Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump dubbed former ally Elon Musk a “TRAIN WRECK” in a fiery Truth Social post, trashing the Tesla CEO after he announced that he was launching his own political party.

“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,” Trump wrote yesterday. “He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”

Musk on Saturday had announced the formation of the America Party, a new political party he’s starting to purportedly combat “waste & graft.”

Musk’s announcement marked the latest salvo in a deepening feud with Trump after they fell out over the President’s recently passed tax bill, which the tech billionaire previously described as a “disgusting abomination.”

While the two had appeared to reach a brief détente of sorts, escalating social media posts over the past week suggested that the animosity between the two was still very much alive.

Trump also referenced Republicans’ sunset of federal tax credits for electric vehicles, a move that could negatively affect Musk’s business. And he noted that he rejected “one of [Musk’s] close friends” for the role of NASA administrator, because he was a “blue blooded Democrat” and posed a conflict of interest.

Musk, meanwhile, has threatened to back primary challenges for Republican lawmakers who supported the tax bill, which he’s repeatedly slammed for bloating the national debt.

Trump wrote that “The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS.”

Trump would know since he proves over and over again that he is the “king” of disruption and chaos.”

Tony

A view inside of a cabin at Camp Mystic, which was essentially washed away after the flash flooding in central Texas on Saturday.  Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Officials in Texas’ Hill Country said yesterday that the death toll from this weekend’s raging flash floods has risen to more than 80 people, as families and search teams continue to look for loved ones still missing in the region.

The new death toll includes 28 children from hardest-hit Kerr County, according to Sheriff Larry Leitha. With additional fatalities reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall and Tom Green counties, the overall number of those killed in central Texas is at least 82.

“We are seeing bodies recovered all over, up and down,” Kerrville city manager Dalton Rice told reporters, with officials warning the casualties will continue to climb. Of those deceased, 18 adults and 10 children are still pending identification.

Officials have so far found many of the dead at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp near the Guadalupe River that was essentially swept away after torrential rains overnight Friday resulted in fast-moving waters rising 26 feet. Photos and video showed a cabin of girls holding on to a rope amid powerful floodwaters, as well as the camp’s absolute devastation the next day.

As of Sunday afternoon, the sheriff said that 10 campers and one camp counselor remain missing. Search teams and families have both been seen sifting through the riverbanks and the camp’s destruction for survivors.

“We will continue our search efforts until everybody is found,” Leitha said, adding that 400 first responders from 20 agencies at the local, state and national levels are working to find missing people.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said that authorities have rescued about 850 people over the last 36 hours, including some clinging to trees. The governor confirmed that 41 people are still missing, though it’s unclear if that includes those from Camp Mystic.

“It was nothing short of horrific to see what those young children went through,” Abbott said regarding his tour of the campgrounds.

Some Texas officials are facing scrutiny for the lack of preparedness, despite the National Weather Service (NWS)  sending out several flash flood warnings overnight on Thursday that told people to “move immediately to higher ground” before issuing the rare flash flood emergencies. Former officials at the NWS told The New York Times that key emergency response roles were vacant, and like FEMA, the Trump administration’s major staffing cuts forced remaining employees to spend less time coordinating with local authorities on disaster preparedness.

“You have to have a response mechanism that involves local officials,” former NWS director Louis Uccellini told the Times on Saturday. “It involves a relationship with the emergency management community, at every level.”

Kerr County also does not appear to have a local flood warning system, likely contributing to the summer camps along the river not being ordered to evacuate in time. Despite the area being long vulnerable to flooding, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said that residents felt a warning system was too expensive to implement.

“What I do know is the flood hit the camp first, and it came in the middle of the night. I don’t know where the kids were,” he said, according to NBC. “I don’t know what kind of alarm systems they had. That will come out in time.”

What a tragedy!

Tony

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty; Maxar Technologies / Getty.

Dear Commons Community,

Phillips Payson O’Brien has an opinion essay today in The Atlantic entitled “What Trump—And the U.S.—Can’t Understand About Air Strikes”.  He provides kernels of good advice to the Trumps of the world who think they can change things by showing their military might.  Here is the entire essay.

“When Donald Trump ordered air strikes on key Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites last month and immediately declared that the targets had been “completely and totally obliterated,” he was counting on a single display of overwhelming air power to accomplish a major strategic goal. Though initially hesitant to join Israel’s 10-day-old bombing campaign against Iran, the president came to believe that the United States could finish off Tehran’s nuclear ambitions all at once. After what he called a “very successful attack,” Trump demanded that Israel and Iran stop fighting, declaring, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

In reality, the U.S. attack may have only delayed the Iranian program by months. Trump ended up short-circuiting both his own efforts at diplomacy with Iran and an extraordinary Israeli campaign that required years of elaborate preparation, rendered Iran’s air-defense network inoperable, and allowed Israeli forces to methodically work through a long list of target sites across the country over the course of a week and a half. Destroying a military target from the air usually requires multiple raids on the site—not one night and a victory declaration on Truth Social. Israeli military planners had clearly hoped to enlist American help in attacking Iran but may not have anticipated that it would be for one night only.

To some extent, Trump’s approach is typical of American leaders, who have routinely underestimated the true complexities of military tasks and assumed that a burst of overwhelming force will secure U.S. objectives and allow Washington to impose its version of peace. Recent events—not just in the Middle East but also in Ukraine—suggest that smaller countries with fewer resources than the United States have a far more urgent understanding specifically of how to use air power and generally of how to defeat their enemies.

An unbounded faith in American military might, combined with a desire not to get bogged down in long foreign engagements, has led to excesses of optimism in the past: the constant escalation cycle in Vietnam, when it was said that more force would bring victory; the infamous mission accomplished banners after U.S. forces deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. In conflicts since the end of World War II, the U.S. military has prevailed in individual battles, but it has won only one clear victory in a war: Operation Desert Storm in 1991. This conundrum has led to far less introspection than it deserves.

One of the reasons might be that U.S. military power has been so extensive that the military, and policy makers, have not had to think too deeply about the process of winning wars. For 80 years, the U.S. military could be deployed to occupy territory, blow up structures, or destroy an enemy force—and was able to do it. It could inflict a frightening toll on its enemies at remarkably little cost to itself.

The risk of overestimating American capabilities may be greatest in decisions about applying air power. The U.S. has the most awesome air force the world has ever seen. (Not coincidentally, the successful Desert Storm campaign involved purposeful and relentless air attacks on enemy targets.) Such power has immense costs, however, one of which is the destructive luxury of not having to think deeply about just what it means to win a war. American policy makers feel able to lecture smaller powers about what they should and should not do. Trump pushed Israel—which had, remarkably, achieved the ability to move freely in Iranian airspace—to stand down before the U.S. could reliably ascertain whether its own air strikes had been effective.

Since 2022, bad instructions from the United States have been devastating to Ukraine’s effort to fight off Russian invaders. Under the Biden administration, the United States feared escalation with Russian President Vladimir Putin and kept Ukrainians from using Western-made long-range weaponry to strike legitimate military targets inside Russia. In effect, the American veto created a large safe space in Russia, and gave the Russians the flexibility to plan and execute a hugely destructive strategic air campaign against Ukraine. Until Ukraine began developing its own systems, it was nearly powerless to stop the Russians from unleashing drones and missiles on Ukrainian military and civilian targets. Instead, the Ukrainians were forced to concentrate their resources on a bloody land war fought in trenches and by drones; despite large casualties on both sides, the fighting has produced only tiny changes in territorial control.

Ukraine has done its best to change this dynamic, by working to expand its own long-range capabilities and using those weapons against targets in Russia. The tragedy for Ukrainians is that the Biden administration stood in their way for three years—and was succeeded by a Trump administration that, perhaps because of a broad sympathy with Putin, seems intent on letting Russia win.

For all its advanced weaponry, the United States would benefit from listening to smaller, more inventive militaries that are fighting larger adversaries in a rapidly evolving technological environment. Ukraine, for example, has developed enormous expertise in designing and deploying unmanned aerial vehicles, which—as the recent attacks on Russian airfields thousands of miles away from the Ukrainian border showed—create new vulnerabilities at traditional military facilities.

Unfortunately, nothing about recent U.S. actions suggests that the country’s leaders have any intention to learn from others. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon seems obsessed with “lethality”—the idea that the United States wins wars by bringing greater lethal force to every direct engagement with the enemy. But although that focus might sound macho and hyper-militaristic to him and Trump, it may be the precursor to more events like Trump’s Iran strikes: showy tactical attacks that fail to accomplish any strategic goals of substance.”

So true!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Elon Musk announced in a post on X  that “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” His decision to create a new political party stems from his dispute with  Republican Donald Trump saying Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill would bankrupt America.”

A day after asking his followers on his X whether a new U.S. political party should be created, Musk declared in the  post that “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!””  As reported by Reuters.

The announcement from Musk comes after Trump signed his self-styled “big, beautiful” tax-cut and spending bill into law on Friday, which Musk fiercely opposed.

Musk, who became the word’s richest man thanks to his Tesla car company and his SpaceX satellite firm, spent hundreds of millions on Trump’s re-election and led the Department of Government Efficiency from the start of the president’s second term aimed at slashing government spending.

The first sign of investor dissatisfaction with Musk’s announcement followed later in the day. Investment firm Azoria Partners will postpone the listing of a Tesla exchange-traded fund, Azoria CEO James Fishback said in a post on X.

Fishback is asking Tesla’s board to clarify Musk’s political ambitions and said the new party undermines the confidence shareholders had that he would be focusing more on the company after leaving government service in May.

Musk said previously that he would start a new political party and spend money to unseat lawmakers who supported the bill.

Trump earlier this week threatened to cut off the billions of dollars in subsidies that Musk’s companies receive from the federal government.

Republicans have expressed concern that Musk’s on-again, off-again feud with Trump could hurt their chances to protect their majority in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

Asked on X what was the one thing that made him go from loving Trump to attacking him, Musk said: “Increasing the deficit from an already insane $2T under Biden to $2.5T. This will bankrupt the country.”

There was no immediate comment from Trump or the White House on Musk’s announcement.

The feud with Trump, often described as one between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful, has led to several precipitous falls in Tesla’s share price.

The stock soared after Trump’s November reelection and hit a high of more than $488 in December, before losing more than half of its value in April and closing last week out at $315.35.

Despite Musk’s deep pockets, breaking the Republican-Democratic duopoly will be a tall order, given that it has dominated American political life for more than 160 years, while Trump’s approval ratings in polls in his second term have generally held firm above 40%, despite often divisive policies.

It will be a tall order indeed but politically the country might need this shakeup to the two-party system.

Tony

Dear Commons Community

Barack Obama had a simple elegant message for America as we celebrated July 4th. 

“Independence Day is a reminder that America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ America is owned by no one. It belongs to all citizens. And at this moment in history—when core democratic principles seem to be continuously under attack, when too many people around the world have become cynical and disengaged—now is precisely the time to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can build our democracies and make them work in meaningful and practical ways for ordinary people.”

Amen!

Tony

Jessica Tarlov

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News host Jessica Tarlov said the “big, beautiful bill” might be anything but beautiful for moderate Republicans during next year’s midterm elections who were jubilant  as they marked the passage of Trump’s  signature “big, beautiful bill.”

She warned said that some of them might not be celebrating next year and could face unexpectedly early retirement.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Polls show the bill ― which adds trillions to the debt, cuts taxes for the wealthy, and slashes Medicaid ― is deeply unpopular with the American public.

With midterm elections looming in 2026, Tarlov ― a rotating co-host of “The Five” ― wrote on X that moderate Republicans in particular will be at risk next year:

The bill is so unpopular that CNN data chief Harry Enten earlier this week showed it was underwater in five recent polls by between 19 and 29 percentage points.

“The American public at this particular point hate, hate, hate the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” he said. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s not a ‘big, beautiful bill,’ it’s a big, bad bill.”

Democrats also believe that Republicans who support the bill will pay the price at the polls next year.

“There are House Republicans now, this morning, who are about to sign their political obituary with this vote,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) told Reuters before the final votes were cast. “They are literally walking the plank for Donald Trump.”

The party that wins the White House often suffers in the midterm elections that follow. Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews expects that to be the case next year, as well, and said the passage of the bill won’t make things any easier for Republicans.

He estimated that Democrats could pick up between 15 and 20 seats ― more than enough to win control of the House.

While I appreciate the optimism of Tarlov and others, the Democrats have to get their act together.  Right now they are suffering from a serious leadership gap.

Tony

Housing Affordability on the Rise. Courtesy of Seeking Alpha.

Dear Commons Community,

The Atlantic has a featured article this morning reviewing the cost of housing in  the country.  Here is an excerpt.

“Something is happening in the housing market that really shouldn’t be. Everyone familiar with America’s affordability crisis knows that it is most acute in ultra-progressive coastal cities in heavily Democratic states. And yet, home prices have been rising most sharply in the exact places that have long served as a refuge for Americans fed up with the spiraling cost of living. Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).

This trend could prove disastrous. For much of the past half century, suburban sprawl across the Sun Belt was a kind of pressure-release valve for the housing market. People who couldn’t afford to live in expensive cities had other, cheaper places to go. Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans.

The trend also presents a mystery. According to expert consensus, anti-growth liberals have imposed excessive regulations that made building enough homes impossible. The housing crisis has thus become synonymous with feckless blue-state governance. So how can prices now be rising so fast in red and purple states known for their loose regulations?

A tempting explanation is that the expert consensus is wrong. Perhaps regulations and NIMBYism were never really the problem, and the current push to reform zoning laws and building codes is misguided. But the real answer is that San Francisco and New York weren’t unique—they were just early. Eventually, no matter where you are, the forces of NIMBYism catch up to you.

The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. The fact that millions of people were being priced out of the locations with the best jobs and highest wages—so-called superstar cities—wasn’t ideal. But the Sun Belt building boom kept the coastal housing shortage from becoming a full-blown national crisis.

No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities.

In a properly functioning housing market, the post-COVID surge in demand should have generated a massive building boom that would have cooled price growth. Instead, more than five years after the pandemic began, these places still aren’t building enough homes, and prices are still rising wildly.

As the issue of housing has become more salient in Democratic Party politics, some commentators have pointed to rising costs in the supposedly laissez-faire Sun Belt as proof that zoning laws and other regulations are not the culprit. “Blaming zoning for housing costs seems especially blinkered because different jurisdictions in the United States have very different approaches to land use regulations, and yet the housing crisis is a nationwide phenomenon,” the Vanderbilt University law professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Christopher Serkin write in a recent paper. Some argue that the wave of consolidation within the home-building industry following the 2008 financial crisis gave large developers the power to slow-walk development and keep prices high. Others say that the cost of construction has climbed so high over the past two decades that building no longer makes financial sense for developers.”

The article concludes:

“The forces opposed to new development are just as vehemently opposed to the kind of reforms needed to avert a future crisis. Many local and state governments across the Sun Belt have tried and failed to implement lasting pro-housing reforms. But the recent spike in home prices across the region has put even more pressure on lawmakers to act. The Texas legislature recently passed several pieces of legislation that will, among other things, reduce the minimum lot size of new homes, limit the power of the “tyrant’s veto,” and allow multifamily housing to be built on land currently zoned for offices and retail. Red states like to portray themselves as free from the pathologies that have made housing such a problem in other parts of the country. Now they have an opportunity to prove it.”

Interesting info.  The entire article is worth a read.

Tony

Dan Rather

Dear Commons Community,

Legendary former CBS News anchor Dan Rather expressed disappointment yesterday at Paramount Global’s decision to pay $16 million to the Trump administration and settle its lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” report.

“It’s a sad day for journalism,” Rather told Variety. “It’s a sad day for ’60 Minutes’ and CBS News. I hope people will read the details of this and understand what it was. It was distortion by Trump and a kneeling down and saying, ‘yes, sir,’ by billionaire corporate owners.”

Most legal scholars agreed the suit — in which Trump accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris — was frivolous and wouldn’t hold up under the First Amendment.

“What really gets me about this is that Paramount didn’t have to settle,” Rather said. “You settle a lawsuit when you’ve done something wrong. ’60 Minutes’ did nothing wrong. It followed accepted journalistic practices. Lawyers almost unanimously said the case wouldn’t stand up in court.”

Rather expressed a full backing of his former colleagues at CBS News and “60 Minutes”: “My support for them is total, absolute,” he said. “I do really think they fought a good fight on this, and they’ll continue to fight. The people on ’60 Minutes’ and at CBS News didn’t just take it lying down. They did their best to stop it.”

Nonetheless, he said he wasn’t shocked by Paramount Global’s settlement. The decision to strike a deal was widely seen as a critical step to receiving approval from the Trump-controlled FCC for Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of the media conglom.

“I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Big billionaire business people make decisions about money. We could always hope that they will make an exception when it comes to freedom of the press, but it wasn’t to be.

“Trump knew if he put the pressure on and threatened and just held that they would fold, because there’s too much money on the table,” he added. “Trump is now forcing a whole news organization to pay millions of dollars for doing something protected by the Constitution — which is, of course, free and independent reporting. Now, you take today’s sell-out. And that’s what it was: It was a sell-out to extortion by the President. Who can now say where all this ends?”

Rather then pointed to the larger issue of what this means for the United States as a democracy. “It has to do with not just journalism, but more importantly, with the country as a whole,” he said. “What kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of country we’re going to be. If major news organizations continue to kneel before power and stop trying to hold the powerful accountable, then we all lose.

“And then big time law firms have been settling right and left, kneeling the same way,” he said. “Big universities doing the same. Trump is extorting what he wants out of them. Now he’s extorting what he wants out of news organizations. So when I say, ‘Where does this go?’ What are the effects on journalism as a whole?”

Asked what advice he might give the folks at CBS News and “60 Minutes,” Rather humbly said it’s not his place — but that they already know “in their hearts, in their very being, the best things to do. I will say that, I do expect them to fully double down now on whatever great reporting they’re allowed to do.”

In his more than 60 years as a journalist, Rather said he’s never seen the profession face the kind of challenges it’s now up against. “Journalism has had its trials and tribulations before, and it takes courage to just soldier on,” he said. “Keep trying, keep fighting. It takes guts to do that. And I know the people at CBS News, and particularly those at ’60 Minutes,’ they’ll do their dead level best under these circumstances. But the question is what this development and the message it sends to us. And that’s what I’m trying to concentrate on.”

Shame on CBS and “60 Minutes”!

Tony

Zohran Mamdani

Dear Commons Community,

I was alerted to this story by my colleague, David Bloomfield.

Zohran Mamdani has not sketched out a plan to manage the nation’s largest school system yet. But the Queens assemblyman, who won a decisive victory for the Democratic mayoral nomination, has one big idea: giving himself less power.

Since 2002, the state has granted the mayor of New York City almost complete authority over the public school system. The mayor unilaterally selects the schools chancellor and appoints the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy, a board that votes on school closures, contracts, and other major changes to Education Department regulations.

Most mayoral candidates this year said they support mayoral control, though some suggested tweaks. Every mayor has lobbied state lawmakers in Albany for extensions to mayoral control since it was enacted more than two decades ago. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic socialist, has vowed to be an exception to that rule.  As reported by Chalkbeat/New York.

“Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together,” his campaign website states. In its place, he calls for a “co-governance” model that empowers existing organizations, such as elected parent councils and local school teams that include administrators, teachers, and caregivers.

Mamdani’s plan would represent a fundamental shift in school governance at a time when the system faces many pressing issues, including elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, declining enrollment, and persistent gaps in student achievement.

“That’s a signal that he’s thinking about this in a very different way than the typical mayoral hopeful,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers College. “Not too many politicians have been in the business of giving power away.”

Mamdani could also be forced to confront local decisions he may disagree with; Manhattan’s District 2, for instance, passed a controversial resolution in 2024 calling for a review of the city’s policy of allowing transgender girls to join girls’ sports teams.

“Is Mamdani really willing to go down roads like that?” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education, law, and public policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Bloomfield, who previously served as the general counsel for the city’s Board of Education before mayoral control, added that Mamdani’s pitch for “co-governance” may be a winning campaign message because it has a populist appeal to make the system more democratic.

“It is a signal of a mindset more than an operational plan,” he said.

Good comment from Bloomfield.

Tony