The Friday Brief, August 1, 2025

Summer Meltdown

Inside

The Heat
A White House Press Release
Maggie On Trump’s Epstein Problem
Trump and the One-Eyed God
Death of Democracy Promotion
Faster, Please
Radioactive Wasps
The Ugly American, 2025
Bessent Slips
Josh Hawley, Meet ETTD
What I’m Reading
Scenes from the Home Front

The Big Picture

The Heat

Somewhere between Perdition and the Piggly Wiggly lies the American South in high summer, rank, thick, blistered, and groaning under a sun that no longer shines but interrogates and accuses. To say this has been a hot summer is putting it far too mildly indeed.

For months now, the heat hasn’t merely lingered; it has squatted upon us with the same ugly aggression as a bloated, drunken uncle at a family reunion who refuses to go home, sweating and muttering about the good old days of segregation and cheap gas, his red political trucker-hat sweat-stained and faded now, but a holy relic to him, nonetheless.

It’s not that we dislike summer down here…we are children of it, after all…but this summer has worn the face of something older and crueler. This summer has teeth. This summer is a rebuke. Even the short walk to the pool sears the feet, and the water, at the temperature of blood, is barely a respite.

We have passed into July, feeling it not as a season but as a sentence, scratching the days on the inside of our skulls, dreaming of cooler rain than the brief, spitting steam of most days, whispering to ourselves about October as though it were a fabled land in a fairy tale.

The magnolias have given up, their waxy perfection brown at the edges. The crepe myrtles still flower, defiantly, absurdly, like 30A debutantes performing for an empty ballroom. Even the kudzu and creeping fig seem tired. And when kudzu is tired, you know God has stepped out for a smoke and left Beelzebub to mind the thermostat.

And the air, sweet Lord, the air is thick as potato salad and meaner than a North Florida grandmother with a switch. (and if you’re from the South, you know half the punishment of a switching was when your grandmother said, “Get a switch. From the elm. Make it a good one, or I’ll pick it.”)

It’s the kind of heat here in Tallahassee that feels Old Testament. The kind that doesn’t just make you sweat, but makes you remember every single sin you've ever committed, and a few you haven’t yet but probably will when the devil finds you in the Buccee’s parking lot and offers a cold Cheerwine in exchange for your last shred of decency and your immortal soul

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