Letters from an American - Nothing to Stand On

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

July 29, 2026Trump’s approval ratings, on the economy, inflation, gas prices, and his priorities, are sinking to 30% and below. 72% disapprove of his handling of the situation in Iran, There are significant pockets of disapproval even among Trump’s supporters, There is no end in sight for the war in Iran, and Iranian officials appear confident, Iranian negotiators have made their demands clear, The US seems to be running low on air defense munitions, Trump threatened renewed strikes, and oil prices rose with the news, Republicans are focusing on a red meat issue, the prosecution of Dr Anthony Fauci, MAGA Republicans have demonized him, and are attempting to rekindle the fury against him as political tides are running against them as the 2026 midterm elections approach, Fauci chose to  take the 5th Amendment and the Republicans produced no evidence that he had broken any laws, Republicans, looking for ways to get attention on social media were vocal in their attacks on Fauci and in one of the most notable Sen. Bernie Moreno used the f-bomb in an outburst that generated significant media attention.Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

July 29, 26. Arrow Edwards Levy of CNN reported today that a new CNN poll conducted by the public opinion research firm SSRS found that 70% of adult Americans disapprove of the way President Donald J. Trump is handling the economy, while only 30% approve. A whopping 75% disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation, while only 25% approve. When it comes to gas prices, the numbers are even worse for the president. 79% disapprove, while only 21% approve. 65% think Trump's own economic policies have hurt the country,

while only 22% think those policies have improved the economy. 73% of those polled said Trump hasn't paid enough attention to the country's most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. 67% agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country. 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president, while 57% did not agree with that statement.

As Edwards Levy notes, Trump's overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6th, 2021 attack. on the U.S. Capitol, his lowest ever, at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low. Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren't keen on the way Trump's handling the situation in Iran. 72% disapprove, while only 28% approve. 67% think his actions there have hurt the U.S.,

while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it, just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval, even among his supporters. Americans unhappy with Trump's war in Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict

over the past few days. Andrew Eger wrote in the bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a loop, orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions. If we bomb the hell out of them, they'll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they'll give us what we want. Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this the Whiplash War and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear. Sanctions removed, troops out,

no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on getting a deal rather than making peace. Davis Winky of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran War. After the removal from the defense casualty analysis system

of four members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week, created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, On Saturday, the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers. The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28th, when Trump began strikes against Iran. Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmidt,

and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot anti-missile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles. The journalists reported that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane, had warned that further combat would dangerously deplete interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, UN Ambassador Mike Walts told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden's fault, but added that the U.S. has everything it needs to conduct this campaign, and the people who are leaking this nonsense

deserve to be in jail. Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis. But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces. Jared Malson and Suha Ma'aa of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamadreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials see themselves as having the upper hand.

It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation. They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks. U.S. Central Command said all of last night's Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel, we are going to beat the f*** of them. We'll be hitting them hard. They're going to get a beating.

U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq. Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady. The three dissenting regional Fed Bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs. And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents, of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President's Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020. But as Savannah Berman and Janine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump's confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly.

By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were politicizing COVID, and by April 26th, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favor of, by a three to one margin. By the summer, as Trump's panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci,

who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci's warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were lying about COVID. By July, he mused about why Fauci's had a high approval rating, and he didn't. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in COVID cases, because European countries

had shut down 95% of their economies, while the U.S. had shut down only 50%. Trump posted, wrong. We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country. If we tested less, there would be less cases. As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad, suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was not a political person, he added, and I have never, either directly or indirectly, endorsed a political candidate. In October, he dismissed Trump's attacks, saying, they don't bother me. I know what my job is, and I I've got to do it, and I'm going to do it. So that kind of, whatever you want to call it, is to me, I just, it's noise.

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci in recognition of his exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed. But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci, not only as a source of, of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also is the source of the virus itself, alleging, without evidence, that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China,

for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding. After voters re-elected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for rough Roman justice for Fauci, as well as Special Counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Millie. Before he left office, former President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci and others to protect them from political prosecution, saying, the issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any

individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstitutional. Nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base, even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 26 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election. As the Associated Press reported today. For years, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of COVID, an accusation Fauci has called preposterous in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci's arrest and imprisonment, and in 2023 published a book with Fauci on the cover,

explicating what he called the Great COVID cover-up. The Trump administration has seen, fed Paul's crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., searching for eight months to find Fauci's private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican of Wisconsin. Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it in full last week. In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab clearly indicates that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into the COVID virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the community. committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul's many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today. In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed the sole reason Paul is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote. Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion, he said. Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the

legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. More than a hundred times he did exactly that, as Republicans berated him, calling him a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar, mocking him and asking him, do you feel like you're in deep? What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws. More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican of Ohio. yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering, Who the f-f-do-you-think-you-were? F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor,

and the outburst has gotten significant media attention. That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulos of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing, as his daughter's ex-husband, Representative Max Miller, a Republican of Ohio, has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their two-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller,

who is running for a third term, to resign. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.