The Kash Patel Loyalty Test

What is the FBI doing? Since the start of the Trump administration, the FBI has ramped up their use of polygraphs, or lie-detector tests. Used in the past to suss out whether employees can be trusted with secret information, the FBI under Director Kash Patel has a new application for polygraphs: Sniffing out whether employees have ever said anything mean about their boss, the controversial right-wing figure himself.

“The use of the polygraph, and the nature of the questioning, is part of the F.B.I.’s broader crackdown on news leaks, reflecting, to a degree, Mr. Patel’s acute awareness of how he is publicly portrayed,” reports The New York Times. “The moves, former bureau officials say, are politically charged and highly inappropriate, underscoring what they describe as an alarming quest for fealty at the F.B.I., where there is little tolerance for dissent. Disparaging Mr. Patel or his deputy, Dan Bongino, former officials say, could cost people their job.”

Lie detectors, of course, are regarded as junk science, so it’s a little insane that the FBI deploys them to the degree it does in the first place. But it’s especially wild that they’re trying to use them to sniff out who is loyal to top officials vs. who feels allegiance to the Constitution and to defending the laws of this country, which is really what these agents ought to be concerned with. (Regardless, lie detectors won’t be able to get them very far on either front.)

Tariff whiplash: Yesterday’s Roundup tackled President Donald Trump’s trade war with Brazil. Today, I bring you fresh insanity: Trump has threatened Canada with a 35 percent tariff to be imposed on August 1—an escalation from the current 25 percent he’s already imposed for anything that doesn’t fall under the terms of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “Fentanyl is hardly the only challenge we have with Canada, which has many Tariff, Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, which cause unsustainable Trade Deficits against the United States,” said Trump on Truth Social, changing his argument from “Canada needs to stop bringing fentanyl into our borders” to “Canada in some way exploits us with (unspecified) unfair trade practices.”

“If for any reason, you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 35% that we charge,” warned Trump in a letter addressed to Canada’s prime minister. Then, oddly, the letter’s kicker deals with fentanyl again, letting the Canadian government know that if the border is made more secure, tariff levels will be tweaked again in their favor.

These two items—the Canada tariffs and the Patel loyalty polygraphs—are but two small examples of what appears to be the Trump administration’s second-term ethos: Arbitrary displays of muscle not grounded in cogent arguments, and not really oriented toward delivering for the American people.

Scenes from New York: THE SHARKS ARE OUT IN FULL FORCE! They’re ruining surfing in New York City (a beach town). I partially recant my earlier-in-the-week hypothesizing that an increase in the fleet of drones was possibly leading to an increase in shark sightings and that city policy pulling people out of the water is dumb. I was about to surf yesterday and ran into my neighbors, who said a big-ass shark had been maybe 8 feet away from them in the water; they immediately stopped surfing and hightailed it to shore. This is more anecdote than data, but it really does seem like there’s been an increase in shark activity, from both police and fire department drone reports and on-the-ground reports from shaken-up surfers. Sorry to the haters, but I’m staying OUT of the water for a few days!

QUICK HITS

• How AI-powered scanners are making it so that rental car companies can charge customers for every single minor scratch or ding sustained.

• “State Senator Angela Paxton of Texas, the wife of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced on Thursday that she had filed for divorce, saying she made her decision ‘on biblical grounds’ and ‘in light of recent discoveries,'” reports The New York Times. Mrs. Paxton claims that her husband has committed adultery, and that they have been living separately for more than a year. This might shake up Texas politics to a fairly substantial degree: Mr. Paxton, a Republican, has mounted a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), in which Paxton has repeatedly questioned Cornyn’s conservative bona fides.

• “The Department of Homeland Security is urging local police to consider a wide range of protest activity as violent tactics, including mundane acts like riding a bike or livestreaming a police encounter,” per information obtained by Wired. “Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even ‘on foot’ are framed as potential ‘scouts’ conducting reconnaissance or searching for ‘items to be used as weapons.’ Livestreaming is listed alongside ‘doxxing’ as a ‘tactic’ for ‘threatening’ police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in ‘surveillance sharing.'”

• “Vietnam’s leadership was caught off guard by US President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that it agreed to a 20% tariff, and the Southeast Asian nation is still seeking to lower the rate, according to people familiar with the matter,” reports Bloomberg. “Straight after last Wednesday’s call with Trump, Vietnam’s party chief To Lam told his negotiating team to keep working to bring the tariff rate down, the people said, asking not to be identified as the talks are confidential. The 20% figure came as a surprise as Vietnam believed it had secured a more favorable tariff range, the people said.”

• This take—which is attracting lots of ire online—raises another interesting question: Have vet prices absolutely skyrocketed over the years? Why is this? “As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed,” writes Helaine Olen for The Atlantic. (“One vet, who worked for an emergency-services practice that, they said, raised prices by 20 percent in 2022, told me, ‘I almost got to the point where I was ashamed to tell people what the estimate was for things because it was so insanely high.'”) More on the explosion in veterinary care prices over the last decade here. As someone who is spiritually Gen X and not millennial (the generation most likely to call animals “fur babies”), I have no problem with Caitlin Francis’ coldness in the tweet below, but am mostly just fascinated by the dynamics that got us here.

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