Trump Judge Rules It’s OK to Discriminate Against LGBTQ People

A MAGA judge in Texas has issued a sweeping ruling that destroys workplace discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people in the United States. 

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who holds a reputation for being a far-right activist judge, declared that while Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not protect LGBTQ people from workplace harassment based on their sexual or gender orientation. The case was brought forth by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right, culturally conservative organization that heavily influenced the writings and goals of Project 2025.  

Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, specifically targeted transgender people in his ruling, stating that they had to simply deal with any kind of discriminatory treatment in their workplace. He deduced that “a male employee must use male facilities like other males,” an assertion that completely invalidates transgender identity in its entirety rather than actually acknowledging the issues they face at work. Kacsmaryk even went so far as to order federal employment policy to remove“all language defining ‘sex’ in Title VII to include ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity.”. 

This all directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which stated plainly that Title VII protects LGBTQ workers from identity-based firing and harassment. 

Kacsmaryk is not new to this. He has been referred to as the “go-to jurist” for right wingers looking for judicial validation for cruel, oppressive, and deeply culturally conservative policy. He attacked LGBTQ protections in the Affordable Care Act, suspended FDA approval of the live-saving abortion pill mifepristone, and tried (and failed) to make Planned Parenthood pay $2 billion to Texas and Louisiana on the grounds that they were “defrauding” Medicaid. This is yet another coordinated attack from the right intended to erode hard fought social justice victories.

Donald Trump’s former lawyer turned U.S. attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba is planning to file federal charges against a sitting congresswoman.

Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver could be charged as early as Friday, according to the New Jersey Globe, for events that transpired last week when McIver, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Representative Rob Menendez paid a visit to Delaney Hall, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement has started using to house immigrant detainees.

After all four were admitted into the prison, the three members of Congress tried to include Baraka in conversations. The mayor had repeatedly sought in previous days to serve the owners of the facility, Geo Group, with summonses over code violations, including refusing to grant access to the facility and failing to have an evacuation plan in place. He had been denied entry during his previous attempts.

But a scuffle took place with ICE agents, protesters at the facility’s gate, and the four, with at least one member of Congress shoved. Baraka was subsequently arrested. McIver tried to physically protect Baraka, perhaps providing Habba with a flimsy justification to arrest her. The three representatives have faced spurious accusations from the right that they attacked or punched ICE officers, and received threats of reprisal from Republicans in Congress.

Last week, the members of Congress denied any wrongdoing.

“We’ve reviewed the body cam footage shared by DHS which confirms what we’ve said from the beginning: ICE agents put their hands on Members of Congress and arrested the Mayor of Newark on public property,” a Watson Coleman spokesperson said at the time. “Nobody was ‘body slammed,’ nobody ‘assaulted’ any agents, and this footage confirms that.”

The footage seems to back up Watson Coleman’s account, as does New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.

“LaMonica, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Rob Menendez have absolute rights to inspect those facilities,” Murphy said to the Globe Friday. “And if [a federal charge] goes ahead, I think it’s just as I said about Ras Baraka: outrageous.”

So long as the Constitution remains as written, conservatives will have to find a new presidential frontrunner to replace Donald Trump on the 2028 ballot. But options, so far, seem scant.

An obvious choice would be Vice President JD Vance, who has emerged as a “clear favorite” in the race, per The New York Post. Most vice presidents in recent decades have attempted a run for the presidency (19 out of 49 prior veeps have shot their shot), with a third of them actually making it to the White House. But Steve Bannon, one of the far-right’s most resilient political operatives, has another possibility in mind: ex-Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.

“I don’t say this lightly. I’m a pretty good judge of horseflesh in this area,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser, told Gaetz on his podcast War Room. “If you keep doing what you’re doing, if you have interest, you’re a future president of the United States.”

“Only if you’re a future chief of staff,” Gaetz replied to Bannon.

The remarkably unpopular Florida politico lost his House seat in an unlikely gamble after Trump nominated him to serve as attorney general in November. The conveniently timed appointment—and Gaetz’s subsequent resignation—had the added benefit of killing the House investigation into Gaetz’s alleged misconduct with women and minors that include accusations of sex trafficking. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Unfortunately for Gaetz, the unsuccessful bid for Trump’s Cabinet also left him without a job, as he was forced to drop his own nomination when it became clear that Republicans weren’t going to vote for him.

Gaetz reportedly pulled his nomination just minutes after CNN reached out to the ex-lawmaker for comment on a bombshell revelation that the Ethics Committee had been notified of a second sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old he was accused of having sex with.

In a statement following Gaetz’s withdrawal, Trump said he had “much respect” for the Florida politician and predicted Gaetz would have a “wonderful future.”

Donald Trump has always boasted about hiring “the best people,” but his special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was a real estate investor and lawyer before being chosen for the role, with no foreign policy experience. So, he opened up Netflix.

Witkoff told The Atlantic that he has been learning on the job thanks to Netflix documentaries like “Turning Point: The Vietnam War.” Witkoff has also reportedly read books to brush up on international affairs, although the article didn’t mention which ones.

Shortly after his inauguration, Trump tasked Witkoff with negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and has since expanded his role to work on mediating between Ukraine and Russia. Witkoff has broken with past U.S. policy by directly reaching out to Hamas, and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin by himself, relying only on Putin’s interpreters.

“I spent a lot of time with President Putin—talking, developing a friendship, a relationship with him—and that led to Marc getting on the plane,” Witkoff told Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, during an FII Institute forum in Miami in February, describing his success in getting American schoolteacher Marc Fogel released from Russian prison.

Witkoff has brushed off criticism about his lack of experience, relating foreign policy to his business background. He told The Atlantic that “[d]iplomacy is negotiation. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

Trump chose Witkoff because they’re friends. The two have known each other since the 1980s, and Witkoff was golfing with Trump at Trump International Golf Club in Florida during an assassination attempt in September. But how does any of that demonstrate skill at resolving international conflicts and representing American interests?

More bad polling news for President Trump: The same Latino voters who helped him beat Kamala Harris in November now strongly disapprove of how he’s carried out his deportation crackdown.

A new poll by Equis Research, first reported on by The Bulwark, shows that 15 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump completely disapprove of his presidential actions to this point. A whopping 66 percent of all Latino voters also believe that his “actions are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.”

When it comes to Latinos who flipped from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, 51 percent disapprove of his overall performance. And 36 percent of all Latino Trump voters feel like he’s crossed a line with his deportation crackdown, as he shirks the constraints of the checks and balances system to make an example of those like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Andry Hernández Romero.

Trump has also completely reversed the goodwill he had with young Latino men ages 18–34. He won them by a margin of +11 in November (54-43), but he now sits at an overall disapproval margin of -11 (44-55). Young Latino men have also cooled on Trump’s economy (-17) and his immigration policies (-12).

The most important issues for the respondents here were mass deportations.

“A very large share of Latinos believe mass deportations will ‘tear families apart, many of whom have been in the US for a long time’ (73% agree, 53% strongly) and will ‘unfairly impact undocumented immigrants who are law-abiding members of society, work hard and pay taxes’ (71% agree, 52% strongly),” according to the Equis poll. “While Latinos have not shed their concerns about border security, it is clear that they think Trump has overreached.”

A group that was initially hailed as a key part of some new, multiracial GOP coalition is now having serious second thoughts about the man they voted for. And while polls like this aren’t fatal, this certainly raises some alarms for how Trump’s actions will impact Republican downballot races in the upcoming midterm election.

Donald Trump’s tax bill is no more.

The House Budget Committee voted against the reconciliation bill Friday, with 16 members voting in favor of it and 21 voting against it. Those opposing the tax bill included Republican Representatives Andrew Clyde, Chip Roy, Josh Brecheen, Ralph Norman, and Vice Chair Lloyd Smucker—the last of whom changed his vote at the eleventh hour.

The president had resorted to panicking over his collapsing tax opus prior to the vote, posting in all caps on Truth Social that “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’”

“We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party,” Trump continued. “STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE! It is time to fix the MESS that Biden and the Democrats gave us.”

Committee members, however, were tired of the spectacle.

“I do not anticipate us coming back today,” said Chairman Jodey Arrington at the close of the vote. “I’m going to let you know if we’ll return first thing Monday. Know that the weekend is yours.”

Freedom Caucus conservatives argued that the bill did not properly address their concerns, calling for more spending cuts and specific start dates for policy proposals such as Medicaid work requirements.

Republicans could only afford to lose two votes on the Budget Committee. Instead, they lost five—a damning indictment of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s whip operation. Johnson has committed to meeting members over the weekend, though it’s expected to be a long haul to get them on the side of a budget plan that they believe does not do enough to downsize the federal deficit.

“We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price,” Roy said in a statement Friday ahead of the vote, admonishing his colleagues for drafting a bill that falls “profoundly short.”

“So I am a no on this bill, unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. We’re having conversations as we speak, but something needs to change, or you’re not going to get my support.”

“I’m not gonna sit here and say everything’s hunky dory when this is the Budget Committee,” he said. “This is the Budget Committee. We’re supposed to do something to actually result in balanced budgets, but we’re not doing it.”

Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and multimillionaires is estimated to add trillions to the national deficit. To offset the hike, Republicans proposed cutting $880 billion from Medicaid by way of adding work requirements and booting undocumented immigrants off the public health coverage program (undocumented immigrants are ineligible to receive Medicaid, though life-saving care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act can be covered by emergency Medicaid).

The bill also didn’t follow through on things that Trump had promised to his base, such as stripping taxes from tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits.

The House had issued a self-imposed deadline to wrap the bill by Memorial Day, but the Republican-led movement to can Trump’s plan has cast doubt on the status of the reconciliation package. The committee is scheduled to reconvene at 10:00 p.m. Sunday for another vote on the bill. If it passes, the bill would then advance it to the Rules Committee on Wednesday, reported Punchbowl News.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump complained about a gift he received from the United Arab Emirates by making a joke Friday morning during his visit to the country.

Trump’s hosts presented the president with a plaque containing a drop of the country’s oil, and while accepting the present, Trump said, “This is the highest quality oil on the planet and they only gave me a drop of it, so I’m not thrilled, but it’s better than no drop, can you imagine?”

The joke was met with laughter from onlookers and Trump’s UAE hosts, but carries a more negative tone in the context of the president receiving a much bigger gift ahead of his Middle East tour: a luxury airplane from Qatar that is being described as a bribe. Trump has bristled from criticism over the jet, which he claims is free but will probably cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars to modify for presidential standards.

The airplane gift was preceded by Trump’s businesses cutting a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar earlier this month. In the UAE, the Trump family has also cut a number of recent deals, with an Emirati-backed firm recently spending $2 billion on Trump’s stablecoin to the unveiling of Trump International Hotel & Tower Dubai last week. And in Saudi, two Trump Towers are in the works. It seems the president should have little to complain about with all of the money he’s making, not to mention the deals that he claims to be cutting in the Middle East for U.S. industries.

After months of baseless claims about “extreme levels of fraud” within the Social Security Administration—even going so far as calling it the “biggest ponzi scheme of all time”—Elon Musk and DOGE have only found two likely fraudulent claims out of over 110,000 at the Social Security Administrations, according to Nextgov.

Musk and other DOGE workers were claiming that 40 percent of calls to the agency were fraudulent.

DOGE instructed the agency to install anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone. That policy impeded the agency’s retirement claim processing, while finding less than 1 percent rate of calls were potentially fraudulent. The two likely fraudulent cases make it a rate of .0018 percent. So DOGE found virtually no fraud and made a system integral to our country’s inner workings less efficient in the process.

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” an internal agency document read. The SSA is now weighing changing the policy entirely.

“The Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Nextgov. ““Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits.... There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”

“It seemed like a solution in search of a problem,” said Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “So many of these policy changes—the proposals, the reversals, the things that SSA has done over these past several months—seem to have been fueled by misinformation from people like Elon Musk.”

Donald Trump has the presidency, but now he seems to want Paris Hilton’s crown.

The president did very presidential things on social media Friday morning, including roasting Taylor Swift by deeming the notoriously litigious pop singer as not “hot.”

“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump likes to dredge up his obsession with Swift every so often, especially during critical policy moments. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”

Swift has already found herself at the epicenter of A-list drama this week, after she was subpoenaed into her reportedly ex-BFF Blake Lively’s harassment lawsuit against It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni. Another scandalous, Swift-related detail emerged from the case this week when Baldoni’s attorneys submitted a letter accusing Lively’s team of extorting Swift by threatening to release “ten years” of private texts with the popstar unless she expressed public support for Lively. A federal judge struck the letter from the docket Thursday, warning Baldoni’s team not to “promote scandal arising out of unproven potentially libelous statements.”

But the 35-year-old chantress isn’t the only singer beefing with Trump. Shortly after calling out Swift, the president took a stab at Bruce Springsteen, snubbing the singer of “Born in the USA”, one of his favorite rally tracks, as “highly overrated.”

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” Trump posted. “If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now!”

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!” Trump added.

The jab followed remarks Springsteen made at a concert in Manchester, England Wednesday. The rock star said that the Trump administration was “taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers,” and that the richest men were “taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times,” Springsteen said. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

“They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society,” he continued. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

This story has been updated.

An Instagram post from former FBI Director James Comey has drawn a massive backlash from the right, which is accusing him of calling for Donald Trump’s assassination.

Comey on Thursday posted a picture of seashells arranged on beach sand reading “8647.” He claimed that he came across the shells, already arranged, while taking a walk, and assumed that it was a political message. Conservatives immediately started attacking Comey, a critic of Trump who was fired by the president during his first term.

“Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered. This is who the Dem-Media worships. Demented!!!!” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wrote on X Thursday, pinning it to the top of his profile.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer also freaked out in multiple X posts, claiming, “This is a call for the assassination of President Trump by the former FBI Director!” And on Fox News Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for Comey to be jailed, calling the post concerning in light of Trump surviving “two assassination attempts on his life.”

But how dangerous was Comey’s post? According to Merriam-Webster, the verb “86” can mean “to eject, remove, or dismiss” a person. The “47” in the picture presumably means Trump, the 47th president of the United States. Though some use the term 86 to mean “to kill,” many also use it to simply mean to get rid of something.

Regardless of what Comey meant, conservatives are acting in bad faith when they call for his prosecution. The phrase was also used against Joe Biden, with conservatives selling “8646” merchandise. Trump’s own social media posts have far exceeded Comey’s post, such as his 2024 post of a video showing Biden hog-tied in the back of a pickup truck. All of this is just another case of the right crying wolf.