Judge Dumps Cold Water on Trump’s Texas Gerrymandering Scheme

A federal judge has thrown out Texas’s gerrymandered congressional maps.

Judge Jeffrey V. Brown ruled Tuesday that the Lone Star State must return to its 2021 maps for the 2026 election, writing that “substantial evidence” proved Texas had “racially gerrymandered” its latest districts.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. But Texas’s decision to do so in the middle of the decade—at Donald Trump’s direction—raised alarm.

Trump had suggested that Texas could give Republicans five more House seats by flipping a handful of blue districts in the Lone Star State next year via “a very simple redrawing.” In July, the Justice Department threatened to take legal action on the matter, asserting that at least four Texas congressional districts were “unconstitutional” since the presence of multiple racial groups had made white people the regional electoral minority.

Mere days after the DOJ letter, Governor Greg Abbott added redistricting to the special session’s legislative agenda.

“Lawmakers reportedly met that request to redistrict on purely partisan grounds with apprehension. When the governor announced his intent to call a special legislative session, he didn’t even place redistricting on the legislative agenda,” Brown wrote in his ruling. “But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board.”

Redistricting is perfectly legal—so long as it complies with federal law. Trump’s directive for Texas forced the state to focus on race rather than politics in defiance of national nondiscrimination laws. Brown noted in the legal opinion that if the effort had intended to thwart Democratic strongholds in the state, it would have also targeted majority white Democrat districts,” but those were “conspicuously absent.”

“In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race. In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts,” Brown wrote.

Brown determined that reverting to the 2021 map was a more adequate solution than providing the state with another opportunity to draw up a plan, since the 2021 iteration was not only developed by the state legislature (as opposed to the state judiciary) but has successfully been used in two previous congressional elections as well as an ongoing special election.

Democrats took the news in stride.

“Womp, Womp,” responded Texas State Representative Gene Wu, the chair of the state Democratic caucus.

Trump issued similar directives for a handful of other red states, including Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.

The aggressive redistricting effort elicited shock and contempt from two of the country’s most populous (and Democratic) regions—California and New York. Both states have since launched their own redistricting wars to potentially offset Texas’s altered numbers, though the initiative may seriously offset House seats in the coming years in light of Tuesday’s ruling.

This story has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed to call out Donald Trump Tuesday at a press conference surrounded by victims of child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

“I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five—no actually six years for. And I gave him my loyalty for free. I won my first election without his endorsement, beating eight men in a primary, and I’ve never owed him anything, but I fought for him for the policies and for America First,” Greene said outside of the Capitol. “And he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.”

Greene laid out her reasons for supporting the release of the Epstein files, using her strongest words against the president to date.

“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is a, is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me,” Greene added.

Greene was one of three Republican signatories to the original discharge petition triggering a vote on the Epstein files. The House is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill to release the government’s files on Epstein, and it is now expected to easily pass with Republican and Democratic support.

Trump has seemingly given up on blocking and delaying the vote, but not without calling the Georgia congresswoman “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” in recent days and mocking her claims of receiving threats. With these latest remarks, it seems Trump and Greene’s relationship could soon be irreparable.

The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking empire are begging Donald Trump to stop turning their suffering into a political issue.

Speaking during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, a group of the financier’s victims excoriated Trump’s dogged efforts to minimize interest in the case as a “national embarrassment.”

Jena-Lisa Jones, who publicly accused Epstein in 2019 of abusing her in his home years earlier, described the process to obtain transparency into the government’s investigation as “distressing.”

“First, the administration said it would release everything, and applauded President Trump for that,” Jones said. “Then it fought to release nothing.

“Now that the checks and balances of our democracy have worked, and the bill is getting passed to release the files, we are hearing the administration say they intend to investigate various Democrats who were friends with Epstein.

“I beg you, President Trump—please stop making this political. It is not about you, President Trump. You are our president, please start acting like it. Show some class, show some real leadership. Show that you actually care about the people other than yourself,” Jones continued. “I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been a national embarrassment.”

The women met on Capitol Hill hours ahead of a House vote that could unlock public access to the Epstein case files.

The Trump administration first bungled the release of the files in July, when the Justice Department issued a memo that contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the alleged existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” Since then, Trump has attempted to brush off the scandal, repeatedly referring to it as a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

Pressure on lawmakers dramatically ramped up last week after Representative Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, adding the final signature necessary to force a vote in the House on the files’ release.

The House Oversight Committee also released more than 20,000 documents that they had obtained from Epstein’s estate, revealing that Trump was a frequent topic of conversation between Epstein and his pen pals.

Senior Republicans privately expect dozens of their party members—“possibly 100 or more”—to vote in favor of a bill that would make the federal government’s trove of Epstein files publicly available.

Their split sent Trump into a tailspin, inspiring him to meet with conservative lawmakers one-on-one in an apparent pressure campaign to kill the vote. But by Sunday, Trump appeared to acknowledge that he had lost the battle—at least in the House—writing on Truth Social that Republicans should release the files because they had “nothing to hide.”

But the sudden reversal didn’t win him any favors with Epstein’s survivors.

“To the president of the United States of America, who is not here today, I want to send a clear message to you,” said Haley Robson, who was 16 when she met Epstein. “While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is.

“I want to relay this message to you: I am traumatized. I am not stupid,” Robson added, repeating herself. “I am traumatized. I am not stupid.”

When misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate and his brother left Romania in February to return to the United States, a Trump administration official intervened on their behalf with Customs and Border Protection.

ProPublica reports that Paul Ingrassia, a White House lawyer who had previously represented the Tate brothers and once bragged about having a “Nazi streak,” intervened on their behalf when customs officials seized their electronic devices at the airport in Fort Lauderdale. 

Ingrassia, working as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, personally sent a letter to senior DHS officials urging them to return the devices. Ingrassia’s letter, obtained by ProPublica, told the officials that seizing the items was not a good use of the department’s time or resources, and that the request came from the White House. 

The letter reportedly alarmed the officials, who thought they could be interfering in a federal investigation if they returned the devices. Tate is under investigation for criminal and civil charges in Romania and the U.K. relating to sexual assault, tax evasion, and human trafficking. A woman in Florida has also sued Tate for coercing her into sex work. 

Ingrassia’s request disgusted at least one government official because of its “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”

“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person told ProPublica. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”

Ingrassia already has a negative reputation inside and outside of government. Currently working for the General Services Administration, he was forced to withdraw his nomination to the Office of Special Counsel last month after text messages surfaced where he made blatantly racist comments. 

Not only is Ingrassia a racist, it seems he has a misogynist streak as well. It’s no surprise that he has also been accused of sexual harassment. But in the Trump administration, all that matters is loyalty to the president, and both Ingrassia and the Tates have it.  

President Donald Trump interrupted his own scrambled attempt to elucidate his affordability pitch to talk about his favorite sandwich.

“I like the fish,” said a hoarser-than-usual Trump while speaking at the McDonald’s National Impact Summit in Washington Monday night. He waved his hand and released a throaty hiss, ostensibly to mime the fish he liked.

“I like it. You could do a little bit more tartar sauce though, please. Seriously. I hate when I say, ‘Do you have any tartar sauce? Do you understand that? Yes, he understands that.’”

Trump’s latest weird attempt to tout the McDonald’s brand in order to seem like a normal person comes just one week after McDonald’s chief executive Christopher Kempczinski told investors that ballooning prices at the fast-food chain had caused traffic from low-income households to drop by double digits.

But it seems that Trump accidentally made clear that his emphasis on the cost of living was simply an attempt to steal the issue from his political opponents, who’d used it to great effect on Election Day earlier this month.

“The word is ‘affordable,’” Trump said. “And affordable should be our word, not theirs, because the Democrats got up and said, ‘Affordability, affordability,’ and they don’t say that they had the worst inflation in history, the highest energy prices in history, everything was the worst. What they are great at is lying.”

In reality, inflation has steadily increased for the last five months in a row.

Clearly, the nation’s economic anxieties have become a sore spot for the president, who has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years. Earlier this month, he ranted that he didn’t want to “hear about affordability.” Now he can’t seem to stop talking about it.

But he still failed to acknowledge his own role in raising prices—through tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants—and blamed former President Joe Biden for, well, everything.

“We’re gonna make the American dream a word that—two words that you didn’t have. You didn’t have those two words. Remember when Biden said, ‘It’s all about three words: the American dream’? You don’t ever want to get in that situation. Remember that? That was not good,” Trump said.

“You are so damn lucky that I won that election,” Trump said.

He’s right: If he hadn’t, we’d never get to hear him make great economic addresses like this one.

American politics has come a long way since World War II.

More than 250,000 Americans lost their lives fighting fascism in the European theater between 1942 and 1945, but decades later, that fervor to reject the destructive ideology seems to have died among the country’s ruling class.

Republicans on the House Rules Committee refused to condemn fascism Monday, voting against an amendment that would formally rebuke the hyper-nationalistic, authoritarian credo.

Lawmakers that opposed the effort included Representatives Michelle Fischbach, Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, Erin Houchin, Nicholas Langworthy, Austin Scott, H. Morgan Griffith, Brian Jack, and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx.

The conservative fascism defense comes days after the White House branded antifa—a catchall for self-described antifascists—as a foreign terrorist organization. President Donald Trump has used the famously decentralized antifascist network as a scapegoat for years, leveraging the provocative label to push narratives that an organized network of violent, far-left radicals is wreaking havoc in cities across the country.

Fascism, however, has become a remarkably touchy topic. In recent weeks, Republicans have flown into a fury over getting called fascists and accused Democrats of inciting political violence by using the term. Since at least 2015, Americans have argued over the application of the phrase, debating the merits of torching Trump’s authoritarian populist ideology as a fascist groundwork or staying silent to maintain the gravitas of the word.

But this wasn’t always true. Decades ago, fascism and its followers had a clear definition in the U.S. consciousness, especially among the Americans who spent their lives fighting it.

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends,” wrote Vice President Henry A. Wallace for The New York Times in 1944.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism,” continued Wallace.

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Donald Trump snapped at a reporter late last week when she asked him about the Jeffrey Epstein files, appearing to insult her appearance.

The president was asked on Friday aboard Air Force One about his name showing up in many of Epstein’s emails and correspondence released by the House Oversight Committee, and how Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls.” Trump tried to deflect, saying that reporters should be looking into how much time Larry Summers and Bill Clinton spent with Epstein.

When a reporter asked him, “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not—,” Trump shut her down.

“Quiet! Quiet piggy!” Trump said to the Bloomberg reporter.

Trump is known for insulting reporters, usually calling them “fake news,” but it seems the Epstein revelations have pushed him into schoolyard territory. After months of calling the Epstein files in the government’s possession a hoax and trying to delay or block their release, Trump is now faced with the fact that Congress is expected to vote for their disclosure.

If Epstein stays in the news cycle much longer, Trump may resort to even more childish antics. But then again, it’s not really a huge departure from his usual self. One thing is for sure: The files must contain some damaging material to provoke this kind of reaction.

Donald Trump is open to the possibility of launching attacks on Mexico to stop the flow of drugs, he told reporters in the White House Monday.

“It’s OK with me,” Trump said. “Whatever we have to do to stop drugs. Mexico is, look, I looked at Mexico City over the weekend, some big problems over there.”

Trump bragged about his bombing campaign across the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific Ocean next to Central America, claiming that it had reduced the drug flow into the U.S. by 85 percent.

“We have almost no drugs coming into our country by the sea, by, you know, the waterways, and you know why, OK? I mean, it’s pretty obvious. Would I do that on the land corridor?” Trump said, making a positive gesture. When a reporter asked if he would need Mexico’s permission, the president was dismissive.

“I wouldn’t answer that question. I’ve been speaking to Mexico. They know how I stand. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of people to drugs. So now we’ve stopped the waterways. We know every route,” Trump said, claiming that the government knows where “every druglord” lives. He said that he’d be proud to go to Congress and claimed that he would have the support of Republicans and Democrats “unless they’re crazy.”

“I am not happy with Mexico,” Trump said, concluding the press session.

The Trump administration has bombed dozens of boats south of the United States without providing evidence that they are trafficking drugs, or providing the names of people killed in the strikes. In some cases, the dead and injured were fishermen whom the U.S. declined to prosecute.

The strikes have been condemned by multiple countries, with some even opting to stop sharing drug-trafficking intelligence with the U.S. out of fear that it would be used for more bombings without transparency. Even Republicans have spoken out against the strikes. But if Trump decides to strike Mexico, that could change, as some Republicans have been egging on the president to bomb the country for years.

Trump himself told advisers in his first presidential term that he wanted to “bomb the drugs” in Mexico, and even devised plans to invade the country before beginning his second term. Will he follow through, or is this just the ravings of a man experiencing cognitive decline?

Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino was seen on video asking a random brown-skinned man standing at a bus stop in Chicago if he spoke English. 

“You speak English?” Bovino asks, pointing at the man, who looks obviously uncomfortable. He gives no response, and Bovino switches to Spanish. 

“No demands made.  It was a very casual conversation that ended with the arrest of this illegal alien,” Bovino posted on X in the comment section of the video. “Chicago will continue to see Title 8 immigration enforcement. All illegal aliens should self deport immediately via the CBP Home app.” 

Bovino has been often criticized for his brutal and wanton tactics, which include using tear gas and pepper balls against peaceful protesters. 

“This is the lie they want you to believe; that you can refuse to answer and walk away but we know that’s not true,” Cato Institute Immigration Studies director David Bier wrote in response to Bovino. “We’ve seen them arresting people for doing exactly that.” 

Bovino’s approach in the clip also aligns with the Department of Homeland Security’s policy of racial profiling, which it has fought in court to preserve. 

“Apparent ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion in appropriate circumstances—for instance, if agents know that the members of a criminal organization under investigation are disproportionately members of one ethnic group—even if it would not be relevant in other circumstances,” the Trump administration wrote in a Supreme Court request that was later granted, clearing the way for racial profiling. “And, in context, officers might reasonably rely on the fact that someone exclusively speaks Spanish to support reasonable suspicion that the person is here illegally.”