Donald Trump Has Beaten Big Law Into Submission

Donald Trump’s efforts to chill legal challenges against his agenda appear to have worked, as Big Law has reached a new low to spare themselves from the president’s wrath.

Reuters reported on Thursday that, after striking deals with the Trump administration, dozens of major law firms are keeping their distance from pro bono work for causes and clients that conflict with Trump’s agenda, and are keeping their distance from litigation against the federal government, leaving advocacy and nonprofit groups to fend for themselves.

Fourteen civil rights groups said that the law firms they have relied on in the past have been hesitant to engage with them, either agreeing to provide confidential help, or turning them down altogether, Reuters reported. Earlier this year, when the Texas Civil Rights Project sought lawyers to provide pro bono work challenging immigration arrests, all of the group’s usual contacts balked.

Reuters’ analysis of court dockets also revealed that Big Law firms had for the most part backed off litigation against the Trump administration—a significant shift from the president’s first term when twenty of the largest law firms challenged his agenda.

The 50 top law firms in the country have represented plaintiffs in only 3 percent of the 865 lawsuits filed under the Administrative Procedure Act, the law that allows challenges to executive actions, since Trump reentered the White House. Those same firms were involved in 9 percent of the whopping 3,400 cases during his firm term. Firms like Paul Weiss and Simpson Thacher, which both challenged Trump the first time around, have now been tucked away in the president’s legal war chest.

Earlier this year, nine major law firms struck deals with the Trump administration to provide pro bono work, after the president targeted firms with executive orders sanctioning them. He’d specifically targeted firms with attorneys who had investigated the president, or defended his enemies, ordering them to end their diversity practices, and entreating them to make a deal. As a result, nine major firms struck deals. Trump walked away with the promise of nearly $940 million in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda.

While four firms fought Trump’s executive orders and won, it seems that the president’s actions have had a broader chilling effect. A whopping 46 of the 50 top-grossing U.S. firms have removed references to DEI from their websites. Seventeen firms have revised descriptions of their pro bono practices to remove causes unsavory to the president, like immigration and racial justice, and three have added language from their deals about supporting veterans and fighting antisemitism.

In May, a group of Democratic lawmakers warned the firms that such deals were unenforceable, and potentially violated federal and state law. Many of the firms have maintained that they’ve kept total control over selecting clients—but that hasn’t stopped them from cowering away from helping those targeted by the president’s sweeping agenda.

The chilling effect goes further than just the law firms—civic groups are similarly concerned about challenging the president’s agenda on issues like transgender rights, immigration rights. Of the 33 groups who spoke to Reuters, all but six fretted that pursuing these causes could risk their access to legal aid in the future.

On the 2024 campaign trail, President Trump promised to “end inflation” and increase affordability, while touting economic proposals widely considered to be at odds with that promise. In April, he dubiously declared victory, saying, “We already solved inflation.”

On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported an increase in the Federal Reserve’s go-to monthly inflation indicator for June, as Trump’s tariff threats start to hit consumers. The personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index shows that consumer prices rose 0.3 percent from May to June, up 2.6 percent from last June (whereas economists had forecast a 2.5 percent increase). This marks the highest annual increase in inflation since February.

“Core” prices, which don’t include the costs of food and energy, also increased 0.3 percent from May and 2.8 percent from a year ago.

The rising inflation helps account for the central bank’s ongoing resistance to Trump’s calls to slash interest rates. Things are only expected to get worse as the majority of the president’s tariffs are set to go into effect on Friday.

On Wednesday, the Fed kept interest rates steady for its fifth meeting in a row as it cautiously assesses the effects of Trump’s tariffs on the economy. “Increased tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories of goods,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said. “Near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up on balance over the course of this year on news about tariffs.”

The central bank’s refusal to budge has frustrated Trump to no end, with the president calling Powell, whom he appointed in his first term, just about every name in the book, including, but not limited to, “numbskull,” “dumb guy,” “major loser,” and “Trump hater.”

Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s proposed bill banning stock trading by legislators has Republicans running around like chickens with their heads cut off—including the president. But Hawley is keeping his cool.

On Wednesday, Trump slammed Hawley on Truth Social, accusing him of playing into the hands of the Democrats with his legislation, which would prohibit members of Congress, the president, and the vice president from trading stocks.

“I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED, because of the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator named Josh Hawley!” Trump wrote.

But Hawley was unbothered by the president’s digs, and laughed them off, according to The Independent. In fact, Hawley says that Trump is a supporter of the bill, reaffirming what the president said to reporters hours before his Truth Social rant.

“He and I had a nice visit this afternoon and he reiterated that he is in favor of a stock ban for members of Congress [and ] that he wants to see it passed,” Hawley said. “He thinks we need to move full speed ahead.”

The bill, which was originally called the PELOSI Act in a mocking tribute to the accusations of insider trading against Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband, made it through the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, in an 8–7 vote, with Hawley as the sole Republican to support the act.

Though the bill does ban the president and vice president from trading or owning stocks, it includes a notable carve-out for Trump: That prohibition will only kick in for future administrations.

The family of Virginia Giuffre has spoken out after President Trump stated that deceased serial predator Jeffrey Epstein “stole” Giuffre from him.

“It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side … no doubt about it,’” Giuffre’s two brothers and sisters-in-law told The Atlantic. “We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”

Giuffre had alleged that she was abducted in 2000 by Ghislaine Maxwell at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where she worked at the time as a pool attendant, and was subsequently abused for the next two years. Giuffre committed suicide in April.

“Hired, by him, in other words—gone,” Trump said earlier this week when asked about Epstein and his “falling out.”

“Other people would come and complain, ‘This guy is taking people from the spa.’ I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people.’ Whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want him taking people.”

“Did one of the stolen persons—did that include Virginia Giuffre?” a reporter asked.

“Um, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa,” Trump said. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

These comments and the immunity deal that the Trump administration may offer to Maxwell drove Giuffre’s family to make a statement.

“If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer, a woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position.”

Canada on Wednesday became the third close U.S. ally to announce its plan to recognize the state of Palestine in recent days, leaving President Donald Trump none too pleased.

“Preserving a two-state solution means standing with all people who choose peace over violence or terrorism, and honouring their innate desire for the peaceful co-existence of Israeli and Palestinian states as the only roadmap for a secure and prosperous future,” said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Canada’s decision follows an announcement from France last week that it will recognize Palestinian statehood. On Tuesday, the United Kingdom committed to do the same unless Israel fails to meet certain conditions to improve conditions in Gaza and commit to peace.

Canada’s decision, like the U.K.’s, comes with stipulations. Palestine must demilitarize, for example, and “hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part,” said Carney.

Trump lashed out in a Truth Social post, in which he threatened that the decision could hamper a prospective trade deal between the U.S. and Canada, which is to be reached by a Friday deadline lest hefty tariffs go into effect.

“Wow!” Trump wrote. “Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”

The response to Canada, a country Trump seemingly has a penchant for intimidating, had more teeth than those to France’s and the U.K.’s announcements (on the former he said, “That statement doesn’t carry weight”; the latter, he said, would reward Hamas).

Trump seemingly hopes to use the impending trade deal deadline to bully Canada into backing down on its pledge to uphold statehood for Palestine (which is, under international law, “a right, not a reward,” according to the U.N.’s secretary-general).

Carney, for his part, has already noted that the U.S.-Canada trade deal may take some additional time to come to fruition. “We’re seeking the best deal for Canadians,” he said Wednesday. “We have not yet reached that deal. Negotiations will continue until we do.”

Trump’s fluid list of demands, per the National Post, has included Canada shelling out for Trump’s “Golden Dome” defense system and aiding Trump’s immigration agenda along the U.S.-Canada border.

With the help of 19 Democrats, the Senate rejected two resolutions Wednesday from Senator Bernie Sanders to block arms sales to Israel as it continues its campaign of mass starvation in Gaza.

The Senate rejected S.J.Res.34, which would have prohibited the sale of $675 million in weapons to Israel, such as 1,000-pound bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits used in airstrikes, by a vote of 27–70. Nineteen Democrats joined Republicans to block the measure.

Seventeen Democrats also voted against S.J.Res.41, which failed by a vote of 24–73 and would have prohibited the sale of fully automatic assault rifles to Israeli forces.

The resolutions had little chance of surviving the House, and President Donald Trump announced earlier on Wednesday that he would veto the measures if they reached his desk. But 19 Democrats still couldn’t support even a symbolic vote against Israel.

Notably, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted against both resolutions, as did Senator Cory Booker, who represents New Jersey. In April, Israeli forces killed a 14-year-old Palestinian American from New Jersey, Amer Rabee.

Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, and Elissa Slotkin did not vote for or against either bill.

The U.N. estimates that one in three Palestinians in Gaza haven’t eaten anything in days, as a result of Israel’s blockade and ongoing genocide. The World Health Organization has also said a “worst-case scenario of famine” has hit the region.

Here is the name of every Democrat who voted to keep arming Israel anyway, blocking at least one of Sanders’s resolutions:

1. Michael Bennett (CO)
2. Richard Blumenthal (CT)
3. Cory Booker (NJ)
4. Maria Cantwell (WA)
5. Chris Coons (DE)
6. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)
7. John Fetterman (PA)
8. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY)
9. Maggie Hassan (NH)
10. John Hicklenlooper (CO)
11. Jon Ossoff (GA)
12. Alex Padilla (CA)
13. Gary Peters (MI)
14. Jack Reed (RI)
15. Jackie Rosen (NV)
16. Adam Schiff (CA)
17. Chuck Schumer (NY)
18. Mark Warner (VA)
19. Ron Wyden (OR)

A dozen Democratic lawmakers are suing the Trump administration for denying them access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. 

In a 67-page federal court filing Wednesday, the group of 12 congresspeople alleged that a new rule requiring them to provide a week’s advance notice to the Department of Homeland Security before visiting a facility used to detain immigrants was illegal. The new rule coincided with a steep increase in the number of immigration arrests and a number of sweeping reports detailing horrific conditions at ICE detention facilities across the country. 

Lawyers alleged that the department’s new rule violated Section 527 of the 2024 DHS appropriations bill, as incorporated by the fiscal year 2025 Continuing Resolution, which stated that the government could not require lawmakers to “provide prior notice of the intent to enter a [DHS] facility.” 

This clause isn’t out of the ordinary—Congress has adopted a similar statute every year since 2019, always proving that no funds appropriated to DHS “may be used to prevent” a Congress member from conducting an oversight visit at such a facility. Since Donald Trump entered the White House, however, each of the 12 plaintiffs said they had been blocked from entering a DHS facility in person. 

The plaintiffs included Representatives Joe Neguse, Adriano Espaillat, Bennie G. Thompson, Jamie Raskin, Robert Garcia, J. Luis Correa, Jason Crow, Veronica Escobar, Daniel S. Goldman, Jimmy Gomez, Raul Ruiz, and Norma Torres. 

In addition to allegedly violating Section 527, the lawsuit accused the DHS of violating the Administrative Procedure Act by acting contrary to the law and in excess of its statutory authority. The lawmakers argued that the oversight visit policy was “arbitrary and capricious because it lacks a lawful basis.” 

The lawsuit also alleged that by preventing the lawmakers from entering the facilities, ICE  had wrongly delayed them from performing their duties. 

The lawmakers are seeking for DHS to declare the rule unlawful and vacate it and to ensure they will be able to freely conduct oversight visits. 

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security imposed restrictions requiring lawmakers to provide ICE with at least 72 hours’ notice before visiting a facility where immigrants are being detained. Previously, sitting members of Congress were allowed to conduct oversight visits at any DHS facility used to “detain or otherwise house aliens” without providing prior notice, and congressional staffers only needed to give 24 hours’ notice. 

The new guidance also granted ICE wide discretion to “deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit” for a number of reasons, including “operational concerns” or if ICE officials or facility managers “deem it appropriate.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva demanded “respect” from President Trump in a New York Times interview published just hours before Trump hit Brazil with sanctions and the whopping 50 percent tariffs he’d been threatening.

“Be sure that we are treating this with the utmost seriousness. But seriousness does not require subservience,” Lula told the Times. “I treat everyone with great respect. But I want to be treated with respect.”

These tariffs are based on politics and personal sensitivities, not economics. Lula has long made his disdain for Trump’s strong-arming known, and Trump’s recent tariff move is absolutely retribution for that. Trump is also attempting to stick it to Brazilian Judge Alexandre de Moraes for his prosecution (or as Trump calls it, “witch hunt”) of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted a January 6–like coup in 2023 to remain in power.

“Maybe [President Trump] doesn’t know that here in Brazil, the judiciary is independent,” Lula said. “At no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.... We know the economic power of the United States, we recognize the military power of the United States, we recognize the technological size of the United States.... But that doesn’t make us afraid. It makes us concerned.”

Trump’s 50 percent tariff is certain to make goods like coffee, beef, and other imports from Brazil much more expensive for the average American.

Lula also mentioned that he found Trump’s use of Truth Social as a platform for actual policy decisions “disgraceful.”

“President Trump’s behavior strayed from all standards of negotiations and diplomacy,” he said. “When you have a commercial disagreement, a political disagreement, you pick up the phone, you schedule a meeting, you talk and you try to solve the problem. What you don’t do is tax and give an ultimatum.”

In the past 24 hours, far-right internet personality Laura Loomer has majorly flexed the influence she wields over the Trump administration’s staffing decisions, claiming not one but two heads.

On Tuesday evening, Loomer publicly cast aspersions on Jen Easterly, a former Biden cybersecurity official who was recently named to a distinguished chair position in West Point’s social sciences department.

Responding to the West Point dean’s since-deleted announcement of Easterly’s appointment, Loomer wrote on X: “Wow [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth]! Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you. There are clearly a lot of Biden holdovers at DOD undermining the Trump admin.” (Easterly, who—Loomer failed to mention—also worked in George W. Bush’s administration, has publicly disputed Trump’s baseless claims about recent elections being rigged.)

The right-wing provocateur urged a “massive” reduction in force at the Defense Department so as to weed out “moles” and tagged the accounts of West Point, the Department of Defense, and Hegseth in the post.

By Wednesday morning, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll publicly shared a memo stating that Easterly was dismissed,and that West Point will “immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees.” Driscoll also requested a “top-down review” of the academy’s hiring practices.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell lauded the decision, and Loomer also celebrated the outcome.

The shake-up at West Point, ostensibly the result of Loomer’s single-handed effort, comes on the heels of another victory for the self-described “pro-white nationalist,” who on Tuesday succeeded in taking down Vinay Prasad, a top official at Trump’s Food and Drug Administration.

Prasad was the FDA’s top vaccine official and an adherent of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But even RFK Jr.’s support wasn’t enough to shield him from Loomer’s wrath for supposed lèse-majesté against Trump.

Loomer launched a campaign against Prasad in recent days, claiming that he was a “progressive leftist saboteur undermining President Trump’s FDA.” Prasad stepped down Tuesday, with a Health Department spokesman saying he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration.”

These two back-to-back Loomerings are just the latest.

In April, Trump reportedly fired a number of national security council officials for disloyalty the day after Loomer flagged them to the president as “people who have played a role in sabotaging” him. She also reportedly sowed doubts about Mike Waltz before he was ousted from his national security adviser post.

Despite protestations from America’s trading partners, Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his tariff scheme would pull in trillions of dollars of investment by some of the world’s largest economies.

“I think we’re going to have the richest economy you’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers nobody has ever seen before.

“We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion,” he continued. “We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing $750 billion plus $400 billion, plus $300 billion, and many other countries. It’s likewise, relatively, those are two big ones.”

But those figures are inaccurate, according to Japanese and European leaders.

Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s top chief negotiator, told public broadcaster NHK on Saturday that he expects just 1 to 2 percent of the $550 billion U.S. fund to be an investment, of which the U.S. and Japan would share the profits at a 90-to-10 ratio. The remainder of the fund would be deployed as a combination of loans and loan guarantees from banks with backing by the Japanese government, reported Bloomberg.

Beyond that, Japan estimates that its new trade deal with the Trump administration would actually save its country money, approximately 10 trillion yen ($68 billion), by way of decreased tariff rates.

“It’s not that $550 billion in cash will be sent to the U.S.,” Akazawa said. “By letting the U.S. have 90 percent of the profits rather than 50 percent, I think Japan’s loss will be at most a couple of tens of billions of yen. People are saying various things, such as, ‘You sold out Japan,’ but they’re wrong.”

Meanwhile, Trump has demanded that Europe reorient its liquefied gas purchases from Russia to the U.S. as a step toward new trading relations. And while European leaders have reiterated the potential of the plan, gas experts are not so convinced that the $750 billion “fantasy” works out.

“We are ready to go for those purchases,” EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič said Monday, echoing comments from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the day before. “We believe these numbers are achievable.”

Actually following through on the arrangement would require Europe to triple its American imports by 2028, forgoing cheaper offerings from its neighbors, such as Norway, which delivers gas to the continent by pipeline. Even divesting from Russian oil would barely make a dent in Trump’s demand—the European Union imported just $23 billion in oil, gas, and nuclear products from Russia in 2024.

Laura Page, a senior analyst at the Kpler commodities firm, told Politico that the figure was “completely unrealistic.”

“The numbers are just beyond wild,” she said.