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Wednesday, August 26

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Good morning.

Dolly Parton was born in 1946, and America was a very different place. Women could vote by then, but being a woman still came with all kinds of limits at work, at the bank and just moving through society. Black Americans across the South were still living under Jim Crow and being pushed away from the ballot. For gay people, living openly could cost you your job, your family, sometimes your freedom.

Dolly came out of real poverty in Tennessee, and what I like about her is that she never seemed to use where she came from as an excuse to make her world smaller. She went the other way. Bigger hair, bigger clothes, bigger dreams, yes, but also a bigger idea of who deserved some room to live their own life. Gay people loved her. She loved them back. She joked about looking like a drag queen herself. And she never seemed bothered by people who were different from her.

She was also a woman of very deep faith. But she did not seem interested in using God as a weapon against somebody else. You saw her faith in what she did. Giving books to children. Helping people after disasters. Funding medical research. Creating jobs back home. Treating people like they mattered.

And that feels especially noticeable right now, because we have people using Christianity to tell other Americans how they should live, who belongs, whose rights count, while the government is fighting over voting access again and we are watching people get rewarded in politics for loyalty before competence.

Dolly lived 80 years and saw this country change enormously. She also showed that coming from a hard place does not have to make you hard toward everybody else.

Sometimes it can make you more generous.

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DOLLY, AMERICA WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU

Dolly Parton has died at 80 after a private battle with cancer. She leaves behind one of the biggest catalogs in American music and a philanthropic legacy that reached far beyond entertainment, including the Imagination Library, which has mailed hundreds of millions of free books to children around the world.

DON’S TAKE: Dolly understood something a lot of famous people never figure out. Fame gets you attention. What you do with that attention is the part that matters.

USPS MOVES AHEAD ON MAIL VOTING

The Postal Service is moving ahead with new national rules for mail ballots, including standardized envelopes, unique barcodes and a federal portal for voter information. The rule is being formally published today after the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration more room to pursue parts of its mail-voting order, although court injunctions still block enforcement of key pieces for this November.

DON’S TAKE: We are months from an election and the federal government is still trying to rewrite how states handle mail ballots. If the goal is election security, prove the problem first. Otherwise this starts looking a lot more like restricting access than protecting anything.

DARLINE GRAHAM WINS

Darline Graham won South Carolina’s Republican Senate runoff last night, defeating Congressman Ralph Norman and surviving one of the roughest debate performances of the campaign. Graham had admitted she was “not that informed on national security,” but Trump’s endorsement and late campaign push helped carry her through.

DON’S TAKE: She won. Now she has to prove she can actually do the job, because winning a primary and being ready for the United States Senate are not the same thing.

TRUMP VS. CANADA GETS UGLIER

Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on billions of dollars in Canadian imports after trade talks collapsed, and Canada is firing back with tariffs of its own. Trump is also threatening more auto and steel tariffs next year, which means this fight could hit prices on both sides of the border.

WENDY’S STORY WITHOUT WENDY

Peacock has greenlit a three-part documentary called Clap If You Care: The Wendy Williams Show, built around interviews with former staffers. Wendy Williams is not involved and reportedly was not consulted about the project.

HE’S THREE. HE’S DOING ALGEBRA.

Three-year-old Ivan Yeboah is going viral for solving algebra problems most adults would rather avoid. The Maryland toddler has been working through linear functions and multi-step equations on camera while his parents cheer him on.

THE CUTEST RESCUE DOGS IN THE WORLD

The finalists are out for the World’s Cutest Rescue Dog contest, and the lineup includes a blind former stray, a three-legged therapy dog and several dogs who survived rough beginnings and are now thriving with new families.

TODAY ON THE DON LEMON SHOW

I’ll be live for Hot Topics at 10 a.m. ET on YouTube. We are getting into Dolly’s life and legacy, the new mail-voting fight and Darline Graham’s win in South Carolina.

Then I’ll be back for Lemon Live at 5 p.m. ET with whatever develops during the day.

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