Trump Judge Hands Him Major Win in Attack on Voting Rights

A federal judge refused Thursday to block President Donald Trump’s executive order to illegally limit mail-in voting, clearing the way to disenfranchise millions of voters for the upcoming midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee based in Washington, rejected the challenge from Democrats and civil rights groups. He sided with the Trump administration’s argument that it was too soon to block the order because it hadn’t actually been implemented yet.

“The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote in his ruling. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.”

Trump’s executive order, signed in late March, directed that states could notify the U.S. Postal Service whether they plan to allow mail-in or absentee ballots up to 90 days before a federal election, and “should” notify the agency whether they intend to supply a list of eligible voters within 60 days of the election. The order also directed USPS to produce a set of mail-in and absentee participation lists for each state, and to refuse to deliver ballots for anyone who is not on the lists.

There is no law that requires states to provide this information to the USPS, or authorizes USPS to require states to provide that data. Trump’s order has been described by Democratic leaders as a “desperate, illegal power grab” and “laughably unconstitutional.”

A judge could still oppose Trump’s executive order as part of a separate legal challenge in Boston. But in the meantime, the way is clear for USPS to make rules that could prevent millions from voting during the upcoming midterm elections.

Democratic lawmakers have urged the Postal Service’s Board of Governors to reject Trump’s directive, as the president has no authority over the USPS, which is an independent agency only accountable to its own board of governors. Lawmakers warned that the USPS is also specifically barred from discriminating against users of the mail, and Trump’s executive order would have the agency illegally perform election administration duties.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was focused on one predominant message during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting: resilience, resilience, resilience.

At least, that’s what his notes let on. Evan Vucci, a senior photojournalist for Reuters, snagged a shot of Bessent’s writing pad, capturing several words the treasury secretary had scrawled in front of him.

“Resilience,” Bessent wrote, with an underscore beneath it.

Bessent also jotted down “Operation Economic Fury,” referring to the economic pressure and sanctions campaign initiated by the Trump administration against the government of Iran.

In parentheses, accompanied by a check mark, Bessent wrote: “Just in time, just in case,” and then, underneath that, another mention of “resilience” and “prosperity.”

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 13 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But Donald Trump’s warmongering has made life more expensive for people everywhere, due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on several major oil and gas facilities.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.45 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

Costs have also gone up for the rest of the world, a reality that has only aggravated U.S. alliances.

During the meeting, Bessent claimed that high oil costs are “transitory” and pledged that “oil will be lower than pre-conflict levels when this ends.” But the prediction came with a degree of irony, as his language echoed that of the prior administration and former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

But a peace deal does not seem to be anywhere in sight. Iranian officials traveled to Qatar earlier this week to work out a potential end to the war, but those efforts stalled after American forces violated the ceasefire arrangement. U.S. strikes destroyed Iranian boats and missile launch sites in and around Bandar Abbas, an Iranian port city that is home to the country’s key naval and air bases.

Speaking to his Cabinet Wednesday, Trump accused Tehran of trying to “out-wait” him on the makings of a deal, pressuring him and threatening the future legislative success of his party as the midterm elections approach.

“I don’t care about the midterms, look what happened last night,” Trump said, seemingly referring to Ken Paxton, who won the Texas Republican Senate primary over incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn.

The amount of fraud the Trump administration has packed into every aspect of its reign is honestly starting to become impressive.

Federal documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contractor assigned to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, is fleecing the feds to the tune of $13.1 million, seven times the price President Donald Trump previously said the work would cost.

A National Park Service analysis concluded that while the typical profit margin for such a job is 6 percent to 12 percent, Atlantic Industrial Coatings is getting a 20 percent profit margin for its work. This means the company is charging the government at least $850,000 more than average.

That Atlantic Industrial Coatings was even chosen in the first place is strange. This is the company’s first federal contract, and it got it without competition. In fact, the administration was in such a rush to hire Atlantic Industrial Coatings in particular that it allowed the company to start work before agreeing on the price tag. This gave the company inordinate leverage—if the government didn’t agree on the price, it could walk off, leaving Trump with a half-finished pool and no time to fix it before the nation’s 250th anniversary.

The office address for Atlantic Industrial Coatings is listed in the unincorporated area of New Canton, Virginia. Google Street View shows its headquarters as three small buildings in the middle of an endless expanse of grass. The company had zero Google reviews until Wednesday, when someone, presumably as a joke, gave the company one star.

The New Republic called the contractor’s publicly available phone number, and a representative picked up but declined to comment. “We’re not taking questions at this time,” he said.

Documents reviewed by the Times show Atlantic Industrial Coatings failed to properly seal gaps in the concrete on the floor of the pool the first two times it tried. The Interior Department declined to tell the Times whether an adequate fix had been found since then.

Unfortunately, the contract given to the Virginia builders isn’t unique. As Trump scrambles to renovate Washington, D.C., for his birthday and other summer festivities, several different companies have secured no-bid deals with the feds. And, hey, remember when a firm with ties to Kristi Noem got a $220 million no-bid contract from Trump to create an ad campaign for Kristi Noem? Where’s Nick Shirley, DOGE, and JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force when you need them?

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is moving to have his wife, Christie, hired under a Special Government Employee, or SGE, designation—the same way former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem hired her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski.

Recent reporting from the Daily Mail states that Mullin has been floating the idea of SGE for his wife—which would allow her to fly free with him in federal flights—“on the regular,” according to Daily Mail sources. She could make over $130,000 per year.

This publication also looked at Mullin’s flight logs, which revealed he is traveling in the same $70 million luxury Gulfstream G700 jet that Noem was criticized for using. According to the logs, he is using the G700 to fly back to his ranch in Oklahoma from Thursday to Monday, running the department from an arm’s length. In addition to retaining that jet, DHS has purchased another luxury Gulfstream G700 jet, as well as seven other planes for both private travel and deportation flights.

“Mullin was one of the people complaining when Noem ordered the new planes,” a Daily Mail source said. “But they bought all the planes that Noem recommended. No complaints all of a sudden.”

“Silence from Mullin. It has been that way for a couple of months now, and we don’t know why,” another source told the Daily Mail. “He leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back until Monday afternoon. He is barely in the building.”

The White House denies reports of Mullin’s absence, stating that the secretary is “very engaged with the work they do on a daily basis and works closely with the President’s entire team to make sure his agenda is being enacted.”

A small office inside the State Department has quietly been chipping away, with little to no oversight, to enact Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation agenda.

The Office of Remigration was created about a year ago, but it has managed to stay out of the limelight ever since. It has not appeared in the State Department’s social media feeds, and no mention of it can be found on the State Department’s official website.

Apparently named after a racist, far-right scheme to expel minorities and immigrants, the office is responsible for processing payments possibly worth tens of millions of dollars to facilitate the deportation of immigrants to countries they may not even originally be from, Wired reported Wednesday.

“Who’s to know where the money goes because there’s no real monitoring, or any kind of accountability attached to these payments,” a source familiar with the work at the Office of Remigration told Wired. “In fact, it was made pretty explicit to us by our leadership that they weren’t interested in applying the same levels of accountability as we had traditionally applied to any kind of federal funding that we were responsible for managing to international organizations or NGOs.”

In response to a request for comment, the State Department wrote:

“President Trump promised to reverse the Biden-era invasion of illegal aliens and once again make America a country for Americans. Remigration puts these words into action.… The Office of Remigration directly addresses the top priorities of the National Security Strategy: reinstating border security as the primary element of national security and ending mass migration.”

Remigration is a far-right fixation that claims ethnic cleansing can restore Western nations to their “former glory.” The concept originated in Europe and focused on the preservation of a white European identity. Yet, after traversing the Atlantic, the concept of remigration has found a broader audience in the U.S. and Canada, and even lodged itself into the minds in the White House.

Both Trump and his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have used the term in social media posts ahead of the 2024 election.

“As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America,” Trump wrote in September 2024. “We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”

Practically no immigrant group in America—the famed country of immigrants—is safe to stay, though certain subgroups are obvious targets of the movement. They include nonwhite minority populations and the children of immigrants, all of whom remigration advocates claim should be deported to their place of racial ancestry.

A lone document published in January by the State Department shed further light on the office’s responsibilities.

“Remigration and border security are central to our diplomatic engagements, especially to those in our hemisphere,” the department wrote in a strategic planning document. “That includes ensuring foreign countries facilitate the repatriation of their nationals who have no right to remain in the United States; negotiating arrangements with other countries to accept the transfer of asylum claimants and illegal aliens removed from American communities; and working with DHS to support voluntary remigration.”