The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. Columbia University handed cash to pro-Israel organizations while it cracked down on its own students. Over the past three years, groups like the ADL and AIPAC's charity arm received cash from Columbia as the school cracked down on student protests — while pro-Palestine groups got nothing. Administrators fund the organizations policing speech on campus and punish the students exercising it.
The same logic scales up. In the summer of 2025 the Trump administration [abruptly imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazil's products, throwing the country into crisis and threatening everyone from coffee planters to shoe manufacturers](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/10/maga-foreign-policy/688352). Working people on both ends of the trade absorb the cost of a foreign policy run as personal leverage.
The same fist lands closer to home. Even as ICE deports the families of service members, the Pentagon is recruiting from immigrant communities, including green-card holders, at a rapidly growing pace — the state deports the household even as it recruits from the same immigrant communities. In Manitoba, an NDP government broke the Dynacare strike, joining a nationwide assault on the right to strike.
That improvisation is running out of road. The August inflation report carried a few bright spots, but in political terms the president and Republicans are out of time heading into the midterms, and the Fed is poised to clash with Trump. The easiest path they counted on to save their majority has closed.
Capital is jittery: tech firms across Asia, Europe and the United States posted declines after tech leaders voiced worries about the safety of "frontier" A.I. technology. Abroad, courts are turned on rulers — Thailand's Election Commission [referred dozens of alleged Senate vote-rigging cases to the Supreme Court, a potential new challenge to Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul's ruling Bhumjaithai Party](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-14/thai-election-commissions-refer-senate-rigging-cases-to-court) — while the Trump administration's pressure campaign on Cuba is cast by high-profile Cuban activists as probably the best chance to collapse the island's government.
Zoom out: Across the day's news, institutions and governments deploy money, tariffs, deportations and courts against dissent, labor and markets, even as the administration's economic path before the midterms narrows.