A staff editorial meeting reportedly flew off the rails Monday morning when longtime host Scott Pelley tore into Bari Weiss’s new pick to run the news magazine as its new executive producer: Nick Bilton, a former Vanity Fair writer with next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.

She announced Bilton’s hire the same day that she fired a large swath of the show’s crew, which some at 60 Minutes are referring to as “Black Thursday.” The axed staff include correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay Alfonsi’s report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

The meeting was intended to introduce Bilton to the show’s team, though Weiss herself was conspicuously absent. With the chief of CBS News missing, the meeting devolved into hostilities, including one particularly heated moment in which Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the show, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Status News.

“Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers during the meeting. “She loves 60 Minutes.”

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired?” He openly questioned Bilton’s credentials and said, “We don’t trust you.”

CBS News managing editor Charles Forelle attempted to intervene in the exchange to no avail. The exchange reportedly left staffers wondering whether Pelley would resign from his post, reported Status.

Bilton, nonetheless, did not have satisfactory answers for the producers and crew, according to two staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Post. At one point, he unintentionally made staffers laugh out loud when he claimed he would bring in people who are already capable of doing the work of a 60 Minutes correspondent, one of the most revered jobs in the industry.

When asked if the show could expect more layoffs, Bilton said, “Not right now.”

Weiss has only been in charge of CBS News for seven months, but her business decisions have already cratered its legendary reputation. Once the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and home to some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, the outlet is now making news for all of the wrong reasons.

According to the bill, “the nuclear family is God’s perfect design for humanity and is aligned with the long-held traditional values of Tennessee.” It consists of “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children.”

The bill’s a clear jab at Pride Month. Though it does not explicitly mention same-sex couples, it’s a reactionary effort against the month-long holiday that celebrates people who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Tennessee was ranked as one of the least safe states for LGBTQ+ people to live. Of course, many in Tennessee will still celebrate Pride Month, with major events planned in Nashville, Knoxville, and Memphis.

But in addition to sidelining the LGBTQ+ community, fixating on the nuclear family like this erases the roles of extended family members: aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.

One can scarcely imagine what a Nuclear Family Month event would look like. Luckily, there don’t seem to be any planned. The holiday is a cheap trick to score culture-war points, courtesy of a party taken over by pronatalism and phony economic populism.

Hegseth personally intervened to block the promotion of several senior Navy officers, including at least two female officers and two Black male officers, four current and former defense officials told the paper.  

This is not the first time Hegseth has moved to block or delay the promotion of female and Black military officers. He did the same thing to Army officers in March, and has reportedly thwarted the advancements of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines. 

The result of Hegseth’s continued intervention is a military leadership that does not reflect its members: 21 percent of active-duty Navy officers are women, and 38 percent are minorities. Women and minorities currently account for less than 20 percent of all generals and admirals in the U.S. military. 

Pentagon rules say that the secretary can only block promotions if there is an issue related to a service member’s fitness to lead—not their identities, or whatever other problem Hegseth seems to have with them. 

This latest reporting is sure to ruffle feathers at the Pentagon, where Hegseth has lashed out at the press and spiraled about leaks. The DOD officially banned journalists from the Pentagon’s press office Monday, declaring it a “classified space.”

Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders bestowed a new name on June, dubbing it “Fidelity Month,” per a new declaration.

The effort is intended to cultivate “fidelity to God, family, community, and country,” and to a “healthy, stable, well-ordered society.” The memo underscores the values of faith, liberty, and patriotism, which Sanders’s office argue are the country’s founding principles, and notes the commemorative month aims to elevate “spiritual and civic institutions” at the core of the state’s “collective identity.”

It’s hard not to see the move as a direct attack on the LGBTQ+ community and everything it’s achieved.

Pride has been the preeminent June celebration since 1970. The protests and parades that take place throughout the month commemorate the history of the Stonewall Uprising, which lasted for six days but began on June 28, 1969, when police raided one of the city’s most popular gay bars, the Stonewall Inn. Incensed by the incursion, New York City’s LGBTQ+ community rebelled, marching through the streets in one of the most significant acts of civil rights disobedience in U.S. history.

At the time, homosexuality was criminalized in every U.S. state save Illinois, which granted individuals the right to express their sexuality in private in 1962.

Sanders’s order comes at a complicated time for gay rights. There are currently 530 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across the country, according to a legislation tracker created by the American Civil Liberties Union. They include attempts to censor school curriculums, redefine sex, create anti-transgender health care barriers, prohibit drag, and force minors out of the closet in school settings.

In Arkansas specifically, state laws do not protect LGBTQ+ people from being fired, evicted, or denied services due to sexual orientation or gender identity. The state Supreme Court ruled against nondiscrimination ordinances in 2017, blocking local, voter-approved referendums to create a more explicitly LGBTQ+ friendly community.

But Arkansas isn’t the only state making an unsubtle jab at gay rights. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee recently signed a similar resolution, marking June as “Nuclear Family Month.” The bill’s text defines the nuclear family as “consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” as intended by “God’s design.”

Meanwhile, marriage equality is nationally upheld by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, a protection that seems increasingly fragile in light of the court’s decision to overturn abortion access via its 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

At the time, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a concurring opinion in Dobbs, arguing that the court “should reconsider” its substantive due process precedents, including its rulings on contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships.

“The Department of Justice disagrees strongly with the decision on the Anti-Weaponization Fund put forth by the United States District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, wherein the Court stated that, under no circumstances, may the Department of Justice proceed with the Anti-Weaponization Fund recently established in order to make up for the tremendous abuse, harm, and hate unfairly shown to so many people,” the Justice Department wrote on X Monday afternoon, referring to the fund’s temporary ban last Friday. “This Fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized, targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise. The Department will abide by the Court’s ruling.”

Last week, a federal judge suspended the administration from proceeding with its slush fund for at least two weeks, scheduling a June 12 hearing to hear arguments.

If Trump has truly given up on his plans, this would be a quick life and death for an enrichment fund that drew criticism from both Democrats and even some Republicans, as both sides decried it as a problematic conflict of interests at best and blatant taxpayer theft at worst. Outrage grew as the administration refused to exclude January 6 rioters convicted of assaulting police officers from getting a payout.

“This has become a distraction,” an administration source told Axios. “The president believes government was weaponized against people—it wasn’t just him. But this isn’t the time and vehicle for it.”

When asked about the moment of silence on Monday, Minnesota GOP Chair Alex Plechash said the request came from the group’s body, not leadership. (The moment of silence reportedly came at the request of one of the state’s delegates.)

“There are a lot of people, I think, that believe Derek Chauvin was improperly convicted and not treated well, and those people wanted to have a moment of silence and recognition because they felt that way,” he said.

Asked whether he agreed with those members, Plechash declined to comment. “I believe the court system had its verdict and I’m not going to challenge the court,” he said.

Of course, Plechash’s consent to honor Chauvin is all the evidence one needs that party leadership is bowing to an extremist sect that basks in conspiracy theories and celebrates state violence.

It also feels particularly cruel following the more recent killings of two other Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, at the hands of federal law enforcement. The alleged perpetrators, ICE officer Jonathan Ross, Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa, and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez, have yet to face any charges for the killings.

The “Commander-in-Chief declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity. To add insult, the President labeled transgender persons as dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars,” the court wrote in a 107-page opinion, which came on the first day of Pride Month.

The court ruled that Hegseth’s ban can remain in place for future service members, but not for any currently enlisted. However, the greater ban still remains in place as the Supreme Court weighs its merits.

“What has been clearly and repeatedly explained are the foundational premises of the Hegseth Policy: persons with a ‘false gender identity’ are unfit for the military, and persons with a history of gender dysphoria are also unfit because they lack ‘honesty, humility, … and integrity,’” the court wrote. “Those animus-filled reasons were expressly given to justify aspects of the Hegseth Policy. As a result, this is not a case where we are left to speculate why the government drafted such broad, undifferentiated classifications. Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line—‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’—we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the Hegseth Policy.”

The ban was announced via a Trump executive order in the president’s first week in office last year. It stated that “radical gender ideology” had infected the military, and that being transgender wasn’t an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” it read—equating gender dysphoria with mental illness or a deep moral deficiency.

This story has been updated.

Alexis Wilkins filed a defamation suit against the news network Friday, alleging that MS NOW had knowingly and recklessly published lies about her. The suit took particular issue with a December article that cited anonymous sources who claimed Patel had ordered an FBI detail to escort one of Wilkins’s inebriated friends back home after a night of debauchery in Nashville.

“This was hogwash and they knew it,” Wilkins’s attorneys wrote.

Over the span of 16 pages, Wilkins’s legal team claimed that the story was unfounded because Wilkins’s personal FBI security detail “did not even exist at the time” (she does concretely have one now—the first time in U.S. history the bureau’s director has extended such protection).

The attorneys further claimed the story was illegitimate because Patel’s 27-year-old beau “does not drink.” In reality, the article never suggested Wilkins herself was inebriated—but even Wilkins’s legal team seemed confused by the details. In their filing, her team contradicted themselves, later writing that Wilkins “very rarely drinks.”

The colorful lawsuit accuses MS NOW of fabricating the story “to self-promotingly advance their own agenda and notoriety,” at Wilkins’s expense, “in George Costanza fashion.” Much of the filing is spent defending Patel against various criticisms, even though Patel is not a listed defendant.

MS Now unequivocally defended its reporting. In a statement, MS Now President Rebecca Kutler told The New Republic that the company stands “firmly behind” its reporting, though it added that it doesn’t comment on ongoing legal matters.

The 46-year-old conspiracy podcaster turned agency chief is up to his neck in his own legal woes. In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is also in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report on the director’s alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

Patel has already sparked several scandals in his position due to his wild habits. Over the last year, he has wantonly flown around the country in FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit Wilkins, where she was singing at a wrestling event.

Patel also ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. Men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon.

As of Friday, Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & the Time, and Bret Michaels had all withdrawn their names from the lineup, leaving only Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice, and a featured guest artist from the group C+C Music Factory.

It seems the remaining lineup isn’t quite star-studded enough to pad Trump’s fragile ego.

“Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center,” Trump wrote, before launching into a lengthy tirade against the federal judge who ordered that the president’s name be removed from the venue’s facade.

In another post, Trump claimed that the artists were merely getting “the yips,” and said he’d happily step in as the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Trump plans to replace several days of concerts with one giant MAGA rally. It sure sounds like another great project for the brilliant party planners behind the president’s botched military parade.

Trump’s rant was part of another Truth Social bender, flush with the typical self-aggrandizing AI slop the president tends to take refuge in when things are going particularly bad.

Peters was freed from prison on Monday after Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis granted her clemency and reduced her sentence just weeks earlier.

Peters was originally sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to publicize the voting machine records in Mesa County, turning all the cameras off while allowing fellow election denier Conan Hayes to copy, photograph, and download information in an effort to prove President Trump’s absurd claims of election fraud in 2020.

Polis’s decision to cut short her sentence angered his local party, even leading them to censure him. Now, he claims that he “concluded that her sentence was simply too long.” After the backlash, he appeared on a party Zoom call with black tape over his mouth. His fellow Colorado Democrats weren’t amused then, and certainly aren’t now.

“The Governor’s grant of clemency to Tina Peters is an affront to our democracy, the people of Colorado, and election officials across the country,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement. “It sends a dangerous message about accountability for those who would attack elections. Peters’ release also will embolden the election denial movement; since the grant of clemency, she has continued to spread election falsehoods and conspiracies.”

Peters has become something of a political prisoner for those on the MAGA right, especially those in the deepest depths of QAnon. Trump had been pressuring Polis to release Peters for months, and Vice President JD Vance recently suggested that Peters should get a taxpayer-funded payout from Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for those who felt wronged or targeted by the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, the first thing Peters did upon her release on Monday was go on Steve Bannon’s podcast, double down on her claims of election fraud, and ask Trump for a job.

NEW: Tina Peters, newly freed by Colorado Gov Jared Polis (D), begins her MAGA media tour by telling Steve Bannon that Democrats are cheating on elections and she was imprisoned as retribution for exposing voting machines that flip votes. pic.twitter.com/KCC9q22fOZ

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) June 1, 2026

“I would like for President Trump—I’d like to be more involved in prison reform,” Peters said, if “that’s the way the Lord leads me.”

This story has been updated.

Tehran placed the blame on Israel, which it said violated the trifold ceasefire agreement when Israeli troops captured Beaufort Castle, a twelfth-century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon, over the weekend.

Israel previously used the castle, also known as Qalaat al-Shaqif, as a military base during its occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. The offensive marked Israel’s deepest incursion into Lebanon in more than 26 years. On Monday, Israel issued an evacuation order to residents in southern Beirut.

Iranian state media reported that “there will be no dialogue” regarding U.S.-Israel-Iran peace efforts until the “aggressive and brutal operations of the Zionist regime’s army in Gaza and Lebanon” is quelled.

Tehran said it would completely close the Strait of Hormuz, as well as another narrow trade route nestled between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula—the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—as a consequence.

Trump optimistically insisted on Truth Social late Sunday that Iran was eager to negotiate, and blamed his negotiating woes on Democrats and dissident Republicans. It is unclear what comes next: Trump casually revealed on Saturday that the U.S. would “finish it off militarily” if he did not reach a good deal with Tehran.

The president repeated that he’s in “no hurry” to negotiate, and that—despite the war’s monumental impact on global gas prices—he believes if he’s in a hurry he’s “not going to make a good deal.”

“And slowly but surely, we’re getting, I think, what we want. And if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to end it a different way,” Trump told his daughter-in-law on Fox News’s My View With Lara Trump.

In the same interview, Trump referred to Venezuela as a “one-day win” and said that the situation with Iran is “a win already,” as the U.S. has “essentially defeated their military.”

But it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what a “win” in the Middle East looks like when the aims of the war were never clear to begin with. While the Iranian regime has suffered major losses over the span of the conflict—including dozens of senior leaders—it has also become more extreme as a result.

Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued in The Guardian late last month that Trump would—at this late stage—be “lucky” to strike a deal similar to former President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump ended during his first term.

The U.S. has so far been at war with Iran for more than 13 weeks and spent an estimated $98 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.

This story has been updated.

In a three-page memorandum released by the White House late Friday, Trump’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, told the public that the president “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological and overall physical function.” But as medical experts told The Wall Street Journal, the report lacked specificity where it mattered.

Barbabella’s report noted that there was “no arterial obstruction or structural abnormalities” in Trump’s heart or important blood vessels—which only meant there isn’t a blockage at the moment. There was also no mention of what his internal plaque buildup looked like.

“If I was creating a report to send to another physician, I would have mentioned a little bit more about the carotid ultrasound,” Texas surgeon Dr. William Shutze told the Journal. “What amount of plaque there is going to be—because almost all of us are going to have some buildup there.”

The report also noted that Trump’s swollen legs had improved, with no mention of what happened to trigger said improvement. His cholesterol was also nearly perfect—raising eyes given his age, visible bruising and swelling, his frequent on-camera naps, and the fact that he is an 80-year-old man who insists that he’s the healthiest person alive.

“That report is almost too good to be true for somebody of his age,” Shutze continued. “This seems to be a filtered narrative.”

Tehran has damaged at least 20 regional U.S. military sites since the war began in late February, according to satellite imagery reviewed by the BBC. The damages have destroyed air defense systems, radars, and aerial refueling planes, costing the U.S. millions of dollars.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, claimed in early April that it hit more than 13,000 targets in Iran within just 38 days of combat operations.

Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has tried to rally attention toward the attacks. Last week, Khamenei wrote in Farsi on his official X account that “America will no longer have a safe haven for mischief and the establishment of military bases in the region.” Khamenei further vowed that the phrases “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” would remain the rallying cry of the Islamic community and “the oppressed of the world, especially the youth.”

The reality is obviously a far cry from the Trump administration’s public declarations, which have involved claims as far back as June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were obliterated and its military sites damaged beyond any scope of immediate repair.

A peace plan does not seem to be on the table, despite a preliminary agreement that was drafted early last week. Iran on Monday suspended talks with the United States over continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which they say violate the ceasefire.

That’s not likely to please Trump, who spent the weekend ranting about congressional opposition to his war.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president wrote on Truth Social late Sunday. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.

“Just sit back and relax,” Trump concluded. “It will all work out well in the end—It always does!”

Senators Adam Schiff of California, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan introduced the “Drain the Fund Act,” which they said would block taxpayer dollars from being funneled to Trump and his allies, including individuals convicted in connection with the January 6 riot, public figures who spread election misinformation, and the leader of a violent hate group.

“As Republicans return to Washington to provide further funding for this and other mistaken priorities, we’re going to hold them accountable,” Schiff said in a statement. “And as Senators who have actually seen their government weaponized against them, we want to make it clear: We will not allow a single payout from this so-called weaponization fund to be paid.”

The bill would also ban settlements stemming from suits brought by the president or the vice president, and be retroactive to January 20, 2025. That would functionally undo the recent settlement for Trump’s failing $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Services that produced the fund, and blocked the president from future audits.

Last week, a federal judge issued a restraining order to ensure that no taxpayer dollars would be “irreversibly disbursed” from the fund before the legal battle could play out.

But the bill is only part of the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday that Democrats would introduce an amendment to their $72 billion budget reconciliation bill in order to shut down the fund. “If they try to bury the issue, we will force them to the Senate floor. If they try to sneak behind appropriations, we will fight them there, too. There will be no escape hatch. No fake guardrails or backroom promises to hide behind,” Schumer said.

Britain’s interior ministry said that Uygur’s and Piker’s presence in the country would “not be conducive to ​the public good.” The statement made no reference to Israel, but their planned appearance at the conference had already led to backlash from British Jewish groups. Last week, Labour member of Parliament David Taylor called for Piker to be prevented from speaking.

“I’ve been banned from the UK. I tried to get on a flight to London to attend SXSW London and give a speech at Oxford. I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel,” Uygur wrote Sunday on X. “Are we free anymore? This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!”

“The UK has revoked my visa as well. All at the behest of Israel,” Piker wrote shortly after. “The west is betraying ‘liberal values’ for a genocidal fascist foreign government. Soon we will all become Israel.”

“It’s good to see the Home Office take a tough stance against those who pose a serious risk to public order and community cohesion. At a time when antisemitism is at record levels, it is completely inappropriate to give someone with a history of inflammatory rhetoric such a high profile platform,” Taylor said after news of the ban. 

This move comes just a year after the U.S. Vice President JD Vance lambasted the U.K. for cracking down on the speech of Islamophobic right-wingers like Tommy Robinson. 

The U.K. has been suppressing criticism of Israel domestically, as well, arresting at least 3,000 people since last summer simply for expressing support for the Palestine Action activist group, which has gained notoriety for damaging weapons manufacturing factories in the region. 

“It’s not just Israel. The UK has been escalating mass censorship under the guise of “safety” for yrs now. This is EXACTLY what every single free speech activist predicted, it’s horrible to see it come to fruition,” journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote. “This censorship is intertwined w laws like the ‘Online Safety Act.’”  

From Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk to Piker and Uygur, it’s clear that the United Kingdom and United States will happily engage in blatant suppression of speech if it means silencing a voice shouting out against genocide.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Friday, former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified to lawmakers behind closed doors about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. What Democrats said afterwards strongly suggests that this mess is not going away for Donald Trump and very likely will get worse next year if Democrats take back the House. This comes amid other signs that the Republican lines of defense around Trump are crumbling on many fronts. And Trump himself may be to blame, because it’s his mounting unpopularity that’s driving it all. As one Republican put it, Trump is lame-ducking himself.

We’re talking about all this with historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of our go-to people on Epstein and the right wing, a topic she’s written several books about. Nicole, always nice to have you on.

Nicole Hemmer: Lovely to be back, Greg.

Sargent: So Pam Bondi, the former A.G., was on Capitol Hill as part of the House’s ongoing investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein files, which are the investigative materials gathered as part of DOJ’s probe of Epstein’s sex trafficking.

One of the big things that happened in her testimony was that she essentially threw acting A.G. Todd Blanche under the bus. Listen to Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, recounting what Bondi said.

Robert Garcia (voiceover): In that interview and what she’s saying here, in her words and remarks, is that it was Todd Blanche, the current acting A.G., that was leading the Epstein investigation. And quite frankly, all of the mistakes that we saw—the redactions, not protecting survivors—she continues to push that back onto the acting A.G. Todd Blanche, who, by the way, was Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.

Sargent: So Bondi apparently blamed Blanche for just about everything that’s gone wrong—the lack of transparency, all of it. Nicole, what do you make of that?

Hemmer: It’s an interesting move. Pam Bondi is in such a different position at this point than she was when she was first subpoenaed to give this testimony. She used to be the attorney general. Now she’s been forced out and she is shifting all the blame onto her presumed successor. Blanche is going to have to go through confirmation hearings soon, and she has just made that very difficult for him. Epstein is going to be the focus of conversation when Blanche goes up for confirmation.

What’s interesting about it, and kind of surprising about it, is that Pam Bondi only has herself to blame for being the face of the Epstein scandal within the Trump administration. She is the one who said that she had the files on her desk. She called in all of those right-wing influencers to come parade around with their binders.

It’s a little too little too late, but it plays into her hand—and into Democrats’ hands—for her to push the blame on Blanche, who’s not only going up to be attorney general but also is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. She’s making his life difficult, probably because she was forced out of her position.

Sargent: Well, yes. We should remind everybody, related to what you just said there, that MAGA for many, many years really wanted to know what was in the Epstein files. It was a huge obsession on the far right. It was a huge obsession among all these influencers, to the degree that she actually brought them in to say, Hey, we’re going to really blow this thing open for you guys. You put us in charge and now we’re going to make it all right.

And then as soon as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the FBI director, got a look at what was in the Epstein files, they were just like, No, we’re not doing that anymore. Can you just talk about that big history in context?

Hemmer: That history is really important because so many of the people who were put in place in this second Trump administration were put in place not only because they were Trump loyalists, but because they had a lot of support from the MAGA base that they built on this idea that the Epstein files needed to be released. This is huge for Kash Patel, for Dan Bongino, both in the FBI, and for Pam Bondi.

Bondi thought early on that she could score a lot of points with the Trump base by pushing the Epstein story to the very front of her time as attorney general. This was going to be the thing that she was going to make her name on because it was so important to the base.

She immediately put herself between a rock and a hard place because the base really cares about these Epstein files. They really care about this scandal. And Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone talking about it. And so Bondi saw herself suddenly serving two masters—the MAGA base and Donald Trump—and there was no way to satisfy both of them. I have a feeling that Blanche is going to be in the same position.

They’re all crushed by this untenable position, which is: You cannot disabuse the MAGA base of the Epstein scandal. They’re not going to drop it. And you cannot force Donald Trump to talk about it because he’s also unwilling to engage with it.

Sargent: Let’s listen to a little bit more of Representative Robert Garcia talking about what Bondi said in this private testimony. Listen.

Robert Garcia (voiceover): I also personally asked the former A.G. five times—five different questions—about her conversations with President Trump: whether he directed her at any given time on the Epstein files, what he knew, what he asked her to redact or not. She refused to answer any questions about President Trump. In fact, she said that she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump.

Sargent: So clearly, Pam Bondi is trying to insulate Trump a bit here while throwing Todd Blanche under the bus instead. But if anything, this is actually damning to Trump. Bondi could have said, Trump didn’t really try to control what we released, he wanted us to put stuff out. She didn’t say that.

Remember, Trump himself, when the heat got very intense, tried to look as if he wanted the Epstein files out. He basically said, Release them, I’m all for transparency. But now what Bondi said will only whet the appetite of Democrats more to find out about how Trump conspired to cover them up.

Hemmer: Well, that’s what’s so interesting about what Democrats are reporting that she said, because it looks on its face like she’s trying to protect Trump, but actually she’s putting a target on him. I can’t talk about it. The thing is, she was not under oath. She was supposed to be under oath for this conversation, but instead of being a deposition, it turned out to be a transcribed interview. She could have said anything in that moment.

She chose to highlight that she just couldn’t say anything about Donald Trump. And that puts Trump in a tough position, but also it puts Blanche as Trump’s lawyer in a particularly tough position, because he goes into his confirmation hearings looking like someone who’s covering for Trump.

Sargent: So, Nicole, we should probably clarify. We don’t know exactly what’s in the files about Donald Trump still. We do know that Trump appears thousands of times in the files based on what’s been released. There have been a bunch of salacious but not verified claims that have floated around.

The key thing that people still don’t really know yet is what Donald Trump knew about Epstein and when, which seems critical. Can you talk a little bit about what we still need to know? What do we know? What’s outstanding?

Hemmer: We do know that Donald Trump had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that he knew about Epstein’s preference for underage girls. This is something that the birthday drawing poem that Trump sent to Epstein revealed.

So there are things that we do know, but a lot that we still don’t know. First of all, we don’t know how many mentions of Trump still haven’t been released. There are still files that are unreleased. We can’t know what they say yet. That’s why there’s still a push to continue to release the rest of the files.

We don’t know whether or not Donald Trump is implicated in any criminal activity. At the moment, we have no evidence that he was involved in criminal activity with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that Trump and Epstein talked a lot about their personal sexual predilections. We know that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in the trafficking of underage girls.

We don’t know what Donald Trump knew and when he knew it, as you were saying. That goes to the extent that Trump was covering up for Jeffrey Epstein. That’s what people want to know.

Honestly, Greg, I think it’s something we never will know the full extent of, and it is because of all of the stonewalling that came from the Trump administration early on. Even if they were to release every single piece of paper that they have, unredact everything, people would still think something else is hidden, something else is being covered up. This has become an unfalsifiable sort of conspiracy about Trump because of the stonewalling.

Sargent: We’re going to get more, because Democrats are now saying that they’re going to push for Todd Blanche’s testimony under oath. They’ve been armed with this new set of claims by Pam Bondi, throwing him under the bus, basically saying he ran the cover-up. She didn’t use those words, but that’s basically what she said: Todd Blanche ran the cover-up, I didn’t.

So I don’t know how far this effort to get Blanche to testify is going to get with Republican control of the House. But guess what? In eight, nine, 10 months, Democrats might control the House. Then you’re going to really see an effort to subpoena Blanche. And also FBI Director Kash Patel, if he’s still there.

What do you think will happen then? Democrats are going to really try to pin down precisely what Trump ordered his underlings to do in terms of the cover-up, as well as trying to ferret out whatever else is in there about him, right?

Hemmer: That’s right. If and when Democrats are in control of this investigation, they are going to turn much more of their focus to this question of a cover-up. What did Pam Bondi know? When did she know it? What did Blanche know? When did he know it? Patel, Trump—what did all of these people know and when did they know it?

What lengths did they go to to ensure that the American people never saw these documents? To what extent did they fail to follow the law that was passed forcing the Trump administration to disclose the files related to the Epstein investigation? Those cover-up questions are going to be much more the driver of the investigation under Democrats.

Sargent: Pam Bondi basically laid out the breadcrumbs. Just to go a little broader here, it seems like Republican defenses of Trump are crumbling across the board. We just saw a judge put Trump’s corrupt slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists on hold. Republicans have turned on him over that. They’re also not willing, as of this recording, to support taxpayer funding for Trump’s ballroom.

Both those things have badly alienated Republicans. Now you’ve got whatever effort they were making to protect Trump from further inquiry on Epstein—that doesn’t seem to really be working. Especially if Democrats take back the House, the Republican defenses are going to more or less vanish.

What do you make of the moment we’re in right here? It sort of seems like there’s a split screen of sorts. On the one hand, Trump still has this iron grip on the Republican primary electorate in the sense that he can just sort of snap his Twitter fingers—or Truth Social thumbs, or whatever—and have someone get knocked off in a primary for crossing him.

He’s able to control Republicans to that degree. But more and more, you’re seeing the party as a whole, as the elections approach, start to worry more about voters outside the MAGA bubble. All that control he wields over Republican primary voters isn’t translating into control over the party. I wonder what you think of this moment.

Hemmer: It’s a fascinating moment because of all of the cross-pressures—cross-pressures that we didn’t necessarily see in the first Trump administration. You have the cross-pressures of the base.

Donald Trump has not been serving the interests of the base in a number of ways. The Iran war, his relationship with Israel, the Epstein files—these have caused a real split in the MAGA base. It has led to a number of right-wing personalities to openly question and criticize Donald Trump more than they had in the past.

Then you have this pressure on members of the party, at least members of the party who are from purple districts. There are plenty of Republicans who are going to be running in deep-red districts. They’re completely safe. Once they win their primary with Trump’s backing, there’s not a scenario in which they’re going to lose that seat.

But you are going to have purple-district Republicans suddenly, again, cross-pressured, because as Trump’s popularity goes down, they’re going to need to win centrists and Democrats in order to win their election. That is going to lead them to criticize—and in an ideal world, maybe even vote against—Trump on a couple of different bills.

So you see all of that, but we have to reckon with still the reality that he does have this hold on the base and even on his critics. You will listen to Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson say the worst possible things about Donald Trump and then end with, I’d still vote for him if the option is a Democrat. We have to take that grain of salt when we think about the kinds of fractures and criticisms that we’re hearing from the Trump base.

Sargent: Yeah. And you see that schism inside Pam Bondi in the sense that he absolutely screwed her royally. She got tossed out as soon as she was no longer useful. We should recall that Donald Trump basically commanded her to do something impossible, which was run the Epstein cover-up. That just was never going to really succeed in any major way. But then when she failed to be corrupt enough for Donald Trump, he just tossed her out.

I want to switch to something a Republican Senate adviser said to The Atlantic, because it’s quite a quote. It’s about Republicans generally. He said this: “The problem is Trump has nobody around him who’s willing to tell him, ‘Sir, the stuff you are talking about is not possible and you are shooting yourself in the foot every time.’ He essentially has lame-ducked himself in pursuit of retribution.”

Nicole, that’s a striking quote. On the one hand, yeah, he is asking for the impossible. But on the other, you knew that about him!

Hemmer: None of this is new information.

Sargent: For years he was telling them to do the impossible for him and throwing people out when they failed the despot in some way. Now they’re essentially fed up.

But I do think it’s a real thing, how fed up they are. He really has lame-ducked himself. And in some sense, there has been a threshold crossed where Republicans are somewhat—maybe not enough—but somewhat less likely to just fall on the sword for him. Do you feel that way?

Hemmer: I do to a certain extent. Certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base when it comes to Donald Trump. To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself—fantastic term—to the extent to which he’s lame-ducked himself, it is by his own making. It’s not just that he goes off and says crazy things.

He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof. It was a deeply unpopular war. He never tried to garner any public support for it. He knew it was an issue that would fracture his base because he was supposed to be the no-new-wars president. You’re like, OK, this is a man who has shot himself in the foot. He’s thrown away the final few years of his presidency.

All of that we have to take in and to a certain extent celebrate, because it’s a weakening of Donald Trump. Here’s my caveat. My caveat is Donald Trump is not somebody who’s ever believed in majorities.

He’s not somebody who believes in democracy. He’s not somebody who believes that Congress has to give him the say-so for what he does. He’s not somebody who respects courts or congressional investigations or impeachment hearings. In a certain sense, he is still quite dangerous as somebody who holds the presidency and has a diminished base of power, because it invites him, in his mind, to use executive power to the hilt and to break laws, damn the consequences.

Sargent: Well, you’ve been observing the right for a long time. And what all this adds up to is the following: We all know that the real story here, the thread running through everything, is that Trump is on his way out.

What we’re looking at is a MAGA movement that knows that it’s losing the one unifying force that held it together, the one thing that brought it into existence, the one thing that has sustained it. Every other effort to create a new MAGA Republican leader has failed miserably. Look at Ron DeSantis. Look at JD Vance—he’s struggling mightily with this.

Can you just reflect a little on the future direction of MAGA, now that Trump has, number one, essentially screwed the movement in every which way, betrayed the movement in every which way, and number two, is going to be gone soon? Where does this all go?

Hemmer: Right. Even though Trump is sort of positioning himself as a competitive authoritarian leader, he still has an actuarial clock. Even if he tries not to leave the office, the man is approaching his eighties and there’s a finite amount of time that he’s still going to be with us. Trump will leave the stage at a certain point. He might still make his feelings about politics known, but there isn’t a charismatic leader to pick up his torch.

He has helped to continue the commitment of the Republican Party to minoritarian politics. He didn’t invent this, but it has accelerated rapidly under Trump. We’ve seen this with the Supreme Court rulings on gerrymandering, the attempts to purge voter rolls, the attempts to strip people of their citizenship.

There are all of these different ways in which the Republican Party under Donald Trump has become recommitted to minoritarian politics. And that actually works in the favor of this very unpopular Republican Party. They are going to lose the focal power of Trump and his ability to pull together his particular coalition. But he is also leaving behind a politics that doesn’t require them to win majorities.

We should be happy that there is not a charismatic authoritarian leader poised to take Donald Trump’s place. And we should be worried about the minoritarian politics that he leaves behind, because even the Republican Party that’s not entirely bought into Donald Trump at this moment is 100 percent bought into ruling as a minority. That’s something that we should be keeping our eye on.

Sargent: Yep. It’s sure alarming when you think of it that way, that those tendencies are going to be with us for a long, long time. As I’ve said a million times on here, I think after Trump’s gone, our politics gets even crazier. Nicole Hemmer, it’s always an enormous pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Hemmer: Thanks for having me, Greg.

This was hardly new. Paxton has been disparaging Talarico in gendered terms for months, casting the Democrat’s support for transgender individuals and a 2022 comment about reducing meat consumption as fundamental threats to Texan values. Calling Talarico “low-T” insinuates that he has lower testosterone levels and thus is insufficiently manly. He has also repeatedly hammered Talarico for saying in 2021 that “God is nonbinary,” comments that Talarico has tried to walk back.

While this tactic may more obviously appeal to Republican primary voters, this November’s contest will be a test of whether this kind of machismo-inflected rhetoric will be convincing to the larger electorate. If Paxton’s theory of the case is correct, fears about the collapse of traditional social norms, as well as the perception of masculinity as strength, could turn even Paxton’s own skeptics against Talarico.

“The attacks resonate more broadly, potentially because they connect this political conflict to larger cultural fears about gender and authority and social change,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, whom Paxton defeated in the Republican primary, argued that the attorney general’s checkered history and firebrand nature could threaten Republicans’ ability to hold onto the seat by turning off some otherwise conservative-leaning voters. But emphasizing red-meat issues has worked for Republicans—not only on a national scale but for Paxton himself. The attorney general, who is closely aligned with Trump and the MAGA movement, has repeatedly succeeded in statewide elections despite being mired in multiple scandals, even surviving an impeachment attempt in 2023.

The modern “culture wars” are preoccupied with gender identity, specifically casting the transgender community—which accounts for less than 1 percent of the national population—as existential threats to American society. Meredith Conroy, a political science professor at California State University of San Bernardino, said that Paxton was engaging in “gender conflict framing,” a concept she developed for her book Masculinity, Media and the American Presidency. As competitions, elections naturally lend themselves to oppositional comparisons, and masculinity is one of the classic paradigms.

“‘Low-T Talarico’ and ‘Tofu Talarico’ tap into two of the most culturally charged touchstones in the current gender culture wars—transgender identity and veganism—both of which carry enormous symbolic weight on the right right now,” said Conroy in an email. As such, these nicknames are “rallying signals” that activate voters “already primed to see plant-based eating and hormone discourse as proxies for a broader cultural battle over gender norms,” Conroy continued.

Rottinghaus noted that Texas politicians have long been rewarded by performing an extreme version of masculinity and toughness, from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s overt machismo to President George W. Bush’s “cowboy persona,” to current Governor Greg Abbott’s emphasis on border security. Even former Governor Ann Richards, the last prominent Democrat to serve in a statewide position before losing reelection in 1994, was known for her tough-on-crime policies. Manliness is thus often tied to Texans’ fundamental political and cultural identity.

“It’s not just that they want to portray [Talarico] as being kind of insufficiently masculine. It’s also that they want to make a case that he’s insufficiently Texan,” said Rottinghaus. “The ‘He’s not Texas enough’ attack is shorthand for ‘He’s trying to change the state culturally in a way that won’t benefit you.’”

Paxton’s first ad of the general election further highlights this contrast in explicit terms. A narrator says, “This is Texas” over an image of sliced brisket, then adds, “This is not,” showing the 2022 footage of Talarico calling for a “non-meat campaign.” The final seconds of the ad include an image of Paxton shaking Trump’s hand with the comment, “This is Texas.” It then shows a picture of Talarico superimposed with the words “radical” and “too low-T for Texas.”

It’s a line of attack that has been echoed by Trump and his allies, who said in a post on Truth Social that Talarico “may be the worst TEXAS candidate I have ever seen.” Trump adviser Stephen Miller also made waves by falsely saying that Talarico himself is a transgender woman.

Caroline Heldman, a political science professor and the chair of the Gender, Women and Sexuality Department at Occidental College, argued that anti-LGBTQ sentiment in itself is “rooted in sexism.” By feminizing Talarico, Paxton is hoping to trigger the discomfort of socially conservative voters who have a more traditional conception of masculinity.

“The attempt to make Talarico a woman … plays into the idea that there is nothing worse for a man than to be feminized,” she said. “It’s not about making Talarico trans, it’s about making Talarico feminine.”

Meanwhile, Paxton has embodied the kind of Trumpian machismo that has dominated American politics for the past decade, an unapologetic version of masculinity that embraces traditional gender norms and encourages criticism of women and other individuals perceived to be more feminine. Although Paxton’s wife filed for divorce on “biblical grounds” last year, Heldman said that Paxton’s alleged history of affairs may work in his favor, as it could be seen as “masculine bona fides.”

Ultimately, Paxton and his fellow Republicans are following this playbook because it has worked in the past—heightening fear that doesn’t only apply to the more ideologically extreme primary voters but to more independent-leaning ones, as well.

“Candidates engage in this because it works. Even in 2026, gender norms remain powerful, and men who are perceived as violating them get penalized,” said Conroy.

Rottinghaus said that there are roughly three electorates in Texas: the hardcore partisans on either side and the low-turnout voters toward the middle who might be compelled to vote in the midterms “if the circumstances are right.” In distracting from his own scandals by casting Talarico as overly feminine—and therefore insufficiently Texan—Paxton’s rhetoric may motivate those independents to cast a ballot in order to avoid a challenge to their idea of what a politician should be.

“On the Paxton side, this race won’t be about Ken Paxton. It’ll be about James Talarico,” said Rottinghaus.

Now that the nation’s 250th anniversary is upon us, you could forgive liberals for feeling conflicted. Few seem in the mood to participate in what will likely be the even grosser distortions offered at Trump-sponsored events. But equally troubling is that many feel that the Revolution doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration. Whatever the Declaration of Independence’s radicalism, with its bedrock assumption that “all men are created equal,” the Founders, as a group, largely failed to put those ideals into practice. Despite the demands of thousands of enslaved people, poor white men, and women during the war years, by century’s end the Founders had rolled back what few liberties they had won. And forget about Native Americans: No matter which side they took, the patriot victory unleashed a torrent of land theft and state violence against which Native nations would continue to fight for at least another century.

But what if this way of understanding the nation’s birth rests on its own faulty assumptions? What if the Revolution can only be judged a failure if we assume it ended in the Founders’ lifetime? Two new books suggest, in very different ways, that one reason the Revolution disappoints is because we assume it ended too soon. Historians typically mark the end of the Revolution with either the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, or, at the very latest, the War of 1812, when the new nation fought a second and final war against the British. But deep into the nineteenth century, many ordinary Americans saw the Revolution as ongoing—an unfinished fight for freedom and equality that only began with the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and continued for at least another century, until the end of Reconstruction. If we take the long view, they suggest, and focus on lesser-known figures who tried to fulfill the Revolution’s radical promise, perhaps this year’s anniversary need not feel like such a downer.

That many Americans sensed the Revolution was still being fought nearly a century after the patriots ended the war with Britain conjures a worldview closer to Marxism than American republicanism. “Permanent revolution” is how socialist and communist leaders have long understood their projects, but in The Long Revolution, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s wonderful new book, he suggests that, despite their differences, many early Americans saw their Revolution in not entirely dissimilar terms. Drawing on an original database of nearly 2,500 Fourth of July speeches delivered around the country between 1776 and 1876, he charts the often-clashing ways Americans made sense of the Revolution and its meaning in their lives. Whatever their politics, most orators—Black and white, men and women, rich and poor—believed their agenda would fulfill the Revolution’s promise and were haunted by the idea that their “experiment” in democratic self-government might fail.

Some of the earliest July Fourth orators saw the Revolution as the first domino in a series of democratic revolutions toppling hierarchical regimes around the world. And for good reason: The French Revolution began the same year the first Congress sat, in 1789; the Haitian Revolution began two years later; and the Latin American wars of independence followed less than two decades after that. Of course, most early orators—mostly small-town white male dignitaries—saw only what they wanted to see. Many avoided references to the Haitian Revolution, wary of associating their “glorious cause” with a republican uprising led by enslaved people. And after initially celebrating the outbreak of Latin American revolutions—“Their cause ought to excite our sympathies … for they are now, as we once were,” noted one Independence Day orator in 1816—many kept their distance as some Latin American republics faltered in the 1820s.

There were also outliers. At the turn of the century, Hamilton’s party, the Federalists—mostly wealthy Northeastern supporters of centralized federal power—advanced a more limited view of the Revolution. Rooted in the struggle to ratify the U.S. Constitution, which they supported in part because it curtailed the power of more democratic state governments, Federalist orators were more likely to portray the Revolution as finished, “the better to reestablish order and hierarchy in the new nation,” Perl-Rosenthal writes.

One might expect that the passage of time would have made orators more comfortable celebrating what the Founders achieved. But Perl-Rosenthal finds just the opposite: Long after the Constitution was ratified, orators consistently suggested the republic might fail. “The nation’s collapse was never far from orators’ minds,” he writes. Part of their dread stemmed from the very idea that the Revolution was unfinished, but other sources of anxiety changed over time. Before the 1820s, Americans watched as new republics abroad collapsed, democratic uprisings were crushed, and the Founders themselves began to die. Over the next three decades, as slavery expanded, Northern society commercialized, and immigration rose, their worries increasingly stemmed from problems at home.

Northern white property holders tended to see the challenges of industrialization—labor movements, single women working in factories, public drunkenness—as moral problems requiring changes to individual behavior. The Revolution was thus recast as a moral struggle for self-control. On July 4, 1844, the Boston orator Peleg Chandler fused the idea of democratic self-government with “self-government by each individual,” arguing that, to save the republic from internal chaos, individual citizens must “bring themselves under ... restraint.”

But these conservative orations were countered by the speeches of abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers. Nearly all, Perl-Rosenthal finds, portrayed their fights for economic, racial, and gender equality as part of the ongoing struggle for freedom that commenced in Lexington and Concord. In 1836, the working-class leader Seth Luther cast the fight of labor against capital as an extension of the patriots’ war against Loyalists: “Workingmen of 76 stood on our battle field,” Luther said in his oration, and so must “we of 36 despise the power of domestic foes,” referring to local business owners. On July 4, 1829, the feminist Fanny Wright, for whom the Declaration of Independence was as sacred as Scripture, declared the “revolution we this day commemorate [is] incomplete and insufficient.”

Black abolitionists had a particularly complex relationship with Independence Day. Since the 1820s, many of their orations mixed righteous condemnations with urgent calls to complete what the Revolution began. Others placed less emphasis on July Fourth, instead celebrating August 1, the day in 1834 when the British abolished slavery in the Caribbean, as a more resonant holiday. By the 1850s, as political debates over slavery’s expansion westward consumed the nation, some Black abolitionists turned July Fourth into what Perl-Rosenthal calls an “antiholiday”—holding their celebrations one day later, on the fifth, as if to underscore the nation’s failure to live up to the declaration’s ideals.

Indeed, perhaps the most well-known July Fourth oration—Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech—was delivered on July 5. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass famously intoned. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license ... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Yet for all the speech’s righteous fury, it’s often forgotten that Douglass began by praising the Founders and concluded by calling the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” In this, Douglass was keeping with the spirit of many abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers of his day, summoning his audience to fulfill the ideals the Founders had professed but failed to deliver.

From the outbreak of the Civil War to the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877, the orations of white Northerners and Southerners followed similar paths, albeit initially toward different ends. On the surface, Southern secessionists had the easier case to make: Leaving the Union out of fear that the federal government would destroy slavery seemed an obvious continuation of the patriots’ war against a tyrannous government. Northerners countered that secession was not a Revolution at all but an “insurrection,” and when emancipation finally became a war aim midway through the conflict, they could at last join abolitionists in seeing the war as a continuation of the Revolutionary struggle for freedom.

And yet it would not last. As Reconstruction dragged into the 1870s and Northern whites lost interest in enforcing racial equality in the South, Northerners and Southerners alike increasingly spoke of the founding as if it had finally been completed—not in the sense that the enslaved had been freed, but that the fragile nation was at last on firmer footing. The Civil War had also produced a new national holiday—what became Memorial Day—which competed with Independence Day for public attention. By the nation’s first centennial in 1876, the federal government had taken over the once locally organized July Fourth celebrations, commissioning orations from across the country that had to be “historical” in nature—a sure sign the sense of a living Revolution had passed.

The Long Revolution makes a smart and convincing case that the Revolution remained alive in the minds of Americans longer than we might assume. But I wonder whether the sense of an ongoing Revolution died quite as soon as Perl-Rosenthal contends. The great benefit of his sources—thousands of July Fourth speeches drawn from newspapers and pamphlets across the country—is that they reveal broad patterns across space and time. The downside is that they leave out other sources where Americans might have expressed the same sense of an unfinished Revolution. We only need know where to look.

Holding up the promise of the nation’s founding documents—“a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963—has always been central to Black activism. The problem is that we tend to fixate on the scalding critiques of the Founders’ hypocrisy—the clickbait—and skim past the patriotism. A recent example is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s lead essay for The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” Critics tended to focus on some of her debatable interpretations of the nation’s founding, but they often overlooked her almost blush-worthy patriotism: “Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused,” she wrote, “but black people did.” She continued: “Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”

My sense is that Perl-Rosenthal might have seen this essay as reflecting an identitarian view of nationhood—one that locates the nation’s strength in its diversity. In that respect, he suggests, it’s not so different from JD Vance’s emphasis on a “heritage” definition of citizenship, by which Vance seems to mean the descendants of white Protestant settlers. Both conceptions rest on the idea “that Americans are those born on American soil or who have come to it—a flexible but still constraining form of blood-and-soil nationhood,” Perl-Rosenthal writes. Better, he argues, to ground citizenship in a commitment to the founding’s principles—freedom and equality for all. I don’t disagree. But speech often dismissed today as divisive identity politics, especially when it blasts the Founders, as Hannah-Jones did, frequently blends the same righteous fury and patriotic optimism—the sense of an unfinished Revolution—that we otherwise admire when spoken by men like Douglass. The question is whether we can hear the echoes of the past through the confusions of the present.

If The Long Revolution documents a broad spectrum of political ideologies early Americans invested the Revolution with, Thomas Richards Jr.’s rousing The Unfinished Business of 1776 primarily focuses on causes that will resonate with today’s left. He doesn’t shy away from the Revolution’s many failures, but he’s concerned that the critical tone of much academic scholarship risks ceding this year’s anniversary to the “twisted perversion of American history” likely to be heard at official Trump celebrations. He thus offers another kind of “long” history, which highlights ordinary Americans from the early republic—rural white farmers and religious dissidents, women, Native Americans, and enslaved and free Black people—for whom the Revolution’s radical ideals were something worth fighting for.

Though many Americans remember the Constitution as the Revolution’s crowning achievement, Richards reminds readers that it was in many ways a negation of its leveling spirit. The state governments created during the War of Independence were often far more democratic, lowering wealth requirements for voting and enacting tax relief that helped the poor but outraged the rich. The Constitution shifted power from the states to distant leaders, most of whom—from the president, senators, and judges—were not directly elected by the people. Many Americans thus saw it as “a betrayal of all they had fought for since 1775,” Richards writes. The anti-federalists—many of whom were small farmers and artisans who saw wealthy Founders like Hamilton as “useless and idle drones” who live “on the common stock,” as one anti-federalist put it—lost the ratification battle but forced the Founders to add the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, which protect many freedoms progressives rely on today, from the right to protest and freedom of speech to the right to a fair trial.

Rural white Americans continued their fight for economic justice well after the Revolutionary War ended. Herman Husband was one of hundreds of small farmers in the Pennsylvania backcountry who saw Hamilton’s whiskey tax of 1791—a regressive tax that fell largely on poor rural farmers and was intended to repay war debts owed to wealthy financiers—as “a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution,” Richards writes. While conservatives today often remember the Revolution as a “tax revolt” against big government, Richards reminds us that tax revolts both during and after the Revolutionary War were less antecedents to modern libertarianism than fights against financial elites who bailed out the rich on the backs of the poor.

In a similar vein, he argues that while the Founders supported market competition and private property, they also believed in “economic equality.” All the revolutionary states abolished inheritance laws that concentrated wealth, believing that equal wealth distribution was the linchpin of a functioning republic. Historians tend to see the Panic of 1819—the nation’s first great depression—as evidence that the unfettered capitalist view won out. But Richards highlights Kentucky’s Relief Party, which arose in response. A proto-Populist movement, the Relief Party protected small debtors from wealthy creditors and created a system of public financing that issued low-interest loans to small farmers and artisans. As the economy recovered, the party faded, but the case study brilliantly shows how left-wing economic populism—far from a recent invention—has deep roots in the Revolutionary past.

Richards also seeks to restore the Revolution’s place in the history of modern feminism. Ask a casual feminist today when the fight for women’s rights began, and they will likely say Seneca Falls (1848). But Richards dates it to Revolutionary-era New Jersey, when the state briefly allowed women with property to vote. Though scholars often interpret this as a modest and short-lived exception that underscores the Revolution’s failures as much as its promise—it applied only to propertied women, mostly white widows, and was repealed in 1807—Richards looks at the voting rolls and finds that in some counties as many as 10 percent of voters were women, surely enough to sway an election. Moreover, women suffragists throughout the nineteenth century referenced the New Jersey laws when campaigning for voting rights, linking their struggle—culminating in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—to the founding era.

Enslaved people drew inspiration from the Revolution as well. When Virginia authorities uncovered plans for an enslaved rebellion organized by the enslaved blacksmith Gabriel in August 1800, captured conspirators revealed they intended to march under a flag reading “Death or Liberty,” a deliberate appropriation of Patrick Henry’s Revolutionary War slogan. Another captured rebel told prosecutors: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer…. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a [sic] willing to sacrifice in their cause.” During Reconstruction, Black civil rights leaders often framed their new constitutional rights—from birthright citizenship to Black male suffrage—as fulfilling the Revolution’s promise, or, as the Black Philadelphian Charles Gibbons put it, a realization of “that divine ideal of human equality … [that] was proclaimed from Independence Hall.”

The case Richards is trying to make works best when focusing on the ordinary Americans who fought for racial, gender, and economic equality in the name of the founding’s principles. But it’s more difficult to sustain for other groups. A chapter on how the Cherokee leader Chief John Ross pleaded with liberal-minded Americans to uphold the Revolution’s ideals of equality and justice and resist the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is only half-convincing. It’s not because many liberal Americans did not listen, but because the American Revolution’s relationship to Native Americans was fundamentally about land speculators and white settlers gaining a free hand to seize Native lands. From the very start of the Revolution, most Native nations saw a patriot victory as portending a loss of Indigenous sovereignty, not a promise of greater freedoms—and they were right.

Other chapters don’t have clear resonance with modern left-wing ideas. A chapter on short-lived breakaway republics in antebellum California, Oregon, Utah, and Texas is framed as demonstrating how the “right to found a new nation” lived on in the minds of Americans long after the Revolutionary War ended. Richards at one point suggests that not all the chapters in this book support left-wing ideas, but it’s not clear how this might inspire liberals today. In any event, the chapter says little about the most consequential breakaway state—the Confederate States of America—which fought a civil war against the United States, and whose central purpose, the protection of slavery, was also an important motive behind Texas’s secession from Mexico in 1836, though Richards has doubts.

Like Perl-Rosenthal, Richards has written a timely and provocative book. Yet readers might finish both with the impression that the chest-thumping patriotism of MAGA—with its “Don’t Tread On Me” flags lifted straight from the Revolutionary War—is simply a distortion of the Revolution’s true meaning rather than one of its genuine legacies. But as historians Steven Hahn and Jefferson Cowie have recently argued, an illiberal understanding of freedom runs straight from the founding to the present—the freedom to dominate—and being morally bankrupt does not make it a less authentic interpretation. For that matter, it’s often impossible to separate the Revolution’s illiberal impulses from what now looks like its latent progressivism. The same backcountry farmers who railed at the Founders for courting the rich were also furious at them for refusing to let them seize Native American land. And many abolitionists who fought slave labor in the name of revolutionary freedom simultaneously ignored—indeed sometimes celebrated—the rise of an exploitative system of wage labor unfolding all around them.

Yet Richards’s final plea is still worth heeding: “a narrative of the American Revolution that only criticizes is a poor replacement for a narrative that only celebrates.” It may simply be that history books are not the best place to look for this “usable past,” as historians call it. In many ways, ordinary Americans are already doing that work themselves. You see one version in MAGA’s appropriation of Revolutionary symbols, from the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag to the movement’s Tea Party roots. But the impulse appears on the left as well. Bernie Sanders frequently invokes the Founders in his fight against oligarchy, even casting his first presidential campaign as part of an ongoing “political revolution” that “never ends.” Mainstream liberals, too, seem to have caught the Revolutionary spirit: What is the protest slogan “No Kings,” after all, if not a reminder that the founding still resonates, and might not be as distant as it seems?

Among other anti-worker rulings, the Trump NLRB effectively scuttled a legal challenge that the Obama NLRB’s general counsel had initiated holding McDonald’s liable for labor-law violations committed by its franchisees; permitted management to require as a condition of employment that workers give up their right to sue the company; empowered management to slow down union elections, a common tactic to undermine organizing drives; and denied workers the right to use work email to communicate about workplace issues.

Despite all this, Trump in 2024 expanded his share of the very working-class voters he worked so hard to undermine, from 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent. Trump even bumped up his share of union-household votes, from 42 percent in 2016 to 45 percent, reducing the Democratic advantage from nine percentage points to eight. It was hard not to conclude that America’s working class, which had been dying in shocking numbers from what the economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair,” was committing economic suicide, as well.

Fentanyl-related deaths began to decline around 2022 and continue to do so, raising some hope that the working class will cease committing self-harm at the ballot box. Early signs are trickling in that this is starting to happen. Trump’s even beginning to falter with white working-class voters, who until now had been his most stalwart supporters. So perhaps the proles will now pay more attention to the havoc Trump II is wreaking at the NLRB.

The main Trump plan this time out has been to put the NLRB on ice by denying it a quorum. That was achieved by firing NLRB Board Chair Gwynn Wilcox, a Democratic appointee, a few days after Trump’s inauguration. No reason was stated for the firing, making it plainly illegal under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (“Any member of the Board may be removed by the President, upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause”). Wilcox sued. A district court judge reinstated her, but then the D.C. Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of that decision, the “emergency” in this case apparently being that the NLRB might resume operations with a lawfully appointed board member. On further “en banc” consideration, however, the appeals court concluded the firing really did violate the law, and so reinstated Wilcox.

That prompted the Supreme Court to execute the final chess move, blocking Wilcox’s reinstatement on the grounds that the high court intended to overturn the 1935 precedent upholding Wilcox’s job protection (Humphrey’s Executor) but just hadn’t got around to it yet. (They’re very busy people!) The vehicle for Humphrey’s Executor’s execution won’t be Wilcox’s case (to which the Supreme Court denied cert) but rather a separate case about Trump’s firing Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.

The high court heard Trump v. Slaughter arguments in December. Considering that it previously broadcast to the world that Trump would win, why haven’t we seen a decision? Because the reactionary majority has to concoct some plausible-sounding reason to dismantle Humphrey’s Executor for the NLRB, the Federal Trade Commission, and all the other independent agencies it doesn’t take seriously enough to care whether Trump fouls them up—but to keep Humphrey’s Executor for the one independent agency the Republican majority does take seriously, which is the Federal Reserve. If Trump fouls the Fed up, that will screw up their retirement accounts! But you can’t say that in a legal opinion, so they’re struggling to come up with something that sounds better.

In denying the NLRB a quorum, Trump denied Wilcox the opportunity to preside over a Democratic NLRB majority until Trump got around to filling its two vacancies—three after Wilcox’s ouster. (Presidents must reserve two of the five NLRB board positions for the opposing party, and by law all five board members serve fixed terms.) Putting the NLRB on ice also denied parties the chance to appeal to the full board in Washington any adverse decision handed down by a regional NLRB administrative law judge. That had the effect of leaving many ALJ decisions in limbo, management’s second-favorite destination for unfair labor practice challenges. And of course, firing Wilcox demoralized the bureaucrats, fulfilling White House budget chief Russell Vought’s pathological desire to “put them in trauma.”

But this strategy was only half-smart, because the absence of a functioning full board in Washington meant that pro-labor Biden-era precedents (many of which overturned pro-management NLRB precedents set during Trump’s first term) would remain in place. Regional administrative law judges are required to follow existing precedents, and until Trump reinstated a Washington quorum these were Biden precedents. That was true for federal courts too, which treat NLRB rulings as case law. Vought’s (and Elon Musk’s) mayhem strategy was similarly self-defeating at other regulatory agencies, the only difference being that instead of not being able to overturn Biden precedents, these agencies were slowed down in their efforts to throw out Biden regulations. (See my “Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree,” February 2025.)

Trump kept up his no-NLRB-quorum strategy until mid-December 2025, when the term of Republican John Ring expired. The president took that occasion to nominate a Republican, James Murphy, to replace Ring and to nominate a second Republican, Scott Mayer, to fill one of the board’s three remaining vacancies. Once confirmed by the Senate on December 11, Mayer and Murphy joined the sole remaining NLRB board member, the Democrat David Prouty, giving the NLRB a three-person quorum until Prouty’s term expires this August. To keep the Republican-majority NLRB going after that, Trump has nominated the Republican James Macy to fill one of two current vacancies, and—because Senate Democrats would try to block Macy’s confirmation if Trump didn’t pair him with a Democrat—to renominate Prouty to another term. Wilcox’s seat, which would have to go to a Democrat, isn’t likely to be filled anytime soon.

Strangely, not much has happened at the NLRB since Murphy and Mayer restored the NLRB’s quorum with a new Republican majority. That’s because a genteel NLRB tradition dictates that you don’t overturn major precedents by fewer than three votes, and the new members are honoring it. For example, the NLRB passed up the chance to overturn a 2023 decision by the Biden NLRB restricting management’s imposition of confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses on severance agreements. Such clauses were shown, in the sexual harassment scandals that gave rise to the #MeToo movement a decade ago, to hush up sexual harassment settlements and thereby limit accountability for, for example, Fox News, where for decades Roger Ailes created a hostile work environment that nobody knew about.

Once the Senate confirms Macy and re-confirms Prouty, however—probably in the next couple of months—the NLRB’s three Republicans will start dismantling Biden precedents. Does that mean the working class will be left unmolested by the Republican NLRB until then? Not according to a letter that Democratic Representatives Bobby Scott and Mark DeSaulnier, ranking members on, respectively, the House Education and Workforce Committee and its Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, sent this morning to NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey.

The letter concerns an appalling case backlog that’s built up as a result of budget-driven staff cuts. This isn’t a new problem, but Trump made it worse. The NLRB budget stood at $302 million when Trump reentered office, down from $408 million (corrected for inflation) as recently as 2011; now it’s $294 million, and the Trump administration is asking Congress for only $285 million next year. In 2011, the agency had 1,733 employees; by 2024 it had 1,233. In the 18 months since Trump’s second inauguration, that’s fallen to 1,151. There are high school graduating classes bigger than that. In February, Bloomberg Law’s Robert Iafolla reported that NLRB field operations would require 23 percent more staff to handle their caseload, and in March Iafolla reported that 10,000 cases had been pending review for more than six months.

Last month the NLRB announced that it would address this problem by taking 3,500 of these cases and transferring them to other, less-burdened regional offices. But as Scott and DeSaulnier point out, that will only introduce new inefficiencies:

For instance, under this Initiative, regional staff will have to transfer a select case and notify the affected parties. Then, if the transferred [unfair labor practice] case is found to have merit by staff in a different regional office, the case will have to return to the originating region for in-person proceedings before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) as there is no remote option. Additionally, staff in the originating region will have to learn the facts of this case to argue before an ALJ, duplicating the work conducted by the regional staff that initially found merit.

Why, faced with a huge backlog, would the NLRB double the number of work hours necessary to advance these cases? Because the efficiency the NLRB is looking for isn’t to process cases more quickly; it’s to dismiss cases more quickly. Where once only one region got a shot at vetoing any given unfair labor practice claim, now two regions get that shot. Also, shifting a case from one region to another makes on-site visits and in-person interviews unlikely. The less NLRB regional employees know about an unfair labor practice claim, the likelier they are to say the hell with it.

NLRB case backlogs are up under Trump—and union elections are down. According to the nonprofit Center for American Progress, the number of NLRB-supervised elections fell 30 percent during Trump’s first year in office. Staff shortages may play some role, but the drop-off is too big for that to explain it. More likely, union organizers know the NLRB is less keen to certify their union, so why bother? They wouldn’t be wrong. In 2023, a union’s likelihood of winning an NLRB-supervised election was 72 percent, up from 65 percent during Trump’s last year in office. Now it’s fallen to 70 percent.

The only comfort we can draw from Trump’s assault on the NLRB is the possibility that it will make working-class voters more aware that Trump is not their champion, and never was. Over the next couple of years, though, they’ll pay a heavy price at the NLRB for that misapprehension.

“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” said the judge, April Perry. She added that sanctions against the federal prosecutors involved may follow—a rare bit of accountability, maybe, in the Trump age, and in an especially destructive case that should never have got as far as it did.

Demonstrations at the Broadview immigration jail preceded Operation Midway Blitz, when federal agents arrested thousands of people in the metro area—more than 2,000 in October 2025 alone. As of April 2026, they had deported more than 2,400 people arrested. As more ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents occupied the city throughout September and October, the protests at Broadview became larger and drew more attention and more repression. Broadview was soon used by the Department of Homeland Security as a backdrop for propaganda—sometimes featuring the homeland security director at the time, Kristi Noem—meant to dramatize the danger protesters allegedly posed. But the “danger” followed a now-familiar pattern. People peacefully standing in the way of an ICE vehicle were said to be threatening the safety of the agents inside. Indeed the Broadview Six were apparently so threatening that they were not stopped and arrested on the spot. Instead, it took the government nearly a month to convene a grand jury willing to bring an indictment, which was filed under seal on October 23, leveling federal conspiracy charges against a small group of people who happened to be near one another at the same September 26 demonstration.

It’s important to remember that back when the Department of Justice first sought these indictments, the city and much of its surrounding towns were living under siege from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nearly every morning for months, neighborhoods across the city would brace for the arrival of caravans of unmarked SUVs and masked federal agents dressed for combat. As the agents flooded residential streets, parking lots, and school drop-off and pickup, they were followed by community members whistling and witnessing and recording. Some of these people later returned to help the neighborhoods recover long after ICE had left. Some stood vigil outside detention centers to welcome those who were released. What was remarkable to many watching across the country was demonstrators’ almost ordinary-seeming willingness to stand in the way of ICE abductions. It was that boldness, that courage to interfere with and confront mass deportations—and the way it spread far beyond Chicago—that the Trump administration wanted to stop.

This is why the issue in this case is not what exactly these six people did or did not do. Arguably, it never was: The Broadview prosecutions were about how far the Trump administration and its allies in the Department of Justice were willing to go to punish people for showing up for their immigrant neighbors.

From the start, the case and the government’s story were sketchy, designed more to have a chilling effect on the ongoing protests, perhaps, than to actually succeed in court. Indeed, now we know a bit more about how desperately constructed the case was. The first group of jurors to hear the government’s case refused to indict the Broadview Six, as we learned from accounts of the grand jury proceedings that were revealed in Judge April Perry’s courtroom last week. The secretive grand jury process, in which only prosecutors are present to make their case unchallenged and transcripts are kept sealed, had allowed federal prosecutors in the Broadview Six case to conceal the fact that after the jury did not give them the indictment they wanted, they dismissed some jurors and replaced them with others who would.

The resulting indictment charged Kat Abughazaleh, Andre Martin, Michael Rabbitt, Catherine Sharp, Brian Straw, and Joselyn Walsh with conspiracy to impede a federal officer, to which all six pleaded not guilty in November. One of the defendants, Abughazaleh, was a candidate for Congress at the time; Sharp was running for a Cook County board seat and was chief of staff to a Chicago alderman; others were also involved in local progressive politics. In March, prosecutors dropped all charges against two of the defendants. The next day, the remaining defendants filed a motion seeking documents related to prosecutors’ possible communications with the Trump administration about the case, a motion prosecutors strongly objected to, claiming that even raising the possibility of such coordination was to suggest that the prosecutors were engaged in misconduct. In late April, prosecutors suddenly dropped the conspiracy charges from the grand jury’s indictment, instead pursuing separate misdemeanor offenses against the remaining four defendants. Only last Thursday in court did U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros admit that the decision to drop the conspiracy charges came once he learned of his attorneys’ misconduct with the grand jury. He had nevertheless continued toward trial, until Judge Perry questioned them about the grand jury transcripts.

U.S. Attorney Boutros, for whom the Broadview Six prosecutors worked, might take issue with the idea that there was a political dimension to their approach to the case. Boutros was chosen to lead the Northern District of Illinois office on an interim basis by then–Attorney General Pam Bondi about a year ago, at a time when thousands had quit the Justice Department. That number would soon include some lawyers from his own office, an “unprecedented exodus of experience, talent and leadership,” one former federal prosecutor said, that “diminishes the office.” Boutros oversaw the office at the height of Operation Midway Blitz. In the course of doing so he praised Bondi, though he has forcefully rejected the understandable concerns that, as numerous federal prosecutors have in the midst of the anti-immigrant mission, he would be taking direction from Trump. “You should write this down,” Boutros told the Chicago Sun-Times this April: In “not a single case,” he said, was “politics” involved in their decision-making. “And anyone who says otherwise is misstating reality. And anyone who says otherwise is an armchair expert who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Period.”

Now Boutros says he is reviewing other cases brought by his office for the kinds of misconduct seen in the Broadview Six case. Still, he believes there was “no deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecutors,” as he told Judge Perry last week, adding, “I will tell Your Honor that as upset as you are and have been, I was upset as well.” That may be. But as one of the defense attorneys said in response, “until yesterday [Boutros] knew what was in those grand jury transcripts and he was still instructing his prosecutors to go to trial on this.” And in court days later, the same defense attorney alleged that Boutros himself may have had improper contact with the grand jury.

Whether or not the prosecutors willfully violated the defendants’ right to a fair trial, they certainly resented the suggestion that they could be doing so at the direction of the administration. In a brief filed when the case was still headed to trial, U.S. Attorney William Hogan fumed that the notion “that officials in Washington” would “blithely expect career prosecutors in Chicago to violate multiple ethical and legal standards to go along with illegitimate orders while jeopardizing their professional reputations” was “the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation, not to mention grossly disingenuous and thoroughly irresponsible, and that “the unavoidable conclusions to be drawn” from such accusations, he added, are that the government lawyers on the case “have not only acted in bad faith but have committed prosecutorial misconduct.” At the time, Judge Perry agreed with Hogan that she didn’t see any evidence of this being a politically motivated case. But just a few weeks later, Hogan’s own boss would offer evidence that those suspicions of “prosecutorial misconduct” indeed had merit.

When Hogan showed up in Judge Perry’s courtroom last week to ask for all charges to be dropped, he admitted that he had engaged in redacting the grand jury transcripts. Boutros was there too, and, in an unusual appearance, he could not stop himself from saying—on the record—that conduct such as the defendants’ was “unacceptable in a civilized society.” He also said that the prosecution “stand by the charges that we were prepared to bring.” For her part, Judge Perry replied that he was “significantly undercutting [his] mea culpa here,” by continuing “to vilify these particular defendants.”

The defendants’ own cases may be over, but they are not letting the prosecutors go so easily. In addition to seeking sanctions against the prosecutors involved, defense attorneys have said that their clients may file for compensation from Trump’s new “weaponization” fund. Any relief they get, at this stage, does not erase the impact of those fearsome federal conspiracy indictments. Nor can sanctions undo the apparent willingness of federal prosecutors to throw themselves into such apparent misconduct. It would be tempting to imagine they were motivated precisely by the reasons they said they were not: following political orders, scoring wins for the administration’s side. But it’s just as possible that prosecutors willing to engage in such misconduct are less the product of Trump than among the engines that enabled Trump to gain and return to power.

Meanwhile, last Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen played a sold-out show in Washington’s Nationals Park (around 41,000 people) for his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour. As you’ve no doubt heard, he opened the show—and he seems to be opening every date on the tour—with a sermonette about the “reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous” occupant of the White House before he launched into a cover of Edwin Starr’s 1970 chart-topping hit “War.”

So, fate having handed us an interesting and useful juxtaposition here, it seems on point to ask: Which of these events represents this country’s better self? OK, it’s obvious that I’m going to answer that by saying Springsteen. But there’s more to the answer. The moment gives us the opportunity to reflect on assumptions the media makes about who is a “real” American: how wrong those assumptions are, how those assumptions have helped elevate and legitimize Trump, and how they distort our political discourse generally.

The lazy media assumption, of course, is that working-class and mostly white Trump supporters are somehow the real Americans. This is driven by some weird psychological combination of guilt and condescension—guilt on the part of educated elites that they don’t know how to earn a living by the honest sweat of their brow, and condescension because it makes a number of assumptions about these people and their “simple” lives and values.

Hence, the still-endless appetite on the part of editors for sending reporters out to some red redoubt in middle America to see what the “real” people think. That this is considered to be “news,” while sending reporters to blue areas to gauge the depth of anti-Trump rage is generally not, stacks the deck heavily in Trump’s favor.

There’s a key distinction to be made here between what it means to be a good person and what it means to be a good American. I’m sure most Trump supporters, the outright racists aside, are decent people. If I had a flat tire and they drove by, I imagine they’d be just as likely as Trump foes to stop and help. The chances that some Trump supporter, somewhere, did you a good turn at some point in the last decade is very high.

But being a good American is entirely different. To be a good American, you have to believe in a few principles and ideas—and you must reject certain other ideas. Chief among those that a good American is compelled to abjure are the ideas that (1) the rule of law is not sacrosanct but fungible and conditional, and (2) that the United States is or should be a Christian nation.

I’d say many or most Trump supporters fall short on one or both of these points. And so by definition, they’re not good Americans. Good Americans believe devoutly that the rule of law applies to everyone. And good Americans know very well that this is explicitly not a Christian nation and never was. Go read the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson himself in 1779, and figure it out.

Anyway, back to the concerts: Trump’s whining about these musicians is comical and pathetic. The whole thing is a mystery. Whoever decided in the first place that America needed to hear performances from some groups that had a few hits 30 years ago is baffling. And let’s face it, it’s not as if Trump couldn’t have gotten some friendly stars out of the Branson circuit. Maybe he just got tired of Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood.

With two-thirds of the country now disapproving of Trump, I’d say there are many millions of real Americans in the anti-Trump camp. About 25 percent of American adults self-identify as part of the MAGA movement. That’s a small minority. Meanwhile, Springsteen’s favorable-to-unfavorables, according to YouGov, are 53 to 14.

Mind you, even The Boss doesn’t really represent today’s America. He’s a 76-year-old white guy whose best album, in my humble view, came out 53 years ago (The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle). What I know about the pop culture of today I know through my kid, and it isn’t a lot, but I do love, say, Olivia Rodrigo. She’s a rocker (“Brutal” is awesome!). She’s very anti-Trump. And she’s most definitely a real American. She grew up in California’s Inland Empire, the daughter of a family therapist and a schoolteacher, and she taught herself the guitar and made it on her own and as far as I know doesn’t whine about paying too much in taxes. In fact, daughter of a therapist that she is, she pays for everyone who works on her tours to have access to mental health services.

So she and her generation are the future, but for now, God bless Springsteen for taking it upon himself to get out there and the be voice of anti-Trump America—which, again, is most of America. Most of America hates or at least disapproves of his childishness, his self-regard, his lying, his racism, his cruelty, his totally retrograde ideas about manhood (and for that matter womanhood), and his operatically corrupt self-dealing, which people appear finally and blessedly to be noticing.

And finally, let’s hope that by 2028, with Trump (we presume) heading to retirement, the media finally wake up from this spell and figure out that real Americans are to be found not just in Youngstown, Ohio, and Topeka, Kansas, but in diverse cities and university towns where people work just as hard as anyone else and believe in a much better America than the one Trump wants to conjure. They’re the people who have not been blinded by Trump’s false light.

The scene was both exceedingly collegiate and exceedingly collegial. In fact, the only evidence that two years prior this had been the site of a notorious pro-Palestinian protest encampment—a source of deep discord and division that drew the ire and rebuke of both President Donald Trump and Governor Josh Shapiro, and ultimately police in riot gear—was a metal sign stating that “Demonstrations, rallies, protests, and large gatherings require prior university approval,” and that “Overnight occupation” was strictly prohibited.

“And that right there, that peaceful and anodyne scene that you witnessed, is the ‘chilling effect’ in action,” a Penn faculty member in the humanities department told me. “College students are the most likely people to be activists. They have strong political passions. And since Trump was reelected, there’s been plenty to protest: the White House’s attacks on science, people being scooped off the street and sent to a gulag in El Salvador, ICE raids in Minneapolis and protesters there being executed in the street, and war in Iran. The list goes on. And yet there hasn’t been a single protest on campus. Not a peep. Professors and students alike are exhausted; exhausted by the threat of doxxing, by the threat of blacklisting, by the threat of being investigated, by the threat of your present and future livelihood being put in jeopardy.”

Over this past winter and spring, I spoke to some 20 current and former faculty and staff at the vaunted Ivy League institution, some of whom refused to be quoted by name for fear of reprisals by Penn administrators, donors, and funders, or fear of harassment from far-right-wing agitators. They all report that diversity, equity, and inclusion, academic freedom, and free speech are under attack on the Penn campus. And it’s not just the absence of protest on College Green that concerns them. DEI language has been scrubbed from university websites and programming scaled back. Trans athletes have been barred from women’s sports. Put up an anti-ICE flyer, and it gets taken down. Attempt to organize a screening or a panel discussion deemed critical of Israel, and a call from campus security says you won’t be accommodated. Lecture on the plight of Palestinians and be accused of antisemitism. Basically, these professors say, anything deemed offensive to the Trump administration, which could thereby put federal funding to the university at risk, can elicit unwanted attention from Penn’s Office of General Counsel. Faculty in the School of Medicine even told me that efforts to urge Congress to preserve science funding were suppressed by Penn administrators. The pursuit of science, they were effectively told, is now categorized as partisan politics. (Penn’s Office of General Counsel declined my requests for an interview.)

The first sign that Penn aimed to play ball with an authoritarian White House came in February 2025, when, in response to a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education, or DOE, threatening to revoke federal funding if Penn didn’t terminate DEI programs, the university introduced drastic changes to its nondiscrimination and affirmative action policies. Overnight, in addition to its central DEI website being wiped off the internet, words like “underrepresented,” “minorities,” and “racism” seemingly disappeared from official Penn vocabulary. Committee on Diversity and Equity? Better change that to Committee on Community and Equal Opportunity, lest the Trump White House puts you on its Naughty List.

But to many of the faculty I spoke to, Penn’s capitulation to Trumpism became official on July 1 of last year, when, following closed-door negotiations, it was announced that the university would fully comply with Department of Education demands to ban transgender women athletes from women’s sports, which included stripping trans swimmer Lia Thomas of her swimming awards and records from the 2021–2022 season.

It started on March 19, 2025, when the White House announced it would freeze more than $175 million in federal funds to Penn for defying Trump’s executive order on transgender athletes. A little more than three months later, in addition to agreeing to the erasure of Thomas, Penn promised to write letters of apology to “each impacted female swimmer” and to “adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” In exchange, the aforementioned $175 million in federal funds was restored. According to my sources, members of Penn’s Office of General Counsel shared with faculty that they were happy with the deal, implying they had reason to believe the Trump administration would leave Penn alone in the future.

Jonathan Katz, a professor in Penn’s gender, sexuality, and women’s studies department, said that Penn made a “strategic decision” with Thomas. “Penn saw the Lia Thomas affair as a necessary sacrificial lamb,” Katz told me. “They thought they could fend off the Trump administration this way. But I think they made a frankly bad decision.” Since Penn’s deal with the DOE, the Trump administration continues to harass the university: The White House targeted Penn for the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which aims to induce universities into adopting conservative priorities, and Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continues to investigate the university for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. (More on those later.) Beyond all this, Katz believes the strategic error was to “not reassure the university community that the first principles of academic freedom are sacrosanct.”

Katz said that Mark Trodden, the dean of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, assured him privately that the newly adopted policy on gender would not extend past athletics—that academic freedom would be preserved. And so far, at least in Katz’s classroom, it has been. But Katz added that Dean Trodden’s failure to make those assurances publicly has left students and faculty feeling vulnerable. And it appears to have already cost the gender studies department an endowment.

“We had one funder express concern after the Lia Thomas deal,” said Katz. “They basically said that universities in this day and age really can’t be trusted to do the right thing because the pressures on them from the Trump administration are so great. That funder has decided not to invest in universities.”

Nevertheless, Katz said, he understands the thinking behind Penn administrators declining to publicly declare Penn’s independence from the Trump administration when it comes to gender issues in the classroom. “I think they’re worried that this would become Trump bait,” he said. “They’re trying to hoe this very narrow row. They really are in an impossible position, and I think they really are trying their best. I just think that, had they resisted Trump’s threats from the beginning, Penn would have been so much stronger all the way around.”

In December 2024, shortly after Trump was reelected, Carter J. Carter, who uses they/them pronouns, was called into a meeting with the director of Penn’s doctorate in clinical social work program and another administrator over a complaint that was made to the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, or OREI, a.k.a. the Title VI Office. Formally opened that same month in response to claims that antisemitism had spun out of control on the campus, the OREI’s stated mission is to handle charges of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, and to ensure that Penn is in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on religious identity, ethnicity, race, color, or national origin at any institution receiving federal funding. But multiple sources at Penn tell me the OREI’s mission appears to be legitimizing and weaponizing spurious claims of antisemitism in an effort to discourage teaching and speech at the university that’s critical of the Israeli government and the war in Gaza. It’s an effort, these critics say, spurred on by a handful of conservative and powerful donors, a U.S. House committee’s investigation into antisemitism at Penn, and the Trump administration, who have all appeared to adopt an overly broad and false definition of antisemitism. (My interview request with the OREI was declined. When I asked via email for specific metrics on the Title VI Office, including the ratio of alleged instances of antisemitic conduct versus other forms of bias, I received a vague response that appeared to merely reiterate the broad mission statement found on the OREI website.)

“We say Kafkaesque too often, but that is some Kafkaesque shit that happened to me,” said Carter, after showing me a recording of the Zoom meeting they had with supervisors regarding the Title VI complaint.

The complaint came from a student in a class Carter was teaching in the fall of 2024 in the doctorate in clinical social work program at Penn’s School for Social Policy & Practice. A course on the history of psychoanalysis, it was essentially a class on the history of Jewish intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it covered such thinkers as Anna and Sigmund Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Heinz Kohut, who all fled Nazi persecution, and Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, key figures of the Frankfurt School who provided foundational theories on the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. Carter is also of Jewish heritage. But Carter assigned one reading about a Palestinian father named Amjad being treated for a “globus hystericus”—a sensation of a ball in the throat. In the reading, the therapist, also Palestinian, concludes that the source of Amjad’s symptom is a traumatic experience he endured with his young daughter at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. As Amjad and his daughter, who was just seven years old at the time, were being detained in their car, Amjad’s daughter urgently needed to pee. When Amjad asked if his daughter could use a bathroom, a soldier said she could “piss herself in the car.” And so Amjad held his daughter, who moments before had been singing a made-up song about a “bouncy ball” bouncing “over the wall,” as she wet herself.

The teaching, Carter told me, was meant to have universal application. The patient is presenting in a very classically Freudian fashion, but the Palestinian therapist’s supervisor, an Israeli Jew, fails to see it. “It’s a really good illustration of neurosis,” said Carter. “But it’s also a really good illustration of how clinician bias can get in the way of seeing certain kinds of people in a fully accurate light. The larger lesson is that we all need to be interested in those kinds of dynamics no matter where we live. No matter who we are or where we are, we’re gonna be inhabiting a different version of that dilemma. But that dilemma is everywhere.”

Following the class, one of Carter’s students reported to the Title VI Office that, as a Jewish person, they felt alienated by the reading and the discussion. In the Zoom meeting addressing the complaint, Carter asked the supervisors—Jacqueline Corcoran (the director of the doctoral program) and Phyllis Solomon (a professor in administration)—to explain where the complaint was reported. “It’s a new initiative ... a university office that now handles this kind of thing,” said Corcoran, who then proceeded to tell Carter that the Title VI Office’s guidance was for Carter to provide balance in their course.

“What does that mean?” asked Carter, with a look of confusion.

“So, there’s stuff about colonialism, and Palestine,” said Corcoran. “Then offering something about how psychodynamic theory also explains antisemitism. You know, for an example, that you just want to offer a counterbalance to different positions on where certain beliefs have come from.”

“Who defines balance though?” asked Carter, incredulous, before stating that, if anything, the balance in their syllabus “very substantially favors Jewish intellectual history, and the history of antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. So I guess what I’m suggesting is that the premise of the complaint is not legitimate.”

“Well, I mean, we’re just telling you what our advice is,” said Corcoran. “It might help students understand it more if it was current, like if you were talking about antisemitism as it plays out today.”

Carter then takes issue with being accused of bias without being presented with any evidence.

“I don’t know if they’ve accused you,” said Solomon. “All they’re saying is for the legislation …”

“What legislation?” asked Carter.

“Title VI,” said Corcoran.

“But Title VI doesn’t tell me what to teach,” said Carter.

“No, but it’s about issues of bias, so that’s why it came to that office,” said Corcoran.

“I trust that you can see, though, how we overuse this phrase ‘chilling effect’ to the point that it becomes not very meaningful,” said Carter. “But this is precisely the sort of thing that has a chilling effect on academic freedom, particularly for an adjunct faculty member.”

“We can tell them that was your response, that’s fine,” said Corcoran coldly.

“We’re in a climate in this institution where it can feel like any invocation of the existence of Palestinian people is seen by some people as ‘unbalanced,’” said Carter. “But I can’t possibly help that.”

“Mhmm,” Corcoran coldly responded.

“That this thing that I did that wasn’t a thought crime but could, nonetheless—” said Carter. “I should be really careful not to do any thought crimes. Like, this is a problem.”

“Well, yeah, I don’t know what else to say about it,” said Corcoran, poker-faced.

“... I don’t imagine it’s difficult for you to empathize with why that would really impinge upon my feeling of having academic freedom,” said Carter.

“OK, well I’m hearing what you’re saying,” said Corcoran, again very coldly. “And we can relay that as well [to the Title VI Office].”

Six months later, in June 2025, Carter received an email from Corcoran informing them that they would not be reappointed. (When I asked the Penn administration about Carter’s departure, a spokesperson said they were unable to comment on personnel matters.)

“It’s pure McCarthyism,” Carter told me after we finished viewing the recording, a more complete transcript of which can be read on Carter’s Substack. “And this behavior by administrators, by fellow professors, no less, just cannot co-exist with the normal exercise of academic freedom. And unfortunately, I think I was the canary in the coal mine for this.”

It’s true: In the time that has elapsed since Carter’s unceremonious departure from Penn, several more professors have been questioned by Penn’s Title VI Office for baseless claims of antisemitism. According to the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP—an organization that advocates for faculty, with a particular focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and working conditions—one was questioned over their peer-reviewed, scholarly research that referenced a third-party resource that a complainant claimed, without evidence, was antisemitic; another was summoned to the Title VI Office for appearing at an off-campus event wearing a stole bearing the Palestinian flag; while others were questioned about political statements made on their personal social media accounts.

“The message I keep trying to send is that when you hear about one high-profile case, you know there are a thousand more that we never hear about,” said Lorena Grundy, a professor in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and vice president of the university’s chapter of the AAUP. “Not to mention those instances where a professor just avoids teaching on a certain topic altogether.”

Grundy then recounted the example of a colleague who spent an inordinate amount of time and effort agonizing over how to frame one bullet point that touched on Israel in a lecture. The colleague even sent Grundy the slide so that she could help bulletproof it against any potential misinterpretation.

“Like, you just don’t do that,” said Grundy. “That’s just not how a college campus should be.”

According to a survey conducted this year by researchers at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, such self-censorship among Middle East scholars is rampant. In the United States, 77 percent of respondents reported feeling the need to censor themselves when speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an academic or professional capacity. Of that 77 percent, 81 percent said they self-censored their criticism of Israel, compared with just 11 percent who said they self-censored their criticism of Palestine.

As an AAUP advocate, Grundy has helped members accused of antisemitism navigate the Title VI Office. Her contention, and fear, is that many of the complaints originate outside the university—a concern that’s echoed in the above-mentioned survey, in which 58 percent of U.S. respondents said they limited their speech on Israel-Palestine due to pressure from external advocacy groups.

“One thing that has certainly happened is complainants who aren’t affiliated with the university see something that upsets them,” she said. “And then they start calling colleagues, and chairs, and deans. Then that well-meaning chair or dean or whatever goes to the Title VI Office, saying, ‘Hey, I got this harassing email from someone upset about this thing that my colleague posted on social media. What do I do?’ And then that’s now taken as a complaint from someone inside the university. That’s how these external complaints, some from far-right-wing activists, get laundered as internal.”

Ian Lustick, a professor in Penn’s department of political science and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has been dealing with these sorts of issues for more than 50 years. An American Jew himself who supports full equality between Israelis and Palestinians, he’s well-acquainted with the ways in which conservative forces try to suppress critical or even nuanced voices on Israel and Palestine. He has also been accused by some right-wing groups of having an anti-Israel bias. The Title VI Office, Lustick said, is a vital tool for the suppression of open debate.

“The Title VI Office incentivizes right-wing activists to make accusations because as soon as they make an accusation, it has to be investigated,” he told me. “Because if the institution doesn’t investigate, that in itself makes the institution look antisemitic. Out of 100 complaints, 99 might be bullshit, but it doesn’t matter because it’s going to create the climate they want—a climate of anticipatory compliance. And Trump is using it.”

It’s a strategy that Lustick observed in Kenneth Marcus’s op-ed in The Jerusalem Post back in 2013. Lustick writes extensively about it in a forthcoming book called Israel’s Lobby. Marcus is the founder and chairman of the Washington-based Brandeis Center, whose main cause is tackling antisemitism and anti-Israelism on university campuses. As Marcus wrote in his op-ed, “These cases [alleging unlawful antisemitic harassment]—even when rejected—expose administrators to bad publicity.” He added that, regardless of the cases’ outcomes, they create “a very strong disincentive” for those who want to speak out against Israel: “Israel-haters now publicly complain that these cases make it harder for them to recruit new adherents. Apparently students are being told not to get mixed up in Jewbaiting, rather to focus on their studies and get their degrees. Needless to say, getting caught up in a civil rights complaint is not a good way to build a resume or impress a future employer.” Marcus concluded that merely filing these cases produces the desired result, “even when we see some or most rejected.”

Marcus would later bring his ideas to Trump’s first presidential administration as assistant secretary of education in the Office of Civil Rights—the same federal office responsible for investigating alleged Title VI violations on college campuses. And in 2026, the second Trump administration appears to be continuing Marcus’s strategy with its investigation of Penn for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. The evidence is apparently so thin that Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has resorted to subpoenaing Penn for a list of its Jewish faculty and students in what appears to be a fishing expedition.

But according to Lustick and others I spoke to on the Penn campus, the current iteration of this “antisemitism witch hunt” predates Trump’s return to power, and even predates 10/7 and the outbreak of war in Gaza. It started, they say, on the weekend of September 22, 2023, when the Penn campus hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.

Huda Fakhreddine is a professor of Arabic literature at Penn. She was born and raised in Lebanon. Since September 2023, when she co-organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on the Penn campus, she’s been doxxed and subjected to death and rape threats both at her office and at her home; she’s been offered police escorts on campus and had police patrolling outside her home; members of the Penn community have called for her firing and deportation; she’s been investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for charges of antisemitism; and called out by name in a congressional hearing as dangerous. “I keep reminding myself that this is happening to me because I was involved in a literature festival,” Fakhreddine told me. “And I insist it was a literature festival. It was a cultural event. There was music, food, children’s literature, poetry….”

“It was one of the most beautiful conferences,” said Eve Troutt Powell, a professor of history and Africana studies at Penn who was also investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on charges of antisemitism. “It wasn’t about victimization. No one talked about Israel. It was all about Palestinian culture.”

But critics of the event pointed to the inclusion of Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd who’s been an outspoken critic of Israel and accused of repeated antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League, and Marc Lamont Hill, a professor with the CUNY Graduate Center and a news commentator who was fired from CNN for statements concerning Israel and Palestine, as evidence that the festival was offensive and hostile to Jewish members of the Penn community.

At the time, Liz Magill, then Penn’s president, defended the festival on the grounds of academic freedom. While the festival had its detractors, it went on as scheduled and without incident. But then, the next month, October 7 shocked the world, and powerful donors at Penn conflated the horrors that Hamas perpetrated in Israel with the festival on the Penn campus. Marc Rowan—the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management, chair of the Wharton School Board of Advisors, and a Wharton graduate himself—published an op-ed calling the festival on the Penn campus a “tragically prescient preview of the horrific events just two weeks later.” He called on his fellow donors to send Penn $1 in place of their usual hefty sums as protest, and said Magill should step down for allowing antisemitism to flourish at Penn. Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, who’s also a Wharton graduate (and, like Rowan, very conservative), made similar statements in an open letter to Magill, in which he demanded that any instructor who was involved in the festival be barred from teaching at Penn’s esteemed Lauder Institute.

“Penn lives in an ecosystem where its highly attracted to private donations,” said Tulia Falleti, a professor of political science at the school who resigned as chair of the Penn Faculty Senate in protest after administrators broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment by force. “All universities choose to develop these very strong ties with donors. But Penn also has a very quasi-symbiotic relationship with the financial sector of New York. It’s partially because of Wharton. There’s this class of very wealthy alumni who donate, and who provide high-paying jobs to Penn graduates. They have outsized influence, and from time to time they exert their pressure on Penn.”

Rowan and other donors continued to call for Magill’s resignation over the fall of 2023, with Rowan leading the pressure campaign on the board of trustees. According to The New York Times, he “sent daily emails to trustees to protest the school’s direction, taking care to number each email to drive his point home.” And then Magill testified at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s hearing on campus antisemitism on December 5, 2023. When asked by Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated Penn’s rules on bullying and harassment, Magill’s probably accurate but politically very tone-deaf response was that it was a “context-dependent decision.” The next day, Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro called her testimony “shameful,” and three days later Magill resigned.

That same fall, Penn administrators started to take a harder stance against programming that could offend its donors. The progressive Jewish student group Penn Chavurah was barred from screening Israelism, a documentary by Jewish American filmmakers critical of the Israeli government. When they screened the film anyway, the vice provost of university life threatened disciplinary action. Meanwhile, donors started singling out professors by name. After Anne Norton, a political science professor, was called out by pro-Israel activists for her pro-Palestinian tweets, the private equity investor Henry Jackson and his wife, Stacey, pulled funding from Norton’s professorship. Fakhreddine alleges that the following month, January 2024, television producer Dick Wolf, whose name adorns Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center, used her as the basis for an antisemitic and homicidal professor on an episode of Law & Order. And on March 28, 2024, a group of alumni and students sent a letter to Magill’s successor, current Penn president J. Larry Jameson, demanding sanctions for eight professors—including Fakhreddine and Norton—citing alleged antisemitic conduct.

What many of the embattled professors I spoke to have in common is twofold. First, they’ve been doxxed by Canary Mission, a website that acts as a blacklist of sorts for professors it deems antisemitic and pro-Hamas. As a result of being profiled on the site, the professors say they’ve been subjected to death threats. More troubling is that, as first reported on The Intercept, Canary Mission received $100,000 in 2023 from the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, whose treasurer is Jaime Peisach, the husband of Penn trustee Cheryl Peisach. Second, many of the same professors were also named in the lawsuit alleging that Penn allowed its campus to become a hotbed of antisemitism. The lawsuit was brought by Eyal Yakoby, a Penn student at the time and a fervent pro-Israel activist, who’s known for doxxing professors he views as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. Many of the professors I spoke to believe Yakoby’s lawsuit was funded by a Penn donor. They point to Rowan, who’s been represented by Kasowitz LLP, which is the same law firm that represented Yakoby in his lawsuit against Penn. (The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge last June on the grounds that the plaintiffs “failed to plead any facts showing either intentional discrimination or deliberate indifference on the part of Penn.” The law firm has not responded to my request for comment.) “Donors and trustees funding these sorts of bullying campaigns undermines the academic integrity of the institution and violates academic freedom,” said Fakhreddine.

When I asked Fakhreddine if the scrutiny and harassment has affected her teaching, she was defiant. “I teach poetry, and I will always teach it the way it needs to be taught,” she told me. “I will not censor myself because there’s somebody on the other side who’s ignorant and racist and bigoted.”

Many of the professors I spoke to said they haven’t changed the way they teach, but they say the chilling effect can express itself in other ways. Troutt Powell recalled a course she taught in the fall semester of 2025, called the History of the Modern Middle East, which touched on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Troutt Powell, out of 45 students, 30 were Arab, and four or five students were very vocal and self-identified as Jewish.

“The Palestinian students were very quiet in class,” she said. She asked them why. “They told me they were afraid that the self-identifying Jewish students would report them to the Title VI Office for ­antisemitism, and then that could result in Marco Rubio taking their visa away.”

Troutt Powell said she developed ways for those students to express themselves in private. And during that same semester, she brought up the issue of academic freedom to Mark Trodden, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Trodden had been addressing the history department, and there were other professors who were complaining about the chilling effect taking hold in their classrooms. Trodden assured the assembled professors that the campus was “safe,” and that they could “talk about anything.”

“Even the Middle East?” Troutt Powell asked him.

“Yes,” Trodden responded, before carefully adding, “It depends how you talk about it.”

Troutt Powell said that afterward Trodden came up to her, and she said, “Mark, that’s crazy!”

Via email, I asked Dean Trodden to explain what he meant by “it depends how you talk about it.” He did not address the point directly, and the Penn School of Arts and Sciences’ communications office offered the following statement on his behalf: “Academic freedom is fundamental to the School of Arts & Sciences’ work. Faculty must be able to teach, research, and discuss difficult and contested subjects, including topics that are politically or socially charged. We have confidence in our faculty to approach difficult questions with intellectual rigor, without bias, and with care for students. That is the spirit in which I have spoken with faculty about academic freedom and classroom discussion.”

While other universities are having similar challenges, what sets Penn apart is Marc Rowan’s relationship with Trump, who is also a graduate of Penn’s Wharton School. According to The New York Times, Rowan was the chief architect of the White House’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The compact was sent to nine of the nation’s top universities—Penn included—last fall; benefits including federal research funds were promised to those institutions that signed on to its conservative priorities. Among those priorities: limiting the number of foreign students and vetting those students for “noxious values such as antiSemitism”; “abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”; and adopting a heavily restrictive policy on campus protests. Many of the ideas in the compact were taken directly from a document Rowan circulated to Penn’s board of trustees amid the campus furor over antisemitism in the fall of 2023.

While Penn ultimately rejected the compact, many of the professors I spoke to feel the university has already adopted many of its proposals. They point to the dismantling of DEI programming, the suppression of free speech and protest in the name of campus security, and, more broadly, the climate of fear that has many opting to avoid engaging in controversial or left-coded material.

“People now are extremely careful about what they say and what they have in class,” said Norton. “Not just junior professors and not just adjuncts. Everybody from top to bottom is scared.”

Grundy, the AAUP advocate, points to Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which were temporarily revised to be more restrictive two years ago in response to the pro-Palestinian protest encampment—revisions that may soon be made more restrictive and permanent. “Neither Trump’s compact nor Penn’s Open Expression Guidelines protect open expression,” she said. “So much of it is couched in the need to be open to all views on campus. But, if you read between the lines, it’s a protection of conservative views, given how much pro-Palestinian views are suppressed. There’s a pattern here.”

Many of the professors I spoke to also allege that, through attrition, the Penn administration appears to be slowly but surely ridding its curriculum of courses that its donors and the Trump administration may find offensive. Norton, who taught Muslim political thought, told me she officially resigned this past fall under pressure from alumni and the board of trustees. She’s skeptical that the university will replace her expertise. Troutt Powell is also due to retire soon and doubts she will be replaced. “I’m very worried about what’s going to happen to the field of Middle East studies,” said Troutt Powell, adding that, with war in Iran, their expertise is needed now more than ever.

Lustick is also worried that Middle East studies in the United States are in danger. “But Penn is doing what so many schools are doing,” he said. “They’re compromising academic freedom and integrity in the hope of avoiding the wrath of this tyrant. In the hope of avoiding the wrath of Trump.”

“I know Penn is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Troutt Powell. “I get that, you know, they’re trying to deal with this crazy president. What in God’s name are you supposed to do? But one thing you do, I think, is you take a breath and remember that your responsibility is to your university community.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled Friday that the name of the performing arts center can’t be changed without an act of Congress, and ordered the Trump administration to take down every sign with Trump’s name and get rid of all references to “Trump Kennedy Center” within 14 days. He also overturned the board’s March decision to close the theater for a yearslong renovation.

The board made its decision to close the center based on “an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information” that “neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions,” Cooper wrote in his ruling.

Trump put his name on the performing arts center in December after replacing board members with his handpicked appointments, who then elected him as chairman. News of the takeover caused the center’s popularity to plummet, with performers canceling events and concerts. Trump decided to close the center to save face, ostensibly for renovations, prompting a backlash from the Kennedy family (except for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).

Considering Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to build his ballroom, people were afraid that Trump’s “renovations” would involve demolishing the center. Now a federal judge has put Trump’s overhaul on hold for the time being. Will Trump follow the court order and remove his name from the building, or will he defiantly claim it belongs to him?

This story has been updated.

America’s service members are being solicited to fill seats at UFC Freedom 250, a mixed martial arts tournament celebrating Donald Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14. But attending troops are not expected to get in for free.

The Defense Department is currently seeking junior enlisted personnel and junior officers, the lowest-paid members on the military’s totem poll, according to internal memos reviewed by The Washington Post Friday. Yet they’ll also be required to pay their own way, should they be admitted—neither the Pentagon nor UFC reportedly intends to pay for the soldiers’ arrangements or accommodations.

Personnel will also be required to meet height and weight requirements before they’re allowed to fill the stands, and will be required to attend in their short-sleeve dress uniforms.

One memo that made its way through the Air Force stipulated that personnel “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard” in order to make the cut for Trump’s audience.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle did not deny that a search is underway in America’s military branches to find seat fillers for Trump’s UFC tournament.

“This will be one of the greatest and most historic sports events in history, and President Trump hosting it at the White House is a testament to his vision to celebrate America’s monumental 250th anniversary,” Ingle told the Post in a statement.

Trump is a lifelong fan of boxing and MMA, and has apparently used the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary as an excuse to host a fight at the executive mansion. The tournament will be the first UFC event ever hosted at the White House.

The main card will pit Justin Gaethje against Ilia Topuria for the lightweight title, and Alex Pereira against Ciryl Gane for the interim heavyweight title. UFC’s parent company, TKO Holdings, has promised that the entire event—which is expected to cost around $60 million—will be funded entirely by the sports organization and come at no cost to taxpayers.

But Trump has already made a buck off the match. The president reportedly invested up to $50,000 in TKO Group Holdings on March 25, according to his May 12 financial disclosure filing, two weeks after the tournament was formally announced.

“Using the White House to promote a company whose stock you bought while promoting it is one of the worst conflicts of interest you could imagine,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told HuffPost. “The agenda of this administration seems to start and stop with how to make Donald Trump richer.”

In a state where one in three residents are Black, the new map redraws the state’s 6th congressional district, which is currently represented by Black Democratic Representative Cleo Fields. Republicans are expected to gain an additional seat in the House, giving them control of five of Louisiana’s six congressional seats.

The state Senate passed the map on Friday afternoon with a vote of 28–10, sending the legislation to Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, who is expected to sign it.

“We are being asked to take one of two minority opportunity districts in this state—where Black Louisianians are nearly one-third of the population—and to reduce that minority opportunity representation to a single seat out of six, from 33 percent of the population to 16 percent of the representation members,” Democratic state Representative Kyle Green Jr. warned during debate on the legislation Thursday. “That’s not a map. That’s a math problem with the moral answer, and the answer is no.”

Louisiana’s House primary election was originally scheduled for May 16, but Landry delayed the election in order to give Republicans time to draw a new map following the Supreme Court ruling. An estimated 40,000 people had already cast their votes before his announcement.

Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were three of a group of nine people who were arrested last June after responding to former City Council President Ben Stuckart’s request for protesters to block a bus from taking immigrants from one ICE detention center to another.

Six of the nine arrested accepted plea deals, while Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla took their case to trial, where a jury found them guilty of “conspiracy to impede or injure officers.”

“This was the first conspiracy prosecution in Eastern Washington history under 18 U.S.C. Section 372—a Civil War-era law dusted off to punish members of the Spokane community who stood up for two young men who were unlawfully detained by ICE,” former acting U.S. Attorney Richard Barker told The Spokesman-Review in a statement. “I hope that moving forward DOJ will focus on the crimes that matter most to keep our families safe and to build trust with the communities that most need and deserve law enforcement protection.”

Washington state ACLU legal director La Rond Baker said the organization is “concerned about the chilling effect that the Department of Justice’s charging decisions will have on protest and free expression in this country.”

“The Administration has a demonstrable history of using the Department of Justice to silence and punish its critics. Using the power of government to deter criticism is undemocratic and counter to the values of our state and the country,” Baker said.

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown claimed that the prosecution was politically motivated.

“Since the federal charges were filed, I have maintained this prosecution was politically motivated. It was meant to make an example out of people who disagreed with federal immigration policy. The right to peacefully protest and criticize the government is a cornerstone of our democracy,” she said in a statement. “We cannot allow these verdicts to silence us.”

Mavalwalla, a combat veteran, and Forral and Archer, both activists, now face a maximum sentence of six years in federal prison or up to $250,000 in fines. Their attorneys said they intend to appeal the decision.

Denizens of Greenland’s closest neighbor, Iceland, are currently weighing the possibility of joining the continental alliance, The New York Times reported Friday.

“The Greenland crisis definitely hit a nerve,” Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir told the Times in February, in an interview at her office in the nation’s capital.

A national referendum will take place in Iceland by the end of the summer—August 29—as to whether to resume accession negotiations with the EU. Iceland originally applied to join the EU in 2009, but negotiations iced after 2013.

While admittance to the EU isn’t a given, the trade seems clear: Iceland is a wealthy nation with a large manufacturing sector and a lot to offer the bloc. In exchange, the country would receive military and economic stability, as well as peace of mind that it’s safe from U.S. incursion.

Reykjavik announced in a statement that a subsequent referendum will allow Icelandic voters to decide whether to join the EU, if accession negotiations go well.

Meanwhile, the U.S. president’s relentless quest to annex Greenland—a Denmark-controlled territory—has simultaneously put the United States at odds with some of its strongest allies, and in cahoots with Moscow.

Earlier this year, Trump’s fixation transformed into a new trade initiative in which he swore to enact sweeping retaliatory tariffs against any country that opposed his attempts to seize Greenland, as well as any nation that continued to trade with the island.

That sparked a celebration in Moscow, which has worked for decades to dismantle NATO, a European-friendly intergovernmental military alliance.

Trump has claimed that the U.S. “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, especially in light of the fact that myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

Greenlanders have not taken kindly to Trump and his associates’ sudden interest in acquiring their land. After months of heavy pressure from the Trump family—including an embarrassing stunt in which Donald Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food, and an effort in the U.S. Congress to rename the territory to “Red, White, and Blueland”—Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences in March to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

The president bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in TKO Group Holdings, HuffPost reports, citing Trump’s May 12 financial disclosures. With the planned “Freedom 250” fight on June 14 (Flag Day and Trump’s birthday), the company will get a ton of publicity and media attention, allowing the president to profit as TKO stock goes up.

Since announcing the fight last summer, Trump has gone out of the way to promote the fight. UFC fighters visited the Oval Office on May 6, and construction of the UFC octagon on the White House lawn this week has already dwarfed the building. An estimated 4,500 fans will be watching the fight on the White House grounds, with another 75,000 to 100,000 people being able to watch the fight on “massive screens” set up at the nearby Ellipse park.

The event is a cash grab even without Trump’s stock buy, as sponsorship packages for the planned bouts are selling for as much as $1.5 million, and neither the White House nor the UFC has said where the money is going. The president and TKO are choosing who gets in, and the process is anything but transparent.

Trump has been accused of manipulating markets on everything from the Iran war to his tariffs. It’s no surprise that he’d try to find another way to make money off of this UFC fight, even though it’s supposed to be part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. Ethical considerations in this administration are of little concern, especially when there is money to be made.

MS NOW’s Kyle Griffin reported that Bondi “lost her temper a bit at some points and grew frustrated when asked about [Donald] Trump,” something Bondi did frequently during public hearings as attorney general. Democratic committee members also expressed frustration after the meeting.

Ranking member Robert Garcia told reporters immediately after the meeting that Bondi had counsel—someone who currently worked for the Department of Justice—present with her, telling her not to answer certain questions.

“[They] stepped in and told the former attorney general that she was not gonna answer those questions, especially when we asked questions of what the president directed her to do,” Garcia said. “So the DOJ is in there right now, stomping questions about President Trump, and about what happened in the release of these files—and why so many survivors were doxxed.”

Rep. Garcia on Pam Bondi's Epstein deposition: "It's also interesting that sitting next to her is…somebody that currently works for the DOJ…The DOJ is in there right now, stopping questions about President Trump." pic.twitter.com/Fo50We6O5Z

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 29, 2026

Representative James Walkinshaw also stated that Bondi avoided direct questions about whether Trump knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes before they were public.

“She had the opportunity to say, ‘Donald Trump certainly wasn’t aware of those crimes.’ She had the opportunity to say, ‘I know Donald Trump, and if he was aware of those crimes he would have done something,’” Walkinshaw said. “Instead, she said, ‘I don’t know.’ She also said, this is a direct quote: ‘I’m not certain of the extent of his knowledge.’ I think that’s a perfect example as to why we need Pam Bondi under oath in a real deposition, for the cameras, so the American people can see and hear her answers to our questions.”

Rep. Walkinshaw: "She was asked specifically about…Trump's awareness of Epstein's crimes before they became public knowledge…She had the opportunity to say, 'I know Donald Trump, and if he was aware of those crimes, he would have done something.' Instead, she said, 'I don't… pic.twitter.com/DjI9YpcAdZ

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 29, 2026

Bondi reportedly left the meeting in haste, avoiding cameras and reporters.

Bureau agents have shown up at the officials’ homes after interviewing Wisconsin’s deputy elections director, and this week, they plan to interview police officers who escorted the elections official who escorted Milwaukee’s 2020 results to the county elections office.

It seems that the Trump administration is intent on relitigating President Trump’s 2020 loss, and election officials are worried that White House officials may try to seize ballots as they did in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year. Milwaukee is Wisconsin’s largest city, and its balloting system makes it possible for agents to figure out who people voted for. The city would have destroyed its ballots, but has held onto them due to litigation.

“Our secret ballot is secret for a reason,” Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of Wisconsin’s bipartisan elections commission, told The Washington Post. “It’s sacrosanct. It is at the heart of our American democracy. And those people who demand to know how everyone voted are violating those core tenets of what it means to vote as an American.”

In addition to Georgia, the FBI obtained images of 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, and is trying to get 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan. These moves suggest the administration is specifically targeting metropolitan areas that voted against Trump in swing states. It raises questions as to whether Trump is trying to build a case to justify interfering in this year’s midterms or even the 2028 presidential election.

Despite being proven wrong multiple times in court, Trump insists that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. His administration is staffed with people who push his conspiracy theories and are eager to carry out his orders, like FBI Director Kash Patel. And Kurt Olsen, an attorney who worked for Trump’s campaign and tried to overturn the 2020 election results, now occupies a job in the White House monitoring election integrity. It seems that the president wants to rig elections in his favor.

The pitch requires Iran to “never” have a nuclear weapon and demands the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz with “no tolls” and the termination or removal of “all water mines.”

“Ships caught in the Strait due to our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade, which will now be lifted, may start the process of ‘heading home!’ Say HELLO to your wives, husbands, parents, and families from me, your favorite President!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president also demanded that any and all enriched uranium—which he referred to as “nuclear dust”—in Iran be extracted by the United States under the supervision of the Islamic Republic and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It would then be destroyed.

He shared that he was entering into the Situation Room in order to make a “final determination” on the matter. It was not immediately clear if Tehran had agreed to Trump’s stipulations.

It was also not clear if any of Trump’s make-or-break items had already been included in the preliminary agreement drafted this week.

“No money will be exchanged, until further notice. Other items, of far less importance, have been agreed to,” Trump noted in his post.

The U.S. and Israel have been at war with Iran since late February. The conflict is currently in its thirteenth week and has seen several potential peace deals thwarted by miscommunications and ceasefire violations.

Earlier this week, U.S. forces attacked Iranian boats and missile launch sites, violating the ceasefire mere hours after Iranian officials arrived in Qatar for discussions to end the war. The boats were reportedly attempting to lay more mines along the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. and Iran have talked more since, and a deal is closer to gaining approval from both sides, though there are several details that still have to be ironed out, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Cornyn turned to social media Friday to share an “old, but apt fable” that appeared to reflect Trump’s sudden betrayal that led to the senior senator’s defeat in the Texas GOP Senate primary.

“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across,” Cornyn wrote. “The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

It seems clear that Trump (the scorpion) stung Cornyn (the frog). Or maybe, the frog is the entire Republican Party, which will now struggle to mount an effort on behalf of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who cheated on his wife, was impeached by his own party on corruption charges, and illegally targeted his donor’s enemies as state attorney general, among other transgressions.

Trump has explained his stinging defection from Cornyn was a result of the senator’s “disloyalty,” but it’s Trump who has turned on his own party, claiming he doesn’t care about midterms anyway.

As The Bulwark’s Will Saletan pointed out to Cornyn: “The reason they wrote these fables is so you’d learn them as a child, not when you’re 74.”

“These investigations span FOUR administrations … The only time federal prosecutors were permitted to launch investigations against Epstein and Maxwell was when President Trump occupied the White House. Only under President Trump were 3 million Epstein-related documents released,” Bondi said in her prepared opening statement. “This was an enormously complicated and labor-intensive process. To the best of my knowledge, the Department produced everything required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

“As the head of a large Department with broad responsibilities, I did not lead every aspect of this effort or conduct that document review myself. I delegated oversight over this process to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche,” Bondi continued, making sure to place as much possible blame on the man who replaced her after she was fired in April. “The team of professionals who reviewed all of the materials that we collected assured me the only materials that were withheld were either non-responsive, privileged, or duplicative. Although not required by the Act, the Department has given Congress access to unredacted, duplicative materials in the Reading Room in an effort at maximum transparency.”

Bondi’s assertion that the DOJ abided by the Epstein Transparency Act has been widely contested, as the department has withheld and heavily redacted thousands of files. Bondi admitted to the omissions herself, saying that there were “redaction errors.”

The DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files has been marked with nothing but chaos—from the moment Bondi backtracked on her own claim that she had a client list “sitting on [her] desk right now,” to when she paraded MAGA influencers around for a photo-op with big white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: PHASE 1,” to when the department released a bunch of blacked out files and told the MAGA base that there was nothing further incriminating at all.

Outside of the room where she is testifying, Garcia, the committee’s ranking member, pointed out that she was not sworn in under oath before her closed-door testimony, which is also not being videotaped.

“I just want to be very clear that we continue to be incredibly disappointed of the decision to not have this interview videotaped and then released to the American public. The second thing we asked [committee Chairman James Comer] is to ensure that this interview is under oath,” Garcia told reporters. “It should have been under oath, and it should be videotaped.”

Garcia said that he and other Democrats want to know why only 50 percent of the Jeffrey Epstein files have been released by the Department of Justice, why many of Epstein’s survivors were put in danger by the information that was released, and why “this continues to be some type of cover-up.”

.@RepRobertGarcia outside of the room where Pam Bondi is testifying—slams the majority for failing to swear her in under oath. pic.twitter.com/obCE1JrdEC

— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) May 29, 2026

It’s shocking that Bondi’s testimony, which was actually compelled by a congressional subpoena supported by both Democrats and Republicans, would neither be under oath nor videotaped for later release. Bondi’s testimony is only coming after she attempted to argue that the subpoena didn’t apply after she was fired as attorney general, leading Democrats to file contempt of Congress charges against her.

Comer has deliberately overhauled the committee’s hearing process to kill the Epstein investigation, removing the oath requirement as well as transparency measures. These changes have given Bondi an opportunity to escape accountability for how the DOJ has mishandled both the Epstein files and any follow-up investigations.

This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.

It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.

That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding,” the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)

If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for “defendant-appellant”: Todd Blanche.

This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.

Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.

So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.

Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. And indeed, he is said to have “recused” himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago.

But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions).

GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not.

What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: “In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him.” So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial.

That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and “his current lawyers” are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, “If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story.”

So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. The ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. The new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. The plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week.

I pondered writing about each of those. I chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory. It can, and will, get worse.

The 83-year-old Democrat announced Friday that her time representing Florida’s 24th congressional district will come to an end after her current term. In a sit-down interview with the Miami Herald, Wilson explained that while she’s decided not to run for reelection, she’s also not ready to retire.

“I think it’s time,” Wilson told the south Florida paper, explaining that she stayed in her position as long as she did in order to assist the 5000 Role Models program, a mentorship program she created for Black and brown boys in 1993.

Wilson disappeared for four weeks without explanation last month, missing 40 House votes in the process while sparking concerns among her constituents about the state of Wilson’s health. Earlier this month, the cowboy hat–wearing lawmaker revealed to WPLG Local 10 that eye surgery was the reason behind her spontaneous absence and that she required several weeks for the stitches to heal.

But Wilson had been privately musing about the possibility of ending her campaign, anyway. Multiple sources told Axios that Wilson made several calls on Saturday to people in her district about her plans to quit the race.

“She’s not running anymore—she’s going to retire,” one source told Axios.

Wilson adamantly denied the report, telling Axios in turn that her supposed exit was just a “crazy rumor.”

“A crazy, crazy rumor. I’m almost distraught. It’s not true. I am still planning on running,” Wilson said.

But the unidentified source doubled down, insisting to Axios that Wilson “called and made it known” that she is planning to retire and that she has already made the decision known to several legislators in her district.

Wilson confirmed to the Miami Herald that she had made her decision to exit the race a while ago—but needed to be “politically strategic” about sharing the news, in light of Florida’s recent redistricting.

“I figured if I announced that I was retiring, what would the Legislature and the governor do? What would they say? Would District 24 be an easy target because Frederica is no longer there? I’m a strong candidate,” Wilson said. “With me not here, would that weaken the survival of District 24?

Wilson’s district, which she has represented since 2013, encompasses the Miami-Dade area and Broward County. The area has a solid Democratic advantage, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

Christine Sanon-Jules Olivo, a small-business owner with ties to the NAACP, is already lined up to replace Wilson in the district’s Democratic primary. But the race could soon be crowded: State Senator Shevrin Jones has also announced his interest in running for Wilson’s seat. The primary is scheduled for August 18.

For her part, Wilson said that she’s not quite ready to endorse her replacement.

“All of this rests on my shoulders. So I carried a lot, and it’s time to find someone who I can trust,” Wilson told the Herald. “I’m going to vet all these candidates to see who I can trust to carry this mission forward.”

Weiss’s recent shakeup at 60 Minutes has involved the exit of several of the show’s major personalities, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Correspondent Anderson Cooper left voluntarily.

To replace the top leadership, Weiss has installed former Vanity Fair writer Nick Bilton, who, like her, has next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.

But 60 Minutes staffers don’t see Weiss’s aggressive restructuring as an optimistic new era for the program—instead, there’s a near-unanimous prediction that “it’s over.”

Status reported on the maelstrom behind the scenes, citing “more than half a dozen” staffers.

“They’re gutting us,” one 60 Minutes employee told Status. “It’s over. I don’t see how ‘60’ will be able to function after this.”

“Goodnight and good luck, motherfuckers,” they added.

Another senior staffer told Status that “everyone—100 percent thought Tanya and Draggan did exemplary jobs.”

“It hurts. We feel violated,” the senior staffer said.

Weiss’s tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

In a statement shared with The New York Times, Vega said she “very much [fears] what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.”

“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” Vega wrote. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.

“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy,” the George Polk Award–winning journalist noted.

But CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was ready and willing to sacrifice 60 Minutes long before that. The media conglomerate undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Donald Trump over the show’s 2024 Kamala Harris interview, in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance.

That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling Trump’s groundless lawsuit.

Owens, who has largely remained out of the spotlight since leaving the show, shared his opinion on Weiss’s recent restructuring with Status. “They’re killing 60 Minutes,” he said.

That liberal is Paulina Mangubat, 30, who writes many of the Democratic National Committee’s tweets as its deputy chief mobilization officer. After Katie Miller named her and posted her picture, the MAGA fury started rolling in.

I spoke with Mangubat Friday morning. The MAGA backlash has been swift, with people circulating images of her engagement photo shoot and insulting her and her fiancé’s appearance. People are posting decade-old pictures of her while commenting on her appearance, weight, and even her happiness in life.

But in our interview, Mangubat stressed emphatically that this dustup should refocus everyone on the real victims of the moment.

“Ultimately, this is not really about me,” Mangubat told me. “It’s about the people who are really being attacked by the Trump administration.”

This saga all started after MAGA extremist Ken Paxton won the Texas GOP Senate primary, after which the DNC posted a fairly conventional tweet that included a picture of the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, adding: “It’s time to take back Texas.”

That prompted Stephen Miller to tweet: “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” It’s a strange claim—Talarico is not transgender, though he’s spoken up for trans rights—but it’s obviously in keeping with the GOP strategy, which is to portray Talarico as woke and effeminate. Regardless, that’s the tweet that the DNC feed—Mangubat—responded to with “Shut up you ugly f–k.”

Mangubat’s tweet was approved by the DNC. She says that the effort to make the Democratic Party’s social media presence more nimble and responsive is the much more important story here, especially given how well Trump and the GOP prosecuted the information wars in 2024. The DNC says its program has grown, pointing to an additional 6.3 million followers across all its social media platforms. It claims the programs have produced over nine billion impressions since Trump took office.

Mangubat says that when Democrats did research into how to reach more people, “overwhelmingly what we heard is people want us to be more direct, speak more like real people, and be faster.”

Speaking like real people also means letting them react in real time with real feeling—which is what happened here with Stephen Miller, Mangubat says.

“All we did was say what everyone else is thinking, which is, ‘Shut up—that’s not what people care about right now,’” Mangubat says. She added that there’s no reason to regret using the “ugly” moniker to describe Miller.

“What he’s doing is ugly—siccing federal agents on civilians, applauding when families are separated. It is ugly behavior,” Mangubat said. “The reason this happened is because Stephen Miller, who is one of the most powerful men in the country, decided that it would be a good use of his time to go on Twitter and hurl an untrue and transphobic attack against James Talarico.”

It’s worth stressing that the roots of this saga lie in the depiction of Talarico as transgender—and that this was intended as a vicious insult. Indeed, Stephen Miller went on a tear after this exchange, going on Fox News and ripping Talarico as soft and effeminate in every way he could. Miller derided Talarico as “transitioning to female,” mocking his testosterone count and claiming Talarico’s blood is made of “soy milk.”

It’s also worth dwelling on the vision of masculinity that Paxton presents. His wife divorced him on biblical grounds, he’s been impeached and indicted while in office, and he has subjected LGBTQ people to relentless abuse.

But this is very much the MAGA vision of masculinity in action, according to Stephen Miller. During that Fox News hit, Miller described Paxton as a “real conservative” and “patriotic” and “God-fearing,” while claiming that Talarico will be roundly rejected by red-blooded Texans, given their manly “pioneer heritage” and “frontier history.”

The roots of this saga, then, really lie in the MAGA-approved view that Talarico doesn’t count as a Real Man, while Paxton somehow does.

Mangubat, the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, tells me she was born in Louisiana and raised in Arizona. She said Katie Miller’s claims about her being an unhappy liberal are false.

“I feel very blessed in my life,” Mangubat said. “I love this country. It has given me every single blessing and opportunity in my life.”

The darker story underneath all this is that these days, going viral is the coin of the realm in our politics, and succeeding at this often requires what’s known as “dunking.” The question that many Democratic operatives are trying to crack right now is how to achieve virality. Does it really require dunks like calling Stephen Miller “ugly”?

One answer to that question can be found in this fact: That tweet about Miller now has more than 40 million views.

“Jill Biden is now out there finally admitting that she did NOT know what went wrong with Sleepy Joe during our spectacular, and highly rated, 2024 Presidential Debate, where Joe was not exactly performing to the highest level of debate standards,” Trump crowed on Truth Social Friday morning. “She said that she thought he was having a ‘stroke,’ and various other really bad things, and yet never rushed onto the stage to help her troubled husband, as any good wife would do.”

Trump went on to brag about his own performance during the debate, and say that the former first lady didn’t mention how well he was doing and whether his performance caused President Biden to “choke.”

In early reports about Jill Biden’s memoir, which is being released this week, it’s revealed that even she was concerned about that fateful evening when President Biden struggled to speak clearly and appear coherent in the face of attacks from Trump.

“Is he short-circuiting?” Jill Biden wrote according to a review by The Atlantic. “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?” She questioned whether he took too much cough syrup or Ambien.

President Biden said that he was recovering from illness that evening, and while helping him prepare for the debate in the preceding weeks, his staff had built naps into his schedule to help him rest following two trips to Europe. It was all for nought, as he still looked and sounded unwell on the Las Vegas debate stage.

Ultimately, fallout from the poor debate performance led to Biden dropping out of the race one month later, and Vice President Kamala Harris was named the Democratic nominee. However, she would end up losing the presidential election in November, raising all kinds of questions as to whether Biden should have dropped out sooner, or made the decision not to run early enough to hold a Democratic primary.

Regardless, that was two years ago, but Trump can’t help reliving one of his greatest moments in the only election where he won the popular vote, because right now, his approval ratings are lower than they have ever been, and his presidency is floundering.

The order, sent down by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, states that the president is not allowed to pursue “the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

The Department of Justice fund has been met with protest from both Democrats and Republicans alike for its deep conflicts of interest—given that this all came about after Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion, then settled for this fund for people who acted in his name.

This ruling came after former January 6 prosecutor Andrew Floyd and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Trump administration on the grounds that the settlement was “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption,” which was “designed to funnel $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund to purported victims of what the President considers ‘lawfare’ and government ‘weaponization.’”

The issue will be adjudicated on June 12, when Brinkema will decide whether to issue a more lasting suspension.

This story has been updated.

The United States is considering creating a massive investment fund for Iran as part of a peace deal, after Tehran demanded reparations for the destruction, The New York Times reported Thursday. An Iranian official put the amount for the “reconstruction program” at $300 billion.

The fund seemed to be spurred by an idea from Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, both of whom are real estate investors. Some mediators said that the duo had pitched promoting real estate projects and an investment fund for Tehran in the event that a deal was reached.

It seems pretty clear that this investment fund is a thinly veiled strategy for them to make money from the destruction Trump leaves in his wake. Kushner is currently being investigated for cashing in on foreign investment funds.

This move also reeks of irony, considering the right-wing criticism of former President Barack Obama’s previous nuclear deal with Iran that unfroze a now meager-looking $1.7 billion. Now Trump wants to write Tehran a bigger check.

The denial came after a lawsuit filed by the Katiba Institute, a Kenyan constitutional rights organization. It alleged that the “secretive, unilateral establishment of an Ebola quarantine facility raises grave constitutional concerns regarding the rights to life, health, fair administrative action, public participation, and parliamentary oversight.”

The facility, built on the U.S. Laikipia Air Base in Kenya, would have housed up to 50 U.S. citizens while they waited for treatment. It was meant to house U.S. citizens exposed to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Uganda.

“At its core, this case is about preserving constitutional accountability, protecting public health, and ensuring that no government may place expediency above the lives and safety of the people of Kenya,” Katiba Institute executive director Nora Mbagathi wrote Thursday on X.

The Kenyan government, which has not publicly commented on the plan, has 48 hours to respond to the court’s interim decision.

The Ebola virus is already reported to have passed 1,000 positive cases and around 250 deaths. Trump attempting to dump American citizens who got the virus in Kenya—even as both countries struggle to protect their own citizens and resources—is a paternalistic move that puts even more Kenyans in danger.

Representative Mike Collins, who is facing former football coach Derek Dooley in a heated GOP primary runoff, published endorsements from several local officials. Except, they say they haven’t actually backed him at all, according to the Daily Caller, a conservative blog.

“I wouldn’t vote for [Collins] if he’s the only one running,” Wayne County Sheriff Chuck Moseley told the Caller, after his name was included among a list of supporters on Collins’s website.

Other officials seemed to have no clue that Collins was claiming they’d backed him. GOP Grady County Chair Jeff Jolly told the Caller he asked County Sheriff Earl Prince and County Commissioner Sam Kines about their apparent support for Collins after seeing their endorsements posted on social media.

“I talked to each of them in private, and I said, ‘Look, you do what you want to do, but for my own sake, I need to know why you endorsed Mike Collins,’” Jolly said. “Both of them looked at me funny, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They didn’t know anything about it.’”

Kines told the Caller he’d only ever offered a “generic reply” to Collins’s campaign, and even had a sign for Dooley in his yard.

Prince told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he’d “never spoken” to Collins or his campaign. “My name was used without my permission, and I have no use for anybody that does business that way,” Prince said.

Earlier this week, former Donald Trump 2024 adviser Tony Fabrizio joined Collins’s campaign as a pollster and senior strategist, indicating that the president may be leaning toward endorsing Collins.

As of Friday, six of the nine original headliners have dropped out of the concert series intended to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & The Time, and Bret Michaels have all withdrawn their names.

Their absence leaves just three booked artists on the widely advertised docket: Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and C+C Music Factory. But even the dwindled remainders seem on rocky ground.

Robert Clivillés, one of the co-founders of C+C Music Factory, revealed on Thursday that the group’s potential participation in the event was highly contentious and possibly illegal.

Clivillés claimed that Freedom Williams—who provided rap vocals on the hit track “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” and whose picture appears on the Freedom 250 event page—had no right to use the group’s name for his own tour, since he was only ever a featured guest artist and never a contractual component of the band.

“C&C Music Factory in-fact means Clivlles [sic] & Cole Music Factory,” Clivillés posted on his Facebook page. “Freedom Williams should not be using it to tour, nor represent what this group stands for in anyway! He should address himself as Freedom Williams formerly a guest featured artist on C&C Music Factory.

“Any comment that Freedom Williams makes or any event that he participates in regarding any Political or Religious views or opinions, he makes as Freedom Williams an individual solely, it has nothing to do with C&C Music Factories music or viewpoints in anyway,” Clivillés added, urging fans to go haunt Williams’s social media pages in order to change his mind.

Other artists on the original advert for the Great American State Fair claimed that the booking process was misleading and that they were not previously made aware of the event’s highly partisan flair.

“I asked lots of questions and was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states,” wrote McBride, a multi-platinum country music singer, on her Instagram page Thursday night. “Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening.”

McBride added that she has spent her “entire career singing songs about real people with real issues,” and was “greatly upset” by the prospect that her fans might think she’s “abandoning the meaning behind those songs” by way of her participation in the Trump-backed event.

“I assure you, that is not the case,” McBride wrote.

To that end, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger on Wednesday signed a bill creating an Employee Child Care Assistance program that would, through matching government funds, incentivize companies to contribute to their employees’ childcare costs. “Because when a family cannot afford child care, oftentimes a parent—and the numbers bear it out, oftentimes a mom—drops out of the workforce altogether. That doesn’t just create a family budget issue, that creates a challenge for our economy,” Spanberger said.

It is true that women are disproportionately likely to drop out of the workforce because they can’t afford to pay for care for young children. But a survey released Wednesday from New America, a nonpartisan, liberal think tank, paints a more complicated picture. Parents of young children want to work, but they also want to be able to spend more time with their children. Making childcare more affordable only addresses half of that equation. What can policymakers do to give parents more time with their children?

The research, from New America’s New Practice Lab, surveyed 5,472 parents with children under 6 years old and found that across income groups and around the country, 72 percent wanted more quality time with their kids—even more than they wanted personal time (63 percent) or sleep (56 percent). The most common ways they wanted to spend this time were “playing, enjoying outdoor activities, and traveling.” Alas, more than half of them said they didn’t have enough money for the kind of childcare arrangement that would allow for more time with their kids.

This was true for men as well as women, and the problem started from the moment their child was born: Nearly everyone said that they didn’t get to take the amount of parental leave they would have preferred, with 59 percent taking six weeks or less and 15 percent taking no leave at all.

“At its simplest, parents need money, but they also need time,” said Tara Dawson McGuinness, executive director of the New Practice Lab. “It’s one thing to be able to afford putting food on the table, but we heard in some of the open-ended questions, a real hunger…to be there with your children at the dinner table, and that wages and work were competing with the ability for people to see their kids.”

This is why Democrats around the country are pushing for more paid family leave; Spanberger recently signed such a bill in Virginia. While there’s no federal guarantee of paid family leave, a recent analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families found that the District of Columbia and 13 states have passed paid-leave laws, providing coverage for nearly a third of private-sector workers across the country; that number would rise to 44 percent if six more states follow through with efforts to pass such a law. Having the right to leave doesn’t mean workers will take it, though; states also need to ensure that workers can afford to take the time and are not punished for doing so.

But paid family leave typically covers only the time right after birth, or when an adopted child joins a family. The New America survey showed that parents wanted more time with their kids throughout their toddler years as well. But when workers, especially women, take extended time out of the workforce to be with young children, they face barriers returning to work and take a hit in their lifetime earnings.  As long as women are discriminated against after having children, the prospect of taking more time off to be with children is unlikely to appeal to men, out of fear that they would be punished in the workplace, too.

Unsurprisingly, low-income parents faced the biggest hurdles finding family time and affording activities, according to the New America study. But parents with higher incomes also wanted more time with their children and named financial concerns as a big reason they couldn’t have it. “What struck us… was how many commonalities there were across income levels,” said Kelly Bidwell, who also worked on the report.

While most of the parents they surveyed wanted to work, there weren’t clear majorities when it came to how their work schedules should look. Parents wanted flexibility, and the biggest barrier to that was money. Two-thirds of parents, across all income groups, said they wanted higher wages, both to be able to afford the activities they wanted to do with their kids and to be able to work less.

The U.S. does need more affordable childcare. But providing that doesn’t solve this fundamental problem: Parents want the resources to be able to spend more time with their children while they’re young. No policymaker can find more hours in a day, but one of the big reasons parents don’t take off more time for their families is that they don’t earn enough to be able to do so. “We are not having a national conversation about time and wages, which are what parents are really asking for,” McGuinness said. “Our policies for families aren’t wrong, but they are not exactly right either.”

On May 25, the pope published his encyclical letter “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” It made a stern but loving case against AI fatalism, reminding humans of our intrinsic worth and cautioning against seeking transcendence in tech rather than grace.

But the human person got another boost in late May. It came from a less holy figure too: Peter Thiel, net worth $28 billion.

As the founder of omnipresent MAGA AI surveillance machine Palantir and longtime student of the Antichrist, Thiel didn’t mean to help out humanity. Benevolence is not his strong suit. He’s out to live forever and build a master race. But by failing to make the case for transhumanism with his much-hyped Enhanced Games, a pro-doping sports event, Thiel accidentally showcased what’s magnificent about humanity.

What makes Thiel’s Enhanced Games different from other competitions is that at his games, which wrapped May 24 in (where else?) Las Vegas, elite athletes were permitted to juice to the gills. They were highly incentivized to break world records, albeit with an asterisk, on the promise of six-figure purses. The Enhanced Games, in other words, were expected by one and all to showcase the possibilities of transcendence through tech and money.

“Like most bad ideas,” wrote Mitchell Duran for Yahoo Finance, “Enhanced Games was born from a mix of grievance and the belief that, with the right amount of tech, financing, and new-age, untested science, any human being can transcend any and all natural limitations.”

Tech and money sure do make a lot of damn winners in this life. In fact, in our corrupt and oligarchic era, tech and money are styled as the one true path to glory. The unaugmented are suckers and losers. It’s surprising how few people dispute that. In fact, from the time that the Enhanced Games were announced in 2023, lavishly capitalized by Thiel and one Don Trump Jr., no one doubted that a doped athlete chasing a huge purse would smash the world records of noncheating, clean ones.

After all, why else has doping been so closely policed, unless it gives an athlete a giant advantage? A chess player with an extra queen would win every game.

But not so fast.

Here are the results. They undercut the case for tech-and-money supremacy so radically that humankind should consider this a big win. Maybe—maybe—the pope’s faith in us is not misplaced.

In short, no doped athlete at the Enhanced Games broke even one record, except a swimmer who won in a buoyant polyurethane supersuit that corseted him into an underwater missile. (The supersuit has been banned by World Aquatics for 15 years.) The other doped swimmers, runners, and power lifters could barely get it together to win, let alone break* any records.

“They were nowhere close to world records,” said the online track influencer Coach Rob. “They were nowhere close to personal records.”

More surprising still: Several athletes who competed clean beat their juiced opponents. Among these are the Olympic gold medalist sprinter Fred Kerley. Kerley, who was banned from the sport until 2027 for missing drug tests, has always maintained he doesn’t dope. He was determined to run clean in the Enhanced Games too. (“I’m inclined to believe him,” said Coach Rob. “The time he ran is consistent with that.”)

Kerley says he ran for the money. But he clearly wanted to prove something too. Indeed, he proved it. When he won the 100 meters with a respectable but not earth-shaking time (9.97 seconds), he trash-talked the rest of the field—and it was hard to blame him.

“They gotta do better than that,” he said. “Train a little harder.”

The event, in the end, was deeply depressing. It was a ratings flop, and Thiel and Junior lost a lot of money; the Enhanced Games start-up lost 70 percent of its value overnight. The bet on drugs over humanity simply didn’t pay off. Sport, which should highlight the triumph of the human spirit, is unwatchable when it’s geared to highlight the triumph of lab-made biochemicals. Why not just have robots race?

But there was politics at the Enhanced Games too. In 2025, Bloomberg called the pro-doping event “the ultimate MAGA athletic competition.” It was hard to miss the point. At a time when Trump is hell-bent on cheating at elections and chases filthy wins to spite the rule of law, the defeat of MAGA Thiel’s dirty athletes by clean ones suggests that humankind’s better nature might, one day, reassert itself. Even in our fallen world.

“God gave me fast feet for a reason,” Fred Kersey said before the race. “I’m here to showcase my talent. You still have to work. Drugs aren’t going to give you an advantage if you’re not putting the work in.”

Fast feet, hard work, and of course God—the pope would approve.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for a 5–4 court, held that the Mississippi courts had “unreasonably applied the clearly established Batson precedents,” referring to a landmark 1986 case, and “unreasonably determined” that defendant had “waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s asserted race-neutral reasons” for striking multiple Black potential jurors.

The court’s ruling is not surprising based on the available record. But the fact that only five of the court’s nine members reached this conclusion is somewhat troubling. Kavanaugh, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to form the majority. Justice Neil Gorsuch led the rest of the conservatives in dissent.

This lineup is not as surprising as it might look. While Kavanaugh tends to vote with his fellow conservatives on most criminal justice matters, he has shown a special interest in questions of racial discrimination during jury selection throughout his legal career. He even wrote a law review note on Batson v. Kentucky, the landmark 1986 case on the matter, while attending Yale Law School in 1989.

Thursday’s ruling is good news for Terry Pitchford, who robbed a grocery store in Mississippi in 2004 along with his then-friend Eric Bullins. During the robbery, Bullins shot and killed the store’s owner. State prosecutors reached a plea deal with Bullins, who was ineligible for the death penalty as a 16-year-old, and instead sent him to prison for 20 years. Under the felony-murder rule, prosecutors then charged Pitchford, who was 18 years old at the time, with first-degree murder, even though he didn’t pull the trigger. A Mississippi jury convicted him, and the court sentenced him to death.

As recent events have shown, the American jury system is an essential bulwark against tyranny, oppression, and prosecutorial abuses. For that reason, prosecutors in the Jim Crow South routinely excluded Black Americans from participating as jurors in criminal trials, especially in cases with Black defendants. So prevalent was the problem that the phrase “all-white jury” entered the American lexicon as a shorthand phrase for manifestly unjust and unreliable trials in the South.

Black jury participation increased after the demise of de jure racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside other forms of direct political participation. But old habits die hard. In the Batson case, for example, a state prosecutor had used his peremptory challenges to strike all of the Black jurors from the jury pool, resulting in an all-white jury for a Black defendant. The Supreme Court ruled in Batson that a state violates a defendant’s equal-protection rights when it “puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposefully excluded.”

Since Batson, prosecutors have typically given race-neutral explanations to the court for why they are striking jurors to avoid future legal challenges. According to court records, the prosecutor struck four of the five Black potential jurors and gave reasons that ranged from their showing up 15 minutes late to court to their being young, unmarried, and male like Pitchford. A defendant’s lawyers then have the opportunity to respond or rebut those explanations. In Pitchford’s case, however, that did not happen.

Rather than allow Pitchford’s lawyers to challenge those strikes, the trial judge simply declared that each of them was race-neutral and moved on. This was implausible, as Pitchford’s lawyers later explained, because the prosecution had “deselected black people from the jury panel who had the same familial, living, social or marital circumstances as whites who were not deselected.” Pitchford’s lawyers tried to object at the end of the process, only to be rejected again by the trial judge, as Kavanaugh summarized:

At the close of jury selection, defense counsel sought to raise the Batson issue again. But the trial court twice cut off defense counsel and ended the inquiry before counsel could try to rebut as pretextual the race-neutral reasons articulated by the prosecution: “I think you already made those, and they are clear in the record. For the reasons previously stated, first the Court finds there to be no—well, all the reasons were race neutral as to members that were struck by the district attorney’s office. And so the, the Court finds there to be no Batson violation.”

One might expect the Mississippi Supreme Court, to which Pitchford turned next, to have ordered a new trial after learning about this flawed jury selection process. But it did not. Instead, the court argued that Pitchford had actually waived his Batson objection on appeal because his lawyer had not argued that the explanations were pretextual during the trial. Since the argument hadn’t been raised then, the court surmised, he could not raise them for the first time now.

Generally speaking, U.S. appeals courts do not review legal questions that weren’t already considered and decided at trial first. Last week, for example, the Supreme Court dismissed a case that it had agreed to hear last year after concluding that the underlying legal question hadn’t been properly considered by the lower courts first. Preserving arguments for appeal is an essential part of the criminal trial process, especially in death penalty cases where the stakes can be existential.

But the Mississippi Supreme Court’s ruling was only true because, as Kavanaugh recounted, the trial judge gave the defense lawyer no real opportunity to do so, even acting at one point as if the argument had already been made. This was obvious to the federal district court that heard Pitchford’s federal appeal, prompting it to rule in his favor. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and deferred to its Mississippi state court brethren.

When arguing before the justices, the state of Mississippi tried to claim that Pitchford’s lawyers had preserved one kind of Batson argument at trial, but not the most important one: that the prosecution’s strikes were pretextual. Justice Neil Gorsuch and the other four dissenting justices agreed, with Gorsuch concluding that Pitchford’s trial lawyers were trying to make a statistical argument of some kind.

The majority dispensed with those assertions with little fanfare. “The State’s argument—that Pitchford preserved his Batson objection but nonetheless somehow waived his Batson pretext argument—does not make much sense and is not a reasonable reading of this record,” Kavanaugh explained. “We need not belabor the matter.” This is a justice’s polite way of saying something is not just wrong, but obviously wrong.

But this particular wrong was apparently not so obvious to four other members of the court. They leaned heavily on a federal law known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, or AEDPA. Congress enacted the law in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing to curb criminal defendants’ ability to invoke—and federal courts’ ability to provide—habeas corpus for state-level criminal convictions unless the lower court’s ruling was clearly “unreasonable” under “clearly established” federal law or Supreme Court precedent.

In his dissenting opinion, Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court has interpreted this limit in extremely strict ways. “Showing legal error, we have said, isn’t enough to satisfy [AEDPA],” he explained, quoting from a 2022 ruling by the high court. “Instead, a petitioner must demonstrate that ‘no fairminded jurist could reach the state court’s conclusion under this Court’s precedents.’” As the law’s many critics can attest, AEDPA made it much more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in federal court.

Notably, Gorsuch also disputed Pitchford’s implication that his lawyers had been shut down by an overbearing trial judge. He cited purported examples from the transcript where the lawyer could have, in his view, interjected to preserve the argument at hand. I won’t bother outlining his version because Gorsuch himself ultimately says it doesn’t matter. Even if he relied fully upon Pitchford’s version of events, the justice concluded, AEDPA would still obligate him to reject Pitchford’s challenge.

“Even if it were a plausible account, that still would not be enough,” Gorsuch argued. “Under [AEDPA], a federal habeas petitioner must show not only that his version of events is plausible. He must show that the record ‘compels’ it. And no matter how generously one interprets the record in this case, that is a standard Mr. Pitchford cannot meet,” relying on his own “reasonable” inference that Pitchford’s lawyers only preserved one kind of Batson claim but not another.

Kavanaugh, for his part, found that the Mississippi-Gorsuch narrative missed the forest for the trees. “That slices Batson way too thin,” he explained. “At that key point in the jury-selection process—after the prosecutor had asserted facially race-neutral reasons for the peremptory strikes—the Batson objection was a Batson pretext argument.” In a footnote, he stated more bluntly that the dissenters’ “speculation” is not “how the Batson inquiry ordinarily operates.”

Gorsuch, undeterred, made sure to conclude his dissent by noting that Thursday’s decision was a “narrow” one. “Precisely because so many of our AEDPA precedents go unmentioned, I do not read today’s decision as calling any of them into question,” he wrote. If those precedents would compel at least four justices to vote to execute a defendant who didn’t actually kill anyone, and whose lawyers could not properly object to the nearly all-white jury composition at trial, then maybe they deserve a few more questions than they received here.

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence is reshaping business, education, and other sectors of life, including politics. Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning economic policy group, says it’s essential that progressives and liberals accept that AI will be a huge force in the world and design strategies for how to deal with it. He argues, citing polling, that Americans’ biggest concern about AI is losing their jobs due to technological advances. Democrats can’t stop AI from putting some Americans out of work. But Jacquez says it’s critical that Democrats push to ensure that the benefits of AI go to all Americans, not just the rich; companies are not allowed to use AI in ways that drive up prices and rip off average Americans; and people who lose their jobs from AI are given sufficient support from the government to find new roles. He says that most people want to earn their income through work, so liberals should concentrate on pushing for policies such as a federal job guarantee instead of proposals like universal basic income that directly give cash to people.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Markwayne Mullin, the new homeland security secretary, leveled a really strange threat at blue states this week. He suggested that DHS might block international flights going into so-called sanctuary cities, which have protections for immigrants that Donald Trump hates. This is a really dark turn in a longer saga involving a battle over an ICE facility in New Jersey, which we’re going to get into.

But first, just note how incredibly absurd this threat is. It would probably do serious damage to the economy and deal another big blow to GOP chances in the midterms.

The whole situation captures some of the ugliest aspects of this presidency. So we’re trying to make sense of it all with Nayna Gupta, the policy director for the American Immigration Council, which follows DHS closely. Nayna, thanks for coming on.

Nayna Gupta: Thanks, Greg, for having me.

Sargent: So in Newark, New Jersey, at a federal immigration center called Delaney Hall, activists have been protesting outside due to complaints from inmates of terrible conditions inside.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill just put out a statement saying that state health inspectors were just denied full access to the facility. She’s calling for it to be shut down. There have been scuffles with lawmakers getting pepper-sprayed. Nayna, can you just quickly recap what’s happening there?

Gupta: Sure. So there are around 300 people in immigration detention at Delaney Hall, this facility in New Jersey, and they have been staging hunger and labor strikes to protest inhumane conditions in the facility for days now. And that sparked protests outside of the facility by family members of those who are locked up inside, who are being fed rotten food, receiving subpar medical care. And those protests have grown over the past several days.

That has attracted the attention and participation of high-ranking elected officials like both New Jersey senators, the governor of New Jersey, who are trying to get into this facility to respond to this growing crisis. And that has triggered a fairly violent reaction from ICE and federal agents that are on the ground there near Delaney Hall.

Sargent: Well, it’s in this context that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin made his preposterous threat. In essence, what he said is if things like this Delaney Hall fight keep happening, he’s going to have to transfer Customs and Border Protection officers out of airports to go protect these federal facilities. Let’s listen to Mullin for a second.

Markwayne Mullin (voiceover): When we have situations what’s happening in New Jersey right now, where we have to prioritize where we put federal employees because local law enforcement won’t help protect their streets—not federal streets, city streets—and keep them from barricading and causing harm to our employees, then we have to decide where we’re going to prioritize our federal employees. So we’re not going to halt the flights. What we’re saying is we just won’t be able to process them because we don’t have officers there. We’re going to pull out our Customs and Border Patrol officers that process these flights and put them in these facilities to help protect our employees coming out of work. And if they’re not there to process international flights, then those individuals, when the airlines land—well, they won’t be permitted into the United States.

Sargent: The Fox News headline on all this read as follows: “Mullin threatens to pull CBP from sanctuary city airports.” What do you make of that, Nayna?

Gupta: Look, I mean, this is the Trump administration, now with Mullin at the helm of DHS, once again threatening vindictive actions because they don’t like growing public pushback on their policies. And it’s really important to note that if the administration actually pulled off this outrageous threat of diverting flights out of entire major metropolitan areas, this wouldn’t be about just hurting those cities or immigrants. It would be hurting very many Americans.

This would be hugely disruptive to critical industries, to travelers who travel through these airports, at a moment when the economy is already facing strain and we know that voters are feeling very poorly about this administration’s economic policies.

We don’t know still how real this threat is. We’ve seen the administration make sweeping threats and then walk those back when they face backlash or because they can’t actually effectuate those threats.

But the fact that he’s even on national news networks talking about this underscores their disregard for Americans generally and their willingness again to be vindictive about policies that are totally within the rights of states and local governments.

Sargent: And it’s interesting that he’s saying a lot of this stuff on Fox News because Fox really likes the idea a lot and is really playing it up. I want to play what a Fox News anchor said about this idea. Listen to this.

Fox News anchor (voiceover): Pulling CBP out of airports in sanctuary jurisdictions obviously would have an enormous ripple effect across the country. That’s because it would effectively be the end of international travel into big airports like LAX, San Francisco, Boston Logan, JFK, Newark, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, many others. No customs agents means you can’t process international travelers or cargo, even Americans coming back from overseas. But DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says the idea is actively being considered.

Sargent: Now, as you said, it’s a little unclear whether Mullin has any real intention of acting on this, but it would really be an extraordinarily dramatic step, as you said. The economic effect would be really, really vast and there would be chaos throughout the travel industry and through many other industries. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I mean, even Fox News seems to be kind of acknowledging here that this is an incredibly draconian scheme. Yet at the same time, Fox can’t help but get kind of excited about it because it’s like, You’re going after sanctuary cities, great, we love it.

Gupta: Right. So let’s be clear about exactly how disruptive and draconian this is. Airlines cannot simply divert flights. There are landing-slot limits, which means other airports couldn’t take the volume.

People wouldn’t necessarily be flying into the specific city they enter the U.S. and maybe transiting elsewhere. And so in reality, we can imagine mass flight cancellations, huge disruption at airports, long lines, people being stuck and stranded in cities where they have nowhere to go.

And again, this is just another example of a policy that they are packaging—with Fox News’s help—as cracking down on immigration, which in reality would hurt all Americans and does absolutely nothing to credibly enforce our immigration laws.

And look, Fox News liking the shock and awe of this—this is part of the marketing angle of this administration’s mass deportation agenda. They love the political theater. They love diverting Americans’ attention from the fact that they have done nothing to meaningfully enforce immigration laws in a credible or humane way and instead are just constantly creating these kinds of distractions that feed the media market that Fox News dominates.

Sargent: Right, it’s the Fox News presidency in action. I think to your point, it wouldn’t even matter if they didn’t intend for this to be serious. It wouldn’t even matter if they intended it only as theater, because it’s really pretty terrible that Markwayne Mullin knows—even if he’s just performing—that performing this show for the audience of one is going to be thrilling to him, right?

Mullin, just like everyone else who works for the ailing despot, knows that this sort of quote-unquote “fight” will excite him greatly. Mullin thinks, OK, if I threaten blue states and sanctuary areas, the boss will love it.

This is really one of the most vile features of Trump governance—this constant threat of unleashing government power on Democratic areas, serious or not, just to thrill MAGA America with the prospect of Trump’s government inflicting suffering on blue America. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Gupta: Yeah. I mean, look, this is Mullin using so-called sanctuary cities and policies as a pretext for targeting and dividing communities in America. That’s what this is. And to your point, it’s also about sucking up to the boss, flexing for the boss to show, Hey, I’m down with the cruelty that you’re using when it comes to your immigration agenda.

And I’ll just say it—this administration now repeatedly has taken steps to threaten jurisdictions that won’t work with them or to force them to work with the federal government, when the reality is that state and local governments are entitled under the United States Constitution to make decisions that are best for their own interests and their own communities when it comes to law enforcement and public safety.

And there are a growing number of law enforcement voices that will echo that. The Tenth Amendment is clear. The federal government cannot coerce or threaten states and localities into working with ICE. And the federal courts have repeatedly agreed with that. And that just underscores the pretext that Mullin is using here to be able to just flex and show some kind of cruelty and power, both for his boss and their political base.

Sargent: Right. It is all about saying to the boss, Look, I’m prepared to use government power to inflict suffering and chaos on blue America. And we shouldn’t let the sheer idiocy of it escape us, either. If you were to stop flights into places like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles—you know who would get hurt? Republican midterm candidates would. You have a lot of crucial House races in Pennsylvania, New York, California.

So basically, Mullin is threatening to further tank Trump’s economy and further wreck GOP midterm chances. Other than that, it’s a great plan, right?

Gupta: I mean, it does seem like they have no regard or care for what kind of backlash there would be when thousands of Americans are waiting hours and hours in airports around the country. This is, again, just Trump’s performative stunts that actually undermine safety, stability, and security and have literally nothing to do with actually enforcing immigration laws. And apparently they don’t care about the political consequences of that. It’s hard then to not come to the conclusion that this is really just cruelty and harm for cruelty’s sake.

Sargent: It really is that. Your group, the American Immigration Council, had a report that one of its features was to go into the need for more cooperation between the states and the federal government, not less. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Trump approach is to essentially make the federal government fundamentally an antagonist of blue states when it comes to immigration enforcement.

We’ve seen it on many other fronts. There are these threats we’re seeing here. There’s the constant threats and bullying toward sanctuary jurisdictions, which you mentioned earlier. Then of course there’s the sending in of armed troops and paramilitary forces into places where the locals and local government don’t want them. You’re advocating for something very different in your report, right?

Gupta: Right. So the framework that we released, “Restoring Credibility and Humanity to Immigration Enforcement,” gives elected officials a vision forward. We know, increasingly, Americans don’t want mass deportation given the kinds of harms we’ve talked about today, but we haven’t really heard elected officials talk about what this could look like instead.

And what we offer when it comes to how the federal government works with states is we say, it can’t be this—that this collaboration happens through threats. It also can’t be that the federal government asks the states to enforce an agenda that actually hurts their communities, that makes people less likely to report crime or less likely to trust their local police officers.

And so instead, the federal government should not only work with states on enforcement, they should also give funding to support states that have large immigrant populations so that they’re working toward safety beyond just cracking down on people who might pose some kind of public safety threat.

And a model like that, that’s not enforcement-only but that’s also supportive, is the only way to rebuild trust that has been absolutely decimated in cities and states like Illinois or California or Massachusetts or even North Carolina, where going forward, states are really nervous to work with the federal government. And to rebuild that trust, the federal government has to step in and start offering support for immigrant communities. And when you do that, you actually create safer, stronger communities. And we offer a vision for what that can look like.

Sargent: Yes. And we’re seeing Democratic governors step up right now. People like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill here in New Jersey that we just discussed. They’re starting to really articulate a vision of state and federal cooperation from the state side, which is really great to see, I think. It’s going to be a big feature of the Democratic agenda going forward, is my guess.

Just to close this out, the threat from Mullin—whatever happens with that—what do you see happening at this ICE facility? It looks like the situation has deteriorated pretty badly.

As I mentioned at the top of this, Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, just put out a statement saying that state health inspectors were denied full access to the facility. She’s calling for it to be shut down. What’s going to happen here? Is it going to be shut down? Is the state going to get access? Are we going to learn more? What do you anticipate?

Gupta: I mean, I think it’s hard to know where the road ends on this. What we’ve seen is that when protesters and leaders dig in and push back and make demands for releases and better care, a lot of the time the Trump administration doubles down and punishes with policies like the one Mullin is threatening now.

I think the question is, can some of these political leaders—like the New Jersey senators, like the New Jersey governor—cut some deal with the Trump administration where they say, you can’t just keep people inside in these conditions, you can’t let the situation outside deteriorate? What can we do to get in better food so people aren’t starving? What can we do to make sure they’re receiving appropriate medical care? Are there at least some vulnerable folks that we can release and get out?

And we hope that this public pressure and the growing public outcry will lead to the kinds of headlines that the Trump administration has been avoiding since what happened in Minnesota. And if that happens, that might be just enough leverage to get them to compromise to some degree, so that people—especially inside, and families outside—are not harmed as extensively as we are seeing right now.

Sargent: That just brings up something in my mind, what you said there about the need for this kind of cooperation. The Trump administration and Donald Trump and the more fascist advisers around him like Stephen Miller—they think this kind of conflict is good.

You mentioned that in Minnesota, the Trump administration actually ended up pulling back, which is true. The public backlash was ferocious, both in Minneapolis but also nationally. They really nosedived in the polls throughout that whole thing. The horrible killing of Americans in Minneapolis was the real precipitator for that.

But there were voices inside the Trump administration that understood that this kind of searing civil conflict is bad for Trump and Republicans politically. On the flip side, you’ve got people like Stephen Miller and Markwayne Mullin who think it’s good for them politically to have these kinds of conflicts.

I don’t really know what to make of that, other than it’s just sort of a struggle between the two camps at all times. And it’s not really clear to me who is dominant. It sort of depends on the day, but right now it looks like the Stephen Miller–Markwayne Mullin nitwit school of politics is really winning out.

Gupta: What we are seeing is this constant back and forth, but that at the end of the day seems to be Stephen Miller, the architect and mind behind all of these extreme and cruel policies, winning the day. We’ve at moments even seen the president walk back some of the most extreme immigration policies they’ve had. And a few days later, the administration nevertheless doubles down.

I think they felt the public backlash to the events in Minnesota, which underscores for Americans that pushback matters even when you have an administration with authoritarian tendencies. But it doesn’t change that they’re still in power and that Stephen Miller can still drive the ship of policy here. And that means at any moment we can quickly nosedive, as you say, back into a very cruel and extreme set of policies.

And the only other point I’ll add, Greg, is that even when what they’re doing doesn’t make headlines—because it’s not so obviously cruel and violent as what we’ve seen in Minnesota and now at Delaney Hall—they’re simultaneously effectuating policies that are more quiet but are nevertheless destructive to our entire legal immigration system, to U.S. citizen spouses and families of immigrants.

They have a toolkit of tactics and policies that they’re using. And when they lean in on the more visibly cruel ones, we do tend to see greater public pushback. I think that will likely continue, and we’ll have to see how that ends up playing out over the next several months before midterms. And then especially after, where they may feel no guardrails at all.

Sargent: A hundred percent. I think that the more light that’s shined on this stuff, the better, for precisely that reason. When this stuff is in the news, they nosedive further in the polls. Nayna Gupta, thanks so much for coming on. It was really great to talk to you.

Gupta: Thanks so much, Greg, for having me.

According to Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser, Mike Brown, have been pressing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce the quarter-G note. After the printing bureau’s director, Patty Solimene, was rude enough to point out that it’s illegal to put the face of any living person on U.S. currency, she got reassigned against her will to another job at Treasury. You can see a mockup of the proposed Trump $250 greenback here.

The autocratic nature of a Trump denomination is difficult to ignore. It’s of a piece with Trump’s putting his face on banners hanging outside three Cabinet headquarters in Washington. A Trump greenback is also consistent with Trump’s putting his signature on the $100 bill, which is legal but unprecedented in this country and, as Reuters pointed out, mimics previous repressive autocratic foreign regimes like those of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Idi Amin Dada in Uganda, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. 

There’s not much more to say about the lawlessness and pathology of Trump’s effort to paste his puss onto American currency, so I won’t. Instead, I invite you to consider another aspect that’s gone unremarked thus far: The denomination Trump is trying to create would be tailor-made for criminals.

The practical undesirability of printing high-denomination bills is a long-standing hobby horse of mine. I’ve written about it for The New Republic (“Let’s Abolish the $100 Bill,” 2024) and for Slate (“Ban the Benjamins!,” 2010). I even yapped about it once on CBS Sunday Morning. My guru in this campaign is a self-described “investigative economist” and onetime Nader’s Raider whom I have never met named James S. Henry. I have, however, given careful study to the founding text Henry published half a century ago, while he was in graduate school, in The Washington Monthly (“Calling in the Big Bills,” 1976); to a follow-up Henry published in the Monthly (“How to Make the Mob Miserable,” 1980); and to a second follow-up Henry published in The National Interest (“Come On In, the Party’s Nearly Over,” 2016). We all stand on the shoulders of giants. In this matter, I stand on Henry’s. (I should acknowledge also a valuable 2024 report in Mother Jones by Oliver Bullough, and academic work by Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff and the British financier-philanthropist Peter Sands.)

Henry’s argument, and mine, is that practically the only constituency that really needs high-denomination currency is criminals, and yet the United States stubbornly persists in printing $100 bills. (Back in 1976, Henry also fretted about $50 bills, but 50 years of inflation have made those less alluring to the criminal class.) We actually print more Benjamins than any other denomination except the dollar bill: 1.3 billion of them in 2023, the most recent year for which data are available. That’s more than five times greater than the number of $20 bills printed that year. A decade ago, before America became a cashless society, we printed more twenties than Benjamins, probably because that’s what ATMs like to dispense. Gen X hipsters used to refer to twenties as “yuppie food stamps.” But if you’re like me, you go to the ATM a lot less frequently than you once did. 

When you look at the quantity of U.S. currency in circulation—greenbacks printed not in one year but in any year—the disturbing prevalence of high-denomination currency is even more dramatic. A larger chunk of the total greenbacks in circulation are Benjamins (19.9 billion) than any other denomination, including single-dollar bills (15.2 billion). Fully 35 percent of all bills in circulation are $100 bills, even though it’s unlikely that you, Dear Law-Abiding Reader, carry any in your wallet. 

Rogoff calculates that more than one-third of all U.S. paper currency is used by criminals and tax cheats. If we assumed that this criminal activity was spread proportionally among all denominations in circulation, then 10 percent of Benjamins would be used by criminals and tax cheats. But of course criminal activity isn’t spread proportionally among all denominations. It’s concentrated in the highest denomination, the hundred-dollar bill. It’s therefore reasonable to extrapolate that the proportion of Benjamins used by criminals and tax cheats well exceeds 50 percent.

Now Trump wants to create a new $250 denomination that we’ll call (in loving memory of the late Ivana Trump) the Donald. If the Benjamin is a currency for criminals, simple arithmetic tells us the Donald is two and a half times more so. After the Post piece appeared, the Treasury Department said that its planning was of course contingent on congressional passage of a bill that Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina very fawningly introduced in February 2025. According to both the bill and the Treasury Department, the Donald would be a “commemorative note.” But Wilson’s bill doesn’t stipulate how many of these notes the Treasury would print, and there’s no custom to follow because until now the federal government hasn’t issued commemorative greenbacks. It’s issued commemorative coins, adding to the face value a surcharge proportionate to the denomination, so that a commemorative half-dollar coin, for instance, might sell for $5.50, a commemorative $1 coin for $11, and a commemorative $5 coin for $40. 

If the Trump Treasury followed that formula, then a commemorative $250 greenback would sell for perhaps $750 and there would be pitifully few takers, even among criminals. But I seriously doubt the president will allow his precious Donald to become some obscure collector’s item. My guess is that in the end Trump will eschew surcharges, eschew numeric limits, and print a maximum number of Donalds, because the whole point is to spread his ugly mug far and wide. If I’m right, then criminals will have plenty of use for the Donald.

Might that prospect deter our president? Of course not. Trump is already getting rich off crypto, another favored vehicle for criminal activity, and he’s pardoning cybercriminals and other white-collar scofflaws left and right. Trump is a convicted felon himself! Those banners featuring Trump’s scowling portrait that hang outside the Justice, Labor, and Agriculture departments?  They’re inspired by, and for all I know are directly copied from, a mug shot taken when Trump got indicted three years ago for racketeering in Georgia. (Two years later, the prosecutor dismissed that case because “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial.”) You can’t insult a person by saying he gives aid and comfort to criminals when that person compares himself to “the late, great” Al Capone. The convenience of a $250 bill for the criminal underworld isn’t a bug in Trump’s semiquincentennial celebration; it’s a feature. Happy birthday, America. Let’s try to do better in 2276.

NOTUS reports that the Trump administration is spending $5 million to cover four bronze horses, known as the Arts of War and Arts of Peace, on the roads around the Lincoln Memorial with the gold by July 4, thanks to a no-bid contract awarded to a Maryland studio through the National Park Service.

According to federal documents, the Gilders’ Studio will use gold paint that is very thick, heavier and purer than the gold paint job the same studio made on the Wyoming state Capitol dome seven years ago.

Trump’s Department of the Interior is spending $95 million on beautification projects in Washington, D.C., according to NOTUS, all initiated between December 2025 and April of this year. The horses haven’t been restored since the 1970s, and their gold coating looks patchy with their stone bases showing cracks and dirt. But the administration’s aesthetic spending raises eyebrows, especially relating to how contracts have been awarded.

Trump’s decision to repaint the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue, for example, is expected to cost $13.1 million, thanks to contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings overcharging the government to the tune of a 20 percent profit margin. That’s seven times what Trump promised the job would cost. The president is also spending millions to repaint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a historic building next to the White House, drawing lawsuits from historic preservation groups.

All of these projects are being rushed so that they are completed before the July 4 America 250th anniversary. The lack of a bidding process means that the government, and by extension, taxpayers, could easily be overcharged by contractors, and the rushed projects mean that the work could be shoddy and cause permanent damage to important landmarks in the nation’s capital. In Trump’s eyes, though, these projects take precedence over improving Americans’ lives.

State Representative Ben Moss removed his name from House Bill 1232, which, if passed, would let North Carolinians vote to change the state constitution’s definition of “life” to beginning at the moment of conception or fertilization, a concept more broadly known as “fetal personhood.”

The one-page document is unequivocal in its language, proposing that any person who seeks to terminate a fetus “shall be held accountable for attempted murder for first degree murder,” and further proposing that such a crime be “punishable by death.” The text of the bill grants no special permissions for cases of rape or incest.

Moss’s reversal came in the wake of enormous public backlash to the measure, reported NC Newsline. In a statement published to his social media accounts Tuesday night, Moss said that he would no longer sponsor the bill, and claimed that the bill’s phrasing had been “broadly misinterpreted.”

“The purpose behind this legislation was to affirm the value and dignity of unborn life—not to suggest that women should face capital punishment or to create uncertainty surrounding difficult medical situations,” Moss said. “Unfortunately, portions of the bill’s current language have led to significant misunderstandings and differing misinterpretations that distract from the core pro-life message and intent.”

Moss, nonetheless, stated that he remains “firmly pro-life.” His retraction leaves state Representative Keith Kidwell as the bill’s sole sponsor.

The issue gained more attention after Jen Hamilton, a labor and delivery nurse, posted a video to Instagram earlier this week claiming that the bill’s broad language would effectively allow people to kill anyone using contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, such as IUDs.

“We can’t feed kids in school, and we won’t give health care to people, but we will make it legal to murder women who use birth control,” Hamilton said.

By the time of publication, Hamilton’s video had garnered more than 209,000 likes.

The bill’s broad language means that doctors and nurses could also be considered accountable and therefore eligible to be put to death.

Pro-abortion activists have long warned that fetal personhood, an ideology that calls for providing equal human rights to a fetus (even if it’s just a cluster of cells), grants embryos rights while stripping them away from pregnant people.

But the concept is not unique to North Carolina: The language of “fetal personhood” is a MAGA policy point, and has already reached the national stage by way of sneakily drafted executive orders. One of dozens of executive orders Donald Trump signed the evening of his inauguration cemented language at the executive level to delegitimize transgender identities. But within the fold of that order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” the Trump administration also decided to legally brand a person’s gender identity as beginning “at conception.”

“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” the order read in part. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

During a White House press briefing Thursday, the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for an update on the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into antifa. “How close are you guys to figuring out who’s funding it?” she said.

“It is ongoing. We’ve made substantial progress. And I think in the weeks and months ahead, we’re gonna have a lot to report,” Bessent said. 

Q: How close are you to figuring out who's funding antifa?

BESSENT: We've made substantial process. I think in the weeks and months ahead, we're gonna have a lot to report. We're going to demand that nonprofits know their grant recipients. pic.twitter.com/o8Qf6wRSLw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 28, 2026

There’s just one problem for Bessent’s loose timeline to deliver results: Antifa doesn’t formally exist. Antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist,” is a movement, not a group. The so-called organization lacks a central structure and instead functions as a loose network of individuals and small groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism. Still, the Trump administration has insisted this so-called group is a major domestic terror threat.

On that front, Bessent claimed he could announce some slight progress: He said the IRS was now providing new guidance on 990 forms, requiring nonprofits to report the recipients of funding following the government’s (spurious) claims about the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

“And we are going to encourage, or demand, that nonprofits know their grant recipients. So, if a grant recipient is violent, if they are suppressing people’s rights, then you are responsible for that,” Bessent said. 

It was a particularly ironic answer from the secretary, who had, moments earlier, defended the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund that could award funding to some of Donald Trump’s most dangerous allies, including the leader of a violent hate group.  

“The New Jersey Department of Health today sought to conduct a health inspection of Delaney Hall, but it was denied full access and was allowed to inspect only a limited part of the facility,” Sherrill wrote on Thursday. “As I’ve said repeatedly, refusing to provide full access raises serious questions about what ICE is trying to hide from public view. New Jersey believes in the rule of law, will uphold the Constitution, and Delaney Hall should be closed down. I am calling for ICE to immediately de-escalate the situation as I continue working to keep New Jersey residents safe.”

Since last Friday, around 300 detainees have reportedly been engaging in a labor and hunger strike inside the facility in protest of due process violations and inhumane conditions—in which at least one person has died. Denying state health inspectors access to the prison only exacerbates those allegations. There have also been protests outside the jail that have seen federal immigration agents pepper-spraying, tasing, and arresting protesters. In one incident over the weekend, agents pepper-sprayed Democratic Senator Andy Kim after he visited the detention center.

Delaney Hall is also where four Democratic politicians, including Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Representative Lamonica McIver, attempted to visit to conduct oversight last year. Baraka was arrested, and McIver is still facing criminal charges after the incident.

The Trump administration has completely denied that the hunger strike is happening, even as border czar Tom Homan threatened to force-feed prisoners participating in it.

“People detained at Delaney Hall are facing brutal and inhumane conditions. Their families and community members who are protesting their treatment, and the elected officials who are asking to inspect the facility, should not face pepper spray and rubber bullets for doing so,” the New Jersey ACLU wrote in a statement. “Our federal representatives—who have the congressional authority to conduct oversight visits of the facility—have instead taken pepper spray to their eyes and experienced abuse at the hands of federal agents.”

Delaney Hall is a for-profit private mass prison run by security company Geo Group, which contracts with the federal government.

During a White House press briefing Thursday, a reporter asked Bessent to comment on the process for developing the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” set up as part of a settlement for Donald Trump’s failing lawsuit against the IRS.

Surprise, surprise: Bessent’s response did not mention the fund at all.

“This is going to be the only question I take on this matter today. So, there’s ongoing litigation, so it’d be inappropriate for me to comment,” Bessent said. “President Trump is a great American who has endured more than 10 years—10 years—of nonstop harassment and weaponization from federal and state government actors. A bad actor at the IRS leaked more than 400,000 tax returns, including the Trump family, all the employees, and that’s how we got here now.

“No American should be targeted for political reasons, and every citizen deserves fair treatment and the full protection of the law. The Department of Justice represented the Treasury and the IRS in this matter, and I’m going to have to refer any questions to active Attorney General Todd Blanche.”

Q: There's a lot of people talking about the 'weaponization fund.' What is the process for those funds now?

BESSENT: Thank you for the question. This will be the only question I will take on this matter. President Trump is a great American who has endured more than 10 years of… pic.twitter.com/j6qZZfaDxY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 28, 2026

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins also pressed the secretary on the sudden exit of Brian Morrissey, the Treasury’s top legal officer, following the announcement of the fund—but Bessent wouldn’t bite.

“I will not be taking any other questions, I will not be taking any other questions,” he repeated. Maybe he should add that to his list of pathetic affirmations?

Q: Mr. Secretary, about the $1.8B slush fund. Is it accurate that the general counsel of the Treasury Department resigned over that?

Trump's Treasury Secretary: I will not be taking any other questions. pic.twitter.com/2sz5PDD5U0

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) May 28, 2026

It appears that Bessent is intent on allowing Trump to pillage the Treasury and award his worst allies with taxpayer dollars—without owing taxpayers any answers. This lack of transparency is par for the course, but Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is a criminal enterprise so egregious that it manages to stand out in a presidency that was already blatantly corrupt.

Philip Alito has been working in the department’s office of the general counsel since early last year, NOTUS reports, raising questions of conflicts of interest as the court hears cases concerning the Treasury, including President Trump’s deal to avoid tax audits of himself and his family, as well as his $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Alito’s office provides legal and policy advice to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and his employment seems to have been deliberately kept secret. Alito doesn’t have a public résumé or a LinkedIn account, and he isn’t mentioned anywhere on the Treasury Department’s website. His three professional bar listings have incorrect information regarding his previous employers and appear to be out of date, according to NOTUS.

An unnamed former official said that when Alito was hired in early 2025, he didn’t have an exact role and seemed to have been hired because the Trump administration wanted loyal employees across the federal government.

“Everybody knew who he was. I think it’s fair to say he kept a pretty low profile. I kind of had the impression that he was kind of a little bit sheepish about his celebrity affiliation. You’d go into a meeting and if people were introducing themselves by first and last name, he’d just say ‘Phil,’ not Phil Alito. He’s a pretty soft-spoken guy,” the official told NOTUS.

Another former official told the publication that Alito became an attorney-adviser, briefed on important department matters and able to offer legal advice.

“There’s no doubt he got that position because of who he is,” this official said. “[Advisers] are in all the meetings, so they knew all the issues across the board.”

Alito was on the job when other important cases concerning his department, such as challenges to Trump’s emergency tariffs, went before the high court, and his father never recused himself. With Trump’s anti-weaponization fund and his IRS settlement blocking audits of his taxes facing legal challenges, that is almost certain to happen again.

A spokesperson told NOTUS that “Philip Alito is currently detailed from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia as a Counselor in the Office of the General Counsel, and his portfolio covers a broad range of topics. As a matter of both professional and personal judgment, Phil does not counsel on any matters reasonably expected before the Supreme Court. Like all attorneys in the Office of the General Counsel, Phil is in compliance with all applicable ethical obligations.”

However, the department didn’t answer NOTUS’s questions on when Alito started at the agency, what his specific duties were, or whether he filed an ethics disclosure form. It seems that in the Trump administration, questions of ethics are easily ignored.

Kirk—a longtime right-wing activist who played a critical role in translating the MAGA agenda to America’s college-age youth—was assassinated in September. His death proved as polarizing as his life’s work: Millions of people reacted, some with shock and rage, and some with apparent glee.

An estimated 600 people were either penalized or let go from their places of employment, a punishment for their publicized opinions on the right-winger’s untimely demise.

The consequences were hailed by the Trump administration. In an honorary postmortem episode of Kirk’s podcast hosted by Vice President JD Vance, the number two Republican encouraged listeners to call the employers of anyone “celebrating Charlie’s murder.” Former Attorney General Pam Bondi likened the anti-Kirk posts to hate speech, and said at the time that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Legal experts fretted that the governmental response had set a dangerous precedent. Yet the settlements have proven to be a major win for freedom of speech.

One of the largest settlement recipients was a retired Tennessee cop, Larry Bushart, who was jailed for more than a month after he posted a meme related to Kirk’s assassination. Bushart settled an “unlawful incarceration” lawsuit for $835,000 last week.

“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” Bushart said in a statement last week. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy.”

Biologist Brittney Brown settled last week with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for $485,000 after she was fired for similar causes, also involving a Kirk-related meme on her Instagram account. In a statement, Brown claimed that all she wanted was her job back.

Suzanne Swierc made a comment about Kirk on her private Facebook page. But a screenshot of her post, taken and shared by someone else, ultimately cost Swierc her job at Ball State University. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the college on Swierc’s behalf. They settled on Tuesday, with Ball State University agreeing to pay $225,000.

“Suzanne was speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern when Ball State fired her over a private social media post,” Stevie Pactor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Indiana, said in a statement. “The First Amendment does not allow government institutions to retaliate in those circumstances, and this settlement reflects that.”

Many more such lawsuits could be on the horizon. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has recorded at least 14 First Amendment lawsuits in federal court over wrongful termination related to comments made about Kirk’s death. That tally does not include those brought by workers terminated in the private sector, or for employees who filed in state court, reported Axios Thursday.

Weiss announced Bilton as executive producer of the longtime evening segment on Thursday, replacing former executive producer Tanya Simon. While Bilton has produced documentaries, he has zero broadcast news experience.

“I’m here to lead this show, not preserve it under glass. That means honoring what works and being honest about what doesn’t. I have a notebook full of ideas. Some are about the show itself. Some are about the next generation of correspondents,” Bilton wrote in his introductory letter to staff. “Some are about the strange fact that we produce one extraordinary hour for one night a week in a world that consumes content around the clock. I’m excited to share them.”

Also on Thursday, CBS officially fired Sharyn Alfonsi, who warned a day earlier that the move was due to her protesting Weiss’s pulling of her story on El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison. The network additionally cut ties with 60 Minutes executive editor Draggan Mihailovich and correspondent Cecilia Vega.

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Alfonsi told The New York Times on Wednesday of her own contract being terminated. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

CBS reports that Trump made time to meet service members while he was at the medical center for his six-month physical, but did not meet any of the ones who were recovering from the recent war, and the White House refused to discuss the matter.

“President Trump was honored to meet with our amazing service members and medical staff while at Walter Reed Medical Center,” a White House spokesperson said.

In a speech at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, Trump mentioned the 13 soldiers who have died during the Iran war, calling them “wonderful souls” who “gave their lives” to ensure that Iran would not get a nuclear weapon. On Wednesday, he again said those 13 were “great people” and that losing them “is a terrible thing.”

“We want to lose very few, we want very few to be injured. We’re very careful, but war is war. War is dangerous,” Trump said.

When it comes to living, wounded soldiers, Trump doesn’t have a good track record. While trying to plan a big military parade in his first term, Trump said to his chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me.”

In 2019, at a welcome ceremony for Gen. Mark Milley being named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump was upset that an Army captain severely wounded in action in Afghanistan, Luis Avila, was brought to sing “God Bless America.” After Avila sang, Trump congratulated him, but afterward he told Milley, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Bloomberg reported that U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro has subpoenaed the massive social media platforms for the information of two anonymous users who made negative comments toward ICE. They are now part of a criminal investigation, even as Pirro’s office has yet to alert them of the charges. Attorneys for the users believe the investigations could be focused on officer endangerment regarding revealing the location of an ICE agent but dispute that their clients committed any crimes.

This is a clear attempt at intimidation of dissent and muzzling free speech, and it isn’t the first time. In February, the Department of Homeland Security sent out dozens of subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), demanding they divulge the personal information of users who have criticized or helped locate ICE agents.

The Trump administration is paying close attention to every Reddit thread and Instagram comment that opposes its massively unpopular deportation units—and is trying to take legal action against them. This insecure authoritarianism is a real low, even for this administration, especially as Trump moves to pay his own supporters who actually committed real crimes from a $1.8 billion slush fund.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Thursday that Washington “will not tolerate any effort to impose a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz.”

“Oman, in particular, should know the U.S. Treasury will aggressively target any actors involved—directly or indirectly—in facilitating tolls for the strait and any willing partners will be penalized,” Bessent wrote in a statement posted to X.

“All nations should reject outright any efforts by Iran to disrupt the free flow of commerce,” he continued. “Tehran’s days of terrorizing the region and the world are over.”

Trump shocked attendees of a Cabinet meeting Wednesday when he casually threatened Oman, promising to blow the country up if it tried to take control of the strait, which Oman borders.

“It’s international waters, and Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ’em up,” Trump said. “They understand that, they’ll be fine.”

The president insisted that “nobody” would control the Strait of Hormuz, and that the U.S. would instead “watch over” the passage.

But Bessent’s toll ban would actually undermine Trump’s plan to make a buck off the vital trade route: The president pitched the idea of imposing a toll on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz back in April, although it was not immediately clear how the U.S. would obtain control of the foreign waterway, let alone toll it.

Approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments funnel through the strait, which is situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Most of that oil is moved toward China or India. In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for about 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Nonetheless, the shuttered strait has caused a crisis of global proportions. The average cost of gas in the U.S. is $4.42 per gallon, with large swaths of the country 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.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last month, ruling he couldn’t claim the paper published the story with actual malice. Then Trump refiled and ran into another stumbling block on May 13, when U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that he couldn’t use the discovery process in his claims that the newspaper defamed him. In the new lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the Journal’s reporters tried to “falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter” but “failed to show proof.”

Trump’s reasoning for the lawsuit is hollow, especially considering that the House Oversight Committee included the birthday book, complete with the drawing from Trump, in a September release of Epstein materials from his estate. It’s more likely that Trump is trying to shake down the Journal for a big settlement and intimidate its owners, the Murdoch family, into favorable coverage.

It’s a pattern that Trump has followed against other media companies, which ended up forking over money that supposedly is going to Trump’s presidential library. Trump also has pending defamation lawsuits against The New York Times for $15 billion and the BBC for $10 billion. It seems that he won’t stop until he’s made them pay for reporting that he doesn’t like.

The White House has instructed federal prosecutors in Miami to avoid criminal investigations into acting President Delcy Rodríguez, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Rodríguez has been on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar since at least 2018, and has been tied to all sorts of criminal activity ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling. But all of that is apparently being brushed under the rug, as the Trump administration shows blatant favoritism toward the leader it installed earlier this year.

It is not clear if prosecutors were working toward charging Rodríguez with a crime. A Justice Department spokesperson told the AP in an email that “there was never an investigation into her to shut down.”

U.S. officials told the AP that the directive was intended to ease Rodríguez’s transition into power in Venezuela, and to avoid further destabilizing the oil-rich nation.

Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to invade Venezuela in early January, sending hundreds of troops through its capital city, Caracas, to capture the country’s 13-year ruler, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife were transported to New York to face federal narcotics charges, to which they both have pleaded not guilty.

Trump failed to notify Congress before doing so, but he didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, was the major political benefactor of his sudden abduction. Despite her criminal affiliations, the Trump administration has opened the door for her to do business with the U.S., lifting sanctions (that were placed during Trump’s first term after she undermined Venezuelan democracy by supporting Maduro’s authoritarian rule) and allowing her to reestablish ties with U.S. banks, according to the Associated Press.

Beyond that, Trump has uplifted her name in an effort to sanitize her character, describing her as a “terrific person.”

“The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate,” Miller wrote Wednesday over a post of Talarico, a baseless and nonsensical insult. Talarico is not trans, but has expressed support.

“Shut up you ugly fuck,” the Democrats responded, easily ratioing Miller’s original post.

That harsh, scary language got his wife, Katie Miller posting in his defense.

“Paulina Mangubat is who runs @TheDemocrats account. She’s 30, unmarried with no kids. Put your name on it next time,” Miller wrote, posting a picture of Mangubat. “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like. It’s why Pew reports 50% of them have been diagnosed with a mental condition.”

For what it’s worth, Miller’s post is pure projection. In the single picture she posted Mangubat looks nice, put together, and professional—much better than her husband who started this entire exchange in the first place.

Miller then went on Fox News to talk about how saying “ugly fuck” on X to her husband is the kind of behavior that led to the multiple failed assassination attempts on Donald Trump, even calling it “violent”—a ridiculous argument given Trump’s own violent rhetoric. Meanwhile, her husband is part of an administration that has shot and killed American citizens in the street. They know very well what real violence is. And what’s lost here is that this is all part of a last-gasp GOP attempt to slander Talarico because they’re afraid he’ll beat their boy Ken Paxton in the midterms.

For her part, Mangubat responded in good nature to Miller’s deranged post.

“Well, now seems like a good time to share that I’m getting married! We just put down the deposit on the venue and bought my dress lol,” she wrote. “I didn’t end up picking this one but I thought it looked nice.”

U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser Mike Brown, both political appointees, have been pushing staff at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for prototypes of a $250 bill with Trump’s name and face on it, The Washington Post reports. U.S. law doesn’t allow for living people to be placed on bills, and employees were alarmed enough to anonymously speak to the Post.

Last August and September, Beach presented staff at the bureau with mock-up designs of the bill, with one of them featuring Trump’s face in the middle between the signatures of the president and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

The Post spoke to the designer, British painter Iain Alexander, who said Trump suggested changes such as adding the colors red, white, and blue, as well as a logo commemorating the country’s 250 anniversary in July.

“He likes to call me his favorite British artist,” Alexander told the publication. Alexander is a former competitive swimmer and DJ who calls himself a royal portrait artist of Queen Elizabeth II and other royal figures.

Putting pictures of living people on American currency has been illegal since 1866, and a bill to allow Trump’s face on a $250 bill was introduced last year but has stalled in Congress. The bureau’s printing director, Patricia Solimene, was reassigned from her position after she tried to explain the legal and procedural hurdles to producing the Trump money, saying it would take years.

“She had told them we’re not authorized to do this. We can’t progress any further, and all the stakeholders have not even met to discuss the next steps,” an employee anonymously told the Post. “Currency often takes six to eight years to produce a new bill, particularly one of such high value.”

On April 27, Solimene said she was reassigned, telling employees the next day that she was leaving with a “heavy heart” and that it was “not my choice.” She said she “never sacrificed the values or character of myself or the organization and always prioritized the U.S. Currency Program and the value each employee brings to the mission.” Brown was named the bureau’s acting director soon afterward.

Trump’s second term in office has been a vanity project, as he has plastered his face and name on federal buildings and the U.S. passport. He has also sought to build a massive ballroom at the White House, a gigantic arch in Washington, D.C., and a golf course near the Potomac. He’s even trying to name an entire class of battleships after himself. Will he get his own money too?

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.”

Millia Vanillia also dropped out Thursday afternoon, stating that they were “shocked” to see themselves listed. “My sister and I were shocked to see our name, ‘Milli Vanilli’, as one of the performers,” Jodie Rocco wrote to the AP.

Vanilla Ice doubled down, as a representative told AP he was “proud” to be there.

The other scheduled acts—the Commodores, Flo Rida, and Martina McBride—have yet to make any announcements. This lineup of artists was already questionable given 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 Trump for it. More withdrawals may soon come.

This story has been updated.

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.

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.

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.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just uttered an extraordinary quote. He said this: “I don’t care about the midterms.” But it actually got more revealing from there on out. In discussing what just happened in Texas, where the MAGA extremist will now be the GOP nominee in the Senate race, Trump accidentally revealed that he’s still under the delusion that he and MAGA are popular. Meanwhile, three different indicators in the polling contain terrible news for Trump and the GOP. And new reports say that Republicans are growing more alarmed about the midterms. Some of them are plainly afraid to say so. So how much longer can they stand by while Trump drags them down?

We’re discussing all this with New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who’s been arguing that Trump’s historic unpopularity gives Democrats all kinds of new openings. Felipe, nice to have you on.

Felipe De La Hoz: Always good to be here, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said at his Cabinet meeting. He was talking about how he’s winning a huge victory over Iran, which he isn’t. That aside, here’s how he characterized that.

Donald Trump (voiceover): They thought they were going to outwait me, you know, ‘We’ll outwait him, he’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms. Look what happened last night. That was the prelude to the midterms. People understand it. They know that it’s very simple—Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I’m doing that for the world. I’m not doing it just for us.

Sargent: So let’s break this up into two pieces. First, Trump’s claim that he doesn’t care about the midterms. I think this is quite literally true. He doesn’t care what happens to Republicans, really. He really doesn’t give a shit. And it’s also true that Trump’s war is absolutely tanking their chances. What do you make of all that?

De La Hoz: Yeah, as is often the case with Trump, it really could be interpreted in a variety of different ways. And I doubt that they’re going to really clarify. On the one hand, it could mean that he literally doesn’t care, which I think is possible.

As far as American political figures go, he is probably the one that has most openly and with gusto thrown his political allies under the bus. I think it could also be a reference to the idea that his MAGA-endorsed candidates have been winning primaries in the last several weeks. I think it could be interpreted as him saying that this is an indication of the strength of his brand, which I think is mistaken.

We saw something similar play out in 2018 and 2022 with his MAGA candidates winning primaries and then getting slaughtered in the general.

Sargent: To your point about how Trump really only cares about how he’s doing with MAGA—the second piece of what Trump said in that little clip is really telling. He says, “The prelude to the midterms is what happened last night,” meaning Tuesday night. He’s clearly alluding to MAGA extremist Ken Paxton getting the GOP nomination in the Texas Senate race, something Trump engineered.

But what’s funny, Felipe, about that is that this has improved Democratic chances in the Senate race, though it’s certainly not going to be easy by any means. That aside, Trump is saying that it’s good that Republicans nominated the MAGA whack job. He really is under the illusion that he and MAGA are popular. He revealed that accidentally, I think. Your thoughts on that?

De La Hoz: Yeah, I mean, Texas is this great white whale for Democrats. And I think there’s sort of an intermediate point that we have to look at this [from]. On the one hand, I think that this idea that there will be some sort of Democratic savior who’s going to run such an excellent campaign that will overcome all the odds and deliver a decisive Democratic victory in a statewide race in Texas is probably not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

However, the idea that it’s also some kind of pipe dream or fantasy, and that it can’t happen—Texas is Texas, blah, blah, blah—I think is clearly wrong and has been disproven, as you wrote, by the success—not the victory, but the success—of the O’Rourke campaign a few years ago.

I remember when Trump endorsed Paxton, which was really on the eve of the election, that there was a lot of reporting about how Republican strategists in the state and in Washington were furious, already almost not writing off the race, but really concerned about the impact that this was going to have. And I think they’re looking at the same polling—more polling than we are. They have their own internal polling and they realize that this is going to be, I think, disastrous.

And James Talarico, I think, as you wrote, is someone who has several layers of credibility. He has the angle of his faith, which is something that we haven’t necessarily seen a Democrat successfully exploit in a race like this. And I think there’s something interesting about him, which is that so far what we’ve seen is that he is very willing and able to attempt to welcome moderates and independents, while at the same time he’s not doing the kind of bipartisan kumbaya thing of, “My opponent is a good man, this is a contest of ideas,” yada yada.

Sargent: James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, is reaching out to independents and moderates and Republicans, but he’s also making it very clear that MAGA and Trumpism and Trump are a disaster for this country. He’s not sidestepping discussion of what Trump and Trumpism have done to us. And that’s really critical.

Also, to your point, it’s going to be really hard. We have a piece on this up at NewRepublic.com. We’re under no illusions here. This is a very hard state for Democrats. Beto O’Rourke came nearly three points away from winning, and he really outperformed in some major ways. It’s going to be a big lift for Talarico to get there.

It’s not impossible though. And even if he loses, he’s probably going to end up forcing Republicans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to save Texas, which could impact the rest of the map. Just want to clarify though—Talarico could win. It’s possible, just very hard.

De La Hoz: I think in my lifetime—presuming that we maintain the same sort of electoral political system—I think that it’s entirely conceivable, and I would say even likely, that at some stage a Democrat will win a statewide race in Texas, just given the demographics, given what we’ve seen. I don’t know if it’ll be Talarico, but it could be. I don’t think that this is a crazy pie-in-the-sky idea.

Sargent: It’s absolutely possible. As I wrote in my piece, and tried to argue anyway, if there’s a time it’s going to happen, a lot of events are lining up right now that make it at least plausible.

Just as an aside on this, the Texas Senate race is going to be really interesting on immigration. Paxton is a MAGA radical, a true extremist whack job. And the Democratic nominee, Talarico, has a striking position on the issue. He calls for increased border security to distance himself from Joe Biden, but he also speaks about the need to be welcoming to immigrants, how immigrants are a positive good for our country, and how they deserve due process and fair treatment. And critically, Talarico casts this as a matter of his Christian faith.

You wrote about this: Is there an opening here for Democrats to strike kind of a new set of moral positions on immigration, due to Trump’s hideous unpopularity and just the horrors he’s unleashed?

De La Hoz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when it comes to Texas, I’m unfortunately not sure that being a complete immigration whack job is a disqualifier, in part because obviously Greg Abbott was sort of the original whack job. And I think he’s kind of a dark horse for a template for how to use immigration as a political cudgel in a really messed-up way, with what he did with the busing and whatever.

But setting that aside, we are in a different situation right now where, historically, immigration has been the impenetrable issue where Trump and Republicans writ large seem to enjoy a sort of default level of deference from the voting public—the assumption that they would handle it better, whatever that means in the median voter’s mind—in a similar way to the economy writ large. People don’t necessarily grasp it in its granularity, but they felt that Republicans did better. That is done, I think.

I don’t think that there is an inherent turn towards trusting Democrats, necessarily, which is why I have argued for not just this approach of responding to what Republicans are doing—though obviously Democrats need to and should respond particularly to the truly atrocious things that are happening in all of our names—but setting out an actual cohesive, forceful, unified vision that can be packaged and repeated by candidates all around the country, with their regional variations, but that actually exists on a separate axis than the defensive posture that Democrats have adopted for the most part—which is to say, not just We’re going to do enforcement better, which has really been the core message, I think, of especially national Democrats.

Sargent: I agree 100 percent. And that’s why I’m really heartened to see James Talarico talking about immigration as a positive good for the country—an affirmative good. It’s a good thing for us. And by the way, the point about Texas being a place where very hard-line immigration politics works—I think we’re in a different place than we were even just a couple of years ago, because now people have seen violent white nationalism as an agenda play out on the streets of major cities across the country and they are recoiling in horror.

And by the way, Trump has thrown away his 2024 gains with Latino voters as a result. So I do think this is the time to step up and provide something affirmative, moral, coherent, clear, and say: Here’s what we’re for. We tried it their way. Mass deportations failed this country, and we’re going to do something better. That’s what I’d like to see.

De La Hoz: Yeah. I mean, what ended up happening was that some of these things went from being theoretical to realized. And unfortunately, it’s a longtime American tradition that people have to sometimes just touch the stove.

There are so many stories all over the country published everywhere where people on the ground in various cities and suburbs and exurbs and even in rural areas are saying, Look, I had this conception of the enforcing the borders agenda or whatever that was going to entail—rounding up these criminals, yada yada.

We hear it over and over again. And once the understanding really sets in that that’s not what anyone meant, that’s not what Stephen Miller wants, that’s not what they’re working toward, that’s not what they’ll accept as victory in this anti-immigration zealotry—people are not only against it, they’re repulsed, they are disgusted.

And so I think that viscerality, that feeling, is something that can be harnessed, if Democrats want to use it as a hook to then also present their alternative agenda. It has to be both things. We’re going to hold these people accountable, we’re going to ensure that this doesn’t happen again is a powerful message. And, Here’s what our vision is—which, as you mentioned, is something that Talarico is attempting to do now. Here’s how we think these things should go, which is just not something that has been part of the conversation.

Sargent: So we just got hit with a barrage of new polling that’s very bad for Trump and Republicans. G. Elliott Morris’s new poll has the Democratic lead in the generic House ballot matchup at eight points now. It’s been growing. If that continues, if it holds at eight, if it turns out to be eight at the end of the day—that’s a wave.

Meanwhile, in the new YouGov tracking poll, Trump has sunk to an approval rating of 34 percent with 59 percent disapproving. That’s around 25 points underwater. And critically, that may not be an outlier, because in the polling averages collected by 50 Plus One, a website, Trump’s approval is at 36 percent. He continues to slide. Felipe, all the polls are telling the same story right now, no?

De La Hoz: Yeah, I think so. And look, I know that there’s been a lot of skepticism about polling that has been borne out of the last several years, where there have been some significant misses, let’s call it. But I don’t think there’s any way to ignore the totality of the polling here. And it’s palpable. It’s palpable all around the country that there is a discontent and there is a sense that people were sold a bill of goods that wasn’t true.

And it’s like almost every day I hear Trump or some of his cadre say something that is just a dream for a Democratic strategist. The idea that they have unified behind the notion of a large billion-dollar ballroom as some sort of necessary policy, as some sort of objective—this grand objective is laughable, right? Especially when people are struggling economically.

There’s this trend that exists already. And then every day they’re sort of lustily shooting themselves in the foot because I think they’re just incapable. Nobody wants to displease the king.

Sargent: Even Trump’s Republican allies are admitting this. The New York Times had a pretty remarkable piece just a couple of days ago reporting that Republicans are growing frustrated by Trump’s megalomania, basically. They put it a little more politely than that, but that’s what they meant.

It’s Trump obsessing over his ballroom, obsessing over monuments to himself. That’s really panicking Republicans. And they’re afraid to, of course, say outright that this is what’s happening, and so that just makes it worse.

A couple of quotes from Republican strategists that I want to read. One is from Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. He says, “If Trump’s highest goal were to maintain control of Congress, he would not be doing what he is doing.” And then on top of that, we’ve got David Urban, a Republican strategist and ally of Trump, telling The Independent, “It’s going to be a tough fall unless things dramatically change.”

Felipe, it’s an interesting loop and an interesting trap that they’re kind of caught in here. The megalomania is sinking them, but it’s also the megalomania that prevents them from going to Trump and saying, we really need a change here, right?

De La Hoz: Yeah. I mean, they have seen the primary results, as we all have, where Bill Cassidy got knocked off even though he voted, infamously now, to confirm RFK Jr. as a sort of bone to Trump and all this stuff—and it wasn’t enough to save him. And so they’re all terrified that they’ll either lose the primary or the general, right? That’s the position that a lot of these elected officials find themselves in.

But one thing that it’s important to keep in mind is that what we’ve seen for the last year and a half is a Congress that has been fundamentally absent from the mechanics of government. It’s a Congress that has openly allowed Trump to usurp their constitutionally delegated functions, whether it be tariffs or whatever else; that is fine with it, has allowed it to happen, and has been paralyzed to the point where just passing a budget with very little policy—the very, very basic mechanics of keeping government open—is like some sort of feat.

And so what Democrats would also do well to remind people is that this isn’t just about acting as a check on Trump necessarily, but that if Democrats were to take control of the House and the Senate, then a lot of things could be put into motion that would severely—or could severely—constrain and actually very functionally limit what Trump is able to do. Congress can take away some of these executive tools that have been misused. Congress can haul officials in under oath and force them to testify about certain things.

Sargent: To conclude this, I really think that after 2026, American politics could get a lot crazier even than it is right now. That’s going to be pretty crazy too, and it’s going to be pretty rough going, I think, for a lot of us. But Trump is out there now saying that he doesn’t care about the midterms. I think he’s going to care about them soon enough. Felipe De La Hoz, thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you.

De La Hoz: Thanks so much, Greg. I’m here whenever you need me.

Siri Hustvedt nods to Proust in Ghost Stories, her memoir of the death of her husband of 40 years, the writer Paul Auster, and of the asphyxiating grief that replaced him. For Hustvedt, grief is an epistemological rupture that makes nonsense of time, perception, and the arrangement of the self. Grief is also a force inextricable from memory, and since there’s no hope that an actual ghost will appear, what is forlorn longing for the lost but the worst kind of haunting?

Before he died, Auster told Hustvedt that he wished to return to her as a ghost. And although Hustvedt includes a shivering scene after Auster’s funeral, as she lies on their bed and unmistakably feels Auster standing beside her, she experiences his revenant presence most strongly as an onslaught of unaccountable disturbances in daily life. Her breathing and blood pressure are now all wrong; her nerves “buzz and hum.” Each day, “there is a dreamlike quality to my life now. I climb into a half-filled bathtub and realize I have forgotten to remove my socks.” She catalogs her symptoms with a clinician’s precision—disrupted sleep, errant bowels—yet the catalog resists medicalization. “I am now in the business of recollecting myself,” she writes—recollection as both remembering and reassembling. The future has collapsed into an incoherent present. How fatiguing to have to tutor yourself through mundanity. She must grasp the banister.

What ultimately emerges from Ghost Stories is a picture of grief as a form of knowledge—anguished and fragmentary, but knowledge nonetheless. Hustvedt’s masterful artistic achievement lies in her ability to render this knowledge without reducing it to bumper-sticker mantra or, worse, to theory. She writes as both subject and analyst, participant and observer, and the tug between these roles generates the book’s intellectual energy. She subjects her personal calamity to rigorous scrutiny without sacrificing its emotional or spiritual verity. More important, her grief is not performed but examined, not exhibited but interrogated. Ghost Stories belongs less to the tradition of therapeutic memoir than to that of philosophical meditation you can locate in Augustine, in Rousseau, in Cellini. 

Hustvedt’s story opens with a blunt, unblinking statement: “I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead.” Time for her has become “deranged beyond recognition”: Unmoored and rudderless, adrift within an annihilating sadness, Hustvedt has to learn how to live again, while recalibrating her comprehension of what living means now. “When he stopped,” she asks, “did lived time stop in me?” 

She must also work out not only how to survive the enormity of Auster’s death but how to think, how to see herself and the world, without him: “I felt more vivid to myself when I was with Paul.” Strafed by his suffering and death, exhausted by “the enactments of ordinary life” that continue nonetheless, she admits: “I have lost the sanctuary of my own thoughts.” For a thinker of such exquisite taste and grasping wisdom, a writer incapable of a limp sentence or lazy answer, the loss of her own thoughts is right next door to the hell she’s already living in. Her new notion of self then, one without Auster to accompany her, becomes suspect, uncertain, a scaffold that trembles beneath the tentative steps of deep sorrow:

I am mourning Paul, but most of the time, I am mourning Siri and Paul. I am mourning AND. I am mourning how the AND made me feel in the world.   

The memoir begins soon after April 30, 2024, the day of Auster’s death, and proceeds through weeks of what Hustvedt will later call “cognitive splintering”—a phrase worthy of William James, whose “wild facts” she invokes. These are the experiences that resist assimilation into any tidy system, any neat theory that might make sense of what cannot. For Hustvedt, this gutting grief is precisely such a wild fact: incapable of being ignored, never mind denied or explained—“the truth is unbearable to me, and yet it must be borne.” But how does she negotiate that fact when her heart has been shorn and her mind stumbles, staggers through another day’s onerous tasks?

Hustvedt’s early chapters center on the immediate material aftermath of Auster’s death: the sorting of pills, the emptying of closets, the handling of objects that once mediated care. The bag of motley medications becomes a grotesque archive of suffering, a pharmacological memento mori. Each bottle is a failed promise, a record of the medical system’s lamentable limits, signs of the hope that did not work—“dirty, sneaking hope,” as Jean Anouilh once had it. Hustvedt’s attention to objects—Auster’s pens, his typewriter ribbons, his boxer shorts—will remind you of the fetishistic detail of Proust, but without Proust’s aesthetics of consolation. There is no madeleine here to restore the past. Instead, objects testify to emptiness, to irreversibility. The typewriter, once animated by Auster’s “percussive” rhythm, becomes “a speechless thing.” And then there’s his chair in their dining room, “the blue chair where he ate breakfast every morning and ate dinner every night, the chair underneath which are scratches in the floorboards because he sat heavily in that chair and sometimes moved it while he was sitting”—scratches that are now “traces of his body’s living weight.”

Here the memoir’s midsection turns more pointedly inward to the domestic space, to the Brooklyn house that becomes both setting and subject. The house is no mere backdrop; it is an “architecture of memory.” The household routines continue—opening the dishwasher, setting the table, taking in the mail—but their meaning has drained away. One of the memoir’s most painful moments occurs when Hustvedt notices a missing plate after a family dinner and cannot immediately account for it. Habit, as Henri Bergson taught us, is the sediment of duration; when it is swept away, time itself becomes not just unruly but uncanny. “Forty-three years,” Hustvedt repeats—the duration of their marriage—as if incanting a spell. The repetition is both assertion and question: What does such a duration mean? The answer, if there is one, lies not in the number but in the narrative that surrounds it, in the accumulation of gestures, habits, and shared perceptions that constituted a life together—that constituted love.

The memoir proceeds chronologically through May and June of 2024, interweaving present-tense narration, Auster’s unfinished letters to his grandson, Hustvedt’s own diary entries and emails to friends, and recollections of their life together. These scenes are not digressions but necessary interludes, evidence that the past persists within the present, what Freud might call Nachträglichkeit—deferred action. Throughout, the prose oscillates between much-needed detachment and deeply lyrical engagement. This oscillation mimics grief’s dual nature: it is both a physiological disruption and an existential undoing. “Grief is not constant,” she observes. “I can seal myself up for days … and then gale winds come.” 

The one metaphor Hustvedt locks on repeatedly, and the one that is the most intelligible to her, is that of amputation. Auster is both here and gone, a phantom limb. “I feel Paul as a gaping hole in my torso, from neck to guts, as if parts of me have been cut out, but I also feel he should be out there beyond my body. I want to pull him into me, but there’s nothing to embrace.” This doubleness—absence and presence—is the chief paradox of the memoir, of all lived grief. It denies our attempts at resolution because it is constitutive of grief itself. He’s not coming back, but he’s not going away either. 

The book’s final sections confront the problem of time more explicitly. Hustvedt reflects on numbers—43 years of marriage, 77 years of Auster’s life—as attempts to quantify what cannot be measured: “As I repeat the number seventy-seven to myself, I hear a jingle of enchantment in the two sevens; seven as prime and indivisible, as lucky; seven as in seven seas, seven voyages, and the seven wonders of the world, a number swollen with magic and the sacred in many cultures.” Numbers, she suggests, offer the illusion of mastery over the unholdable, serving our need for quantification, a belief that reality, or truth, can be reduced to data. It can’t.

In his book The Future of Truth, filmmaker Werner Herzog, whom Auster admired, distinguishes between a derisible “accountant’s truth” and “the ecstatic truth” of art and lived experience. Hustvedt knows the difference. Still, in desperation she clings to numbers as talismans even as she recognizes their impotence. This ambivalence is emblematic of the memoir’s central program: a refusal of both naïve consolation—don’t insult her with clichéd talk of silver linings, please—and of soul-shattering despair. Hustvedt neither denies the finality of death nor relinquishes the persistence of love. Instead, she inhabits the tension between them.

At Auster’s end, Hustvedt brings us through the almost second-by-second undoing of his life—“I wanted to be as close as possible to his body as he died.… Haunted eyes. I kissed him over and over”—and these scenes are, almost literally, unbearable to experience: You have to stop, put down the book, and, with Hustvedt, gather whatever strands of fortitude remain for you to continue.

In Les Misérables, Hugo observes that “beyond a certain pitch of suffering, men are overcome by a kind of ghostly indifference.” Hustvedt has gone beyond that pitch, and Ghost Stories is partly about the effort to find her way back from it. There is no manufactured uplift at the end of her telling. She knows the abyss left by Auster’s death will never fill. But after six months of his absence she has begun to reassemble herself: in small parts, in disparate places. “I can’t predict what will happen,” she admits. “My grief won’t end, but it will keep changing.” Hustvedt’s relationship with Auster will keep changing too, for as long as her love and memory last. D.H. Lawrence, in a 1923 letter, was characteristically to the point: “The dead don’t die. They look on and help”—and that’s as ghostly as we’re going to get.

As that CNN article shows, a lot of people in America are struggling to get by right now, thanks in part to a huge spike in prices caused by President Trump’s war against Iran, which retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The nationwide average for a gallon of gas is $4.45, per AAA’s tracker. Consumer sentiment just hit an all-time low—worse not only than during the Great Recession or the pandemic, but even the oil crises of the 1970s. Since 2021, CNN notes, prices are up more than 25 percent.

The high cost of everything played a pivotal role in the 2024 election, dragging down approval of the Biden-Harris administration and boosting Trump’s campaign, which focused on bringing down prices. Now, looking ahead to the November midterms and the 2028 presidential election, the table has turned: Without really doing much of anything—largely because it holds no power in Washington—the Democratic Party is favored to retake at least one chamber of Congress in the fall and will likely be in a strong position to retake the presidency two years later. Affordability politics has become a pendulum, with consumer sentiment driving electoral shifts: Voters punish incumbent parties for high prices and empower minority parties, and then a few years later they reverse course. That’s good news for the Democrats in the near term—but a warning to them, as well.

There is a temptation to view these electoral shifts as being driven by events—that post-pandemic inflation doomed the Democrats and now Iran war inflation is kneecapping Republicans. That is hard to argue with, but it obscures something else: Affordability politics predates both crises. It is the second-most-important political trend of the last decade, behind the rise of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. As The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey wrote in a shrewd piece last weekend, even many people who are not drowning in this economy still hate it. “People have stopped believing that the economy can be good, and have lost the willingness to admit that they are doing well,” Lowery writes. “That pessimism might be harder to fix than an actual downturn.” That pessimism has also become a stubborn part of our politics, and will no doubt persist in two years—even if the war ends, the Strait of Hormuz reopens, and global commerce returns to “normal.” Democrats need to prepare right now for this political reality—and if and when they retake power, they need to have a plan to deal with what Lowery calls the “permacession.”

Here’s Lowery running through the data:

Ninety-six out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one. The rate of underemployment is low, and the rate of labor-force participation is high, meaning that there’s no pool of discouraged workers lurking behind the marquee jobs statistics. Young workers are struggling to establish themselves, given businesses’ caution around hiring. Still, the tight labor market has fueled wage gains that have swelled family budgets, even after accounting for inflation. Real disposable personal income, which measures how much spending power Americans actually have, is at a record high.

It’s a bit perplexing to read this, given that prices are soaring again, but she’s right. The U.S. economy is, in spite of everything, still quite good—and it looks even better when compared to other countries.

The idea that the economy is in good shape, but people still complain about it, was a familiar refrain from Biden administration officials—including the president—and many of their allies. They were perhaps right to be bitter. They had done a masterful job of managing the end of the pandemic and reopening the economy—better than anyone else in the world. They blamed Republicans and, especially, the media for fueling negative feelings, essentially arguing that the press was gaslighting the people, who simply didn’t know how good they had it.

That is never a good electoral message, of course, and it was especially lousy coming from a blundering 82-year-old president. But Lowery’s piece offers a better, if frustrating, explanation: Americans are just kind of miserable right now.

She offers a number of potential explanations: political polarization, the sticker shock of inflation, declining trust in institutions, phone addiction. There isn’t a clean explanation, but what’s offered is more thorough—and in some ways more dispiriting—than the one offered by Biden. Americans are miserable right now for reasons that aren’t easy to explain, which means elected politicians can’t message their way to success. There’s no easy way to convince people who think the economy is terrible that it’s good—even if it is.

That was the Biden plan in a nutshell: to tell people about all the effective things they were doing to steer the economy. But this problem is deeper than the political class has acknowledged, and it’s possibly systemic. As costs rise, so are bankruptcies, delinquencies, and credit card debt. But ending the most immediate driver of high prices—the Iran war—may not make a significant difference in stemming those other trends.

Americans probably have been miserable for longer than we realize. Economic anxiety was indeed a factor in the 2016 presidential campaign, even if some on the liberal left dismissed such claims as whitewashing MAGA’s obvious racism. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign was undoubtedly driven by some of the trends Lowery describes, particularly economic dissatisfaction among young people.

In fact, Democrats could look to that campaign as a model for how to deal with the new politics of affordability. It’s not enough to argue that you will be a good steward of the economy, as Biden did. There needs to be a grander message about why people are miserable and how you can fix it—which is something that Sanders offered in 2016 and that other politicians, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are offering today. Will that arrest the misery crisis? Maybe not. But it’s clear that nothing either party is offering right now is working.

Extreme heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the United States. It’s not exactly breaking news at this point to say that the Trump administration denies the climate crisis that’s now helping the U.S. smash long-held temperature records year after year. It’s worth emphasizing, however, that such denial isn’t a matter of abstract doctrinal dispute—or even just a means to allow fossil fuel companies to drill and pollute whatever and wherever they’d like. As the coming summer will likely illustrate, climate denial often takes fairly invisible, quotidian forms, like weakening little-known regulatory programs as a way of helping out employers who’d rather not cool down their overheated workers. This sort of ordinary, everyday climate denial doesn’t always make headlines. But as temperatures continue to rise, it will almost certainly rack up a body count.

In the case of the United States, at least, that kind of denial can mean just not changing much about the status quo. There are still relatively few federal protections in this country against extreme heat. That’s long been the case with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is charged with keeping workers safe on the job. The Biden administration proposed a rule in 2024 that would have established the country’s first nationwide workplace heat safety standard. It aimed to mandate that employers offer specific protections—like water and shade breaks—once temperatures cross dangerous thresholds. It also meant to require employers to make certain upgrades at job sites and conduct regular audits and trainings related to heat risks. Unsurprisingly, that rule has faced harsh pushback from business groups. While the Trump administration so far hasn’t opted for a full withdrawal, favored by groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it also hasn’t moved that regulatory process forward since last summer. If it does, OSHA has signaled that it could significantly water down the proposed rule.

Last month, in the meantime, OSHA issued a new and notably vaguer National Emphasis Program on heat-related hazards. When that program was first launched in 2022, OSHA set out a goal of increasing heat-related workplace inspections in every region by 100 percent over previous baselines, making sure that bosses offer water and shade in warmer temperatures. Before the program was implemented, OSHA performed just 200 heat-related inspections. Between April 2022 and December 2024—while the National Emphasis Program was in place—it conducted more than 7,000. Those inspections resulted in 60 heat citations for violations of the general duty clause—OSHA’s omnibus safe-workplace requirements—and 1,392 “hazard alert” letters to employers, laying out steps to keep workers safe when it’s hot.

That program’s latest, Trump-era iteration, which eliminates and replaces the Biden-era version, makes no reference to specific numerical inspection goals, leaving it an open question as to just how many proactive inspections OSHA will perform. Data released by Senator Elizabeth Warren earlier this year—which isn’t regularly published—showed that overall inspections had declined by about 20 percent in the first six months of 2025; Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget requested a steep 7.5 percent cut for OSHA. Several elements of the 2022 National Emphasis Program remain in place—including randomized inspections on heat advisory days—but the new version has removed 46 designated “high-risk” industries while adding 23. Among the industries no longer considered to involve heat-related hazards are support activities for mining, waste treatment and disposal, motor vehicle manufacturing, and basic chemical manufacturing. The new program is slated to remain in place for the next five years.

The administration’s slow erosion of modest heat protections like the National Emphasis Program won’t get the same kind of attention as Trump Cabinet members’ bombastic sound bites about being in a “golden era” of fossil energy, or Trump himself posting nonsense about climate science on social media. Arguably, letting such programs lapse—and scrapping the proposed OSHA rule outright—would be newsier. Whether there’s some grand communications plan at work or not, the White House’s quieter forms of climate denial could end up being some of its most dangerous.

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.

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?

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.”

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.”

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.”

Markwayne Mullin: "You have a senator complain because he got splattered with a pepper ball. I'm sorry, you probably shouldn't have been there" pic.twitter.com/vLXpR1UXNO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 27, 2026

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.”

Mullin: There was only a handful of individuals that was refusing to eat because they want their ethnic food. Well, they go back to the country and get whatever food they want. The fact is we're giving them the calories they want. This isn't Holiday Inn. Uh, we're giving… pic.twitter.com/FHpJAcfQce

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 27, 2026

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.

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.”

The president could be seen with his eyes closed for a prolonged period of time while sitting right next to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And he seemed to struggle to keep them open while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke, as well.

Marco Rubio is putting Trump to sleep pic.twitter.com/qwvMuIlDuR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 27, 2026

Trump appears to doze off while Pete Hegseth briefs the Cabinet on the Iran war pic.twitter.com/asdE1OHaqR

— FactPost (@factpostnews) May 27, 2026

This comes just one day after the administration’s Rapid Response 47 X account spent hours lambasting various CNN hosts for blinking or looking down, equating it to Trump’s obvious naps. But people aren’t that stupid—the president is an old man, turning 80 in a matter of days, and sometimes he’ll doze off in a meeting. And we should be having these conversations about his health because his naps, swollen ankles, and mysterious bruises, as well as the constant denial from his team about them, only makes the situation more alarming.

This is at least the eighth time President Trump has fallen asleep on camera this year.

During a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump whether he would accept a short-term deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that would allow Iran and Oman to control the essential passageway for global trade. Trump claimed that “nobody” would control the Strait of Hormuz, but that the U.S. would “watch over it.”

“It’s international waters, and Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ’em up,” Trump said. “They understand that, they’ll be fine.”

Reporter: Would you accept a short-term deal that allows Iran and Oman to control the strait?

Trump: It’s going to be open to everybody.

Reporter: Who would control it?

Trump: Nobody. We’ll watch over it. Oman will have to behave or we’ll blow them up. pic.twitter.com/5jnH6pqPUL

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 27, 2026

The so-called peace president’s remarks were shockingly violent, and at odds with other reports.

The U.S. and Iran are reportedly finalizing a draft “memorandum of understanding” that would require the U.S. military to withdraw its forces from the region and lift the blockade on Iranian ports, according to a report on IRIB, Iranian state television. In return Iran, in cooperation with Oman, would restore trade through the Strait of Hormuz to prewar levels within one month.

The White House pushed back against the report Wednesday morning, calling it “a complete fabrication.”

Maureen Galindo’s candidacy was anything but normal: The sex therapist faced national criticism for her antisemitic remarks, which involved pledging to turn ICE centers into “castration processing” facilities “for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Galindo nonetheless shocked state Democrats when she placed first in the March 3 primary—although not by enough to avoid a runoff.

Shortly afterward, Galindo’s small campaign—which had just a few thousand dollars in the tank—was infused with nearly $1 million from a mysterious super PAC, Lead Left, which was formed on April 24. The enormous donation forced Democrats to contend with the possibility that Galindo could actually win the Democratic nomination in Texas’s 35th congressional district, which was recently gerrymandered in order to heavily favor Republican candidates.

Lead Left went to great lengths to conceal the identities and political affiliations of its backers, though it proudly announced on its website that it “stands against MAGA extremists who will infect our country with Donald Trump’s agenda.” New reporting, however, reveals that’s not so likely.

Galindo’s windfall came by way of Caleb Crosby, the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which serves as the primary super PAC of the House Republicans, Judd Legum reported via his Popular Information substack Wednesday. Crosby also serves as the treasurer of the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC for Senate Republicans.

Several details ultimately tie Crosby to the fundraising venture: Some of his other entities, connected to his political compliance firm Crosby Ottenhoff Group, share the same address as Lead Left, according to Legum.

Nebraska Public Media also found that the original Lead Left website included a snippet of code that linked out to WinRed, the predominant Republican fundraising website.

But the race to fill the Texas House seat isn’t the only campaign where Lead Left has inserted itself. The secretive super PAC also intervened in Democratic primaries in critical races in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, and has spent more than $2.4 million to date on political ads targeting Democratic primary races across the country.

Earlier this month, the Campaign Legal Center, or CLC, accused Lead Left PAC of violating federal reporting rules by funneling its money through two newly formed shell companies, Piruzi LLC and OTG Media LLC, in what the CLC claimed was an attempt to “conceal the actual vendors” and undermine “crucial electoral transparency for voters.”

This drew roars from the MAGA faithful at Paxton’s victory party, who were excited to see Trump’s endorsement of Paxton over establishment GOP incumbent John Cornyn triumph. But all Paxton’s sandbox barrage actually accomplished was to remind everyone that in this critical Senate race—one that could determine Senate control—Republicans have nominated someone who typifies everything normie voters hate about Trump and Trumpism.

The MAGA rage, the hate, the juvenile name-calling, the bottomless corruption, the seething contempt for public service—Paxton has exhibited all of it as the attorney general of Texas. If there were ever a time that Democrats might pull off a Texas miracle—and make no mistake, it will be very hard—this may be it.

This isn’t just due to the standard reasons we often hear: Trump is highly unpopular, Paxton is deeply compromised, and Talarico is a formidable fundraiser. It’s something more subtle: Paxton’s ugly MAGA credentials provide an unexpected opening for Talarico—a state legislator and seminarian—to play the foil to Trumpism with a new kind of politics rooted in a fresh understanding of our moment: It combines open professions of Christian faith and promises to transcend Trumpian acrimony with kindness and goodwill toward the opposition.

“To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: You have a place in our campaign,” Talarico tweeted after Paxton’s victory, reaching out to Republicans and right-leaning independents across the state.

Talarico’s potential path to victory tells the story. Matt Angle, director of the pro-Talarico Lone Star Project, says that path requires three factors. Talarico must run up sizable majorities in the five big urban counties—the home of places like Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio—and get at least into the high 40s in adjoining suburban and exurban counties. He must win around 65 percent in the heavily Latino Texas counties along the border and in the Rio Grande valley. And he must limit GOP gains in all the other non-metro and rural counties, which constitute a truly huge expanse of territory.

“It’s straightforward—and really, really hard,” Angle told me. “You’ve got to dominate in the big five urban counties. You’ve got to compete in surrounding suburbs and exurbs. You’ve got to reclaim the border. And you can’t get blown away in small-town and rural Texas.”

To appreciate the challenge, consider that in the 2018 Texas Senate race, Beto O’Rourke fell short of ousting Senator Ted Cruz by fewer than three points. As Ron Brownstein details, O’Rourke won solid majorities in the urban counties and won around two-thirds of the vote in Latino-heavy ones. But O’Rourke still lost, Brownstein notes, primarily because Cruz won nearly three-quarters of the vote in all the other counties.

Since then, if anything, Democrats have lost ground in the state. In 2024, Trump did surprisingly well in the urban areas and, famously, made big inroads with Texas Latinos in border counties. So Talarico must win back majorities in the urban counties, improve Democratic relations with Black voters, get close to parity in the exurbs, climb back to Beto-like support in Latino-heavy counties, and limit Trump’s margins everywhere else.

Here’s where Talarico’s challenge to MAGA comes in. O’Rourke was an electrifying candidate, and so is Talarico, as his massive fundraising hauls demonstrate. But Talarico has the added ingredients of his faith and the sincere offer of goodwill to the opposition. These might resonate amid bone-deep exhaustion with Trump plus Republicans nominating the most Trumpy candidate imaginable.

So to run up totals in exurban and suburban areas, Democrats tell me they are eyeing educated but not-particularly-liberal white voters who might be unhappy with Trump yet would support Cornyn, but who will see Paxton as just too much. These voters might see in Paxton—a fanatical Trump loyalist who viciously smears opponents, had a messy divorce, and has been both impeached and indicted for securities fraud in office—a standard-bearer for the economic carnage, corruption, megalomania, and degradation of our politics that Trump has wrought.

“These are country-club Republicans and independents who are really agitated by how Trump has handled the economy and the White House—whether it’s the ballroom or the billion-dollar slush fund for folks who tore down our Capitol,” Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Talarico’s campaign, told me. “He has to win some Republicans and a bunch of independents.”

Meanwhile, Trump is furiously bleeding Latino support by tanking the economy while embracing violent white nationalist immigration policies. Many Texas Latinos are culturally conservative but not necessarily Republican in orientation, potentially making them gettable by a Democrat of faith who embodies a lower-stakes, more conciliatory politics.

“Paxton puts together Trump’s corruption with a David Duke–style white nationalist politics,” Congressman Greg Casar, who represents a district in central Texas, told me. Casar added that Latino swing voters who temporarily believed Trump’s 2024 promise to control costs now find MAGA’s blend of corruption and racial nationalism “abhorrent.” The New York Times’s Nate Cohn sees a similar path.

If you want to understand why Republicans are casting Talarico as a leftist freak, his potential potency among these demographics is it. Some public and internal Democratic polls show Talarico leading Paxton by a few points, but the wave of outside money set to smear Talarico will be formidable.

Yet Talarico knows how to electrify the national fundraising base and has the chops to go viral. Importantly, he gets that politics in the Trump era is an information war. He is focused on costs and offers an economic agenda that will be broadly popular with Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans, with closing tax loopholes on billionaires at its center. But he is not adopting a Democratic-consultant-approved “kitchen table” approach that avoids talking about Trump.

Rather, Talarico speaks powerfully about the need for a fairer economy as the foundation for a more just society. He contrasts that with the society that Trump and MAGA crave—meaner, crueler, unrepentantly hierarchical, proudly anti-egalitarian, and wracked by violent ethnic purgings.

“Christ is the immigrant deported without due process,” Talarico says. He calls for stringent border security to distance himself from Joe Biden while simultaneously insisting on welcoming legal immigration and granting immigrants compassion and fair judicial treatment as a matter of faith. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, Talarico is a walking biblical challenge to the GOP embrace of militant right-wing Christianity. One might say that Talarico is willing to go theologically toe-to-toe with MAGA white Christian nationalism in all its vicious glory.

It may be a sign of the times that Talarico’s faith-based campaigning is attracting prominent right-leaning Christians, who—one hopes, anyway—represent the views of many non-MAGA voters in Texas. David French, for instance, argues that Talarico is bringing real Christian virtues to public conduct in a way that challenges “MAGA Christianity,” which worships the false idols of corrupt self-enrichment, violent subjugation of the opposition, and of course, Trump.

Here’s how I’d put this: Talarico’s politics goes big. He treats it as fundamental to this moment that Trump and Trumpism are wrecking our common life at a very profound moral and spiritual level.

The nomination of Paxton—the Trumpiest of candidates—will place that brute fact front and center. That contrast may not be enough to win in Texas—only time will tell—but, prosecuted well, it will leave little doubt about the future that MAGA Christianity envisions for us, and why our liberal alternative would be a whole lot better.

Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, Martina McBride, and Vanilla Ice will headline the “Great American State Fair” in Washington, D.C., which runs from June 25 to July 10. Young MC, the Commodores, C+C Music Factory, Morris Day and the Time, and Bret Michaels will all also perform.

Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, and Vanilla Ice are not people who come to mind when considering which artists would best represent American art, history, and culture on its 250th birthday. But those people—from Stevie Wonder, to Bruce Springsteen, to Taylor Swift, to Beyoncé—probably wouldn’t be caught dead performing for this administration. We’ll have to wait and see who the next wave of performers brings.

Pam Bondi has been appointed to an advisory committee on AI policy by President Donald Trump, Axios reported on Tuesday.

The committee, officially called the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, includes 13 members, most of them tech billionaires. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen are all part of the club.

Bondi doesn’t appear to have a background in AI policy. Panel co-chair David Sacks—another wealthy white tech bro—wrote on X that she will “advise the President on legal and regulatory barriers” in her new position.

Trump tapped Bondi as attorney general in 2025, but she soon came under extreme criticism for mishandling one of the most important prosecutions of modern times.

After the Epstein Files Transparency Act was pushed through Congress—despite Trump dismissing his friendship with the deceased sex trafficker as a “hoax”—Bondi led a sloppy, incomplete rollout of the files, leading to ongoing accusations that the Department of Justice is covering up Trump’s involvement with Epstein.

First, the DOJ blew past the 30-day deadline it was given to release the files in November, claiming it needed more time after it coincidentally discovered new records. Then Bondi was caught lying about the files. She bragged to Fox News in February that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk,” only for the DOJ to backtrack months later and say the list never existed.

In January, the department released approximately three million files. Great—except nearly 100 victims’ names and nude pictures were mistakenly left visible, while key information on the criminals was redacted. The DOJ withdrew thousands of files, blaming the mistake on “technical or human error.”

Since the release, no one has been arrested in the U.S. for involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. There are also 2.5 million documents that are still under wraps, meaning tons of information about Epstein’s circle continues to be withheld from the public.

Trump fired Bondi in April, though reports suggest this was more because she failed to prosecute enough of the president’s political rivals than it was about the Epstein files.

Axios also reported that Bondi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after leaving the Trump administration. Bondi herself confirmed this to CNN on Wednesday, adding that she had surgery a few weeks ago and is “doing well, though.”

A new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published Wednesday found that munitions depleted during Trump’s military onslaught against Iran have created a multiyear “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. 

The study estimated it will take until at least 2030 to replace the more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles the U.S. fired deep into enemy territory. While Raytheon aims to produce more than 1,000 missiles a year, the current production rate is less than 200. It will also take until at least 2029 to restore the interceptors used in U.S. air defense systems, as well as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, and Patriot missiles, according to the study.  

Earlier this month, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost roughly $24 billion to replace the munitions expended on Trump’s military campaign alone. Trump has moved to deliver a record-breaking $1.5 trillion to the U.S. military for the fiscal year 2027, by sapping taxpayer dollars from other federal agencies. But the report says, “The problem today isn’t money; it’s time.

“It takes time to expand production capacity and to build these complex systems,” the report said. “Thus, there will be a window of vulnerability for several years until inventories return to their previous levels and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire. The DOD will need to make plans for dealing with this gap.”

The report warned about potential future conflicts in the Western Pacific, but said that the outlook was “not all bleak.” The U.S. military’s major show of force in Iran and in operations against Venezuela and the Houthis could act as deterrence against China, which has “no recent combat experience.”

Perry Bacon: And so we’re going to talk about three different nations that Trump is threatening or dealing with—Cuba, Iran, and Greenland. I’ll start with Greenland only because it was off my radar screen that Trump was still thinking about taking over Greenland.

There was a story in The New York Times on May 18—Greenland politicians have circled a date on their calendars to be wary of: June 14, Trump’s birthday. They’re worried about some kind of invasion that day. And I guess the talks are that the U.S. wants some kind of military arrangement to ensure troops are in Greenland indefinitely, and they also want to have effective veto power over any investment deals Greenland makes.

So let me jump back and start with the—I don’t remember. I’ve covered four or five presidents. Was there a push to change Greenland with Bush or Obama or Clinton or Biden that I missed, or even in Trump’s first term?

Elizabeth Saunders: He did talk about it in his first term, actually.

Bacon: OK. Yeah.

Saunders: And we edited a piece—published a great piece by a political scientist named Jeff Colgan, who studies climate politics. He pointed out that buried under the ice, which is now melting, is a lot of nuclear and toxic waste. So be careful what you try to annex as U.S. territory, because it comes with some very thorny problems.

So yes, Trump talked about it in his first term. But this has been another level—although it seems like the crisis over Greenland, and I would say it was a crisis during the Davos meeting in Switzerland in January—it already feels 100 years ago.

It was already one war ago, right? It was between the intervention in Venezuela—which resulted not in a major military operation but a one-day seizing of the president, Nicolás Maduro, bringing him back to the U.S. to face trial—and the Iran war, which started about a month later.

But Greenland was a real crisis. We’ve subsequently learned that the Danes took it very seriously, and the troops that went to Greenland, ostensibly for prearranged NATO military exercises, had pints of blood go with them—the kind of steps that you would take if you were expecting there to be a fight. And that is just almost unthinkable between NATO allies. I think that was truly the final—if anybody else in Europe needed waking up, that woke up the deepest sleepers, I would say.

So Greenland has been going on the whole time—just like we have foreign policy with all these countries that doesn’t make the news every day. The Iran war has been dominating all the news, so it’s not that surprising that it fell off everybody’s radar.

Bacon: Not Trump’s.

Saunders: Not Trump’s. His radar—you could write a whole book about what he decides to put and keep on his radar.

Bacon: Let me repeat my question, though. Besides Trump, the U.S. government’s point of view was not previously We have to take over Greenland—with either Republican or Democrat, right?

Saunders: No. And I think when the Greenland crisis happened in January, a lot of people pointed out that we had a tremendous number of bases in Greenland. We had gone down to only one, as part of, I assume, the post–Cold War peace dividend.

But if the U.S. wanted more troops and bases in Greenland, the Danes would undoubtedly be happy to negotiate that in good faith—and probably would welcome it, because the Arctic is now very much a front in the conflict with Russia, and with China, as the ice melts and you can transit the Arctic more, and so forth.

So I don’t—I think that if Trump really only wanted basing rights, this is not how you would go about it.

I think that having had the Greenland crisis, it will be that much harder to try to get back basing rights that we had in previous administrations. But previously, most administrations have recognized—at least since the end of World War II—that it is actually far better and cheaper, in the sense of not just money but the cost in forward deployments and risks and not having to govern.

What would it mean to take over Greenland? Are we going to be running the policing and the courts? All those things come along with annexation. And they don’t want to be annexed, which creates a whole host of other points of conflict.

So administrations previously have recognized that negotiating deals with our allies to have military bases—and they’re not perfect deals, and there’s not perfect behavior on the part of the U.S., as we know, in places like Japan and so forth—but that is efficient for the United States within an alliance.

It benefits both sides. And it is far preferable from the U.S. point of view. Leaving aside the moral problem with trying to annex anybody’s, but most certainly your ally’s, territory—just in the coldest, most cynical cost-benefit view—it is much, much more efficient to negotiate deals for bases.

Bacon: What’d you make of him sending the governor—I guess they made the governor of Louisiana the envoy, and he’s—what’d you make of that? Because he has no foreign policy knowledge that I know of that could have been comforting to Greenland or Denmark. Was that a move to show We don’t care what you think, basically? Or what do you make of that?

Saunders: It’s an insult to everyone around, because presumably he also has duties as governor of Louisiana, right?

Bacon: One would hope.

Saunders: I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a resident of Louisiana and my governor was spending all his time in Greenland. I think it’s yet another—yes, it’s a sign of: We’re not sending somebody serious about diplomacy. We’re not sending somebody for whom this is their primary job. We’re sending somebody who is loyal to Trump, and I can’t even begin to understand why this particular person for this particular mission.

But I think it’s yet another sign that they don’t invest at all in real diplomacy—which has shown up in all of these conflicts and made everything harder. Again, you could have made a deal with Greenland, even including some of the mineral raw materials. That might have been more contentious, but you could imagine skilled diplomats getting around to that, because at a minimum, they would want to make the deal with the U.S. and not with the Chinese.

But once you burn all your diplomatic capital threatening to take it by force—the diplomacy—it’s like starting with a time penalty in the biathlon, those things in the Olympics where you’re down a certain amount because you missed a shot. It’s self-harm. It’s diplomatic self-harm. It just makes the task that much harder.

Bacon: We’re going to talk about Cuba and Iran in a second. But this June 14 day—I hadn’t really thought about that until I read the piece. Do we think that—

Saunders: Also Flag Day.

Bacon: Flag Day. Do we think that—whatever the country is—part of celebrating Donald Trump’s birthday or America 250 is going to be that we invade someone? Is that something you think is serious or not very serious?

Saunders: I wouldn’t dismiss it entirely if the Danes think it’s true. But first of all, the U.S. military doesn’t usually announce—even Venezuela, that everyone knew was coming—we were all shocked. I spoke to you that morning after the operation, and nobody expected it to be that night. And the Iran strike—same thing, big buildup and then—I’d be shocked if we actually did anything military on his birthday that was preannounced in that way.

The only country I can think of that regularly chooses to do what it sees as aggressive moves on American holidays—not even the Dear Leader’s birthdays—is North Korea, which is famous for shooting off missiles on things like Columbus Day. Things that it thinks are super important to every American—big national holidays that are no longer really that salient to most people.

Bacon: So what do you think is going to happen? Predictions are bad, but what’s your sense of where this is heading? More bellicose rhetoric? Because this is still ongoing—the Danes have to deal with this. Trump has to get a win out of this, right? So something has to happen along those lines.

Saunders: The comfort I think the Danes can take is simply: We are so militarily overstretched right now. Just before coming on air with you, I saw that apparently we’ve told the Europeans that we’re taking some strategic bombers out of Europe—which doesn’t make any sense for European security, even if you want them to do more for themselves, because that’s not something they can replace.

The stockpiles of munitions—maybe we’re going to do something in Cuba, but we cannot take on three fronts. It’s just not how it works. So I always say nothing surprised me anymore. I would be very surprised if we saw military action in Greenland. I’d be even more surprised if it happened on June 14. But I will happily come on air and eat my words if it happens.

Bacon: Eat your own caveats, as we know. As we know, nothing is predictable.

Saunders: But I do think there comes a point where the military hardware becomes its own constraint. And hopefully the military brass is giving some straight talk to enough people. Hardware is hardware.

Bacon: So in terms of Cuba, this feels like the most analogous to Venezuela. You have this indictment against—I guess they arrested Maduro and did the charges at the same time—but this sort of targeting a leader, indicting them.

There’s been a lot of military buildup around Cuba, with the U.S. sending more planes there, making clear they’re talking about it. Rubio has had some very bellicose, ranty rhetoric. So that feels like the place where we might see something next—something very aggressive. Do you agree?

Saunders: Yeah, I do. And I think, of all of the words you just said, the most important one is Rubio—because this has been his pet project for pretty much ever. And so I have wondered about Rubio’s silence in the Iran war debates. If you believe—I think we talked about the New York Times tick-tock article. Not that TikTok, but the journalistic tick-tock piece.

Bacon: Yeah. It was Rubio sort of—it implied Rubio’s not that supportive of the Iran mission, but also not being that opposed to it either.

Saunders: He doesn’t really do anything to try to stop Trump.

And I have to assume that he is in the camp of people who could look one step ahead and see the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as the very logical next step that people have always—at least for 20 years—known would be the next thing the Iranians would do in a situation like this.

So I have wondered—when he talks about Iran now, he talks about a deal. And when he talks about Cuba, he says, The president wants to make a deal, but it doesn’t look like that’ll happen. Again, just guessing—but he is the national security adviser, and he’s also the nation’s top diplomat, and he’s not really involved in the Iran negotiations. All the talk he’s been saying in the last week about Iran has been from India, and now I think he’s in Azerbaijan.

And these are important—it’s important for him to be talking to allies and partners and countries around the world that are affected by the war. But if making an Iran deal was the highest priority, you would not expect the secretary of state to be in a third country that is not one of the mediating countries—and in fact is the enemy of one of the mediating countries. India, of course, in an adversarial relationship with Pakistan.

So one read—and it’s only a read—is that Rubio has been trying hard to stay on side with Trump but wants to get out of Iran, as Trump does, and focus on Cuba. And I don’t know whether he really intends to get Trump to launch a regime change intervention. But he put a tremendous amount of pressure—the reporting suggests—to do something military in Venezuela, and undermined some of the deal-making that Trump was actually kind of going down before he turned more hawkish on Venezuela.

And of course, the other thing is: We have been blockading Cuba since right after, or thereabouts, the Venezuela operation. And that’s technically an act of war.

And the Cubans are out—Cuba as an island is out of fuel. The suffering we are inflicting on Cuba is immense, and of a scale that I think if we didn’t have the Iran war and so many other [things]—Ebola, even, or the renewed Russian assault on Ukraine—I think we would be hearing a lot more about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not immense. It’s a huge toll.

And I have a hard time seeing what the endgame is here other than military force or some kind of operation like Venezuela, because the moment for regime change to take place of its own accord—clearly that hasn’t happened. And I don’t see any likelihood that it will happen quickly, and Trump is not very patient.

So what do you do if you need a win? If I were Trump—trying as hard as I can to put myself in his mind—I’d be receptive to a good-sounding SOUTHCOM plan to seize somebody in Cuba and try to bring down the regime. It worked once. Didn’t work so well in Iran. Again, thinking like Trump.

Bacon: Do we have someone we would install—do we have a way to have a one-day invasion and install someone we like in Cuba? Do we know?

Saunders: I highly doubt it. Cuba’s—and I’m no expert on Cuban policy. But in Venezuela, we just went to Maduro’s number two, who had been secretly talking to the U.S., right? So maybe that’s been happening.

But Rubio—this is just a really different situation. Venezuela was an electoral or competitive authoritarian country far more recently than Cuba was anything other than what it is now.

It’s been this way for—what, 60 years or something like that? And what our intelligence is in Cuba is hard to know. Although, we said that about Iran, and the Israelis helped a lot with that—they had exquisite intelligence about Iran. So I don’t know if they have someone in mind. But then there’s also the expatriate community, and Rubio very much is part of that.

And there is a Venezuelan expatriate community, but I don’t know that they—the politics are just quite different, I think. So maybe they do. But it turns out that there’s been reporting that the plan for Iran was to originally install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So if that was the plan for Iran—of course, he was famously, aggressively anti-American, antisemitic. The collective response of Iran watchers to that news was, Oh my God, no way.

Bacon: What a terrible idea.

Saunders: Yeah. So who knows what—I think I agree with Dan Drezner’s assessment this morning in his column: Why should we trust the administration to even have a plan for the day after?

Bacon: Moving to Iran. When we talked last, you argued that Trump’s choices in Iran were confrontation or capitulation. I think we’re really seeing that play out.

Saunders: Humiliation or escalation.

Bacon: You said that, right? You said humiliation. That’s correct. And it’s interesting, because each time we get close to some kind of formal agreement, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, all these people have basically announced this deal is too weak—in other words, they’re telling Trump, You will be humiliated if you do it. And then Trump cannot accept that.

So are we going to keep going down that road, or do you think anything’s changed since you said that a month ago?

Saunders: I don’t think a lot has changed. I think the fundamentals of this are just extremely difficult for a president who initiated a war and got us to this place.

So what are the fundamentals here? Iran will not accept anything that permanently takes away even the threat of the Strait of Hormuz closure again. Even if the strait opens—which I think is looking increasingly likely in the medium term, maybe—what does that actually mean? It means that the world cannot unsee the Iranian closure of the strait, which required very little active effort on their part. Just the threat and a few mines was enough.

So that is not really going back to the way it was—freedom of navigation. That’s one thing.

The second thing is the nuclear issue, which—the Iranians obviously have shown that they are willing to make nuclear deals. But why would they trust Trump? And also, he said yesterday on Truth Social that the Atomic Energy Commission will supervise this, maybe. The Atomic Energy Commission went out of existence in the 1970s, I think. That was the first atomic … so we’re not dealing with someone steeped in the specifics. OK. And his team is not.

Bacon: What do we think he means? What do we think he’s referring to?

Saunders: The Department of Energy? The IAEA?

Bacon: Yeah. Who knows? That is my thought initially.

Saunders: But he got “Atomic Energy Commission” from somewhere—it was a real thing. It oversaw the U.S. atomic program. It was a U.S. agency. So who the heck knows.

I could see some kind of deal. I think the nuclear issue is, weirdly, more possible to deal with than Hormuz is. And I think Hormuz has given Iran so much leverage that maybe there’s a way you could figure that out. But it’s not—the regime is even more entrenched right now.

And then you have the unfreezing of assets. We all remember when Republicans cried a flagrant foul over Obama releasing, in the single digits, billions of dollars to Iran. There was some money that Biden released for a prisoner swap. The amount that Iran is demanding is enormous.

And so this is a little bit like saying you’re down by 30 points in a basketball game—just to pick a random example. Let’s go, Knicks. And you hit one three-pointer, and suddenly you’re close to—the gap here is very wide, and one team has the momentum and home-court advantage. The Strait of Hormuz, as I think I’ve said before—maybe not here—is literally between a rock and a hard place. And you can’t make a deal about geography.

So I think the problem here is that Trump is trying very hard to find a way to make a deal and call it a win. But this is about as hard a task in that category—declaring victory and going home—as any I can think of. The risks going forward are so high, the trust is so low—of the Iranians of us, and of us of the Iranians.

But the one thing I will say is this: Both sides so desperately seem to want a deal. Trump is more desperate, but the Iranians really want a deal. And so we struck some—we shot down a plane, we hit some boats yesterday, last night, and the Iranians have threatened retaliation.

But CENTCOM went out of its way to say, “The ceasefire is not over.” The more that stuff happens and we don’t get a major escalation—that’s both sides saying, Come on, we really want a deal. It’s almost like we’re in mercy-rule territory here—just to carry the analogy further.

Bacon: Let me finish by asking—Cuba, Iran, and Greenland don’t have much in common. They’re not in the same regions. In terms of U.S. foreign policy doctrine, we’re not talking about imperialism, authoritarianism, democracy promotion—I’ve heard lots of ideas. But when you put these things together, what is Trump trying to do, from your vantage point?

Saunders: I would first add Venezuela to that grouping—because I don’t think you get Iran without Venezuela, the perceived success.

So I definitely don’t think it’s democracy promotion because we aren’t promoting democracy in the autocracies. In fact, we’ve entrenched autocracy in Venezuela and especially in Iran. But also, we’re being aggressive against a democratic ally in Denmark. And whatever everyone thinks of Greenland’s relationship with Denmark, that’s between them. And Greenland certainly does not want to become part of the U.S. So it’s definitely not democracy promotion.

I think there is an imperialist streak in him, but he doesn’t obviously intend to acquire Iran.

Bacon: Or colonize, or something.

Saunders: Yeah. So I think mostly it’s just toughness, throwing his weight around, and—most importantly—not having anyone who will say no to him.

Bacon: Why these nations—why these particular crises, as opposed to others? Other parts of the world we could try to annex.

Saunders: I think Latin America is a combination of Rubio and the fact that it’s next door. The one other thing that—not so much Greenland and Venezuela, but Cuba and Iran—have in common is that they’ve been problems bedeviling U.S. presidents for decades. Many decades. And he is a creature of the Cold War era.

He will remember things about trying to deal with Cuba and Iran—the Iran-Iraq War would have been very salient to him. So there is this feeling of, I can be the one to fix it. Not I alone can fix it in that way, but I’m going to finally—

Bacon: I’m the only person in the room who understands this. Yes.

Elizabeth Saunders: Yes. And beware U.S. presidents trying to use military force to solve a problem once and for all. That’s a theme that goes back—the Iraq War, we’re going to solve that once and for all. Goes back all the way to the Korean War, when they tried to go past the 38th parallel and unify Korea.

So that’s one thing. But I also just think these are the places that popped up on his radar. I don’t know that Iran was on his radar until the protests in January. I think that was opportunistic in a weird sort of way. And then I think what you’re seeing is a dictatorship—at least in foreign policy—that is acting impulsively, on whims, and has no constraints even inside the White House to stop him.

Bacon: So if you were with Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro tomorrow, what would you tell them? What about foreign—what should the antidote to this be? What would be the reverse of this? More multilateralism, less impulsiveness? What do we want to see in foreign policy as opposed to this?

Saunders: I think you can’t even get to talking about more multilateralism until you get your own house in order. The guardrails in foreign policy have been in terrible shape for decades—that’s not a totally Trump thing.

Bacon: Meaning Congress is not involved.

Saunders: Congress has not been involved. But a lot of my research has been about the constraining effect that advisers and others in the executive branch and the military can have on presidents, in addition to or alongside—or even in lieu of—Congress.

That actually worked reasonably well, by some standards, in the first Trump administration. You still had people willing to say no, willing to stop his worst impulses. He talked about annexing Greenland but didn’t do anything—nothing like what he did in January.

Now even those guardrails are gone, and we’ve moved into all sorts of issues of corruption. The State Department is decimated. I think Rubio has helped him and abetted in the destruction of the diplomatic apparatus. Witkoff is negotiating with all these major figures.

USAID is gone, which affects so many things, including hundreds of thousands of deaths, potentially. But it also means there’s less goodwill—the Ebola outbreak is not being contained quickly enough because the USAID was integral to those logistics. USAID was part of those logistics.

So all to say: The first thing that has to happen is we’ve got to reimpose some guardrails on any president in foreign policy. And I don’t think you can even go into what we should be doing with that foreign policy until that gets reestablished.

Bacon: And guardrails means—you should appoint normal people to good jobs, or Congress should be involved? What do you think that means?

Saunders: I think you’ve got to start in concentric circles. First, you have to say you’re going to have serious vetting and not party-line votes on unqualified candidates. I really think that was—to me, the whole thing broke when Hegseth got through. People love to say 99 senators voted for Marco Rubio, but I thought it was a terrible idea and he would not be the savior. I was never in the “Marco Rubio is the sane one” camp. But there was not really a reason to vote against him—he had done a lot in this area, and it’s more of a disagreement-type thing.

But Pete Hegseth was manifestly unqualified. There were credible accusations. It at least should have been paused so those accusations could have been surfaced. You just can’t have completely unqualified people. So the vetting system and the confirmation system—you’ve got to start inside. And I think the promotion system in the military—you’ve got to have a way of—they’ve got to at least explain why they fire people when they start firing people, and the only reason that anyone can see from the outside involves gender and race.

Because they aren’t giving any reason why these people with otherwise exemplary records—

Bacon: And it may be about gender and race, let’s not rule that out. That’s a possibility.

Saunders: Yes. But if there was a reason … the military is subservient to the civilians, and the president or the secretary of defense on his behalf can fire any of these people at will. That’s civil-mil 101. But I think what we need are norms again. The norms have been completely busted.

You need a commitment to some very basic—we aren’t even talking about legislation. Just: If this person is unqualified, both parties should be willing to say so. Start there. My standards have got to start somewhere, and that’s where I’d start.

Bacon: One other thing. You mentioned the State Department, USAID. I assume if you’re trying to win Wisconsin, saying I’m going to rebuild USAID is not going to win you a lot of votes. We probably do want the next president—

Saunders: You’d be surprised, because of farming. The farmers lose a tremendous amount of money.

Perry Bacon: Oh, OK. That’s interesting.

Saunders: Wisconsin is a big farming state. I was just there last week. But go ahead.

Bacon: We want the next president to rebuild the diplomatic corps and USAID, even if—but we’re not sure if that’s the best campaign idea. We want that to happen even if it’s not necessarily the best campaign idea, right? We want the next president to commit to that kind of stuff when they’re in office, at least.

Saunders: Yes, I think so. I don’t know that it has to be part of a campaign, but it can be part of a vetting process in the parties. All of this goes back to the Republican Party—as Julia Azari has talked about—being unwilling to vet and coordinate against Trump in 2016, in the primary season.

So the parties have to make a priority of picking somebody that is going to rebuild foreign policy. I would include the Republican Party—I think you can think of people. I would say Marco Rubio in his prior incarnation.

In 2016, he was the only one who went to the Council on Foreign Relations to give the traditional Council on Foreign Relations presidential candidate speech. And I think he missed the memo that it no longer mattered politically, but I think that was emblematic of his prior willingness to do the establishment thing. A Nikki Haley—Nikki Haley doesn’t want to be president without a functioning State Department.

Bacon: I’m assuming JD Vance or Rubio will be the Republican nominee, and they’ve already signed on to these things. That’s why I didn’t bother—I agree with you. I didn’t bother to ask for that reason. But hopefully I’m wrong

Saunders:. I don’t know about that, because—

Bacon: Yeah, hopefully I’m wrong.

Saunders: But the task of rebuilding the State Department and starting up USAID 2.0 from the ground up—that’s the task for USAID. The State Department still exists—it’s a shell, but it exists. That is going to be a design-of-institutions problem, and we want to future-proof it.

Presidents can point the bureaucracy in whatever policy direction they want. The civil service is equipped to help them do that—that is what elections are about. But the norms and the guardrails keep things more predictable for everybody. It engenders trust so that a new president from a different party can come in and change direction without people feeling like they’re going to be fired or sued.

This is beneficial to everyone—to reinstall these norms and guardrails for future presidents. You don’t want a State Department that doesn’t trust the White House on some very basic—I’m not talking about bureaucratic suspicions, that sort of thing—

Bacon: There’ll be inevitable things in government.

Saunders: Yes. I’m talking on a basic level here. And so I think rebuilding those norms is the only way. And I don’t know how you test for that in any sort of—it’s not going to be done on cable TV. It’s going to be done by party leaders, and that is a process that has just completely broken down, at least on the Republican side.

Bacon: Let me ask you one question, a little out of left field, but I’m just curious what you think. There’s a push on the Democratic left to say John Finer, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken—people like that—should not serve in government because they should be blamed for the Gaza policy.

I’m not asking about your views on the Gaza policy stuff. What do you think about that as a decision—I’m just curious how we should think about that, as a person who thinks about foreign policymaking.

Saunders: I’ll flip it around, because I’ve been asked a number of times—or I was asked a number of times at the end of the first Trump administration—if people should be blacklisted for having served in the first Trump administration. Like on China policy—should they be given cushy jobs when they leave office? And I’m not talking about the people who abetted January 6—

Bacon: Understood.

Saunders: I’m talking about people who just worked in the Trump administration. And I’ll say what I said then—and I think the only consistent thing to say would be to apply it to the Democrats. I don’t think you can blacklist people for their policy views.

I think somebody had to keep the lights on in Trump 1.0 on China, which was not really a focus of—by the end, it was just not where the action was.

Bacon: The idea is we don’t want to blacklist people because of what? Because we want to preserve the—

Saunders: Because policy differences are what we should be litigating in—litigating is not even the right word, because it’s not a legal process. It’s a debate. And it doesn’t necessarily happen in elections, either, as in foreign policy.

But policy differences have to be allowed. And then it becomes a question of: What are—obviously some policies are just beyond the pale.

Bacon: Sure. Yeah.

Saunders: And you have to be able to say what those are. But before we blacklist anybody, I think you have to have some debate about what those are. You cannot say so-and-so cannot work for the government again without having some statement. Having a China policy in a Republican administration is definitely not a blacklistable offense in my mind.

Bacon: Obviously. Sure, yeah.

Saunders: Whether other things are is something—

Bacon: We can—I’m not asking you to weigh in on that. I’m just curious what your thinking is about the question.

Saunders: Yeah. So that’s my thinking. I think if you as a country decide that such and such a policy is beyond the pale, you can blacklist people. And I think people who abetted January 6—because that’s not a foreign policy question, right? To me, that is over the line. No matter where you worked, if you were part of or encouraged January 6—

Bacon: Undermining democratic functionality.

Saunders: —you just aren’t living in the same democracy that we want to live in. But policy is—you’ve got to have a very wide range of acceptable policies. I just firmly believe that. And I think the Gaza question is a really hard one, but I don’t think it should be for anyone to just say that is beyond the pale without some kind of debate.

Bacon: I’d love the debate, because I think we’re going to have the debate. I’m just curious where you think the parameters of it should be. This is coming up a little more because we’re going to start this democratic process somewhat soon—capital D, but also small d.

Saunders: But I also think what’s interesting about this is: Sometimes these calls—the Overton window for what’s acceptable on policy toward Israel, I think, is changing in the Democratic Party. If you look just today, Chris Van Hollen had a very powerful op-ed in The New York Times about reckoning with aid to Israel and what it means—the Democratic Party can’t be reflexive. He’s hardly the most lefty senator.

So I think that debate will happen. I think that is a far more productive way to deal with things than to start—because once you do that, other people can start to blacklist policies that you don’t think [should be blacklisted]. It’s a little bit like the filibuster—everybody has to refrain from doing that, because it could be done to you.

Bacon: Trump’s not a good example, but—let’s put it that way. That cat’s way out of the bag. But I see your point. That is true.

Saunders: Yes.

Bacon: Elizabeth, thanks for joining. It was a great conversation.

Saunders: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.

Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.

Saunders: Bye.

An envoy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Alexander Velez-Green, shared details of the forthcoming recissions with senior officials of NATO member states during a meeting in Brussels last week, reported German news outlet Der Spiegel.

The proposed plan is much more drastic than European diplomats had predicted: It involves decreasing the number of U.S. fighter jets, warships, drones, and aerial refueling tankers available to the alliance, according to the briefing. The number of available fighter jets, for instance, could be diminished by a third, and the number of strategic bombers halved.

All submarines will be pulled out, and the number of available destroyers will also be cut.

Washington also intends to substantially scale back its previous commitments to NATO’s “Force Model,” which was agreed upon in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The model stipulates which units the Supreme Allied Commander Europe is allowed to directly access from NATO member states in defensive strategies. 

European countries are expected to fill in the resulting gaps themselves, Der Spiegel reported.

Donald Trump has been threatening such an action for weeks, specifically since the European continent refused to support his invasion of Iran and the subsequent blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

Last month, Trump claimed he was open to the idea of pulling troops from Italy, Spain, and Germany, accusing NATO members of being “cowards” and “terrible” for refusing to assist in his Middle East war.

At the time, the sudden Oval Office announcement stunned the Pentagon as much as it did America’s allies.

The Defense Department “was not expecting it and has not been planning any kind of drawdown,” a congressional aide familiar with the situation told Politico. “But we have to take him seriously because he was serious about it during his first administration.” 

In July 2020, Trump proposed pulling 12,000 troops out of Germany in order to punish Berlin for its low defense spending. That order was never implemented.

But the president has been on the offensive against NATO since the early days of his first term in office. He regularly baselessly insists that other members have failed to pay their dues and argues that the U.S. has been shortchanged by other NATO countries, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.

It is unclear who in the Western world benefits from the dissolution of NATO. John Bolton,  Trump’s first-term national security adviser and a policy hawk who also served under Ronald Reagan’s administration, has said that the consequences of exiting the alliance could be dire. A U.S. withdrawal from the pact could effectively be the death of NATO, leaving behind a fractured and significantly weakened European alliance, while devastating America’s international credibility as an ally.

The interviews in question were used in the 2023 special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. That investigation concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing, but that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s attorneys argue that the interviews were private conversations that should not be released retroactively by the Trump DOJ.

“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” Biden’s attorneys wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

They also noted that the DOJ spent two years properly protecting these transcripts in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, until they switched up in February, telling Biden they’d be releasing them “without any formal explanation.”

While the idea of Senator Paxton is terrifying to Democrats, establishment Republicans were perhaps even more upset. Conservative groups who backed the slightly less extreme Cornyn were forced to scrub their social media of statements attacking Paxton, presumably while a kind of metaphysical angst washed over them.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee deleted at least eight critiques of Paxton, including a July 2025 statement released after Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”

“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting. No one should have to endure what Angela Paxton has, and we pray for her as she chooses to stand up for herself and her family during this difficult time,” read the statement.

Another deleted post bore the headline “Ken Paxton’s Lies and Incompetence Keep Piling Up.” This statement cited an Associated Press article that found that Paxton and his then wife were listing three different homes as “primary residences” so they could take advantage of lower interest rates.

Paxton’s primary win was aided by a late endorsement by President Donald Trump. Some expected that Trump might back the more electable Cornyn, but fealty matters more than anything with our president, and Paxton has given the president lavish, consistent support over the years.

Paxton was “very loyal to your favorite President, ME,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “Ken’s opponent was VERY disloyal to me.”

Paxton is also an outsider with a long history of scandal. He was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on corruption charges in 2023. That, plus the adultery, may be why Trump saw himself in him and blessed him with an endorsement.

Donald Trump is a salesman trying to convince us that this used car is actually brand new. What he is trying to get is a deal that trades dollars for “dust,” his term for the enriched uranium held by Iran. Trump would give Iran billions of dollars by unfreezing Iranian assets in U.S.-linked banks and ending U.S. sanctions. In exchange, Iran would get rid of its stockpile of enriched uranium that it could enrich further to make the cores of nuclear bombs.

Most likely, Iran would give up not just its 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent, but the more than 10 tons of uranium that it has enriched to various lower levels.

This is what the Obama negotiations accomplished in 2015. Iran took its then-eight tons of uranium and downblended it with natural uranium, which has less than 1 percent of the U-235 isotope needed for fission. That brought the uranium down to very low levels of enrichment, potentially usable for fuel but not for a rapid sprint to weapons-grade of 90 percent U-235.

Then, in a belt and suspenders approach, Iran shipped all of that uranium to Russia. It was allowed to keep only 300 kg of uranium at the low 3.67 percent level used for fuel. All of this meant that the 2015 deal moved Iran from being able to produce the cores for bombs in a few weeks to needing a full year.

In exchange, the United States released Iranian funds frozen in foreign banks by U.S. sanctions. Critics of the deal harshly criticized this as shipping “pallets of dollars” to Iran. But this is precisely what Trump is proposing as part of his deal.

That’s because there really isn’t any other way to do this. Either you trade something Iran wants for something you want, or you go to war.

Trump could have gotten this deal without going to war. In late February, the Iranians agreed to get rid of their uranium stockpile. Plus, they agreed to suspend all enrichment for three to five years—something they were not willing to do in 2015.

That was such a good deal that the Omani foreign minister mediating the talks flew to Washington on February 27 to brief Vice President JD Vance on the deal. Britain’s national security adviser Jonathan Powell said that he was surprised at how good the offer was—and added that he didn’t think it was their final offer.

But Trump got greedy. He listened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and attacked. Trump thought there was no need to negotiate, he could overthrow the whole regime. He failed. Now he is back at the table trying to get the same deal he could have gotten without the war.

This is nowhere near the original goals of Trump’s illegal war. It is not regime change, or liberation for the Iranian people, or unconditional surrender, or weakening Iran, or eliminating its entire nuclear program. But it could still be a good deal. It would put Iran back to where it was under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, before Trump ripped it up in 2018.

Plus, if it actually includes a multiyear enrichment suspension, it would be a major barrier to Iran building a bomb. It would not secure an absolute end to the program, but it buys time to build on the agreement with other agreements that could further restrict the program and address other areas of concern, like Iran’s missile program.

That was the path laid out by Obama. It is the path Netanyahu campaigned against; the path that Trump mocked.

It is the path that Trump may now take, while trying to convince everyone that it is a brand new deal.

Forcing Black politicians out of office is in many ways just another step in the re-transformation of the South (and more broadly, red-state America) into an undemocratic region. Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Southern Republican politicians have gradually but aggressively eroded political power and rights for African Americans, Democrats, and liberals in their states. Freedom House earlier this year downgraded the United States from a full “liberal democracy” to an “electoral democracy,” arguing that checks and balances on the executive and other core characteristics of liberal democracy have diminished here. Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies. 

And with the Voting Rights Act shuttered, this antidemocratic drift will only accelerate. 

The drift has a long history. The South has been the country’s most antidemocratic region for most of U.S. history. Only a few decades after slavery ended, the region had installed Jim Crow laws. Until the 1960s, anti-Black Democrats controlled most states in the South and often prevented African Americans from voting or holding political power. But the region’s politics improved from the 1970s to the early 2000s. As the Democratic Party became more liberal and tied to African Americans, Southern Democratic governors such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton tried to advance policies that would make their states more just and equal. And even Republican governors like Jeb and George W. Bush courted African American and Latino voters, assuming that a more inclusive politics was inevitable, even in the South. 

It wasn’t. In a process that started in the late 1990s and accelerated during Obama’s presidency, Republicans gradually won control of the state legislatures and governor’s office in most Southern states. “These states are now nearly as red as they were blue during the Jim Crow era,” author and former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer wrote a few years ago. Meanwhile, Black voters in those states overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates. So the South has become again a region dominated by one party that is hostile to Black interests. And as in the past, that dominant party has enacted an aggressively antidemocratic agenda: 

• Preemption. States in the South often bar cities from raising the minimum wage, mandating that companies provide paid sick leave, enacting policies to reduce carbon emissions, removing Confederate monuments, or virtually anything else that is considered liberal. So Democratic voters in the South often elect mayors and City Council members who have little power. Going even further, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been suspending locally elected prosecutors if he doesn’t approve of their practices. 
• Low wages and benefits. States in the South almost universally have right-to-work policies that limit the expansion of union memberships and maintain low minimum wages. The states that have declined federal funding under Obamacare to cover people through Medicaid are largely in the South. These policies have a particularly negative effect on African Americans, who tend to have lower incomes.  
• Freedom restrictions. Getting an abortion, receiving gender-affirming health care if you are under 18, and teaching critical race theory in a classroom are among the actions banned in many states in the South. 
• Constant breaking with democratic norms. From Louisiana legislators recently voting to eliminate a position in New Orleans after a Black Democrat won it to Kentucky lawmakers threatening impeachment of judges whose rulings they disagree with to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp canceling a state Supreme Court election, Southern Republicans regularly take actions that are technically legal but violate democratic principles. Georgia Republicans are rushing to gerrymander the state now, because they fear Democrat Keisha Bottoms will be elected in November, putting Democrats on equal footing in redistricting. 

None of these moves are the modern-day equivalents of poll taxes or literacy tests. It is obviously far better to live in the South today than in 1935, particularly as a Black person. And many of the antidemocratic practices in the South have also been adopted by Republicans in states they control in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. But the Republicans in the South are most aggressive in constraining the political power and rights of those they disagree with. And unlike in very white states, such as Wyoming, these policies have terrible (and often intentional) racial impacts, privileging white residents over Black ones. 

Most voters in Southern states are Republicans, and they are voting for the politicians who enact these policies. But democracy is not just about elections. A region where individual rights are curtailed, minority groups have little power, and local officials can’t decide policies within their jurisdictions isn’t particularly democratic. 

Before Callais, the South was a region where there were plenty of Black politicians in office, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, but those Black officials had little power. Now, even that veneer of Black inclusion is being removed. While most attention nationally has been on Republicans in the South eliminating majority-Black congressional districts, Republicans are likely to use the Callais ruling for redistricting at the City Council, state legislative, and judicial levels in ways that will force even more African American politicians out of office. 

I experience this Republican antidemocracy personally. I live in Louisville, one of the few blue areas in very red Kentucky. The Republicans who dominate the state legislature in Frankfort hate the choices we make here and are constantly overriding them. GOP legislators recently passed a law that reduces Louisville’s school board from seven to five elected members. No one in Louisville wanted that, since it’s already fairly hard to get in touch with a school board member. But the current school board includes three African Americans and generally supports liberal policies, so it’s an irritant to Republican legislators. (The Republicans have such a large majority in the legislature that they override Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s vetoes.) 

And when the Republicans aren’t directly limiting democracy in Louisville, the specter of them doing so hovers over everything. Louisville recently had a mayoral primary where the two top candidates advanced to the general election: Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Black progressive city councilwoman who was a leader of the protests after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor six years ago; and incumbent Mayor Craig Greenberg, a center-left Democrat. My policy views are close to Parrish-Wright’s, so I will back her in November. But I’m nervous about the prospect of her winning. If Parrish-Wright were elected, I suspect the Republicans in the state legislature would destroy Louisville as we know it, enacting all kinds of restrictions on the city and its government to essentially punish us for voting for someone they really dislike. 

That’s “democracy” in the American South in 2026. If you are Black, a Democrat, or both, you get to vote for officials who have no power—or will be stripped of power if they are elected because of your votes. 

I regularly read writers, particularly in The New York Times, who praise red states for good scores on standardized tests for kids and low housing costs. These writers of course live in blue states and are really using those real and laudable Southern achievements to make a point about liberal failures. They aren’t focused on the realities of the South. I wish they were. America has an autocratic region. It’s the region where most of its Black residents live. It’s the region where I am raising my daughter, to be closer to the rest of my family. The region is going through another antidemocratic wave. It’s painful. The only potential silver lining is that the horrible fallout from the Callais decision will get liberals across the country to start paying attention to the South. It is happening here. And the first step to reversing democracy erosion in the South is to be fully aware it’s happening in the first place. 

Four months after Trump launched his preposterous pet project for Gaza, the group’s official fund set up by the World Bank and approved by the United Nations has yet to see a drop of the billions promised to the board, four people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times Wednesday.

“Zero dollars have been deposited,” one person told the FT.

Rather than rely on the official fund, Trump’s Board of Peace has decided to receive donations through its JPMorgan account, which has no transparency or reporting requirements.

A Board of Peace official told the FT that contributors were offered a number of options for paying, and had at this point “opted to use other options.” The board would report its financials to its executive board—which includes classic Trump cronies such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—“at a time deemed appropriate,” the official said.

Ten countries pledged billions of dollars to carry out Kushner’s master plan to turn Gaza into a strip of luxury hotels, but so far, barely any of that money has materialized.

Morocco has contributed $20 million to fund the office of Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the “high representative” for Gaza, plus salaries for the slate of technocrats who will oversee the enclave. The United Arab Emirates also provided $100 million to train new police in Gaza, but the program has yet to begin and the funds are frozen, two people told the FT.

Trump has previously pledged $10 billion in taxpayer money to his slush fund. The State Department has offered $50 million to keep the board running, which has yet to be allocated. The State Department has also promised to reallocate $1.2 billion in aid spending to the Board of Peace’s myriad projects, but apparently that money isn’t headed for the board at all.

“None of that money [has gone to the board]. None of that money is being managed by the Board of Peace. And State tells us there’s no intent to have any of that money managed by the Board of Peace,” one congressional aide told the FT.

“Iran war, White House ballroom, security for the White House ballroom, immigration enforcement, Trump arch … the reflecting pool renovation, slush fund for crooks, and the farm bill. How do we pay for all this?” said one Nebraskan, according to CNN.

“I know you’re a lawyer. You’ve taken an oath as a congressman to support the laws of this land. A million Epstein files have still not been released, and … the Epstein Transparency Act you signed, the Senate signed, Trump signed, yet we still have millions of files that still have not been released,” Fremont resident Kim Stabbe asked Flood. “We know that Trump is in them tons of times; why do you continue to protect the pedophiles and Trump’s DOJ as they continue to break the law?”

“We have passed a law to release the Epstein files,” Flood replied. “Do you think that under President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, if President Trump was in the Epstein files, it would have been released?” He was met with boos and jeers. Flood toed a hawkish line on Iran, conceding that “everything costs too much,” while in the same breath maintaining support for the war that is making everything cost so much, stating, “I also don’t want Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

The only thing Flood seemed to fully agree with the crowd on was Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund—a shameless plan to direct billions of taxpayer dollars to Trump’s supporters who felt wronged or targeted by the Biden administration—even those who attacked Capitol Police on January 6.

“I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement,” he said. “The Senate is opening an oversight effort. And we in the House have to determine whether we do the same in the Judiciary Committee or in the Oversight Committee. I clearly think Congress needs to have an oversight role in this before I can sign off or support this.”

The hostilities Flood was met with aren’t just local to Norfolk. Americans nationwide are fed up with blatant corruption, another pointless and expensive war in the Middle East, and worrying about how much it’ll cost to fill their tank.

Watch the full town hall here.

Deputy Assistant Director Emily Morales was terminated from the bureau last week, in what insiders are claiming is the latest in a string of partisan firings at the hands of FBI Director Kash Patel, reported MS NOW Tuesday.

Morales received a letter from the director Friday and was subsequently walked out of the building with her belongings (as is standard procedure). It was not immediately clear what was in the letter, or why Morales was given the pink slip, but the top intelligence analyst did play a role in a tactical report that angered the GOP—nearly a decade ago.

A shooter opened fire on House Republicans’ baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2017. Representative Steve Scalise sustained life-threatening injuries from the attack, which struck his hip and shattered his bones. A week later, the FBI determined that the attack was not domestic terrorism but “suicide by cop.”

The matter has since been complicated by what former FBI Director Christopher Wray described as an evolving definition of domestic terrorism. In 2021, the FBI provided a statement to the House Appropriations Committee that read, “The shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on Members of Congress.”

“This conduct is something that we would today characterize as a domestic terrorism event,” the statement continued.

Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued another report on the attack, accusing the FBI of utilizing “false statements and manipulation of known facts” in order to reach its original conclusion in the 2017 shooting assessment.

But other ousted FBI staffers with experience working on intelligence reports claim that there was nothing atypical about the bureau’s original report. “Tactical reports give an understanding of information as it’s known at the time. Anyone with crisis response experience knows that information can change, and usually does,” Tonya Ugoretz, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Intelligence Directorate, told MS NOW.

Ugoretz was fired several months ago after she contributed to a decision to withdraw a “thinly sourced intelligence report” that alleged “China tried to flood the United States with fake driver’s licenses in order to promote fraud in the 2020 election,” according to MS NOW.

“The FBI’s actions are choking the capabilities that help it stop criminals, spies, hackers, and terrorists before they act,” Ugoretz said. “I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, and I don’t know which is worse.”

Speaking on Fox News’s Hannity Tuesday, Mullin complained that local law enforcement had allowed a chaotic protest outside of New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, a privately operated immigration detention facility under federal jurisdiction. The secretary warned that he’d met with the White House to plot his petty revenge on any city that doesn’t get behind Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportations.

“We’re currently drawing up plans to say, ‘Listen, in these sanctuary cities, where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,’” Mullin said. “Because they don’t want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process immigration at their facilities, nothing about that makes sense to me.”

Markwayne Mullin: "We are currently drawing up plans to say, listen, in these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities." pic.twitter.com/ayx6lD0dtf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 27, 2026

But Mullin’s plan lacks support from, well, everyone.

The U.S. Travel Association, a nonprofit lobbying group for all aspects of travel, has warned that such an unprecedented action would have “devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.”

Airlines for America, the largest trade association for the industry in the country, also urged against the idea. “Reducing CBP staffing at major airports would have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries, causing a significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo,” the group said in a statement.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also opposed Mullin’s plan while appearing at a House Budget Committee hearing last week. “We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places,” he said. “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just had a physical exam at Walter Reed Medical Center. Right after it, he proclaimed himself to be in perfect health. Then Trump’s propagandists unleashed an extraordinary attack on journalists for the sin of pointing out that Trump regularly falls asleep at public events. The moral is clear: Trump world knows that the second he’s perceived as weak in any way, his whole political mystique is at risk of imploding. We think it’s not a coincidence that this comes amid new signs that Trump may emerge from the Iran war with less than a world-historical victory. Indeed, Trump exploded over this at the news media just now as well.

So we’re working through all of it with Michael Cohen, who does good work on his Substack, Truth and Consequences, dissecting both Trump’s weakness and his authoritarianism. Michael, good to have you on.

Michael Cohen: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump just tweeted this: “Just finished my six-month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY.” Michael, I don’t know how his physical went, but the symptoms are constant.

There’s the bruising on his hand, which he covers with makeup, the swelling in his legs, the rash on his neck, and the constant falling asleep at official events right on live television—not to mention the constant slurring, the constant incoherence, the constant losing of his train of thought. Trump is obviously deteriorating. What do you think about that?

Cohen: I mean, there’s no question about it. You’ve seen a significant deterioration. I think one of the problems with Trump is that he’s always been somebody who has never appeared to be the most coherent individual in the world. Certainly not the healthiest person in the world, either physically or mentally. But it does seem as though he’s gotten significantly worse.

And as he’s gotten worse, the arguments that the White House is using to defend him against legitimate questions about this are even more ridiculous. I’m sure you saw this, but when he fell asleep at an Oval Office event, the White House tweeted out that he was just blinking when they caught him with his eyes closed. Like, are we that stupid?

I mean, maybe some people are that stupid in this country. But I think most Americans are not that dumb. And they realize the man’s falling asleep at public events.

Sargent: He absolutely is falling asleep. We can all see it happening right in front of us. And by the way, the White House rapid response Twitter feed did something really weird on this. It just unleashed a series of tweets that showed imagery of various journalists who appeared in the snapshots to have their eyes closed from actual blinking.

The Twitter feed then ridiculed them, saying they must be asleep and that they should be forthcoming about their health. This was directed mostly at CNN journalists like Brianna Keilar, Kevin Liptak, Kate Bolduan, and Dana Bash. For instance, one White House tweet said, in all caps, “Dana Bash falls asleep ahead of her 55th birthday next month. What is going on?”

Now, this is supposed to be mockery, but it’s just deranged. Everyone can see that the president is sleeping on camera, yet his propagandists are trying to intimidate everyone into not saying so. What do you make of that component?

Cohen: Well, I don’t think it’s going to work. First of all, I think people can see clearly that he’s falling asleep. But I think the bigger thing here is this is what happens when you have a president who is such a malignant narcissist as Trump is.

Narcissists cannot accept ever being seen as weak. They cannot accept ever being seen as not perfect. And Trump is the uber example of that phenomenon. This is why I go back to 2020—why he refused to acknowledge he lost. He can’t ever present himself as a loser. He lost that election. And so that just morphs into everything about him.

He has to seem strong—not just strong, by the way, the strongest person. Not just healthy—he’s the healthiest person. What Trump has done is surround himself with all of these people who basically their only job is to stroke his ego. And so they will make these insane comments like the ones you mentioned a second ago, because that’s what Trump cares about.

And the political fallout, the ridicule that it leads to of Trump, is almost a secondary consideration for them. Because what matters to these people is keeping the boss happy, because the boss helps them keep their jobs. It is a ridiculous situation. It is like the emperor has no clothes come to life. That’s what we’re basically seeing here.

Sargent: I want to get into another element of this, which is the degree to which it really resembles an authoritarian cult. It’s also obvious that Trump and the White House are only drawing more attention to his health and his physical and mental state by insisting, like a bunch of lickspittle North Korea propagandists, that his health is absolutely perfect and his strength and virility will be unquestioned.

But they clearly understand something about Trump’s mystique, which is that if he’s seen as weak, or if there are any cracks in the facade of any kind, for a non-insignificant swath of his following, suddenly that’s a real problem. Where do you think this comes from? It really is authoritarian cult stuff, isn’t it?

Cohen: It is. And by the way, I think for the record, even the North Koreans are like, guys, take it down a notch. It’s a little much. Honestly. I think it is partly what you said—it is a sort of authoritarian mindset of the administration where they have to project strength all the time. But I think it’s also a product of just his particular psychology, and not healthy psychology.

But again, I think the bigger problem for this White House is that nobody is believing it. I mean, look, maybe the 80 to 90 percent of MAGA supporters who continue to be supportive of Trump—maybe they buy it. And I actually suspect that they will buy whatever Trump tells them at this point. But I really do think that it is opening Trump up to so much ridicule because it is so obvious. We don’t live in an authoritarian society, right?

We are able to get contrary points of view that point out that in fact the man was falling asleep, the man’s not the healthiest person in the world. He can’t outrun that. You can’t run the authoritarian playbook in a society that isn’t fundamentally authoritarian, at least not yet. So I just think that it’s not an effective political strategy.

And to me, what it does is make Trump’s political problems worse, because I think you see this discrepancy between what he is talking about, what the people around him are talking about, and the reality of what Americans are actually seeing.

Sargent: It’s interesting that you say that they really understand themselves to be trying an authoritarian strategy and that this can’t work in a society that’s still, at least to some degree, a free society. Because they very consciously, I think, did try to run this playbook right at the outset of the second term in a way that they really didn’t during the first term, as bad as it was.

You had Stephen Miller out there essentially speaking like a totalitarian propagandist very regularly. You had the demonization of enemies and immigrants and the tanks in the streets, the imagery, the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship kind of oozing out of just about every public event. They really did think they were running this playbook.

And at this point, it should be pretty damn obvious that it has failed, and yet they continue to do it anyway. I find that a little tough to understand. Why do you think they do that?

Cohen: Look, I think it’s, to your point—I think it’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought about this before, but you’re absolutely right. A lot of the early things the administration did, whether it was trying to intimidate law firms that had had lawyers who’d worked on some investigation against Trump—they were trying to impose their will.

And there were a lot of people, to be honest, in the corporate world especially—all the social media folks, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos—who sort of played into it and kind of fell for it. But as time has gone on, that effort has largely, I think, failed. The so-called vibe shift we talked about in January, February 2025 has long gone.

As to why they keep doing it, I think it’s just because they know that’s what Trump wants to hear. I just think this is the bottom line. Trump doesn’t care about one thing and one thing only—his image, his ego. He needs validation constantly. He needs the people around him to tell him how great he is.

This is why you had a great article in The New York Times over the weekend looking at how cabinet members talk about Trump. And they described him as though he is saving the country—the most glowing terms imaginable. They know that’s what Trump wants to hear.

And I think a lot of Republicans have come to this realization that in order to keep Trump happy, in order to maintain their own political standing, they need to, for lack of a better term, smooch Trump’s derrière. And that’s what they’re doing on a daily basis.

But again, I think there is this huge gap between doing that and the reality of what people see. And to bring up one point here, you see this in some of the Republican primaries. Trump’s word remains golden. If Trump says vote against Thomas Massie, Kentucky voters are going to vote against the guy who’s been a congressman for several years and they’re going to pick the person Trump supports.

And so within the Republican Party, he still has this hold. But outside the Republican Party, that hold has disappeared completely. Among independents, his numbers are just atrocious. And I think you see this gap between the people who love Trump, which is a very small minority of the country at this point, and those who loathe Trump, which is a majority of the country.

Sargent: Yeah, and not only that, I think his support is actually slipping among elite Republicans as well, because he’s now jammed them into a position where they have to just play along with the authoritarian cult worship in a way that now is exposing them to really serious political liabilities in the coming midterm elections, right? It looks to me like MAGA world is cracking up in a new way over this.

So for instance, Trump endorsed MAGA whack job Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP primary, and allies of incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn are furious. Now, by the time people listen to this podcast, we’ll have a result in that primary.

Don’t know what it’s going to be—maybe Paxton’s going to win, it looks like—but right now we don’t know who’s going to win it. Still, the fury among Republicans is really notable, because what’s got them ticked is that Cornyn was mostly loyal to Trump yet Trump screwed him anyway.

One Texas Republican had this really eye-opening quote to Politico. It was this: “No matter what we do for you, you will still stab us in the back.” Michael, this guy is really on to something. No amount of loyalty to Trump is ever enough for him. And it is now at the point where they’re just not willing to take it anymore.

Cohen: I mean, if only there was some indication previously over the past 10 years if this is who Trump really is. I mean, what’s crazy is, is anyone surprised by this? So my pet theory as to why Trump came out in support of Paxton is because he wants to be associated with the winner of this runoff election, and that’s likely to be Paxton.

He doesn’t want to be seen as the loser—like Cornyn—even though endorsing Cornyn is better for the party, better for him actually, because it increases the likelihood that if Cornyn’s the nominee, the Republicans hold the Senate in November. This is, I think, where his psychology gets in the way of this.

But the thing is, I was struck by how many Republican senators were just so frustrated with Trump that he endorsed Paxton. And again, my response is, how are you surprised by this? You have carried water for this guy over and over and over again for how many years? And when the, you know what, hits the fan, are you really surprised that he is going to sell you guys out? Because that’s what he always does.

But the problem for Republicans now is that a lot of them have already gotten past the primary, so they don’t have to worry about a primary challenge. But if you’re a Republican in a safe seat—or even more likely, a seat that’s in danger of losing—do you want to risk getting on the wrong side of Trump and maybe Trump saying something bad about you online, or possibly cutting off funding for you from one of his PACs?

No Republican wants to take that risk because no Republican can win without strong Republican support and they will lose that Republican support—or they risk losing it—if they come out against Trump.

I look at Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania. He’s an example of this. He clearly has made the calculation that he’s willing to piss off Trump in order to shore up his standing with non-Republican voters. I’m not sure it’s going to work, because I think Trump’s going to go after him with both barrels, because he’s basically trying to shut down this slush fund that Trump has created with the Department of Justice.

But this is the problem for Republicans. They are caught between an unpopular president—a deeply unpopular president—who, however, remains popular within the party and will basically get Republican voters to do whatever he asks them to do.

Sargent: A hundred percent. So I want to switch to another front because it deepens the portrait here. Trump erupted on Truth Social on Tuesday afternoon. He said that even if Iran surrenders completely in every way, the media won’t admit it.

He tweeted this: “The failing New York Times, the corrupt and now irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the fake news media will headline that Iran had a masterful and brilliant victory over the United States of America. The Dumocrats and media have totally lost their way. They have gone absolutely crazy.”

Michael, this is just self-pitying nonsense. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though, that it’s coming even as Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is loosening and even as his physical and mental deterioration is obvious to the world.

He’s clearly aware that there’s a confluence of slippage here working against him—slipping health, slipping control of the GOP, his inability to force Iran to do his bidding. It really feels very clear to me that things have crossed a new threshold of him not really being able to control events anymore.

Cohen: Well, I think this is the thing about narcissists. They always try to create their own reality. And that’s what Trump has constantly done. I think Trump truly believes if he says it enough times—this was a war, the war with Iran has been a success, and it truly is not a success—then it becomes a success. And I think certainly among his supporters, there’s a belief that if he says it enough times, they will actually agree with him. I think that has proved itself pretty true over the past 10 years or so.

I just think the problem again is that Trump is unpopular. He’s at 37, 38 percent. He can keep saying these things that clearly are not true, and it’s just going to further erode the support that he has. He’s lost Democrats. He’s lost independents at a pretty large margin. He still maintains Republican support, although some recent polls suggest even that’s slipping. I mean, how much longer can he even maintain that support if he is describing things that are completely counter to reality?

I think this is the problem. No one around him is going to say to the president, you need to stop saying stuff like this, you’re hurting yourself. Nobody. This isn’t like his first term, where there were people around him who had the guts to at least try to sway him from bad ideas. No one in his inner circle will do that.

And so I just think that this, to your point, is going to get worse, because there is just no check on what he is doing and saying. And again, the gap between what he is doing and saying and the reality—what Americans are dealing with, whether at the gas pumps, whether what they’re seeing in the news—you can’t square the circle on these things. You just can’t.

Sargent: Well, that’s another experiment they’re running. They’re going to try to essentially tell us what to think and try to just completely hoodwink the entire electorate. But it seems to be failing pretty miserably. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Michael Cohen’s Substack, Truth and Consequences. He gets into this kind of stuff regularly. Michael, nice to have you on. Thanks so much.

Cohen: Great, my pleasure. Great to be here.