On July 8, the interim truce between the U.S. and Iran collapsed after Iran allegedly struck multiple commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz; now, the war has gone regional, and U.S. service members are losing their lives. This war shows no signs of ending in the near future, and it appears to be one operating entirely through the White House.

Congress has not mounted any meaningful resistance. The Senate, which couldn’t hold together a bipartisan majority for withdrawal even during a ceasefire, is now watching as the president wages a war whose scope he himself describes as open-ended — floating outright U.S. control of one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints as a war aim, not a ceasefire condition.  Whatever appetite existed in Congress in June to reassert Article I war powers hasn’t produced any mechanism to actually stop a war the president has decided, on his own, to keep fighting.

On June 29, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 91-year-old precedent that has allowed Congress to shield independent agency leaders from removal except “for cause.” In a 6-3 ruling, the Court found that Trump’s 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts dismissed the precedent as “a result in search of a rationale” and declared that “subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”

The ruling’s reach extends far beyond the FTC. For decades, Humphrey’s Executor has protected roughly two dozen agencies designed to operate independently, and above partisan politics — including the FCC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Stripping their leaders of removal protections clears the way for a president to purge regulators who resist his agenda and replace them with loyalists, collapsing the independence that allows these institutions to police elections, markets, communications, and safety without fear of retaliation.

In a separate same-day ruling, the Court drew one line the administration didn’t get to cross: a 5-4 majority blocked Trump’s attempt to immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over disputed mortgage-fraud allegations, finding the Fed uniquely insulated from at-will removal and that Cook hadn’t been afforded due process.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the Slaughter case, warning the decision “promises only chaos,” underscores what’s now at stake: the leaders of federal agencies, with the exception of the Fed, are now much more beholden to the president.

In a speech on June 16, President Trump repackaged a wide variety of claims about the 2020 election, including that multiple foreign actors attempted to interfere with the election. There is no credible evidence to support these claims, and multiple studies of 2020 have confirmed that the election was safe and secure.

On their face, those claims might seem like Trump indulging a personal obsession — he thinks he won in 2020, and he needs to prove it. As we’ve covered over the past few months, though, his claims serve a larger purpose. They are designed not just to relitigate 2020, but to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms and to justify new measures to enable his allies to override our elections. This is one piece of a broader strategy that the president has pursued for months: Deceive the American people about the security of our elections, Disrupt the playing field in ways that favor his party, and ultimately Deny results he doesn’t like after ballots are cast.

The best way to combat election lies is to understand how much control each of us still has over the outcome of this election. The president and his allies want us to feel like we won’t be able to vote, or our votes won’t be counted or won’t matter. Our job is to prove them wrong, by exercising our right to vote and making sure our votes are counted, regardless of candidate or party preference.

On June 23, Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at the Rochester, NY home of David Streever — a private citizen, not a public figure — over an email he’d sent five months earlier calling then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a “monstrous human being” after ICE agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens during the Minneapolis surge. Agents left his wife a “WARNING NOTICE” citing federal threat statutes, then tracked him to a New York City hotel days later when he returned from a vacation abroad with his 7-year-old daughter. The same day, agents separately confronted a Syracuse woman at her polling-place job over an Instagram post.

On July 6, Streever sued DHS, arguing that the five-month gap between the email and the agents’ visit undercuts any claim he posed a real threat, and that the real purpose was to chill criticism of ICE. The lawsuit also describes a similar incident involving another critic who emailed an ICE attorney and was later hit with a DHS subpoena to Google for his email account before agents showed up at his home.

As these incidents demonstrate, the administration is now making efforts to quash the speech not only of its well-known political opponents, but also of regular people who speak against the administration or its policies online.

On July 16, President Trump used a primetime address from the White House East Room — a platform historically reserved for major national moments — to reiterate long-debunked claims about the 2020 election, alleging a “deep state” conspiracy involving Barack Obama and Joe Biden and accusing China of “sinister election meddling.” Experts found no credible evidence to support his claims, while several points merely exaggerated findings publicly released by the intelligence community years ago.

The pattern isn’t confined to the president. The next day, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin held his own press conference, amplifying claims that fact-checkers trace to Iranian disinformation and threatening state election officials with prison time if they refuse to implement the White House’s preferred election policies.

Both speeches bring into focus the administration’s organizing priority through November — to use disinformation that has the patina of legitimacy to undermine confidence in American elections, and the 2026 midterms more specifically. By raising these claims now, Trump and his allies are also laying the groundwork to, after Election Day, deny election results they don’t like. American elections remain safe and secure, even as the president works to undermine the confidence Americans have in them.

Facing scrutiny after killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine within the same week, ICE issued a nationwide order on July 14 telling officers to stop pursuing people in vehicles. The agency also reportedly extended its training program for new agents and said prior graduates would receive “follow-on training.” A States Newsroom review found the Guerrero shooting was the 22nd time federal immigration officers had fired at someone during Trump’s second term, and that 19 of those incidents began with a vehicle stop.

But the next day, President Trump overruled ICE leadership and ordered agents to resume their use of vehicle stops. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier explains, this reversal “endanger[s ICE] officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.”

On July 1, a federal judge in Fort Worth handed down the final wave of sentences in the Prairieland ICE detention center case — some as long as 50 to 100 years — for a July 4, 2025 protest outside an Alvarado, Texas immigration facility where one attendee shot and wounded a police officer. The officer survived. But prosecutors charged and convicted sixteen people under a “material support to terrorists” theory tied to Trump’s September 2025 designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization — a designation civil liberties groups note has no formal legal definition, meaning it functions less as a criminal statute than as a label prosecutors can attach to political protest.

Several of those sentenced weren’t accused of firing a weapon: one defendant received 30 years for moving a box of “antifascist zines,” and a married couple who said they arrived late and left when confronted by guards were each sentenced to 50 years. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor said he wanted the sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” while then-Acting AG Todd Blanche framed the case as proof that “Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement… will face swift and uncompromising justice.”

Violence is never an acceptable part of political discourse. In weaponizing this single act of violence, though, the Trump administration has worked to quash the dissent of more than a dozen political opponents, many of whom had nothing to do with the shooting, and potentially made other protesters more concerned about the harsh consequences they might face for opposing the administration.