Shorter America This Week: He started it; Won't someone think of the billionaires; Creeps and weirdos

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act continues. War continues in Iran and Lebanon. The President is quickly losing interest. And the rest of us are left with the mess.

This week:

• He started it
• Won’t someone think of the billionaires
• Creeps and weirdos

He started it

Delivering the federal budget this week, Australian federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers noted that his government – and governments around the world – are dealing with a lot of “global uncertainty”.

“War in the Middle East,” Chalmers said, “has been pushing up prices, pushing down growth, and punishing Australians”.

Australians – along with most of the rest of the world – “didn’t decide when this war began and have no control over when it will properly end”.

The person who did decide, and who has control over when it will end, is the President of the United States. Trump probably wants to end it, but not “properly”, as Chalmers said – he just wants to be able to say he won and that he got a better deal than Obama.

This mess was a long time in the making. In Foreign Policy, Matt Duss and Zuri Linetsky outline how the much-lauded Abraham Accords, signed during Trump’s first term, paved the way for “a new era of conflict”.

This new era of conflict, embodied in Trump’s war of choice, is exposing the cracks that always existed in the MAGA movement. Those in the loose coalition who lean libertarian – those who are genuinely anti-war – are incensed by Trump’s war on Iran.

I thought this Mother Jones profile of Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, now in a mid-term primary battle, was pretty interesting in that regard. Massie has always been an outlier – he was, for example, always a supporter of Julian Assange. He’s also a political survivor. As the profile outlines, how Massie fares in this primary could be an indication of things to come.

And as those mid-term elections get closer, here’s Mother Jones again, on how the electoral map is being redrawn after the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

Won’t someone think of the billionaires

Speaking of budgets, some people are getting really upset about tax. Just like that poor guy with the Porsche, those wealthy enough to own a second home in New York worth more than US$5million are very sad that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing what he said he would and taxing them a bit more. In The Nation, you can read about how “American plutocrats can’t stop whining”.

And speaking of billions – at the end of last month, the Pentagon estimated that Trump’s war on Iran has cost US$29 billion. So far. But Trump’s not worried. All that matters, he said on Wednesday US time, is that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon. In the context of negotiations with the regime, he said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

When people tell you who they are, etc. etc.

Creeps and weirdos…

…are everywhere. Including in the Oval Office, where this week one of Trump’s direct from TV appointments Mehmet Oz (aka “Dr. Oz”, the current Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) said that Americans are “under-babied”. His boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talked about teen sperm count. Urgh. There’s a great piece in Wired this week on how and why these guys are so weird and creepy about fertility. And for more on MAHA and its impact on public health, here’s a great conversation featuring one of our favourites, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.

And finally, a few weeks ago I shared this brilliant essay on AI and the military by historian Kevin T. Baker. The Boston Review hosted a conversation with Baker and colleagues on AI, rationality and violence. Just in case you weren’t creeped out enough.