BAGHDAD — The U.S. military announced on Wednesday that it has completed the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq, ending a 12-year mission to fight the Islamic State group. The last U.S. troops left an air base in northern Iraq under a deal between Baghdad and Washington.
The withdrawal, agreed on two years ago, comes against the backdrop of the ongoing war between the United States and Iran that has also sometimes spilled over into Iraq, with Iran-backed militias firing on U.S. troops and the U.S. striking the groups’ strongholds.
In recent years, Washington has appeared to seek to shift its focus from the Middle East toward Asia, but that shift has been inconsistent, with the Pentagon alternating between reducing its Mideast presence and then finding itself engaging in new conflicts — including the ongoing war in Iran.
Baghdad touted the end of the U.S. mission as a sign of the country’s increasing strength and sovereignty.
The withdrawal was also celebrated by Iran-backed groups but raised concerns among some other Iraqis, particularly in the Kurdish region, where many fear a resurgence of IS as well as more attacks by Iran-linked groups, possibly emboldened by the departure of U.S. forces.
Meanwhile, questions loom around the future of the Iraqi militias, which the Baghdad government has sought to disarm, with little success so far.
A new phase in Iraq after decades of US involvement
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement that U.S. troops and equipment had completed an “orderly departure” from the air base in Irbil, in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
“This milestone reflects the success of a 12-year campaign that defeated ISIS as an organized military threat in Iraq and across the region,” he said. “It also marks a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort supported by a more normal bilateral security relationship.”
He added that the U.S. military “will continue to provide targeted training and intelligence support to our Iraqi partners.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi presided over the handover ceremony and described the U.S. withdrawal as the beginning of a “new phase, one defined by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends.”
He said Iraqi security forces will continue the fight against IS and the government will ensure that non-state groups no longer hold weapons.
U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein. They departed in 2011, but three years later, Iraqi authorities invited a smaller U.S.-led mission to fight the Islamic State group, which had rampaged across Iraq, seizing large swaths of territory.
With the extremist group reduced to scattered sleeper cells, Washington and Baghdad agreed in 2024 to wind the mission down.
U.S. troops pulled out of bases in most areas of Iraq last year but maintained a small presence of hundreds of troops in the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region. Bases there have regularly come under attack since the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran on Feb. 28. Iran-backed Iraqi militias also have coordinated with Yemen’s Houthi rebels to attack Saudi Arabia.
While a handful of less-influential militias have agreed to turn over their weapons, powerful groups close to Iran rejected the prospect or set conditions for disarming that the government would be unlikely to meet.
Al-Zaidi has since walked back the deadline. He told The New York Times earlier this month that the deadline for militia disarmament has been pushed to June 2027.
The effects of the U.S. withdrawal may not be immediately visible, particularly since the U.S. military presence had already been scaled down. But officials in Iraq’s Kurdish region have expressed anxiety about the departure and particularly about the removal of U.S. air defense systems.
The Kurdish regional government’s Peshmerga Ministry said the Kurdish region had faced more than 1,000 drone and ballistic-missile attacks during the recent U.S.-Iran conflict.
“The departure of the United States from the Kurdistan Region under these complex regional circumstances, without the provision of a defense system, is a matter of concern,” the statement said.
Iran-allied groups in Iraq, meanwhile, have celebrated the U.S. withdrawal.
“The expulsion of the occupation forces, defeated, from the land of Iraq is the beginning of full sovereignty,” Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a security official with the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia, said in a statement.
He added a warning to al-Zaidi and his government not to carry out American plans, threatening that “any government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be overthrown by all means.”
I feel like I need to apologize for a column a couple of months ago when I compared the current president of the United States to Caligula, the possibly mad Roman emperor who is said to have nominated his trusted horse for high office. I need to apologize to Caligula. From pitching his triumphal D.C. arch as a storage shed for deadly snipers’ bullets to banning reporters from the White House in a narcissistic rage, Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality. This is unsustainable.
Worried about AI killing humans? Bad news: It already is.
A cleric takes a photograph earlier this month at the shattered Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, southern Iran. It has become a place of mourning and a memorial to those killed in a U.S. airstrike on Feb. 28.Vahid Salemi
Which is it?
Are the robots of AI, or artificial intelligence, so smart that they’re on the verge of holding a secret meetup in the darkest corner of the dark web and developing a plot to kill all humans through germ warfare, to make sure we don’t kill them first by pulling the plug?
Or is AI so dumb — artificial stupidity, despite the billionaires of Silicon Valley showing up daily on our TV screen to brag about the sky-high IQ of their son, Claude — that the thing that will murder us is a crazy hallucination that will turn a false alarm into World War III?
The fact that we can’t answer this should give us pause, but maybe we aren’t even asking the right question. Maybe the real issue is how easy we’ve made it to kill off the human race — a capability that was already created by people even before we invented the computer.
One thing is certain. Artificial intelligence has already been an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again.
Remember the very first days of the now seemingly endless Iran war, and the news that two missile strikes had obliterated a school for young children in the Iranian coastal city of Minab, in an apparent “double-tap” strike in which the second attack from the skies killed young girls and boys and their teachers as they huddled in a prayer hall?
Those bombings, which killed 156 people on Feb. 28, caused the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran to report last week that it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks …” The U.S. government has never taken responsibility for the bloodshed, despite overwhelming visual evidence that the bombs were precision-guided U.S. Tomahawk missiles.
It didn’t take long for additional speculation that an AI program had mistakenly targeted the school, perhaps using outdated maps and info from an earlier time when its buildings were attached to an Iranian military complex. After all, the Pentagon has been openly bragging about the death and destruction facilitated by its use of Palantir’s Smart Maven System and also Anthropic’s Claude.
Last week, Bloomberg News reported that the Pentagon’s overreliance on AI, and specifically the Palantir Maven program, was a major factor in the school tragedy, along with the outdated intelligence about the Minab site — the “garbage in.” Its exposé noted that U.S. military planners were racing to identify some 1,000 Iranian targets in the early hours of the war, giving humans little time to double-check the list. Kindergartners were slaughtered as a result.
This was hardly the first time robots have been linked to human death, both in war — in 2024, +924 Magazine reported the Israel Defense Forces were using an AI program code-named “Lavender” to target sites amid the mass killing in Gaza — and in peace, as shown by numerous accounts of robots helping troubled people die by suicide.
And yet, it could have been much, much worse. At the same time as the Bloomberg report on the AI link to the mass killing in Iran, the world also learned that a false report generated by robot intelligence nearly sparked a conflict between the United States and China that could conceivably have spiraled into major fighting.
CNN and other outlets have reported that a U.S. special operations command analyst working with AI generated an urgent report that a Chinese ship bound toward the Middle East was carrying components for a nuclear weapons system, which caused military leaders to scramble jets and assemble a team to seize the vessel.
Only at the last minute did the Pentagon dig deeper and learn the AI-generated report was completely false, a hallucination — one that nearly triggered a violent conflict between the world’s two largest military powers.
The two disturbing reports about the use, or misuse, of AI by the U.S. military in a time of war did make news but didn’t get nearly as much attention — either in the media or on sites like Bluesky or X — as warnings from both whistleblowers and CEOs in Silicon Valley that a swarm of robots could decide on their own and without any human intervention or awareness to try to kill off our so-called civilization.
The fear of an unprompted attack from AI secret agents is real, based on several incidents that have already occurred, including a well-planned and partly successful operation by OpenAI’s robot agents to hack into a company called Hugging Face.
Still, it says something about human intelligence that we are captivated by the unknown and mysterious possibility of a random attack, while the fact that people are currently misusing AI to cause death and suffering is a less compelling story. I noted in this space last week that the threat to humankind from climate change is arguably even more real — and yet this gets denied by many and ignored by others.
It’s also striking to me as a boomer born in 1959 that a generation that wasborn into a time of constant terror — backyard bomb shelters, “duck and cover” drills in the classroom, and sci-fi horror at the drive-in that an atomic arms race could kill us at any moment — is suddenly back to where we started.
The fact that civilization managed to — so far — pause the number of world wars at two has given us the space and the false bravado to create new and much more insidious killing machines, and the threat from invisible robots on a hidden dark web is somehow even scarier than the radioactive mushroom cloud that we more or less understand.
Boomers who went to bed as kids in the 1950s and ’60s praying we wouldn’t die before we woke are now spending our senior-citizen-discount years fearful that something stranger than science fiction is coming for our children, or grandchildren. Over the course of a lifetime, the arc of that moral universe has not bent at all.
Still, humans were able, somehow, to prevent nuclear annihilation so far, and now it’s past time to get to work on the actual threats from AI and start on those workarounds. For example, the articles I’ve read speculating on how the robots plan to kill us frequently mention the prospect of AI agents developing bioweapons and releasing them, either on their own or prompted by a bad actor. (In theory, human development of bioweapons has been banned for a half century.)
From everything I’ve read so far about AI, it sounds like we’d have better luck safeguarding or eliminating the components that could make a biological agent rather than stopping the robots. Likewise, AI agents would not be able to start an atomic apocalypse if our human politicians went to work at finally eliminating nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence won’t kill little girls in an Iranian school if humans don’t start dumb wars in the first place.
If Silicon Valley’s prophets of doom are serious, there’s no fix that’s too big or too ambitious. But understand that the biggest problem isn’t that AI wants to murder us, but that since 1942 we humans have been busy creating all the suicidal weapons AI agents could use.
Can you even “duck and cover” from a killer robot? I don’t intend to find out, and I don’t want my yet-to-be-born grandchildren to have to even think about it.
Yo, do this!
I’ve always been a big fan of filmmaker Barry Levinson, whose trilogy of Baltimore movies (Diner, Tin Men, Avalon) defined postwar American nostalgia. Now Levinson, along with his codirector Robert May, has come north to the Philly burbs to catch up with our divisive 21st century in a five-part documentary, Bucks County, U.S.A. If you’ve been reading The Inquirer these last six years, you know howthe communities just north of Philadelphia — where cosmopolitan suburbs meet the rolling fields of Trump Country — have become ground zero for culture wars around the COVID-19 response, book banning, and LGBTQ pride. Bucks County, U.S.A.began streaming on PBS Monday night. It’s getting mixed reviews, but I plan to check it out myself.
With the exception of my growing obsession with A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, I’ve struggled the last few years to find new podcasts that excite me. But I’ve been enjoying Dan Taberski’s Manifesto on Audible, which is the award-winning, prolific podcaster’s six-part look at the role that these impassioned declarations have — or haven’t — played in reshaping our troubled world, from Occupy Wall Street to Big Tech utopianism to the online rant of murderous ex-LA cop Christopher Dorner.
Ask me anything
Question: What is the reason for the boat strikes? Do they really think they are carrying drugs? — David Poe (@culthero12.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: David, your question is well-timed. Just this week, Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur monitoring human rights in the context of counterterrorism, issued a report that U.S. boat strikes off South America in the Caribbean and the Pacific that have killed more than 220 people so far violate international law and plausibly constitute crimes against humanity. Based on the reports I’ve read about the deadly drone strikes, it’s true that small fishing boats in the region are sometimes drafted for a supporting bit role in drug trafficking. Yet, it seems powerfully likely that some murdered in the U.S. attacks were innocent fishermen, and there’s no evidence these bombings have made any real dent in the flow of drugs. Most importantly, since when did minor involvement in drug smuggling become a capital offense? The only thing as troubling as these American war crimes is the silence on Capitol Hill. The next Congress must hold hearings and create the momentum for shutting this down.
What you’re saying about …
Oops, maybe I should have read my emails before writing another column about the problems with artificial intelligence. Based on the lack of responses to last week’s question about the AI threat, this is clearly not a topic that excites my readers like the betrayals by Sen. John Fetterman or the mainstream media. A couple of frequent correspondents did weigh in, including Mary Ann Petro, who is very concerned over reports of unauthorized hacking by AI agents, and Joe Stepansky, who thinks the risks are somewhat overblown. “This is all deflection from data center opposition and the stock market bubble,” he wrote. “Just remember there are humans behind all of this, humans who may be amoral at best (I used to work with some) and malicious at worst (them too).”
📮 This week’s question: The big story for several days has been the fallout from Donald Trump’s rash decision to ban three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House grounds, in a move that experts agree is a violation of the First Amendment. Do you think the entire presidential press pool should walk out in solidarity, or do Americans need audio and video of what their president is up to? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “White House press corps” in the subject line.
Backstory on George W. Bush’s betrayal of democracy
Former President George W. Bush reacts while watching players from the U.S. team practice before the Walker Cup golf matches against Great Britain and Ireland at Cypress Point Club in Pebble Beach, Calif., earlier this month.Jeff Chiu
For those of us who experienced a political reawakening during those dreadful years between the U.S. Supreme Court’s coronation of a president in the disputed 2000 election and the shock-and-awe carpet bombing of Baghdad in 2003, today’s frequent refrain is incredibly grating. “I never thought I’d say this,” says some self-proclaimed Democrat, often a boomer, “but I’m feeling nostalgic for George W. Bush.”
To be sure, the 43rd president wasn’t nearly as nakedly corrupt as Donald Trump and his family, not as crude and boorish, and also more determined to at least make it look like what he was doing was constitutional. There were flashes of goodness — like Bush’s support for fighting the AIDS epidemic in Africa — which stand out today because there are so few of them. But his lies — and there were a lot of them, even if he could never match Trump — were more diabolically purposeful.
The stench of dead bodies in Fallujah had barely lifted when none other than Joe Biden came to Philadelphia to drape the Liberty Medal around Bush’s neck. When Trump descended on his gilded escalator in 2015 to finish the job of trashing America that had started in Iraq, Bush said nothing other than to let it be known that he’d left his 2016 ballot blank. When even his despised vice president Dick Cheney came out in 2024 and said a second Trump term would be a disaster for democracy, Bush again said nothing, insisting that he has “retired from presidential politics.”
Apparently congressional politics is another story. On Monday, it was revealed that Bush and his fellow Texan Sen. John Cornyn — a lame duck after losing a primary to Trump-backed Ken Paxton — have teamed up to throw a massive fundraiser in Dallas for six GOP Senate candidates in battleground states. The touting of Bush as a “special guest” at the event is meant to lure conservative donors. The New York Times, in its scoop on the evening, played up the fact that the event is not raising money for Paxton, going with the angle of a Texas-sized political feud.
Just like the Democrats who are willing, in the Trump era, to turn a war criminal into an icon of civility, the Times is missing the point. Electing these GOP Senate candidates in states like Iowa and Maine will give Trump the ability to extend aspects of his dictatorship for two more agonizing years. The would-be senators Bush is raising money for would rubber-stamp new MAGA judges and allow Trump to replace Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas with younger far-right zealots. Senate committees would lack the power to investigate the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors. That could finish the job Bush started when he lied to Congress about Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist: The implosion of U.S. democracy.
What I wrote on this date in 2009
It’s weird now to read what survives of my early Attytood blog posts from the late 2000s, when many days I published just a quick hit while I worked on longer news articles for the Daily News. On Sept. 22, 2009, I quoted a prediction from internet guru Clay Shirky that seems incredibly prescient 17 years later. Shirky said that “the ongoing shrinkage of newspapers is likely to create a ‘giant hole’ that will not be filled for some time. He said he has a vision of communities of 10,000 people or fewer becoming rife with ‘casual endemic corruption,’ as newspapers are no longer able to fulfill their traditional watchdog roles.” He nailed it.
Nothing has been more troubling in 2026 than the assault on the First Amendment that’s been taking place from Donald Trump’s Oval Office to our hometown council meetings, and even our football palaces. In my Sunday column, which was written before the president booted three news organizations from the White House, I looked at the growing hostility and even violence toward working journalists, including arrests, physical assaults, and Trump’s rants toward Black female journalists. Tolerance of these abuses is a mark of a dying democracy. Over the weekend, I shifted gears and tackled the Eagles’ silence over the team’s reported role in the cancellation of hip-hop’s pro-Palestinian Macklemore from the Ed Sheeran tour that stopped at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday. How can free speech be censored in a city-owned stadium?
Speaking of those Birds, the city’s $10 billion NFL franchise was conveniently hundreds of miles away in Nashville as pro-Palestinian protesters descended on the Linc this weekend. The Eagles eked out a last-second victory by the seat of QB Jalen Hurts’ pants, over the seemingly hapless Tennessee Titans. The unimpressive showing cemented the notion that it’s impossible to know what to make of Philly’s 2-0 footballers after their narrow wins over mediocre opponents, but The Inquirer is on the case. Our extensive coverage looked at the good (standout performances from Hurts and No. 1 wide receiver DeVonta Smith), the bad (the subpar play of a battered and aging offensive line), and the unexpected (the return of Super Bowl hero Zack Ertz due to injuries in the tight-end corps). Ace columnist Mike Sielski recently went deep, as usual, with a humanitarian look at guard Landon Dickerson’s tortured decision to try to play through the pain. The Inquirer’s sportswriters are likely to rack up more wins this fall than an iffy team, so why not subscribe and read every word.
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In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, I went to New York to report on a story about Johanna Sigmund, a young woman from Wyndmoor who perished after one of the hijacked planes rammed the north tower.
Over the course of my career, I’ve spent more time than anyone would want writing pieces about people whose lives were cut short prematurely. One of the most memorable was Johanna, whose story and positive spirit remain seared into my soul.
Johanna’s parents invited me, a stranger, into their home at their worst hour. They took the time to tell me about their only daughter, and shared photograph after photograph after photograph — Johanna smiling after she ran the New York City Marathon, Johanna posing with her girlfriends at a wedding, and so on.
One image stood out.
It was a photo of Johanna, 25, and her brother, John, 23, smiling while standing arm in arm at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The photo was taken two months before the terror attacks. In the background loomed the twin towers.
An article by Paul Davies about Johanna Sigmund in the Oct. 19, 2001, edition of the Daily News.Staff
Johanna’s story has stuck with me for a quarter century, but her life is emblematic of the promise and potential of so many others who were lost. At least 40 people with ties to Philadelphia and its western suburbs were killed in the attacks, including 18 from Bucks County, 11 from Montgomery County, five in Chester County, eight from Delaware County, and three from Philadelphia. It may be impossible for any of us to fathom how many other lives were forever impacted by the horrors of that day.
I wondered how Johanna’s family and friends had fared over the years.
So much has been lost in the 25 years since 9/11. Johanna would have turned 50 on the first day of summer — the longest day of sunlight. Her elegant beauty remains frozen in time, and — all these years later — her life remains a catalyst for good.
A scholarship fund set up in her name continues to help students attend St. Malachy School in North Philadelphia, as well as another at her alma mater, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.
Johanna packed a lot into her brief time here. She was the captain of the field hockey, lacrosse, and squash teams in high school. She studied economics and played field hockey at Fairfield University, and spent a semester in Paris before moving to New York in 1998 with three friends from Philadelphia.
When I met with Johanna’s roommates a few weeks after the attack, they shared stories of her love of cooking, dancing, and listening to U2, often replaying the song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” that begins, “I’m not afraid of anything in this world.”
From left: Johanna Sigmund, Rory McDevitt, and Kim Ongaro were all bridesmaids at the wedding of their friend, Lexie Beatty, in May 2001. Sigmund was one of the victims in the 9/11 attacks.h
Johanna cared for others. She distributed pizza and McDonald’s to the homeless people in her neighborhood. She helped a woman who was thrown from a taxi get to a hospital. Johanna spent the night by her side and returned home in the morning with blood on her clothes.
Kimberly Ongaro, a roommate and friend from Springside, called her “an angel.”
The toughest interview in the weeks after the attack was with Johanna’s boyfriend, Joe Bonavita. They had dated for several years and had discussed marriage.
Their final weekend together was a whirlwind. They went to the Yankees game Friday night and drove to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., on Saturday, met up with friends, attended the Army football game, and walked through the cemetery for soldiers, which included Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
On Sunday, Johanna competed in a 5K race down Broadway before continuing on as part of her training for the Philadelphia Marathon. She and Joe shared dinner that night.
Johanna Sigmund and her boyfriend, Joe Bonavita, at the wedding of her friend Lexie Beatty Morris.
Johanna did not feel well on Monday, but went to work. When she was still under the weather on Tuesday — Sept. 11 — Joe urged her to stay home.
But she went into the office at an investment firm on the 93rd floor of the north tower.
Joe worked near the Trade Center. As he exited the subway, he saw the first plane smash into the north tower.
A life upended
I located her brother, John, and emailed him. He responded a few minutes later and graciously agreed to speak. When we connected after 25 years, it almost felt like old friends catching up.
John told me how 9/11 upended his life.
He had planned to move to New York after college, but lost interest after the attack. He visited ground zero to commemorate the first anniversary. President George W. Bush greeted families, including John’s aunt, who offered veiled advice regarding the plans to invade Iraq. “I hope you are making a prayerful decision,” she told the president.
Bush was taken aback, but continued shaking hands before circling back to tell John’s aunt that he prayed every day.
A photograph of Johanna Sigmund running in the New York City Marathon in November 2000.
After college, John, a Spanish speaker, spent a year with AmeriCorps teaching literacy to second graders in Kensington. After he explained to one class’s teacher why he wanted to take off for the anniversary of 9/11, she had her students write notes of support. John was struck by how many kids shared stories of loved ones they had lost to violence.
“Everyone has their 9/11,” he said.
Along the way, we all pay a price. Some more than others. But how one responds is a lesson for all as we navigate these trying times 25 years after 9/11.
John said he wonders how his life would have been different if not for Sept. 11. After a year teaching in Philadelphia, he moved to Texas, in part to get away. He earned a master’s degree in art education at the University of Texas in Austin before going on to teach at Say Sí, an after-school arts program in San Antonio.
John’s attempt to get away brought him back to New York. One of his students won an art award that included a trip for the student and teacher to Carnegie Hall. The artwork was displayed at the Winter Garden located near ground zero in May 2010.
“My heart sank,” John said. “I didn’t want to go anywhere near ground zero.”
Even then, nearly a decade after the towers fell, ground zero remained little more than a giant pit with the Freedom Tower slowly rising alongside it. In a macabre daily scene, tourists jammed the sidewalks, gawking and posing for pictures in front of what John could only see as a mass grave, while street hustlers sold photos of the hijacked planes crashing into the towers.
John tried to maintain his composure as he made his way through the gauntlet to the Winter Garden, but a man stepped in front of him and tried to sell him a fiery photo from the attack.
John snapped. He grabbed the stack of photos from the man, threw them in the air, and cussed him out. The two got into a tussle. After the fracas, John tried to gather himself by channeling his sister’s unflappable spirit.
John Sigmund (center) holds a picture of his sister, Johanna, as he and his family run down Kelly Drive toward the finish line of the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2001.d
“Johanna, help me,” he said to himself while overlooking ground zero. “I need to get it together.”
‘Beyond coincidence’
John calmed down and carried on. After the event, he met friends at a nearby bar. John was telling them about the run-in with the street hustler when he suddenly saw Johanna’s old boyfriend, Joe Bonavita, across the bar.
Joe had moved to New Orleans but, in a twist of fate, was in town for a 9/11 event. The two were not close but quickly bonded. John viewed the reunion as his sister’s handiwork.
“Some things are beyond coincidence,” he said.
Eventually, John did move to New York. The city helped him better find himself. After years of worrying about disappointing his parents or adding to their suffering, John told them he was gay. His parents, who have a deep Catholic faith, were supportive.
Twelve years ago, John returned to Philadelphia and fell in love with the city, and especially Fairmount Park.
After running the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2001, John Sigmund holds a photo of his sister, Johanna, and wears two medals around his neck — one he earned after finishing the race and another his sister won after completing the New York City Marathon in November 2000.Courtesy of Tony Webb / Office of the City Representative
But tragedy struck again in September. Three days after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, his father died.
For John, September remains the cruelest month. But he credits a strong support network of cousins and friends for helping him navigate life’s challenges — and added that Johanna always feels close by.
“I have a thing with the wind,” John said. “When I think about her, the wind will kick up.”
After losing his sister and father in September, John and his partner, Jaime, decided to add some positivity to the month. They got married last Sept. 26 and are planning an anniversary party in a couple of weeks.
Like every American who lived that fateful day, I can vividly remember where I was on Sept. 11, 2001.
I was in the middle of chairing a hearing as a city civil service commissioner when my administrative assistant burst into the room. She told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. I postponed the hearing immediately.
But unlike millions of Americans who were frozen in place watching the heartbreaking visuals of the second plane hitting the second tower, I was already on the phone with the Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia School District,and the Human Relations Commission.
I knew there would be an immediate backlash against the Arab and Muslim American community.
Like every other minority community in this country’s history, our community knew too well the playbook that isdeployed following a tragedy. The provocations from talking heads on television, the incendiary questions expedited by the broader 24/7 media landscape, even the inflammatory comments made by elected officials —the very people who weresupposed to protect us.
I could see it coming. In America, we always search for an enemy to blame, and sadly, on Sept. 11, 2001, Arab and Muslim Americans were the ones unfairly blamed.
In those first few days, thanks in part to our partners in law enforcement and our wider community outreach, we managed to head off the worst of it for the Arab and Muslim American community in Philadelphia. We had some threats and attacks on stores, and some people were targeted with violence. But even thoughthat was horrific and traumatizing, in comparison to others, inPhiladelphia our community was surprisingly fortunate.
Across the country, Arab American businesses and mosques were literally burned to the ground. Arab Americans were arrested, and some were held for a long period of time without charge. Other Arab Americans —and those perceived to be Arab — faced targeted violence and,horrifically, a few people were murdered.
These serious hate crimes and attacks by both lone actors and, sadly, also the government, were widely underreported by the media, then and now. Our community still feels that pain every day.
We weren’t even given the time to mourn the tragedy ourselves,including the many victims on 9/11 who themselves were Arab and Muslim Americans.
While our country mourned the thousands dead in New York, we as Arab Americans also had to mourn our place in American society,which has never recovered. It was the way the country changed after 9/11 that has been so difficult for our community. It was a transformation that hit every American, but it felt targeted at us.
The response to 9/11 fundamentally shifted what the U.S. stood for. We were dragged into two devastating wars, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq. Those conflicts took hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi lives and thousands of our own soldiers.
Then came the Transportation Security Administration, a government organization that utilized racial profiling in what never once felt like “random” checks.
The Patriot Act expanded government spying into the private lives of all Americans, but particularly Arab and Muslim Americans, who faced extraordinary government surveillance.
Other law enforcement agencies followed, with their own prejudiced practices, especially the New York Police Department, whichstarted sending undercover agents into mosques to record worship services. Their “Demographic Unit” went to gatherings, restaurants, and clubs to survey the community. They made lists of our businesses and started infiltrating student groups.
On top of that, the federal government started the NSEERS program, forcing thousands of men visiting the U.S. from Muslim-majority countries to be fingerprinted and registered like criminals. No terrorists were found among those profiled.
We also now know the extent to which the government used torture against mainly Arab and Muslim prisoners at black sites, and most notoriously at Guantánamo Bay. We now know that many of those prisoners were innocent and had nothing to do with 9/11, let alone al-Qaeda. That didn’t stop theCIA and its contractors, all of whom escaped justice for their role in the torture program, from using waterboarding and extraordinary rendition on these prisoners, all while denying their basic rights.
After 9/11, if you were Arab or Muslim, there was no such thing as being innocent until proven guilty anymore.
Even now, more than a dozen men are still sitting in Guantánamo Bay without ever facing a trial, due in part to the very torture program the government once tried to say was necessary.
And in the decades since, some things have gotten worse.
There continue to be travel bans targeting people from predominantlyArab and Muslim nations.
Groups in places like Texas are trying to ban Sharia law — a grotesque, Islamophobic distortion that pretends Sharia is a legal system challenging the Constitution rather than a set of guidelines for moral and ethical conduct in a religious context.
And attempts to silence and censure Arab American voices, particularly on issues like Palestine, continue at universities, corporations, and state capitals across the country.
It hasn’t all been dark, though.
The pressure our community has faced since 2001 has made us stronger in a lot of ways. It forced us to build real, lasting ties with our religious allies, especially our Jewish and Christian neighbors. That’s how the Interfaith Center of Philadelphia got its start.
The author (seated at right) watches Gov. Tom Wolf sign “The Pledge to Combat Bigotry,” a public commitment to speak out against bigotry toward Muslims and Arabs, in Harrisburg on Sept. 30, 2015.Courtesy of Marwan Kreidie
It solidified our political presence, too.
Now, we have more leaders than ever standing up for our inclusion in the city and the state. Many elected leaders have rallied to support us, and our community has the greatest number of people elected to local, state, and federal offices we’ve ever seen.
By working together with allies to make the U.S. freer, and toprotect the importance of what it means to be an American citizen, Sept. 11 showed the resilience of our community.
I could not be prouder of that.
Twenty-five years ago, even as those terrorists tried to break us, and others inside our own country tried to divide us, America prevailed.
We nearly lost our democracy on that fateful day, as our democratic system was hijacked in the name of “security.” But we, as Americans, came together.
And today we must continue to live the words of the great Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Marwan Kreidie teaches political science at West Chester University and is the executive director of the Philadelphia Arab-American Development Corps.
I have been faking it for 25 years. Not about the people and issues that matter to me. Not my work or anything like that.
But in the way everyone tells you to “fake it till you make it.” Get up. Go to work. Act like you’re doing fine when you’re not, hope nobody notices, and hope you’ll eventually get better.
When I got to ground zero late on Sept. 11, 2001, nothing felt real. Therapists have since explained that I may have slipped into what they call a dissociative state, and it was frightening.
I hadn’t exactly lost my grip on reality, but I felt detached, like I was living in a movie, feeling uncertain about what was real and what wasn’t.
A New York City firefighter looks out onto the collapsed World Trade Center on the morning after the attack of Sept. 11, 2001. Chronicling the devastation there has haunted the author over the years.
I managed to keep taking pictures, leaning into the parts of myself that were still working, as I have in some ways every day since.
My friend and colleague Chris Brennan, the reporter with whom I had gone to the scene for the Daily News, later wrote about our journey together and the early aftermath.
A harrowing aftermath
The next 18 months were the worst for me, filled with flashbacks, nightmares, extreme insomnia, memory blackouts, mood swings, and broken relationships.
Serendipitously, a psychiatrist wrote to me in early 2003 about acquiring some of my photographs for instructional use. She also sensed what I was going through, and provided the treatment I needed to get the most crippling symptoms under control.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Far from it.
New York City firefighters sift through the rubble of the World Trade Center on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.Jim MacMillan
From the outside, what followed looks almost ridiculously good: a career filled with fellowships, faculty appointments, and even a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for my photographs from the war in Iraq.
I had accompanied U.S. troops on hundreds of combat missions over the course of a year, feeling indestructible following my initial recovery, but then some new and old symptoms emerged, and I needed more care when I got back. I got better again, although I still overreact when startled.
One of my pictures from 9/11 went on to have a remarkable life of its own. The New York Times wrote about the time it toured alongside some of the great artworks of the 20th century. My alma mater, Tufts University, hung it in a gallery next to a Picasso.
Looking back now, it feels painfully obvious that I have also spent the past 25 years stockpiling accomplishments as if to prove I was OK, probably to myself as much as anyone else.
We talk a lot in the news about surviving terrible events and their immediate aftermaths. And we love stories of recovery. But we don’t talk much about the long tail of trauma.
Our traumatic pasts aren’t so easily fooled. There is no unseeing what we have seen.
Rescue workers carry a body from the ruins of the World Trade Center to a temporary morgue at the heavily damaged Dow Jones Building in the early morning after the Sept. 11 attack.
I still have occasional nightmares and persistent phobias that seem obviously related to things I saw at ground zero.
And random reminders can bring me back there in every sense. The smoke and rubble appear behind my eyelids in an instant. I can hear the sounds and taste the dust. My breath deepens, and my skin crawls again.
Giving back
Most of the time I am completely fine. Sometimes I get triggered, and I’ve got my hands full again for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. I had a bad year not so long ago.
Living my best life takes maintenance, just as I imagine countless people quietly manage other long-term health challenges.
Since 2006, I have also spent a lot of time studying and teaching students and journalists about trauma. Giving back has felt both cathartic and critical to maintaining my well-being.
A message is scrawled in ash on a column inside One Financial Center, adjacent to the World Trade Center ruins at ground zero.Jim MacMillan / Staff Photographer
But while journalists and other first responders are frequently invited onto stages for these conversations, most people carrying trauma will never get the spotlight.
Domestic violence and other crimes can alter lives without ever making the news. Trauma can accumulate alongside structural violence, from racism and concentrated poverty to overpolicing and mass incarceration.
Rescued from Lower Manhattan, a family lands in Liberty State Park in New Jersey hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. The trauma from that day lives on for survivors and witnesses.
Communities most vulnerable to trauma are often the least likely to have access to the kind of care that helped me endure.
Too many are left to carry their burden alone, while resources seem perpetually overstretched, and horrifying headlines keep coming at us with relentless frequency.
If nobody is coming to save us, we’ll need to get better at taking care of one another, now more than ever.
I’m no clinician, but I can tell you what I needed: Listen when people tell you about their struggles. Don’t turn up the heat or ask when they’re going to get over it. Ask what they need, ask how you can help, and help them find more support.
A New York City firefighter surveys the wreckage of the collapsed World Trade Center on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.Jim MacMillan
I recently moved to Ireland, where my grandparents were born, thinking I might have one more chapter to write in my career and that, for once, I might step away from all the trauma.
Instead, every new relationship and opportunity seems to be leading me back to the same work: helping journalists stay safe and healthy while reporting responsibly on survivors.
The distance has also helped me see more clearly what I’ve carried all these years, and what we can’t fake.
Jim MacMillan spent 17 years as a photojournalist at the Daily News. His photographs from ground zero now reside in the Special Collections Research Center at the Charles Library at Temple University, and one was acquired last year by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. He founded the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting in 2019 and served as its director until June.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of ordinary men walked into a brick building in Philadelphia and signed their names to the most consequential document in American history, the Declaration of Independence. Throughout this year, and all across the nation, Americans are gathering to celebrate those first steps toward freedom.
Last month, while I listened to the concerts on the Parkway and watched the fireworks over the Art Museum, I found myself thinking about the people who have kept it going ever since.
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is shown along Route 539, Whiting-New Egypt Road, Manchester Township, N.J. The author has served nearly all of his 26-year Air Force career at the 514th Airlift Wing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.Doug Hood/Asbury Park Press
I have spent nearly my entire 26-year Air Force career right here, at the 514th Airlift Wing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in South Jersey, affectionately known as the Freedom Wing. That name has always meant something to me, but this anniversary year, it carries a particular weight.
Freedom is not a monument or a date on a calendar. Freedom is a daily act of service, renewed by ordinary people who choose to do an extraordinary thing: raise their right hand and pledge to lay it all on the line for their fellow citizens.
The members of the Freedom Wing are your neighbors. Truly and literally. They teach your children in Philadelphia classrooms. They run toward the smoke when your house is on fire. They wear a SEPTA uniform in the morning and a flight suit in the evening. They are nurses, corporate executives, police officers, and small-business owners. They coach Little League in the summer and strut down Broad Street on New Year’s Day.
And then, when the nation calls or the mission demands, they put on the uniform and get to work. They leave their families, their jobs, and their routines, and they go where they’re needed. No questions asked.
In the Air Force Reserve, we call them citizen airmen. I call them my chosen family and the best people I have ever known.
Since this wing was originally designated in 1949, our citizen airmen have answered the call in every major conflict our country has faced — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — and in humanitarian missions across the globe. The Freedom Wing has never sat on the sidelines of history.
Task Force McGuire-Dix Airmen prepare personal protective equipment to aid in the arrival of Afghans in support of the U.S. Department of State-led Operation Allies Refuge at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey in 2021.U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Joseph Morales
After more than a quarter century standing alongside these individuals, what strikes me most is not the mission accomplishments, though they have been extraordinary — it’s the sacrifice that surrounds each one.
It’s the spouse who holds the household together for a sixth month of deployment. It’s the firefighter who tells his crew he has to leave again, and the crew that jumps to cover his shifts. It’s the teacher who builds training plans instead of lesson plans in the back of an aircraft at 30,000 feet, and the students who send hand-drawn cards and care packages.
The uniform isn’t what makes these people and their loved ones remarkable. Their character does. Their grit does. This city is known for it, and so are our citizen airmen.
As Philadelphia continues to celebrate 250 years of this improbable, magnificent country, take a moment to consider how we got here.
Look around for the people who have dedicated their lives to preserving our freedom — they are already among you. Tell them you see them. That recognition costs nothing, and to a citizen airman who has given up more than most will ever know, it means everything.
The truest way I know to celebrate Freedom 250 is not just to enjoy the freedoms we have inherited, but to honor the people who are still out there, right now, making sure we keep it.
Col. Thad Amundson is the deputy wing commander of the 514th Airlift Wing, the “Freedom Wing,” at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The Philadelphia resident has flown combat sorties in Operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, New Dawn, and Inherent Resolve. He is a command pilot with over 4,000 flying hours, 800 hours flown in combat, and more than 5,000 flying hours as a civilian airline pilot.
When Herman Welker came to Washington in 1951, he had what seemed to be the ideal résumé to become a man of influence.
The Republican senator from Idaho was an unwavering conservative — a former prosecutor and World War II veteran — whose opinion counted on matters including war, national security, and U.S. Supreme Court seats.
But Welker’s path to power and prominence — serving as a close ally and faithful wingman to Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy in his abusive, power-hungry, and attention-seeking campaign to root out American communists — undid him in a single term. Welker, known in the Senate as “Little Joe from Idaho,” was implicated in another senator’s blackmail-driven suicide. When McCarthy faced censure in the Senate, Welker tried to delay, dissuade, and, according to accounts at the time, bully others out of officially expressing their disgust.
Welker lost his seat in the next election, then, after a brief illness, died.
That’s the thing about influence attained through a grand bargain with those who wield power in ways that defy the law, norms, and anything approaching restraint: It requires a grasp of time and mortality few humans can reliably claim. Which is precisely the risk Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lawyer and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran until his sudden death this month.
Unlike Welker, Graham transformed in full public view from a man who was once one of Donald Trump’s most strident and vociferous critics into a dependable MAGA workhorse in Congress.
Now, Graham’s legacy will be forever bound up with that of the 47th president, who took pains to tell NBC News that his faithful wingman’s death would be a “big blow” to the passage of the SAVE America Act.
In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham described Donald Trump as a bigot. Much changed over the next decade, Janell Ross writes.Jacquelyn Martin
In 2015, Graham was a third-term senator from South Carolina vying for the Republican presidential nomination — a field that included more than a dozen others — en route to being crushed by Trump.
Graham, for his part, described Trump as a bigot, interested in anti-American policy, and a malignancy that, if nominated, would destroy the GOP.
Given that, when Graham offered his pithy prescription for America in a December 2015 appearance on CNN, I wasn’t exactly surprised.
“You know how you make America great again?” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
It was a riff on the recycled bit of American political sloganeering that Trump had pushed into the zeitgeist, again. Trump’s vision was to make America more like it was in the past: less diverse, more exclusionary, with group suspicion as public policy, and strict racial and gender hierarchies governing national life.
In 2015, Graham’s position on Trump seemed clear and immutable. He told reporters he did not vote for Trump in 2016. Then, Trump won the election, and Graham spent most of the decade since transforming into one of the president’s most steadfast defenders.
There was a brief interregnum, a wobble of sorts on Jan. 6, 2021. After Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, Graham gave a speech. On the Senate floor, Graham seemed to point the finger of responsibility directly at Trump.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) speaks with reporters during the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump in February 2021 at the U.S. Capitol Building.Stefani Reynolds
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
But Graham, converted MAGA bannerman and, his critics say, Trump-era opportunist, soon returned.
Graham’s devotion to Trump was so sweeping and so sudden that the more conspiracy-minded have embraced the idea that Graham was the victim of blackmail or controlled by some sort of kompromat.
In death, Graham’s defenders — a group that, in these contentious times, notably includes Republicans and Democrats — have described his Trump transition as pragmatic, even admirable; what a skilled legislator must do.
Graham, they say, managed, in the final days of his life, three substantive foreign policy victories. He hammered out the details of a Russian economic sanctions bill Trump has said he will sign. He secured U.S. approval for Ukrainian strikes in Russia. And with these agreements, Graham effectively shored up NATO and its fundamental goal of staving off world war. Of course, all of that is contingent upon a mercurial president remaining uncharacteristically disciplined and consistent.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) with President Donald Trump at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., in March 2020.DOUG MILLS
And therein lies the public lesson for us all. Time can and will run out. Redemption arcs, periods of public reconsideration, and book-tour explanations are not guaranteed.
Entirely honest assessments of the dead are rare. Many will offer familiar strings of superlatives, words of admiration, mutual respect, and sympathy — perhaps in the hope that those sentiments will be reciprocated when their time comes.
Others might just say our passing was a “big blow” to one of their pet projects.
Ultimately, though, our actions and associations will speak unvarnished truths about us long after we are gone.
Visit the block where Welker lived in Washington, D.C. Today there is not so much as a plaque. There’s just a Marriott.
Janell Ross is a former senior correspondent at Time magazine who frequently writes about race, politics, and identity.
If the summer of 2026 came with an Official Cliché™, it would have to be “glass half empty, half full.” Things could be better. Things could be worse. It’s people — many of whom are quite wonderful — doing our best in a world run by institutions that are rotten to the core. You’ll find no greater example than the World Cup that wrapped up Sunday with a well-deserved trophy for Spain. Will we remember the gross commercialism and rank corruption perpetuated by FIFA and its political twin, Donald Trump? Or the many remarkable moments on the pitch, and the joyous sense of internationalism in the stands and beyond? How do we get to a place where elite greed is crushed while mere mortals like us thrive?
U.S politics becomes a farcical unreality show. How worried should we be?
Video monitors in the White House briefing room in Washington carry a live feed of President Donald Trump as he addresses the nation on July, 16.DOUG MILLS
If you live inor near a big city and use mass transit to get around, you know this experience. You hop on a subway or a bus, focused only on getting from point A to point B, but there’s a man just a few feet away who demands your attention. He is talking loudly, repeating the same gibberish phrase over and over, seemingly arguing with someone until you realize he’s not even holding a phone. It’s just him. You feel a mix of emotions — sorry for the guy because clearly he’s going through something, yet mainly praying he will just stop yelling and give you some peace.
Trump commandeered 26 minutes of invaluable TV prime time (CBS and MS Now ran all or most of it; NBC, ABC, and even CNN declined) for a speech that arguably may be remembered as one of the most consequential ever delivered from the White House — but only for the Big Lie constructed on a foundation of half-truths.
Despite days of hype, which was sensibly ignored by most folks who know better after a decade of Trump’s political dishonesty, there was zero new evidence that China or any other foreign power consequentially interfered in the 2020 presidential election Trump lost fairly and squarely to Joe Biden. POTUS instead offered gross exaggerations around old reports that would have made the late red-baiter Joe McCarthy blush, with bizarre allegations about the CIA and other intel agencies while he was in charge of them in 2020.
There was a huge problem, however, with the president’s scare tactics: No one was scared. It’s not just that many among the 61% or so of Americans who disapprove of Trump’s job performance had expected the Thursday night monologue would include even worse lies or fabrications, or stronger threats — instead of a leader who was not just incoherent but weak.
But even the Republican politicians and right-wing opinion makers who were a main target of the White House address looked the other way in the immediate aftermath. We were all the mortified passengers on the same subway car, hoping the noise would just end.
Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump’s longtime friend, was on the air when the speech ended and fairly quickly changed the topic, so eager to avoid the stench. Even worse, the president’s favorite show, Fox & Friends, which aired early the next morning, did not mention the address once in the three hours it was on.
I’ve lived through the 1980 men’s hockey gold medal and Watergate, the Iraq War and the legalization of gay marriage — so I know how it feels to be proud to be an American, and to be furious with our government. But I’ve never felt the sense of utter embarrassment that was the national mood at 9:30 p.m. last Thursday. The president gave a prime-time address that was complete fiction. Who will ever again take the United States seriously on a world stage?
But there was also a dangerous flip side to America’s week of magical thinking. In delivering a speech about election integrity problems that don’t exist, there was also a pack of wild dogs that did not bark Thursday night. For one thing, Trump barely mentioned his unilateral decision to resume and escalate the war in Iran, even as three more U.S. troops would be dead by week’s end, and everyday Americans once again felt the pain of gas prices over $4 a gallon.
But Trump and his GOP allies were determined to ignore, deflect, or flat-out lie about the crisis that was literally right in their faces: the smoke from northern wildfires, mostly in rural, remote Canada, that shrouded huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast in thick, wood-smelling smoke and led to orders for people to remain indoors.
Wildfires may be as old as the trees, but there’s only one reason why smoke from Canada has caused two major health emergencies in the United States since 2023, and that reason is climate change. Consistently warmer summers — even more extreme in northern Canada than elsewhere — have led to drought conditions that fuel these blazes. “The best way to solve it is to just stop burning fossil fuels,“ Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean at the University of Michigan, told the CBC.
But suffocating smoke from the northlands is a jolly big problem, which nobody can deny. And so a president who’s been utterly skewered by South Park decided to rap, “Blame Canada.” The world’s climate-denier-in-chief was shocked, shocked,that “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”
Filmmaker Jim Pattiz called this — wait for it — America’s “latest global embarrassment.” He wrote, “The whole planet is watching an American president shake his fist at the sky and order a sovereign country to get its clouds under control.”
There’s two ways to look at all of this. For now, Trump’s lame efforts to frame the looming midterm election as rigged are coming off as sad and pathetic, a lot more Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator than an actual führer. He lacks both evidence and judges who will rule in his favor, while his political base is shrinking every day.
For now, Trump will not be ignored, like Glenn Close flipping the lamp switch on and off in Fatal Attraction. Neither the mortification of Thursday’s speech nor the death of three soldiers in his Iran war of choice could keep the president from bullying his way onto the main stage at Sunday’s World Cup final in New Jersey, ignoring the boos to shoehorn his way into Spain’s victory photos as if he had assisted on the winning goal.
Can a world superpower die from embarrassment? We are finding out in real time.
Yo, do this!
Blame — or thank — the Major League Baseball schedulers who seem determined to stop the Phillies from playing on Friday nights, but the baseball blackout forced me to go on Netflix and realize it has added an awesome documentary that came out in 2019 but is needed now more than ever: Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins. The film shows how the outspoken and relentlessly funny Texas journalist rebelled as a student in the 1960s against the hypocrisies of her privileged upbringing and never looked back until she was taken from us, way too young, in 2007. Every up-and-coming young journalist needs to watch this and discover a role model for life.
After that commercial that ran incessantly during the World Cup, the lyrical phrase “What the world needs now …” has been stuck in my head for weeks. Well, what the world needs now, with rising authoritarianism and ruthless capitalism, isn’t only love, sweet love, but also courage. What remarkable timing for Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer’s new book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. The authors tell the story of more than 100 dissidents all over the globe, from Hong Kong to Venezuela, to learn how everyday folks can find the gumption to resist oppression. It’s a must-read for Donald Trump’s America, and it is next on my list.
Ask me anything
Question: Why is [Donald Trump] being allowed to randomly declare tariffs on Canada again if the Supreme Court said that it was illegal? Do we have to have the same argument over and over again? — Stephanie King (@stephstephking.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Apparently we do. Section 338 of the 1930 Trade Act — known, notoriously, to history geeks as the Smoot-Hawley Act that only exacerbated the Great Depression — gives the president fairly broad powers to impose retaliatory tariffs if his administration concludes that a foreign country is discriminating against U.S. products. Thanks to the international trade war that Trump himself initiated, the president is now claiming Canada is punishing American autos, alcohol, and dairy products. It feels like the proposed 50% levy on many Canadian products is less about sound economics and more about a) answering GOP calls to blame Canada for the wildfires that are actually the result of climate change, and b) trying to change the subject from a disastrous week. They don’t take effect for 30 days, plenty of time for the next TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) Tuesday.
What you’re saying about …
Last week’s question about how to respond to Trump’s Big Lie about election fraud that we all knew was coming in Thursday’s speech was probably, in hindsight, too wonky to generate much response. Those who did write agreed that a heavy burden falls on the news media to do everything to debunk — or, as longtime reader Rosalind Holtzman put it, “pre-bunk” — the president’s many falsehoods. She added: “Americans have the attention span of mayflies and need review and repetition. Revisit the events of the 2020 elections and how Trump’s claims all failed in court.” I couldn’t agree more.
📮 This week’s question: Optimists are already starting to ponder a world where Donald Trump is no longer president. But where would a Democratic successor even start to undo the damage caused by the many destructive policies of the Trump regime? What should be the Day One measures to start rebuilding U.S. democracy? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Dems Day One agenda” in the subject line.
Backstory on Trump’s campaign cash and ‘explosive diarrhea’
Federal health officials have linked a large cyclosporiasis outbreak to shredded lettuce served at Taco Bell. Is lettuce from grocery stores and restaurants OK to eat?NICOLE BENGIVENO
Before last week, most Americans had never heard of Taylor Farms, a California-based produce firm, and, for a company that supplies lettuce to large U.S. restaurant chains, anonymity was arguably good for business. There are no two words in the English language that can raise awareness of a brand — and destroy it — faster than “explosive diarrhea.” That’s the most alarming symptom from a foodborne illness linked to the parasite cyclospora that’s laid low thousands of Americans in multiple states. Since the early days of the outbreak, suspicion has focused on Taylor Farms after Taco Bell stores stopped using the iceberg lettuce it procures from the company. But the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) probe into the cause has so far been a mess — much of that the result of steep cuts to food safety by the Trump regime. But there are also ethical concerns.
Follow the money.
Regular folks might not have heard of Taylor Farms, but the world’s largest salad processor has made itself known in the corridors of the Trump regime since March 2025. That was right around the time the FDA surprised industry observers by postponing its Food Traceability Rule — drafted under the Biden administration to better track and remove contaminated products — for 30 months. Just six days after the industry-friendly move, Trump’s main political action committee, MAGA Inc., received a whopping $1 million donation from Taylor Farms.
What’s more, money buys access in Trump World. The Daily Beast has reported that last Thursday — despite the company’s nationwide lettuce recall — Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials and complained about the way the government has been investigating the outbreak. That meeting was followed by a bizarre weekend in which the FDA initially announced that testing of Taylor Farms produce from central Mexico had tested positive for cyclospora, then told the company one day later the result had been a “false positive.” The chaos means ongoing confusion about why so many Americans are getting sick, and whether it’s safe to eat lettuce. And that raises troubling questions about whether political cash has compromised food safety.
This was hardly the first time donations to Trump’s massive empire of political wealth — money raised for a man who is constitutionally barred from running for the presidency again — have overlapped with key policy decisions. For example, the New York Times reported this spring that tobacco company Reynolds American donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. just one week before an industry-friendly FDA ruling on e-cigarettes.
MAGA Inc. — just one of several ways billionaires and corporations can funnel money to Trump World, along with projects like his presidential library — had more than $400 million in the bank at the end of June, an astronomical sum. Its donors have included not only a who’s who of American industry, but also crypto dudes — whose industry has been largely deregulated under Trump — and wealthy pardon seekers. Some of those dollars will go to GOP candidates in November’s midterms, but what happens to most of this cash is a mystery. Trump may be leaving office on Jan. 20, 2029, but we’ll still be following the money for years to come.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
Trump’s second term has been so dangerous for democracy that we tend to forget the horrors of his first four years in the White House. On this date seven years ago, I joined a lot of other folks in shock and dismay over the raw racism of the 45th president’s campaign-style rally in South Carolina, where a diatribe against Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen and represents a Minnesota district, sparked a frenzied chant: “Send her back!” I wrote about the tween girl in the crowd directly behind Trump, who looked around and joined the adults. “In front of national TV cameras, with the 45th president of the United States as maestro, we are witnessing the exact moment that the raging rabble of a Donald Trump rally has taught a child how to hate.”
No columns from me this past week as I spent time with family up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but my Inquirer colleagues have been hard at work. It turns out that the Philadelphia metro area has been ground zero for the latest bizarre business scheme that’s hopelessly intertwined with the Trump regime: a pop-up scheme of at least 25 gas stations rebranded as Trump-aligned Freedom Fuel that — at least for a week or two — were selling gasoline at much lower prices than their nearby rivals. The Inquirer has been all over this weird local story with national implications, and with more questions than answers. Where does this cheap gas come from? Who’s really behind the Freedom Fuel stations? On Tuesday, The Inquirer’s Ximena Conde and Rob Tornoe started to unravel the somewhat dubious past (surprise, surprise) of some of the folks connected to the gas stations, and how suddenly prices at Freedom Fuel aren’t as cheap as they used to be. I suspect the final chapters of this saga are going to be a doozy. The only way to stay on top of local news and support the in-depth journalism we do here is to become an Inquirer subscriber. Join us. It’s a gas.
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A journalistic mentor of mine back in the 1980s told me that Harry Truman, pressed for a comment on the passing of a political enemy, finally said, “It’s a damn shame when anybody dies.” Of course, like most perfect quotes, HST probably never actually said this, yet I find occasion to think of these words often. On Saturday night, South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham — whose moral compass went haywire in the 2010s when a brief moment of truth–telling about Donald Trump melted into embarrassing capitulation — died suddenly from heart problems. He was just 71. It’s a damn shame.
Dems need to give up on fake blue-collar campaigns like Platner’s
Supporters cheer for Graham Platner in Blue Hill, Maine, after he won the Democratic Senate primary on June 9. Platner’s bid for the Senate inspired progressive Democrats. But the campaign, which he suspended July 8, was messy, disorganized and ultimately doomed by a steady drip of scandal. SOPHIE PARK
Graham Platner, the failed Maine Democratic Senate candidate, was introduced to most of us outside of the Pine Tree State less as a human being than as a fully formed narrative.
The ruggedredhead with angry eyes was an ex-Marine from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who became an oyster farmer and then a political outsider with all the right words for an electorate that’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore.
We now know that Platner’s origin story — compelling, but larded with omissions and sprinkled with lies — belonged on the fiction shelf. But even after the Democrats’ scandal-scarred June primary winner accepted the inevitable and ended his candidacy on Friday, he lives on as an avatar upon which everyone with a stake in a badly broken Democratic party can project their distrust and rage toward others — folks who ought to be their allies in an all-out war against fascism.
Days later, the Platner discourse is almost as toxic as the candidate himself. People who voice their opinions, even in 280 characters on social media, get called everything from sexist Bernie-bro rape apologists to Quislings who want big corporations to keep running the Democrats into the ground, and all the rest in between. Don’t even mention Israel. In fact, don’t @ me after this is posted.
Having said all that, there is a conversation that must be had by the Democrats, and probably a wider circle. And the disappearance of Platner himself from the picture makes that easier, because I think we can all stipulate that as a human being he was clearly not worthy to be a U.S. senator, even in the Senate’s current morally diminished state.
There is another Graham Platner somewhere on Earth 2 who also suffered PTSD and developed a drinking problem fighting in pointless wars, and who also got a Nazi tattoo and posted wretched stuff on Reddit, but turned his life around in a glorious redemption song. But that’s not the Platner we got on here on Earth 1. Instead of an apology, he was weirdly defensive about his past, because — we now know — he was hiding stuff that was even worse than that.
Although Platner has denied the most serious charge of a sexual assault, there should be zero tolerance in the Democratic Party for the type of sexual misconduct that’s been confirmed, let alone what’s been additionally alleged. That’s not just the only proper moral stance, but it sets Dems apart from a twisted GOP that nominated Trump three times. Platner’s disappearance is a blessing to everyone.
But even with that matter resolved, we still haven’t answered the bigger question that I posed the only other time I wrote about Platner back in the spring: Why did a majority of Maine Democrats — roughly 150,000 voters — ignore the party establishment to back this guy?
But first Democrats — and just about everyone, frankly — need to do a better job understanding not just the “why” of Platner supporters, but the “who.” Baked into the Platner myth was this notion that in running a gruff-sounding ex-Marine and oyster farmer, Democrats had found a key to regaining the long-lost white working class.
Two huge problems with this. First — and this will sound familiar here in Pennsylvania where shorts-and-hoodie-wearing Sen. John Fetterman grew up upper middle class before donning a blue collar — Platner comes from a fairly privileged background. He’s the son of a lawyer and upscale restaurant owner and grandson of a famous architect; he started high school at the super-elite Hotchkiss School.
Which brings us to the crux of the problem: the notion that Platner’s pre-implosion success was his ability to win back working-class voters in an overwhelmingly white state. Polls exposed this all as a lie. A late June survey from the New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena showed Platner losing white, non-college educated voters by a whopping 21% to the GOP incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. So what gave him a shot at winning? A massive 37% edge among college degree holders.
Look, we all know that it’s been the obsessive mantra of the political pundit class that Democrats will never fully win back America without restoring the working-class coalition that elected Franklin Roosevelt four times during the New Deal era. I hate to be a contrarian here, but what if that’s not true?
A society that over a half-century has once again made higher education an elite sport and now has a right-wing media and demagogues like Trump to heighten working-class grievances and blame the wrong people has created voters who — at least for now (hold this thought) — arguably aren’t worth chasing after.
The frayed alliance of progressives and liberals who comprise the core of the Democratic base do some dumb stuff — opposing new units that could lower housing costs, or “nice white parents” leading to de facto school segregation — that should stop.
An America that’s not inclusive and that isn’t fair when it comes to gross income inequality, not to mention who gets to see a doctor or send their kid to college, isn’t a cause worth fighting for. And there’s already a healthy number of working-class people — not the majority, not yet — who would agree with this.
Platner was a bad guy but he appealed to voters who wanted good things. Let’s not bemoan the fact that his movement was based on educated people. Let’s build on that. Instead of lowering our values to win elections, let’s play the long game to lift more people up to a better place.
It’s way past time for college-educated progressives and our allies to stop apologizing for the things we believe in. The current push to find a candidate who can replace Platner and fight for all the right stuff — without the personal baggage of their predecessor — is a great place to start. Maybe it’s even time to revive the old cliché: As Maine goes, so goes the nation.
Yo, do this!
Tuesday is the folk-music legend Woody Guthrie’s 114th birthday. I use the present tense because it very much feels like the singer who influenced living icons from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen is still with us. Now, a friend, the pioneering rock journalist Greg Mitchell, has directed a new documentary about the musician, his political activism in the mid-20th century, and his lasting influence: Woody Guthrie and the Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s now streaming on PBS.org and will also be popping up on PBS stations this summer. You can — and should! — stream it here.
Monday night I read a remarkable piece of journalism that I feel compelled to share. Last week, a lot of America was talking about a photo from July 4 that showed a young Black woman on a D.C. Metro train surrounded by masked members of the white supremacist Patriot Front. There was so much commentary about what this woman must be feeling and thinking, and almost all of it — as shown by some remarkable reporting by former Inquirer journalist Ellie Silverman, writing for NOTUS — was wrong. The truth is heartbreaking.
Ask me anything
Question: Why do we not know what’s going on with (ailing Kentucky Sen. Mitch) McConnell? What is the Republican endgame? What’s the benefit to prolonging the process of determining a replacement? What is that process (seems to be in dispute)?
Answer: We know a little more now than we did when I addressed this issue last week. His staff on Sunday released a brief statement and what is being called a “proof of life photo” — with that morning’s Washington Post sports page visible in the shot — seeking to explain McConnell’s month-long hospitalization and hoped-for return to the Senate. There were, of course, immediate conspiracy theories that the photo was artificial intelligence, but there’s no compelling evidence of that. The biggest mystery is, why doesn’t the 84-year-old McConnell just quit, with only about six months left until he leaves office in January? Kentucky has changed its Senate replacement law a couple of times, mainly because GOP lawmakers don’t want Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear making the pick. The new law requires a special election, but there probably will not be one if McConnell stays in office through Aug. 3. Republicans seem desperate to avoid the special election, and I’m not sure why, since McConnell surely isn’t helping advance the Trump agenda from his hospital bed.
What you’re saying about…
You really didn’t think I could go a whole newsletter without mentioning soccer, did you? Last week’s question about Trump’s FIFA intervention and the reversal of the American Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension drew a unanimous response: The president was wrong to get involved, and he seemed to create a negative vibe around the U.S. team before it got blown out of the World Cup by Belgium, 4-1. “To me, it appeared to be the wrong call, but the ref called it.” wrote ex-soccer mom Suzanne Urban Ryan. “We had to live with it. Trump getting involved was just really poor judgement based on his need to win a game that he is not even a player.” Added Jordan Lang: “I’m sure his corrupted meddling negatively affected the psychology of the U.S players.” Yup.
📮 This week’s question: Trump plans to address the nation in prime time Thursday with ginned-up information about his bogus and debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He is laying the groundwork for November, and election interference on a scale to rival the Jim Crow South. How can Congress, the courts, the media, and everyday citizens respond to this dire threat before it spirals out of control? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump election meddling” in the subject line.
Backstory on why ICE is killing immigrants, again
A vehicle with a damaged window is transported away from the scene of a shooting involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Robert F. Bukaty
The fight against police brutality against African Americans in the late 2010s found its rallying cry when New York City police choked and killed a street peddler named Eric Garner, whose last words were. “I can’t breathe!” Now, Monday’s latest fatal shooting by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that shattered the morning calm of Biddeford, Maine has produced a new mantra. As 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero lay dying on the pavement — shot in the head, then dragged from his car and handcuffed — a bystander heard him say in anguish: “I tried to stop.”
Moments earlier, the man, reported to be a Colombian national with a U.S. work permit, had left his home, possibly with his daughter, in a white Kia sedan, which was hemmed in by ICE agents in their vehicles. Although the Department of Homeland Security changed the wording of its statements over the course of the day, it ultimately reported that an ICE agent shot Guerrero because the driver attempted to flee and the officer was “fearing for public safety.” But ICE and DHS, whose officers have now shot and killed at least 11 people since Donald Trump returned to office, have repeatedly seen their versions unravel as more video and witnesses emerged. The two most recent attacks — Monday’s assault on Guerrero and last week’s Houston shooting of 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — happened on working-class residential streets without clear videos of the shootings, and with ICE agents not wearing body cams.
Still, a pattern is starting to emerge as DHS and its new leader, the former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, put a flood of new, barely trained ICE recruits on the streets in attempt to make mass arrests of immigrants without the same level of hoopla and backlash that happened in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago under Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem. In both the Houston and Biddeford shootings, ICE began the morning in what it claimed was a targeted operation seeking a specific immigrant with a removal order, only to try to arrest and ultimately kill men, in Salgado and Guerrero, who were not the supposed targets.
It’s quickly becoming clear that ICE’s new strategy is a recipe for disaster. Both Salgado and Guerrero, according to what we know from witness accounts, didn’t seem to know what exactly to do when their vehicles were surrounded by unmarked vans and yelling men. In both cases, ICE agents interpreted the predictable panic and chaos as aggression, and made a split-second decision to end a human life forever. It increasingly looks as if the federal agents — facing an impossibly ambitious goal from the Trump regime of arresting and deporting 1 million people a year — insist they have a name on a sheet of paper, when in reality they are racially profiling brown-skinned men driving to blue-collar jobs.
Like so many projects of our current government, the new ICE scheme is not only inhumane but also dumb and counterproductive. Mullin’s apparent new strategy was to meet the high arrest quotas sought by Trump and his immigration guru Stephen Miller without generating the kind of public protest and backlash that all but drove DHS out of Minnesota this winter. It’s not working. Even before Guerrero’s name was released, angry demonstrators took to the streets in Biddeford and stormed the office of the state’s GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who recently voted for a $70 billion cash infusion for immigration raids.
The tactics may have changed slightly, but the repulsive devaluation of human life has not. Mass deportation is a failure — strategically, politically, and morally.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
Some days my past writings read like Nostradamus, but more often than not they reveal how fleeting our political moments can be. On this date seven years ago, this columnist joined a lot of progressive voters in swooning over the early-stage presidential ambitions of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who had just spoken at the left-wing convention Netroots Nation here in Philadelphia. “With her slam-dunk performance Saturday,” I wrote, “Elizabeth Warren became president … of the American progressive movement, anyway.” But Sen. Bernie Sanders had other ideas about that, and then Joe Biden and South Carolina voters came along with different ideas about Warren, Sanders, and control of the Democratic Party. Read the rest: “Netroots Nation was the day Elizabeth Warren became president of the American left.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
It was a full week for me, and for American outrage. First, I tackled the Houston ICE killing of 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and the return of ambitious immigration raids to American cities. I noted that the new ICE strategy aimed to ramp up arrests without generating public outcry, and I urged readers not to go to sleep on mass deportation. Over the weekend, I wrote about the similarities between the Trump regime and the disastrous ancient reign of the Roman emperor Caligula. I detailed how Trump’s growing paranoia that he will be assassinated in office is causing new bloodshed in the Persian Gulf and inspiring fresh efforts to quash civil liberties here at home.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis must be spinning in his grave. He was the former federal judge who tried Chicago’s notorious “Black Sox” for throwing the 1919 World Series at the behest of New York gamblers, then became baseball commissioner to clean up the national pastime. For decades, Major League Baseball shunned even the slightest whiff of gambling connections that might taint the sport — but times have changed. My Inquirer colleague David Gambacorta — one of the best investigative reporters in the business — last week broke a remarkable story about how the lucrative betting site FanDuel egged on a local addicted gambler to keep playing until he lost some $1.5 million. Plot twist: FanDuel’s effort includedhaving Phillies slugger Bryce Harper send a personalized video to please the local bettor. It’s disturbing that a) Harper, with a 13-year $330 million contract, also feels the need to peddle $899 videos on Cameo and b) he has a relationship with people at a gambling website. But FanDuel is now “the official sports betting partner” of MLB — an appalling relationship that only encourages morally dubious behavior like the Harper video. The rank corruption of modern American society, including sports, is why we need investigative reporters like Gambacorta. You can read the next installments in this saga, and support his work, when you subscribe to The Inquirer.
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This should be a moment for sports fans to be insanely happy. The finals are underway in both the NHL and NBA, and the matchups and the games so far have never been more compelling. Soccer’s World Cup — always the greatest show on earth — starts Thursday (see below). Yet, something seems off. If you wanted to attend Monday night’s Knicks-Spurs Game 3 at Madison Square Garden, it would have cost about $4,500 — not courtside, but in the last row. Equally insane and opaque ticket pricing has ruined the World Cup for many fans. Sports are supposed to be an escape from life’s problems, not a PowerPoint demonstration of them.
Orange-clad Ivorians bring soccer joy to a World Cup tune-up in Chester
Fans of the Côte d’Ivoire national soccer team erupt in cheers during their team’s 2-0 friendly match win over the Philadelphia Union II squad at Subaru Park in Chester on June 8, ahead of the 2026 World Cup.Will Bunch
The cosmic vibes were not great Monday night. On the car radio, the news brought a new cycle of bombs dropping across the Middle East, and yet another onscreen meltdown from an American president who is stumbling toward his 80th birthday in confused anger. Reports from the eve of the much-anticipated return of soccer’s World Cup to North America were less about the game and more about U.S. immigration outrages, including a Somali referee turned away at the airport.
Then at about 6:59 p.m., I walked through a long tunnel in suburban Chester and into an undulating orange sea of pure joy.
On the green soccer pitch of Subaru Park, the national team from Côte d’Ivoire lined up in rapt attention as “L’Abidjanaise,” the national anthem of the West African nation, blared from a loudspeaker. But in the stands, fans wearing their native country’s iconic orange jerseys could not sit still, laughing and waving their cell phones, confirming with videos that their heroes were actually here, on U.S. soil.
For a you-can’t-beat-it ticket price of zero dollars, in a year of maximum sports greed, members of an African diaspora scattered along the Eastern Seaboard had driven up or down I-95 for hours to watch Côte d’Ivoire — also known by the anglicized Ivory Coast — easily win its World Cup tune-up match against the young American prospects of the Philadelphia Union II, 2-0.
Fatim Toure, 27, in her Côte d’Ivoire jersey, and her 26-year-old sister, Ferima, wearing her headwrap like many female fans at the stadium, had driven down from North Jersey to see the match, and were now beaming as they watched the kickoff from the tunnel as the sun set on a crisp, perfect June evening.
Fatim said the sisters “were filled with nationalism and pride, so we’re excited to see how it goes.”
The cheerfulness of the Côte d’Ivoire faithful who turned the 18,500-seat stadium bright orange — drowning out scattered dots of Philadelphians in the Union blue of the regular home squad — was infectious. It was truly what the world needs now.
Soccer fans like me have been waiting since 1994 with patience, then anticipation, and finally something bordering on dread for the World Cup — Planet Earth’s ultimate sporting event — to finally return to U.S. grass. With the opener in Mexico City (75% of the matches are in the United States, with the rest in Canada and Mexico) slated for Thursday, news about the World Cup and soccer’s corrupt, authoritarian-loving governing body, FIFA, has been dominated by grim headlines.
Indeed, the political rise of Trump — the stuff of cartoon satire not long after the first World Cup matches were played here 32 years ago — and his hostile border regime have sparked the greatest angst, and on the eve of the kickoff, these fears are coming true.
Top soccer referee Omar Artan from the African nation of Somalia was turned away at Miami International Airport on Saturday, denied the pinnacle of his profession by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents for reasons still unknown. The star striker for the Swiss national squad was also initially denied entry (since reversed), while a star player from Iraq was interrogated for hours.
Players from Iran — the nation Trump decided to bomb back in late February and is still engaged in a murky war — are going ahead with matches in Los Angeles and Seattle, but U.S. officials are forcing them to immediately return to their base camp over the Mexican border in Tijuana and not stay here overnight.
Côte d’Ivoire, an ethnic melting pot of 32 million people on Africa’s Atlantic coast where French is the official language, hasn’t been immune to the xenophobic U.S. turn on immigration. The nation is one of several under a restrictive travel ban by the Trump regime, and efforts to allow visas for some soccer fans have been plagued by confusion, including a $15,000 bond that was announced, then canceled.
While Monday’s free friendly match was a gleeful coming-out party for a diaspora that’s rooted in East Coast urban neighborhoods such as Southwest Philadelphia, most acknowledged that fans back in their native Côte d’Ivoire, where soccer is the national obsession, could never afford the cost of coming here — or the risk.
“The ICE situation has killed the entire momentum of the World Cup,” a Liberian-born woman from Southwest Philly, who said she came out to support her African neighbors, told me. “America could have used this to boost the economy and generate income, but because of the whole ICE situation, a lot of people are afraid to come.”
No World Cup squad will be more deeply tied to Philadelphia than Côte d’Ivoire, which plays two of its three matches at the temporarily unbranded Lincoln Financial Field, starting against Ecuador on Sunday night. The team is training in Chester at the Union’s facilities and staying in Delaware. But with the cheapest tickets on StubHub for that Ecuador showdown starting at $836, few whom I spoke with will be attending the matches that actually count for Côte d’Ivoire’s long-shot dream of becoming the first African nation to win the World Cup.
“I wish, but I couldn’t get any tickets, unfortunately — it was too expensive,” Audrey Yao, a 32-year-old Ivorian American researcher from the University of North Carolina who was visiting Philly from Chapel Hill, told me. “So the opportunity to see the team today — that’s why I’m here.“
For many Ivorians, Monday’s free friendly was essentially their World Cup, and they partied accordingly — swaying and gyrating to piped-in African Zouglou music between breaks, and celebrating wildly as keeper Alban Lafont stopped a penalty kick for Les Éléphants against rising young Union star Cavan Sullivan.
As a die-hard — emphasis on the word die — Union supporter for their 16-year tortured history, I’ve seen some great matches in Chester, but I’ve never had so much fun.
Monday night wasn’t just how the World Cup should have, could have been. It was very much the way America is supposed to be — with people who were proud and happy to be here, with one foot still planted in their bright-orange African heritage as they lived and breathed that Philadelphia freedom, with no masked goon squads there to hassle them.
By the setting-sunlit banks of the Delaware River, there was no U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no need to raid the ATM, no bad news from outside the stadium walls. Just 90 minutes of the Beautiful Game.
Yo, do this!
Don’t expect a lot of high-class book or film reviews this month, as my waking nonwork hours are devoted to watching the World Cup. Three games to circle this week are Thursday afternoon’s opening match in Mexico City between Mexico and South Africa (3 p.m., Fox); the first U.S. match against Paraguay in Los Angeles Friday night (9 p.m., Fox); and Philadelphia’s first contest between Côte d’Ivoire and Ecuador Sunday night at 7 p.m. on FS1, or in person at “Philadelphia Stadium” if you can spare the cash.
What if the biggest story of our time isn’t Trump’s outbursts, or even the World Cup — but the growing inability of our young people to sit down and read a book from cover to cover? The latest installment in this genre comes from university professor Tyler Jagt in a searing essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education: “My Students Can’t Read.” Is the culprit the smartphone and now AI, or the lost COVID-19 years, or the teach-to-the-test dictates of the Common Core curriculum? There’s a strong case for “All of the Above.”
Ask me anything
Question: You recently wrote about data centers. Have there been any groups who have successfully gotten data center plans aborted? What do you think are the most effective ways for communities to fight back? — @silvermoonfafo.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: There are already signs that the backlash against these massive, noisy, energy-and-water-sucking data centers powering the artificial intelligence revolution is becoming one of the most successful grassroots movements in American history. I wrote this spring about how everyday folks in rural Montour County, Pa., successfully blocked an Amazon-backed site that started with a lot of support from elected officials. How’d they do it? I wish there was some big secret, but basically it was: showing up. They organized petitions and got big crowds to speak at county commission and zoning board meetings, and the politicians had little choice but to listen. They have money, but we have people. Never forget that.
What you’re saying about …
Well, you won’t know it from today’s soccer-heavy newsletter, but not all readers share my deep passion for the Beautiful Game. Most questions that aren’t some variation on how much do you hate Donald Trump, or John Fetterman, or the media get low responses, but my World Cup question about a favorite team besides the U.S. set a record for reader nonparticipation. Andrew Ross is rooting for Portugal because he moved there from Philly three years ago (and we are all jealous). Weekly correspondent Mary Ann Petro isn’t rooting for anyone and hopes the Yanks “go down in flames.” I’m rooting for the U.S. and Côte d’Ivoire, but you knew this.
📮 This week’s question: Few things are more outrageous these days than Donald Trump’s expensive desecration of Washington, starting with that $1 billion-or-whatever proposed ballroom at the White House. So what happens to the ballroom when the good guys retake power? Tear the whole thing down, or blow it up on national television? Or repurpose it as a community health center or midnight basketball court, or something else? Please email me your answer, and please put “Ballroom future” in the subject line.
Backstory on how an LA mayor’s race could blow up America
Everything about the doomed bid of a B-list reality-TV star, Spencer Pratt, to become a Republican mayor in the ultra-liberal enclave of Los Angeles has been utterly predictable. That includes his campaign that was big on the kind of social media stunts that an entertainment-oriented LA media loved, and short on substantive ideas for a city with big problems that are both chronic (its incurable homelessness) and acute (violent immigration raids, the 2025 wildfires). It also includes the fact that Pratt wasn’t likely to get more than the roughly 27% his highest-profile fan, Donald Trump, received in 2024 from America’s second-largest city.
And now the least surprising thing of all: The right-wing conspiracy theories that Pratt’s apparent defeat by two Democratic women of color — incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and progressive upstart Nithya Raman — is their long-sought proof of massive voter fraud, after Pratt had started the lengthy vote counting in second place.
It’s not just the usual loudmouths on X. Trump is taking the lead role, again, in spreading election lies, telling Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press in their now-notorious Wisconsin interview that the California voting was rife with fraud, and, when asked for any proof, blurted angrily: “No, they’re crooked … Just like you’re crooked.” When House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these lies on Capitol Hill, he only amplified them, stating that “everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong.” No proof, just “instincts.” Trump’s handpicked and apparently incompetent top prosecutor for Southern California is now threatening an investigation.
Here’s the thing. California’s elections are among the most democratic and inclusive in America. There is extensive opportunity for the convenience of mail-in voting, and voters are allowed to send these ballots right up until Election Day. Local officials then have up to 30 days to meticulously count all the votes. That means a) it takes longer to declare a winner in California than anywhere else, and b) it unexpectedly turns out there are significant differences between who votes by mail instead of in-person, and the shape of the race can change dramatically from election night to the end of the lengthy counting. To today’s GOP, any fair and measured vote-counting must be a conspiracy.
Why does it matter? Pratt loses and — according to some reports — moves out of LA. End of story, right? Not exactly. We don’t know yet what ridiculous claims California’s train wreck federal prosecutor will make about supposed election fraud, but it’s almost guaranteed that the Trump regime is looking to make California the bogus argument for extreme measures to influence the general election in November.
Sending in troops? Seizing election machines? Invalidating results? It will all be on the table for Team MAGA in November, and the fact that the former bad boy from MTV’s The Hills couldn’t get elected mayor of one of the nation’s most diverse and liberal cities will be cited as a reason. Spencer Pratt has landed a starring role in the worst reality show ever.
What I wrote on this date in 2023
Even though it was only three short years ago, memories of this week in early June back in 2023 are a little foggy — because the skies here in Philadelphia and around the Eastern Seaboard were filled with suffocating, thick smoky haze from wildfires up in Canada. Before digging up my column, I’d forgotten that a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park was canceled because of the horrendous air quality. I wrote: “In a perfect world, [President Joe] Biden would have donned an N-95 mask Wednesday and spoken in front of the orange blur of the Statue of Liberty to declare unconditional war on fossil fuels.”
I’ve never had so many column ideas swirling around in my head as this chaotic start to the summer of 2026. Last week’s Sunday column looked at the openly fascist coming-out party for the former U.S. chief immigration raider Greg Bovino, who attended a European white supremacist conference. I said it matters a lot that he is now screaming the not-that-quiet part about U.S. xenophobia out loud. I shifted gears over the weekend and wrote about the growing panic of U.S. elites over grassroots opposition to data centers, which has sparked bizarre accusations of Chinese influence, as well as spying on activists by some police agencies. The 1 Percent can’t admit it’s really the noise pollution and higher electric bills.
Wrapping up this week’s theme in a bow, I have to say I’ve been blown away both by the quality and the quantity of The Inquirer’s coverage of the World Cup, which has truly matched, if not surpassed, some of the national outlets. Lead writer Jonathan Tannenwald, with a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s top soccer journalists, has been following the U.S. team in its Georgia training and at its warmup matches, profiling key American players like its star Christian Pulisic, and filing other human interest stories like a Penn soccer standout who’ll be taking the pitch for Haiti. Other Inquirer writers have contributed with in-depth features about everything from the role the late Tug McGraw’s widow played in bringing soccer to Philadelphia, to the storied history of the cinder (ouch!) pitch in Fishtown that brought Philly “attytood” to the sport’s slow rise here. That’s not to mention the comprehensive guide we published earlier this year. You won’t be able to read all this without a subscription, so now is the time to finally sign up. And let the games begin.
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