Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Belgian diamond dealers gave Donald Trump a $35,000 gem-encrusted ring for the Fourth of July months after he gave them a zero percent tariff on $2 billion in exports. The Atlantic republished JD Vance’s 2016 essay calling Trump “cultural heroin.” DOGE officially expired on Independence Day, having cost more than it saved and left behind a trail of gutted agencies now hiring back the workers it fired. And Republicans are waging a quiet, systematic war on children’s health.
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Now, the news.
Diamond Dealers Gift Trump $35K Ring After Tariff Break
Nothing says “happy birthday, America” like a foreign industry buying the president jewelry after he exempted them from tariffs.
The Antwerp World Diamond Center gifted Trump a customized, diamond-encrusted gold ring for the nation’s 250th birthday. The ring contains 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds, and six rubies. The diamonds spell out two giant letter T’s. The numbers 45 and 47 are framed in the shape of Superman’s logo.
An engraving on the inside reads, “Crafted in Antwerp for Donald John Trump.” The ring is estimated to be worth $35,000.
The AWDC president said the ring was a reminder that “true partnership, like the finest natural diamonds, are formed under pressure.” That is one way to describe a quid pro quo. Last September, the AWDC announced it had secured a zero percent import tariff on its annual export of more than $2 billion in polished diamonds to the United States.
Trump accepted the ring in a pre-recorded message, calling the diamond dealers “my friends from Antwerp.” The ring was presented at a Fourth of July party in Brussels to the U.S. ambassador to Belgium.
America celebrated 250 years of independence from monarchy by watching its president receive tribute jewelry from a foreign trade lobby. The founders would be thrilled.
JD Vance Once Called Trump ‘Cultural Heroin’
Ten years ago, JD Vance wrote an essay in The Atlantic calling Trump “cultural heroin.” On Saturday, the essay’s tenth anniversary and America’s 250th birthday, The Atlantic republished it, inviting readers to judge for themselves how well Vance’s assessment has held up.
It has held up extremely well, which is the problem.
In the original essay, written during Trump’s first presidential campaign while Vance worked at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Vance argued that Trump offered simple solutions to complex problems without any details for how they’d work. He compared Trump’s political appeal to a pain reliever and called his promises “the needle in America’s collective vein.”
He predicted that Trump’s supporters would one day realize he could not fix what ailed them.
The essay went viral almost immediately. It landed at the top of The Atlantic’s most-popular list while Vance himself was on social media dutifully sharing clips of Trump’s Fourth of July speech.
This is the same period in which Vance privately described Trump as “America’s Hitler” and publicly called himself a “Never Trump guy.” He has since explained that his views changed after watching Trump govern, which is true in the same way that an addict’s views on heroin change after the first hit.
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DOGE Cut 260,000 Jobs. Now the Government Wants Them Back.
The Department of Government Efficiency officially expired on July 4, 2026, as required by the executive order that created it. Elon Musk once said the final step of DOGE would be to “delete itself.” That may be the only thing it did on schedule.
Trump created DOGE on his first day back in office, renaming the Obama-era U.S. Digital Service and installing Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-leaders. Ramaswamy left almost immediately to run for governor of Ohio. Musk clashed with government officials and departed last May.
DOGE’s X account, with nearly 5 million followers, went largely dormant months ago. Its website went dark last month. The president’s proposed budget contains no funding for it.
DOGE claims it saved $215 billion. Independent analysts and watchdog groups have questioned whether those figures reflect actual budget reductions. What is not in question: more than 260,000 federal employees were pushed out through layoffs, buyouts, and early retirement. Agencies that were gutted are now hiring workers back.
The IRS received fast-track authority to rehire up to 8,000 people after DOGE slashed a quarter of its workforce. The State Department is recruiting new Foreign Service Officers after purging its most experienced diplomats.
They could have just left everyone at their desks and set $11 billion on fire in the parking lot. Same result, fewer steps.
Republicans Are Waging War on Children’s Health
The party that wants to protect children from drag queens is surprisingly comfortable taking away their food, their vaccines, and their health insurance.
It starts with vaccines. The Trump administration narrowed the recommended childhood immunization schedule in May, and the Department of Health and Human Services quietly removed vaccine reporting requirements from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, making it harder to track what’s happening.
Then come the nutrition cuts. House Republicans, with the help of four Democrats, voted to slash fruit and vegetable benefits under WIC — the nutrition program for pregnant women, infants, and young children. The proposed cuts would strip benefits from nearly 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, and pregnant and postpartum participants.
Then comes the insurance. Enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP fell by 4.8 million people between March 2025 and March 2026, a 6 percent decline. For children alone, the drop was more than 1.9 million.
These aren’t three separate policies. They’re a sequence. A child who misses vaccinations gets sicker. A child who loses nutrition benefits gets sicker faster. A child who loses insurance doesn’t see a doctor until something breaks.
But at least no one read them a book about a penguin with two dads.
The Part the Billionaires Hate
The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Last-Ditch Effort to Stall $5.8M Payout to E. Jean Carroll Denied. A federal judge denied Trump’s last-ditch effort to delay paying E. Jean Carroll $5.8 million on July 4, without further explanation. The Supreme Court had already declined to review the case earlier in the week, upholding the jury’s finding that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump’s lawyers asked for more time, arguing that his new lead attorney needed to get familiar with the case because his old lead attorney had left to become a federal judge — a position Trump appointed him to. $5.5 million is already sitting in a court-controlled account. Trump made $2 billion last year, mostly in crypto. The amount he owes Carroll is 0.29 percent of one year’s earnings.
Gov. Gavin Newsom Announces Plan to Make Seizing California’s Ballots a Felony. Gavin Newsom is drafting a bill to make it a felony to seize ballots before election officials have certified them, which is the kind of law you’d think you wouldn’t need until a county sheriff in Riverside confiscated 650,000 ballots because a group of election deniers told him they’d found fraud. The bill is aimed squarely at the White House after federal officials opened investigations into local election offices in states Trump lost in 2020, which is a novel use of the FBI. The proposal also includes funding to help local offices count ballots faster, addressing the state’s achingly slow vote count, which has been less of a democratic failure and more of a content pipeline for conspiracy theorists.
Georgia Teacher Gets Nearly $300K in Settlement Over Charlie Kirk Social Media Post. A Georgia school district just paid nearly $300,000 to a former teacher of the year finalist for pressuring her to resign after she posted a Charlie Kirk quote on her private social media account. Kirk once said gun deaths were “worth it” to protect the Second Amendment. Michelle Mickens posted the quote the day Kirk was shot and killed, added no commentary of her own, and was pushed out of her job after a former classmate screenshotted the post. An account with 600,000 followers shared it along with her principal’s contact information. She is not alone: a University of Tennessee professor got $1.9 million, an Indiana University employee got $225,000, and an Iowa teacher got over $200,000, all for being fired over Kirk-related posts.
California Bans ‘Sell By’ Labels, Hoping to Cut Food Waste. California just became the first state to ban “sell by” dates on food packaging and require standardized labels — “use by” for safety, “best if used by” for quality. The “sell by” date was always just one business telling another business when to rotate stock, but consumers saw a date and panicked, stores started pulling products weeks early, and even food banks couldn’t give the stuff away for free because nobody wants to eat something a sticker says is dead. The federal government recommended this fix a decade ago. California throws away 6 million tons of food a year, and an estimated 20 percent of all food waste nationally comes from people staring into their refrigerator and losing their nerve. The experts’ official advice for determining whether food is still safe? Smell it.
