FBI Director Kash Patel seems to be very bad at his job.

This was confirmed yet again on Thursday, when national security journalist Seth Hettena found documents showing Patel instructing his team to search for and respond to online accounts that criticize him. In one instance, Ben Williamson, the FBI’s assistant director for public affairs, tells Patel via text message that the FBI should not respond to a post making fun of the director from what looks like a troll account on X with a handle referencing the r-word slur.

Patel texted a link of the post to Williamson in February, to which Williamson replies, “this is an ‘Epstein didn’t kill himself’ bot account if you’re wondering where that’s coming from.” But Patel seems to fixate on the reaction to the post: “277k responses are not bots what i asked you and your team to do is find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continuously.”

The records appear in the FBI Vault, a large set of documentation that the FBI proactively released for public interest in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. The documents that Hettena highlights are from a collection titled “Records regarding the review of the Investigative Holdings related to Jeffrey Epstein Part 11.”

Williamson dismissed his director’s concern over the February troll post—as of Friday morning, it only has 492 comments, about 1,000 reposts and quotes, and 16,000 likes—with Patel appearing to confuse the number of views with the number of responses. He warned Patel that responding to the post would “look bad on you”—a valid point. 

Working for @FBIDirectorKash means @_WilliamsonBen has to spend his time explaining why the @FBI should not respond to a post by @ifindretards.

Found in the FBI vault: https://t.co/ikrrNjt7Ge pic.twitter.com/y9rKd8ZLou

— Seth Hettena (@seth_hettena) September 10, 2026

This behavior aligns with Patel’s excessive drinking and extended unexplained absences from his post, according to an April report in The Atlantic. The FBI director filed a defamation lawsuit against the media outlet, a case that remains pending following The Atlantic’s motion to dismiss in July.

The year is 2026, and by now, you know, with clarity, that Donald Trump is a brazen liar with an unusually impressive record of promising free cash—only to rarely ever fulfill those lofty pledges. It is the personality of a deadbeat that long precedes his entry into politics. But in between flashing “meat pics” of Hasan Piker and a surprise video appearance by John Fetterman, rabid cheers greeted the president’s offer to hand out $5,000 checks to every adult in the United States if Republicans win both the House and Senate in the November midterms.

“It will be called the Trump Dividend,” he said at Wednesday’s GOP convention in Dallas, as a beaming Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, applauded along.

The plan, as many have now weighed in, would cost at least $1 trillion and arrives just as alarm bells are clanging over a ballooning national debt and everyday expenses continuously get more expensive. But Trump’s latest pledge is as fantastical and mendacious as many of Trump’s previous promises of free cash: $2,000 checks from supposed tariff revenue, $5,000 checks from all that money we never saved from DOGE, etc. This time around, though, some on the right don’t appear to be buying it. Here’s Fox News cautioning against believing Trump:

Fox pointing out this is not the first time that Trump has promised cash payments: He promised Americans $2000 rebate during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but those $2000 checks so far have not materialized. pic.twitter.com/4KH7VUIjCT

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 10, 2026

The rare caveat by Fox News comes amid signs that Trump’s frantic midterm strategy—which has involved a whole lot of lying, efforts to feign indifference, and impossible Iran war predictions—isn’t agreeing with Republicans, as more appear to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular president. But at Wednesday’s convention, the first of its kind for the midterms, Trump continued to demand attention to the one person Republicans could afford to hear less from these days. “Pretend that I am running,” he told the crowd.

It isn’t a coincidence, then, that also on Wednesday night, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel announced that his interview with James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, would no longer air on broadcast television after new threats from the FCC. As Kimmel told the audience, Trump’s “FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations—based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.” The announcement, which follows a similar move by the FCC when Stephen Colbert interviewed Talarico in February, reveals more of the same chaos ahead of the fast-approaching November elections, as well as a president desperately using every lever of political power to keep the spotlight on himself.

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Andrew Garfield, the actor playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, says in the teaser trailer for Artificial. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

The film’s set against the backdrop of the five days in November 2023 after Altman was ousted and then reinstated as CEO. The drama of that week is now the stuff of legend: text messages between Altman and then-interim CEO Mira Murati, later released in court documents, show him desperately pleading for the board to reinstate him. Even more extensive reporting from the time turned up dozens of Atlman’s former co-workers, all of whom describe him as someone with an implacable drive for more power. Will Artificial have any sympathy for him? Or will he be a monstrous villain undeserving of such consideration?

The trailer doesn’t do much to dispel this notion. In it, Garfield gets out of a Batmobile-looking car and walks into a futuristic blue-light room stacked with automatic guns encased in glass shelves. The question for audiences isn’t subtle: can and should Altman be trusted with a tool as powerful as artificial intelligence?

The movie’s marketed as a thriller, which makes sense because OpenAI has undeniably done things worthy of the genre. This week, the Intercept reported that the Pentagon asked the company, which signed a $200-million agreement with OpenAI back in February, to design automated tools that would rarely deny their requests.

Then on Monday, OpenAI announced that it had solved a 200-year-old math problem, and on Tuesday, said it only took its AI agents 88 hours to complete and provided its full solution to the public. That would be a monumental achievement, evidence of AI’s efficiency over human intelligence. But mathematician Tristan Buckmaster said on Monday night the company actually rushed to solve the equation after learning about his and his colleague’s, Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, progress on the problem using Anthropic and OpenAI tools. It wasn’t about the good of humanity. It was about competition.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it heard rumors last week that two complex, long-unsolved math problems had been solved—one of which was the problem Buckmaster and Alpöge were working on. “Inspired by these rumors,” the company said it tried to use one of its internal models to solve it and said it did not realize until later that Alpöge was an Anthropic employee.

The movie, scheduled to release on December 25, also has drama of its own: Amazon dropped the project in June, following its partnership with OpenAI, which integrates the company’s models into Amazon Web Services.

Garfield notably portrayed Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, a 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg’s time in college. That film seemed to sympathize with Zuckerberg as a tragic figure leading a company that hadn’t yet leaked tens of millions of users’ personal data, failed to stop its platform from being used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, or become a hotbed of dangerous AI slop.

Public sentiment has turned so squarely against companies that profit from social media that even West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin—who also wrote the screenplay for the 2010 film—has returned to the action with another dramatic rendering of Zuckerberg due out in October and aptly named The Social Reckoning.

On Wednesday morning, in a Manhattan press room containing about 50 reporters and union members, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the US announced an agreement with Microsoft that, among other things, prohibits the tech company from tracking student use of its AI tools and applying student and teacher data to train AI models.

The guidelines listed in the American Federation of Teachers’ deal with Microsoft apply to any school district “that desires the same principles” when forming their own customer agreements with the company and purchasing its AI products.

The union also gives Microsoft—and any other tech company that signs on (AFT President Randi Weingarten mentioned ongoing conversations with OpenAI and Anthropic during Wednesday’s announcement)—a 180-day deadline to delete records of AI data use from students and school districts on its active systems following a request.

Microsoft agreed not to use student and teacher data to train its AI — but there are exceptions. The guidelines point out “narrow safety and security” situations, including letting the company use “the minimum amount” of school user data to detect, prevent, investigate, or remediate harm to users or security threats to its AI products and retain it “for as long as reasonably necessary.”

The contract also lists “contractual remedies” for school districts that sign on, such as the ability to pause or discontinue Microsoft’s deployment of its AI systems if the company commits any material breaches of its agreement obligations.

The current guidelines do not present explicit, quantifiable rules for what is considered remediation by a “reasonable” time—it’s something that both Microsoft and the customer will “engage in good faith” to come up with. 

When I asked Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith about specific guidelines on how an accountability process will work if Microsoft fails to comply with remediation on Wednesday, he largely dodged the question, saying that Microsoft has to publish reports that provide transparency to the AFT and school districts and have tight deadlines for fixes.

“Obviously, this [remediation process] becomes part of our broader contract with each school district, and all of those [existing] contracts already have built-in remedies,” Smith told Mother Jones. “I think that there’s just an unprecedented amount of transparency associated with the commitments that are in this agreement.”

When I asked again about specific steps that will be taken if Microsoft fails to comply, Smith said they are “connected back into the provisions that we have in our contract with each school district. Those can vary.”

“Mostly, what I find is that what people want when something goes wrong is just to go fix it. People don’t want to end up with more time with lawyers,” he continued. “That’s always an option if somebody wants to take action, but let’s just fix problems when they arise.” 

While accountability applies to how each school district will work with Microsoft in the near future, the company seemingly not holding discussions now raises questions about the feasibility of contract enforceability.

Microsoft, and other companies like Google, have a history of promoting their AI products to schools and educators, and a healthy skepticism is needed when relying in part on tech companies to police AI and previous failures of implementing educational technology.

Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers representing New York City public school educators and others, who were also taking questions immediately following the announcement, did not respond to the question.

The contract comes a week after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students in the city’s public schools, and the Los Angeles Unified School District announced restrictions to generative AI platforms for all students for the 2026-27 school year. 

The AFT’s contract with Microsoft contains the sentence “When in doubt, protect the student.” on the bottom of each of the 31 pages. But exactly how any of these policies around AI use in schools will actually work remains unclear.

On September 8, the British government banned the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

Eleven other nations—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden—signed a joint statement with the UK, saying they too plan to introduce sanctions prohibiting trade in goods with the settlements. 

“The Government of Israel must immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence, and investigate allegations against Israeli forces,” the foreign ministers of the twelve countries wrote. 

Since 2023, according to a Human Rights Watch report, Israeli settlers have fully or partially displaced 107 different West Bank communities. With Israeli military backup, settlers frequently attack and kill Palestinians. In July of 2024, the United Nations’ top court declared that settlements in the West Bank—housing over 500,000 Jewish Israelis, buoyed by religious fervor and generous government tax breaks—are illegal under international law. Nonetheless, West Bank settlers are subsidized by millions of dollars from US nonprofit organizations, and are rarely, if ever, condemned by the US government. 

US officials quickly spoke out against the British sanctions. “Obviously we’re not going to do what the UK did,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee threatened pushback. “If the Brits go and put some kind of boycott and sanctions on them, the repercussions are going to be significant,” Huckabee told the BBC. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fl.) said the sanctions could impact British trade with the state of Florida, which currently has a law on the books banning any company that boycotts Israel from doing business in the state. 

“Florida has made it clear.  Any company—or nation—that boycotts Israel is boycotted by Florida,” Fine wrote on social media. This might harm Florida more than it does the UK, though. Great Britain is the single largest foreign investor in the state, which would lose out on billions of dollars if Florida were to boycott UK companies over Israel. 

As the British government considers forcing British companies to boycott portions of Israel, it should be aware that a Florida law that I passed as a member of the Legislature would ban any British company forced to comply from doing business with any state or local government in…

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) September 7, 2026

“ Why are we ruining our relationship with the United Kingdom over Israeli settlements?” asked  Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy, who was previously a foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders. “This is something I think that most Americans just find ridiculous.”

Six Democratic legislators have commended the United Kingdom’s choice to ban trade in settlement products. Greg Casar (D-Tx.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a social media post that “the US must do the same.” 

“A very key part of sustaining Israeli impunity is the fact that it’s backed by the United States and the United States is the one that punishes people for imposing consequences on Israel.”

Joaquin Castro (D-Tx.) also applauded the move as a “step in the right direction,” standing against “an ugly land grab carried out through violence and terrorism.” 

“Any American President serious about achieving peace should do the same,” Castro added. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson (D-Il.), Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Il.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) also threw their support behind the sanctions. Some analysts want to see the US join in on sanctioning Israel—and even go further. 

“When Democrats take power in the next Congress, and when hopefully Democrats take back the White House, I want to see people talking about what further, more expansive, and even more serious measures they’re willing to take,” said Duss. 

That could include sanctioning any banks that finance mortgages in West Bank settlements, Duss said. “A very key part of sustaining Israeli impunity is the fact that it’s backed by the United States, and the United States is the one that punishes people for imposing consequences on Israel,” he added. “Banning trade with illegal settlements is something we should have done decades ago.” 

“It tells the US and Israel that we’re outliers here,” Duss said. “I think the question will be, how many of America’s historic alliances are we willing to undermine and destroy on behalf of this extremist Israeli settlement project?

Where was Donald Trump on 9/11? Getting pulled from Ground Zero by firefighters, he seemed to claim on Tuesday.

Nup.

“We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys… they grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘got to get out of here!’ and they literally lifted me up… and they started running with me,” the president said in a rambling speech at a memorial ceremony near the White House on Tuesday morning.

But calling into a local television station a few hours after the attacks in 2001, the real estate developer recounted watching an explosion out of his Trump Tower window more than four miles from the Twin Towers. True to form, he found a way to make the moment about himself, adding that his building, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. 

The president has landed himself in several 9/11-related controversies in the last 25 years. During the 2016 presidential race, he ignored pleas to help 9/11 first responders pass the reauthorization of the law that set up a health care fund for the police, firefighters, and other rescue workers. In 2015, he falsely said “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheered the destruction of the Twin Towers. And after the attacks, he “ignored the federal definition of a small business” to collect economic recovery aid meant to go to small businesses for his building at 40 Wall Street.

This year, Trump will be the only living president not in attendance at the Ground Zero memorial ceremony in New York City for the 25th anniversary of the attacks, in part because the ceremony’s organizers wouldn’t let him deliver a speech, according to a New York Times report. Trump responded by saying the story was made up and calling Times reporter Maggie Haberman, one of the four reporters bylined on the story, “Maggot.” 

It’s the day after Labor Day, and it’s not a great day to be a worker. New data released this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the share of economic growth that translates to worker compensation is now at the lowest level ever recorded. Now, 52.8 percent of that wealth goes into workers’ pocketbooks. For comparison, that number—known to economists as the “labor share”—was at about 65 percent immediately following World War II, when the government began collecting data.

“Since approximately the start of this century, the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600 percent,” as Rob Wile recently reported for NBC News. “Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5 percent.” Corporate profits are at a record high. Many Americans, meanwhile, are doing things like buying groceries on credit and taking out “buy now, pay later” loans to afford electricity or rent.

There are a few different factors that might be blamed for this situation: corporate consolidation, tariff-related price-gouging, and the capital-intensive, labor-light AI boom among them. But this trend—GDP goes up, but workers take home a slimmer share of that money—has been building for fifty years, long before AI or the Trump presidency.

“I think it’s really disturbing news for workers,” Joseph McCartin, professor of labor history at Georgetown University, told Talking Points Memo back in May, when the labor share hit 54.1 percent. That was, at the time, the lowest level on record. In the intervening months, the labor share has plunged yet again. “It shows that even while the economy is growing, workers are getting a smaller and smaller share of the economic pie.”

As of September 3, the official White House website features a page titled “arcade,” where users can play games like Rio Run, in which the player—a pixelated, white, and balding Border Patrol agent—collects “border crossers” and adds them to a line of orange-jumpsuited figures trailing behind him. 

It’s a retro-cutesy version of the nightmarish and very real scenes of ICE agents forcing immigrants, chained in a line, onto deportation planes. Other games in the “arcade” include Build the Wall, a Tetris rip-off in which the user builds a wall to “protect the border from the coming horde.” (Tetris, in response to Build the Wall, has posted on Instagram that the company takes copyright infringement “very seriously.”) There’s also an eagle-themed game called Flappy Bill, and a MAHA-oriented school lunch game.

It’s no surprise, considering the “wartime recruitment” framing of ICE’s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of immigration enforcement.

A White House spokesperson told CNN the arcade is “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.” It’s also part of a long American history of gaming as propaganda. 

As Jesse Robertson wrote for the Nation in 2024: “It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that today’s global gaming colossus is the offspring of the Pentagon; by some measures, the nearly $350 billion gaming industry is one of the Defense Department’s most significant innovations since the end of the Cold War.” Recruitment-by-gaming is a project that the Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, and it’s one that has paid big dividends. 

In fact, one of the world’s first video games, Spacewar!—launched in 1962 on punch-tape computers at MIT—was funded by a DOD grant. In 2002, the US Army launched a free-to-play computer game called, fittingly, America’s Army; a 2008 study found that the game “had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” The game proved incredibly popular with US soldiers and wannabe soldiers, who were enamored of its realistic first-person-shooter gameplay. Members of the Army’s brass floated the idea of shipping computers to Afghanistan so enlisted men could play America’s Army while serving in the real American Army. 

The game ran for 20 years and reached millions of potential recruits before shutting down in 2022. “As time has passed and AA has fulfilled its mission, it is time to shift our focus to other new and innovative ways to assist the Army with comms and recruitment,” the game’s developers wrote in a statement at the time. Today, the ideas behind America’s Army live on through the military’s sponsorship of esports tournaments and Twitch streamers. Most recently, an Army unit offered soldiers early access to Grand Theft Auto VI as an incentive for re-enlistment. 

It’s no surprise, considering the “wartime recruitment” framing of ICE’s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of militarized immigration enforcement.

More games, the White House website says, are coming soon.

“If you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee’s in St. Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday at a news conference. He announced that Florida will revoke all law enforcement license-plate-recognition camera permits on state highways, with all such cameras to be removed by the end of September.  

“What we don’t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times,” DeSantis added, referring to the recent expansion of ALPRs—automated license plate reader cameras—across the country. The cameras are supposed to catch people committing crimes, and sometimes they do. But they’re also ripe for abuse. Each camera forms part of a nationwide network, and by sharing vehicle information between and within police departments, ALPRs can enable officers to track what are called “patterns of life”: where a person is likely to be, who they spend time with, and what they’re doing in a given moment. 

Police officers nationwide are taking advantage of that surveillance ability. In dozens of cases, officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for doing things like searching an ex-girlfriend’s license plate information 2,000 times, searching an estranged wife’s license plates 700 times, or tracking an abortion-seeker across state lines. 

Florida is not alone in cancelling Flock contracts. Texas, last week, ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026.  (At least three towns have reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.) 

Strictly regulating data retention might be one solution. A police department can’t do as much to share data with ICE, for example, if state laws mandate that the data be deleted quickly. In New Hampshire, ALPRs must delete all data after three minutes; Flock’s current default retention period is seven days. 

Corinne Worthington works as the advocacy manager with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit focused on litigation and research on discriminatory surveillance technology. To Worthington, Flock is “putting a name to people’s fears.” 

“I think that because of how public Flock has been, people have woken up to the harms of ALPRs in a way that maybe, previously, they weren’t aware of,” Worthington said. While Flock has over 120,000 license plate readers across the country, it is far from the only ALPR company. Motorola, the AI roadway safety firm Rekor, and Axon, the police tech firm behind Tasers, all sell similar cameras to police. Those companies aren’t household names in the way that Flock is, nor have they been subject to the same backlash. 

“That’s the problem with targeting specifically the vendor, not the technology as a whole,” Worthington said. When states and cities cancel their contracts with Flock, they’re likely to end up replacing those cameras with ones made by one of the other ALPR companies. And those other companies are certainly aware that people aren’t happy with Flock. Rekor, another company that sells ALPRs, is calling for national regulations on the cameras to “preserve ALPR’s public safety value.” Those regulations would include “anonymizing non-hotlist plate data” which could then be re-identified with a valid warrant or court order. 

“The fight over whether ALPR should exist has stopped being useful to anyone,” Rekor vice president Charlie Degliomini told me. “The rules are the real argument.” As far as he is aware, Degliomini added, his company is the only ALPR vendor calling for a warrant requirement on at least some plate searches.

But Rekor’s cameras can be abused, too: activists in New York are suing the Westchester County Police Department for allegedly using Rekor’s tools to log their locations thousands of times. And the CEO of Axon, another camera manufacturer, floated the possibility of changing the shape of Axon cameras so they look less similar to the Flock cameras Americans are lately so fond of destroying. 

“We’ve had some people say they’d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera,” Axon CEO Rick Smith said in a now-deleted webinar, as 404 Media first reported. 

Whether cameras that look different, but perform the same surveillance function, will eventually inspire the same pushback remains to be seen.

On Thursday, Nvidia, the tech giant that develops chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT, announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion amid an arms race to dominate every level of the industry. 

Well, specifically, the cost was $12,930,300,000, with 129,303 apparently being the character encoding for the 🤗 emoji, which the startup Nvidia acquired is named after.

Hugging Face is the venture that broke into AI safety discussions when OpenAI’s advanced system breached its platform while undergoing a test. Since then, Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue has propelled a publicity campaign to support open-source AI. His startup is a community platform for millions of open-source AI models that anyone can use, modify, and share (many models are free to download). 

Per a chart Delangue posted on X, Hugging Face’s library skyrocketed with almost 60 percent more data uploads in the first two weeks after news of the breach by OpenAI became public, and last month, Meta released its new open model on Hugging Face. 

It certainly looks like it pays to be breached by OpenAI. 

For Nvidia, the acquisition is another move toward vertical integration. The company is also throwing money into data centers, offering up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease an Ohio data center, which is still under construction but is expected to be the world’s largest. 

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang has also positioned the company as a proponent of open-source models—such as the millions Hugging Face shares—for what it calls ensuring safety with the technology. This stance is opposed to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic who have lobbied Washington against open models over fears of losing the ability to protect against misuse of their products and preserving their economic value.

Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.

Thank you…

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) September 3, 2026

As AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google try to make their own AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, Nvidia looks to add open-source models that compete with the AI providers.

“Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” wrote Huang in his announcement of the acquisition. What his ideas of “more capable” and “more accessible” mean for the future is anyone’s guess. 

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

For the past few months, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been embroiled in a growing list of scandals and allegations of harm. Miller’s ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), has accused the Republican congressman in legal filings of being an absentee father, abusive husband, and having a history of violence and misconduct towards women dating back to his high school days. Miller has repeatedly denied these allegations.

As Mother Jones’ Abby Vesoulis reported in July:

For instance, one of [Emily] Moreno’s legal filings in their ongoing child custody case asked Miller to comment on the accusation that he pushed a female peer down a set of stairs during his high school years.

“Why did you not pursue a defamation lawsuit against [redacted] for alleging you pushed her down a flight of stairs?”

Miller’s response: “OBJECTION; relevance, scope of admissible evidence.”

According to Politico’s 2021 report, “Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath.”

Miller categorically denied to Politico that the altercation took place. But reached for comment this month, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

Vesoulis recently traveled to Ohio where she and our producer got a chance to speak with Miller directly following a family court hearing between him and his ex-wife. While visiting, Vesoulis made a stop at the public library in the town that Miller grew up and attended high school in. She wanted to see if there was anything more to be learned from his old high school yearbooks.

“We’re going to flip through all these yearbooks and we could find nothing,” says Vesoulis, sitting in one of the library’s study rooms. “We could find something interesting.”

Interesting, indeed. Here’s what she saw:

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is set to depart the Pentagon in the next few days, following a months-long feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firings of several top officials and allegedly blocking many of his innovation projects like streamlined technology adoption. 

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news on Monday.

Driscoll’s resignation after serving for 18 months leaves the US Army effectively without a senior leader. Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April and has not nominated a replacement.

Hegseth has cut down the number of top military officials in his Defense Department. According to Military Times, since taking his post last January, he presided over the firings and early departures of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the Army’s vice chief of staff, and the commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa, among others. 

While it’s unclear which firings Driscoll took issue with, Hegseth also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers and blocked promotions for several female and Black Navy officers, seemingly under his anti-diversity push. In early 2025, Hegseth said the firings were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national-security approach we want to take.”

“Secretary Driscoll has been highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army by providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. (Noting the emphasis on lethality.) 

Driscoll took his worries about the Army’s future under Hegseth’s leadership directly to President Trump, four people familiar with the discussion told The Atlantic, given the series of firings of top officers. One of the people said that Trump was surprised and expressed concern.

Hegseth is reportedly considering his chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell—who also allegedly abused his estranged wife and children—to succeed Driscoll. As I pointed out on Monday, Parnell criticized the Washington Post’s reporting that cited classified documents in which top military officials stated that the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the US from other threats, baselessly claiming on Sunday that publishing the report was “a crime” and evidence of Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome. 

This all looks like a move to replace officers who push back on Hegseth’s policies with loyalists.

The Trump administration is back on the warpath. Over the weekend, the government resumed military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, which in turn prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes against the United Arab Emirates and American bases in Jordan. On Monday, Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst said the president told him that “there will be a US response” to the Iranian attack on US forces in Jordan.

Which is all to say that Iran, thanks in part to economic support from China, isn’t backing down.

The Trump administration also signaled that it may ramp up economic sanctions on Iran this week, seeking to make good on promises of an “economic D-Day” against the country: “This is going to be financial violence if we have to,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Iranian leadership joined an economic summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose largest members are China and Russia, in a meeting that many American outlets have characterized as adverse to US interests China has been Iran’s economic bulwark during the current war, defying US sanctions by remaining the main importer of Iranian oil. 

While struggling to fight Iran on multiple fronts—through Bessent’s “financial violence” in the form of severe economic sanctions—and the conventional violence of deadly military action against both the country’s civilian infrastructure and combat forces, the US has achieved little in terms of forcing Iran’s leadership to budge on negotiations.

We’ve seen this play out again, and again, and again in the months since Trump dragged the U.S. into war with Iran.

In response to an exclusive from the Washington Post citing classified documents in which top US military officials state the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the country from other threats, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, claimed that publishing the report was “a crime”—it is not—and evidence of “TDS and PDS”—Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome, respectively.

Even as it scrabbles for new tactics—and publicly appears at a loss—the Trump administration continues to deny that its war isn’t working. 

But as Bessent himself said Monday of Canada’s claim that it was weathering Washington’s trade war: “What else are they gonna say?”

On Monday, President Trump promoted continued data center construction and criticized opponents, despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the November midterms. 

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”  

Trump says the only reason to oppose data centers is if communities want to be “backwards and poor.” pic.twitter.com/cpi14lMGql

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 31, 2026

The president also posts an endless stream of AI videos on social media. On Sunday night, he shared a video depicting the bombing of Kharg Island, a vital port for exporting Iran’s oil products amid the US resuming major strikes on the country. And the night before, Trump posted an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and planting down a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place.

But boosting AI and the data centers that help power them is largely unpopular. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote in May, most Americans oppose a data center in their backyard. From Sophie: 

“Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Opposition to data centers is truly bipartisan, even in solidly GOP states like Florida. 

On Sunday, President Trump said that NBC News’ Meet the Press host Kristen Welker will be “reported” to the Federal Communications Commissions for “rebuke or punishment,” claiming she said that the candidates he endorsed had “mixed results” in this election cycle—despite the FCC having no such jurisdiction.

“Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, ​just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of ​Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, ⁠stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. ​House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”

Trump: "Kristen Welker, the Unpopular 'Hostess' of Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has 'mixed results' on Endorsements… Bc of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to FCC for rebuke or punishment… I hope Brendan Carr takes this Threat to our Country very seriously."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-30T13:42:21.944Z

According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Welker mentioned Trump’s “mixed” endorsement outcomes only during a pre-show live shot on NBC’s Washington, DC, affiliate station, not during the main broadcast itself.

In his Truth Social post, Trump boasted that he has a 98.35 percent congressional endorsement record in 2026 Republican primaries. But Welker only cited previous NBC News reporting that notes that six Trump-backed candidates lost House and gubernatorial primaries in August. According to an analysis by USA Today, as of Sunday, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidates have fared worse than congressional candidates, only winning 79 percent of the time.

“He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results,” Welker said on NBC 4 Washington. “But most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle.”

It sounds like a reasonable statement, especially as Welker explains later in the same remarks that Trump’s approval rating is at a record low over his second term as key issues like affordability remain largely unaddressed.

Trump’s threat is another escalation of his long-running assault on journalism—going after Welker personally as opposed to demanding the FCC crack down on networks like ABC, as has happened most often. The FCC cannot legally punish Welker individually, as it regulates public broadcast licenses.

ABC, and its corporate parent Disney, sued the FCC earlier this month, asserting that the Trump administration violated free speech rights by challenging its licenses over its news coverage and views presented on talks shows.

And as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke licenses for broadcasters “running hoaxes and news distortions” of the ongoing Iran War in March while pointing to Trump’s complaint about the reporting from “Fake News Media.”

And Noah’s point is a good one: “The goal is obvious: Turn independent news outlets into state propaganda machines.”

If you’re a Google Map user in the United States, you’ll now see the name “Lake America” instead of “Lake Ontario,” just days after President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water amid his ongoing trade war with Canada.

In an announcement published late Saturday, Google explained that it “reflect[s] name changes in official government sources,” in this case citing the US Geographic Names Information System. 

According to Google, Maps users in Canada still see “Lake Ontario” while those outside the US and Canada will see both names: “Lake Ontario (Lake America).” “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country,” the announcement in part reads. 

On Saturday night, Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and placing a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place. His AI avatar then dances robotically to the tune of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Earlier on Saturday, he shared an AI video of ducks sporting Trump’s haircut firing assault rifles to celebrate “Lake America.”

Online reactions of outrage are widespread, but Google has long demonstrated little interest in opposing the Trump administration. The corporation followed a similar pattern to what it did when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a day-one executive order last January. The following month, the company announced the same split—”Gulf of America” in the US, “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico, and the bet-hedging “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in the rest of the world.

Google has also previously carried out the Trump administration’s bidding in other ways, including eliminating DEI hiring goals last February while reviewing Trump executive orders unwinding DEI in the federal government, and—along with other tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund last year.

So maybe we all go back to using MapQuest again? 

We’re not changing it. pic.twitter.com/NdeE9v2BNO

— MapQuest (@MapQuest) August 27, 2026

President Donald Trump on Thursday followed through on a threat to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” issuing an executive order to “Make the Great Lakes Even Greater” amid a collapsed trade deal with Canada, further escalating tensions between the two former allies.

The lake in question has been known as Lake Ontario since the 1600s. Trump contends that it should be renamed because America spends more money on it than Canada does.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Thursday’s executive order reads. “The United States Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice breaking vessels on the Great Lakes, securing commercial shipping lanes free of charge.  The United States has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”

My colleague Alex Nguyen covered Canada’s response to the escalating trade war—a large support package for Canadian workers and firms—on Tuesday:

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers… Nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

The “Lake America” decision is a return to a Trumpian theme: governance as branding exercise. That includes renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Defense Department as “Department of War,” the Kennedy Center as “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and (unofficially) ICE as NICE.

Trump cannot force Canada or any other country to follow his preferred naming conventions. It remains to be seen whether independent news, weather, and mapping firms will fall into line.

A heated scene unfolded at the Cuyahoga County family court in Cleveland on Wednesday, as the key players in a bitter dispute that has grabbed national headlines assembled in one room.

The case is one that Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis has been covering for weeks: a custody fight over the two-year-old daughter of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno—whose father is Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Miller is currently defending himself against Emily’s allegations that he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, and threw scalding water at her—all of which he vehemently denies. Despite these allegations, and at least six Republican senators (including his former father-in-law) urging him to drop out, Miller is running for reelection and has vowed to stay in the race. The deadline to replace him on the ballot passed earlier this month.

Abby got a rare chance to question Miller directly, just weeks after uncovering more than 2,000 pages of court and police records detailing the abuse allegations. Miller had initially declined to speak to the press after the hearing, referring all inquiries to his attorney. But while his lawyer was speaking, Miller interrupted to deliver what sounded like a veiled threat against Sen. Moreno.

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” he said. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have… because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

His lawyer went further, claiming Sen. Moreno “hates Max and wants to destroy Max” and only “came out of the woodwork” to attack Miller once reporters began asking why he had stayed silent about his daughter’s allegations.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo Tuesday suggesting that, if incumbent Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted loses his upcoming election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the Republican Party’s position on data centers is to blame.

The memo, as Axios reported, says that “the data center brand is the anchor” of Brown’s campaign. “He has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record,” the NRSC wrote, arguing that if “voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” They go on to suggest that Republican candidates support some restrictions on data center development, such as only allowing their construction in communities that approve it by popular vote—while still opposing a total pause on data center construction, which they say would cause the US to “lose the AI race to China.”

While the NRSC urges caution, Donald Trump is still positioning himself as an unequivocal ally to data center developers. Speaking at a White House cryptocurrency event Wednesday, he insisted that “we’re building the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state and I had a chance to get an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump said. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

Data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing; while they do generate tax revenue, they also tend to be built with generous tax abatements.

“If I were a governor or mayor, I would want that plant in my community,” Trump repeated. But, he added, “maybe [the industry] can use a little public relations help.”

Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon just defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary—even though Vindman raised roughly sixteen times as much money as Nixon. 

Nixon, 42, helped lead the fight against Republican-led redistricting in Florida that disproportionately supports GOP voters, who are mostly white. According to the Miami Herald, 86 percent of Florida’s congressional districts will favor the GOP, even though only 41 percent of voters are registered Republicans. The three-time state lawmaker from Jacksonville protested the bill during an April legislative session and videos of her wielding a pink bullhorn and declaring “this is a violation of the constitution” went viral. Nixon also staged a sit-in at the governor’s office in May, where she was arrested and faces a jury trial on charges of trespassing and resisting an officer without violence in September. 

Despite Democratic opposition, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the new map in May. In June, the state’s Supreme Court allowed the new map to stay in effect for the upcoming 2026 US House elections. 

Nixon ran on an affordability platform, pushing Medicare for All, free childcare and family leave, and a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions. She touted endorsements from Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Maxwell Frost and—featured prominently on her website—the children’s content creator and activist Miss Rachel. 

“These things are not radical, they’re not extreme,” Nixon said during her primary victory speech on Tuesday night. “This is just basic human decency; it’s caring for our neighbors.”

Vindman, whose national public profile mostly centers on his role as a witness and director of European affairs for the National Security Council in the first Trump impeachment over the 2019 Ukraine scandal (and on his twin brother Eugene, who is a Virginia congressman), has never held elected office in Florida. Nonetheless, Vindman raised over $16 million for his campaign, according to FEC data, and polls pointed to his likely victory. He seemed sure he would win—so much so that he reportedly had a fundraiser in Nantucket scheduled for this coming week. He lost by 12 percentage points.

Nixon now faces an uphill battle in November. She’ll be facing off against DeSantis-appointed Republican incumbent Ashley Moody, who replaced Marco Rubio when he became secretary of state. Moody is also a staunch proponent of President Trump’s voter-suppression efforts, including co-sponsoring the SAVE America Act. Florida hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2012, when former Senator Bill Nelson won his third term.