Already this year the Trump administration has paid over $1m each to settle claims by Michael Flynn and Carter Page, two allies. Expect the Capitol rioters to be first in line. Mr Trump pardoned nearly all 1,600 of them on his first day back in office. Cynthia Hughes, a maga activist, has called those pardons a “start, not the finish”, and indeed some defendants were seeking civil damages before the announcement of the fund. They contend they were merely engaging in political protest that day, much like the crowd at the Women’s March. They skip over the fact that pussy-hat-wearing moms did not ransack the Capitol for all to see on tv, in the biggest act of American political violence this century. Anti-abortion activists who obstruct or attack clinics have in essence been invited to seek payouts, too. Last year Mr Trump pardoned two dozen of them. In April the doj awarded $1.1m to another who was acquitted at trial three years ago. Yet another cohort of claimants may well be violent cops. Through pardons, downgraded charges and reduced sentences, Mr Trump has undercut at least four cases against those prosecuted by the Biden administration for their excessive use of force. Mr Trump’s crusade against “weaponisation” stems from his own experience. While campaigning in 2024 he was indicted twice by Joe Biden’s doj and twice by Democratic district attorneys. He was also sued in civil court. Some of those prosecutors ran on the promise to go after him. That was ill-judged. But Mr Trump has outdone them all with his baseless revenge-prosecutions targeting his critics. Anyone who thought Democratic prosecutors were overzealous towards Mr Trump then should be boiling now. The president claims to want to end the weaponisation of the law. Of course the way to end it is to end it, not turbocharge it, notes Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer. Conveniently, the anti-weaponisation fund expires before the next election, meaning Mr Trump’s targets will be ineligible. ■ Editor’s note (May 19th): This story has been updated. Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and
Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/19/even-by-trumpian-standards-a- 18bn-fund-for-friends-is-bad
Drained by war with Iran, America is stalling deliveries of arms to Europe Many allies are starting to look for different suppliers May 21st 2026 America has long been the world’s arms dealer of choice. From 2021 to 2025, its share of global arms exports jumped to 42%—more than Russia, China and the European Union combined. Over the same period, American arms exports to Europe were 217% higher than in the previous five-year period, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a think-tank. As the old world rearms at its fastest pace since the end of the cold war, it has splurged on American warplanes, air-defence systems and long-range missiles. These days, however, Europe could be forgiven for experiencing some buyer’s remorse. America has churned through munitions in the war against
Iran and has told European officials to expect significant delays in the delivery of American-made weapons. Shipments are instead being diverted to replenish America’s own depleted stocks. That reportedly includes scarce munitions, like air-defence interceptors, as well as strike systems like the HIMARS rocket launchers. This has left European diplomats privately frustrated. They have reason to feel aggrieved. White House officials have long pressed European governments to boost defence spending and also to buy American kit as a way of placating Donald Trump and keeping him engaged in NATO. It has not worked. He has repeatedly displayed contempt for NATO allies, most recently over their refusal to send ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The shortfall of munitions is starting to complicate NATO’s existing operational plans. Further delays in shipments might soon affect the flows of weapons to Ukraine, too. Europe buys most of its weapons from America through the arcane Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process. Instead of being agreed on with contractors, FMS deals are struck directly with the American government, which has leeway to adjust the terms. It is best to think of FMS not as a standard procurement process but as a tool of American foreign policy, says Javier Ospital of Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank. The fine print on each agreement states that “materiel procured or stocked for FMS may be diverted to meet higher priority requirements”. America has redirected the delivery of some weapons in the past. Under the Biden administration, shipments of air-defences were diverted from other European countries to Ukraine. The current problem is the sheer scale of the shortage and America’s inability to fulfil a giant backlog of orders. Take the Patriot air-defence system. America has burned through more than 1,300 interceptor missiles during the Iran war, which is equivalent to more than two years of production at current rates. At the same time, the Trump administration has fast-tracked the sale of Patriots to countries in the Gulf, which have also run down their stockpiles. That has pushed European orders even further down the priority list. Switzerland, for example, has said the delivery of five Patriots batteries, which it expected to receive this year, could be delayed up to seven years because of the Iran war.
Even before the Iran war, Trump administration officials had expressed misgivings about selling certain weapons to Europe. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, has long questioned the wisdom of some foreign military sales given existing production constraints. Each air- defence system sold to Europe, in his logic, is one fewer available to America to defend against China in the Pacific. But if the current delay in deliveries lasts much longer, it could come to hurt America in the longer run, too. “It really undermines trust in America’s willingness to be a reliable supplier of arms,” says Pieter Wezeman of SIPRI. Countries in Asia, for example, may think twice before buying American weapons, he adds. European countries, for their part, are buying local to reduce their dependence on America. Last year Denmark opted for the Franco-Italian SAMP/T air-defence system instead of the Patriot. More recently, NATO’s procurement agency chose a Swedish-Canadian aircraft as its future airborne warning and control aircraft, a programme which has been served by an American aircraft for 43 years. But Europe will struggle to quickly replace American capabilities like airborne surveillance or long-range missiles. Until then, it will have to follow the dealer’s choice. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and
Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/21/drained-by-war-with-iran- america-is-stalling-deliveries-of-arms-to-europe
America’s sermons are becoming op-eds An analysis of nearly 90,000 evangelical sermons quantifies how many pastors are endorsing parties May 21st 2026 THE STORY goes that Lyndon Johnson was so incensed that some non- profit groups had backed his opponent in a 1954 Senate primary election that he proposed a change to the tax code to prohibit such groups from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Today the Johnson Amendment means that churches can lose their non-profit status (and be forced to pay taxes) if clergy engage in political advocacy from the pulpit. In practice it is widely flouted. Back in 2016 Donald Trump vowed to “totally [knock] out” the amendment, which he has so far failed to do. Yet surveys of churchgoers suggest that America’s clergy regularly do engage in political advocacy. Despite this there has been little research into
the content of such speech, or how common it is. Sermons have always been hard to study in a systematic way: they take place behind closed doors; congregants may self-censor when surveyed; and texts can be edited before being published. Since 2020, though, evangelical pastors have been live-streaming their sermons and posting the recordings online, giving researchers lots to study. Electioneering happens across denominations: black churches, for example, regularly endorse and raise funds for Democrats. But no other church has documented itself in this way. Beyond the question of access, evangelical churches are worth studying in their own right. They are decentralised, meaning pastors are freer than Catholic priests or Mormon bishops to say what they please. And no other religious group has mobilised quite so enthusiastically around President Trump. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers analysed 63,683 hours of unfiltered audio recordings from 88,546 evangelical church sermons delivered across the country during the 2020, 2022 and 2024 election cycles, and a non-election control period. After transcribing the sermons, the researchers used a large language model (LLM) to screen them for electioneering. It first sorted political from non- political text by searching for words to do with politics, such as “elections” and “voting”. It looked for references to political figures or parties, like “Trump” and “MAGA”, and live questions such as “abortion”. Generic references to “America”, ancient governments like “Judea” or spiritual mentions of “the nation” were excluded. Text flagged as “political” was then passed through a second filter, which identified instances of “political advocacy” as defined by the Internal Revenue Service. The LLM was instructed to flag passages such as “Vote for Candidate X” or “Candidate X is God’s choice” as well as any calls for campaign contributions. Mentions of general political issues or of “voting for God” were ignored. A third step made sure that each instance of “political advocacy” referred to a specific party or candidate and classified each as either favourable or