President Donald Trump has held campaign-style events in 17 states, most of them key swing states, in preparation for the 2026 midterm elections. While most presidents have a minimal presence in midterm elections, chief of staff Susie Wiles said in December that Trump would keep a presidential-style campaign schedule for 2026.  “Typically in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House. You localize the election and you keep the federal officials out of it,” Wiles said. “We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot, because so many of those low-propensity voters are Trump voters.”  As a result, Trump has made multiple visits per month to key states where he has touted economic wins, such as investments in domestic manufacturing, baby bonus accounts, and tax cuts from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Many of the states are home to toss-up congressional races critical to maintaining the already slim Republican House majority. “President Trump is hitting the road with unmatched energy to build enthusiasm because he understands what’s at stake this November,” Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters told the Daily Signal. “President Trump is taking charge and delivering the America First message directly to voters, and when they are presented with the facts, voters will reject the Socialists’ radical agenda and elect Republicans up and down the ballot.” Trump addressed three events in Florida this year, where Republicans have the chance to flip several blue seats after the Legislature successfully redrew the state’s congressional maps. The seats include the 9th District; the 22nd District, as Democrat Lois Frankel decided to run in the 23rd District; and the 14th District, currently represented by Democrat Kathy Castor.  Trump has also visited twice each of the swing states Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Georgia is home to a key Senate race, where Republican Rep. Mike Collins is taking on Democrat incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, viewed as one of the most vulnerable Democrat Senate incumbents. Michigan features three key House races and one Senate race, where Bernie Sanders-backed candidate Abdul El-Sayed is expected to win the Democratic nomination next Tuesday. The House races in Michigan could determine which party will control the House, Mitchell said.  “You’ve got the seventh district with Tom Barrett in the Lansing area,” he said. “That’s a very very close seat, one of the closest in the nation. Then you’ve got John James, who’s running for governor, who represents the 10th district, which is Macomb County primarily, and a little bit of Oakland County in the Detroit suburban area.” “On the west side of the state, there’s Bill Huizinga, who’s in the 4th congressional district, and he could get into trouble if this becomes a sort of wave election,” Mitchell continued.  Pennsylvania has four tossup districts currently represented by Republicans: the 1st Congressional District represented by Brian Fitzpatrick; the 7th district represented by Ryan Mackenzie; the 8th district represented by Rob Bresnahan, and the 10th represented by Scott Perry.  Trump visited Pennsylvania to energize his base, said Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling, which is based in Pennsylvania. “Trump’s visits to Pennsylvania are a way to try to fire up the base to get the GOP electorate tuned in to the election because it’s only a short three months away, to make sure they’re galvanized and ready to turn out,” he told the Daily Signal. Lee said polls have found an excitement gap between Democrat and Republican voters. Even though economic data suggests the country is on strong footing, people are still feeling the pain of inflation, Lee said.  “They’re not saving as much money as they had been in the past,” he said, “so there’s a lot of apathy, particularly among former Trump supporters, and we’re seeing that because in our polling, Republicans don’t seem to be as committed to vote for Republican candidates, whether it’s for a governor, for a U.S. Senate race, or for congressional races.”  Trump has made one trip each to Kentucky; Ohio; Texas; North Carolina; Iowa; Tennessee; Nevada; Arizona; New York; Wisconsin; Connecticut; North Dakota; and South Dakota.

War is cruel. The Battle of Camden illustrates this, and recent discoveries on that battlefield shed light on the events of Aug. 16, 1780.   Fought in the summer heat of South Carolina’s Midlands, Camden stands as one of the most consequential battles of the American Revolution. Though a disastrous loss for the Patriots, it became a turning point in the Southern Campaign, leading to strategic changes and linked events that resulted in American victory.  Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates, Maj. Gen. Baron Johann de Kalb, and Lt. Gen. Charles, Earl Cornwallis, tower over Camden’s roster of 4,000 patriots and 2,100 British soldiers. One thousand Americans were captured, and 68 died.  After the Americans fled Camden or were captured, the bodies of their dead brothers were left to rot in the extreme elements. Wild animals took care of most of the remains. It is likely that the British forced American prisoners of war to eventually bury what was left of the fallen. The graves were shallow; farmers in Camden were finding human bones well into the 20th century.   In 2020, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust spearheaded recovery efforts at Camden. Archaeologists conducted a metal detector survey of the site. Among the musket balls, buttons, and other battlefield artifacts, they discovered human bones protruding from the ground. Further excavation revealed the shallow graves of 14 soldiers who fought in the American Revolution. 12 were American, two were British.  Old Presbyterian Cemetery in Camden, S.C. (Jim Sanderlin) Anthropologists arranged for Astrea Forensics, a lab in California that specializes in ancient DNA, to extract and sequence DNA from two of the soldiers. The lab then created the oldest genealogy profiles in their lab’s history, uploading the profiles to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, databases of genetic profiles of users who have opted into forensic comparisons.  One of the soldiers was referred to at the lab as Camden 9B. The lab was able to extract DNA from a petrous portion of his temporal bone, the hardest, densest bone of the human body found behind the ear at the base of the skull. This revealed his three types of DNA: X chromosome from his mother, Y chromosome from his father, and autosomal from his mother and father.  When his profile was uploaded to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, 20,000 living relatives were found. These 20,000 represent the descendants of the soldier’s ancestors.  Researchers began to build a genealogical profile, but they were not positive that this experiment would work since so much time had passed; they supposed that the genetic distance would be too great between Camden 9B and his 20,000 living relatives.  To their surprise, the databases showed that the soldier was linked to prominent families in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Further, they used his three types of DNA to discover the identity of the patriot: teenager John Pumphrey.   Forensic analysts, archivists, and genealogists built a profile of the young soldier and discovered that when John Pumphrey enlisted in the 7th Maryland Regiment in Baltimore in 1777, he was 13 to 15 years old. He was orphaned and could not read or write; he signed his enlistment papers with an X. Records in Maryland indicate that after the deaths of his parents, an older cousin took advantage of young John through the legal system.   The orphan faced financial hardship. Looking to find his way in the world, John became a Continental soldier at Valley Forge with Gen. George Washington. The stories of the winter of 1777-1778 are well known; hunger, cold, nakedness, and disease plagued the camp. John and his fellow Continentals would have experienced it all.   They were trained at Valley Forge by Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who transformed the Continental Army. John and the Maryland 7th went on to fight in some of the major battles, including Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Springfield. Between these battles, John reenlisted and was paid a $100 bonus. Eventually he found himself marching south.  At Camden, one thing after another went wrong for the Americans. Gates marched the soldiers through the hot August night without proper provisions or rest. John’s final moments included chaos and fear as Cornwallis repeatedly outmaneuvered Gates.   After Gates famously fled on horseback, Baron de Kalb heroically led the Maryland and Delaware Continentals on foot, after his horse was shot from under him. De Kalb and John both received mortal wounds.    The British bayoneted many Americans that day, but John’s cause of death cannot be determined as analysis of his remains did not point to a specific injury. What we do know is that John’s bones reveal that he was so young that at his death, the growth plates around his knees had not fully closed.  After the battle, John Pumphrey was listed as missing.  From 6:00 p.m. on April 20, 2023, until the stroke of midnight on April 22, the remains of the Camden 14 lay in repose in the beautiful rooms of the historic Kershaw House near the Camden Revolutionary War Battlefield. Twelve coffins were draped in American flags and two coffins lay under the Union Jack.   At 9:30 a.m. on April 22, horse-drawn caissons carried the coffins to Bethesda Presbyterian Church for a funeral. The remains were brought to the Old Presbyterian Burying Ground, adjacent to the Camden battlefield.   There, the U.S. Army rendered full military honors, including an Apache helicopter flyover. Bagpipes played before American and British military leaders joined South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, Rep. Joe Wilson, Rep. Ralph Norman, Camden residents, members of the Sons of the American Revolution, and members of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Over a dozen of John’s living relatives, representing the 20,000 DNA matches found in the lab, attended. Historian Rick Wise delivered the burial tribute, titled “The Fate That Brings Us Here.”  I recently walked the Camden battlefield and found the new, white granite headstones of the Camden 14. Enveloped in sun and humidity and surrounded by the tall pines of central South Carolina, my own teenage sons came to mind as I reflected on John Pumphrey. John was just 15 to 17 years old when he died fighting for his new nation.   I hope my boys understand the cost of their freedom.   This article is part of a series on the American Revolution in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Democratic Socialists of America don’t like being called communists, though many members might echo the sentiment of leftist influencer Hasan Piker when he says, “I don’t have an issue with an end goal of communism.”   Yet, however the group self-identifies, its agenda is openly revolutionary.  Its plans call for, among other things, abolishing the United States Senate and making the executive branch and the Supreme Court subservient to the House of Representatives.   Like many a revolutionary organ, the DSA acts as a party within a party, and it increasingly represents the youth wing of the Democrats.  Elected officials aligned with the group, like New York city Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., look to be the future of the party.  Yet DSA’s ideas are remarkably old-fashioned—so old, in fact, they were refuted by John Adams in 1787.  That was the year he began publishing a multivolume work called “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America.”  It was so long ago Americans still spelled “defence” with a “c.”  The book refers to “constitutions,” plural, because Adams hadn’t seen the new U.S. Constitution drawn up in Philadelphia that year.  He was actually defending the state constitutions against French intellectuals who insisted they should be more radical.  That was just two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, with all the murder and mayhem it would bring.  The old French versions of today’s DSA schemers condemned bicameral legislatures for the same reason Mamdani’s and AOC’s fans do now: Their idea of “democracy” called for centralizing power in a single body.  No checks, no balances, and certainly no federalism—the whole nation was to be personified in an omnipotent unitary legislature.  Adams, who had been one of the first American revolutionary leaders to call for independence from Britain, was no enemy of popular self-government.  But pure democracy would be as bad as any other kind of centralized despotism—so he defended the “mixed” constitutions of the states, almost all of which had separate upper and lower legislative chambers and divided legislative, executive, and judicial power.  The federal Constitution was drawn up on the same principles—and combined them with a division of powers between the states and national government.  A glance at how the Constitution has performed for the last 239 years, compared to the chaos and bloodshed that engulfed revolutionary France once the proto-DSA types started getting their way there, shows who was right.  But DSA, not content with dreaming of an end to capitalism, wants to end constitutionalism as well.  Revolutionary parties, like Russia’s Bolsheviks, have often had such farfetched goals—the point isn’t to achieve them so much as it is to wreck whatever already exists.  DSA’s first step is to radicalize the Democratic Party, making previously outrageous ideas like packing the Supreme Court seem mild by comparison to the Democratic Socialist program.  Abolishing the Senate may be politically impossible, but de-legitimizing it is a way to de-legitimize obstacles to centralized power—not just the Senate itself, with its equal representation for all states, large or small, but the very principle of federalism.  Why should North Dakota have a government of its own?   What gives the people of Idaho a right to govern their own territory?  California has the largest absolute number of Republicans in the country, but because they live in what operates as a massive one-party state, they not only lack adequate representation, but what representation they have can be snatched away by the Democratic majority—as is happening now thanks to the congressional gerrymandering championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.  DSA wants to make the whole country like California, only worse.  That’s their idea of democracy—the socialist version.  It’s the revolutionary French version as well, and it’s as un-American as anything can be.  Yet it’s a magnet pulling the Democratic Party hard to the left.  Notoriously, DSA has a disproportionate number of members who are highly educated but low-paid or unemployed.   Like the Marxists of the last century or the French philosophes of the century before that, they’re sophisticated enough to seem like they know what they’re talking about, if you haven’t learned how disastrous their ideas have proved to be in practice.  But American education doesn’t teach much about the horrors of communism or France’s Reign of Terror.  Radicals occupied the educational establishment early on, and now they’re reaping political rewards for the ignorance they’ve fostered in the public.  According to recent Cato Institute polling, Generation Z—Americans between ages 14 and 29—favors socialism over capitalism by 53% to 45%, though the “Democratic Socialist” label polls less well.  Despite having “democratic” in its name, however, DSA doesn’t need majority support to bring about revolutionary change for the worse: A motivated minority is enough when the majority is unaware of its danger.  COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced this week that the Federal Aviation Administration launched a new initiative to “streamline commercial space licensing.” The decision removes barriers for companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to further advance space exploration. “America won the first Space Race, and we can do it again—but only if we get government red tape out of the way,” Duffy said. “That’s why President [Donald] Trump has charged USDOT with unlocking the final frontier and re-establishing the United States’ dominance in space.” This initiative, under the FAA, would waive “unnecessary environmental laws” that the department says are “slowing American innovation.” In cutting this red tape, the department says the proposed rule will not impact requirements protecting public health and safety, property, national security, or foreign policy interests. The FAA can now fast-track commercial space launch licensing. Companies with FAA commercial launch licenses could be approved more quickly to launch rockets, re-enter spacecraft, and operate launch and re-entry sites. In a month, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to embark on a journey to discover the unknowns of our universe!Launching 9 months ahead of schedule, Roman is slated to lift off no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30 aboard a @SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. pic.twitter.com/rz7QAlYRJJ— NASA's Kennedy Space Center (@NASAKennedy) July 30, 2026 “Commercial space activity is surging, and we must do everything safely possible to support this vital sector,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said. “The bottom line is clear: we will not keep pace with this rapid growth unless we streamline, modernize, and strengthen our regulatory approach.” According to the Department of Transportation, the FAA has authorized more commercial space operations in the past five years than in the previous three decades. The increase is due to the administration’s overall push for space exploration. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we are supercharging commercial space activity, slashing costs, and strengthening America’s competitive edge in this vital field,” Duffy continued. LIVE FROM SPACE: President Donald J. Trump Calls Artemis II Astronauts After Breaking the Farthest Distance Record in Human Spaceflight HISTORIC!"Your mission paves the way for America's return to the lunar surface very soon." pic.twitter.com/1TzmIEQG0l— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 7, 2026 The proposed rule follows the 2025 executive order Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry, which pushed for an increase in U.S.-based commercial launches. It also instructed Duffy to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for licenses and permits. The FAA can now waive requirements from 13 federal laws for certain licenses. According to the department, this includes laws from the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, parts of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and several other environmental and natural resource laws.

This week, Dr. Amy Acton’s team held a virtual meeting nearly a month after the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee offered comments on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding state laws protecting women’s sports. As Acton told the Toledo Blade on June 30, “I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor, I will enforce and uphold the law.” Among those taking issue with Acton’s comments were the Ohio Democratic Progressive Caucus and Arienne Childrey, a transgender candidate running for the 84th House District. Although Childrey previously mentioned having “high hopes” for a meeting with Acton, the campaign “made no commitments to any sort of action to repair the damage, and they completely refused to offer a retraction of her prior comments.” Childrey also claimed that LGBTQ+ “voices were actively suppressed,” and some “were refused entry” into the meeting. It took involvement from the chair of the Pride Caucus calling and putting Childrey on live speakerphone. “All in all, this felt like a meeting designed to pacify the LGBTQ+ community and allies, without any real commitment to change or making amends for past harm,” Childrey said in a statement. The statement concluded with Childrey extending “a direct invitation” to Acton, calling for “real explanations” and “a conversation that includes a public commitment to repair the damage she has caused.” "And to be clear, this is all about people, because trans youth are not 'issues,' they are people. Trans adults are not 'issues,' we are people." pic.twitter.com/gMsDZQazoS— Arienne Childrey (@Ari4Ohio) July 29, 2026 Childrey did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment. About half of states, including Ohio, have laws on the books protecting women’s sports. Ohio’s law, HB 68, went into effect in 2024 after the Legislature overrode a December 2023 veto from Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Since making the comments, Acton has seen more pushback from liberal constituents. Equality Ohio downgraded Acton’s score from an “A” to “pending,” according to the Buckeye Flame. A statement from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group noted comments like Acton’s “are extremely harmful” and “reflect a broader pattern of scapegoating trans people.” The statement also noted that the pending grade reflects the group’s belief “that accountability is still possible, and that the door remains open at this time.” “Should Dr. Acton choose to take meaningful steps forward, we will update the status accordingly,” the group added.