NBC:
Poll: Trump struggles on immigration, prices and Iran as Democrats hold a midterm edge
Voters give Trump higher marks on border security, but they disapprove of his handling of several key issues, according to a national NBC News poll.
Voters give Trump poor marks for his handling of immigration after his administration surged federal agents into the heart of American cities and immigration officers in Minnesota killed two U.S. citizens in January. They are down on his tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down his main tariff program in February and Trump later reimposed some of those levies.
And they don’t like his actions on Iran, with the U.S. now at war with the nation after Trump ordered strikes starting last weekend — strikes a majority say should not have happened.
Meanwhile, voters continue to disapprove sharply of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living, issues that were key to his 2024 victory and remain among Americans’ top concerns heading into the midterm elections.
Wall Street Journal:
The Long-Feared Persian Gulf Oil Squeeze Is Upon Us
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a virtual halt, unleashing the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s and threatening the global economy
One week into President Trump’s war on Iran, the most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s is cascading through the world economy. The disruption quickly fed into higher gasoline and diesel prices at the pump, and higher mortgage rates and borrowing costs for the U.S. government, endangering Trump’s economic priorities.
To be sure, the U.S. has more shock absorbers this time around. Oil is a far smaller component of gross domestic product than it once was, and the U.S. has become a top energy exporter in its own right...
Appearing Sunday on Fox, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that “energy will flow soon” through the Strait of Hormuz. He blamed the rise in prices on “the unknown that this could be some long, you know, drawn-out crisis. But it won’t be.”
But the impact will still reverberate, especially in Europe and Asia. For decades, the U.S. military and its allies have spent billions of dollars ensuring the Strait of Hormuz stays open. Just 21 miles across at its narrowest stretch, and flanked to the northeast by a sworn enemy of the West, the channel between Oman and Iran is a superhighway for about a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas.
Massive amounts of fertilizer sail through these waters, feeding crops on every continent. The few ships that have left the strait since the start of the war were mostly carrying Iranian oil. Traders say crude markets could soar even higher if the strait doesn’t open within days, either with U.S. naval escorts or because shipowners think the danger has receded.
Rogé Karma/The Atlantic:
The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow
A soft labor market, persistent inflation, a potential oil crisis—what could go wrong?
The job market is weakening, inflation is still too high, and we’re at serious risk of a once-in-50-years oil shock. This is almost the exact set of conditions that triggered the stagflation of the 1970s, which at the time was America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the moment, the economy is still far from that kind of doomsday scenario, but the direction of travel is disquieting. The economy’s warning lights might not yet be flashing red, but they are certainly flashing yellow.
The jobs report released this morning showed that the U.S. labor market lost 92,000 jobs in February, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 4.4 percent. The numbers for the previous two months, which had suggested decent job growth, were also revised downward: January now showed fewer job gains than initially estimated and December showed overall job losses. These new numbers continue the trend of last month’s revisions, which showed that the economy had added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, a tenth of the jobs that had been added the year prior. Taken together, the numbers suggest that 2025 appears to have had the most months with negative job growth since 2010—the midst of the Great Recession—and that 2026 is off to a similarly slow start. The Trump administration sometimes claims that weak job numbers are the by-product of deporting undocumented workers, but the native-born unemployment rate has risen by half a percentage point since Trump took office.
Three stories on Texas to follow. Why? Well, because we’re a political blog, and because strategies that winning candidates employ are worth exploring. That’s reason enough.
Washington Post:
Texas primaries raise GOP alarm about Latino voters
Strong Democratic turnout last week in heavily Latino parts of Texas has some Republicans fearing they will struggle to maintain the coalition Trump built in 2024.
Turnout last week in Texas was the latest fuel for GOP worries that the Latino voters who helped power Trump’s 2024 victory are slipping away ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Heavily Hispanic areas have swung back toward Democrats in key off-year races as polls show the public souring on Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration, among other issues.
Trump was elected on promises to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But the scope of his administration’s crackdown has still surprised some supporters who expected him to focus more narrowly on violent criminals. His deportation push has ensnared undocumented immigrants living in the United States for years, including children, and his deployment of federal agents in Democratic-led cities drew intense backlash — especially after the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
David French/New York Times:
James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray
These days, I’m asked more about James Talarico than I’m asked about any politician not named Donald Trump.
Talarico is a 36-year-old Texas state representative and the Democratic Party’s latest and greatest hope for winning its first statewide election there in more than 30 years.
He’s also one of the most faith-forward politicians in the United States.
Talarico doesn’t just root his policies and ideology in his Christian beliefs, he’s a seminarian willing to dive deep into theology. When he’s arguing with the religious right about, say, Christian nationalism, he makes a specifically Christian argument to counter a poisonous Christian movement.
“Jesus liberates,” Talarico said in a sermon in 2023. “Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”
Roger broke the story of the missing interviews. He’s a subject matter expert.
New York Times:
How Talarico Won Texas Democrats With Love, Luck and a Little Restraint
A carefully disciplined campaign that capitalized on viral media, months of organizing and strong outreach to Latino voters helped propel James Talarico to the center of Texas politics.
The moment captured the instincts of a campaign that was defined by strategic restraint rather than aggressive reaction. It was a stay-the-course strategy that transformed the soft-spoken Presbyterian seminarian into a national figure who might offer Democrats a chance to win a Senate seat in Texas for the first time in decades.
Mr. Talarico did not swerve when Representative Jasmine Crockett, one of the party’s biggest rising stars, entered the primary just months before the vote, or when his first opponent, former Representative Colin Allred, dropped out, or even when accusations of racially-charged comments threatened to derail his campaign in its final weeks.
But his win was also a victory for a proud combatant in the 2026 attention economy, reflecting the internet-first mind-set of a young candidate who leveraged an interview with Joe Rogan to catapult his candidacy even before it was official. The Colbert moment helped seal it at the end.
Hint: if Talarico can steal from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, others can steal from Talarico.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
A debate on AI in warfare obscures the truth about an Iran school bombing. U.S. humans are to blame for this war crime.
According to a report in the U.K.-based Middle East Eye, many of the students — mostly young girls who’d packed classrooms on a Saturday morning that is the start of the Islamic world’s workweek — survived an initial explosion and were then taken by a teacher and a principal to shelter in a prayer hall, which was hit by a second, more lethal strike. Some experts believe this was a so-called “double tap” strike — back-to-back hits designed to maximize death and destruction.
It’s been more than a week now since the school bombing — a fiery cataclysm that was so horrific that it’s taken America and the world a while to fully grasp the magnitude of such a war crime. The city where this atrocity occurred, Minab, looks likely to join the anguished map of places from Wounded Knee to Tulsa to My Lai to Kent State to Abu Ghraib that have left indelible blood stains on the soul of a nation that too often falls far short of its lofty ideals.
Have I mentioned that gas prices are up? Trump is responsible.
