We Can Hear You in There

Iran burns, the economy slows, ICE hunts travelers, Russia crosses into Poland, and Trump reaches for a bucket of paint.

The home front is happy again. My husband is feeling better, the children have survived the family plague, and I have finally emerged from my cocoon, slightly rumpled but prepared to rejoin society with the cautious optimism of a moth who has recently learned about porch lights.

My oldest had a friend sleep over last night, which meant I told them to go to sleep approximately one hundred times while they conducted a whispering operation in the living room at a volume normally reserved for leaf blowers. Every time I walked out there, they were suddenly “asleep,” lying perfectly still beneath their blankets with the rigid commitment of two children who had apparently died of innocence moments before my arrival.

Unfortunately for them, I have been training for this moment for ten years. I went into the living room to get water, and on my way back to the bedroom I didn’t actually go back in. Instead, I opened and closed the door so they would think I had. The second the latch clicked, they resumed talking, and at this moment I emerged from the hallway and caught them in the act.

It was a strangely proud moment. My son is growing up, and I have finally reached the stage of motherhood where I can teach some of life’s most valuable lessons, including that your stepmother was once a child too, she knows every trick you are attempting, and she has been waiting nearly your entire life to use them against you.

It’s a new day, endless possibilities await, and somewhere in Washington, a collection of grown men is using exactly the same strategy as two ten-year-olds at a sleepover. They make an extraordinary amount of noise, insist nothing is happening, and lie very still whenever the country opens the door.

The United States and Iran are trading missile barrages again after the United States launched another heavy wave of strikes against Iranian targets. Iranian missiles have reached neighboring Jordan and Kuwait, where one struck a Chinese facility and killed a person. Jordan intercepted five missiles for the second consecutive day, while attacks connected to the expanding conflict have threatened ports, ships, oil infrastructure and American military positions across the region. This is the war Trump suggested would be quick, decisive and glorious, because history has repeatedly demonstrated that the Middle East is famous for simple conflicts with tidy endings.

Most Americans are no longer pretending to believe him. A new AP-NORC poll found that roughly two-thirds of adults believe the war hasn’t been worth fighting. Trump’s approval on Iran has fallen to 28 percent, and even among Republicans, support is beginning to erode. The administration may continue describing every new attack as progress, but when the missiles are crossing borders faster than the diplomatic proposals, the problem isn’t that the public has failed to appreciate the strategy. It’s more that the strategy appears to be prolonged warfare with occasional announcements that prolonged warfare is nearly over.

The economy is also refusing to participate in the administration’s performance. Real gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent during the second quarter, down from 2.1 percent in the first. Consumer spending increased, but investment and exports slowed, government spending declined and imports rose.

At the same time, the price index for domestic purchases increased at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent, while the personal consumption expenditures price index rose 5.1 percent. That doesn’t mean prices increased by 5.1 percent in three months, but it does mean inflation accelerated sharply during the quarter while economic growth weakened.

This isn’t the roaring economic miracle Trump promised. It more closely resembles an economy walking even more slowly while its grocery bags become even more expensive, which the administration will presumably solve by giving it a better hat and insisting everyone has confused exhaustion with tremendous success.

Todd Blanche, meanwhile, has encountered the rarest obstacle in Washington: Republicans asking for something in writing. The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis withheld their support. They want written assurances that the proposed $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is truly dead and that the settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS doesn’t grant the president and his family open-ended protection from future tax audits.

Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, helped sign a settlement protecting Trump while serving at the Justice Department and is now attempting to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. The ethical circle is so perfectly closed that it may soon qualify as infrastructure.

The Justice Department says the fund has been abandoned, but Cornyn and Tillis would apparently like confirmation stronger than the traditional Trump administration guarantee of someone saying a thing until everyone stops asking. Blanche’s nomination remains stalled while negotiations continue, proving that even inside this Republican Party, there are still arrangements so nakedly self-serving that somebody occasionally asks whether they could please be slightly less naked.

At American airports, the machinery of immigration enforcement is becoming more aggressive and less discriminating. CBS News reports that the Transportation Security Administration has expanded its information-sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, providing leads about noncitizen travelers suspected of civil immigration violations, including people without criminal records and some with pending immigration applications or work permits.

An ICE source described airports as “easy targets” because agents know where travelers will be and can arrest them in secured locations. The source also connected the strategy to the White House demand that ICE produce 2,000 arrests per day.

Once a government begins measuring human beings against a daily quota, justice becomes a production line. The question is no longer whether someone poses a threat, has committed a crime or deserves individual consideration under the law, it’s whether the agency has met its number before closing time.

Airports were already places where Americans removed their shoes, surrendered their shampoo and accepted being scanned in exchange for the promise of public safety. Now TSA information is helping ICE locate travelers for civil immigration enforcement, turning domestic travel into another opportunity for the administration to hunt people whose paperwork is complicated enough to make them vulnerable.

The most dangerous story today, however, unfolded over Ukraine and crossed into Poland.

Russia launched more than 70 missiles and approximately 280 drones in a massive overnight assault across Ukraine, killing at least nine people, including children, and injuring more than 50. Homes and infrastructure were struck across several regions while Ukraine attempted to intercept hundreds of incoming weapons with an air-defense system already strained by years of war and shortages of Western antimissile equipment.

During the attack, a suspected Russian Kh-101 cruise missile entered the airspace of Poland, a NATO member, and came down near Tarnawa-Kolonia. NATO jets were scrambled, and although no one in Poland was killed, the missile left considerably more than a crater.

A Russian missile entering NATO territory doesn’t automatically trigger Article 5 or place every NATO country at war. The alliance must determine whether an incident constitutes an armed attack, and the affected country must request or consent to collective action. Those distinctions matter because the alternative is allowing every malfunction, navigation error or provocation to begin a continental war by reflex. They’re also precisely why this incident is so dangerous.

The security of Europe now depends on governments correctly determining why a Russian cruise missile crossed the border, whether it was deliberate, what Russia believed would happen, and how many future incursions can be classified as accidents before the classification itself becomes an invitation. NATO exists partly to make attacking one member too costly to contemplate, but deterrence weakens whenever an adversary can breach alliance territory and leave everyone debating whether the hole in the ground was sufficiently intentional.

Meanwhile, Trump has committed American military resources to an expanding war with Iran while Ukraine warns that it urgently needs more Patriot systems and interceptor missiles. The United States is now helping manage two escalating wars, one that Trump chose to enter and another that Russia may be nudging closer to NATO territory. This is a global security system being forced to juggle live explosives while the president pats himself on the back for keeping everyone guessing.

Fortunately, Trump has also found time to address the other great emergency facing the republic: the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is gray. Preservationists are seeking an emergency injunction to stop the administration from testing white paint on the historic granite building, which was completed in 1888 and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Experts warn that the proposed mineral silicate coating could permanently damage the stone, but Trump believes the building is ugly and would look better painted white.

This is the governing philosophy in its purest form. If something old, complicated or valuable fails to flatter him immediately, he would like to cover it, rename it or break it while explaining that nobody has ever respected history more.

The war is spreading, prices are rising, ICE is turning airports into hunting grounds, and a Russian missile has crossed into NATO territory. Yet the president remains focused on giving a nineteenth-century granite landmark the landlord special.

He can close the door and pretend nothing is happening, but the rest of us are standing in the hallway. We can hear him in there.

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