◼ There’s no way around it: Donald Trump had a tantrum and harmed the statistical apparatus of the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is just about the least political government agency there is, full of stats nerds who have established a sterling record of revising jobs numbers in whichever direction the data say under presidents of both parties. Their task has become harder in recent years because the response rate to the employer survey used for the jobs report has declined steeply since Covid. Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner in 2019, William Beach, has begged Congress for funding to modernize the survey, and an advisory task force was studying how other countries have improved their survey response rates. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded that task force in February, and Congress hasn’t approved more funding. Trump got a jobs report he didn’t like and fired Beach’s successor, Erika McEntarfer. Trump is shooting the messenger of bad economic news, not unlike when China discontinues inconvenient data series that make the Communist Party look bad. The BLS will continue to do its work, but now under a justified cloud of speculation that it is manipulating data to avoid Trump’s wrath. And the economy itself is what it is, no matter how the statistics are reported.

◼ “We’ve reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared. He directed the cancellation of $500 million in “investments” related to the development of mRNA vaccines—the most famous of which were Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid shots. Kennedy insists that “mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses,” and his department would instead advocate live-virus vaccines for infections such as cold, flu, and, presumably, Covid. The mRNA vaccines do require tweaking to counter viral adaptation, but they don’t carry the slight risk of real infection, as live-virus vaccines do. The vast body of clinical evidence suggests the Covid shots were both safe and highly effective at preventing bad health outcomes or death as a result of infection, even if they did not stop viral transmission. The potential for mRNA vaccines goes well beyond Covid, though. They may help immunologists develop vaccines for diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever, rabies, hepatitis C, and Ebola. They could even be used to develop individualized treatments for certain cancers. The U.S. is not giving up on mRNA research—just, apparently, in the area in which its application has proven most effective. Kennedy is handing that singular American achievement over to other countries, from which they will prosper. Also bearing responsibility: Republican senators who failed to exercise their constitutional authority to keep this crank out of the cabinet.

◼ Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced this week that his agency would “move quickly” to develop and deploy a nuclear reactor to the surface of the moon by 2030. And it is a race. “China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” Duffy’s directive read. “The first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone,” it continued. Presumably, if America landed a reactor first, it would do the same. We can deduce, therefore, that earthly geopolitics will extend into the solar system—it’s only a matter of when and who sets the rules first. A nuclear reactor on the moon would be a vital component of any strategy to exploit the resources outside America’s atmosphere. At the moon’s poles, the plant would rapidly process the 600 million tons of ice trapped in dark lunar craters into oxygen and hydrogen, turning the moon into a way point on the path to Mars and the Asteroid Belt. This may sound like science fiction. But so, too, did the prospect of a commercial space industry, and that is our status quo today. Trump’s NASA deserves credit for thinking both big and long-term.

Learn about the landscape of the American Right in this limited series from DonorsTrust.

◼ Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature have decided to play hardball by redrawing the state’s congressional map in between censuses, with the aim of adding as many as five new Republican seats to a delegation that is presently 25–13, favoring the GOP. We don’t have proportional representation in this country because we believe geographical districts are important to represent the people who live in a particular place. That makes gerrymandering inevitable, and both parties do it. There is not a single Republican House member in all of New England, and Democratic strongholds such as Illinois and Maryland have laughable gerrymanders. Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say, and gerrymandering is such an old trick that it is named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence. We would advise Texas Republicans to remember that pushing political norms to their absolute limit has a way of boomeranging. But Democrats are the last people on earth who ought to be crying foul.

◼ Once again Donald Trump has issued a threat on Truth Social: “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City.” This comes in the wake of a random street attack on DOGE employee Edward Coristine by a mob of youths last week; Coristine allegedly intervened to prevent an attempted carjacking on a woman and was pummeled in response. (Two have already been arrested in connection with the event.) Trump’s anger may be motivated in this case specifically by an attack on a member of his administration, but his underlying point retains validity. The District of Columbia has, under its congressionally granted home rule, failed to keep its streets as safe as they could be. The District’s catch-and-release approach to violent criminals certainly doesn’t help. A 2021 report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform found that most violent crime in Washington is committed by a relatively small group of a few hundred people, and most homicide suspects had been previously arrested about eleven times. If D.C. politicians refuse to take action, they have nobody to blame for what comes next but themselves.

◼ In the summer of 1934, the Gestapo carried out a murderous purge against Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s enemies in the Nazi Party known as the Night of the Long Knives. In the summer of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained illegal immigrants and ensured they weren’t evading lawful immigration proceedings. Can you spot the difference? Democrats apparently can’t. “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” said Governor Tim Walz (D., Minn.) at a May commencement address. Representative Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) said, “When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland and you compare them to those nondescript thugs who grabbed that graduate student, [it] does look like a Gestapo operation.” Rachel Maddow invokes ICE in making the case that “we have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.” Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) said ICE agents are like “secret police” who need to be unmasked. Some anti-ICE activists have been taking matters into their own hands. Eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. Another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot a police officer and injured two Border Patrol employees. On Tuesday, a rioter threw a rock into and set fire to an ICE building in Washington State. There is a movement to “unmask” ICE agents and harass them at their homes. The White House reports that ICE agents are facing a 700 percent surge in assaults—all while ICE enforces the laws that are on our books, which say that illegal immigrants shall be detained until their immigration proceedings reach a conclusion. This inflamed rhetoric is firmly in the American tradition. It is also totally cracked and part of a febrile atmosphere around ICE’s legitimate operations.

◼ The sharper our eyes, the more we see. A NASA-funded telescope recently spotted Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object—many more will have come passing through over the eons—to enter our solar system. The closest the comet, which is about the size of Manhattan, will come to us here on Terra is somewhere between 150 million and 170 million miles, so we can all relax. Or can we? Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and two associates have written a paper in which they hypothesize that, based on certain anomalous characteristics, “this new interstellar interloper” might be a “functioning technological artifact.” The trio emphasize that they do not “necessarily” subscribe to this hypothesis. On the contrary, they believe that “the most likely outcome will be that [it] is a completely natural interstellar object.” That indeed seems to be the case. Loeb is best known to the public for having speculated that ʻOumuamua, the solar system’s first (known) interstellar visitor, might be the product of some alien technology. He enjoys thinking through the implications of such a discovery. What, for example, if 3I/ATLAS’s intentions are malign? Well, that “would possibly require defensive measures to be undertaken (though these might prove futile).” Might?