Washington, DC

1. Capitol Hill’s dog days
2. New Trump tariffs
3. Polymarket’s PPP loan
4. Manchin’s next act
5. House campaign pivot
6. Montana Senate weirdness
7. Loomer’s Ukraine shift

PDB: Cyclospora confusion continues

Trump speaks at rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner … Democrats finalize nominating calendar … NYT: Number of troops deaths in Iran lowered on Pentagon website

Congress loses grip on priorities

The wheels are coming off the 119th Congress, Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Nicholas Wu report. The House is now gone until Aug. 31 and the Senate is in for two more weeks as doubts grow over whether lawmakers can do anything of substance before the midterm elections. “I’m worried about our ability to pass things in general,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Republican leaders’ top priority is passing a government funding bill, more than two months before the Oct. 1 deadline. It’s a savvy plan but a challenging one, said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.: “When’s the last time we had a clean CR in July? I think the Earth’s crust was just cooling.” The funding focus comes as a bipartisan college sports bill, Russia sanctions, and crypto legislation all stall — and as GOP tensions spike over the SAVE America Act, which Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called a preelection “circular firing squad.”

Trump ducks Supreme Court with new tariffs

President Donald Trump’s new tariffs took effect today, exacerbating tensions with US trading partners. The levies are designed to permanently replace the global tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, and ban goods purportedly made with forced labor, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports. They indefinitely apply to 59 countries and the European Union following Section 301 trade investigations. Allies rejected accusations of forced labor — Australia said its anti-slavery measures are “among the strongest in the world,” while Brazil called the tariffs “unjustified.” Analysts said the levies were intended to force countries to limit Chinese imports, but one leading trade expert called it the “wrong policy,” arguing countries would be better served focusing on China’s monopoly on essential goods production. Regardless, the new 10-12.5% tariffs — similar to the US’s current global rate — are expected to have limited economic impact.

Polymarket parent company got PPP loan

Blockratize, the firm that launched Polymarket, received a government loan from the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program less than two years before federal regulators fined it $1.4 million for operating an unregistered prediction market. The previously unreported $39,727 loan was approved in June 2020 — the same month Polymarket entered its beta phase — and repaid in July 2021, according to Small Business Administration data. In January 2022, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Blockratize to “wind down” Polymarket’s US operations because it was not operating “within the bounds” of the law. The loan is no secret to some in its industry: “Polymarket relied on the largesse of the American taxpayer to operate their business actively flouting US regulations,” one executive told Semafor. Polymarket, which now counts Donald Trump Jr. among its advisers and his venture capital firm among its investors, did not comment.

— Eleanor Mueller

Manchin pushes to elect independents

Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is launching the Independent Leadership Council, a new effort to elect independent candidates to Congress that will focus first on competitive seats this election cycle. “We’re trying to build a true independent network,” Manchin told Semafor. “Not a third party, but a movement of people that will bring our country and the people who are participating in politics today more towards the center.” The project will combine work being done by Manchin’s daughter Heather at Americans Together and Independent PAC, an effort led by former FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon to put millions of dollars behind independents like California’s Kevin Kiley (a former Republican) and Alaska’s Bill Hill (who’s supported by Democrats). Most of the chosen candidates will meet with donors and strategists in West Virginia this weekend.

— David Weigel

House pivots to the midterms

House lawmakers departed Washington on a campaign footing ahead of the five-week-long August recess. House Speaker Mike Johnson is vowing to crisscross the country in support of GOP candidates and incumbents, and he’s framing the midterms as “common sense versus communism” in an effort to hitch Democratic candidates to insurgent progressive challengers across the country. Republicans hope that gerrymandering and a backlash to the progressive left will help tip the midterms in their favor despite headwinds. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Democrats plan to launch a pre-midterm “100 days of action” on Sunday that would be “connected to our commitment to fight for an affordable America,” a sign they’re doubling down on cost-of-living issues. He brushed off the Republican attacks, too, insisting the effort to label Democrats “communists” would “fail.”

— Nicholas Wu

DSCC shuns Dem candidate in Montana

Alani Bankhead, the Democratic nominee in Montana’s Senate race, bashed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this week for its “absolute lack of support” and said “it’s not too late” for the DSCC to get behind her campaign against Republican Kurt Alme and independent Seth Bodnar. That’s not going to happen. DSCC executive director Devan Barber told Semafor that “the DSCC partners with viable campaigns who have a path to victory, which Ms. Bankhead does not.” The DSCC did not comment directly on Bodnar, but by traditional metrics he’s the more viable candidate: He’s raised more than $3 million so far and has nearly $1 million on hand; Bankhead has raised only $58,000 thus far. But Bankhead creates a problem for Bodnar by splitting the anti-Alme vote. There’s debate over either candidate dropping out to give one a better chance to beat a Republican.

— Burgess Everett

Loomer becomes Ukraine’s MAGA ally

Far-right activist Laura Loomer went from criticizing Ukraine to meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a rapid transformation that came as a pleasant surprise to Europe and Ukraine’s backers. The roots of Loomer’s pivot, which she began a month ago by acknowledging on her show that she “fell for Russian propaganda,” can be seen in an earlier trip her Loomer Unleashed colleague, Andrew Moore, took to Ukraine with the help of Ukraine advocate Steven Moore. “Andrew is a smart man, and once conservatives get to Ukraine, it is easy to see that Ukraine is winning and deserves our support in their fight for freedom against our longtime adversary of Russia,” Steven Moore told Semafor, noting that his group took Andrew Moore to see an evangelical church in Kyiv that Russia had bombed and embedded him in a Ukrainian drone unit.

— Morgan Chalfant

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is more worried about your phone than your body. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, Murthy joins Max and Ben to make the case that America’s loneliness crisis is a public health emergency — and that social media is a bigger driver of it than almost anything else we’re paying attention to. Plus, why he chose to focus on isolation rather than cancer or heart disease after his tenure as Surgeon General, whether the science on social media harms is as definitive as he suggests, and what’d he say to people who think the health risks of drinking alcohol are worth the social benefits.

Debatable: Restrictions on defense stock buybacks

Congress is in a standoff with industry groups over a push to limit stock buybacks for defense contractors. A provision included in the Senate’s version of annual defense policy legislation would require defense companies that contract with the government to get approval from the Pentagon before buying back their stock from shareholders or paying dividends. The idea has bipartisan appeal, but industry groups have lobbied forcefully against it, characterizing the proposal as a harmful federal intervention in the private sector that discriminates between publicly traded and private companies. “At its core it’s basically one of the largest intrusions and power grabs by Congress into the private sector that we’ve seen in years,” the US Chamber of Commerce’s Neil Bradley told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: The Trump administration spent money that was allocated by Congress to addressing threats from China’s global illegal fishing operations on FIFA World Cup security measures and America250 celebrations.

Axios: Republicans in Washington and South Carolina believe that Darline Graham has an uphill battle to climb in order to get elected to a full Senate term.

White House

• President Trump announced that a coalition of energy providers, utilities, and Republican officials had signed on to a nonbinding pledge to keep energy ratepayers from footing the bill for data centers.