The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. The heaviest cost of Trump's war on Iran is landing on working people at the pump. Diesel prices have spiked so high in parts of the country that some gas stations can no longer display the correct cost, feeding fresh fury at a president who launched a deeply unpopular war. The fallout runs abroad too: Saudi Arabia now faces mounting threats from Iran and its allies, sending jitters through global markets. At Modi's summit in New Delhi, Trump's foes — Russia and Iran among them — projected a united front, their joint statement targeting the US-launched war, Washington's tariff campaign and its sanctions. The bosses call it geopolitics; the bill arrives on ordinary paychecks.
At home, the administration's deportation machine is colliding with the people organizing against it. In the Twin Cities, churches are locked in a legal battle over ICE surveillance and the right to protest, more than six months after the federal surge turned Minnesota into a symbol of defiance of Trump's policies. The machinery grinds on regardless: the Alien Terrorist Removal Court deported a lawful permanent resident to Afghanistan in its first-ever case.
Internationally, the pressure on Israel is real but thin. The UK's new sanctions on Israeli settlements may be groundbreaking, but they are full of loopholes — including for certain weapons exports. A first step is not the end of complicity — not while Israel kills children on the first day of school in Gaza.
The right, meanwhile, is hedging its own promises. In a Kansas State Fair debate against Democrat Adam Hamilton, Sen. Roger Marshall appeared to backtrack on Trump's $5,000 dividend. And the AI barons are suddenly preaching caution: after a researcher warned the firms are not acting responsibly, Anthropic's Dario Amodei agreed the pace must slow, while Sam Altman calls it an ill-advised time to take OpenAI public.
Zoom out: Trump's war on Iran is breaking gas-station displays at home and pulling his rivals into a united front abroad, while his deportation machine and his party's own promises keep running into resistance.