In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 9 Oct 2026 09.20 AEDT
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The "Red Lines for 1.5°C" come from the Pacific Climate Justice Demands, built each year through a consultation across a network of more than 290 organisations. They were unveiled in a visual action led by communities already living the impacts these climate negotiation talks are meant to address.
Things are not normal! But you knew that already. This week, Trump thinks it’s fine if Iran “takes out” San Diego or Los Angeles. And despite his historic unpopularity, he’s “doing great”. And on we go.
This week:
The midterm elections are now less than a month away. Republicans are clearly worried – they should be. Trump is a historically unpopular president. We’re talking below Bush Junior 2006 levels of unpopularity (and incidentally, his unpopularity in Europe is now genuinely comical). By almost all the normal measures, Republicans are looking at losing both the House and the Senate.
But as we know, things are far from normal. A normal president would not suggest that it would be fine for Iran to “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego. Though it is now normal for coverage to suggest that the president was joking, only for him to then double down and say it again.
Trump has long considered “Democrat cities” as something other; not part of his version of the United States, places to be controlled and subdued.
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What is also normal is for the president to suggest a “big surprise” is coming. He does that all the time, and it could be nothing, or it could be something. It’s not exactly reassuring that when he said that he nodded to Russ Vought – one of the architects of Project 2025, who now runs the Office of Management and Budget, an innocuous sounding role that Project 2025 identified as a key site for consolidating executive control.
As we’ve long maintained in this column, the other dude who is very much not normal is Elon Musk. Last week, we pointed out that Musk has been tasked, along with Newt Gingrich (???), with investigating the future of warfare and defence technology through “Project Meridian” at the Department of Defense. Which means, incidentally, that Musk will likely have a huge influence on the future of Australian force structure too. Which I’m sure is fine.
It’s probably not a problem at all that this is how Musk’s exes talk about him. Or that he’s successfully tied the sovereignty of several nations to himself, personally. On that – I’ve just finished Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s brilliant Muskism – a rare, successful effort to explain Musk both as an individual and a structural phenomenon.
Even as I’m railing against the tech lords, I have to admit that sometimes the algorithm does get it right. This week, mine fed me a reel of former President Barack Obama talking to Ta-Nehisi Coates about James Baldwin. Ded.
That conversation is part of a new podcast series hosted by Obama, called “A Great Book”.
We just won’t talk about how that conversation is paywalled at Audible, owned by Amazon, and what that tells us about a broken country.
