An oil pipeline stretches across the landscape outside Prudhoe Bay in North Slope Borough, Alaska on May 25, 2019.(Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Just over a week after a leading US Senate Democrat described President Donald Trump’s relationship with fossil fuel giants as “old-fashioned corruption, by a thuggish government and a desperate industry,” his administration on Thursday announced yet another giveaway to climate polluters who want to exploit the Arctic.
The US Department of the Interior is moving forward with a plan to allowoil and gas companies to conduct certain wintertime activities at the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska without reviews generally required by the National Environmental Policy Act—a landmark law long targeted by Trump’s Republican Party.
“In issuing this categorical exclusion, this administration is seeking to fast-track large-scale oil drilling and seismic exploration without any further environmental analysis or public input,” warnedEarthjustice attorney Janet Bering. “It is cutting the public out of this decision and future decisions.”
“The administration finalized this new approach with zero public input,” Bering noted. “Combined with a similar proposal that rubber-stamps new oil production, this is a one-two punch. It’s bad policy, and it is unlawful.”
The 60-day public comment period is ongoing for the earlier proposal she cited, which is designed to streamline decision-making for construction and operation of oil and gas production sites in the same 23-million-acre Alaska reserve.
When the Interior Department unveiled that policy in early September, Earthjustice Attorney Erik Grafe declared that “what we’re seeing here is a concerted attack by the Trump administration to greenlight oil and gas drilling in the Western Arctic while ignoring the harm it will cause to these irreplaceable public lands and also the government’s obligation to protect these lands for wildlife and future generations.”
“These are large-scale, industrial activities that cause permanent damage to sensitive Arctic ecosystems, nearby communities, and the climate,” Grafe stressed. “The administration’s proposal flaunts basic environmental laws meant to protect land, wildlife, and people and allow for fully informed decision-making.”
Earthjustice is far from alone in blasting Trump’s recent attacks on the Arctic. Dan Ritzman, director of Sierra Club’s conservation campaign, condemned last month’s proposal as “another piece of the administration’s relentless effort to expand drilling across Alaska’s public lands.”
“The Western Arctic is home to caribou, migratory birds, and countless other wildlife, and decisions about its future deserve careful scrutiny—not a permitting process designed around the demands of the oil and gas industry,” Ritzman said at the time.
His colleague Mike Scott, Sierra Club’s national oil and gas campaign manager, was similarly critical of Thursday’s announcement.
“The Trump administration is handing Big Oil another free pass to exploit America’s public lands, this time by gutting environmental oversight in one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet,” said Scott. “Oil companies have already shown the risks they pose to the Western Arctic, and now this administration wants to make it even easier for them to drill without scrutiny.”
“This isn’t about lowering energy costs or helping Alaskans,” he continued—as the president drives up fuel costs with an illegal war on Iran. “It’s about doing the fossil fuel industry’s bidding at the expense of wildlife, Alaska Native communities, and our public lands. The Trump administration is putting corporate profits ahead of people and the planet, and the Western Arctic will pay the price.”
Oil companies have already shown the risks they pose to the Western Arctic.
Now Trump wants to make it even easier for them to drill without scrutiny, threatening sensitive Arctic wildlife and the communities that depend on them.
Trump campaigned for a second term on a pledge to serve fossil fuel interests—even telling industry executives that he’d roll back climate policies if they poured $1 billion into his campaign. Last week, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Committee on Environment and Public Works Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released a report detailing how the president has delivered on that promise since returning to power last year.
“The fossil fuel industry and their allies bought their way into the Trump White House with hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations, after Trump promised fossil fuel bigwigs at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that he’d do anything and everything they wanted, for the right price,” Whitehouse said. “Now, their minions run the government from the inside, driving up energy bills to deliver payouts to the donors that put Trump back in office.”
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
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The United States Capitol building is seen in Washington DC, United States on April 22, 2026, [Celal Güneş – Anadolu Agency]
Foreign policy is rarely the principal factor shaping how Americans vote in congressional primaries or midterm elections. The 2026 cycle, however, appears to be different, as crises abroad increasingly spill over into concerns at home. The issues emphasised by Republican and Democratic candidates, the results of the primaries and shifts in public opinion suggest that Iran and the Palestinian question have emerged as additional factors in the domestic political contest. Iran has entered the electoral calculus through the economic costs of the war and majority opposition to military action, while the Palestinian issue has gained salience amid a discernible shift in American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians. These developments could influence the outcome of November’s midterms, against a backdrop of falling approval of the administration’s foreign policy and a growing Democratic lead in congressional polling.
The war with Iran shows this most clearly. Its repercussions have spread beyond foreign policy into the economy and the cost of living, the issues that weigh most heavily on American voters. The effects of the US-Israeli war on Iran have fed through into energy prices, inflation and interest rates in the United States, while consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest level. Public opposition is also substantial: 60 per cent of voters opposed US military action against Iran in a Quinnipiac poll conducted in July, and only 29 per cent approved of Trump’s handling of Iran in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in June.
Attitudes towards Israelis and Palestinians point to a notable shift in American public opinion, one that is increasingly reflected in the positions of the candidates of both parties and in the electoral mood. For nearly two decades, Gallup polling showed a wide and persistent sympathy gap in favour of the Israelis, exceeding 40 percentage points in many years and averaging 43 points between 2001 and 2018.
That gap had begun to narrow even before 7 October 2023, particularly among Democrats and younger Americans. In February 2023, Gallup found that, for the first time, Democrats sympathised more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The war in Gaza, however, accelerated and deepened that trend. The change has not been confined to Democrats. Movement within the Republican electorate, historically the constituency most sympathetic to Israel, has also contributed to the broader evolution of American opinion. Republicans still sympathise overwhelmingly with the Israelis, but that advantage has begun to erode. Gallup found that Republican sympathy for the Israelis had fallen by 10 percentage points since 2024, to its lowest level. More striking still is the emerging generational divide: among Republicans under 30, Pew found favourable views of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples almost evenly matched, at 42 and 40 per cent respectively. The most consequential movement, however, has come among independents. In 2025, they sympathised more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians by 42 to 34 per cent; a year later, that balance had reversed to 41 per cent for the Palestinians and 30 for the Israelis, a swing Gallup identifies as the principal driver of the latest change in public opinion. The trajectory across the three political groups underscores how far this realignment broadened during the war.
Between 2023 and 2026, Gallup recorded an increase in sympathy for the Palestinians from 49 to 65 per cent among Democrats, from 32 to 41 per cent among independents and, more modestly, from 11 to 13 per cent among Republicans.
The scale of the movement varied considerably across the partisan spectrum, but its consistent direction suggests that the war marked an important inflection point in a process already under way. Taken together, these trends indicate that the latest change is neither sudden nor transitory, but part of a deeper and more gradual realignment in American public opinion attitudes. Against this backdrop, Gallup’s finding in February this year that 41 per cent of Americans sympathised more with the Palestinians, compared with 36 per cent who sympathised more with the Israelis, appears less an isolated polling result than the culmination of a longer-term trend cutting across the country’s partisan divide.
The change is not confined to sympathy. It is increasingly extending to the terms of the US relationship with Israel itself, and particularly to whether American military and financial support should remain as extensive and as largely unconditional as it has traditionally been. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted between 18 and 22 June found that 48 per cent of registered voters considered the United States too supportive of Israel, the highest proportion since the question was first asked in 2017. That sentiment has begun to find expression in Congress. In April, 40 of the 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted to block a $295 million sale of bulldozers to Israel, while 36 opposed a $151.8 million sale of 1,000-pound bombs. The votes marked a significant expansion of Democratic support for placing limits on arms transfers to Israel and reflected a widening gap between the two parties over the terms of US support. Within the Republican coalition, the change is more limited, but potentially significant. Support for Israel remains dominant within the party, yet an increasingly visible America First current on the right has begun to question whether extensive US military commitments to Israel serve American interests.
Tucker Carlson has become one of the most prominent voices articulating that argument, accusing the Republican establishment of placing Israel’s security ahead of America’s. Such arguments remain far from commanding the Republican mainstream, but their growing visibility, particularly alongside weakening support for Israel among younger Republicans, suggests that a debate once concentrated largely within the Democratic Party is beginning to reach parts of the American right as well.
The 2026 congressional primaries offer an early indication of how these shifts may play out in November, both in the issues candidates chose to emphasise and in the results themselves. According to Ballotpedia, 2,497 candidates ran in congressional primaries covering 468 seats: all 435 in the House of Representatives and 33 in the Senate. With two special Senate elections in Ohio and Florida, 470 congressional seats are being contested this year. Of those running, 2,232 sought House seats, the highest number since 2014, while 265 competed for the Senate, the third-highest figure over the same period. The cycle also featured 547 competitive primaries: 272 Democratic, 209 Republican and 66 conducted under the “top-two” system, in which parties do not hold separate primaries. Instead, all candidates appear on a single ballot, and the two who receive the highest votes advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation.
In the 2024 congressional primaries, the MAGA wing accounted for 43 per cent of Republican winners, compared with 40 per cent for traditional conservatives and 11 per cent for moderates, according to Brookings. On the Democratic side, the mainstream wing, the party’s dominant force, accounted for 67 per cent of winners, while progressives made up 30 per cent and democratic socialists remained marginal.
With no comprehensive breakdown of the balance of forces within either party yet available following the primaries, concluded in mid-September 2026, Brookings offers partial results that allow for a comparison between the two cycles. Its analysis is confined to the most competitive contests in 33 House districts and 10 Senate races, covering a total of 300 candidates.
Among Republicans, MAGA candidates won only around 26.7 per cent of the competitive races, while more than 92 per cent of Trump-endorsed candidates prevailed. Around half of those endorsed by Trump, however, were incumbents, giving them an inherent advantage in seeking re-election. Even with that qualification, Trump-backed candidates recorded a markedly higher success rate than MAGA candidates across these swing races.
Among Democrats, progressives won only 17.8 per cent of competitive races, while democratic socialists remained marginal, broadly in line with their showing in 2024. Yet other analyses suggest that progressives’ success rates were close to those of previous cycles, and that more progressive candidates won. The wing also registered notable victories, among them those of candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani in New York. An important caveat is that the 2026 figures measure each faction’s success rate in competitive races, rather than its share of all winners, as the 2024 figures do. They therefore offer an indication of the broader direction of travel, not a definitive numerical comparison between the two cycles.
These results point to a pattern among Democratic winners whose campaigns centred on issues of particular concern to their constituencies, rather than necessarily signalling an ideological shift to the left. More broadly, across the most competitive districts and states in 2026, the outcomes in both parties show an advantage for their mainstream, less ideological wings, reflecting the premium placed on general-election viability and the ability to reach voters beyond each party’s ideological core.
The issues on which the winners of the latest primaries campaigned offer an important measure of each party’s voter priorities, as well as a guide to what may matter most in the coming midterms. Republican candidates were more supportive of Israel than their Democratic counterparts, and less so of military and economic assistance to Ukraine.
Among Republicans, immigration, security and the border featured more prominently. Only 23.5 per cent of those running in swing or contested states defended the administration’s record on the economy and the cost of living, while none acknowledged shortcomings in its handling of these issues. Healthcare went unaddressed by roughly half of the party’s candidates, and most of those who did discuss it focused on containing spending. In competitive races in swing states, success was associated with a combination of Trump’s endorsement, electability and the avoidance of ideological positions that might narrow a candidate’s broader electoral appeal.
Among Democrats, the economy and the cost of living came to the fore, with affordability emerging as the overriding economic concern. Around 56 per cent of Democratic candidates addressed inflation, most using it to criticise the Trump administration’s record, while 94 per cent made healthcare an issue in their campaigns. In competitive districts, no candidate embraced an “open borders” policy or called for defunding the police, and many steered clear of more divisive positions, including on transgender issues. On immigration, the small number who took more conservative stances performed well. In safe Democratic seats with competitive primaries, progressive candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani defeated their rivals with a more left-wing message centred on economic inequality, immigration, the Palestinian question and higher taxes on the wealthy. The results underscored how the issues that decide a party primary can vary with the electoral character of the district.
Trump’s endorsement emerged as a powerful factor in Republican candidates’ performance, while the economy, the cost of living and healthcare featured prominently in Democratic messaging. Across both parties, candidates in competitive races sought to balance the issues that mobilise their party base with the need to appeal to swing voters.
Pew polling in 2026 shows a clear divide between Republican and Democratic priorities on illegal immigration, security and crime. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this month, 79 per cent of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of immigration, revealing a marked gap between the Republican base and the public at large. Among Americans overall, only 36 per cent approved of his immigration policy and 55 per cent disapproved. Democratic priorities, according to Pew, are more heavily concentrated on the cost of living, healthcare, gun violence and climate, while only 17 per cent of Democrats regarded illegal immigration as a very big problem. Yet the economy, the cost of living and healthcare are concerns that extend well beyond Democratic voters. On healthcare policy, Democrats held a clear advantage over Republicans, 42 per cent to 28 per cent, and also led on climate, abortion and education, positions that broadly align with public opinion. Republicans, by contrast, led clearly on crime and more narrowly on immigration.
This alignment may help explain the broader electoral mood, which in recent months has tilted towards the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in the middle of this month put Democrats at 44 per cent, against 37 per cent for Republicans. In 37 swing House districts, a Cook Political Report poll conducted in September found Democrats ahead by 49 per cent to 47 per cent. Trump had carried these districts collectively in 2024. In a separate poll, his approval rating fell to 32 per cent.
The seven Senate races rated Toss Up by the Cook Political Report are in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, with Republicans currently holding five of those seats. The balance of the Senate stands at 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats, alongside two independents who caucus with the Democrats. This leaves Republicans defending more of the most competitive seats at a time when late-September polling shows Democrats ahead in several swing races. The battle for the Senate has therefore become more competitive, although current polling is not sufficient to determine which party will hold the chamber after the elections.
Domestic concerns nevertheless continue to carry greater electoral weight. Seventy per cent of voters said the cost of living was important to their vote in House elections, compared with 59 per cent for healthcare, 57 per cent for immigration and 41 per cent for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a national Quinnipiac University poll released on 24 June 2026.
The polling therefore does not suggest that foreign policy has displaced the economy as a principal determinant of electoral outcomes. It does, however, show that Iran and the Palestinian question have become factors whose impact on these elections can no longer be overlooked.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says he wishes someone would lock him up, small Orca speaks bluntly.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
Green-winged teals are seen flying over water at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in Wyoming on April 25, 2019. (Photo by Tom Koerner/US Fish and Wildlife Service/flickr/cc)
“If it comes to pass, this deal would bulldoze America’s most important wildlife law,” said one campaigner.
A bipartisan Senate proposal to overhaul federal permitting rules drew fierce opposition Wednesday from environmental and wildlife advocates, who warn that the legislation could significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act and other key protections in service of boosting President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel and artificial intelligence agenda.
Senate negotiators—chiefly Democrats Martin Heinrich (NM) and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Republicans Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Mike Lee (Utah)—reportedly reached an agreement Monday on the text of a sweeping permitting package intended to speed construction of energy and infrastructure projects.
While the full legislative text of the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026” had not been publicly released as of Wednesday, reported provisions have prompted alarm among conservation groups, who warn that the proposal would weaken endangered species protections, shift federal authority and responsibility to states, limit scientific review and judicial oversight, and exempt some projects from key environmental consultations.
“If it comes to pass, this deal would bulldoze America’s most important wildlife law,” Defenders of Wildlife president and CEO Andrew Bowman said Wednesday. “We can build the infrastructure America needs without sacrificing the wildlife we have a responsibility to protect and that Americans cherish. Development should not come at the expense of science, accountability, or the ability of America’s most imperiled wildlife to survive.”
“This ‘dirty deal’ threatens to raise electricity prices for working families by accelerating the buildout of energy-guzzling AI data centers and liquefied natural gas export projects,” said Oil Change International US campaigns manager Collin Rees. “Our recent research shows that the Trump administration’s support for reckless AI development and greater gas exports drives up energy costs for households.”
Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said that “this is a climate kill shot that condemns our most vulnerable communities to suffer decades more fossil fuel pollution.”
“It’s absurd to ensure our planet chokes with greenhouse gases, gut endangered species protections, and eviscerate the Clean Water Act for what seems to be a nearly meaningless victory against Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Hartl continued. “The minor benefits for renewable energy corporations are massively dwarfed by the gifts to the fossil fuel industry.”
“If this grotesque legislation becomes law, the paltry increases in renewable energy will be instantly devoured by AI data centers,” he added. “The only winners here are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, tech oligarchs, and the shareholders of fossil fuel companies.”
According to CBD:
Today’s package contains numerous provisions that lock in thousands of fossil fuel projects, including oil and gas pipelines, [liquefied natural gas] export terminals, and expanded fossil fuel drilling onshore and offshore approved by President Trump over the past two years. It also ensures that future fossil fuel pipelines and methane gas-generated electricity can never be challenged in court.
Additional provisions gut parts of the Clean Water Act, including the Section 401 authority of states to protect their rivers and streams from the impacts of building pipelines and the [Environmental Protection Agency’s] Section 404(c) permit veto authority, which has been used to stop projects like the Pebble Mine in Alaska.
The legislation weakens the National Historic Preservation Act and Tribal consultations, leaving most Tribal nations with no meaningful way to protect their sovereignty when faced with potential fossil fuel projects on their lands.
Furthermore, CBD noted, “the legislation guts the Endangered Species Act by allowing states to take over the Section 7 consultation process with minimal safeguards, turning one of the law’s strongest provisions into a state-run rubber stamp of dangerous projects.”
The Western Environmental Law Center described the proposal as a “five-alarm fire,” warning that it could weaken the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, [National Environmental Policy Act], and other safeguards.
“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water, and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the group’s executive director, who warned that the measure could ultimately “hobble the ability of future administrations to enact an ambitious climate and conservation agenda.”
Hartl called out Democrats Heinrich and Whitehouse for “giving away our most cherished environmental laws based on fantastical models that project a renewable energy utopia.”
“They’re rewarding a ruthless fossil fuel industry that will always put its quarterly profits ahead of a livable planet and future generations,” he said. “Trump promised fossil fuel companies that he’d do everything in his power to assist them in his second term, and Sen. Heinrich and Sen. Whitehouse seem hell-bent on helping Trump fulfill that promise.”
Bowman contended that “Congress should be looking for ways to make permitting more efficient rather than a Trojan horse to weaken the Endangered Species Act.”
“Efficiency and conservation are not opposing goals,” he added. “A durable permitting bill should deliver both. Congress should not lock in permanent damage to the Endangered Species Act simply to get a deal today.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
A coral reef around Taravai Island with many acropora corals is seen on February 16, 2018 in the Gambier Islands, French Polynesia. (Photo by Alexis Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
“The ocean is transforming before our eyes: Warming, rising seas, and ecosystem degradation are interconnected signs of significant and long-term change.”
The 10th annual Copernicus Ocean State Report, released Wednesday by a team of more than 100 international scientists, provided the latest reminder that, as one United Nations official said, “the ocean is one of the clearest indicators of the profound shifts” that the climate crisis is causing.
Data gathered by Mercator Ocean International, the nonprofit that produced the report, revealed “an ocean warming at an alarming pace, with far-reaching consequences for marine life, coastlines, and communities worldwide,” said the group.
The study delivers ocean scientists’ “starkest warning yet of the profound changes sweeping across the ocean, as a likely unprecedented El Niño takes shape in the Pacific,” said Mercator, referring to the natural warming trend that is expected to be made more intense this year by planetary heating.
Drawing on four decades of data from satellites, buoys, sensors, and modeling, the scientists found that 2024 was marked by record-breaking marine heatwaves as well as an unprecedented extreme low sea level event, causing levels in the Bothnian Bay between Sweden and Finland to plunge 60 inches, bringing ferries to a halt for 18 hours.
Heatwaves in the Mediterranean and Black seas lasted more than 30 days and raised water temperatures by more than 8.3°F (4.6°C) above average.
“These are not isolated hot spells; they are occurring against a backdrop of sustained ocean warming that is changing the conditions marine ecosystems experience,” Blanca Fernández-Álvarez, a report author and a conresearcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, told CNN.
Ten editions. One increasingly urgent picture. Explore the 10th Copernicus Ocean State Report and the evidence shaping our understanding of the ocean.
But along with extreme events documented in the report, the scientists found unmistakable trends showing no sign of letting up, including persistent damage to marine life due to ocean heating fueled by continued oil and gas extraction.
Small island states—some of the countries least responsible for carbon emissions that are leading to record heat absorption by the oceans—face worsening, “overlapping pressures” including sea-level rise that could wipe out coastal and island communities and the growing threat of more intense tropical cyclones.
Over the last three decades, reads the report, “ongoing reorganization of marine ecosystems around the world” hasr been made clear by persistent changes in growth patterns of phytoplankton, which support food webs and carbon flows, in nearly 5% of the ocean.
Heat stress also contributed to coral bleaching in 84% of the world’s reefs, threatening marine ecosystems as well as coastal communities that rely on reefs for protection and tourism.
“The ocean is transforming before our eyes: Warming, rising seas, and ecosystem degradation are interconnected signs of significant and long-term change,” said Pierre Bahurel, director general of Mercator Ocean International.
As humans have continued to emit carbon and other greenhouse gases despite warnings from energy experts and scientists, the rate of ocean heating has doubled over the past two decades, causing sea surface temperatures to skyrocket to record highs in 2023, 2024, and this year.
In 2025, the report says, the ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules—about 40 times the energy consumed by the entire world last year. The energy absorption is equivalent to 12 atomic bombs going off every second for one year.
The global mean sea level rose by 3.8 ± 0.3 millimeters each year between 1999-2025, and the ocean has become about 17% more acidic over the last four decades, wreaking havoc on crucial underwater ecosystems.
Peter Thomson, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the ocean, emphasized that the dangers posed to the world’s oceans by continued fossil fuel extraction have been made clear over 10 years of reports by Mercator, as well as other warnings from scientists.
“What it tells us is unmistakable: The ocean is changing, and those changes are reaching into the lives, livelihoods, and security of people everywhere,” said Thomson. “We have the knowledge. We have the evidence. Now we need the political will to act.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
Protesters march to show opposition to the war in Iran in Austin, Texas, on April 8, 2026. (Photo by Mikala Compton/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
“This is a self-inflicted wound, it’s a choice, and it can be undone.”
A group of experts says that President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran, which has been massively expensive and has made Americans less safe, shows the need for a radical overhaul of US foreign policy.
Scholars at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts on Wednesday are holding a webinar to present ideas for reducing the US military footprint and using the savings to invest in programs that will directly benefit working-class Americans.
In a video posted on social media ahead of the webinar, PERI experts advocated for making major changes to US foreign policy, which they argued has left the country overstretched.
“The Iran War costs us billions while making us less safe,” says a message accompanying the video on PERI’s social media account. “By reining in military spending and taxing the wealthy to pay their fair share, we can fund critical services like universal preschool, infrastructure investments, and Medicare for All.”
The Iran War costs us billions while making us less safe.
By reining in military spending and taxing the wealthy to pay their fair share, we can fund critical services like universal preschool, infrastructure investments, and medicare for all. pic.twitter.com/daOFLyWHEr
Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project (NPP), made the case that the US can no longer enforce a policy of “maintaining dominance over the entire world.”
“We have endless wars in the Middle East, a war of choice with Iran at the moment,” said Koshgarian. “Clearly, something is broken about our foreign policy. It’s extremely costly and, in fact, it actually makes us less safe.”
Koshgarian then outlined her plan for what she described as “a smaller, safer military” that would slash US presence overseas and generate between $200 billion to $500 billion of savings per year.
Heidi Peltier, senior researcher at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, pointed to Trump’s request for an “astronomical” $1.5 trillion military budget to argue that America’s priorities have become completely warped.
“The money is there,” Peltier said. “The question really is, what are our priorities?”
Peltier’s research aims to “demilitarize” federal spending by reducing the annual US Department of Defense budget by 10%, which would free up $100 billion more to spend on domestic priorities.
Aaron Medlin, professor of international studies at Boston College, pointed to the ways Trump’s illegal war had made the price of energy more expensive and was inflicting economic pain on working-class Americans.
Medlin said that his work focuses on raising taxes on the wealthy by taxing income generated from owning assets at the same rate as income generated from working, while also imposing a minimum tax on fortunes over $100 million, and small levies on stock, bond, and derivatives trades.
In total, Medlin estimates that the proposed tax package would raise more than $2 trillion annually.
“The United States is just becoming unaffordable for a huge share of Americans,” he said. “This is a self-inflicted wound, it’s a choice, and it can be undone.”
The experts’ proposals for reducing the US military footprint and taxing extreme wealth came on the same day that petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan estimated that Americans have now spent over $75 billion more on gasoline since the start of the Iran War.
When higher gas prices are combined with rising rates for diesel, the Costs of War Project at Brown’s Watson Institute estimates that Americans have spent an extra $121.7 billion.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
