AI-powered killer robots with no human in the know have been a hypothetical sticking point between the Trump administration and AI companies. But in Ukraine they are already a reality. The New York Times reports on what could be the first known deaths caused by an autonomous drone weapons system: a Russian drone that killed three civilians in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia last month. It’s a scary new world we’re entering. Happy Monday. Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein for MAGA Mondays today at 10:00am EDT on Substack and YouTube. (Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) by William Kristol What do you do if you’re a second-level official in Trump’s Cabinet, basically a laughing stock, but very eager to curry favor with the boss? Well, the boss loves television and has been desperate to find some kind of political victory in the series of embarrassments and parodies with which he has marked America’s semi-quincentennial. But the gimmick you contributed—a big televised American road trip for your family sponsored by companies regulated by your department—hasn’t worked very well. So Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, rushed to the Fox booth at the IndyCar race in DC yesterday. He was asked about Trump’s dispute with Canada and, as you would expect from a Trump administration official, he entered the fight in a particularly stupid and offensive way. The fight Duffy was so excited to join began on Friday, when Trump renewed his trade war with Canada, our second-largest trading partner and the largest buyer of American exports. On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful and well-received speech to his compatriots in which he explained that the Trump administration had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any agreement.” Carney stated emphatically that “We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give them what they asked for.” This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page (normally happy enough to excuse Trump) put the blame squarely on the president in an editorial titled “The Dumbest Trade War Revisited,” with the subtitle: “Trump’s decision to escalate a tariff fight with Canada makes no economic or political sense.” On TV yesterday, Duffy didn’t even try to defend Trump’s tariff war. He also didn’t address Carney’s broader point about America under Trump: “We’ve recognized from the beginning that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes his signature is written in pencil.” But Duffy vaguely knows that the Trump administration aims to be pro-military, pro-social conservatism. So he launched a vehicle attack against Canada on those fronts. Canada, Duffy said, is “a country that doesn’t have a military… We provide their security and they take advantage of us.” As our friends in Quebec would say, c’est faux. Canada has fought alongside us in wars for more than a century. In World War II, Canada suffered about 44,000 war deaths, about 0.4 percent of its population, a slightly higher per capita casualty rate than the United States. (They also joined the war in 1939, two years before the United States.) And, of course, just a few miles from Omaha Beach and the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was Juno Beach, where, as Ronald Reagan said in his speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the world saw “the unsurpassed courage of Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred.” A century later, after the attacks on the United States on 9/11, Canada provided generous shelter to thousands of stranded Americans when our airspace was closed, led the effort to invoke NATO Article 5 on behalf of the United States, and then fought side by side with us in Afghanistan, losing 158 soldiers. I guess it would be too much to expect a member of Trump’s cabinet to know any of this. Or if you know it, recognize it. But Duffy wasn’t done imitating high-profile cabinet members. Going from imitating the macho Pete Hegseth to imitating the prudish JD Vance, Duffy also attacked Canada for its “record euthanasia rates.” He was probably referring to Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program, a more liberal assisted suicide policy than we have in the United States. Whatever the merits or demerits of that policy, one might point out that Canada does, in fact, have a lower overall suicide rate than the United States and, in fact, a higher average life expectancy. But it’s the culture war that matters to Duffy and his audience; not Trump’s trade war, not any real war, not the real well-being of Americans. Meanwhile, it is our neighbors to the north who see the situation clearly. As Canadian journalist Stephen Marche wrote this morning: For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or joining the pseudo-democratic fiscal case of a nation whose only apparent foreign policy goal has been domination for the gratification of its president’s bungling vanity. This description of America under Trump is sad but true. And while Duffy may insult Canada in his effort to suck up to Trump, his claim that “you will see Mark Carney come to the table very, very quickly” is unlikely to be any more accurate than other claims this administration has made about winning the war. Duffy’s comments yesterday are a useful reminder of the bottomless vulgarity and mendacity of Trumpism. Carney, on the other hand, has spoken truth to power. It has reminded us how free men and women must stand up to attempts at autocratic domination. BREAKING: THE MMR VACCINE IS NOT LETHAL: It turns out that some of our nation’s top health officials will say obviously true things about vaccines. All you have to do is put them on the spot and refuse to let them change the subject until they do. To wit: Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, admitted yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation that “the MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.” This directly contradicts Donald Trump’s comment earlier this month that there is a “chance” that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines will be “quite lethal” when given in combination, as they have been routinely administered around the world for more than forty years. But something had to be done to get Oz to say it. “The president said twice that the shot could be lethal,” Margaret Brennan asked. “Do you want to clarify that?” “We want patients to receive the treatments their doctors recommend,” Oz responded, “but we also want patients to have the autonomy to decide what their children receive.” “But he said it was the MMR vaccine and used the term ‘lethal,'” Brennan said. “That’s what I’m asking you to clarify.” “The president wants Americans (and he has said this many times) to get vaccinated as their doctors recommend. As long as they have a choice in the matter,” Oz said. “The challenge we face is that many states haven’t made that clear, and it’s actually harder for parents to ask these difficult questions.” “The MMR vaccine is not offered as three separate shots,” Brennan said. “Merck, which produces it, said they couldn’t offer it for ten years. Currently it’s only offered in a single shot. The president called that single shot lethal. Do you want to clarify that?” “The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine,” Oz finally said. Thank you doctor! Clear communication from our top health officials is very important. A BLUE MIRROR?: Polls and conventional wisdom have been predicting monstrous midterm results for Democrats. But could that be a mirage? Last week, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini made that argument in a Substack post, arguing that “Senate polls are always worse in the summer” and that Democratic candidates tend to lose their apparent summer advantages on Election Day. And looking at the last few cycles, he’s right: “3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern,” Ruffini wrote. “In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of published polls overstated the Democrat relative to the election outcome.” No, answers progressive pollster G. Elliott Morris. “Bias in polls tends to change randomly from year to year,” Morris writes, citing polling data going back to 1998. “Like taking low-probability bets, predicting errors in polls from previous cycles works until it doesn’t.” Morris offers some more ideas about why this cycle might be different in the data: Early polls tend to sample adults or registered voters rather than likely voters. But as Election Day approaches, pollsters tend to move to the more accurate screen of voters. In recent cycles, Democrats have done better in [polls of adults and registered voters] than in polls of likely voters. So the LV shift produced a natural curve to the right that made it look like Democrats were losing ground, when in reality, their support in early polls was being inflated because they sampled the wrong populations. But, as Ruffini’s own polls have shown, this is not the case for 2026. Democrats are doing about one point better in the LV polls than in the adult and RV samples this year. So one could even argue that we should naturally see the opposite trend this year as pollsters shift to LV testing. Read everything and continue to take each survey with a grain of salt. Darline Graham’s show continues:
