Trump Makes It Even Easier for Him to Ignore Protesters

The White House is replacing a space known for protests with a parking lot for a month of major national events—including Donald Trump’s birthday.

Over the weekend, a pedestrianized stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square Park was painted with yellow lines denoting parking spaces. The area has served as a viewing spot for tourists and a gathering place for protesters for two decades.

The White House said the parking lot will last through June 28 in order to accommodate several events on the grounds for the country’s 250th anniversary.

Next month, Trump’s birthday plans include “UFC Freedom 250,” which apparently means a pricey UFC fight on the White House’s South Lawn and a “fan fest” at the Ellipse. It’s the same spot where Trump once urged his followers to “fight like hell” before they stormed the U.S. Capitol. In late June, the Great American State Fair will be held at the nearby National Mall.

Lafayette Square Park, another protest spot, has been closed for months for a “major rehabilitation” and is expected to reopen on May 31, according to the National Parks Service.

It seems clear that the president, who regularly lashes out against critics, isn’t interested in getting any more angry feedback from Americans.

There’s reason to suspect that this change may not be temporary, as the Trump administration hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the president’s other renovation plans.

The price tag for Trump’s White House ballroom skyrocketed from $200 million in private donations to $400 million, before Republicans decided to throw $1 billion sourced from American taxpayers at the project. Trump claimed last July that the project would not “interfere with the current building,” but then demolished the entire East Wing.

Fox News thinks that escalating the war in Iran is the best way to end the conflict.

On Fox and Friends Monday morning, Brian Kilmeade called for sending American troops to seize Iran’s enriched uranium, seizing the Strait of Hormuz, and targeting the “bad actors that have been insincerely negotiating with our group.”

“The best chance for no casualties is you open up four different fronts immediately, simultaneously, with an army that hasn’t been paid, with the IRGC, which is being also hurt,” Kilmeade said.

Resuming attacks on Iran in this way would likely produce a response from Iran and increase the chance of U.S. military casualties. Kilmeade has no military experience or expertise on the Middle East, but being on Fox News carries weight: Trump is an avid watcher, and could very easily take this as a viable option.

Later on Monday, Trump made a long-winded post on Truth Social complaining about media coverage of the Iran war, mentioning “The Failing New York Times, The China Street Journal (WSJ!), Corrupt and now Irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the Fake News Media” and claiming that even if Iran totally surrendered, the media would say it had defeated the U.S.

Trump didn’t mention Fox News in his rant, and the network continues to support the war even as other right-wing personalities have come out against it. It’s not clear what he’ll do, but the president won’t take any option that makes him look bad, even if it divides his base and is the best way forward.

Tens of thousands of children have been separated from their families during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution.

The report, released Monday, suggests that more than 145,000 children have been separated from their parents since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an astronomical projection that far eclipses the estimated 5,500 separations that occurred during Trump’s wildly controversial “zero tolerance” policy in his first administration, reported The New York Times.

Three-quarters of those children are likely U.S. citizens, a detail that could be contributing to the previously under-reported figures, since immigrant parents are not being asked about, nor disclosing, their American-born children, according to the report.

Federal immigration agents are required to ask about the parental status of those taken into custody, as per the guidelines described in the ICE Detained Parent Directive. But anecdotal evidence obtained by the Brookings Institution suggests that they rarely do. Further still, other firsthand accounts reveal that some immigrants fear mentioning their children at all, for fear of adverse consequences for their families.

That’s caused a lack of reliable data regarding how many detainees or deportees actually have U.S. citizen children. It’s also caused a lack of reliable data regarding what happens to the children after their parents are taken into custody, according to the report.

Around 60,000 people are currently in ICE detention, according to official data. The Trump administration has arrested some 400,000 immigrants over the last year and a half.

The Department of Homeland Security has provided statistics showing 18,277 detainees with U.S. citizen children in fiscal year 2025, but that number “is almost certainly a substantial undercount,” reads the Brookings report.

To determine their own numbers, the Brookings Institution used an alternative approach that inferred the number of children based on the known demographic data of adult detainees obtained from the Detention Data Project, matching the detainees’ country, age, sex, and marital status to likely undocumented immigrants that participated in a national survey.

“This exercise implies that about 27 percent of detainees are the co-residential parent of a minor child, and 20 percent have citizen children in the home,” reads the report. “Using this method, coupled with an estimate of 400,000 detentions from interior arrests between January 20, 2025 and April 9, 2026, we estimate the total number of children affected by parental detention to be around 205,000 and the number of U.S. citizen children affected to be around 145,000.”

Those numbers are expected to grow given the $45 billion that Congress allocated via Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to expand the country’s detention capabilities.

Exactly where all those children have gone—or who is watching over them—is not as clear. Researchers estimated that just a small fraction of the separated children end up in the foster care system, or under similar arrangements.

“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care—most children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” Dr. Maria Cancian, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and one of the co-authors of the study, told the Times.

The vast majority of parent-child separations spurred by the federal government are rarely temporary—a ProPublica study that examined ICE arrests of mothers of U.S.-born children found that 60 percent had been removed from the country, while 17 percent remained in custody by the end of study itself.

Senator Rick Scott thinks President Trump should “bomb the living daylights” out of Iran so that “we all don’t get killed” by Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapon.

The GOP hardliner stumped for more death, destruction, and war crimes against Iranians on Fox Business Monday morning.

“President Trump is busting his butt. Does he want the Strait of Hormuz closed? No. But does he want us killed by a nuclear weapon? Absolutely not. So he’s doing the right thing by making sure we all don’t get killed by a nuclear weapon,” Scott said. “Ultimately what I think has to happen here—Trump is gonna have to go in and bomb the living daylights out of Iran to hopefully finally get a regime that wants to work with them and stop this ‘death to America,’ ‘death to everybody in the Middle East’ attitude.”

Scott is acting as if Iran has hundreds of warheads pointed directly at the United States and Israel. It has never been proven that Iran has built any nuclear warheads, and Israel and the United States have each bombed nuclear energy plants in the region multiple times during this war, claiming to have destroyed them completely. (Meanwhile, the U.S. has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, while Israel has a sizable secret arsenal.) To assert that Iran is on the brink of dropping a nuke on the U.S. is an absurd statement only meant to drive up support for this massively unpopular war.

Prediction market analysts uncovered what looks like blatant insider trading within the U.S. military after a group of nine connected Polymarket accounts won more than $2.4 million by placing bets on Donald Trump’s war in Iran.

Nicolas Vaiman, the CEO of data analytics firm Bubblemaps, told CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday that a series of nine anonymous accounts had a 98 percent win rate after placing more than 80 bets on pivotal moments of the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran.

“This might be the most insane pattern we have found on Polymarket so far,” Vaiman said. “Luck alone cannot explain those numbers.”

Last month, federal prosecutors charged Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a 38-year-old active-duty Army soldier involved in the planning and capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, with using confidential intel to win $400,000 on Polymarket predictions related to the raid.

“Deebs,” Bubblemap’s head of investigations and a former U.S. military officer, told 60 Minutes that military markets are particularly ripe for rigging, as there are many individuals involved in organizing a military operation.

“That means there are, consequently, a lot of potential insiders,” Deebs said.

David Kovel, a former commodities trader and lawyer representing victims of fraud, pointed to March 23 as a prime example of suspicious trading. That day, just 15 minutes before Trump posted claiming the White House and Iran had “very good and productive” conversations about ending fighting, more than $800 million was staked on the odds that oil prices would drop. Trump’s post sent oil prices plummeting more than 10 percent.

“We’re talking tens of millions, could be $80 million,” Kovel told 60 Minutes, adding that blaming insider trading was “a natural conclusion to draw.”

Federal investigators are reportedly probing the trades on the oil market, but Trump himself doesn’t seem too concerned about reports of insider trading. He lamented last month that “the whole world has become somewhat of a casino” while quietly planning to launch his own prediction market.

A report from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective analyzed long-shot wagers—meaning bets of more than $2,500 that have a less than 35 percent chance of winning—and found that 52 percent of such bets on military and defense actions were successful, the highest rate of any political topic. “These were driven by highly successful wallets placing well-timed bets,” the report said.

The report pointed to the U.S. military’s surprise strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025.

“Across day-specific markets that resolved ‘Yes’ after the strike, 19 longshot bets totalling $164,292 were placed in the hours immediately before the operation,” the report said. “Eight wallets walked away with $1.8 million in combined profit—one earning nearly $500,000—despite the strike relying on deception, decoy bombers, and stealth aircraft that left no public signal of timing.”

Practically no one attended Donald Trump’s eight-hour religious program Sunday on Washington’s National Mall.

Even the president—or his cabinet members—couldn’t be bothered to show up to Rededicate 250, which was billed as a “national jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving.” A smattering of people attended the outdoor event, held during 90-degree weather and high humidity in the nation’s capital, to hear Trump’s glitchy, prerecorded message about God. Trump, meanwhile, was at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.

Appearing from his seat behind the Resolute Desk, Trump read a verse from 2 Chronicles 7:14 that urged people to “humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways.” The three-minute missive ended on an abrupt note, sparking slow applause as the sparse audience figured out that was all they’d be hearing from the president.

The one-day event was organized by the nonprofit Freedom 250 in a public-private partnership. It is not clear how much the lone Christian assembly cost, but the Department of the Interior has thrown at least $100 million at the nonprofit to organize several events in honor of the nation’s semiquincentennial, including a government-sponsored IndyCar street race through Washington on August 23 and a “Freedom Truck” mobile history museum.

Trump couldn’t even be bothered to read a new Bible passage or film a new clip for Sunday’s event: The prerecorded message from the president originally aired in April for an event called America Reads the Bible, reported the Associated Press.

The gathering was another indication as to what kind of America the Trump administration—and its MAGA acolytes—is willing to uplift. Prior to the ceremony, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that Christianity, rather than other religions or the freedom of religion, is a core tenant of the American identity.

“The naysayers who have created this new term ‘Christian Nationalism’ as a pejorative, a derogatory term, are trying to silence the influence and voices of Christians,” Johnson said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “I think that’s wildly inappropriate.”

Instead of attending his administration’s nine-hour prayer festival on Sunday, President Trump decided to play golf at his club in northern Virginia.

Rather than speak at the Christian nationalist event, held as part of the America250 celebrations for the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Trump sent a prerecorded message where he read from 2 Chronicles 7:11-22. It was the same video he made last month for a marathon Bible reading organized by a Texas supporter.

On Truth Social, Trump barely mentioned the festival, posting a note at 8:30 a.m. Sunday: “I HOPE EVERYBODY AT REDEDICATE 250 IS HAVING A GOOD TIME. IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP, JUST HAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL, BOTH INSIDE AND OUT, RACHAEL C.D., GIVE ME A CALL. I’M BACK FROM CHINA!!! President DJT.” For some reason, the post appeared to mention Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Secretary Chris Duffy and a co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend.

Despite enjoying strong support from evangelical Christians and regularly professing his Christian faith, Trump does not appear to have attended any church services since his second inauguration in January 2025. On Easter Sunday, he opted to skip attending religious services and instead drove with his motorcade around the site of his proposed “triumphal arch.”

Trump has provoked religious ire by repeatedly posting photos comparing himself to Jesus and picking fights with Pope Leo XIV. The backlash to the president has been strong in these cases, and may have even provoked the man who attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. The president, however, has continued to golf and post through it all with no regard for consequences.

President Trump is officially dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, opting instead to create a roughly $1.8 billion fund to further enrich himself, January 6 rioters, and virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the Biden administration.

Trump initially attacked the IRS for allegedly allowing “a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to The New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” Trump’s attorney said last week. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.” Now Trump is abandoning that in favor of using the IRS—which is under his executive purview—to get him and his friends paid without legal action.

What’s perhaps even more troubling is that Trump would be able to choose and fire members of this weaponization committee without cause, forming it in his own image with little to no oversight—as they aren’t required to reveal who the money goes to either.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse in the flesh,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote last Friday on X. “Donald Trump wants to settle his joke lawsuit against his own IRS department to hand out $1.7 BILLION of OUR TAX DOLLARS to Jan. 6th insurrectionists and his cronies.” The Justice Department later announced the fund would total almost $1.8 billion.

MAGA Republicans are teaching a scary lesson in the wake of Senator Bill Cassidy’s weekend primary loss: Do not cross Donald Trump.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on NBC News’s Meet the Press Sunday to spread the word.

“Are you glad that Senator Cassidy is no longer going to be your colleague, senator?” asked host Kristen Welker.

“No, I like Bill. I thought he was a great senator, but he made a political decision,” Graham said.

Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial—a decision that, even five years on, has earned him the ire of his MAGA-aligned peers. Graham said Cassidy’s actions would have “ruined” Trump’s “political life” and kept him from ever “running for office again.”

Graham also threw shade at Representative Thomas Massie, another Trump dissenter whose primary is coming up on Tuesday, whining that the Kentucky Republican “votes against Trump all the time.”

“What’s the headline? ‘Trump strong,’” Graham said. “Those who try to destroy Trump politically—stand in the way of his agenda—are going to lose.”

“Bill made a decision. What would LBJ do?” the South Carolinian continued, referring to former President Lyndon B. Johnson. “Is it natural for a politician to go after people who try to destroy their political life? So, Bill Cassidy lost because he tried to destroy Trump. Massie is gonna lose because he’s trying to destroy the agenda.

“You can disagree with President Trump, but if you try to destroy him you’re going to lose, because this is the party of Donald Trump,” Graham concluded.

Cassidy was first elected in 2008 to represent Louisiana’s 6th congressional district, a thin, backslash-shaped region that spans from Shreveport in the northwest to Baton Rouge in the heart of Louisiana. The incumbent senator finished third in the district’s Republican primary on Saturday, officially pushing him out of the running. The remaining two candidates—including a Trump-endorsed state representative, Julia Letlow—are headed to a runoff in June.

A CSPAN caller who identified himself as a three-time Donald Trump voter compared the president to Adolf Hitler.

In a damning pulse-check on Trump’s second term, a caller, who identified himself as “Thomas from Hawaii,” told CSPAN’s Washington Journal Saturday that he regrets supporting Trump after realizing he was “the worst president we’ve ever had.”

“It’s hard for me to say this, but I think if I can open up about it in public that it might help others,” Thomas said. “I wanted to believe Trump was the real deal for a long time, even though I had doubts because I knew enough about his business history to think otherwise. But now I regret my support for him, and I should’ve known better. He’s making it plain as day.”

“He’s a con man, a liar, doesn’t keep his promises. He’s in office all for himself and he doesn’t even try to hide his corruption anymore.”

The caller added: “He’s the worst president we’ve ever had and he’s the most corrupt president we’ve ever had. I know it’s hard, it took me a while to be able to say that. Very difficult when you commit yourself to believing in somebody.”

Washington Journal host Taylor Popielarz asked what had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Thomas replied it wasn’t any one thing. “He was gonna lower prices on day one, he was gonna do this on day one, only he could fix all this stuff,” he said. “And now I understand how somebody like Adolf Hitler was able to brainwash millions of people. I never thought I’d see that again in my lifetime. But it’s happened, right? I thought we got past that, but we don’t learn from history.”

Thomas isn’t alone in his concerns.

In a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, seven in 10 Americans said that they were either “angry” or “frustrated” with Trump’s economic approach. A New York Times/Siena poll found that Trump’s approval rating has sunk to a second-term low of 37 percent amid his deeply unpopular war with Iran, which has sent the price of energy skyrocketing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report, released last week, found that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, outpacing wages, which grew at a rate of 3.6 percent. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to tout cherry-picked data to show dropping prices.