examining the Paramount-WBD merger for antitrust violations, and he has said publicly the deal is not a done deal.

6:51 Oregon's AG withdrew a motion to delay the merger, but California is now the leading state voice opposing the consolidation.

7:00 And second: the ATF and the National Shooting Sports Foundation are running a month-long public education campaign in San Antonio against straw firearm purchases — where someone buys a gun for a person legally prohibited from owning one.

7:17 That's a welcome step, but it's a narrow effort in a state with lax gun laws, and it doesn't change the broader Justice Department shift away from civil-rights enforcement toward immigration enforcement.

7:31 So that's where we are: a president threatening allies, an election commission gutted, a housing law stalled, military strikes without congressional authorization, and a media system learning to police itself.

7:46 This isn't just today's news. We are reading Project 2025 itself, piece by piece — one hundred and forty-seven of its actions have been read, reframed, and logged so far.

7:59 Eleven hundred and sixty distinct actions are now on the record and mapped. The watch is constant.

8:06 Next on the calendar: the sixty-day window for the Islamabad ceasefire with Iran runs through mid-August, with final negotiations on the Strait of Hormuz expected in Geneva.

8:19 The House is expected to take up the SAVE America Act later this summer, and the California attorney general's antitrust review of the Paramount-WBD merger is ongoing.

8:30 The Election Assistance Commission remains vacant, with no confirmation hearings for new commissioners yet scheduled. That's the day. We'll be back tomorrow. Take care of yourselves.