President Donald Trump returned to Queens, the New York City borough where he grew up, for the U.S. Open men’s final Sunday — and he got a Bronx cheer from the crowd.
When Trump was shown briefly on the jumbotrons at Arthur Ashe Stadium during the singing of the U.S. national anthem — with the president standing in salute — fans responded with an audible cascade of boos, as could be heard on ABC’s telecast. There also were some attendees who clapped, per journalist Ben Rothenberg. That came before the start of the championship match on the men’s side, which pits No. 1 Jannik Sinner (Italy) vs. No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz (Spain).
ESPN is broadcasting the U.S. Open men’s final on nationally on ABC, which aired the crowd reaction to Trump. That came after the United States Tennis Association sent a memo to media partners requesting that they censor “disruptions or reactions” in response to Trump. “We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity,” the USTA said in the memo. Trump is attending the event as a guest of Rolex, in the luxury watchmaker’s private suite, as first reported by the Bounces tennis blog.
The Sinner-Alcaraz match was scheduled to commence shortly after 2 p.m. but the start time was pushed back by more than half an hour because of traffic delays and additional security screening procedures put in place because of Trump’s attendance at the match. The championship finally got underway at about 2:48 p.m., while ESPN’s coverage showed long lines of people still waiting to enter the stadium.
Trump’s most recent appearance at the U.S. Open was in 2015, when he was a candidate still vying for the Republican nomination for president — and he was loudly booed then, too.
ESPN’s exclusive coverage of the 2025 U.S. Open tennis tournament concludes Sunday with the men’s championship on ABC, ESPN Deportes and the ESPN streaming app. Coverage began at 1 p.m. ET with a preview special on ABC.
Trump’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ threats conceal seeds of political weakness
President Donald Trump is vowing to wield apocalyptic power inside the United States, even as the adverse impact of some of his key policies is becoming clear.
His weekend share of a social media meme in which he threatened to wage war on Chicago, the next Democratic city up in his crime and immigration crackdown, was a classic Trumpian tactic. It depicted him as a strongman unafraid to impose force and incited liberal outrage to delight his base. It was also laced with menace and implied lawlessness that reflects his view of the presidency as a tool of personal power rather than a constitutionally limited national trust.
Still, beneath Trump’s hyperbole, there are signs that his second administration, eight months in, is entering a new phase. His frenetic pace and thunderclap tests of the Constitution have thus far had a disorienting impact. Courts struggled to keep up. Democrats flailed, mourning their election loss and trying to work out the basic business of learning to talk to Americans.
But on the economy, public health and foreign policy especially, Trump’s policies are having impacts that risk political blowback. Democratic opposition is stirring through governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ JB Pritzker, who are both looking for a fight to elevate their own political futures. The president had a terrible time in the courts last week, with policy priorities at least temporarily disrupted. A landmark Supreme Court decision is pending on Trump’s tariff policy that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” could be “terrible” if the government loses, since Trump would have to cut refund checks for half of tariff revenue.
The White House response to mounting challenges is to double down on more disruption and executive power grabs. It’s the only way Trump knows. Its new front against drugs cartels in the Caribbean underscores the point. US forces last week blew up a speedboat off Venezuela allegedly holding drug traffickers. Officials reacted to questions about the potential illegal use of force and destruction of due process with machismo. “We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, without bothering to explain why.
The administration’s claims the boat was run by the Tren de Aragua gang could be true. But presidents lack constitutional authority to wage war without informing Congress or the public. Vice President JD Vance upped the populist defiance by saying he didn’t “give a sh*t” on X after a Trump critic described the killings as a war crime. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul responded that it was “despicable and thoughtless sentiment … to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
Pundits often warn that events such as those off Venezuela are “distractions” from other Trump vulnerabilities. But there comes a point when the distractions threaten the Constitution as much as the original escapades. And when is a distraction simply distracting from another distraction?
Challenging political months may lie ahead
Putting aside inflammatory X posts and military bombast — Trump now wants Hegseth to be called “secretary of war” — there is growing evidence that the administration is headed into treacherous political waters.
Trump’s economy — the pre-Covid first-term version, which offered a brief window of voter security — helped win last year’s election. But the Trump economy 2.0, now fully exposed to his idiosyncratic theories on trade and government intervention, is floundering in uncertainty. Friday’s jobs report was dire, not just because only 22,000 positions were created in August. It showed negative jobs growth in June, unemployment at 4.3% at the highest level since 2021, and the impacts of Trump’s tariffs and immigration purges on hiring.
By most measures in the report, the Biden economy was stronger than the Trump one. The manufacturing sector has taken a particular hit, which feels somewhat ironic since the president’s trade wars are meant to revive a 1950s-style utopia of factories running full steam.
For those Americans who buy dinner in grocery stores and who will not be regulars at Trump’s new White House “Rose Garden Club,” his claims that prices are falling are absurd. If this disconnect deepens, the administration’s spin could have a similar impact to the false trope that inflation was transitory, which helped sink President Joe Biden’s hopes of reelection.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pyrotechnical display in a Senate hearing last week, meanwhile, portends extreme disruption to public health. It raised the question of whether Trump’s election win last year was really a message that voters want to destroy all the progress made by vaccines and to risk new epidemics this winter.
In foreign policy, the embarrassing failure of Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin was laid bare by this weekend’s ferocious air assault on Kyiv, the war’s largest yet. How much more carnage needs to unfold before Trump becomes the last person in the world to realize his Russian friend doesn’t want peace?
The president told reporters Sunday he was ready to impose tougher sanctions on Russia. But he’s made threats before. Trump also wondered last week whether India was “lost” to the US after his tariffs pushed a nation US presidents have been courting for 30 years into the arms of China.
Last week was also a setback for the administration in the courtroom. A judge ruled Trump’s deployment of the federalized National Guard to California in June “willfully” violated the law. The ruling coincided with a huge military parade in China showing the immense domestic power of President Xi Jinping. It was a reminder that a US strongman still faces more constitutional constraints than genuine tyrants.
Another US judge ruled that the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members is illegal and blocked its use in several Southern states. One federal judge handed Harvard University a huge victory, ruling that Trump had unlawfully blocked $2 billion in funding against the Ivy League school. And another froze Trump’s termination of temporary status allowing more than a million Haitians and Venezuelans the right to live in the United States.
Why Trump fans don’t think his administration is in trouble
The administration doesn’t have much time for district court rulings, arguing, sometimes with reason, that it will fare better in more conservative appeals courts and at a Supreme Court with an expansive interpretation of executive power.
And supporters see the political environment differently.
Trump has been using wrecking-ball power executive power, defying courts and attacking public health, military, legal, educational and media establishments ever since he took office. This is an end in itself for many MAGA supporters. His relish for battles is a selling point, one that was noted by Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I have tremendous respect for who he is. And a lot of people have tried to really, really make life very difficult for him. And he’s emerged and he’s been a terrific leader and a terrific symbol for many, many Americans,” Ladapo told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Still, Trump seems unconvinced by Ladapo’s attempt to end Florida’s school vaccine requirements. “You have vaccines that work; they just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used,” he said Friday.
Cabinet officials like Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor, understand the base.
Tough talk and forcing liberals to argue that alleged drug traffickers were victims of war crimes can be good politics. So can sending National Guard troops into Democratic cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC, that have tolerated high levels of crime and homelessness.
“Thank God President Trump called the National Guard in to bring peace,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said on “State of the Union,” crediting reservists with lowering crime rates. His comment underscored the political equation here. In the abstract, it may be troubling that soldiers are on city streets and often look under-occupied, with some reduced to picking up trash during a $1-million-a-day deployment. But might not voters get used to their presence and see it as reassuring? Can you put a price on lives saved in the inner cities?
Trump has another thing on his side — there’s no chance that supine Republicans on Capital Hill will do anything to check him, even though his actions off Venezuela and in trade wars are usurping congressional power.
And if all else fails, the White House simply declares victory. Trump’s claims to have ended seven wars might be an exaggeration, and his trade deals lack details — but they sure sound good.
Low polling numbers haunt Trump again
New polls Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating in the low to mid-40s. The latest CNN Poll of Polls has him at 43%. Historically, this is threatening territory for Republicans, with a midterm election just over a year away. But Trump has almost always polled at such low levels during White House years when he’s made little effort to govern for every American, so the West Wing may not be alarmed. However, this a poor place to start if the economy does deteriorate this year.
And that’s the key question. Will Trump’s so far impregnable support from a base that always sustains him crack if the economic goes bad? How long will his promise that a golden age is beckoning stand up if inflation strikes, unemployment rises and economic gloom envelops the nation?
In the short term, Friday’s jobs report may offer some political help by prompting the Federal Reserve into larger interest-rate cuts than expected. But Trump’s attempt to eviscerate the independence of the central bank is a longer-term issue. He could send prices soaring if he orchestrates huge rate cuts next year after the end of the term of the Fed chief, whom he calls “Too Late” Jerome Powell.
The impending peril can be detected in in scattershot response to the jobs report from Trump’s subordinates. Bessent said on NBC that August was the “noisiest” month of the year statistically. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the problem was “dissonance in data.” Wealthy Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick predicted on CNBC that great jobs numbers would be “starting six months from today to a year from today.” That’s no consolation for a working American who just lost their job in Trump’s economy.
None of these officials addressed the core issue: the impact on the economy of idiosyncratic trade policies that have long obsessed one man — the president — but that most experts believe are rooted in fantasy.
Perhaps the economy, which has been extraordinarily resilient, will save Trump. If not, Americans will learn whether he can truly defy political gravity. At that point, a meme of Bill Kilgore, the amoral but guilt-free protagonist of “Apocalypse Now,” wouldn’t be of much help.
The Movie Trope that Explains Trump’s Political Dominance
The 1980 film Caddyshack — in which a teenage golf caddy gets sucked into a power struggle between the bluebloods who run the country club and rich but ill-mannered real estate developer Al Czervik, played by Rodney Dangerfield — is pretty much a metaphor for the last decade of American politics. Voters are the caddy. The rude developer who insults ladies and buys his way into the country club is Donald Trump, right down to the accent. And the judge, doctor and various other professionals scandalized by his antics are the leaders of the Democratic Party. Spoiler alert: The caddies side with Dangerfield’s character, even though they work for tips and he is the kind of guy who can just buy their place of employment. In their defense, it is pretty fun to watch him stick it to the snobs.
Caddyshack and its predecessor Animal House — in which a fraternity of drunken misfits feuds with the preppy frat and the dean of their college — helped establish a type of comedy now called “slobs vs. snobs.” This subgenre spans decades and includes The Bad News Bears (losing Little League team vs. winning team), Revenge of the Nerds (nerds vs. jocks), Trading Places (Black hustler vs. white yuppie), Stripes (enlisted men vs. military brass), Wayne’s World (outsider video artists vs. professional producers) and Dodgeball (independent misfits vs. corporate fitness chain). A lot of American comedies fit this rubric, so long as they pit low-status protagonists against institutional power in ways that expose the people in charge. That part is important: No slobs-vs.-snobs comedy has ever been made about wealthy and powerful heroes beating back an incursion of losers.
I mention this constraint of the form because I think it contains a political lesson for the Democratic Party, which keeps losing elections because its leaders are still urging voters to stop the slobs.
Zohran Mamdani, for example, has become the first mayoral candidate in memory to win the New York City Democratic primary but not the endorsement of his party’s leadership. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Governor Kathy Hochul have all withheld their support, perhaps because they believe voters will prefer former governor/governor’s son Andrew Cuomo or current mayor/former federal defendant Eric Adams. In national politics, too, senior Democrats have repeatedly put their thumbs on the scale: In 2016, party leaders attempted to intervene to elevate Hillary Clinton to the nomination above Bernie Sanders, and the final 2024 nominee, Kamala Harris, was selected with no primary at all. In New York, senior Democrats’ decision regarding Mamdani may prove wise; their choices in 2016 and 2024 did not.
As elected Democrats and their consultants try to figure out where they went wrong in recent elections and how they might turn the party around in 2026 and 2028, they should ask themselves: If this were a movie, would we be the villains?
One reason slobs-vs.-snobs movies have proven so successful with American audiences is that they are about the restoration of meritocracy. In the first act, the slobs are kept down, unfairly, by the snobs’ hold on institutional power, even though the slobs are smarter, more inventive or just more likable. In the second act, the slobs try to stand up to the snobs, but their institutional power seems insurmountable. In the third act, though, the slobs redouble their effort/cleverness/alcohol consumption and expose the snobs as unfit for their positions. The social or institutional hierarchy is torn down, and the slobs become free to succeed on their own merits, without having to join the snobs or struggle vainly against their power.
This outcome was basically what Trump promised voters in 2016. Identical to
Caddyshack’s Dangerfield in his speech, demeanor and financial position if not actual class alignment, he joked and mugged his way to a series of victories over more experienced political opponents. Voters recognized that he was the slob, and his major rivals — first a president’s son, Jeb Bush, and then a president’s wife, Clinton — were the snobs.
That Trump was a boarding school graduate who inherited over $400 million did not seem to affect voters’ calculus, in the same way Danny the caddy doesn’t ask why he should risk his college scholarship to help a millionaire win a bet. In the narrative of the 2016 election, Trump was the slob, even though he was a textbook snob in both background and agenda. From cutting taxes for the wealthy to slashing regulations for corporate America, his policies reinforced the positions of those already in power, i.e. the snobs. But his rhetoric, demeanor and attitude toward the mythic Washington establishment has been pure slob.
One reason Trump has managed to remain the slob in American politics — despite his wealth, his hostility to actually marginalized people of all kinds and his now-total dominance of the Republican Party — is that Democratic leaders have consistently framed him as a threat to the system. On July 3, 2024, approximately three weeks before President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy, the Biden-Harris campaign released a video framing Trump as a danger to democracy and the rule of law. I happen to believe this argument, but it is also what a snob would say. From the incumbent president, the argument that Trump endangered everything Americans hold dear sounded like Caddyshack’s Judge Smails warning that admitting Dangerfield’s Al Czervik would undermine the integrity of Bushwood Country Club, or stuck-up sorority sister Mandy Pepperidge complaining that John “Bluto” Blutarsky was a “P-I-G pig” in Animal House. The argument is not that the snobs are a superior alternative, but that the system preserving their position must be protected.
Any voter with access to a streaming video service will see through this argument immediately, because 50 years of entertainment have trained us to. While a supermajority of Americans continue to say that democracy is good, the word is flexible in both its connotations and its usage by various political figures, and voters know it. The candidate who says voting for her is the only way to save democracy is likely to be heard in roughly the same way as the CEO who warns that raising the minimum wage will lead to communism: as a beneficiary of one way of doing things who is defending that system and, by extension, her position at the top. The proof is in Trump’s 2-1 record in the last three presidential elections and Democrats’ total exclusion from power in Washington.
How much the slob/snob dichotomy has influenced recent races is, of course, a matter of conjecture. Who knows why American voters do anything? Some weigh the issues carefully, but I’m not sure enough do to swing an election. One 2004 paper by Princeton political scientists concluded that rainfall swung the 2000 election for George W. Bush. If you find a slobs-vs.-snobs theory of voter preferences farfetched, you have an opportunity to articulate the first convincing argument that Americans vote based on rational self-interest.
There are other factors, of course, and they are often more decisive than the slobs-vs.-snobs dynamic. The 2020 election, for example, was almost certainly a referendum on the Covid-19 pandemic, which voters were against. It would be absurd to conclude that Trump lost that year because he was the snob to Biden’s slob; Trump lost because the economy cratered and children stopped attending school. The slobs-vs.-snobs dynamic is one force in electoral politics, not the only force.
But it is a persistent pattern, and one that works to Democrats’ disadvantage. In order to change the dynamic that has cost them two out of the last three presidential elections, Democrats need to stop acting like the snobs at the end of the movie and become the slobs at the beginning. Then they can start the process of challenging Republicans’ institutional power. Maybe a second Trump administration and at least two years of total Republican control of Washington will be enough to shift voters’ sense of the parties, casting Democrats as the slob insurgents in 2026 and 2028. But that will only work if they change their rhetoric.
First, Democrats need to stop casting themselves as the defenders of institutions. The language of institutional power will always be the language of snobs. Rather than framing Trump as dangerous to systems that many voters already regard as stacked against them, Democrats should present him and other Republicans as the political arm of big business, inherited wealth and other structures of exclusionary power — because they are.
In order to advance this message, Democrats will need to talk about class. Since Bill Clinton, the party has run away from class issues, but those arguments are the ones that give the lie to Republicans’ claim that they are the slobs. For decades, Republicans have been the party of the rich, pursuing tax cuts and deregulation first and seeing to the cultural interests of their coalition partners second. Trump has continued that approach to governance, and none of his allies in Congress has meaningfully challenged it. Trump’s signature legislation lavishes tax cuts on the wealthy and cuts spending on Medicaid and food stamps; even his populist economic allies on the right have been disappointed. Democrats should call this class warfare what it is.
Some of these arguments and messaging strategies are likely to repel the snobs who are the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. That would not necessarily be a funding disaster. Mamdani and Sanders both built financially effective campaigns on small donors, but they did it by running on economic issues that appealed to voters at the expense of the large-donor class. Thus far, Democratic leaders have proven unwilling to do something similar.
In the third act of the slobs-vs.-snobs movie, the slobs always win, either through official competition (Caddyshack, Dodgeball) or by realizing they don’t care about the status symbols that matter to the snobs (Animal House, The Bad News Bears). In both cases, the slobs prove that they are better than the snobs, because the snobs’ privilege has made them soft. Such movies are based on the fundamentally American belief that poor kids, nerds, uggos and outcasts of all sorts are more likely to get it than people who are wealthy and popular.
Democrats’ biggest problem may be that they have forgotten this basic truth. Now that they are out of power, they have an opportunity to develop the kind of grit and inventiveness that slobs and all other types of underdog need to survive. First, though, they will have to remember that the moral of the slobs-vs.-snobs movie is actually true: The people who have to work for it are better than the people who have it handed to them. Until they embrace this idea and all its potentially uncomfortable implications, they will remain the snobs in the third act of American politics — wild-eyed and increasingly desperate, ordering voters to return to a system the slobs have already destroyed.
Trump says he’s ready to move to second phase of sanctions against Russia
President Trump said Sunday he’s ready to move forward with the second phase of sanctions against Russia amid stalled peace talks to end the war with Ukraine.
“Yeah, I am,” Trump told a reporter, who asked whether he’s ready to move forward with Phase 2 of the sanctions.
Trump has bristled at the suggestion he has not taken action against Russia, which has continued to bombard Ukraine with drone strikes amid efforts by Trump and others to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Asked on Wednesday why he’s not taken action against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump objected to the premise, pointing to the tariffs he imposed on India over its purchase of Russian oil, and he suggested that step was merely the first phase.
“How do you know there’s no action? Would you say that putting secondary sanctions on India — the largest purchaser outside of China, they’re almost equal — would you say there’s no action?” Trump said, referring to the additional 25 percent tariffs placed on India for purchases of Russian oil.
“That cost hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia. You call that no action? And I haven’t done Phase 2 yet or Phase 3,” the president added.
The move toward additional sanctions on Russia comes as progress has appeared to stall on efforts to broker a deal to end the war in Eastern Europe. The president has sought to arrange a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but there has been little progress on getting the two leaders together.
Trump expresses frustration with Russia, Putin after heavy attack on Ukraine
President Trump said he was “not happy” about the Russia-Ukraine war after Moscow hit Kyiv with its largest drone attack since the war began, underscoring his administration’s failure so far to reach a peace deal even after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.
“I’m not happy, I’m not happy about the whole situation,” Trump told reporters after landing at Joint Base Andrews following his trip to see the U.S. Open men’s tennis final in New York.
Trump insisted that no one had been tougher than he on Russian and Putin, and he defended his efforts to end the war, saying those efforts would continue
“I’m not thrilled with what’s happening,” Trump continued. “I believe we’re going to get it settled. I’m not happy with anything having to do with that war.”
Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Sunday was also notable because Moscow hit a Ukrainian government building for the first time since the war began.
The attack did not suggest any signs of a slowdown by Putin and Moscow, even after Trump has increasingly shown his frustration.
Trump in his remarks on Sunday, however, was careful not to single out Russia or Putin for criticism.
When a reporter asked Trump what he thought the biggest obstacle was to getting a peace deal, Trump did not mention the Russian leader or Moscow.
“Well we’re going to see. We have some very interesting discussions,” he said, noting that European leaders would be coming to Washington this week.
Trump in recent weeks has expressed growing exasperation with Putin. He repeated Sunday that he thought the Russia-Ukraine war would have been the easiest conflict to resolve upon his return to office. It has turned out to be among the most intractable.
The president was also asked about the conflict in Gaza, and he offered optimism that a solution would be found to that war as well.
“I think we’re going to have a deal on Gaza very soon. It’s a problem we want to solve for the Middle East, for Israel, for everyone,” Trump said.
On another issue, Trump said his administration would decide in a day or two where its crime crackdown might be headed next.
“We’re going to make a decision about where we’re going to go in the next day or two,” Trump said while decrying crime in Chicago and insisting that Washington, D.C., was now a safe zone because of his actions.
Finally, Trump complimented the fans at the U.S. Open. Trump was met with a mix of boos and cheers at the event and indicated he was not sure how he’d be received because of the liberal tilt of New York City.
He called the fans at the stadium “great fans.”
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