It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 17 Jul 2026 11.00 AEST
The White House/Flickr
On Thursday night US time, President Trump is slated to give a national address rehashing his lies about the 2020 election, claiming some new information about interference. The President of the United States has already tried to steal one election; he is laying the groundwork to do it again.
This week:
By the time you read this, we’ll know if the major news networks in the United States broadcast Trump’s speech. Over at The Present Age, Parker Molloy makes a compelling case for why they shouldn’t, and outlines in vivid detail the way Trump’s MAGA influencers have been saying out loud what the plan is: “wave declassified documents around as proof that 2020 was stolen from him, declare a national emergency over it, and use that emergency to grab control over this fall’s midterms that Congress and the courts keep refusing to hand him.”
This comes in an environment of heightened political violence against Americans. ICE agents killed two more people this week, bringing the total to 11 since the start of Trump’s second term. As this Mother Jones piece outlines, that number is likely to keep going up. And we’re likely to keep seeing headlines like this one: “Afghan national who fought with U.S. forces died of allergic reaction in ICE custody”.
But as the midterms approach, some in the Democratic Party are still playing the old game: they’re more worried about the release date of Grandpa Joe’s memoir, Promise Me, America.
Meanwhile, Trump’s “Memorandum” with Iran is finally dead – as if it ever really lived. The war continues. Our friend Jon Wolfsthal, US Nuclear Policy Fellow at Pax Sapiens, has a great Substack called Thinking Nuclear. Jon helped negotiate the Obama-era Iran agreement, so he knows what he’s talking about. His analysis of the MOU (albeit written before Trump said it was all over) is a clear-eyed assessment of where things are at. As he puts it: “Iran is better at this than Trump.”
And at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, I liked Jack Kennedy on “Why Trump’s nuclear blackmail of Iran failed spectacularly”.
In other spectacular, catastrophic failures, here’s another harrowing piece on the consequences of the dismantling of US AID.
All of this could be why, according to new polling research by Pew, China is now viewed more positively than the United States in most of the 36 countries they surveyed. That includes Australia, where we have a 24% favourable view of the US (down from 52% in 2023!) to a 31% favourable view of China. That’s quite the reversal.
In light of Prime Minister Albanese’s speech on AI (which made the New York Times! Imagine the whooping about that in the PM’s office), I thought this piece in The Nation on progressive responses to AI in the US, and particularly the difference between Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, really interesting. With thanks to my colleagues at Dollars & Sense, who put me onto it after their own discussion about AI this week.
And here’s another great piece in Wired on “All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology”. Which seems like it might be a good idea.
Speaking of Europe, I made a new friend on my trip. Anna Fifield is the former Asia Pacific editor for the Washington Post, and is now back in NZ. Anna has a great Substack called Between Giants, and is about to start hosting a weekly podcast on foreign policy stuff — first ep will be out Saturday. And look out for her on After America next week.
And finally, I got a lovely email this morning letting me know that Richard Cooke’s new book is out in October. The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia will be brilliant. You can pre-order it here. I’m sure I’ve written this before, but Richard’s 2019 book Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline is still one of the best things you’ll ever read on Trump’s America. I return to it often.
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It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
We all know that visitors can be expensive. And in the regional security world, they can be very expensive. When Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat came calling a fortnight ago, it cost Australia half a billion dollars, albeit to be spent over a decade or more.
