The World and Everything in It: August 20, 2026

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Russian missiles and drones increasingly overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses as technology transforms the war.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: We’ll hear from a reporter in Kyiv, and to an expert on how the war is changing.

Also, new medical codes could help people who regret their gender transition.

And a longtime music publicist finally puts his own songs in the spotlight.

COWAN: I said, “You know, if we pursue this now, I won't know my two sons, and we’ll probably be divorced.”

And WORLD commentator David Closson on the politics behind Algaegate.

BROWN: It’s Thursday, August 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Myrna Brown.

REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR:  Trump says U.S.-Canada reached deal to delay tariffs » President Trump says the U.S. has a trade deal with Canada though the White House says nothing is signed just yet. And Trump's tariff deadline runs out tomorrow night.

He told reporters Wednesday.

TRUMP: We had a very good conversation with the Prime Minister last night, and we've come to a deal with Canada. As you know, the 50% tariffs across the board were going on against Ca- Canada today.

The tariffs would hit 50 percent but only on about $20 billion of Canadian goods. That's roughly five percent of what Canada sells in the US.

Trump says Canada agreed to drop its tariffs on American farm goods a long-running sore spot, because Canada tightly limits how much U.S. dairy can come in.

TRUMP: The farmers have been hurt very badly by Canada, and they won't be paying any tariffs anymore. And, uh, we may bring, uh, some of the tariffs down to a level where other countries are, 'cause Canada was paying a higher tariff.

Canada tells it differently. Trade minister Dominic LeBlanc says his country's dairy protections came through---quote---entirely intact.

Negotiators are still at the table. Reports say the U.S. would also cut its steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada in half.

Fauci advisor pleads guilty » A former top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci has pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy charge. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports:

KRISTEN FLAVIN: David Morens admitted he steered government business to a private Gmail account to keep records about the origins of COVID-19 away from public records requests.

The case centers on a federal grant to a New York nonprofit that funded coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China where the COVID outbreak began.

Prosecutors say he also took wine and dinner offers from the scientist whose grant was at stake.

He faces up to five years in prison. Prosecutors dropped four other counts in the plea agreement. Sentencing is slated for November.

Dr. Anthony Fauci was not accused of wrongdoing in this case. And Fauci is shielded from federal prosecution after President Biden pardoned him before leaving office.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Ebola update » Congo's Ebola outbreak has passed 5,000 cases, and it's spreading faster than any Ebola outbreak in history.

Nearly 2,400 people have died, almost half of everyone infected.

Mobs have attacked health workers, and some of those workers have walked off the job, saying they weren’t getting paid.

Doctor Thierno Baldé with the World Health Organization says they are working to better engage the community

BALDE: We are really recentering all of the operational approach, all of our activities, you know, around the engagement of the communities.

He wants the motorbike taxi drivers on board, the men who carry sick people and dead bodies from village to village.

The strain of the virus behind the outbreak has no approved vaccine or treatment.

The agency expects this outbreak to pass the West African epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people a decade ago.

Israel strikes an air base in northwest Syria » Israel is facing fresh criticism from the Trump administration after an airstrike in Syria. WORLD's Travis Kircher reports.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: Israel struck an air base in northwest Syria this week … explaining that the goal was to prevent Turkish troops from deploying there.

Turkey has close ties to the Syrian government and has had tense relations with Israel… as both countries try to curb each others' influence in the region.

No one was hurt in the attack, but a runway was reportedly damaged.

Syrian officials called the airstrike a violation of Syria's sovereignty.

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack also condemned the attack, calling it an unjustified escalation.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Syria had ignored Israel's warning that it was about to breach a previous agreement… by allowing Turkish troops to deploy there.

For WORLD...I'm Travis Kircher.

Screwworm concerns delay pet adoptions » Animal shelters in Texas are running out of room.

A flesh-eating parasite called the New World screwworm turned up in Texas cattle in June, the first time in 60 years. Now 44 states have restricted pets coming from affected areas.

Aaron Grady is shelter director at the Houston Humane Society.

GRADY: Houston has one of the largest stray pet populations, uh, not only in Texas, but the country. So that, that presents unique challenges.

Texas sent nearly 89-thousand dogs to shelters in other states last year, more than any state.

Grady says they often look to transport animals to shelters with lower demand out of state:

GRADY: But recently, though, some of those, uh, transports has, uh, either slowed down or, um, halted, uh, out of a response due to, uh, the screwworm.

Texas also put down about 45-thousand dogs last year. Shelters warn that number could climb. Nearly all the confirmed screwworm cases so far have been in livestock, not pets.

I'm Kent Covington. 

Straight ahead: Russian missiles and drones increasingly overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. Plus, a longtime music publicist finally puts his own songs in the spotlight.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 20th of August.

You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad to have you along with us today. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up on The World and Everything in It: a changing war.

Ukraine this week launched one of its largest long-range assaults on Moscow since the war began, using more than 600 drones. The strike comes as drones and ground robots increasingly restrict troop movement along the front lines.

BROWN: While Russia continues to pound Ukraine's power grid, Ukraine is targeting Russia’s economy, including warehouses belonging to the country's largest online retailer.

REICHARD: In a moment we’ll speak to one of our WORLD correspondents who is in Ukraine. But first, joining us is Kateryna Stepanenko. She's Russia team lead for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington and a native of Kyiv.

REICHARD: Kateryna, good morning.

KATERYNA STEPANENKO: Thank you so much for having me. Good morning.

REICHARD: Good morning. Well, would you bring us up to speed? How well is Ukraine defending itself against Russ Russia's missile and drone attacks right now, and what are the challenges that they are experiencing?

STEPANENKO: Absolutely. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian stockpiles of patriot interceptors have been dwindling for quite a bit of months, and Ukraine is increasingly facing challenges repelling Russian ballistic strikes, which has been become ha which has become a priority effort for Russian forces. Russia is using quite a bit of missiles that have a ballistic trajectory with the intent of exploiting the vulnerabilities and the shortages of the Ukrainian air defense capabilities.

On top of that, Russia is also using jet powered Shahed drones, which is a new adaptation of the Iranian provided and Iranian made drones that allow essentially Russian forces to fly drones at a faster speed at greater altitudes, making it harder for Ukrainian forces to intercept. Over the past months, Ukraine was pretty good at intercepting Russia in long range drones, but this adaptation is making it

increasingly challenging for Ukrainians to counter additional straits.

REICHARD: Well, Ukraine greatly expanded its drone campaign inside of Russia, hitting its bomber fleet, ports, energy infrastructure. What is Ukraine trying to accomplish with these strikes and how does that strategy differ from Russia's?

STEPANENKO: Think there's several objectives here. Number one, I think it's bringing the war closer to Russia and making Russian people actually realize that Putin's decision to launch a long-term war against Ukraine will have sacrifices, increasing sacrifices for their lives. On the other hand, it's also putting pressure on the on the Putin regime. we are seeing quite a bit of people complaining about gas shortages, about the lack of various goods and products both in occupied Ukraine and Russia. Lastly, you know, the ongoing campaign against the wild berries, which is a Russian analog of Amazon, it is something that Russia has been using for military or dual purpose goods, for procurement and storage of dual purpose goods that Russia uses in its war effort in Ukraine. So all of these aspects are important. The other types of strikes that Ukraine has been conducting is using its missile, domestically produced missiles, to go after Russian defense industrial base facilities, specifically the facilities that produce microchips and other very technically sophisticated equipment for Russian precision missiles and pres precision drones to eliminate the Russian drone strikes and missile strikes against Ukraine. They've also launched some strikes against the Russian infrastructure necessary for space capabilities to counter Russian efforts to create a Starlink of their own.

REICHARD: Kateryna, I want to go back to this Wildberries, as you said, Russia's equivalent to our Amazon. Why go why go after a commercial logistics network?

STEPANENKO: Well Russia has been using it for dual purpose goods, for example, procurement of drones or other various other components that later on do feed into the Russian war effort in Ukraine. So it is it's a large sort of logistical hub for various different Russian components that supply and support the war effort.

REICHARD: What are you watching on the fronts of war beyond the battlefield? I'm thinking about certain sociocultural aspects outside of what we normally associate with war.

STEPANENKO:Yes, absolutely. I think it's quite interesting to see that Putin felt it so necessary to eliminate the only anti war party that likely didn't have any chance of succeeding in the elections. This party is called the Yabloka Party. Which tells me a little bit about how unconfident Putin is about this referendum that he's trying to make, which is posing these elections, these State Duma elections.

As a referendo on the ongoing s Russian public support for the war. He's trying to present this election as all of these Russian people are continuing to support the war and his vision for the long term conflict in Ukraine and possibly against the West. and he was so unconfident in himself that he had to eliminate a party that didn't really have much traction in the Russian information space until he made them into a martyr.

REICHARD: Kateryna Stepanenko is Russia team lead for the Institute for the Study of War. Kateryna, thank you so much.

Stepanenko: Of course, thank you so much for having me.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: One of our WORLD correspondents returned to Ukraine about a week ago. Lindsay Mast connected with him and wanted to bring him back on to find out how things have changed since he was there last.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Thanks, Mary and Myrna….Longtime listeners may recall Caleb Welde’s reports from Ukraine in 2025… He returned just over a week ago to the capital city of Kyiv, so I called him up to find out what he’s seeing there.

Caleb, good morning.

CALEB WELDE: Good morning.

MAST: Caleb, you were last in Ukraine at the end of last year. Can you compare what it was like then to what you've experienced since being back?

WELDE: The alarms are going off a lot more than they were when I was here last time. Last time it'd be, on average, three or four times a day. Now it's six, eight times easily. Yesterday they went off ten times during the day, and that counts all hours of the night as well.

So the other different thing is that there's much more missiles coming in than there were when I was here last. I'm in one of the nicest parts of the city right now, surrounded by embassies. There's a U.S. embassy building just a block from where I was staying. And at 3 a.m., a bunch of missiles came in, you know, close enough to where I just immediately, you know, asleep, but hit the floor and went into the bathroom. That's the safest place. I'm told that people are taking the alarms a lot more seriously now. um you know before you used to

have 30 minutes an hour of notice where before the shahids reached the city so you could gather your things you could go to the the car park the basement you're building whatever you wanted to do metro but now you know those those missiles hit while the alarms are still going off, you know, maybe 45 seconds, a minute of warning. So now there's not time, you know, for people necessarily to get to safety.

MAST: I know you've been out on the streets. How does the damage compare to when you were there before?

WELDE: Well, most of my time has been in the center of the city, and I have to say I am surprised. I went to my favorite coffee shop for the first time a few days ago, which is in the very center of the city. If you've seen any picture of Kiev, you've probably seen in the central square, there's a large pillar with a statue of a woman on top, the Maidan Memorial. And this coffee shop is 200 yards from there. And I went, sat down in my normal spot, and the window was gone. And then I noticed the other windows were damaged, and they said that was around two months ago.

Sunday evening, I went to a concert, an open-air concert set in the middle of some really, really nice apartment buildings.

On the way in, there was clearly evidence of an explosion of some sort. And I talked to the security guard. He said, missile, 2 a.m., killed a man and a woman.

Sounds like a baby was injured. He was shaking with anger,

you know, telling me about this. This is, you know, 200 yards from where this orchestra was. Um, was, was practicing.

MAST: Do you see any signs of rebuilding at this point?

WELDE: I do. Just anecdotally, the church I'm going to is,

is, uh, is, is doing an addition. My landlord was showing me, you know, the apartment he's remodeling. People are, are definitely just continuing life here.

MAST: I know you said you had talked to people about the war, and you, of course... talking to them when you were there before. When they talk about the war, how has that changed?

WELDE: That's, that, that's a difficult question. I, I asked the people I was talking to on the street last night, and I said, how many people do you know that have been killed in the war, you know, personally? And he said 10 close friends.

He wanted to make sure that was clear, close friends in his, you know,

immediate circle. And then I was talking to three soldiers a few minutes later, and I asked them, and they said, the first guy said 10 close friends, and then the next guy said 25.

He wanted to be clear. He said he's an instructor, and he wanted to be clear.

He said that's not counting, you know, soldiers that I've trained. And then the third guy said he

didn't seem to want to answer. He said he's on a number of chats from the different military assignments. He's done group chats. And that, you know,

when someone is killed, they post on those chats. But that he didn't, he said he tries not to check the chats because it's psychologically too difficult. And then I also asked a gal at a coffee shop this morning how many she knew that had died. And she said around 25, counting like friends of her parents.

And I actually asked her, I said, what gives you hope? And she just looked at me with just a very flat look and said well to be honest I've tried to take my life three times recently and it didn't seem like she she had a lot of a lot of hope without Christ.

MAST: Caleb, last time you were there, you had a piece of reporting that we ran where essentially people were going about their lives as sirens and warnings went off and that war was something that was coexisting with a somewhat regular life. How would you assess that now?

WELDE: I would say that's definitely still true. I mean, you know, like I said,

the alarm's going off 10 times yesterday. It's too much, you know, to go to a shelter every time,

you know. But then there's also, you know, like that gal in the coffee shop, she said one of her coworkers' close friends was killed. And she said another friend. came really close to being killed, you know, by a rocket here in the city. So, yeah, I mean, everyone seems to be carrying on for sure,

but it's just the new normal, I guess.

MAST: Caleb WELDE joining us from Kiev. Caleb, thank you so much, and we're praying for your safety.

WELDE: Thank you so much, Lindsay. Good to talk to you.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Up next, medical cheat codes.

The Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, is investigating possible misuse of insurance billing codes by doctors disguising transgender procedures performed on minors as other forms of treatment. HHS Assistant Secretary Bryan Christine:

CHRISTINE: Millions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of families misled, medical best practices [music] rewritten or cast aside to serve this new agenda.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: The Biden administration threatened doctors with loss of federal funds for refusing to provide sex-rejecting procedures, which LGBT activists often call “gender affirming care.”

REICHARD: But the Trump administration has reversed course and is now looking at penalties for hospitals administering those procedures.

WORLD’s Harrison Watters reports from Washington.

HARRISON WATTERS: Last Fall, HHS published a report that found there is little solid evidence to support using hormone treatments or surgeries to treat kids confused about their sex.

Around that time, HHS called Dr. Aaron Kheriaty with the Ethics and Public Policy Center asking for help with another question:

KHERIATY: How is it that so many hospitals and clinics, including at major academic medical centers, so readily embraced procedures that were not supported by sound scientific evidence?

The new report, published last week, counts more than 225 gender clinics in the U.S. Insurance doesn't always cover what they do so many of them appear to be mis-using disease codes used in billing. For example, precocious puberty is a condition found in fewer than 1 out of every 5000 children and starts before age 8 for girls or 9 for boys.

But Dr. Kheriaty says:

KHERIATY: What we found was thousands of patients diagnosed with precocious puberty between the ages of 13 and 17, all the way up to the age of 22, in fact.

Those teenaged patients were prescribed puberty blockers. Double mastectomies on young girls were coded as “breast reduction surgeries,” while cross-sex hormones were billed under “endocrine disorder, unspecified.” And Kheriaty says those discrepancies would have been difficult to get past hospital compliance offices.

KHERIATY: Unless they were told to do so by hospital leadership. Unless hospital leadership said, This is how we're going to go about doing this.

WORLD asked the American Hospital Association about the report, but they declined to comment.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has previously objected to HHS blocking funds for transgender procedures on minors. It says the move intrudes into doctor-patient relationships.

Kheriaty and nine other researchers went through government and private insurance claims. They found upwards of $50 million in potentially fraudulent billing for puberty blockers alone.

KHERIATY: A lot of this was Medicare billing, but people who pay premiums for private insurance are also being defrauded by this thing.

Till now, doctors have had no agreed-on way to treat patients who want to undo the damage. That’s allowed many medical groups to claim the only road forward for those who have started transgender treatments is to continue them no going back. But emergency room doctor Jared Ross says a new disease code from HHS could help change that.

ROSS: There's an F64.A code, which is gender identity disorder in remission.

Meaning detransitioning can now go in a patient's chart as a medical condition.

Dr. Ross says that code will help doctors treating young people who regret receiving body-altering procedures.

ROSS: What do we do with a boy who had his testicles cut off at 18, and now wants to live as a boy? How do we, you know, how do we get him off estrogen? How do we get him on testosterone? He's got to be on one or the other. If you don't have sex hormones, your bone density is just going to plummet.

Dr. Kheriaty says more research is needed along with insurance companies willing to cover restorative procedures.

KHERIATY: We can't completely undo the damage that was done, but at least do whatever we can, whatever's medically and psychologically possible to mitigate that damage. That is the very least we owe to these young people who were railroaded into this before they knew what was going on and harmed in the process.

For now, the Department of Justice is looking into whether hospitals and clinics broke the law in how they billed for transgender procedures.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters in Washington.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Police in Dunellen, New Jersey, recently went undercover.

Way undercover.

The department posted a photo of an officer disguised as a shrubbery!

Literally covered in foliage, but with binoculars and hands visible.

Police later clarified that the costume was mainly for the social-media picture. He did not spend the entire six-hour crackdown rooted to one spot. (You see what I did there.)

No, during the actual operation, officers watched for drivers using their phones.

Police say they caught some FaceTiming. Others they caught holding phones with two hands, steering with their knees.

In all, 74 citations issued.

So the shrub may’ve been mostly for show.

But the tickets and fines, those were for real.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 20th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The new album by the music industry’s most fascinating PR man.

In the late 1980s, Lance Cowan began a career that made him the top Americana-music publicist. His clients included Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, Gatemouth Brown, and Joe Ely.

BROWN: But since 2024, Cowan has released three critically acclaimed albums of his own.

WORLD’s music reviewer Arsenio Orteza spoke with him about his unusual odyssey.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: There’s a sarcastic education cliché that goes “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” A music-industry version might go “Those who can, make music; those who can’t, work in PR.” Lance Cowan, however, is proving that cliché wrong.

MUSIC: [“The Air That You Breathe” by Lance Cowan]

This is “The Air That You Breathe,” the title cut of Cowan’s new album. Its lyrics tell the story of a singer-songwriter whose passion is music but who has to wait ’til his hair turns gray before he gets the attention he deserves. It’s a story not unlike Cowan’s.

COWAN: About four years ago, I thought, “I've got these songs that nobody's hearing. How am I going to get people to hear them?” Well, a friend of mine writes novels. And he said, “You get up every day, and you write one page. And before long, you're writing 20 pages.” And I thought, “Every day I'm supposed to be in the office at 9:30. I'm going to come in every day at 8 and spend that hour, hour-and-a-half, working on my music.”

By the time he made that decision, Cowan was securely established as a publicist. But he’d started out wanting to be a musician. In fact, the music-licensing group BMI sent him to Toronto in 1991 to play a career-launching showcase. What he saw there was hundreds of likeminded hopefuls all competing for a break. The young husband and father of two made a hard choice.

MUSIC: [“Home with You” by Lance Cowan]

This is “Home with You,” the song that closes Cowan’s new album. The final stanza goes “They call this ‘suitcase living,’ / but it feels like dying to me. / ’Cause if you can’t hold your lover, / what good is your dream.’” It’s a lot like what was running through Cowan’s head 35 years ago.

COWAN: I told my wife—I said, “You know, if we pursue this now, I won't know my two sons,” because they were young, then. And I said, “We'll probably be divorced.” And so I said, “I think it'd be best to focus on PR.”

Cowan’s PR focus did not keep him from performing. He’s played off and on at Nashville’s Bluebird Café for decades. And he didn’t entirely stop writing either. His schedule may have been busy, but when someone like the folk icon Janis Ian wants to write a song with you, you say yes.

MUSIC: [“When He Was Here” by Lance Cowan]

This is “When He Was Here,” a song that Cowan wrote with Ian—and which Ian herself recorded—over 30 years ago.

COWAN: And I got to tell you, I was so nervous about writing with her. And she was so remarkably kind and made me so comfortable writing.

“When He Was Here” is about a divorcing couple and the divorce’s effect on the children. Cowan says it reflects Ian’s experience rather than his, but he doesn’t mind portraying characters when he sings. Or being a third-person narrator. Or leaving his narrative songs open-ended. His audience, he says, is pretty intelligent, and doesn’t need to be spoon fed.

Cowan’s pretty sharp himself. He laughed and said “I’m not deep” when I pointed out the depth of the lyrics “You’ve got to believe before you see, / trust before you feel, / hope before you find” in his song “Love.” But it’s wise advice–for the deep and the not-deep alike.

MUSIC: [“Love” by Lance Cowan]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Algae-gate is mostly dead, though Attorney General Todd Blanche says the Justice Department is waiting for a D.C. Superior Court judge to rule on whether it stays dead. Prosecutors now acknowledge that damage blamed on vandals was actually caused by a rushed, faulty installation.

REICHARD: But WORLD Opinions commentator David Closson says that in a country divided between red and blue, even the green in the Reflecting Pool was bound to become partisan.

AUDIO: Great work, sweetheart. Everybody’s proud of you. You are single-handedly doing more to fight fascism than any American has.

DAVID CLOSSON: She was not speaking to a child or cheering on an athlete.

She was speaking to an aquatic nuisance.

That is where American politics arrived this summer: algae with a constituency.

The green bloom appeared in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool shortly after the Trump administration completed a multimillion-dollar renovation. The work was part of a broader effort to prepare Washington for America’s 250th anniversary.

President Donald Trump had personally promoted the project, promising that the new surface would last for decades.

TRUMP: It’ll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything with it.

Instead, the water quickly turned green, and portions of the new blue coating began to peel.

The administration deserved scrutiny. Questions about the project’s cost, its no-bid contracts, and the compressed timeline around the July Fourth festivities were legitimate. So were questions about the president’s response.

Trump repeatedly blamed vandals. At one point, suggesting that someone might have put fertilizer into the pool.

TRUMP: They did something to create the algae.

But algae hardly requires a political conspiracy. The Reflecting Pool has suffered recurring blooms for years. A large, shallow body of barely moving water, sitting in direct summer sunlight, is practically an invitation.

And one widely publicized vandalism prosecution—that of former Olympic canoeist David Hearn—was dropped after prosecutors said the evidence pointed elsewhere.

The president’s insistence on sinister enemies helped keep the story alive.

But his critics were happy to help.

PROTESTERS: Let’s grow algae, let’s grow!

DC: A small group calling itself “Team Algae” gathered nearby. There were green pompoms, pro-algae signs and a protester wearing an inflatable frog costume. One chant declared, “Pond scum matters.”

The protesters were joking, of course. They said the absurdity was the point—a way of ridiculing an administration they despise.

But jokes can still reveal our loyalties.

The algae had become welcome because it embarrassed Donald Trump. Literal pond scum had been drafted into the resistance.

The media joined in.

MONTAGE: “Color catastrophe…”, “Our chief algae correspondent…”, “And I’m a botanist now…”, “It’s a metaphor for so many of the things that are wrong in Trump’s Washington.”

News programs covered the story with mock seriousness—with on-scene reports, water sample results, and political analysis on the meaning of microscopic organisms. Commentators repeatedly declared the pool a perfect metaphor for the Trump presidency. One national podcast devoted 26 minutes to what it called “The Reflecting Pool fiasco.”

Certainly, journalists are free to criticize public officials. Satire is no sin. But the episode reveals what happens when political opposition becomes an identity.

We stop asking whether something is true, good, or beneficial. We ask only whether it helps our side or humiliates the other.

The administration displayed its own version of the same temptation. Every loose piece of hastily installed coating became evidence of malicious enemies.

Christians should recognize the danger. Scripture teaches us to love truth more than political advantage and our neighbors—even our enemies—more than our parties. Political animosity disorders those loves, teaching us to treat an opponent’s failure as our success and the country’s pain as our opportunity.

“Team Algae” appears on both sides. Christians should not join it. When our enemy’s embarrassment becomes our good news, something unhealthy is growing in us—and pond scum is a strange foundation for the country’s future.

For WORLD, I’m David Closson.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: John Stonestreet will be here for Culture Friday. And, a popular British children’s series comes to life on the big screen. We’ll have a review of The Magic Far Away Tree. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.” —Colossians 2:6-10

Go now in grace and peace.

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