Donald Trump’s posture toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara has been striking even by Trump’s own standards. He has praised the Turkish leader as a “hell of a leader” and a good friend, floated reversing a seven-year-old ban on F-35 sales to Turkey, and pushed a $700 million-plus jet engine deal through over bipartisan objections on Capitol Hill. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reasons behind it say as much about Trump’s own instincts as they do about Erdogan’s skill in exploiting them.

The same agreement produced two verdicts this week. Wall Street read the US-Iran memorandum of understanding as the end of a war, sent oil below $79, and pushed the major indices to records. A senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee read it as a hollow ceasefire that settles nothing. Both verdicts are defensible, because they are measuring different things — and the gap between them is the story.

The Justice Department’s sustained effort to criminally prosecute former FBI Director James Comey has now produced a measurable institutional cost: more than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, others are weighing departures, and at least one major case has been disrupted. The campaign against Comey, spanning two separate indictments across nine months, has accomplished less legally than it has damaged the office pursuing it.

A Russian tanker is currently en route to Cuba carrying oil the island desperately needs. The timing is not incidental. It lands as Donald Trump softens his posture toward Moscow for what is, by now, an uncountable number of times — each retreat dressed up as diplomacy, each concession framed as dealmaking. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence and too durable to be strategy. Trump does not appease Putin because he is outmaneuvered.

Congressman John Garamendi (CA-08), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and Ranking Member of the Readiness Subcommittee, issued a scathing statement following President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unprecedented gathering of the military’s top commanders. Garamendi described the event as “wasteful, pointless, and blatantly partisan,” stressing that in all his years of public service, he had never witnessed such an unnecessary display. He underscored that meetings of this scale, bringing together the nation’s most senior military leaders from across the globe, are almost unheard of and typically only convened under extraordinary circumstances tied to national security.

ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 28, 2024 - For nearly four years, Asian Americans have been harmed by the radical policies of the Biden-Harris administration, especially: Woke DEI policies that discriminate against Asians in education and employment. Defunding police and soft-on-crime policies that endanger Asian American lives and properties in major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Open border polices that lead to spikes in welfare spending and crimes.