A tense Oval Office meeting last week put President Donald Trump in the middle of a clash between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s team and a top agriculture lobbyist over pesticides, farmers’ health, and the U.S. food supply.

“The confrontation, which one attendee called ‘shocking,’ exposed a sharp fault line in Trump’s coalition — the push by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement to reduce conventional pesticides vs. farming interests determined to preserve them,” Axios reported.

Secretary Kennedy and his MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement see pesticides as a product that is making Americans sick, while the farmers largely warn that restricting the use of pesticides would make food prices more expensive for consumers and cost farmers — who are already struggling — billions of dollars.

Trump had planned to sign an executive order later that day to promote alternatives to conventional pesticides and to study their effects, Axios reported. American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall opposed the signing of the order, expressing concern that it would send a signal that would undermine Americans’ confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply.

Duvall represents more than 5 million farming and ranching members.

South Dakota farmer and former USDA official Jonathan Lundgren was also present at the Oval Office meeting and supported the president’s executive order.

“One of the take-home messages I really wanted [Trump] to understand is that the farmers were sick right now,” Lundgren told Axios. “We’re literally killing our farmers with these food systems.”

“It was intense in there,” Lundgren told Axios. “They were arguing. It was back and forth.”

Axios added that “Lundgren said Duvall’s decision to forcefully confront Trump was ‘shocking,’ and that the president appeared concerned and ‘wanted to understand why Zippy was so worried.'”

“Several other farmers at the meeting echoed Lundgren’s support for regenerative agriculture, a farming approach focused on improving soil health and reducing reliance on pesticides.”

Trump asked aides for their advice on signing the executive order. Ultimately, he decided to sign it. Later, Duvall agreed to support it.

“Mike Tomko, an American Farm Bureau Federation spokesperson, disputed the idea Duvall wasn’t in favor of exploring pesticide alternatives,” Axios reported. “He said Duvall’s concerns about the executive order centered on the ‘insinuation that our food supply is not safe.'”

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President Donald Trump has a plan to steal the midterm elections, argues The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Will Bunch, and he’s “screaming it out loud.”

Bunch writes that “nothing is scarier than when the 47th president speaks the truth about what’s really on his mind. Because the only thing that’s in Trump’s brain right now is stealing the November midterm election, by changing the rules in his favor…or worse.”

It should not have been surprising that Trump called the bipartisan housing bill he is now refusing to sign a “big yawn,” before he embarked on promoting his SAVE America Act legislation, which critics call a voter suppression bill.

Trump has made clear that that bill is his top priority, and has said so repeatedly. He’s even declared that if the SAVE America Act becomes law, Republicans will not lose an election for the next 50 years.

On top of the SAVE America Act are Trump’s executive orders, Bunch notes, which include effectively ordering an end to most mail-in voting.

“That effort suffered a bit of a setback Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can continue to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after the polls have closed,” writes Bunch. “But that will not stop the Trump regime from politicizing the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November.”

“Last week, Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress that USPS plans to not deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t turn their voter rolls over to the Trump regime, a demand that many governors have resisted so far.”

Then there is Trump’s use of the Intelligence Community.

“The Trump regime has been signaling for months that it sees the U.S. intelligence community — spy agencies like the CIA — not as a tool for finding out what comes next in the Persian Gulf, or if or when China is invading Taiwan, or when Vladimir Putin’s Russian empire will fall,” says Bunch. “No, Trump wants secret agents who can creatively invent theories of foreign-born election fraud that would demand a strongman response.”

Bunch points to then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s appearance in Fulton County, Georgia, “to oversee an FBI raid of voting materials from the 2020 election that Trump, with no evidence, continues to dispute. That link made clear that the regime is looking to create links to foreign actors.”

Gabbard’s replacement, Bunch notes, is Bill Pulte, who has no requisite experience for the job. Pulte “showed up Monday and immediately began firing current staffers, with a rumored list of hundreds. The steep reduction in eyeballs on the world’s trouble spots is disturbing, but what’s even more alarming is the one person Pulte has hired.”

Bunch points to the newsletter SpyTalk, which describes Pulte’s new chief of staff, Christina Norton, as “a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues” who previously ran what she called “the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen.”

He surmises that Pulte and Norton “will have one job: investigating fantastical ‘foreign election plots’ that will be cited to justify radical measures like sending troops to polling places, seizing voting machines, or worse.”

“Now Trump is not only staging another coup, but he is yelling about it, in your face,” Bunch concludes, writing that there is nothing Trump will not do to prevent Democrats from “investigating how he and his family have made billions of dollars off the American presidency.”

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A Democratic strategist is warning Democratic voters against complacency, arguing that the “blowout” midterm many are expecting could vanish — and the fix rests with one key demographic.

Writing at The Hill, Celinda Lake says that Republicans still have a massive war chest, Trump loyalists are still winning big, and redistricting efforts are likely to benefit the GOP.

“Democrats should be worried,” says Lake. “Although President Trump’s approval ratings have been in the doldrums and inflation is angering MAGA voters, the fragile agreement with Iran might help Trump’s numbers and revive Republicans’ chances in November.”

Lake says that Democrats should not rely on Trump administration “missteps” to take back control of Congress in November, but rather must “swell” their turnout at the ballot box.

That turnout relies on women voters — and specifically, those women she calls “skippers” and “flippers.”

Skippers are Democratic voters who did not turn out in 2024. Flippers are disaffected Republicans who could choose to vote Democratic.

“Trump has a serious problem when it comes to women’s votes,” says Lake. Citing a recent New York Times-Siena poll, she notes that nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of women disapprove of Trump’s performance. Another poll showed Democrats with a 21-point lead among women over Republicans. And 60 percent of young women disapprove of Trump as well.

There were millions of Democratic skippers, says Lake. And even convincing a small percentage of flippers to vote Democratic could “swing the outcome” of the election, as they’re not just adding one Democratic vote but reducing one Republican vote.

“My team’s analysis of 2024 exit polls showed that if less than 2 percent of Trump’s White non-college educated voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had gone for Harris, she would have won the election,” Lake writes. “It’s likely that flipping a similarly small percentage of women would make the difference this year, even in newly-minted Republican districts.”

Other polls show “a majority of non-college-educated White Americans now disapprove of Trump’s performance.”

Lake warns that while Republicans ought to be frightened by these numbers, bad polling numbers do not automatically translate into votes for Democrats.

“We need to reach and persuade these women to turn out, especially if the Iran war actually ends and gas prices fall,” she writes. “Democrats must do the work to mobilize skippers and create flippers. If we want to lock up a victory in November, these women hold the keys.”

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