Cheers and Jeers

Today’s notice: Trump vs. New York. The grassroots vs. the Democrats on spending. Beshear vs. the rumor mill. And: Is the Biothreat Radar RFK touted science fiction?

THE LATEST

Trump back in a New York groove? When the president visited the U.S. Open yesterday, organizers reportedly prepared for him to be mercilessly booed like the last time he attended, in 2015. But the leaked USTA memo calling on broadcasters not to show fans booing proved to be largely unnecessary.

Videos posted from inside The Open showed President Donald Trump getting some boos and some audible cheers — as well as throngs of frustrated fans stuck in the security line while Trump made his big entrance. The match was delayed for more than a half hour because of Trump’s presence.

Pick your narrative: There was, of course, an online debate over the amount of cheers vs. jeers detected in various clips. But The Open was not universally hostile territory to Trump, which is a big change from 10 years ago.

The Big Apple can still bite, however. Trump’s plan to make life harder for mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was thwarted on Friday when Eric Adams said he was not quitting the race.

It was the culmination of a long week that exposed a few fractures in the MAGA coalition, and came just hours after a second consecutive poor jobs report was released. After the first one, Trump fired the head of the agency tasked with creating the report.

This time, he spent the weekend prioritizing his social life. On Friday night he hosted a swanky party for Washington insiders at the White House Rose Garden, which he dubbed “The Rose Garden Club.”

“It’s a club for senators, for congresspeople and for people in Washington, and frankly, people that can bring peace and success to our country,” Trump told reporters.

Open tabs: ‘We’re not going to war’ with Chicago, Trump says (ABC7 Chicago); How electricity costs are shaping this year’s elections (CNN); ICE Has Begun Immigration Crackdown in Massachusetts (NYT); D.C.’s mayor says she’s out to win (WaPo)

From the grassroots

Exclusive: Indivisible’s shutdown redlines. The vocal Democratic activist group is sending its New York membership to pressure the state’s federal delegation. There are separate call scripts for House Democrats and House Republicans and open letters sent to Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

The ask: Indivisible wants Senate Democrats to “oppose any funding bill that continues Trump’s healthcare cuts or funds his administration’s lawlessness” and commit to that publicly. It’s a redline.

They are also giving Democrats room to work. The GOP lawmakers are being urged to come to the negotiating table, and Indivisible says it’s fine with Democrats voting for a clean CR by Sept. 30 if it means more time to negotiate a bipartisan bill.

From the Hill

Democrats target Vought: Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rosa DeLauro have released an updated tracker that purports to show the funding streams withheld by the Trump White House, just in time for a pitched fight over spending priorities. The new total? More than $410 billion.

“President Trump and Russ Vought have been stealing resources promised to working Americans in every part of the country,” the Democrats said in a joint statement. “They are cheating families all while giving big corporations and billionaires trillions of dollars in new tax breaks.”

From the campaign trail

The Andy Beshear speculation: There’s talk that Kentucky’s Democratic governor is considering running for the Senate or for president, despite having two years left on his term.

So what’s the truth? “As of today, the door for Andy Beshear for the U.S. Senate is closed,” Morgan Eaves, executive director of the Kentucky Democratic Party and a longtime aide to Beshear, told NOTUS’ Alex Roarty. “He’s stated it on the record that he’s fully committed to serving out the length of his term.”

But… Eaves did leave the door open to a run, even just a tiny little bit. “Of course, he’s always free to revisit that decision,” she said.

THE BIG ONE

RFK’s elusive Biothreat Radar Detection System. The HHS secretary touted in a WSJ op-ed last week that the CDC’s “advanced early-detection tool — can spot pathogens like H5N1 or MERS early enough to prevent catastrophe.”

“I literally wondered what he was talking about,” Johns Hopkins public health professor Gigi Gronval told NOTUS’ Margaret Manto, summarizing widespread head-scratching among experts in this space.

This appears to only exist on paper. One CDC employee told Margaret staff are aware of a proposed Biothreat Radar, but work on it has yet to start. Funding for the program exists in Trump’s 2026 HHS budget proposal, which allocates $52 million for “a new Biothreat Radar program.”

What HHS says: Spokesperson Emily Hilliard called it “a project designed to combine new technological capability with automated result interpretation by artificial intelligence systems.”

The broad strokes of a biothreat radar sound good, experts say. But…the emerging language around how the administration wants to use AI is giving experts some pause.

“There’s peril involved in that,” Brown University pandemic expert Jennifer Nuzzo said. “It used to be that you couldn’t immigrate to the United States if you had HIV. Those rules were changed about 10 years ago, but you could imagine the same kind of tendencies that created that rule in the first place being misapplied.”

NEW ON NOTUS

Shorting the economy you’re voting for. Rep. Tim Moore has up to $245,000 invested in the Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X Shares fund, per his public disclosures. That fund makes investors money when the Russell 2000 stock market index falters – effectively, shorting market growth, Dave Levinthal reports for NOTUS.

That’s pretty different from what Moore says of the economy under Trump. Last month he told his constituents Trump’s tax cuts are “going to spur the economy, which, by the way, we are already seeing happen already.”

Another Kennedy ready to join the family business? John F. Kennedy’s 32-year-old grandson and social media sensation Jack Schlossberg announced on Sunday that he has formed a congressional exploratory committee — the first step towards a run for the seat being vacated by retiring New York Rep. Jerry Nadler.

Nadler isn’t sold: “I don’t think he’s going to be a candidate in the end, and he certainly is not going to be a major candidate,” the 78-year-old told CNN last week.

More: Rand Paul Spars With Vance Over Venezuelan Boat Strike, by Brett Bachman

NOT US

• Trump Tried to Kill the Infrastructure Law. Now He’s Getting Credit for Its Projects, by Richard Fausset for The New York Times
  
• The Movie Trope that Explains Trump’s Political Dominance, by Dan Brooks for Politico
  
• Riots and abuse troubled these former prisons. ICE plans to reopen them, by Douglas MacMillan and Marianne LeVine for The Washington Post

WEEK AHEAD

Today: Scheduled meeting by the House Rules Committee to consider immigration and NDAA-related bills.

Tuesday: Special election to replace the late Rep. Gerry Connolly.

U.N. General Assembly meeting begins in NYC.

Scheduled hearing on “How The Corruption Of Science Has Impacted Public Perception And Policies Regarding Vaccines” by a subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Scheduled hearing on “Hidden Harms: Examining Whistleblower Allegations that Meta Buried Child Safety Research” by a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Wednesday: Scheduled hearing on “From Playground To Classroom: The Spread Of Antisemitism In K-12 Schools” by a subcommittee of the House education committee.

Thursday: Scheduled hearing to consider a slew of federal judge nominees by the full Senate Judiciary Committee.

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