Donald Trump has apparently decided that when the Supreme Court tells him he can’t rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment by executive order, what it really means is that he should go home, make a few edits and submit the assignment again. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman declined to immediately block Trump’s newest attempt to limit birthright citizenship, but the ruling is considerably less victorious for the administration than the headline might suggest. Boardman said the plaintiffs asking her to stop the order had a fairly basic procedural problem: their existing lawsuit challenged Trump’s original birthright citizenship order, not the new one he signed on August 6. She is allowing them to update their complaint and has put the challenge on an expedited track.
Boardman wasn’t particularly subtle about what she thinks of the new order, calling Trump’s attempt to carve exceptions out of birthright citizenship “unprecedented.” The Supreme Court already rejected his broader effort on June 30, finding that it violated the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The replacement order now targets several narrower categories, including children whose parents are classified as “alien enemies,” work for foreign governments, or are accused of certain kinds of citizenship fraud.
So this isn’t a federal judge announcing that the president has discovered a constitutional loophole. This is a federal judge saying, essentially, you have brought me paperwork for the previous constitutional crisis and will need to update the paperwork before I can rule on the current constitutional crisis.
At our house, meanwhile, the rules are considerably more specific. Last night, we broke out the glue, modeling clay, food coloring, borax and balloons and made our own stress balls with Ember. She is obsessed with slime, squishies and anything that can be squeezed, stretched or made to gush unpleasantly between your fingers. She saw a video, we bought the ingredients, and then we spent the evening having some family fun with science and sticky gooey things. Sometimes slowing down looks like making strange objects with your children.
Ezra participated from a safe distance inside his “play pack,” as his sister calls it, because he’s eleven months old and therefore believes every scientific experiment should conclude with him putting the findings directly into his mouth. Eventually he decided it was time to conduct a different experiment involving whether he could simply refuse sleep through force of personality. He was obviously exhausted, but he didn’t want to go to bed, he wanted to be held and snuggled, and naturally I obliged because there are very few defenses against a sleepy baby asking to curl into your chest.
Eventually I was sweaty, he was sweaty, and it became clear that neither of us was accomplishing anything except prolonging the inevitable. That’s when Dad comes in. My husband has a patience at bedtime that I simply don’t possess. He picks Ezra up, settles him against his chest and starts humming the Misty Mountains song, and this tiny furious person who moments earlier had dedicated himself to overthrowing the institution of sleep just melts away. His dad is his calm, and I must admit, while I didn’t grow up picturing I would marry a man who would hum our babies to sleep with the soundtrack from the hobbit, it has become my calm as well.
Each of our children has developed an entirely different relationship with bedtime. Ezra generally requires calming music or his dad humming and then he falls asleep without much protest. Our oldest appears to regard sleep as an unfortunate government mandate imposed upon him against his will, but he also requires absolute silence because if he hears even the smallest sound his brain will grab onto it and apparently spend the next forty-five minutes conducting an investigation.
Our daughter has constructed a far more elaborate system. She must be tucked in correctly, her water must be on the left, her bunny must be on the right, her slippers must be positioned at the edge of the bed, the night lights must provide sufficient illumination without shining directly into her eyes, and she must receive a bedtime snack, preferably something healthy. I realize this sounds like a lot, but there is no need to worry about remembering all the requirements because if you neglect even one of them, she will notify you posthaste.
I am perfectly willing to ensure she has her cozy bedtime arranged exactly the way she likes it, but the entire production is mostly ceremonial because without fail, about fifteen minutes after I tuck her in, she gathers her necessities, marches into my bedroom, selects a book and climbs into my bed for story time and sleep. I would happily let her do this forever if human skeletons were designed differently, but my husband has had two back surgeries, I have tendonitis, she is getting bigger, and every morning we wake up compressed into whatever pieces of mattress she has decided to leave available for the adults financing the operation.
So, we are working on getting her to stay in her own bed, and I am working on feeling okay about walking her back to it. There’s always a small piece of me that thinks there will someday be a last night when she asks to crawl into my bed and I won’t know it was the last time until years later. We’ll get there, though, and she’ll know how much I love her.
Last night my husband and I also got to spend some time together, first with our daughter and then just the two of us, which was wonderful because sometimes it’s nice to simply exist beside the person you love without needing to solve anything. We’re constantly battling chaos and occasionally, somewhere in the middle of renovations, doctors, children, money, work and whatever piece of the house has decided it requires immediate intervention, we forget that we’re fighting for the same team. We always come back.
He is, after all, my woodland hero, the architect of my imagination and my safe passage home. I wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world. We may not always see eye to eye and we may misunderstand each other spectacularly from time to time, but there’s nothing that could break the bond we have built.
Then there are renovations, doctors and all the usual crap people have to deal with every day. It costs me around $80 to fill a thirteen-gallon gas tank. My oil change is suddenly $125. A pair of children’s shoes can cost $50 somehow, and at this point I am seriously considering learning to make footwear myself, with the primary obstacle being the bullying my children would likely endure after arriving at school wearing Mom’s First Attempt at a Sneaker.
We’re all doing some version of this math, trying to determine which things can last a little longer, which expense can wait another month and whether perhaps an oil filter can be encouraged through positive reinforcement to exceed its expected lifespan. Which brings us naturally, back to the federal government, where Donald Trump is still waging war against mail voting because apparently six years hasn’t been enough time for everyone to move on from the 2020 election.
A federal judge has again temporarily blocked the administration’s new Postal Service rules for mail ballots, just days after the Supreme Court removed an earlier injunction on procedural grounds. The Postal Service finalized the rules afterward, which allowed the states and voting-rights groups challenging them to return to court with an actual policy rather than a hypothetical one.
Judge Indira Talwani issued a fourteen-day temporary restraining order Thursday, finding that states do not have the time or money to suddenly rebuild their mail-ballot systems with the first ballots scheduled to begin going out next week. Under the administration’s plan, states would be required to provide lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service and comply with standardized ballot-envelope requirements before USPS would handle their ballots.
The Supreme Court has still not ruled that any of this is constitutional. Its earlier decision was procedural, concluding that Talwani acted before the Postal Service issued its final regulations. Now the regulations exist, the lawsuit is back, and on Friday the Trump administration announced that it is immediately appealing Talwani’s new order. There’ll be another hearing September 3, assuming the appellate courts don’t rearrange the furniture again before then.
There’s something almost comforting about knowing that while election officials are scrambling to figure out how Americans will cast ballots in November, the president has also found time to address another pressing national emergency. Lake Ontario has the wrong name. Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the federal government to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” a decision produced during his escalating trade fight with Canada and apparently made because changing the names of extremely large bodies of water has become part of the presidential workload.
For clarity, Trump can’t actually rename the entire lake for everyone who shares it. His order governs American federal usage. Canada doesn’t have to call it Lake America, international organizations don’t have to call it Lake America, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has already announced that New York will not be calling it Lake America either.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that the lake’s name predates both modern countries and said Canadians would continue calling it Lake Ontario “then, now and always.” Trump, undeterred by the possibility that geography may have boundaries even executive power can’t conquer, then suggested that perhaps he should rename an ocean next.
“We have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean,” he said.
This is all occurring while trade talks with Canada have collapsed and both countries are imposing tariffs on one another, because apparently the diplomatic strategy has progressed from negotiating trade terms to writing our preferred name on Canada’s half of the lake with a Sharpie.
Unfortunately, the things that actually determine whether American families can afford to exist have proven somewhat harder to rename. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh delivered his first major Jackson Hole speech Friday and gave financial markets the clearest indication yet that the Fed may have to raise interest rates again if inflation does not continue moving toward its 2 percent target. That isn’t what Trump has spent the last several years demanding from the Federal Reserve.
Warsh said recent inflation reports have improved somewhat, but not enough to convince him that the underlying problem has meaningfully changed. Markets heard the message immediately. The probability of a September interest-rate increase jumped from about 35 percent before Warsh spoke to roughly 60 percent afterward, while the yield on the two-year Treasury rose to its highest level in a month.
Warsh didn’t promise a hike, and there’s still significant disagreement about whether the Fed will actually move in September, but the direction of the warning was unmistakable: inflation remains too high, the economy remains relatively strong, and the Fed is prepared to tighten monetary policy if the numbers don’t improve. Which is a rather inconvenient development for a president who appointed Warsh while demanding cheaper borrowing and lower rates.
It’s also the sort of economic conversation that can feel comically abstract when you’re standing beside a gas pump watching eighty dollars disappear into a thirteen-gallon tank. Economists can debate the PCE index, Treasury curves and whether financial conditions are adequately restrictive, while normal people are standing in a shoe aisle wondering when children’s feet became a luxury market. Both realities matter, but only one of them gets handed to you on a piece of carbon paper.
Then there is Iran. Today marks exactly six months since the United States and Israel began the war Trump repeatedly described as a short “little excursion” that would last only a matter of weeks. It’s still going. The United States has now spent more than $37.5 billion on the conflict, American stockpiles of key weapons have been depleted enough to raise concerns about military readiness elsewhere, and the administration has increasingly shifted from military strikes toward economic warfare as it searches for some path toward the victory it has repeatedly declared but hasn’t quite managed to finish.
This week Trump shared an AI-generated “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026” image, because apparently the historical lesson from George W. Bush standing beneath a Mission Accomplished banner during the early months of the Iraq War was that somebody should eventually try it again with artificial intelligence.
There has been one important improvement in the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM says international shipping lanes have now been cleared of Iranian sea mines, although that claim hasn’t been independently verified and vessels still face threats from drones, missiles and boats. The International Maritime Organization says at least nineteen seafarers have been killed in attacks on international shipping since the war began, with at least seventy attacks verified in the Persian Gulf.
The administration has also begun putting real machinery behind its newly announced “Operation Economic Outcast.” On Friday, the Treasury Department proposed cutting the UAE branches of Egypt’s Banque Misr off from U.S. correspondent banking, alleging those branches processed approximately $1.8 billion in transactions for 103 companies potentially linked to Iranian shadow-banking networks between January 2024 and June 2026. Egypt’s central bank is already communicating with Washington and emphasized that the proposed restriction applies specifically to Banque Misr’s UAE branches and their dollar transactions.
Six months after the bombs began, the mission has therefore evolved from a short war that would quickly transform Iran into a combination of military pressure, maritime insecurity, sanctions, depleted weapons stockpiles and negotiations Trump now says he is “not in a hurry” to pursue. There’s a kind of arrogance in believing that control and care are the same thing.
At home, control is mostly an illusion. Children grow, houses break, bodies hurt, prices climb and babies occasionally decide sleep is an unacceptable infringement upon their liberty. You can establish routines and make plans, but eventually you learn that caring for people requires adjustment, patience and the humility to recognize when what you’re doing isn’t working. Sometimes you change the routine, sometimes you carry your daughter back to her own bed even though part of you wants to let her stay, and sometimes Dad takes the baby because Mom has reached the limits of her patience, hums a song and accomplishes in three minutes what she has been attempting for half an hour. You don’t win a family, you care for one.
Countries are harder, but I suspect the principle is not entirely different. Renaming the lake doesn’t resolve the trade war. Declaring the mission accomplished doesn’t end the war. Rewriting an executive order doesn’t erase the Constitution, and changing the rules for ballots does not make losing an election six years ago disappear. Eventually reality remains what it is, regardless of what someone in Washington has decided to call it.
And somewhere tonight, while powerful men continue trying to force the world into precisely the arrangement they prefer, we will probably be putting the water on the left, the bunny on the right, the slippers at the edge of the bed and the night light at exactly the correct angle. Because apparently civilization survives through somebody remembering the details.
Sources: Reuters reporting on the August 28 birthright citizenship hearing, the August 27 Lake Ontario executive order, Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks and the resulting market reaction, and the Treasury Department’s action involving Banque Misr. Associated Press reporting on the mail ballot litigation, the six-month anniversary of the Iran war and developments in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Treasury Department materials on the alleged Iranian shadow-banking transactions involving Banque Misr’s UAE branches.
I love your descriptions of daily, family life and how you relate them so brilliantly (and beautifully written) to the state of our country. I have to admit this piece depressed me; not for the $80 gas, which really is depressing, but because you said it takes someone with "humility" to change direction. There is not one atom of humility in this administration and, unfortunately, humility scores evenly with the amount of competence and empathy.
Any parent can relate, with warmth and a chuckle, to your daily experiences. Juxtaposing them with the world’s madness helps make sense of the larger picture. Thank you!
Somehow I found myself thinking of my daughter at about seven, when we were visiting a friend in Prague. On a city bus, an older man moved close to her and began singing with creepy intimacy, sending my alarm bells ringing. Meanwhile, I realized later, his associate unzipped my purse and took everything from an inside pocket before we hastily exited.
Deception, diversion, manipulation, theft - the world’s masters you describe feel and act like that man on the bus. More Americans are waking up to the ruse, hopefully.