September 22, 2026 – Short News

Today in our news briefs in the magazine: Trump’s approval rating drops to 32%, investors are having second thoughts about the billions earmarked for data centers, and a NATO exercise in Latvia reveals just how poorly protected tanks are against drone attacks.

Also: ICE is making detainees disappear from its online locator, while Hungary’s new government is asking Trump for an exemption that would allow it to keep buying Russian oil.

Trump’s Approval Rating Hits 32%: The Iran War Is Driving Up Prices, and Even His Own Voters Are Turning Away

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he promised to bring inflation under control and end foreign wars. Back then, his approval rating stood at 47%. He has now been waging war against Iran for nearly 7 months, gas and diesel prices have risen sharply, and his approval rating has fallen to 32%. That is the lowest figure of his political career. Just the week before, it was 35%. Even among Republicans, his approval rating dropped from 82% to 73% in just 7 days. What is hitting him particularly hard is the very issue on which he once promised voters relief: Only 17% of Americans surveyed are satisfied with his handling of the cost of living. Even within his own party, disapproval of his policies on prices now outweighs support. Among Republicans, 51% disapprove, while 44% approve.

The war began in February. Trump initially said it would last a few weeks and justified the attacks as an effort to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Since then, energy prices have risen because the conflict has cut off a significant amount of oil and gas from the Middle East from the world market. Higher transportation costs eventually show up at the grocery store checkout, too. In early September, Trump promised the war would end “immediately after” the election. Iran has shown no willingness to surrender so far, while Tehran and its allies are threatening further disruptions to oil markets. Only 34% of respondents support the attacks. A full 82% expect the conflict to drag on, including 3 out of 4 Republicans. While American families are paying more at the pump, the initial prospect of a short war has long since parted ways with reality.

Congressional elections will take place on November 3. Among registered voters surveyed, 43% said they intended to vote for Democrats, compared with 35% for Republicans. Nationwide polls, however, can only capture the individual House districts and Senate races to a limited extent. On immigration, 79% of Republicans still support Trump’s approach, but among all adults surveyed, that figure is 36%, while 55% oppose it. His approach to crime has the approval of 35%, while 50% disapprove. The survey ran for 4 days and ended Sunday. During that time, Trump barred 3 news organizations from the White House and publicly considered tearing down the Washington performing arts center named after John F. Kennedy if his own name could not be added to it. A total of 1,277 adults across the United States were surveyed online (Reuters/Ipsos); the stated margin of error is 3 percentage points. Joe Biden’s lowest recorded approval rating was 35% in late October 2024. Trump is now below that, while Americans are still paying the bill for his war at the checkout.

The Data Center Billions Haven’t Even Been Earned Yet, and Wall Street Is Already Having Second Thoughts

For years, investors seemed willing to believe the numbers would add up as long as something had artificial intelligence attached to it. Now the very companies expected to feed data centers’ enormous appetite for electricity and construction land are coming under pressure. Opposition to these facilities is growing in American communities, where their energy demands have long since become a topic of conversation around kitchen tables. Wall Street is starting to take a closer look, too. Several companies have postponed their planned stock market debuts, even though they had hoped to raise billions there to build new data centers. SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japan’s SoftBank, originally planned to go public in September. The company wants to build what it says will be the world’s largest data center project in Ohio and is seeking a valuation of at least $50 billion. So far, though, it has not found enough buyers willing to pay the desired share prices. Its stock market debut is now expected no earlier than mid-to-late October.

The skepticism is particularly clear in Holtec’s case. The company wants to supply data centers with nuclear power, operates a major nuclear power site, and builds small nuclear reactors. It had hoped to raise up to $900 million on the stock market at a targeted valuation of as much as $10 billion. Last week, Holtec put its plans to go public on hold indefinitely. The company cited uncertainty surrounding the construction of new data centers as its main reason. Power supplier Aggreko, which serves live events and mining projects alongside data centers, has also pushed back its planned stock market debut. Rising interest rates and broader economic uncertainty are adding to the problem. In several states, political measures are now making it harder to build new facilities. Opposition cuts across party lines and is becoming an issue in the campaigns ahead of November’s congressional elections.

SB Energy, of all companies, shows just how much money is riding on expectations. The company has yet to put a single data center of its own into operation, but it expects $439 billion in contracted revenue over roughly 20 years starting in 2028, mostly from its planned Ohio facility. OpenAI is expected to lease the site. Nvidia is backing the project; its chief executive, Jensen Huang, has offered to guarantee OpenAI’s lease obligations and spend up to $105 billion to do so. To win over investors, SB Energy even brought OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, and its head of infrastructure, Sachin Katti, into a discussion with prospective investors. Other operators have already built facilities: Vantage Data Centers has built more than 25, and CyrusOne more than 55. Nscale, whose customers include Anthropic and Microsoft, released its financial figures on Friday ahead of a planned stock market debut in October. That could show what prices investors are still willing to pay under the changed circumstances.

Demand for computing power remains enormous. According to estimates by PIMCO, more than $5 trillion may be needed by 2030 to build out the infrastructure; Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle have already committed to spending more than $1 trillion combined. Anthropic is still sticking to its plans to go public this fall. Shares of publicly traded data center specialists Equinix and Digital Realty Trust have each fallen between 1% and 2% this month. More facilities are being planned while communities push back against their electricity demands. The banks are supposed to come up with the money. Only now, investors want an answer to a rather old-fashioned question: When will all those billions actually start making money?

NATO Is Training for Yesterday’s War While Drones Are Already Deciding the Fate of Its Tanks

In a Latvian pine forest, Danish soldiers with red bands on their helmets creep toward Spanish positions. Moments later, the position has been overrun. “Everyone’s dead,” a Spaniard calls out from beneath his tank, its raised gun barrel indicating that the vehicle has been destroyed. The Danes had already attacked the NATO brigade’s assembly areas with training drones during the night. Sleeping soldiers were jolted awake, and some were subsequently declared killed. Canadian Col. David Brassard, commander of the brigade deployed to protect Latvia, describes the exercise as preparation for an actual mission. Around 35% of Canada’s land forces are committed to Latvia, he says. Germany is permanently stationing a brigade in Lithuania, while Britain leads a battle group in Estonia. The Russian threat leaves the Baltic states little time to incorporate lessons from the war in Ukraine into their own defenses.

Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs is warning of a possible Russian escalation that, according to current intelligence assessments, could initially remain below the threshold of an outright attack and thus fall short of triggering NATO’s collective defense commitment. Russia’s military has become more dangerous despite its limited territorial gains in Ukraine, he says, because it has gained combat experience and adapted to new forms of warfare. Unknown drones were spotted during the exercise; whether they came from Russia or were operated by civilians remains unclear. The Danish unit has studied drone warfare intensively. Nearly all of its roughly 150 soldiers can operate at least basic drones. Their commander has been to Ukraine himself but acknowledges that even his unit is still far from matching the capabilities developed there. During the exercise, around 90% of its drones were used for reconnaissance. The number of drones available was limited.

Just how far behind the fighting in Ukraine the exercise remains becomes clear a few miles down the road: 2 Canadian Leopard tanks are parked at a forest intersection without protective netting. Their crews say they are only just beginning to learn about drone warfare. One soldier expects to receive a shotgun soon as a means of defense. The tank has no technology for detecting approaching drones. Canadian artillery units are now positioning their M777 howitzers as far as 12 kilometers apart and digging them into the ground as deep as 3 meters. Juris Jurašs, a former Latvian lawmaker who has served in the Ukrainian military since 2022, considers that inadequate. Towed howitzers there are quickly targeted by drones after firing, he says; tanks have largely disappeared from the front line or are fitted with multiple layers of protection. NATO armies still do not understand just how fundamentally warfare has changed, he says.

Brassard is now having roads covered with anti-drone netting and command posts reinforced. Ukrainian soldiers do train with Latvian units, but they are not participating in his brigade’s exercise. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, criticizes the fact that Ukrainian units are usually allowed to play only the enemy in NATO exercises. That way, the alliance gets to see its units destroyed but does not learn how to apply Ukrainian methods itself. Latvian Defense Minister Raivis Melnis is calling for those lessons to finally be incorporated into preparations. According to the Danish commander’s assessment, drones account for around 90% of deaths in the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the Latvian forest, the Canadian tank crewman is still waiting for his shotgun.

ICE Is Making People Disappear From Its Locator: Families No Longer Know Where Their Loved Ones Are

Since September 15, people with final deportation orders have been disappearing from the publicly accessible online database maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. They are still being held in custody, but their relatives can no longer look up where they are. Attorneys, too, are losing one of the most important ways to find their clients. According to 2 former Department of Homeland Security officials, ICE officers are now also prohibited from telling families and legal representatives where a detainee is being held over the phone. There was no public announcement. The agency neither confirmed nor denied the change when asked. Instead, ICE said that people with final deportation orders were being prioritized for removal and that all detainees had access to phones. But making a call from a detention facility often involves long waits, and detainees have to pay for it.

At the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, at least 17 clients disappeared from the locator within days, according to deputy program director Atenas Burrola Estrada. At first, she thought it was a technical glitch. Then it became clear that their entries had been deleted. My Khanh Ngo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, can no longer find 8 of her clients in the system. They are being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and are suing over the conditions of their detention. Without knowing where they are being held, she says, she can barely represent them effectively. To file a petition asking a judge to review someone’s detention, attorneys need to know which judicial district the person is being held in. ICE sometimes transfers people thousands of miles, more than once. By the time an attorney tracks down a client’s new location, that person may already have been deported. We reported on this weeks ago and are dealing with the very same problems ourselves.

The locator was introduced in 2010 under Barack Obama after investigations uncovered serious abuses in immigration detention facilities, including medical neglect and deaths that had initially gone unreported. Since then, families have been able to search for relatives using their names and countries of origin or an immigration case number. They also used that information to deposit money for food and hygiene products or to drop off prescription medication. Today, ICE holds more than 60,000 people on an average day, roughly twice as many as under Joe Biden. Last year, 33 people died in immigration detention, the highest number in 2 decades. The Trump administration is aiming for 1 million deportations a year and is also sending people to countries of which they are not citizens.

A final deportation order also does not necessarily mean that every legal avenue has been exhausted. People may seek to reopen their cases, for example, if they missed a hearing. Others are appealing decisions or seeking protection because they could face persecution in their home countries. Nancy Morawetz, a law professor at New York University, warns that some of these people may be entitled to remain in the United States despite their deportation orders. If they are sent away before their attorneys can find them and go to court, bringing them back could be difficult, she says. The government still knows where it is holding its detainees. It is taking away everyone else’s ability to find out in time.

Orbán Is Gone, but Russian Oil Remains: Hungary’s New Government Is Asking Trump for the Same Exemption

Viktor Orbán has lost his job as Hungary’s prime minister. His request to Washington has survived the change of government. Péter Magyar’s government wants to move away from its predecessor’s Russia-friendly policies, but it also wants to keep buying Russian oil without being penalized by the United States. Marton Hajdu, chairman of the Hungarian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, traveled to Washington and asked American lawmakers to support an exemption from the new sanctions. Hungary needed time during the transition to reduce its dependence on Russian energy and secure supplies from multiple sources, he explained. Budapest wants to break away from Moscow. Until then, it apparently wants to keep buying Russian oil.

Trump signed the new sanctions law on September 18. Among other targets, it goes after Russia’s energy industry and the so-called shadow fleet used to transport Russian oil despite existing restrictions. Within 30 days, the U.S. president is supposed to raise tariffs on goods imported directly from Russia to as much as 500%. For the 5 largest buyers of Russian oil or gas, the law provides for tariffs of up to 100% if they make additional purchases after the deadline. Countries that help Russia evade oil sanctions on a particularly large scale could also be affected. The list is to be reviewed every 180 days. Originally, tariffs of up to 500% were proposed for buyers of Russian energy. That ceiling was lowered to 100% during the legislative process. Trump himself can decide how many of the penalties are applied.

Orbán already knew how to make use of that discretion. In November 2025, he claimed that Trump had granted Hungary an indefinite exemption from sanctions on Russian energy purchases. The arrangement would remain in place, he said, as long as Trump was U.S. president and he himself governed Hungary. Orbán has since been replaced, and his successors must now ask for a new exemption. Economy and Energy Minister István Kapitány says Hungary should be ready to give up Russian gas by October 2027. Hungary also wants to stop buying Russian oil, he says, but he has not given a date. The new government promises a different approach to Moscow. Apparently, a change of government does not make much difference to the pipeline carrying the oil.