By the numbers: OKC Thunder just put together one of the greatest single seasons in NBA history

 

Getty Images

84 total wins, a record point differential, an elite defense and the MVP, the list goes on and on

By Brad Botkin

 

Jun 23, 2025 at 5:23 pm ET•

What makes an all-time NBA team? Is it a roster filled with all-time talent? Is it a pure numbers game: wins, point differentials, efficiency rankings, etc.? The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors would like to know if failing to finish an all-time season with a title excludes you from this conversation. 

That's an important word. Conversation. That's all this is. We can't line up the Jordan-Pippen Bulls against the Curry-Thompson Warriors and actually find out which team was better. What we can say is both these teams, and certainly a handful of others, are in the all-time conversation. 

And now our question is this: Does this Oklahoma City Thunder team that just defeated the Indiana Pacers in seven games for the 2025 NBA title belong as well?

From a dynastic standpoint, it's obviously premature to answer yes to that question. There's no doubt that the Thunder -- as the youngest team to win a championship since the 1977 Trail Blazers, and with a league-high 13 first-round draft picks in their war chest between now and 2031 -- are set up to win multiple titles. But until they actually do, which will be easier said than done in what has become the deepest and most equitable landscape in NBA history, particularly in the Western Conference, they cannot be in that conversation. 

But from a single-season standpoint? That's a different conversation, and through any sort of objective lens, it would be almost impossible to keep the Thunder out of it. To put OKC's place in history into perspective, let's start with some numbers and then go from there. 

84

Only four teams in history have topped the 68 regular-season wins that Oklahoma City piled up this year. Add the 16 postseason wins, and that's 84 total victories. Only two teams have surpassed that number, and one of them, the 2015-16 Warriors, who won 88 games after a record-setting 73-win regular season, didn't finish the deal with a championship. The other was the '95-96 Bulls, who won 87 games (the '96-97 Bulls matched OKC's 84 wins). 

There's some important context here. The NBA didn't go to seven-game series in all four playoff rounds until 2003. Prior to that, the first round was only a five-game series, and prior to 1984, there were only three playoff rounds in total. 

So those '90s Bulls teams, for instance, would've had a chance to add one more victory if their first-round series would have been best-of-seven. Not a huge deal, but still relevant. A team like the '66-67 76ers, who won a total of 79 games, would've had to win five more games to win the title as there is now a full extra round and they are all best-of-seven. 

All of this is to say, if you chalk up 84 wins and finish it off with a championship, you are in the rarest of historic air, whatever "era" context you would like to invoke notwithstanding. But it goes deeper, as not only did OKC win a lot of games, but it won them by historic margins. 

12.9

This was OKC's average per-game point differential in the regular season, and it's the largest in NBA history. The previous record, 12.3 by the 1971-72 Lakers, stood for more than a half century. Below are the top five regular-season point differentials. 

1,247

This was Oklahoma City's total point differential for the regular and postseason combined, and it's also an NBA record. This number included:

• 63 wins by at least 10 points (most in NBA history)
• 40 wins by at least 15 points (most in NBA history)
• 12 wins by at least 30 points (most in NBA history)
• 4 playoff wins by at least 30 points (most in NBA history)

It worked the opposite way, as well, which is to say when the Thunder weren't building their own big leads they were erasing those of their opponents. In the regular and postseason, OKC went 19-12 in games it trailed at halftime. That is the seventh-best come-from-behind win percentage in NBA history. 

16

With a 68-14 regular-season record, the Thunder finished 16 games ahead of the second-seeded Rockets in the Western Conference. That is the biggest gap between a No. 1 and No. 2 seed since the 1977 merger. 

Historic defense

The Thunder are the first team since the 2014-15 Warriors to win the title with the league's top-ranked defense, and the only team since the 1976-77 merger to lead the league in defensive rating (106.6), opponent field goal percentage (43.6%) and opponent turnovers per game (17.0).

Including the postseason, here are some more numbers to chew on. 

• 18: OKC's postseason turnovers created per game, the most since the 1996 Bulls (minimum 15 games)
• 16.4: OKC's postseason steals+blocks per game, the most since the 1983 Lakers (minimum 15 games)
• 1,689: OKC's total steals+blocks for regular and postseason combined, the most since the 1981-82 76ers (1,813)
• 10.7: OKC's postseason steals per game, the most since the 1975 Warriors (minimum 15 games)
• 247: OKC's total postseason steals, an NBA record
• 1,094: OKC's total steals for regular and postseason combined, fifth most all-time
• 131: OKC's total postseason turnover margin, an NBA record
• 62: OKC's number of games (regular and postseason) with at least 10 steals, seventh most all-time
• 468: OKC's total postseason deflections, 100 more than any team over the last decade
• 2.5: The Thunder defense finished 2.5 points per 100 possessions better than the next-best defense (Orlando was 109.1). That is the second-biggest gap over the last 25 seasons. Only the 2015-16 Spurs were better with their 98.2 defensive rating registering 2.6 points/100 possessions better than the 100.8 Atlanta Hawks. 

The MVP season by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander notwithstanding, defense was this OKC team's superpower. The Thunder weren't going to shoot you out of the gym, but when they locked in defensively, it was an avalanche. In Game 5 against Indiana, the Thunder became the first team to record at least 15 steals and 12 blocks in a single Finals game since those two stats started being tracked in 1974. 

Even crazier? The Thunder carded at least 10 steals in an NBA-record 15 games this postseason. Next on the list are the 1977 Trails Blazers with 12 such games and the 1985 Lakers with 10. 

Ten steals in an NBA game is a major number to card. The Thunder did it 65 times in the regular and postseason combined. Only six teams in history have ever topped that mark. 

Now, to pile up 10 steals in a playoff game is even harder, by the very nature of facing the best teams in the league. To get to this number in even a couple playoff games would be an achievement. To reach that mark in 65% of your playoff games, as the Thunder did (15 out of 23) is almost hard to fathom. 

The officials allowed defenses to play extremely physically in these playoffs, and the Thunder, already an inordinately disruptive defense, used these conditions to constrict the life out of opponents in a way we haven't often seen in the NBA. 

SGA's all-time season

If you're going to be talked about as an all-time great team, it's basically a requirement to have an all-time great player. As stated above, we can't call the 2024-25 Thunder an all-time great team yet, but we can say they had an all-time great season. 

Likewise, it's too early to stamp Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with the all-time great label, but from a single-season standpoint, few have topped what he did this year when he became the fourth player in history to win MVP, the scoring title and Finals MVP in the same season. Suffice it to say, he's in some pretty good company.

CBS Sports

A few more SGA notes for you ...

• 12 playoff games with 30+ points and 5+ assists, an NBA record
• 10 straight 30-point home playoff games, an NBA record (passing Wilt Chamberlain)
• 15 playoff games with at least 30 points, third all-time (Michael Jordan & Hakeem Olajuwon had 16)
• 212 Finals points, third most all-time (Shaquille O'Neal had 228 in 2000, LeBron James had 218 in 2015)

All season long, Gilgeous-Alexander was the standard for scoring. Combining the regular and postseason, he led the league in 20-point games (95, tied with '90-91 Jordan for most all-time), 30-point games (64), 40-point games (14) and 50-point games (4). Also, SGA's 32.7 PPG this regular season is the highest scoring output in history on a championship team. 

Season/team	Player	PPG
2024-25 Thunder	Shai Gilgeous-Alexander	32.7
1992-93 Bulls	Michael Jordan	32.6
1970-71 Bucks	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar	31.7
1990-91 Bullls	Michael Jordan	31.5

All of this is to say nothing of SGA ranking second in total regular-season steals and postseason steals. He is an all-time one-on-one scorer with a merciless midrange game and the best driver in the world. And way you break this thing down, Gilgeous-Alexander just put together one of the great single seasons in NBA history, as did the Oklahoma City Thunder. 

Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision

June 22, 2025, 2:29 p.m. ET

Credit...Pool photo by Carlos Barria

By Bret Stephens

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

That’s a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies. Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.

Trump chose otherwise, despite obvious risks. Those include Iranian strikes on U.S. military assets and diplomatic facilities in the region and terrorist attacks against American targets worldwide, possibly through proxies and possibly over a long period. One grim model is the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was carried out by Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime most likely in retaliation for President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya. In the Lockerbie atrocity, 270 people lost their lives.

But one set of risks must be weighed against another, and there are few greater risks to American security than a nuclear Iran.

The regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is ideologically committed to the annihilation of Israel and is currently attacking it with indiscriminate missile fire on civilian targets. It is an ally of North Korea, China and Russia — and supplies many of the drones Russia uses to attack Ukraine. It is developing and fielding thousands of ballistic missiles of increasingly greater reach. Its acquisition of a bomb would set off an arms race in the Middle East. And it has sought to assassinate American citizens on American soil. If all this is not intolerable, what is?

Critics fault the administration for its refusal to seek congressional authorization for attacking Iran. But there’s a long, bipartisan history of American presidents taking swift military action to stop a perceived threat without asking Congress’s permission, including George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998.

Critics of the strike also point to an American intelligence estimate from this year that claimed Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb. But that was a judgment about intent, which can be fickle. Trump’s responsibility was to deny Iran’s leaders the capabilities that would have allowed them to change their minds at will, to devastating effect. Amid uncertainty, the president acted before it was too late. It is the essence of statesmanship.

We’ll find out in the coming days and weeks how Iran will react. In his White House address, Trump noted that there are many other targets in Iran that the United States could easily destroy if Iran doesn’t agree to dismantle its nuclear program once and for all. Iran may disregard that warning, but if it does, it is choosing further destruction for the sake of a nuclear fantasy. As in 1988, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to end the Iran-Iraq war for the sake of regime survival — he said it was like “drinking from a chalice of poison” — my guess is that the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, will stand down and seek a negotiated settlement. In my column last week, I suggested the outlines of a potential deal, in which the United States could promise Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its complete nuclear disarmament and an end to its support for foreign proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Whether or not that happens, Iran’s hopes of acquiring a nuclear weapon have probably been seriously degraded. And adversaries everywhere, including in Moscow and Beijing, must now know that they are not dealing with a paper tiger in the White House. The world is safer for it.

Editors’ Picks
A Way for People With Low Credit Scores to Raise Them
A Traveler Waits in the Stars for Those Willing to Learn How to Look
A Beginner’s Guide to Trail Running


Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues.

AMERICA BOMBS IRAN NUCLEAR SITE AT FORDO

At the White House. Pool photo by Carlos Barria

by Lauren Jackson and Evan Gorelick

Last night, the U.S. entered the war with Iran.

President Trump upended decades of diplomacy when he sent American warplanes and submarines to strike three of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including Fordo, its top-secret site buried deep inside a mountain. The bombs fell at about 2:30 a.m. local time.

In an address from the White House, Trump said the goal of the strikes was to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon. He claimed the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated,” but the extent of the damage is not yet clear.

Trump also called for the war to end. “Iran, the bully of the Mideast, must now make peace,” he said. He threatened “far greater” attacks if it did not.

Still, the war continues: Iran said today that it wasn’t open to diplomacy right now. It launched missiles into Israel early this morning, wounding at least 16. Israel responded with its own strikes on Iran. More than 40,000 American troops are stationed in the region, and the U.S. is expecting retaliation. (See American bases that Iran could strike.)

The U.S. attack was an “extraordinary turn for a military that was supposed to be moving on from two decades of forever wars in the Middle East,” our colleagues Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian Barnes wrote.

Below, we explain the strikes and what could happen next.
What were the targets?

The New York Times


America targeted three Iranian sites, including the buried facility at Fordo, the crown jewel in the country’s nuclear program. The U.S. is the only country believed to have bombs big enough to reach it. Israel has been asking Trump to strike the site since its offensive began. Now he has.

Here’s what we know about each target:

Fordo: Iran built this site — where centrifuges concentrate uranium to a form used in nuclear weapons — inside a mountain to shield it from attacks. The U.S. military concluded that one “bunker-buster” bomb would not destroy it. So six B-2 bombers dropped a dozen of these 30,000-pound weapons, a U.S. official said. The attack was the first time the military had used the weapon in combat. See how the powerful bombs work.

Natanz: This is the largest uranium enrichment site in Iran. Its centrifuge halls are also buried deep underground, but experts say this site is less secretive and less heavily fortified. Israel struck the site recently with warplanes; the U.S. struck it with cruise missiles launched from submarines.

Isfahan: The U.S. also hit a site that holds Iran’s largest nuclear fuel stockpiles near the ancient city of Isfahan. Israel hit parts of the facility last week but avoided the fuel.

Why did the U.S. strike?

The U.S. says it is joining Israel in its war to keep Iran from creating a nuclear bomb.

Trump pledged as a presidential candidate to keep America out of “stupid endless wars.” But he also vowed to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Israel and Iran, sworn enemies for decades, have been striking each other for more than a week. Israelis launched a surprise assault that targeted Iranian infrastructure, including nuclear installations, and military leaders. Israel wanted U.S. help, but Trump was noncommittal.

When Israel began its attacks, the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, “We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” Trump said that he would decide “within the next two weeks” whether to help. He took two days.

What’s next?

It’s not clear. But experts at The Times, including our Cairo bureau chief Vivian Yee, outlined a few scenarios:

Iran could retaliate: The U.S. has troops on bases and warships across the Middle East. Iran might attack them. It might also create havoc in international shipping: It could move to shut the Strait of Hormuz, a critical transit hub for the world’s oil and natural gas. All the options carry risks for Iran’s clerical rulers. Read more about their dilemma.

Iran could negotiate: The strikes could give the U.S. leverage in its negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear capacity. They may also force Iran to the table. Still, the prospects for a diplomatic solution don’t seem promising, our colleague Michael Shear writes.

The war could get messier: Iran’s allied militias in the region, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah, although weakened by Israeli bombing, in Lebanon and armed groups in Iraq, have not fully joined the fight.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it had not detected any increase in off-site radiation levels at the nuclear sites the U.S. attacked. Read the latest news.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that the U.S. strikes had been carried out “in full coordination” between the American and Israeli militaries.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been in a bunker, with limited communication, to protect him from possible assassination.

Responses

Israel: The Israeli foreign minister said that Trump “wrote his name tonight in golden letters in the history books.” Netanyahu also praised the attack.

Iran: The Iranian foreign minister said that the attacks would have “everlasting consequences.”
United Nations: António Guterres, the head of the U.N., called the U.S. attacks a “dangerous escalation” and “a direct threat to international peace and security.”

Republicans, including Mike Johnson and John Thune, rallied behind Trump, calling the strikes a necessary check on Iran’s nuclear efforts. Democrats condemned the attack as unconstitutional and warned that it could drag the U.S. into a long war.

Trump Is Losing Political Ground on Immigration

By Molly Ball
June 20, 2025 5:00 am ET

A vigil was held last month outside a Miami detention center that houses immigrants. PHOTO: REBECCA BLACKWELL/AP

The Trump administration’s aggressive deportation program is testing the political bounds of what Americans will tolerate, spurring a backlash from voters and some Republicans and testing the administration’s resolve.

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found that just 43% approved of Trump’s performance on immigration while 54% disapproved. On deportations, 40% approved while 56% disapproved. In the polling average maintained by the analyst Nate Silver, Trump’s immigration policies were popular on a net basis until earlier this month—but are now more unpopular than popular by a 3-point margin. Trump is still viewed more positively on immigration than on the economy and trade.

On Thursday, Trump blasted a Fox News poll showing that 53% of voters disapproved of his handling of immigration, posting on his social-media platform: “They are always wrong and negative. It’s why MAGA HATES FoxNews.” (Fox News’s parent, Fox Corp., and The Wall Street Journal’s parent, News Corp, share common ownership.)

Federal officials in recent weeks have stepped up raids on worksites and farms, seeking to fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. The move has sparked alarm in immigrant communities and street protests in Los Angeles and other cities. Last weekend, Trump directed that arrests be paused at farms and hotels, only to reverse the directive days later.

The back-and-forth was a sign of the confusion and conflict within the administration, which faces pressure from businesses and some Republicans to dial back enforcement even as it is under pressure from the MAGA base to pick up the pace.

Republican members of Congress from California, Texas and Florida have publicly urged the White House to give priority to deportations of criminals rather than migrants who have resided in the U.S. for long periods and have otherwise obeyed the law. The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R., Pa.), called the farm raids “just wrong.” The co-founder of Latinas for Trump, Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, wrote on X that the administration’s actions were “unacceptable and inhumane” and “not what we voted for.”

“I may have voted for Trump, but I can’t stay silent about what’s happening with ICE in LA,” Ryan Garcia, a former interim lightweight boxing champion who endorsed Trump last year, wrote on X. “We can have borders without losing our humanity.”

Presidents of both parties have historically hesitated to pursue large-scale immigration enforcement in the country’s interior precisely because it tends to be politically unpopular. Trump’s push for deportations far from the border has begun to trigger a backlash in public opinion, with polls showing his approval rating on immigration and deportations—formerly one of his strongest issues—has now turned negative.
A pause in immigration arrests at farms was reversed days later. PHOTO: APU GOMES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

People are reacting to the way Trump’s immigration policies have played out, and they don’t like what they see, said Democratic pollster Molly Murphy. “A majority support the policies, a majority oppose the enforcement,” she said. People like the idea of tightening the border and cracking down on illegal immigration, but they view the administration’s conduct as capricious and unfair, she said.

“Trump’s muscularity on immigration has always been a source of strength, but pulling people out of their homes and workplaces and schools seems cruel,” she said. In her surveys, Americans by a 40-point margin oppose deporting people without due process or in violation of a court order and conducting raids at churches, schools and hospitals.

At the same time, some of his most ardent supporters are urging the president to continue aggressive enforcement. “If they’re looking to achieve the deportation numbers that they campaigned on, that the White House says they want, there’s still a lot of work to do to get to that point,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which calls for deporting all migrants in the country illegally. “I’m hopeful they will ramp up deportations and keep it going even when they start to lose some public support,” he said.

The problem, experts say, is that the millions of deportations Trump has repeatedly promised can only be achieved by targeting migrants who have resided in the U.S. illegally for a long time but haven’t broken other laws and have become integrated into society, as opposed to criminals or those apprehended shortly after an illegal border crossing.

“We are witnessing a level of interior immigration enforcement the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, who opposes the administration’s policies. “Nobody likes border chaos, and that was a big reason voters supported Donald Trump in 2024. But interior enforcement is much less popular than border enforcement because it’s socially and economically disruptive.”

The Biden administration’s liberalization of some border and asylum policies and the flood of migrants that ensued were broadly unpopular, helping build support for Trump’s 2024 election comeback. During the campaign, Trump opposed a bipartisan legislative effort to tighten border policies and falsely claimed refugees were eating people’s pets in Ohio. Majorities in polls expressed support for “mass deportations”—a phrase that was printed on signs waved at the Republican National Convention.

But in practice, the administration’s approach to the issue has struck many as both erratic and extreme, with high-profile examples of foreign students having their visas revoked, migrants deported in error or without due process, foreign tourists held for questioning, and even some U.S. citizens detained.
Border Patrol agents driving last week near the wall in California separating the U.S. and Mexico. PHOTO: GREGORY BULL/AP

Trump-supporting podcaster Joe Rogan deplored the administration’s actions on a recent broadcast, saying, “If you got here, and you’ve integrated, maybe you shouldn’t have snuck in. But you did it, and now you’re not breaking any laws, and you’re a hardworking person—those people need a path to citizenship, man.”

Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@wsj.com

To Bomb Or Not To Bomb

June 18, 2025

Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens


Nobody, perhaps not even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.

If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.

And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.

Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.

By contrast, skeptics fear that the lesson Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war that the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.

But it’s also foolish to dismiss the skeptics’ case. Unintended consequences are a fact of life. An American strike could well drive Iran to double down on its nuclear bid as insurance against future strikes, especially if the regime believes it can safely resume the effort once the attacks stop. The key to making the effects of airstrikes stick is to give the regime reason to think otherwise.

Here, then, is what Trump should do: First, drop bunker busters on Fordo and other hardened nuclear sites to ensure that Iran has no fast route to a bomb. That would need to be followed up by dropping a diplomatic bunker buster on Tehran — the proverbial offer Iran can’t refuse.

It would look like this. As an inducement, the United States could offer immediate relief from most economic sanctions, along with a pledge that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Iran’s critical energy infrastructure and other economic assets. The United States could also persuade Israel to end its bombing campaign.

Editors’ Picks
How to Stay Cool and Safe in a Heat Wave
27 No-Cook Recipes for a Heat Wave
Can I Use Sick Leave if I’m Not Actually Sick?



The price? The regime would have to agree to two things: First, permanent, verifiable, comprehensive and immediate denuclearization, including a system of intrusive inspections and an end to its enrichment programs. Second, an end to its financial and military support for Hezbollah, Hamas and other foreign proxies. Trump could also threaten to lease stealth bombers and MOPs to Israel if Iran refuses the terms of the deal.

The supreme leader might well reject the deal out of rage or pride. But he would have to think carefully about the consequences. The regime, including its apparatus of repression, now looks weak and vulnerable to its people; they might well revolt against leaders who would choose uranium centrifuges over sanctions relief. As for Hezbollah and Hamas, they are now spent forces, yielding dwindling strategic benefits for Iran at an unaffordable financial and political cost. And if the regime thinks it can still do anything in secret, it should ask itself how Israel was able to track down and assassinate so many of its top military commanders and intelligence officials as they slept in their beds.

Trump claims he will make a decision "in 2 wks" whether to bomb Iran or continue negotiations.

Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15.

Today, Trump issued a statement through White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, falling back on his usual tactic of promising something “in two weeks.” “Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”

In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program. With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart.

Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted throughout his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the Intelligence Community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.

In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not “enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”

But Iran’s allied militant actors Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been badly hurt by Israeli strikes since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s major ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, fell in December 2024. Discussions began in April of this year, and negotiators met for five rounds by the end of May.

Israel was not included in the negotiations, and on Thursday, June 12, it launched strikes against nuclear and military targets in Iran. The strikes killed a number of nuclear scientists and senior military personnel. Iran retaliated, and the countries have been in conflict ever since.

After the strikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also became the acting national security advisor after Trump fired his first national security advisor for inviting a journalist onto a Signal chat about a military strike against the Houthis, issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel’s attack on Iran. “Tonight,” he said, “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”

But by early Friday morning, Trump appeared to be trying to take credit for the strikes and demanded that Iran make a deal. The next day—Saturday, June 14—was the day of No Kings protests in which at least 2% of the U.S. population turned out to oppose his presidency, as well as the sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C., an embarrassing contrast for the president.

The U.S. possesses a 30,000-pound bomb that would perhaps be able to penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear sites, which are fortified against attack. According to Alex Horton, Maham Javaid, and Warren P. Strobel, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) can penetrate the ground up to at least 200 feet. The U.S. B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only Air Force aircraft that can deploy the heavy MOP.

On June 16, while at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump posted that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.” He continued: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” More than 9 million people live in Tehran, with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area.

Then Trump abruptly left the G7 and on the trip home told reporters on Air Force One that he didn’t care what Gabbard said, and thought Iran was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. When France’s president Emmanuel Macron suggested Trump left to work on a ceasefire, Trump posted: “Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay tuned!” Later that day, he posted that “[w]e”—a word suggesting U.S. involvement—“now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and he credited U.S. weaponry with that dominance.

About a half-hour later, he posted: “We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”

As Trump’s “Stay tuned!” suggested, his hints that he could bring the U.S. into the conflict monopolized the news. It has pushed the No Kings Day protests and the military parade to the background, putting Trump back on the front page.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo interpreted Trump’s shift to back Israel as a typical Trump branding opportunity: “Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it.” In the short term, that product offers a quick way to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program, which has long been a U.S. goal.

But Trump’s flirting with joining a Middle East war has badly split his supporters. Led by Steve Bannon, the isolationist wing is strongly opposed to intervention and suggests that the U.S. will once again be stuck in an endless war.

In contrast, the evangelical MAGA wing sees support for Israel as central to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in the end times. Earlier this month the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said the U.S. was abandoning its longstanding support for a Palestinian state. Huckabee is a strong supporter of the expansion of Israel’s settlements. After the Israeli strikes, Huckabee messaged Trump to urge him to listen to the voice of God. In an apparent reference to Truman’s decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan at the end of World War II, Huckabee told Trump: “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Harry Truman in 1945.”

At the unveiling of two 88-foot-tall (30.5 meters) flagpoles at the White House yesterday, Trump told reporters who asked what he planned to do about Iran: “I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He added, “Nothing’s finished until it’s finished. You know, war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made.”

He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due, you know, because things change.”

Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) pointed out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the $1 billion mission he led against the Houthis—who do not have a navy—has not restored the ability of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels to go through the Red Sea. Instead, it cost the U.S. two F18 Hornets, which cost $60 million apiece, and seven Reaper drones that cost another $200 million. Duckworth accused Hegseth of “blowing through money” and said: “Your failures…since you've taken office, have been staggering. You sent classified operational information over Signal to chest thump in front of your wife, who, by the way, has no security clearance, risking service member lives in the process…. You’ve created such a hostile command environment that no one wants to serve as your chief of staff or work with you in other senior lead [Department of Defense] leadership roles.”

“But what we should all be talking about more than all of this,” she added, “is that you have an unjustified, un-American misuse of the military in American cities, pulling resources and attention away from core missions to the detriment of the country, the war fighters, and, yes, the war fighting that you claim to love.”

Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Hegseth and Gabbard have been sidelined in discussions of whether the U.S. will get involved in the conflict. The White House is also operating without a full complement of professional staffers at the National Security Council, since Rubio fired many of them when he took over from Waltz, apparently with the goal of replacing the think-tank mentality of past NSCs with a group that would simply implement the president’s ideas.

Talking Points Memo’s Marshall noted Tuesday that “there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing back on the idea that Trump can unilaterally decide to take the United States into a war. On Monday, Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a measure to reassert Congress’s power over the authority to make war. The Constitution explicitly gives that authority to Congress, not the president, but presidents have chipped away at that power for decades. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced another measure to bar the use of federal funds for military force without authorization by Congress.

Look at the Ukraine War to Understand Why Israel Struck Iran

June 14, 2025

By David French
Opinion Columnist

While it’s far too soon to tell whether Israel’s military strikes will cripple or even substantially set back Iran’s nuclear program, the necessity of stopping Iran’s march to a bomb is far more clear today than it was even three years ago.

Two things have happened since President Trump’s first term that alter the strategic calculus: Russia invaded Ukraine, and Hamas massacred Israeli civilians.

The first event taught the world a lesson it shouldn’t forget. When a nuclear-armed nation engages in armed aggression, the rest of the world’s options narrow considerably. If Russia didn’t possess a nuclear deterrent, it’s highly likely that Western support would have been more immediate, more intense and more decisive.

Instead, Western powers were often slow to approve new weapons transfers, and when they did provide more capable weapons, they initially placed sharp limits on their use. Western aid certainly kept Ukraine alive, but restrictions on that aid have inhibited its defense.

One could easily imagine a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, or granting Ukraine weapons and a freedom of action to use those weapons that is more similar to the freedom Israel currently enjoys. But at every step Western powers have worried that they might be pushing Russia too far. This means that aid has often been too slow and too limited to give Ukraine a viable chance of reversing Russian gains.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal, in other words, serves as the world’s most dangerous insurance policy. It grants Russia the ability to launch aggressive military operations while also exercising at least some degree of control over the armed response.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal serves the same purpose. It means that Western powers can’t really contemplate the same kind of military actions that ultimately ended Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq or Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya.

While the West might look at both interventions as cautionary tales (they unleashed considerable disorder), dictators look and see something else: a gruesome end to despotic regimes, an end they desperately want to avoid for themselves.

Now, imagine Iran with even a modest nuclear arsenal. Even if it didn’t try to obliterate Israeli cities, it could use its arsenal to grant it a freedom of action in conventional war that it currently lacks. Like Russia, it could be relentlessly aggressive at the same time that its nuclear weapons could maintain the regime, even in the face of military defeat. They would constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself.

Editors’ Picks
Go Ahead, Have a ‘Fridge Cigarette’
What Is Tapping, and Can It Really Improve Mental Health?
How a Neon Light Artist Spends Her Day in the Studio


At the same time, Israel is living with the reality since Oct. 7, 2023, that its enemies will directly target civilians, massacre them on video and celebrate their deaths. Is there a sovereign nation on the planet that would then permit its chief adversary — the primary military backer of its terrorist enemies — to possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction if it believes it can do so at a reasonable military cost?

In fact, Israel has a much better window of opportunity to stop Iran’s race to a bomb than either India or Pakistan had to stop each other’s nuclear program — or than the United States and South Korea had to stop North Korea. Each of those nations possessed enormous, intact conventional forces that would have made any military intervention extraordinarily costly.

Iran’s military capabilities, by contrast, have been sharply degraded. It still retains the ability to strike Israel with its missiles (it hit Tel Aviv on Friday, causing some damage), but Israel has a capable missile defense. Its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria have suffered a series of catastrophic military defeats. And previous attacks from Israel damaged Iran’s air defenses. Iran is weaker than it’s been in years.

None of these arguments mean that Israel will prevail or that the strikes will prove effective or wise in the long term. We have to wait on the results of the conflict to understand that. But for now the combination of Iran’s weakness and the catastrophic consequences of an Iranian bomb mean that Israel’s strikes are both more justifiable — and more likely to succeed — than at any time in the recent past.

Israel Had the Courage to Do What Needed to Be Done

June 13, 2025

Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

It may be months or years before we’ll know the full results of Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear and military targets, which began early Friday morning and could last for days or weeks. But critics of the strike — and already they are vocal — might at least ask themselves whether Israel had any realistic alternative against an adversary that has repeatedly vowed to wipe it off the map.

Barely a day before the strike, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, representing 35 nations, declared that Iran was in violation of its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. The agency’s technical report points to “rapid accumulation of highly enriched uranium,” a failure by Iran to provide “technically credible answers regarding the nuclear material at three locations” and Iran’s “insistence on a unique and unilateral approach to its legally binding obligation.”

In plain English, Iran has been deceiving the world for years while gathering the means to build multiple nuclear weapons. In a better world, diplomacy would have forestalled and perhaps eliminated the need for Israeli military action.

But President Trump, who tried to dissuade Israel from striking, failed to get a deal after five rounds of negotiations and noted this week that Tehran had become “much more aggressive” in the talks. Make of his testimony what you will, but it’s worth recalling that a much more pliant and patient Biden administration spent years trying to reach an agreement, and also gave up in frustration with Iran’s repeated prevarications.

As for other alternatives, the clandestine means of sabotage and targeted assassinations that Israel had long used, and which probably delayed Iran’s nuclear breakout moment by years, had plainly run their course — otherwise, Israel would have continued to use them rather than risk Iranian retaliatory strikes using drones and missiles that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Those strikes have begun. But they underscore, from an Israeli point of view, how crucial it is that Iran be prevented from being able to mount any of those missiles with a nuclear warhead. Academic theorists in, say, Chicago may be convinced that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would merely help create a stable balance against a nuclear-armed Israel.

Yet that fails to take into account the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran’s theocratic leaders, for whom the ideological objective of destroying Israel may be worth the price of mass martyrdom in a nuclear exchange. It also ignores the prospect that an Iranian nuclear bomb would lead Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey and Egypt, to seek nukes of their own. How stable is a balance of terror if there are three, four or five nuclear powers in the world’s most volatile region, operating in uncertain diplomatic combinations, each at daggers drawn with the others?

Still, even if Israel had no better options against Iran, it’s no guarantee that the strikes will succeed, either in the short or long term. Besides a direct retaliatory strike on Israel, Iran will be tempted to hit back at other targets: ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, Jewish sites in faraway places, U.S. diplomatic or military installations in the region. The Israeli strike may also drive Iran’s nuclear programs further underground, figuratively and literally, accelerating its effort to get nukes while making future attacks more difficult to carry off.

Those risks can’t be ignored. But it’s worth noting that Iran was doing many of those things without the pretext of an Israeli strike, sometimes directly and sometimes through proxies, such as the Houthis and Hezbollah.

Editors’ Picks
A Way for People With Low Credit Scores to Raise Them
A Traveler Waits in the Stars for Those Willing to Learn How to Look
A Beginner’s Guide to Trail Running



Also worth noting is that Hezbollah has been quiet since Israel’s attack. That could always change, but it’s a result of its swift decimation at Israeli hands last September. That, too, was denounced by Israel’s critics as dangerously escalatory. But now it’s paying dividends in the form of constricted Iranian retaliatory options, the end of the pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the first possibility in two generations for the Lebanese people finally to govern themselves.

Sometimes military strikes end with blowback. But sometimes they accomplish their goals — as Israel showed when it took out Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007 and Iraq’s in 1981. Neither regime, thankfully, ever acquired nuclear weapons.

As for the prospect of Iran now racing toward a bomb, evidence suggests it was already doing so anyway. It will take time, probably years, for Iran to regain its former pace, and it will do so in a severely weakened military, technical and economic state. And it can always be hit again.

It also matters that Iran’s leadership has again been bested on its home turf, not by the “Great Satan” of the United States but, much more humiliatingly, by the “Little Satan” of Israel. The weaker and more uncertain the regime looks in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the likelier it will spark the kinds of mass protests that nearly brought it down in 2022. An end to the regime that has inflicted so much misery on so many people for so many years offers the only sure route to ending the nuclear crisis for good.

I’m writing in the first hours of a conflict that surely still has many surprises in store. It’s far too soon to say how it will end. But for those who worry about a future in which one of the world’s most awful regimes takes advantage of international irresolution to gain possession of the most dangerous weapons, Israel’s strike is a display of clarity and courage for which we may all one day be grateful.

Tennis Was Supposed to Get Boring. Nobody Told Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.

By 

Jason Gay

Carlos Alcaraz embraces Jannik Sinner at the conclusion of their epic French Open final on Sunday. PHOTO: AURELIEN MORISSARD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Men’s tennis was supposed to be dull, dull, dull right now. Seriously! We’re all supposed to be hating it. 

Not long ago, tennis fans used to dread this moment: the dying embers of the glorious “Big Three” era. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are now folding their Nike headbands in retirement. Novak Djokovic is clinging on, but lonely, a goat chasing ghosts.

After three men collectively won 66 major tournaments, mostly playing each other, a men’s tennis recession didn’t merely feel realistic. It felt like the natural cycle of things. After the simultaneous symphony of Roger, Rafa and Novak, the sport would need time to rebuild itself and rise again. 

Or maybe it wouldn’t rise at all. 

Nobody told Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. 

I’m assuming you’ve heard about their epic by now. It’s possible you’ve seen highlights, or watched the whole ridiculous thing. Maybe you caught the ending, since the Sinner-Alcaraz French Open final Sunday lasted five and a half hours—enough time to drive from Pittsburgh to Syracuse, with an unhurried stop for lunch.  

In a rollicking match already drawing reasonable claims of all-time status, Alcaraz, the 22-year-old comet from Spain, beat back three match points, crawled out of a two-set deficit, and rallied to finish off his generational rival in a five-set, final set tiebreaker 4-6, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(3), 7-6(2) classic that both men will be answering questions about when they’re old and gray. 

Carlos Alcaraz lifts the trophy after rallying from a two-set deficit to retain his French Open title. PHOTO: LIONEL GUERICOLAS/MPP/STARFACE/ZUMA PRESS

It was a showdown men’s tennis craved—needed—and it overdelivered. 

Alcaraz and the 23-year-old Sinner played plenty before, but never for a title at a major tournament. They are not newbies: they are the No. 2 and No. 1 players in the world, respectively, and yet Sunday still resembled a torch-passing, especially with clay maestro Nadal finally done and out of the picture in Paris. 

I still can’t quite believe what we saw. 

How close was Sinner to winning Sunday? Let me put it this way: with three match points in the fourth set, I was so certain he was going to do it, I began pestering my Paris-side Journal colleague Joshua Robinson over whether or not Sinner now had a shot at next winning Wimbledon—and the U.S. Open—to complete a calendar Grand Slam, becoming the first since Rocket Rod Laver to achieve that crazytown feat. 

After winning at Roland-Garros, Sinner, his game soaring, would roll into Wimbledon with maximum confidence…and he’d won the U.S. Open final just last year…

Then Alcaraz woke up. 

Alcaraz had accomplished plenty already, including the 2024 French among four prior major titles, but he’d never crawled out from under a tombstone like this before. Until Sunday Alcaraz was 0-8 lifetime after going down two sets. He spent the early afternoon looking ready to go 0-9. Sinner’s hammering was pinning him in corners, putting him on the back foot, neutralizing his speed, dampening his mood.

Carlos Alcaraz celebrates after scoring a crucial point against Jannik Sinner in the French Open final. PHOTO: JULIAN FINNEY/GETTY IMAGES

Alcaraz soars when he’s having fun. He wasn’t having fun. At all.

And yet at two sets down, 0-40, at 3-5 in the fourth set, just before they carried out the staging and the Simple Messieurs trophy for Sinner, something clicked in the reeling Spaniard. Sinner tightened, and Alcaraz found a spark. Shots that weren’t going in suddenly were. His confidence leapt. He pumped a fist. He would not go quietly. 

He would not go at all. 

What makes Alcaraz vs. Sinner compelling theater is the contrast in styles. Both are heavy hitters with those whip-like ground strokes that get extra oomph from modern super strings. But Sinner, a former skier, is the more technically adept player, an agile defender capable of dictating offensively, especially when he gets up and over the ball and generates additional force. His first serve has gotten absurd. 

Alcaraz, meanwhile, is the magician, the player most capable of turning nothing into something. His level is more volatile than Sinner’s—he’s capable of drifting mentally, and did early on Sunday—and yet he’s the showman, the crowd-pleaser, capable of circuslike recoveries and a drop shot so cruel it’s criminal. 

He also plays his best when it means the most: Alcaraz is now 13-1 in matches that run five sets, and 5-0 in major tournament finals, a couple of notches behind Federer’s 7-0 career start. He’s 8-4 versus Sinner, and has won the last five matches they’ve played. 

Jannik Sinner sits on his bench before the trophy ceremony following his defeat to Carlos Alcaraz in the French Open final. PHOTO: JULIAN FINNEY/GETTY IMAGES

What may have been most stunning Sunday was how Alcaraz and Sinner held up physically. Both players have unraveled in extended matches due to cramping or other ailments. Suffering for five and a half hours in a major final cannot be replicated in practice, but their bodies did not get the best of them at Roland-Garros. The fifth set was mostly high level. 

As for the “all-timer” discussion of this match, I’m not going to disagree if you want to put it there. Hard to argue that the second-longest major final with three saved match points and multiple momentum swings isn’t one for the books. Sinner, still wrestling with reputational recovery after a doping suspension—he was cleared of intentional wrongdoing—played with admirable heart, even as he wobbled. Both he and Alcaraz brought their best; Alcaraz, a little more. 

Still, I’m not quite ready to put it in the category of the Big Three doozies: Fed-Nadal Wimbledon 2008, Fed-Djokovic Wimbledon 2019 or Djokovic-Nadal Australia 2012, because those matches came at deeper points in those rivalries, with histories, scars, and the audience emotionally invested (Roger and Rafa had already played six major finals before their ’08 twilight saga.)

If anything, Sunday was closer to Borg-McEnroe Wimbledon 1980, another first-time major final for a pair of generational rivals, but that match is so iconic—and feels so precious, since Borg will not last—that any contemporary comparison sounds like blasphemy. 

I can’t do it, yet.

It’s silly pressure, but they may get there. This pairing is all anyone wants in men’s tennis now, and the crowd will get attached. All they need is time. The rivalry of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner already has a little bit of everything—but especially time.

Marching orders delivered by White House aide Stephen Miller sparked the Los Angeles migrant crackdown.

 

Photo: Aude Guerrucci / Reuters

Marching orders delivered by White House aide Stephen Miller sparked the Los Angeles migrant crackdown. With Trump’s deportation numbers falling short of Joe Biden’s, Miller told top ICE officials that agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” The sometimes violent protests that then unfolded in Los Angeles have handed Trump the ingredients to again burnish his tough-on-crime message. Monday’s move to send in the Marines to Los Angeles, to protect federal buildings and personnel, marked the first time in more than three decades that the U.S. has sent Marines into an American city to address civil unrest.  ( Listen)  ICE Protests Spread to San Francisco, Testing Mayor (Read) ( Listen) California Sues Trump Over National Guard Deployment (Read) Trump’s Immigration Plans Meet a Powerful Adversary: Unions  (Read)