The American auto industry is protected and thriving—and that’s thanks to Republicans in Congress doing their job, President Donald Trump said in a rally on July 27.  Trump spoke at the General Motors facility in Milford, Michigan on Monday ahead of the Senate primary debate to come later that evening. The president emphasized that America is doing well, attributing much of the credit to Republicans in Congress, and inviting several Republican candidates on stage. “And thanks to our Republican majorities in Congress, we actually made interest on auto loans fully tax deductible—but only if the car is made in America,” Trump said. “If it’s not made in America, we have no interest in doing that.” With early voting in Michigan already underway, Reps. Lisa McClain and Tom Barrett, U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers, and gubernatorial candidate John James all briefly addressed the crowd during the rally.  Trump made it clear that he could not have improved America without Republicans like these four running for election, all of whom he has endorsed. “With the help of our Republican majorities in Congress, I proudly signed the largest tax cuts in American history for the second time,” Trump said. He also said that his administration will continue to fight crime with the help of a Republican majority. The Auto Industry Under Trump In a state where auto manufacturing is one of the top industries, Trump spoke about the work his administration has done for the car industry, including continuing to allow the purchase of internal combustion engine vehicles. An electric vehicle mandate would have drained the auto industry, according to Trump. “That was a short road to bankruptcy for every single car company in this country, and a total disaster that would have killed the internal combustion engine,” Trump said. “They wanted it dead within five years. As long as I’m president, that will never happen, but it’s going in the opposite direction.” He also said that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy recently gave permission for American car companies to build little cars such as those manufactured by European companies. And although there was a time when car companies were moving to other countries such as Germany, Mexico, and Canada, they are now returning to America, according to Trump. “It’s all coming back,” Trump said. “Who would think? It’s all coming back.” The auto industry is a key part of American success, according to Trump. And it’s dependent on Michigan and the candidates Michiganders choose to represent them in Congress.

President Donald Trump said the United States has far more munitions than it needs, but some national security experts fear the Iran war has depleted critical stockpiles that could be used in other operations. “We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. However, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that at least 1,500 Patriot interceptors have been used in the war with Iran, leaving an inventory of less than 1,000 interceptors that are crucial to missile defense abroad. In 2023, long before Operation Epic Fury, CSIS released the results of a war game showing the U.S. could last less than a week in a high-intensity conflict with China. “We’re very low,” said Robert Peters, a missile defense expert at the Heritage Foundation. “We’ve used an enormous amount of missiles, both offensive and defensive during Epic Fury.” There are costs every time the U.S. expends its munitions or sends them to be used in other conflicts, Peters said. “Every time we give munitions or systems to Ukraine that’s needed to deter Chinese aggression, that adds to the problem,” he said. “We gave a lot of munitions to Ukraine, we have used a lot of interceptors, correctly, in the defense of Israel. We have used a significant amount of ordnance in Epic Fury. That’s not to say that those were unimportant activities or that we got no benefit from them. But we have to understand that there’s costs every time we use these munitions.” Building up the munitions stockpile could take years, Peters said. “You’ve got to appropriate the money to build more missiles at a higher rate than what we’re building today, and then the companies that build those interceptors have to expand production lines, which will take a few years because they’ve got to do new construction, and then they’ve got to get the machines and the people to be able to build these missiles,” he said. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called the report that munitions are dwindling “totally false.” “We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need, despite the fact that an unprecedented amount was given away by Crooked Joe Biden and the Biden Administration to Ukraine and Europe at no cost, in one of many of their extremely dumb moves,” Kelly told the Daily Signal in a statement. She said defense companies are currently “making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels.” “And as we build up, we will start issuing more to our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” she said. A D.C.-based national security expert said the biggest threat is not a lack of munitions but that traditional European allies are not supporting the U.S. in the conflict. “Some of it is will, especially in Western Europe, but a lot of it is also capacity,” the expert said. The Trump administration has been right to push allies to contribute missiles, according to the expert. “The Trump administration has gone where no prior administration has ever gone before in identifying and eradicating direct threat to the American people, and has, by doing so, brought this all to light, and has sharpened the focus on who our actual partners that can contribute and want to contribute are, and where the gaps are with some of our more traditional partners and allies,” he said, “and I think that’s that’s one of the understated but equally important aspects of the administration’s policies.” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said that while there is no shortfall in weapons to address the Iranian threat, there could be a shortfall to address other threats, like if the U.S. were to defend against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or if Ukraine required multiple interceptor capabilities to address a major Russian offensive. “The real question here isn’t necessarily whether the U.S. has the ability to intercept Iranian missiles targeting American bases,” he said, “but does it have a strategy to eliminate the Iranian capability to launch missiles in the first place?”

Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has spent more campaign funds on makeup services this year than any other federal candidate, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis of the senator’s campaign finance records. According to its analysis, Ossoff’s campaign has paid Atlanta-based makeup artist Stephanie Ponder $2,887 since February for “makeup services.” That total exceeds spending on similar services by other prominent Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who has spent $1,837.93 on “campaign event hair & makeup services” in 2026, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who has spent $320 in campaign funds on “hair and makeup services.” The Georgia senator, who is seeking reelection against Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., has made three payments to Ponder since February, the most recent on June 10, when his campaign paid $900. This recent payment dwarfs the latest payments reported by other Democratic lawmakers. Ocasio-Cortez’s most recent reported makeup-services payment was $450, while Tlaib’s most recent expenditure was $110. While the specific nature of Ponder’s services for the Ossoff campaign is unclear, according to the Free Beacon, campaign finance records show payments were made shortly after several high-profile events. Ossoff’s campaign paid Ponder $1,087.33 nine days after an April 18 rally in Augusta, Georgia, and $900 10 days after a May 31 rally in Atlanta. Ossoff and Ponder did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment. Not Just Any Makeup Artist The makeup expenditures come as some liberal media figures have discussed Ossoff as a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination and highlighted the senator’s on-camera presence.For example, MS NOW host Chris Hayes described Ossoff as “very conventionally handsome and young” and noted he “could be in a movie.”His makeup artist already works in the movies. According to her IMDb profile, Ponder’s professional credits include “Remember the Titans,” “The Notebook,” The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1.” Ironically, Ossoff’s makeup artist also worked on “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2020 film adaptation of Vice President JD Vance’s memoir about his tough, low-income upbringing in Middletown, Ohio. 2028 Run? Yet, in a recent interview, Ossoff stated that Vice President JD Vance has “zero credibility as a champion for America’s working class,” while touting himself as a working-class champion. At the Augusta event, for which Ossoff’s campaign apparently spent over $1,000 on makeup services, the senator criticized claims that the MAGA movement represents working-class Americans. At the Atlanta rally, where the senator spent $900 for Ponder’s services, Ossoff argued that many Georgians are struggling with rising costs, saying that for many residents, “groceries, rent, insurance, taxes, the car note, the power bill—the math just does not work.”

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   We’re approaching five months of our on and off war with Iran, but it’s not really quite five months of war. It’s more like forty days of kinetic action, the first forty days, and then the subsequent hundred and ten days are often on negotiations with the Iranian regime, once in a while punctuated with exchanges of missiles and bombs, etc.  So where are we now? What is the strategy of the United States? We’ve been talking about the midterms for seven months, six months, five months, four months, three months, but as we’re looking at August, September, and October, we’re getting down now close to just three months.  So what is the Trump strategy?  What is the Iranian strategy? We know what the Iranian strategy is. The regime cares nothing for its own people, whether that’s the thousand or so collateral deaths through our and our allies’ bombing, and we know that they slaughtered somewhere between 40 and 50,000 of their own, and they don’t care.  As long as they’re corrupt, rich, and in control, that’s all they care about. They have no problem being royals, monarchs, and lording over a nation of rubble.   So what should we do though? They’re trying to wait us out, remember, because they think Trump will—if the price of gas is $4 and the price of oil is $110 and there’s a war going on—the Left will win the midterms.  They’ll take the House, and we’ll have an impeachment circus for the next two years punctuated by lawfare. That’s their strategy. And then you’ll have a Democratic president, they think, soon enough, and it will be Barack Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken all over again. That’s what they hope.  Donald Trump has to have a strategy, so what is it? How’s he going to stop and get out? I think we know he’s now going on a two-week… he just finished two weeks of intensive bombing.   The strategy is to say that I have taken a 50-year investment worth about a half a trillion dollars and essentially destroyed it.  Destroyed it. And I’ve also hit some dual-use targets, and I’m about ready to leave. But I had certain objectives that I want to ensure are met. Number one, they can’t have a nuclear bomb. I can bomb Pickaxe Mountain. I would expect he might do that in the next week and seal it, not necessarily get all the enrichment, but just seal as he did the other nuclear depositories.  He can say I wanted to create turmoil. So when we’re gone and the Iranians start to recoup and they emerge from the rubble, they see what their government’s doing. They see they’re broke, their standard of living is falling, falling, falling, and this theocratic corrupt regime wants to take what little money they have and buy missile launchers and centrifuges and subsidize Arab terrorists, and therefore domestic unrest will continue, if not accelerate.  And that will be a form of containment itself. I also want to ensure if Donald Trump is talking, he would say, I want to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is open. We have done considerable damage to the coastal offensive capability opposite of the strait of the Iranians, and we have attrited its navy, its drone forces.  So he can probably say, with a skeleton American fleet who is always stationed in or at the Gulf, the strait, I can tell my Gulf allies and the Israelis and my allies in Europe and Asia, you depend on the strait, you can help patrol it, and we will help you too. And it won’t be hard to keep it open.  He can also say, “We are not  lifting the sanctions. No, no, no, no. And we’re not going to stop the bank account freezes. You’re not gonna get any money. We’re not gonna talk to you, is what I’m saying.”  And then he can say as well, “I don’t know what the denominator of missiles is. I know the numerator. We have destroyed thousands. But obviously they had prepared for this and there are launchers here and there.”  But Israel and the Gulf states between them have nine hundred combat aircraft. We probably have five to six hundred in the area. If they begin launching missiles, they can always retaliate, and we can keep the strait open, but we’re not going to be in a war footing and the majority of our forces are going to leave.  And here’s what I think is new. He can declare that there is now a government in exile, an alternate regime. It can be based in the Western countries, or it can have affiliates in places in the Middle East that are sympathetic to it. And we will talk to the government in exile, the alternative government.   Who did this?  Ayatollah Khomeini did. For 13 years, he was in Iraq setting up, with the help of Saddam Hussein, the arch enemy of his own Iran, an alternate theocratic government and inundating Iran with propaganda. And then as it started to work and the revolution started to take off, he went the last four months of the Shah’s regime to France, and he sent thousands of cassettes in, and he was the government in exile.  And people in Europe began talking to him. Michel Foucault and other crazy French intellectuals thought he was wonderful. But the point is, then he flew in and hijacked that revolution and took control.   Why can’t that regime suffer what they created? In other words, take the confiscated money, the hundreds of billions of dollars, and say to the Iranians, “We don’t want to talk to you because you can’t tell the truth.  We don’t recognize you anymore as the official government because you killed forty to fifty thousand of your own people. So whether it’s the Shah or a temporary coalition of dissidents, we’re going to recognize a government in exile, and we’re going to give it sufficient funds so it has media capability.”  It can tour Europe, it can tour Asia, it can seek big power support, and we’re going to probably help arm it and arm the Iranian people. And they will be a government in exile. As far as we’re concerned, there is no government in Iran. We don’t know who’s running it, and we don’t care. We do not want to talk to it.  We are talking to a group of people who represent the people of Iran and who have promised us, as a condition of our support, that they will, if in power, quickly move to a transitional government that ensures elections within a year or two. And it worked for Khomeini, it can work for us. Don’t talk to the Iranians.  Do enough damage so you can go home with the assurance they have not had the ability, they do not have the ability, to create a bomb. And the Strait, with the help of our allies, will remain open, and any tit-for-tat further activity can be managed by the fifteen hundred combat aircraft that is shared by U.S.bases, our Gulf partners, and Israel.   And that should be sufficient force to handle a radically debilitated Iran that has lost a half-century and a half trillion of investment. And the moment it gets one dime, it will not spend it on a restive population. It will spend it on Arab terrorists to arm them and to rebuild, but that will be very difficult, both politically when the people are furious at them and both financially when they have a half a trillion dollars of reconstruction and no income.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

For a while there, Airbnb seemed bent on taking a vacation from its principles. Happily, a federal lawsuit has driven home to the company the importance of honoring its stockholders.The lawsuit has prompted Airbnb to rethink and reverse its actions from a year ago, when the company refused to include two legitimate shareholder resolutions—both filed before the company’s deadline—leaving both off the proxy ballot for Airbnb’s 2025 annual meeting.The two resolutions were each delivered by FedEx and signed for, on separate days, by an Airbnb mailroom employee, six months before the meeting and four months before the ballots were sent out. Company officials, though, shrugged off the omission, suggesting the signatures were forged, presumably by some enterprising delivery person.Curious that the malevolent delivery worker should choose—at random—to compromise only the resolutions filed by The Heritage Foundation (owners of $46,000 worth of Airbnb stock) and the American Conservative Values ETF ($447,000 in Airbnb stock)—especially given that a separate resolution, mailed in by a considerably more left-leaning stockholder, made the proxy ballot without any trouble at all.No one at Airbnb has ever explained this odd double-standard, or why, contacted nearly a month before the shareholder meeting with Heritage and ACVF’s concerns, the company declined to make any effort whatsoever to investigate or address the situation.Nor, until being sued, did anyone at the company show any great concern that improperly excluding shareholder proposals is a violation of both company protocol and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules.Shareholders have a right for compliant proposals to go on the company’s proxy materials—to have their voices heard.The Heritage resolution highlighted Airbnb’s long history of political divestment, calling on the company’s board to issue an annual report to shareholders analyzing the legal and reputational risks of bowing to the “profoundly anti-business activism” represented by the “Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions” movement.In 2018, for example, under pressure from some of those activists, Airbnb delisted Israeli-owned rental properties in the West Bank. True, the company relisted those properties the following year, but similar pressures continue to be exerted.Meanwhile, ACVF’s resolution called on Airbnb to issue a report on the potential of its terms-of-use policies to undermine fundamental freedoms. Like many digital service providers, Airbnb has embraced a policy of banning people from their services who are “leaders of hate groups” or engage in speech that the company deems “hateful.” Those words paint in broad strokes—and, oddly, it seems only conservatives are suspected of coloring outside the lines.Airbnb drew media attention in recent years for blocking conservative commentators Michelle Malkin and Lauren Southern from reserving properties—and in Southern’s case, extending that ban to include her parents, for no other reason than their relation to their daughter.Airbnb trumpets tolerance and celebrates diversity, but actions speak louder than words. And Airbnb’s actions—blackballing potential customers whose ideas they don’t agree with and excluding shareholder resolutions that could shed light on its politicized business practices—have been deafening.Displaying that kind of contempt for the views of millions of Americans is unjustifiable—and ultimately, bad for business.In response, the firm I work for, Alliance Defending Freedom, joined with attorneys from top legal firm Boyden Gray in filing a federal lawsuit against Airbnb in federal district court. After the court denied in part Airbnb’s motion to dismiss the case—specifically allowing the claim challenging the exclusion of the resolutions to go forward—the company agreed to include the two shareholder proposals from Heritage and ACVF on the agenda for its 2026 annual meeting of stockholders.It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to steer Airbnb’s leadership in this right direction, but both Heritage and ACVF have expressed their hope that this decision brings about lasting and meaningful change for the company, “creating long-term value for investors and focusing on its core business,” in the words of Andy Olivastro, Heritage’s chief advancement officer.In other words, here’s hoping Airbnb will find this new moral high ground a good place to stay. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.