Scheduled Artists Begin Bailing on Trump’s “Great American State Fair”

Two major performing artists have bailed on President Trump’s America 250 celebrations on the National Mall since the administration included them in the lineup.

Freedom 250 on Wednesday announced a list of performers for the “Great American State Fair,” which will take place from June 25 to July 10 in Washington, D.C.

Just hours later, Morris Day and the Time dropped out.

“Contrary to rumor, Morris Day & the Time will not be performing at the ‘“GREAT AMERICAN STATE FAIR,’” they posted in a graphic on Facebook captioned “It’s a no for me.”

Rapper Young MC, best known for his song “Bust a Move,” followed suit, announcing that he’d be refusing to perform at the “Trump-backed” event.

“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” he wrote on Facebook. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is non-partisan, SPIN magazine describes it as Trump-backed.” I hope to perform in D.C. in the near future at an event that is not so politically charged.”

The other scheduled acts—the Commodores, Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, Martina McBride, and Vanilla Ice—have yet to make any announcements. This lineup of artists was already questionable given that most of them haven’t been relevant in years. But now performers who were announced are dropping out, and at least one of them directly blamed President Trump for it. More withdrawals may soon come.

A top White House adviser intervened to send a massive defense loan to a company linked to Donald Trump Jr., ProPublica reported Thursday.

In November, the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a start-up manufacturer of rare earth elements. Just three months earlier, Don Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital had purchased a large stake in the company. When the Defense Department deal first came together, those involved were quick to deny allegations of political favoritism.

But in fact, the deal was reportedly the work of the White House.

The massive loan was personally directed by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser who is also a friend of the president’s son, according to interviews and DOD records obtained by ProPublica. Of the many companies being considered to receive funding, Vulcan was the only one that garnered the attention of one of the president’s top aides, one Pentagon official told ProPublica.

Defense officials were instructed to move at a rapid pace to see that the loan was processed, and it went through within a matter of weeks, according to another Pentagon official who spoke to ProPublica. “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

Navarro and Don Jr. are chummy. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison, and he was one of the few people listed in the dedication of Navarro’s latest book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To. A week before the Vulcan deal was officially announced, Don Jr. hosted Navarro on his streaming show and urged viewers to buy the book.

A spokesperson for Don Jr. told ProPublica that the president’s son had not discussed his work with federal employees and “has no knowledge about how this deal came together.” A spokesperson for 1789 Capital said it played no role in securing the deal. The White House claimed that the administration, including Navarro, was “working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.”

The massive loan is part of a push by the Office of Strategic Capital to secure a tighter grip on rare earth metals, the same kind used to build the Tomahawk missiles that will need to be replaced after Donald Trump’s onslaught against Iran.

This isn’t the first time the president’s son has directly financially benefited from his father’s office, but it’s the first time the White House has directly intervened to make it happen.

Eric and Don Jr. won a government contract of an unknown value after they merged their publicly traded golf course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones. The brothers also co-founded World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform that has attracted the financial interest of foreign investors who then benefited from Trump’s policy changes.

Donald Trump’s retribution campaign is turning the Justice Department against E. Jean Carroll.

The DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into the writer, probing whether Carroll committed perjury in her previous cases against Trump, reported CNN Wednesday.

Carroll has a long and unfortunate history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s. He subsequently lost his defamation case against her the following January, when a judge ruled that Trump had continued to slander the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book.

The American public also did not agree with Trump’s interpretation of events. Ultimately, two juries awarded Carroll $88.3 million in damages, though she hasn’t yet seen a dime. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether it will pick up the case.

Yet despite the court rulings, Trump is apparently still keen to use the power of his office to punish her: The DOJ investigation will examine whether Carroll committed perjury during depositions for her civil suits, reported CNN.

The theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement provided by the magazine columnist, in which Carroll claimed she received no outside funding for her lawsuit. That would later prove untrue, as it was revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman—the co-founder of LinkedIn—had paid some of Carroll’s legal fees.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been recused from the investigation into Carroll, since he was previously involved in the cases while serving as Trump’s personal attorney. Blanche, nonetheless, has played a major role in advancing Trump’s retribution campaign, placing immense pressure on the DOJ to ramp up its process against the president’s personal foes since he took the reins of the department in April.

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.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed New Jersey Senator Andy Kim for being attacked by federal law enforcement.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Mullin pointed the finger at Kim, who was among dozens of demonstrators who were pepper-sprayed outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark. The crowd was protesting in solidarity with immigrant detainees engaged in a hunger strike over their conditions.

“Now you have one of the senators complained because he got splattered with a, you know, with a pepper ball,” Mullin said. “I’m sorry, you probably shouldn’t have been there.”

Mullin also offered an outrageous denial to reports of the ongoing hunger strike that was as ridiculous as it was racist.

“There was only a handful of individuals that was refusing to eat, because they want their ethnic group—or their ethnic-right food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want,” Mullin said. “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn. We’re giving them sanitation.”

In reality, demonstrators have alleged that the detainees at Delaney Hall have been denied sufficient food, sanitary facilities, and medical care.

One Guatemalan man held at Delaney Hall told the group of protesters via video call Monday that nearly 300 other detainees had decided to “stop eating and stop working” indefinitely, in order to demand improvements to the inhumane conditions inside the facility, according to NJ.com. “But that’s not all we demand,” the man said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom.”

Selenia Destefani, a managing attorney and CEO of Nova Law Group, which is representing the detainees at Delaney Hall, also described the “brutal” conditions. “People just sleep on the floor—overcrowded rooms, cold showers, no food, extremely cold in the cells with no blankets,” she said. “Not sound conditions to live in.”

Soto Hernandez, one of the detainees held at the privately operated immigration detention facility, has been served spoiled food with worms in it, according to Destefani.

Kim, who visited Delaney Hall Monday, reported that the bathrooms were “filthy,” that it was difficult to get hot water, and that each room housed 12 to 16 people.

Other members of Trump’s administration haven’t gone so far as to deny the hunger strike. Speaking on Fox News Tuesday night, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan appeared to confirm that there was a hunger strike. “Hunger strikes never work. We’re not gonna change what we do because someone goes on a hunger strike,” Homan said, adding that if conditions were dire enough, federal immigration enforcement would obtain a court order to “force feed” detainees.

Half a year since a 60 Minutes segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was cut last-minute by CBS News boss Bari Weiss, the journalist reporting the piece has lost her job.

Sharyn Alfonsi had worked with 60 Minutes for over a decade. On Wednesday morning, she told The New York Times that CBS News allowed her contract to expire while ignoring her agent for weeks, and that her dismissal was a “deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

CBS News has not publicly commented on the news so far.

Since Weiss, a former opinion columnist, took over as editor in chief of the TV network’s news division, her tenure has been marred by clashes with CBS’s more experienced reporters. The biggest of these came in December 2025, when she pulled a report on the suffering of Venezuelans deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration, arguing the story wasn’t balanced enough. She also suggested the reporters reach out to Stephen Miller, the fascist curmudgeon behind Trump’s deportation policies, for an interview.

Alfonsi wrote an angry email bashing the decision that was subsequently leaked to the press. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote. “In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Alfonsi alleged it was not explained to her why the story was killed, and noted that she had tried to get comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the White House, but was rebuffed each time.

“If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast,” Alfonsi concluded.

Weiss’s tenure has also coincided with the departure of the most famous 60 Minutes staffer of all: Anderson Cooper, who bounced in February. In his final episode, Cooper stressed the importance of the program’s editorial freedom, in remarks seen as a jab at Weiss and CBS.

CBS News has long permitted 60 Minutes to work independently of the rest of the network, but Alfonsi told the Times she saw the tides turning. “For the last 60 years it’s been the same formula: Tell the truth, hold the power accountable, don’t blink,” she said. “It’s unclear what next season looks like.”

Alfonsi is technically still employed at CBS but doesn’t plan to work without a contract. Instead, the longtime correspondent is hunkering down. “I’m not resigning,” she told the Times. “If they want me gone because I did my job, they’ll have to fire me.”