◼ President Donald Trump imposed sweeping new tariffs on Canadian imports. He then announced on Truth Social that current tariffs on “Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he will retaliate by imposing tariffs on goods from dairy products to electronics. This needless trade war will inflict economic damage on both sides of the border. In the U.S., it will harm manufacturers and raise prices. That is unwelcome news for consumers and for the Republican candidates who will be asking for their votes in a few weeks. The geopolitical consequences may also be serious. In an age of anxiety over supply chains, creating a cohesive North American bloc makes sense. But the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction, and its behavior toward Canada cannot fail to alarm other American allies. The U.S. and Canada must resolve this crisis as soon as possible. But the damage done to America’s close friendship with its resource-rich and strategically located northern neighbor will take a long time to repair.

◼ At the same time Trump is escalating the trade war, he is conceding that lowering tariffs reduces prices at home. Responding to a 75-year low in domestic cattle herds, the president announced that he would temporarily allow more beef imports with a low tariff rate. He seeks to provide grocery shoppers with some relief, as beef has seen the largest price increases of any food product since the pandemic. Many Republicans nonetheless rebuked the decision. Mostly representing farm states, these lawmakers argued that ranchers must be shielded from foreign competition while they rebuild their herds. Yet imports are a natural part of price adjustments for almost every other commodity. Just last year, foreign producers helped fill a gap in egg supplies. Trump’s transient tariff exemption may be a midterm gimmick, but the administration should at least appear to pay attention to affordability.

◼ Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is attempting to distance himself from the poisonous internet personality Hasan Piker. In a recent livestream, Piker declared that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action.” “Not against the state of Israel, mind you,” he clarified, “but against American Jews.” In response, El-Sayed limply stated that “Americans deserve the right to advocate what they believe without fear of violence.” He then complained that “politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer.” But the politician most responsible for making Piker an issue has been El-Sayed himself. For months, he happily campaigned with the streamer. And there’s ample evidence that El-Sayed, who has made rabid anti-Zionism a cornerstone of his campaign, shares many of Piker’s sentiments. They are singularly invested in each other, and voters should take the appropriate electoral action.

◼ In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham—who was appointed, largely on Trump’s say-so, to fill her brother’s Senate seat—narrowly defeated Representative Ralph Norman in a primary runoff. Graham had flailed badly in a debate, and Norman, a hard-charging member of the House Freedom Caucus, gained significant ground. Graham was probably fortunate that the campaign didn’t last another week. In Oklahoma, Trump-backed Mike Mazzei, a former state budget director, claimed an even narrower win in the gubernatorial primary runoff, beating Attorney General Gentner Drummond 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent. Drummond attracted criticism from conservatives for prosecuting a case against a Catholic charter school to the Supreme Court, over the objections of the rest of the state’s leadership. What both states show: Trump’s endorsements carry a lot of weight, but candidate quality still matters.

◼ The leadership of the U.S. Navy has discussed renaming an aircraft carrier after Trump. Although several aircraft carriers have been named after former presidents, naming an aircraft carrier after the sitting president would be a dramatic break from tradition. Even worse, the ship these unnamed Navy officials discussed renaming was the USS Doris Miller, which is named after an American hero. During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller rescued his commanding officer, manned a machine gun, and opened fire on the Japanese planes overhead even though he had no training on that weapon. Renaming the USS Doris Miller is such a ludicrous idea that it’s hard to believe anyone with any responsibility seriously proposed or entertained it. The president’s name already appears on plenty of things.

◼ Americans are growing increasingly hostile to data centers. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have all enacted restrictions on data center construction. Polls consistently show that a supermajority of voters oppose the construction of new facilities near their homes. But the internet and artificial intelligence are here to stay. The question, therefore, is not whether more data centers will be built, but where. And the answer should be America. Embracing data center construction would yield significant economic rewards. The United States should own this technological revolution as it has owned so many others—from mass-produced automobiles in the 1910s, to lunar exploration in the 1960s, to smartphones and cloud computing in the 2000s. There are no obvious historical examples of Americans benefiting from rejecting a new technological advance. The AI build-out is unlikely to serve as an exception to that rule.

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◼ As part of a $17.1 billion settlement, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to impose limits on how minors interact with its products. Among the coming changes for teenagers are a two-hour daily usage limit across all of Meta’s products; a default block on access between midnight and 6 a.m.; automatic interruptions in response to prolonged use; and the default hiding of likes and reaction counts. In addition, Meta has agreed to more aggressively verify users’ ages—especially when it suspects that a user is under 13—and to limit what data it collects and uses for advertising and marketing. These new safeguards seem mostly sensible. Nevertheless, the manner in which those safeguards have been imposed ought to alarm a self-governing people. They were not effected via publicly debated legislation, followed by transparent rulemaking and judicial review, but via a backdoor legal effort that crammed a host of highly specific policy objections into a set of broad statutes that were silent on those questions. They were not applied to all social media companies; only to some. And, because Meta elected to settle before the trial could proceed any further, it now finds itself bound by rules that the judiciary may lack authority to impose. Most worryingly of all, the deal’s stricter restrictions—as well as roughly $5 billion in contingent payments—are expressly tied to Snap, TikTok, YouTube, and other companies becoming subject to the same obligations. The settlement therefore uses one company’s capitulation as the mechanism for constructing an industry-wide regulatory regime, without any legislature ever having enacted such a thing. And while in most cases state legislative action is preferable to federal, the operation of the internet by its nature demands national rules. The place that should set them is Congress.

◼ The Supreme Court lifted an injunction against Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots and citizenship. There is less to this decision than meets the eye. It’s a federal crime for noncitizens to vote, but, at present, there are no real federal safeguards to prevent such ballots from being cast. In 2013, the Court ruled that federal law prevents states from checking for citizenship when registering voters. Congress can and should change that. The executive order does two things that are within the president’s power: direct the Justice Department to prioritize prosecutions of noncitizen voting, and direct the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizenship lists and send them to election officials. The Court, reversing an overzealous injunction, properly found that nobody had standing to challenge either move. But neither has much effect. Trump also ordered the U.S. Postal Service to develop regulations to prevent noncitizen ballots from being carried in the mails. That would have an effect, but he lacks the power to do it. The Supreme Court decided it would be premature to rule on the legality of rules that have not been finalized. Those rules are unlikely to be in place this election cycle, if ever.

◼ The winning combination of the free market and human ingenuity appears to be yielding yet more remarkable medical advances. The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a drug, daraxonrasib, developed by Revolution Medicines, a small California company. The drug works by attacking a mutated cellular protein called KRAS, which fuels pancreatic and some other cancers that were previously thought to be untouchable. No longer. Daraxonrasib is not a cure, but it is a start. Compared with chemotherapy, daraxonrasib has been shown in trials to increase life expectancy by an additional six months, and sometimes much longer. Former Senator Ben Sasse is currently taking the drug, and we are delighted to hear that he is benefiting from it. Meanwhile, Moderna and Merck have announced promising results from a late-stage trial of an mRNA-based “personalized” cancer vaccine against melanoma. A personalized vaccine takes aim at a specific cellular mutation, meaning that treatment will involve less collateral damage and appears to limit both the spread and recurrence of the disease. We stand alongside medical research, yelling Onward.

◼ Americans are increasingly alarmed by the proliferation of Flock cameras, a brand of AI-powered automated license-plate readers that record passing cars. Critics fear that the cameras might enable mass surveillance. When used properly, however, they have proven to be an effective law enforcement tool for flagging vehicles linked to active investigations. Flock cameras help the police arrest countless suspects and locate thousands of missing persons. But there have also been several cases of misuse by officers, who have used Flock’s database to track civilians for personal reasons. To earn back the trust of their communities, local governments must balance the technology’s genuine public safety benefits with firm guardrails.

◼ The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy has inspired a ghoulish public response. In 2023, Clancy, a 36-year-old mother, allegedly strangled her three young children to death in her basement after sending her husband on an errand. She then attempted to commit suicide by leaping from a second-story window but only paralyzed herself. Outside the courthouse, protesters have assembled to defend Clancy, claiming that she is an innocent victim. On social media, meanwhile, Clancy has gained a passionate following of sympathizers who seek to justify or excuse her actions. Clancy had been prescribed a range of medications to treat psychological problems including depression, insomnia, and suicidal ideation. According to her defense team, the drugs induced psychosis, which drove her to the killings. The struggles often experienced by new mothers should, of course, be taken seriously. But there is ample evidence to suggest that Clancy carefully planned the murders, sending her husband away and calculating how long he would be out of the house. Mental distress cannot excuse such a ghastly crime.

◼ Tim Curry was an impossibly charming character actor. A stage player at heart, he first found fame portraying Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the then wildly transgressive theater-to-film adaptation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Curry demonstrated his versatility in countless supporting roles on film and leading ones on stage. He used his natural expressiveness to play characters as diverse as the cannier-than-he-seems butler in Clue, the devil himself in Ridley Scott’s Legend, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, and even a man dismembered by superintelligent apes in Congo. Always invested in the role and the lovely absurdity of the show. Dead at 80. R.I.P.

◼ Dolly Parton was the queen of country music. During her six-decade career as a singer and songwriter, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She wrote more than 3,000 songs, 25 of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard country charts. In the 1980s, she turned to Hollywood, landing starring roles in 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Steel Magnolias. A prolific philanthropist, her book-gifting program, Dolly’s Imagination Library, has provided more than 300 million books to children around the world. She also donated millions of dollars over the years to medical research and disaster relief. Her sweet twang, blonde wigs, and altruistic heart will be deeply missed. We will always love you, Dolly. Dead at 80. R.I.P.