| The 5-Minute Fix will be off next week. President Donald Trump spent much of the past two weeks focused on foreign policy. The U.S. military bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities (to questionable effect) and he traveled abroad to meet with leaders of two prominent alliances. But there were lots of issues back home that drew attention and controversy, too. Here’s what happened this week under Trump. Trump questioned one of the core commitments of NATO, again Trump, along with his political base, has long voiced skepticism about the usefulness of international alliances. Some of his most pointed criticism targeted NATO, a Western global military alliance formed after World War II that promises defense from all member countries if any member country is attacked. “No, I would not protect you,” he said during the 2024 presidential campaign, describing a hypothetical conversation with a NATO member that refused to contribute enough money to the mutual defense alliance. “In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.” He didn’t go quite that far this week, but he continues to unsettle world leaders with his noncommittal approach to the core agreement binding NATO together: That an attack on one is an attack on all. But as he arrived to all-out flattery from other NATO leaders, Trump said what his NATO allies wanted to hear: “It’s not a rip-off, and we’re here to help them.” Hesitation to support NATO is yet another example of how Trump has helped morph a once-hawkish Republican Party into one that has dabbled in isolationist views on global events. A June Quinnipiac poll found that 39 percent of Republicans said American troops shouldn’t get involved if Russia invades a NATO country. On Iran, prominent MAGA supporters questioned Trump’s decision to bomb the country, and 57 percent of Republicans now say they’re concerned about getting into a full-scale war with Iran, a Washington Post survey this week of 1,000 people found. Republicans pushed forward on cutting millions from Medicaid Republicans are working to pass Trump’s massive tax bill as soon as possible. The legislation would make permanent Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and largely benefit the wealthy. Lawmakers are close to making it happen with a key vote in the Senate soon that should be one of the bill’s last hurdles. It’s considered the premier legislation of Trump’s second term, and it’s shaping up to be expensive and unpopular. It would add trillions to the national debt over the next decade, and the version passed by the House makes changes to Medicaid that could leave 10.9 million people without health insurance. The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said this week that the bill “takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.” Recent polls routinely show that a majority of Americans oppose what they know about the legislation and suggest that Republicans are skeptical about it A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found just 49 percent of Republicans say they support the bill, and a KFF poll found a majority of Republican-leaning voters who don’t identify as MAGA oppose it. Millions of Republicans are enrolled in Medicaid. Republicans are moving forward despite these concerns. “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the influential former Republican Senate leader, told his colleagues at a private meeting this week, according to Punchbowl News. “But they’ll get over it.” Trump can continue deporting people to third countries This week, the Supreme Court said that for now, the Trump administration can deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens. Sending migrants to countries that will take them has been a major piece of Trump’s mass deportation plan. Trump deported Venezuelans to a brutal Salvadoran prison without giving them an opportunity to challenge their removals and has tried to deport migrants to South Sudan and Libya. Lower courts largely paused or slowed the practice until the Supreme Court stepped in. Trina Realmuto, the head of the advocacy group that sued on behalf of migrants — the National Immigration Litigation Alliance — said in a statement that the impact of this ruling will be “horrifying.” The merits of the case is expected to play out in the courts during a process that could take months or years to complete. In the meantime: “Fire up the deportation planes,” Tricia McLaughlin with the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement after the Supreme Court ruled. As cases about this and other controversial deportation practices flood the lower courts, the Trump administration sued every federal judge in Maryland this week, where some of the most prominent deportation cases have been heard. The government argues the courts are improperly slowing down deportations. It’s a remarkable attack on the judiciary coming from the Justice Department itself, legal experts told The Post, with potential implications on the independence of the courts to be a check on the executive. The Supreme Court made it harder for judges to check Trump One of the first major moves Trump made when he got back in office was to try to ban birthright citizenship, which gives citizenship to U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants. But the 14th Amendment of the Constitution says anyone born on U.S. soil has American citizenship. An executive order from the president can’t change the Constitution.
Lower courts quickly blocked Trump’s executive order. One judge called it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
But Friday, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court said that Trump can continue to deny birthright citizenship for now because the lower courts overstepped when they temporarily paused a nationwide policy by the president. The Supreme Court didn’t rule on the merits of whether a president can end a constitutional right. But their ruling makes it much harder for judges to be a check on the administration with a tool called nationwide injunctions. As a result, many people who feel their child’s birthright citizenship – or any other right – has been improperly denied by the government may have to individually sue to get relief. The ruling, writes The Washington Post’s Ann E. Marimow, “largely strips federal judges of a powerful tool they have used to halt many of Trump’s policies nationwide, reshaping the judicial process when it comes to challenging executive action.” It could create a patchwork of laws state by state, legal experts told me as the Supreme Court was considering this case. “Birthright citizenship would be available to babies born in one judicial district but not the others,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. "Transgender service members would be permitted to serve on military bases in one part of the country but not another.” Anti-vaccine activists are making policy on vaccines As the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be doing what public health experts feared he might: He fired the entire panel of medical professionals who determine which vaccines to recommend and replaced them with several vaccine skeptics earlier this month. This week, the new committee handed vaccine skeptics a huge win. It voted to effectively remove a preservative from flu shots that medical experts have said is safe. Kennedy wrote a book about this ingredient, thimerosal, alleging it isn’t. Though most flu vaccines don’t use the ingredient thimerosal, the board’s vote to stop recommending vaccines that do could make flu vaccines harder to get and more expensive, since insurance is required to cover what the government recommends. The Post’s Lauren Weber and Lena H. Sun report it “showed the panel’s willingness to disregard scientific evidence.” | 
