The $5,000 Promise

The Theatre in Dallas

The arena in Dallas filled with flags and the sound of Lee Greenwood singing God Bless the USA, a giant video screen rising to reveal dozens of mainly female Trump fans waving little flags and smiling exuberantly. Donald Trump walked slowly across a shiny black stage trimmed with gold in a navy blue suit, white shirt and blue tie as chants of USA erupted.

He was visibly gratified to see the front row Joes from his rallies, including Blake Marnell, who wears a brick-patterned suit resembling a border wall. He spoke for an hour and 44 minutes, surpassing his own record length convention speech set in Milwaukee two years ago. He never stopped to sip water.

He opened with feigned stiffness for a State of the Union, then said this was a harder routine, a place to have a little bit of fun. The crowd roared.

He claimed the arena was packed and that an equal number of people were standing outside, if anybody would like to give up their seat. Reporters saw dozens of empty seats in the stadium, with the nosebleeds in the upper tier mostly unfilled. He made the dubious boast that no one had left the arena after 80 minutes and said everybody loves me and I love everybody.

The speech was a catalog of riffs. He mentioned the Gulf of America and earned cheers and chants of USA. He said Lake Ontario, you know we’re going to call that Lake America. He joked about Ken Paxton, his handpicked candidate for Senate in Texas, saying he may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen but you know what he is? He’s the greatest attorney general in America.

He falsely claimed to have won three presidential elections and declared falsely that people on the other side are actually admitting it. The crowd cheered and shouted four more years.

A Dividend and a Warning

Midway through the night Trump offered an outlandish proposal. If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000. He said it will be called the Trump dividend.

The offer would cost over $1tn. It laid bare the extent of Republican concern about prospects in the pivotal November elections. The party which holds the White House traditionally struggles in midterms, and Trump said we’ve got to change that, because we have something going that’s so good.

He urged voters to pretend that I’m on the ballot despite his historic unpopularity causing many vulnerable Republican politicians to avoid the event. His approval rating is hovering at about 38 percent. Many Republican candidates running in competitive races skipped the two-day confab entirely.

He devoted much of his speech to fearmongering about what would happen should Democrats win the House or the Senate for the final two years of his presidency. There is a crazy little sick cloud over our country, he said. We will defeat communism in America.

He made several references to the war in Iran, warning Tehran not to get cute or the US will have to hit them very hard. He re-enacted the way he told his economic advisors that the US needed to start the conflict because Iran was two, maybe three weeks away from having a nuclear weapon. I hate to do this to you, he said he told them, noting the economy had been doing well.

He appeared to acknowledge economic pain caused by soaring oil prices. Trump says oil prices that spiked because of Iran war likely won’t come down until after midterms.

The convention was the first the GOP has ever held. The Republican Party chairman called it a Trumpapalooza. The event, part rally and part political showcase, is aimed at energizing Republican voters. More than 100 House and Senate candidates were said to be in Dallas, but organizers acknowledged President Trump posted that they’re really asking only those candidates that are in tight races, a little up, a little down, or even to speak. We want to save the stage for them.

Ticket prices reflected the fund-raising calculus. An honorary delegate ticket cost $7,500 for an individual, including floor seating and hotel. It was $25,000 for members of Congress to attend. A fund-raiser with the president cost $250,000 per person. A photo with the president cost $88,600.

Names on Water and Stone

The renaming campaign has become a signature of Trump’s second term. He has issued executive orders during his second term mandating that the Interior Department, in coordination with the country’s Board on Geographic Names, rename familiar landmarks.

The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America. Denali became Mount McKinley, restoring the government’s official name for the tallest mountain in North America from 1917 to 2015. Lake Ontario became Lake America.

The orders were criticized around the world, including by many Americans. Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered with a giant Lake Ontario sign. Alaska’s legislature formally opposed Trump’s renaming of Denali as Mount McKinley.

The claim that former President Joe Biden’s administration renamed roughly 650 geographic features is true. In 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed an order renaming roughly 650 geographic features because their existing names contained a racial slur demeaning Native American women. In September 2022, the Interior Department announced the Board on Geographic Names had approved new names for each of the affected locations. Beyond the renamed Olympic Valley, California, which hosted the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, none of the locations that underwent a name change under Biden could be considered nationally prominent in the same way as Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico or Denali.

On August 27, 2026, President Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes, to Lake America in federal documents. Trump renamed the lake during his trade war with Canada. Rumors began circulating a few days prior to the executive order. After the order, people questioned Lake Ontario’s name history, Canada’s reaction and what else Trump may do.

Snopes investigated claims that circulated online after the order, including that Canadian officials were refusing passage to ships bound for Lake America, and that Trump had posted about building a Melania Canal connecting to Lake Ontario. The claim that Lake Ontario isn’t named after the Canadian province was examined, and the claim that a French map proves Lake Ontario was once called Lac America was found to be altered.

The Drug Price Claim

Trump and administration officials are claiming credit for a recent drop in prescription drug prices, citing deals they’ve struck with drugmakers and the launch of the online direct-to-consumer platform TrumpRx.

It is true that prescription drugs have just seen the largest one-year price decline in decades, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index. The CPI tracks prescription drug prices based on what individuals and insurers, including Medicare drug plans, pay to pharmacies. Those prices are down 3.1 percent since last July, the largest one-year decrease since 1963. Prices didn’t change much in the second half of 2025, but have dropped 3.3 percent since the start of this year, the steepest six-month drop since the BLS started tracking prescription drug costs in 1947.

Trump said during an August 14 speech on Long Island: Under my most-favored-nation policy on drug prices, we are delivering the largest prescription drug price cuts in the history of our country. He repeated the claim during an August 31 event at the White House at which he announced deals with additional companies.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz attributed the drop to the administration’s dealmaking and the launch of TrumpRx, which lists discounts on certain drugs for consumers paying cash prices. This increasing savings that we’re seeing, the additional amount of savings we’re getting — primarily driven not just by having the medications at most-favored-nation pricing, but available to the American people on TrumpRx.gov — is seismic in its nature, Oz said.

Several drug pricing experts say the reasons for that decline are a lot more complicated than the administration is letting on, and neither TrumpRx nor the agreements with drug companies are likely to have been major drivers. They cite other factors they see as likely having a bigger impact, including market pressures driving down the cost of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, more generics entering the market and a Biden-era policy that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

I think it’s totally possible that there are both some Republican policies — or, you know, Trump policies — as well as Biden policies that are at play here, Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president at the nonpartisan health policy research organization KFF, said. But I think there’s also just market forces at play, in particular around GLP-1 drugs, that are really hard to ignore.

Since November, the Trump administration has announced agreements with 17 large drug companies, including Pfizer, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, to implement most favored nation pricing for certain drugs in exchange for three years of tariff relief. For existing drugs, MFN prices apply in only limited circumstances — drugs sold to state Medicaid programs, direct-to-consumer sales through TrumpRx and certain other contexts.

A Warning After 9/11

It is 25 years this week since the 9/11 attacks launched by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida on New York and Washington, which killed about 3,000 people. Though there have been no successful attacks on anything like a similar scale in the US since, many are warning of growing risks.

The US faces growing challenges in countering international terrorism as resources are diverted to other threats, experienced security officials leave and complacency spreads. Some blame Donald Trump for politicising counter-terrorism efforts, making ill-considered and inappropriate appointments to senior intelligence posts and diverting attention from more urgent threats with a campaign against drug cartels.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said: I remember 9/11 and this pure chaos and pandemonium in the streets and I remember thinking that we would never lower our guard again and complacency against a threat that is episodic but when it is revealed highly consequential.

This year, Hoffman told the US House permanent select committee on intelligence that the counter-terrorism architecture built after 9/11 is eroding through budget cuts, personnel losses, and the diminution of terrorism as a national security priority. This was recreating the conditions of under-resourcing and institutional neglect that preceded the 2001 attacks. Moreover, the terrorist threat to Americans has both changed and grown.

Intelligence veterans criticised the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel as director of the FBI, accusing both of lacking sufficient top-level experience in law enforcement.

For the 2026 financial year, funding requested for the principal agencies of the civilian intelligence community totalled $81bn. But the designation of criminal groups such as the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations has stretched resources.

An updated counter-terrorism strategy released in May by the Trump administration has been controversial. Many intelligence experts and analysts have highlighted how the strategy downplays the rising threat from rightwing extremism in the US and stresses instead the battle against leftwing violence, cartels and gangs.

We have finite resources now. You don’t have a blank cheque like after 9/11 and at the same time it’s not just Sunni jihadist groups which are considered the threat, one analyst said.

The president is running for a second act while the apparatus he inherited is being reshaped around his priorities. The crowd in Dallas cheers the spectacle. The analysts who study the threat watch the resources thin.