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U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on July 21, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Members of the Trump administration appeared before the committee to request supplemental funding amid a recent escalation in the war with Iran.
(Getty Images)
Not good, but we can’t just quit Iran now
Jul 25, 2026
While President Trump threatens to destroy “ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” in Iran for every shot they take at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Americans back home are hoping and praying this folly of a war wraps up yesterday.
Strikes over the weekend brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 18, with 100 more injured; the Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed again, with Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threatening to block other oil routes; gas prices are up 16 cents from the average a week ago, 88 cents higher than last year and $1.04 higher than the week before the war, per Politico; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admitted in a hearing on Tuesday that the conflict had already cost U.S. taxpayers $37.5 billion — as he asked for $67 billion more.
All of this while no one — not Hegseth, not Trump, not Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Vice President JD Vance — can tell voters how or when we plan to exit this war having achieved anything of long-term significance. It’s the very definition of a quagmire.
Meanwhile, Iran and its dangerous proxies are clearly playing the long game, hoping that upcoming American midterm elections force the U.S. to exit the war we started without accomplishing a single one of our stated objectives — a very real possibility.
Trump is posturing, as he’s wont to do, insisting he’s not influenced by the calendar. “I don’t view it as ‘Gee, we’re having an election in a period of time,’ ” he said on Tuesday. “No, the election — I can’t think about that having to do with this. I think people are very impressed.”
Not so, as a majority of Americans now say the war in Iran was the wrong decision, while a belief that the war is worth the economic cost among Trump’s MAGA base has dropped to just over a third — a 13 point drop in two months.
Voters, Republican lawmakers up for reelection, and the Iranian regime — all united in their hope that Trump can be pushed to the exits by the election politics of an unpopular war.
But for once, I hope Trump isn’t bluffing.
We shouldn’t have entered this war, and we most definitely shouldn’t have entered it without a clear strategy. But here we are, and it’s now our job to leave it responsibly.
What does that mean?
Unfortunately, it means admitting we likely can’t make good on a number of the grandiose promises Trump made to justify the war in the first place. It seems we’ve given up on the idea of regime change and liberating the Iranian people, to name two. But we can and should pursue other objectives that would leave the U.S., our allies, and the region better off.
First and foremost, we must leave with verifiable restraints on and multilateral monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program. If it’s unrealistic or costly to retrieve Iran’s buried uranium cache, we must secure a non-conditional non-proliferation agreement — with teeth.
We must leave having guaranteed unfettered access to shipping routes, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Our European, Asian and Gulf allies must be integrated into a joint coalition to protect international shipping lanes from repeated extortion attempts.
And we must leave our regional allies, like Kuwait, protected from retaliatory strikes through binding non-aggression commitments and a long-term off-shore carrier strike group presence to prevent a security vacuum.
This is a far cry from what Trump promised with his ill-advised and ill-prepared blunder of a war — and in the case of Hormuz, it’s merely restoring access we already had before the war. But it’s the least we should accept in our retreat.
As much as we want to get out now, we owe it to our allies, our Gulf partners, our troops — and the Iranian people — to leave this mess of our own making with something to show for it.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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Two Americans from opposite political perspectives explore patriotism, democracy, and the importance of finding common ground in an increasingly divided nation.
Getty Images, David Malan
Trust But Verify: A Conservative and a Progressive on Loving America Honestly
Jul 24, 2026
Patriotism with Reservations
I am unapologetically patriotic and deeply grateful to be an American. My father served in the United States Army for twenty years, and because of his service I had the opportunity to live abroad in places such as Germany and South Korea. Those experiences broadened my worldview and gave me a greater appreciation for other cultures and nations. Yet they also reinforced a conviction that has only grown stronger with time: there is no place quite like the United States of America. For all of our imperfections, America remains a remarkable experiment in liberty, opportunity, and self-government.
As a Black conservative American, I recognize that I did not personally endure slavery, segregation, or the Jim Crow era. Nevertheless, I cannot ignore the challenges confronting our nation today. I am troubled by the increasingly divisive rhetoric surrounding immigration, the toxic state of our political discourse, the growing extremism that has taken root on both the left and the right, and the willingness of some to flirt with authoritarian impulses when democracy becomes inconvenient. These developments give me pause. They do not diminish my love for America, but they do create reservations about the direction we are heading.
Still, I remain hopeful. The American spirit has proven resilient through war, economic hardship, social upheaval, and countless moments of national uncertainty. We can overcome our present divisions, but doing so will require more than slogans or partisan victories. Democracy is resilient, but it is also fragile. Its preservation depends upon citizens who are willing to practice accountability, extend grace to one another, love their neighbors as themselves, and become ambassadors for peace in their communities. The next 250 years could represent an unprecedented era of human flourishing, innovation, and freedom. But that future will require us to change our narratives, reject the temptation to demonize those with whom we disagree, and remember that our fellow Americans are not enemies.
As a conservative who works to reform the criminal justice sphere and elevate a civil debate as to what public safety should look like, I choose to believe that patriotism is interconnected with redemption, restoration and the belief that we should not be totally defined by our worst mistake.
So yes, my patriotism comes with reservations. Not because I have lost faith in America, but because I care deeply about its future. True patriotism is not blind loyalty; it is a commitment to both celebrating our strengths and confronting our shortcomings. To borrow a phrase often associated with Ronald Reagan: trust, but verify. I trust in the promise of America, but I also believe it is our responsibility to ensure that promise endures for generations to come.
A Call to Civility
I am a progressive Democrat and serve as a state representative in the Vermont General Assembly. These days, that statement alone might make some people put this piece down. But like most Americans, my story and identity are complex yet meaningfully part of the larger American story. I grew up in rural Alabama, the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant father and a mother who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower. My grandparents both served in the United States Army, with my grandmother among the first to join the Women's Army Corps during WWII. Patriotism runs deep in my family, and both sides have paid a cost, in one form or another, to proudly call themselves American.
This patriotism, and my belief in the American Dream, is what led me to run for office. When I'm not wearing a suit and heels and walking the halls of the statehouse, I'm wearing scrubs and working as an occupational therapist. It was through that work that I realized Americans, regardless of party affiliation, or lack thereof, hold more in common than they do differences. The struggles of affording childcare, accessing healthcare, and securing housing plague so many of us. The stories we hold often share some of the same throughlines: we graduated during a recession, the factory in town closed up shop, and we're struggling to find time to care for aging parents while also raising our children. Yet the narratives we see on TV focus on dividing us rather than highlighting what we share.
That's what worries me and should worry you. The more divided we are, the less united we are in finding the root causes and common-sense solutions that could make this the America our parents and grandparents fought for. Is all hope lost? Of course not. But we have to push back against what's becoming the new "normal." Politics and relationships should be less sensational and more relational. Patriotism relies on relationships. That doesn't mean there won't be opposition or differences in ideas, but it does require seeing past that and focusing on what we have in common, in a civil manner.
The future is up to us, and how we shape it. So let's do so with courage and compassion, seeking unity over division.
Demetrius Minor is the Executive Director of Conservatives Concerned. He is a current fellow with the Center for Christianity and Public Life
Rep. Mary-Katherine Abdel-Ghany Stone currently serves as the Assistant Majority Leader for the Vermont House Democratic Caucus. She also co-chairs both the Vermont Future Caucus and the National Guard and Military Affairs Caucus. She is a current fellow with the Center for Christianity and Public Life.
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In an aerial view, customers depart a Taco Bell restaurant on July 14, 2026 in Pasadena, California. Federal and state health officials have reportedly begun investigating whether lettuce served at some Taco Bell restaurants has led to the widespread outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness, which has sickened thousands around the country.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
Taco Bell Lettuce Outbreak Exposes Gaps in U.S. Food Surveillance
Jul 24, 2026
By this point, most Americans with a cutting board have heard the warning: wash the lettuce, or, even better, avoid it. Now, at least, there's a specific bag to point to.
A year before the worst Cyclospora outbreak in recent memory, the federal government quietly stopped requiring anyone to actively look for it. That is not a coincidence worth shrugging off — and finding the source this week doesn't change that. It confirms it.
On July 16, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced they had traced a multistate Cyclospora outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations, primarily in the Midwest, as well as bagged lettuce sold in many stores.
An FDA traceback identified a single lettuce supplier in Mexico, but not until more than 1,644 illnesses and 94 hospitalizations had been tied to that lettuce alone, amid a national outbreak that had reached nearly 7,000 cases.
So, the mystery is solved. What isn't solved is the question the mystery should never have taken this long to answer.
Case interviews for the Taco Bell cluster point to symptom onset in late June. The broader national climb in illnesses stretches back to May. That is roughly two and a half months between the first wave of sick Americans and a federal agency naming a supplier — for a pathogen and a food category — using a well-worn investigative playbook.
There's a reason this one dragged as long as it did, and it isn't bad luck.
In July 2025, the CDC quietly narrowed FoodNet — the federal surveillance network that has tracked foodborne pathogens across 10 states since 1996 — from eight pathogens to two.
Salmonella and E. coli remained mandatory. Six others, including Cyclospora, were reclassified as optional. A CDC talking point at the time cited funding that "had not kept pace" with the cost of running full surveillance.
Eleven months later, the parasite the agency stopped requiring anyone to actively hunt for is the one that took nearly three months and thousands of illnesses to trace to a single supplier.
To be fair to the agency, that timeline is not the whole story, and a column that pretends otherwise isn't being honest with readers.
Public health researcher Craig Hedberg has pushed back against a direct causal link, noting that Cyclospora remains a nationally notifiable disease, tracked separately through the CDC's National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System, regardless of what happened to FoodNet.
An HHS spokesperson made the same point to CNN, adding that funding for state foodborne disease work has remained roughly flat at around $33 million annually. And the Taco Bell cluster, while large, still accounts for only a fraction of the national case total — a reminder that other clusters, with their own separate sources, are still being untangled.
But there's a difference between a disease still being counted somewhere and a disease being counted fast enough to matter.
FoodNet wasn't just another spreadsheet — it was the active layer, the one where public health workers went looking for infections through standardized lab testing rather than waiting for an already-strained state health department to notice a cluster, test for the right pathogen, and pass the news up the chain.
Losing that layer doesn't erase the data. It slows it down and thins it out, at exactly the moment speed matters most — and for eleven weeks this summer, that's precisely what happened while thousands of Americans kept getting sick.
And FoodNet isn't the only place the cupboard has gone bare. The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees since the start of 2025; the CDC has shed close to 3,300. The FDA's own outbreak investigations, which identified a source 77 percent of the time in 2024, did so successfully only about a third as often in 2025.
None of that proves that a faster FoodNet would have caught this specific supplier's lettuce in May rather than mid-July. Outbreak investigations are genuinely hard, and this parasite is particularly difficult to trace. But the system eventually worked — it found the lettuce and the supplier.
The question is not whether the system worked. It is why it took eleven weeks and thousands of preventable illnesses to get there, especially when the surveillance layer designed to speed up the process had been quietly turned off a year earlier. Over three decades, we built a system so that “hard to trace” would not also mean “slow to find.” We took part of that system apart a year before the worst Cyclospora outbreak in recent memory.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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Higher education sustains democracy despite the government’s attempts to restrict it
Jul 24, 2026
For as long as I can remember, pursuing higher education at a college or university has been the ultimate goal.
My family instilled in me the value of higher education, and I made it my mission to attend college, knowing it would provide me with invaluable knowledge, opportunities, and a broader perspective on the world.
Despite the ongoing push for students to enroll in college, in the United States, it feels as though institutions that once seemed to represent freedom of knowledge and discourse are now facing threats to their very missions.
Despite continuous threats to universities from the federal government, universities challenge those in power by publicly rejecting attempts to limit their programs and goals. Universities’ resistance against government threats represents a broader movement of democratic resilience and shows how they are necessary to sustaining the freedom of ideas and opinions.
When President Trump began his second term, he claimed that college and university campuses had been “infested with radicalism like never before.” He has then used the federal government’s power to threaten funding to schools that offer programs or initiatives that don’t align with his agenda.
While these threats were more prevalent towards the beginning of Trump’s term, universities continue to face targeted warnings from the government.
Since the start of Trump’s second administration, he has targeted the higher education system through federal funding freezes, forced settlements, crackdowns on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and restrictions on visas for international students.
In terms of funding, the federal government moved to reduce staff at the Department of Education, cut research funding, and freeze grants supporting work across areas such as health care, energy, and technology.
The Trump administration heavily targeted schools with strong DEI programs, threatening to close their DEI offices and restore merit-based admissions as opposed to considering race in the admissions process.
The federal government also targeted international students at elite universities, including Harvard, where some faced the threat of travel restrictions or the fear of having their visas revoked.
These threats and executive actions by the president not only instill fear in students, faculty, and university leaders, but plants an idea that higher education should operate under the federal government's agenda.
In response to threats from the Trump administration, colleges and universities have responded differently, with some adhering to certain requirements to retain funding, while others have denounced the administration's instructions entirely.
Despite all nine universities that rejected Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which outlined a series of demands for continued funding, several schools, including Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, and Penn, have worked to reach separate agreements with the administration to secure their research funding.
Shortly after the compact was sent to the nine universities, nearly 100 higher-education leaders endorsed the American Association of Colleges and Universities, calling the compact an “ultimatum” that ties funding to a political agenda.
Many university presidents called out the administration for sending the compact.
Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock said, “I do not believe that a compact — with any administration — is the right approach to achieve academic excellence, as it would compromise our academic freedom, our ability to govern ourselves, and the principle that federal research funds should be awarded to the best, most promising ideas,” in a letter to the community.
A consensus against the compact among university leaders indicated a broader movement across the nation in which schools would not accept government demands that restricted their academic independence.
However, while universities represent institutions where knowledge and the debate of ideas are fundamental, that does not mean they are perfect systems. Higher education in the United States has several flaws, and consideration of reform or adjustment to this system should not be discounted.
Affordability is a major issue in higher education, making it difficult for low- and middle-income students to afford rising tuition costs. In 1996, low-income families paid tuition amounts equal to 54%, and in 2020, that number rose to 66%.
Despite universities’ efforts to increase diversity on their campuses, many of the highest-ranked schools in the country continue to have higher proportions of white and upper-class students.
While universities encompass centuries of research, scholarly expertise, and distinguished professors, certain communities and histories remain left out of campus textbooks and course offerings.
These flaws, among others, make it hard to defend the argument that higher education institutions should be protected.
However, instead of receiving threats from the federal government to adhere to their agenda, universities should be receiving support to improve their systems and practices to make education more affordable, inclusive, and representative of the population that makes up the United States.
To ensure higher education continues to thrive, several steps can be taken to ensure they continue to build on existing programs without adhering to a political agenda.
Like many schools already doing so, having university leaders reject political compacts or demands will help ensure the government cannot dictate what universities teach, how they admit students, and how their funds are allocated to which programs. University leaders can also pursue legal action when the administration threatens to strip funding in response to politically driven demands.
For students and families, being actively engaged with university leaders and sharing concerns, signing petitions, or advocating for their schools to resist government overreach can form a collective action that involves both the university and its community.
Lastly, students play an essential role in being a voice for their respective schools beyond academic leaders. Student involvement, such as protests, writing to university and government leaders, and organizing to make their voices heard to administrators, can ultimately make a significant difference in how universities respond to government demands and make decisions.
Actions from university leaders, students, and community members contribute to universities' representation of democratic resilience and show how collective action can ensure that schools continue to operate without succumbing to excessive demands from the government.
For now, it is important to stay informed about any new developments between the Trump administration and universities across the country, and to continue to monitor any demands or policies they are calling on schools to follow.
Beyond this, ensuring that the public also keeps university leaders accountable is crucial to ensuring that students' voices are heard and that schools make decisions to best serve their students and their mission to improve education.
While the education system in the United States contains many flaws, such as affordability, accessibility, and inclusion, it still offers a necessary pillar of democracy for the country that must be protected.
I feel privileged to attend an institution like USC, which has provided me with opportunities to meet people from around the globe and broaden my perspective on a variety of topics.
But more than anything, it’s proven to me how essential universities are to sustaining democracy and academic independence by using knowledge, research, and a global perspective to advance a better society.
Daniela Mattson is a student at the University of Southern California and a Fulcrum Fellowship cohort member.
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