“See You in Court”: Blue States Trash Trump’s Mail-In Voting Order

Donald Trump’s executive order targeting mail-in voting is already being challenged by states, while election experts say it’s dead on arrival.

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday requiring the Department of Homeland Security to partner with the Social Security Administration to assemble a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. The order also directs the U.S. Postal Service to bar anyone not included on these lists from receiving a mail-in or absentee ballot. Mail ballots are required to be packaged in special envelopes with trackable barcodes.

The order also empowered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate states and localities that give ballots to ineligible voters.

Trump called the order “foolproof” while signing it Tuesday evening, but states are already fighting back, Time reported Wednesday.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows called the order “laughably unconstitutional,” and promised there was no way her state would “obey in advance.” Despite Trump’s calls for Republicans to nationalize elections, the U.S. Constitution empowers states to run their own elections.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar also condemned the order, claiming it was just another attempt by Trump to undermine free and fair elections. “The President has spent years attempting to manufacture a crisis around mail voting when there is none. Any claims that there is widespread fraud in our elections are false and create chaos and confusion for voters in the middle of an election year,” he said in a statement.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes released a statement calling the order a “disgusting overreach” to “weaponize the sensitive information of voters in this country.”

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read called the order a “desperate, illegal power grab,” adding, “My message to the president: We’ll see you in court.”

Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, also announced his intention to challenge the order. “We know where this will go—the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement. We will sue and we will win,” he wrote on X.

Others election experts had a more laissez-faire attitude. David Becker, executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that Trump’s order was a total nonstarter. “Some may freak out about this, but honestly, this is hilarious,” Becker told MS NOW. “He might as well sign an EO banning gravity.”

It’s worth noting that Trump recently voted by mail in a Palm Beach election won by a Democrat. Trump’s executive order comes as Republicans are attempting to pass the SAVE America Act, which would prohibit universal mail-in voting. Under the new legislation, voters would have to submit an application to receive a mail-in ballot.

Donald Trump’s presidential library will probably have very little to do with books and reading.

Trump shared a mock-up of the facility to his Truth Social account Sunday night, teasing a new glass skyscraper on the Miami skyline labeled “Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.” Renderings of the building included a red, white, and blue needle on top, a U.S. flag hanging down the side, and a gargantuan plane on the first floor that resembles the super luxury jumbo jet Qatar gifted him last year.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, Trump directly addressed the proposed development, flatly admitting that his presidential library will probably not be a library at all.

“It’s a huge skyscraper—is that all a library?” asked a journalist.

“Well, it’s a library. It’s a museum, a library, it’s presidential,” Trump said. “But I wouldn’t start until I’m out of office. I don’t believe in building libraries or museums.”

Trump then went on to insult Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago, calling it “a very unattractive building” that’s in a “bad location.”

“I think you’re going to see a great one here,” Trump said, adding that he believes it will be built in the “best block in Miami.”

“Will people live on the floors?” asked another reporter.

“No, it’s going to most likely be a hotel, you know this concept could be an office but it’s most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Airforce One in the lobby. It’ll be a trick,” Trump said.

Presidential libraries are typically built with private donations and managed by the National Archives and Records Administration. No such library ever erected in honor of a former president has featured a hotel.

It’s far from the first time that Trump has attempted to use his power and political prestige as a get-rich-quick scheme. Trump’s long list of election-year hustles included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and a limited-edition, $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood, which was ultimately forced on Oklahoma public schools by their MAGA superintendent.

And last month—just two weeks into the Iran war—Trump issued a fundraising email to his supporters that promised a “National Security Briefing Membership” in exchange for their cash.

Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were booed at the prestigious national theater the president has spent months running into the ground.

While attending the opening night of Chicago at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Tuesday, Trump appeared to receive a mixed reaction from the audience.

One video posted by PatriotTakes on X showed Trump and Melania standing in the mezzanine at the Kennedy Center receiving some applause and some loud boos.

In a 31-second clip posted by Rapid Response 47, the boos are much less audible, until the last 10 seconds.

CNN reported that Trump received a “warm reception” compared to when he attended the opening show of Les Misérables in June, when he was protested by drag performers.

The Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese wrote on X that there had been two warring factions in the audience. “President Trump enters the Kennedy Center to loud cheers. Some boos, but the crowd drowned them out with more cheers,” she wrote.

Earlier this year, Trump announced that he planned to shutter the Kennedy Center for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”

Many have speculated that the planned temporary closure is an attempt by Trump to save face after his takeover of the institution—including renaming it the “Trump-Kennedy Center”—led to a sharp decline in ticket sales and multiple artists canceling shows.

The Trump administration is going to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, and conservatives are not happy.

Right-wing media outlet The Daily Wire reported Tuesday that the White House will continue Biden-era grants to the family planning organization for another year, but end them after that.

“The administration has issued the fifth and final year of Title X grants that were locked in place during the Biden presidency,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told the outlet. “The administration faced significant legal challenges in stopping any of these dollars from going out.”

Planned Parenthood has long been targeted by the right for its abortion and contraception services, even though it provides many other vital health programs, and the Trump administration’s decision immediately drew a backlash.

“This is an inexplicable slap in the face to the pro-life GOP base,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of SBA Pro-Life America, told The Daily Wire. “Three out of 4 GOP base voters support defunding Planned Parenthood. One third of those voters say they’d be less enthusiastic about voting this November if the GOP abandons pro-life policies.”

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America (who graduated from college more than two decades ago), complained on X Monday night that she and other abortion opponents were told that the funding would continue because “the rules require it.”

“Let’s talk about that,” Hawkins posted. “If we are going to claim we must follow ‘the rules’ to fund abortion vendors, then we should also enforce the law that prohibits mailing Chemical Abortion Pills. The Comstock Act is already federal law, and it makes it ILLEGAL to traffic dangerous abortion drugs by mail.

“The Trump Administration doesn’t get to ignore federal law when it comes to the predatory abortion industry and then reward the same industry with more taxpayer dollars!” Hawkins added.

The White House’s decision shouldn’t be mistaken as a friendly move toward reproductive rights. The Trump administration is in the midst of several court battles over its policies, and has appealed many losses to the Supreme Court.

Administration officials, who are staunchly anti-abortion, probably see one last year of Planned Parenthood funding as a small price to pay until they can ditch it altogether. In the meantime, though, it’s funny to see the president’s base fly into a rage even as he has successfully restricted abortion rights in many other ways.

The Army has suspended the aircrew that flew over Kid Rock’s house during a No Kings protest on Saturday.

Two Apache attack helicopters hovered outside the MAGA musician’s 27,000-square-foot Tennessee mansion, a replica of the executive estate that Rock has dubbed the “Southern White House.” In a bizarre exchange recorded by someone at Rock’s house, the “Bawitdaba” singer saluted the wayward copter.

“This is a level of respect that shit for brains Governor of California will never know,” Kid Rock, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, captioned the clip on X. “God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her.”

A second video posted to Ritchie’s account revealed that two helicopters had passed by his wannabe presidential property.

The Army identified the aircraft as AH-64 Apache helicopters that were operating around Nashville. A military spokesperson told NBC News Monday that the aircraft flew from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to the Nashville area.

“Army aviators must adhere to strict safety standards, professionalism, and established flight regulations,” the Army said in a statement Monday. “An administrative review is underway to assess the mission and verify compliance with regulations and airspace requirements.”

The Army noted that it would take “appropriate action” if any violations are uncovered.

A spokesperson for the 101st Airborne Division told NBC News that the helicopters’ presence was “entirely coincidental” with the No King demonstrations taking place across the country on Saturday.

Ritchie, a country rapper from Detroit, has become an increasingly prominent figure in the MAGA scene in recent years. He played at the Republican National Convention in 2024, was present in the White House as Donald Trump signed an executive order to curb ticket scalping in March 2025, and headlined Turning Point USA’s counterprogramming to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show in February.

He’s also gotten close with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., playing a prominent role in a series of agency-sponsored “Make America Healthy Again” adverts that featured Kennedy and Ritchie chugging milk and swimming in a pool with pants on.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project after a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation—which argues that Trump acted beyond his authority when he demolished the East Wing to build said ballroom.

The Trust was awarded a preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, suspending the project until the lawsuit is decided.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Leon, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote. “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Enforcement of the ruling is paused for two weeks, while awaiting a probable appeal from the Trump administration—but Leon warned that “any above-ground construction over the next fourteen days that is not in compliance” with his ruling “is at risk of being taken down depending on the outcome of this case.”

Trump, incensed, took to Truth Social to rail against Leon’s decision.

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years,” Trump wrote. “Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman.”

Trump’s ballroom was initially projected to cost $200 million, and the price has since ballooned to double that.

This story has been updated.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from defunding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. 

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled that President Trump’s executive order last May to end federal funding for the two public broadcasting networks is illegal and unenforceable, saying that the First Amendment to the Constitution “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.”

“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch,” Moss, who was appointed to the Washington, D.C., circuit by President Obama, wrote in his ruling. 

Trump and his fellow Republicans have long railed against PBS and NPR for what they perceive as bias towards liberals and Democrats. That’s not enough for the president to deny them federal funding, Moss said, because there is no legal precedent for it. 

“The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech,” Moss wrote. “The First Amendment does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.” 

The heads of NPR (which sued the Trump administration last May) and PBS celebrated the decision. “Public media exists to serve the public interest — that of Americans — not that of any political agenda or elected official,” NPR’s president and CEO Katherine Maher said to the Associated Press. PBS President and  CEO Paula Kerger, called the executive order “textbook” viewpoint discrimination and retaliation. 

“At PBS, we will continue to do what we’ve always done: serve our mission to educate and inspire all Americans as the nation’s most trusted media institution,” Kerger said. 

Trump’s executive order cut off millions of dollars for PBS’s children’s programming from the Department of Education, resulting in layoffs for one-third of PBS Kids employees. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversaw the federal funding for PBS and NPR, was forced to close after Congress eliminated federal appropriations for the public outlets. 

The Trump administration will likely appeal the ruling, and it’s not clear how or if Congress will resume funding for PBS and NPR. Smaller and more rural communities with fewer news outlets were hit the hardest by the loss of public funding, as comedian John Oliver pointed out on HBO’s Last Week Tonight in November. Arkansas PBS even briefly considered ending its affiliation with the national PBS organization. Hopefully, this court ruling will spur a much-needed revival of public media funding in the U.S. 

This story has been updated.

The Justice Department dropped thousands of criminal cases last year in an attempt to reorient its efforts—almost singularly—toward winning convictions in cases involving immigrants.

Altogether, America’s top law enforcement agency closed some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Donald Trump’s term, which involved investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases, ProPublica reported Tuesday.

The bulk of the shuttered files were closed without prosecution, and had been referred to the DOJ by different law enforcement agencies under different presidential administrations. Some were the result of yearslong investigations helmed by the FBI or the DEA.

The process began immediately after Attorney General Pam Bondi was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025. That month alone, the DOJ declined nearly 11,000 cases, marking the most it had done so at once since at least 2004, and nearly doubling the previous high, when more than 6,500 cases were dismissed in September 2019 (during Trump’s first administration).

The shift in priorities is an indication that “making America safe again” is not necessarily as much of a goal for the current administration as Trump has promised. At the president’s direction, federal authorities have arrested thousands of noncriminal immigrants across the country. The administration has claimed that the subjects of its deportation purge are the “worst of the worst”—including “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.”

But demanding the DOJ hyperfixate on immigration (a civil issue that has historically been handled by the courts) has come at a cost to investigating and prosecuting actual crime. Over the last year, the DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, more than other administrations, per ProPublica.

The result has been a crushing blow to agency morale, according to DOJ officials. Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi spent years working on the agency’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section to challenge fentanyl suppliers in India and China before Bondi ordered him to abandon his work.

“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” Gerbasi told ProPublica. The career prosecutor retired as the section’s acting deputy chief in March 2025, just weeks into Bondi’s tenure. Gerbasi had worked for the DOJ for 28 years.

He’s not alone: Thousands of lawyers have quit the agency, or been forced out, as Bondi carries out the Trumpian overhaul.

Bondi’s decision to halt the work had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” Gerbasi said.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid are putting more than 440 hospitals at risk of closure, which could sever care from millions of Americans.

Public Citizen, a government watchdog, reported Tuesday that 446 hospitals were at a heightened risk of closure due to the president’s behemoth budget bill, which will cut an estimated $911 billion from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, over the next 10 years.

These are hospitals that receive more than 20 percent of their revenue from low-income government programs such as Medicaid and CHIP, and have operated on a negative profit margin between 2022 and 2024. They account for 68,986 beds and employ approximately 275,458 direct patient care workers, not including nonmedical workers.

The hospitals endangered by the president’s bill serve poorer communities with a higher percentage of Hispanic and Black populations than other hospitals. At-risk hospitals served communities that had 7 percent more Hispanic and 4 percent more Black people than other hospitals. Nearly 20 percent of at-risk hospitals served high-poverty areas.

Many of these hospitals hold special Medicaid designations indicating how essential they are to the communities they serve. For example, 19 percent of the at-risk hospitals identified were designated “Critical Access Hospitals,” which are 24/7 health care facilities that operate more than 35 miles from another hospital.

These cuts will hurt hospitals across 44 states, both red and blue. However, five blue states—New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and California—now have more than one-quarter of their hospitals at risk.

In rural communities, more people receive and rely on Medicaid coverage, meaning that rural hospitals—which already operate on razor-thin margins—will be forced to absorb skyrocketing rates of uncompensated care, according to the National Rural Health Association. Rather than shut their doors right away, rural hospitals will cut services and lay off staff, depriving patients of access to essential health care. Public Citizen identified 176 at-risk hospitals in rural areas.

Democratic lawmakers have previously warned that more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closure as a result of Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have seemed less than concerned about cutting services.

Approximately half of the hospitals in the United States are in urban areas, and Public Citizen has identified 267 urban hospitals that are also at risk of closure.

American journalist Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in broad daylight in Baghdad on Tuesday. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior stated that Kittleson, who has covered the Middle East for various outlets, was taken by “unknown individuals.”

“Security forces immediately launched an operation to apprehend the perpetrators, acting on precise intelligence and through intensive field operations, tracking the kidnappers’ movements. The pursuit resulted in the interception of a vehicle belonging to the kidnappers, which overturned as they attempted to escape. Security forces were able to arrest one of the suspects and seize one of the vehicles used in the crime,” the ministry reported.

The investigation to find the remaining perpetrators, and to free Kittleson, is ongoing.

Kittleson has written extensively for outlets like BBC World, Politico, Al-Monitor, and Foreign Policy. She was awarded the Premio Caravella award in Italy in 2017 for her war zone reporting.

“We are deeply alarmed by the kidnapping of Al-Monitor contributor Shelly Kittleson in Iraq on Tuesday,” Al-Monitor said in a statement. “We call for her safe and immediate release. We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work.”