Af unny thing happened to our political blowhard class on its way to its next appointed bout of savvy prognosticating. As breathless pundits looked to this week’s handful of off-year elections for telltale signs of the country’s mood swings, the news broke that President Donald Trump has reached a new low in his national approval ratings. In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance in office, leaving just 37 percent approving. As polling analyst G. Elliot Morris notes, the 26 point net gap in disapproval is the lowest Trump has ever clocked—even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when many observers predicted his political demise.

On Sunday night, Donald Trump abjectly surrendered in one of the most intense political battles of his second term. For months, the White House had been pressuring congressional Republicans to hold the line against a bill that would require the release of Justice Department files connected to late pedophile—and Trump pal—Jeffrey Epstein. But Trump couldn’t get every GOP member to do his bidding. Four Republican representatives—Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—stubbornly joined with every House Democrat to support the bill’s passage.

New advances in environmental science are providing a detailed understanding of the human costs of the Trump administration’s approach to climate change.

Increasing temperatures are already killing enormous numbers of people. A ProPublica and Guardian analysis that draws on sophisticated modeling by independent researchers found that President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda of expanding fossil fuels and decimating efforts to reduce emissions will add substantially to that toll, with the vast majority of deaths occurring outside the United States.