Procedure or Plot? Trump Targets Cali’s 30-Day Vote Count

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(Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

There is a ritual to California’s elections now, and the ritual is patience. The polls close, the night ends, and the counting goes on — for days, sometimes weeks, in a state so large it counts like a small nation. To those who live there, it is procedure. To the President of the United States, watching from across the country Thursday, it looked like theft. “The Dumocrats are at it again,” Donald Trump wrote on TRUTH Social, in the capital letters that have become their own form of punctuation. He accused Democrats of trying to “STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

Cali’s Improbable Contest: Establishment vs. Upheaval

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(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

There is a particular kind of political theater that only California can stage, and on Tuesday, it raised the curtain again. Out of a field of sixty-one — sixty-one! — the voters of the nation’s largest state narrowed their choices to two men who could not be more different in pedigree or promise. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra are now headed toward a November contest to replace the term-limited Gavin Newsom, and the early-morning returns suggested neither man intends to be modest about it. For Hilton, the moment carries the weight of history, or at least the hope

Where Trump’s Diplomacy and Netanyahu’s War Diverge

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

There are calls that change a war, and then there is the one President Trump placed to Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday — blunt, profane, and, by every account that has leaked since, decisive. Israel had ordered strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Beirut, Iran had walked away from negotiations with Washington in protest, and Trump saw months of his own diplomacy slipping toward collapse. So he picked up the phone and, according to Axios, opened with a question no aide would put on letterhead: “What the f–k are you doing?” It did not soften from there. A U.S. official summarized

When the Channels Close: Iran Walks Away and Widens the War

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(Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) /

The deal, such as it was, is off. Iran has stopped talking. And it has begun to organize instead. On Monday, after Israel’s strikes on Beirut, Tehran pulled the plug on the back-channel diplomacy that mediators had been quietly stitching together for weeks — the fragile architecture meant to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and walk everyone back toward formal talks. The Iranian negotiating team is suspending, in the words of the government-linked Tasnim News Agency, “discussions and exchanges of texts through intermediaries.” The reason given: the ceasefire, they say, has been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon, which was

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