Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative May 2026 news and views. See our News Reports section for coverage of earlier dates in May and earlier months and years.

Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this. Nearly all excerpts are drawn from news sources for which the Justice Integrity Project pays a subscription. Readers here are encouraged also to subscribe to these outlets also to receive their full coverage and to support their work. 

May 31

Top Headlines

 

 

• The Parnas Perspective, Major Deep Dive: Exposing how the Trump Family is Earning Billions off the Presidency, Aaron Parnas, right, May 31, 2026. This week, I spent considerable time examining one question: how much wealth has the Trump family accumulated since Donald Trump returned to the White House? The answer is extraordinary.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Commentary: Learning from a Mentally Ill President, Paul Krugman, right, May 31, 2026. We need to deal with the powers and system that put him in power and keep him there.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Hits the Stalemate Phase of His International Interventions, and It Stings, David E. Sanger, May 31, 2026. In Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran, President Trump’s early declarations of easy wins have given way to harsh reality.
• New York Times, After Voting Decision, a Month of Political Earthquakes Across the South, Emily Cochrane and Rick Rojas, May 31, 2026. Republican officials are jubilant, some voters are confused and concerned, and civil rights activists are gearing up for the fight of a generation.
• New York Times, Inside the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S., Alan Feuer, Andrew Duehren, Glenn Thrush, Ben Protess and Maggie Haberman, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). Discussions among a group of lawyers with allegiance to the president were closely held. Some senior White House officials were said to have felt blindsided as the agreement took shape.
• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigtive Commentary: Strategic Candidacy Manipulation and the plague of Bernie Sanders-endorsed politicians, Wayne Madsen, left, May 31, 2026. Florida in 2018, Pennsylvania in 2022, and now Maine in 2026. Democrats better start taking advice from those inside its party and not pedantic rabble-rousers from outside their ranks.

More On Trump Team Governance

 

President Trump's Egocentric, Deranged Posts Within Seven Hours Via Truth Social In Reaction To Musicians' Snubs (Compiled by Aaron Rupar on May 30, 2026).

• Heather Delaney Reese, Trump's outrageous behavior yesterday is causing deep concern around the world, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, May 31-June 1, 2026. For more than seven hours on a Saturday, the President of the United States posted nearly 50 times in one of the most revealing meltdowns of his presidency. He posted his face carved into Mount Rushmore beside Washington and Lincoln, twice.
• New York Times, Trump Urges Canceling Freedom 250 Concerts After Artists Drop Out, Derrick Bryson Taylor, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). The president had earlier said on social media that he should take the place of “these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’” saying he gets “larger audiences than Elvis.”
• New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Pulling Customs From ‘Sanctuary’ City Airports Would Cause Chaos, Business Groups Say, Karoun Demirjian and Madeleine Ngo, May 31, 2026. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s proposal could block hubs like Boston, New York and Los Angeles from accepting international flights.
• New York Times, What’s Actually Wrong With The Reflecting Pool, Lazaro Gamio, David A. Fahrenthold and Maxine Joselow, Featured May 31, 2026 (print ed.). And why President Trump’s repairs have not addressed a major underlying problem. In April, President Trump announced his plans to reseal and add blue-tinted coating to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, U.S. Military Is Quietly Guiding Ships Through the Strait of Hormuz, Peter Eavis and Eric Schmitt, May 31, 2026. U.S. Central Command has helped around 70 commercial ships pass through the strait in the last three weeks, an official said.
• New York Times, Trump Sends Tougher Terms to Iran for Peace Framework, Officials Say, Luke Broadwater, Ronen Bergman and Tyler Pager, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). His changes to the proposed deal were potentially designed to speed up the process by putting pressure Iran to accept the current framework, one official said.

More Global News

• New York Times, The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People, Max Bearak and José María León Cabrera, May 31, 2026. Residents of coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador said the airstrike campaign was making many reconsider anything involving the ocean as a livelihood.

More On Trump Team Scandals, Allegations, Probes, Accountability

• Civil Discourse, Opinion: Trump's Past Is Catching Up With Him, Joyce Vance, right, May 30-31, 2026. We’ve discussed Trump’s ongoing efforts to prevent the release of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the now-dismissed classified documents prosecution against the president. That issue has now resurfaced. 
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Rush to Disavow the Terrorist Slush Fund, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 31, 2026. As some Trump insiders rush to distance themselves from the Terrorist Slush Fund, they’re not answering very basic questions, such as what happened to Trump’s expressed plan (which predated the IRS lawsuit) to give any money he bilks from his own government to charity, or why Trump sued the IRS in the first place, much less for the absurd amount of $10 billion. 
• The Breakdown via The Bulwark, Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak, Jonathan Cohn, May 31, 2026. Doctors around the country are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.
• Mobology, Dana White, the UFC, and their metaphor for Donald Trump's cruel and violent legacy, Dan E. Moldea, right, May 31, 2026. "Beating a man when he's down." . . . A disturbing sports extravaganza on the South Lawn of the White House, aka Emperor Trump's Roman Colosseum.
• PoliticusUSA,Opinion: Interior Secretary Falls Apart And Admits Trump Is Grifting Off America's 250th Anniversary, Jason Easley, right, May 31, 2026. Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would not say who is sponsoring Trump's Freedom 250 organization that is being run out of the White House, who the donors are, or how the money is being used.

U.S. Courts, Crime, Law, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, C.I.A. Officer Arrested With Gold Once Worked With No. 2 Pentagon Official, Julian E. Barnes and Mark Mazzetti, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). David Rush, a longtime C.I.A. officer, appears to have first had contact with Stephen A. Feinberg during President Trump’s first term. Some officials said the two men were not close.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent, Eileen Sullivan and Andrea Fuller, May 31, 2026. The departure of more than 10,000 federal lawyers has left some agencies without sufficient staff and has boosted the ranks of state attorneys general offices and advocacy groups.
• Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: George B. Tonks: Named In The Files, Jana, right, May 31, 2026. Convicted felon on fed supervision appears in Epstein files 46 times. Farmer reported him to DOJ, Chicago PD, NYPD. 2023 judge banned him from mentioning Epstein victim online.
• New York Time, Notre Dame Students Abused by Priest in ‘Weighing Scheme,’ Report Finds, Stephanie Saul, May 31, 2026. An investigation commissioned by Notre Dame found that the Catholic university could have done more to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct.

News Roundups

• Medias Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates and Comment: More Failed Deals, Economic Gaslighting, and New Iran Strikes, Ben Meiselas, right, May 31, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking in today’s midday update: Iran shot down another U.S. drone, the fifth American aircraft lost this week alone; Trump “toughened” his Iran deal terms, a move that analysts say makes zero strategic sense when Iran refused his last demands; Iran’s parliament speaker made clear: no deal until Iran’s rights are fully secured.
• Meidas Touch Network, Thiis Weekend in Politics, Bulletin 390, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 31, 2026. Trump made another 100+ batshit crazy posts on Truth Social again this weekend. Here are a few. 

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, After A Terrible Week Full Of Consequential Losses Trump Completely Loses It On Social Media, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 31, 2026. Our community hit an important milestone this week - $10m raised for battleground candidates and party committees - thank you all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• New York Times, Senator Dan Sullivan Has a New Challenger in Alaska: Dan Sullivan, Tim Balk, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). Two candidates with the same name will be on the ballot seeking the same seat in the state’s primary. “It’s going to be confusing,” one Republican said. In Alaska this election season, the biggest supporters of Dan Sullivan could be the biggest antagonists of Dan Sullivan.
• PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Gov. Andy Beshear Obliterates Kristen Welker's Biden Obsession, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 31, 2026. Meet The Press's Kristen Welker still thinks that Joe Biden and the 2024 election are a big story, but she tried to question Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) about it, and he turned the tables.
• NBC News,

  Graham Platner’s wife ‘angry, disappointed’ her past disclosure of his extramarital sexting was made public, Alexandra Marquez and Julie Tsirkin, May 31, 2026. Amy Gertner said it was “shameful” that media outlets and others had “spread gossip” instead of focused on the “real issues” her husband is running on in Maine.

U.S. Economy, Income Inequality, Inflation, Markets

 

An artist’s rendition of the horrendous carnage that occurred during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the Stone Bridge over the Conemaugh River,,killing more than 2,200 after wealthy residents failed to fortify a dam at their resort -- while escaping legal liaibility despite a national scandal.

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 30, 2026 [Good Life, Disaster and No Legal Accountability: The Way We Were], Heather Cox Richardson, right,May 31, 2026. Life was good in 1889 for the more than fifty wealthy industrialists who belonged to Pennsylvania’s South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The New Inequality, Paul Krugman, right, May 31, 2026. Goodbye, returns to education. Hello, concentrated ownership of capital.

U.S. Religion, Culture, Science, Media, Space

• New York Times, In U.F.O. Files, Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons, Ruth Graham, May 31, 2026. The prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raises unsettling theological implications.

Top Stories

 

The Parnas Perspective, Major Deep Dive: Exposing how the Trump Family is Earning Billions off the Presidency, Aaron Parnas, right, May 31, 2026. This week, I spent considerable time examining one question: how much wealth has the Trump family accumulated since Donald Trump returned to the White House? The answer is extraordinary.

Based on publicly available financial disclosures, corporate filings, reporting from major media organizations, and independent watchdog investigations, the Trump family has generated an estimated $2.4 billion in realized profits tied to foreign business dealings, cryptocurrency ventures, licensing agreements, and government-connected opportunities during the first eighteen months of Trump’s second presidency. When unrealized gains and digital assets are included, some estimates place the family’s wealth increase as high as $9.7 billion, including hundreds of millions of dollars connected directly or indirectly to foreign interests.

The scale of enrichment is unprecedented in modern American presidential history. Please share this report, and if possible, subscribe to support independent journalism. I choose truth over access, and I rely on readers like you to continue this work.SubscribedForeign Deals Return With a Vengeance

During Donald Trump’s first term, the Trump Organization publicly maintained a policy of avoiding new foreign deals. Whether that policy was fully successful remains debated, but the company largely refrained from launching major international developments while Trump occupied the Oval Office.

That restraint has disappeared during Trump’s second presidency.

In little more than a year, the Trump Organization has announced or pursued at least eight significant foreign projects. While the company maintains that it is not doing business directly with foreign governments, many of the developments involve entities closely tied to state actors, ruling families, or government-backed corporations.

In Qatar, a Trump-branded golf club and luxury villa project is being developed with participation from a company owned by the Qatari government.

In the United Arab Emirates, Eric Trump recently unveiled plans for an 80-story Trump Tower in Dubai. During the same visit, he attended a cryptocurrency conference alongside Zach Witkoff, co-founder of the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, one of Donald Trump’s most influential foreign policy envoys.

In Vietnam, the government approved a massive Trump resort project after reports that farmers were displaced from their land to accommodate development plans. The project spans nearly 1,000 hectares and includes golf courses, residential communities, commercial districts, and recreational facilities. The investment approval was personally signed by Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister. And now? Vietnam farmers are being forced to move the graves of their ancestors to make space for the complex:

Saudi Arabia presents another striking example. Trump Plaza Jeddah, a billion-dollar luxury development backed by Dar Global, a company with close ties to the Saudi ruling establishment, will feature apartments, office space, private parks, and Trump-branded residences. Eric Trump publicly celebrated the project as evidence of the family’s confidence in Saudi Arabia’s future:

These projects are not isolated ventures. Together they represent a coordinated global expansion occurring while the patriarch of the family occupies the highest office in the United States.The Meetings That Raise Ethical Questions

The corruption concerns extend beyond the real estate deals themselves.

According to investigations by the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have met with senior officials from at least eight foreign governments while pursuing international business opportunities.

The countries involved include Serbia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Qatar, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Somaliland, and Israel.

The concern is obvious. Foreign leaders understand that every dollar flowing into Trump family businesses ultimately benefits the sitting President of the United States. Even if no explicit quid pro quo exists, the incentives are impossible to ignore.

When foreign governments and politically connected developers negotiate business deals with the President’s family, the line between diplomacy and private enrichment becomes increasingly blurred.

By some estimates, the Trump Organization earned at least $87 million in 2024 from international Trump-branded projects alone. More than twenty Trump-branded developments are currently under construction or in planning stages outside the United States.Cryptocurrency: The Billion-Dollar Gold Rush

If foreign real estate represents one pillar of the family’s wealth expansion, cryptocurrency represents another.

In fact, crypto may be the single largest driver of Trump family wealth since the election.

A New Yorker investigation estimated that Trump-related ventures generated approximately $3.4 billion in gains shortly after the 2025 inauguration. More recent analyses from financial researchers suggest those numbers have climbed significantly higher.

The Wall Street Journal reported that businesses launched following Trump’s re-election generated at least $4 billion in proceeds and paper wealth for the family. Forbes estimates Trump’s personal net worth has increased by roughly $4.2 billion since 2024.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee maintain a running “Trump Family Digital Grift Tracker,” which currently estimates crypto-related wealth accumulation at approximately $4.9 billion.

The centerpiece of this windfall was Trump’s meme coin launch, unveiled just days before his inauguration. According to data cited by the Associated Press and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the project generated roughly $320 million in trading-related revenue within four months.

Unlike traditional businesses that require years of development and operational investment, cryptocurrency projects can create enormous wealth almost overnight. The result has been a financial bonanza unlike anything previously associated with a sitting American president.Government Connections and Favorable Treatment

The Trump family’s business activities increasingly overlap with government decision-making.

Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Air Force agreed to purchase interceptor drones from Powerus, an Arizona company backed by Trump’s sons.

Donald Trump Jr. joined investment firm 1789 Capital shortly after the 2024 election. The firm later invested in a critical minerals startup called Vulcan Elements. Not long afterward, the company reportedly received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, the largest loan in that office’s history.

Supporters argue these investments reflect sound business judgment.

Critics counter that companies connected to presidential family members should not simultaneously benefit from federal contracts, loans, and regulatory decisions overseen by the administration.

At minimum, the appearance of favoritism is difficult to dismiss.The Presidential Stock Trading Controversy

The ethical concerns do not stop with Trump’s children.

Donald Trump himself has embraced a level of stock trading that would have been almost unimaginable for modern presidents.

Previous presidents generally sought to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. George H.W. Bush used a blind trust. Bill Clinton followed a similar approach. George W. Bush sold individual holdings. Barack Obama invested primarily through diversified mutual funds. Joe Biden largely avoided active stock trading altogether.

Trump has charted a different course.

Federal disclosures show more than 3,600 stock transactions during the first quarter of the year alone, representing potentially more than $100 million in trading activity.

Among the reported investments was up to $5 million in Nvidia, a company whose fortunes were directly affected by administration decisions concerning advanced chip exports to China.

The portfolio also included major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, companies heavily influenced by geopolitical decisions and military policy.

The trading activity has proven extraordinarily lucrative for the President, with estimates suggesting he has generated between $200 million and $700 million through stock trades and asset sales. You can read all of the President’s financial disclosures here and here.

The broader issue is that a president possesses extraordinary power to shape markets. Trading stocks while simultaneously making policy decisions that affect those same companies creates unavoidable ethical questions.The Merchandising Empire

While billion-dollar crypto ventures and international real estate projects attract headlines, a parallel stream of revenue continues to flow through Trump-branded merchandise.

The Trump Mobile venture illustrates the pattern.

Marketed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the service centers around a gold-colored smartphone called the T1 and a Trump-branded wireless plan. The project has faced criticism over delayed deliveries, changing sales terms, questions regarding manufacturing claims, and confusion surrounding its actual telecommunications infrastructure.

Similarly, the “God Bless the USA Bible” has generated controversy. The product combines the King James Bible with American founding documents and patriotic materials. Critics have condemned it as a commercial exploitation of religion and nationalism.

Trump-branded guitars have followed the same model. Limited-edition instruments priced between $1,500 and $10,500 have been marketed directly to supporters, continuing a broader strategy of monetizing political loyalty through consumer products.

Individually, these ventures may generate only a fraction of the revenue associated with crypto or foreign real estate.

Collectively, they reinforce a broader pattern: nearly every aspect of Trump’s political brand has become a commercial opportunity.

The contrast with recent presidents is stark.

Joe Biden earned a presidential salary of $400,000 annually. Across four years in office, his presidential compensation totaled approximately $1.6 million. Combined with First Lady Jill Biden’s income as a professor, the family’s annual earnings remained roughly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Barack Obama similarly earned $400,000 per year throughout his eight years in office, receiving approximately $3.2 million in total presidential salary.

Neither president increased his personal wealth by billions while serving in office.

The difference is not merely one of scale.

It is a difference in philosophy.

Previous presidents generally treated public office as a temporary position separate from private business interests. The Trump model treats political power and commercial opportunity as deeply interconnected.The Bottom Line

The available evidence points toward a conclusion that would have been difficult to imagine in earlier eras of American politics.

The Trump family has built one of the most lucrative political enterprises in modern history. Foreign real estate projects, cryptocurrency ventures, licensing agreements, branded merchandise, investment deals, and government-adjacent business opportunities have combined to produce billions of dollars in new wealth.

Supporters view these ventures as legitimate business success.

Critics view them as a profound conflict of interest and an unprecedented monetization of public office.

Regardless of one’s political perspective, the numbers themselves are difficult to dispute. Measured by financial gain alone, no modern presidential family appears to have benefited more directly from political power than the Trump family has during Donald Trump’s second term.

And based on the projects already announced, the wealth accumulation may only be beginning. Billions down. Billions more to go.

 

Among the deranged self-portraits President Trump posted on his Truth Social media site the weekend of May 30 to 31 was one of him in American Colonial garb directing an Air Force attack and another of him installed with the greatest American Presidents on Mount Rushmore.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Commentary: Learning from a Mentally Ill President, Paul Krugman, right, May 31, 2026. We need to deal with the powers and system that put him in power and keep him there.

The President of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that. So while we should continue to focus on this degeneration taking place in front of our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we can do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power.

Hi I’m Paul Krugman. First video update in a while.

It’s May 31st. If you have been following some of the news you may know that Trump’s mental deterioration, which has been obvious for quite a while, got even more extreme in the past few days. Tellingly, the things that are really driving him into more obvious dysfunction are things that are blows to his ego. I was especially struck — I was rattled actually — by his reaction to the wave of artists canceling out on the self-glorifying concert series he’s holding on the mall.

So, if you haven’t seen it, here’s what he said on Truth Social: That artists are “getting the yips” and

I am thinking about bringing 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, the man who loves our country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the greatest president in history, Donald J. Trump.

Oh my god. I would not want to trust this guy alone in a room, let alone running the world’s formerly greatest power, although he’s doing a lot to run that into the ground.

Okay, but we knew that, right? It’s not really a surprise to find out that he has lost his mind, what was left of it. And yet, he is in power. People who did a lot to put him in power did so, knowing this — the billionaires who contributed vast sums of money to his campaign, the Supreme Court which gave him immunity back in 2024 — they all knew who they were doing this for. They understood what they were doing. Now, maybe, even they are getting a bit of cold feet as as he goes over the edge and as we’re starting to see in Iran and elsewhere what happens when you have a lunatic running the United States, a lunatic who has far more power than a previous president because all of the normal institutional safeguards have been short-circuited or dismantled.

Still, they are continuing to support him, and they are continuing to do so not just in concrete ways, but verbally, which matters. They continue to cover for him.

Just the other day, Jeff Bezos — who is not an idiot; he has to know what he’s looking at — but he said, oh, Trump is much more mature than he was in his first term, which is obviously a complete lie. That is not what Jeff Bezos thinks. And it’s telling you that he is still providing cover.

The Supreme Court, although it’s been knocking back a few things, is for the most part continuing to give Trump treatment that it would never have accorded, not just to any Democratic president, but to any previous Republican president.

Okay, this is not coming out of thin air. These people — I’m not talking about Trump but people who are empowering him — are not stupid. Some of them are weak but they are also acting because they think there’s something in it for them.

All of this at some level is about money and power for people beyond Trump. And it’s made possible by the fact that there is so much money in the hands of a few people, many of whom turn out, not too surprisingly, to be terrible, insensitive, anti-democratic people themselves.

Obviously, we need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a deMAGAfication. And I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany.

And it’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.

It’s not going to be easy, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try because this is a nightmare. This is a nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives who still have a conscience. (There still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA.)

This has to be turned around and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.

Have a good rest of your weekend.

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Hits the Stalemate Phase of His International Interventions, and It Stings, David E. Sanger, May 31, 2026. In Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran, President Trump’s early declarations of easy wins have given way to harsh reality.

President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean and decisive.

On his desk in the Oval Office, he keeps models of the B-2 bombers that took out three Iranian nuclear sites in one night, not quite a year ago. In the opening weeks of the Iran conflict this year, he talked often about replicating his success in Venezuela — “the perfect scenario,’’ he said — shorthand for overthrowing a troublesome leader with one quick commando raid, and replacing him with a pliant, American-friendly successor.

But now, Mr. Trump has hit the stalemate phase of his presidency.

The war with Iran is clearly at that stage. When he declared a cease-fire on April 7, Mr. Trump said on social media that the end of combat operations would be conditional on “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” It wasn’t. Even if commerce now resumes across the strait under a memorandum of understanding still under negotiation, it will still leave the future of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs exactly where they were in February: stuck in a further negotiation that the administration insists will be “time limited,” probably to 60 days.

But the Iranians sense Mr. Trump’s deep reluctance to restart combat operations that are deeply unpopular in the United States, and most Iran experts say they expect Tehran to try to stretch the negotiations for months or years — as they have with past administrations.

Then there is the Ukraine war, a conflict in its fifth year that Mr. Trump famously boasted he would end in 24 hours after taking office. Sixteen months after he was sworn in, he rarely mentions the war anymore, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently complained that he was tired of wasting time in endless negotiations, suggesting that he would be perfectly happy if some other country wanted to step in and play that role.

For their part, the Russians have quietly made clear that they are tired of periodic visits from the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to people familiar with the negotiations. They say they want a stable, diplomatic process, with working groups and regular meetings. They also want an American ambassador to Russia — a job that has been open, astoundingly, for nearly a year.

And there is Gaza. When Mr. Trump flew to Israel to celebrate the release of the last of the living hostages from the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, he enthused about a 20-point plan that started with the disarming of Hamas, the creation of an international stabilization force and, ultimately, rebuilding Gaza into a gleaming territory of glass office towers and seaside resorts. Eight months after that trip, Hamas has still not disarmed, except in fake, A.I.-generated videos. (One, sent out by Mr. Trump, depicts him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing.)

While more aid is making its way into the territory, Palestinians are still sleeping in tents, the rat-infested rubble has not been cleared, and Mr. Netanyahu announced last week that the Israeli military would expand its control to about 70 percent of the Palestinian enclave.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Perhaps all of this is the inevitable result of a president with huge ambitions running into the brick walls of global realities. Perhaps it is the result of overreach, as Mr. Trump — infused with the success of his first two military adventures, into Iran and Venezuela — assumes that there is no task too big for the U.S. military.

Some experts suggest that it arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of American power. As one of Mr. Trump’s close aides said recently, destroying nuclear sites from the air is what America does best, and controlling political events in nations like Iran, Russia and Ukraine is what the United States does worst.

“Foreign policy tends to be a long and difficult enterprise,” Richard Fontaine, a former top aide to Senator John McCain and now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, said in an interview over the weekend. “Mr. Trump is not the first president to imagine quick, simple solutions to complicated and enduring international problems. Yet it is the sustained management and follow-through that often makes all the difference, not the grand and dramatic announcement.”

Follow-through has never been Mr. Trump’s strong suit. To establish his bona fides for a Nobel Peace Prize, he liked to gather testimonials to the breakthroughs he made or invite leaders at the White House and hold a signing ceremony; if fighting resumes, he is unlikely to dwell on the implications.

An exception is the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where Mr. Trump has episodically admitted he underestimated the complexity of the problem, and perhaps his powers of persuasion.

“I’ve had cases where I had Putin all done and Zelensky wouldn’t make the deal, which shocked me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times in January, referring to Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “Then I’ve had cases where it was the reverse. I think now they both want to make a deal, but we’ll find out.”

 

Earlier this month, people from all over the United States came to Selma, Ala., to march for voters’ rights, beginning at Tabernacle Baptist Church and ending on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge  (New York Times photo by Wes Frazer). 

New York Times, After Voting Decision, a Month of Political Earthquakes Across the South, Emily Cochrane and Rick Rojas, May 31, 2026. Republican officials are jubilant, some voters are confused and concerned, and civil rights activists are gearing up for the fight of a generation.

It is a confusing moment to be a voter in the South.

Republican leaders across the region have redrawn congressional maps at breakneck speed in the month since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, leading primaries to be postponed, a veteran House member to abandon his re-election bid and new candidates to charge into races ahead of the November midterms.

The outcome could be the most sweeping reconfiguration of the region’s political landscape in at least a generation, pushing what was already a largely red swath of the country more firmly into the Republican column and jeopardizing the political careers of a number of Black Democrats.

In the meantime, the rush to redistrict is stoking a fierce debate over what representation should look like in the South — as well as more pragmatic questions about district boundaries that are shifting, or may soon shift, under voters’ feet.

“They literally have created chaos,” said Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, Tenn., a Democrat whose home was drawn out of the Tennessee district where he had spent months running for Congress when Republican state lawmakers adopted a new map in early May. “It’s the voter that loses in this kind of partisan gamesmanship.”

Recent redistricting efforts have not been limited to the South, nor have Republicans been behind all of them. But President Trump pushed the party to adopt the strategy even before the Supreme Court ruling, recognizing the uphill battle that Republicans faced to maintain their slim House majority in the midterms.

Texas began the current redistricting wars last summer at the behest of Mr. Trump, drawing a new map in an effort to flip five House seats to Republicans. Democrats in California responded in kind, and several other states followed last fall. But it was the Supreme Court ruling late last month that set off the frenzy in the South, where the Voting Rights Act had long protected a handful of districts with a majority of Black voters who have largely elected Black Democrats.

About 60 percent of Black Americans live in the South, a share that has grown in recent years in a reversal of the exodus from the region during the Great Migration, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute.

At least a third of the population is Black in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, as are about one in four voters in Alabama. But while Republicans fully control almost every Southern state, the region remains racially polarized, as most of the districts with a majority of Black voters lean Democratic and have elected Black representatives.

They include James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, left, and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, right, who have both served more than three decades in Congress. Georgia has four Black members of the House. As recently as 2024, rulings tied to the Voting Rights Act paved the way for the creation of new districts in Alabama and Louisiana that Black Democrats won.

But in its ruling last month, the Supreme Court rejected Louisiana’s congressional map as unconstitutional. The court’s conservative supermajority agreed with plaintiffs in a lawsuit that race had illegally been used as a primary factor in drawing the second majority-Black district, which Representative Cleo Fields won in 2024, flipping it from Republican to Democrat.

The ruling significantly raised the bar for proving discrimination against minority voters under the Voting Rights Act.

Within hours, it set off a redistricting frenzy across the South, with Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama quickly moving to eliminate districts with large concentrations of Black voters. The Florida Legislature approved a map on the day of the ruling that eliminated four Democratic-held districts, diluting the voting power of Black and Hispanic voters in several regions.

In states like Mississippi, where primaries had already been held, Georgia, where early voting had started, and South Carolina, where lawmakers failed to reach agreement on a new map before early voting began last week, top officials vowed that the coming midterm elections would be the last to use their current maps.

The ruling also surfaced a fraught debate about just how far the South has been able to move beyond the racism of the region’s past, where segregation-era poll taxes, literacy tests and other disenfranchisement tactics were used to deny basic rights to Black voters. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.,left, wrote for the majority in the ruling.

In interviews around the region, though, many Black voters said the ruling worried them deeply.

“They’re trying to bring us back,” said Janet Tobias, 70, sitting outside a Louisiana State Capitol hearing room where lawmakers were debating new district lines one recent evening. Noting attempts by Mr. Trump and other conservative lawmakers to roll back diversity efforts and the teaching of Black history, she said she feared that “we are not going to have anyone behind those doors speaking up on our behalf.” 

 

New York Times, Inside the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S., Alan Feuer, Andrew Duehren, Glenn Thrush, Ben Protess and Maggie Haberman, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). Discussions among a group of lawyers with allegiance to the president were closely held. Some senior White House officials were said to have felt blindsided as the agreement took shape.

Time was running out.

President Trump had sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion, and a federal judge was pressing the Justice Department to explain how it could muster an independent defense of the agency against the man who ultimately controlled it.

Behind the scenes, the job of addressing the vexing problem of how to settle the suit fell to a tight-knit group of lawyers, all of whom had allegiance to Mr. Trump.

On one side of the talks was a Justice Department run by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who once served as Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.

On the other were the president’s private lawyers, among them Boris Epshteyn, who was a former client of Mr. Blanche’s. Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving forward the deal to end the suit, coordinating and holding discussions with all of the sides involved: Mr. Trump, the president’s personal lawyers and Justice Department officials, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The discussions were so closely held that some senior White House officials told others that they were blindsided, learning of them only once the agreement was nearly complete.

In the end, the lawyers’ solution did not give Mr. Trump what his lawsuit had demanded, which was simply to move funds from the Treasury Department into his own pocket. But the agreement that was reached was still a big victory for the president and his allies: It set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people deemed to have been harmed by so-called government “weaponization” — possibly including hundreds of rioters charged with storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and released Mr. Trump and his businesses from potentially costly I.R.S. audits.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who discussed internal deliberations about the I.R.S. suit on the condition of anonymity.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that anyone who believed they were a victim of government weaponization could apply for money from the fund, claiming that many people had been victimized by the Biden administration.

Much is still unknown about how the arrangement came about. But the plan drafted by a group of Trump allies posed conflicts of interest that are remarkable, even for an administration riddled with them

As questions have mounted about the nature of the deal, the federal judge who oversaw the lawsuit, Kathleen M. Williams, took the extraordinary step on Friday of revisiting the case, asking whether the parties had deceived her.

When the details of the agreement were first revealed two weeks ago, Democrats and former government officials lodged accusations of corruption and self-dealing, and even some Republicans reacted with scornful disbelief. Some G.O.P. senators were so angry they abandoned plans to approve a measure to finance the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Within days of the agreement becoming public, and before the judge raised questions about it, senior administration officials began preparing to get rid of the fund amid the intense blowback. Those discussions were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

But while the agreement appeared to have emerged abruptly, it fused two ideas that had been kicking around in Mr. Trump’s circle for years: a desire by him and his family to avoid extensive tax audits, and a longing by his allies to obtain financial restitution for legal wrongs they claimed to have suffered during the Biden administration.

In its broad strokes, the plan was in keeping with other maneuvers by Mr. Trump. As president, he has often used the levers of power at his command to serve himself at a moment when he still maintains control over the government, including having the United States accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar that he could fly as president and intend to take later. But in establishing a fund that would involve billions in taxpayer money, the deal stands alone.

The president himself has said little about how the agreement came together or who played a role in resolving the suit, which faulted the I.R.S. for the leak of his tax information to The New York Times during his first term. The closest he has come in recent days was a post on social media in which he declared that he had given up “a lot of money” by “allowing” the fund to be created.

“I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

Trump v. Trump

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. landed at the Justice Department with a thud in late January.

By early spring, lawyers there were already wrestling with the legal dilemma the president’s pleading had created.

After all, to defend the I.R.S. against Mr. Trump, the department would have to fight a sitting president who was technically in charge of the agency and who demanded total loyalty from his subordinates.

Department lawyers were not the only ones who had identified this problem. Judge Williams, an Obama appointee who sits in Miami, had also homed in on it, wondering whether there was actually a conflict to adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was effectively on both sides of the suit.

 

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent representing Vermont, has endorsed for important offices under the Democratic Party banner Graham Platner of Maine (top left), Andrew Gillum of Florida (top right) and John Fetterman of Pennsylvaia (bottom right) -- each of whom developed major problems destructive to the Democratic Party's agenda.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigtive Commentary: trategic Candidacy Manipulation and the plague of Bernie Sanders-endorsed politicians, Wayne Madsen, left, May 31, 2026. Florida in 2018, Pennsylvania in 2022, and now Maine in 2026. Democrats better start taking advice from those inside its party and not pedantic rabble-rousers from outside their ranks

There is an old joke about a visitor to a mental institution asking one of the patients why he keep hitting his head on a brick wall. The patient replied, “When I stop, I feel better.” The same analogy applies to the lack of effective candidate vetting in the Democratic Party. How many Andrew Gillums, John Fettermans, and Graham Platners will it take to convince the Democratic Party that a gadfly non-member of the party, perennial presidential spoiler Bernie Sanders, has no standing in endorsing candidates for a political party that must appeal to voters a long way from Burlington, Vermont to be a winning political party?

Not that I have anything against Burlington or Vermont, they’re idyllic compared to living in the banana republic of Ron De Santis, but Sanders had absolutely no business sticking his nose into the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida. Sanders’s endorsement of Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum resulted in the disaster of two terms of DeSantis. The strongest Democratic candidate against the corruption-clouded Gillum was former U.S. Representative Gwen Graham, the daughter of Florida’s popular former governor and U.S. senator Bob Graham.

In retrospect, Gillum was a “poison pill” candidate and Sanders and his flock of listless supporters swallowed it whole. In 2020, police discovered a drunk Gillum in a South Beach, Miami hotel with a gay male escort. Police also found packets of crystal meth in the room. In 2022, Gillum was indicted by the Merrick Garland-selected U.S. Attorney for Northern Florida on 21 felony counts that included wire fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements for allegedly diverting money raised during his political campaign. A jury found Gillum not guilty on the charge of making false statements and was hung on the remaining counts. The remaining charges were dropped by the federal prosecutors.

It is guaranteed that Gwen Graham’s record was immaculate when compared to Gillum’s corruption-tainted record as mayor. Sanders also failed to understand that his endorsement of Gillum was bound to hurt Graham because there were two other candidates in the Democratic primary — real estate billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member Jeff Greene and former Miami Beach mayor Phil Levine, both of whom had ties to Donald Trump. Sanders’s endorsement of Gillum proved that the one-time Brooklyn Socialist activist had little to no knowledge of the political formula required to win a statewide race in Florida.

The octogenarian Sanders would again upset the Democrats’ political apple cart in 2022 when he endorsed Pennsylvania’s quirky Lieutenant Governor, John Fetterman, for a U.S. Senate seat. Fetterman soundly defeated centrist Democrat and Marine Corps veteran, former U.S. Representative Conor Lamb. One of the reasons for Fetterman’s lopsided victory over Lamb was Fetterman’s stroke just before the election. The Sanders supporters of Fetterman relished in the fact that Democratic centrists in purple-but-reddening Pennsylvania“Felt the Bern.” Fetterman went on to defeat Republican Mehmet “Dr. Oz” in the general election. There is little doubt that Lamb would have also defeated Oz with likely a greater share of the vote. Just like the Gillum disaster in Florida, Sanders and his minions were silent as Fetterman became Donald Trump’s most loyal Democrat in the Senate.

Sanders then decided to insert himself into this year’s Senate election in Maine. Endorsing oyster farmer Graham Platner, above, over Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills, Sanders, once again, failed to vet his favorite candidate. It has now been reported that Platner had been sexting messages to several women after his marriage. This fuck up brings back nightmares of Florida in 2018.

Bernie Sanders has given the nation Ron DeSantis, John “Lurch” Fetterman, and, if Platner’s campaign collapses, yet another term for Susan Collins. Someone please send the old prune Sanders back to one of his three luxurious homes in Vermont where he can no longer threaten a political party of which he has never been a member.

Vetting political candidates should be a normal process taken by the Democrats to prevent the running of decoy, spoiler, false-flag, poison pill, dummy, or strategic plant candidates.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

It is noteworthy to point out that such tactics have not only been heavily employed by the Republican Party but have been a mainstay of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and pro-Moscow parties in Ukraine and Belarus. Trojan horse candidates are designed to split the vote of the opposing party (as witnessed in Florida in 2018), confuse voters with similar names, drain resources from a target campaign, create scandals or chaos inside the opponent’s coalition (as seen currently in Maine), and manipulate primaries to produce a weaker nominee (for example, 2022 in Pennsylvania).

Republicans were behind a scheme in 2020 to field “ghost candidates” in Florida state senate elections. Sham “independent” candidates with similar political branding siphoned off votes from Democrats in tight races. The GOP operation resulted in criminal prosecutions.

Republicans have also been caught recruiting candidates in Democratic primaries to weaken the field. One such candidate is Bill Forbes, an anti-abortion Republican running as a spoiler in this year’s Democratic primary in Nebraska.

More On Trump Team Governance

 

President Trump's Egocentric, Deranged Posts Within Seven Hours Via Truth Social In Reaction To Musicians' Snubs (Compiled by Aaron Rupar on May 30, 2026).

 

Heather Delaney Reese, Trump's outrageous behavior yesterday is causing deep concern around the world, Heather Delaney Reese, May 31-June 1, 2026. For more than seven hours on a Saturday, the President of the United States posted nearly 50 times in one of the most revealing meltdowns of his presidency. He posted his face carved into Mount Rushmore beside Washington and Lincoln, twice.

He posted a fake “Trump Peace Prize” bearing his own face. He posted himself kissing a flag and depicted as the God of War. And most dangerously, he repeatedly called for a federal judge to be investigated, impeached, and removed, naming both the judge and his wife and putting a target on their backs before an already radicalized base. The judge’s offense was reading the law. For that, the president said he “should be brought up on charges.”

This is how it always begins. The strongman does not start by jailing his enemies. He starts by naming them. And the judges go first, because an independent court is the one thing that can tell a president no and make it stick. But the timing of this meltdown is what makes it so revealing. On Friday night, in the news slot reserved for things you must release but hope no one examines, the White House released a statement about his physical, claiming a cardiac age 14 years younger than his real age, a perfect cognitive score, and “excellent health.” The very next day, the man that report describes spent seven hours proving the opposite.

The report does not match the man we have all watched with our own eyes. The one who falls asleep in meetings, who loses his breath mid-sentence, who keeps going back for heart scans that healthy people his age do not need. And underneath all of it was an embarrassment he cannot fix: the artists booked for his birthday are declining to perform. So he called them “third rate,” nominated himself to replace them, and then called for the whole celebration to be scrapped rather than admit the performers who represent this country would not share a stage with him. The living people told him no. So he generated fake images of dead founders who cannot decline his proximity. This was not strength. This is what it looks like when power can feel itself slipping.

New York Times, Trump Urges Canceling Freedom 250 Concerts After Artists Drop Out, Derrick Bryson Taylor, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). The president had earlier said on social media that he should take the place of “these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’” saying he gets “larger audiences than Elvis.”

President Trump on Saturday called for the cancellation of a concert series celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, after a wave of musicians pulled out.

“Cancel it,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding, “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.”

Freedom 250, the group that is organizing the administration’s events for the birthday celebration, announced on Wednesday that a series of nine musical acts would perform during a 16-day exposition — known as the Great American State Fair — on the National Mall beginning in late June. The exposition is part of the festivities surrounding America’s 250th birthday.

But at least five musicians have since dropped out. Some of those artists said they had not been aware that the event had been part of an initiative planned by the Trump administration for the nation’s birthday.

In an earlier post on Truth Social on Saturday, Mr. Trump had suggested that, rather than canceling the concerts, he should instead headline the event.

Calling himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World” and “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime,” Mr. Trump wrote that he should “take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists.’”

In that post, Mr. Trump said he was ordering “my Representatives” to explore “the feasibility of doing an America Is Back rally,” where he would “give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

There was some confusion surrounding whether Mr. Trump was, indeed, referring to the concerts in the earlier post. There, the president referred more than once to an event “on Wednesday.” The concerts announced by Freedom 250 are currently scheduled to take place across two Thursdays and Fridays and one Saturday.

 

New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Pulling Customs From ‘Sanctuary’ City Airports Would Cause Chaos, Business Groups Say, Karoun Demirjian and Madeleine Ngo, May 31, 2026. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s proposal could block hubs like Boston, New York and Los Angeles from accepting international flights.

Travel industry and business leaders are denouncing a proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to remove customs officers from airports in liberal cities, saying it would create havoc for travelers and jeopardize the travel economy at some of the nation’s largest ports of entry.

The idea, which Mr. Mullin has floated on cable television interviews, is designed to punish so-called sanctuary cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Customs officers monitor goods flowing in and out of the country and must be on hand for international flights. Removing customs from airports would mean they cannot accept incoming international flights.

“Any reduction in Customs and Border Protection operations at major U.S. gateway airports threatens to cause unnecessary chaos throughout the nation’s air transportation system,” a coalition of travel and business trade groups, including the U.S. Travel Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote in a statement Friday. The fallout of making such changes at even a handful of gateway airports, the statement added, “will quickly ripple across the country.”

Last week, Sean P. Duffy, the transportation secretary, also told lawmakers that such a move would be ill-advised.

“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 during a hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee. “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”

The White House, despite past efforts to target sanctuary cities over their immigration policies, has not endorsed Mr. Mullin’s plans. The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the idea, beyond pointing to Mr. Mullin’s comments.

But as the criticism has mounted, Mr. Mullin has only dug in on the proposal.ImageMr. Mullin used the protests outside Delaney Hall, an immigrant detention facility in Newark, as justification for potentially moving customs officers out of airports.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. Mullin promoted the idea multiple times last week, saying in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday that the department was drawing up plans to withdraw officers who process international flights in cities where “local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws.”

“We shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,” Mr. Mullin said. “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.”

The next day, Mr. Mullin claimed during an interview with Newsmax that local law enforcement in New Jersey refused to respond after federal officials requested help following the eruption of protests outside an immigrant detention facility in Newark. Mr. Mullin held up that event as justification for potentially moving customs officers “out of the airports so they can help assist to secure the area.”

“If local law enforcement isn’t going to help, then we have to provide what assets we have,” he said, adding: “Therefore we won’t be able to process international flights going to those airports, because those officers will be reassigned.”

The travel industry has said the impact of such moves, if they come to pass, is potentially significant.

There are 18 airports in areas that the Department of Justice has put on its list of sanctuary cities including Boston, New York and Los Angeles. They handle a combined 68 million passengers a year, worth tens of billions in commercial activity. Some of them are also major cargo hubs, processing billions in imports on a daily basis.

According to travel industry representatives, shutting down customs at Newark Airport alone would jeopardize an estimated $8 billion per year in travel spending, and an estimated $100 million of imports on a daily basis. The city is expected to be a major destination for travelers arriving this summer to watch World Cup soccer games in New Jersey.

 

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is the largest of the many reflecting pools in Washington, D.C. It is a 2,030-by-167-foot (619 by 51 m) rectangular pool located on the National Mall, directly east of the Lincoln Memorial, with the World War II Memorial and Washington Monument to the east of the reflecting pool. Part of the iconic image of Washington, D.C., the reflecting pool is lined by walking paths and shade trees on both sides. Depending on the viewer's vantage point, it dramatically reflects the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Mall's trees, and the expansive sky (Source: Wikipedia). 

New York Times, What’s Actually Wrong With The Reflecting Pool, Lazaro Gamio, David A. Fahrenthold and Maxine Joselow, Featured May 31, 2026 (print ed.). And why President Trump’s repairs have not addressed a major underlying problem. In April, President Trump announced his plans to reseal and add blue-tinted coating to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

It is his latest project to reshape the nation’s capital. But the work may not be a long-term solution.

Multiple problems plague the landmark. One issue is its leaky pipes, which are not currently being addressed by the renovations.

When the architect Henry Bacon designed the Reflecting Pool, he envisioned it as a quiet, mirror-like surface that would reflect the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the surrounding sky.

But beneath the smooth surface, major engineering problems have lurked since it was constructed in the 1920s. The pool was built on unstable mudflats that have shifted over the decades, cracking the pool’s concrete and causing massive leaks. And the stagnant, shallow water has become a petri dish for algae.

It has posed a headache for other presidential administrations, and the first Trump administration formed a plan to fix some of the pool’s problems, but it was never carried out. Then, around Thanksgiving last year, the second Trump administration suddenly took interest again.

Two days before the holiday, the National Park Service cleaned goose poop and fallen leaves out of the Reflecting Pool using specialized equipment called a “super scrubber.” Frank Lands, the deputy director of the Park Service, was scheduled to personally supervise this work, according to a copy of his calendar obtained by The New York Times.

The next day, Mr. Trump suggested on social media that the Park Service would pursue a larger renovation project immediately after it had finished cleaning the pool. “Study it hard because you won’t be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer,” the president wrote in a post on social media.

But the Park Service waited four months to award the contracts for a broader renovation project. And that project did not tackle one of the pool’s biggest problems: its pipes.

The Reflecting Pool is supported by a complex plumbing system that centers on a water treatment plant.

That plant was built during the most recent renovation in the 2010s, when the Obama administration spent $35 million to renovate the pool. Afterward, the algae and leaks returned.An illustration showing the network of plumbing that supports the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is a network of pipes that cycle water between the pool and a water treatment plant. Additionally, there are pipes connecting the treatment plant to the Tidal Basin and the city’s sewer system. A drain line connects the pool to the Tidal Basin, and a municipal water line also connects to the pool.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Trump Sends Tougher Terms to Iran for Peace Framework, Officials Say, Luke Broadwater, Ronen Bergman and Tyler Pager, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). His changes to the proposed deal were potentially designed to speed up the process by putting pressure Iran to accept the current framework, one official said.

President Trump has toughened the terms of a potential framework for a deal to end the war in Iran, and has sent those proposed changes back to the country for consideration, according to three officials.

It was not immediately clear what changes had been made to the text of the agreement.

Mr. Trump has been concerned about parts of the potential deal that would include unfreezing funds for the Iranians, two officials said. He has been harshly critical of President Barack Obama for doing the same in the more than decade-old agreement that was signed to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Trump has also been frustrated by how long it has taken for Iran to respond to U.S. proposals, one official said. The proposals have been hammered out with the involvement of intermediaries, including from Pakistan.

The official added that Mr. Trump’s changes — a new, tougher proposal — were potentially intended to speed up the process by putting pressure on Iran to accept the framework already sent to Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, for approval.

Reaching the supreme leader has been difficult, so any changes to the document, known as the memorandum of understanding, could mean additional delays.

On Friday, Mr. Trump met for two hours in the Situation Room with top aides to discuss an end to the war, but left the meeting with no announcement.

The framework would effectively end the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran in exchange for Iran lifting its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for oil and gas shipping. The strait was open for trade before the bombing campaign against Iran, which began on Feb. 28.

Some of the thorniest issues, such as the future of Iran’s nuclear program, would be deferred to later rounds of talks. 

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Hits the Stalemate Phase of His International Interventions, and It Stings, David E. Sanger, May 31, 2026. In Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran, President Trump’s early declarations of easy wins have given way to harsh reality.

President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean and decisive.

On his desk in the Oval Office, he keeps models of the B-2 bombers that took out three Iranian nuclear sites in one night, not quite a year ago. In the opening weeks of the Iran conflict this year, he talked often about replicating his success in Venezuela — “the perfect scenario,’’ he said — shorthand for overthrowing a troublesome leader with one quick commando raid, and replacing him with a pliant, American-friendly successor.

But now, Mr. Trump has hit the stalemate phase of his presidency.

The war with Iran is clearly at that stage. When he declared a cease-fire on April 7, Mr. Trump said on social media that the end of combat operations would be conditional on “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” It wasn’t. Even if commerce now resumes across the strait under a memorandum of understanding still under negotiation, it will still leave the future of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs exactly where they were in February: stuck in a further negotiation that the administration insists will be “time limited,” probably to 60 days.

But the Iranians sense Mr. Trump’s deep reluctance to restart combat operations that are deeply unpopular in the United States, and most Iran experts say they expect Tehran to try to stretch the negotiations for months or years — as they have with past administrations.

Then there is the Ukraine war, a conflict in its fifth year that Mr. Trump famously boasted he would end in 24 hours after taking office. Sixteen months after he was sworn in, he rarely mentions the war anymore, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently complained that he was tired of wasting time in endless negotiations, suggesting that he would be perfectly happy if some other country wanted to step in and play that role.

For their part, the Russians have quietly made clear that they are tired of periodic visits from the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to people familiar with the negotiations. They say they want a stable, diplomatic process, with working groups and regular meetings. They also want an American ambassador to Russia — a job that has been open, astoundingly, for nearly a year.

And there is Gaza. When Mr. Trump flew to Israel to celebrate the release of the last of the living hostages from the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, he enthused about a 20-point plan that started with the disarming of Hamas, the creation of an international stabilization force and, ultimately, rebuilding Gaza into a gleaming territory of glass office towers and seaside resorts. Eight months after that trip, Hamas has still not disarmed, except in fake, A.I.-generated videos. (One, sent out by Mr. Trump, depicts him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing.)

While more aid is making its way into the territory, Palestinians are still sleeping in tents, the rat-infested rubble has not been cleared, and Mr. Netanyahu announced last week that the Israeli military would expand its control to about 70 percent of the Palestinian enclave.

Perhaps all of this is the inevitable result of a president with huge ambitions running into the brick walls of global realities. Perhaps it is the result of overreach, as Mr. Trump — infused with the success of his first two military adventures, into Iran and Venezuela — assumes that there is no task too big for the U.S. military.

Some experts suggest that it arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of American power. As one of Mr. Trump’s close aides said recently, destroying nuclear sites from the air is what America does best, and controlling political events in nations like Iran, Russia and Ukraine is what the United States does worst.

“Foreign policy tends to be a long and difficult enterprise,” Richard Fontaine, a former top aide to Senator John McCain and now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, said in an interview over the weekend. “Mr. Trump is not the first president to imagine quick, simple solutions to complicated and enduring international problems. Yet it is the sustained management and follow-through that often makes all the difference, not the grand and dramatic announcement.”

Follow-through has never been Mr. Trump’s strong suit. To establish his bona fides for a Nobel Peace Prize, he liked to gather testimonials to the breakthroughs he made or invite leaders at the White House and hold a signing ceremony; if fighting resumes, he is unlikely to dwell on the implications.

An exception is the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where Mr. Trump has episodically admitted he underestimated the complexity of the problem, and perhaps his powers of persuasion.

“I’ve had cases where I had Putin all done and Zelensky wouldn’t make the deal, which shocked me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times in January, referring to Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “Then I’ve had cases where it was the reverse. I think now they both want to make a deal, but we’ll find out.”

New York Times, U.S. Military Is Quietly Guiding Ships Through the Strait of Hormuz, Peter Eavis and Eric Schmitt, May 31, 2026. U.S. Central Command has helped around 70 commercial ships pass through the strait in the last three weeks, an official said.

American forces in recent weeks have helped coordinate the passage of dozens of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. officials, even as travel through the waterway remains risky amid stalled negotiations to end the war with Iran.

U.S. Central Command has guided around 70 commercial ships through the strait, traveling into and out of the Persian Gulf, in the last three weeks, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The U.S. officials added that most of the vessels had turned off their transponders to avoid detection when going through the narrow waterway.

The officials declined to say what type of vessels were going through and what route they took, but one official indicated that at least one route was not close to the Iranian coastline. Ships passing near Iran without obtaining Iranian approval face the threat of an almost-certain attack by Iranian drones or missiles, U.S. officials said. Shipping analysts say the U.S.-guided crossings appear to follow routes that are closer to Oman.

Before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran in late February, well over 100 commercial ships a day passed through the strait. So the U.S.-coordinated passages — an average of three a day over the three-week period — do not represent a big comeback for shipping. And because U.S.-guided crossings take place with transponders turned off, known as “dark” passages, shipping analysts say they cannot independently verify how many may have taken place.

Still, a steady passage of ships under U.S. guidance would suggest that some shipowners are willing to take the risk to get in and out of the Persian Gulf, where many vessels have been stranded for weeks, losing money and leaving their crews in trying conditions.

More Global News

New York Times, The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People, Max Bearak and José María León Cabrera, May 31, 2026.  Residents of coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador said the airstrike campaign was making many reconsider anything involving the ocean as a livelihood.

More than 200 people have now been killed in a bombing campaign by the U.S. military against people it has accused of smuggling drugs in the waters off South America, after a string of deadly attacks over the last week.

The military said on Saturday that three men had been killed in the eastern Pacific during a strike ordered by Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of the Southern Command, against a boat that was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” Their deaths bring the total killed to at least 202, in more than 60 strikes.

The strikes have been shrouded in secrecy. Few bodies of those killed have been recovered, and scant physical evidence exists of debris or the drugs the Trump administration claims the boats were transporting.

A wide range of legal experts say the strikes are illegal because the military is prohibited from deliberately targeting civilians, even if they are believed to have committed a crime, unless they pose an immediate threat. Experts also say there is no evidence that the strikes have had any impact on the amount of cocaine reaching the United States from South America.

The death toll, however, only accounts for one dimension of the consequences of the lethal campaign.

Coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the boats are thought to have begun their journeys, are counting the losses not just in relatives who never returned, but in how the attacks have upended the lives of those who make their living from the ocean and now fear it.

Residents described entire communities abandoning fishing because the small “lanchas,” or speedboats, used by traffickers and fishers are often indistinguishable.

“Fishermen endure the forces of nature: wind, rain and sun. But they also face pirates, and on top of that, now there is this bombing thing,” said one Ecuadorean woman from a fishing family in San Mateo, a seaside town of 5,000. Like many in these coastal Ecuadorean villages, she asked not to have her name published for fear of retribution from the government, which has actively supported the bombing campaign. The Ecuadorean government did not respond to requests for comment.

“We live in fear of these strikes,” she said, “and because of that, many people have stopped going out to fish.”

In Ecuador and Colombia, residents described being caught between forces beyond their control: an emboldened Trump administration that has dismissed accusations of wrongdoing while offering little proof to back up its claims, and drug traffickers who often prey on fishermen, commandeering their boats to use for their own purposes.

The lines between fishermen and traffickers can blur, too, some said. In low seasons, or simply as a way to make more than fishing’s meager income provides, some fishermen take occasional trafficking jobs to get by.

Unlike Ecuador’s right-leaning government, Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has sharply criticized the strikes, calling them “murder” and claiming, in the case of one strike last October, that a Colombian fisherman had been killed. After that strike, Mr. Petro suspended intelligence sharing with the U.S. military for the purposes of the strikes.

On Colombia’s Guajira peninsula, where The New York Times found the first physical evidence of one of the strikes last December, nearly all the men had left the towns of Puerto López and Siapana, each just a few miles from where a bombed boat and two bodies of its crew members washed ashore.ps of Engineers. The joints would be sealed within days, he said.

More On Trump Team Scandals, Allegations, Probes, Accountability

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Rush to Disavow the Terrorist Slush Fund, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 31, 2026. January 6 Insurrection. 

The word “charity” appears in neither Friday’s WSJ story describing that Trump’s Terrorist Slush Fund, “Sparks Alarm Inside White House,” nor Saturday’s NYT story promising an inside look at how the fund came together, which bears the subhead, “Some senior White House officials were said to have felt blindsided as the agreement took shape.”

Which is to say that, as some Trump insiders rush to distance themselves from the Terrorist Slush Fund, they’re not answering very basic questions, such as what happened to Trump’s expressed plan (which predated the IRS lawsuit) to give any money he bilks from his own government to charity, or why Trump sued the IRS in the first place, much less for the absurd amount of $10 billion. The only explanation in either story as to the latter point is this paragraph from WSJ:

The president remains angry about the illegal disclosure of his tax returns by a former IRS contractor and about the criminal investigations he faced before returning to the White House, including one that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation searching his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. The raid came after Trump took classified documents from the White House and declined to return them. He frequently talks to aides and his lawyers about the audits he faced—and the leak of his returns—and his desire for revenge, people familiar with the comments said. Under the settlement that includes the creation of the “anti-weaponization fund,” all pending audits against Trump were effectively ended.

While Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey is on this byline, it’s not clear whether the reported “frequent[] talks with aides and lawyers” or talks with Trump directly serve as the basis for WSJ’s assertion about Trump’s feelings of anger. In any case, the paragraph doesn’t question how stiffing taxpayers to the tune of $10 — or even $2 — billion exacts revenge against those who he claims harmed him (by providing the transparency every other President has freely given), as opposed to cutting Booz Allen from all Treasury contracts (which the NYT does mention in one of its prior stories linked in this one).

Trump may have invented a grievance in his own imagination and decided to turn that grievance into personal profit — a common schtick for Trump — but that doesn’t explain why the IRS lawsuit was so much more unhinged than the complaints about the Russian or stolen documents investigations, which also purport to be part of this grift.

I’m interested in why and how Administration insiders are sharing details of this story. One explanation may be an urgency among some Trumpsters to disavow the Terrorist Slush Fund given the pushback from a good chunk of GOP Senators. That’s the leading theme of the WSJ story:

Administration officials have grown increasingly concerned about the viability of the fund, people familiar with the matter said, which had been expected to provide payouts to an array of Trump allies. Trump hasn’t agreed to drop the fund, but has told allies that he understands he has political problems with Senate Republicans, the people said. On Friday, a federal judge ordered a pause on efforts to stand up the fund while she weighs a legal challenge in an Eastern Virginia federal court.

Senate Republicans pressed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on the fund at a contentious meeting last week that Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) referred to as one of the roughest in his years in the Senate. Another person who was at the meeting said it was the toughest grilling of an administration official they had ever seen from Republican senators.

[snip]

Only a few Justice Department officials were involved in the fund’s creation, including Blanche’s top aide, Trent McCotter, and the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, people familiar with the matter said. Senior Trump aides in the White House learned of the fund a few days before it was announced publicly, people familiar with the timing said.

Many lawmakers are worried that the fund, set up to compensate people who claim political persecution, could award millions of dollars to some who were in the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol and assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021.

But the NYT story repeats WSJ’s claim that this deal was closely held and — as soon as it became public — insiders started moving to reverse it.

The discussions were so closely held that some senior White House officials told others that they were blindsided, learning of them only once the agreement was nearly complete.

[snip]

When the details of the agreement were first revealed two weeks ago, Democrats and former government officials lodged accusations of corruption and self-dealing, and even some Republicans reacted with scornful disbelief. Some G.O.P. senators were so angry they abandoned plans to approve a measure to finance the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Within days of the agreement becoming public, and before the judge raised questions about it, senior administration officials began preparing to get rid of the fund amid the intense blowback.

The claim of immediate outrage about the Slush Fund may be more than convenient retconning. After all, someone shared very accurate details of the Slush Fund with ABC around the same time when, according to these stories, insiders first became aware of the details. Someone leaked details then, possibly in an attempt to kill it before it was rolled out, and now people are leaking more details now, disavowing any approval of the scam.

And given the rush to disclaim involvement, I find another common detail to both stories of particular interest: Boris Epshteyn was at the center of this scam, even recommending members to serve on the Slush Fund, according to WSJ.

The president’s personal lawyers, including Boris Epshteyn, were among those involved in discussions about the fund, according to people familiar with the matter. Epshteyn has suggested potential names for a five-member commission that would review claims and approve payouts, the people said.

Reviewing these articles (and NYT’s earlier coverage, which is linked), one wonders whether DOJ shifted their approach after Pam Bondi got fired in early April, just days after NYT described what a dilemma this lawsuit posted.

Back then it was an intractable problem for Bondi’s DOJ to deal with. Now, it’s a scam that old allies attempted to pull off, with seemingly no clue how controversial it would be.

As NYT recalls, Epshteyn, below, has his own relationship with Todd Blanche.

On one side of the talks was a Justice Department run by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who once served as Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.

On the other were the president’s private lawyers, among them Boris Epshteyn, above, who was a former client of Mr. Blanche’s. Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving forward the deal to end the suit, coordinating and holding discussions with all of the sides involved: Mr. Trump, the president’s personal lawyers and Justice Department officials, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

One thing NYT does not mention in its overly simplified description that Epshteyn “has been close to the president for about a decade” is that Epshteyn’s ties to Eric Trump go back even further, to their student days at Georgetown. Though that didn’t protect Epshteyn when he was under scrutiny, including by now-White House Counsel David Warrington for a pay-to-pay scandal on appointments to the Administration.

In this case, though, any protection from the IRS would extend especially to Eric, the CEO of Trump Organization under whom known tax problems occurred.

Epshteyn is already being sued, along with Steve Bannon, for crypto-related fraud. And now we learn he may be at the core of what a bunch of judges call “Fraud on the court.”

And if the inquiry Judge Kathleen Williams, right, just entertained is allowed to go anywhere, it may get bigger than that.Links

• May 14: ABC story revealing slush fund
• May 29: WSJ story describes alarm within White House
• May 30: NYT story describes how Terrorist Slush Fund came to be

 

Civil Discourse, Opinion: Trump's Past Is Catching Up With Him, Joyce Vance, right, May 30-31, 2026. We’ve discussed Trump’s ongoing efforts to prevent the release of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the now-dismissed classified documents prosecution against the president. That issue has now resurfaced. 

Judge Aileen Cannon, below left,who was appointed by Trump and has always ruled in his favor, was never going to order the release of Volume II of the Special Counsel Report, which covers the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. But now the matter is in the hands of a different court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has not hesitated to correct Cannon’s errors in the past.

There is a fascinating resonance between Cannon’s decision to prevent the release of Volume II and the issue we’ve seen surface in Trump v. IRS, the case whose “settlement” led to the creation of the slush fund Trump can use to give taxpayer dollars to January 6 defendants while erasing his and his family’s liability for debts owed to the government, like back taxes from tax audits. The common thread is cases where, instead of a legitimate adversarial process, with opponents duking it out in court, Trump is the actual party in interest on “both sides of the v.” In both of these situations, it’s Trump v. Trump, which leaves the president to decide what positions government agencies will take in these supposed legal conflicts. In the case of the special counsel’s report, DOJ, which would normally argue for its release, has taken Trump’s side. And Judge Cannon has played along.

On Inauguration Day, she issued an order blocking the Justice Department from sharing the Volume II with leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, who were set to receive it in accordance with the typical practice after a special counsel concludes their work. With DOJ on Trump’s side, there was no one to challenge it.

Then, in February in a piece appropriately titled, “If DOJ is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon is his Judge,” we discussed Cannon’s next move. She ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case, both designed to prevent release of Volume II. At the time I noted, “If it weren’t such a serious matter, ‘unopposed’ would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.”

While Judge Cannon was doing everything possible to prevent the release of Volume II, two groups of journalists, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute, asked to intervene in the case to ensure a truly adversarial proceeding, with the parties presenting opposing views on whether the report should be released. Cannon dealt with that by dragging her feet, simply refusing to rule on the request. That went on until November, when the matter reached the Eleventh Circuit and she was given 60 days to rule. The Eleventh Circuit pointed to “undue delay.” Cannon predictably ruled against permitting intervention, and the issue was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit.

Now, the Eleventh Circuit has ordered a briefing schedule on the requests to intervene and argue in favor of the release of the report. The timing is fast, with the next set of briefs due 14 days from the date of the order, and all of the briefing to be concluded by July.

The scheduling order is signed by Judge Nancy Abudu, who was appointed to the Eleventh Circuit by President Biden. The court will have to consider the issues once the briefs are in, but the ruling over Cannon’s foot-dragging signaled they were out of patience with her efforts to keep her thumb on the scale for Trump. There is good reason to be optimistic here, even if the process takes time. Assuming the media entities are permitted to join the proceedings, there would still have to be briefing on the issue of release, but here again, Cannon was an outlier, and there is good reason to believe the Eleventh Circuit would not agree. DOJ’s accidental release earlier this year of a document detailing some of the work in the case gives us reason to believe there could be interesting material in the report.

Is it coincidence that two separate cases, involving two of the most important challenges to Trump’s ability to exert control over the government and pervert the rule of law, are coming to fruition at the same time? Perhaps so. But what’s at stake here is a core constitutional principle. Article III of the Constitution gives federal courts jurisdiction to decide actual “cases” or “controversies,” which means there must be opposing parties with conflicting interests. The Supreme Court has held that the “case or controversy” requirement means there has to be a genuine, active dispute between genuinely adverse parties for a court to have jurisdiction. Trump has elicited favorable decisions in both the IRS case and the release of the report case by trying to avoid that requirement. But it’s starting to look like time is up.

If this doesn’t sound like an enormous development, admittedly, it’s a bit inside-baseball. But by forcing Trump to act within the confines of the rule of law, courts can create accountability. Refusing to let him get away with using them as a sham vehicle for perpetrating frauds that allow him to extract government funds for his personal use or avoid accountability for past conduct is an important reassertion of real guardrails. The one-two punch of courts requiring him to face an actual adversary would be a welcome development.

Trump’s past is finally catching up with him.

 

The Breakdown via The Bulwark, Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak, Jonathan Cohn, above, May 31, 2026. Doctors around the country are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.

And if you want to know why these medical professionals are upset, ask infectious disease physician Tara Palmore.

Palmore knows better than most what Ebola care looks like in the American facilities, because she provided it during the 2014 outbreak. Although most of the cases were in West Africa, nearly a dozen infected Americans got treatment in the United States, including one who ended up at a facility inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.¹

That is where Palmore was working at the time. And in a phone interview on Thursday, she described the unit to me—how the surfaces are all nonporous, lest they absorb infected bodily fluids that can’t be fully wiped away, and how there’s extra space for medical equipment, because staff have to bring machines to the patient rather than the other way around.

Another distinguishing feature of the unit, Palmore said, is the sealing of every wall, door, and window seam. It’s part of a system to maintain negative pressure, so that air is circulated only through special filters—a system that patients and staff cannot see but can sometimes hear, because of the high-powered fans. “It can be a little loud in there,” Palmore said.

For her and her colleagues, though, a bigger issue was

learning how to effectively administer care for patients with such an aggressive, awful disease while protecting themselves and others from infection.

It took years of regularly scheduled training, plus more intensive sessions that had started months before they actually got a patient in October 2014. She and her colleagues practiced feeling for injection points while wearing two layers of gloves.² They went over why it’s important to scrub the wheels of scanning devices and, when appropriate, to decontaminate equipment or rooms with hydrogen peroxide vapor.

“I was part of drilling and simulations all summer, because we saw this epidemic growing,” Palmore said. “It was working with the chest x-ray guy to get his system down, making sure the nurses involved knew how to put in a line, making sure the intensivists figured out how they were going to put someone on dialysis or intubate them for a ventilator. We drilled with dummies, we drilled with people.”

The work paid off: Nine of the Ebola patients in American facilities survived, the only two deaths coming from people who arrived in advanced stages of the disease. And no facility staff got sick.

But while the United States now has thirteen fully stocked, fully staffed facilities capable of providing such care, the Trump administration has no plans to make use of them. Instead, the administration has decided to transfer Americans who are exposed or infected abroad to a quickly constructed field hospital in Kenya, and then—when necessary for more serious cases—to specialized facilities in Europe.

Supposedly this is all for the sake of the patients, given that it will be easier to get American patients infected in Africa to Kenya or Europe than all the way back to the United States. “These decisions were made to make sure we provide the best care,” a senior administration official told reporters during a White House background briefing this past week, to “optimize what can be done for our American citizens who are overseas.”

It’s possible the administration’s plan will accomplish that, just as it’s possible Trump and his lieutenants truly made this decision with patient well-being foremost in their minds. But infectious disease physicians I interviewed over the last few days were highly skeptical, and it’s not hard to see why.

THE MOST IMMEDIATE QUESTION about the administration’s scheme—at least as of this writing—is whether it will even go forward.

The plan had been to open the Kenya facility in stages, starting with a fifty-bed unit on Friday following an agreement with the Kenyan government. But that was before the Kenyan union representing health care workers objected and threatened a nationwide strike—and before a Kenyan judge temporarily blocked the facility, arguing that the country’s government had not shown that it had taken the necessary precautions to protect its citizens.

 

The U.S. State Department late Friday acknowledged the ruling, announcing via tweet that “We are in touch with Kenyan authorities and are optimistic we can resolve objections.” CNN on Saturday reported that the American health officers had arrived, and that Kenya’s government intended to allow the plan to proceed, despite the court order. By the time you read this, the facility could be operating.

But there are plenty of other questions that officials have yet to answer definitively. At the very top of the list is what level of care the field hospital will be expected to provide, and whether it will be able to do so.

It was hard to tell from the guidance senior officials gave to reporters in that White House background call this week. At times, they described the Kenya facility almost as if it were a triage center for watching people in quarantine, unless and until they test positive and show symptoms, at which point they would get transport to tertiary care in Europe. But officials also mentioned the advanced care available, and said several times staff on site would make decisions about when a patient’s status warranted transfer. That made it sound more like a place for treatment.

The distinction is crucial, and has implications for the facility’s basic design. Patients sick with Ebola would ideally have their own bathrooms as well as their own bedrooms, Boston University infectious disease specialist Nahid Bhadelia told me in a phone interview, because it’s through exposure to bodily fluids that the disease spreads. And because Ebola can cause multiple organ failure, Bhadelia said, facilities need both ECMO devices (which act as artificial hearts and lungs) and dialysis machines (which function as surrogate kidneys).

But the personnel may matter even more than supplies, Bhadelia said, especially because this latest outbreak comes from the rarer Bundibugyo version of the virus. It has no approved treatments, unlike the more common Zaire version. That could leave clinicians relying more on the traditional approach: managing the various complications in the hopes of keeping patients alive until their bodies’ defenses can finally get rid of the disease.

“Ebola is a very labor-intensive disease to treat,” said Bhadelia, who has treated Ebola overseas and managed a biocontainment facility here in the United States. “You have patients who are losing a lot of fluids, so you have to deal with fluid replacement, and then beyond that you have to provide multi-organ support including potentially renal support, ventilatory support. It’s not just about the stuff. It’s making sure you have the right ratio of human resources to patients.”

Administration officials said they have dispatched roughly thirty commissioned public health officers to supplement staff already in central Africa, with a possibility of adding more. The physicians I interviewed said it was impossible to know whether that number would be enough, just as they said they weren’t sure whether the workers would have the proper training.

But they were nervous, they said, given that administration officials have been telling reporters that the newly dispatched health workers had three days of instruction and drilling.³ That doesn’t sound like the kind of preparation that staff at the specialized American facilities have gotten—or that Brown University public health professor Craig Spencer recalls seeing as a patient in 2014, when he was one of the Americans who got Ebola and received treatment at the special unit in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital.

“They were so well-practiced and well-prepared,” Spencer told me in a phone interview. He added:

Whether I needed an x-ray, whether I needed dialysis, they had thought about how they were going to make those things happen—who was going to be responsible for doing that, how they would get them into the room, how they would keep them safe. These are all protocols that exist beforehand and, quite frankly, can’t be taught over a three-day weekend at a training.

Palmore noted that staff at the existing facilities “have been preparing for years, drilling and training, and some of them have taken care of people with other hemorrhagic fever viruses.” She went on from there: “The idea that a few days of training and, like, some kind of modular hospital is going to create any sort of equivalent care setting for people with Ebola infection, which requires incredibly complex care, just does not seem realistic to me.”

And in such an ad hoc medical setting, Bhadelia pointed out, “the chances of potential staff exposures go up. It reduces the quality of care for the patient, but also makes it a more dangerous equation for the health care workers themselves.”

 

President Trump, right, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and UFC leader Dana White, left, at a UFC match on April 11, 2026 (Pool photo).

Mobology, Dana White, the UFC, and their metaphor for Donald Trump's cruel and violent legacy, Dan E. Moldea, right, May 31, 2026. "Beating a man when he's down." . . . A disturbing sports extravaganza on the South Lawn of the White House, aka Emperor Trump's Roman Colosseum.

Two weeks from today—Sunday, June 14, 2026—Donald Trump will further damage and debase America’s dignity and honor with a shameless public exhibition of cruelty and violence on the South Lawn of the White House.

For today’s column, I asked AI Mode for a summary of the event. The site replied:

Construction is officially underway on the White House South Lawn to build a temporary, steel-enclosed UFC Octagon cage. The structure is being erected for a historic mixed martial arts event titled UFC Freedom 250, scheduled for Sunday, June 14, 2026. The date serves a dual purpose: celebrating America’s 250th Semiquincentennial anniversary and marking President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. The Arena Structure

* “The Claw”: UFC CEO Dana White has nicknamed the massive, temporary stadium structure featuring a towering metal arch and lighting grid designed to look like a giant claw.

One of mob boss Donald Trump’s closest friends and allies is bad-ass Dana White, the knuckle-dragging owner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). They seem to share a common belief in Social Darwinism: “survival of the fittest”. . . every man for himself.

Speaking of Trump earlier this year, White, an unlikely member of the Meta/Facebook board of directors, told the New York Post: “[T]he thing . . . with President Trump is he believes in God, and he’s very religious. . . . He believes that, to his core, God has spared his life to be the president and do the things that he’s going to do over the next four years.”

Knowingly or not, White and the UFC have given Trump the most descriptive metaphor for his shameless anti-God reign of terror against the poor and powerless . . . beating a man when he’s down. That is pure dogma from The Church of Donald Trump.

This cowardly assault against weak and defenseless people, both foreign and domestic, is a trademark, even a hallmark, of Trump’s presidency. They are Trump’s scapegoats of choice when his dreams and schemes often fall flat.

When speaking of them, Trump appears to have an incurable and uncontrollable physical and spiritual compulsion to express complete contempt and utter cruelty towards the least among us, to defame them at will, and to bully them into further submission.

This also best explains Trump’s loud but tired expressions of sheer disrespect for and withering attacks on former President Joe Biden, who had the audacity to humiliate Trump in 2020 in an election Trump still refuses to concede and, without legitimate evidence, continues to claim was rigged.

Sadly, the now-diminished 82-year-old Biden, shown above with Trump in  file photos) whom Trump has repeatedly and unfairly labeled as “the worst president of all time,” is now ill-equipped to defend himself. That makes Biden, who cannot fight back, the perfect absentee foil for bully-boy Trump.

Biden is on the mat in the warriors’ cage, lying flat on his back, and Trump is pounding him with both fists. There is no referee to stop the fight. And those of us in the arena who still admire and respect the man Biden once was are watching helplessly, unable to do anything for the ex-president who is getting pummeled daily.

In short, Trump is showing all of us that his heart is filled with hatred and resentment, with a fundamental need for retribution. Incredibly, his acts of vengeance bring a pathetic sense of joy to the faithful but vindictive sheep in his defiant and unrepentant flock, who find an inexplicable nobility and valor in Trump’s despicable and dishonest words and deeds.

Consequently, Trump is busy waging an ongoing war with orthodox society. And he appears willing and able to beat down anyone who either refuses to kneel before him or stands in the way of his brutal and cynical anti-democracy agenda.

Meantime, Fox News, aka Trump State Television, which has a well-documented history of on-air lying on its news programs in its defense of Trump, provides him with political cover and personal cult-like status, as well as false and misleading talking points for his followers.

Indeed, Trump is a huge fan of Dana White and UFC combat fighting. But many of us are waiting for someone fearless and strong, yet truly honest and noble, to take him on and provide him with the rich comeuppance that Joe Biden gave him in 2020.

In UFC, fighters continue striking a downed opponent because there's no rule prohibiting it, and the fight continues until the referee intervenes to stop it, often based on the downed fighter's ability to defend themselves. 

PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Interior Secretary Falls Apart And Admits Trump Is Grifting Off America's 250th Anniversary, Jason Easley, right, May 31, 2026. Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would not say who is sponsoring Trump's Freedom 250 organization that is being run out of the White House, who the donors are, or how the money is being used.

The confusion over the past week that led to the majority of the musical acts withdrawing from the Great American State Fair can be traced back to an organization that is being run out of the White House called Freedom 250.

Freedom 250 emerged after Trump returned to the presidency and is not the same as the official organization created by Congress, America 250.The difference between the two organizations could be confusing to someone casually looking at each website. Both websites greet visitors with fireworks. Both are (.org) web domains, but that is where the similarities end. The official America 250 website features a list of board members with their pictures, which includes lots of members of the House and Senate Democrats and Republicans.

The official website also features a list of sponsors, donors, and organizations. You may not like all of the corporate involvement, but you can see who is involved. It is transparent.PoliticusUSA is 100% independent with no corporate, billionaire, or partisan influence.

Trump’s Freedom 250 has no transparency. There is no list of donors and sponsors. The website looks sketchy.

It is this sketchiness that has caused people to ask questions about who is funding Freedom 250 and where the money is going.

After the musical performers dropped out, Trump named himself the headliner of “The Great American State Fair.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, right, was asked where the money is coming from, and his answer was to admit that Freedom 250 is essentially a Trump grift.

CNN’s Dana Bash asked Burgum on State Of The Union, “ There are lots of questions about why this Freedom 250 organization was created, and maybe it's not partisan, but there are questions from Democrats about where this private funding is coming from, and it's not transparent. Do you think that should be opened up to the public so that people see where it's coming from?”

The answer to this question from an administration that wasn’t operating as a criminal enterprise would be yes.

That wasn’t Burgum’s answer.Burgum said, “I think transparency is always a good thing, and of course I work for the president that I think is the most transparent ever. He, w- who... There's not a CEO in the country that invites the entire press pool into their board meetings, and we haven't had a Cabinet meeting in the first 16 months….”

Bash asked, “So you're gonna make the donors to Freedom 250 public?“

Burgum dodged, “That's up to the Freedom 250 organization and their arrangements with their donors.”

Bash asked again, “But you're a leader there, right?”

Burgum admitted that this was being run out of the White House, “I, the Freedom 250 organization's run out of the White House.”

Bash asked about transparency, “But it is not a the... It's not about the transparency of the donors and the...”

Burgum said, “It's just it is a, again I'm... This is about Americans celebrating the 250th anniversary, and it's all, it's... Again, the fact that we a- we are, right now have so much to celebrate in our country, and we're talking about a single event on a single night in DC is-”

Bash concluded the line of questioning, “No, this is about Freedom 250, as you know better than I do, governing a lot of these events. And I think that Americans wanna be able to celebrate and make, and be confident that the money is coming from a place that, that makes sense.”

U.S. Courts, Crime, Law, Rights, Justice

 

New York Times, C.I.A. Officer Arrested With Gold Once Worked With No. 2 Pentagon Official, Julian E. Barnes and Mark Mazzetti, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). David Rush, a longtime C.I.A. officer (shown above), appears to have first had contact with Stephen A. Feinberg during President Trump’s first term. Some officials said the two men were not close.

The C.I.A. officer arrested last week with more than $40 million in gold bars in his home once worked with Stephen A. Feinberg, now the deputy secretary of defense, according to current and former U.S. officials.

David Rush, 49, a C.I.A. officer for 17 years, was a part of the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, and held a relatively senior rank before he was arrested on May 18, according to current and former officials.

They do not appear to have worked closely together, but Mr. Rush appears to have first had contact with Mr. Feinberg on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to officials. Mr. Feinberg, the founder of Cerberus Capital Management, was the chair of the advisory board in the first Trump administration.

The board is charged with providing advice to the White House and to spy agencies on intelligence collection and other matters.

Some of the officials said Mr. Rush and Mr. Feinberg were not close. But Mr. Feinberg has long taken an interest in technology developed by the C.I.A. He has also paid close attention to the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, both when he was on the advisory board and once he took the No. 2 job at the Pentagon.

What Mr. Rush was doing with the gold bars, and why the C.I.A. issued them to him, remains a mystery.

Former U.S. officials said that Mr. Rush had to have been working on a covert program to gain access to so much money.

Mr. Feinberg and the Pentagon had no involvement in whatever Mr. Rush was doing that led to his obtaining the gold bars, according to people briefed on the investigation.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The C.I.A. declined to comment. Mr. Rush’s ties to Mr. Feinberg were earlier reported by NBC News.Mr. Rush is being held in jail, after he was charged with stealing public money by filling out fraudulent time sheets.

In court papers, the government accused Mr. Rush of inflating his academic credentials and lying about his work history.

But the legal action against Mr. Rush raised far more questions than it answered.

From last November to March, according to the court papers, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, tens of millions of dollars in gold bars and foreign currency for “work-related expenses.”

When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed, the agency was unable to locate them, according to court papers.

New York Times, Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent, Eileen Sullivan and Andrea Fuller, May 31, 2026. The departure of more than 10,000 federal lawyers has left some agencies without sufficient staff and has boosted the ranks of state attorneys general offices and advocacy groups.

President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda.

Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.

Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles.

Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers.

“There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, who has hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the last year. “That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’”

Wariness of the Trump administration is also palpable inside law schools, where many aspiring lawyers who would have once jumped at the chance to hold a federal government job are seeking alternative paths, according to faculty members and students.

“A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” said Matthew Duray, who described himself as a conservative Republican and just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long term.”

While federal agencies brought on about 3,200 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, departures still outpaced hiring, data shows. Lawyers also exited the government at a faster rate than turnover in the overall work force. All told, the federal government employed about 37,000 civilian lawyers at the end of March, 17 percent fewer than it did at the end of 2024.

The Justice Department, which employs more than a quarter of all government lawyers, saw the largest decline in raw numbers. But other agencies — including the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development — lost an even greater share of attorneys.The only major agency to gain lawyers was the Department of Homeland Security, which saw its legal ranks grow by 21 percent as it drove Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

 

Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: George B. Tonks: Named In The Files, Jana,left, May 31, 2026. Convicted felon on fed supervision appears in Epstein files 46 times. Farmer reported him to DOJ, Chicago PD, NYPD. 2023 judge banned him from mentioning Epstein victim online.

This piece is part of the ongoing Last Page First series on the federal Epstein archive. See also: The Harassment Network: What Maria and Virginia Filed About the People They Said Were Destroying Them, which documented EFTA01652628, Maria Farmer’s41-page FBI dossier, and placed Tonks within the broader network Maria filed as evidence five days before Virginia Giuffre’s death.

A convicted felon on federal supervised release appears in the federal Epstein archive nearly 50 times. Maria Farmer reported him to the DOJ, the Chicago Police Department, and the NYPD. In 2023, a federal judge found he was harassing an Epstein victim while under court supervision and issued an order forbidding him from mentioning her anywhere on the internet. The record is documented and it does not require interpretation.What Was Filed

Four separate documents in the federal Epstein archive: EFTA01652187, EFTA01652134, EFTA01652208 and EFTA01652050, contain the same statement filed by Maria Farmer (shown at right as a teen) with federal authorities:

GEORGE B TONKS IS A felon WHO STALKED ME FROM PRISON, and I have reported to DOJ/Chicago Police/NYPD/and you! Do something!

She reported him to the Department of Justice, the Chicago Police Department, and the New York Police Department. She put it in the federal Epstein archive many times. She was begging federal authorities to act.

Maria Farmer’s April 20, 2025 email to attorneys Jennifer Freeman, David Boies, and Sigrid McCawley, filed in the federal Epstein archive as EFTA01652208. She writes that she was gaslit during cancer treatments while Lady Victoria Hervey attacked her, and that she had to use her settlement funds to serve Hervey with legal papers in the UK. “Everything was optics for BSF. All broth, no meat.”

Hervey is on an active campaign to protect Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Maria filed in her emails regarding Tonks, Hervey, Krauss and others. EFTA01652208

On April 20, 2025, five days before Virginia Giuffre’s death, Maria Farmer filed a 41 page evidentiary dossier with the FBI. That document is EFTA01652628. It placed George Bing Tonks,  shown at left in a Tik Tok photo, within a network she believed was coordinating a campaign to discredit Epstein survivors. It named him alongside Lady Victoria Hervey as operating together, Hervey providing platform and social legitimacy, Tonks providing distribution of private survivor communications.

A deeper dive into Maria’s dossier and what it contains about Tonks, Hervey, and the broader network is documented in the Last Page First investigation "The Harassment Network." This piece focuses on the federal court record that sits alongside that filing.

Three Convictions, Three Jurisdictions, Thirty Years

The federal record on George Bing Tonks spans three decades and three jurisdictions.

By 2009, Tonks was appealing a federal conviction under yet another name. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, No. 08-3821.

In September 1993, he pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to mail fraud, money laundering, and criminal contempt — United States v. Dupont, 2:93-cr-00192

He operated a network of fraudulent modeling agencies under the name David L. DuPont, defrauding approximately 1,800 people out of advance fees for placements that did not exist. A $2.3 million civil judgment was entered against him and his company, DuPont Model Management. He violated a federal injunction barring him from operating modeling agencies by immediately opening a new agency in Chicago — the criminal contempt charge. Sentence: 37 months, five years supervised release.

In May 2008, he was sentenced to 115 months in the Southern District of New York in United States v. Stone, 1:06-cr-00771. The case originated under the alias Ian Stone. The scheme defrauded over 250 victims of more than $1 million through false promises of adult film roles. A $1.5 million forfeiture judgment was entered.

In November 2008, he was sentenced to 78 months consecutive in the Northern District of Iowa in United States v. Tonks, 1:07-cr-00086, before Chief Judge Linda R. Reade, for a lottery advance fee scheme that extracted $264,872 from a single elderly Iowa woman across 16 wire transfers. He pleaded guilty to Counts 6 and 17.

His confirmed alias roster, drawn from the April 2019 SDNY Final Order of Forfeiture, Document 123, signed by Judge Crotty, and confirmed in the case caption of United States v. Catalano, Second Circuit Court of Appeals, April 20, 2010, is:

• George Bing Tonks
• David L. DuPont
• Ian William Stone
• Alex Michael Hausner
• Mike Kaplan
• Michael Warner
• David Luiz Silva
• Jorge Crespo
• Jorge Tonks
• Patrick Kessler

10 confirmed names across the federal court record.

New York Time, Notre Dame Students Abused by Priest in ‘Weighing Scheme,’ Report Finds, Stephanie Saul, May 31, 2026. An investigation commissioned by Notre Dame found that the Catholic university could have done more to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct.

A blistering report issued last week accuses the University of Notre Dame of failing to take action against a former priest despite years of alleged sexual misconduct against students while he was a dorm rector and while he worked at nearby Holy Cross College.

The investigation, which was led by the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton at Notre Dame’s request, found that Rev. Thomas King conducted a coercive “weighing scheme” at Notre Dame during the 1980s and 1990s. As part of the scheme, he expressed worry over the health of male students and insisted that they go to a locker room and undress to be weighed.

“Once in the locker room he would direct students to undress fully before they stepped onto a scale,” the report said. “Multiple individuals, some of whom were weighed, were sexually touched or assaulted by Fr. King, both at Notre Dame and after he left.”

The law firm’s 25-page report concluded that Notre Dame, one of the nation’s leading Catholic universities, should have done more to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct in the case of Father King. The report noted that witnesses said they had complained to university employees about him as far back as the 1990s.

The report also noted that these instances were not the first time that the university had to confront allegations of sexual abuse by priests, and listed two other instances when priests had been accused.

The law firm interviewed staff in two separate departments that supposedly received the complaints, but no one could remember having received them, the report said. In other cases, the report said, university employees who heard the complaints did not understand the sexual implications of the “weighing.”

The investigators also said they requested an interview with Father King through his attorney, but it was declined.

In 1997, Father King left Notre Dame for Holy Cross College, then a two-year institution that served as a feeder school to the larger university. He remained there for about 10 years, where he held sway over students because he was instrumental in recommending students for transfer to Notre Dame. The report said there were at least 15 cases of the “weighing scheme” across the two schools.

In addition to his time at Notre Dame and Holy Cross College, Father King served at parishes near Lakeville, Indiana, and Niles, Michigan. Following complaints there, he entered a senior home for priests in the Order of the Holy Cross, the report said. He could not be reached for comment.

The law firm said that during the course of its investigation, it was told of other priests who were accused of misconduct. Its report detailed claims against one of them, the Rev. David Porterfield, the rector at another Notre Dame dormitory, Sorin Hall.

Father Porterfield resigned in 1983 after Notre Dame learned of a complaint against him, but was later rehired, the report said. The investigators criticized the university for continuing to allow him access to the Notre Dame community in various capacities.

The report said Father Porterfield, who died last year, was rehired as an assistant rector at Grace Hall and assistant director of admissions.

Following another complaint against him, he entered an alcohol treatment program, but returned to the South Bend area, where he served in various capacities at parishes and, later, served as a substance abuse counselor.

The allegations against Father King, a former rector at Notre Dame’s Zahm Hall, came to light following complaints from a group of former students at Notre Dame and Holy Cross College, both located in South Bend, Ind.

One of the students, David Tybor, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that he remained dissatisfied with the report.

“I think the report raises as many questions as it answers,” said Dr. Tybor, a professor at Tufts University who received a degree from Notre Dame in 1998. “And I think this is not the first situation like this at Notre Dame. These are the same things they said 25 years ago in other situations where they said it’s never going to happen again.”

In a statement, the Rev. Robert A. Dowd, Notre Dame’s president, said the university was “deeply disturbed” by the findings, thanking those who had come forward to “share their painful stories.” Father Dowd said that Notre Dame had created a counseling support program for former students who were the victims of sexual abuse.

The university also said it was establishing a new process for promptly sharing information about reports about misconduct by priests, including those previously employed by the university.

Some complaints to the university had arrived following Father King’s departure.

Notre Dame had announced last year that it had requested the law firm’s report. The university has referred the allegations against Father King to state and local police in Indiana, the report said.

The findings come nearly 25 years after reports of widespread clergy sexual abuse first emerged in extensive reports by The Boston Globe. Hundreds of cases are still pending in courts in more than 20 states across the country.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, After A Terrible Week Full Of Consequential Losses Trump Completely Loses It On Social Media, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 31, 2026. Our community hit an important milestone this week - $10m raised for battleground candidates and party committees - thank you all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As we discussed yesterday we need to be very loud this week. Congress needs to hear from us on Ukraine, on Iran, on Trump’s corruption, their outrageous funding of ICE without reform, and whatever else is on your mind. Be aggressive this week peeps. Call your Senators and House Member and let them know you want them fighting for something better. Trump’s Congressional coalition has weakened, and we need to keep the pressure on. Be loud and proud.

Graham Platner, right. These new revelations are not good. Here’s CNN’s recap. And as we’ve discussed here the reason party committees leantowards candidates who’ve run and won before is 1) they’ve shown they know how to win 2) they’ve already been vetted.

Donald Trump. After a terrible week of racking up loss after loss our addled, aging leader has had a particularly crazy weekend, seeming intent to become known as an American Caligula. Yesterday Fox News featured a fawning and delusional North Korea/Dear Leader like walking tour of his ballroom conducted by his daughter-in-law. He’s been mad posting all weekend:

His deranged and unhinged posting included this (via the NYT):

President Trump on Saturday called for the cancellation of a concert series celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, after a wave of musicians pulled out.

“Cancel it,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding, “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.”

Freedom 250, the group that is organizing the administration’s events for the birthday celebration, announced on Wednesday that a series of nine musical acts would perform during a 16-day exposition — known as the Great American State Fair — on the National Mall beginning in late June. The exposition is part of the festivities surrounding America’s 250th birthday.

But at least five musicians have since dropped out. Some of those artists said they had not been aware that the event had been part of an initiative planned by the Trump administration for the nation’s birthday.

In an earlier post on Truth Social on Saturday, Mr. Trump had suggested that, rather than canceling the concerts, he should instead headline the event.

Calling himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World” and “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime,” Mr. Trump wrote that he should “take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists.’”

In that post, Mr. Trump said he was ordering “my Representatives” to explore “the feasibility of doing an America Is Back rally,” where he would “give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

There was some confusion surrounding whether Mr. Trump was, indeed, referring to the concerts in the earlier post. There, the president referred more than once to an event “on Wednesday.” The concerts announced by Freedom 250 are currently scheduled to take place across two Thursdays and Fridays and one Saturday.

And he dropped this completely insane rant about the Kennedy Center ruling by Judge Cooper (all these links come from the great Aaron Rupar):

Trump’s dangerously unhinged weekend of posting and self-adulation are to going to do little to re-assure Congressional Republicans and their 2026 candidates that he can or even aspires to lead them into battle this November.Subscribed

Finally, us. Our community. Proud, plucky patriots all. We hit a major milestone this week - we’ve now raised $10,000,000 in together since we started formally raising money for battleground candidates and party committees in October of 2023. $10 million from 93,000 donations to high leverage, high return investments. While we did not win the Presidency in 2024, this community has had a whole lot of wins together in these last three years, and we are making smart and critical investments towards us having the election we all want to have this November.

 

NBC News, Graham Platner’s wife ‘angry, disappointed’ her past disclosure of his extramarital sexting was made public, Alexandra Marquez and Julie Tsirkin, May 31, 2026. Amy Gertner said it was “shameful” that media outlets and others had “spread gossip” instead of focused on the “real issues” her husband is running on in Maine.

The wife of Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, said she is “really angry” about reports that she previously told her husband’s campaign he had exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women.

“It makes me really angry, disappointed,” Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, said in a direct-to-camera video Platner’s campaign released Saturday night. “And I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on.”

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Gertner told Platner’s campaign about the sexually explicit texts last year, near the start of his Senate bid. Her disclosure came during a conversation with campaign officials about potential opposition research into Platner, the two outlets reported, with the Times citing a former senior official in Platner’s campaign and the Journal citing people familiar with the matter.

Platner’s campaign confirmed he sent multiple women sexually explicit texts at the beginning of his marriage.

“Amy and I went through something hard — because of me,” Platner, right, said in a statement. “We did the work, and I’m grateful for her every hour of every day. I’ve learned throughout this campaign is that people don’t care about gossip or headlines, they care that you’re fighting for their hospitals, their paycheck, their kids. This campaign is about the ideas that will move Maine forward and past a broken politics of the past. Our opponents want politics to be empty of content and empty of actual change — and beating that is exactly what our movement is about.”

In addition, NBC News verified a Kik account tied to Platner after it visually matched the tattoos visible in the profile photo to tattoos on his torso and arms. Kik is a popular platform that allows anonymous messaging. The platform indicates that the account was created 3,610 days (nearly 10 years) ago and provides no record of Platner’s activity, contacts or actions.

A spokesperson for Platner’s campaign confirmed the account belongs to Platner but said he deleted the app and hasn’t used the account in years.

In the video she recorded Saturday, Gertner said: “Graham and I have a great marriage. Being married is hard. Being newly married is hard. Being newly married and going through infertility is hard. Being newly married, going through infertility and a Senate campaign is hard.”

“Our marriage counselor helps,” she added. “My personal counselor helps. Graham’s personal counselor helps.”

The pair married in 2023 and have been open about their infertility struggles, including sharing that they traveled to Norway for in vitro fertilization treatment this year.

Platner’s campaign has been dogged by revelations about his past since he launched his bid for the Senate last year, but so far that has not slowed the momentum of his campaign.

In October, Platner apologized for resurfaced Reddit posts in which he minimized the challenges faced by members of the military who have been sexually assaulted, called white rural people racist and stupid, referred to himself as a “communist” and encouraged people to limit their intake of certain substances to avoid being raped.

“For those of you who have read these things and been offended, have read these things and seen someone that you don’t recognize, I am deeply sorry,” Platner said in a video he posted on X.

The same month, Platner covered up a tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol, saying he got the tattoo while in the Marines in 2007 and had no idea the skull-and-crossbones figure was associated with Nazis.

In her video Saturday, Gertner added: “No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage. I want my marriage, and I want to be married to Graham. ... I knew the man that I married is wonderful and dynamic, and probably a genius.”

In a separate written statement distributed by the campaign, Gertner also blamed “someone I considered a friend,” without naming the person, for divulging her disclosures about her husband’s texts.

“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend. In the months since, I have had to watch as she spread malicious gossip to anyone who would take her call,” she said in the statement. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind — and I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy.”

Maine Gov. Janet Mills launched her own campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Senate last year but dropped out in April after she struggled to raise money and trailed Platner in the polls.

Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer, has been endorsed by a slate of national progressive leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

After reports of Platner’s sexual texts to other women emerged Saturday, Khanna re-emphasized his support and advertised a campaign rally he’ll be attending alongside Platner in June.

“I am proud of @grahamformaine for having the character to stand up against the war in Iran, against genocide, and against an unfair & lopsided economy. I am proud of him for having a vision for a new deal for our time. Excited to campaign with him June 5!” Khanna wrote on X.

Platner is challenging longtime Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who is running for a sixth term.

While Maine has trended toward Democrats in presidential elections — Vice President Kamala Harris won the state by 7 percentage points in 2024 — Collins has outperformed other Republicans in recent elections to keep her seat. She won her 2020 re-election race by 9 points.

New York Times, Senator Dan Sullivan Has a New Challenger in Alaska: Dan Sullivan, Tim Balk, May 31, 2026 (print ed.). Two candidates with the same name will be on the ballot seeking the same seat in the state’s primary. “It’s going to be confusing,” one Republican said. In Alaska this election season, the biggest supporters of Dan Sullivan could be the biggest antagonists of Dan Sullivan.

The field of contenders challenging Senator Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican who is up for re-election, has grown in recent days with a rather befuddling addition: Dan J. Sullivan, a former educator of no known relation, has entered the race.

His arrival could cause a headache for Senator Sullivan, who is working to fend off a challenge from former Representative Mary Peltola, a well-funded and independent-minded Democrat who says she is running on “fish, family and freedom.”

Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign announcement says he is a former elementary-school teacher and bartender from Petersburg, Alaska, a small town about 120 miles southeast of Juneau known locally for its Scandinavian spring festival. The announcement lays out no policies and does not describe his party affiliation.

The campaign arm of Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, suggested that Dan J. Sullivan was a plant by Democrats intended to confuse voters and siphon support from Senator Sullivan, a former Marine who worked in the State Department under President George W. Bush.

If some voters mistakenly vote for Dan J. Sullivan thinking they’re voting for Senator Sullivan, it could make the difference in a tight race, political observers said.

But Alaskans in both parties were skeptical it was a ploy. Alaska simply has a lot of Dan Sullivans, they said.

Gary Stevens, the Republican president of the Alaska Senate and a supporter of Senator Sullivan, said it was “pretty unlikely” that the new challenger was a Democratic plant. But he added that it was going to be a “campaign issue for the senator.”

“It’s going to be confusing,” Mr. Stevens said.

When Senator Sullivan was first elected to the Senate in 2014, another Dan Sullivan — Dan A. Sullivan, who was mayor of Anchorage at the time — was also on the primary ballot as a candidate for lieutenant governor.This year, Alaska is one of a handful of states that Democrats are targeting as they try to chart a narrow path back to the Senate majority.

Under Alaska’s election system, the top four candidates in a nonpartisan primary will advance to the general election in November. This year’s primary will be held on Aug. 18.

Alaska has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly two decades. But the state has gradually shifted toward the center in presidential elections over the last quarter-century. (President Trump carried it by about 14 percentage points in 2024, roughly mirroring the margins he won by in Texas, Iowa and Florida.)

Most Alaska voters are politically unaffiliated, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican, won re-election in the state in 2022 by beating a Trump-backed rival.

In announcing that he was joining this year’s race, Dan J. Sullivan said he had one goal: to unseat the incumbent. “It’s time for Alaska to elect a Sullivan that’s on their side,” he said in a statement.

The Daily With Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Gov. Andy Beshear Obliterates Kristen Welker's Biden Obsession, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 31, 2026. Meet The Press's Kristen Welker still thinks that Joe Biden and the 2024 election are a big story, but she tried to question Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) about it, and he turned the tables.

The mainstream media backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. They did this by tilting their coverage to hide Trump’s flaws, going into a frenzy over Joe Biden’s age, and withholding endorsements of Kamala Harris from some of the highest-profile outlets in the country.

Many of the biggest media outlets and those who run them had decided that Donald Trump would be better for their business than four more years of a Democrat in the White House.

Trump’s second term is historically unpopular and failing. The big ratings, book deals, and revenue increases have not arrived for the media, but instead of examining their role in how the country got into this mess, they are trying to both-sides Trump’s failure by sticking with Biden being a problem for Democrats, nearly two years after he left office.

Meet The Press host Kristen Welker has been obsessed with Joe Biden and keeps asking Democrats as if voters are going to care about Biden when they can’t afford food, gas, health insurance, and other life essentials.

On Meet The Press, Welker continued her Biden line of questioning with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, but the governor turned the tables on her.

Welker began her questions with, “I want to ask you about one of the big headlines for Democrats this week – former First Lady Jill Biden speaking out, weighing in on that disastrous debate performance by former President Joe Biden back in 2024.”

I haven’t heard any Democrats talking about the Bidens, but sure, ok, let’s see where this goes.

After playing a clip of Jill Biden, Welker asked Beshear, “Did former First Lady Jill Biden mislead the American people, Governor?”

Beshear’s answer turned Welker’s question into an epic fail.

The Kentucky Governor answered:

Well, what I see is a First Lady that loves her husband, that is fiercely protective. And I’m not going to criticize that. We were all concerned when we saw that debate. This was a president who governed in a way that helped my state, that helped me bring in a significant number of jobs, that’s helping me build a bridge that people said no one would ever build in their lifetime between northern Kentucky and Ohio. But I think it’s fair to look back now. Given that Joe Biden did drop out and say he shouldn’t have run for re-election in the first place. You can both compliment him for things he did that helped your state and your people, but also be able to look back and know that was a decision that should have been made differently.

Beshear talked about how he thinks Biden should not have run, but Biden had a good record of helping people and getting things done.

News Roundups

 

Medias Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates and Comment: More Failed Deals, Economic Gaslighting, and New Iran Strikes, Ben Meiselas, right, May 31, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking in today’s midday update:

• Iran shot down another U.S. drone, the fifth American aircraft lost this week alone
• Trump “toughened” his Iran deal terms, a move that analysts say makes zero strategic sense when Iran refused his last demands
• Iran’s parliament speaker made clear: no deal until Iran’s rights are fully secured
• Iran’s IRGC launched attacks on armed groups in northern Iraq
• Netanyahu ordered the IDF to expand operations in Lebanon, seizing the Beaufort Ridge
• Trump is threatening a federal judge over a drone port he wants built in the White House ballroom
• Treasury Secretary Bessent and economic advisor Kevin Hassett spent the morning telling Americans the economy is actually great
• Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to say who’s funding “Freedom 250”
• Mike Pence called Trump’s anti-weaponization slush fund “deeply offensive”

Meidas Touch Network, Thiis Weekend in Politics, Bulletin 390, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 31, 2026. Trump made another 100+ batshit crazy posts on Truth Social again this weekend. Here are a few:

On his Freedom 250 event: "I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance, so I am thinking about bringing 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, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History, DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

… If they are 3rd rate artists, why did he book them?

“I don’t want so-called ‘Artists’ that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited — It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America!”

Then later: “We should have a giant MAGA RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center.”

… Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) posted a video on social media to Trump where he volunteered to organize new talent for the event. He said that Kid Rock, John Rich and Lee Greenwood be the new headliners and said he could also round up some random bands from Nashville: “Everybody in the country will be watching this dadgum thing. Let’s see if we can make this thing happen.”

“Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name ‘TRUMP’ despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED.”

“The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed, and just released, were extremely good. Unlike other US Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’ It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved 4 times in a row.”

… Dr. Jonathan Reiner: “I’m glad the president did well on the MOCA exam, but it’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test, so a score of 26 or higher represents normal cognitive performance, not extreme intelligence. None of the questions are high difficulty.

“The DronePort at the WH Ballroom will be, perhaps, the most sophisticated anywhere in the World! Judge Richard Leon should stop playing games with America’s Security! If anything happens, he will be held responsible for the Death and Destruction caused to our Country. He has already created enough problems by allowing ‘Top Secret’ info to be released and exposed based on a ridiculous lawsuit started by a highly litigious woman. This ridiculous lawsuit must be dismissed, IMMEDIATELY!”

… And of course, Trump also posted lots of weirdo memes:

… Interior Secrtary Doug Burgum, right, on CNN: “There are questions about where private funding is coming from for Freedom 250. It’s not transparent. Burgum: Transparency is always a good thing. I work for the president I think i most transparent ever. Q: So you’ll make the donors public? Burgum: That’s up to Freedom 250. It’s run out of the WH. It’s not about the donors it’s about Americans celebrating.”

… NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon: “Mr. President: Your supporters are hurting. They need help. And they need it from you. A stimulus check to get working-class people through the months of negotiations in Iran would go a long way.”

… Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) to CNN on the migrant detention center in NJ being protested: “Delaney Hall is run by GEO Group. GEO Group is getting a nearly $1 billion contract to run Delaney Hall. They tell me there is one full-time doctor for 800 detainees. They could have more doctors if they wanted to, but that’s cutting into their profits.”

… Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ): “GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two private prison giants making billions of dollars as they physically and psychologically torture tens of thousands of people in detention every day. It’s a moral stain on our country. We need to end for-profit detention in the US now!”

… Privatizing prisons and detention facilities is one of the worst public policy decisions this country has ever made.

… NYT: “In recent conversations with aides and allies, Trump often interjects with a question about his VP: Does Vance have what it takes to go all the way? He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure. Trump often compares Vance’s performance to his own achievements. He has told several allies that Vance has never won a tough race without his help. He has brought up the number of vacations Vance has taken as VP.”

… “He has repeatedly mentioned the VP’s initial opposition to starting a war with Iran and has done so in front of Vance. The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war.”

… “Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Vance might not look the part. He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the WH South Lawn.”

… “In meetings, Vance frequently scrolls his phone, and he uses social media to fight with his critics. The president frequently posts to Truth Social, but he does not spend time replying to people online, as Vance does. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, recently advised Vance to take a break from social media, as have other officials in the West Wing, because the fighting was beneath his office.”

… “In November, the president wondered aloud why Vance was not more subservient, like the officials who work for President Xi Jinping of China. ‘Why don’t you behave like that?’ Trump asked Vance during a breakfast for Republican senators. ‘JD doesn’t behave like that! JD butts into conversations! I want to have that for at least a couple of days. OK, JD?’”

We make the entire Weekend Bulletin available to everyone while about the first third of the daily Bulletins during the week can be read by free subscribers. Tomorrow is also Ask the Editor where I choose 5 questions from you to answer with our Capitol Hill reporter Pablo chiming in with his take. Please submit your question in the comments section to this Bulletin below.

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… WaPo: “Democratic state leaders around the country have an unusual strategy to stymie Trump’s $1.8 billion settlement fund for people who claim they were wrongly investigated by the govt. Their plan: Tax the payouts at 100%. Gavin Newsom has endorsed the idea, saying, ‘It’s an action we look forward to taking.’ State legislators in NY and WI are crafting bills on the topic. And Democratic candidates are rallying behind the tactic in blue states.”

… Sen. Michael Bennet, who is the front-runner in the CO governor’s race: “The slush fund is a blatantly corrupt theft of taxpayer dollars, and we need to do everything we can to stop it.”

… Mike Pence on NBC: “This talk of a weaponization fund, the idea of creating a fund that could compensate people that assaulted police officers and vandalized the Capitol that day is totally unacceptable. My hope is the admin will drop it. Drop the idea entirely.”

… Zelensky: “We wanted to conclude the first Drone Deal with the US. The US wanted to test all types of our drones. We agreed to the way they wanted to test, train with, and use our systems in the air, on land, and at sea. But we still don’t have a bilateral Drone Deal – a big framework document.”

… “The Drone Deals we have are with some countries in the Middle East and Europe, and now we are preparing a big Drone Deal with the EU. I hope we will reach the same agreement with our American partners. I count on it.”

… I mean, they’re competing with Don Jr’s drone company. What the hell do the Ukrainians know about drones compared to Junior?

… The Hill: “The federal prosecutor who secured an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening the life of Trump in a since-deleted social media post of seashells has stepped down. A ‘notice of substitution’ filed in the E. District of NC stated that Matthew Petracca would no longer serve as DOJ’s counsel on the case and would be replaced by assistant US Attorney Timothy Severo.”

… “The filing did not provide any explanation for Petracca’s removal from the case, and the E. District of NC did not immediately return a request for comment.”

… Politico: “Graham Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with multiple women while married to his wife, Amy Gertner, his campaign confirmed, the latest scandal he has faced since launching his Maine Senate campaign last year.”

… Gertner: “I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend. In the months since, I have had to watch as she spread malicious gossip to anyone who would take her call. I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives - the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind - and I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy.”

… Henry Olsen with Ethics in Public Policy: “Per Maine law, Platner can quit after he is nominated without providing a reason prior to 5 PM on the 2nd Monday in July. The state party then names a replacement prior to 5 PM on the 4th Monday in July.”

… Not a bad idea to keep those dates in mind. At this rate who knows what’s coming out next.

… Lara Trump interviewed her father-in-law for Fox:

On the ballroom: “Eric Trump has the gene. He has the gene that I have. I have the gene. Eric has it. He looked at this and understood it immediately.”

“The ballroom will be the most secure facility ever build. The way the world is now, that’s very important. You have the drone ports and the sniper ports.”

“We’re gonna have the inauguration here”

… The next president decides that. But he continues to talk like that will be him.

On Iran negotiations: “I’m in no hurry. I’d like to say I’m in a hurry because gas prices but if you are in a hurry you won’t make a good deal.”

“We sort of left their military alone because we think that their military is somewhat moderate. We’ve actually let their military alone - people would be surprised to hear that. Moments later: Iran is a very bad position. They have no military.”

… Pete Hegseth on March 13: “Never before has a modern, capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed.”

… Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA): “Now we know why Trump still hasn’t been able to open the Straight of Hormuz. It’s because, in the cognitively impaired mind of trump, Iran cleverly has the only Schrödinger military in the world: it exists and it doesn’t exist all at the same time.”

On CA: “They don’t have voting booths, everything is by mail. I know the system very well. I don’t think a Republican can win CA until they pass the SAVE Act.”

… Gavin Newsom: “Trump is actively lying to Americans. Again. This time it’s to keep you from voting. Don’t believe him.”

On his new nickname ‘dumocrats’: “Dumb ends with a B but most people don’t know that.”

… Whenever Trump says “the country” he means himself. Whenever he says “most people don’t know that” it means he didn’t know it.

On his President’s Walk of Fame: “This is a brass plaque. I did this. Most people would put brass on top of a piece of wood. This is solid brass. This is all solid beautiful brass.”

“Did you see CNN did a poll on me and I was 100% with MAGA? They couldn't believe it. Harry Enten. He's legit. He gives me a lot of good polls."

… Trump’s physical said he is 6’3”. Lara must have gotten a lot taller recently.

… Political consultant Chris Jackson: “I’m hearing from multiple folks who would know that Andy Beshear had a very good night in SC. He brought the house down at the Blue Palmetto Dinner and made a real impression at Jim Clyburn’s Fish Fry. Clyburn reportedly called it ‘one of the most incredible speeches I’ve heard from a Democratic governor from the South.’”

… “That matters. A Democratic governor who wins in deep-red Kentucky, talks like a normal person, leads with decency, and can connect in SC? Keep an eye on Andy.”

… Axios’s Barak Ravid with his latest update on Iran’s surrender: “A senior American official said that Trump was told it would take about 3 days for the Iranians to come back with a response to his request: ‘They’re really hiding in caves and they’re not using email. There will be a deal. As for how close it is—we’ll wait and see. We’re prepared to wait so that the president gets what he’s asking for. It could be a week. It could be less. It could be more. Early next week we hope we’ll have something'.’”

… Axios has been reporting every few days for the past 3 months that a deal was happening any day.

… NewsNation asked about Intel Committee Chair Rick Crawford about the US military intel report that Iran’s military capabilities remain largely intact: “The clear-eyed view is listening to the president, who has access to more info than anybody does. There may be some individuals who take delight in undermining the president through leaks. I would encourage them to get with Team America and come in on our side.”

… Middle East expert Danny Citrinowitz: “The chances of Iran backing down on its core negotiating positions are extremely low. This applies to its demand for meaningful economic relief from the outset, its insistence on preserving its sovereign rights in Hormuz, and its willingness to discuss limitations on its nuclear program only as part of a later stage of the process.”

… “If Washington's demands clash with these fundamental positions, Iran is likely to prefer no deal at all rather than accept an agreement that, in its view, fails to improve its strategic situation. The danger of introducing tougher demands at the last minute is that such a strategy assumes Iran lacks confidence and can be pressured into concessions. The opposite is true: Tehran currently sees little reason to compromise on what it considers its core interests.”

… “The admin must recognize a basic reality. If the goal is to fundamentally alter Iran's strategic calculus, it would require a prolonged and costly campaign to undermine Tehran's confidence in its position. But as long as Washington prioritizes reaching an agreement, there is little logic in insisting on demands that Iran is almost certain to reject and that would only push a deal further out of reach.”

… “Brett Erickson with Obsidian Risk Advisors: “Last night, Trump made a move that came as a surprise to many. He got TOUGHER in his negotiating position. But why did he do this is the question many are asking right now. Iran has consistently rejected terms offered by the US because, quite frankly, they are ridiculously maximalist and entirely detached from the reality of the situation.”

… “Trump is at the table with Iran holding a 7 & 2 off-suit, and Iran is sitting with pocket aces. So why even waste the time to make an offer Iran is sure to refuse immediately? Because the deal wasn’t meant for Iran. It was meant for American consumption.”

… “Throughout this conflict, from a strategic standpoint, Trump has been absolutely dog walked by the Iranian regime. From the very first day that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and every day since, Iran has held the upper hand, and it only gets stronger by the day.”

… “Trump knows this, even as he wallows in self pity and denial. Iran obviously knows this, and sees the upcoming bullet train of the World Cup, lowest SPR levels in history, midterms, cratering approval numbers - everything is going south for Trump fast at this point. It’s spiraling, and Trump looks increasingly desperate for a deal.”

… “As much as Trump has tried to claim Iran is ‘begging’ for a deal, it is obvious to everyone that it is really Trump that is on his hands and knees. So if he’s going to reject the latest Iranian proposal because the terms are simply a step too far… why not give the image, the bluster, the BRAVADO of a ‘tough on Iran’ Commander in Chief to sell to the American people.”

… “Of course, this is all obviously rubbish. Iran knows that. Trump knows that. And everyone around the world knows that. But it’s not meant for them, it’s meant for his MAGA base. Trump, by setting forth even more ludicrous terms, allows for a kicking of the can down the road, and the veneer of a tough President that will placate his base that has been ready to rip him to shreds.”

… “It’s not a serious offer. It doesn’t have even the slightest of chance to be accepted by Iran. But it was never meant for them. It was meant for the desperate and hopeless. Trump to try to prove to his base that he is still in control. Even when he is clearly not.”

… WH economic advisor Kevin Hassett on ABC: Q - “The Exxon Mobil senior VP said prices will ‘shoot up’ after the next 2 to 3 weeks if a deal isn’t struck. Hassett: There’s a lot of pressure on Iran to finally agree to the president’s terms.”

… Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Fox: "Many people have said to me, 'Are you surprised the market has gone up on bad news?' I say, I don't think the news is that bad. I think the news is bad. The quality of the reporting. The anti-Americanism. People are so anti-President Trump."

… Media reporter Bill Carter: “Here we go: reporting in ways we consider negatively abt the leader is ‘unAmerican.’ Hence we get the FCC going after comedians, CBS censoring 60 Min, and women reporters asking legit questions being told to shut up Piggy.”

… Republican senate nominee Ken Paxton on Fox: Q - “What are you going to do about your perception? The WSJ describes you as 'scandal plagued'. Paxton: The reality is they could say the same thing about Donald Trump.”

… I’m not sure that’s much of a selling point.

… Smirking Kevin Hassett was back on Fox to show again how out of touch he is with the vast majority of Americans:

Q - “The BLS says inflation is now outpacing wage growth. How do you answer that concern? Hassett: That's a technical matter. Personal income includes lots of things like transfers and food stamps that we have been reducing as part of our effort to make govt leaner and meaner.”

… Former Senate Budget Committee staffer Bobby Kogan: “Insane response. This is literally false. The personal income report counts transfers, but BLS report he was asked about doesn’t. Inflation outpaced wages. But EVEN IF talking about personal income, saying ‘the only reason you’re poorer is we took away your Medicaid’ is crazy.”

Q - “WSJ says the percentage of delinquent credit card balances is 13%, the highest since the period following the financial crisis. People say they're using them for necessities. Your message to them? Hassett: We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time. Delinquency is different from default, and there's not any financial threat to the credit card companies. It's just people are taking a little bit longer.”

"People are spending more on gas, but they're also spending more on everything else - not just groceries, but restaurants and so on. I think that's a sign you see when people are optimistic about the future."

… ACJ covered the debate today between Republican senate candidates Mike Collins and Vince Dooley:

“Ossoff earlier challenged Collins and Dooley to say whether they support Trump-backed measures to finance $1 billion in security funding tied to a new WH ballroom and a $1.8 billion fund for people who say they were politically persecuted. Both endorsed each initiative.”

“Only clashes so far: Dooley pushes back against Collins attack calling him weak on illegal immigration. Collins blames Collins and a lackadaisical Congress for not taking further action. ‘Typical politician,’ says Dooley.”

“Report card on today’s GA GOP Senate debate: Collins v. Dooley = Hardliner vs. Happy warrior. Both pro-Trump, both support ballroom, Iran and Trump weaponization fund. BUT Collins forced to defend on ethics 3 times in 30 min.”

… Meanwhile Jon Ossoff held his first of many joint events on Sunday with the Democratic nominee for governor Keisha Lance Bottoms:

“This war in Iran is the worst foreign policy blunder since Iraq. And just like the Iraq War, it's a war built on lies. Let’s update the record: On day one, the president said it was running ahead of schedule. On day 10, he said it was very complete. Day 21, getting very close. Day 32, leaving very soon. On day 39, the President said a whole civilization will die.”

“On the next day, day 40, he declared total and complete victory. Day 67, great progress. Day 79, the clock is ticking. Today is day 92 . And on day 92 Iran's ballistic missiles and drones have not been destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz, which was opened before the war is still closed. The regime is intact along with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium—a stockpile Iran only built after Trump shredded President Obama's Iran deal.”

“The America first president who said he would end foreign wars to put America first and focus on America's working class. Instead, now he says, it's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid or Medicare. Now he says all we can afford is war. Now he demands we cut cancer and Alzheimer's research to throw even more money at Hegseth’s Pentagon. While Hegseth's broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran.”

They tried to run Brian Kemp, but he refused. So we're left with the congressman who's only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman and the coach, who's only a coach because his daddy was a coach. It doesn't matter which one wins. They're both Trump puppets and we'll beat either one of them in November.”

… Axios: “At least $2 million in settlements has been agreed to after employees and other critics were fired or penalized over their posts about Charlie Kirk following his killing. The settlements illustrate the limits employers can have in regulating their workers’ political rhetoric.”

… “Kirk’s death became a catalyst for a free speech debate after an estimated 600 individuals were fired or punished for criticizing the conservative political activist or downplaying his death - repercussions that were backed by the Trump admin. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is aware of 14 First Amend lawsuits in federal court brought by workers terminated for their comments about Kirk, not including those brought by workers terminated in the private sector or filed in state court.”

… “Case in point: The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission settled a lawsuit with biologist Brittney Brown for $485,000 after she was fired for reposting a meme criticizing Kirk on her personal Instagram account. ‘All I wanted was my job back,’ Brown said in a statement, slamming the state agency for acting as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ‘personal puppet show.’”

… Sen. Bernie Sanders was the first guest on Meidas’ new Sunday talk show On Sunday: “What we have here, and it’s a real issue, is that if you’re progressive, you can go out there and give a great speech, fine. You’re saying all the right things. You’re right on the issues. Great. Can you run a government? Can you be a good mayor? Can you be a good governor?”

… “What Mamdani is doing is showing that you can have a democratic socialist, progressive ideology and run a city. You know what? NYC had really serious snowstorms. It meant that people couldn’t get to work, kids couldn’t get to school, ambulances couldn’t get people to the hospital. You know what he did? He got the bloody snow off the ground and did a great job on that.”

… “So the point is, we have got to have progressives who are not only right on the issues—and I speak as somebody who was a mayor for 8 years—you’ve got to know how to run a govt. You’ve got to cut through the bureaucracy. You’ve got to stand up for working-class people. You’ve got to create the best educational system in the world that we can. You’ve got to make the system work efficiently.”

… Rep. Ro Khanna was also a guest to talk about the Epstein files: “James Comer has made this totally partisan. He used two to three months to go after the Clintons, who haven’t been in office for 20 years, and yet he didn’t have Pam Bondi under oath. He didn’t have her testimony public. He didn’t have Howard Lutnick under oath. He didn’t have his testimony public.”

U.S. Economy, Income Inequality, Inflation, Markets

 

An artist’s rendition of the horrendous carnage that occurred during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the Stone Bridge over the Conemaugh River,,killing more than 2,200 after wealthy residents failed to fortify a dam at their resort -- while escaping legal liaibility despite a national scandal.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 30, 2026 [Good Life, Disaster and No Legal Accountability: The Way We Were], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 31, 2026. Life was good in 1889 for the more than fifty wealthy industrialists who belonged to Pennsylvania’s South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.

Most of the men had made their fortunes in nearby Pittsburgh in the heady years after the Civil War. New national markets and a new national financial system made business boom across the country. Factories grew and railroads hammered across the country, moving grain east and manufactured products south and west.

Pittsburgh produced the iron and steel that fed the railroad industry and the growing cities. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick ran the steel mills, while there was also money to be made in real estate, storekeeping, lawyering, and accounting in the booming city. Bankers like Andrew Mellon, who would become the U.S. secretary of the treasury during the boom years of the 1920s, made enough money to reshape the country.

In 1880, Frick’s friend Benjamin Franklin Ruff, who sold coke (the high-heat fuel necessary to make steel), contracted to make railroad tunnels, and bought and sold real estate, proposed to Frick and other wealthy friends that they establish a secret and exclusive club in the mountains, where members could spend their summers away from the heat and dirt of bustling Pittsburgh.

Ruff owned an abandoned reservoir on Pennsylvania’s Little Conemaugh River in southwestern Pennsylvania. The reservoir had been created in 1852, when Pennsylvania finished damming the river to create a canal system. But railroads soon replaced canals, and the reservoir became obsolete. The state sold it, along with the South Fork Dam, to private interests. By 1880 it was in Ruff’s hands.

Ruff and his friends organized the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which took control of the reservoir—renaming it Lake Conemaugh—and established a club on about 160 acres of land. The main building on the site was a 47-room clubhouse with a dining room that could seat 150. Sixteen members built large “cottages” along the lakeshore and spent their evenings at plays or musical performances.

At two and a half miles long and a mile wide, the lake was big enough to run the club’s two steam yachts or to enjoy on sailboats or canoes. It covered about 450 acres and was 70 feet deep. It held about 20 million tons of water. The club’s wealthy industrialists and financiers centered their summer relaxation around the artificial lake.

Private owners had already changed the lake and the dam significantly. The man who had bought the property from the state removed from the dam the five sluice pipes that allowed the removal of excess water, selling them for scrap. This meant there was no way to drain the reservoir either for repairs, or to lower water levels during periods of heavy rain.

As they prepared for summer recreation, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club stocked the lake with black bass sport fish. Then, worried that the expensive bass might get washed downstream, they put screens over the dam’s spillway. To enable carriages to cross the dam, the club lowered it. There was no way to lower water levels in their Lake Conemaugh, but in what must have been an idyllic existence in the summers of the early 1880s, they ignored warnings that the changes they had made to the dam had weakened it dangerously.

There were 30,000 people, mostly Welsh and German immigrants, living in Johnstown, a factory town in the valley below Lake Conemaugh, about fourteen miles downstream from the South Fork Dam. The economy that had made fortunes for the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was built on the labor of workers like the men in Johnstown. The men there worked in the blast furnaces, converters, rolling mills, or coal mines of Cambria Iron or worked for the Gautier plant making barbed wire. The steep hills of the region meant the drop in elevation from the lake to Johnstown was about 450 feet, more than 40 stories in a modern-day building. But there was little reason for members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to think about the people who lived downstream.

Until May 30, 1889, Decoration Day, when a torrent of rain began to fall.

On the morning of May 31, the president of the club, Elias Unger, observed from his farmhouse above the lake that “...the valley below me seemed to be all under water, and I couldn’t understand what all that meant.” Unger was at the farmhouse to oversee the construction of a sewage system for the club, and when he ran down to the dam, he immediately ordered the Italian workers from the sewage project to dig an emergency spillway to relieve pressure on the dam. But the workers hit rock and made little headway. Then Unger ordered workers to tear out the fish screens that had become blocked with debris, but it was too late. By 1:30 in the afternoon, after Unger had tried unsuccessfully to warn the people below, it was clear there was nothing to do but wait for the dam to fail.

A little before 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday, May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on Pennsylvania’s Little Conemaugh River broke. Unger said the dam failed “little by little until it got a head way, and when it got cut through it just went like a flash.”

As 20 million tons of water spilled downstream, it picked up houses, trees, bridges, railroad cars, animals, and people. The water measured at least 35 feet high and traveled at 40 miles an hour. As it traveled, it became a wall of debris, grinding through more than $4.4 billion of property in today’s dollars. It swept locomotives from their tracks, discarding some nearly a mile away.

The water consumed victims. And when the wave smashed into a stone bridge in Johnstown, the trapped debris caught fire, trapping more. Two thousand, two hundred and eight people died in the Johnstown Flood, the largest loss of civilian lives in the U.S. at that time. Ninety-nine entire families died. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, four hundred miles away, and as late as 1911.

Gertrude Quinn Slattery later recalled that her father had been terribly worried about the heavy rains, warning that not a house would be left standing if the dam burst. Hearing the roar of the coming water, he grabbed one of his children and ordered the rest to “Run for your lives” to a nearby hill.

Slattery later recalled: “I can never forget what I saw! It was like the Day of Judgement I have since seen pictured in books. Pandemonium had broken loose, screams, cries and people were running; their white faces like death masks; parents dragging children, whose heads bobbed up and down in the water; a boat filled to capacity with eager, anxious passengers; household pets of all descriptions dangling from living arms; a wagon loaded to the breaking point lost a wheel and the despairing mortals riding therein were dumped down in a heap in the filthy water. They scrambled to their feet in less time than it takes to tell it, as the on-rushing mob moved rapidly forward, bent on self-preservation at any cost…and now a moving mass, black with houses, trees, boulders, logs and rafters was coming down like an avalanche.”

Debris from The Johnstown Flood in 1889 in Western Pennsylvania.

From around the world, people rushed to help the survivors. One of the first to arrive was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who stayed for five months. She brought with her fifty doctors and nurses, and together they learned how to respond to a natural disaster.

But those survivors who hoped to hold the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club accountable were disappointed. Blaming the club members for the disaster, newspapers built the story into one of the biggest in American history. Even the pro-business New York Times reported that “justice is inevitable even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station, and the majority of the victims the most downtrodden workers in any industry in the country.”

But the club men denied responsibility for the disaster, and all four lawsuits launched against the club failed. Club members and law partners James Hay Reed and Philander Knox defended the club in court, claiming the flood was an act of God for which the members could not be held responsible. Reed went on to become a federal judge. Knox went on to become a U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and U.S. attorney general.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The New Inequality, Paul Krugman, right, May 31, 2026. Goodbye, returns to education. Hello, concentrated ownership of capital.

“To understand why people are so miserable about the economy,” Greg Ip recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “look no further than Thursday’s report on gross domestic product. Not how much GDP grew, but how it was divvied up.” Ip went on to document the growing divergence between wages, which are a declining share of national income, and corporate profits, which are taking an ever-larger share.

It’s not clear how much trends in the division of the economic pie between capital and labor — what economists call the factor distribution of income — are driving current economic discontent and anger. But there’s a growing public sense that the system is unfair and rigged against ordinary people. This sense partly reflects the reality that a rising share of economic rewards is going to shareholders as profits rather than to workers as earned income. It also reflects the fact that, even as a growing share of income accrues to wealth, within the growing upwards distribution of income within, there is growing concentration of wealth at the very top. In other words, a rising share of unearned total income is going to a very small number of people.

As a result, it is now widely recognized that the U.S. economy is far more unequal than it was a few decades ago. However much of the discourse about inequality is still stuck in the past — shaped by the perception that rising inequality is largely a consequence of greater inequality in paid income. According to the prevailing yet misguided story, rising inequality is due to higher earnings of those with more education.

That story was never entirely true even in the past. But to the extent it was ever true, it mainly explains rising inequality between around 1980 and 2000. Since then, and especially in recent years, the main story is one of rising oligarchy: more and more of the economy’s rewards are going to a small group that overwhelmingly derives its income from the assets it owns.

And the reality of rising oligarchy is important, not just for explaining current malaise, but for thinking about the possible implications for the future, especially the impact of AI.

Beyond the paywall I will discuss the following:

• 1. The old, earnings-based inequality: The big rise between 1980 and 2000, and its limited relevance since then
• 2. The economics of rising profits and stagnant wages
• 3. The growing concentration of wealth
• 4. Will AI produce an inequality apocalypse?
• 5. The political economy of oligarchy

U.S. Religion, Culture, Science, Media, Space

New York Times, In U.F.O. Files, Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons, Ruth Graham, May 31, 2026. The prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raises unsettling theological implications.

The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February weren’t sure exactly what they were in for. An organizer asked them to turn their phones on airplane mode. Snacks were served. Then, for at least two hours, two mysterious men presented a slide show laying out the evidence, as they saw it, for some kind of extraterrestrial life and the spiritual confusion that coming revelations could sow among Christians.

“It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever been a part of,” said Alan DiDio, a pastor in North Carolina who attended. “You’ve never seen that many Pentecostals in a room that quiet.”

For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there’s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.

As the pastors left the meeting and turned on their phones, they began receiving news alerts that confirmed for many of them that something significant was happening. That very day, President Trump had directed his administration to begin releasing files related to extraterrestrial life.

The disclosure began this month, with the Pentagon’s release of murky “new, never-before-seen” images whose significance is so far unclear.

But for some conservative Christians, who are among Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, the prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has some unsettling theological implications. Some worry that it undercuts the Bible’s account of the Earth and humanity as the centerpiece of God’s plan for the universe, for example.ImagePresident Trump gestures with his hands while sitting in a brown chair.For the Trump administration, the release of government files was an attempt to demonstrate transparency on a topic of widespread public speculation. Credit...Carolyn Van Houten for The New York Times

Christians in the United States are significantly less likely than the general public to say intelligent life exists on other planets, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center. Among atheists and agnostics, 85 percent say their best guess is that intelligent life exists outside Earth. Among white evangelicals, only 40 percent say the same.

“The U.F.O. topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from U.F.O. “experiencers.”

In Dr. Kripal’s view, the origin stories of many earth-based religions can be read as descriptions of encounters with unexplained entities of unknown provenance.

“The gods have always come from the sky, and we call that religion,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of words in the Western canon for these entities of the middle realm, so my own feeling is that when religious people look out and they see entities that don’t fit into their religious world, they call them demons.”

The possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be better understood as demonic entities is not a new theory among some conservative Christians. But it has lately burst from the fringes of speculative religious cosmology into more prominent view, including from elected officials at the highest levels of government.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said on a conservative podcast this spring.

The Catholic church has no formal teaching on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, though it has intrigued some Catholic theologians. A Vatican scientist made headlines in 2010 when he suggested aliens might have souls, and said he would baptize an alien “if they asked.”Editors’ Picks9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This WeekBy September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in Dying7 Songs We’re Talking About This Week

“Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain,” Mr. Vance added.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado made a similar point recently on another podcast, this one hosted by the conservative Christian musician and activist Sean Feucht.

May 30

Top Headlines 

 

The Ebola Outbreak's Epicenter (New York Times photo by Arlette Bashizi). 

• New York Times, Inside the Ebola Epicenter, the Virus Rages With Little to Stop It, Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi (reporting from inside an Ebola ward in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak), May 30, 2026. A remote gold mining town is under siege, as medical workers struggle to beat back a surge of deaths and infections.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Rough Night in the Courts, White House Releases Physical Results, Pentagon Prohibits Overweight Troops From UFC Fight, Aaron Parnas, right, May 30, 2026. President Trump had a rough stretch in the courts overnight. A federal judge reopened the IRS lawsuit and is now examining allegations that a fraud may have been committed on the court, while a federal judge in Washington is refusing to simply dismiss the indictment against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes because the Trump administration asked him to.
• New York Times, Trump Squeezes Immigrants by Cutting Them Off From Jobs, Health Care and Housing, Nicholas Nehamas, Miriam Jordan, Coral Davenport, Hamed Aleaziz, Lydia DePillis and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, May 30, 2026. The methodically planned strategy is intended to pressure noncitizens, including many with legal status, to leave the United States. 

More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Rights, Justice

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Stan Woodward’s Many Terrorist-Defending Hats, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 30, 2026. January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ. 
• New York Times, Judge Reopens Trump’s I.R.S. Suit and Questions His ‘Weaponization’ Fund, Alan Feuer and Andrew Duehren, May 30, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling was a blow to both President Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department, which used the suit to establish a fund likely intended for Trump allies.
• New York Times, Kennedy Center Must Remove Trump’s Name From Building, Judge Orders, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, May 30, 2026 (print ed.). In an incensed social media post, President Trump suggested that the ruling might prompt him to cast the center aside after more than a year at its helm.

News Roundup

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Losing Confidence in Vance, Says he Will Headline State Fair After Artists Bail, Lashes Out at Opponents, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, May 30, 2026. Donald Trump appears to be increasingly frustrated with JD Vance, reportedly revisiting old disagreements, questioning his judgment, and sidelining him in ways that are already fueling speculation about 2028.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran’s Hard-Liners Try to Derail Potential Deal With the U.S., Farnaz Fassihi (has covered Iran for three decades, living and traveling in the country. She was a war correspondent based in the Middle East for 15 years), May 30, 2026 (print ed.). A political fight is playing out in Iran, where the small but loud faction of hard-liners has used rallies, state media and private and public statements to try to undermine negotiations.

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

 

• New York Times, Is JD Vance the 2028 Front Runner? Trump Has Questions, Katie Rogers and Tyler Pager, May 30, 2026. President Trump appears to see the matter of his heir as unsettled, adding a layer of tension to his relationship with Vice President JD Vance.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 29, 2026 [Beaten Texas Senator Disses President],Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 30, 2026. This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:
• The Independent Pollster, Staggering Data that Should Make the Political Class Reconsider Its Tribal Messaging and Strategies, Jeremy Zogby, May 30, 2026. Going well beyond typical polling data, such as which party voters favor, and instead probing their belief that the U.S. will still exist as a unified nation—and whether they plan to be part of it.
• Medias Touch Network, Opinion and Advocacy: Trump COLLAPSES in Ohio as STATE TURNS BLUE!!! Ben Meiselas, May 29, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump’s support collapsing in Ohio as Democrats look prepared to win the Ohio Governor’s race and Meiselas speaks with the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton.
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Republican election judge assaulted Democratic judge, Tarrant County Dems say, Rachel Royster, May 29, 2026. A Tarrant County Democratic election judge says she was assaulted by a Republican election judge while working at her polling place for the primary runoff election Tuesday morning. 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary: Trump's Latest Medical Report Is An Embarrassing Cover-Up Of Decline, Jason Easley, right, May 30, 2026. The White House news dumped the results of Trump's latest physical late on a Friday night and it is easy to see why. The report is a propaganda document, not a transparent public disclosure.
• Associated Press via Politico, Trump jumps into Republican primaries for governor in South Carolina, Iowa and Oklahoma, Staff Report, May 30, 2026. Contests in those states have pitted allies against each other in a fierce competition for the president's endorsement.
• The Daily With Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Delusional Trump Replaces Music Acts With Himself At The Great American State Fair, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 30, 2026. After the majority of the musical acts dropped out of his Great American State Fair, Trump replaced them all with himself.
• Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Bobby Brainworms gets bit, Preznit F___wit gets hit, and so much more, Jeff Tiedrich, right, May 30, 2026. As another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back.....
• New York Times, Platner’s Texts With Women Concerned Campaign as Senate Race Took Off, Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, May 30, 2026. The wife of Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate in Maine, told the campaign he had sent sexual messages to other women.

More Global News

• New York Times, What to Know About the Ebola Outbreak, Amelia Nierenberg, Ephrat Livni and Lynsey Chutel, Updated May 30, 2026. Aid agencies are racing to help underequipped health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 245 people are now suspected to have died from the virus.

U.S. Media, High Tech, Culture 

 

White House Chronicle, Opinion: The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose, Llewellyn King, above, May 30, 2026. I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines: “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” Write that in the corporate prospectus.

Top Stories

 

The Ebola Outbreak's Epicenter (New York Times photo by Arlette Bashizi). 

New York Times, Inside the Ebola Epicenter, the Virus Rages With Little to Stop It, Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi (reporting from inside an Ebola ward in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak), May 30, 2026. A remote gold mining town is under siege, as medical workers struggle to beat back a surge of deaths and infections.

In the cramped, dilapidated Ebola ward, a 5-year-old boy languished on a bare mattress, a tissue stuffed into his nose to stanch the incessant bleeding. His father stood over him, eyes clouded with worry.

A few beds away lay the body of Christiane Bahati, 21, who had died seven hours earlier but had not yet been taken away. Her shoes were still tucked under the bed, her wailing relatives gathered outside the ward doors.

The body, covered by a thin sheet, was highly contagious. Yet hardly anyone in the ward was protected. Relatives came and went, carrying food and water to ailing patients because the hospital had none to give them. A few wore rubber gloves or pulled a scarf across their mouths. Most had nothing at all.

In the next ward lay the hospital’s laboratory technician, also sick. Seven other hospital workers had already died from suspected Ebola. Few of the staff members had ever been trained to fight the disease, and the most rudimentary equipment was in dangerously short supply: tests, protective suits, goggles, masks, even drinking water.

Outside, the sound of hammering broke the hushed silence. Aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were racing to erect isolation tents and disinfection stations.

Dr. Alex Bogole, a Congolese doctor in the hospital’s intensive care ward, was furious.

The virus had been spreading for months, virtually unimpeded, “and this is the best we can do?” he said, the frustration pouring through his protective gear.

This is the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), and the front line is completely overwhelmed.

• See Also: New York Times, What to Know About the Ebola Outbreak, Amelia Nierenberg, Ephrat Livni and Lynsey Chutel, Updated May 30, 2026. Aid agencies are racing to help underequipped health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 245 people are now suspected to have died from the virus.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Rough Night in the Courts, White House Releases Physical Results, Pentagon Prohibits Overweight Troops From UFC Fight, Aaron Parnas, right, May 30, 2026. President Trump had a rough stretch in the courts overnight. A federal judge reopened the IRS lawsuit and is now examining allegations that a fraud may have been committed on the court, while a federal judge in Washington is refusing to simply dismiss the indictment against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes because the Trump administration asked him to.

Meanwhile, we have Trump’s physical exam results, new questions from doctors about some of the findings, and reporting that the Pentagon is prohibiting overweight soldiers from receiving free tickets to the UFC fight at the White House. I also have an exclusive text message that one service member received. And much more.

One thing we discussed during Thursday’s live stream was the possibility of a Washington, D.C., meetup, and I wanted to gauge interest. The Epstein Library is coming to town in June, and I may organize an event with the library to highlight the Epstein files and give me a chance to meet many of you in person.

We have some exciting things in the works and some big news coming soon. Your support helps us build something truly independent and accountable to people, not corporations, billionaires, or political insiders.

Here’s the news:

The White House released the results of President Donald Trump’s annual physical, with his physician stating that Trump remains in “excellent health” and is fully fit to serve as president. However, the report recommended increased exercise, continued weight loss, dietary changes, and a daily low-dose aspirin regimen, noting that Trump now weighs 238 pounds, up from 224 pounds a year ago. The exam also found mild leg swelling related to chronic venous insufficiency, while neurological testing and a cognitive assessment showed normal results, including a perfect score on a dementia screening test. Trump’s doctor also said an AI-assisted analysis estimated his heart health to be comparable to someone roughly 14 years younger than his actual age. 

The Pentagon is compiling a list of troops who will attend the UFC event on the White House South Lawn on June 14, but not every service member will be eligible. According to the report, military officials were instructed to prioritize soldiers who meet physical fitness and weight standards, leading some personnel to jokingly describe the policy as: “No fatties.” The event is scheduled to take place on President Donald Trump’s birthday as part of the administration’s America 250 celebrations.

Here is an exclusive text I received showing what service members received concerning the UFC fight:

Trump purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock in TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of UFC, according to a financial disclosure filing, months before hosting a major UFC event on the White House South Lawn. The June 14 "UFC Freedom 250" event, scheduled for Trump's 80th birthday as part of America's 250th anniversary celebration, is expected to draw thousands of attendees and has been heavily promoted by the president. UFC President Dana White said White House officials began planning the event shortly after Trump proposed the idea. The disclosure is likely to raise questions about potential conflicts of interest as Trump promotes an event tied to a company in which he holds a financial stake.

CNN’s Dr. Jonathan Reiner challenged a claim in President Trump’s newly released medical report that lower-leg swelling had “improved” from last year. “There’s a section about extremities—slight lower leg swelling was noted with improvement from last year,” Reiner said. “April of last year, it notes no swelling in the legs. So if he has swelling in his legs then that’s not an improvement from last year. That’s a deterioration from last year.” Reiner argued that the report’s characterization appears inconsistent with the previous year’s findings, which reportedly documented no leg swelling.

Dr. Reiner also questioned a claim in President Trump’s medical report that an AI-assisted analysis found his heart health comparable to someone 14 years younger.

“How about this AI evaluation of 14 years younger?” Laura Coates asked. Reiner replied: “They reported that last year as well. And when I discussed this with some of my colleagues in cardiology, everyone laughed. That’s not a clinical use tool. That’s not really a way to gauge cardiac health.” Reiner argued that the AI-generated “cardiac age” metric is not a standard medical measure and should not be treated as a meaningful assessment of heart health.

A federal judge has reopened President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after critics alleged that a proposed settlement between Trump and the Justice Department may have been improper. The agreement would have dismissed the case in exchange for creating a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund for people claiming harm from the government and included a provision barring future IRS scrutiny of Trump's past tax returns. Judge Kathleen Williams said allegations that the lawsuit and settlement may have been collusive or constituted a "fraud on the court" warranted further review and ordered both sides to explain their actions. The decision is a setback for Trump and the Justice Department, as it revives judicial scrutiny of a controversial deal that has drawn criticism from both Democrats and some Republicans.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, left, is demanding that the Trump administration explain its effort to erase the seditious conspiracy conviction of Stewart Rhodes, right, rather than allowing the case to be quietly dismissed. Mehta signaled skepticism about the government’s request and ordered officials to provide a legal justification for vacating one of the most significant convictions stemming from the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The move comes as the Trump administration has sought to revisit or undo several January 6-related prosecutions. Mehta’s order ensures that any attempt to overturn Rhodes’ conviction will face public scrutiny and judicial review before moving forward.

Former Border Patrol official Greg Bovino publicly encouraged ICE agents stationed at New Jersey's Delaney Hall detention center amid ongoing clashes with protesters, telling them to "give them hell" and praising their efforts to "hold the line." The comments came as demonstrations intensified over allegations of detainee mistreatment, with protesters, Democratic officials, and immigration advocates criticizing the facility's conditions and the federal response.

Federal immigration agents will withdraw from the area outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark after days of escalating clashes with protesters, with New Jersey State Police taking over security operations. The protests began over conditions inside the facility and intensified after federal agents used chemical irritants, physical force, and arrests to disperse demonstrators, while activists alleged detainees were protesting poor treatment and inadequate medical care. New Jersey officials said the transition is intended to lower tensions and create a designated protest area, though confrontations between protesters and state police continued after the handoff. The dispute has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, drawing the involvement of elected officials, immigration advocates, and civil rights groups.

A United Airlines flight from Chicago to Minneapolis was forced to divert to Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday after an unruly passenger created what the airline described as a security concern. Flight 2005 departed from Chicago O’Hare International Airport but landed safely in Madison so authorities could address the situation. United said no injuries were reported and that the flight was expected to continue on to Minneapolis later that evening. Officials have not yet released additional details about the passenger or the nature of the incident.

A catastrophic explosion destroyed a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket and severely damaged the company’s only launchpad at Cape Canaveral (as shown above in a NASA photo), creating a major setback for NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2028. The blast is expected to delay key lunar missions, including Blue Origin’s planned launches of cargo, rovers, and lunar landers that are central to NASA’s Artemisprogram. With Blue Origin likely sidelined for months, NASA may have to rely more heavily on SpaceX, despite that company's own ongoing testing challenges. Industry experts warn the incident could push back construction of a planned lunar base and complicate the United States' effort to beat China back to the moon.

The Trump administration’s sweeping Ebola-related travel restrictions are drawing criticism from the World Health Organization and public health experts, who argue that travel bans are often ineffective and can make outbreaks harder to track. While the WHO has urged countries not to impose border restrictions, the U.S. has barred most travelers from affected countries and is even routing some exposed Americans to third countries for quarantine and treatment. Administration officials defend the measures as necessary to prevent Ebola from reaching the United States, while critics contend they are driven more by politics than science. The dispute echoes battles from the COVID-19 era and highlights a broader clash between national governments seeking to minimize domestic risk and international health organizations focused on global outbreak response.

U.S. officials believe the American F-15 fighter jet shot down over Iran in April was likely struck by a Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile, marking the first time in decades that a U.S. fighter has been downed by enemy fire. Sources also told NBC News that China may have provided Iran with advanced early-warning radar technology capable of detecting stealth aircraft, though officials are still investigating the extent of Beijing’s support. The revelations complicate relations between Washington and Beijing as the Trump administration simultaneously seeks China’s cooperation in ending the conflict with Iran. China has denied providing weapons to Iran during the war, while U.S. officials say any Chinese assistance did not have a decisive impact on the battlefield.

A Guardian investigation found that an obscure company with ties to President Donald Trump's inner circle is poised to secure more than $1 billion in energy contracts in Bosnia, including a major pipeline project intended to reduce the country's dependence on Russian gas. The company, AAFS Infrastructure and Energy, is linked to Trump allies Jesse Binnall and Joe Flynn, both of whom were involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election results and have little apparent experience managing projects of this scale. Critics warn the arrangement blurs the line between U.S. foreign policy and private enrichment, especially because the contracts were advanced without a competitive bidding process and have received strong backing from the Trump administration. The project also intersects with broader geopolitical tensions in the Balkans, where Bosnian leaders hope closer ties to Trump-connected figures could strengthen both energy security and political support from Washington.

Ukraine is increasingly relying on drones, robots, and remotely operated vehicles to offset severe manpower shortages in its war against Russia, with some assaults now conducted entirely without soldiers on the ground. Ukrainian commanders say these systems have saved thousands of lives by replacing dangerous frontline missions, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently claimed Ukrainian forces captured a Russian position using only robotic and drone systems. The technology has helped Ukraine inflict heavy casualties on Russian forces and given it a tactical advantage in some areas, even as soldiers continue to endure grueling deployments lasting nearly a year at a time. Military leaders say the war is being transformed by automation, with success increasingly determined by technological innovation rather than traditional battlefield tactics.

A truck carrying Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan crashed in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 22 people and injuring about 36 others, most of them women and children. Officials said the vehicle overturned after the driver reportedly fell asleep while traveling on a highway in Laghman province. The passengers were among the millions of Afghans who have returned from Pakistan and Iran in recent years amid crackdowns and deportations targeting Afghan migrants. The tragedy highlights both the challenges facing returning refugees and the dangers of Afghanistan’s poorly maintained roads and weak transportation infrastructure.

President Trump has begun restoring relations with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, praising his “cooperation and friendship” after Belarus released some political prisoners and easing certain U.S. sanctions on the country. The move has alarmed democracy activists and opposition leaders, who note that Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994, is widely accused of severe human rights abuses, and remains one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest allies. Critics argue that Lukashenko is receiving diplomatic and economic concessions while continuing to imprison political opponents and suppress dissent, with more than 1,100 political prisoners still reportedly behind bars. Supporters of the outreach say it could encourage further prisoner releases, though the State Department says the effort is not connected to negotiations over the war in Ukraine.

New York Times, Trump Squeezes Immigrants by Cutting Them Off From Jobs, Health Care and Housing, Nicholas Nehamas, Miriam Jordan, Coral Davenport, Hamed Aleaziz, Lydia DePillis and Zolan Kanno-Youngs (The reporters have been covering how President Trump is reshaping the nation’s immigration system through the vast power of the federal bureaucracy), May 30, 2026. The methodically planned strategy is intended to pressure noncitizens, including many with legal status, to leave the United States.

For nearly three decades, Raquel Molina — an immigrant from El Salvador who has a valid Social Security number and permission to work in the United States — swabbed the toilets, wiped down the seats and vacuumed the aisles of airplanes at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

But last summer, Ms. Molina, 65, was abruptly fired from her $19.75-per-hour cleaning job, alongside dozens of other immigrants who have long legally worked at Logan. Her supervisor told her she no longer had clearance to enter secure areas at the airport. The Trump administration had decided that only U.S. citizens, green card holders and others with more permanent forms of residency should be granted access, according to a lawsuit that a labor union filed in federal court.

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Ms. Molina, who has been living legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian program that shelters people from troubled countries until they can safely return home. “I had worked hard at my job. This news put me in a state of shock.”

Her firing reflected a broader and methodically planned piece of President Trump’s hard-line strategy to make the United States less welcoming to those from other countries.

For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.

The initiative underscores the president’s ability to reshape immigration policy through executive orders and the vast power of federal regulations while sidestepping Congress. And it shows how the administration has pursued more creative — and lower-profile — tactics after Mr. Trump’s militarized deportation raids into major cities prompted political backlash earlier this year.

The changes range from structural shifts in the immigration system to small-scale, regulatory tweaks taking away jobs or services from just a few thousand people like Ms. Molina. In her case, the administration no longer considered T.P.S. a form of “authorized residency,” said Justin Long, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, meaning Ms. Molina could not be “given official government credentials and granted unescorted access to secure airport areas.”

The administration’s strategy, along with the threat of arrest and imprisonment, has helped drive many immigrants underground, intimidating them from filing taxes, visiting doctors and even traveling. So far, more than 116,000 people without permanent legal status have voluntarily left the United States, including some through a government self-deportation program, according to internal Department of Homeland Security figures reviewed by The New York Times. Many others are believed to have departed without telling the government.

“It has been immensely effective,” said Daniel Delgado, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations and left government last year. “It’s truly widespread and far-reaching across all sides of the government. There are so many regulations that impact immigrant communities.”

More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Rights, Justice

 

Shown above in red are members of the paramilitary group Oath Keepers, including convicted defendant Kelly Meggs, as they used a military-style "Stack Formation" to penetrate past Capitol Police defending the United States Capitol during the insurrection designed to prevent elected officials from certifying the election of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2021.

Shown immediately above are some of the rioters, including the Oath Keeper Meggs, within the Capitol as some of their co-insurrections stormed through offices seeking to threaten, and in some instances threaten to kill, those officials who would not support a continued Trump presidency (Photos from Justice Department prosecutions of insurrectionists).

Emptywheel, Analysis: Stan Woodward’s Many Terrorist-Defending Hats, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 30, 2026. January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ. 

This is Stan Woodward’s signature (below) on a sentencing memo arguing that his client Kelly Meggs, who in spite of Woodward’s vigorous defense of his client, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and several other conspiracy charges (including, importantly, 18 USC 372) should serve just a few more months in prison for his crimes:

By contrast, here is the government sentencing memo calling for upward departures, including a terrorism enhancement, for Meggs’ assault on his own governmen

t.

Woodward’s argument proved unpersuasive to Judge Amit Mehta, a former public defender. Mehta sentenced Meggs to a 12 year sentence, including a terrorism enhancement, which Mehta justified this way:

I’ve already ruled that given the conviction for seditious conspiracy as well as, in Mr. Meggs’ case, the 1512(k) conspiracy, it does meet the definition under 3A1.4, Note 4, for a terrorism departure. These are crimes and offenses — and the conduct bears it out — that was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of the government by intimidation or coercion; the finding by the jury of intended use of force; and then the evidence of actual use of force certainly establishes the requisite facts to meet that definition.

And there’s ample evidence from which I conclude that Mr. Meggs’ conduct was calculated to influence or affect the conduct, his individual conduct. As I said, he did lead the first group of individuals into the building, led individuals towards the Speaker’s Suite. And among those facts and others, including his various communications, both before and after, I think it’s quite evident by a preponderance of the evidence that his conduct was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of the government by intimidation or coercion.

And here is Stan Woodward’s signature, formally in his role as Associate Attorney General, purporting to settle a lawsuit by Donald Trump and setting up a slush fund that would benefit people like his former client.

Even as DOJ was choosing not to defend against Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against the IRS, DOJ was choosing not to defend against various challenges to the convictions of Meggs and his co-conspirators (that filing was signed by an AUSA reporting to Jeanine Pirro, who reports to current DAG and former Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche). That had the effect of sending the case of Meggs and others back to Amit Mehta, right, moving to dismiss the case — the result of years of work and weeks of jurors’ time — with prejudice. That filing was signed by an AUSA assigned as the Criminal Chief in DC USAO, also reporting to Jeanine Pirro who reports to Todd Blanche.

Having received a request over which he has very little discretion, Judge Mehta did what Judge Dale Ho did in the case of Eric Adams, where lawyers for Trump made a prosecution go away via unbelievably corrupt means. He ordered DOJ to explain itself: 

The court defers ruling on the government’s request until it receives additional information. The D.C. Circuit in United States v. Ammidown addressed the court’s responsibilities when faced with a Rule 48(a) motion of the kind filed here. Describing what it called a “distinctly different situation” “when the defendant concurs in the dismissal but the [trial] court is concerned whether the action sufficiently protects the public,” the court of appeals articulated three guiding principles. 497 F.2d 615, 620 (D.C. Cir. 1973). First, “Rule 48(a)’s requirement of judicial leave . . . gives the court a role in dismissals following indictment.” Id. Second, “in the exercise of its responsibility, the court will not be content with a mere conclusory statement by the prosecutor that dismissal is in the public interest, but will require a statement of reasons and underlying factual basis.” Id. And third, “the court does not have primary responsibility, but rather the role of guarding against abuse of prosecutorial discretion.” Id. The court summarized that Rule 48(a) “contemplates exposure of the reasons for dismissal ‘in order to prevent abuse of the uncontrolled power of dismissal previously enjoyed by prosecutors,’ and in pursuance of this purpose ‘to gain the Court’s favorable discretion, it should be satisfied that the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial.’” Id. (citation omitted).

The government’s motion here is insufficiently detailed to allow the court to heed Ammidown’s principles. The government has offered little more than a “conclusory statement” that dismissal is in the public interest. See Gov’t Mot. at 1. It provides neither a “statement of reasons” nor the “underlying factual basis” for the request. See id. As a result, the court lacks the information necessary both to determine whether “the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial” and to guard against “abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

The ultimate outcome is still likely to be a dismissal. It may even result in some horrible outcome: A DOJ claim that nothing bad happened on January 6, which Pirro has ordered up in less controversial cases (like that of Taylor Taranto).

But there will be some subtleties to this outcome. This request covers all the Oath Keepers who were not straight-out pardoned in both Oath Keeper trials, and so covers two people — Kenneth Harrelson and Jessica Watkins — who were not convicted of sedition (there’s an analogue on the Proud Boys side with Dominic Pezzola, who also was acquitted of sedition). Meggs and Stewart Rhodes and defendants from the second trial were convicted of sedition. But Harrelson and Watkins were primarily convicted of obstruction (18 USC 1512) — the charge that SCOTUS narrowed — and obstruction to impede cops (18 USC 372); See Roger Parloff’s handy chart.

By forcing DOJ to explain itself, Mehta will force DOJ to explain why it wants to dissolve the prosecutions of people who overwhelmed cops on January 6, even while charging (and convicting, over the objections of the then Acting US Attorney who resigned over the charges, in the Stuckart case in Spokane) far more peaceful people protesting against ICE.

DOJ will need to come up with some dumb excuse for why even the charges DOJ still uses were inappropriately applied against people who dressed in military kit and broke into the Capitol in stack formation.

Stan Woodward’s central role in this is important because of a different judge’s order: Judge Kathleen Williams’ decision — pursuant to a request by a bunch of judges to reopen the case to determine whether DOJ conducted a fraud on the court — to reopen the case (separately, in an EDVA case filed by Jan6 prosecutor Andrew Floyd, Leonie Brinkema issued an order enjoining DOJ from doing anything to set up the Terrorist Slush Fund).

Those judges argued that the people who dismissed Trump’s frivolous lawsuit without first telling Judge Williams that they were doing so as a ruse to steal $1.8 billion from taxpayers to pay off people like Kelly Meggs engaged in a fraud on the court.

Fraud on the court is established by clear and convincing evidence. See, e.g., Booker v. Dugger, 825 F.2d 281, 283 (11th Cir. 1987); Kinnear-Weed Corp. v. Humble Oil & Ref. Co., 441 F.2d 631, 636 (5th Cir. 1971). Here, it is undisputed that this Court did not have the Settlement Agreement in front of it at the time Plaintiffs filed the Notice. The Settlement Agreement establishing the Anti-Weaponization Fund was not before the Court and the broad purported release of Plaintiffs’ known and unknown liabilities was neither announced nor publicly released until after the case had been dismissed. It is also undisputed that Plaintiffs filed the Notice before the Court received briefing it had ordered regarding whether an actual case or controversy existed. In such circumstances, setting aside the Notice and reopening the case in order to determine whether an actual case or controversy existed is necessary to ensure that the parties have not corrupted the judicial process, and to prevent federal courts from providing cover to a collusive settlement. Indeed, the corruption of the judicial process is exactly what happened here. The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a “commission” controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them. And the parties have plainly tried to shield this conduct from necessary judicial scrutiny by short-circuiting this Court’s inquiry into whether the lawsuit is in fact an actual case or controversy by filing the Rule 41(a)(1) Notice before they announced the “settlement”—clearly in hopes of preventing the Court from ever completing that inquiry, which, if it comes out against the parties, will undo their collusive “settlement.”

There are commenters who claim that DOJ is dismissing the Oath Keeper and Proud Boys’ prosecutions, in particular, because Joe Biden’s DOJ charged Jan6ers with charges that are unviable, a claim based on SCOTUS’ decision to limit 18 USC 1512 (but not in a way that would affect Todd Blanche’s client, Donald Trump). If the obstruction charge was misapplied, they argue, then so was the sedition charge.

But that argument falls apart given that DOJ continues to rely on the 18 USC 372 charge.

And Stan Woodward is at the center of that issue. Woodward was unable to defeat the even the 372 charge against his client, much less the sedition charge or terrorist enhancement. Trump’s own DOJ is using the 372 charge against much less dangerous defendants. At the same time, Stan Woodward is accused of fraudulently using this settlement to set up a slush fund that will pay off people like his former client Kelly Meggs, convicted of both sedition and conspiring to disrupt the cops on January 6. 

 

 

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, shown in part via a video above released by the Department of Justice (Pool photo of Capital Police officers by Oliver Contreras via Getty Images).

New York Times, Judge Reopens Trump’s I.R.S. Suit and Questions His ‘Weaponization’ Fund, Alan Feuer and Andrew Duehren, May 30, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling was a blow to both President Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department, which used the suit to establish a fund likely intended for Trump allies.

A federal judge in Miami reopened President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. in a striking turnabout, saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.”

The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, on Friday to revive the case shortly after closing it was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department. After the president withdrew the suit, senior department officials released a pair of extraordinary agreements that settled the case by establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization” by Democrats.

The deal also conferred lucrative tax benefits on Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses.

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

The former judges said that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his “candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.”

Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had in fact questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.

In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, right, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.

In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

She also wanted Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Judge Williams pointed to reporting by The New York Times that described how the I.R.S. had prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining defenses against the suit that the Justice Department did not take up in court.

Lawyers for the former judges hailed Judge Williams’s decision.

“The judges and their counsel greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the court is addressing these grievous allegations,” said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges for the nonprofit group, Democracy Defenders Fund. “We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter.”

Mr. Eisen was joined by the law firms Platkin and Susman Godfrey.

 

New York Times, Kennedy Center Must Remove Trump’s Name From Building, Judge Orders, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, May 30, 2026 (print ed.). In an incensed social media post, President Trump suggested that the ruling might prompt him to cast the center aside after more than a year at its helm.

A federal judge ordered on Friday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remove President Trump’s name from the building’s facade and all official branding and temporarily blocked the institution from shuttering this summer for renovations.

Mr. Trump railed against the judge’s ruling in an incensed social media post, suggesting that he was considering casting the Kennedy Center aside as one of his personal projects. The president wrote that unless he was free to decide the center’s trajectory, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey.”

“Unfortunately, Judge Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life,” he wrote.

Judge Christopher R. Cooper, left, of the Federal District Court in Washington, determined that the board’s decision to add Mr. Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center violated a law passed by Congress in 1964 that made “crystal clear” the institution was to be named for former President John F. Kennedy.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote in a 94-page opinion. He ordered that the 18 letters added to the center’s front portico be removed within two weeks.

The center’s board of trustees, a vast majority of whom are allies of Mr. Trump, voted in December to add the president’s name to the performing arts center. Less than a day later, new lettering was added to the building’s marble facade, which now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the center, said that it would appeal the ruling, signing her statement as the “Trump Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations.”

“We are confident that on appeal the court will uphold the board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center,” she said.

The judge’s order came in response to a lawsuit by Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, who is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board. She objected to both the renaming and the plans to close the institution, which her lawyers argued was in fact a decision “designed to hide their embarrassment about declining ticket sales.”

Judge Cooper found that the board had been “derelict” in considering the possible consequences to programming when shuttering the center, as well as its legal responsibility to maintain the center as a memorial to the slain president. His order did not make any specific directives for reinstating programming as the board reassesses its renovation plans.

Ms. Beatty said in a statement celebrating the ruling that “the Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.” 

News Roundup

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Losing Confidence in Vance, Says he Will Headline State Fair After Artists Bail, Lashes Out at Opponents, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, May 30, 2026. Donald Trump appears to be increasingly frustrated with JD Vance, reportedly revisiting old disagreements, questioning his judgment, and sidelining him in ways that are already fueling speculation about 2028.

At the same time, after a string of performers withdrew from his America 250 celebration, Trump suggested he could become the main attraction himself. He also spent much of the day posting on social media, attacking critics and political opponents, including Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV, while flooding his feed with AI-generated content.

Meanwhile, there are new developments at Delaney Hall, fresh questions surrounding immigration detention conditions, continued uncertainty over negotiations with Iran, and much more.

Here is the reality: the reason I remain independent is that I do not feel obligated to pretend any of this is normal. Regardless of political party, it is unusual for a president to spend a Saturday afternoon behaving this way while major domestic and international issues remain unresolved.

That is the standard I will continue to apply. Tomorrow morning, I will have a good-news update for you. I am also filming something exciting for PBS, and tomorrow afternoon I will publish a deep dive into the Trump family’s finances.

Here’s the news:

According to the New York Times, President Trump has singled out JD Vance on several policy-related issues, often revisiting them in conversations and public settings. He has repeatedly highlighted Vance’s initial skepticism toward military action against Iran, contrasting it with the administration’s eventual approach. Trump has also questioned the effectiveness of a diplomatic mission to Pakistan that Vance helped lead, suggesting it did not produce significant results. The repeated references indicate that Trump continues to scrutinize and publicly revisit some of Vance’s most visible foreign-policy positions and assignments.

Beyond policy disagreements, Trump has reportedly mocked Vance over personal habits and memorable mishaps. He has criticized the amount of vacation time Vance takes and joked that the vice president has a tendency to interrupt others during conversations. Trump has also repeatedly brought up a widely publicized moment when Vance dropped Ohio State’s national championship trophy during a White House celebration, turning the incident into a recurring punchline. Together, the comments reflect Trump’s tendency to mix substantive critiques with personal teasing, even when discussing one of his closest political allies.

A Trump-backed concert series planned for America’s 250th anniversary celebration is facing turmoil after many of its headline performers, including Martina McBride, Young MC, and Bret Michaels, withdrew, saying they were not initially informed about the event’s political ties to the Trump administration. The performers who pulled out described the event as having been presented to them as nonpartisan, with some characterizing the situation as a bait-and-switch once its political affiliations became clear. In response, President Donald Trump mocked the departures, suggested the artists had “the yips,” and floated the idea of personally headlining an “America Is Back” rally on the National Mall during the same period.

Donald Trump also went on a lengthy rant again about losing in front of a federal judge who ordered the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center:

He also spent the day posting a number of AI slop images, like the one below (with Trump at center riding on horseback):

 

Here is Trump attacking the Pope:

Here is Trump posting AI slop about a drone port on the White House roof:

The President then spent the afternoon taking an impromptu trip to his golf club. :

Negotiations over a potential U.S.-Iran agreement remain stalled despite repeated indications from American, Iranian, and regional officials that a deal could be close. President Donald Trump has said any agreement must permanently prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and require the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, while Iranian officials accuse Washington of undermining diplomacy through continued military and economic pressure. The uncertainty has created a gap between optimistic reports from mediators and public statements from both governments, with neither side formally approving a proposed framework that would extend the current ceasefire and launch new nuclear talks. Even so, hopes for a breakthrough have contributed to falling oil prices as markets anticipate the possibility of reduced regional tensions and the restoration of normal shipping through one of the world’s most important energy corridors.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where supporters of detainees and pro-ICE demonstrators faced off amid heavy police and federal security presence. The protests were fueled by allegations of unsafe and inhumane conditions inside the facility, including claims of violence against detainees, which the Department of Homeland Security and the facility’s operator, GEO Group, have denied. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill urged demonstrators to remain peaceful and established designated protest zones after several days of arrests, clashes, and escalating tensions around the site.

The Trump administration is considering selling some of the large warehouses and aircraft that Immigration and Customs Enforcement acquired earlier as part of an effort to dramatically expand detention and deportation capacity. The review reflects a shift under Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose team says the agency no longer needs enough space to detain 100,000 immigrants at one time and is reassessing assets for cost-effectiveness. Several of the warehouse projects had sparked local opposition, lawsuits, and concerns about costs, with critics arguing the facilities would strain communities and taxpayers. While no final decisions have been made, the potential sales suggest a significant recalibration of the administration’s immigration enforcement strategy and infrastructure plans.

A coalition of civil-rights and immigrant-advocacy organizations has filed a class-action lawsuit against ICE and other federal agencies, alleging that conditions at Camp East Montana in Texas—the nation’s largest immigration detention facility—are unsafe, abusive, and unconstitutional. The complaint describes severe problems including inadequate medical and mental-health care, excessive use of force and solitary confinement, unsanitary living conditions, spoiled food, disease outbreaks, and allegations of sexual misconduct by guards. Plaintiffs argue that detainees are being held in punitive conditions despite immigration detention being a civil process, and claim that some individuals have suffered serious injuries, deteriorating mental health, and pressure to abandon legal efforts to remain in the United States.

In an interview with The Guardian, a 23-year-old asylum seeker identified as “Ana María” said she abandoned her asylum case and agreed to be deported after spending months in ICE detention, where she alleges she was repeatedly shackled, transferred between facilities, denied adequate food, and subjected to humiliating treatment. She described being moved through at least six detention centers, often without being told where she was going, and said guards sometimes mocked detainees’ complaints about pain, hunger, and harsh conditions. Ana María had entered the United States seeking protection after violence and threats in her home country and had been living and working legally while her asylum case was pending before her detention began.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States is fully prepared to resume military operations against Iran if ongoing negotiations fail, emphasizing that American forces and munitions remain ready despite a fragile ceasefire. His remarks came as President Donald Trump weighs whether to extend a temporary truce and pursue a broader agreement that would include restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, while Tehran insists no final deal has been reached. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore, Hegseth also expressed concern about China’s expanding military capabilities but said Washington seeks a stable balance of power and does not want unnecessary confrontation with Beijing.

The U.S. military has reportedly disabled a sixth commercial vessel accused of attempting to breach the American blockade of Iranian ports, targeting the Gambia-flagged cargo ship Lian Star after it ignored warnings while approaching Iran. The incident comes amid a broader U.S. effort to restrict maritime traffic linked to Iran following the conflict that began with U.S. and Israeli strikes earlier this year and the subsequent disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Although a ceasefire has largely held since April, uncertainty over extending it and reopening normal transit routes continues to weigh on global energy and commodity markets, as oil, natural gas, and fertilizer shipments remain constrained.

A meteor about three feet wide streaked into the atmosphere over New England on Saturday afternoon, producing a loud double boom that rattled buildings and startled residents across several states. The event triggered reports from Delaware to Montreal, with witnesses describing shaking, hearing explosions, or seeing a bright daytime fireball in the sky. Officials initially investigated whether the disturbance was an earthquake, but the U.S. Geological Survey found no seismic activity and experts concluded the shockwave was caused by the meteor entering the atmosphere. Researchers say the object likely burned up before reaching the ground, though any surviving fragments would most likely have fallen into the ocean.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, traveled to eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as officials struggle to contain a rapidly growing outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which has reached 906 suspected cases and 223 suspected deaths. Health authorities and aid organizations say the response has improved with additional staff, supplies, and international assistance, but the outbreak continues to spread faster than containment efforts. Violence, attacks on health facilities, misinformation, and ongoing conflict involving rebel groups have complicated testing, treatment, and public-health measures. WHO and humanitarian groups have also criticized border closures and travel restrictions imposed by neighboring countries and the United States, arguing that such measures do little to stop transmission and may discourage transparency.

Israel says its forces have advanced beyond Lebanon's Litani River, roughly 30 kilometers into southern Lebanon, marking a significant escalation in its military campaign against Hezbollah. Lebanese security sources confirmed Israeli troops crossed the river but said the incursions were limited and that forces later withdrew to positions south of the river before crossing again. The development comes as U.S.-brokered talks between Israeli and Lebanese officials continue at the Pentagon in an effort to reinforce a fragile ceasefire and pursue the disarmament of Hezbollah. The conflict has displaced more than 1.2 million Lebanese people and killed thousands since fighting intensified earlier this year.

Three members of a Latvian mountaineering expedition died after falling near Denali Pass on Alaska’s Mount McKinley, while a fourth climber was rescued and transported to a hospital. The accident occurred on the mountain’s West Buttress route near the notoriously hazardous stretch between High Camp and Denali Pass, an area known for steep ice, exposed terrain, and a history of fatal falls.

Federal authorities have charged former CIA officer David Rush with allegedly stealing public funds after investigators discovered roughly 300 gold bars worth more than $40 million, along with about $2 million in cash and dozens of luxury watches, during a search of his home. Prosecutors allege that Rush, who held a senior position and top-secret clearance, requested large amounts of money, foreign currency, and gold for supposed work-related purposes before diverting some of those assets for personal use. Court documents also accuse him of fabricating major portions of his résumé for nearly two decades, including claims about academic degrees, military credentials, and aviation experience that investigators say were false.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran’s Hard-Liners Try to Derail Potential Deal With the U.S., Farnaz Fassihi (has covered Iran for three decades, living and traveling in the country. She was a war correspondent based in the Middle East for 15 years), May 30, 2026 (print ed.). A political fight is playing out in Iran, where the small but loud faction of hard-liners has used rallies, state media and private and public statements to try to undermine negotiations.

As Iran and the United States appeared to be nearing an agreement to end hostilities this week, not everyone in Iran was on board.

The hard-line faction, a fringe but loud group with members in Parliament and a seat on the Supreme National Security Council, has openly opposed any concessions to Washington, using rallies, state media and private and public statements as tools to try to derail a deal.

It remains unclear when an actual agreement will be announced, if at all. President Trump met for two hours with cabinet members in the Situation Room at the White House on Friday, but he put off making a final decision, according to a senior administration official. Iran’s lead negotiator, Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in a social media post earlier in the day that Tehran did not trust Washington and that no step would “be taken before the other side acts first.”

But in Iran the political fight continues. State television, which is controlled by a hard-line director, has amplified the divisions in the country and portrayed negotiations as a failure. On Monday, President Masoud Pezeshkian scolded state television in a meeting with its senior leaders, calling on them to avoid sowing discord.

Mr. Pezeshkian said even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader killed on the first day of the war, “agreed that we must go to the negotiation table.”

“But now,” he continued, “we are advertising that we should not negotiate.”

At a packed rally of hard-line supporters in Tehran on Friday, large crowds waved flags and chanted for defiance. A state television reporter asked some attendees if Iran should retreat or continue fighting the United States and Israel. “We want them to punish them good,” one woman attendee said. “Stand firm, we are with you until our last drop of blood,” said one man.

“Trump must know that Iran, as the victor and conqueror of the field, sets the terms,” said Ebrahim Azizi, a conservative lawmaker and the head of Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committees, in a social media post on Friday.

Analysts close to the government in Iran say that the hard-line faction represents a minority view, both in the general public and among officials. Still, ignoring it risks alienating the part of the population that has been among the most loyal supporters of the Islamic Republic through political and social upheavals.

“This faction does not speak for the majority of Iranians and has been marginalized from key decision making; the nuclear talks are proceeding despite their disapproval,” said Mehdi Rahmati, a political analyst in Tehran, in a telephone interview. But, he added, “the system needs to come up with a plan to control them and keep them in check, otherwise they can become very dangerous forIran’s stability.”

Even Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, right, who is the son of the slain former leader, is not immune from their ire. On Thursday, a hard-line lawmaker cleric, Hamid Rasaee, took a jab at Ayatollah Khamenei in a social media post titled, “Who is worthy of the supreme leadership?” (Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been in hiding since the start of the war in late February, has expressed support for the nuclear negotiating team in written statements.) 

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

 

President Trump, with Vice President JD Vance at left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio at center and Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethat far right (Pool photo from files)

New York Times, Is JD Vance the 2028 Front Runner? Trump Has Questions, Katie Rogers and Tyler Pager, May 30, 2026. President Trump appears to see the matter of his heir as unsettled, adding a layer of tension to his relationship with Vice President JD Vance.

In recent conversations with aides and allies, President Trump often interjects with a question about his vice president: Does JD Vance have what it takes to go all the way?

He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure.

It is not that Mr. Trump is abandoning Mr. Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. In a cabinet meeting this week, Mr. Trump compared Mr. Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to ferret out fraud in mostly Democratic controlled states.

Mr. Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance. Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.

But when it comes to Mr. Vance, the stakes are higher. As the default front-runner for the Republican nomination and would-be inheritor of the president’s political movement, Mr. Vance’s fortunes ride to a substantial degree on the enthusiasm of the support he gets from Mr. Trump. And Mr. Trump’s regular polling of people on whether they prefer Mr. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become one of the most closely watched early indicators of how power in the Republican Party might pass to the next generation.

When he conducts those polls in private, Mr. Trump often compares Mr. Vance’s performance to his own achievements. He has told several allies that Mr. Vance has never won a tough race without his help. (Mr. Trump’s endorsement got Mr. Vance over the finish line in a tight race for an Ohio Senate seat.) He has brought up the number of vacations Mr. Vance has taken as vice president. (Mr. Trump does not generally take them.)

He has repeatedly mentioned the vice president’s initial opposition to starting a war with Iran and has done so in front of Mr. Vance. (“I’m more of a peace person than you are — but I had to do it,” he has said to him.) The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war.

Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part. He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn. (Mr. Trump has said he is happy it wasn’t him.)

This account of Mr. Trump’s relationship with his vice president is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who are directly familiar with the dynamic between the two men. Some of them were granted anonymity to speak about Mr. Trump’s thinking. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 29, 2026 [Beaten Texas Senator Disses President], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 30, 2026. This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:

“An old, but apt fable:

“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. 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.’”

Cornyn appears to be firing a shot across the president’s bow, and now that Trump has alienated Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas by endorsing their opponents, there are six Republican senators who may be willing to stop moving in lockstep with him.

Trump’s war on Iran and the rising prices Americans are enduring in its wake are costing him support from all but his most fervent base, and there is no immediate solution that will make those problems go away. As Noah Berlatsky noted in Public Notice yesterday, no matter what he does in Iran, Trump will leave that situation with a loss. “[I]f Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options,” Berlatsky wrote, “which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.”

There has been more noise today about how the U.S. and Iran are on the verge of an agreement, but so far it has come to naught. Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported today that Trump met with advisors for two hours today in the Situation Room to discuss the agreement but came to no decision about it. What did happen today is that officials from both Chevron and Exxon warned that oil inventories are dangerously low, raising concerns about dramatic price spikes.

As Americans sour on Trump’s economy, lawmakers are backing away from his self-aggrandizing plans for a new $250 bill with his face on it for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is touting the plan, Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the necessary congressional approval is not forthcoming as lawmakers recognize that releasing a $250 bill raises images of gilded ballrooms and extravagance at a time when Americans are having trouble paying for gas and groceries.

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill. But, so far, only fifteen Republicans have cosponsored a bill to create the Trump $250 bill.

Trump’s other plans for demonstrating his power also took at least symbolic hits today.

Today Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to remove Trump’s name from the building, and from all official materials and signage, within fourteen days and blocked its plan to close for two years. As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, Cooper stood firm on Congress’s authority over the Kennedy Center. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” he wrote, “and only Congress can change it.”

Cooper also found that the board of the Kennedy Center agreed to close it for two years without advice of legal counsel and that Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer since Trump appointee Ric Grenell left, “had served in the role of Kennedy Center Executive Director for all of a few minutes before suggesting that the institution be shut down for years.”

Yesterday, Trump’s Freedom 250 organization, which he set up to compete with the bipartisan America 250 celebration of the nation’s birthday, announced that nine musical artists would perform at a sixteen-day “Great American State Fair” it was sponsoring on the National Mall. By today, most of the performers had pulled out after realizing that they had not been invited to be part of the nonpartisan America 250 but instead had been invited to Trump’s personal version of the anniversary celebration.

Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is working hard for a certain kind of vibe at another Freedom 250 event: his Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House for his 80th birthday on June 14. They reported that the Pentagon is trying to recruit hundreds of troops to show up to watch the matches in their uniforms. In addition to paying for their own travel, those military personnel must meet height and weight requirements.

U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia Leonie M. Brinkema temporarily stopped the Department of Justice from creating or operating the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, the $1.776 billion slush fund the administration created to pay off those convicted of committing crimes to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The administration cannot transfer money to the fund, consider any claims for payments from it, or pay out any money from it.

Louise Radnofsky and Lydia Wheeler of the Wall Street Journal report that those challenging the fund are people and entities prosecuted or threatened by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs say the government is not treating them on a par with Trump loyalists as worthy of compensation for government “weaponization.”

Brinkema has scheduled a hearing on the case for June 12.

This afternoon, yesterday’s request by thirty-five federal judges that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization had brought against the IRS bore fruit. Although the Trumps dropped the suit, the Department of Justice used it as justification for the establishment of the $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those who claimed the country’s legal system had been “weaponized” against them because they were convicted of crimes related to their actions to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Today Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond to the judges’ filing by June 12 and to address the judges’ claims that the two sides in the case—the Trumps on the one hand and the Internal Revenue Service, which Trump oversees, on the other—were not in fact adversaries in the case.

Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that more than a dozen Republican senators have privately asked Trump advisors to get rid of the slush fund, suggesting it will be hard to defend on the campaign trail before this fall’s midterm elections.

As the courts and the American people challenge Trump, he is lashing out. He responded to the judge’s order to take his name off the Kennedy Center with a long social media screed in which he insisted that he alone was “saving a dying Performing Arts Center” and said he would “transfer this failing Institution back to” Congress, although of course it was never his to command.

“There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country.” Then, in another long screed, he complained that the New York Times “is doing everything possible to criticize the magnificent restoration of the Reflecting Pool.”

But as Trump lashes out, his loyalists are working to consolidate their power.

The Office of Management and Budget, overseen by director Russell Vought, who was instrumental in the construction of Project 2025, has proposed a sweeping change in federal rules that would put Trump’s appointees in charge of billions of dollars of federal grants. According to Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed, the change would empower Trump’s appointees to kill grants that aren’t aligned with Trump’s priorities. That includes grants awarded to universities through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth said that federally funded research at MIT is down 20% compared to last year. “That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” she said. The number of graduate students MIT takes on will also drop by about 20%, or about 500 fewer.

As Erica Orden of Politico reported yesterday, in the case of the firing of former FBI director James Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Karen Lesperance, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, told Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the government’s position is that Trump has the power to fire anyone, even if he is doing so for political reasons. When Furman asked if there were any limits to that power—could he fire people to create an “all-white executive branch? Or all-Black?” he asked—Lesperance avoided the question.

Comey’s lawyer said the Justice Department’s position was a “novel and breathtaking theory about the scope of” presidential power.

Trump and his loyalists have tried for months now to get control of state voter lists but have lost repeatedly in court, since the Constitution establishes that states run elections. Today the United States Postal Service has proposed that it will send mail-in ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.

As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket note, this “would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.”

 

Medias Touch Network, Opinion and Advocacy: Trump COLLAPSES in Ohio as STATE TURNS BLUE!!! Ben Meiselas, right,  May 29, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump’s support collapsing in Ohio as Democrats look prepared to win the Ohio Governor’s race and Meiselas speaks with the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton.

Donald Trump is collapsing in Ohio, where his approval is net negative 22. Let me repeat that. In a place once viewed as ruby red,  in Ohio, Donald Trump's approval has plummeted to net -22 and it just gets worse from there. In the latest state regime media, which calls itself Foxl, Donald Trump's approval rating on the economy falls below 30% in the latest Fox poll. Zooming in right now into Ohio.

You go to the EMC research poll: One of their latest polls shows Dr. Amy Acton up 10% over Vivek Ramaswami and they say Ramaswami only has 64% Republican support. Independents ldon't support the guy at all.

A notable question that the Overston Insight poll asked: Do you believe the recent attempts on Donald Trump's life, such as the July 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the April 2026 shooting at the White House correspondents dinner, were staged or genuine by party?

12% of Republicans view it was staged. 45% of independents believe it was staged. Only 37% of independents believe it was real. 54% Democrats say staged, 29% say real.

The Independent Pollster, Staggering Data that Should Make the Political Class Reconsider Its Tribal Messaging and Strategies, Jeremy Zogby, May 30, 2026. Going well beyond typical polling data, such as which party voters favor, and instead probing their belief that the U.S. will still exist as a unified nation—and whether they plan to be part of it.

The numbers that follow come from a recent John Zogby Strategies national survey of 1,000 likely voters, conducted May 20-21.

I recently asked a question that most pollsters avoid. This question gets to the core of whether Americans are still in this together. The results are shocking and almost absent from mainstream political coverage.

The exact wording of last week’s poll question was: “In your view, do you believe the United States will remain united in five years?” Just 55% of voters say yes.

To obtain greater depth, I followed it up with a time series.

“In your view, do you believe the United States will remain united in ten years? To which 51% tell us yes.

And then once more regarding twenty years from now — 48% say yes.

50% is a key psychological barrier, and less than half of likely voters believe the U.S. will still be united two decades from now. Beyond these topline data points, that movement from 55 to 51 to 48 is revealing as a directional indicator, and speaks volumes about the exact moment we’re in regarding the Hyperpolarization Age (2004-Present).

It’s revealing because with each additional time increment, voters’ confidence in our ability to maintain national unity withers. It gives us a greater understanding of our destiny than we’re typically accustomed to with two-dimensional questions such as, Is the country headed in the right direction or off on the wrong track? Or even the classic approval/disapproval temperature check pollsters frequently release. And even though Substack readers of the Independent Pollster are accustomed to seeing numbers such as President Donald Trump’s underwater approval rating in the minus 30s among unaffiliated voters, the unity question, as it has been framed over time, offers us a much clearer picture of where things are going as we approach our 250th anniversary.

A breakdown of party identification is equally powerful. And notice, only on the surface does it reflect our current hyper-partisan environment. Those who say yes to remaining united in five years include 40% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans, and 49% of Independents. 

 

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump's Latest Medical Report Is An Embarrassing Cover-Up Of Decline, Jason Easley, right, May 30, 2026. The White House news dumped the results of Trump's latest physical late on a Friday night and it is easy to see why. The report is a propaganda document, not a transparent public disclosure.

It is okay for people to get older. In fact, staying alive is a good thing, but when an administration that lies pathologically mixes with a person who is ever to return to the presidency, who is showing signs of decline, a physical goes from being a standard release of information to a wild document that denies reality.

All presidents have final approval over what goes into their medical reports. Regular people don’t have editorial over their doctors, but the President Of The United States does.

Keep this in mind while looking at the results of Trump’s latest physical.

There are three parts of this report that raise eyebrows.

Let’s look at what the report says about Trump’s cardiac health:

Cardiac: Coronary CT angiography demonstrated no arterial obstruction or structural abnormalities of the heart or major vessels. In addition, AI-enhanced electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis estimated his cardiac age, an established measure of cardiovascular vitality, to be approximately 14 years younger than his chronological age. Additional testing, including an echocardiogram, showed no abnormalities. Cardiac chambers and valves are normal with a preserved ejection fraction. Cardiac examination revealed a regular rate and rhythm with normal heart sounds. Overall, cardiac function is normal, and circulation to the extremities remains intact.

Trump believes that exercise is bad for your health because he thinks the body has a finite amount of energy and exercise wastes it. This is also a president who loves fast food.

The White House using AI to project Trump’s cardiac age is an insult when this is a president who is having so much trouble with blood flow that he does most of his events sitting down, but sure, Trump’s heart is 14 years younger than his age.

Trump also wants America to know that he aced another dementia screening:

A comprehensive neurological examination demonstrated normal mental status, intact cranial nerves, normal motor strength, sensation, reflexes, gait, and balance. He also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) screenings for depression and anxiety which was normal. Cognitive function, assessed with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), was within normal limits with a score of 30 out of 30.

The latest test would be at minimum Trump’s fourth dementia screening, but everything is fine because AI told us that Trump’s heart is young.

As far as the bruising on Trump’s hands is concerned, the president is sticking to a story that no one believes:

Examination of the dorsal hands revealed ecchymosis (bruising), consistent with minor soft tissue irritation related to frequent handshaking in the setting of aspirin use for cardiovascular prevention. This represents a common and benign effect of aspirin therapy. No suspicious lesions or concerning growths identified.

The administration listed the hand bruising as a skin condition that they want us to believe is caused by handshaking and aspirin. The problem is that the bruising is on both hands, and no other presidents had bruised hands, and they shook hands frequently too.

The document is creating a story about Trump’s health that should spur more questions about the president’s situation. The American people understand that Trump is about to turn 80. It is not a secret.

I believe that all presidents should be transparent about their health, but what Trump is trying to sell is impossible to believe, and if the corporate press had a collective spine, they would start digging deeper and asking uncomfortable questions.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Republican election judge assaulted Democratic judge, Tarrant County Dems say, Rachel Royster, May 29, 2026. A Tarrant County Democratic election judge says she was assaulted by a Republican election judge while working at her polling place for the primary runoff election Tuesday morning.

When the Democratic election judge, who has run her polling location for 15 years, arrived at the polls Tuesday morning, she found that a Republican election judge had removed the official seal from and opened the Democratic voting equipment, according to a news release from the Tarrant County Democratic Party.

The seal on the voting equipment is used to show it has not been tampered with after leaving the elections office. Because the Tarrant County Republican Party votes to hold separate primaries, Democratic and Republican election workers have different sets of election equipment.

According to the news release, when the Democratic election judge confronted the Republican judge to inform him he was wrong in his actions, he forcefully poked her in the neck and shoved her. The Tarrant County Republican Party declined to comment on the situation. The release from the Democratic Party did not identify the election judges, the polling location, or the municipality it is in.

Following the incident, the Tarrant County Democratic Party sent advocates to check on the Democratic judge, the release said.

The advocate called the police, who took statements from all parties involved, but no charges have been filed.

“A day which was otherwise calm and marked by bi-partisan efforts to run a smooth primary runoff election was marred by an act of violence and unacceptable election equipment tampering,” said Allison Campolo, Tarrant County Democratic Party chair, in the news release.

The release from the Democratic Party said the party does not believe the Republican election judge’s actions represent all the Republican election judges in Tarrant County and called on voters, poll workers and elected officials to “promote an environment of peace and fairness.”

“We are fortunate enough to have a dedicated Tarrant County Elections Office that holds election workers to the highest standards, as well as a tri-partisan ballot board that carefully and digitally counts mail-in and provisional ballots,” Campolo said.

Associated Press via Politico, Trump jumps into Republican primaries for governor in South Carolina, Iowa and Oklahoma, Staff Report, May 30, 2026. Contests in those states have pitted allies against each other in a fierce competition for the president's endorsement.

President Donald Trump endorsed three Republican gubernatorial candidates Friday, wading into contests in South Carolina, Iowa and Oklahoma that have pitted allies against each other in a fierce competition for their party leader’s blessing.

In a trio of social media posts, Trump gave his backing to South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, Iowa Rep. Randy Feenstra and former Oklahoma state senator Mike Mazzei as primary elections approach.

Iowa’s primary is Tuesday, South Carolina’s is on June 9 and Oklahoma’s is on June 16. All three states are having their first competitive Republican gubernatorial primaries in years.

For two terms, Evette has served alongside Gov. Henry McMaster, one of Trump’s earliest backers during his first presidential campaign. Earlier this year, the long-serving governor endorsed his No. 2, telegraphing to some that Trump’s backing could be next.

On Friday, Trump expressed both appreciation for Evette and the state she represents, noting that she stumped for him in 2024. He also said “A BIG added plus” for her campaign is that Henry McMaster Jr. — the sitting governor’s son — may be Evette’s running mate.

In the deep red state of South Carolina, the competition for the president’s support has been the most intense part of the primary race.

In a separate post, Trump described Feenstra as “MAGA all the way” and said he would “fight tirelessly” for the state on issues including the economy, border security and support of law enforcement.

Evette and Feenstra have been vocal about wanting Trump’s endorsement, in the hopes that it would carry weight in states that helped propel Trump’s return to office in 2024. Feenstra said earlier this year that he asked for Trump’s support, and much of Evette’s campaign media has featured photos of her next to Trump.

Along with Feenstra, four other Republicans — state Rep. Eddie Andrews, businessman and former conservative political director Zach Lahn, former state Rep. Brad Sherman and former director of the state Department of Administrative Services Adam Steen — are in the primary to replace outgoing Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who opted out of a third bid.

Evette is competing for the South Carolina nomination against Rep. Nancy Mace, Rep. Ralph Norman and state Attorney General Alan Wilson.

Mazzei is running to replace Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, who is finishing his second term. He’s competing against state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, former state House Speaker Charles McCall and former state public safety secretary Chip Keating.

Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Bobby Brainworms gets bit, Preznit F___wit gets hit, and so much more, Jeff Tiedrich, right, May 30, 2026. As another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back.....

Monday, It looks like two of Bobby’s brainworms have escaped his head...

Who does this?

Bobby Brainworms and Dr. Oz were hanging out — as one does, because crackpots of a feather flock together — when two of the unluckiest snakes ever happened to slither onto Oz’s patio. Bobby just couldn’t help but wander into the fray, scooping them right up and frolicking with them. This bro can’t leave nature alone.

Giffed for posterity’s sake: it’s the moment the Marvelous Mister Measles gets bitten. Ace job, bro.

Tuesday: After twenty-four-seven scandal factory Ken Paxton crushed incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary, the Republican Party got caught up in a bit of a sticky wicket. They’d been saturating the airwaves with anti-Paxton attack ads — because nobody except Dear Leader wanted Paxton to be the candidate in the first place.

The GOP did the only thing it could: they ....quietly deleted their ads.

Yeah, well guess what, homies: the internet never forgets. You can’t delete anything in the twenty-first century. Here’s one of the ads: 

“This is the sound of Texas. and this is how it sounds under Ken Paxton. Homicides, highest in nearly 30 years under Ken Paxton. Rape up 40% under Ken Paxton. Aggravated assaults up nearly 30% under Ken Paxton. Car thefts nearly doubled under Ken Paxton. 250+ human trafficking cases dismissed under Ken Paxton. AG’s trafficking unit, 40% quit under Ken Paxton. Sex traffickers walked free under Ken Paxton. Violent crime up across Texas under Ken Paxton. Texas deserves better than the sound of Ken Paxton.”

....Thanks for doing the Democratic Party’s work for them, GOP.

On Wednesday, Freedom 250 — the MAGA-aligned concert series that Donny cooked up as part of his infantile co-opting of America’s 250th birthday — announced their lineup. It was a grab bag of has-beens, never-weres, and wow-are-they-still-even-alives, with a few legitimate acts mixed in.

After the list went public, a super cool thing happened — one by one, the performers started dropping out — because no one told them they’d be appearing....

Freedom 250 now looks like this.

 

 

And MAGA is melting all the way down.

You have to say this about the manosphere: they spend ....a lot of time worrying about shit that no one else worries about.

Men are naturally more attractive than women on average, that’s why women need makeup. This isn't me being gay, it’s science. Look at a peacock or a cardinal, male vs female, females get mogged Greek statues dedicated to the peak aesthetic form? Overwhelmingly men.

“This isn’t me being gay, it’s science.”

Oh, it’s science, is it? How do you know it’s science? Did you get Ivanka to help you crunch the numbers?

Fact check: dude, this isn’t science. This is you being super gay. You’re attracted to dudes.

Friday: 

 

The Daily With Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Delusional Trump Replaces Music Acts With Himself At The Great American State Fair, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 30, 2026. After the majority of the musical acts dropped out of his Great American State Fair, Trump replaced them all with himself.

What’s the most unpopular president in the history of polling to do when most of the musical performers drop out of his Great American State Fair?

How would Trump ever find a replacement for artists like Morris Day, Young MC, Martina McBride, C+C Music Factory, and Bret Michaels?

Only a truly delusional egomaniac would pick himself to replace the artists who dropped out of the show, but that is exactly what Donald Trump did.

Trump posted on Truth Social:

I understand Artists are getting “the yips” having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing 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, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!

The artists went from being praised by Trump to being third-rate as soon as they bailed on his show.

Things got even crazier in Trump’s post.

Trump, who is grifting billions of dollars from American taxpayers, claimed that the artists were too expensive, and wrote:

Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited — It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America!

Trump wants to be surrounded by winners, but his approval rating just dropped to a new low of 34%.

The artists who pulled out of the Trump event all told the same story. They were lied to about the event. It was presented to them as being non-partisan, and they had no idea that it was a Trump production.

It takes a special level of delusion to replace musical acts that have had success in the past with yourself, but that is what Trump did.

Trump hasn’t been a top draw in American politics for more than a decade. One of the features of his 2024 campaign was smaller venues and smaller crowds. TV ratings for Trump have been on the decline for years.

Trump and his political allies can’t put together a musical event that will be popular and draw a huge crowd. The Turning Point USA Super Bowl halftime show is the most recent example of a MAGA media entertainment bomb.

The president is completely out of his mind, and his decision to make himself the headliner has ensured the event will bomb.

 

 New York Times, Platner’s Texts With Women Concerned Campaign as Senate Race Took Off, Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, May 30, 2026. The wife of Graham Platner, above, the Democratic candidate in Maine, told the campaign he had sent sexual messages to other women.

Graham Platner’s insurgent bid for Senate in Maine was gathering steam last summer when his campaign was confronted with some potentially explosive information.

Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told a senior campaign aide that he had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.

It was the kind of revelation with the potential to damage the political newcomer just as his campaign to unseat Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, was beginning to resonate with voters, especially in a state where female voters make up a large share of the electorate.

Mr. Platner’s exchanges with women were confirmed by current and former campaign officials, who gave different accounts of some of the details. Ms. Gertner said the couple, who had married in November 2023, according to the town clerk of Sullivan, Maine, was working through his indiscretions in marriage counseling.

Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was the Platner campaign’s political director before leaving in October, said Ms. Gertner reached out just days before a big Labor Day rally with Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and was concerned her husband’s behavior could become a political liability.

Ms. McDonald said Ms. Gertner told her that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women.

A current Platner campaign official said Mr. Platner had been communicating with up to six women. The conduct had stopped, the official said, before the campaign launched.

The current official said that the messages surfaced when Ms. McDonald asked Ms. Gertner if there was anything she wanted to share amid an internal vetting process. Ms. Gertner told the campaign that the couple had dealt with the issue in counseling, according to the official.

The revelation threatened to add to Democratic anxieties about the state of the Maine race, which the party sees as critical to its chances of winning control of the Senate in November.Editors’ PicksHow to Get Grandparents and Grandkids to Connect More OftenHe Wanted to Kiss a Million Times. Could We Do It?17 Food Items You Should Buy When They’re on Sale

In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by “the invasion of our privacy.”

“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”

“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”

Ms. McDonald’s account of Ms. Gertner’s discovery of the messages and alerting the campaign to them last summer before the rally with Mr. Sanders was confirmed by another person who was told about the messages at the time. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the existence of the messages on Saturday afternoon.

Ms. McDonald shared with The New York Times what she said was a screenshot of a text message exchange with Ms. Gertner that started in the early hours of Aug. 27, 2025. Ms. Gertner had sent a message to a broader group, asking someone from the campaign to contact her, and Ms. McDonald offered to talk. In their conversation, Ms. Gertner told her about the messages, which she described as “sexting,” according to Ms. McDonald.

“The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption,” Ms. McDonald said. “It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity.”

Ms. McDonald was one of three campaign officials who resigned in October after revelations about controversial social media posts by Mr. Platner and scrutiny of a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.

In the months since then, despite a barrage of headlines about inflammatory remarks Mr. Platner made about women online years ago — remarks for which he has apologized — the candidate went on to have a stunning rise to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in one of the nation’s marquee Senate races.

His campaign has become a movement in Maine, and some Democrats are already discussing Mr. Platner, a fiery populist running on his working-class credentials, as the future of the party.

More Global News

New York Times, What to Know About the Ebola Outbreak, Amelia Nierenberg, Ephrat Livni and Lynsey Chutel, Updated May 30, 2026. Aid agencies are racing to help underequipped health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 245 people are now suspected to have died from the virus.

The Ebola outbreak spreading through the Democratic Republic of Congo could become the deadliest in history, aid groups have warned.

By late May, two weeks after the Congolese health ministry declared the outbreak, it was outpacing the international response. At its epicenter, though health workers and aid groups were racing to fight the virus, there was still very little infrastructure in place to slow its spread.

“I know the resources are often not enough,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the leader of the World Health Organization, wrote on social media on Thursday as he began a trip to Congo. On Saturday, he went to Bunia, a city at the center of the outbreak, in a show of support for health care workers.

As of Thursday, at least 1,077 suspected cases and 246 suspected deaths had been recorded, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One major complicating factor: The type of Ebola virus behind this outbreak, known as Bundibugyo, is rare. Early surveillance and testing failed to identify it, delaying the health authorities’ response. Few field test kits are available. And this kind of Ebola has no targeted vaccine or treatment, making it harder to contain.

Here’s what to know about the outbreak.Here’s what you need to know:

Where did the outbreak start? Are travel bans in place? How are countries contributing to the relief effort? What is Ebola? Are there vaccines?

U.S. Media, High Tech, Culture

 

 

White House Chronicle, Opinion: The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose, Llewellyn King, above, May 30, 2026. Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions.

But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk, above. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble. 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

May 29

Top Headlines

 

Former President Donald Trump is shown in a photo collage with columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won a jury verdict that he sexually attacked her three decades ago.

• New York Times, In Carroll Lawsuits Inquiry, Scrutiny Turns Toward Private Citizens Who Antagonized Trump, Glenn Thrush and Benjamin Weiser, May 29, 2026. The Justice Department is said to be examining the funding of lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll, an author who has never sought a public role, political power or governmental authority.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Semiquincentennial Faceplant, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 29, 2026. His attempt to usurp America’s moment—and meaning—is failing.

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: Judge Blocks Trump's Slush Fund, Bondi Testifies and I Speak With Survivors, Majority of Artists Bail on Trump's Celebration,' Aaron Parnas, right, May 29, 2026. I just got back from Capitol Hill, where I was outside the room where Pam Bondi is testifying. Media and survivors were not allowed inside, and when Bondi arrived, she would not answer a single question or even acknowledge the survivors waiting outside
• Meidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Bulletin 388, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 28, 2026. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to advance his insane plan to pull all US Customs agents out of intl airports of “sanctuary cities” who refuse to assist ICE with their local law enforcement on deportations.

More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Civil Rights, Justice

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 28, 2026 [Trump Lashes Out], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 29, 2026. It’s an excellent bet that future books and films made about the Trump Era will begin with an image of the White House this week. The world-famous Rose Garden has been replaced with a patio that looks like one at Mar-a-Lago. The East Wing is rubble. And on the sweeping South Lawn, right outside the front door of the White House, construction is underway on a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship arena for cage matches to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.
• New York Times, Where Do E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits Against President Trump Stand? Abbie VanSickle, May 29, 2026 (print ed.). Two monetary judgments against Mr. Trump are winding their way through the legal system, with the Supreme Court likely to be the final word on both.
• New York Times, Opinion: There’s No Escaping the Rot in This Justice Department, Michelle Goldberg, May 29, 2026. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois used to be considered one of the best federal prosecutors’ offices in the country, but the last week has shown that Donald Trump’s administration is driving it off the rails. 

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Uncertainty Hangs Over Talks as U.S. Says It Is Close to Agreement, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Tyler Pager, David E. Sanger and Hari Raj, Updated May 29, 2026. An emerging “memorandum of understanding,” which could lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, still needs approval from President Trump, and Iran has not confirmed any commitments.
• New York Times, Bombs, Bargains and Bluster: Trump’s Iran Approach Sows Confusion, Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt, May 29, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump’s pendulum swings on Iran have often seemed driven by mood and moment rather than any discernible strategy.

U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 29, 2026. The fight against Jim Crow continues. 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary:Democrats Are On The Verge Of Killing Trump's Entire Senate Agenda, Jason Easley, right, May 29, 2026. By refusing to support ICE and border patrol, Senate Democrats forced Republicans to try to pass a reconciliation bill that is on the verge of collapse. 
• MSNow, Opinion, Project 2029 sure doesn’t look like an answer to Project 2025, Zeeshan Aleem, May. 29, 2026. A Democratic group is displaying a puzzling lack of ambition for the party’s policy vision.
• Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: Thomas Massie Thought He Was Fighting a King. He Was Facing a Cult, Kristoffer Ealy, May 29, 2026. Kentucky Republicans just spent $32 million to prove that loyalty to Trump matters more than record, principle, or independent thought. 

More On Trump Administration

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It’s Still About Us, Not About Him, William Kristol, right, May 29, 2026. On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, voted to approve the resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stating that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

U.S. Economy, Consumer Confidence, High-Tech, Space

• New York Times, Blue Origin Rocket Blows Up on Florida Launchpad During Test, Kenneth Chang, Updated May 29, 2026. The rocket, built by the Jeff Bezos-owned space company, was to carry 48 satellites into space. Blue Origin reported on social media that “all personnel have been accounted for.”
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Who’s Deranged, Exactly? Paul Krugman, right, May 29, 2026. Of partisanship and economic sentiment.

Top Stories

 

Former President Donald Trump is shown in a photo collage with columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won a jury verdict that he sexually attacked her three decades ago. 

 

Disclosures in the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault lawsuit echoed Trump's words in "Hollywood Access" videotape, reported upon above, that arose during the 2016 presidential campaign. Shown Then: The front page of a 2016 New York Daily News edition contrasts with President Trump's claimed but unsworn innocence in the Carroll case. Trump never took the witness stand in either the Carroll case or his fraud trial resulting in his conviction on 34 felony counts of seeking to hide payoffs to suppress adverse publicity in sex scandals.

New York Times, In Carroll Lawsuits Inquiry, Scrutiny Turns Toward Private Citizens Who Antagonized Trump, Glenn Thrush and Benjamin Weiser, May 29, 2026. The Justice Department is said to be examining the funding of lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll, an author who has never sought a public role, political power or governmental authority.

The Justice Department’s examination of E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits against President Trump could prove to be a significant shift in the administration’s campaign of retribution, moving from targeting of public officials to scrutinizing a case brought by an 82-year-old private citizen who has accused him of sexual assault.

What sets Ms. Carroll apart is the profoundly personal nature of her assertions about the president. And unlike other prominent figures facing investigative scrutiny — James B. Comey, Letitia James, Adam B. Schiff, John O. Brennan — Ms. Carroll, an author and columnist (shown at right and below left in file photos), never sought a public role, political power or governmental authority.

The investigation involves donations made by a nonprofit founded by the liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman to pay for Ms. Carroll’s legal bills, according to people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing inquiry.ImageReid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, in San Francisco in 2023. A nonprofit founded by Mr. Hoffman helped pay Ms. Carroll’s legal bills.Credit...Clara Mokri for The New York Times

As part of that inquiry, prosecutors are examining the veracity of her responses to questions about the donation during the civil proceedings over her accusations that Mr. Trump assaulted her decades ago. But Mr. Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic — and not Ms. Carroll — is currently the subject of the criminal inquiry, although that could change, a person with direct knowledge of the situation said.

The U.S. attorney overseeing the matter in the District of Northern Illinois, Andrew S. Boutros, said in a statement Thursday evening that his office “has never opened” a criminal investigation into Ms. Carroll.

On Wednesday, people briefed on the investigation said that Ms. Carroll was a primary target, prompting a backlash in the hours after news of the inquiry broke.

Ms. Carroll and her benefactor are being scrutinized by a department in which naming and shaming, as opposed to securing convictions, is considered a legitimate aim of law enforcement. Since Mr. Trump returned to office, he has not hesitated to single out his purported enemies as potential targets, even before criminal charges are in the offing.

Under the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, the pace of department activity involving Mr. Trump’s rivals has accelerated significantly, alarming not only career prosecutors but even some Trump appointees who have supported previous efforts to prosecute those who prosecuted the president during the Biden administration.

The investigation into Mr. Hoffman’s nonprofit has been overseen by top department officials in Washington, according to people with knowledge of the matter. But Mr. Blanche, who represented the president in one of his appeals of Ms. Carroll’s legal victories, has recused himself.

Ms. Carroll declined to comment through a representative. A representative for Mr. Hoffman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Critics say the investigation proves Mr. Trump’s appointees are bent on executing Mr. Trump’s personal agenda, even if it means abandoning their commitment to the public, particularly the victims of sexual assault.

“Two of the reasons survivors of sexual abuse often don’t come forward are, first, a fear of not being believed, and second, a fear of retaliation,” said Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who led the unit that investigated civil rights offenses, including sexual abuse and exploitation.

“Putting a survivor in the cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation involving perjury strikes at both of those fears,” added Ms. Kelly, now a partner with Boies Schiller Flexner in New York.

Mr. Trump and his legal team have vehemently contested Ms. Carroll’s allegations and have accused the president’s political enemies of backing her claims in an unsuccessful effort to destroy him.

The president has disputed Ms. Carroll’s claim that he sexually assaulted her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, has called her a “total wack job” and said the attack could not have happened because she was not his physical “type.”

• New York Times, Where Do E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits Against President Trump Stand? Abbie VanSickle, May 29, 2026 (print ed.). Two monetary judgments against Mr. Trump are winding their way through the legal system, with the Supreme Court likely to be the final word on both. (More detail below.)

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Semiquincentennial Faceplant, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 29, 2026. His attempt to usurp America’s moment—and meaning—is failing.

Our long national nightmare may be coming to an end: The White House and Iran are reportedly closing in on a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran seemingly willing to forgo tolls or controls on the waterway in exchange for various U.S. concessions like sanctions relief and the unfreezing of assets.

If the deal materializes as promised, it’s likely a better outcome for the United States than the extraordinarily bleak one many expected, in which Iran felt empowered to throw its weight around in the strait in perpetuity—although, as always, the devil will be in the details.

Even here, the deal represents at best a return to the pre-war Hormuz status quo of open international navigation—and at a heavy cost. In addition to the thirteen American service members killed and more than 500 wounded, plus the eye-watering price to taxpayers of the war itself, the United States appears prepared to extend a major economic lifeline to Iran that will help it quickly rebuild. And Iran seems to have convinced the Trump administration to punt for now on further negotiations about its nuclear program. Why American negotiators think they’ll be able to get more concessions from Iran later, when they’re able to apply less economic and military pressure, is unclear. Happy Friday.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: Judge Blocks Trump's Slush Fund, Bondi Testifies and I Speak With Survivors, Majority of Artists Bail on Trump's Celebration,' Aaron Parnas, right, May 29, 2026. I just got back from Capitol Hill, where I was outside the room where Pam Bondi is testifying. Media and survivors were not allowed inside, and when Bondi arrived, she would not answer a single question or even acknowledge the survivors waiting outside.

As I was leaving, major news broke: a federal judge blocked Trump’s weaponization slush fund. At the same time, six of the nine performers scheduled to appear at Trump’s Great American Fair have now dropped out.I also spoke with several survivors, and those interviews are included below.Throughout the day, I’ll be speaking with members of Congress, survivors, and sources involved in the hearing to bring you the latest information about what Bondi says behind closed doors. We are keeping this story front and center.

Here’s the news:

• A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving forward with a proposed $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which was intended to compensate people Trump claims were targeted by politically motivated prosecutions and investigations. The court order prevents the Justice Department from transferring money into the fund, reviewing claims, or distributing any payments while the case is under review. Critics argue the fund could be used to direct taxpayer money to political allies, including people convicted for their roles in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A hearing is scheduled for June 12 to determine whether the injunction should remain in place or be lifted.

• Former Attorney General Pam Bondi is currently testifying before a House oversight committee about the Justice Department’s handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Lawmakers have raised questions about delays in releasing the documents, compliance with transparency requirements, and concerns that some information was either improperly disclosed or excessively redacted. Bondi had previously resisted appearing after leaving office, leading some committee members to pursue contempt proceedings, but she ultimately agreed to testify. Justice Department officials are expected to attend to help explain departmental actions taken during her tenure. Congressman Robert Garcia blasted the Republican leadership for refusing to have Bondi under oath: • I just got back from Capitol Hill. I spoke with several survivors outside of the Committee room. Pam Bondi would not even look at the survivors as she walked into the hearing and refused to talk to them. Here’s what Dani Bensky had to say: • Here is what survivor Sharlene Rochard wants the world to know: • Here is what survivor Liz Stein wants the world to know: • Six out of the nine featured performers for the Great American State Fair have now pulled out of the fair after backlash, with some saying they never agreed to perform in the first place. Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, Bret Michaels, The Commodores, and Morris Day have all pulled out:

Meidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Bulletin 388, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 28, 2026. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to advance his insane plan to pull all US Customs agents out of intl airports of “sanctuary cities” who refuse to assist ICE with their local law enforcement on deportations.

Mullin first made this threat on Fox on April 6, but now says he has “approval from the WH” to move forward after police in NJ refused to clear out protestors outside a DHS detention facility.

The idea behind the threat is to force airlines to divert all intl flights to red states. Cities that would be affected include NYC, Newark, BOS, CHI, LA, SF, DEN, PHI, SEA among many others. Airlines will never agree to that and will simply cancel flights if this threat ever happens, which would cripple the US economy.

Mullin on Fox today: “This may affect intl flights coming in and out of their airports because I’m gonna have to pull CBP officers out of being able to process intl flights and put them helping our ICE agents. If CBP isn’t there processing intl flights, then those individuals when the airlines land won’t be permitted into the US. If things don’t change, we’re gonna have to make this step pretty quick.”

Mullin said the people protesting conditions for detainees at the ICE facility in NJ were wrong: “This isn’t a Holiday Inn. We’re not providing luxury housing. What we’re doing is providing a sanitary place for them to be detained. We’re providing 3 meals a day, we’re meeting the calorie standard.”

Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) to Fox: “I think Markwayne is onto something here, this is a good idea, it’s one way to crack down on what these sanctuary mayors have created. It benefits states like Indiana, Texas and Florida, Republican red states that are playing by the rules.”

Fox host Harris Faulkner: “Sanctuary cities includes Boston, Chicago and Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco - all of those airports handle 1,100 international flights per day. They're not just gonna not fly. They're going to go to red states and cities. A boon for red states. People will hate living in blue states.”

It's really hard to understand how people can be this monumentally stupid. This will never, ever happen. Flights are not going to be diverted by airlines to red states. Idiocracy.

More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Civil Rights, Justice

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 28, 2026 [Trump Lashes Out], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 29, 2026. It’s an excellent bet that future books and films made about the Trump Era will begin with an image of the White House this week. The world-famous Rose Garden has been replaced with a patio that looks like one at Mar-a-Lago. The East Wing is rubble. And on the sweeping South Lawn, right outside the front door of the White House, construction is underway on a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship arena for cage matches to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.

Now treating the nation’s capital as his property, Trump appears to be leaning on his past role as a real estate developer as a solution in Iran remains elusive, inflation in the U.S. climbs, and his popularity drops.

In addition to turning back to real estate, Trump seems to be lashing out to reassert his dominance over those who have hurt him.

Last night, Hannah Rabinowitz, Paula Reid, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that the Department of Justice under President Donald J. Trump has launched a criminal investigation into whether 82-year-old E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully sued Trump for defamation and for sexual assault, committed perjury in her testimony by saying she was not being paid to launch the lawsuit when it turned out later that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her legal fees and expenses.

Trump also refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its publication of an article describing a card for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. The card shows a crude sketch of a girl, bearing words that refer to “certain things in common” and saying, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump’s lawsuit says that the article damaged his reputation and that the card is fake, although it came from Epstein’s estate. The estate later provided a copy of the card to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which published it on its own website.

U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles tossed out the original lawsuit last month, saying that Trump came “nowhere close” to establishing that the article’s authors acted with “actual malice” to defame him, but said Trump could amend the lawsuit and refile it. Yesterday, he did.

On Tuesday, Alan Feuer of the New York Times noted that Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice means grand juries as well as judges appear to be losing faith in the department. Although it is a common saying that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, government prosecutors have had trouble getting the indictments Trump wants against his perceived political enemies.

In part this is because Trump has replaced career prosecutors with inexperienced loyalists, as Feuer notes, but it is also because of trumped-up charges against people like former FBI director James Comey and the six Democratic lawmakers who released a public video reminding military and intelligence personnel that they must not obey illegal orders.

Federal judges have been accusing prosecutors of misconduct, most recently in a case last week in Chicago in which a grand jury indicted six people, including a Democratic congressional candidate, for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a protest at a detention facility.

As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case after she discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. After making these maneuvers, the prosecutors then tried to hide evidence of them by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.

Judge Perry said: “I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

If Trump can end the rule of law, he can do as he wishes.

At least some of what he appears to want is corrupt dealings that put money into the pockets of himself and his family members. Today Robert Faturechi of ProPublica reported that Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro personally pressured the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup company in which Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake.

Navarro and Don Jr. appear to be close, and a Pentagon official told Faturechi that “[t]he call came from the White House: We have to get this done.”

According to Faturechi, the Pentagon invested $620 million in Vulcan, a rare-earth magnet company, and another $80 million in its partner ReElement. The Commerce Department provided another $50 million in incentives, and the government took a $50 million stake in Vulcan.

When Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital invested in Vulcan in August 2025, the company was worth about $200 million. After the government investments, that valuation jumped to around $2 billion. Bloomberg reported last week that the investment in ReElement might not go through because of concerns over its ability to scale up its technology.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon told Faturechi that the Vulcan deal was sped up as defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”

And yet, despite their evident attempt to warp the U.S. legal system to their own purposes, Trump and his MAGA loyalists insist that they are the ones against whom the Department of Justice has been used. That is their justification for the $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off those who were convicted of crimes for their participation in Trump’s schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Last night, a group of thirty-five former federal judges took on that slush fund.

As Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post reported, the former judges, appointed by members of both political parties, asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization brought against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a “judicial review of the extraordinary—and historically unprecedented—circumstances presented by this litigation and by the collusive ‘settlement’ that invokes this litigation as the legal justification for its terms.”

Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization dropped the lawsuit after Williams appeared to question whether it was actually a legitimate lawsuit, since Trump was both the plaintiff and the person in charge of the IRS, then announced they had reached a “settlement agreement” with the Department of Justice. Williams was clear in her order closing the case that there was “no settlement of record” in it.

The judges expressed concern that the Trumps were manipulating the judicial system, “which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice.” They suggested that “this ‘case’ that the parties purport to have ‘settled’ is itself a fraud on the Court.” They also maintain that “this ‘settlement’ is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court,” and that “[f]raud on the court is established by clear and convincing evidence.”

“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a ‘commission’ controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.”

“To be clear,” the judges wrote, “the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified.”

 

Former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, center, at federal court with her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, left, on April 25 in New York City (Associated Press photo by Seth Wineg).  

New York Times, Where Do E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits Against President Trump Stand? Abbie VanSickle, May 29, 2026 (print ed.). Two monetary judgments against Mr. Trump are winding their way through the legal system, with the Supreme Court likely to be the final word on both.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual assault, The New York Times has reported.

The investigation involves donations made by a nonprofit founded by Reid Hoffman to pay for Ms. Carroll’s legal costs, according to people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the inquiry.

The inquiry comes as the Justice Department appears to be moving to take retribution against President Trump’s political opponents. Ms. Carroll won two separate but related civil judgments — one for $5 million, the other for $83.3 million — against Mr. Trump, both stemming from her accusation that the president sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.

It’s likely that the Supreme Court will have the final word on both cases. One dispute is already before the justices. The second appears to be headed to the court in the coming months.

Here’s where things stand.The 2019 defamation lawsuit

In 2019, Ms. Carroll sued the president, claiming that Mr. Trump had sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room, then defamed her by denying her account of the attack in social media posts. Mr. Trump lost the case and in January 2024, a jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million in damages.

In September 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan upheld the judgment. In late April, a majority of the appeals court rejected Mr. Trump’s request that the case be heard by the full court, letting the verdict stand.What is the core legal issue?

Mr. Trump says the case should be dismissed because he is immune from liability since he was president at the time he made the comments the jury found were defamatory. As support, he is citing the July 2024 Supreme Court decision granting the president substantial immunity from criminal prosecution.

In court filings, lawyers for Mr. Trump have argued that “presidential immunity forecloses any liability here and requires the complete dismissal of all claims.” They contend that the statements implicated by Ms. Carroll’s allegations were official presidential acts and the Supreme Court has extended immunity that cannot be waived for such actions.

The federal judge who oversaw the trial determined that Mr. Trump had waived the immunity argument because he did not raise it early in the litigation

Separately, Mr. Trump has argued that he is shielded from liability under the Westfall Act, a federal law that provides government employees immunity from personal liability for actions performed within the scope of their employment. 

New York Times, Opinion: There’s No Escaping the Rot in This Justice Department, Michelle Goldberg, right, May 29, 2026. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois used to be considered one of the best federal prosecutors’ offices in the country, but the last week has shown that Donald Trump’s administration is driving it off the rails.

First, an egregious attempt to prosecute protesters fell apart amid serious allegations of prosecutorial malfeasance. Then, this week, we learned that the office is investigating payments made to the law firm representing E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump for millions after accusing him of sexual abuse. The former home of the legendary prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — known for going after both Al Qaeda and the Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby — is devolving into just another squalid arm of Trump’s vengeance campaign. Which raises the question: How long can decent people continue to work for such a corrupted institution?

In the face of Trump’s attempts to turn the Department of Justice into his legal praetorian guard, many career employees seem to think they can keep their heads down and wait out their new masters. “We are the mole people now,” one department employee told the New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice.” But at a certain point, it may be impossible to serve both the cause of justice and an unjust government.

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. It stemmed from a September protest outside an ICE detention center in suburban Broadview in which demonstrators briefly surrounded a government vehicle and allegedly damaged it. A month after the incident, six local politicians and activists who’d been part of the crowd, including a Democratic congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, were indicted on charges including felony conspiracy, for which they faced years in prison.

The case of the Broadview Six, as their supporters call them, was a naked attempt to criminalize protest, and prosecutors needed three grand jury sessions just to get an indictment. The real scandal, however, was what went on inside the grand jury room.

Apparently, after initially failing to secure an indictment, prosecutors excused grand jurors who rejected the government’s case before trying again. One career prosecutor, the assistant U.S. attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, was accused of “vouching,” essentially leveraging her own credibility with the grand jurors to convince them to trust her evidence, a prohibited practice. Then, when Judge April Perry of Federal District Court asked to review grand jury transcripts, prosecutors provided her with redacted versions that covered up their apparent misconduct.

Last week, after Perry finally reviewed the unredacted transcripts, she said she was “incredibly shocked” by what she’d discovered, exclaiming, “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.” All charges against the Broadview Six have been dismissed, and defense attorneys in the case are now seeking sanctions that would let their clients recover some of their legal fees. Mecklenburg had since been reassigned to work with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee; last week Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, announced she’d been let go.

In response to the debacle, Andrew Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District, who himself was accused of having personal contact with the grand jury, has announced “sweeping reforms to internal grand jury practices and disclosures.” His announcement brought to mind the hot dog meme from “I Think You Should Leave”: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”

One puzzling thing about the case is that Mecklenburg was a longtime career prosecutor, not a MAGA apparatchik. Yet she seems to have been willing to behave in ways that have astonished legal observers.“You really do wonder about the ethical environment that these people are operating under, if this is what we’re seeing,” said Andrew Weissmann, the former deputy to Robert Mueller and author of the new book “Liar’s Kingdom.” Christopher Parente, a defense attorney for one of the Broadview Six, spent almost a decade as a prosector in the Northern District. Now, he said, “I’m worried that no one’s ever going to trust an indictment that comes out of this office again.”

The day after I spoke to Parente, news broke that Boutros’s office has opened a criminal investigation related to E. Jean Carroll’s case. The inquiry is reportedly looking into a nonprofit run by the Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman, which made a grant to Carroll’s lawyer’s firm. “The investigation, which is expected to look at statements Carroll made during a deposition, could also morph into a criminal perjury probe against the 82-year-old columnist,” reported The Washington Post.

Hoffman’s payment has been public knowledge for years; The Times reported on it in 2023, and Trump’s lawyers tried and failed to make an issue of it during his trial and appeal. It therefore seems fair to assume that the investigation into it is yet another attempt by the administration to go after Trump’s enemies.

The White House’s demands for political prosecutions “are putting career prosecutors into very, very difficult situations,” Barrett told me, forcing people to constantly ask where their red line is. Some in the Justice Department, he said, make a “Lord of the Rings” analogy. “Most of the people there can still do their jobs well and do good, meaningful work in law enforcement until the Eye of Sauron turns to you,” he said, meaning you get pulled into one of Trump’s vendettas. The problem is that even before that happens, you’re still working for the orcs.

More On Iran War

 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Uncertainty Hangs Over Talks as U.S. Says It Is Close to Agreement, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Tyler Pager, David E. Sanger and Hari Raj, Updated May 29, 2026. An emerging “memorandum of understanding,” which could lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, still needs approval from President Trump, and Iran has not confirmed any commitments.

Here’s the latest.

The fate of the negotiations between the United States and Iran to end the war remained unclear on Friday after U.S. officials said there had been progress toward a “memorandum of understanding.”

They said the United States was moving closer to an agreement with Iran that could lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for oil and gas shipping, and extend the cease-fire, paving the way to more talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

The officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, were granted anonymity to discuss the U.S. view of the current negotiations.

The emerging “memorandum of understanding” still needs approval from President Trump, who has not commented publicly, and Iran has not confirmed any commitments. In recent days, the two sides have exchanged fire, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened a return to full-scale war.

Should an agreement be finalized, it could give Mr. Trump an off-ramp from a war that has driven up oil prices and grown deeply unpopular at home. It could also eventually allow Iran to regain access to frozen overseas assets and provide a route for Tehran to get billions of dollars of oil revenue flowing again.

In comments to reporters on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance said he could not guarantee that an agreement would be signed. He said that while the two sides were “very close” to an agreement, they were still deliberating the precise language in addition to questions over Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon and demanded that it agree to dispose of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• The framework: Here are some details emerging about a draft agreement, according to officials involved in the talks. Read more ›
• Gaza: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday that he had directed the Israeli military to expand its control of the Gaza Strip to 70 percent. Negotiations on Gaza’s future have stalled over Hamas’s refusal to disarm and Israel’s nearly daily strikes in the enclave, both in apparent defiance of the cease-fire agreement struck in October, after two years of war. Read more ›
• Lebanon: The Israeli military widened its offensive against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, in Lebanon on Thursday, striking Beirut for the first time in almost a month and pushing deeper into the country’s south. Read more ›

New York Times, Bombs, Bargains and Bluster: Trump’s Iran Approach Sows Confusion, Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt, May 29, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump’s pendulum swings on Iran have often seemed driven by mood and moment rather than any discernible strategy.

Three months after President Trump launched war on Iran, his seemingly haphazard approach to the conflict is bewildering allies at home and abroad as he veers between diplomatic dealing, military strikes and increasingly far-fetched ideas.

It is possible that Mr. Trump is near a breakthrough in the form of what both sides call an interim agreement that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin detailed talks on Iran’s nuclear program. But U.S. officials said on Thursday that Mr. Trump had not yet signed off on the agreement, and several others like it have fallen apart.

The latest diplomatic crescendo comes just after a new round of clashes between the United States and Iran tested a fragile cease-fire that has held since early April. Mr. Trump has threatened to restart the war if Iran does not reopen the strait to commercial shipping. Last Friday, U.S. officials hinted that he was reviewing military options for potentially resuming the bombing campaign.

But neither saber rattling nor outright shooting has derailed diplomacy between Washington and Tehran, which has continued in fits and starts in the weeks since Mr. Trump canceled a round of planned talks with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month.

A long post on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Monday typified his mixed message, declaring at once that negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely!” before warning that anything short of a “great deal” would mean “Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that!”

At the Defense Department, military officials expressed bewilderment over the stop-start nature of the conflict. A senior defense official said that the more than 50,000 U.S. troops assigned to Iran who are scattered throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States were “in limbo” as Mr. Trump swings from option to option.

For centuries, statesmen from Otto von Bismarck to Henry Kissinger have argued that diplomacy with adversaries is most effective when backed by force, real or threatened. “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said in a 1986 speech.

But Mr. Trump’s pendulum swings on Iran have often seemed driven by mood and moment rather than any discernible strategy. Adding to the confusion are his many claims of diplomatic progress that later proved unfounded.

Mr. Trump’s shifts also reflect a political tug of war between hawkish supporters urging him to hit Iran harder and noninterventionists — along with Republicans nervous about rising gas prices and sagging poll numbers — urging him to make a quick deal.

Some members of the pro-war camp were especially exasperated on Thursday as details of the possible interim deal emerged. They maintained that Mr. Trump might relieve pressure on Iran in order to reopen the strait without winning firm Iranian commitments to surrender its nuclear material and stop enriching uranium.

“The cease-fire has become rather farcical,” said Michael Makovsky, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a Washington-based think tank that promotes hawkish pro-Israel policies. “It has reduced U.S. leverage for a good deal, and made America look weak — that we’re vulnerable if gasoline prices go above $5.”

“No deal with this regime will be worth the paper it’s written on, and better to end this war with a bang than a whimper,” added Mr. Makovsky, who urged Mr. Trump to resume strikes against Iran’s military and its nuclear sites while continuing a blockade of Iranian oil exports.

Mr. Trump has further clouded matters with recent statements that seem poorly thought out, if not disconnected from reality altogether.

On Monday, for instance, he bewildered Middle Eastern allies by suggesting that a peace deal with Iran should include pledges by several Arab states to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel and join the pact known as the Abraham Accords.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump threatened to attack Oman, a Gulf Arab nation and a longtime U.S. partner, if it entered into a notional agreement with Iran to share control of the strait. “We’ll have to blow them up,” Mr. Trump said, before indicating that was not likely to happen.

More substantively, Mr. Trump reversed course almost immediately after unveiling a plan for U.S. warships to escort stranded tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Firm opposition from Saudi Arabia — which was caught by surprise and feared that Iran would respond with escalation — forced Mr. Trump to abort the operation, called Project Freedom, after just one day.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 29, 2026. The fight against Jim Crow continues.

The MAGA Supreme Court justices’ decision in Louisiana v. Callais struck a serious blow to multi-racial democracy, but it is not the final word on the reimposition of Jim Crow in the South. In both South Carolina and Alabama this week, voting rights’ advocates successfully pushed back to limit the fallout from Callais, which threatens to eviscerate the Congressional Black Caucus and deny millions of Blacks and Hispanics the power to select representatives of their choosing.

“The majority-Black district held for 34 years by South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn will survive intact, for now, after Republican state lawmakers rejected a plan to redraw congressional maps,” NPR reported. Clyburn responded: “A critical number of Republicans did not believe in putting a man over the law. Today, members of the South Carolina State Senate stood up for the constitutional principles that they say they believe in.”

Some Republican lawmakers (unlike the partisan hacks on the Supreme Court) refused to confuse voters by imposing a new map in an election for which early voting was already underway. Others had personal relationships with Clyburn, who has been a giant in the State and delivered billions in federal funding for his constituents. And self-interest certainly played a role as well: By packing Black voters into Clyburn’s district, the others remain solidly Republican. Rep. James Clyburn (SC)

Credit goes to Clyburn, who refused to go into retirement quietly. By insisting on running for re-election, he saved Democrats, at least for one election, a seat that Republicans would otherwise have snatched before the midterms.

Regardless of the reason Republicans backed down, no one should underestimate the significance of Republicans’ failure to remove the only Black congressman from a state infamous for leading secession from the Union in 1860. Jace Woodrum, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina, in a written statement, asserted:

Don’t let anyone tell you that our political fate is set in stone. Remember that showing up and fighting for democracy still matters. South Carolinians from all walks of life showed up to give testimony, to call and write to our lawmakers, to lift our voices in protest, and finally to cast ballots in record-breaking numbers on the first day of primary voting. There are powerful people who want you to believe that showing up doesn’t matter. But we the people still hold the power, and representative democracy is still standing. After we made our voices heard, lawmakers from both political parties finally saw that the rush to redistrict hurts voters — and they did the right thing.

MAGA politicians are counting on voters’ despondency and cynicism to make the reimposition of Jim Crow as pain-free for Republicans as possible. But Democrats’ refusal to concede and determination to build momentum, using key events and political battles to drive organization and turnout, will aid both their fight to flip the House in November and their long-term mission to restore democracy.

On the same day as the victory in South Carolina, the Congressional Black Caucus released a letter urging corporate America “to defend our nation’s democratic principles and publicly reaffirm its commitment to voting rights and equal representation amid growing attacks on fair representation and Black political and economic power in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais.”

Citing a letter to Congress from 200 corporations issued 5 years ago demanding reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the CBC called on corporations once more, to publicly condemn “efforts to dilute Black voting strength and dismantle the protections of the Voting Rights Act” and to engage with civil rights groups. They urged corporations to attend “a national convening alongside civil rights leaders, advocates, and movement organizations to discuss the urgent defense of voting rights and Black political power in America.” Public Plaque on Voting Rights Act - Selma, Alabama

Only a whole-of-society push (in state government, the business community, electoral politics, etc.) with a broad coalition across the political spectrum can defend voting rights and recover pluralistic democracy. Despite the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision, the courts can still afford some protection.

A three-judge federal district panel in Alabama considered Allen v. Milligan in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, which held that intentional discrimination could still be grounds for striking down a map. The panel (with two Trump-appointed judges and one Clinton-appointee) held that even under the MAGA majority’s latest opinion, a congressional map with only a single Black congressional district could not stand:

[W]e cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination. And under the unusual circumstances of this case, we conclude that a limited order requiring the Secretary to continue using this Court’s race-blind map will not disrupt Alabama’s elections (all candidates ran under the race-blind map until fifteen days ago, and all voters remain districted under the race-blind map in electoral computer systems). We do not lightly intrude in state affairs, but our previous review of the undisputed evidence left us in no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan (the “2023 Plan”) intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution. Our re-examination in light of Callais yields the same conclusion.

The panel reiterated that there was no evidence of partisan gerrymandering (blessed by Callais). This was intentional, undisguised racial discrimination.

Alabama immediately appealed. We should not be surprised if the MAGA Supreme Court majority, having opened the door a sliver to permit certain VRA claims (for intentional discrimination), slams it shut in Alabama voters’ faces. Nevertheless, in that event, the 3-judge panel would at least have smoked out the MAGA hacks who all but struck down the VRA in its entirety. We will find out if the MAGA justices (as many voting rights advocates believe) are determined to defend any Republican-friendly map, no matter how blatantly discriminatory.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of LDF, who argued Callais at the Supreme Court, reacted to the three-judge panel’s opinion: “Our teams have been working nonstop around the clock since the Callais decision to defend the maps in Alabama. This is a critical victory [and] affirmation that Black voters deserve fair maps.”

Victories in South Carolina and Alabama are the direct result of undaunted, unflagging, and unapologetic activists, civil rights lawyers, elected leaders, and organizations laboring to defend voting rights. In the case of Alabama, credit goes to the two conscientious Trump-appointed judges who insisted that the law still guaranteed two Black-majority districts.

The fight to undo Callais’ noxious legacy and secure voting rights will take years. However, this was inarguably a positive week, thanks to dogged voting rights activists who refuse to accept it as the final word on our 250-year experiment in multi-racial democracy.

PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary:Democrats Are On The Verge Of Killing Trump's Entire Senate Agenda, Jason Easley, right, May 29, 2026. By refusing to support ICE and border patrol, Senate Democrats forced Republicans to try to pass a reconciliation bill that is on the verge of collapse. 

Senate Republicans were forced to pass a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol because Trump refused to make a deal with Democrats that reformed ICE and Border Patrol after American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in Minneapolis, MN, by Trump’s immigration officers.

The original Senate Republican idea for the reconciliation bill was a simple bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol. They called this a skinny bill and thought that it could be quickly passed because the Department of Homeland Security has been burning through the funding that it received in last year’s Republican reconciliation bill to make up for the funds it has not received this year.

It should have been a simple process that would have forced them to own the actions of ICE and Border Patrol or come to the table and negotiate reforms.

Trump got involved and saw the reconciliation bill as a vehicle for massive corruption. First, Trump demanded a billion dollars for his supposedly privately funded ballroom. Then Trump launched a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that was actually a taxpayer-funded slush fund for individuals who committed crimes trying to help the president overturn the 2020 election.

Senate Republicans rebelled against the ‘weaponization fund,’ so Democrats pounced and announced amendments to the reconciliation bill to basically kill the fund, and now, because of Trump, the entire agenda is on the verge of collapse in the Senate.

Republicans really want to go back to just funding ICE and Border Patrol, but the White House is refusing.

Semafor reported:

The easiest path forward for the bill is to return to the narrow approach that Senate Majority Leader John Thune started out with: solely funding ICE and Border Patrol through Trump’s presidency. “I would hope that we can … take care of our law enforcement. That was our focus, it remains our focus,” Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., told Semafor on Thursday.

Trump’s so-called anti-weaponization fund “caught a lot of us off-guard,” she added.

Republicans want to pass the bill as quickly as possible, but the party-line bill’s exposure to anti-weaponization fund amendments is clouding its path in both chambers.

Senate Republicans want the White House to deny payouts to anyone convicted of a violent 1/6 crime or anyone who attacked a police officer.

So far, the White House has refused to put any restrictions on the fund.

The additional complication is time.

Republicans have months-long recesses scheduled in the House and Senate for August and October. There is also a 4th of July recess upcoming. Both parties tend to follow the same election-year schedule no matter who has the majority. August is the traditional summer recess. October is used to allow members to be back in their states and districts to campaign before elections.

The whole point was to get the reconciliation bill passed fast.

It has become a quagmire because Democrats have fought and forced Republicans to do things themselves. The entire Republican agenda could sink because Trump is more interested in corruption than governing.

Democrats have realized that they don’t get rewarded by voters for being the responsible adults in the room. Republicans have all of the power in the federal government, and Democrats are refusing to bail them out. In fact, Democrats are doing what they are supposed to do as the minority. They are forcing Republicans to govern and acting as the opposition.

MSNow, Opinion, Project 2029 sure doesn’t look like an answer to Project 2025, Zeeshan Aleem, May. 29, 2026. A Democratic group is displaying a puzzling lack of ambition for the party’s policy vision.

The new Democratic policy group Project 2029 sees itself as an answer to Project 2025 — the radical MAGA policy blueprint President Donald Trump has embraced during his second term to transform the government. But Project 2029’s shockingly timid first policy roll out this week suggests the group isn’t up to fulfilling its own mandate.

The people behind Project 2029 exclusively releasing their initial set of proposals to The Bulwark in and of itself signals moderation: The Bulwark, home of many Never Trump Republicans, is a conservative sector of the Democratic coalition. The group’s apparent view of The Bulwark as friendly turf suggests its outlook on social change is going to be restrained.

It’s hard to imagine these proposals animating large groups of voters.

The preview Project 2029 shared with The Bulwark includes four proposals that are described in broad terms and allude to policy documents that apparently have yet to be released. Some main points include:

Breaking up utility monopolies: “Our proposal outlines how the next President should break these monopolies open, letting competition drive down bills, speed up delivery, and unleash a new wave of cleaner, cheaper energy for families and businesses.”

Childcare changes: “Our proposal outlines how the next President can ensure that every family has the time, financial support, and high-quality care options they want, giving parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.” Protecting kids from the internet: “Our proposal would protect children from the most harmful features of social media and AI, give parents stronger tools, and dismantle the surveillance advertising model that drives much of the harm.”

Cutting down on “The Annoyance Economy”: Tackling the “enormous amounts of time, money, and patience to the small, daily hassles corporations deliberately design into modern life: spam calls, useless chatbots, surprise fees, impossible cancellations, endless paperwork.”

This isn’t a promising first impression. These items aren’t objectionable, but Project 2029 promised an agenda “bigger and bolder than what people have been offered before,” and this looks like establishment-friendly technocratic reform. And there’s a conspicuous absence: namely the big-ticket items that prompt national debates and polling about America’s affordability crisis, such as housing, education and healthcare.

The pledge to break up utility monopolies to cut down energy costs is worthwhile and a nice nod to the growing anti-monopoly current of the Democratic party, but it’s relatively small potatoes. People tend to think more about how hard it is to make rent than it is to pay for electricity. More from MS NOW Daily

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Childcare reform is badly needed, but the language of “options” that Project 2029 offers up in this preview seems to suggest more means-tested tax credits or other policies that depend on income. If you want to go “bigger and bolder” than before, then you would want to talk about childcare as a social right and use language of universalism — and address the reality that even many middle-class people find childcare costs financially ruinous.

A promise to protect children from the harms of the internet is … fine. More robust measures are overdue, certainly, although we would need specifics to weigh in on how judicious these reforms are. But in any case, that’s hardly the kind of thing that draws out huge crowds or fires people up.

And lastly, the “annoyance economy” proposal is undoubtedly not the kind of policy you want to center political campaigns around. Cutting down on needless paperwork and the “time tax” is a good idea and can be a policy layup, but the very name of the term insinuates frivolity. And it gets at none of the fundamental dynamics that make the economy work for tech billionaires but not working people. People are depressed and anxious about the economy, not merely irked. This is precisely the kind of policy that should not be part of an opening salvo for a group trying to stand out as a generator of big policy swings.

Project 2025 proposed a radical right-wing transformation of the government with ideas such as eliminating entire federal departments, gutting abortion access and overturning the immigration system. There is no progressive equivalent of that here, either through procedural or policy proposals. There is no agenda-defining idea like Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. And, interestingly, the proposals don’t tap into the buzz and momentum surrounding either New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s social democratic commitments (such as fast and free buses for the city) or the build-big-things-fast ethos of the Democratic abundance agenda.

Remarkably, Project 2029 seems to consider its proposals to be moonshot goals. The Bulwark reports that the Project 2029 policy advisers it interviewed said “they were less concerned with calculating how programs would be paid for or whether their plans could be realistically shepherded through Congress than with animating their base.” Whom do they consider their base? It’s hard to imagine these proposals animating large groups of voters. If this is just their vision board, then why are they playing it so safe?

Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: Thomas Massie Thought He Was Fighting a King. He Was Facing a Cult, Kristoffer Ealy, May 29, 2026. Kentucky Republicans just spent $32 million to prove that loyalty to Trump matters more than record, principle, or independent thought.

Thomas Massie stood before a crowd of supporters at the Marriott Cincinnati Airport in Hebron, Kentucky, last week, and delivered one of the more remarkable concession speeches in recent political memory. He cracked jokes. He quoted the Constitution. He drew a clean, direct line between a republic and a monarchy, telling the crowd that if the legislative branch always votes with the president, what you have is a king.

The crowd chanted his name. Some of them shouted that he should run for president. And somewhere in that room, almost certainly wearing a MAGA hat, was a voter who had just helped remove him from the seat he’d held since 2012 — not because of anything Massie did wrong, not because his record was a disaster, not because he failed the district — but because Donald Trump told them to. That voter heard Massie’s speech about kings and republics and constitutional architecture and thought: yeah, but the king said vote for the other guy, so.

Before we get into all of that, and we are absolutely going to get into all of that, let’s give credit where credit is due. Because I would lose my journalistic credibility if I didn’t keep it real, and my credibility is one of the few things I’m not willing to sacrifice for a good paragraph. Thomas Massie ran. He didn’t quit. He didn’t pull a Marjorie Taylor Greene and sense the heat coming and hop off the train before it could run him over. He didn’t try to appease Trump like John Cornyn, who was crushed anyway in the Texas runoff this week.

Massie stood at the edge of the cliff, looked straight down, and said — fine. Let’s find out. The country needed that. We needed the most expensive House primary in American history — $32 million in ad spending, Pete Hegseth stumping for his opponent the night before what was reportedly a planned military assault on Iran, Trump calling him the worst congressman in the Republican Party on the actual day of the vote — we needed all of it, because we needed to know exactly where things stand. And now we know. We will get to what we know in a moment. But first — the receipts.

That is, if you are keeping score at home, one of the more painful ironies of the entire MAGA era: a congressman undone in his own house by followers who chose the man they’d never met over the one they’d known for over a decade. Principle, it turns out, does not come with cult immunity.Subscribed

Massie has been in Congress since 2012. Eight terms. In that time he built one of the most consistent libertarian records in the House — pushed back on foreign aid, the national debt, executive overreach, and the kind of blank-check war-making that Republicans used to pretend to oppose before opposing it became a threat to their primary survival. He co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna. He voted against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill over its impact on the national debt. He said out loud that the president did not have the authority to bomb Iran without congressional approval. He was, in short, doing the job. And for that, he got buried.

Now. Before I go any further, I have to be honest with you in the way that only someone who genuinely respects you can be honest with you. The Thomas Massie who stood at that podium Tuesday night — thoughtful, principled, quoting the Founders — is not the Thomas Massie who has occupied that seat for the last several years. Because that Thomas Massie was, for a significant stretch, a card-carrying member of the very movement that just ate him alive. He was a true believer. He didn’t wander into MAGA by accident. He set up a tent and made himself comfortable.

Exhibit A: December 2021. Days — not weeks, not months, days — after the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan, where four students were killed, Massie posted a family Christmas photo on social media. In the photo, every member of his family — his wife, his children, all of them — is holding an AR-15-style rifle. Every single person. The family is grinning. The caption asks Santa for more ammo. The photo was posted four days after four teenagers were shot to death at their high school. Now, I am a political scientist. I try to approach things with a degree of analytical distance. But I have to be honest with you: that is some of the most aggressively weird shit I have ever seen from an elected official, and I have been watching elected officials do weird shit for a very long time. That is not a Second Amendment statement. That is a performance. That is a man looking directly into the camera and saying: I know exactly who I am performing for, and I want them to know I am one of them. Merry Christmas. Please pass the ammunition.

He was, at that point in his career, a true believer. Not a cynical operator using the movement as a vehicle, but an actual participant who had marinated long enough in the MAGA sauce to think that the Christmas rifle photo was a good idea. He and Marjorie Taylor Greene had more in common than either of them would probably like to admit today.

So what changed? The Epstein files changed him. Or more specifically: Trump’s response to the Epstein files changed him. When the files became a serious political pressure point and Trump — the man who had promised to drain the swamp, expose the powerful, and finally deliver accountability to the people who had been running the game in the shadows — waved the whole thing away like it was a minor scheduling conflict, something cracked inside Massie. You could almost see it happening in real time. Imagine spending years inside a movement, genuinely convinced that the leader shares your values and your outrage, and then watching that leader look directly at the thing you’ve been fighting for and say: nah, we’re good, moving on.

It was like watching a man get slowly doused with cold water. First a drip. Then a trickle. Then a full bucket. By the time Massie was standing in front of the Senate demanding Pam Bondi answer for the files, the spell was broken. He had wandered out of the MAGA fog — blinking, slightly disoriented, looking around at the landscape like a man who had just walked out of a three-year movie and was trying to remember what sunlight felt like. The principled libertarian had been in there the whole time, apparently, just waiting for the moment the cult did something too stupid to rationalize. For Massie, that moment was Trump calling Jeffrey Epstein’s victims a hoax. For a lot of people, that moment never comes. That’s kind of the whole problem.

And that brings us to his primary. And to Ed Gallrein. And to what may be the single most clarifying political story of the 2026 primary season.

Ed Gallrein beat Thomas Massie 55% to 45% — a nine-point margin in a district Massie had dominated for over a decade, a district where he won his last primary with nearly 76% of the vote. This was not some foreign territory he stumbled into. This was his district. He knew these counties the way you know the layout of a house you’ve lived in for thirteen years — where the squeaky floorboard is, which neighbors wave back, which roads flood in the spring. He had shown up. He had done the work. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he probably believed that meant something. That being principled, being present, being the guy who actually read the bills and asked the hard questions — that all of that would be enough. That his people knew him. That knowing him would matter more than a Truth Social post from a man who has never spent a night in Boone County.

That is, if you are keeping score at home, one of the more painful ironies of the entire MAGA era: a congressman undone in his own house by followers who chose the man they’d never met over the one they’d known for over a decade. Principle, it turns out, does not come with cult immunity. Gallrein is a retired Navy SEAL, a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer, and a man who ran an entire congressional campaign without debating his opponent a single time. Not once. Zero debates. His explanation for this was that he was already debating Massie “every day” by talking directly to the American people, “just like the president does, with no middleman.” He literally campaigned on the promise of being a middleman-free vessel for whatever comes out of Mar-a-Lago. No filter. No independent analysis. No pesky personal opinions getting in between the Dear Leader’s instructions and the congressional voting record. He offered himself up as a human rubber stamp and the voters of Kentucky’s 4th said: yes, that’s exactly what we want, thank you, where do we sign.

More On Trump Administration

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It’s Still About Us, Not About Him, William Kristol, right, May 29, 2026. On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, voted to approve the resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stating that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

The next day, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, explaining what the Congress had done. And he looked forward with pride and pleasure to the fact that July 2 would heretofore be celebrated as the new nation’s birthday, with “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

As it happened, Americans decided to date our independence not from the vote on July 2 but from the adoption of the formal document declaring independence two days later. So July 4 became our national birthday. But Adams was vindicated in his hope that it would be commemorated by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations.”

And so it will be this year, our 250th anniversary of independence.

There is one small problem, though. We elected Donald J. Trump as our president in 2024. And so he will preside over the 250th birthday of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

I hope the Supreme Judge of the World (as the Declaration refers to Him) is enjoying this rather dark cosmic joke.

It’s not just that Trump’s policies fly in the face of the principles of the Declaration, and seek to undermine a government that secures our rights and derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

It’s also that Trump is doing his best to horn in on the celebration, to turn it into his event, not ours, to vulgarize it according to his taste, to personalize it in accord with his narcissism, and to distort its meaning in line with his prejudices.

Help us build a better kind of politics for this country. Join our pro-democracy community. We’d love to have you.Subscribed

And so we had the unseemly “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” on the National Mall two weeks ago. And we have the plans for the grotesque 250-foot Trump arch desecrating Arlington National Cemetery. And we have the attempt by the Trump administration to feature Trump on a new $250 bill for our 250th birthday (about which more below). And we have the $1.776 billion slush fund to be dispersed to January 6th insurrectionists. And so on.

These efforts all need to be blocked by Congress and the courts if possible, and shunned and deplored by the public as necessary.

The good news is that this seems to be happening. Trump may succeed in pulling off individual events and even projects, for now. But his attempted hijacking of the meaning of America is failing. The public disapproves of his grandiose imperial arch by 51 percent to 21 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll last month, and Democrats in Congress are introducing legislation to block it.

And even Republicans in Congress don’t support repealing the century and a half-old law that stipulates that “no portrait or likeness of any living person shall be engraved or placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes, or postal currency of the United States.” This law harkened back to the example of Washington, who during his lifetime turned down having his portrait struck on the first silver dollar, believing this would be reminiscent of a monarch and inappropriate in a republic.

There’s no way to stop all of Trump’s indignities. The State Department is beginning to issue passports featuring Trump’s portrait and signature, which doesn’t require congressional approval. The late-Roman-empire-style Ultimate Fighting Championship event scheduled for June 14 on the South Lawn of the White House is presumably going to happen. And so will the “Great American State Fair” exposition on the National Mall from June 25 through July 10, though performing artists are pulling out of it en masse.

But we do have reason to be increasingly confident that Trump won’t succeed in using our 250th birthday to corrupt our civic traditions. We have increasing reason to think that the American people aren’t being seduced by his vision of the country. And so we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Sometimes Stopping Extremism Means Getting Your Hands Dirty… MATT DALLEK writes about how the Anti-Defamation League’s secret spy campaign helped destroy the far-right John Birch Society.
• The Holiday from History Is Over and the Great Powers Are Back… BRIAN STEWART reviews Brendan Simms’s unsettling and erudite new book.
• Three Movies to Prep For Our Viral Apocalypse… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, JONATHAN COHN joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss Contagion, And the Band Played On, and Outbreak.
• CBS Fires Top Staffers from 60 Minutes In Newsroom Purge… On Bulwark+ Takes, JVL and SAM STEIN give their takes on CBS News firing Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and top executives at 60 Minutes.
• The Tech Bros Should Just Shut Up… KARA SWISHER joins TIM MILLER on The Flagship Pod to explain why the pitchforks are coming for big tech.

Quick Hits

PHONY AS A $250 BILL: Another day, another Trump’s-putting-his-face-on-something news story. Here’s CNN:

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is planning to potentially print a commemorative $250 bill with the image of President Donald Trump to mark the country’s 250th anniversary.

A Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed the plans in a statement, saying it was conducting “appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to “active legislation.”

“Should this legislative mandate be signed into law, the BEP is moving proactively to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation,” the spokesperson told CNN.

Remarkably, the president’s face being involved might not even be the stupidest part of this. There’s competition, anyway: Commemorative coins are one thing, but high-denomination commemorative bills? And in a gaudy red, white, and blue color scheme to boot? What are we doing here, exactly?

Then again, maybe there’s one silver lining: Inventing brand-new high-denomination bills and slapping his face on them is a pretty good way for Trump to remind Americans just how little he’s done to address their inflation anxieties.

BOMBS AWAY IN GUATEMALA: Wars in the Middle East not going so hot? Maybe throwing around your weight a bit more in Latin America is what you need to put the pep back in your step. The New York Times reports on America’s planned military strikes against drug trafficking groups in Guatemala:

Guatemala has agreed to carry out joint strikes with the United States military inside its territory to target drug trafficking groups, according to three people familiar with the talks, in a further expansion of the Trump administration’s military campaign across Latin America.

Last week, President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala agreed to both airstrikes and other military action in a call with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, two of those people said, with operations to start as early as next month. It was unclear what other military activities could be included in the agreement. . . . One of the next countries that the Defense Department intends to press to accept joint military action is Honduras, said two of the people familiar with the plans.

But Guatemala and Honduras aren’t the big fish:

The Trump administration is targeting Guatemala and Honduras to pressure Mexico into accepting joint counterdrug operations, those two people said. While Washington has been pushing for U.S. boots on the ground and drone strikes, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has staunchly rejected the requests. The White House’s broader strategy is to normalize an American military presence across Latin America to gain leverage over Mexico, according to the two people.

Read the whole thing.

LEFT HOLDING THE BAG: Donald Trump tends to brush off unfavorable headlines as fake news, but here’s one from Politico he might want to pay attention to: “Trump could be on the hook for taxes on his $1.8 billion ‘Weaponization Fund.’”

Here’s the gist: Because the fund is set up to draw from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund—a step the lawyers took to make sure they wouldn’t need to ask Congress for new money—the money by law must first go to Trump himself, as the litigant in the case that resulted in the settlement. Thus, some tax experts argue, he’ll likely be the one on the hook for the settlement fund’s tax bill—even if he sticks to his pledge (made explicit in the text of the settlement) not to take any of it himself.

It’s not like Trump has anything to worry about in the short term: The IRS that he ordered to give him the ridiculous settlement in the first place might not be too quick to force him to fork over any money he owes. Future IRS leadership, though, might be another story.

U.S. Economy, Consumer Confidence, Inflation, High-Tech, Markets

 

 

New York Times, Blue Origin Rocket Blows Up on Florida Launchpad During Test, Kenneth Chang, Updated May 29, 2026. The rocket, built by the Jeff Bezos-owned space company, was to carry 48 satellites into space. Blue Origin reported on social media that “all personnel have been accounted for.”

A rocket built by the Jeff Bezos-owned space company Blue Origin blew up on the launchpad in Florida on Thursday night.

The explosion occurred at about 9 p.m. during a test being conducted in advance of an upcoming launch.

“We experienced an anomaly during today’s hotfire test,” Blue Origin reported on social media. “All personnel have been accounted for.”

The test was to fire the seven engines in the booster stage, while keeping the rocket firmly held down on the launchpad. Flames began rising up the sides of the rocket and a massive explosion enveloped the launchpad.

The fireball badly damaged the launchpad and surrounding equipment at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It is the only launchpad that Blue Origin has for its 322-foot-tall New Glenn rocket, which is named after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth. Repairs will most likely take months, at the least.

The rocket had been set to carry 48 satellites for Amazon’s internet constellation, Leo, an acronym for “low-Earth orbit.” Leo is a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink network. The Amazon satellites were not onboard.

“It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” Mr. Bezos wrote on social media. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

Mr. Bezos’ billionaire space competitor, Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, expressed sympathy: “Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” he wrote on X.

The failure will affect NASA’s moon plans, which already include little margin for error.

Blue Origin is one of two companies — SpaceX is the other — that NASA has hired to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface. That plan depends on multiple New Glenn launches to get that lander to the moon.Editors’ PicksThis Season of ‘Summer House’ Was Unexpectedly Emotional. Fans Gathered for Catharsis.Help! My $7,300 Business Class Seat Was Broken, and I Got a Pittance.You Barely Need a Recipe for This Weeknight Dinner. That’s What Makes It Timeless.

NASA’s Artemis III mission, scheduled to launch next year, is intended to allow NASA astronauts to practice docking their Orion capsule with the SpaceX and Blue Origin landers while remaining in orbit around Earth.

With the destruction of the launchpad, Blue Origin may not be able to participate in Artemis III.

“Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, wrote on X. “We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”

He added, “We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”

A smaller Blue Origin robotic lunar lander, known as Blue Moon Mark 1, was scheduled to launch later this year on a New Glenn rocket. On Tuesday, NASA also announced that it had awarded contracts to Blue Origin for two New Glenn rockets to take rovers to the moon as soon as 2028, for astronauts to drive during the Artemis IV and Artemis V moon missions. 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Who’s Deranged, Exactly? Paul Krugman, right, May 29, 2026. Of partisanship and economic sentiment.

Kevin Hassett Reportedly Becomes Front-Runner for Fed Chair - The New York Times

Donald Trump’s chief economist said something interesting the other day. Yes, the remarks by Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, were stupid, but that goes without saying. The point is that they were stupid in an interesting way.

On Fox News, Hassett was, as usual, boasting about how great the economy is, when he was asked why Americans aren’t feeling it — why the long-running Michigan index of consumer sentiment has hit its lowest level ever. He responded by claiming that the index “is being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.”

Well, yes indeed … someone is deranged here.

The Michigan survey tracks respondents by party, and politics clearly does affect economic perceptions. Democrats were much more positive about the economy under Biden than Republicans; they became much less positive, while Republicans became much more positive, when the White House changed hands:

At this point, however, independents’ views of the economy are similar to those of Democrats. Republican optimism, not Democratic pessimism, is out of line with the views of most Americans.

But wait, there’s more. YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better: Let me present these data slightly differently: Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.

So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans. Given these numbers, Trump officials should conclude that they have failed in some way. The great majority of Americans — essentially everyone who isn’t a total Trump loyalist — believes that the economy is getting worse. And there are good reasons for that negativity. Inflation is way up as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his Iran war. Because of this surge in prices, real personal income has declined sharply: And even if Trumpists believe that these numbers are somehow misleading and that the economy is really in great shape, they should acknowledge that they are failing to make their case to the American public.

Trump and his minions, however, never admit to failure. We’ve all seen that in the case of the Iran war: Trump keeps claiming that it’s a glorious victory and that reporters pointing out that it isn’t are “treasonous.”

They bring the same mindset to economic sentiment. If the public hates Trump’s economy, the problem must be with the politically deranged public, not with Trump.

Still, let’s look at it rationally. (I know, rationality has a well-known liberal bias.) The 19 percent of Americans who support MAGA, many of whom literally believe that Trump was sent by God, say that the economy is good. The other 81 percent of Americans say that it’s very bad. Which group is more likely to have economic perceptions that are warped by politics?

May 28

Top Headlines

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Trade Strikes, Further Threatening Negotiations, Qasim Nauman, Eric Schmitt, Luke Broadwater, Euan Ward and Leo Sands, May 28, 2026. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said it had targeted an American military base, without saying where, in retaliation for strikes in the country’s south.
• Meidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Bulletin 388, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 28, 2026. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to advance his insane plan to pull all US Customs agents out of intl airports of “sanctuary cities” who refuse to assist ICE with their local law enforcement on deportations.
• New York Times, Jill Biden’s Reaction to Biden’s 2024 Debate: ‘He’s Having a Stroke,’ Katie Rogers, Jill Biden, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). “I had never, ever seen Joe like that,” the former first lady told CBS News. “Before or since.””

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Pushes $250 Bill With His Face and $100 Bill With His Signature as Trump Jr. Company Lands $620M Deal Amid Iran Strikes, Aaron Parnas, right, May 26, 2026. Trump is now demanding his face be placed on a new $250 bill while his signature is set to appear on the $100 bill.

Gaza, Israel, Palestine: Starvation, Conquest, War Crime Allegations

• New York Times, Netanyahu Says Israel Will Control 70 Percent of Gaza, Squeezing Hamas, David M. Halbfinger and Johnatan Reiss, May 28, 2026. Israel’s military continues to conduct strikes and seize territory despite a cease-fire with Hamas. Many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters see the war as unfinished business.
• Drop Site News, Palestinians in Gaza Protest World Central Kitchen Scaling Back Amid Rising Food Costs and Israeli Blockade, Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddouss, May 28, 2026. “If the World Central Kitchen stops, there will be no breakfast, no lunch, and no dinner.”
• New York Times, Israel to Cut Ties With U.N. Chief Over Its Inclusion on Sexual Violence Blacklist, Ephrat Livni, May 28, 2026. The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, told Israel there had been an “increasing number of cases” of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, according to a letter shared by Israel’s U.N. ambassador.

U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Rights, Justice 

• New York Times, Former Judges Urge Inquiry Into Deal Trump Struck With I.R.S., Alan Feuer, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The motion was particularly significant because it asked the judge overseeing the initial suit against the I.R.S. to examine the terms of the deal.
• New York Times, Texas School Police Pepper-Sprayed, Tackled and Tasered Students, Clare Amari, Kristian Hernández and Asher Lehrer-Small, Photographs by Meridith Kohut, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). This article was reported in collaboration with The San Antonio Express-News as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
• New Yok Times, Court Orders Customs Chief to Address Compliance on Refunding Tariffs, Tony Romm, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The surprising demand to appear at a hearing suggested new concern about the Trump administration’s efforts to repay the full $166 billion owed from illegally imposed tariffs.
• New York Times, Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry of E. Jean Carroll Over Trump Lawsuits, Glenn Thrush and Benjamin Weiser, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Carroll, who prevailed in a civil trial after accusing President Trump of sexual abuse, is the latest target in a Justice Department campaign going after his perceived enemies.
• UPI, Ex-CIA agent charged with stealing $40M in gold bars from the agency, Lisa Hornung, May 28, 2026. A former CIA agent is charged with stealing $40 million in gold bars, $2 million in cash and lying to the agency about his background. 
• Politico, DOJ makes broad case for presidential power in Maurene Comey case, Erica Orden, May 28, 2026. Maurene Comey alleged in her lawsuit that she lost her job “solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”
• Bloomberg Law, Eleanor Ross Is US Judge Reprimanded for Sex in Chambers, Suzanne Monyak, Olivia Alafriz and Jacqueline Thomsen, May 28, 2026. Eleanor Ross is the federal district court judge who was subject to a private reprimand for having sex with a police officer in chambers in earshot of law clerks, according to a person familiar with the situation.
• One First Look, Analysis: Conduct Unbecoming, Steve Vladeck, right, May 28, 2026. A federal district judge who not only conducted an affair in their chambers but then lied about it (and threw a clerk under the bus in the process) deserved more than a "private reprimand."
• Emptywheel, Analysis: More Grand Jury Shenanigans in Illinois, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 28, 2026. Shortly after the Broadview 6 (-2) case fell apart, Chicago US Attorney Andrew Boutros boasted to Jon Seidel for a May 22 story that his office was proactively conducting a review of other cases in which Sheri Mecklenburg was involved.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords, Vivian Nereim, Isabel Kershner and Elian Peltier, May 28, 2026. The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.

More Global News

• Politico, Recent survivors of US boat strikes haven’t been found, bringing overall death toll to 199, Staff Report, May 28, 2026. At least 22 people survived an initial strike only to be hit again or die at sea during the campaign that began last September.
• New York Times, Lebanese Resigned to a Long War, Even if U.S. and Iran Make a Deal, Christina Goldbaum, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). Few in Lebanon believe that diplomatic efforts to end the wider war will bring peace to their country, as clashes between Israel and Hezbollah intensify in the south.
• Politico, Zelenskyy pleads with Trump for Patriots to fight Russian bombardment, Veronika Melkozerova and Jonas Loesel, May 27, 2026. Ukraine wants more missile defense, but the war in the Middle East has driven up demand.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 27, 2026 [Trump's Texas-Sized Problem], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 28, 2026. In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Saddles Republicans with Paxton, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 28, 2026. Paxton can damage Republicans beyond Texas.
• Politico, Poll shows Becerra opening lead in California governor’s race, Jeremy B. White, May 28, 2026. The Democratic frontrunner is in position to draw a Republican matchup in November.
• Lincoln Square, Political Opinion: The Exquisite Corpse and the DNC Autopsy, Rick Wilson, May 28, 2026. So the Democratic National Committee has finally, mercifully, vomited out its long-overdue post-mortem on the 2024 catastrophe, eighteen months after the body cooled, and friends … you should read this thing. Not because it’s good.
• New York Times, Bare-Knuckle Tactics and Brash Promises: How Howard Lutnick Operates, Michael Rothfeld and Ana Swanson, May 28, 2026. Before becoming U.S. commerce secretary, Mr. Lutnick controlled 818 companies. A review of their dealings sheds light on his freewheeling first year in government.
• New York Times, ‘Up for Grabs’: Can Democrats Sway Young Men Who Have Soured on Trump? Kellen Browning and Emma Goldberg, May 28, 2026. Many Gen Z men who voted for the president are dismayed by his time in office. But they are not hearing an appealing pitch from Democrats, either: “Both parties kind of get it wrong.”
• New York Times, Massie Visits Greene in Costa Rica for Fishing and ‘Spicy’ Political Talks, Tim Balk, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The two Republican critics of President Trump — Thomas Massie, who lost his House primary last week, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress — met up in the tropics.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump betrayed the man who tried to name an Interstate after him, Heather Delaney Reese, May 28, 2026. Yesterday morning, the President of the United States shared an image of himself sitting on a rhinoceros holding a rifle beside giant letters reading “NO RINOS!” It was not about hunting.
• New York Times, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Says She Will Not Run for President in 2028, Mitch Smith, May 28, 2026. Governor Whitmer of Michigan had been viewed as part of a field of possible Democratic candidates. She has been governor for two terms, and is barred from running again.
• Heather Delaney Reese via Substack, Commentary: While the world watched Trump fall apart, something worse was brewing, Heather Delaney Reese, May 29, 2026. At his twelfth cabinet meeting, the President of the United States sat slumped forward with his eyes barely open while Rubio and Hegseth tried repeatedly to pull him back from rambling spirals he could not control. When asked whether the economic pain Americans are feeling gave him any urgency to reach a deal on Iran, he lashed out and brought up the midterms on his own, snapping, “I don’t care about the midterms,” before anyone had mentioned them. 

U.S. Health Care, Inflation, Rents, Economy

• Meidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Bulletin 388, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 28, 2026. Fox Business: “1st quarter GDP coming in with a read of 1.6%. So this is a revision down. The first read was 2%, now we’re coming in with a second read of 1.6%, and that is actually below the expected range.”
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Unlocked Repost: Curing U.S. Health Care, Part II, Paul Krugman, right, May 28, 2026. How we got to Obamacare.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: One reason why the rent is too damn high, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, May 28, 2026. In the last few years, rents across the United States have skyrocketed. According to a Congressional Research Service analysis of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, more than 22.7 million renter households, or nearly half, were considered “cost burdened” in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

Media, High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Copyrights 

From left are current and former “60 Minutes” staffers: Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Leslie Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Anderson Cooper.(Jai Lennard)L

• Los Angeles Times, Bari Weiss shakes up ‘60 Minutes’ with a new executive producer; Stephen Battaglio, May 28, 2026. The venerable news magazine “60 Minutes” is undergoing a major overhaul under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, who hired a new executive producer and ousted two correspondents.
• Politico, Trump refiles defamation suit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein story, Cheyanne M. Daniels, May 28, 2026. The president’s complaint revolves around a 2025 report related to a bawdy letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s signature.
• PetaPixel, NYC Gallery Sold an AI-Generated Ansel Adams Photo Without Permission, Jaron Schneider, May 25, 2026. The New York Danziger Gallery displayed for sale an AI-generated version of Ansel Adams’ photo “Moonrise Over Hernandez” without consulting the photographer’s trust, effectively stealing the legendary artist’s work and dramatically altering it with AI for the sake of profit. 

Top Stories

 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Trade Strikes, Further Threatening Negotiations, Qasim Nauman, Eric Schmitt, Luke Broadwater, Euan Ward and Leo Sands, May 28, 2026. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said it had targeted an American military base, without saying where, in retaliation for strikes in the country’s south.

Here’s the latest.

Iran said it had retaliated on Thursday against the United States by targeting an unnamed American base in response to strikes in southern Iran, escalating tensions amid negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war.

In recent days, Washington and Tehran have suggested that they were close to agreeing on a narrow agreement to allow commercial shipping to resume in the strait. But on Wednesday, U.S. forces launched new strikes and President Trump reiterated that he did not want the waterway to be under Iranian control.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards said on Thursday that it had targeted a base where the U.S. strikes originated but did not say where that was or how it had been attacked. The guards warned that further U.S. strikes would be met by an even “more decisive” response.

On Thursday morning, the Kuwaiti military said that its air defenses had intercepted hostile drones and missiles, but did not specify the origin or extent of the attack. The United States has five military bases in Kuwait.

Hours earlier, American forces conducted strikes in southern Iran, the second round of attacks this week. The United States knocked down four attack drones that a U.S. official said Iran had launched over the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. military also struck a drone ground-control station in the port city of Bandar Abbas before Iran could fire a fifth drone, they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

In a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Trump signaled that he was prepared for protracted negotiations and was indifferent to the domestic political pressure caused by the unpopular war. Iranian officials “thought they were going to outwait me,” he said, adding, “I don’t care about the midterms.”

The Treasury Department said on Wednesday that it had added Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority, an organization that Tehran launched last week to oversee the waterway, to its sanctions list. The Treasury described the Iranian authority as an extortion attempt.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Hostilities in Lebanon: The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had launched new strikes against Hezbollah targets in Tyre, a city in southern Lebanon. The resurgence in fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon has complicated the broader peace efforts because Iran wants any deal to cover Lebanon.
• Oman threat: Mr. Trump on Wednesday warned Oman, a U.S. ally that has acted as a mediator with Iran, not to enter into any agreement with Tehran to share control of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to bomb the country if it did. He later said he did not believe the U.S. would have to take such an action. Read more ›
• Energy markets: Oil prices jumped after the latest hostilities. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose more than 2 percent on Thursday to about $94 a barrel for August delivery. Read more ›

Meidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Bulletin 388, Ron Filipkowski, right, May 28, 2026. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to advance his insane plan to pull all US Customs agents out of intl airports of “sanctuary cities” who refuse to assist ICE with their local law enforcement on deportations.

Mullin first made this threat on Fox on April 6, but now says he has “approval from the WH” to move forward after police in NJ refused to clear out protestors outside a DHS detention facility.

he idea behind the threat is to force airlines to divert all intl flights to red states. Cities that would be affected include NYC, Newark, BOS, CHI, LA, SF, DEN, PHI, SEA among many others. Airlines will never agree to that and will simply cancel flights if this threat ever happens, which would cripple the US economy.

Mullin on Fox today: “This may affect intl flights coming in and out of their airports because I’m gonna have to pull CBP officers out of being able to process intl flights and put them helping our ICE agents. If CBP isn’t there processing intl flights, then those individuals when the airlines land won’t be permitted into the US. If things don’t change, we’re gonna have to make this step pretty quick.”

Mullin said the people protesting conditions for detainees at the ICE facility in NJ were wrong: “This isn’t a Holiday Inn. We’re not providing luxury housing. What we’re doing is providing a sanitary place for them to be detained. We’re providing 3 meals a day, we’re meeting the calorie standard.”

Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) to Fox: “I think Markwayne is onto something here, this is a good idea, it’s one way to crack down on what these sanctuary mayors have created. It benefits states like Indiana, Texas and Florida, Republican red states that are playing by the rules.”

Fox host Harris Faulkner: “Sanctuary cities includes Boston, Chicago and Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco - all of those airports handle 1,100 international flights per day. They're not just gonna not fly. They're going to go to red states and cities. A boon for red states. People will hate living in blue states.”

It's really hard to understand how people can be this monumentally stupid. This will never, ever happen. Flights are not going to be diverted by airlines to red states. Idiocracy.

New York Times, Jill Biden’s Reaction to Biden’s 2024 Debate: ‘He’s Having a Stroke,’ Katie Rogers, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). “I had never, ever seen Joe like that,” the former first lady,shown above in a 2020 phoro, told CBS News. “Before or since.”

On the evening of June 27, 2024, millions of viewers watched with alarm and confusion as President Joseph R. Biden Jr., appearing listless and lost, made an ultimately campaign-ending appearance in his only presidential debate against Donald J. Trump.

Among the viewers who came away frightened: his wife, Jill Biden.

“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing “View From the East Wing,” a memoir of her time as first lady.

Mr. Biden, who had made back-to-back trips to Europe in the weeks leading up to the debate, has said that he was recovering from an illness that evening. When Mr. Biden was preparing at Camp David, his team had built naps into his schedule. Despite the extra rest, a raspy-sounding Mr. Biden mumbled and wandered through his appearance as Mr. Trump hammered him on immigration and foreign policy.

“I was frightened,” Dr. Biden told CBS of what she saw that night, “because I had never, ever seen Joe like that. Before or since. Never.”

Her memoir, according to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, promises to bring readers “behind the scenes” of her life as first lady, including what it was like to witness “the abrupt end of her husband’s bid for re-election.”

But on the night of the debate and for weeks afterward, she was not just a witness but a driving force behind Mr. Biden’s decision to keep fighting to salvage his campaign for re-election. She comforted the shaken president in the minutes after the debate ended, and told him that she was still all in.

“You did such a great job, you answered every question,” she told her husband when they joined supporters after the debate, “you knew all the facts.”

In the weeks following the debate, Dr. Biden and other members of Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, Hunter, were supportive and encouraged him to keep fighting.

But as Mr. Biden was recovering from the coronavirus in late July, his wife began to stress to him that he needed to make a decision. He ended his campaign and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice president.

As first lady, Dr. Biden was a protective force around Mr. Biden. She gained a reputation for bluntly pointing out when she felt that Mr. Biden’s advisers had made mistakes when it came to her husband.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she told this reporter when asked about that reputation during an interview. “Do you?”

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Pushes $250 Bill With His Face and $100 Bill With His Signature as Trump Jr. Company Lands $620M Deal Amid Iran Strikes, Aaron Parnas, right, May 26, 2026. Trump is now demanding his face be placed on a new $250 bill while his signature is set to appear on the $100 bill.

A student journalist accepting a CBS-funded scholarship publicly called out CBS News on stage in a stunning moment that left the room shocked. Iran and the United States continue trading strikes as tensions escalate, while new reporting reveals the White House pushed to fast-track a massive government contract tied to Donald Trump Jr. Trump opens a new criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. And that is only the beginning.

I am also working on a major deep-dive investigation into the contracts and financial benefits Trump’s children received as a result of their father’s presidency. That piece will be out this weekend.

Almost daily now, I hear from people saying my work is being shadow banned or suppressed on other platforms. That is exactly why I am building this independent network. Your support helps us build something independent that answers to the people, not corporations, billionaires, or political insiders. And, it helps to fight back when inevitably they target me next.

Here’s the news:

According to the Washington Post, Trump administration officials reportedly pushed the Treasury Department to create a new $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump’s portrait, which would make him the first living person to appear on U.S. currency in more than 150 years. Treasury appointees allegedly pressured Bureau of Engraving and Printing staff to prepare mockups despite legal concerns that current federal law only permits deceased individuals on currency and does not authorize a $250 denomination without congressional approval. The proposed note was tied to America’s upcoming 250th anniversary celebrations and included direct feedback from Trump on the design.

Remember: George Washington refused to place his image on U.S. currency while he was alive because he believed it resembled the behavior of a monarch, reflecting early American fears about concentrated executive power. Congress later reinforced that principle in 1866 through the Thayer Amendment, which explicitly banned “any living person” from appearing on U.S. money, a restriction that remains central to legal objections against proposals to place President Donald Trump on a $250 bill.

Treasury officials also approved plans to print $100 bills bearing Trump’s signature, which would reportedly be the first U.S. currency in history to feature the signature of a sitting president. While experts noted there is no law preventing Trump’s signature from appearing on bills, critics inside the bureau warned the administration was politicizing the currency design process and rushing changes that normally take years to implement.

Patricia “Patty” Solimene, the longtime director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, was abruptly reassigned after reportedly resisting pressure to move forward with the $250 bill proposal. In a farewell email to colleagues, Solimene said her reassignment was “not my choice” and wrote, “The buck stopped here,” while emphasizing that she had refused to compromise the bureau’s values or legal obligations.

A student journalist accepting the prestigious Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship at the News Emmys publicly criticized CBS News, saying the network’s recent direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace” despite funding the award. The remarks reportedly drew applause and visible surprise from people in the room, underscoring growing backlash over CBS leadership decisions and concerns about editorial independence. The moment comes amid mounting criticism surrounding the treatment of 60 Minutes journalists and broader fears that political pressure is reshaping the network’s news division.

A ProPublica investigation found that White House adviser Peter Navarro personally pushed the Pentagon to fast-track a $620 million loan to rare-earth startup Vulcan Elements, a company tied to Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm. According to Defense Department officials, the request came directly from the White House and staff were pressured to complete the deal within weeks rather than the many months normally required for Pentagon funding decisions. The report says the loan dramatically increased Vulcan’s valuation and financially benefited investors connected to Trump Jr., fueling accusations of political favoritism and self-dealing.

The Pentagon and White House denied any improper influence, insisting that no company receives preferential treatment and that Trump Jr. had no involvement in securing the deal. However, ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers argued the arrangement raises serious conflict-of-interest concerns because the president’s family stood to financially benefit from a government-backed loan pushed by a close Trump adviser. The investigation also revealed that another company tied to Trump Jr., drone manufacturer Unusual Machines, was under Pentagon review for additional funding.

The broader investigation highlights how the Trump administration dramatically expanded the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, increasing its funding authority from roughly $1 billion to $200 billion to rapidly invest in critical minerals and military technology companies. Critics say the office now relies heavily on personal networks and political connections rather than traditional application processes, creating fears that access to government funding increasingly depends on proximity to Trump allies. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter called the situation “corruption we pay for,” while companies seeking Pentagon money reportedly scrambled to hire lobbyists and insiders to gain access.

Iran and the United States traded new military strikes despite ongoing ceasefire talks, with Iran firing a missile toward a U.S. airbase in Kuwait after American forces struck Iranian drone targets near the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump dismissed pressure to quickly end the conflict, saying he does not care about the midterm elections and warning that if Oman cooperated with Iran to control the strait, “we’ll have to blow them up.” The escalating conflict has intensified global economic fears because the Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most important energy shipping routes, with oil and food prices already rising due to disruptions. Meanwhile, diplomatic talks mediated by Qatar and Pakistan appear to be stalling again as disagreements continue over sanctions, shipping access, and the release of frozen Iranian assets.

According to CBS, Donald Trump visited Walter Reed Medical Center during a routine checkup but did not meet with any of the 14 U.S. troops wounded in the Iran war who are currently recovering there, according to military officials and families of injured soldiers. The decision has drawn scrutiny because presidents traditionally visit wounded service members during wartime, especially after Trump publicly praised soldiers killed in Operation Epic Fury during Memorial Day remarks. One recovering soldier, Sgt. Cory Hicks, suffered severe injuries including a traumatic brain injury after an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait that killed six American troops. Critics have also resurfaced past controversies involving Trump’s comments about wounded service members, including his previous remarks minimizing traumatic brain injuries suffered by troops after Iranian attacks.

Israeli airstrikes across southern Lebanon killed at least 14 people, including women, children, and a Lebanese soldier, as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah intensified ahead of security talks in Washington. The escalation follows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing expanded military operations in response to Hezbollah drone attacks targeting Israeli troops and northern Israeli towns. Hezbollah has rejected the upcoming talks and instead aligned itself with Iran, which is demanding an end to the Lebanon conflict as part of broader negotiations with the United States. The war has now displaced more than one million people in Lebanon and left thousands dead and wounded as both sides continue exchanging drone and missile attacks.

A New York Times investigation found that the Trump administration is using at least $67 million in national park entrance fees to fund beautification projects in Washington, D.C., including repairs to ornamental fountains and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. Critics say the administration is diverting money away from urgent infrastructure and safety repairs at national parks across the country, many of which face crumbling roads, damaged water systems, mold, and failing sewer infrastructure. The report also revealed the administration awarded multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts tied to Trump’s D.C. renovation projects, including one to the same company building Trump’s planned White House ballroom. Supporters argue the projects are legal and overdue, but conservation groups accuse the administration of prioritizing cosmetic projects Trump can personally see over critical national park needs.

According to CNN, the Department of Justice has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into writer E. Jean Carroll over whether she committed perjury during her civil lawsuits against President Donald Trump. Carroll previously won nearly $90 million in judgments after juries found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation related to her accusations from the 1990s. Sources say Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recused himself from the investigation because he previously represented Trump in the matter. The probe is the latest in a growing series of Justice Department investigations targeting Trump critics and political opponents, raising new concerns about politicization inside the department.

Fox Business reported that revised first-quarter U.S. GDP growth was downgraded from an initial 2% estimate to 1.6%, coming in below economist expectations and signaling slower economic growth than previously believed. The weaker reading could intensify concerns about the health of the economy heading into the 2026 midterm elections, especially as inflation, tariffs, and global conflicts continue weighing on markets and consumer confidence.

Officials say 11 workers are now presumed dead after a massive chemical tank implosion at the Nippon Dynawave paper mill in Longview, Washington, making it likely the deadliest industrial accident in modern state history. Rescue operations have shifted to recovery efforts because authorities no longer expect to find survivors, while crews continue navigating dangerous conditions caused by highly caustic chemicals and structural instability at the site. The explosion released hundreds of thousands of gallons of “white liquor,” contaminated parts of the Columbia River, and hospitalized multiple workers, prompting state and federal investigations into the cause of the disaster. Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson said the tragedy’s impact on workers, families, and the surrounding community would be “profound.”

Federal prosecutors accused Google engineer Michele Spagnulo of using confidential internal search data to make more than $1.2 million betting on the prediction market platform Polymarket. Investigators say Spagnulo used nonpublic Google search trends to correctly predict that singer D4vd would become the company’s most-searched person of 2025 before the information was publicly available. Prosecutors allege he then tried to hide the source of his profits, leading to charges including commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The case is one of the highest-profile insider trading investigations tied to prediction markets and comes amid growing scrutiny of platforms like Polymarket.

The United States denied claims that it evacuated diplomats from Kyiv after Russia warned foreign embassies to leave ahead of further strikes on the Ukrainian capital. At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a rare direct letter to President Donald Trump and Congress urgently requesting more Patriot missile systems and air defense ammunition as Russian attacks intensify. Zelenskyy warned that U.S. weapons deliveries are falling behind because of the war with Iran, leaving Ukraine increasingly vulnerable to missile and drone attacks. The appeal comes amid escalating bombardments of Kyiv and growing concern among U.S. allies about whether Washington can continue supporting multiple global conflicts at once.

A federal judge declined to block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, handing Democrats an early legal setback ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The order directs the federal government to help states create citizenship-based voter eligibility lists and restrict mail ballot delivery to voters appearing on those approved rolls, while also requiring expanded record retention for elections. Democrats argued the policy could wrongly disenfranchise millions of eligible voters because government databases may contain errors, but the judge ruled the lawsuit was premature because the administration has not yet implemented the new system. Additional legal challenges from Democratic-led states are still moving forward in federal court.

Trump publicly endorsed Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ahead of Armenia’s upcoming parliamentary elections, praising him as “a great friend and leader” who shares his vision for peace and prosperity in the South Caucasus. The endorsement comes as Armenia continues distancing itself from longtime ally Russia and deepening ties with the United States and Europe following tensions over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and Moscow’s declining influence in the region. Trump also promoted a major proposed infrastructure initiative called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” aimed at connecting Central Asia to Europe through Armenia and Azerbaijan while expanding access for American energy companies.

A rare albino buffalo in Bangladesh nicknamed “Donald Trump” because of its blond comb-over and perceived resemblance to the president was spared from ritual sacrifice after going viral online. The buffalo had been scheduled for slaughter during the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, but authorities intervened after massive public attention and security concerns drew crowds to see the animal. Officials arranged for the buffalo to be transferred to the national zoo in Dhaka, while the owner said the name was given affectionately and the animal had become a local sensation. The story quickly spread internationally as another unusual example of animals being compared to President Donald Trump.

The U.S. military carried out another strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people as part of the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against Latin American cartels. Since September, nearly 200 people have reportedly been killed in similar strikes, though the Pentagon has not publicly provided evidence that the targeted vessels were actually carrying drugs. The Pentagon’s inspector general has now opened a review into whether the military followed proper targeting procedures, amid growing criticism from Democratic lawmakers and legal experts over the legality and oversight of the operations. The administration argues the strikes are part of a broader war against drug cartels blamed for the U.S. overdose crisis. 

Gaza, Israel, Palestine: Starvation, Conquest, War Crime Allegations

New York Times, Netanyahu Says Israel Will Control 70 Percent of Gaza, Squeezing Hamas, David M. Halbfinger and Johnatan Reiss, May 28, 2026. Israel’s military continues to conduct strikes and seize territory despite a cease-fire with Hamas. Many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters see the war as unfinished business.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday that he had directed the Israeli military to expand its control of the Gaza Strip to 70 percent of the Palestinian enclave, ratcheting up the pressure on Hamas, the militant group that rules the rest.

His announcement came as negotiations on Gaza’s future have stalled over Hamas’s refusal to disarm and Israel’s nearly daily strikes in Gaza, both in apparent defiance of the cease-fire agreement struck in October, after two years of war.

At the time, as provided by the cease-fire, the Israeli military pulled back to an area encompassing roughly 53 percent of the ravaged enclave. But it has gradually taken more territory in Gaza, sometimes simply by moving concrete blocks with which it marks the boundary. Earlier this month, Mr. Netanyahu disclosed that Israel had increased its control to 60 percent of the territory.

Hamas retains de facto control of the shrinking western stretch of Gaza, where the vast majority of its roughly two million Palestinians are living, including many who have fled or been pushed out of the portion under Israeli control. Many Gazans displaced throughout the two-year war were warned not to approach the Israeli side.

Speaking Thursday at a conference sponsored by a pre-military academy and a West Bank local government agency, Mr. Netanyahu boasted that Israel had expanded its grip on the Gaza Strip.

“We are now in 60 percent of the territory,” he said, adding, “We were at 50. We moved to 60.” As members of the audience shouted that Israel should take 100 percent of the territory, he demurred: “First of all, 70,” he said. “Let’s start with that.”

Israeli analysts said that being more aggressive in Gaza could help Mr. Netanyahu, who is in an uphill battle for re-election later this year, to deflect Israelis’ attention from grim news elsewhere. Israeli forces in Lebanon have been struggling to stop Hezbollah’s attacks, particularly with drones, and many Israelis expect U.S.-led talks with Iran to result in a bad deal.ImageAt night, people stand amid rubble and smoke, some shining flashlights.

 

Drop Site News, Palestinians in Gaza Protest World Central Kitchen Scaling Back Amid Rising Food Costs and Israeli Blockade, Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddouss, May 28, 2026. “If the World Central Kitchen stops, there will be no breakfast, no lunch, and no dinner.”

Last week, Ahmed Abu Ras, 55, stood in the center of dozens of men and children, many holding empty cooking pots, on a sandy, sun-washed plot of land near the edge of the Jinan displacement camp in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza.

“We call on international organizations to extend a hand of relief and aid to the displaced, not to cut them off from it,” Abu Ras said to the crowd, which had gathered to protest the lack of food. “The suffering is still ongoing. The siege is still ongoing. The displacement is still ongoing. The pain, hunger, and famine are still ongoing.”

Earlier this month, World Central Kitchen (WCK), the biggest provider of hot meals in Gaza, made the decision to cut its distribution in half, from around one million meals a day to 500,000. Abu Ras, a director of the Jinan camp, helped to organize the demonstration in response.

“World Central Kitchen added more pain to this suffering with its decision to stop the community kitchens serving the displacement camps stretching across northern Hamad City, consisting of 12 camps with a population of more than 13,000 displaced people,” Abu Ras said.Scenes from Jinan displacement camp in Khan Younis, including a protest against a decision by World Central Kitchen to cut its meal distribution in Gaza by half. May 18, 2026. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

In a statement earlier this month, WCK said its decision was “driven entirely by financial pressure” and did not “reflect any reduction in need on the ground.” The founder of WCK, José Andrés, said the cost of supplying food had become unsustainable, citing the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. “The war in Iran has pushed up our costs significantly. The price of rice has risen by 30 percent, while the costs of chicken and meat have spiked between 10 and 20 percent,” Andrés wrote in an essay in Semafor. “We rely on gasoline to deliver supplies into Gaza and transport meals across the strip, and higher gas prices have affected our operations too.”

This week, Israel’s supreme court upheld draconian government registration rules for international aid groups operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, making it near impossible for anyone to fill the vacuum left by WCK. The court upheld a government ban on 37 foreign NGOs, giving them 30 days to comply with new screening procedures “or cease operations.” Those procedures include submitting detailed employee lists, a measure that aid groups have resisted because it would put their Palestinian staff members at risk. Israeli authorities revoked the licenses of the agencies in January, including some of the world’s largest humanitarian groups—such as Oxfam, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the International Rescue Committee—after they refused to comply with the intrusive registration requirements.

Aid groups have warned of devastating effects if Israel moves ahead with the bans. WCK is not part of the ban, making its reduction that much more consequential.

WCK has employed thousands of Palestinians at its community kitchens, providing a crucial source of income for families in Gaza where the unemployment rate has increased to over 80%, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. In the wake of WCK’s decision to drastically scale back food distribution, hundreds of Palestinians suddenly found themselves out of work.

Last week, in a separate demonstration, a group of employees gathered, in WCK uniform, to protest the decision and call for the reinstatement of the fired workers. “On behalf of the employees of World Central Kitchen, and the families affected in the Gaza Strip, we are announcing at this solidarity protest our condemnation of the unjust and unfair decision to arbitrarily dismiss employees from World Central Kitchen, depriving many affected families who depend entirely and exclusively on its meals in light of the ongoing financial crisis as a result of the genocide in Gaza,” one of the WCK workers said, surrounded by his colleagues, in an video circulated on social media.

“Previously, the World Central Kitchen used to provide meals, and people were barely getting by,” Fatima Abdullah Al-Basyouni, a displaced Palestinian mother in Khan Younis, told Drop Site. “Lunch would arrive. Breakfast and dinner were not available except through aid, and the aid was extremely limited. Now, if the World Central Kitchen stops, there will be no breakfast, no lunch, and no dinner. It will create a huge shortage, a shortage of food supplies at homes.”

“It is a decision that is very harmful to the Palestinian people,” she continued. “They must reverse it and look at it from a broader and more developed perspective, not in a way that prevents food from reaching us. The idea should be to improve the quality and quantity of food for people, not to reduce it.”

WCK did not respond to inquiries from Drop Site News.

Beyond WCK scaling back and the Iran war sending global food prices soaring, Gaza’s Government Media Office has repeatedly warned the number of aid trucks Israel allows into Gaza has routinely fallen far below the levels agreed upon in the October “ceasefire” deal.

“The agreement stipulates the entry of 600 trucks daily, including 50 fuel trucks. However, the occupation has not adhered to this,” the office said in a statement on Monday. “Only 37% of the agreed-upon number of trucks have actually entered Gaza. The fuel situation is particularly critical, with only 14% of the agreed-upon quantities having been delivered. Furthermore, only 1,196 trucks entered the Gaza Strip last week, out of the 4,200 that were supposed to enter during the same period.” They called the level of food and supplies “entirely insufficient.”

The United Nations, too, has documented the steadily worsening food crisis, noting a drop of 37% in aid between the first and second three-month periods following the October 10 agreement. The UN’s World Food Program also noted that Palestinians in Gaza were eating less in the first half of April than in March, with most families eating vegetables, fruit, or protein only once a week or less.

The UN placed the blame squarely on Tel Aviv. “Israel’s intermittent closure of crossings, restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid, and continued ban on the entry of essential supplies have produced chronic shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods across Gaza,” the UN reported last week.

President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, recently acknowledged in its May 15 report to the UN Security Council ongoing daily violations and “impediments to humanitarian access” but did not identify Israel as the responsible party. Israel has killed over 900 Palestinians since the agreement went into effect in October.

On Wednesday, as families were gathering to celebrate Eid Al-Adha, an Israeli airstrike slammed into a residential home in central Gaza City, killing at least 10, including four children, and wounding more than 20, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Harrowing images emerged of residents carrying bloodied children from the rubble through flames and smoke.

On Tuesday, 14 Palestinians were killed in a series of Israeli attacks across the enclave, including one that killed the head of Hamas’s armed wing, Mohammed Odeh—also in violation of the ceasefire—along with his wife and children.

Israel has also continued to target aid workers in Gaza, with two killed in late April in separate incidents, triggering the suspension of health and water services. Israel also fired on a World Health Organization vehicle in early April, killing a contractor and wounding several others, prompting WHO to suspend medical evacuations via the Rafah crossing for six days. At least eight aid workers have been killed since the “ceasefire” was announced in October, according to OCHA. Nearly 600 humanitarian workers have been killed since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023, including seven WCK aid workers when their convoy was targeted by Israeli airstrikes as it left one of the group’s warehouses in Deir al-Balah in April 2024, prompting the group to temporarily pause its operations.

According to local authorities, Israel has committed more than 3,000 violations of the “ceasefire” since it went into effect in October, without any condemnation from Trump’s Board of Peace.

“The plan was supposed to bring relief. Instead, Palestinians in Gaza are still hungry, still cannot reach medical care, and civilians are still being killed,” Adam Coogle, Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement last week ahead of a Board of Peace briefing at the UN Security Council on its newly-issued six-month progress report. “No spin can hide the fact that aid is not entering at the needed scale,” Coogle added. The group also noted that four UN agencies had warned back in December that famine, pushed back only weeks earlier through the ceasefire, could rapidly return without sustained access and supplies.

Standing at the demonstration last week against the WCK decision to scale back meal deliveries, one man burst angrily through the crowd. “We truly have nothing. Where are we supposed to work? How are we supposed to feed our children? I sit waiting at the community kitchens from 8 in the morning. This is the result,” he cried, holding up an empty cooking pot. “I have two daughters—from where are we supposed to get food? Or is that it? Have you all conspired against us? I ask for what any Arab country or European country lives with: dignity and peace of mind.”

New York Times, Israel to Cut Ties With U.N. Chief Over Its Inclusion on Sexual Violence Blacklist, Ephrat Livni, May 28, 2026. The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, told Israel there had been an “increasing number of cases” of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, according to a letter shared by Israel’s U.N. ambassador.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said Thursday that his country would cut ties with the U.N. secretary general and his office, after the office’s decision to include Israel on an upcoming sexual violence blacklist over alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador, said that he had been officially informed by the secretary general’s office that Israel and its security services would be included in an annual report on conflict-related sexual violence. He called the decision “disconnected from the facts and reality.”

Hamas is also included on an associated list of countries and groups accused of using sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Mr. Danon denounced the decision, denied the accusations and accused the U.N. chief, António Guterres, of lying and of choosing not to fully investigate claims against Israel. “To put us and Hamas terrorists on the same list,” Mr. Danon said in a video. “That’s unacceptable.”

Friction between Israel and the United Nations has intensified in recent years, with Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, declaring Mr. Guterres persona non grata in 2024. It was a rare diplomatic designation that reflected Israel’s broader tensions with the United Nations following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Mr. Guterres’s term as U.N. chief will end this year, and it is not clear what Israel’s announcement that it is severing ties with his office means, considering the already dire state of their relations.

The U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, characterized Israel’s announcement as “symbolic” and unlikely to change U.N. operations. He said the organization would “continue to work with the Israeli Mission.”

“We think that member states should engage and continue to engage,” he said, adding that “engaging is always a better solution than disengaging.”

Mr. Dujarric declined to comment on the contents of the report, which he said would be shared with members of the Security Council on Thursday and made public in about 10 days.

U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Rights, Justice

New York Times, Former Judges Urge Inquiry Into Deal Trump Struck With I.R.S., Alan Feuer, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The motion was particularly significant because it asked the judge overseeing the initial suit against the I.R.S. to examine the terms of the deal.

A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges on Wednesday asked the judge who oversaw President Trump’s remarkable lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to reopen the case and conduct an inquiry into whether the hasty deal to resolve it could be challenged as an act of fraud.

The move by the former judges was one of an increasing number of legal efforts to attack the validity of the two extraordinary benefits that emerged from the agreement last week: a $1.8 billion fund that could compensate allies of Mr. Trump who claim they suffered “weaponization” at the hands of the federal government and the conferral of lucrative tax benefits on the president, his family and his businesses.

The motion by the former judges, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was a direct appeal to Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who closed the I.R.S. case last week after Mr. Trump voluntarily dismissed his suit. It asked her to bring the matter back to life under a rule that permits her to set aside a judgment she had made and examine the terms of the deal that appeared to have been reached in a plan to avoid that sort of scrutiny.

“The purported ‘settlement’ that was publicly disclosed after this court dismissed this matter raises profound questions about the parties’ candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system, which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice,” lawyers for the former judges wrote.

The judges are represented by Democracy Defenders, a nonprofit group, and two law firms, Susman Godfrey and Platkin L.L.P.

“It is a routine move for plaintiffs to dismiss cases without referencing any settlement,” a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Natalie Baldassarre, said in a statement. “This motion is frivolous and there is nothing improper about this agreement.”

The motion came as the fund faced stiff headwinds on Capitol Hill, especially among Senate Republicans who expressed deep skepticism about a pot of taxpayer money that could be used to issue payouts to Trump supporters, including the rioters prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

At the heart of the former judges’ argument was an assertion that Mr. Trump improperly used his lawsuit against the I.R.S. as a way to obtain “unlawful private benefits” for himself and his family and to create a fund that would dole out taxpayer money “without constitutional or congressional authority.” Moreover, the former judges claimed that the president tried to shield the deal from “judicial scrutiny” by “short-circuiting” Judge Williams’ ability to examine its terms.

Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, first sued the I.R.S. in January, claiming they were owed at least $10 billion because a former contractor at the agency had leaked their tax returns (and hundreds of others’) during the president’s first term in the White House. The Trumps claimed that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

But as Judge Williams dug into the suit, she began to have qualms about whether it was valid, given that Mr. Trump — by his own admission — was engaged in a form of legal self-dealing. The judge wondered whether there was an actual conflict at stake that she could adjudicate if the president was essentially on both sides of the suit, seeking damages from a federal agency that he directly controlled.

To get to the bottom of that question, Judge Williams ordered the parties in the suit to explain their position on the case. But just two days before those briefs were due, Mr. Trump abruptly withdrew his suit, telling the judge that she had no authority to question the dismissal because the I.R.S. had never formally responded to the claims.

Acknowledging that her hands were tied, Judge Williams quickly closed the case, but noted in her order that there had never been a “settlement of record.” Within hours, however, the terms of a deal surfaced in public in an agreement that was signed by a senior Justice Department official and detailed how the fund would work. The next day, the department released an addendum to the agreement giving the Trump family its own extraordinary boon: immunity from all past I.R.S. investigations.

In their court papers, the former judges laid out that sequence of events, telling Judge Williams that it showed the fraudulent nature of the agreement. The judges said she did not have to rule immediately that settlement was invalid, suggesting that she could first “commence an inquiry into the whether the court was deceived.”

The judges reminded Judge Williams that the Justice Department had fought on behalf of the I.R.S. against nearly identical claims that were brought by the other people whose tax returns had been leaked by Mr. Littlejohn. The I.R.S. had even written a 25-page memo, laying out an unused plan to defend against Mr. Trump’s claims.

In recent days, two other lawsuits have been filed seeking to block the compensation fund from making any payouts.

One of the suits was filed by two Capitol Police officers who were injured while defending lawmakers on Jan. 6 and claimed that the Trump administration had exceeded its statutory authority by setting up the fund without congressional authorization.

The other was filed by a former federal prosecutor who was fired after working on Jan. 6-related cases, a California college professor who was arrested while protesting an immigration raid, and the city of New Haven, which was targeted by the Trump administration for being a “sanctuary” city for immigrants. That suit claimed the fund violated the First Amendment and the Constitution’s equal protection clause because of the “blatant partiality” it showed in making money available to people who claimed to have been targeted by Democratic administrations.

Politico, Recent survivors of US boat strikes haven’t been found, bringing overall death toll to 199, Staff Report, May 28, 2026. At least 22 people survived an initial strike only to be hit again or die at sea during the campaign that began last September.

The death toll from the Trump administration’s monthslong series of strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean has risen to at least 199 people after survivors of recent attacks were not found.

The total includes at least 22 people who had survived an initial strike only to be hit again or die at sea during the campaign that began last September. That includes three people who survived two separate strikes this month, according to the U.S. military.

U.S. Southern Command says it notifies the U.S. Coast Guard of any survivors of such attacks, but those reports largely appear to be passed on to countries closer to the actual strike location.

When asked about any recent search and rescue efforts, Mexico’s navy said it had received an alert from the U.S. Coast Guard about the strikes this month but it did not mention survivors. The U.S. Coast Guard referred requests for more information to Mexico’s authorities.

The strikes have been contentious, with the Trump administration declaring that the U.S. is at war with Latin American drug cartels. They drew more backlash late last year after revelations that two people survived the first boat attack last September only to be targeted again in a follow-up strike and killed. Legal experts have said that would have violated laws governing armed conflict.

The Pentagon’s watchdog said this month that it plans to look into whether the U.S. military followed an established targeting framework when carrying out its strikes. However, the evaluation is focused specifically on what’s known as the six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle and not the legality of the strikes, the inspector general’s office said.

To date, only three people are known to have survived strikes and then been rescued. Two were rescued from a semi-submersible ship accused of carrying drugs in October and later returned to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.

UPI, Ex-CIA agent charged with stealing $40M in gold bars from the agency, Lisa Hornung, May 28, 2026. A former CIA agent is charged with stealing $40 million in gold bars, $2 million in cash and lying to the agency about his background. 

A former CIA agent is accused of stealing nearly $40 million worth of gold bars and about $2 million in cash from the agency, and lying to the agency about his education, military history and pilot license.

David J. Rush of Virginia, who is described in a criminal complaint as a former senior executive with a top secret clearance, was arrested last week and charged with theft of public funds, The Washington Post, USA Today and NBC News. He also claimed about $77,000 of paid military leave for which he wasn't entitled.

The FBI searched Rush's home last week and found 303 gold bars that weighed 2.2 pounds each and are estimated to be worth about $40 million, according to an affidavit written by Special Agent Matthew Johnson, USA Today reported.

The FBI seized the gold from the home along with about $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches, many of which were Rolexes.

From November 2025 and March 2026, Rush requested and received "a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses," the affidavit said. When the government visited the storage facility where it was supposed to be stored, most of it was missing. The documents don't list the reason he needed so much money and gold.

Rush had been in the Navy and was honorably discharged in 2015. But he allegedly told the agency that he was in the reserves for 10 years and took 744 hours of military leave during that time adding up to about $77,000, the affidavit said.

The affidavit alleges that Rush claimed to have a bachelor's degree from Clemson University and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. An FBI investigation found no record of him attending either school. He also claimed to have been a Navy pilot, but the investigation found no record of that, and the Federal Aviation Administration has no pilot's license registered to Rush.

Rush is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. He waived his right to a preliminary hearing, and a detention hearing is set for June 5.

Politico, DOJ makes broad case for presidential power in Maurene Comey case, Erica Orden, May 28, 2026. Maurene Comey alleged in her lawsuit that she lost her job “solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

A lawyer for the Justice Department outlined an expansive vision of presidential power under the Constitution during a pretrial conference Thursday in Maurene Comey’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over her termination last summer.

Comey, a longtime federal prosecutor in Manhattan, was abruptly fired without explanation via a letter citing only the Constitution’s Article II, which outlines the powers of the president, as the basis for her firing. She alleged in her lawsuit that she lost her job “solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

The Justice Department recently brought a second indictment against her father, a longtime foe of President Donald Trump, after a judge tossed an initial set of charges last fall.

DOJ lawyer Karen Lesperance said at the pretrial hearing that Comey’s firing was valid “even if there were political motivations.”

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman pressed Lesperance on whether there are any limits to the president’s Article II powers. Could the president, for example, decide to fire people in order to achieve an “all-white executive branch? Or all-black?” he asked.

Lesperance stammered in response, finally saying, “I can’t answer on behalf of the government.” Furman replied: “You’re here representing the government.”

Comey’s lawyer, Ellen Blain, described the Justice Department’s position as a “novel and breathtaking theory about the scope of Article II power.”

Blain also acknowledged a thorny road ahead in terms of discovery, saying she expects the government to attempt to withhold many documents based on executive privilege and deliberative-process privilege.

She said Comey expects to seek discovery from former Attorney General Pam Bondi, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton and Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean Buckley.

Bloomberg Law, Eleanor Ross Is US Judge Reprimanded for Sex in Chambers, Suzanne Monyak, Olivia Alafriz and Jacqueline Thomsen, May 28, 2026. Eleanor Ross is the federal district court judge who was subject to a private reprimand for having sex with a police officer in chambers in earshot of law clerks, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Ross, of the Atlanta-based US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2014. She previously served as a state court judge, a federal prosecutor in the district, and a prosecutor in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.

Ross and other court representatives didn’t return requests for comment sent Thursday through phone calls to chambers and via email.

A special judicial conduct committee of the Eleventh Circuit found a judge, who wasn’t named in the report, engaged in sexual intercourse in “chambers and during business hours” over the course of a two-year relationship, according to the panel’s recently released report. This relationship “demonstrated a gross lack of judgment” and resulted in a “chambers workplace that was extremely uncomfortable and troubling for clerks,” the report said.

The affair was with an unnamed police department commander, creating a “conflict-of-interest risk,” the report said.Police Commander

The officer was identified by the person familiar with the situation as Atlanta Police Department Deputy Chief Kelley Collier, who commands the department’s community services division, according to the department’s website.

The report said the officer had worked for the police department since 1998, serving as the “commander of a certain division” since 2025. Those years align with Collier’s biography on the police department’s website and his now-deleted LinkedIn profile.

The judge didn’t preside over any case in which the officer or the police department was a party between January 2022 and October 2025, according to the committee report.

“The U.S. Court of Appeals has not identified the police officer as being a member of the Atlanta Police Department,” a department spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “However, the Atlanta Police Department has made an inquiry with the U.S. Court of Appeals into the identity of the officer in question.”

Collier didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent via email, which generated an automated out-of-office response.Committee Report

The Judicial Conference’s judicial conduct and disability committee in a May 22 order affirmed a February misconduct finding by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit’s judicial council. A December special committee report laid out the allegations against and resulting investigation of the judge.

The report identifies the judge as someone who previously worked at a district attorney’s office, and said the judge has been friends with a district attorney since 1999. The judge’s affair spanned from 2023 to 2025 and made the judge vulnerable to extortion since their spouse wasn’t aware of it, the report said.

The report also notes the judge attended a primary election victory party for a district attorney, which generated news coverage and was held the night before the summer interns’ first day.

Ross worked at the Fulton County District Attorney’s office from 1998 to 2002 and from 2007 to 2011. She is the only active district judge within the Eleventh Circuit who previously worked for a district attorney’s office that had a contested primary election at the beginning of the summer in 2024: the May Democratic primary for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

The report also notes the judge had a criminal revocation proceeding the morning after the victory party. An archived version of Ross’s calendar during that period of time shows that such a hearing was scheduled for the morning of May 22, the day after the May 21 primary. An entry on that case’s docket confirmed that the hearing took place.

Ross received a private reprimand for her misconduct, after the special committee created to investigate a law clerk’s allegations against her said the judge “has demonstrated a strong propensity for rehabilitation and continued diligent service to the judiciary.” She also agreed to write apology letters to the former clerks interviewed during the investigation and not to serve as chief judge or other judicial leadership roles.

That penalty has received pushback for being too light, as it allowed the judge to remain anonymous and didn’t give litigants in her courtroom the opportunity to raise any conflict of interest concerns they might have.

“The judge’s misconduct “strikes at the heart of judicial integrity and destroys public confidence in an impartial, ethical court system,” Aliza Shatzman, who leads the Legal Accountability Project, which advocates for judicial law clerks, said in a statement released before Bloomberg Law published Ross’ identity.

The judge was also found to have improperly attended a partisan political event hosted by a district attorney’s campaign, and to have made false statements to judges investigating the conduct.Judge’s Background

Ross presided over the criminal case of reality television stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were sentenced in 2022 after they were convicted of bank and tax fraud. President Donald Trump pardoned the couple last year.

The judge also dismissed a lawsuit filed by Georgia’s two Republican senators at the time that challenged mail-in ballot procedures in 2020.

Ross is the first Black woman to serve as a judge on the Northern District of Georgia. She was born in Washington, the daughter of two school teachers. Her father died when she was eight years old and her older sister, who became a doctor, helped pay her way through the University of Houston’s law school, according to a 2015 Law.com story.

At her 2014 Senate confirmation hearing, Ross introduced her husband, Brian Ross, a former Clayton County prosecutor who currently serves as a Georgia state court judge.

One First Look, Analysis: Conduct Unbecoming, Steve Vladeck, right, May 28, 2026. A federal district judge who not only conducted an affair in their chambers but then lied about it (and threw a clerk under the bus in the process) deserved more than a "private reprimand."

For the better part of the last sixteen months, a lot of what I have written in this space has been, in one way or another, in defense of the federal district courts. As President Trump and his subordinates and supporters have escalated their rhetorical (and sometimes more than rhetorical) attacks on individual trial judges; as members of Congress have introduced bills to strip district courts of jurisdiction, cap their remedial powers, or impeach them for adverse rulings; and as a steady drumbeat of online invective has tried to recast every adverse ruling as a bad-faith act by a partisan judge, I have tried to make the case—repeatedly, and I hope persuasively—that most district judges are doing the unglamorous, constitutionally indispensable work of applying law to facts. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that the institutional legitimacy of the federal courts depends in no small part on the public’s continued willingness to trust them to do it.

That is exactly why a story like the one that emerged on Tuesday—about a February 11 Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council ruling regarding a judicial misconduct case—is worth dwelling on, even as it makes a defender of the district courts wince. In a nutshell, the case arises from a multi-year affair a district judge carried out with a senior officer in a local police department, including in chambers during business hours (and within earshot of law clerks). When one of the judge’s clerks complained to the district court’s Chief Judge, the “subject judge” not only aggressively denied the charge, but attempted to blame the clerk for trying to retaliate against the judge. The subject judge only came clean once a special committee appointed to investigate the matter discovered incontrovertible evidence of the affair—and even then, still tried to put some of the blame on their clerk. (The subject judge also attended a partisan political event and was … less than fully candid about it.) Despite all of that, the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council recommended only a “private reprimand,” because of “(1) the Subject Judge’s correction of the judge’s false statements and subsequent candor with the special committee; (2) the unlikelihood that the Subject Judge will engage in similar misconduct in the future, evidenced by the judge discontinuing the relationship with the Officer and commitment to avoid future partisan political events; and (3) the Subject Judge’s otherwise exemplary service to the court.”

As I explain below the fold, my own view is that a “private reprimand” was not a remotely sufficient punishment for the subject judge’s misconduct—not because of the affair, but because of the subject judge’s dishonesty and their transparent attempt to throw one of their own law clerks under the bus. Especially today, the federal judiciary needs to look not merely competent but conspicuously above reproach. A “private reprimand” of an unnamed district judge who carried on an extramarital affair in their chambers, lied about it to two chief judges, and tried to shift the focus to alleged retaliation by a law clerk does not look that way. It looks like the institution flipping over the (not-so-proverbial) cushion.

For those who aren’t paid subscribers, we’ll be back (no later than) Monday with our continuing coverage of the Supreme Court. For those who are, please read on.I. Factual Background

The facts, drawn from the Special Committee’s Amended Final Report and adopted in full by the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council, are not in serious dispute—largely because the subject judge eventually admitted to most of them. For roughly two years, from around October 2023 through October 2025, an unnamed United States District Judge sitting somewhere in the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) conducted an extramarital affair with a high-ranking officer of a local police department—a division commander who had been with the department since 1998. The officer visited chambers frequently, usually at lunchtime, in uniform, signing in on the law-enforcement log and storing a service weapon in a locker at the courthouse’s security entrance.

What turned a private indiscretion into a judicial misconduct matter was where the affair was consummated. On multiple occasions, the judge and the officer had sexual intercourse in the judge’s private office, during business hours, behind a door that—as investigators confirmed by acoustic testing in a similarly configured chambers—did not fully muffle the sound. Three of the six former clerks who were interviewed reported hearing, from their desks immediately outside the judge’s office, “kissing sounds,” “moaning,” and, on one occasion, the officer using the word “affair.” One clerk was so unsettled that she left for the day; another described losing focus and sleep; a former career clerk described feeling “powerless” to shield incoming term clerks from what was happening behind the door. Investigators went so far as to remove a sofa cushion from chambers and transport it across state lines for forensic testing (although the acid-phosphatase test came back negative).

These allegations were memorialized in a memorandum sent by the Chief Judge of the (unidentified) district court to Eleventh Circuit Chief Judge William Pryor in September 2025, based upon conversations the district court Chief Judge had with one of the subject judge’s law clerks (identified in the report as “Law Clerk A”).

Consistent with the Judicial Conduct and Disability (“JC&D”) Act of 1980, Chief Judge Pryor wrote to the subject judge on September 29, 2025, asking for a response to the allegations. The subject judge replied the same day, calling the allegations “outrageous” and “baseless,” denying ever having had sex in the courthouse, and professing not to know which “law enforcement officer” the complaining clerk could possibly mean. In a follow-up email to the district court’s Chief Judge later that morning, the subject judge wrote, “I am astounded and confused, and have no idea what this clerk is referring to or why [the clerk] has made such allegations”—and immediately advanced a theory that the clerk, whom the judge had recently disciplined for cell-phone use and remote-work issues, was retaliating against the judge. A second email the next day to Chief Judge Pryor reiterated the retaliation theory. It was only on October 10—after investigators had pulled security footage, interviewed clerks, accessed the officer’s LinkedIn profile, and removed the cushion—that the judge, now represented by counsel, recanted and admitted to the affair and the in-chambers sex.

The Special Committee made three misconduct findings: the affair-in-chambers itself; attendance at what the judge eventually conceded was a partisan political event hosted by a district attorney’s campaign; and a freestanding “lack of candor” finding for the September 29-30 falsehoods. It recommended, and the Judicial Council imposed, a private reprimand, with three add-ons that the judge agreed to: letters of apology to the six former clerks interviewed; foregoing service as chief judge if and when the subject judge becomes eligible for that position; and indefinitely refraining from service on any Judicial Conference committee. On May 22, 2026, the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability affirmed the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council’s ruling. And all of this was broken by Bloomberg Law’s Suzanne Monyak and Jacqueline Thomsen in a piece that went live on Tuesday.II. The Legal Architecture

For those who haven’t committed the U.S. Code to memory (“I get a little tripped up by Title 14”), a brief refresher: The JC&D Act, codified at 28 U.S.C. §§ 351-64, provides the exclusive statutory mechanism for addressing alleged misconduct by Article III judges short of impeachment. Complaints may be filed by “any person” under § 351(a), or, as happened here, “identified” by the chief circuit judge under § 351(b)—a power Chief Judge Pryor used on September 30, 2025, dispensing with the need for a written complaint. When a chief judge concludes that a complaint cannot be summarily dismissed or concluded, § 353(a) requires appointment of a Special Committee, which investigates and reports to the circuit judicial council.

The judicial council—the governing body of each circuit, composed of circuit and district judges—then decides what to do. Under § 354(a)(2), the council’s toolbox runs from the very modest (private censure or reprimand, public reprimand, certifying disability, ordering that no further cases be assigned for a limited time) to the more dramatic (requesting that the judge retire, or—where the council “determines . . . that consideration of impeachment may be warranted”—certifying that determination to the Judicial Conference, which may in turn transmit the matter to the House of Representatives). Rule 20(f) of the Rules for Judicial-Conduct and Judicial-Disability Proceedings then requires, for any complaint “identified” by a chief judge, automatic transmission to the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability for review, whether or not the subject judge petitions for review—which is how this matter ended up before Judge Tymkovich’s committee. Review is for “errors of law, clear errors of fact, or abuse of discretion,” with substantial deference to the circuit council and special committee.

That deferential standard matters here. Once the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council settled on a private reprimand, the JC&D Committee was never going to second-guess the sanction absent something close to an arbitrary-and-capricious showing—and it didn’t.III. Why a “Private Reprimand” Falls Short

I want to be clear about what I am and am not criticizing. The affair itself is, I think, the least interesting part of this story. Judges are human; foolish choices get made; marriages fail. If a judge had conducted a discreet extramarital relationship outside the courthouse and disclosed it candidly when asked, this wouldn’t be a story. The two features that make this case different—and that should have moved the needle to at least a public reprimand, in my view—are the subject judge’s lack of candor and the ginned-up retaliation claim.

Start with the lack of candor. As the Special Committee itself recognized, the judge’s September 29-30 statements were not casual evasions; they were affirmative, material falsehoods to Chief Judge Pryor and the district court’s Chief Judge, made in the course of a formal misconduct inquiry, and they triggered an investigation that consumed significant resources. The Committee correctly rejected the judge’s lawyerly attempt to import a grand-jury-style “recantation” defense, observing that by October 10, the falsehoods had already “substantially affected the proceeding” and the subject judge had every reason to suspect exposure was imminent. Federal judges insist—rightly—on absolute candor from every lawyer, party, and witness who appears before them. A regime in which a district judge can lie to two chief judges in writing, recant only when cornered, and receive a sanction the public will never see is not one that is calculated to inspire reciprocal candor from the bar.

The subject judge’s retaliation theory is, if anything, even more troubling. Within hours of receiving Chief Judge Pryor’s letter on September 29, the subject judge was already constructing a narrative in which the complaining clerk—the most structurally powerless person in the chambers environment—was the real wrongdoer, fabricating sexual-misconduct allegations because the judge had told the clerk to put their phone away and to spend more time in the office.

The judge stuck to that theory through the November interview, insisting that Law Clerk A’s report was “at least in part” retaliatory even after admitting that the underlying conduct was real. This is the part that should truly worry anyone who has ever clerked, or who cares about the people who do. Federal clerkships are short, intensely hierarchical, reputationally make-or-break appointments in which the judge has undue influence over not just the clerk’s day-to-day activities, but also over their next career steps. The judiciary’s own workplace surveys suggest that something like one in seventeen federal judges is abusive toward staff, and that almost none of it is ever formally reported, precisely because clerks understand that the system tends to protect the institution rather than them.

Law Clerk A did the thing the system is theoretically built to encourage—reported up the chain, through the district court’s Chief Judge, with corroborating detail—and the response from the subject judge was an accusation of bad-faith retaliation that the Special Committee felt obliged to recite, even as it found no misconduct in how the judge treated staff. (For what it’s worth, that finding struck me as hardly self-evident, much like the Special Committee’s charitable treatment of the subject judge’s … shifting … explanations for how they came to be at a partisan political event).

Given the weakness of the stated reasons for imposing only a “private reprimand,” one thought is that the Special Committee (and the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council) also worried that anything more would necessarily out the judge—turning this into a public spectacle that would only make things worse. To be clear, I agree that there are real, defensible reasons to keep the subject judge’s identity out of the public order. Naming the judge would, as a practical matter, name the clerks: the universe of recent term clerks in any given chambers is small, and the Eleventh Circuit covers only three states. There is also a legitimate institutional interest in not prejudging matters that might (in theory) be revisited, and in encouraging future subjects of investigation to cooperate rather than litigate. I take those points seriously.

But anonymity is not free. A private reprimand of an unnamed judge, accompanied by three negotiated side-agreements the subject judge proposed in their sanctions submission, does very little deterrent work and even less to reassure the public—or future clerks—that the judiciary takes lying to chief judges and scapegoating subordinates as seriously as it should. The Eleventh Circuit could have issued a public reprimand without naming the clerks; it could have referred the candor finding to the Judicial Conference for consideration of further proceedings under § 354(a)(2)(A)(vii); it did neither. (One might also point out that sufficiently clever sleuths might be able to find enough detail in the Special Committee’s report to identify the subject judge anyway—which would, presumably, only further undercut the case for anonymity.)

In all events, I keep coming back to the same point. We are in a period in which the political branches are openly challenging the legitimacy of the district courts. The answer to that test cannot be “trust us, we handled it”—particularly when the handling consists of a sealed letter, an apology no one outside chambers will ever read, and a promise not to chair committees the subject judge was unlikely to chair anyway. The district courts deserve the defenses they’ve been receiving over the last sixteen months. 

New York Times, Texas School Police Pepper-Sprayed, Tackled and Tasered Students, Clare Amari, Kristian Hernández and Asher Lehrer-Small, Photographs by Meridith Kohut, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). This article was reported in collaboration with The San Antonio Express-News as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

School officers across the state turned to heavy-handed tactics on children, often in response to minor misbehavior, our investigation shows.

• This girl was fighting her classmates. A police officer at her school, near Houston, blinded her with pepper spray, then kneed her in the face.
• This boy threw a punch during a lunchroom brawl. A school officer in Irving yanked him off his feet and slammed him into a metal cart.
• This 14-year-old was caught with a vape at his school in Mesquite. After he was restrained, an officer smashed him into a wall. “Who else?” the officer shouted at the teenagers gathered nearby.

Since the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in 2022, school districts across Texas have spent billions of dollars to station police officers on every campus in the state. The effort, the most ambitious in the nation, was intended to protect students from similar tragedies.

But the constant presence of officers has transformed the way many public schools manage discipline, subjecting students to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office, The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News found.

Officers in Texas displayed startling belligerence at times, grabbing or tackling students a fraction of their size over misconduct that often appeared to be minor. Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they wound up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which are prohibited in the state’s juvenile detention facilities but allowed in its public schools.

There is no comprehensive record of use-of-force incidents across the more than 1,000 public school districts in Texas. Many districts and police agencies declined to disclose their data to our journalists; others did not respond to public records requests. More than 200 provided some information, but in most cases, it was limited.

Still, by examining even that small share of records, our reporters identified more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents that occurred from January 2022 through December 2025. About 450 of those interactions were described in detailed reports, which we reviewed. We also watched video footage from over two dozen encounters.

The records provide a first-of-its-kind look at how Texas’ initiative around school policing has played out in districts large and small, urban and rural.

Many incidents began over misbehavior such as dress-code violations, vaping or schoolyard scraps. Officers, often summoned by principals or teacers, escalated some situations by shouting obscenities or insults. They used physical takedown tactics in about 60 situations when students ignored their commands, talked back or pulled away

New Yok Times, Court Orders Customs Chief to Address Compliance on Refunding Tariffs, Tony Romm, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The surprising demand to appear at a hearing suggested new concern about the Trump administration’s efforts to repay the full $166 billion owed from illegally imposed tariffs.

A federal trade court has ordered Rodney S. Scott, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to appear at a hearing next month on the Trump administration’s handling of roughly $166 billion in tariff refunds.

The unexpected demand, issued on Wednesday, hinted at a judge’s ongoing concern that the government has not fully complied with a directive to return all of the money amassed under duties that were declared illegal by the Supreme Court earlier this year.

At the heart of the matter are the so-called reciprocal tariffs that President Trump previously applied to imports from around the world. In February, a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court struck down those tariffs, finding that Mr. Trump had exceeded his authority under law. That decision forced the government to repay the money, plus interest.

Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Court of International Trade took the first, formal steps to compel the administration to begin the refund process. While Mr. Trump publicly opposed returning the money, his administration still worked to set up a system to do so. It officially began accepting importers’ requests for repayment in late April.

But the refund system does not allow all importers to recover the taxes they paid from tariffs imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The government said in a court filing in April that it could process refunds for only about $127 billion out of the approximately $166 billion collected.

Otherwise, customs officials have said little publicly about how they might handle the remaining imports that were subject to IEEPA tariffs. The affected goods include those on which tariff payments were calculated and finalized earlier in Mr. Trump’s trade war, and others that are subject to more complicated import rules, the government has previously indicated.

The lack of clarity prompted Richard K. Eaton, a judge on the trade court, on Wednesday to order a hearing for June, at which he directed Mr. Scott to “appear to answer the court’s questions as to the anticipated timing of Customs’ compliance with the court’s order.”

In a separate filing, the judge also cited concern about “millions” of entries for which the government has “not presented a proposal” for providing refunds.

Ted Murphy, a top trade lawyer at the law firm Sidley Austin, said it was “extraordinary” for the court to order the head of an agency to testify in such a manner. But he said it was highly suggestive that the court had grown frustrated with the Trump administration, after months of patience over the issue of tariff refunds.

Mr. Murphy said that the trade court had been clear from the start that the government must “give back everyone their money.” But the administration, he said, has set up a system in which many importers had to apply, and still others potentially had to sue, just to reclaim what they paid.

“The court and the government are far apart,” Mr. Murphy said. “That’s what this boils down to.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The court’s action could presage another round of intense legal wrangling between the U.S. government and importers over the extent of the president’s trade powers. So far, judges on the highly specialized trade court have repeatedly found against Mr. Trump, most recently ruling that his replacement tariffs — a 10 percent rate imposed on most foreign goods — violated the law. That case is on appeal and, if Mr. Trump loses, could add to the amount owed in refunds.

“We look forward to going back to court and making clear once again that these IEEPA tariffs were illegal and should be refunded immediately,” said Sara Albrecht, the chairman and chief executive of the Liberty Justice Center, which represented small businesses that had sued over the president’s tariffs.

Still, the plaintiffs in those suits could run into trouble showing they have legal standing to file their claims.

New York Times, Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry of E. Jean Carroll Over Trump Lawsuits, Glenn Thrush and Benjamin Weiser, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Carroll, who prevailed in a civil trial after accusing President Trump of sexual abuse, is the latest target in a Justice Department campaign going after his perceived enemies.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual assault, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The investigation centers on whether Ms. Carroll committed perjury in civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Ms. Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her, which the president last November asked the Supreme Court to overturn. She also won a $83.3 million civil judgment against him in another defamation case.

An inquiry into Ms. Carroll would represent the latest chapter in Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, which has been carried out by Justice Department officials. A number of figures who brought criminal and civil cases against Mr. Trump have come under the department’s scrutiny, including James B. Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and other adversaries of the president.

Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, opened the inquiry into Ms. Carroll, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. The investigation was reported earlier by CNN.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is said to have recused himself from the probe because of his prior representation of Mr. Trump, although officials from department headquarters have been involved in the inquiry.

The investigation comes at a volatile moment in a Justice Department that appears to be increasingly controlled by Mr. Trump, who has faced little pushback from department leadership as he accelerates his campaign of retribution against those who accused, challenged or defied him in the past.

Mr. Blanche has aggressively pursued investigations against people Mr. Trump has targeted. Last month, the department charged James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over a social media post of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47,” which prosecutors said was a threat against Mr. Trump. Mr. Comey has said he did not associate the phrase with violence and denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign kicked into high gear last September when he publicly demanded that the then-attorney general, Pam Bondi, move to prosecute several of his adversaries. Within several weeks, a newly selected prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia had indicted Mr. Comey and Ms. James. But both of those cases were thrown out by a judge, and, despite the newer indictment of Mr. Comey last month, the department has struggled to gain traction in a number of cases against Mr. Trump’s adversaries.

Ms. Carroll’s accusations are among the most severe leveled against the president, and he has long sought to demean and discredit her.

In one area of contention before the first trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote to the judge, accusing Ms. Carroll of concealing financial support her case received from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a strong critic of Mr. Trump’s.

The lawyers said the eventual disclosure of the funding raised “significant questions” about Ms. Carroll’s credibility. Her lawyers, in their own letter to the court, argued that Mr. Hoffman’s financial support was irrelevant to Ms. Carroll’s legal claims and that she had nothing to do with obtaining the outside funding.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hoffman did not respond Wednesday night to a request for comment.

In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. The jury also found that Mr. Trump had defamed her by saying on his social media site that her case was a hoax and a lie.

Ms. Carroll was awarded $5 million by the jury, a verdict upheld on appeal in December 2024, a month before Mr. Trump was sworn in for his second term, when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously rejected his request for a new trial. The panel said Mr. Trump had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings.”

Mr. Trump won a delay this month in another defamation case in which Ms. Carroll was awarded $83.3 million in January 2024 after another trial in Manhattan.

The verdict included $65 million in punitive damages after the jury found that Mr. Trump had acted with malice in defaming Ms. Carroll. Her lawyers argued to the jury that a large verdict was necessary to stop Mr. Trump from continuing his attacks on her, which he made at news conferences, in social media posts and during the trial itself.

Mr. Trump, who did not testify against Ms. Carroll at the first trial, took the stand briefly in the second. The $83.3 million verdict was also upheld by a Second Circuit appeals court in a unanimous three-judge ruling.

The appeals panel said Mr. Trump “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” on Ms. Carroll, and that she was subjected to public harassment as a result of his statements, including death threats and threats of physical injury.

The court ruled that Mr. Trump did not have to pay the judgment, as he intends to appeal to the Supreme Court.

It was not immediately clear why the investigation of Ms. Carroll was being conducted by Mr. Boutros, who is based in Chicago, although a nonprofit associated with Mr. Hoffman is there.

The Justice Department’s leadership also has made extensive use of a provision that allows the designation of cases to handpicked prosecutors across the country, regardless of whether possible crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.

The department assigned its investigation into John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, to the U.S. attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quiñones, because he was seen as more willing to pursue a case viewed as questionable by other offices, according to former officials.

The conduct of prosecutors under Mr. Boutros’s supervision has come under serious criticism in recent days.

Last Thursday, he announced that misdemeanor charges against people who had protested outside an immigration detention facility near Chicago last year would be dismissed.

In a hearing in downtown Chicago, Mr. Boutros said that potential misconduct by prosecutors during the grand jury process had led to the dismissal.

Defense lawyers said that prosecutors working under Mr. Boutros held conversations with individual grand jurors outside the courtroom about the case, a breach of rules.

Emptywheel, Analysis: More Grand Jury Shenanigans in Illinois, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 28, 2026. Shortly after the Broadview 6 (-2) case fell apart, Chicago US Attorney Andrew Boutros boasted to Jon Seidel for a May 22 story that his office was proactively conducting a review of other cases in which Sheri Mecklenburg was involved.

Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros confirmed Friday an “ongoing” review of grand jury presentations by his office that might have been tainted similarly to the case of the “Broadview Six,” which derailed Thursday amid revelations of apparent prosecutorial misconduct during grand jury proceedings.

A pair of high-profile fraud cases tied to Loretto Hospital are among those that could be affected by any such review. That’s because Sheri Mecklenburg, once the lead “Broadview Six” prosecutor who appeared before the grand jury, participated in the Loretto-related indictments.

But a motion to dismiss filed by the attorneys for Mahmoud Sami Khan, who was indicted last summer in a COVID fraud scheme, reveals that that same day — May 22 — prosecutors informed them that an AUSA who must be Mecklenburg engaged in conduct similar to that which occurred in the Broadview case.

On May 22, 2026, a day after Judge April Perry made her findings, the government met with undersigned counsel in a Teams meeting and disclosed that the grand jury in the Rabbitt case was the same grand jury as the above captioned case. The government further advised there may be an issue in the present case where AUSA A also vouched for witnesses or evidence, but qualified that it would be up to defense counsel to decide. The government indicated it would tender all transcripts to defense counsel and that it, in an abundance of caution, planned to seek a superseding indictment in the matter to attempt to cure any potential taint associated with AUSA A’s conduct

Khan describes that grand jury transcripts show the AUSA did the following:

Eight distinct categories of misconduct reoccur throughout the proceedings. Considered collectively, they obliterated the grand jury’s independent functioning and the integrity of the process via: (1) repeated personal vouching for witnesses and the strength of the government’s case; (2) treatment of the indictment as a foregone conclusion and assurances about post-indictment events; (3) inflammatory characterizations of the defendants, including name-calling and folk-wisdom metaphors; (4) disclosure of extra-record information including off-the-record negotiations with a subject’s counsel; (5) familiarity and rapport-building with the grand jurors that compromised their independent role; (6) disclosure of related charging decisions, including the flight of one subject to Dubai and the prosecution of another in a related matter; (7) mischaracterizations of legal principles upon which the undersigned defendants were ultimately indicted; and (8) mischaracterization of evidence specific to the undersigned defendant in a way that compromises the integrity of the evidence.

As noted, the government wants to simply supersede the indictment to cure it of taint. But Khan is seeking to have the whole thing dismissed with prejudice, just like the Broadview case.

He’s doing so on two related grounds. First, he has been pushing for a Speedy Trial, even while the government has been trying (unsuccessfully so far) to stall the trial until the alleged mastermind of the fraud is extradited back to the US. The trial was due to start on July 9, but any superseding indictment would delay that and probably grant the government’s wish to try them men together, all due the government’s misconduct.

Khan has also been prejudiced by the timing and manner of the government’s disclosure. Counsel was advised that the government ordered the grand jury colloquy transcripts some time ago, in other words, it was aware of the potential misconduct but, it did not advise Khan or the Court of any potential concern, any proposed review, or any investigation until May 22, 2026 — the day after Judge Perry’s findings in the Broadview Six case. By that point, pretrial preparation for the July 9 trial was at full sprint, motions in limine were due, and the trial date was a few weeks away. The parties had appeared before the Court in this matter for status hearing on March 31, 2026 and April 23, 2026 (the same day the government submitted redacted grand jury transcripts to Judge Perry). Khan was denied the opportunity to litigate the misconduct from a posture in which the trial calendar permitted a full and orderly evidentiary inquiry. As discussed below, the resulting prejudice extends to Khan’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, see infra Section II.B, and to his ability to defend against a now-pending superseding indictment that the government has signaled is forthcoming, see infra Section II.E.

But in addition, Khan argues that the government did not disclose this misconduct right away (and doesn’t say this, but might not have disclosed it were it not for Judge April Perry’s exposure of the misconduct in the Broadview case).

More On Iran War

New York Times, The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords, Vivian Nereim, Isabel Kershner and Elian Peltier, May 28, 2026. The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.

In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon.

As a result, the meandering ultimatum that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israel for countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?

“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.”

Two Western diplomats in the region said that no one was really taking the idea seriously. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy.

Asked to explain the connection between peace negotiations with Iran and expanding the Abraham Accords, a White House spokeswoman did not answer directly. Instead, she referred to remarks made by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, when he suggested that U.S. agreement on a deal with Iran could be made contingent upon countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar agreeing to recognize Israel.

“I think those countries owe it to us,” he said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal, if they don’t sign.”

The Saudi and Qatari governments did not respond to requests for comment.

More Global News

New York Times, Lebanese Resigned to a Long War, Even if U.S. and Iran Make a Deal, Christina Goldbaum, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). Few in Lebanon believe that diplomatic efforts to end the wider war will bring peace to their country, as clashes between Israel and Hezbollah intensify in the south.

Once again, there has been a cease-fire in Lebanon for weeks.

And, once again, the fighting has not stopped.

Israel is still bombarding much of the south and east of the country. Israeli drones are still buzzing low over the skies in Beirut, the capital. Hezbollah is still attacking Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory, and firing rockets into Israel. The death toll is still rising.

And now — though a truce was declared in April, and there has been talk this week of a potential U.S. deal with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor — resignation is setting in across Lebanon that a meaningful end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah is not coming anytime soon.

Instead, Israel has vowed to intensify its military campaign in Lebanon and pushed deeper into the country beyond the territory it already occupies, ordering sweeping evacuation orders for two southern cities.

“I have no trust in either Israel or the U.S.,” said Ghinwa Ftouni, 42, in Baisariyah, a village in southern Lebanon. “Just listen to the massive bombing,” she added, as the thuds of Israeli strikes echoed from a few miles away.

Her disillusionment reflects the past two years of war in Lebanon, but also decades of dysfunction in which the country has lurched from crisis to crisis — its fate often determined more by outside powers than its own fractured leadership.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 27, 2026 [Trump's Texas-Sized Problem], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 28, 2026. In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator.

President Donald J. Trump endorsed the scandal-ridden Paxton last week after Senate Republicans had dumped $90 million into the race to defend Cornyn. Democrats will now use their advertisements calling attention to Paxton’s many scandals against them.

As Philip Elliott of Time magazine noted, Republicans can look forward to dumping another $250 million into trying to get Paxton elected, money that they needed to flip Democratic seats elsewhere.

Trump backed Paxton because he didn’t think Cornyn was loyal enough to him, despite the fact that Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time. Trump preferred Paxton’s attacks on Democrats and his flaunting of his MAGA identity despite—or perhaps because of—Paxton’s many scandals.

As CNN’s Patrick Svitek explained, in 2015, shortly after he took office as Texas attorney general, Paxton was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud, a case ending in March 2024 with an agreement that Paxton would pay restitution and complete community service. In 2020, Paxton’s top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office. He fired four of them. A judge later agreed they were fired improperly and awarded them $6.6 million. In 2023 the Texas House, dominated by Republicans, impeached Paxton on a bipartisan vote; under pressure from Trump, the Texas senate acquitted him. And then, last year, his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”

Trump appears to see politics as a dominance sport, much like the mixed martial arts fighting promoted by Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose arena is currently going up on the lawn of the White House for the fights Trump will host on his birthday, June 14. Brian Wiechert of WBAL-TV explains that workers are putting up a massive 90-foot-tall structure called The Claw to loom over a temporary octagon fighting arena in a way that the White House and the Washington Monument will be framed for television during the event.

With his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving of the Rose Garden to create a patio that looks like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and now the framing of the White House through a UFC arena, Trump has asserted his dominance over the People’s House. Similarly, with his purging even of loyalists in favor of extremists, he is asserting his dominance over the Republican Party, turning it fully into the MAGA Party.

In a similar moment in the 1850s, elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.

Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.

Frustrated that the existing parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were not taking a strong enough stand against the demands of elite enslavers, those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery abandoned their old political allegiances and came together. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.”

As voters swung away from the Democrats in the 1850s, those Democrats left in office represented the most extreme districts and were themselves the most extreme members of the party. They tried to rally their base by appealing to racism, warning that Black Americans would murder white people unless they remained enslaved and insisting that anyone opposing the spread of slavery was endangering the country and that the U.S. had always been a nation of and for white men.

The echoes of that tactic today are blaring as Trump and MAGA Republicans try to cement their power through racism and culture war issues. Trump today insisted—completely falsely—that ethnic Somalis in Minnesota, almost all of whom are American citizens, are “all crooks.”

Media Matters yesterday reported that Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio said he expected those Trump supporters convicted of crimes for their actions around the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would use the money Trump has promised them from the $1.776 billion slush fund to spread “conservative culture” and to run for office to take over the system.

The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “

But Talarico seems to have gotten the memo. He welcomed Cornyn supporters to his campaign and responded to the Republican attacks by telling Ben Meiselas of Meidas Touch: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”

He has refused to take the bait and has stood firmly on the idea of a government that works for everyday Americans. To Meiselas, he made a point of suggesting that “many of my family members, my friends, my neighbors” voted for Trump because they thought he would lower costs, end forever wars, release the Epstein files, and “drain the swamp.” Instead, “he’s done the exact opposite.” Talarico said he wants to “speak directly to those Texans who feel disillusioned, who feel like the system doesn’t work for them, that it only works for billionaires and puppet politicians like Paxton and Cornyn.” If “we can bring those Texans together across all these divisions in our politics, if we can see past the distractions and the culture war tactics, I think we can do something extraordinary,” Talarico said. “We can end thirty years of one-party rule in Texas, and we can transform American politics in the process.”

Today his campaign announced a tour called “THE PEOPLE vs. KEN PAXTON.”

Unlike anti-Nebraska candidates in 1854, Talarico and other Democratic candidates this year have the advantage of running against a party whose leader is openly corrupt. In addition to the $1.776 billion slush fund, the fortune in cryptocurrency deals, and so on, David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported today that “the contractor given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being paid an inflated and excessive profit margin.” The government is paying $13.1 million for the pool work, seven times what Trump initially said it would cost.

Maxine Joselow and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times also reported today that Trump is using $7 million worth of the entrance fees visitors have paid to national parks across the country to pay for the work on the reflecting pool. He is also using nearly $60 million in those national park fees to repair nine ornamental fountains in the capital.

And the administration appears determined to hide what it’s doing. It proposed today in sweeping language that it will require federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement, a tool Trump has relied heavily on to protect him from potential exposure for wrongdoing. As Don Moynihan explained in Can We Still Govern, the new role would make it impossible for the American people to know what government officials are doing.

That secrecy is hurting the American people in obvious ways. Sarah Owermohle of CNN reports that the administration has barred key U.S. officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from talking to officials at the World Health Organization, from which Trump withdrew the U.S. This limitation has been relaxed slightly since the outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship with U.S. passengers and a breaking Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now U.S. officials can attend small virtual meetings “in a listening capacity.”

After a trip yesterday to Walter Reed Military Medical Center, after which Trump posted that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY” and the official White House social media account went further, posting, “PERFECT BILL OF HEALTH!” and, in even bigger letters, “PERFECT PHYSICAL.” Trump once again appeared to fall asleep today at a Cabinet meeting.

He did, though, threaten to “blow up” U.S. ally Oman if it doesn’t “behave” over Trump’s demands to open the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Yesterday the U.S. military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the number of boats struck in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean to fifty-eight. At least 194 individuals have been killed. The administration insists the boats are trafficking drugs but has produced no evidence for that accusation, and as Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today, “military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.”

Taking these patterns, along with others, into consideration, G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers assesses that although Texas voters haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in thirty-two years, the Texas Senate election is a toss-up.

In the midterm election of 1854, northerners tore through the ranks of congressmen who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected eleven senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North. Still disorganized in 1854, by 1856, those in the new coalition opposed to the Slave Power had turned to a new political party, the Republican Party.

By 1859, that new party found a champion, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who articulated a new vision of government that worked not for a wealthy cabal, but for the American people.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Saddles Republicans with Paxton, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 28, 2026. Paxton can damage Republicans beyond Texas.

Donald Trump got what he wanted. His preferred candidate — scandal-plagued MAGA extremist Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — clobbered a fixture in Texas politics, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). Cornyn became the second incumbent senator to lose in a primary, something that, until this year, virtually never happened.

Not one to look beyond immediate gratification, Trump likely could not pass up the thrill of at least seeming to manipulate his base to do his bidding, regardless of the results in the general election. He nevertheless procrastinated until the campaign’s closing days, when Paxton’s lead was already secure (and the risk of Trump’s embarrassment low). (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

Paxton has been Democrats’ dream opponent. “Since he became a state official more than ten years ago, he’s fended off criminal indictments, whistleblower allegations and an impeachment by the Texas House,” Houston Public Media recounted. “He was acquitted in the Texas Senate. His estranged wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last summer on ‘biblical grounds.’” And that does not even include his Herculean efforts to invalidate the Affordable Care Act and overturn the 2020 election; zealous litigation to criminalize abortion; frivolous attempt to criminally investigate Beto O’Rourke; unrelenting attacks on immigrant nonprofit groups; alleged racist enforcement of voting laws; and an absurd plea deal sentencing former Waco Attorney Adam Hoffman “to 60 days in county jail for his sexual abuse of a minor over the course of several years.”

While the hardcore MAGA primary voters embraced Paxton, one can imagine millions of right-leaning independents and Republicans may be turned off by such a character. How many of those voters will flip in the general election to Democratic nominee state senator James Talarico, or just stay home?

Paxton’s win certainly puts Texas in play for Democrats, as G. Elliott Morris explains, thanks to “a potentially very weak Republican nominee in Paxton (scandal-ridden, polling 2-3 points behind Cornyn in head-to-heads against Talarico), a Democratic recruit who plays well with independents and suburban voters, eye-popping primary turnout numbers, a diversifying Democratic electorate, a continued Latino swing back toward Democrats in special elections, and Trump’s poor numbers in the state.”

Trump does not apparently care that taking down a Republican who would be more electable in November could deprive himself of a Senate majority. As he explained when backing Paxton, who he claimed “was also very loyal to your favorite President, ME,” over Republican stalwart Cornyn (“VERY disloyal to me”), it is all about him.

Ever since Trump endorsed Paxton, Senate Republicans have been hopping mad, but could they have been surprised? As Politico reported recently:

Republicans are coming to grips with a president who less than six months out from the midterms is focused on racking up a body count of lawmakers who have crossed him, asserting his control over his party and burnishing his legacy — putting the GOP legislative agenda and the survival of its majorities at risk.

They should have figured this out months, if not years, ago: Trump cares not one wit about their careers or agenda. Trump’s handling of the Epstein files or his anti-immigrant overreach (which forfeited Republicans’ advantage on their strongest issue) might have been clues.Subscribed

Paxton very likely would have won the primary comfortably without Trump’s help. But having endorsed Paxton, Trump will not be able to hide from the fierce backlash if, as many Republicans fear, Paxton loses in November.

A Paxton victory aided and abetted by a wholly self-absorbed president would give Texas Democrats their first statewide win since 1994 (and the first elected U.S. senator since 1988) and deliver what could be the seat determining which party holds the majority. Moreover, a Talarico win would unleash sheer panic in Republican ranks.

The potential that Texas — Republicans’ richest electoral treasure trove and its ideological home base since George HW Bush — could slip through their fingers would be a fitting comeuppance for a party that has jettisoned every principle, parroted every Trump inanity, and twisted itself in knots struggling to cling to power.

Between now and November, Paxton’s nomination may well torment Republicans. In addition to unleashing another senator more willing to buck Trump for his remaining months in office, Paxton’s nomination means Republicans will have to fork out tens of millions of dollar trying to save a seat that would ordinarily be, at the very worst, “likely” Republican.

“National Republicans are growing increasingly worried that having Paxton as the nominee will force them to spend massively to hold onto the seat, sucking away resources from other top battlegrounds,” Politico reported. “Some among the GOP donor class say that if Paxton prevails the general election will be Trump’s problem to deal with, and think he will need to deploy MAGA Inc.’s $300 million war chest.” Even if Trump is willing to spend his own money (and why not hang onto it for another coup or his post-presidency?), MAGA Inc. millions spent on Paxton won’t be available for other races. No wonder Senate Republicans are seething.

In addition, down ballot Republicans in Texas will rightfully worry that Paxton will depress turnout and/or make it impossible for them to distance themselves from the most wackadoodle elements in the party. Paxton’s nomination compounds the difficulty Texas Republicans will have in holding on to re-redistricted seats whose lines were drawn with the (faulty) assumption that Hispanics would stick with the party.

Even worse, just as Republican nominee for the Senate Rep. Todd Akins (R-MO) became the poster boy for extremism and hostility to women in 2012, Paxton may well become the national avatar for MAGA craziness and scandal in 2026. What better example of dysfunction and grotesque corruption could Democrats ask for in making the case that we need a Senate to check (not accelerate) Trump’s mayhem and graft? (If things are bad now, imagine a MAGA controlled Senate with the likes of Paxton calling the shots.)

Certainly, if Democrats are to win this very Republican state, they will have to spend and organize as they have not done in Texas for decades. They must intensify outreach to Black and Hispanic voters. Still, while this remains an uphill fight for Democrats, few could have imagined a year ago that we would be discussing just how fragile is Republicans’ hold on Texas.

Republicans’ newest midterm headache highlights the toxic political environment and self-destructive revenge mentality Trump has visited on his party. Losing the Texas Senate seat, and with it the Senate majority, would be karmic payback for a party that has never managed to stand up to him.  

New York Times, Bare-Knuckle Tactics and Brash Promises: How Howard Lutnick Operates, Michael Rothfeld and Ana Swanson, May 28, 2026. Before becoming U.S. commerce secretary, Mr. Lutnick controlled 818 companies. A review of their dealings sheds light on his freewheeling first year in government.

When auto executives learned last year that President Trump’s punishing tariffs on foreign car parts were set to cost their companies billions of dollars, they were rattled.

Eager to lessen the blow, they began calling and visiting Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in his spacious, wood-paneled office near the White House, where they negotiated, complained and cajoled in talks that stretched on for months.

Then, in October, there came a breakthrough: Mr. Lutnick and his aides informed the automakers that the administration would offer a credit on auto part tariffs for American-made cars, retroactive to when the levies began in May 2025, according to six industry executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

What happened next would leave them flabbergasted, with billions of dollars fewer than they had anticipated — and would drive home the sense that Mr. Lutnick, a 64-year-old billionaire, was a commerce secretary unlike any in recent memory.

In a freewheeling first year in office, Mr. Lutnick, one of President Trump’s most influential deputies, has used the power of the federal government in unorthodox and aggressive ways. Some of his tactics have been creative. Others were blunt-force. Still others were downright outlandish.

All of them were honed during decades at the helm of the Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, a period in which he amassed wealth and prominence and assumed leadership positions at a dizzying array of corporate entities, at least 818 in all.

Now, as Mr. Lutnick presides over a broad and important agenda, from planning the 2030 census to regulating technology flows to rivals like China, a close examination of those companies’ dealings offers lessons on how he has operated as commerce secretary.

Drawing on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of records related to Mr. Lutnick’s career, the review shows him to be an intuitive deal maker with an appetite for risk and a willingness to walk up to ethical lines. It also reveals that he has acted as a steward of firms that have paid more than $50 million in penalties for money laundering, misleading disclosures and other offenses.

By turns charming and caustic, Mr. Lutnick as commerce secretary has kept negotiating partners off balance, pressuring foreign countries and American companies alike into making concessions while pushing legal boundaries in seeking new revenue for the government.

A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick “has delivered important wins for the American people,” including “bringing manufacturing back to the American soil” and securing investment commitments from Japan.

But his approach has sown uncertainty for the automakers and others, leaving officials at home and abroad to ask: What are these tactics all about? And where did they come from?

Loss and Profit

At Cantor, Mr. Lutnick came of age in the “rough and tumble” world of voice-trading treasury brokers — brash men shouting prices on trading floors, said Rupak Ghose, who worked at a competing financial firm.

ImageA young Howard Lutnick stands before a whiteboard on the trading floor of Cantor Fitzgerald.Mr. Lutnick was still in his 30s when he rose to become the leader of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“Howard was a hustler, an opportunist and someone who was willing to push the boundaries,” said Mr. Ghose, who now writes and advises on financial technology. “He’s an entrepreneur who will find a way to make some money somewhere, right?”

In an early example of his bare-knuckle tactics, Mr. Lutnick took control of his firm from an ailing Mr. Cantor while still in his 30s, a move that an adviser to Mr. Cantor’s wife described as a “palace coup.”

In the following years, Mr. Lutnick would lead Cantor through Sept. 11, 2001 — despite losing his younger brother and more than 600 other employees at the firm’s offices in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center — and on to enormous success, earning a reputation as a creative thinker with a penchant for pushing boundaries in pursuit of profit.

Along the way, many of his more than 800 corporate entities would explore new opportunities for Cantor, while others held valuable assets, including a 1950s Jaguar and at least five luxury homes.

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Some of the Cantor ventures, like real estate and cryptocurrency, took off. Others, like a foray into the gambling business and an advertising-related investment alongside the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, did not.

Even amid the successes, Cantor and its affiliates were sometimes accused of breaking rules. Companies linked to the firm paid more than $50 million in law enforcement penalties for money laundering, misleading disclosures and other offenses, records show.

In another case, a jury awarded an inventor, Russ Slifer, $400,000 over a patent for a video game controller, after finding that a Cantor affiliate had violated its agreement to buy and license it. Cantor had agreed to generate a set amount of licensing fees, and then buy him out or return the patent if it did not, he said in court filings.

“Cantor decided that it wanted to create a third option; keep the patent and not pay me,” Mr. Slifer wrote in a 2018 LinkedIn post. He said in an interview that he never dealt with Mr. Lutnick personally.

In separate litigation, a trustee for a New York financial broker, Refco Group Ltd., said his firm had invested $8 million in Cantor gambling ventures through one of its affiliates but saw its investment decimated after Cantor transferred the affiliate’s assets to other companies. Some of Refco’s claims were dismissed, and the parties settled in 2019 for undisclosed terms. The trustee declined to comment.

Mr. Lutnick has also battled over money in his private life. He withheld about $500,000 in co-op maintenance on his penthouse at the Pierre, overlooking Central Park, after his unit was damaged in a storm. (A representative said he had done so on advice from his insurer; Mr. Lutnick eventually paid what he owed.)

Lincoln Square, Political Opinion: The Exquisite Corpse and the DNC Autopsy, Rick Wilson, May 28, 2026. So the Democratic National Committee has finally, mercifully, vomited out its long-overdue post-mortem on the 2024 catastrophe, eighteen months after the body cooled, and friends … you should read this thing. Not because it’s good.

Read it as a document from a party that would rather lose than offend elements of its own base. Read it as an indictment of a consultant class living on hopium from the glory days of Barack Obama. Read it as a fossil record of exactly why The Lincoln Project exists, why we keep showing up, and why the work isn’t optional anymore.

The report is titled, “Build to Win. Build to Last.” A heroic title for a document whose Executive Summary section literally reads “This section was not provided by author.” The Conclusion? “This section was not provided by the author.” The Appendices? Same. The document is full of redactions and excisions. It’s the Epstein Files of political party autopsies.

The DNC, in a delicious act of institutional self-loathing, has bracketed half the report’s claims with footnotes that essentially say we really don’t want to own the brutal reality of all this. They published it anyway. This is what passes for accountability in the party that lost to a convicted felon running on grievance, gold sneakers, and the cognitive capacity of a ten-day-old sponge cake.

Let me draw your attention to page 72, because this is the part where the patient describes the murder weapon and then politely declines to disarm the killer.

The autopsy admits … in writing, with their own pollsters on the record…that the Trump “Kamala is for they/them” ad was “very effective.” It admits the campaign was “boxed.” It admits … and I quote the bureaucratic euthanasia of the next line … “if the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”

Nothing. Would. Have. Worked.

Reading that, you can smell the cowardice and the rot and the suicidal ideation of a coalition inclined to punish internal apostasy even at the cost of victory.

The Democratic Party’s official explanation for getting their teeth kicked in by a $20 million transphobic carpet-bombing is: we had no answer and there is no answer.

This is both a lie and an admission that their multibillion-dollar political enterprise, with its cozy consultant class and its pollster priesthood, its focus-group obsessives, its “blowback score” fetishists, and its boutique messaging firms operating out of converted DC townhouses charging $40,000 a month for the privilege of losing…had nothing to offer. The best they could come up with was a Friday afternoon immigration speech with no amplification.

That’s not from me. That’s from their own pollsters, weeping into their oat milk lattes.

Here is what worked, because someone had to do it: The Lincoln Project ran the counter-ad they couldn’t.

While the geniuses at Harris HQ and the billion-dollar boondoggle of Future Forward were workshopping whether they would be permitted by a fraction of a fraction of a handful of a tiny sliver of their own base to even point out the actual Trump-era federal policy that the ad was attacking … yes, gender-affirming care for federal inmates was Trump’s own policy, you can look it up, the New York Times fact-checked it … we got to work and cut an ad called “He/Him.”

There was a solution because our team made it. We said it out loud: Trump is gaslighting his own base about his own record. We said Trump is for he/him. We turned the knife. We flipped the script. We didn’t care if the Democratic base hated it, because they were never the targets of the ad. This is Cartesian object/subject confusion of the first degree.

From inception to delivery? 36 hours. No focus-group bullshit. No Zoom calls with “allies” to get their permission. Create. Hit hard. Go.

Give to Lincoln Square

We are always on offense because that’s what works against fascists and their propaganda machines.

Because we are not paralyzed by the consultant terror of saying something a focus group in Bucks County might wince at. Because we literally don’t give a damn about internal opposition if that internal opposition blocks a chance at victory. Well-meaning Democrats whispered to us at the time, “Well, the trans community won’t like it.” Oh …you think they’re better off under Trump, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller?

We were Republicans. We know how Republicans fight. We fight back the same way, and we aim for the spleen — not for a win at the regional high school Speech and Debate contest.

This is the entire thesis. The Democratic Party, per its own autopsy, has:

A messaging apparatus terrified of its own shadow. A 2022 internal review whose five recommendations were not implemented on the proposed timeline, if at all … a sentence so passive it could only have been written by someone who has never been punched in the face.

An organizing infrastructure that didn’t seriously start mobilizing until Labor Day. A “Bidenomics” branding strategy that tied the sitting president’s name directly to voter pain like a “kick me” sign written in his own handwriting. And a pollster class who, when confronted with the most effective ad of the cycle, concluded that the correct strategic response was to keep doing what wasn’t working.

This is a party that needs more than an autopsy. The Democrats are lagging behind with their own donor class, and they can’t figure out that smart, rich people won’t invest in what doesn’t work.

That’s us. That’s the work.

The trans ad wasn’t an aberration. It was a beta test. They are running it again in 2026 as a way to turn off the debate over Trump’s failed economy, insane war, and lavish corruption.

You’ll see culture war ads come back in Senate races, in House races, in school-board races, in city-council races in towns you’ve never heard of. They will run it until something stops them, and the Democratic Party, by its own forensic confession, does not know how to stop it.

They are, even now, in 2026, intellectually dishonest with themselves, litigating their 2024 polling memos like the corpse on the table is going to sit up and explain itself.

We don’t have time for that. The autocrats don’t wait for your strategic plan. The deepfakes don’t wait for your training summits. The next “Kamala is for they/them” …and there will be a next one, and a next one, and a next one … is being storyboarded right now in a windowless room in Alexandria, Virginia.

And here is the part where I am, against my better instincts, going to be generous. Because the report does, in soft flashes, like a lighthouse seen through fog, demonstrate something resembling self-awareness. The Strategic Implications section warns, plain as a slap, “don’t assume identity politics will hold male voters of color.” Oh, do you think?

The North Carolina case study praises Josh Stein for running away from “abstract issues and identity politics” and toward housing, disaster relief, the cost of eggs. The authors concede that “the focus on social issues over economic issues alienated socially conservative voters who prioritized kitchen-table concerns.” Allow me to use the sociological term “duh” here for your elucidation.

“Stein’s pathway to victory, in contrast, should encourage others to do the same: focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability.”

The autopsy knows the patient was killed by performative pronoun discourse and a refusal to talk about grocery prices. The autopsy knows.

Knowing isn’t doing. But credit where it’s earned: the diagnosis is sitting right there in the chart.

But telling elements of the base that their beloved identity politics is political poison simply can’t be done. Blowback, you know.

Here is what actually worked in 2024, and the autopsy says it out loud, in chapter after chapter, like a confession after too much wine. Jacky Rosen in Nevada, 4.5 points ahead of Harris … won by running on healthcare costs, scheduling stability, and wages. Ruben Gallego in Arizona, eight points ahead of Harris, won by being a working-class guy who didn’t talk down to working-class people.

Elissa Slotkin outperformed Harris in 68 of Michigan’s 83 counties by talking about manufacturing jobs and the auto industry like she actually gave a damn about Macomb County. Stein, as noted above, won North Carolina by talking about housing and disaster relief while a Trump-endorsed maniac was on the ballot next to him.

The pattern is so painfully obvious you could spot it from low Earth orbit: when Democrats run on the price of groceries, the cost of rent, the wage you take home, and the dignity of your job … they win, or they at least lose like contenders.

When they run on the etymology of pronouns and the boutique issues that peaked politically in the early 2000s … they get vaporized. The economic climate this year is beyond perfect for the Democrats … and six months out, they’re thinking, “Well, now it’s time to pivot to gun control,” or whatever boutique issue they wrongly assume is what a working-class voter who can’t afford gas to get to work really wants.

So here is the pitch, and I’ll keep it brief because brief is what they never are: when the official party of the opposition publishes a 192-page document explaining, with its own footnotes, that it cannot win the fights it is currently in, somebody has to pick up the sword.

Love us or hate us, that’s us. We will never coddle you. We will never tell you pretty lies about civility and the imaginary rewards for never standing up to your own base. We will never let you believe that the loud edges of your party will beat the technical brilliance of the GOP’s apparatus.

That is the work. That has always been the work.

And in the wreckage of this autopsy, the work has never mattered more.

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An image of a hallway in a school. Officers are walking alongside students.

Texas is home to nearly 400 school district police departments, more than all other states combined. Officers across the state have grabbed, tackled and shocked students. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

New York Times, ‘Up for Grabs’: Can Democrats Sway Young Men Who Have Soured on Trump? Kellen Browning and Emma Goldberg, May 28, 2026. Many Gen Z men who voted for the president are dismayed by his time in office. But they are not hearing an appealing pitch from Democrats, either: “Both parties kind of get it wrong.”

Frustrated with the cost of everyday necessities, Carter Tice, a 20-year-old tree landscaper in Milwaukee, voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because he promised economic relief — but Mr. Tice has not yet seen any improvement.

In Phoenix, Jared Cassell, a 25-year-old server and restaurant manager, voted for Mr. Trump because of his opposition to abortion but has been horrified by immigration raids and regrets his decision.

And Owen Cheyne, 21, from rural Klamath Falls, Ore., who listens to podcasts from influencers who supported Mr. Trump in 2024 — like Joe Rogan and Theo Von — has been disappointed by the president’s much-heralded tariff policy.

“He said it would get bad because of tariffs, and he said it would get better,” Mr. Cheyne said. “We’re still waiting.”

Propelled by economic anxiety, young men lurched to the right in the 2024 election — a 15-percent swing from 2020 — and helped Mr. Trump win the White House, setting off a round of soul-searching among Democratic politicians and strategists who were dismayed that this once-reliable demographic had fallen away.

A year and a half later, some Gen Z men say they are disillusioned by Mr. Trump’s second term. A variety of surveys have shown that young voters are veering sharply away from Mr. Trump since the last presidential election, and recent New York Times/Siena College polls found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating with young men fell by about 10 percentage points in the past few months.

At the same time, despite efforts from Democratic politicians to reach young men by diving into “bro culture” after the 2024 election, many young men said Democrats had not yet landed on a compelling message that resonated with them.

In interviews with two dozen young men in Wisconsin, Maine, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Illinois and Washington, D.C., many said their disaffection reached far beyond politics. They said they felt daunted by an unforgiving job market, pessimistic about matters as personal as their romantic prospects and broadly unsure of where they fit in society.

Neither party, they said, was speaking to their concerns.

New York Times, Massie Visits Greene in Costa Rica for Fishing and ‘Spicy’ Political Talks, Tim Balk, May 28, 2026 (print ed.). The two Republican critics of President Trump — Thomas Massie, who lost his House primary last week, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress — met up in the tropics.

After Representative Thomas Massie, an outspoken Republican critic of President Trump, lost his seat in a closely watched primary last week, he brushed off questions about his future political aspirations by saying he was going to run — back to his off-the-grid Kentucky farm.

But as Mr. Massie pondered his future, and recovered from the most expensive House primary in recent years, he set a heading this week for sandier horizons, flying to Costa Rica. Waiting for him when he landed was a familiar Trump antagonist from the Republican Party: former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Ms. Greene, who maintains a house in the Central American country, arrived there earlier this month for a two-week birthday trip, her fiancé, Brian Glenn, said in an interview. In recent days, Ms. Greene invited Mr. Massie and his wife, Carolyn, to hop a last-minute flight to join them at the house, and the congressman arrived on Tuesday, Mr. Glenn said.

In an image that Mr. Glenn posted on Instagram, Mr. Massie and Ms. Greene stand shoulder to shoulder as they smile broadly at the beach, their partners at each of their sides. The group spent Wednesday fishing, Mr. Glenn said, as they celebrated Ms. Greene’s 52nd birthday.

“We had a good time out on the water,” said Mr. Glenn, adding that they had some “spicy” conversations about politics. Mr. Massie needed a “break” after his bruising campaign, Mr. Glenn said. “We’re happy to provide a break.”

On Wednesday night, Mr. Massie posted a video on social media showing him and Ms. Greene smiling and laughing while fishing.

The visit has brought together two longtime friends who have faced a backlash from Mr. Trump over their criticism of the war with Iran and the government’s handling of files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr. Massie, a seven-term congressman with a penchant for drinking raw milk and registering patents for inventions, saw his profile rise in recent months as he sparred with Mr. Trump, saying he could not fully abide by the Republican agenda if it included “bankrupting the country or covering up for pedophiles or starting another war.”

Mr. Trump responded by putting his full weight behind Ed Gallrein, a farmer and a Republican primary challenger to Mr. Massie. The president visited the district to call on Kentucky voters to oust Mr. Massie, describing him as the worst congressman in the history of the Republican Party.

In the end, Mr. Massie could not overcome Mr. Trump’s intervention, losing by about 10 percentage points in his deep-red Kentucky district. But the congressman cast his defeat as a success of sorts, telling The Cincinnati Enquirer that his opponents had “bought a congressional seat.”

“But in the process we’ve inspired a lot of people to run for state rep or city council or even Congress,” Mr. Massie told the newspaper, adding that he might run again himself. “And so I do think it was a victory, even though we lost.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Massie filed a statement of candidacy allowing him to raise money for a potential run for office in 2028, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The document suggested he would be seeking office in the House. But Mr. Massie wrote on social media that he had not decided what office, if any, he might run for in two years.

Ms. Greene, a conspiracy theorist who was once one of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters in Congress, resigned from office at the start of the year, saying she did not wish to endure a bruising primary against a Trump-backed opponent.

Like Mr. Massie, she had forcefully criticized the president over the Epstein files. Mr. Trump, in turn, branded her a “traitor.”

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump betrayed the man who tried to name an Interstate after him, Heather Delaney Reese, May 28, 2026. Yesterday morning, the President of the United States shared an image of himself sitting on a rhinoceros holding a rifle beside giant letters reading “NO RINOS!” It was not about hunting.

“RINO” is MAGA shorthand for Republicans In Name Only. The President of the United States used violent imagery to target members of his own party, and then spent the rest of the day trying to further solidify his power. Because the night before in Texas, four-term Republican Senator John Cornyn lost his primary to Ken Paxton, the candidate Trump endorsed. Cornyn had spent a year courting Trump, even introducing legislation to name an 1,800-mile highway after him. None of it mattered. Trump held a grudge because Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Paxton was impeached by his own Republican legislature on sixteen counts. National Republicans have been warning he could lose them a Senate seat they’ve held for thirty years. Trump handed him the nomination anyway, because punishing disloyalty mattered more to him than keeping the Senate.

The pattern never bends. A week ago, Trump’s hand-picked challenger defeated Thomas Massie in the most expensive House primary in American history, $32 million spent to destroy a man whose crime was pushing to release the Epstein files. There is no level of devotion that buys safety. Loyalty is not something Trump feels or returns. It is only something he demands. And the moment you stop being useful, you become the next target.

But today in South Carolina, Republicans crossed the line and joined Democrats to kill Trump’s redistricting push to erase the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, on the very first day of early voting, as more than 32,000 people cast ballots in record turnout. A White House adviser called it “a betrayal.” But it was not betrayal. It was conscience. The very Republicans Trump threatened with a meme are the ones who just proved he can be stopped. And in Texas, the man Trump chose over Cornyn now faces Democrat James Talarico in November in what could become one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. Trump keeps creating his own opposition. And every time he does, he makes November a little more possible.

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U.S. Health Care, Inflation, Economy

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Unlocked Repost: Curing U.S. Health Care, Part II, Paul Krugman, right, May 28, 2026. How we got to Obamacare.

On March 23, 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — usually referred to either as the Affordable Care Act or as Obamacare — into law. Joe Biden, then the vice president, could be overheard whispering “This is a big fucking deal.” And it was.

The ACA, which went into full effect in 2014, created a system of subsidies and regulations designed to make health insurance available to many Americans who had previously been left out. It worked: In 2010 there were 47 million uninsured people in America, but by 2016 this number had dropped to 27 million. This still fell short of the universal health insurance that every other advanced nation has, but it was real progress.

In 2017, during his first term, Donald Trump tried to destroy the ACA, replacing it with the American Health Care Act — legislation that would have eliminated most of the provisions that expanded health insurance under Obama.

At the time the Congressional Budget Office projected that the G.O.P.’s replacement bill would nearly double the number of Americans without health insurance, increasing the total uninsured population by 23 million and undoing all of the progress achieved under the ACA.

However, the attack on Obamacare failed by one vote in the Senate, and the ensuing public backlash against the G.O.P. delivered a large victory in the 2018 midterms to the Democrats. After these developments many observers assumed that the ACA had become a more or less permanent feature of American life.

Such assessments, however, failed to take into account the deep hostility of the U.S. right toward policies that expand access to healthcare. As we’ll see, this hostility goes back generations. And the second Trump administration has taken actions that the CBO projects will add 16 million people to the rolls of the uninsured by 2034.

How did we get here? And now what? Today’s primer will analyze the political economy of U.S. healthcare since the 1940s and the combination of danger and opportunity created by the current crisis.

Below I will discuss the following:

• US health care on the eve of Trump II
• 80 years of US health politics
• The Obamacare story
• The new assault on healthcare
• U.S. health care on the eve of Trump II

In my previous primer I explained that access to modern healthcare depends crucially on having health insurance. I also explained that there are three ways nations can guarantee more or less universal health insurance: insurance that covers major healthcare costs for every citizen.

1. The government can provide care directly, as it does most famously in the UK.

2. It can act as the universal insurer, as it does in Canada.

3. It can use regulations and subsidies to corral private insurers into covering everyone, as it does in the Netherlands.

All of these methods can work and do work in some nations.

By contrast, the U.S. healthcare system is a patchwork of different programs that falls short of universal coverage yet achieves a relatively high level of coverage using versions of all three approaches. In the U.S. the private sector plays a larger role in healthcare than in any other advanced country. However, we are far from having a free-market healthcare system.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: One reason why the rent is too damn high, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, May 28, 2026. In the last few years, rents across the United States have skyrocketed. According to a Congressional Research Service analysis of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, more than 22.7 million renter households, or nearly half, were considered “cost burdened” in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

According to a March 2026 report by Zillow, “rents have increased by 36.2%” since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the typical asking rent was $1,910, according to Zillow, meaning that a household would have to earn at least $76,400 a year to be able to comfortably afford it.

Rising rents in the U.S. are a complex problem. But one factor contributing to higher costs for renters is the concentration in ownership. According to a new report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, private equity firms now own “at least 11,800 apartment buildings with almost 3 million units,” or approximately 13% of apartment units in the U.S.

The number of apartments owned by private equity firms has increased dramatically in recent years. Over 1.3 million apartment units have been acquired by private equity firms since just 2021.

In some states and major metro areas, the concentration of apartments owned by private equity firms is even higher. In Georgia, for example, private equity firms own nearly one-third of all apartments and in North Carolina, private equity owns nearly one in four apartments. In many major metro areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, and Orlando, over 30% of apartment units are owned by private equity.

Many states with high concentrations of apartments owned by private equity have also experienced large increases in the number of renters who are cost burdened. Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Texas, and Florida, for example, all have a high percentage of private equity owned apartments and have had some of the biggest increases in cost burdened renters. This is also true for many large metro areas, including Tampa-St. Petersburg, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

Private equity landlords can lead to higher rent prices, aggressive evictions, and lower quality of life, according to the report.The private equity playbook for rental units

Private equity firms buy apartment buildings to increase their value and then sell them, ultimately providing a return to their investors. In order to maximize this return, private equity firms hike costs for tenants while cutting down on their own costs, such as maintenance.

This leaves tenants paying more to live in a lower-quality apartment.

The report points out several examples of this. In San Diego, after Blackstone purchased dozens of properties with almost 6,000 units in 2021, tenants reported mold, cockroaches, and rats in their buildings. At the same time, their rent was increasing by up to $200 per month. In Arizona and Florida, Starwood Capital raised rents by 30% or more at certain properties while tenants at other low-income properties complained about leaking appliances and mold. In some cases, widespread maintenance issues and rising costs have led to unionization efforts by tenants in private equity-owned properties.

Another profit-maximizing strategy employed by private equity exploits low-income housing. Private equity firms acquire buildings funded by low-income housing tax credits at a low cost while rent restrictions still apply. Then, once those restrictions expire, they increase rents and sell the properties for a large profit. There are half a million units in the U.S. whose rent restrictions will be lifted by the end of the decade. Blackstone, for example, has focused on this tactic, spending over $5 billion on purchasing low-income housing in 2021 alone.

A ProPublica investigation from 2025 found that private equity firms and other wealthy investors frequently exploit a loophole that allows them to get out of the rent restrictions on buildings funded by low-income housing tax credits earlier than they normally would be able to. According to ProPublica, this loophole has remained in place largely due to lobbying by private equity firms and developers.AI rent collusion

The added fees, maintenance issues, and aggressive evictions that tenants face are compounded by the fact that many of the private equity firms are effectively colluding to raise rental prices.

As Popular Information has reported on previously, many private equity firms use a property management software called RealPage, which offers an AI-optimized algorithm for determining rents.

In January 2025, RealPage and private equity firms including Blackstone, Cortland, and Greystar were sued by the Department of Justice and attorneys general in ten states. The lawsuit alleged that RealPage had created a “cartel” by getting nonpublic information from competing corporate landlords about their rental units and using it to create its price-setting algorithm, which all of the participating landlords then had to use to set their rental rates. Essentially, RealPage allows corporate landlords to collude and inflate their prices through a third party, instead of having to directly exchange information with each other.

RealPage’s algorithm has come at a significant cost to tenants. A report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers from December 2024 found that in 2023, rent inflation caused by RealPage cost American renters more than $3.6 billion. On average, the report found that renters in units whose price was set by RealPage were paying an additional $70 per month, but in some metro areas, that number could exceed $100.

May 27

Top Headlines

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: GOP Concerned Texas Could Flip Blue, Board of Peace Gets Zero Funding, UFC Arena at White House, Trump May Curb Travel to Airports, Aaron Parnas, right, May 27, 2026. Ahead of the World Cup, the Trump administration is drawing up plans that could severely disrupt international travel to major airports in sanctuary cities, Trump’s “Board of Peace” has reportedly received no funding to date in another blow to the White House, construction on the UFC arena at the White House is beginning, and Republicans are growing nervous about a possible blue Texas after Ken Paxton’s victory.

More Global News

• New York Times, Global Supply Shortages Deepen, Threatening Jobs and Growth, River Akira Davis, Catie Edmondson, Eshe Nelson, Peter S. Goodman and Suhasini Raj, May 27, 2026. After three months, the fallout of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is spreading, with developing countries bearing the brunt of the shortfall.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: White House Denies Iranian State Media’s Outline of ‘Unofficial’ Deal, Leo Sands, Euan Ward, Abdi Latif Dahir and Hari Raj, May 27, 2026. The reported draft agreement said Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for the United States’ lifting its naval blockade.

Top U.S. Political Stories

• New York Times, News Analysis: Cornyn’s Defeat Fuels Tensions With President Trump in Senate G.O.P., Carl Hulse, May 27, 2026. Senators are angry President Trump turned on a respected former leader whom they consider a loyal Republican. Now Mr. Trump faces resistance from his own embittered ranks.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Texas Republicans Get What They Deserve, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 27, 2026. What did John Cornyn think was going to happen?

More On U.S. Law, Immigration, Rights, Courtts, Crime, Law

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25, 2026 [ICE Pepper-Sprays U.S. senator], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 27, 2026. Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Big John Deflated, Andrew Egger, right, May 27, 2026. If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase. Outside his party, he’s already a lame duck with catastrophically low approval and a stalled agenda. But as he weakens outside the building, his remarkable influence inside seems only to grow over a party eager to drink the Kool-Aid at his request.
• New York Times, A Blue Texas May Be More Than a Dream for Democrats, Nate Cohn, May 27, 2026. Ken Paxton’s victory for the Republican nomination and a big shift among Hispanic voters have put a Senate seat within reach.
• New York Times, In Alabama Case, Supreme Court Faces First Major Test of Voting Rights Act Ruling, Abbie VanSickle, May 27, 2026. Republican leaders in the state have asked the justices to clear the way for a congressional map that a lower court found discriminated against Black voters.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Do Not Pity Big John, William Kristol, right, May 27, 2026. Just after 9:00 p.m. last night, soon after it became apparent that Sen. John Cornyn had lost his primary to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico posted:

Top Stories

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: GOP Concerned Texas Could Flip Blue, Board of Peace Gets Zero Funding, UFC Arena at White House, Trump May Curb Travel to Airports, Aaron Parnas, right, May 27, 2026. Ahead of the World Cup, the Trump administration is drawing up plans that could severely disrupt international travel to major airports in sanctuary cities, Trump’s “Board of Peace” has reportedly received no funding to date in another blow to the White House, construction on the UFC arena at the White House is beginning, and Republicans are growing nervous about a possible blue Texas after Ken Paxton’s victory.

Reuters has confirmed that the Trump administration is considering plans to halt customs and immigration processing at major airports located in so-called “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the proposal could suspend international travel and cargo operations at airports in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, though no final decision has been made. Travel industry groups warned the move could severely disrupt tourism, airlines, and global commerce, especially with millions of international visitors expected for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Critics argue the proposal would weaponize federal airport operations in the administration’s broader immigration crackdown and intensify conflicts with Democratic-led cities and states.

A Financial Times report says Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” initiative for Gaza reconstruction has not received any money in its official fund four months after launching. According to the report, some donors instead routed contributions through a separate JPMorgan account that reportedly lacks independent transparency requirements. Trump introduced the initiative in January as a major international effort aimed at rebuilding Gaza following the Israel-Hamas war. The report raises new questions about oversight, accountability, and how reconstruction funds connected to the project are being managed.

Trump’s push to pressure more Muslim-majority countries into joining the Abraham Accords as part of a potential Iran deal is reportedly being met with skepticism and quiet resistance from key U.S. allies in the Middle East. Officials from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan reportedly view the demand as politically unrealistic and potentially dangerous, especially given strong public support for Palestinians and ongoing tensions from the Gaza war. Some diplomats believe Trump is raising the issue mainly to satisfy hawkish domestic political allies rather than expecting it to become a serious condition of negotiations with Iran. The proposal has added uncertainty to already fragile regional diplomacy as the U.S., Israel, and Iran remain locked in escalating military and political tensions.

Trump moved a planned Cabinet meeting from Camp David back to the White House because of expected heavy rain as negotiations over ending the Iran war enter a critical stage. The meeting comes amid conflicting signals from the administration about whether a peace agreement with Iran is close, especially after recent U.S. strikes on Iranian targets and backlash from conservative allies who fear Trump may concede too much. Trump also lashed out at media coverage suggesting the emerging deal could favor Iran, accusing major news organizations of trying to portray any agreement as a humiliation for the United States.

A WIRED investigation found that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly monitoring what they call “anti-tech extremism” as public anger grows over artificial intelligence, data centers, and fears of mass job displacement. Internal documents obtained through public records requests show fusion centers and federal agencies tracking protests, online discussions, and activist movements critical of AI and large tech infrastructure, with some reports warning that anti-technology sentiment could evolve into violence. Civil liberties advocates argue the category is dangerously broad and could be used to surveil peaceful protesters, environmental activists, and critics of the tech industry under the guise of counterterrorism. The reporting also highlights growing concern that the Trump administration is expanding domestic surveillance powers to target political dissent tied to AI, corporate power, and technology policy.

Former President Joe Biden has sued the Justice Department to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from private conversations with his memoir ghostwriter, arguing the materials contain deeply personal discussions that should remain protected under privacy exemptions in federal disclosure laws. The recordings were originally withheld by the Justice Department but are now scheduled for release after pressure from the conservative Heritage Foundation and congressional Republicans. The dispute is tied to the classified documents investigation led by former special counsel Robert Hur, whose report raised concerns about Biden’s memory and cognitive sharpness. Unless a court intervenes, the recordings are expected to be released publicly on June 15. Trump responded by calling him a crooked politician:

New photos show the construction of a UFC arena at the White House: Image

An Associated Press investigation found that suicides among ICE detainees have reached unprecedented levels during Donald Trump’s second term, with at least 10 detainees dying by suicide since January 2025. Experts and public health officials say the deaths point to major failures in mental health care, oversight, and detention conditions, including delayed treatment, isolation practices, inadequate screenings, and poor monitoring of high-risk detainees. Many of the men who died had no violent criminal records and reportedly experienced severe stress, fear, loneliness, and communication barriers while in custody. The report also details repeated violations of ICE detention standards across multiple facilities operated by private contractors, county jails, and federal partners.

Texas primary results:

Sen. John Cornyn lost his Republican primary runoff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton despite years of supporting Donald Trump’s agenda, showing that past criticism of Trump still carries major political consequences inside today’s GOP. Trump endorsed Paxton late in the race, arguing Cornyn had not supported him “when times were tough,” while Paxton allies painted Cornyn as insufficiently loyal to the MAGA movement. The loss highlights growing tensions between establishment Senate Republicans and Trump-aligned hardliners, with even top GOP leaders privately preferring Cornyn as a safer general election candidate. Democrats now hope Paxton’s controversies could make the Texas Senate race more competitive against Democratic nominee James Talarico.

Democrats are increasingly optimistic about flipping Texas’ Senate seat after Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary, with many viewing Democratic nominee James Talarico as their strongest statewide candidate in decades. Party strategists believe Paxton’s legal controversies, impeachment history, and ties to Donald Trump could make him vulnerable in a difficult national environment for Republicans. Talarico has drawn attention for his fundraising strength, strong early polling, and appeal to younger and moderate voters, though Republicans are already attacking him as too progressive on cultural issues. Despite the enthusiasm, Democrats acknowledge that winning statewide in Texas remains a major challenge after decades of failed attempts to turn the state blue. Trump celebrated the result:

Former Rep. Colin Allred defeated Rep. Julie Johnson in a Democratic primary runoff for Texas’ heavily Democratic 33rd Congressional District after Allred dropped out of the Senate race and returned to House politics. The race became competitive following redistricting changes and featured tensions over immigration policy, ICE, and financial ties to companies connected to immigration enforcement. Allred, who previously lost a Senate race to Ted Cruz, positioned himself as a more prominent Democratic figure after earlier stepping aside for Jasmine Crockett in the Senate primary. Johnson’s loss, along with Rep. Al Green being defeated in another Texas primary, reflects a broader reshaping of Democratic leadership in the state following recent redistricting battles.

Rep. Christian Menefee defeated longtime Rep. Al Green in a Democratic primary runoff after Republican-led redistricting forced the two incumbents into the same Houston-area district. Menefee, a freshman congressman and former Harris County attorney, emphasized his legal fights against the Trump administration, while Green highlighted his long record as one of Trump’s most outspoken critics in Congress. The race also drew attention because of millions of dollars in outside spending from a cryptocurrency-backed super PAC supporting Menefee. Green’s loss marks the end of a lengthy congressional career and reflects broader political shifts reshaping Texas districts after aggressive GOP redistricting efforts.

More news:

North Korea says it tested several advanced weapons systems during its latest missile launches, including new battlefield nuclear warheads, AI-guided nuclear-capable cruise missiles, and precision-guided rocket artillery. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reportedly supervised the tests and called for accelerated modernization of frontline military forces near the border with South Korea. The launches come as Kim continues expanding North Korea’s nuclear arsenal following the collapse of diplomacy with Donald Trump in 2019 and deepening ties with Russia during the war in Ukraine. South Korea confirmed multiple projectiles were launched into western waters, though it did not immediately verify all of North Korea’s claims.

At least one person was killed and nine others remain unaccounted for after a massive chemical tank implosion at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging plant in Longview, Washington. Officials said the ruptured tank contained “white liquor,” a hazardous chemical mixture used in paper production, and lingering instability at the site has complicated rescue and recovery operations. Several workers and a firefighter were injured, with some suffering burns and inhalation injuries, while local hospitals treated multiple victims in conditions ranging from fair to critical. The incident has also renewed scrutiny of the plant’s safety history after previous workplace violations and recent complaints filed with Washington state regulators.

All evacuation orders have been lifted in Garden Grove, California, after authorities successfully prevented a potentially catastrophic explosion at a chemical tank containing toxic and flammable methyl methacrylate. The emergency forced up to 60,000 residents from their homes over several days as firefighters worked around the clock to cool the overheating tank and reduce pressure buildup. Officials said a malfunction in the refrigeration system caused the tank to dangerously overheat, but emergency crews ultimately stabilized the situation before an explosion or major chemical leak occurred. Local leaders say city, state, and federal investigations will now examine how the incident happened and whether safety regulations were violated.

Trump has increased the U.S. refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 people to allow more white South Africans, specifically Afrikaners, to enter the country under a special refugee program. The administration claims white South Africans face racially motivated violence and discrimination, though South Africa’s government strongly rejects those accusations and says there is no evidence of systemic persecution. Since taking office, Trump has largely frozen refugee admissions from the rest of the world while prioritizing this program, with only a handful of non-South African refugees admitted during the same period. Critics say the policy marks a dramatic break from traditional refugee standards and reflects broader ideological shifts in the administration’s immigration agenda.

Experts are questioning the Trump administration’s explanation for delaying a major $14 billion weapons package for Taiwan, arguing the pause is unlikely to be related to the U.S. war with Iran. Analysts note that the weapons systems under consideration would not be delivered for years, making claims that they are needed immediately for operations in the Middle East difficult to justify. The delay has fueled concerns in Taiwan that Trump may use arms sales as leverage in negotiations with China following his recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The situation has heightened uncertainty about U.S. support for Taiwan as tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to grow.

The U.S. military carried out another strike on a suspected drug-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing one person and leaving two survivors after the vessel exploded during the operation. The strike is part of a broader Trump administration campaign targeting alleged cartel-linked boats in Latin American waters, a campaign that has reportedly killed nearly 200 people since last year. Critics and legal experts have raised concerns about the lack of public evidence showing the vessels were actually carrying drugs, while the Pentagon’s inspector general has launched a review into whether proper military targeting procedures were followed. The Trump administration argues the operations are part of a wider war against drug cartels tied to the U.S. overdose crisis.

The American Cancer Society has added a blood test called Shield to its list of recommended colorectal cancer screening options for the first time, aiming to increase screening rates among people who avoid colonoscopies or stool tests. The test detects DNA fragments from cancerous tumors in the blood and is about 83% effective at finding colorectal cancer, though experts say it is less effective at detecting early-stage cancers and precancerous polyps. Doctors emphasized that colonoscopies remain the gold standard because they can both detect and remove potentially dangerous growths before they become cancerous. Health experts say the updated guidelines reflect growing concern over rising colorectal cancer rates, especially among younger adults, and the need to expand access to screening options.

The European Commission is preparing to reserve most of a valuable satellite radio spectrum band for European companies, a move that could significantly limit access for U.S. firms such as SpaceX and Amazon’s satellite business. EU officials say the proposal is aimed at strengthening European technological sovereignty, secure communications, and independence from foreign-controlled infrastructure, especially as competition over space technology intensifies. The plan could spark tensions with Washington because American companies currently dominate much of the spectrum and may lose access when existing licenses expire. European leaders argue the shift is necessary for security and economic resilience, while critics warn it could trigger retaliation from the United States and escalate transatlantic technology disputes.

Iceland’s foreign minister, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, warned that the country could face a “Brexit moment” ahead of its upcoming referendum on whether to resume European Union accession talks, citing concerns about misinformation, foreign interference, and AI-generated propaganda. She accused opponents of using rhetoric similar to Nigel Farage and Reform UK while warning that Russia and other outside actors could try to influence public opinion. The referendum comes as Iceland reevaluates its global alliances amid rising tensions involving the United States, Greenland, and broader European security concerns. Polls show the country deeply divided, with debates over sovereignty, fishing rights, and economic integration likely to dominate the campaign.

Washington, D.C. will host a massive FIFA World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall during the 2026 tournament, even though the city itself is not hosting any matches. Organizers say the event will connect the World Cup with celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary and attract large numbers of international visitors to the nation’s capital. City leaders are positioning D.C. as a major tourism destination during what is expected to be one of the busiest travel summers in years. The fan zone will be located near the U.S. Capitol and is expected to feature large public watch parties and cultural events tied to the tournament.

More Global News

New York Times, Global Supply Shortages Deepen, Threatening Jobs and Growth, River Akira Davis, Catie Edmondson, Eshe Nelson, Peter S. Goodman and Suhasini Raj, May 27, 2026. After three months, the fallout of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is spreading, with developing countries bearing the brunt of the shortfall.

At the onset of the war in the Middle East, industry officials and experts warned that the closure of one of the world’s most vital maritime waterways would trigger acute shortages of oil, gas and other critical commodities. Three months into the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, those warnings are materializing across the globe.

Before the war, roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne crude oil and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas passed through the strait. The region is also among the world’s largest suppliers of products derived from oil and gas, including fertilizer and naphtha, a liquid used in everything from plastic wrap to industrial inks.

Much of the world has largely experienced the crisis through price shocks. Physical supply shortages have afflicted economies across Asia. Developing countries everywhere, especially in Asia, have been hit the hardest, as shortfalls of oil, gas and their derivatives have strained everything from farming and cooking to medical imaging. Governments across the region have rationed power, drawn down emergency stockpiles and scrambled for alternative supplies.

“It’s not just a price shock, it’s explicit shortages,” said Krishna Srinivasan, a director at the International Monetary Fund. “In the context of shortages, industry scales back, people lose their jobs, and this has a secondary impact on growth,” Mr. Srinivasan said.

Here is the state of play in the major energy and commodity supply crunches gripping Asia and the rest of the world.The most visible early supply shocks struck crude oil and liquefied natural gas. Both fuels depend on passage through the Strait of Hormuz from major producers like Kuwait and Qatar, with most shipments bound for buyers in Asia.

Japan, which typically sources more than 90 percent of its oil from the region, saw crude imports plummet 67 percent in April. Singapore, which generates 95 percent of its electricity from natural gas and relies on Qatar for roughly a quarter of its liquefied natural gas imports, has issued sweeping energy-conservation guidelines across commercial districts.

While wealthier nations like Japan, Singapore and China can tap strategic reserves and outbid rivals for alternative gas supplies, developing economies have suffered the deepest disruptions. Shortfalls of gas for power generation and oil refined into diesel and gasoline have forced governments to reduce demand.

In Bangladesh, starved of affordable natural gas, the government has imposed widespread rolling blackouts. Vietnam has rolled out mandatory energy rationing in industrial hubs. The Philippines declared a state of emergency in late March, shifting government operations to a shortened workweek and limiting air-conditioning in public buildings.

More On Iran War

 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: White House Denies Iranian State Media’s Outline of ‘Unofficial’ Deal, Leo Sands, Euan Ward, Abdi Latif Dahir and Hari Raj, May 27, 2026. The reported draft agreement said Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for the United States’ lifting its naval blockade.

Iranian state television said Wednesday that it had obtained a draft of a preliminary deal with the United States, which the White House quickly dismissed as untrue, calling the described memorandum a “complete fabrication” amid tense negotiations.

According to the reported draft, Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial marine traffic in return for the United States lifting its naval blockade. Iran’s broadcaster projected the “initial, unofficial” 14-point agreement as one in which Iran “cemented its power in the Strait,” while laying out a potential path to peace with the United States.

President Trump, speaking at the start of a Cabinet meeting, did not immediately address the back-and-forth or any of the details under negotiations. He said that the U.S. side was “not satisfied” so far with the state of talks, adding a familiar threat: “Maybe we’ll have to go back and finish it, maybe we won’t.”

Mr. Trump also said he did not feel political pressure to end the war, which has raised fuel prices around the globe. Iranian officials “thought they were going to outwait me,” he said, adding, “I don’t care about the midterms.”

It was unclear what the back-and-forth about the Iranian state television report might mean for the negotiations, which appeared to be at risk after the United States and Iran ratcheted up hostilities this week. The United States attacked Iranian boats and launch sites early Tuesday in what it called “self-defense strikes.” Two American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military matters, said Iran had deployed mine-laying boats in the strait and flown attack drones near U.S. ships.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps responded by vowing a “decisive reciprocal response” to any cease-fire violations and the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, suggested that the country could renew strikes on U.S. military installations in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian officials have said that the recent talks have had a narrow focus, and some of the most contentious issues between the two countries were not mentioned in the Iranian state media report, including the future of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium.

It said that the management and routing of ship traffic through the waterway, a crucial shipping route for oil and gas that Iran has effectively closed since the early days of the war, would be handled by Iran in cooperation with Oman.

It also said that the United States would withdraw an unspecified number of military forces “from the areas surrounding Iran.” .

Also on Wednesday, Israel pounded southern Lebanon and issued fresh evacuation warnings for residents there, the latest strikes in its escalating military campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah that could complicate efforts by the United States and Iran to get a deal over the line.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Cabinet meeting: Mr. Trump is hosting a meeting of his entire cabinet at the White House. Read more ›
• Hamas in Gaza: The leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Odeh, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza on Tuesday, Hamas confirmed, less than two weeks after Israel said it had killed his predecessor. They are the most senior Hamas officials to be killed by Israel since a cease-fire began last fall.
• Internet in Iran: Iran has begun restoring internet access, lifting a blackout imposed after the war began. NetBlocks, a monitoring group, said that its data showed a “partial restoration to internet connectivity” in Iran after 88 days, making it “the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history.” Read more › 

Top U.S. Political Stories

New York Times, News Analysis: Cornyn’s Defeat Fuels Tensions With President Trump in Senate G.O.P., Carl Hulse, May 27, 2026. Senators are angry President Trump turned on a respected former leader whom they consider a loyal Republican. Now Mr. Trump faces resistance from his own embittered ranks.

Senator John Cornyn’s resounding primary defeat in Texas on Tuesday has sharpened tensions between President Trump and Senate Republicans, and threatens to imperil the president’s agenda as allies who have stayed in lock step with him see his actions increasingly diverging from their interests.

Mr. Cornyn, who less than two years ago came within a handful of votes of becoming the Republican leader, was a popular and respected senator as well as a prolific fund-raiser, a dependable conservative vote and an able floor debater. His colleagues saw the president’s last-minute endorsement of his scandal-mired opponent as a move to punish a senator whom Mr. Trump deemed insufficiently loyal, an insult to the institution and a self-serving political mistake that put his party’s hold on the Senate at risk.

“It is very sad and unsettling, and not good for the Senate,” said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican facing her own difficult re-election race who worked closely with Mr. Cornyn when he was the No. 2 Republican for six years ending in 2019.

Republicans found Mr. Trump’s decision to back Attorney General Ken Paxton over Mr. Cornyn especially perplexing given that Mr. Cornyn was far from a never-Trump rebel. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Texas Republicans Get What They Deserve, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 27, 2026. What did John Cornyn think was going to happen?

One small but welcome story out of Texas last night: Democrat Johnny Garcia easily won his House primary in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, dispatching loony sex-therapist candidate Maureen Galindo, who had promised “prison for American Zionists”—and been backstopped by substantial spending from Republicans who had hoped to secure her the nomination to throw them an easy win in the purple district. Happy Wednesday.

More On U.S. Law, Immigration, Rights, Courtts, Crime, Law

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25, 2026 [ICE Pepper-Sprays U.S. Senator], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 27, 2026. Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility, yet the facility opened about a year ago.

In February, twenty-five detainees at Delaney Hall signed a letter distributed by the national advocacy group for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha, as “Our Cry: A Letter from Inside Delaney Hall.” In the letter, they apologized “for the way we entered the United States,” explaining that “we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family.” They emphasized that they had surrendered to border authorities and continued to work within the system, attending check-ins, getting work permits, and paying taxes, before being seized by ICE agents.

They explained that they have not been afforded the legal hearings guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and are being pressured to self-deport under threats of being sent not back to their country of origin, but rather to third countries like Uganda. They noted that ICE agents have arrested children, the elderly, and people with medical issues and that the facility is overcrowded.

In a second letter, Delaney Hall detainees expanded their picture of their circumstances, noting that some of them have lived in the country for more than a decade, have citizen children, and were complying with legal requirements. They noted that detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions are not receiving proper medical attention.

In the second letter, signed by nearly 300 people, the detainees pleaded with “Senators, Congress members, foundations, and organizations that collaborate with immigrants” for help. In big letters at the bottom of the document they wrote: “S.O.S.,” the international distress call.

As Sophie Nieto-Muñoz of the New Jersey Monitor reported, about 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began a work and hunger strike on Friday over the conditions and treatment there. From inside, they called their family members outside, who shared their stories of worm-infested food, crowded conditions, and pressure to self-deport until guards cut their access to phones and tablets. Their goal, they said, was the immediate release of young detainees, the elderly, and those who are medically vulnerable, and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases.

On Saturday, Kim and Representative Rob Menendez Jr. visited the facility.

Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.

Kim concluded: “Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.”

On Sunday evening, dozens of protesters blocked the entrances to Delaney Hall after it appeared that guards were trying to move Martin Soto, one of those who announced the hunger strike. His wife, Gabriela Soto, has been organizing protesters on the outside. “The people inside Delaney Hall are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and members of our community,” she told Ryan Mancini of The Hill. “In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We have a duty to safeguard the rights, health, and well-being of everyone within our borders.”

On Monday, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was denied entry to the facility. She said that refusal raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Sherrill’s visit was “nothing more than a political stunt on Memorial Day when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside in the facility.”

DHS also insisted that Democratic lawmakers were “spreading smears” about ICE and Delaney Hall. It denied that there was a hunger strike underway, and claimed that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” although nearly 50 ICE detainees have died. It claimed Democratic concerns were “a political stunt” and insisted those it is detaining are “the worst of the worst.”

On Monday, Kim, Sherrill, and New Jersey representatives Nellie Pou and LaMonica McIver were back at the facility along with about 150 protesters when federal agents sprayed the crowd with pepper balls and pepper spray. In a statement, DHS said: “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” It then went on to call the protesters “dangerous rioters” and said their obstruction of the way out of the facility—preventing Soto’s removal—was “a federal crime.” It added that “assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”

In fact, far from being a dangerous rioter, then-representative Kim was caught on film in the evening of January 6, 2021, picking up the trash the actual rioters left behind in the Capitol.

On Monday afternoon, a DHS spokesperson said they had moved Soto to a different facility.

Representative McIver responded to DHS today, saying: “I was at Delaney Hall yesterday. Everything the detainees wrote in their S.O.S. letter is 100% correct. DHS is lying to keep their abuses from being exposed. And to make things worse, they pepper sprayed [Senator Andy Kim] and are lying about it to cover their tracks.”

The administration’s deportation policies were back in the news this weekend after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, announced sweeping changes to policies for obtaining permanent residency in the U.S. Before this administration, about 800,000 people a year applied for a green card, and half of them applied from within the U.S. Now those people apparently will have to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained that the new policy will “force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense,” decisions made at consulates are “virtually unchallengeable” in court, and backlogs will get even worse than they already are. He notes that about half of all green cards go to people applying from within the U.S.: “everyone from spouses and children of US citizens to skilled professionals getting a green card through an employer.”

Law professor Daniel Kanstroom told Rebecca Schneid of Time magazine that it appears “[t]his Administration is trying to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible to attain permanent resident status.” Referring to the spouses and family members of people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, he added: “We’re focusing now on the group of people who potentially have the strongest reasons to stay in this country legitimately.”

Schneid notes that in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress explicitly allowed people to change their residency status from within the U.S.

David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told Schneid that DHS has already slashed green card approvals in half simply by failing to process the applications.

On Friday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García. After wrongfully deporting Ábrego García to El Salvador, the administration facilitated his return only after securing an indictment against him for human smuggling, based on a 2022 traffic stop, saying he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Ábrego García had not faced charges from the traffic stop initially, and Crenshaw said the Justice Department’s reopening of the old case to prosecute Ábrego García after he had successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador showed vindictive prosecution. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw said.

Sergio Martínez-Beltrán of NPR reported that DHS called Crenshaw’s decision “naked judicial activism” and vowed that “this Salvadorian is not going to remain in our country.”

In a statement, Ábrego García said, “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”

Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted today that he had just visited so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” which appears to be in the process of shutting down. He suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump haven’t wanted to admit it was closing because they have spent a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the site in less than a year.

But, Frost said, “we can’t allow this place to just shut down and then not talk about it anymore. That’s what they want because they used a billion of our dollars to enrich private contractors that built and operated the place. They want us to move on because they don’t want us to talk about the human rights abuses and civil rights abuses that happened there and in other facilities as well…. We have to continue to push for accountability and consequences for people who broke the law and misused our…money, meant for hurricane preparedness, to kidnap and cage our neighbors.”

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Big John Deflated, Andrew Egger, right, May 27, 2026. If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase. Outside his party, he’s already a lame duck with catastrophically low approval and a stalled agenda. But as he weakens outside the building, his remarkable influence inside seems only to grow over a party eager to drink the Kool-Aid at his request.

Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary runoff in Texas was the clearest sign of this yet. It pitted a formidable, well-funded establishment incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, against a sad-sack rabble-rouser MAGA type in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton is damaged goods in fifteen different ways—uncharismatic and dull, loathed by those who have worked with him in state government, beset by serial adultery scandals, impeached by his own party over his extraordinary corruption and self-dealing. Paxton had exactly two strengths: The perverse intuition of the MAGA base that his run of bad behavior and scandal meant he was actually a strong conservative fighter, and his obsequious, servile loyalty to Trump, for which the president rewarded him with a late endorsement.

Which turns out, of course, to be all you need. In the end it wasn’t even close. Paxton walloped Cornyn by more than 27 points.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges.

You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John. For years, he was the consummate grin-and-bear-it Trump ally, steadfastly supporting his agenda from his post in Senate leadership. But as it turns out, that posture wasn’t as bulletproof as guys like Cornyn thought. It kept him in Trump’s good books as long as the president had bigger, more openly mutinous fish to fry. But once he had rid himself of the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys of the world, Trump found himself at his leisure to start punishing smaller and smaller crimes: an unwillingness to abandon the legislative filibuster, a curiosity toward other candidates early in the 2024 presidential primary, the inescapable scent of belonging to a pre-Trump establishment at all.

In another world, I would lament Cornyn’s ignominious defeat. It seems impossible to deny he is a better man than Paxton, and a better and more reasonable negotiator of the sort the Senate needs to function.

But in this world, it’s hard to respond to last night’s outcome with anything but grim, bleak pleasure. What, in the end, did Cornyn’s decade of Trump accommodation get him? Nothing but the futile hope that he might outlast the era—a hope that finally brought him to the greatest humiliation of all, a yearlong fruitless effort to woo Trump into blessing him with his endorsement by posting pictures of himself reading The Art of the Deal and introducing bills to rename Texas highways after the president. He made himself a dog for Trump, and Trump put him down like a dog.

At the same time, Cornyn’s loss can only diminish Trump’s actual political power. Trump has now robbed yet another Republican senator of his political future, meaning he has unencumbered yet another Republican senator of his biggest reason for ignoring or indulging Trump’s perpetual outrages. And that’s not all: The rest of the Senate GOP can’t help but notice that their former accommodationist arrangement seems to be falling apart before their eyes. What’s the point of giving the president America increasingly hates so much of your blood and sweat when he may just turn around and sic his base on you anyway?

And then there’s the little matter of the Texas seat itself. We’ve known all along that Democratic nominee James Talarico polls much better against Paxton than he does against Cornyn. That gap will shrink in the months ahead as “normie” Republicans—now a minority in their own base—perform their now-familiar humiliation ritual and try to rationalize away their distaste for Paxton. But there’s no question that Republicans can no longer count on Texas; they will be forced to spend heavily in the (very expensive) state just to feel good about a race they by rights shouldn’t have to think about at all.

So enjoy your nominee, Mr. President—and try not to choke on him.

New York Times, A Blue Texas May Be More Than a Dream for Democrats, Nate Cohn, May 27, 2026. Ken Paxton’s victory for the Republican nomination and a big shift among Hispanic voters have put a Senate seat within reach.

Could Texas really turn blue in 2026?

While it’s tempting to be skeptical, a blue Texas is increasingly easy to imagine. It’s even easier to imagine after Ken Paxton’s victory over John Cornyn, the incumbent senator, in the Republican primary runoff on Tuesday night.

That’s partly because Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has distinct political liabilities. He’s faced investigation, indictment, impeachment and a messy public divorce.

But there’s another reason Democrats might pull off a statewide win for the first time in three decades: demographics. Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country, and national polls show Democrats surging back in support among young and nonwhite voters — and especially Hispanic voters.

On paper, these national demographic trends ought to send Texas racing toward the left and into contention. Add in Mr. Paxton’s nomination and you can start to see how Democrats could flip Texas this fall.

New York Times, In Alabama Case, Supreme Court Faces First Major Test of Voting Rights Act Ruling, Abbie VanSickle, May 27, 2026. Republican leaders in the state have asked the justices to clear the way for a congressional map that a lower court found discriminated against Black voters.

Alabama Republican leaders asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow them to use a congressional district map that a lower court this week determined discriminated against Black voters.

The fight over Alabama’s map will be the first major test of how the justices intend to apply their recent ruling narrowing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The push to switch out Alabama’s congressional map — a move that could advantage Republicans in the heated fight to maintain their razor-thin majority in the House in the midterm elections — began immediately after the justices’ April ruling that raised the bar to bring a discrimination claim under the landmark civil rights law.

In response, Republicans in Alabama sought to swap out their state’s congressional map and use one that had been rejected by courts in 2023 that included only one majority-Black district, rather than two. A ruling by the Supreme Court in Alabama’s favor would most likely cost Democrats one of those seats.

The court already once instructed a lower court to review the Republican-proposed map in light of its April ruling, which found that courts should strike down maps only if there is evidence they were drawn with an intent to discriminate and not simply to obtain partisan advantage.Sign up for the Docket newsletter. Adam Liptak helps you make sense of legal developments in a turbulent time. Get it sent to your inbox.

Although critics of the ruling had feared that standard would be impossible to meet, a panel of three federal judges found on Tuesday that the state’s actions violated even the new, higher bar set by the Supreme Court and once again nixed its use.

In the emergency request filed on Wednesday, Alabama officials asked the court to move swiftly to clear the way for the state to use the map in special primaries in August for four House districts affected by the change in district lines.

In the application, they argued that the Supreme Court’s April ruling “vindicates Alabama’s position on the lawfulness” of the Republican-friendly map and asserted that the lower court had erred by once again concluding the map was discriminatory and acting as if the Supreme Court’s updated test had “changed nothing.”

The Alabama officials requested a ruling by 10 a.m. on June 1, or “as soon as possible thereafter.” They urged the court to act quickly, saying they wanted to be able to resume election preparations and to assign voters into districts before the election.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Do Not Pity Big John, William Kristol, right, May 27, 2026. Just after 9:00 p.m. last night, soon after it became apparent that Sen. John Cornyn had lost his primary to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico posted:

"I want to thank Senator John Cornyn for his years representing our state. We don’t agree on everything, but we both still believe in public service. To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign."

The post was kind and gracious. It was true to Talarico’s political identity as someone who believes in civility and comity. It was quite likely politically effective.

At almost exactly the same time yesterday evening, another Texan, Michael Wood, an ex-Republican and friend of The Bulwark (you can watch my Sunday conversation with him on the war in Iran and Memorial Day here), published his own thoughts about Cornyn.

Wood sounds very different from Talararico.

It is as important to call out our gutless elected officials as it is to celebrate the brave ones. . . .

John Cornyn . . . has had more agency in our country’s existential fight against Trumpism than roughly 99.999% of Americans. In 2021 there were exactly 100 people who could have put this sad and sorry chapter of American history behind us for good, and in that moment John Cornyn hid behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt . . .

Fifty-seven United States senators were able to do the right and obvious thing and voted to convict and bar that evil man from ever holding public office again, including seven Republican senators. . . .

This little man didn’t want a primary challenge six freaking years later.

And yet again the world is shown the fruits of every Faustian bargain ever made: you sell your soul, and in the end you lose your soul without even getting the object of your desire. . . .

What annoys the hell out of me about people like Cornyn—which is to say almost every person still active in GOP politics in Anno Domini 2026—is that they think they are all so smart and clever. . . .

No. The difference isn’t intelligence and skill. The difference is courage and patriotism. These men without chests, as C.S. Lewis would call them, are not nimble or smart. They are cowards, and I for one will not let them forget it. . . .

So goodbye and good riddance, Big John Cornyn.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Wood obviously differs in both tone and substance from Talarico.

But I’m pro-Wood and pro-Talarico. Both truth-telling and prudence are virtues.

The democratic opposition to Trump and Trumpism needs to understand the truth. It needs the moral clarity and intellectual honesty of Michael Wood.

The democratic opposition to Trump and Trumpism also needs to defeat corrupt and dangerous men like Ken Paxton. So it needs the gracious civility and political prudence of James Talarico.

So Wood ends his piece, “Vote Talarico.” And one trusts that in private Talarico would say, “You’re right, Michael Wood.”

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Republican Exiles Make the Case Against Trump… Targeted by the big orange boss and ousted from Congress, they’re finally speaking up, writes WILL SALETAN.
• ‘Backrooms’ Review… SONNY BUNCH on the labyrinth of the mind.
• An Inventory of Trump’s Second-Term Wreckage… Betrayed, a new summary of the appalling damage so far, is a midterms turnout tool—and hopefully a roadmap for repair, JILL LAWRENCE writes.
• Texas Primary Results! Megyn Kelly Turns on Trump?! Join JVL, SARAH, and TIM for The Next Level, recorded live on TX primary night.

Quick Hits

REDISTRICTING SKIRMISHES CONTINUE: Republicans turned out the winners in this year’s Redistricting Total War, but a couple recent developments may end up crimping their advantage a bit. Yesterday, Republicans in the South Carolina Senate once again rejected a redistricting measure that had been championed by President Trump and Gov. Henry McMaster, arguing that the state had run out of time to change its maps with primary voting having already begun: “Neither my conscience nor my common sense,” state Sen. Richard Cash said, “will allow me to stop an election that is already underway.” The upshot: Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s seat appears safe for now.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday against Alabama’s newly gerrymandered map, a decision that could theoretically preserve a second Democratic district in the state—should the Supreme Court allow it to stand, which might be a dubious proposition. Politico has more:

Following the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling earlier this year, Alabama sought to revert to a 2023 map—with only one Democratic-leaning district—that had previously been blocked in court.

But a three-judge panel Tuesday prevented the state from using that map, mandating that Alabama use a map that has two majority Black, blue-leaning seats.

“Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the panel wrote in their decision.

Read the whole thing.

OLD PRESIDENT IS OLD: This guy just can’t stay away from the hospital! Donald Trump was back at Walter Reed yesterday for what he described as his “six-month physical,” and he’s happy to have you know, as he wrote on Truth Social, that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.” In and of itself, that wouldn’t be so interesting—setting aside the many oddly unresolved questions still knocking around out there about the president’s health and haleness, like the now-frequent makeup smears on the backs of his hands and his habit of falling asleep in cabinet meetings and, well, any other public function at which he’s sitting down.

What was particularly odd, though, was the frothing rage the president’s digital comms teams flew into over the latest round of “the president’s pretty old” commentary sparked by the latest presidential hospital visit. The “Rapid Response 47” X account spent most of the day tweeting out still images of various media figures mid-blink with ludicrous captions: “BRIANNA KEILAR SAYS NAP WENT ‘PERFECTLY’ AFTER FALLING ASLEEP LIVE ON AIR.” “FAKE TAPPER APPEARS TO DOZE OFF THROUGHOUT HIS ‘SHOW.’” “@DanaBashCNN FALLS ASLEEP AHEAD OF HER 55TH BIRTHDAY NEXT MONTH. WHAT IS GOING ON?”

We could ask them the same question.

May 26

Top Headlines

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Tensions Rise as Iran Threatens to Retaliate Against U.S. Strikes, Leo Sands, Erika Solomon and Eric Schmitt, May 26, 2026. The threat came hours after American military forces renewed attacks in southern Iran, even as fragile diplomacy efforts to end the war continued.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities, Paul Krugman, right, May 26, 2026. America descends into a flattery-failure doom loop.
• New York Times, Paxton Routs Cornyn in Senate G.O.P. Runoff With Trump’s Backing, Reid J. Epstein and Patricia Mazzei, May 26, 2026.  Results: Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, was endorsed by President Trump over John Cornyn, a four-term Republican senator. The winner will face the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, in a race with national implications.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Wants Federal Employees to Sign Nondisclosure Agreements, Eileen Sullivan, May 26, 2026. Lawyers representing federal workers said the move is intended to chill speech and could be challenged on First Amendment grounds.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Iran War Was a Failure, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 26, 2026. And a few Republican senators admitted it—for a moment.

Political Violence In the United States 

 

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack (Pool photo by Oliver Contreras via Getty Images).

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump Encourages Political Violence, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 26, 2026. I want to make a simple point. Political violence is a scourge. Opponents of Trump who embrace violence harm more productive efforts to oppose him. But really, once you set up a slush fund to reward political violence, you no longer get to complain when it targets Trump. For years, he has stoked it deliberately.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Posts Violent Image About his GOP Opponents, Doctors Question his Physical Health, Iran Strikes, ICE Sprays Senator, Aaron Parnas, right, May 26, 2026. The president posted violent rhetoric targeting Republicans he does not support and amplified QAnon conspiracies as he heads to Walter Reed for his third “annual” physical in 13 months, with some doctors raising new questions about his health amid repeated public incidents where he appeared to fall asleep.
• The Parnas Perspective, Tuesday evening News and Comment: Aaron Parnas, right, May 26, 2026..A bit of a rough day for the White House this afternoon. After Donald Trump's third annual physical in 13 months, the White House got upset with reporters suggesting that the president had fallen asleep publicly.

U.S. Law, Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice

The U.S. Justice Department is now adorned for the first time in U.S. history with a banner showcasing a President, Donald Trump, shown at center (New York Times photo by Eric Lee)

• New York Times, As Trump Politicizes Justice Dept., Prosecutors Struggle With Grand Juries, Alan Feuer, May 26, 2026. Judges and grand juries have increasingly lost faith in the Justice Department as the president uses it to reward his friends and go after his opponents.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 26, 2026. We can do without Todd Blanche. Acting Attorney General Todd “I love you, Sir” Blanche for a while looked like he had the inside track on the permanent post. Violating the Epstein Transparency Act and dissembling about release of the files are just the sort of ethical abominations Donald Trump demands of his attorney general. 
• New York Times, Confusion and Worry After Abrupt Change to Green Card Process, Christina Morales, May 25, 2026 (print ed.). Immigrants and their advocates and lawyers are trying to interpret a new Trump administration rule that requires people to be in their native country to apply for a green card.
• New York Times, Supreme Court Reverses Ruling in Immigration Judges’ Free Speech Lawsuit, Ann E. Marimow, May 26, 2026. A group of immigration judges in 2020 challenged work-related restrictions on their public speaking engagements, saying they violated their free speech rights.

More On  Iran War

• The New Republic, Analysis: Trump Summons Entire Cabinet as Iran Deal Crumbles in Front of Him, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 26, 2026. Donald Trump is preparing to meet several key administration officials at Camp David on Wednesday as Iranian peace talks fall apart.
• The New Republic, Analysis:“No One Asked You”: Trump Advisers Lash Out at GOP Over Iran Deal, Finn Hartnett, May 26, 2026.  MAGA is splitting over Donald Trump’s Iran war.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s War Ends With a Whimper, William Kristol, right, May 26, 2026.  One of these days, we might get an Iran ceasefire that actually involves a cessation of fire. Not yet, though: Iran warned this morning it will respond to last night’s U.S. attacks—which CENTCOM described as “self-defense strikes”—in southern Iran. 

More On U.S. National Security, Military, Veterans 

• New York Times, Evolving Warfare Connects the Conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, Lara Jakes, May 26, 2026. Aspects such as drone technology and diplomacy show how the wars intersect on the battlefield and in global alignments, providing a model for future conflicts.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25, 2026 [Shifting Personnel], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 26, 2026. Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. Certainly, he has sidelined her.
• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY, DUMOCRATS! and other inspiring words from Dear Leader, Jeff Tiedrich, right,May 26, 2026. Yesterday morning, the president of the United States woke up, picked up his phone, and tapped out a Memorial Day message of peace and love — and that message was WAAAAAH MY DIAPER IS FULL WHY WON’T ANYONE CHANGE MEEEEEEEE?
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: The President couldn’t control himself for even a day, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, May 26, 2026. At noon today [Memorial Day, May 25), Donald J. Trump walked toward the wreath-laying ceremony, slapping his right hand against his upper thigh again and again with almost every step. Moments later, as he stood at attention with his hand raised in salute, he wobbled back and forth, unable to hold still.
• New York Times, Iceland, Rattled by Trump, Weighs Joining the E.U., Amelia Nierenberg, Visuals by Sergey Ponomarev, May 26, 2026. Iceland has stood apart from the rest of Europe. But President Trump’s threats to Greenland have provoked a reconsideration.Iceland is in Europe. But it is not in the European Union.

U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability

• New York Times, SpaceX’s Unconventional Corporate Arrangements Favor Elon Musk, Ryan Mac, May 26, 2026. The ways it set up its board and Mr. Musk’s pay appear to benefit him at the expense of other shareholders, corporate governance experts said.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump promotes unregulated online casino after $1 million Super PAC donation, Judd Legum, right, May 26, 2026. On Truth Social, Trump has repeatedly promoted Stake, an unregulated online casino that, according to state gambling regulators, is operating illegally.  

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy: Trump's Failed War Keeps Failing, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 26, 2026. I think we have to accept that there are parties in this war -- Iran, Russia, Israel, perhaps China -- that don’t really want the war to end. High inflation and energy shortages are weakening Western and Asian democracies, including the US, which benefits Russia-China-Iran. Trump’s weakness was on full display in China a few weeks ago, something that must have delighted our adversaries throughout the world. Israel wants to keep fighting. And so today, rather than peace, strength, and winning Trump’s failed war keeps failing and he and America keep losing.
• New York Times, An Election Denier Might Be Georgia’s Next Governor, Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, May 26, 2026. Burt Jones, the leading G.O.P. candidate for governor, worked with Trump allies to try to overturn the election, and even talked to the president himself.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Around the Bulwarkt, Staff  reports, May 26, 2026.
• New York Times, U.F.C. Fight Venue Takes Shape on the White House Lawn, Luke Broadwater, May 26, 2026. The Ultimate Fighting Championship bout is scheduled for June 14, President Trump’s 80th birthday.
• New York Times, Trump Administration to Send Americans Exposed to Ebola to Kenya, Apoorva Mandavilli and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, May 26, 2026. In past outbreaks, Americans exposed to the virus were sent home to be treated in state-of-the-art facilities. The Trump administration has already flown some U.S. citizens to Europe for treatment.
• New York Times, Christian Menefee Defeats Al Green in Houston-Area House Seat, Shane Goldmacher, May 26, 2026. The showdown, manufactured by a Republican gerrymander, created one of many generational clashes consuming Democrats this cycle.
• Politico, Sex therapist accused of antisemitism loses Democratic runoff for Texas House seat, Lisa Kashinsky, May 25, 2026. Johnny Garcia, a county sheriff's deputy backed by national Democrats, defeated Maureen Galindo, the controversial candidate, in the competitive 35th District.Maureen Galindo speaks as Johnny Garcia listens during a forum
• The New Republic, Analysis: Missing Republican Representative Still Had Time to Trade Stocks, Malcolm Ferguson, May 26, 2026. Representative Thomas Kean Jr. is apparently well enough to play in the stock market, even as he continues to skip work.

Climate Change, The Environment, Energy Production

• New York Times, Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade, Brad Plumer and Eric Niiler, May 26, 2026. While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.
• Washington Post, Rafe Pomerance, who helped sound the alarm on climate change, dies at 79, Sarah Kaplan, May 21, 2026. He pushed for the first congressional hearings on climate change and helped negotiate a landmark U.N. treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.
• Tom Cosgrove via Substack, Appreciation: Remembering Rafe Pomerance: Don’t Mourn, Organize, May 24, 2026. Three Ways To Block A Punch.

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Inflation, Markets

• New York Times, Celebrity Assistants Exist to Indulge Their Bosses, but When Does Duty Cross a Line? Matt Stevens, May 26, 2026. Matthew Perry’s assistant injected the ketamine that killed his employer. His sentencing has some in the demanding profession considering the power dynamics involved.

U.S. Media, Environment, Education, Culture, Religion

• New York Times, Donald E. Newhouse, Low-Profile Heir to a Media Empire, Dies at 96, Clay Risen, May 26, 2026. He ran the newspaper division of Advance Publications, while his older brother, Si, ran the Condé Nast magazine operation.
• New York Times, Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95, Peter Keepnews, Updated May 26, 2026. Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality.
• The Parnas Perspective, Important Evening News and Commentary, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. The news slowed down tonight, and while I have updates below, I wanted to share something I’m still trying to fully process: for one straight year, this has been the number one news Substack in the world.

Top Stories

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Tensions Rise as Iran Threatens to Retaliate Against U.S. Strikes, Leo Sands, Erika Solomon and Eric Schmitt, May 26, 2026. The threat came hours after American military forces renewed attacks in southern Iran, even as fragile diplomacy efforts to end the war continued.

Here’s the latest.

Tensions remained high between Iran and the United States on Tuesday, threatening to upend fragile diplomacy efforts as Iranian officials warned of retaliation after American strikes overnight.

Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said in a written statement on Tuesday that the war with the United States had shown that American military bases in the Middle East are no longer safe, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it would respond forcefully to any U.S. strikes.

The comments were released hours after American military forces conducted what U.S. Central Command said were “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran.

The hostilities have added to the uncertainty surrounding a potential peace deal, with President Trump and his administration offering conflicting signals about the state of play. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday said talks to end the war were continuing, and a deal could take “a few days.”

Iranian officials sought to project a position of strength, with Mr. Khamenei saying in a written statement that “the hands of time do not turn backward, and the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases.”

During the war, Iran bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for U.S.-Israeli strikes, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces, military personnel and American officials said.

Mr. Khamenei, who succeeded his father after he was killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes on the opening day of the war in late February, also called for greater cooperation among Muslim countries in his statement, which marked the start of the Hajj pilgrimage, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

U.S. forces on Monday struck missile launch sites in Iran and boats that were trying to place mines, American officials said. U.S. Central Command said they were intended “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.”

In recent days, Mr. Trump has threatened a return to hostilities while also pushing a potential path to peace. He has focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was effectively blockaded by Iran in the early days of the war, disrupting energy markets worldwide.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Enriched uranium: Mr. Trump said on Monday that he expected Iran either to hand over its enriched uranium or to destroy it in front of neutral witnesses. It is unclear whether Iran has agreed to that.
• Conflict in Lebanon: Israel’s military told residents to evacuate from one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, Nabatieh, on Tuesday. The warning was issued a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled a wider intensification of his country’s fight with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. Hezbollah and Israel exchanged new strikes on each other overnight.
• Abraham Accords: Mr. Trump called on Monday for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among other Middle Eastern countries, to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several states. But that is highly unlikely, according to analysts.
• Internet in Iran: President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran has ordered the country’s communications ministry to end its near-total internet blackout, according to Tasnim, a semiofficial Iranian news agency. On Tuesday, however, the internet monitoring group Netblocks reported that the blackout had nevertheless remained in effect. Read more › 

President Trump, amid threats May 17 to renew all-out U.S. war against Iran, broadcast on his Truth Social network an image portraying him as about to press what could be a nuclear war button inside a high-tech bunker.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities, Paul Krugman, right, May 26, 2026. America descends into a flattery-failure doom loop.

On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior-official sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,

On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

This “Dear Leader” treatment is unprecedented in American history. Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.

Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security:

Inside the MAGA fantasy bubble, however, Trump’s reign is hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.

Some of this reflects Trump’s own personality. His inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting stupid wars.

But Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this? Was George W.Bush wearing rank and insignia when he landed the jet? : r/Presidents

And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.

It’s tempting to dismiss personality-cult theater as trivial, but it isn’t. When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy, the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.

Beyond that, influential Republicans have substantively granted Trump more personal power, more ability to act as a monarch, than any of his predecessors. Republicans in Congress have abandoned their role as an independent branch of government. In a recent post on X, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, sounded just like Trump’s cabinet members:

And the Roberts Supreme Court has gone most of the way toward giving Trump dictatorial powers.

Right-wing legal thinkers have increasingly embraced “unitary executive theory,” under which the entire executive branch — including agencies Congress has designated as independent — answers personally to the president, who can hire and fire officials at will. The Roberts Court hasn’t explicitly endorsed this theory. But the Court has given presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts — effectively placing Trump above the law. And Roberts has declared that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” which, combined with the subservience of both Congress and the Court itself, does in effect make Trump a dictator.

Why has the modern American right abandoned the idea of a constitutional republic and embraced rule by strongman? Good question — and one I’ll try to answer another day.

For now, let me just point out that while it may seem ironic that so much praise and power has been lavished on Trump, America’s most incompetent modern president, the combination of flattery and failure isn’t an accident. It is, in fact, a self-reinforcing doom loop.

Trump needs and demands sycophantic praise and unfettered power in part to compensate for the fact that he’s such an objective failure. And while his manifest unfitness is part of the explanation for his failure, his policy disasters also have a lot to do with the bubble that surrounds him. Nobody dares to tell him when he’s wrong. Nobody can stop him from indulging his whims, not matter how disastrous their consequences.

The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great. 

New York Times, Paxton Routs Cornyn in Senate G.O.P. Runoff With Trump’s Backing, Reid J. Epstein and Patricia Mazzei, May 26, 2026.  Results:

Candidate / Percent

Ken Paxton / 64%

Johhn Cornyn / 36

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, defeated John Cornyn, a four-term Republican senator, in a runoff that confirmed the president’s hold on his party’s voters. Mr. Paxton will face the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, in a race with national implications.

Ken Paxton, the MAGA-aligned state attorney general who received President Trump’s endorsement last week, won the Republican primary for Senate in Texas on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. His victory scrambles the national battle for control of the Senate, puts Republican fealty to the president at risk in the chamber and upends politics in Texas.

Mr. Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn, a four-term Republican who is well-liked by his Republican colleagues and had not faced a close general election in his more than 20 years in the Senate. Mr. Paxton has remained popular with voters despite being marred by scandal throughout his career, including being impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023.

But Mr. Trump, fresh off a successful tour of political retribution that ousted another Republican incumbent senator in Louisiana, backed Mr. Paxton, angering many Republicans in the Senate who abandoned some of the president’s legislative priorities in Congress last week. Some spoke bluntly that Mr. Trump had put a safely red Senate seat in play.

Democrats have been eager to face Mr. Paxton in November. The Democratic nominee, James Talarico, a state representative and fund-raising juggernaut, enters the general election campaign with a significant cash advantage over Mr. Paxton.

The Senate race was the marquee battle on Tuesday night, but there were several other notable runoffs. Texas touched off a national gerrymandering fight last year when it engaged in unusual redistricting in the middle of the decade to try to help Republicans retain control of Congress, setting up several notable House contests.

In one closely watched runoff, Representative Christian Menefee defeated Representative Al Green in a matchup of incumbents who had been drawn into the same district. Their contest was the kind of generational clash that has been consuming the Democratic Party nationwide.

Here’s what else to know.

• Talarico awaits: Mr. Paxton will face Mr. Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminarian who has prioritized outreach to independent voters. He wasted no time courting Cornyn supporters, saying on social media, “You have a place in our campaign.” Read more ›
• Paxton: Mr. Paxton, a conservative firebrand, has been accused of adultery by his wife of 38 years, a state senator who did not include him in her endorsements. He’s been indicted and had the charges dropped. And he’s been impeached and acquitted. But in his quarter-century of public life, he has never lost an election. Here are five things to know about Mr. Paxton.
• U.S. House races: The new congressional map created several intraparty battles. Democrats had runoffs in newly redrawn seats in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, while two Republican contests pit candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump against those backed by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Read more ›
• Texas attorney general: Republicans also voted on who should succeed Mr. Paxton in a statewide race that has been notable for a deluge of negative political advertising. Representative Chip Roy, who has at times broken with Mr. Trump, faced State Senator Mayes Middleton. Read more ›

New York Times, Trump Administration Wants Federal Employees to Sign Nondisclosure Agreements, Eileen Sullivan, May 26, 2026. Lawyers representing federal workers said the move is intended to chill speech and could be challenged on First Amendment grounds.

The Trump administration wants to roll out a uniform nondisclosure agreement across the federal government that would bar employees from sharing internal government information, citing the need to stop leaks to media organizations.

Each agency could determine whether to adopt the agreement, which would require federal workers not to disclose “nonpublic, confidential or proprietary” information and to notify the agency of any theft or loss of such information, according to a proposal released on Tuesday by the Office of Personnel Management. Agencies could ask both current employees and new hires to sign the agreement.

Employees who breach the terms could face potential disciplinary action, as well as civil and criminal penalties, according to a draft agreement, although it did not state which civil and criminal statutes would apply to disclosures not already covered under federal law.

The Trump administration said the proposed nondisclosure agreement would not add additional restrictions on employee speech or disclosures. But the broadly worded agreement could go beyond laws that already govern the improper release of classified information and protected personal details held by the government.

Lawyers who represent public workers said the requirement could be vulnerable to legal challenges on First Amendment grounds, noting that a government employee’s speech is protected if the person is speaking as a private citizen.

The push to impose the agreement on federal workers comes as the Trump administration has sought to crack down on unauthorized disclosures to journalists, including through leak investigations. Advocates for federal workers said it could create additional fear among government employees, who have already been buffeted by major job cuts and other changes since President Trump returned to office.

In its proposal, the administration said that authorized whistle-blower disclosures to inspectors general, the Office of Special Counsel and Congress would remain intact.

The nondisclosure agreement “is designed to provide agencies with a standardized mechanism for employees to acknowledge and agree to comply with obligations that already exist under law and regulation,” the personnel office wrote. The public has 30 days to comment on the proposed draft.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Iran War Was a Failure, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 26, 2026. And a few Republican senators admitted it—for a moment.

One of these days, we might get an Iran ceasefire that actually involves a cessation of fire. Not yet, though: Iran warned this morning it will respond to last night’s U.S. attacks—which CENTCOM described as “self-defense strikes”—in southern Iran. “The nations and lands of the region,” Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a statement, “will no longer serve as shields for American bases.” That peace deal is apparently all but worked out, though! Happy Tuesday.

 Political Violence In the United States 

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack (Pool photo by Oliver Contreras via Getty Images).

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump Encourages Political Violence, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 26, 2026. I want to make a simple point.

A mentally ill man named Nasire Best set off a shooting incident over the weekend. He has serially threatened the White House.

Nasire Best, the 21-year-old man shot and killed by agents outside the White House on Saturday, had previous encounters with the Secret Service, court records show — including one occasion where he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital and another where local police arrested him while he claimed “he was Jesus Christ.”

[snip]

Officers had encountered Best multiple times near the White House last summer, according to a court affidavit, which says he was “known to the Secret Service” for “walking around the White House complex inquiring how to gain access at various entry points.”

He was involuntarily committed on June 26, 2025, for “obstructing vehicle entry” to part of the White House complex, the court documents said.

This has led right wing nuts to demand that “they” stop trying to kill “my” President, and equally nutty types to demand, again, a bunker-ballroom that would not prevent such incidents.

Democrats are to blame, these right wing nuts say, for the serial attempts on Trump.

There’s a facial similarity between most if not all those attempting to kill Trump and Taylor Taranto, the mentally ill Jan6er who took the address Trump himself posted to Truth Social and started to stalk Barack Obama in an armed van (one of the Trumpiest judges continues to let Taranto violate the terms of his release). Which is to say, Trump literally goaded one of his own supporters to target the former President.

No Democrat has done something remotely similar with Trump.

More importantly, what the fuck do you think happens when you first pardon 1,500 participants in a mob, hundreds of whom assaulted cops, and then set up a slush fund to reward those people, refusing to rule out rewarding the most violent? The people Trump is rewarding explicitly hunted Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and others.

Political violence is a scourge. Opponents of Trump who embrace violence harm more productive efforts to oppose him.

But really, once you set up a slush fund to reward political violence, you no longer get to complain when it targets Trump. For years, he has stoked it deliberately.

The US has a terrible problem with political violence. But the first step you’d need to take to address it would require the most powerful man in the world to disavow political violence.

Instead, he is rewarding it in the most corrupt way possible.sures serve as a warning to those looking to buy into its I.P.O., Mr. Quinn said. “It’s terrible for shareholders,” he said.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Posts Violent Image About his GOP Opponents, Doctors Question his Physical Health, Iran Strikes, ICE Sprays Senator, Aaron Parnas, right, May 26, 2026. The president posted violent rhetoric targeting Republicans he does not support and amplified QAnon conspiracies as he heads to Walter Reed for his third “annual” physical in 13 months, with some doctors raising new questions about his health amid repeated public incidents where he appeared to fall asleep.

Meanwhile, ICE pepper-sprayed a United States senator, the U.S. launched new strikes on Iran as Tehran accused Washington of violating the ceasefire, the Trump administration proposed NDAs for federal employees, and much more.

This week I’m working to help members prepare for Pam Bondi’s upcoming testimony, which I’ll be covering live. We cannot, I repeat, cannot let the Epstein files disappear from public attention, and I will not let that happen. Because of our work, front pages in Alabama are now covering the DOJ’s wiping of January 6 records. We can do the same again with Epstein.

Help me keep this going and continue getting this reporting out to millions of people. We’re growing quickly, but we’re still up against institutions with far greater resources. Your support is what keeps this work alive and helps us build something even bigger. Subscribe today, upgrade your membership, and help me continue doing this work.

Here’s the news:

 

Trump posted a violent AI meme depicting himself with a shotgun hunting “RINOS”, with the text: “NO RINOS! REPOST TO MAKE THE POINT CLEAR.” The term “RINO” stands for “Republican in Name Only” and suggests that the President is supporting violent actions against Republicans who he does not agree with, like Congressman Thomas Massie:

The President further posted QAnon memes for most of the morning. Here is one of them:

Donald Trump is undergoing his “third annual” physical examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center amid renewed public attention on his health ahead of his 80th birthday next month. Recent photos showing a neck rash, swollen ankles, and a bruised hand have fueled questions about his condition, though White House officials and his physician have described the issues as minor and benign. Trump has continued to portray himself as energetic and healthier than former President Joe Biden, while maintaining an active golf schedule and dismissing concerns about moments where he appeared to fall asleep during meetings. Medical experts have also questioned the unusual use of an MRI during a recent exam, although the White House said the tests showed Trump to be in “exceptional physical health.”

Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, “The president has severe daytime somnolence. He falls asleep very often. He’s fallen asleep in the Oval Office on multiple occasions with people talking to him in the cabinet room, and I was concerned yesterday that he might have fallen asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during Memorial Day observances. Chronic insomnia is a severe illness. It can result in an increase in risk of dementia, decrease in cognitive effects in older people.” Reiner’s comments come amid growing public scrutiny of Donald Trump’s health ahead of his annual physical examination.

This is the front page of a newspaper in Alabama today. Our efforts to preserve the truth are working:

 

Iran accused the United States of violating a temporary ceasefire after U.S. forces carried out “self-defense” strikes near the Strait of Hormuz targeting missile launch sites and boats allegedly laying mines. Despite the renewed attacks, American and Iranian officials continue negotiations aimed at ending the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with diplomats suggesting a preliminary agreement could be reached soon. Tensions remain high as Iran threatened retaliation, claimed it intercepted U.S. drones, and rejected parts of President Donald Trump’s proposal linking a peace deal to the expansion of the Abraham Accords. Key disputes in the negotiations include Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, sanctions relief, and the broader future of Iran’s nuclear program. Here is what the United States is saying:

An Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Mashghara killed 12 people as Israel intensified attacks against Hezbollah and called up additional troops to Lebanon. The escalation comes ahead of planned direct talks between Israeli and Lebanese military delegations in Washington, while Hezbollah continues launching attacks using advanced drones and rockets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would increase the intensity of strikes, prompting fears in Lebanon of a wider war and causing panic among civilians already displaced by the conflict. Since the fighting began, more than a million people in Lebanon have been displaced and over 3,000 people have reportedly been killed in Israeli strikes.

Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management is proposing that federal employees sign nondisclosure agreements aimed at discouraging leaks of internal government information to the press and the public. Under the proposal, “confidential government information” would include internal agency discussions, personnel matters, procurement details, and pre-decisional materials that are not publicly available.

Donald Trump was mocked on the internet after he reportedly referenced the “Atomic Energy Commission” while discussing Iran’s nuclear program, even though the agency was dissolved in the 1970s and replaced by newer federal nuclear oversight agencies.

Iran is demanding the release of $24 billion in frozen funds as part of ongoing negotiations with the United States under a proposed 14-point memorandum of understanding. According to a source cited by Tasnim news agency, Tehran wants half of the funds released immediately when the agreement is announced, with the remaining amount transferred within 60 days.

Trump said any future agreement with Iran should require additional countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations with Israel. Trump argued that countries benefiting from U.S. diplomatic efforts should “simultaneously” sign onto the accords, which were first established during his first term with countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. While negotiations with Iran are reportedly progressing, it remains unclear how expanding the Abraham Accords would be tied to a final deal, and Trump even suggested Iran itself could eventually join. The proposal reflects Trump’s broader effort to expand regional cooperation and diplomatic ties between Israel and Middle Eastern nations.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center reported that a tanker vessel experienced an external explosion near the waterline while traveling about 60 nautical miles east of Muscat, Oman. Although the crew and vessel were reported safe, the blast caused a fuel spill into the surrounding water. Authorities are monitoring the situation as investigators work to determine the cause of the explosion and assess any environmental impact. The incident adds to ongoing security concerns surrounding commercial shipping routes in the region.

U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, right, said he was pepper-sprayed by ICE officers during a protest outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where migrants are reportedly staging a hunger and work strike over conditions inside the center. Kim accused ICE agents of escalating tensions by deploying armored vehicles, pepper spray, and batons against demonstrators instead of addressing complaints about due process, food quality, and treatment of detainees. Democratic officials, including Gov. Mikie Sherrill and several members of Congress, visited the facility for oversight purposes, though some said they were denied access. The Department of Homeland Security dismissed the protest as a political stunt and disputed claims that a hunger strike was taking place inside the detention center.

Officials in Orange County said they successfully prevented a potentially catastrophic explosion at a California aerospace facility after a 7,000-gallon tank of methyl methacrylate began overheating because of a refrigeration system failure. Evacuation orders were reduced from about 60,000 people to 16,000 after firefighters and hazardous materials crews cooled the tank and relieved pressure without causing a leak. Authorities said there is still a small risk of fire or minor explosion, but air monitoring has found no contamination or dangerous chemical exposure in the area. Officials praised emergency crews and said they will continue monitoring conditions before lifting the remaining evacuation orders.

A new report says Americans are falling behind on debt payments at the fastest pace since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, with serious credit card delinquencies rising to 13.1% in the first quarter of 2026. Student loan delinquencies also climbed sharply, while auto loan delinquencies reached record highs, signaling growing financial strain across U.S. households. Researchers noted that more borrowers are defaulting despite continued consumer spending, highlighting the disconnect between economic activity and consumer financial health. The data suggests many Americans may be relying increasingly on debt and credit to maintain spending levels amid ongoing affordability pressures.

Texas primary runoffs tonight are testing Donald Trump’s influence within the Republican Party, especially in the high-profile Senate race where Trump endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton over longtime Senator John Cornyn. Republicans are divided over whether Paxton’s controversies could hurt the GOP in the general election, while several House races feature intense battles involving Trump- and Gov. Greg Abbott-backed candidates. Democrats are also facing contentious runoffs, including a nationally watched congressional race involving controversial candidate Maureen Galindo and another contest between younger and older party leaders that highlights generational tensions. The outcomes of these races could shape the balance of power in Texas politics and determine several likely future members of Congress.

Republicans are increasingly worried that the bitter Texas Senate runoff between Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton is deeply dividing the GOP ahead of the general election. Backed by Donald Trump, Paxton has gained momentum despite ethics scandals and relentless attacks from Cornyn allies, while many establishment Republicans fear his nomination could endanger the seat and drain party resources. The race has exposed growing tensions between traditional conservatives and Trump-aligned hardliners, with some Republicans warning that Trump’s endorsement of Paxton alienated longtime donors and lawmakers loyal to Cornyn. Democrats are closely watching the race because nominee James Talarico has raised significant money and is polling competitively against both Republican candidates. Here’s the latest polling:

A Guardian investigation found that U.S. immigration enforcement flights under the Trump administration have sharply increased carbon emissions as deportations and detainee transfers expand. According to data analyzed by advocacy groups, ICE air operations produced an estimated 335,876 metric tonnes of carbon emissions in 2025, an 88% increase from the previous year, with 2026 already on pace to exceed that total. Critics argue the flights not only worsen climate change and local air pollution, but also contribute to human rights concerns involving deportations, detention transfers, and the treatment of migrants during flights. The Department of Homeland Security defended the operations as necessary for immigration enforcement and dismissed environmental criticisms raised in the report.

Trump’s economic advisor Kevin Hassett said, “The thing I’ve seen is that while people have been spending more money at gas stations, they’ve been spending more money on everything else, which means they’re still very very optimistic about the state of the economy.” However, that contrasts sharply with consumer sentiment surveys, which currently show confidence near historic lows as many Americans remain concerned about inflation, affordability, debt, and broader economic uncertainty.

Vice President JD Vance is hosting a White House meeting with state attorneys general as part of the Trump administration’s new anti-fraud task force initiative. The meeting is expected to focus on cooperation between federal agencies and state officials in combating fraud, though many Democratic attorneys general declined the invitation, criticizing the short notice and lack of agenda details. The administration has expanded fraud investigations across several agencies, including the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services, with a major focus on alleged Medicaid and child care fraud cases in Minnesota.

Rescue teams in Laos and Thailand are working to reach seven villagers trapped inside a flooded cave in central Laos after heavy rain blocked the exit during a gold-searching expedition. One member of the group escaped before the flooding and alerted authorities, but the condition of the trapped individuals remains unknown. Divers have begun navigating the flooded cave system as rescuers race against time to locate the group. Officials said the cave has long been considered dangerous, and authorities had previously warned villagers against entering it.

The New York Knicks advanced to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 after sweeping the Cleveland Cavaliers with a dominant 130-93 victory in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals. Led by Karl-Anthony Towns and Jalen Brunson, the Knicks have won 11 straight playoff games by historically large margins and will face either Oklahoma City or San Antonio in the Finals beginning June 3. The team’s resurgence follows years of struggles, with key changes including Brunson’s arrival in 2022 and the hiring of coach Mike Brown helping transform the franchise into a championship contender. The victory sparked major celebrations among Knicks fans, with Towns saying the team has restored “hope” to the franchise after decades of disappointment.

U.S. Law, Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice

 

The U.S. Justice Department is now adorned for the first time in U.S. history with a banner showcasing a President, Donald Trump, shown at center (New York Times photo by Eric Lee). Meanwhile, examples of grand jury malfeasance come on top of the many cases in which Justice Department prosecutors have failed to get grand jurors to return indictments.

New York Times, As Trump Politicizes Justice Dept., Prosecutors Struggle With Grand Juries, Alan Feuer, May 26, 2026. Judges and grand juries have increasingly lost faith in the Justice Department as the president uses it to reward his friends and go after his opponents.

Grand juries are the heart of the criminal justice system, the inner sanctum where prosecutors, working unchecked and in secret, have enormous power to indict their fellow citizens.

But under President Trump, the Justice Department has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.

In the past several months, prosecutors have repeatedly failed to persuade grand juries that the cases they have brought warrant criminal charges. And if it were not unusual enough, they have also been admonished at least three times since last November by federal judges who have accused them of misconduct.

The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in a case that was dismissed against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility.

The blunders shocked the judge, April M. Perry, who recounted from the bench on Thursday how prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.

The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Making matters even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts — that is, until Judge Perry ordered them to give her the full copies.

The government’s missteps were bad enough to necessitate tossing out the case against the critics of the president’s immigration plan just days before it was supposed to go to trial.

But the mistakes also pointed to a more important problem: As Mr. Trump has demanded more and more charges against those he perceives as his opponents, prosecutors have felt pressure to push weak cases through grand juries. And that, in turn, has led to an erosion in faith in the Justice Department by both the grand jurors themselves and the judges considering the cases.

“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry told Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who appeared in court to apologize for his subordinates’ mistakes. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”

Natalie Baldassare, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that the Chicago case and the handful of others in which prosecutors have been scolded for their grand jury presentations were an anomaly.

“These few cases are not representative of D.O.J.’s overall achievements to date,” Ms. Baldassare said, “and we will not be deterred in our efforts to hold criminals accountable and keep the American people safe.”

There are almost no statistics that gauge how often prosecutors fail to secure indictments or are chastised by judges because of their grand jury presentations, if only because such events used to be rare. Legal experts say it is just as uncommon for jurists like Judge Perry to shine a spotlight on grand jury proceedings, which are held in secret, although that, too, has been happening more often.

Barbara L. McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said that in her 20 years in the Justice Department, she had never worked on a case — or even heard of one — in which a judge had examined grand jury transcripts because of concerns about misconduct.

“Courts almost never do that, mostly because they trust that the government is acting honestly,” Ms. McQuade said. “But if the department demonstrates that it isn’t worthy of that trust, then it invites judges to look under the hood.”

That is precisely what happened in Wyoming in recent weeks, when a panel of three federal judges threw out nine indictments — including some for murder — after an examination of the grand jury proceedings revealed misconduct by Darin Smith, the state’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.

The judges ruled that Mr. Smith, who was in his first prosecutorial post after serving as a state senator and executive at the Christian Broadcasting Network, had addressed a panel of grand jurors at the federal courthouse in Casper on March 16. In remarks that broke with prosecutors’ typical nuance and restraint, he told the grand jurors that they were about to hear evidence concerning “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.”

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 26, 2026. We can do without Todd Blanche.

Acting Attorney General Todd “I love you, Sir” Blanche, shown below right, for a while looked like he had the inside track on the permanent post.

Violating the Epstein Transparency Act and dissembling about release of the files are just the sort of ethical abominations Donald Trump demands of his attorney general. While credible lawyers cringed at the indictment (as obviously violative of the First Amendment) of former FBI director James Comey for commenting on seashells,that, too, is just the type of prosecutorial abuse Trump wants.

However, two events last week suggested “Attorney General Todd Blanche” might be a designation even Republicans could do without.

First, the prosecution persecution of deported-then-retrieved-then-indicted Kilmar Abrego Garcia blew up in Blanche’s face. A federal court judge not only dismissed the case but hammered home key adverse evidence that Blanche supplied warranting Abrego Garcia’s release.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., of the Middle District of Tennessee ruled on a record replete with damning facts that the government’s decision to reopen a closed case against Abrego Garcia for transporting undocumented immigrants stemming from a November 2022 traffic stop was an illegitimate, vindictive prosecution. In stinging language, Crenshaw invoked the revered Attorney General Robert H. Jackson’s famous warning that the worst abuse of power comes when a prosecutor “will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”

Crenshaw cited repeatedly the key piece of evidence: Blanche’s “unrebutted public statements tying the reopened investigation” to Abrego Garcia’s successful suit challenging his deportation to CECOT. Crenshaw wrote that the inference of vindictiveness was supported by the “reopening of the investigation, Blanche’s unrebutted statements, and [Blanche aide and associate deputy attorney general Aakash] Singh’s sustained oversight.” Judge Crenshaw emphasized, “Blanche’s statements tie Main Justice to the tainted investigation and confirm what motivated it.”

Judge Crenshaw found the Justice Department could “not explain the Government’s change in position to remove Abrego Garcia and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him.” Crenshaw recounted:

[Blanche’s] public statements stand unrebutted. Blanche stated that the Executive Branch began “investigating” Abrego after a judge in Maryland “questioned” the Executive Branch’s decision to deport him. The Court previously found that Blanche’s “remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights,” and that Blanche “directly tie[d] [Homeland Security’s] investigation to Abrego’s Maryland suit.”

Blanche’s words directly confirm that the Executive Branch reopened the criminal investigation because the Judicial Branch required the Executive Branch to facilitate Abrego’s return from El Salvador.

Ouch. It’s one thing to lose a case critical to Trump. (Abrego Garcia infuriated the regime when he challenged Trump and Stephen Miller’s evil deportation scheme — and won!) It is quite another to lose it because you gave the defense critical evidence of vindictive motive. “Instead of investigating the November 2022 traffic stop to identify who was responsible for the human smuggling, Blanche started the investigation to implicate Abrego,” Judge Crenshaw wrote. “He did so to justify the Executive Branch’s decision to remove him to El Salvador.” Trump wanted a Roy Cohn attack dog, but in Blanche he has a loose-lipped bumbler.

Trump’s primary use for DOJ these days is to harass his enemies under the guise of legitimate law enforcement. Blanche’s blunder makes him a poor choice for that task. Crenshaw’s order nailing Blanche for vindictive prosecution puts other judges on notice; in these concocted revenge cases, judges will be that much more skeptical and less inclined to extend the “presumption of regularity” to Blanche and his attorneys. Blanche sure does not seem the ideal attorney general to pursue Trump’s revenge cases.

If the Abrego Garcia case was a blunder for Blanche (in large part because it confirmed critics’ accusations against Trump’s vicious deportation scheme and lies about Abrego Garcia), then the anti-weaponization fund might turn out to be Blanche’s career ender with Trump. Blanche, in testimony before Congress and then in a heated, disastrous row with two dozen Republican senators, did nothing but infuriate lawmakers over Blanche’s demand that they approve Trump’s “payout pot for punks,” as Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) so colorfully put it. After two hours with Blanche, Republican Senators voiced their fury, taking turns bashing Blanche. The irate senators were unusually candid:

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sneered: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.”

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson called the scheme a “galactic blunder.”

Tillis appeared disgusted: “Under what circumstances would it ever make sense to provide restitution for people who were either pled guilty or were found guilty in a court of law? You want to talk about maybe providing restitution for people who weren’t found guilty? Fine, but if you do this, why not for the poor, mostly peaceful prospect protesters in Kenosha; in Portland?”

Blanche not only failed to calm the storm; he wound up provoking usually docile senators and maring his own standing with the people who would have to confirm him if he were nominated for the job. (As a result of the blow-up, the Republicans had to flee D.C. and forgo a vote on the reconciliation bill.)

Even if Trump sticks with Blanche as his nominee, the rate at which Blanche is alienating Republican senators (and at which Trump is creating new defectors in the Republican Senate ranks) suggests Blanche might not make it through a confirmation fight.

Let’s hope that a lawyer who is this undisciplined, untrustworthy, and unethical does not get the AG job. If his prat-falls knock him out of consideration, we would be spared ever having to hear the phrase “Attorney General Blanche” — a phrase that a democracy struggling to hang on to the rule of law could certainly do without.

 

New York Times, Confusion and Worry After Abrupt Change to Green Card Process, Christina Morales, May 25, 2026 (print ed.). Immigrants and their advocates and lawyers are trying to interpret a new Trump administration rule that requires people to be in their native country to apply for a green card.

A new federal policy that could require thousands of immigrants to return to their home countries before petitioning for green cards has applicants and immigration lawyers scrambling to understand how the change will affect the path to permanent residence.

On Friday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the green card system, said that only in “extraordinary circumstances” would people already in the United States be granted permanent residence. Otherwise, anyone seeking permanent U.S. residence would need to apply at an American consulate in their home country.

Immigration lawyers and advocacy organizations said over the weekend that the change would reduce green card applications. In 2024, 1.4 million green cards were issued, and more than 800,000 of the recipients were already in the United States and had their immigration status modified as part of the process.

The change announced on Friday will be of particular concern to those who are married to U.S. citizens and seeking permanent residence, said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer and the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Such immigrants typically need to resolve their own immigration status before seeking a green card and they have generally been able sort out those issues while remaining in the United States.

“This is simply an attempt to slow immigration,” Mr. Kuck said, “and make immigration so unpleasant that you go home.”

Zach Kahler, a spokesman for the agency, said on Friday that the policy would remove a loophole where immigrants “slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”

The memo notes that allowing immigrants to remain in the country while their green card applications are processed, “is a matter of discretion and administrative grace.”

Efrén Olivares, the vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the new policy is about disrupting the green card process.

“It’s going to upend people’s lives in every sense of the word,” he said.

Most applicants have been allowed to remain in the United States with their families, which can include spouses and children who are U.S. citizens, while the green card process plays out. But now remaining in the country, may be the exception. In the past, Mr. Olivares said, someone may have been asked to apply from their home country in extraordinary circumstances, like if they had been deported several times or if they had a serious criminal history.Editors’ Picks‘Star City,’ and 5 More Things to Watch on TV This Week‘I Was Prepared for a Long Wait and Surly Interactions’Do You Know the Inspiring Places Where These Authors Lived?

Approval for permanent residency through a U.S. citizen relative can vary depending on the relationship, Mr. Olivares said. For a spouse, the waiting period could be about a year; for siblings it can take upward of five years; and for parents, it could take as long as a decade.

Several immigrants, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said on Saturday that they were confused and worried about what this change could mean for their own applications or those of their partners.

New York Times, Supreme Court Reverses Ruling in Immigration Judges’ Free Speech Lawsuit, Ann E. Marimow, May 26, 2026. A group of immigration judges in 2020 challenged work-related restrictions on their public speaking engagements, saying they violated their free speech rights.

The Supreme Court on Monday dealt a setback to immigration judges challenging restrictions on their ability to speak out on public policy.

With the ruling, the justices sided with the Trump administration and reversed a lower-court decision in the case that had allowed the challenge to proceed in federal court.

A group of immigration judges filed suit in 2020 over a government policy limiting their work-related public statements, saying it violated their free speech rights. The National Association of Immigration Judges said such restrictions interfered with their ability to guest lecture at universities and to speak to community groups about matters of public importance, an issue that has taken on greater significance as Mr. Trump has put new pressure on the immigration system.

The judges are part of an administrative court system and make decisions about asylum claims, deportations and other related matters. They are overseen by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a division of the Justice Department.

The legal issue in the case centers on the proper venue for resolving such employee complaints. Typically, internal government bodies would weigh complaints first, including the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But Mr. Trump fired leaders of both of those offices last year.

In June, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that because it was not clear that those independent bodies are currently able to handle federal employee claims, a district court should reconsider whether immigration judges could instead make their case in federal courts that would otherwise be initially closed to them.

On Monday, the Supreme Court disagreed. The justices’ unsigned ruling was a procedural one and allows the litigation to continue in the lower courts. But the justices said the Fourth Circuit had overstepped and essentially decided the case on grounds not raised by either of the parties.

“The court did so without giving either side a chance to address its theory,” they wrote in an five-page opinion. Federal courts are not “roving commissions” licensed to “sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right,” the court said, quoting from earlier opinions.

There were no noted dissents.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, would have gone further and found that the Fourth Circuit was also wrong on the underlying legal merits.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, praised the court’s ruling and reversal of the Fourth Circuit.

“Judges should be judges resolving the case before them, and should never try to seize Congress’s role,” he wrote in a post on X. “This opinion sends a clear message: lower courts must accept that the law is the law, no matter the ‘political controversies of the day.’”

The decision comes as Trump administration has fired immigration judges across the country and put pressure on those remaining to deport more people, according to a recent New York Times investigation.

Before Mr. Trump returned to office, a district court judge had initially dismissed the association’s case in 2023, saying the immigration judges were required by law to channel their complaints through an administrative agency process.

But the appeals court had revived the matter, writing that political realities called into question whether the administrative process was “functioning as Congress intended.” The panel said it would not allow its “black robes to insulate [it] from taking notice of items in the public record.”

The Trump administration then filed an emergency request asking the Supreme Court to intervene and review the case. The justices decided the matter without holding oral arguments.

Alex Abdo, litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, who represents the immigration judges, called the Supreme Court’s decision disappointing.

“Public servants shouldn’t have to wade through cumbersome and futile administrative procedures before challenging broad restrictions on their speech,” he said. “Now more than ever we need the insights of public servants into the work of the government.” 

More On  Iran War

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s War Ends With a Whimper, William Kristol, right, May 26, 2026. One of these days, we might get an Iran ceasefire that actually involves a cessation of fire. Not yet, though: Iran warned this morning it will respond to last night’s U.S. attacks—which CENTCOM described as “self-defense strikes”—in southern Iran. “The nations and lands of the region,” Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a statement, “will no longer serve as shields for American bases.” That peace deal is apparently all but worked out, though! Happy Tuesday.

Whoa. This past weekend, as the outlines of Donald Trump’s Iran deal became clear, not one, not two, but three Republican senators were so appalled that they did something heretofore unimaginable in the era of Trump: They told the truth.

On Friday, Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker had warned that President Trump was “being ill advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it is written on. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness.” On Saturday, Wicker followed up: The rumored deal “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!”

Later that day Sen. Ted Cruz joined in voicing his alarm:

I am deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran “deal,” being pushed by some voices in the administration. President Trump’s decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. . . . If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant “death to America”—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake.

Even Trump’s lickspittle extraordinaire, Sen. Lindsay Graham, weighed in:

If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism and Iran still possesses the capability to destroy major Gulf oil infrastructure, then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.

This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability to inflict massive damage to Gulf oil infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel.

Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with if these perceptions are accurate.

Needless to say, this brief spasm of Republican truth-telling will likely prove . . . a brief spasm. Since Saturday, Wicker and Cruz seem to have fallen silent. Graham, for his part, has already reversed course. By yesterday he had fully entered fantasy-land in order to be back in Trump’s good graces:

President Trump’s most recent proposal requiring expansion of the Abraham Accords as part of a negotiated settlement to the Iran conflict is simply brilliant and would result in the most significant change in the Middle East in thousands of years.

With Saudi Arabia and others like Pakistan making peace with Israel, the region will know a level of stability never dreamed of before President Trump and will eventually lead to regional integration making the Middle East a powerhouse for economic opportunity and good instead of a powder keg.

Still, even as the truth-telling subsides, the question Graham posed will linger: “It makes one wonder why the war started to begin with.” And the answer will be hard to evade: The war started because Trump and his administration are foolish and reckless and hubristic, and those in a position to check him—like Sens. Wicker and Cruz and Graham—have utterly failed to do so.

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The bad news is that since Trump is our president, the country will pay a price for his foolishness and recklessness and hubris. And the damage that’s been done is real.

Iran’s brutal and terror-sponsoring regime is in place, having withstood the fury and might of the world’s strongest military. The brave Iranian people, who were told that help was “on the way,” have been betrayed. The Iranian regime has shown it can close the Strait of Hormuz and attack its neighbors, and get away with it. More than get away with it: Iran will apparently now get sanctions relief and substantial assets unfrozen.

What’s more, the conditions under which the strait will reopen remain murky, with Iran retaining the explicit or implicit ability to exact fees or favors for its passage. The disposition of Iran’s nuclear material, and the regime’s ability to restart its nuclear program, remains uncertain.

So the Iranian regime has emerged from the past three months strengthened. The United States has emerged weakened. In addition to the failure to achieve our war aims, and on top of our losses of soldiers and weaponry, our allies, from the Gulf to Europe to Asia, have all learned that they can’t trust us. In this respect, this three-month “excursion” has been a significant moment in American decline. Trump will do his best to bluster and obfuscate. But no one should be fooled.

It is a depressing but unavoidable fact that in this instance, Trump’s defeat is also America’s. And it’s important to acknowledge that this defeat will be very difficult to reverse. But there was never going to be a painless way out of the disaster of Trump’s second term.

At least more people are telling the truth, even if only for a moment, that it is a disaster. That’s a step on the road to recovery.

More On U.S. National Security, Military, Veterans 

New York Times, Evolving Warfare Connects the Conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, Lara Jakes, May 26, 2026. Aspects such as drone technology and diplomacy show how the wars intersect on the battlefield and in global alignments, providing a model for future conflicts.

The trench warfare and heavy artillery on Ukraine’s battlefields in 2022 don’t look much like the war by air and sea that began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

But similarities between the two conflicts soon became evident and remain so almost three months later.

In both, the country with the more powerful military has been unable to vanquish its adversary. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia expected a quick victory when he launched his “special military operation,” more than four years ago. President Trump initially vowed that the “little excursion” against Iran, which started on Feb. 28, would last four to five weeks.

“For both Russia and for the United States, there’s a lot of unmet expectations about their military operations,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran and Russia and a professor at Sciences Po, the elite social sciences university in Paris, attributing it to “the hubris on both sides.”

Over the last several days, negotiations have produced progress toward an initial plan for peace between Iran and the United States, though with much uncertainty, given the renewed American strikes against Iran on Monday. Whether or not an agreement is reached, the war will have provided lessons, along with the conflict in Ukraine, on the evolution of modern warfare.Technology reshaping warfare

Asymmetrical tactics have helped both Ukraine and Iran hold off stronger forces with which they could not compete in a conventional miliary confrontation. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 26, 2026. Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. Certainly, he has sidelined her.

Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 after concluding that intelligence failures, including a lack of communication across agencies, had contributed to the vulnerability that permitted the 9/11 attacks. The ODNI is supposed to oversee the eighteen different intelligence agencies and to coordinate the information they produce.

Gabbard did not have deep experience in intelligence and had endorsed Russian talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when Trump named her director of ODNI. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton called her “a hand grenade ready to explode.”

Gabbard ran into trouble with Trump by June 2025, when she released a video warning of “nuclear holocaust” because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” They were bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said. She released the video days before Trump launched his first attack on Iran, and a former intelligence officer told Nick Schifrin of PBS that Trump considered the video an attempt to try to convince him not to launch the strikes.

Afterward, Gabbard seemed to try to regain Trump’s favor by backing his extremist pet projects, including accusing former president Barack Obama of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” and calling for him to be prosecuted over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian operatives. She also oversaw an FBI raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election headquarters during which the administration scooped up all the physical ballots from the 2020 presidential election, as well as ballot images, tabulator tapes, and the voter rolls from that election.

But she never recovered her standing with the president. As Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, while Trump was preparing to invade Venezuela and extract its president and his wife, Gabbard was posting pictures of herself on a Hawaiian beach.

Trump stayed in the White House over the weekend, missing his son Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas with a social media post explaining that “[w]hile I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so. I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.”

Whatever else might be going on, Trump is under pressure to find a way out of Iran. Not only are prices skyrocketing owing to the rising cost of oil after Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, but the clock has run out on any authorization he could have claimed for his military adventure in Iran, and Congress seems ready to force his hand.

Congress alone can declare war, but the 1973 War Powers Act permits the president to act against an “imminent” threat so long as he notifies Congress within 48 hours. Then he has 60 days to get congressional approval. That timeline ran out on May 1, and the administration claimed it didn’t need authorization because it had declared a ceasefire on April 7, although it continued to maintain a blockade against Iranian ports—an act of war—and to exchange fire with Iranian forces. Republicans in Congress appeared to accept that argument for a time. But last Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to send representatives home a day early to keep members from passing a war powers resolution that would order Trump to remove U.S. troops from his war on Iran.

The House and Senate will come back on June 2, and Trump clearly would like to have an agreement with Iran in place before they do.

Trump’s social media account over the weekend was active. He twice posted an image of himself leering over Greenland with the caption “Hello, Greenland!” and repeated suggestions that “China Loves Trump.” He posted an AI image of Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) as a devil (I think), calling him a “SLEAZEBAG” and a “Dumocrat,” and an image of eight lawmakers or officials in orange jumpsuits (except for Obama’s tan one), claiming they had “Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization!” And he posted a number of images of colorful fountains.

But much of the account’s attention this weekend was on Iran. On Saturday morning the account posted an image of Iran covered by a U.S. flag, and at 4:30 that afternoon, it posted that Trump had just had a call with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain, and then a separate call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Iran. All the calls “went very well,” according to the post.

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” the post read, subject to finalization…. Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly. In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened.”

But Iran’s state media immediately posted that Trump’s claim that the strait would reopen as it was before the war was “not true,” adding that “it should be noted that American officials have acknowledged in multiple messages to Iran that Trump’s tweets are primarily for promotional purposes and media consumption within the United States, and they have recommended that no attention be paid to these statements.”

Firm details about the deal were scarce, but as journalist David Schuster posted, Al-Jazeera reported that the deal included “unfreezing billions in Iranian funds, lifting U.S. blockade, pulling U.S. forces away, reopening strait of Hormuz though with tolls to Iran, and allowing Iran to keep its enriched uranium.” “This would be a total U.S. surrender,” Schuster noted. Iran’s military spokesperson Ibrahim al-Fiqar posted an AI image of Trump kneeling before Iran’s supreme leader with the caption “The end.”

Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, immediately condemned the deal. He told reporters it “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.” Wicker urged Trump to “allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It is past time for action.”

By Sunday morning Trump was, once again, posting AI images of U.S. bombers attacking Iranian ships (complete with bodies flying through the air) and insisting that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Trump added that he expected Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, to join the Abraham Accords, the deal hammered out during Trump’s first term under which the UAE and Bahrain formally recognized Israel. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Arab leaders met Trump’s suggestion of such a recognition during the Saturday phone call with silence.

Then his account posted: “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon. Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”

This morning, Trump’s account posted: “I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet.” “[T]hey are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!”

Meanwhile, on Meet the Press Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who last week lost the primary for reelection to his seat after Trump backed his opponent and Trump supporters threw a gobsmacking $35 million at the contest, reopened fire from a different direction. Massie has been key to demanding the release of the Epstein files, and the administration continues to ignore the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025.

When host Kristen Welker, noting that Massie had named names from the files in the past, asked, “Can we expect you to name more names in the coming weeks and months?” Massie answered: “Yes.”

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY, DUMOCRATS! and other inspiring words from Dear Leader, Jeff Tiedrich, right, May 26, 2026. Yesterday morning, the president of the United States woke up, picked up his phone, and tapped out a Memorial Day message of peace and love — and that message was WAAAAAH MY DIAPER IS FULL WHY WON’T ANYONE CHANGE MEEEEEEEE?

“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year. God Bless those that have made the ultimate sacrifice. I love you all! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

What a wildly inappropriate thing for any world leader to say on their country’s most solemn day of remembrance for their nation’s war dead. ‘Dumocrats,’ that’s Donny’s latest insult — and he’s super proud of it. It’s why he was prattling on the other day about how ‘most people don’t know dumb has a b in it.’

So, Democrats ‘disrespect the military’? that’s an odd accusation coming from the five-time draft dodger who quite famously called soldiers who died for their country ‘suckers and losers.’

That why, if you stand him up at a podium and ask him to make a speech about Memorial Day, he turns it into kind of dick-measuring contest about which president had the best war, and got the fewest service members killed.

“In two wars recently we’ve lost a total of thirteen service — members, in Venezuela — which was a complete and total victory, where we’re working very closely with the Venezuelan government right now. We took that over in one day. Lost no one. In Operation Epic Fury we lost thirteen wonderful souls. Wonderful, special people.”

Donny wins! in your face, FDR! F you and your 400,000 WWII casualties. Donny did his war with only thirteen!

He’s so proud of himself for only getting thirteen ‘wonderful special people’ killed (so far) during his unprovoked, unnecessary and illegal don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran. He wants infinite praise. He wants a cookie.

Someone should ask Donny to name even one of those thirteen wonderful special people who he sent to their unjustifiable deaths. You know he wouldn’t be able to. He doesn’t care. he doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself — and he has no idea if any of the thirteen fallen were actually ‘wonderful’ or not.

‘wonderful’ is just one of those meaningless superlatives Donny love to stick in front of whatever noun happens to seep out of his rancid anus-mouth.

‘Wonderful special people.’ ‘Beautiful chocolate cake.’

Oh, and I’m not kidding about the beautiful chocolate cake. That’s what this psychopath bragged about chowing down on while bombing Syria back in 2017. “I was sitting at the table, we had finished dinner,” Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’re now having dessert—and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen—and President Xi was enjoying it.”

Bartiromo then said it was “brilliant” that the missiles were “unmanned.”

“It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant,” Trump agreed.

Wonderful people. Beautiful cake. Brilliant missiles.

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: The President couldn’t control himself for even a day, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, May 26, 2026. At noon today [Memorial Day, May 25), Donald J. Trump walked toward the wreath-laying ceremony, slapping his right hand against his upper thigh again and again with almost every step. Moments later, as he stood at attention with his hand raised in salute, he wobbled back and forth, unable to hold still.

He looked exhausted, unsteady, and vacant, like a man who had slept only a few hours and was being moved through the motions of a ceremony he knew he could not avoid. But today was May 25th, 2026. Memorial Day. And the President of the United States was standing before the families of the fallen, before service members, and before a country that still understands what this day is supposed to mean. He did not need to be inspiring or eloquent. He only needed to be solemn and to give one sacred day the seriousness it deserved. And once again, he could not do it.

Because Donald Trump has never understood service. He understands performance. He understands cameras, applause, and the choreography of power. But he does not understand sacrifice. And today, that failure was on full display. When it was his turn to speak, he opened by talking about the weather. He said how beautiful it was, better than the heat, while standing on a dry, covered stage as Gold Star families stood just feet in front of him in the pouring rain. That contrast said everything. The comfort of the powerful, shielded from the storm, while the people who had already given more than any family should ever have to give stood exposed beneath it.

This is who he has always been. We just do not always get to see it this clearly, on a day this sacred, with the contrast this impossible to ignore. Because watching people who do not care about the military, who do not care about sacrifice, and who do not care about this country stand on hallowed ground and reduce the memory of our war dead into another empty political production feels like desecration. There is no other polite way to say it. Today was just another show.

The wreath-laying ceremony was never really about his choosing to honor our fallen dead. It is a tradition. An obligation. Every president does it. It was placed on a schedule prepared by other people, and Trump moved through it like a man completing a task he could not avoid. He showed up because the office required it. Not because reverence brought him there. And you could feel the difference in every moment.

His real priorities revealed themselves on social media. By how he spent the hours that actually belonged to him and what he said. Because if Donald Trump cared even a little about the meaning of Memorial Day, he would have spent the morning honoring the fallen. He would have spoken about the young men and women who never made it home. He would have used his time and his platform to remind his followers and all Americans what sacrifice actually costs. He would have talked about the families carrying folded flags and empty seats at dinner tables tonight. He would have talked about service, duty, courage, grief, or love of country.

Instead, he spent his morning posting hatred from his phone. Long before the wreath, before the salute, before the cameras at Arlington, Donald Trump was awake and posting. At 6:10 this morning, his very first instinct on Memorial Day was not the fallen. It was grievance. He posted a long, bitter rant about the deal he claims he is making with Iran, naming the Republicans who have crossed him, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Thomas Massie, calling them and almost all Democrats “losers.” Eight minutes later, at 6:18, came the thing that passed for a tribute: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military.” He could not even wish his country a Memorial Day without making it an attack on his fellow Americans. And then at 6:26, he stopped pretending to mark the day at all and posted that “the Dumocrats have BAD POLICY, AND BAD CANDIDATES. Other than that, they are doing quite well!”

That was his morning. Attacks, then a fake tribute, then more complaining. The men and women who died for this country got one sentence squeezed between insults, like he suddenly remembered he was supposed to mention them.

At least he is not completely hiding how he really feels. It is just heartbreaking to watch a president treat this day with such little respect. Because nobody made him spend Memorial Day morning attacking people online. Nobody made him turn even this day into another performance about himself. Those were his instincts. Those were his priorities. And it is just another reminder of how far our country continues to fall.

And it should tell us something else, too, about where his energy actually goes. He was awake before dawn, sharp enough to craft insults, to track which senators had wronged him, to brag. But by the time he reached the part of the day that was supposed to be about someone other than himself, there was nothing left in him.

During the remarks portion of today’s event, while Secretary Hegseth was speaking, the President fell asleep. Or as his handlers like to spin it, he took a long blink. What we saw was him sitting with his eyes closed, motionless, for an extended stretch, caught on the livestream for everyone to see. We have heard for a long time now that he sleeps only a few hours a night and is up posting at all hours. He has all the energy in the world for grievance at 6 a.m. and none of it for the fallen at noon. Awake for the cruelty. Asleep for the cost. That is not a scheduling problem. That is a window into what he values and what he does not.

And maybe the worst part is that not respecting veterans, our current military members, and those who died in the line of duty is nothing new for Trump. None of this was a slip, not one bad morning, or the rain getting to him. It is the same thing he has done in public for years.

In 2015, he said of John McCain, a man who spent five and a half years being tortured as a prisoner of war, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” He has never taken it back.

In 2016, when Gold Star father Khizr Khan stood at a podium with his wife beside him and said Trump had sacrificed nothing and no one, Trump’s response was to suggest that Khan’s wife stood silent because, as a Muslim woman, “maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” Their son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in Iraq while shielding the men around him. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Trump’s instinct, faced with that grief, was to insult the boy’s mother.

His own former chief of staff put the worst of it on the record. John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general whose son Robert is buried in Section 60 at Arlington, confirmed in 2023 that Trump called Americans who died in war “suckers” and “losers.” He described Trump as a man who believes those who serve, who are wounded or captured or killed, are all “suckers” because “there’s nothing in it for them,” and who did not want to be seen with wounded veterans, with amputees, because “it doesn’t look good for me.” The Atlantic first reported that Trump stood at Robert Kelly’s grave on a Memorial Day visit and asked, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” And in the book “The Divider,” reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recounted Trump telling Kelly he wanted no wounded veterans in his planned military parade, saying, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys.” When Kelly told him those were the heroes, Trump did not understand. It was the plainest summary anyone has ever given of him: in his mind, sacrifice without personal gain makes no sense.

In 2023, when Trump decided that General Mark Milley had betrayed him, he wrote that what Milley, right, did was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” A former president suggested execution for the nation’s highest-ranking military officer.

In 2024, standing beside a billionaire donor he had given the civilian Medal of Freedom, he told a crowd that the civilian medal was “actually much better” than the Medal of Honor. Why? Because, in his words, the soldiers who earn the Medal of Honor are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” She, by contrast, was “a healthy, beautiful woman.” That is how he thinks about the highest award this country can give for valor. The wounded and the dead embarrass him. The healthy donor impresses him.

And during the 2024 campaign, he went even further. At a ceremony honoring the thirteen service members killed in the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal, his campaign brought cameras into Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where many of our most recent war dead are buried and where political activity is banned, so they could film campaign footage. When a cemetery worker tried to stop them, members of his staff physically pushed her aside. The Army, which almost never publicly comments on political matters, took the extraordinary step of defending her afterward.

And that is the part I think our whole country needs to understand. We have been sold a lie that Donald Trump cares deeply about patriotism, the military, veterans, or sacrifice. Most of us know the truth, but his enablers keep repeating it because the image is politically useful, but reality keeps exposing something completely different. We can see it with our own eyes. We can hear it with our own ears. Every time he talks about service members as “suckers” or “losers.” Every time Memorial Day becomes another chance for him to rage about himself. And every time he treats sacred places like campaign backdrops instead of gravesites filled with people who gave everything for this country.

And maybe that is why all of this hits such a nerve for so many of us. Because once you really understand what sacrifice means, what it means to die for your country and for people you will never meet, you realize the sheer emptiness of what patriotism has become in the hands of people like Trump. You realize the difference between loving your country and simply using it.

I remember the first moment I started to truly understand the meaning of that word, and honestly, I am not even sure “sacrifice” is big enough for it. I was standing in the American cemetery in Normandy when I was in high school. Row after row after row of white crosses and Stars of David stretched farther than my eyes could follow. Every single one belonged to an American who crossed an ocean to fight fascism and never came home. And suddenly they stopped being names in a textbook or numbers in a war documentary. They became real people to me. I remember standing there with tears in my eyes, thinking about never seeing my own siblings again, or one of my parents, and trying to imagine what those young men must have felt. The pride of knowing they were part of something bigger than themselves, mixed with the unimaginable grief and fear of leaving everyone they loved behind. The weight of it hit me unexpectedly. So much so that I took the exact same tour a second time that day because I could not bring myself to leave. I wanted more time to honor them. More time to process the unimaginable human cost of what happened there.

The magnitude of what Memorial Day is supposed to be does not fit inside your chest. You can try to process the number of lives, the number of families who got a folded flag instead of a son, a daughter, a husband, or a father, and eventually you realize something that changes you forever. We are only standing where we are standing because they stood where they stood. We are breathing free air because they crossed the world to fight evil before it reached us. And not just in WW2, but in so many wars and conflicts. Even “excursions” like Donald Trump is taking our military into right now.

That is what Memorial Day is supposed to mean. That is what this day is. And we must never forget.

Some nights these posts are easier to write than others. Some nights, it is the sheer absurdity of what Trump and the people around him are doing. Other nights, it is the danger they are creating, not just here in the United States, but across the entire world. So much of the instability, the public health crises, the economic chaos, and the growing sense that everything is coming apart at the seams can be traced back to this administration and the people enabling it.

The entire world is being forced to live at the mercy of a madman. And I used to hesitate to use words like that. I used to pull back from direct language because I worried about sounding alarmist. But we are running out of time for euphemisms. At some point, honesty matters more than sounding polite.

And the truth is that sitting down every night to document this slow collapse into authoritarianism is the last thing anyone wants to do. Nobody wants to spend their evenings recording another assault on democratic norms, another act of cruelty, another lie, another abuse of power, another moment where the unthinkable somehow becomes normal by the next news cycle.

But the record has to be kept. There needs to be a place where all of this is clearly written down. In order. With the dates, the quotes, and the timestamps. With what they said and what they did and how it felt to live through it while it was happening. Because when this eventually ends, and one day it will, there are going to be people who try to minimize it. People who will pretend they did not support it. People who will say it was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or “not that bad.” And I never want them to be able to erase what this felt like for the people who lived through it.

Because here is what genuinely frightens me. So many people developed amnesia about his first term. Everything that happened somehow got blurred. Those were brutally hard years for so many of us, for the whole entire world, with the virus and everything that came with it. The years ran together. And people forgot how close we came to even worse outcomes.

We cannot let that happen again. Someday, I hope we will be able to look back on these posts and understand they were not just written for us, but for future generations too. I hope they become reminders and warnings, proof of what this felt like while we were living through it. The dread of waking up every morning, wondering what line would be crossed next. The exhaustion of watching cruelty become routine. The constant feeling that something precious was slipping away from us. And I hope that when this country is faced with the next Trump, because there will be a next one someday, people can pull these words back up and remember how bad it really was, how quickly things escalated, and how close we came to becoming a country we no longer recognized. Because memory matters. Records matter. History matters. That is how democracies protect themselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So that is what these posts are. A record. And every single one of you who reads them, saves them, shares them, and refuses to let any of this pass by as normal, you are helping keep that record too.

Today I have been thinking about our service members. The ones who raised their right hand and swore an oath, not to a man, not to a political party, and not to a flag someone waves around for cameras and applause, but to the Constitution of the United States. The ones willing to give everything for people they will never meet. The ones who live “country above self” as the actual shape of their lives and not as some empty slogan to wear on a hat or scream online. They are the patriots. They are the real Americans. They always have been. And they are the exact opposite of the man who spent today insulting the very meaning of sacrifice.

I have been thinking about the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice so the rest of us could have a country worth fighting for, and I still believe that if the day ever comes when this man, or the next man just like him, asks our military to choose between the Constitution and a would-be king, they will choose the Constitution. I believe the people who understand sacrifice more deeply than anyone else alive will not allow the sacrifice of their brothers and sisters to be twisted into loyalty to a small, hollow man who genuinely believes they were suckers for giving everything they had. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

New York Times, Iceland, Rattled by Trump, Weighs Joining the E.U., Amelia Nierenberg, Visuals by Sergey Ponomarev, May 26, 2026. Iceland has stood apart from the rest of Europe. But President Trump’s threats to Greenland have provoked a reconsideration.Iceland is in Europe. But it is not in the European Union.

For a long time, that was just fine for Iceland, which has fiercely protected its independence — and its control over its fishing industry.

Not so much anymore. In recent months, the top of the world has felt precarious as President Trump repeatedly threatened to “get” Greenland, Iceland’s closest neighbor. And the 400,000 or so Icelanders have been seriously debating the once unthinkable: Has the time come to try to join the bloc?

“The Greenland crisis definitely hit a nerve,” Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir said in February, in an interview at her office in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital.

U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability

 

Space X Chairman Elon Musk, left, the world's richest human in large part via U.S. taxpayer-funded contracts and favorable regulatory and income tax policies, play-acts as taking a chainsaw to the U.S. government and its personnel during an annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Cheering on Musk at right is Argentine President Javier Millei, whose reelection last fall was heavily subsidized by $40 billion in Trump-authorized U.S. loans and other payments to support a fellow "conservatiive" supporting radical free-market, anti-regulatory policies. 

New York Times, SpaceX’s Unconventional Corporate Arrangements Favor Elon Musk, Ryan Mac, May 26, 2026. The ways it set up its board and Mr. Musk’s pay appear to benefit him at the expense of other shareholders, corporate governance experts said.

In January, SpaceX granted Elon Musk, its founder and chief executive, a pay package that eventually totaled 1.3 billion restricted shares. The award was contingent on the rocket company’s establishing a colony on Mars with one million inhabitants and launching high-powered data centers into space.

Mr. Musk has not achieved those goals. Even so, he can vote those 1.3 billion shares in shareholder decisions, according to SpaceX’s offering prospectus, which was released on Wednesday. In other words, the company is allowing Mr. Musk to vote with shares he has not yet earned.

“I have never heard of this,” said Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “He basically found a way to hack the normal rules of corporate organization.”

The restricted shares weren’t the only unusual corporate governance arrangement that SpaceX revealed as it prepares what could be the largest initial public offering ever. The company, which builds rockets and operates the Starlink satellite internet service, has valued itself at more than $1.25 trillion, and its I.P.O. — which is set to happen as soon as next month — is likely to create a bonanza for Wall Street, Silicon Valley and, of course, Mr. Musk.

Among the atypical arrangements, SpaceX does not plan to have the majority of its board be independent directors. It added that it would not use a committee of independent board members to determine executive compensation, as most companies do. And its governing documents say any shareholder claims under federal securities law must be resolved through arbitration.

All of these moves appear to benefit one person: Mr. Musk.

The measures give him more command over a company where he controls 85 percent of shareholder votes, corporate governance experts said. They allow Mr. Musk to put more insiders onto SpaceX’s board, pick the people who determine his pay and largely insulate himself from shareholder lawsuits, they said.

The measures are “a defensive moat” that will “entrench him permanently” as chief executive, said Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College who studies corporate governance. He called the January compensation package “insane.”

What SpaceX is doing goes beyond the corporate governance structures at Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric carmaker. In September, Tesla awarded him a stock compensation package tied to increases in the company’s valuation and operational milestones, such as the commercial deployment of one million autonomous taxis. But Mr. Musk cannot vote with those shares until he hits the operational goals, according to Tesla’s filings.

SpaceX’s governance mea

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump promotes unregulated online casino after $1 million Super PAC donation, Judd Legum, right, May 26, 2026. On Truth Social, Trump has repeatedly promoted Stake, an unregulated online casino that, according to state gambling regulators, is operating illegally. 

Trump publicized Stake alongside the UFC match being held at the White House on his 80th birthday, June 14. He posted AI-generated images featuring himself, UFC CEO Dana White, and the Stake logo on April 9, May 8, and twice on May 20.

Stake is a major sponsor of the UFC, including prominent placement in the UFC octagon.

Stake.us users play traditional casino games like slots and roulette. The company, which is based in Cyprus, claims it is a “safe and free gaming experience.” But gambling regulators across the country say it is an illegal online casino. Stake.us has two types of currency: 1. “Gold Coins” which cannot be converted into real money, and 2. “Stake Cash” which can be converted to crypto currency or gift cards. To obtain “Stake Cash” players buy “Gold Coins” and receive “Stake Cash” for free.

A lawsuit by the Los Angeles City Attorney called this “a ruse” that is indistinguishable from real money gambling. Nevertheless, Stake.us has not obtained or sought gambling licenses from any jurisdiction in the United States.

Why is Trump lending his image — and the White House itself — to this kind of scheme? One possible answer was included in the May 20 FEC filing of MAGA Inc., the primary Super PAC connected to Trump. On April 27, Bijan Tehrani, the co-owner and co-founder of Stake, donated $1 million to MAGA Inc.

Tehrani, a billionaire who resides in Australia, is able to donate to MAGA Inc. because he was born in the United States. Tehrani is a named defendant in the California lawsuit, which alleges Tehrani “created, directed, controlled, knowingly profited from, and otherwise knowingly participated in the illegal conduct.”

Overall, Stake.us is facing more than a dozen lawsuits, including consumer class actions, across the United States. As a result of legislative and regulatory actions in recent years, Stake.us is now blocked in at least 17 states.

Stake pays millions to celebrities to lend legitimacy to its platform. According to a 2023 report from the Financial Times, Drake is paid $100 million annually to promote Stake.The government contractor loophole

Government contractors are prohibited from making political contributions in the United States, even to Super PACs. But, as the latest MAGA Inc. filing reveals, there are plenty of loopholes.

For example, Intuitive Machines, a space service company, is a significant government contractor. It has been particularly successful in securing government contracts during the second Trump administration. Intuitive Machines has secured at least eight new government contracts since Trump returned to the White House, including a NASA contract valued at $46.8 million on March 25, 2026.

Intuitive Machines cannot donate to MAGA Inc. But Kamal “Kam” Ghaffarian, the founder and chairman of Intuitive Machines, is not prohibited from donating to Super PACs. On April 9, Ghaffarian donated $1 million to MAGA Inc.

Ghaffarian is also founder and chairman of other major government contractors, including Axiom Space, X-energy, and Quantum Space.The tobacco payoff

On April 30, the tobacco company Reynolds American, through its RAI Services subsidiary, donated $5 million to MAGA Inc.

Two days later, according to reporting by the New York Times, Trump met with Reynolds executives and Brian Ballard, a Reynolds lobbyist and Trump fundraiser, at Trump’s golf club in Juipter, Florida. At the meeting, the executives complained to Trump about the prohibition on fruit-flavored vapes, which have been banned because of their appeal to children.

Trump interrupted the meeting to call FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. Within a week, the FDA had produced new guidance to facilitate Reynolds and other companies to resume selling fruit-flavored vapes. Makary reportedly resigned in protest.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy: Trump's Failed War Keeps Failing, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 26, 2026. Look at the front page of The NYT right now.

I think we have to accept that there are parties in this war -- Iran, Russia, Israel, perhaps China -- that don’t really want the war to end. High inflation and energy shortages are weakening Western and Asian democracies, including the US, which benefits Russia-China-Iran. Trump’s weakness was on full display in China a few weeks ago, something that must have delighted our adversaries throughout the world. Israel wants to keep fighting. And so today, rather than peace, strength, and winning Trump’s failed war keeps failing and he and America keep losing.

This ongoing failure has weakened Trump abroad and at home. He can no longer count on Congressional Republicans to be there for him, as we saw last week. When Congress returns next week Trump is likely to lose two highly symbolic votes - on Ukraine and on the Iran war. Trump also keeps losing on his ballroom and his ridiculous slush fund. Here’s a prominent WaPo story today.

Paxton’s likely win tonight in Texas will further loosen his grip over Senate Republicans. Here’s the lead story in Politico this morning: The ugliness of his mass deportation regime, which they’ve done everything they can to bury, came roaring back yesterday when New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was tear-gassed and injured:

Yesterday, in a major speech, Pope Leo challenged the Trump-tech bro anything goes alliance in very clear terms:

Pope Leo XIV has been a major global critic of immigration crackdowns and war, staking out a moral agenda that has at times challenged the political leadership of his home country.

Now Leo, the first pope from the United States, has added to that list artificial intelligence, taking on American power brokers of another kind — this time in Silicon Valley.

Leo’s papal document, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” and made public on Monday, is the defining theological statement so far of his young papacy, and the most significant moral intervention on A.I. to date from a religious leader. It also is an effort to inject Catholic moral values into a famously secular, and significantly American, industry that is transforming the world at lightning speed.

“Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Leo wrote.

Leo specifically called for A.I. to be “disarmed,” similar to the church’s support for nuclear disarmament, meaning “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he explained in a speech at the Vatican.

Here’s a link to Magnifica Humanitas.

In a strategic blow to Trump Putin’s failed war is also really failing too:

Friends, in surveying the news this morning there is very, very little that looks like winning for Donnie.

A new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll captures the urgency Trump now faces in changing the trajectory of the election. Look at these charts from G. Elliott Morris……

Dems lead by 8 in the generic ballot, a lead that means big blue wave in November if it holds:

Concerns about rising prices are spiking, making any possible recovery for Trump and the Rs this year far less likely (note elections and democracy are #2 issue here):

Democrats are opening up meaningful leads on the things that matter most to voters:

The DCCC has launched a new digital ad campaign targeting black voters in key battleground House districts, turning Trump’s institutionalized racism and white supremacy into a call to act and vote. Here’s the ad. It’s very good:

 

U.S. House candidates Maureen Galindo, left, and Johnny Garcia participate in a forum in San Antonio, Texas, on May 6, 2026 (Photo by Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images). 

Politico, Sex therapist accused of antisemitism loses Democratic runoff for Texas House seat, Lisa Kashinsky, May 25, 2026. Johnny Garcia, a county sheriff's deputy backed by national Democrats, defeated Maureen Galindo, the controversial candidate, in the competitive 35th District.Maureen Galindo speaks as Johnny Garcia listens during a forum.

Progressive sex therapist Maureen Galindo lost the Democratic runoff for Texas’ 35th District after being accused of antisemitism and facing condemnations from within her own party.

Johnny Garcia’s victory over Galindo on Tuesday has national and Texas Democrats breathing a sigh of relief.

They had moved en masse to disavow Galindo after she said in a recent social media post that she would write legislation to turn a local ICE detention center into a “prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” They had also accused Republicans of trying to prop her up, pointing to a shadowy super PAC with possible GOP ties, Lead Left, that pumped over $900,000 into the race to boost Galindo and attack Garcia.

The district is one of the five that Texas Republicans are targeting for pickups this fall, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added Garcia, a county sheriff's deputy.

 

New York Times, U.F.C. Fight Venue Takes Shape on the White House Lawn, Luke Broadwater, May 26, 2026. The Ultimate Fighting Championship bout is scheduled for June 14, President Trump’s 80th birthday.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship has released its latest rendering of the octagonal cage that officials are building at the White House for a fight scheduled on President Trump’s 80th birthday.

It depicts a star-spangled arch over the cage on the White House South Lawn along with seating for thousands.

Construction for the fight on June 14, which is one of several major events planned around the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, is already underway at the White House. Mr. Trump is also planning a temporary IndyCar street circuit racing past landmarks including the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol that will take place in August.

Last week, Mr. Trump said the tickets for the U.F.C. event were in high demand.

“I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets,” he said. “It’s a one of a kind U.F.C.”

Mr. Trump said the temporary arena would hold more than 4,000 people. He said the White House Ellipse grounds would host a U.F.C. Freedom 250 Fan Fest, where 75,000 to 100,000 people could watch the fights for free.

Weigh-ins will take place at Lincoln Memorial, officials have said.

New York Times, Trump Administration to Send Americans Exposed to Ebola to Kenya, Apoorva Mandavilli and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, May 26, 2026. In past outbreaks, Americans exposed to the virus were sent home to be treated in state-of-the-art facilities. The Trump administration has already flown some U.S. citizens to Europe for treatment.

The Trump administration plans to send to Kenya U.S. citizens exposed to the Ebola virus rather than bring them home for observation and treatment, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.

The approach is a stark contrast to the way previous administrations responded to outbreaks, during which health care workers and other U.S. citizens exposed to the virus were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units. The administration this month flew an American doctor who developed symptoms to a hospital in Germany, and transported six other Americans for monitoring in Germany and the Czech Republic.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is estimated to have ballooned to more than 1,000 cases and more than 200 deaths in just the 11 days since it was first announced, making it the third largest on record already. Aid cuts by the Trump administration shut down crucial disease surveillance networks and medical supply chains that might have detected and contained the epidemic sooner.

Last week, the Trump administration invoked a public health law known as Title 42 to bar immigrants and legal permanent residents who had been in Congo, Uganda or South Sudan in the previous 21 days from entering the United States.

The administration’s new plan would also keep U.S. citizens who might have been exposed to Ebola out of the country, according to two of the people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

New York Times, Christian Menefee Defeats Al Green in Houston-Area House Seat, Shane Goldmacher, May 26, 2026. The showdown, manufactured by a Republican gerrymander, created one of many generational clashes consuming Democrats this cycle.

Representative Christian Menefee defeated Representative Al Green on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, in a Texas showdown that represented the kind of generational clash consuming the Democratic Party nationwide.

Mr. Menefee, 38, toppled the 11-term incumbent, Mr. Green, 78, in a new Houston district that Republicans redrew last year, compressing two Democratic-held districts into one as they sought to increase Republican seats in the state.

Mr. Green became the first incumbent Democrat to lose a primary in 2026. A series of other generational challenges is set to unfold in the coming weeks and months, including next week in California.

Mr. Menefee first won a special election to fill a congressional vacancy in February. He immediately continued campaigning to stay in Congress, putting him on a collision course with Mr. Green, who has been an outspoken progressive known for heckling President Trump during his speeches before Congress.

Republican mapmakers shifted Mr. Green’s Ninth District from south of Houston to the city’s suburbs, making it solidly Republican. He opted to run for re-election in the new Texas 18th, which Mr. Menefee began representing only a few months ago and which overlapped with some of his old seat.

The race pitted two Black progressives against each other. Even though he had just arrived in Washington, Mr. Menefee, who previously served as the Harris County attorney, scored the endorsement of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.

By far the biggest spender in the race was a super PAC aligned with the crypto industry, which poured more than $5.7 million into the race, partly to make an example of Mr. Green, who is a critic of the industry and sits on the powerful House Financial Services Committee

In a speech on the House floor in May, Mr. Green ripped the industry and called those in his party who sided with it “Cryptocrats.”

“I rise as an unbought, liberated, unafraid Democrat, unbought by crypto cash,” he declared in the speech.

Mr. Menefee initially edged ahead of Mr. Green in the first round of voting in March, but because neither had 50 percent, the race went to a runoff.

The 18th District boasts a storied legacy of prominent Black representatives, including Mickey Leland and Barbara Jordan. In the two years before Mr. Menefee’s election, two of the previous occupants of the seat, both in their 70s, died in office.

New York Times, An Election Denier Might Be Georgia’s Next Governor, Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, May 26, 2026. Burt Jones, the leading G.O.P. candidate for governor, worked with Trump allies to try to overturn the election, and even talked to the president himself.

Burt Jones, the Republican front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor.

On the stump, he even boasts about it.

“You’ve got to think back to who was standing up — who was in the ditch, in the foxhole — with everybody when we were fighting in 2020,” Mr. Jones told a crowd recently while campaigning inside a gun store in suburban Atlanta.

Last week, Mr. Jones, with the help of an endorsement from President Trump, was the top vote-getter in the first round of Georgia’s Republican primary for governor. He now faces a June 16 runoff against Rick Jackson, a brash, pro-Trump billionaire.

But Mr. Jones still carries the baggage — or as some would have it, bragging rights — from the presidential election of six years ago, when there were few state officials who played more important roles than Mr. Jones in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.

The New York Times reviewed the lengths to which he went, drawing on thousands of files from state and federal investigations, including public documents as well as leaked discovery material produced in the failed Georgia criminal case against Mr. Trump and his allies.

Taken together, they show that in the weeks after the election, Mr. Jones, then a state senator, coordinated with the Trump campaign and was even in contact with Mr. Trump himself, who would proclaim during a 2020 rally that Mr. Jones was “in my pocket.”

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Around the Bulwarkt,Staff  reports, May 26, 2026.

• Trump’s Slush Fund Is Based on a Lie… The real victims of lawfare and weaponized prosecutions aren’t the insurrectionists, observes MONA CHAREN.
• Trump’s Iran Disaster Is Also a Defeat for the U.S.… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER for a holiday pod about the ‘master’ negotiator who clearly wants out.
• For the First Time Since WWII, Moscow Is Under Attack… Author and journalist MARC BENNETTS joins ELIOT COHEN and ERIC EDELMAN on Shield of the Republic to discuss the state of Russia years into its war against Ukraine.
• Bulwark Book Club for June: If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal... Leave a question and then join the discussion with MONA and MARK on Monday, June 8 at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
• Danielle Crittenden on Losing Her Daughter… On The Mona Charen Show, DANIELLE CRITTENDEN joins MONA CHAREN for a raw conversation about what Danielle calls the “alternative universe of grief” after the death of her child.
• Quick Hits

GABBARD GONE: Donald Trump’s cabinet is down another woman. On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she would resign from the Trump administration, citing her husband’s bone-cancer diagnosis.

This wasn’t the only factor. Reuters, citing a source familiar, reported Friday that Gabbard had been quietly pushed out by the White House. Whatever the reason—and it’s plausible that it was a combination of both—her exit comes after two months of war in Iran, which has been pure political pain for Gabbard. After all, she was the longtime anti-war Democrat who jumped ship to the GOP one month before the 2024 election, ostensibly on the conviction that Republicans were more serious about keeping America out of pointless wars. That she stayed as long as she did was notable: She had reportedly been frozen out of the planning for major military operations, had been publicly contradicted on intelligence questions by Trump himself, and had seen top aides like National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent head for the hills earlier in the conflict with Iran.

Even as Gabbard found herself more and more crosswise of the president’s plans abroad, she long kept him happy with her zealous pursuit of a shared agenda here at home: using America’s intelligence agencies to target the “deep state” and other supposed domestic enemies of Trump. She issued reports disparaging the early days of the Russiagate investigation, accused Barack Obama of “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump, and was on scene when the government seized ballots in Georgia and directed the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico to advance Trump’s undying claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Gabbard becomes the fourth woman—after Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer—to experience an unscheduled rapid departure from Trump’s cabinet. Linda McMahon, Kelly Loeffler, and Brooke Rollins better keep their heads on a swivel.

THE POPE VS. THE MACHINE GOD: Pope Leo XIV yesterday sounded the alarm about the threats posed by the “anti-human vision” of artificial intelligence, writing in a papal encyclical that the technology risks reducing humans “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever-greater efficiency.” Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces.

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote.

In the Bible, the Tower of Babel symbolizes a top-down, grandiose project where decisions are driven by pride, profit and a push for homogenization, the pope suggested in his text. In the rebuilding of Jerusalem, diverse people worked together to rebuild the ruined walls and established a fraternal coexistence within them, he added. . . .

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

Leo stopped short of condemning AI technology as inherently evil, instead focusing on the dangers of its haphazard and profit- and conflict-driven development and of the risks of concentrating power over it in the hands of a few all-powerful companies. Read the whole thing.

ADVENTURES IN SYCOPHANCY: If you’ve ever watched a Trump cabinet meeting, you know how viscerally unpleasant they are, with each member of the president’s retinue squirming and squeeing to squeeze in as many over-the-top compliments to their boss as possible. Now, the New York Times’s Ashley Cai has the analysis we didn’t know we needed, breaking down the adulation by official and by type. “On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit, or criticized his political opponents,” Cai writes. (That few?) Some other chestnuts:

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio “both spoke and flattered the president the most.”
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “said three times that Mr. Trump would have prevented conflicts from occurring.”
• Vice President J.D. Vance “insulted political opponents the most. On average, one of six sentences was an insult.”
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “said Mr. Trump achieved what nobody believed was possible five times.”
• Environmental Protection Administrator Lee Zeldin “repeatedly said Mr. Trump was ‘willing to take a bullet for this country.’”

Climate Change, The Environment, Energy Production

New York Times, Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade, Brad Plumer and Eric Niiler, May 26, 2026. While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.

It’s rare for technical papers about climate modeling to kick off a heated public debate, or attract attention from the White House.

But that’s what happened recently after an international team of researchers published a major revision of the emissions scenarios used to study global warming.

When scientists try to model how hot Earth could get this century, they typically look at a range of possibilities for how much planet-warming pollution humans might pump into the atmosphere. These scenarios get updated every seven years or so.

In this latest update, the researchers abandoned a dire — and often criticized — high-emissions scenario known as RCP8.5 that has been prominently cited in thousands of climate studies over the past decade. The authors said the scenario was now “implausible” given recent energy trends.

That provoked online arguments among scientists. For years, critics of the high-emissions scenario had argued that it was always unrealistic, in part because it envisioned that countries would burn coal at absurdly high rates. They argued that any studies or news reports relying on that scenario exaggerated the risks of climate change. Why, those critics now asked, did the course correction take so long?

Other researchers, however, noted that scientists still can’t rule out extreme warming, even if the odds might be low, and that there are good scientific reasons for studying high-emissions scenarios.

Last weekend, President Trump weighed in, suggesting that the revision showed that global warming wasn’t a threat and that “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

The majority of climate scientists still say global warming is a serious problem, and that even more plausible, medium-emissions scenarios can carry grave dangers. But the new paper has raised questions about whether some of the risks of climate change have been poorly communicated or overstated in years past and how best to think about those risks going forward.

Washington Post, Rafe Pomerance, who helped sound the alarm on climate change, dies at 79, Sarah Kaplan, May 21, 2026. He pushed for the first congressional hearings on climate change and helped negotiate a landmark U.N. treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.

Like most of humanity, Rafe Pomerance had never heard of climate change when he stumbled upon the phrase in a dense government document in the late 1970s. Mr. Pomerance was working as a clean-air lobbyist for the environmental group Friends of the Earth at the time, more concerned with curbing pollution at ground level than tracking an invisible gas way up in the atmosphere.

Yet here on the 66th page of a report on coal liquefaction, federal scientists were warning that surging emissions of carbon dioxide, caused mostly by burning fossil fuels, could cause a “significant and damaging” increase in Earth’s temperature.

“This was so much more profound than the issues I’d been working on,” Mr. Pomerance told The Washington Post in 1989. “I remember thinking: What right does this generation have to warm up the Earth?”

Mr. Pomerance spent the rest of his life trying to avert catastrophic warming, leading the push for the first congressional hearings on the issue and helping negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark United Nations treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.

The journalist Nathaniel Rich, whose New York Times Magazine article about the early days of climate activism brought Mr. Pomerance some late-in-life glory, described him as “a hyperkinetic lobbyist … who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming.”By the time of his death Thursday at 79, the annual amount of carbon dioxide released by humans had nearly doubled, and global average temperatures had risen by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. But nearly everyone on Earth has heard about the dangers of climate change.

His death, from lung cancer, was confirmed by his son Benjamin Cooley.

Just a few days after he read the coal report, a colleague showed Mr. Pomerance a newspaper article about a speech by geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald discussing the likely effects of carbon-fueled warming: devastating storms, widespread drought, enough ice sheet melt to submerge major coastal cities.

Mr. Pomerance swiftly tracked down MacDonald’s phone number and asked for a meeting. Over the course of several hours, as MacDonald patiently explained the greenhouse effect, which researchers had been studying since the 19th century, Mr. Pomerance became increasingly appalled that no one beyond a siloed group of scientists seemed to know about the issue.

“I describe the situation as, we were in an empty room,” Mr. Pomerance said in a 2025 webinar hosted by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “There was no interest, no knowledge, very little work going on.”

Having spent the better part of a decade prowling the halls of Capitol Hill, this was a problem Mr. Pomerance knew how to solve. The lanky, gregarious activist began to arrange meetings between MacDonald and every government official he could find.

Even Mr. Pomerance was surprised by how quickly their effort gained traction. Gus Speth, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Jimmy Carter, asked the duo to prepare a memorandum, which he promised to bring to the president. The resulting document prompted the White House to commission a comprehensive assessment of the science on carbon dioxide and climate.

Tom Cosgrove via Substack, Appreciation: Remembering Rafe Pomerance: Don’t Mourn, Organize, May 24, 2026. Three Ways To Block A Punch.

When art critics in the 19th century coined the phrase “larger than life,” they used it literally — to describe statues built to a heroic scale, grand monuments meant to occupy more physical space than an ordinary human ever could.

I have spent the last half century in the orbit of a man who was built to that exact scale.

To read the Washington Post headline this week — “Rafe Pomerance, who helped sound the alarm on climate change, dies at 79” — feels like a logical impossibility. How do you compress a relentless force of nature into a column of newsprint? How do you say goodbye to a friend you have witnessed over five decades refusing to let the world look away from its own future?

I first met Rafe in January 1980.

I had just arrived in Washington as an intern for the Coast Alliance, the organization coordinating the “Year of the Coast,” a national effort to draw attention to America’s shorelines and oceans. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, carrying more idealism than experience, and trying to figure out how I might contribute to the long, unfinished project of perfecting our union.

Rafe was president of Friends of the Earth and chair of the Coast Alliance. At my first board meeting, I heard about climate change for the first time.

“We have something more important than the coast to talk about today,” he said. “Rising greenhouse gases.”

At the time, few environmentalists — let alone most Americans — had ever heard the phrase “greenhouse gases.” Rafe had stumbled across a warning buried in a late‑1970s EPA coal report, a brief reference suggesting that continued fossil fuel combustion could fundamentally alter the atmosphere. In August 2018, journalist Nathaniel Rich documented that entire decade of early climate awareness and political failure in a landmark New York Times Magazine piece, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” Rafe was at the center of that story.

Little did I know that morning that it would begin forty‑six years of collaboration and friendship. Or that Rafe Pomerance would become one of the defining figures of my life.

Rafe was gregarious, loud, funny, relentless, and endlessly energetic. When he got an idea, he went all in. His enthusiasm was not only infectious — it was joyous. He loved turning a phrase into a weapon, a rallying cry, or occasionally a punchline. What I came to call “Pomerisms.”

A year later, I became the field director of the National Clean Air Coalition — the same job Rafe himself had once held during the fights to pass and defend the Clean Air Act.

My office was directly across the hall from his.

Which meant no day was ever quiet.

One week it was organizing around acid rain. Another it was the Watt Petition drive against Interior Secretary James Watt, whom Rafe famously described as “the visible operator of the Reagan environmental wrecking ball.” Rafe helped drive the massive “Dump Watt” petition campaign that ultimately delivered more than a million signatures to Congress.

And his leadership came with his humanity.

One summer afternoon in 1981, when I was clearly having a rough day, Rafe walked by my desk, took one look at me, and said, “Let’s go get ice cream.”

So we walked up Pennsylvania Avenue eating cones and talking.

At some point, he paused, looked at me seriously, and said, “You know what you need? You need kids.”

I think he was projecting a little. At twenty‑three, children were nowhere on my radar. But his own children — Benjamin, Lilah, and Ethan — were clearly the emotional center of his life. Beneath the whirlwind energy and political combativeness, they grounded him.

For five decades, versions of that conversation took place whenever one of us was tilting at a new political windmill, or just needed a compassionate voice on the other end of the phone.

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Inflation, Markets

New York Times, Celebrity Assistants Exist to Indulge Their Bosses, but When Does Duty Cross a Line? Matt Stevens, May 26, 2026. Matthew Perry’s assistant injected the ketamine that killed his employer. His sentencing has some in the demanding profession considering the power dynamics involved.

Matthew Perry wanted ketamine. So his personal assistant got it for him. And on Oct. 28, 2023, according to court papers, Mr. Perry told the assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, “Shoot me up with a big one.” Mr. Iwamasa complied.

Hours later, he said, he found Mr. Perry dead.

Two doctors, a drug dealer and an acquaintance of Mr. Perry, the actor who starred in the TV show “Friends,” have since been sentenced in the case. Mr. Iwamasa has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death, and prosecutors have asked that he spend 41 months in prison. On Wednesday, a judge is expected to render a sentence.

Members of Mr. Perry’s family have made clear in letters to the court that they hold no sympathy for Mr. Iwamasa. One relative called his actions a “betrayal,” noting that Mr. Iwamasa had spoken at Mr. Perry’s funeral.

“We trusted a man without a conscience,” wrote Mr. Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, “and my son paid the price.”

Martin Estrada, who was the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California when that office charged Mr. Iwamasa, agreed. “His job was to assist Mr. Perry, but he did the opposite,” Mr. Estrada said.

People with experience in the industry, either as personal assistants themselves or as recruiters, also condemn Mr. Iwamasa’s behavior, saying it was an aberration in a profession full of principled employees who do not break the law. But the episode has prompted some to consider the power dynamics between influential celebrities or executives and underlings hoping to get a foot in the door.

Assistants are often chosen because they have “discretion and loyalty and confidence and exceptional judgment,” said Emily Levine, an executive vice president at Career Group Companies who specializes in staffing for high-profile clients. Those attributes, many people with knowledge of the industry concede, can convince bosses that their assistants are willing to do anything to please them.

It was in that spirit that Mr. Iwamasa’s uncle Yukio Iwamasa defended his nephew in a brief telephone interview. “He’s not a devious person,” he said. “He is somebody that follows instructions very, very sincerely, very thoroughly. And that’s the reason why he was a personal assistant. That’s the reason why he was hired and kept.”

U.S. Media, Environment, Education, Culture, Religion

New York Times, Donald E. Newhouse, Low-Profile Heir to a Media Empire, Dies at 96, Clay Risen, May 26, 2026. He ran the newspaper division of Advance Publications, while his older brother, Si, ran the Condé Nast magazine operation.

Donald E. Newhouse, the billionaire media mogul who for decades ran the lucrative if low-profile newspaper division of Advance Publications, providing a steady hand and an open wallet for newsrooms that won dozens of Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, died on Tuesday at his estate in Lambertville, N.J. He was 96.

His son Steven, a co-president of Advance, confirmed the death, from lymphoma.

Donald and his older brother, Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., better known as Si, inherited a media empire from their father, Samuel I. Newhouse, who started with the Staten Island Advance in 1922 and gradually built his company into one of the world’s largest privately held media conglomerates before his death in 1979.

The siblings both left college early and joined the company. The family patriarch had raised them with an eye toward a clear division of roles: Donald in charge of Advance’s newspapers and cable assets, and Si overseeing, through the Condé Nast subsidiary, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Wired and other magazines.

Though they were both described as shy and hard-working, Si’s position atop a portfolio of high-profile magazines that were closely watched in media circles made him a much better-known public figure than his brother. (Si Newhouse died in 2017.)

While Si ran Condé Nast from a series of glittering aeries across Manhattan, Donald, who lived on the Upper East Side, woke every day at 5:30 a.m. to commute to Newark, where he worked out of an office at The Star-Ledger, one of Advance’s bigger newspapers.

The less glitzy but more profitable newspaper subsidiary encompassed large regional papers like The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and The Oregonian of Portland, as well as those with much smaller readerships, like The Saginaw News in Michigan, The Times of Trenton and the now-defunct Birmingham News in Alabama.

In 1999, near the height of the company’s success, Advance newspapers had a combined circulation of 2.9 million, putting the chain in third place behind Gannett and Knight Ridder. Advance also owned Parade, a Sunday magazine insert that appeared in hundreds of newspapers.

Especially in the first several years after Sam Newhouse’s death, Donald and Advance often received criticism for treating the company’s newspapers like cash cows, with enormous advertising runs, while taking a hands-off approach to operations that resulted in mediocre journalism.

“Newhouse! Few people think of great journalism when the name is spoken,” The Columbia Journalism Review observed in a 1985 article about the chain.

That began to change in the 1990s, after years of steady investment by Mr. Newhouse. Newsrooms got bigger, and several, including The Star-Ledger and The Plain Dealer, expanded coverage into the suburbs. Mr. Newhouse hired superstar editors: He brought in Jim Willse from the New York Daily News to run The Star-Ledger, and he hired Sandra Mims Rowe from The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., to run The Oregonian.

New York Times, Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95, Peter Keepnews, Updated May 26, 2026. Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality.

Sonny Rollins, whose forceful and imaginative approach to the tenor saxophone made him one of the dominant jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., on Monday. He was 95.

His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Terri Hinte.

Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality.

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.

The Parnas Perspective, Important Evening News and Commentary, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. The news slowed down tonight, and while I have updates below, I wanted to share something I’m still trying to fully process: for one straight year, this has been the number one news Substack in the world.

A little over a year ago, none of this existed. No team. No funding. No billionaire backing. No corporate safety net. Just me, a laptop, a fire in my chest, and a belief that journalism could still mean something. Then you showed up.

You subscribed. You read. You shared. You pushed back against the noise and said: we want truth, not spin. You believed in this experiment in independent journalism by subscribing to show your support, and now here we are. Subscribe tonight to keep it going, if you can

Let’s be clear about what this means: we built this with zero corporate dollars, no clickbait, and no compromise. We built it together. We are redefining what media can look like. We are proving that truth still matters. We are building something no one can buy, censor, or spin.

So tonight, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for believing in this work. Thank you for making it possible.

Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Let’s keep breaking the mold. 

May 25

Top Headlines

• New York Times, War Live Updates: As Talks to End War Resume in Qatar, U.S. Conducts Strikes on Iran’s Gulf Coast, Aaron Boxerman Tyler Pager Eric Schmitt Ephrat Livni and Sanam Mahooz,May 25, 2026. Iranian officials went to Doha on Monday for the negotiations, hours before the U.S. military announced the strikes it said were in “self defense” to protect troops. Israel’s leader said his country plans to intensify attacks against Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, in Lebanon.

More On Iran War

A crashed U.S. warplane from the nation's failed attempt to defeat Iran this spring in an undeclared war initiated by the United States president without consulting Congress but in close coordination with Israel.

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Donald Trump’s Ego-Driven “Excursion” Has Crashed Into Reality, Paul Krugman, right, May 25, 2026. Trump lost his war, bigly. Why?
• New York Times, News analysis: To Get the Strait Open, Trump Had to Leave the Hardest Issues for Later, David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager.Updated May 25, 2026. President Trump is hailing the agreement with Iran as groundbreaking, even as he admits it “isn’t even fully negotiated.” But the nuclear stockpile, enrichment and missiles have not been discussed.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Has A Memorial Day Meltdown As His Iran Deal Looks Fake, Jason Easley, right, May 25, 2026. Judging from Trump's long stream of gibberish posted on social media, the latest "Iran deal" looks like an effort to scam the stock market and lower oil prices.Donald Trump could be trying to manipulate the stock market, now that we know that he has done more insider stock trading than all of Congress combined since returning to office.

U.S. Scandals, Probes, Accountability

Mothers keep praying while the rich men steal. Truth disappears behind another deal. Flags keep waving over broken trust. Empires always fall when they rot from lust (Presidential Portrayal by The Hartmann Report).

• The Hartmann Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump Just Pull Off the Biggest Heist in Modern History? Thom  Hartmann, right, May 25, 2026. Trump’s Inner Circle Appears to Be Running a Smash-and-Grab Operation on the U.S. Government…

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

• Legal AF, Opinion: Roberts Court and Democracy UnderFire, Mike Sacks interviews Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman, May 24, 2026. Harvard Law Professor SOUNDS ALARM on Roberts COURT!!!
• New York Times, Artificial Intelligence Floods Court Dockets with Home-Brewed Lawsuits, Mattathias Schwartz and Zach Montague, May 25, 2026. For years, courts have welcomed cases brought by self-represented litigants. Now those plaintiffs have A.I., and their filings are consuming more and more bandwidth.

U.S. Memorial Day Reflections

Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia (U.S. Army photo).

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Especially Now, Americans Should Reflect on Memorial Day, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 25, 2026. It's more than mattress sales and picnics.
• Michael Cohen via Substack, Opinion: Tomorrow’s Fallen Await, Michael Cohen, right, May 25, 2026. As fresh wars spread across continents, Memorial Day becomes less about history and more about the terrifying possibility that tomorrow’s graves are already chosen.
• Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Republicans hate our veterans — and no one hates them more than Preznit, Jeff Teidrich, right, May 25, 2026. Watch what they do, not what they say. (This is an updated version of a Memorial Day post from May 26, 2025.)

More Global News

 

Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born first Pope born in the United States (Vatican Media photo).

• New York Times, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, May 25, 2026. The document marks a powerful foray by the leader of the Roman Catholic church into the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence.
• New York Times, In City at Center of Ebola Crisis, ‘the Virus Is Far Ahead of Us,’ Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, Updated May 25, 2026. The deadly virus has spread alarmingly in Congo for months. Only now is the response taking shape The country, formerly known as Zaire, is shown on a map at left.

News Roundups

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Monday Update: Trump Lashes Out as Congress Takes Action to Stop Slush Fund and Opposition to Iran Deal Grows as Gas Prices Continue to Rise, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. This Memorial Day, we pause to honor the Americans who gave their lives in service to our country. May we never forget their sacrifice or the families and loved ones they left behind.
• The Parnas Perspective, Important Evening News and Commentary, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. The news slowed down tonight, and while I have updates below, I wanted to share something I’m still trying to fully process: for one straight year, this has been the number one news Substack in the world.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Massie Unleashed over Epstein Files as White House Urges GOP to Tweet Support of Trump's Iran Deal Which is Falling Apart, Aaron Parnas, right, May 24, 2026. The White House reportedly urges Republican lawmakers to publicly support Trump’s emerging Iran deal, a deal that may already be starting to unravel. Thomas Massie, fresh off his election loss, is unleashed, promising to expose more names connected to the Epstein files and claiming Melania Trump knows more than she’s saying. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio called people making racist comments about Indians “stupid people,” prompting the State Department to delete a tweet after critics noted it could indirectly implicate Trump himself.

Trump Regime's Terror Tactics, Threats

• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: Trump told on himself today, Heather Delaney Reese, right,May 25, 2026. Just after midnight last night, shortly after I had fallen asleep, I was woken up by a loud sound outside. I jumped out of bed, and I was on my feet before I had even finished the thought. My brain immediately went to our family safety plan, a sequence of steps we take in the event of any number of threats to our safety.

U.S. Elections, Governance, Politics

• New York Times, Trump’s Self-Indulgence Deepens G.O.P. Fears in Midterms, Shane Goldmacher and Patricia Mazzei, May 25, 2026. “The stupid stuff is killing our chances,” said a retiring Republican senator.
• New York Times, 5 Big Moments in the Texas Republican Senate Race, Taylor Robinson, May 25, 2026. The contest between the incumbent John Cornyn and his challenger Ken Paxton will culminate in a Tuesday runoff. Here are the developments that shaped the campaign.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Democrats Are Surging In California's Gubernatorial Primary, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 25, 2026. A few months ago, Republicans hoped they could take both spots in California's gubernatorial primary, but it is looking certain that Democrats will be on the fall ballot and may take both spots.
• Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Ben Rhodes Warns America Has Become the World's "Rogue Nation" Under Trump, Ben Meiselas and Ben Rhodes, May 25, 2026. The former Obama deputy national security advisor joined MeidasTouch's Ben Meiselas to discuss his new book, the collapse of American global standing, and what Democrats must do to rebuild.

U.S. History, Media, Culture, 250th Anniversary, Education

 

Above: The U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776.

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 24, 2026 [New Ongoing Tribute To U.S. Declaration of Independence and American Traditions], Heather Cox Richardson, right,May 25, 2026. For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.
• The Independent, CBS stops its effort to halt sharing of Colbert’s public access show appearance after massive backlash, Rhian Lubin, May 25, 2026. CBS swiftly backtracked on the copyright threats after Colbert’s surprise episode was shared online by third-party sites. 

U.S. Tariffs, Economy, Inflation, Markets, Jobs

• New York Times, Oil Prices Fall Sharply on News of Possible Iran Deal, Jack Ewing, Updated May 25, 2026. Oil prices fell sharply on Monday after American officials said that the United States and Iran had agreed in principle to a peace deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But final approval of a deal could take days.
• Public Notice, Opinion: The triple toll of Trump’s terrible tariffs, Tom Schaller, May 25, 2026. Ultimately, American workers and consumers suffer three different ways.

More On Religion, Culture, High-Tech, Media, Education 

 

Marilyn Monroe in her Hollywood apartment in 1952. A new book catalogs the 400 volumes she took with her from home to home (Photo by Philippe Halsman via /Magnum Photos). 

• New York Times, Critic’s Notebook: Some Like It Literary: How Marilyn Monroe Gave a Smart Gloss to Her Image, Alexandra Jacobs, May 24, 2026. It was all about self-improvement for the actress, who was born a century ago next week. Two new volumes shed light on the books she collected and the intellectual she married.
• New York Times, News Analysis: As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words, David Streitfeld, May 25, 2026. The American pope wants to take artificial intelligence down a notch. Is he challenging the tech companies, or will tech take over the papacy?
• New York Times, What’s an Encyclical? Here Are 5 That Mattered, Elisabetta Povoledo, May 25, 2026. Leo XIV issued his thoughts about artificial intelligence in the modern world using a centuries-old form of papal communication called an encyclical.

Top Stories

New York Times, War Live Updates: As Talks to End War Resume in Qatar, U.S. Conducts Strikes on Iran’s Gulf Coast, Aaron Boxerman Tyler Pager Eric Schmitt Ephrat Livni and Sanam Mahooz,May 25, 2026. Iranian officials went to Doha on Monday for the negotiations, hours before the U.S. military announced the strikes it said were in “self defense” to protect troops. Israel’s leader said his country plans to intensify attacks against Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, in Lebanon.

Here’s the latest.

Hours after Iranian negotiators arrived in Qatar for talks on ending the war, U.S. forces struck missile launch sites in Iran and boats trying to emplace mines, American officials said Monday night.

U.S. Central Command characterized the strikes in southern Iran as defensive and said they had been intended “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.”

“Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing cease-fire,” Capt. Tim Hawkins, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement.

The strikes came on a day when Israel signaled that it planned to intensify its fight against the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

With the two conflicts closely intertwined, escalation in the fighting in Lebanon might make it still harder for negotiators to reach a peace deal. Iran has said that any agreement should cover both the war with the United States and Israel, and the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah.

On Monday evening, after vowing that any agreement reached would be “great and meaningful” or “there will be no deal,” President Trump said he expected Iran either to turn its enriched uranium over to the United States or to destroy it in front of neutral witnesses.

It is unclear if Iran has agreed to this, though a senior U.S. official told reporters on Sunday that the Iranians had, in principle, committed to giving up stockpiles of enriched uranium. On Monday, Esmaeil Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said Iran was not discussing details of its nuclear program.

The fate of Iran’s nuclear program was just one critical aspect of a potential peace deal that remained unclear on Monday. So was the status of Iran’s stockpile of missiles. It was also unclear how an agreement might address Iranian attempts to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway vital to world commerce.

Though Mr. Trump has at various times said a deal was close, he also said that his negotiators were in no rush to close the agreement.

Iran likewise poured cold water on hopes for an imminent deal to end the war and reopen the strait, which Iran has blockaded since the United States and Israel attacked in late February. The blockade has throttled global oil and gas supplies.

“It is true that we have reached conclusions on a large portion of the issues, but no one can claim that the signing of an agreement is imminent,” Mr. Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said on Monday, according to Iran’s state broadcaster.

Mr. Trump has also called on countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to sign on to the Abraham Accords to normalize ties with Israel as part of the initial agreement — to which they are highly unlikely to agree. If more countries sign up to the accords, it could placate some Iran hawks in the Republican Party who have expressed misgivings about a the potential deal.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, led his country’s delegation in the Qatari capital, Doha, according to Iranian state media. According to two diplomats, the delegation arrived on Monday and also included Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister.

Ending the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran would allow Mr. Trump to extricate himself from an unpopular war that has battered the global economy.

Speaking at a Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, Mr. Trump paid tribute to the 13 U.S. service members killed in the war with Iran, saying: “These incredible men and women gave their lives to ensure that the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror will never have a nuclear weapon. Oh, and they won’t. They will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Oil markets: Oil prices fell sharply on Monday, with Brent crude, the global benchmark, settling for the day below $94 a barrel, down 6.5 percent. The price of oil remains around 30 percent higher than it was before the war.
• Strait of Hormuz: Even if an agreement between the United States and Iran is reached, the flow of oil and gas from the Middle East could take months to return to normal. Read more ›
• Israel’s reaction: In Israel, talk of a potential deal was received with concern, with some politicians warning it would fail to constrain Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Read more ›
• Global diplomacy: The senior leaders of Pakistan, which has been brokering the talks between the United States and Iran, visited China on Monday. China has close commercial ties with Iran and is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil. Shehbaz Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister, posted on social media that he and other top officials had met with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and discussed the peace talks.

More On Iran War

A crashed U.S. warplane from the nation's failed attempt to defeat Iran this spring in an undeclared war initiated by the United States president without consulting Congress but in close coordination with Israel.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Donald Trump’s Ego-Driven “Excursion” Has Crashed Into Reality, Paul Krugman, right, May 25, 2026. Trump lost his war, bigly. Why?

“Many questions, few details in latest Iran peace proposal,” read the headline on a New York Times report Sunday. As the subhead explained, “It is too early to tell what exactly Trump and Iran have agreed to, or if they have agreed to much at all.” The article, by the way, was written by David Sanger, who Trump called “treasonous” over his clearly accurate reporting on how badly the war was going.

But, in fact, Trump’s Iran war may be over, or virtually over. America lost.

Iran may or may not agree to exercise restraint in its control over the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear program. But as Donald Trump of all people should know, agreements can be broken. At a fundamental level Trump, who began by demanding UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and trying to impose a subservient new regime, is now slinking away, leaving Iran’s hard-liners empowered — and America’s reputation shattered.

How did that happen? America is a superpower, Iran a middle-sized regional power at best. Spending isn’t the only determinant of armed might, but even so a comparison of the two government’s military budgets is ludicrously one-sided:

Yet the Iranian regime is not only still standing, it is stronger than before. Meanwhile, Trump is running away.

Trump’s disastrous leadership isn’t the sole factor behind this debacle, although it’s a large part of the story. In my view there are four main reasons Trump’s Iran “excursion” is ending in humiliation.

First, this was a fundamentally unwinnable war.

Once the initial decapitation strike against Iran’s leadership left the regime’s hold on power intact, Operation Epic Fury became an attempt to end Iran’s threat to world oil supplies by suppressing its missiles and drones with air power. Unfortunately, as the Substack History Does You has documented, such campaigns have never worked. Allied air forces tried to stop Nazi Germany from launching V1s and V2s in World War II; they failed. During the first Gulf War, Coalition air forces devoted huge resources to an attempt to stop Iraq from launching Scud missiles; they also failed. Chasing down mobile launchers, especially in an era of cheap, abundant drones and in a huge, mountainous country like Iran, is an impossible game of whack-a-mole.

Of course, leaders who aren’t terminally arrogant and ignorant don’t start unwinnable wars in the first place.

Second, painful as this is to recognize, the U.S. military, after decades of unchallenged dominance, appears to have lost much of its edge. As Phillips O’Brien recently wrote,

The lack of thought-through US response to the technological changes we are seeing [especially in the Russia-Ukraine war] before it embarked on the Iran bombing shows how smug militaries can be—and the bigger and more powerful they think they are the more smug they tend to be.…

There is far too much self-congratulation in the US about its military, a belief that US armed forces are highly professional, show initiative, are thoughtful, etc. This is a romantic vision that Americans are using now to throw all blame for the Iran failure on the Trump Administration.

That said, the Trump administration has made the degradation of the military much worse.

Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed Secretary of War, has carried out an unprecedented purge of military officers with impeccable reputations, with the majority of those fired Black or female. He has replaced them with political loyalists like Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, who has in effect been running Trump’s war.

The officers who survived the purge got the message. Under Hegseth, official accounts of the war’s progress have been a stream of bombastic claims of victory and ludicrously rosy depictions of the situation on the battlefield. Less than two weeks ago Cooper was still peddling fantasies of easy victory to Congress, asserting among other things that the U.S. could easily open the Strait of Hormuz by force.

Do you believe that these delusions are only for public consumption, that Hegseth has been getting and acting on accurate information? I don’t. It’s far more likely that Hegseth and Trump have also been receiving false, optimistic reports, because nobody in the military dares to tell them the uncomfortable truth.

The sycophancy and flattery Cooper exhibited in that testimony surely reflected groupthink that has led to many bad decisions. For example, reporting by CNN, the Washington Post and the Times finds that U.S. bases and facilities have suffered a remarkable amount of damage from Iranian drone and missile strikes, with casualties and much expensive equipment and aircraft destroyed. Why wasn’t the U.S. military prepared for this possibility?

The lack of preparation clearly reflected a predetermined view that Iran would be so devastated by U.S. attacks that it would be unable to strike back. And it’s reasonable to infer that any officers who tried to warn of the dangers were treated as defeatists and silenced.

Finally, success in modern war depends crucially on out-thinking one’s enemies. But MAGA is all about deprecating hard thinking and valorizing belligerent ignorance

.

On Saturday Hegseth [shown at left on the cover of a book he wrote, American Crusade] addressed the graduating class at West Point (shown above). In war, he declared, “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” He congratulated the cadets on being “fit, not fat.” Despite humiliating failure, Hegseth still has his job — and is still asserting that eliminating DEI wins wars and that bulging biceps can beat drones.

Can America still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or should it accept a deal that leaves us clearly worse off than we were before the war? The answer is that running away — if that is what Trump is doing — is now the right move. It’s better to accept a bad deal, one that leaves America much weaker than it was a few months ago, than to double down on a failed war. Time is not on our side: looming shortages of critical weapons, the imminent exhaustion of world oil inventories, and the lost support of our allies and the American public mean that this war needs to end soon.

Musical Coda: The Irish Rovers, Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye (w/ lyrics).

New York Times, News analysis: To Get the Strait Open, Trump Had to Leave the Hardest Issues for Later, David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager.Updated May 25, 2026. President Trump is hailing the agreement with Iran as groundbreaking, even as he admits it “isn’t even fully negotiated.” But the nuclear stockpile, enrichment and missiles have not been discussed.

The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal. It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.

Those may yet come — perhaps in a few months, though a senior United States official said there was no agreed time limit for nuclear talks, or perhaps far longer if the history of negotiations with Iran holds. But for now, Mr. Trump has emerged with an arrangement that could extend a cease-fire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, relieving the greatest energy disruption in modern times.

The best news from this at-the-brink negotiation between Washington and Tehran, mediated by a hard-line Pakistani general, is that a conflict that easily could have spun further out of control appears to be de-escalating. Assuming both President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, in hiding to avoid assassination attempts, approve the final wording, the choke point through which a quarter of the world’s oil passes should reopen.

That is no small thing at a time when Republicans feared they would be headed into the November midterm elections with gasoline hovering around $4.50 a gallon and a president pursuing a war most Americans tell pollsters they oppose. For the Iranians, the opening comes just as their battered economy appeared about to crack, from the loss of most of their oil revenue.

But for a president who had declared only 11 weeks ago that “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” the agreement he announced this weekend was far short of that. And his tone was markedly different.

“The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner, and I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side,” he wrote on social media. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Has A Memorial Day Meltdown As His Iran Deal Looks Fake, Jason Easley, right, May 25, 2026. Judging from Trump's long stream of gibberish posted on social media, the latest "Iran deal" looks like an effort to scam the stock market and lower oil prices.

Donald Trump could be trying to manipulate the stock market, now that we know that he has done more insider stock trading than all of Congress combined since returning to office.

Something else appears to be happening. It is my suspicion that Trump isn’t trying to manipulate the price of stocks as much as he is trying to lie to lower the price of oil.

The president’s broken mind is still operating under the mistaken belief that gasoline prices will fall immediately if oil prices drop.

After touting a deal with Iran that the White House claimed could be coming at any time, Trump spent Memorial Day spewing a sea of nonsense that is apparently designed to distract people from the fact that no deal has been announced.

Trump posted on his social media platform (bold is mine):

Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are proceeding nicely! It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that! During my discussions on Saturday with President Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of The United Arab Emirates, Emir Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and Minister Ali al-Thawadi, of Qatar, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah, of Pakistan, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Türkiye, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, of Egypt, King Abdullah II, of Jordan, and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, of Bahrain, I stated that, after all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords.

Wait a minute. Weren’t we just told there was a deal coming any moment now?

Republicans have been ripping the deal as bad, and the White House asked Republicans to post support for the deal, which they were dreading doing.

Now, it is maybe there is a deal.

Trump went on to get totally delusional in the rest of his message.

The president then rambled on about the Abraham Accords:

Those Countries discussed are Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates (already a Member!), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain (already a Member!). It may be possible that one or two have a reason for not doing so, and that will be accepted, but most should be ready, willing, and able to make this Settlement with Iran a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be. The Abraham Accords have proven to be, for the Countries involved (The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan), a Financial, Economic, and Social BOOM, even during this time of Conflict and War, with the current Members never even suggesting leaving, or taking so much as even a pause.

The reason for this is that the Abraham Accords have been great for them, and will be even better for everybody, and bring true Power, Strength, and Peace to the Middle East for the first time in 5,000 years. It will be a Document respected like no other that has ever been signed, anywhere in the World. Its level of Importance and Prestige will be unparalleled! It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit.

If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention. In speaking to numerous of the Great Leaders mentioned above, they would be honored, as soon as our Document is signed, to have the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of the Abraham Accords.

Wow, now that would be something special! This will be the most important Deal that any of these Great, but always in Conflict Countries, will ever sign. Nothing in the past, or in the future, will surpass it. Therefore, I am mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords, and that, if Iran signs its Agreement with me, as President of the United States of America, it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition.

The Middle East would be United, Powerful, and Economically Strong, like perhaps no other area, anywhere in the World! By copy of this TRUTH, I am asking my Representatives to begin, and successfully complete, the process of signing these Countries into the already Historic Abraham Accords. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

In case you don’t remember, the Abraham Accords were Trump’s supposed Middle East peace deal that has resulted in the region being in virtually perpetual warfare since Trump returned to office.

Trump is trying to tie Iran to this failed initiative of years gone by to apparently hide the fact that there is no deal with the Iranians yet.

The whole new Iran is looking like chapter 937 in Trump’s effort to manipulate stock and oil prices with lies. It may work for a day, but unless a deal is announced, prices will shoot back up, because Donald Trump can’t lie his way out of a war.

U.S. Scandals, Probes, Accountability

Mothers keep praying while the rich men steal. Truth disappears behind another deal. Flags keep waving over broken trust. Empires always fall when they rot from lust (Presidential Portrayal by The Hartmann Report).

The Hartmann Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump Just Pull Off the Biggest Heist in Modern History? Thom  Hartmann, right, May 25, 2026. Trump’s Inner Circle Appears to Be Running a Smash-and-Grab Operation on the U.S. Government…

Donald Trump knows his time is running out, both personally and politically, so he’s doing a smash-and-grab, making off with as much of our (and others’) money as he can. And his family is in on it.

Even though he’s not particularly bright, Trump’s no idiot. He knows his stupid mistake in attacking Iran, his war crimes of murdering unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, his on-again-off-again tariffs, his massive tax cut for himself and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and now his grift where Todd Blanche gifts him the $100 million the IRS was trying to collect while making him eligible to draw from his own $1.776 billion Thug Fund, are all catching up with him.

Inflation is exploding, America is humiliated, working people are furious, and his own Republicans in Congress are starting to rebel. If he’s going to add a few billion more to his family wealth, he has to do it now, because, he knows, the window will be closed after next January when the new Congress is sworn in. And maybe even before then.

Trump’s grifts are running so fast and furious that the media can’t keep up. When Todd Blanche put together the “settlement” of Trump’s phony $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, “resolving” the case by handing Trump’s hand-picked panel $1.776 billion to distribute as they see fit (including to both J6ers who killed 4 cops and to Trump himself) Blanche included a huge Easter Egg for Trump and his kids: he forgave $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from Trump and his boys for over 15 years.

The New York Times exposed this in an article with the headline “With Trump’s Deal, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away.” Back in 2010, the IRS busted him for allegedly claiming a deduction against the losses from his failing Chicago tower twice, a crime called felony tax fraud, and has been trying to collect around $100 million (plus interest) from him ever since.

But this new Thug Fund will eliminate all claims against him, his kids, and his “affiliated entities” and businesses, for all past, present, and future times. So he gets to keep the $100 million (plus interest). And the media — other than that one reference in the Times — seems to have completely ignored it.

There’s just so much. Dissing our allies and embracing Putin and his oligarch and autocrat friends. Going to China where his company owns multiple trademarks he can turn into business opportunities. Betraying Ukraine and Taiwan. Getting back the top-secret documents he stole, which he’s said he wants to sell to the highest bidder like Nixon did. Burying the Epstein files and the charges that he raped multiple 15-year-old girls.

But Wendy Lawrence over at Glass Empires suggests something even darker is going on. She looks at Trump’s behavior and compares it to historical mass murderers like Jim Jones and Hitler who saw the end coming; invariably, they tried to take as many people with them as they could.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face ‘Narcissistic Collapse’ as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. He wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was first writing it and during the three years Armin and I traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

I mentioned the stories Armin told me to psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee on my program, and she confirmed that this is, indeed, a common pattern and Trump could decide to take out as many people as possible when he goes down.

Christopher Armitage, at The Existentialist Republic, notes, as his headline reads, that “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.” More smash-and-grab and, so far, they’re getting away with all of it.

Armitage suggests that New York Attorney General Letitia James could prosecute the Trump boys, but so far she’s shown no inclination to enforce the law in her state when it comes to the Trumps. And given the levels of “militia” death threats and DOJ revenge prosecutions that even minor attacks on the Trumps provoke (think pictures of seashells, for example), her reticence is easily understood.

Armitage noted in a previous post that James could also put Elon Musk in prison for over 100 years and offers “the receipts.” And James is only one of multiple state AGs who could conceivably prosecute Trump and his sons as well as Musk and his Doge boys.

So, what’s to be done about this greedy, criminal, treasonous attack on American institutions and the rule of law? Can we even stop Trump after he’s already pulled in billions in his crypto and alleged insider-stock-trading schemes?

Democrats need to start drawing harder and clearer lines, and do so in ways the press can no longer ignore.

When Congressman Ted Liu held a press conference to say he’d seen evidence suggesting Trump raped young teenagers in the Epstein files, most of the media ignored it. And, as noted, they’re ignoring the $100 million gift Blanche gave him and his boys last week.

So, how do we get the word out?

Political theater works. Fossil fuel billionaires funded the Tea Party to do just that, challenging the legitimacy of our first Black president and telling lies about the ACA, and the DNC and related entities should be thinking of ways do something like it.

And Republicans need to hear from us, to buck up their courage. While Trump could do anything — from sucking up to Putin to stealing from the treasury to raping teenage girls — and his MAGA base would forgive him because he’s done so much to harm Black people and women, the base is only a real factor in primaries. That’s why post-primary-elections we’re seeing a few Republicans turn on him. They need to hear from us.

Call your two senators and your member of the House at 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think. Share this newsletter with everybody you can. It’s entirely possible we won’t have to wait until November/January for change to come; let’s begin pushing for it now.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

 

Legal AF, Opinion: Roberts Court and Democracy UnderFire, Mike Sacks interviews Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman, May 24, 2026. Harvard Law Professor SOUNDS ALARM on Roberts COURT!!!

Noah Feldman—law professor at Harvard, Bloomberg opinion columnist, and author of TO BE A JEW TODAY—joins Court Accountability Action’s Mike Sacks to discuss Chief Justice John Roberts's antidemocratic legacy, from gutting voting rights, using the major questions doctrine and the shadow docket to drive right-wing decisions, and letting partisan gerrymandering run amok. Roberts is shown at right in a file photo. 

Mike and Noah debate what, if any, reforms are necessary to counter the Roberts Court's harmful impact on our democracy.

New York Times, Artificial Intelligence Floods Court Dockets with Home-Brewed Lawsuits, Mattathias Schwartz and Zach Montague, May 25, 2026. For years, courts have welcomed cases brought by self-represented litigants. Now those plaintiffs have A.I., and their filings are consuming more and more bandwidth.

The complaint Donald Sauve submitted in Minnesota last year was a familiar type in the nation’s federal courts.

In legal parlance, Mr. Sauve filed “pro se,” Latin for “for oneself,” meaning he had no lawyer as he sued his ex-wife, her lawyer and a state judge who had rejected one of his earlier legal challenges as “frivolous.”

In a handwritten scrawl, he previously filed a suit asking for $275,000 in damages, claiming he had been unlawfully deprived of his home. It took less than a month for Judge Jerry W. Blackwell to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction.

Three months later, Mr. Sauve was back. This time he had help.

Using ChatGPT and Claude, Mr. Sauve filed a new complaint in federal court. This time, it was a neatly typed document accompanied by 50 additional filings including a “case law synthesis” of legal research he said backed up his claim. In an interview, Mr. Sauve said A.I. had provided “the only path forward” for his case.

“Knowledge is power,” he said.

Federal judges and legal experts said they are increasingly seeing filings like Mr. Sauve’s flooding court dockets and clogging an already overburdened system as A.I. supercharges pro se litigation — even as it opens up the legal system to people who might not otherwise be able to afford to bring a case.

The eventual outcome for Mr. Sauve was the same. In September, two months after he filed, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, chief of Minnesota’s Federal District Court, dismissed his suit again, this time in a 14-page opinion that found he had failed to clearly state a claim.ImageMr. Sauve said artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Claude helped him add 50 additional filings to a complaint he filed in federal court.Credit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

But first, each one of Mr. Sauve’s filings had to be read, captioned by the clerk and entered on the public docket.

Judge Schiltz entered an order that any further filings would be “shredded without any additional notice.”

“A litigant cannot dump hundreds of pages of documents on a court and expect the court to sift through them to find facts or arguments that might support claims against a defendant,” Judge Schiltz wrote, as he dismissed the case.

In interviews, judges and experts said that the use of A.I. by pro se litigants also offers potential upsides. “A.I. presents great promise for enhancing access to justice for those without the resources to retain counsel or to represent themselves effectively,” wrote Judge Michael Y. Scudder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit this year, when ruling on a pro se case.

And some federal judges are also discussing ways that A.I. could be used responsibly to help with workflow in their own chambers, noting that it’s possible that A.I. could someday be used to help clerks to read and assess a larger number of filings.

In the meantime, however, many judges emphasized the seriousness of the immediate workload problem created by A.I.-enabled pro se filings. Judge Schiltz, who declined to discuss any particular case, characterized the overall problem as “an existential threat to the federal courts.”

The arrival of A.I. has caused the number, length and complexity of pro se filings to “increase dramatically,” he said. “There’s just no end in sight, and no satisfactory solution in sight either.”Editors’ Picks7 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week23 Easy, Crowd-Pleasing Graduation Party RecipesWhat Happens When Militancy Conflicts With Motherhood‘Something Has to Give’

U.S. Memorial Day Reflections

 

Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia (U.S. Army photo).

The Contrarian, Opinion: Especially Now, Americans Should Reflect on Memorial Day, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 25, 2026. It's more than mattress sales and picnics.

Like so many other American holidays with noble purposes underpinned by important lessons, Memorial Day has become just another three-day weekend. The day should entail more than shopping and cookouts. Especially now, somber reflection about those who gave their lives in battle could provoke much-needed debate about the ease with which a president can take us to war unilaterally with no debate, no congressional vote, and no coherent explanation of his aims.

Memorial Day was not always another generic holiday. “Originally called Decoration Day, from the early tradition of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of those who have died in service to our country,” PBS explained. “It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868, to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, by proclamation of Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former Union sailors and soldiers.” The tradition of decorating graves of our military dead continues to the present. Arlington and other federal cemeteries, marked by headstones adorned with flags or wreaths, remain islands of solemnity in a country not given to self-reflection. A soldier assigned to the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” helps place U.S. flags at every gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery, Va., on May 21. (Department of Defense photo)

But Memorial Day is too important to be confined to the grounds of military cemeteries. We could use more venues, events, and traditions that encourage Americans to take time to appreciate the cost of war and the sacrifices of brave men and women who died fighting them. As we apparently edge toward a flimsy deal to end an unnecessary, illegal, unilateral war, Americans should consider how the Constitution’s granting of authority to Congress to declare war has been virtually ignored, enabling an unhinged president to launch a war of choice without properly understanding the risks, without public debate, and without congressional consultation.

Every other president has recognized that war must be the last resort after exercising all avenues and should be undertaken only for vital national interests. But not Trump. He launched a war against Iran that cost the lives of 13 Americans and wounded hundreds of others, killed thousands of civilians throughout the region, burned through billions of dollars, reduced Tehran and Beirut to rubble (and left residents in dire conditions), and saddled already struggling Americans with higher gas prices and an inflation surge. And for what?

We have failed to achieve Trump’s goals of eliminating Iran’s nuclear ambitions, according to news reports about negotiations closing in on a final deal. An agreement to talk about a deal that might suspend enrichment for some time is weak tea. (A deal akin to the JCPOA would be the best possible outcome, but it may be unattainable at this point). We did not permanently destroy Iran’s missile capacity or shrink its footprint in the region. To the contrary, Iran comes out with more leverage than it has ever had and the potential to reassert control of the Strait of Hormuz. (And if reports are accurate, Trump is prepared to release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets, $23.3 billion more than released in conjunction with the JCPOA. Republicans excoriated President Barack Obama, claiming he was funding Iran’s nefarious activities.)

As historian Bob Kagan explained at a recent Brookings forum, the war is “pretty much a disaster” and has resulted in a “significant diminishing of American influence in the region, the enhancement obviously of Iran’s influence, and also Iran’s good allies who are China and Russia.” Had the Constitution as written been followed, there would have been ample time to flag the risks, rally public opinion, and force Trump to explain how he would avoid predictable calamities (e.g. closing of the Strait of Hormuz).

Only after the bombs stopped falling did Congress finally push back on Trump’s disastrous war. (Last week, the Senate voted to advance the War Powers Act; the war powers resolution then had to be pulled from the House floor to avoid another humiliating defeat for Trump.) The Framers would be shocked, no doubt, at the inversion of power they carefully crafted to prevent executive abuse.

Some serious commemoration to honor of our war dead would serve as a timely reminder that:

• War should be a last resort; never undertaken lightly;
• Executive power has grown in dangerous and unconstitutional ways; and
• We have the power to correct the unconstitutional inflation of executive power that can easily result in disasters like the Iran War.

As to the latter, we could use a long overdue debate about the War Powers Act, which has become essentially useless. If Democrats win back the majority in one or both houses, they must work on revising the War Powers Act to provide real restraint on presidents and reassert Congress’s sole authority power to declare war.

Fortunately, Democrats do not need to start from scratch in considering War Powers Act reforms. Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a well-crafted bill in 2021 to address several serious infirmities with the current statute. As Just Security explained at the time, the bill would have tightened up the definition of hostilities (which triggers the consultation obligations and starts the clock for Congress to halt military engagement) to include “any situation involving any use of lethal or potentially lethal force by or against United States forces.” It also would have shortened the 60-day time limit for the president to engage troops without congressional consent to 20 days.

Most critically, the bill would have enacted “an automatic funds cut-off” if Congress did not vote to continue military action. If Congress does nothing, military action would halt. Linked to the power of the purse, such a mechanism would “not require a vote, let alone a supermajority in both houses [to overcome a presidential veto], to take effect.” That’s a bill worth pulling out of the filing cabinet and reintroducing.

In sum, Americans should find time today to ponder the enormous sacrifice of our armed forces over 250 years and the dangerous expansion of presidential power that makes it far too easy for a president to take us to war on an ill-conceived whim.

I can think of no better way to honor our military men and women — living and dead — than to make it as hard as possible for a president to launch a harebrained war without the buy-in of voters and Congress.

Michael Cohen via Substack, Opinion: Tomorrow’s Fallen Await, Michael Cohen, right, May 25, 2026. As fresh wars spread across continents, Memorial Day becomes less about history and more about the terrifying possibility that tomorrow’s graves are already chosen.

Memorial Day was never supposed to become another three-day mattress sale wrapped in red, white, and blue balloons. It was meant to be sacred. Solemn. A pause. A collective exhale for a nation built on sacrifice and stained, time and time again, by the cost of war.

So before anything else, to every one of my Substack subscribers; especially those currently serving, those who once wore the uniform, and the families who carried the burden right alongside them, thank you. Truly. Your sacrifice deserves more than hashtags, parades, or politicians awkwardly placing wreaths while glancing toward the nearest camera lens. It deserves honesty. Respect. Memory.

That’s the point of Memorial Day. Memory.

And memory is a funny thing in America. We remember selectively. We remember heroism but often forget consequence. We celebrate the warrior while too frequently abandoning the wounded. We love the imagery of patriotism; the jets overhead, the flags waving, the country songs swelling in the background, but we rarely sit long enough with the silence that follows the folded flag handed to a grieving mother, father, husband, wife or child.

I’ve seen enough in my life to know that silence can be deafening.

This Memorial Day arrives at a particularly dangerous moment in world history. The war between Russia and Ukraine grinds on like a brutal machine that refuses to run out of fuel or bodies. Young men who should be worrying about mortgages, children, or whether the Knicks can finally put together a championship season are instead crouched in muddy trenches dodging drones and artillery. Meanwhile, Israel and Palestine remain trapped in a horrifying cycle where grief becomes revenge and revenge becomes policy. Entire generations are now growing up believing trauma is normal.

And now Iran sits in the middle of the geopolitical poker table, with everyone pretending they’re not already reaching for the matches.

Add in renewed threats involving Cuba, escalating rhetoric from world powers, cyber warfare, proxy militias, and enough nuclear bravado to make the Cold War look almost quaint, and suddenly Memorial Day feels less like remembrance and more like a warning label.

That’s the uncomfortable truth nobody selling “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers wants to discuss: Memorial Day is not about glorifying war. It’s about mourning the human beings consumed by it.

There’s a difference.

The young Marine from Nebraska who never came home wasn’t thinking about partisan politics while under fire. The Army medic who died saving a fellow soldier wasn’t concerned with cable news ratings. The families sitting at cemeteries today don’t care whether someone is Republican, Democrat, Independent, or whatever Elon Musk decides he is by next Thursday afternoon.

Loss has no political party.

And yet our leaders; on all sides, continue to speak about conflict with the casual confidence of men who know somebody else’s children will do the dying.

That’s what unsettles me most lately. War rhetoric has become cheap. Disposable. Almost performative. Politicians throw around phrases like “strength,” “dominance,” and “total victory” the way drunken guys in Manhattan sports bars yell advice at quarterbacks from twenty feet behind a plate of buffalo wings. Everyone becomes a wartime strategist when they’re nowhere near the battlefield.

But cemeteries tell the truth.

Rows of white headstones have a way of humbling even the loudest voices. They remind us that patriotism is not screaming the national anthem at a football game while holding a fifteen dollar beer; without tip. Patriotism is sacrifice. It’s service. It’s duty performed quietly by people who understood something many Americans have forgotten: freedom is not self-sustaining.

It requires guardians.

And sometimes those guardians never make it home.

As I write this today, families across America are setting an empty chair at the barbecue table. Someone’s father is staring at an old photograph trying not to cry in front of the grandchildren. Someone’s wife is visiting a grave before sunrise because grief is easier in private. Someone’s son or daughter is deployed right now, reading headlines about Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Cuba while wondering if they might soon be sent into the next chapter of mankind’s endless appetite for conflict.

That should sober every one of us.

Memorial Day should not simply be about honoring the dead. It should be about questioning the living. Demanding better decisions from leaders. Resisting the normalization of perpetual war. Understanding that behind every military statistic is a human life interrupted forever.

Because once the ceremonies end, once the speeches are over and the flags are folded away, the families continue carrying the weight. The weight of sadness.

They always do.

So today, enjoy your families. Enjoy your freedoms. But also remember the cost attached to both. Take a moment of real reflection in a world increasingly addicted to outrage and distraction. Call a veteran. Thank a military family. Teach your children why this day matters.

And maybe, just maybe, let Memorial Day serve not only as a remembrance of sacrifice, but as a reminder of how urgently we should avoid creating more of it.

Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Republicans hate our veterans — and no one hates them more than Preznit, Jeff Teidrich, right, May 25, 2026. Watch what they do, not what they say. (This is an updated version of a Memorial Day post from May 26, 2025.)

Today is Memorial Day. You’re going to hear a lot ... from the Usual Republican Suspects about how much they honor and respect our nation’s fallen heroes. They’re going to be all over social media, tweeting out the same old boilerplate platitudes about duty and sacrifice. As always, watch what they do, not what they say.

Soldiers, sailors and marines are useful props whenever some asshole wingnut needs to burnish their ‘patriot’ cred, but when it comes time to actually support them — say, by helping them when they’re in need — it’s a completely different story.

Need proof? let’s go to the video tape, from July 29, 2022:

Here we have a bunch of Republican Senators fist-bumping. Why? Because they just blocked a bill that would have expanded healthcare coverage for military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits during their service.

Awesome job, you evil soulless hypocrites — because nothing says ‘we support our heroes’ so much as ‘just f____ die.’

Fast forward to 2025. in April of that year, the Space Nazi’s merry band of pimply DOGE incels showed up at the Department of Veterans Affairs and said. "Good news, everyone — you’re all fired. They then took a wrecking ball to the place."

Right now, the VA is so understaffed that veterans calling in with need for assistance can’t get anyone to answer the phone.

Tommy Tuberville ...posted an eight minute video:  “It’s Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day is about more than just grilling out by the lake. It’s a time to reflect and be grateful for the tremendous sacrifices that have been made for our freedom.”

ugh.

Let’s not forget that Mr. Should Have Worn A Helmet When He Played Football single-handedly blocked all military promotions for the better part of a year. why would T-Tubes do this? because he had worked himself up into a big hissy over a Pentagon policy that paid the travel expenses of raped soldiers in need of abortions. How dare they.

Terminally-Concussed Tommy so screwed with U.S. military readiness that a top Marine general ended up hospitalized from a cardiac event caused by the stress of having to do two jobs at once.

Here’s something that white supremacy’s middle manager, Steve Scalise, tweeted out on Veterans Day 2023:

“America is the greatest nation in the history of the world because of the bravery and sacrifices of our veterans. Join me in thanking and honoring all those who answered the call to serve our country and defend our freedoms—because without them we'd have neither. #VeteransDay”

Let’s have a look at your stellar record:

you voted against the VA Employee Fairness Act, the Veteran Service Recognition Act, the PACT Act (twice), the Equal Access to Contraception for Veterans Act, and the Ensuring Veterans Smooth Transition Act.

For a guy who claims to honor those who made sacrifices, you have an odd way of showing it.

Now let’s move on to the googly-eyed director of the Federal Bureau of Guzzling As Much Bourbon As You Can, As Quickly As You Can — the always steady on his feet Kash Patel.

This atrocity should be fresh in your mind, as it was first reported on a couple of weeks ago. I’m talking about the day that Krazee-Eyes Kash got it in his head to invite a bunch of his besties to have a snorkel party within splashing distance of one of America’s most sacred war memorials — the sunken remains of the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

This memorial is such a hallowed place that no one but the divers who inter the remains of fallen heroes are allowed to go into the water. You can’t even walk around in a bathing suit. They will throw your disrespectful ass right out of there — but that didn’t stop Kash and his posse from jumping right in for some snorkely hijinks.

Aand don’t even get me started on this rotting diaperload. Cadet Bone Spurs has spent his entire life finding new and inventive ways to insult and dishonor our troops. back during the 2024 presidential campaign, the Biden-Harris HQ assembled this greatest hits video:

“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year. God Bless those that have made the ultimate sacrifice. I love you all! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Awesome. Donny can’t even post a simple Memorial Day message without turning it into some broken-inside grievance-fest.

Let’s not forget that in November 2018, as world leaders gathered at a cemetery in France to honor the memory of US soldiers killed while fighting in World War One, Donny blew the whole thing off — because it was drizzling lightly and he didn’t want that weird tangle of piss-colored bullshit on top of his fat head to get wet. instead, he spent the day rage-tweeting from his hotel room. good times, bro, good times.

And let’s not forget this disgraceful episode:

On October 4, 2017, four US soldiers involved in special operations in Niger were ambushed and killed.

how did Commander-in-Chief ....react? He told the families of the slain soldiers that “they knew what they signed up for” and then engaged in a petty twitter spat with a grieving widow.

Then he went on TV to praise himself and brag about how he handled the situation better than Obama would have. He also disavowed any responsibility for the soldiers’ mission.

Let’s also not forget that in conversations with his chief of staff John Kelly, Donny referred to prisoners of war as “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” He also called soldiers killed in action “losers.”

Then there was the time that the US Navy had to hide an entire fucking warship, the USS John S. McCain, because they knew that Donny would throw a shit-fit if he saw it.

what kind of overgrown diaper-baby gets mad at a fucking boat?

let’s not ever forget that incident in 2024, when Donny barged his way into Arlington National Cemetery to do a disgraceful thumb’s-up campaign photo-op while trampling over the graves of fallen heroes — and grinning like an asshole the whole time.

when an Arlington staffer — a US Army sergeant — tried to stop this abomination from taking place, Donny’s thugs roughly shoved her out of the way, because fuck you, that’s why.

while campaigning in 2024, he mocked Nikki Haley because her husband, an active-duty soldier, is deployed overseas.

“Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away. … What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone,” Trump said at his rally in Conway, his first visit to the state this year.

Michael Haley is deployed in Africa with the South Carolina Army National Guard in support of the United States Africa Command, his second active-duty deployment overseas.

Hey, remember that Pentagon policy that got Terminally-Concussed Tommy Tuberville so upset — the one that paid the travel expenses of raped soldiers in need of abortions? Tommy should be happy now, because Donny shitcanned it four days after taking the oath of office.

Now I want to repost something I wrote on September 24, 2023:  this one just might be the rock-bottom worst:

Meanwhile, another heartwarming story came to light this week, about Donald Trump’s deep and enduring love and devotion for our nation’s wounded combat troops.

At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.

It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Holly­anne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)

“Why do you bring people like that here? no one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Imagine you’re a severely wounded soldier. after five combat tours, sacrificing yourself for your country — you find yourself in a military hospital, minus one leg, your life permanently altered. you live though months of hell — bedridden, undergoing multiple operations and grueling physical therapy — and when finally you’re discharged, you’re confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life.

And what does the President of the United States — your Commander in Chief — say about you?

“No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

More Global News

Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born first Pope born in the United States (Vatican Media photo).

New York Times, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, May 25, 2026. The document marks a powerful foray by the leader of the Roman Catholic church into the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence.

Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

• government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
• protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
• education to help students think critically about the technology
• action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I. safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.

Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment,” he said.

“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

 

Disinfecting the public market on Saturday in Bunia, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeast, as part of the response to the Ebola virus’s resurgence (New York Times photo by Arlette Bashizi).

The country, formerly known as Zaire, is shown on a map below.

New York Times, In City at Center of Ebola Crisis, ‘the Virus Is Far Ahead of Us,’ Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, Updated May 25, 2026. The deadly virus has spread alarmingly in Congo for months. Only now is the response taking shape.

Since an Ebola outbreak was declared in Bunia, a bustling city in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, global alarms have gone off. Borders have slammed shut, flights have been diverted as far as the United States and the Congolese World Cup team is currently in quarantine in Belgium.

Yet here in Bunia, at the heart of the crisis, the usual signs of an organized response — large medical tents, medics in sealed white suits and goggles and patients lying in strict isolation — are not yet in place.

Instead, the incipient aid effort is only getting set up. Outside Bunia’s main hospital on Saturday, workers hammered nails and pushed up tents a few yards from the main door, in a frantic scramble to erect a handful of isolation wards where patients can be triaged, isolated and treated.

“The virus is far ahead of us,” said Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, which is building two of the isolation wards. “And it’s spreading fast.”

The world is playing catch-up in Congo. Caught flat-footed by an outbreak that was discovered disastrously late — perhaps two months after it started — the system of international response is struggling onto its feet.

News Roundups

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Monday Update: Trump Lashes Out as Congress Takes Action to Stop Slush Fund and Opposition to Iran Deal Grows as Gas Prices Continue to Rise, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. This Memorial Day, we pause to honor the Americans who gave their lives in service to our country. May we never forget their sacrifice or the families and loved ones they left behind.

There is still a lot of news to cover this morning. Congressional Republicans and Democrats have now introduced bipartisan legislation to block Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Meanwhile, the president is lashing out at Republicans questioning his emerging Iran deal, and many conservatives are increasingly worried Trump’s focus on personal grievances could hurt the GOP in November. And much more.

This week, I’ll be covering Pam Bondi’s testimony in the Epstein investigation live, bringing you inside reporting from survivors and members of Congress, while also working on several major deep-dive investigations.

Here’s the news:

A growing number of Republicans are privately and publicly worried that President Donald Trump’s focus on personal grievances, loyalty tests, and controversial projects could hurt the GOP in the 2026 midterms. Republican senators and strategists are especially alarmed by Trump’s creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that could compensate January 6 defendants and Trump allies, with Sen. Thom Tillis warning that “the stupid stuff is killing our chances.” Trump’s support for controversial candidates like Ken Paxton, attacks on vulnerable Republican incumbents, and growing frustration among GOP lawmakers who fear the president is prioritizing personal legacy projects and political vendettas over issues like inflation and affordability. Despite the concerns, many Republicans remain reluctant to openly challenge Trump because of his influence over the party and primary voters.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi introduced legislation this morning to block federal money from being used for the Justice Department’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Critics from both parties argue the fund lacks congressional oversight and could allow payouts to Trump allies and January 6 defendants who claim they were unfairly targeted by the government. The proposal comes amid growing Republican backlash against the fund, which was created as part of a settlement involving President Donald Trump and the IRS over leaked tax returns. Opposition to the fund has become strong enough to complicate broader Republican legislative negotiations in Congress.

Iran said a peace agreement with the United States is not imminent despite ongoing negotiations and signs of progress in talks aimed at ending the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed they would not rush into a deal, warning that if diplomacy fails the U.S. could pursue other options. Emerging details of the proposed agreement have already sparked backlash from Republican lawmakers concerned that Iran could retain some nuclear-related capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief and economic concessions. Qatar and Pakistan are playing increasingly important roles as mediators while both the U.S. and Iran continue discussions over a possible 60-day framework for a broader peace agreement. Trump lashed out at Republicans this morning who opposed him publicly:

According to NBC News, the U.S. is struggling to replenish advanced weapons used in the Iran war because many of them rely on tungsten, a critical metal whose global production is overwhelmingly controlled by China. To reduce dependence on Beijing, the U.S. and allied companies are racing to reopen and expand tungsten mining operations in places like South Korea and Montana. Experts warn that rebuilding a reliable Western tungsten supply chain could take decades, creating concerns about future military readiness and potential conflicts involving China or Taiwan. The situation has also intensified broader efforts by the Trump administration to secure access to critical minerals through domestic projects and international partnerships.

A potential security flaw on the Trump Mobile website may have exposed the personal information of around 27,000 people who attempted to preorder the company’s gold-colored T1 smartphone. The company said names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses may have been affected, though no payment or banking information appears to have been compromised. The issue was discovered by an Australian programmer and later reviewed by cybersecurity experts, who found the exposed data likely included both completed and abandoned preorder attempts. The incident comes as Trump Mobile begins shipping its delayed T1 smartphones and faces scrutiny over earlier claims that the devices would be manufactured in the US.

Donald Trump’s Memorial Day post this morning:

Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year. God Bless those that have made the ultimate sacrifice. I love you all! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

President Donald Trump is pushing for a major expansion of the Abraham Accords, publicly urging Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel as part of a broader regional peace framework tied to the emerging Iran negotiations. Trump also said that if Iran signs the current agreement under discussion, he would welcome Tehran into the Accords as well, a dramatic shift that would link a U.S.-Iran peace deal to wider Arab-Israeli normalization efforts. Reports indicate the proposal has been met with skepticism and discomfort from several regional leaders, especially given ongoing tensions surrounding Israel and the broader Middle East conflict.

A major investigation found a sharp rise in violent crimes committed by people impersonating ICE agents during Trump’s immigration crackdown, with at least 31 documented cases in 2025 alone. Victims reported robberies, assaults, kidnappings, and sexual violence carried out by fake agents targeting vulnerable immigrants who were often too afraid to contact police or testify in court.

Experts, activists, and law enforcement officials say the widespread use of masks and tactical gear by real immigration agents has made it harder for immigrants to distinguish legitimate officers from criminals. The FBI warned that criminals are exploiting ICE’s increased visibility and fear surrounding deportation efforts to terrorize immigrant communities.

Investigators found that many fake agents carried weapons, used police-style vehicles or clothing, and staged fake “immigration operations” to intimidate victims into compliance. Several lawmakers and civil rights advocates are now pushing for stricter identification requirements for ICE officers, arguing that clearer rules are needed to protect public safety and prevent abuse.

A Florida biologist who was fired after reposting a social media comment criticizing conservative activist Charlie Kirk following his assassination has received a $485,000 settlement from the state. Brittney Brown lost her job with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission after her private Instagram repost spread online and sparked backlash from conservative figures. The settlement includes compensation for lost wages, back pay, and legal fees, and is part of a growing number of payouts and lawsuits tied to disciplinary actions over online comments made after Kirk’s death.

A group of Vietnam veterans and former U.S. officials is suing to stop construction of Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot ceremonial arch near Arlington National Cemetery, arguing it resembles an authoritarian monument rather than a patriotic memorial. The veterans say the project disrespects fallen soldiers, disrupts the historic symbolism between Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial, and was pushed forward without proper congressional approval. Trump has openly embraced the project, at one point joking that the arch was being built for “me,” while critics compare it to monuments commonly associated with strongman regimes. Despite overwhelming public opposition, federal arts officials approved the project last week and construction could move forward soon.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has worsened significantly, with suspected deaths now surpassing 200 and more than 1,000 suspected infections reported. Uganda has also confirmed new Ebola cases linked to the Congo outbreak, raising fears of wider regional spread as health officials struggle to contain infections that may have circulated undetected for weeks. Response efforts have been complicated by violence, distrust of authorities, and attacks on hospitals and treatment centers, including incidents where angry residents stormed facilities and patients fled quarantine. The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a global public health emergency, warning that the risk inside Congo is now considered “very high.”

Firefighters in Orange County are conducting an around-the-clock operation to prevent a catastrophic explosion at a leaking aerospace chemical tank containing thousands of gallons of methyl methacrylate. More than 50,000 residents remain under evacuation orders as crews monitor rising temperatures and investigate cracks in the tank that could either relieve pressure or signal an approaching rupture. California officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have declared a state of emergency and requested federal assistance while hazardous materials experts warn that a BLEVE explosion could cause widespread structural damage and release toxic vapors. Authorities have also launched a criminal investigation into the incident as lawsuits and public anger grow over the handling of the crisis.

Pope Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence is fueling global conflict, concentrating power in the hands of a few companies, and making warfare more normalized through autonomous weapons systems. In his first major encyclical, he called for stronger ethical oversight and a slower pace of AI development, arguing that regulation alone is not enough to protect humanity. Leo emphasized that AI should remain accessible and guided by moral principles rather than controlled by governments, corporations, or military interests. He also warned that unchecked AI development could push the world toward a more dangerous and violent future.

Pope Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery, acknowledging that past popes authorized and justified the enslavement of non-Christians during the colonial era. In his first encyclical, he called the Church’s delayed condemnation of slavery “a wound in Christian memory” and asked forgiveness for the suffering caused. Leo connected the history of slavery to modern forms of exploitation tied to artificial intelligence and global labor systems, warning that society must avoid repeating similar moral failures in the digital age.

The Parnas Perspective, Important Evening News and Commentary, Aaron Parnas, right, May 25, 2026. The news slowed down tonight, and while I have updates below, I wanted to share something I’m still trying to fully process: for one straight year, this has been the number one news Substack in the world.

A little over a year ago, none of this existed. No team. No funding. No billionaire backing. No corporate safety net. Just me, a laptop, a fire in my chest, and a belief that journalism could still mean something. Then you showed up.

You subscribed. You read. You shared. You pushed back against the noise and said: we want truth, not spin. You believed in this experiment in independent journalism by subscribing to show your support, and now here we are. Subscribe tonight to keep it going, if you can

Let’s be clear about what this means: we built this with zero corporate dollars, no clickbait, and no compromise. We built it together. We are redefining what media can look like. We are proving that truth still matters. We are building something no one can buy, censor, or spin.

So tonight, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for believing in this work. Thank you for making it possible.

Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Let’s keep breaking the mold.

Now, here’s the news:

President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Walter Reed Medical Center on Tuesday for a medical and dental checkup, marking his third hospital visit in just over a year. The visit comes amid growing public scrutiny over his health, fueled by visible bruising, swelling in his ankles, and questions from former White House physicians about the administration’s transparency. Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency in 2025, though he has continued to insist he is in “excellent health.” Recent polling shows declining public confidence in both his mental sharpness and physical fitness to serve. Despite the concerns, the White House has described his visits as routine and scheduled. The President’s recent visit today to Arlington for his Memorial Day speech showed his hands discolored again:

A CNN report says the Trump administration has restricted key U.S. infectious disease researchers from directly communicating with the World Health Organization during major virus outbreaks, including Ebola and hantavirus. Officials at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases can now only attend some WHO meetings in a limited “listening” role, with follow-up routed through the Department of Health and Human Services. Critics and former health officials warn the restrictions are slowing global coordination at a time when the U.S. is also facing major leadership vacancies across agencies like the CDC, FDA, and surgeon general’s office. The report also links the administration’s pullback from global health institutions and cuts to USAID to weaker international outbreak response systems. Despite the criticism, the administration says the U.S. remains fully prepared to respond to public health threats and continues coordinating through the CDC.

The World Health Organization says the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is spreading faster than response efforts can contain it, with neighboring countries now considered at high risk. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there have been 220 suspected deaths so far and warned that violence and attacks on health facilities are severely disrupting containment efforts. In several incidents, angry residents attacked hospitals and treatment centers after authorities refused to release Ebola victims’ bodies for traditional burials, allowing multiple infected patients to escape. Uganda has also confirmed additional Ebola cases, including infections among health workers in Kampala. The outbreak is being fueled by insecurity in eastern Congo and the lack of an approved vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola.

A Daily Mail report says Vice President JD Vance is becoming increasingly isolated inside the Trump administration following Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, which reportedly stemmed from her husband’s cancer diagnosis. According to sources, Vance is now the administration’s last major anti-interventionist voice and is even considering stepping away from a possible 2028 presidential run. Insiders quoted in the report described Vance as highly visible and politically active, but suggested his future ambitions may be shifting as tensions grow within Trump’s inner circle over issues like Iran policy.

Iran says a final agreement with the U.S. is not imminent despite progress in negotiations, blaming conflicting signals from Washington and interference from Israel for slowing talks. Iranian officials confirmed that many issues have been resolved, but major disagreements remain over nuclear restrictions, sanctions relief, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. still hopes for a deal, while President Donald Trump pushed for additional countries to join the Abraham Accords as part of a broader regional agreement. Critics in Israel and across the Middle East reacted skeptically, with analysts saying countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar are unlikely to normalize ties with Israel under current conditions. The proposed framework would reportedly reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days of a ceasefire and launch new nuclear negotiations, though tensions remain high on all sides.

Trump posted about nuclear dust today: President Donald Trump said any future agreement with Iran should require more countries to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations with Israel. Trump specifically called on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan to sign on, saying participation should be “mandatory” as part of a broader regional deal. He said negotiations with Iran are “proceeding nicely” and suggested even Iran could eventually join the accords if an agreement is reached. The Abraham Accords were first established during Trump’s first term and initially included the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain before expanding to additional countries.

Pakistan has rejected President Donald Trump’s call for Muslim-majority countries to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel. Pakistani officials said the country is “under no compulsion” to comply and argued that negotiations involving Iran should not be linked to the accords. Trump had urged countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan to sign on as part of a broader regional agreement tied to ongoing Iran talks. Saudi Arabia also pushed back, reiterating that normalization with Israel depends on a clear path toward Palestinian statehood. Analysts say expanding the Abraham Accords remains difficult because of widespread anger across the Muslim world over the war in Gaza.

The Israeli military says it launched a major wave of airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon after a recent surge in drone attacks on northern Israel. The escalation follows Hezbollah drone strikes that damaged property in towns near the border, prompting evacuation warnings in areas around the Lebanese city of Tyre. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly ordered the military to “intensify” operations against Hezbollah as tensions rise alongside fragile U.S.-Iran negotiations. Israeli officials and opposition figures are also expressing growing concern that a potential U.S.-Iran deal could leave Hezbollah intact and weaken Israel’s influence over regional diplomacy.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico has “no issue” hosting Iran’s national soccer team during the 2026 World Cup after the team moved its training base from Arizona to Tijuana. According to Sheinbaum, FIFA told Mexico that the U.S. did not want the Iranian team staying overnight on American soil outside of match days amid ongoing tensions tied to the war involving Iran, the U.S., and Israel. Iran will still play its World Cup group matches in the United States, including games in California and Seattle, but will train and stay in Mexico throughout the tournament. FIFA formally confirmed the relocation on Monday, while the U.S. State Department said Iran remains welcome to participate in the World Cup.

Southern California officials say the risk of a catastrophic vapor explosion involving a 7,000-gallon tank of toxic methyl methacrylate at a Garden Grove aerospace facility has been eliminated after a crack in the tank released pressure and lowered internal temperatures. The incident triggered evacuation orders for roughly 50,000 residents amid fears the tank could explode, spread toxic vapors, or contaminate waterways. Authorities said there is still some danger, but the worst-case scenario known as a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion is now “off the table.” Emergency crews, the EPA, FEMA, and state officials continue monitoring the area while shelters remain crowded with displaced residents. Officials described the situation as potentially one of the worst chemical incidents in California history if the tank had ruptured.

Trump posted another private message on Truth Social, this time directed at Speaker Mike Johnson.

France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Lithuania are pushing the European Union to take a tougher stance on China’s trade practices by expanding the use of tariffs and other defensive measures. In a joint proposal to the European Commission, the countries called for more investigations into unfair trade practices, stronger enforcement tools, and greater focus on “economic security” when deciding trade penalties. The plan comes as Brussels prepares a broader strategy to counter China’s industrial overcapacity and growing economic influence. The proposal also includes creating a new “resilience tool” to protect European industries when existing trade measures are insufficient.

Protesters clashed with ICE agents outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where detainees are conducting a hunger and work strike over alleged poor conditions and inadequate medical care. Demonstrators tried to block the transfer of detainee Martin Soto, whose wife has been organizing protests, leading to confrontations in which protesters say ICE agents used pepper spray and physical force. The Department of Homeland Security said protesters obstructed facility operations and damaged vehicles, but confirmed Soto was ultimately transferred to another detention center. Advocacy groups and New Jersey officials, including Senator Andy Kim and Governor Mikie Sherrill, criticized the facility and called for Delaney Hall to be shut down. The unrest follows allegations from hundreds of detainees about unsafe living conditions and retaliation against strike organizers.

A second Spanish passenger from the hantavirus-hit cruise ship MV Hondius has tested positive for the virus while in quarantine at a Madrid hospital, according to Spain’s Health Ministry. The patient was among 14 Spaniards aboard the ship and had already been identified as a close contact through ongoing monitoring efforts. Health officials said the case was detected within the existing quarantine system and does not increase the public health risk. Authorities worldwide are continuing to trace and monitor passengers after at least three people died following the outbreak aboard the ship. Experts warn additional cases may still emerge, as hantavirus can take up to six weeks to produce symptoms.

According to Politico, an American journalist and political commentator, Thomas Pauken II, has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent for China after allegedly preparing confidential reports for Chinese officials and helping connect a U.S. government employee with a Chinese intelligence contact. According to FBI filings, Pauken told investigators he believed there was an “80 percent chance” the associate would provide classified information to China, though he claimed he personally refused requests for classified material. Prosecutors say Pauken delivered devices, arranged meetings, and offered payments tied to information intended for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Pauken’s lawyer argues the case is not about espionage, but about failing to properly register foreign work with the U.S. government. The case remained sealed for days after Pauken’s arrest and comes amid broader tensions over Chinese influence operations in the United States.

A new scientific analysis warns that rising sea levels and disappearing wetlands could eventually make New Orleans uninhabitable, with some researchers saying the city may be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of the century. The study argues that officials should begin planning a long-term, managed relocation now to avoid a chaotic collapse driven by worsening floods, stronger hurricanes, and economic decline. Scientists say Louisiana has already lost thousands of square miles of wetlands that once protected the region from storm surges, while nearly all New Orleans residents now face high flood risk. Some experts point to examples like Sweden’s relocated mining town of Kiruna as a possible model, though many residents fear relocation would destroy the city’s culture and disproportionately harm Black communities. Researchers say New Orleans could become a global test case for how coastal cities adapt to accelerating climate change and sea level rise.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Massie Unleashed over Epstein Files as White House Urges GOP to Tweet Support of Trump's Iran Deal Which is Falling Apart, Aaron Parnas, right, May 24, 2026. The White House reportedly urges Republican lawmakers to publicly support Trump’s emerging Iran deal, a deal that may already be starting to unravel.

Thomas Massie, fresh off his election loss, is unleashed, promising to expose more names connected to the Epstein files and claiming Melania Trump knows more than she’s saying. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio called people making racist comments about Indians “stupid people,” prompting the State Department to delete a tweet after critics noted it could indirectly implicate Trump himself.

Trump Regime's Terror Tactics, Threats

 

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: Trump told on himself today, Heather Delaney Reese, above right and right, May 25, 2026. Just after midnight last night, shortly after I had fallen asleep, I was woken up by a loud sound outside. I jumped out of bed, and I was on my feet before I had even finished the thought. My brain immediately went to our family safety plan, a sequence of steps we take in the event of any number of threats to our safety.

And before I go any further, I want you all to know that my family is fine. We are absolutely okay. But in that moment, nothing felt okay. My heart was racing, and I was responding with instinct and adrenaline only. Thankfully, a quick look out the window showed someone getting into their truck out on the street. I must have just heard them loudly closing their door. That was all. There was no danger.

But once my heart rate finally came back down and I got back into bed, I couldn’t fall asleep again. I spent the rest of the night lying there thinking about the fact that a year or two ago, that same sound would have meant absolutely nothing to me. A noise in the middle of the night was just a noise. I still would have checked what it was, but it never would have crossed my mind that someone might want to hurt me or my family because of words I had written online. That is not the country I grew up in. But it is the one we are living in now. And I know I am not the only person lying awake at night feeling the psychological weight of what this country has become. We are surrounded by violence now. Threats, rage, political extremism, and constant instability.

I finally fell back asleep sometime before dawn. And when I woke up, I did what I have done almost every morning since Trump was re-elected: I reached for my phone and braced myself for what he had done while I was asleep. And after spending nearly the entire night thinking about the culture of violence and fear spreading through this country, I opened my phone to see that the President of the United States had woken up thinking about violence, too. The difference is that I am horrified by it, and he is entertained by it. Because on a Sunday morning, Donald Trump opened Truth Social and shared a fake image of a bombing. A plane carrying the American flag, firing missiles into boats as flames erupted across the water, bodies flying through the air beneath the word “Adios” written in giant red letters across the top of the screen.

The image (above) was not subtle. It was yet another digital war fantasy posted by the man who actually commands one of the most powerful militaries on earth. He was once again treating the killing of human beings like the punchline to a joke he could not wait to tell.

And that was just one of many disturbing posts he made just today. He started his morning by posting a pretend movie poster featuring fake mug shots of his political enemies in orange prison jumpsuits. He called it “The Shady Bunch.” There were 8 people shown (below), including James Comey, and “Barack Hussein Obama” in a tan jumpsuit. He added the caption “This is a bad (Sick!) group of people. Very destructive to our great Nation. Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization! President DJT” The irony of the man who has actually been convicted of 34 felony counts, posting pictures of people who have not, is not lost on any of us.

He also shared an image captioned “China Loves Trump,” showing himself walking through a crowd of adoring Chinese citizens waving American and Chinese flags. Followed quickly with an image of him clasping hands with Xi Jinping on a grand staircase. And staying with the China theme, he posted a photo of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Xi, under giant text that read, “President Trump gets YOUNGER.” He turns 80 next month.

 

Stepping back and looking at all of these posts tells us a great deal about where Trump’s mind is right now and what his biggest concerns are. We are seeing someone who is aligning himself, in image after image, with one of the most powerful authoritarians on the planet. A man insisting, in giant letters, that he is growing younger, when he is weeks away from 80, and the entire world has watched him struggle to finish sentences and fall asleep in meetings. A man posting his enemies in prison clothes while he is the one with the criminal convictions. Every single thing he posted today shows us exactly what he is most afraid of. His own decline. His own irrelevance. His own crimes catching up to him. He might not even realize how obvious he is making it.

And then there is the thing all of it was built to distract us from. Iran. Because underneath the war memes and the strongman photos and the fountain-of-youth fantasy, there was a real story unfolding, and it is the one he least wants us to look at. At 10:10 in the morning, in a long and unusually careful statement, Trump tried to sell the country on a deal with Iran that does not exist yet. He spent most of it attacking the deal Barack Obama negotiated, the one he himself tore up, calling it one of the worst deals ever made by our country and a direct path to a nuclear weapon. He insisted his version is the exact opposite. And then he admitted the part that undoes the whole performance. He said the negotiations were still proceeding, that he had told his representatives not to rush, that time was on our side. By 2:16 in the afternoon, in a shorter and angrier post, he said it plainly: nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. He told the critics, the losers, as he called them, to stop talking about something they know nothing about.

He was telling on himself. There is no deal, and if there is one, he is actively negotiating it, and it will likely be worse than any deal we have had in the past. He is trying to get ahead of the optics of that. He pulled the United States out of the prior agreement and has spent the time since fumbling for a replacement. And he now stands in front of the country bragging about a triumph that exists only in his imagination. And here is the detail that proves how shaky the ground beneath him really is. The White House has reportedly been urging Republicans to publicly tweet their support for this Iran deal, the one that nobody has seen and that may yet fall apart entirely. A leader confident in what he has built does not need his own party to pre-load their applause. That is the behavior of a man bracing for the thing to collapse, trying to lock in loyalty before the floor gives out.

Trump thought he could go into Iran, wreak havoc, and come out a war hero. Trump thought he could convince us all that immigrants are destroying our country. Trump thinks he can threaten allies and still be accepted as a strong world leader. He is learning the hard way that we see right through him. Because we know that this is what authoritarian leaders have always done when they have nothing real to offer. They manufacture spectacle. They pick simple, frightening words, and they hammer them, because simple solutions to complex problems are easier to sell than the hard work of governing. Mussolini staged grand parades and Roman pageantry while the economy buckled beneath the show. The Soviet leadership announced record harvests to a population standing in bread lines. The performance of strength becomes the entire job, because strength is the one thing they cannot actually produce. Trump campaigned, over and over, on ending wars. And here he is, on a holiday weekend, posting bombs and boats and the word “Adios,” because the deal-making he promised has turned to dust in his hands, and a war meme is so much easier to post than an admission of failure.

I think a lot about why I started writing these posts every night. When I began, I told myself I was either going to be documenting the fall of what could have been one of the greatest countries this world has ever seen, or I was going to be documenting her greatest comeback. I did not know then which one it would be. I still do not know for certain. But a year in, I know something I did not know at the start, which is that I am not doing it alone. I have met people who read this every single night, in person, out in the world, and there is nothing like that feeling. Because it tells me what I suspected all along. We are not on the fringe. We are the majority; they are just louder. We are people who want the best for everyone, who want our neighbors to be safe and our kids to grow up free, who do not want to wake up every morning and check a phone to see whether the President has marched us into a new war overnight. That is not radical. That is just decent. And there are so many more of us than they want us to believe.

Which brings me back to that sound outside my window, and the reason it kept me awake. The truth is, I knew this risk before I ever wrote a word. I sat my family down, and we talked about it, all of it, before I started, because speaking out publicly does not just put a target on you, it touches everyone you love. And I talk about the emails I receive. So many lovely ones. People sharing why they still have hope for America. Their fears and concerns, and what they are doing to push back in their own ways. How they are building the resistance. But a small and very ugly handful are full of the kind of words I will not repeat here. I laugh most of them off, because they come from deeply broken people, but I would be lying if I said the weight of them does not settle somewhere underneath, quiet and heavy, in the part of you that hears a noise at night and assumes the worst. And it has been weighing heavily on me. I know that this is not unique to me. Nearly every other person who is taking a public stand against this evil regime gets much of the same emails that I do.

And I’ve had to accept that this is the country he is building. One where violence is the background hum of life. There have been more threats and acts of violence swirling around this presidency than around any in living memory, including real attempts on his own life. This is what happens when the man at the very top treats violence as entertainment and posts a bomb as a joke. It gives everyone permission. The cruelty flows downhill, into inboxes, onto streets, and outside ordinary people’s windows at midnight.

And if I sound upset, know that I am. But also know that it fuels me. It sparks a flame in me to push harder. I know that the path to better days is not an easy one to walk. We are going to have to climb mountains to get there. But we are not alone, and there are more people speaking out every single day. Including Congressman Thomas Massie, right, who appeared on Meet the Press this morning. When he was asked whether he would name more names from the Epstein files in the weeks and months ahead, he said yes. He accused acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of violating the law by sitting on millions of files that the Epstein Files Transparency Act requires the government to release. He said he does not believe convictions are even possible with Blanche running the Justice Department and Kash Patel running the FBI, because, in his words, both men have effectively perjured themselves by claiming there is nobody else in the files. Nobody else. Epstein acted alone, case closed. And then he said the line that must have infuriated Donald Trump, because he took aim at that claim with the most damning witness he could find. “Even Melania doesn’t believe that,” he said. “The First Lady knows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone.” He was pointing to Melania Trump’s own public statement, in which she acknowledged that Epstein was not alone and that several prominent men resigned their positions once the matter became politicized. Massie’s argument was simple and brutal.

Massie said he would be reading more names from the files for the country to hear. And Trump has no one to blame but himself for whatever comes next. Because in one of his fits of wounded ego, Trump backed a challenger and helped end Massie’s career in the House. He thought he was eliminating a problem. What he actually did was take the last restraint off a man who now has nothing left to lose and a legal shield to say whatever he wants. Trump did not silence the threat. He unleashed it. And as Massie himself pointed out, it does not even matter whether he is in Congress, because the Transparency Act is the law, and it runs for years. If this Justice Department will not release the files, the next one is legally obligated to. The cover-up that the entire day of memes and bombs and strongman photos was designed to distract us from has a hole in it, and the President widened that hole himself, with his own thin skin.

That is what his insecurity does. It makes him careless. It makes him lash out at the very people he most needs to keep quiet. He is on his way out, whether he understands that yet or not, and a cornered man making enemies he cannot afford is a gift to the rest of us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

U.S. Elections, Governance, Politics

New York Times, Trump’s Self-Indulgence Deepens G.O.P. Fears in Midterms, Shane Goldmacher and Patricia Mazzei, May 25, 2026. “The stupid stuff is killing our chances,” said a retiring Republican senator.

A little more than five months ahead of the midterm elections, President Trump seems to be focused on virtually anything other than keeping Republican control of Congress.

He endorsed a MAGA challenger over Texas’s senior Republican senator, ignoring warnings that he could endanger the seat. He has boasted almost daily about his expensive and expansive new White House ballroom. He has minimized rising gas costs, waving off spiking prices at the pump as “peanuts” last week compared to what he is pursuing in Iran. And even as he engaged over the weekend in negotiations to end the Iran war that he began, Mr. Trump has made plain that he prioritizes his record abroad above domestic affordability, which he has dismissed repeatedly as a Democratic “hoax.”

For many, a new jaw-dropper came last week when Mr. Trump created a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who say they have been victims of “weaponization and lawfare,” including those who attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers there, on Jan. 6, 2021.

Incensed Senate Republicans, many of whom lived through that day, returned home vexed by a president who appears set on pursuing his personal priorities ahead of the November midterm elections, even if doing so undermines his own party. They angrily abandoned Washington on Thursday without funding the president’s immigration crackdown or the $1 billion he wants for his ballroom.

Republicans know that their party’s fate rests with the president, according to interviews with numerous officials in recent weeks. Yet they also know there is not much any of them can do to make him help them.

“The president was elected to juice the economy, to bring down inflation, to stop illegal immigration and to get away from woke culture,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “If his highest goal were to maintain control of Congress, he would not be doing what he is doing.”ImageMr. Trump gestures in a blue suit and red tie next to a rendering of the ballroom. The construction site is behind him.President Trump spoke to reporters at the construction site of the new White House ballroom, which Senate Republicans refused to fund before leaving town on Thursday. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Ayres called the $1.776 billion fund — the figure is a reference to the nation’s 250th anniversary — “a whole new level of brazenness.” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who is not seeking re-election, spoke out against it, calling it “stupid on stilts,” earning him a rebuke from Mr. Trump on social media on Friday. The president called him “weak and ineffective” and a “Nitpicker.”

“We need Republicans to do well in November," Mr. Tillis replied, “but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!”

Mr. Trump has long been a self-indulgent political leader who trusts his own instincts, even when that means veering off message. But, in his second term, he has surrounded himself with a senior team of loyalists who mostly acquiesce to his impulses. The institutional guardrails that once kept him in check are weakened or gone, with his Cabinet and Republicans largely proving pliant to his demands over the last 16 months.

Along the way, the president’s overall approval rating has slumped to an all-time low, leaving congressional Republicans alarmed at their fall prospects. A string of wins in G.O.P. primaries — in which Mr. Trump helped oust those who have disagreed with him — appears to have emboldened him to remain focused on his pet projects, including attacking those he deems insufficiently loyal.

 

The California Govenor Candidates Debate (April 22, 2026, pool photo).

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Democrats Are Surging In California's Gubernatorial Primary, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 25, 2026. A few months ago, Republicans hoped they could take both spots in California's gubernatorial primary, but it is looking certain that Democrats will be on the fall ballot and may take both spots.

There has been a great deal of stress among Democrats about the California gubernatorial primary. From the lack of big-name candidates after both former VP Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla passed on running to Eric Swalwell getting into the race, looking like the frontrunner, and then being revealed to be a predator, Democrats seemed to have everything imaginable go wrong.

The Daily is journalism that fights for democracy and freedom. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

However, after Swalwell dropped out, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra consolidated support and rose to the top spot in the polls, where he has remained for weeks.

The biggest problem that Democrats have faced is that race is loaded with too many candidates who are splitting the vote. Democratic leaders in the state called for low polling Democrats to drop out so that the field could solidify around one or two Democrats, but that didn’t happen, so the Democrats have muddled along with a bloated field, and it looked like Democrats being shut out of the general election was possible until Becerra rose to the top of the field.

Primary polling is always difficult, and California’s size and jungle primary, where all candidates from both parties appear on the same ballot and the top finishers advance to the general election, can make polling an even more complex challenge, but what we know is that two Democratic candidates are surging, and only three candidates total have a real chance to advance.

According to the latest Emerson College poll of the primary, only Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer are surging.

Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said, “Xavier Becerra tops the crowded California primary for the first time in an Emerson poll, his support increased by nine points since mid-April, driven by now being the top choice among Democratic voters at 31%. Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer closely follow at 17% respectively, Hilton’s support stagnant, while Steyer’s support increased three points since April.”

The reason why Democrats think they have a chance to get both slots in the general election rests with undecided voters.

According to the Emerson College Poll:

Undecided voters were asked whom they would support if the election were held today and they had to decide right now. When including which candidate undecided voters lean toward, support for Becerra increases by one point to 20%, Steyer by two points to 19%, Hilton by one point to 18%, and Katie Porter by three points to 13%.

Steyer and Becerra got into the top three in very different ways. Becerra is Biden’s former HHS Secretary, former state attorney general, former congressman, and member of the state assembly. It was old-school political networking among California Democrats that helped Becerra rise. Steyer has risen from spending $200 million of his own money on ads.

The real race in this primary is between Hilton and Steyer for second place. It could be argued that Hilton had some momentum until Donald Trump gave his toxic in California endorsement.

Getting endorsed by Trump could end up costing Hilton a spot in the general election, as his momentum died after Trump got involved.

The Republican fantasy of flipping California looks increasingly cooked, as Democrats may end up freezing them out of the November gubernatorial election.

 

The California Govenor Candidates Debate (April 22, 2026, pool photo).

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Democrats Are Surging In California's Gubernatorial Primary, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, May 25, 2026. A few months ago, Republicans hoped they could take both spots in California's gubernatorial primary, but it is looking certain that Democrats will be on the fall ballot and may take both spots.

There has been a great deal of stress among Democrats about the California gubernatorial primary. From the lack of big-name candidates after both former VP Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla passed on running to Eric Swalwell getting into the race, looking like the frontrunner, and then being revealed to be a predator, Democrats seemed to have everything imaginable go wrong.

The Daily is journalism that fights for democracy and freedom. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

However, after Swalwell dropped out, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra consolidated support and rose to the top spot in the polls, where he has remained for weeks.

The biggest problem that Democrats have faced is that race is loaded with too many candidates who are splitting the vote. Democratic leaders in the state called for low polling Democrats to drop out so that the field could solidify around one or two Democrats, but that didn’t happen, so the Democrats have muddled along with a bloated field, and it looked like Democrats being shut out of the general election was possible until Becerra rose to the top of the field.

Primary polling is always difficult, and California’s size and jungle primary, where all candidates from both parties appear on the same ballot and the top finishers advance to the general election, can make polling an even more complex challenge, but what we know is that two Democratic candidates are surging, and only three candidates total have a real chance to advance.

According to the latest Emerson College poll of the primary, only Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer are surging.

Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said, “Xavier Becerra tops the crowded California primary for the first time in an Emerson poll, his support increased by nine points since mid-April, driven by now being the top choice among Democratic voters at 31%. Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer closely follow at 17% respectively, Hilton’s support stagnant, while Steyer’s support increased three points since April.”

The reason why Democrats think they have a chance to get both slots in the general election rests with undecided voters.

According to the Emerson College Poll:

Undecided voters were asked whom they would support if the election were held today and they had to decide right now. When including which candidate undecided voters lean toward, support for Becerra increases by one point to 20%, Steyer by two points to 19%, Hilton by one point to 18%, and Katie Porter by three points to 13%.

Steyer and Becerra got into the top three in very different ways. Becerra is Biden’s former HHS Secretary, former state attorney general, former congressman, and member of the state assembly. It was old-school political networking among California Democrats that helped Becerra rise. Steyer has risen from spending $200 million of his own money on ads.

The real race in this primary is between Hilton and Steyer for second place. It could be argued that Hilton had some momentum until Donald Trump gave his toxic in California endorsement.

Getting endorsed by Trump could end up costing Hilton a spot in the general election, as his momentum died after Trump got involved.

The Republican fantasy of flipping California looks increasingly cooked, as Democrats may end up freezing them out of the November gubernatorial election.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Ben Rhodes Warns America Has Become the World's "Rogue Nation" Under Trump, Ben Meiselas, right and above left, and Ben Rhodes, Bbove right, May 25, 2026. The former Obama deputy national security advisor joined MeidasTouch's Ben Meiselas to discuss his new book, the collapse of American global standing, and what Democrats must do to rebuild.

Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to President Obama and one of the most consequential speechwriters of the modern era, sat down with MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas to cover the sweeping damage he sees Trump inflicting on American power — and what a future Democratic president will need to do to reverse it.Subscribed

Rhodes is out with a new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches. The conversation touched on the book’s themes throughout, and 

Meiselas opened by framing what he sees as the defining contradiction of Trump’s foreign policy — attacking allies while embracing adversaries. Rhodes explained that Trump feels most at home in what he called “the autocrat club.” Vladimir Putin wants to destroy the U.S.-led international order. Xi Jinping wants to replace it with something China dominates. And Trump, whether wittingly or not, is accelerating both projects simultaneously. Every institution he undermines, every alliance he destabilizes, advances that agenda.

“America is kind of the rogue nation in the world,” Rhodes said, describing how Gulf Arab allies who once counted on U.S. security guarantees are now reassessing their relationships after watching American forces fail to defend them during the Iran conflict. Nations shopping for a stable partner, he argued, are increasingly finding China — not the United States — to be the more predictable option. The terms may be harder, but they don’t change based on whoever won the last election.

Rhodes also pushed back on the assumption that the full costs of the Iran war have been disclosed. He said sources across the Middle East have described significant damage to U.S. bases, facilities, and embassies that the Pentagon has not been forthcoming about — Munitions drawn down from Asia, leaving South Korea more exposed, and fundamental questions raised about whether billion-dollar defense systems are suited for a world where Iranian drones built cheaply can strike American assets and a speedboat can effectively close the Strait of Hormuz.

The longer-term stakes Rhodes raised were even more pointed. If Gulf nations begin hedging toward China, and if dollar-denominated oil trades start shifting, the U.S. loses more than just influence, which is bad enough on its own. It loses the financial architecture that allows it to carry its debt load and sustain its standard of living. Most Americans, he said, don’t fully grasp how much of their quality of life depends on the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.

Meiselas brought up a pattern that both he and Rhodes constantly grapple with. Democratic presidents inherit catastrophes, spend their terms cleaning them up, and then get blamed when the cleanup is imperfect, while the party that created the mess repositions itself for the next election cycle. Sound familiar? Rhodes said that Obama and Biden both made a version of the same mistake. They chose to look forward rather than hold the previous administration accountable, took ownership of the handoff, and left voters without a clear story about who broke things in the first place.

His prescription for whoever comes next is blunt. Don’t come in promising a return to normal. Come in like FDR. Rhodes pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression as the model. Fast, large, transformative, unapologetic. The next Democratic president, he argued, needs to treat the situation as the emergency it will be. Expose the corruption, uproot any entrenched MAGA infrastructure inside the federal government, pursue a reform agenda ambitious enough to match the Gilded Age progressives who delivered the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage, and reengage the world not as a security guarantor for hire but as a nation with a genuine purpose.

On that last point, Rhodes returned to the core argument of his book. The speeches he found most consequential throughout American history, FDR’s Four Freedoms address, Kennedy’s civil rights framing, King’s moral vision, Obama’s 2004 convention speech, weren’t primarily policy documents. They were stories about what America is and who it’s for. FDR’s Four Freedoms didn’t just make the case for opposing fascism; they became the foundation of the entire post-World War Two international order, threading into the UN charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. That kind of storytelling, Rhodes said, is precisely what’s missing from Democratic politics right now.

When Meiselas asked him what a 2028 candidate needs to sound like, Rhodes pointed to three figures he sees doing something right. Jon Ossoff, he said, is connecting systemic corruption not just to abstract democratic values but to kitchen-table outcomes, like high prices, inaccessible healthcare, job insecurity. James Talarico in Texas is speaking from an authentic place of personal faith and moral obligation in a way that feels genuinely his own. And AOC is demonstrating that anger and joy aren’t mutually exclusive. That you can be furious about oligarchy and inequality while making people want to show up.

The 2008 Obama campaign, Rhodes said, was the most joyful political experience he’d been part of. He worries Democrats have spent the Trump era so consumed by appropriate alarm that they’ve forgotten how to make people want to be part of something. The ingredients for what’s needed, he concluded, are all visible — coherence, authentic values, and fearless joy. The question is whether someone can pull them together at the scale the moment demands.

New York Times, 5 Big Moments in the Texas Republican Senate Race, Taylor Robinson, May 25, 2026. The contest between the incumbent John Cornyn and his challenger Ken Paxton will culminate in a Tuesday runoff. Here are the developments that shaped the campaign.

After a heated and expensive campaign, the Republican Senate race in Texas between Senator John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton will culminate in a runoff on Tuesday.

Mr. Cornyn, who has had a long career in Texas Republican politics and who has been an occasional critic of President Trump, is fighting for political survival against Mr. Paxton, who has been a magnet for scandal and recently won the president’s endorsement, giving him a big boost heading into the final stretch.

The race has been full of twists and turns. Here are five big moments from one of the marquee G.O.P. contests of the 2026 election cycle:

U.S. History, Media, Culture, 250th Anniversary, Education

Above: The U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 24, 2026 [New Ongoing Tribute To U.S. Declaration of Independence and American Traditions], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 25, 2026. For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.

Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.

That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”

So, to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we decided to launch a series of one-minute videos that highlight the people, places, and events that have helped to move us toward a more perfect Union.

We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

When we floated the plan, lots of wonderful people all over the country understood the idea immediately and jumped in to help, suggesting topics, writing scripts, offering images, narrating.

We’re launching the project tomorrow with the stories of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, narrated by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey; the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, narrated by Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention (I narrated that one); Ruben Salazar, narrated by journalist Sylvia Salazar; Yellowstone, narrated by former senator Jon Tester of Montana; the AIDS Quilt, narrated by originator Cleve Jones; the Acadians, narrated by historian Jason Herbert; the Erie Canal, narrated by former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg; John Peter Zenger and the First Amendment, narrated by journalist Jelani Cobb; the Charter Oak, narrated by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, narrated by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and the story of actress and dancer Rita Moreno, narrated by Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.

For the next several weeks, we will be telling these stories and hundreds more. We hope that you will share them widely to flood social media with the real story of how Americans have always worked, often against seemingly insurmountable odds, to create a more perfect Union.

What has made America great has always been the American people.

Now, as for the past 250 years, “We Are America.”

—

Notes:

Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250

 

Detroit Free Press, Stephen Colbert hosts Michigan public access show ‘Only in Monroe’ again, Julie Hinds, May 24, 2026 (print ed.). After his final “The Late Show” aired on CBS May 21, Stephen Colbert made a surprise appearance (shown above) the next night on what you might call his last last show.

Selected Reader Comments for "Only In Monroe (Monroe, MI Community Media) with Stephen Colbert as guest host:

• If Colbert spent the next year touring community TV broadcasts, I'd watch every single one.
• Surprised how entertaining it was.
• This is so fantastic. I would rather watch this over a highly polished network program any day. Just feels so much more authentic.

The Independent, CBS stops its effort to halt sharing of Colbert’s public access show appearance after massive backlash, Rhian Lubin, May 25, 2026. CBS swiftly backtracked on the copyright threats after Colbert’s surprise episode was shared online by third-party sites. 

CBS slapped online users with requests that videos must be removed after they shared footage of Stephen Colbert’s surprise return to late-night television Friday, before the network swiftly backtracked on its copyright threats.

Colbert thrilled fans just 24 hours after his departure from The Late Show by appearing as the host of Only in Monroe, the same local access show in Michigan he commandeered for one night shortly before starting his stint on the CBS program 11 years ago.

Short clips and full uploads of the episode, which featured musician Jack White, a skit from actor Steve Buscemi, and a cameo from Eminem, were posted online before Colbert launched his own official YouTube channel, beating him to the punch.

Media outlet The Desk was among the publications struck with a copyright infringement notice after its upload of the episode received more than 700,000 views. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the owner of the content can request that a website take down the content if it was posted without permission.CBS slapped third-party accounts with takedown notices after they shared footage of Stephen Colbert’s surprise return to late night television Friday, before swiftly backtracking on the copyright threatsCBS slapped third-party accounts with takedown notices after they shared footage of Stephen Colbert’s surprise return to late night television Friday, before swiftly backtracking on the copyright threats (Monroe Community Media/Stephen Colbert/YouTube)

“Paramount is apparently trying to suppress copies of ‘Only in Monroe’ from appearing on other social platforms by filing frivolous copyright notices, even though the show was produced by a public access TV channel and doesn't use their intellectual property…,” The Desk’s founder editor Matthew Keys wrote early on Sunday in a post on X.

Following backlash, CBS said in a statement to Variety that it was waiving the notices while it reviewed the situation.

“Stephen Colbert’s return to Monroe in the ‘Only in Monroe’ episode was financed and produced by CBS Studios and was posted on Stephen Colbert’s YouTube channel in collaboration with Monroe Community Media and ‘The Late Show’s’ YouTube channels,” the CBS spokesperson said.

“As is our regular practice, we send copyright notices to unauthorized websites that post copyrighted content from CBS and our network/studio talent such as Stephen Colbert,” the statement continued. “However, for this episode, we have decided to waive further enforcement of this standard industry practice until additional review.”

The Independent has contacted CBS for more information.

Colbert thrilled fans just 24 hours after his departure from The Late Show by appearing as the host of Only in Monroe , the same local access show in Michigan he commandeered for one night shortly before starting his stint on the CBS program 11 years agoColbert thrilled fans just 24 hours after his departure from The Late Show by appearing as the host of Only in Monroe , the same local access show in Michigan he commandeered for one night shortly before starting his stint on the CBS program 11 years ago (AFP/Getty)

Colbert’s official YouTube channel has since posted the episode, which has received more than 400,000 views.

The 62-year-old referenced his 2015 stint on the small Michigan public-access program in his final appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“Technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan, for an audience of 12 people,” Colbert said. “Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.”

Colbert couldn’t resist taking a swipe at Paramount, CBS’s parent company.

“It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV, so I am grateful to be able to be here on Monroe Community Media before they also get acquired by Paramount,” the comedian quipped.

The final episode of the late-night show attracted an audience of 6.74 million viewers, making it the most-watched weeknight episode during the show’s 11-year run.

More On Religion, Culture, High-Tech, Media, Education

New York Times, News Analysis: As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words, David Streitfeld, May 25, 2026. The American pope wants to take artificial intelligence down a notch. Is he challenging the tech companies, or will tech take over the papacy?

Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams, dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms.

One of the oldest industry jokes has a programmer asking a computer, “Is there a God?” The computer answers: “There is now.” The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, tech leaders are signaling that those early dreams have been fulfilled. Next stop, transcendence.

Just as the new religion of A.I. seemed to be solidifying its control over mankind’s destiny, however, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world.

Its message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate the human. Machines are not gods.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity.” The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley’s assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.

“A.I. can be a valuable tool,” the pope acknowledged, but the technology “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” Without adequate oversight and transparency, he warned, “those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems.”

That would be bad news, he said: “A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

The encyclical is expected to be at the center of the 70-year-old pontiff’s reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated for workers’ rights and a fair wage, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII’s papacy at the end of the 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley slept, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly restrain the A.I. boom.

President Trump last week came close to signing a measure that would have given the federal government the power to evaluate A.I. models before they were publicly released — then canceled the signing. The same day, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a measure to study A.I.’s impact on employment, an acknowledgment of the turmoil the companies insist is coming. Elon Musk, who has his own A.I. ambitions, tried to derail OpenAI, the leading A.I. company, with a lawsuit but was thwarted this month on technical grounds.Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former.

New York Times, What’s an Encyclical? Here Are 5 That Mattered, Elisabetta Povoledo, May 25, 2026. Leo XIV issued his thoughts about artificial intelligence in the modern world using a centuries-old form of papal communication called an encyclical.

Pope Leo XIV on Monday presented his vision for how to preserve human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence.

​He offered his ideas by issuing a kind of document known as an encyclical, a nearly 400-year-old papal tradition of teaching the Roman Catholic faithful. The document issued on Monday, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” is Leo’s first encyclical since he became pope last year.

Written by the pope and generally addressed to the whole church, encyclicals impart authoritative teachings about moral or social challenges. They lack the legal status of a papal bull, which is a formal declaration of an article of faith or moral law. But Catholics are still encouraged to use encyclicals to guide their lifestyles and choices.

Popes do not usually attend the presentation of their encyclicals, but Leo presented his in person at the Vatican alongside Christopher Olah, a founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, and several Catholic prelates and theologians.

Popes have been writing letters to the faithful since the early days of the church, but Benedict XIV, pope from 1740 to 1758, is credited with having codified the encyclical as it is understood today.

Here are five previous encyclicals that stand out.1. On Workers’ Rights: “Rerum Novarum”

Issued on May 15, 1891, this encyclical from Pope Leo XIII became a foundation for Roman Catholic social teaching.

It’s no coincidence that the current pope chose his papal name to refer to Pope Leo XIII and that he formally signed “Magnifica Humanitas” on May 15, 2026, even though he presented the document publicly 10 days later.

After the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum,” or “Of New Things,” addressed the needs of the working class and helped kindle a social justice movement. The encyclical defended workers’ rights, including the right to form unions and to earn a living wage, while rejecting both the socialism of the time and laissez-faire capitalism.2. On World Peace: “Pacem in Terris”

Written in 1963, in the context of the Cold War, Pope John XXIII presented a catalog of rights that he said all people and nations had a duty to respect. Unlike earlier encyclicals, the document was addressed to all of humanity, not just to Catholics.Editors’ PicksThey’ve Heard the Warnings. Gen Z Is Tanning Anyway.Some Like It Literary: How Marilyn Monroe Gave a Smart Gloss to Her Image‘I Was Prepared for a Long Wait and Surly Interactions’

The encyclical, which means “Peace on Earth,” called for a ban on nuclear weapons and suggested the creation of a global public authority that would promote the “universal common good,” seeing the United Nations as a first step in that direction. The document exhorted people to participate in public life “and to work together for the benefit of the whole human race.”

When it was issued, The New York Times printed the entire text.3. On Birth Control: “Humanae Vitae”

Paul VI’s encyclical in 1968 confirmed the church’s prohibition of artificial birth control. It immediately prompted debate among Catholics that has continued for decades.

The central point of the encyclical, whose title means “Of Human Life,” was that every act of sexual intercourse had to be free of any deliberate effort to prevent conception.

Not all Catholics agree. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, most Catholics in the United States and Latin America said the church should allow the use of artificial birth control. And to stop the spread of AIDS, many bishops have since offered qualified support for teaching about condoms.4. On Economics: “Caritas in Veritate”

Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical, “Charity in Truth,” called for a radical rethinking of the global economy. The declaration criticized a growing divide between rich and poor, urged financiers to behave more ethically and called on businesses to exercise greater social responsibility.

Like the “Pacem in Terris” of John XXIII, Benedict’s encyclical also called for a global political authority to play a role in regulating the economy. Many scholars admired the document’s powerful reflections on the links between love, truth and justice, but some critics considered the encyclical a tough read, citing the dense prose and sprawling range of themes.5. On the Environment: “Laudato Si’”

Written by Pope Francis in 2015, “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You,” was the first encyclical focused solely on the environment. The document called on people to care for the planet, framing that obligation as a moral and spiritual imperative, not just a consideration of politics, science and economics. When the encyclical was issued, The Times published an interactive version online.

 

Marilyn Monroe in her Hollywood apartment in 1952. A new book catalogs the 400 volumes she took with her from home to home (Photo by Philippe Halsman via /Magnum Photos). 

New York Times, Critic’s Notebook: Some Like It Literary: How Marilyn Monroe Gave a Smart Gloss to Her Image, Alexandra Jacobs, May 24, 2026. It was all about self-improvement for the actress, who was born a century ago next week. Two new volumes shed light on the books she collected and the intellectual she married.

The best-seller list bows to Reese Witherspoon. Sarah Jessica Parker judged the Booker Prize. And Kate Hudson reared up recently in a New Yorker video praising Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

But long before actors put the Botox in BookTok there was Marilyn Monroe, who might be celebrating her own hundred years on June 1, had her life not ended at 36 in a haze of barbiturates and jumbo tabloid type in 1962.

There is little new to say about her films or fashion. But what of her literary influence?

In MARILYN AND HER BOOKS: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe (Gallery, 290 pp., $30), Gail Crowther attempts to debunk Monroe’s dumb-blonde reputation through the Murphy door of her private library. (A few selections from which will be auctioned by Julien’s in June, along with the front gates to the house where she died — welcome, guests! — and a used pot of rouge that at this writing had already been bid up to $3,500.)

The star owned over 400 books, moving them with her from dwelling to dwelling. They range widely in genre, from “The Little Engine That Could,” by Watty Piper, possibly bearing her juvenile scrawl, to “Look Homeward, Angel” and other works by Thomas Wolfe, to Russian literature (she hoped to play Grushenka in a movie version of “The Brothers Karamazov”). There is a copy of “The Tales of Rabbi Nachman,” by Martin Buber — Monroe converted to Judaism when she married the playwright Arthur Miller — and four copies of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.”

Sensitive about not graduating from high school, Monroe studied world literature in an adult-extension program at U.C.L.A. “If you are ignorant, books won’t laugh at you,” she said poignantly.

As if to combat a public perception of ditziness, she was often photographed in the popular magazines of the day with her bobbed nose in a book, or browsing in a bookstore (where, according to Miller, a male customer once began masturbating as she was mouthing the words to some E.E. Cummings poetry). But she was rarely queried about her reading habits by journalists. Her eternal quest was for self-improvement, underscored also by the dumbbells she hoisted well before Jane Fonda made it fashionable. (A set is currently $1,250 at Julien’s.)

U.S. Tariffs, Economy, Inflation, Markets, Jobs

New York Times, Oil Prices Fall Sharply on News of Possible Iran Deal, Jack Ewing, Updated May 25, 2026. Oil prices fell sharply on Monday after American officials said that the United States and Iran had agreed in principle to a peace deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But final approval of a deal could take days.

The deal would reopen the waterway between Iran and Oman, a vital trading route for oil and natural gas that normally carries up to one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. In addition, Iran would commit to disposing of its highly enriched uranium, said a U.S. official.

Iran’s leaders and official state media have not publicly commented on what a potential agreement would say or what is being discussed.Here is the latest:

Oil prices fall. Stocks rise. Gasoline prices drop a bit. What they are saying: ‘Prolonged’ supply disruptions loom.

Oil prices fall.

The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was down about 6 percent. It hit a one-month low of around $94.50 a barrel, for August delivery. Brent traded at just over $72 a barrel before the war began. 

Public Notice, Opinion: The triple toll of Trump’s terrible tariffs, Tom Schaller, May 25, 2026. Ultimately, American workers and consumers suffer three different ways.

Following the Supreme Court’s February ruling that Donald Trump’s tariff policy violated Congress’s tax authority, the administration must now refund the $159 billion it collected from its unconstitutional tariffs.

But unfortunately for American workers and consumers, winding down this fiscal fiasco results in a lose-lose-lose situation:

First, most Americans will never be reimbursed for what were effectively temporary sales taxes they paid for various imports, nor will they receive the public benefit of having those sums spent on government programs or projects.

Second, because it is logistically easier to reimburse the American companies that directly paid the tariffs, some corporations may enjoy windfall refund profits — presuming, that is, those companies did not go bankrupt.

Finally, the surviving businesses and the employees who still work for them — hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off because of the tariffs — will for the foreseeable future continue to suffer because foreign countries, companies, and citizens quite rationally retaliated against Trump’s policies.

Let’s work through the three-fold ruin wrought by Trump’s catastrophic policy.#1: Lost taxes paid

Despite Trump’s woefully ignorant belief that tariffs transfer monies from foreign treasuries into our own, that’s not how they work.

Yes, tariff receipts temporarily ended up in Washington. But those taxes were paid indirectly, via increased retail prices, by every American who bought imported goods or products made from imported components. Yale Budget Lab estimated the price tag per American at $2,400 per year, which is almost how long tariffs were in effect until the Supreme Court’s February 20 decision. Because it’s nearly impossible for individual citizens to compute how much they paid in tariffs, no less apply for reimbursements, most will get nothing.Trump goes to China, without any cards Trump goes to China, without any cardsDavid R. Lurie · May 18Read full story

Some plucky consumers are seeking class-action relief. Nike customers already filed a suit against the sportswear manufacturer demanding reimbursement for the so-called “embedded costs” passed through to them in higher prices; customers at Costco and Ray Ban sunglasses filed similar suits. In a second category of “line-item cost” lawsuits filed against FedEx and United Parcel Service, litigants seek to recover sums these couriers required recipients to pay upon delivery for import tariffs their purchased mailed from abroad incurred in transit.

No matter who wins these cases, litigation creates economic inefficiencies, particularly the litigants’ legal expenses. And these suits only account for a fraction of the $159 billion in collected tariffs.

Last November, Trump promised qualified citizens they would receive $2,000 tariff “dividend” checks paid for by the “trillions and trillions” of dollars he claimed his tariffs already raised.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comTrump: "We're gonna issue a dividend to our middle income people and lower income people of about $2,000, and we're gonna use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt."Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:58:47 GMTView on Bluesky

That’s Trumpian bluster at its finest: lying by several magnitudes of order about how much the tariffs raised, followed by yet another broken promise of restitution. It sounds like his earlier, broken promise to ink 90 trade deals during his first 90 days in office.

No citizen likes to pay additional or higher taxes, but they at least expect the revenues to support government projects and programs. After the Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump, Trump chafed that the Court could have ended the tariffs but at least allowed the government to keep the $159 billion raised. He specifically praised Brett Kavanaugh — the only of Trump’s three appointees to vote for the tariffs — who warned that refunding the collected tariffs would be “messy.”

Kavanaugh and Trump have a point. Because figuring out how much and to whom to issue refunds will be messy, in an ideal world it would have been better for the federal government to keep and spend the money on public programs. In effect, consumers qua taxpayers paid taxes but will receive no services or benefits in return.

Bottom line? If companies ultimately reap the lion’s share of the refunds, the tariff policy will be remembered as a federal sales tax paid by consumers for which the revenues ended up not in government coffers but on the balance sheets of American companies.#2: Lost exports and jobs

Who will likely get most of the tariff-generated revenues the Supreme Court mandated the Trump administration refund? American businesses, of course. But do they deserve it?Trump's hopeless tariffs confusion, explained by a historian Trump's hopeless tariffs confusion, explained by a historianAaron Rupar and Thor Benson

Small or large, businesses and corporations initially paid the tariffs. They then faced two unenviable options: (a) raise prices to account for the added costs, thereby risking lost sales, or (b) absorb the tariff costs at the cost of profitability. The logical move was to pass the tariffs along to consumers, but either way businesses reliant on imports suffered.

Which is why many businesses — including notable corporations like Mack Trucks and Proctor & Gamble — explained substantial layoffs as a consequence of the policy. Other companies shuttered entirely; in fact, year-over-year business bankruptcies rose 14 percent in 2025 thanks mostly to Trump’s tariffs. Small businesses represented by the Chamber of Commerce — once the free market backbone of the pre-Trump Republican Party — were particularly hard hit.

Consequently, roughly 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in 2025 after businesses scaled back or closed entirely. And because other companies, like outdoor retailer Orvis, closed multiple store locations, the 2025 retail job loss rate was even higher than in manufacturing. Nobody suffered more from Trump’s tariff policy than the workers who lost hours, shifts, or their jobs entirely. No wonder personal bankruptcies in 2025 surged 11 percent above 2024 levels.

Suffice to say, forcing workers into unemployment and businesses into bankruptcy is precisely the kind of unintended yet predictable consequence Trump and his advisers were warned about but ignored.Farmers are rightfully pissed at Trump Farmers are rightfully pissed at TrumpNoah Berlatsky · May 12Read full story

On one hand, Americans should be furious at corporations seeking reimbursements that passed their costs along to consumers. On the other, logistically it is easier to figure out which businesses paid how much in tariffs, reimburse them, and hope they pass those refunds along, too.

Unfortunately, companies likely will not.

Basic Fun! CEO Jay Foreman told the New York Times his toy company already received a $400,000 refund, but complained that the amount is a fraction of the $7.4 million he estimates his company paid in tariffs. One might empathize with Foreman if his company absorbed all $7.4 million in tariffs as lost sales or profits.

But if his company passed the costs along to the families who bought Tonka trucks and other toys, Basic Fun! broke even in the short term and is now $400,000 to the good — even if the feds never send him another nickel.

What’s certain are Foreman’s plans for the reimbursement: He told the Times he would be “primarily reinvesting the money into the business.” So caveat emptor: buyer beware of thinking you will be made whole.

Trump’s illegal tariffs are gone but their effects will continue. Why? Because foreign countries and companies are not suckers who promptly submitted and groveled to the president, as he foolishly expected them to. Quite rationally, those bullied by Trump’s absurd tariff formula and impose-today-pause-tomorrow schizophrenia did not capitulate.

Many exporters, thinking about the longer term, realized the Trump administration was an unreliable economic actor. Accordingly, they took their business elsewhere.

Canada, our top trader partner, responded forcefully. They initiated reciprocal tariffs, of course. But they made global headlines by also forging trade agreements with other countries in order to reduce their vulnerability to Trump’s erratic behavior. Public officials led by Prime Minister Mark Carney — who closed a 30-point election gap to defeat Conservative Party nominee Pierre Poilievre in two months thanks in no small part to Trump’s talk about making Canada the 51st state — encouraged Canadians to rely less on American imports. Pretty soon, US wine and liquor makers were complaining about plummeting Canadian sales.Trump blames Canada. 

May 24

Top Headlines

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Massie Unleashed over Epstein Files as White House Urges GOP to Tweet Support of Trump's Iran Deal Which is Falling Apart, Aaron Parnas, right, May 24, 2026. The White House reportedly urges Republican lawmakers to publicly support Trump’s emerging Iran deal, a deal that may already be starting to unravel. Thomas Massie, fresh off his election loss, is unleashed, promising to expose more names connected to the Epstein files and claiming Melania Trump knows more than she’s saying. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio called people making racist comments about Indians “stupid people,” prompting the State Department to delete a tweet after critics noted it could indirectly implicate Trump himself.
• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Agree in Principle to Reopen Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Official Says, FarnazFassihi, Julian E. Barnes, Aaron Boxerman and Tyler Pager, May 24, 2026. The official said Iran had also agreed to dispose of highly enriched uranium, but stressed that a deal had not yet been signed. American and Iranian officials have described the terms differently.
• Politicus USA. News and Commentary: Trump Called A Fool As His New Iran Deal Gets Ripped By Republicans And Democrats, Jason Easley, right, May 24, 2026. The deal that the Trump administration is floating as almost done to extend the ceasefire in the Iran war is being criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for failing to meet the objectives that the Trump administration laid out when it started the war three months ago.
• New York Times, Trump Administration: One Killed in Exchange of Gunfire With Secret Service Near White House, Campbell Robertson, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Clarence Williams, Updated May 24, 2026. A gunman known to the U.S. Secret Service opened fire near the White House and was shot and killed by federal officers. President Trump was in the White House at the time.
• Detroit Free Press, Stephen Colbert hosts Michigan public access show ‘Only in Monroe’ again, Julie Hinds, May 24, 2026 (print ed.). After his final “The Late Show” aired on CBS May 21, Stephen Colbert made a surprise appearance the next night on what you might call his last last show. Link here.

U.S. Courts, Crime, Law, Rights, Immigration, Justice

• New York Times, With Big Decisions Ahead, the Supreme Court Collides With a Testy Trump, Ann E. Marimow, May 24, 2026. President Trump has alternated between bullying the justices and cozying up to them as the court prepares to announce major decisions that will determine the fate of the key aspects of his agenda.
• All Rise News, Legal Commentary: Judge Dismisses Abrego Garcia's criminal case: a conversation with Glenn Kirschner, Adam Klasfeld, May 24, 2026. In case you missed it on Friday, here's what you need to know about the judge's ruling.

Trump's $1.8b Taxpayer-paid Slush Fund For Cop-Bashing Insurrectionists, Other DOJ 'Victims'

Jacob Chansley, right, "The Q Anon Shaman" during the Jan. 6 Pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.  

Emptywheel, Analysis: “Unhinged from Reality:” Donald J. Trump Caged the Q-Shaman, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 24, 2026. Those trying to make the case for the Jan6ers are focusing on a few cases that seem innocuous, in which the person was jailed pretrial and convicted primarily of obstruction, the charge which SCOTUS narrowed, requiring an evidentiary basis for the obstruction. (Before Trump pardoned everyone, DOJ was attempting to sustain some of the obstruction cases of defendants who were more closely involved in preventing the presentation of evidence in the Senate.)

Jacob Chansley, the Q-Shaman, is one of the Jan6ers on whom boosters focus. And now a bunch of insurrection boosters say that Jacob Chansley, eating his organic food and suffering very real mental health challenges in Alexandria while facing felony charges that Trump’s own DOJ charged him with, should get a payout because Joe Biden’s DOJ was weaponized against him. If Jacob Chansley was the victim of a weaponized DOJ, he was victim of weaponization by Trump’s DOJ.

More On Iran War

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Is Frantically Searching for an Offramp From His Disastrous War, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 24, 2026. His strategic defeat is now clear for all to see.
• New York Times, These Are 5 of the Main Issues to Be Resolved in an Iran-U.S. Peace Deal, Amelia Nierenberg and Ephrat Livni, May 24, 2026. President Trump says the U.S. and Iran could be close to a peace deal.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

• Heather Delaney Reese via Substack, Commentary, Trump’s desperate plan to destroy our country from the inside, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, May 24, 2026. After abruptly clearing his weekend travel schedule, opting to stay in Washington, D.C., missing his own son’s wedding, the President of the United States has once again locked himself away inside the White House.
• New York Times, Times Investigation: How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency, Sharon LaFraniere and David Yaffe-Bellany, May 24, 2026. Last fall, a high-stakes struggle unfolded inside the red brick walls of an obscure federal agency.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy, Our Weak And Cowardly Leader Keeps Yielding To Our Adversaries And Selling Out America, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 24, 2026. While we do not yet have the details of the deal the regime is striking to-open the Strait of Hormuz what has been reported sure appears as Trump is surrendering to Iran. Here is what Lindsay Graham posted yesterday.
• New York Times, Kennedy’s Push to Curb Antidepressants Has Shaken Psychiatry, Ellen Barry, May 24, 2026. An annual psychiatric meeting was abuzz over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call to rein in the use of depression medications. Some fear it will drive patients away from care.

U.S. Economy, Tariffs, Markets, Jobs

• Receipts via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump’s Tariffs Have Created an Economic Sh*tshow Beyond Your Wildest Imagination, Catherine Rampell, above, May 24, 2026. My very first Bulwark newsletter back in November laid out the case for why a Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s tariffs could boost the economy. Welp. The tariff refunds are finally coming out in dribs and drabs, plus interest, and yet there’s no economic boom in sight. This week’s newsletter looks at why. 
• New York Times, Detroit Once Ruled Canada’s Car Industry. Trump’s Tariffs May End That, Ian Austen, May 24, 2026. Detroit-based automakers pioneered open trade between Canada and the United States, benefiting both countries. 

More Global News

• New York Times, Rubio Says U.S.-India Ties Are Strong, Despite Fury Over Trump’s Actions, Edward Wong, May 24, 2026. In New Delhi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to explain why President Trump has pushed aggressive trade and immigration policies affecting India and Indians in the United States.
• New York Times, Russia Pummels Kyiv in Major Missile and Drone Attack, Andrew E. Kramer, May 24, 2026. Buildings rattled in the Ukrainian capital for hours early Sunday. Russia launched an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile for only the third time in the war.

Memorial Day Roundup

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 23, 2026 [Trump's Monumental Pro-Confederate Tilt], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 24, 2026. President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

More On U.S. Media, Culture, Religion, Education

CBS Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/

• Steady with Dan Rather, Commentary: A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather, right, May 24,  2026. Stephen Colbert signed off from the Ed Sullivan Theater for the final time on Thursday night.
• The Mayday Network, What the F CBS?, Michaelle Kinney and Julie Roginsk, May 24, 2026. Yesterday afternoon over at The Mayday Network — Julie Roginsky and I shared Stephen Colbert’s appearance on the public access show in Michigan “Only in Monroe” because we wanted to make sure as many people as possible saw it. (Fair Use!) We linked to Monroe Community Media to make sure they received everyone’s support, clicks, likes etc.

Top Stories

 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Massie Unleashed over Epstein Files as White House Urges GOP to Tweet Support of Trump's Iran Deal Which is Falling Apart, Aaron Parnas, right, May 24, 2026. The White House reportedly urges Republican lawmakers to publicly support Trump’s emerging Iran deal, a deal that may already be starting to unravel.

Thomas Massie, fresh off his election loss, is unleashed, promising to expose more names connected to the Epstein files and claiming Melania Trump knows more than she’s saying. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio called people making racist comments about Indians “stupid people,” prompting the State Department to delete a tweet after critics noted it could indirectly implicate Trump himself.

It’s going to be a busy week ahead. Pam Bondi is set to testify on Capitol Hill regarding the Epstein probe, and I’ll be covering it live for you. Plus much more.

Our first live show with Jessica Tarlov will be Wednesday, and our paid subscriber live stream will be Thursday evening.

Here’s the news:

President Donald Trump said he will not “rush into” a deal to end the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, despite earlier signals that an agreement was close. Possible terms under discussion reportedly include lifting oil sanctions on Iran and restoring shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran has stated it is willing to assure the world it is not pursuing nuclear weapons. Several prominent Republican senators, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, criticized the potential deal, warning it could strengthen Iran and undermine the war’s objectives. The conflict, which began with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes in February, has already caused thousands of deaths and cost the U.S. more than $25 billion.

The White House is reportedly pressuring Republican lawmakers to publicly support the emerging Iran deal as internal GOP divisions grow over the negotiations. While some Republicans defended the talks online, others privately expressed frustration and anxiety about returning from recess and having to justify a deal many conservatives view as too favorable to Iran. The backlash reflects broader tensions within the Republican Party, where several senators and House members have already criticized reports that Iran could retain nuclear material or receive sanctions relief under the agreement.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, appeared caught off guard when asked in India about anti-Indian comments coming from the United States, including remarks previously amplified by President Donald Trump. Rubio dismissed the controversy by saying “every country in the world has stupid people” who make offensive comments online, unintentionally seeming to include Trump among them since the president had shared posts describing India as a “hellhole.”

The incident added tension to Rubio’s diplomatic visit, which was partly focused on repairing U.S.-India relations after disputes over tariffs, trade, and Trump’s earlier rhetoric. Indian officials had previously condemned the comments as uninformed and disrespectful. The State Department proceeded to delete the following tweet after realizing that the President was implicated:

Gas prices in the U.S. have surged following the Iran war, with national averages rising above $4.50 per gallon after a 50% increase tied to disruptions in global oil supply. Several states, including California, now have average gas prices above $5 or even $6 per gallon, while central states are seeing comparatively lower prices. The spike in fuel costs has also affected jet fuel and airline prices, contributing to financial strain on consumers and airlines alike. Although prices briefly stabilized during ceasefire talks, recent increases have pushed gas prices to their highest levels of the year.

Scott Jennings confirms that the U.S. does indeed plan to give Iran money and sanctions relief and that opening the Strait (something that was already open prior to the war) is the initial priority:

Rep. Thomas Massie said he plans to continue releasing names connected to the Jeffrey Epstein files, accusing federal officials of withholding information and over-redacting documents. During a television interview, Massie claimed there are still unreleased files and argued that Epstein did not operate alone, even suggesting that Melania Trump does not believe otherwise. He criticized top Justice Department and FBI officials for their handling of the investigation and said future officials could still be required to release additional records under transparency laws.

The Trump family has expanded into cryptocurrency and online betting markets while federal oversight of those industries has weakened significantly. Donald Trump Jr. has investment and advisory ties to companies like Polymarket and Crypto.com, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has reportedly reduced enforcement actions, dropped investigations, and removed officials involved in crypto oversight. Former regulators warn that these changes undermine accountability and may benefit businesses connected to the Trump family. Critics argue the situation reflects growing political influence over agencies meant to independently regulate financial markets.

Sen. Thom Tillis sharply criticized the Justice Department’s new $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” calling it a “payout pot for punks” and arguing it could reward people convicted for crimes related to the January 6 Capitol attack. The fund was created as part of a settlement involving President Donald Trump, the IRS, and the Trump Organization, and has faced bipartisan backlash from lawmakers and lawsuits from Capitol Police officers. Tillis also criticized the Trump administration’s handling of a potential Iran deal, questioning why the U.S. might allow Iran to retain nuclear material after earlier claims that its defenses had been destroyed.

Tillis criticized the emerging Trump-Iran agreement, saying it “doesn’t make sense” for the U.S. to potentially allow Iran to retain nuclear material after earlier claims that Iranian defenses and nuclear capabilities had been heavily degraded.

President Donald Trump defended the still-developing Iran negotiations by arguing critics are attacking a deal that “isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” He contrasted the potential agreement with the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, claiming his version would be “the exact opposite” and insisting, “I don’t make bad deals.” The comments came as Republican lawmakers and foreign policy hawks increasingly questioned reports that the agreement could allow Iran to retain some nuclear material or receive sanctions relief.

According to Axios, President Donald Trump told Arab leaders that any future U.S.-Iran agreement should become part of a broader regional peace framework involving Israel, potentially expanding the Abraham Accords and wider Arab-Israeli normalization efforts. The proposal reportedly received a cold reaction during the call, with silence from the participating leaders, suggesting little enthusiasm for tying an Iran deal to normalization with Israel. The response highlights continuing political sensitivity around relations with Israel across the Arab world, especially amid ongoing regional tensions and conflict.

President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by framing loyalty to him as the key issue in the race, praising Paxton as “very loyal” while attacking Paxton’s opponent, Senator John Cornyn as “VERY disloyal.”

Firefighters in Southern California are racing to prevent a massive chemical explosion at an aerospace facility in Orange County involving tanks filled with methyl methacrylate, a toxic substance used in plastics and resins. Tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated, and Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as crews work to cool overheating tanks that officials say are close to a “thermal runaway” explosion. Emergency responders discovered a possible crack in one tank that may be relieving pressure and could improve the situation, though officials still warn of potentially catastrophic consequences if multiple tanks explode. Authorities are also concerned about possible chemical leaks contaminating storm drains and nearby waterways even if a blast is avoided.

Russia launched a massive overnight assault on Kyiv using around 600 drones and 30 missiles, including at least one Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Ukrainian officials said the attack killed at least two people, injured dozens, and damaged residential buildings, schools, cultural sites, and media offices in the capital. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russia’s use of advanced hypersonic missiles sets a dangerous global precedent, while European leaders condemned the strikes as acts of terror and nuclear intimidation. The attack followed accusations from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine had struck a dormitory in occupied eastern Ukraine, claims Kyiv denied.

Countries neighboring the Democratic Republic of the Congo are reintroducing Covid-style health measures to prevent the spread of a growing Ebola outbreak that has already caused hundreds of deaths. Uganda confirmed new Ebola cases and suspended large public gatherings and some transportation routes near the Congo border, while countries like Rwanda, Zambia, and Malawi increased border screenings, surveillance, quarantine rules, and public hygiene campaigns. Health officials warn that porous borders, frequent cross-border travel, and delayed symptom detection make regional spread a serious concern. Aid organizations also say containment efforts inside Congo are being complicated by violence, protests, limited testing capacity, and instability in affected areas.

Former White House Covid coordinator Deborah Birx said the United States is still well-equipped to respond to the current Ebola outbreak in Central Africa despite vacancies at major public health agencies like the CDC and FDA. She argued that federal agencies still have experienced career staff and said the government has already deployed personnel, funding, and resources to help contain the outbreak. Birx also said it is unclear whether recent cuts to international aid or the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization will significantly affect the response effort. She warned that the outbreak is especially concerning because it likely spread undetected for several weeks before being identified, making it harder to track how quickly new infections are growing.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will travel to Lithuania for emergency talks after a series of drone incidents in the Baltic region raised security concerns near the borders of Belarus and Russia. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have recently experienced airspace violations involving drones, including one incident that triggered NATO’s Baltic air-policing mission and another where a NATO jet shot down a drone in Estonian airspace. Baltic leaders accuse Russia of using the incidents and disinformation campaigns to create divisions between Ukraine and its European allies. The visit will focus on solidarity with the Baltic states and strengthening European air defense and joint military capabilities amid growing fears over regional security threats.

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Agree in Principle to Reopen Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Official Says, Farnaz Fassihi, Julian E. Barnes, Aaron Boxerman and Tyler Pager, May 24, 2026. The official said Iran had also agreed to dispose of highly enriched uranium, but stressed that a deal had not yet been signed. American and Iranian officials have described the terms differently.

Here’s the latest.

The United States and Iran signaled on Sunday that they were close to reaching a deal to wind down the war in the Middle East, although the emerging agreement seemed likely to delay resolving at least some details of the toughest points of contention.

President Trump said in a social media post on Sunday that he had ordered his negotiators “not to rush into a deal,” after saying a day earlier that a preliminary agreement between the two countries was “largely negotiated.”

If the deal was certified, Mr. Trump said, the United States could end its blockade of Iranian ports, which it had used to pressure Tehran.

U.S. and Iranian officials said the agreement — even if they managed to finalize it — would be an initial framework which would lead to further negotiations, rather than the last word.

For Mr. Trump, a deal with Iran could offer a path to ending the turmoil wrought by the war, which began in late February when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The conflict has killed thousands, rattled global energy markets, and been broadly unpopular among the American public.

But neither the United States nor Iran released a copy of the proposed framework, leaving the contours of the deal in doubt. The future of Iran’s nuclear program, part of Mr. Trump’s case for launching the war, was unclear.

In Israel, Mr. Trump’s announcement was received with concern. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had said the war could lead to the collapse of Iran’s Islamic Republic and an end to the Iranian nuclear threat — both of which now seem remote.

Israel did not officially comment, although the Israeli government circulated a statement attributed to an unnamed official saying that Mr. Trump had assured Mr. Netanyahu that he would stick to his demands on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said Iran must give up its stockpile of enriched uranium, which the United States and Israel fear could be used to build a nuclear weapon. But U.S. and Iranian officials have given clashing statements as to what had been agreed.

Two U.S. officials said the proposal included a commitment by Tehran to give up the uranium, with details to be nailed down later.

But three Iranian officials said the memorandum of understanding stipulated only that nuclear matters would be negotiated within 30 to 60 days. Like the American officials, they spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive subject.

Publicly, both the American and Iranian officials emphasized the concessions they hoped to secure. Mr. Trump said the deal would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas supplies, which Iran has effectively blockaded during the conflict, spurring a surge in global energy prices.

The Iranian officials said the deal Tehran had agreed to would reopen the Strait of Hormuz without any tolls; lift the U.S. naval blockade on Iran; stop the fighting on all fronts, including between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, in Lebanon; and release $25 billion in Iranian assets frozen overseas.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Cease-fire backdrop: The United States, Israel and Iran agreed to a cease-fire in early April to allow for talks on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump’s latest announcement followed a wave of last-ditch diplomatic efforts to stave off a return to full-scale war.
• Congressional backlash: Iran hawks, including some Congressional Republicans, slammed the emerging agreement as effectively undermining Mr. Trump’s own war goals. Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the proposal “a disaster” and cast doubt on the notion that Iran would “ever engage in good faith.”  

 

  U.S. Sen. Tom Tillis, Republican representing North Carolina, and President Trump (File photos on May 24, 2026)

Politicus USA. News and Commentary: Trump Called A Fool As His New Iran Deal Gets Ripped By Republicans And Democrats, Jason Easley, right, May 24, 2026. The deal that the Trump administration is floating as almost done to extend the ceasefire in the Iran war is being criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for failing to meet the objectives that the Trump administration laid out when it started the war three months ago.

On CNN’s State Of The Union, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was asked:

Let's talk about Iran and this potential memorandum of understanding with Iran. Your colleague Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker said -- quote -- "The rumored 60-day cease-fire with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith would be a disaster" -- unquote.

I know that the details are vague at this point, but, from what you have heard about this deal, would you support it?

Tillis pointed out all of the holes in the deal: "It doesn't make sense to me. I'm not too far away from where Pompeo is, to be honest with you, and I support what Chairman Wicker says." He contnued:

Look, we were told about 11 weeks ago by Hegseth and the Department of Defense that they had obliterated Iran's defenses and it was just a matter of time before we had the nuclear material. Now we're talking about a posture where we may accept the nuclear material remaining in Iran? How does that make sense at all?

Also, a 60-day cease-fire and expecting that they're going to clear the Strait of Hormuz before the terms of the deal are established also seems questionable to me. There are a lot of things that need to be explained. And, as I have said before, any agreement with Iran that isn't subject to ratification, ratification by Congress, is going -- I think going to be doomed to fail, just like the agreement we're trying to replace, which was the failed agreement by Obama.

The Obama agreement wasn’t a failed deal. It was working until Trump trashed it for something that looks weak.

Tillis was far from alone. The right and the left are hating this deal.

War hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that the deal keeps the regime in place and allows Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz:

If it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq.

A deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the Strait in the future will put Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shia militias in Iraq on steroids.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) trashed the deal also on CNN:

So, we haven't had an official briefing, but this is what I'm seeing that has me so outraged right now, is the president said he went into this to deal with their nuclear program.

This does not deal with that. Before he became president the first time, they had no highly enriched uranium. They had sent it out. Now they have it because of him.

Number two is, he criticized roundly that the deal that got rid of their nuclear program, or at least their highly enriched program involved getting $50 billion for Iran.

Well, already the president's balance sheet is letting more than $14 billion go through that, during this conflict, he allowed them to sell oil. And this deal alone, easing of sanctions on Iran, allowing them to get billions of more, the same deal he criticized, he's already doing worse than.

Giving Iran more money, as he has said, will allow them to do things like fuel their proxy -- terrorist proxies. That's why this war is wrong. He's got us in a situation that's worse than it was before, a more extreme regime. The Strait of Hormuz now is a leveraging point for them.

This weak nation has put America in a stalemate, and Donald Trump is being played as a fool that he is for getting us into this in the first place.

This deal does nothing for the United States, except maybe bring down gas prices in 6 months to a year. The regime in Iran gets to stay in place. The Iranians get to sell oil and possibly have sanctions lifted. There is currently no agreement on the Iranian nuclear program outside of a pinky swear not to seek a nuclear weapon.

Members of both parties are criticizing this deal for the same basic reason. The deal doesn’t fulfill the objectives that the administration laid out when the war began.

New York Times, Trump Administration: One Killed in Exchange of Gunfire With Secret Service Near White House, Campbell Robertson, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Clarence Williams, Updated May 24, 2026. A gunman known to the U.S. Secret Service opened fire near the White House and was shot and killed by federal officers. President Trump was in the White House at the time.

A man who was already known to the U.S. Secret Service approached the White House complex on Saturday evening, took a gun out of a bag and opened fire before being shot and fatally wounded by Secret Service police officers.

A bystander was also struck by gunfire, the Secret Service said in a statement, though it did not give details on the nature or severity of the injuries. It was unclear who fired the shot that struck the bystander.

The gunman, who was identified by two officials with knowledge of the investigation as Nasire Best, 21, was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. No officers were injured, the Secret Service said.

In a social media post early Sunday, President Trump thanked the Secret Service and law enforcement officers involved in the shooting, and described the gunman as having “a violent history” and a “possible obsession” with the White House.

The shooting took place a little after 6 p.m. near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, at the northwestern corner of the White House grounds.

Mr. Trump, who was in the building at the time, had made it known on Friday that he would be spending the long holiday weekend at the White House.

In his social media post, Mr. Trump also appeared to renew his push for a proposed ballroom and security expansion at the White House, saying the episode underscored the need for “the most safe and secure space of its kind ever built in Washington.”

Within the last month, two people have been arrested after opening fire in the vicinity of top U.S. officials.

On April 25, a man from California who was armed with a shotgun, handgun and several knives charged past a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where Mr. Trump was due to speak, before being subdued by Secret Service agents.

On May 4, a man from Texas was wounded during an exchange of gunfire with Secret Service officers near the Washington Monument, accused of making vulgar statements about the White House afterward, as he was being taken to a hospital in an ambulance.

Mr. Best had been arrested last July for walking into a restricted area on the White House grounds, ignoring signs and commands to stop. At that time, according to an affidavit filed in D.C. Superior Court, Mr. Best had already been known to Secret Service personnel “for walking around the White House complex inquiring how to gain access at various entry posts.”

He had briefly been involuntarily held that June for blocking a vehicle entry on the east side of the White House, the affidavit said. At the time of that arrest, on a misdemeanor charge of unlawful entry, he had no pending warrants. He told officers at the scene that “he was Jesus Christ and that he wanted to get arrested.”

Court records show that a judge issued a “stay away order” the day of his arrest, apparently barring him from the area around the White House. After he did not show up for a hearing in August, a bench warrant was issued.On Saturday evening, the flurry of gunfire prompted a brief White House lockdown, and rattled the reporters who were gathered on the North Lawn.

Selina Wang, a senior White House correspondent for ABC News, posted a video on social media of her recording a report when what sounds like gunfire can be heard in the background.

She was about three seconds into the recording when the noises are heard, and she dropped to the floor for cover.

“I was in the middle of taping on my iPhone for a social video from the White House North Lawn when we heard the shots,” she wrote on X. “It sounded like dozens of gunshots. We were told to sprint to the press briefing room where we are holding now.”

Allison Robbert, a photographer for The New York Times, said that about 20 to 30 gunshots were heard from the north lawn of the White House.

“Journalists heard it from outside the press room and were ushered inside by Secret Service,” she said in a text message. 

 

Detroit Free Press, Stephen Colbert hosts Michigan public access show ‘Only in Monroe’ again, Julie Hinds, May 24, 2026 (print ed.). After his final “The Late Show” aired on CBS May 21, Stephen Colbert made a surprise appearance the next night on what you might call his last last show.

As spotted first by LateNighter, Colbert guest-hosted an “Only in Monroe” episode that aired at 11:35 p.m. Friday, May 22, his second trip to the public access show from the southeast Michigan city.

Colbert’s first appeared on "Only in Monroe" in July 2015, where he interviewed Eminem a few months before he took over “The Late Show” from the retiring David Letterman.

Selected Reader Comments for "Only In Monroe (Monroe, MI Community Media) with Stephen Colbert as guest host:

• If Colbert spent the next year touring community TV broadcasts, I'd watch every single one.
• Surprised how entertaining it was.
• This is so fantastic. I would rather watch this over a highly polished network program any day. Just feels so much more authentic.
• I hope this is not only the future of Colbert, but of television hosts in general. Less attention on the orange ghoul - imagine how upset he will be if nobody watches anything he does

U.S. Courts, Crime, Law, Rights, Immigration, Justice

 

The U.S. Supreme Court:, above: The Contrarian, Opinion: The MAGA Supreme Court is Incompatible with Democracy, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 18, 2026. Congress must act.  The MAGA Supreme Court majority put a stake through the Voting Rights Act, at least for now, and unleashed a frenzy ofchaotic redistricting in the South designed to erase 60 years of voting rights progress. 

New York Times, With Big Decisions Ahead, the Supreme Court Collides With a Testy Trump, Ann E. Marimow, May 24, 2026. President Trump has alternated between bullying the justices and cozying up to them as the court prepares to announce major decisions that will determine the fate of the key aspects of his agenda.

Vice President JD Vance made an unannounced visit to the Supreme Court last week to attend a private dinner in a wood-paneled conference room with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and dozens of the chief justice’s former law clerks.

Accompanying his wife Usha, who clerked for the chief justice nearly a decade ago, Mr. Vance’s visit was a social call, people familiar with the dinner said. But Mr. Vance’s friendly pop-by illustrated the awkward dance that has been underway between the Trump administration and the nation’s highest court, as the administration has at times appeared to woo the justices even as President Trump has repeatedly bullied and insulted them.

With the court preparing to issue major rulings in the coming weeks that will determine the fate of key aspects of the president’s agenda, Mr. Trump has vacillated between combative and conciliatory in his treatment of the justices.

He has seemed ever aware and at times resentful of the critical role the justices play in determining the lawfulness of his policies, with the court representing perhaps the one force in American government truly able to thwart his agenda. At the heart of the tension: a president who appears to believe that justices, especially those he appointed, should be loyalists rather than independent actors in a separate, equal branch of government.Sign up for the Docket newsletter. Adam Liptak helps you make sense of legal developments in a turbulent time. Get it sent to your inbox.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the American people have “always valued President Trump’s ability to freely speak his mind and share his thoughts directly with them” — including about the court.

The chief justice did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.

Mr. Trump was furious with the court after it invalidated his sweeping tariffs in February. He called a news conference to vent, criticizing individual justices as “fools and lap dogs” and saying his two nominees who voted against him were “an embarrassment to their families.”

While past presidents have voiced disagreement and frustration with Supreme Court rulings, that kind of language and personal animosity has been unheard-of from a president. 

 

All Rise News, Legal Commentary: Judge Dismisses Abrego Garcia's criminal case: a conversation with Glenn Kirschner, Adam Klasfeld, right, May 24, 2026. In case you missed it on Friday, here's what you need to know about the judge's ruling.

On Friday, a federal judge dismissed Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal indictment for vindictive prosecution, describing the case as an “abuse of prosecuting power” and invoking the immortal words of the late Nuremberg prosecutor turned Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson.

In case you missed our coverage at the time, ex-federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner and I unpacked the significance of the decision in a Substack Live in the wake of the then-breaking news.

Trump's $1.8b Taxpayer-paid Slush Fund For Cop-Bashing Insurrectionists, Other DOJ 'Victims'

Jacob Chansley, right, "The Q Anon Shaman" during the Jan. 6 Pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.  

Emptywheel, Analysis: “Unhinged from Reality:” Donald J. Trump Caged the Q-Shaman, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 24, 2026 As I noted here, the Jan6ers bidding to be paid out of the Terrorist Slush Fund are making their case on Xitter, abetted by a range of interested actors.

Those trying to make the case for the Jan6ers are focusing on a few cases that seem innocuous, in which the person was jailed pretrial and convicted primarily of obstruction, the charge which SCOTUS narrowed, requiring an evidentiary basis for the obstruction. (Before Trump pardoned everyone, DOJ was attempting to sustain some of the obstruction cases of defendants who were more closely involved in preventing the presentation of evidence in the Senate.)

Jacob Chansley, the Q-Shaman, is one of the Jan6ers on whom boosters focus.

And why wouldn’t they? Chansley was among the very limited number of people not charged with assault who was jailed pretrial. He pled guilty to obstruction on September 9, 2021, long before SCOTUS narrowed that single charge. He completed his sentence long before Trump pardoned anyone.

Among the many convicted felons, why wouldn’t you focus on Chansley as your poster child?

There are several problems with that.

First, while many Jan6ers detained pretrial say they’re due a kickback because of the conditions in which they were held (conditions that were significantly dictated by the COVID pandemic and were exacerbated by the fact that many of them refused vaccines), Chansley got special treatment. Days after arriving in DC, his attorney filed for emergency accommodation for Chansley’s strict adherence to an organic diet, which request Royce Lamberth granted. So whereas the other Jan6ers jailed pretrial were stuck in the shitty DC jail (albeit a nicer part than other detainees), and stuck with each other, Chansley was moved to Alexandria Jail early in his detention.

Another way Chansley got better treatment than others is that, after the FBI tested why Chansley first called Mike Pence a traitor and then left a threatening note on the dais at which Mike Pence was and soon again would be counting the vote, they didn’t charge him for it.

“Justice is Coming!” Chansley warned, on a document left on the dais for the Vice President.

Here’s how Chansley’s sentencing memo contextualized the note.

The defendant then scaled the Senate dais, taking the seat that Vice President Mike Pence had occupied less than an hour before.8 The defendant proceeded to take pictures of himself on the dais and refused to vacate the seat when Officer K. R., the lone law enforcement officer in the Chamber at the time, asked him to do so. Instead, the defendant stated that “Mike Pence is a fucking traitor” and wrote a note on available paper on the dais, stating “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”9

Note Written by Defendant Chansley at the Senate Dais and Collected by U.S. Capitol Police After Officer K. R.

again asked the defendant to vacate the seat, the defendant remained, calling other rioters up to the dais and leading them in an incantation over his bullhorn, which included giving thanks for the opportunity “to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow America, the American way of the United States of America to go down.” The defendant went on to say “[t]hank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”10

This is a far more ominous note than a picture of shells spelling out 8647 that Jim Comey posted, and it was far more proximate to Pence’s person (though Chansley, like Comey, told authorities he did not mean the communication to be a threat).

Chansley could have been, but was not, charged for threatening the Vice President.

But the biggest problem with claiming that Chansley is uniquely entitled to a payoff from the Terrorist Slush Fund is that Joe Biden’s DOJ didn’t charge him with obstruction. Joe Biden’s DOJ didn’t obtain the decision to hold him pretrial.

Donald Trump did that.

Chansley was initially charged via complaint (just with trespassing) on January 8. He was indicted — with that obstruction charge that MAGAts complain Joe Biden’s DOJ misapplied, along with civil disorder — on January 11, over a week before Trump left office. The obstruction charge that Jan6 boosters point to claiming it is proof of weaponization is a prosecutorial decision Trump’s DOJ made, with Chansley and a handful of others.

The original detention hearing happened on January 15, in Arizona. In that hearing DOJ — still Trump’s DOJ — argued several things justified detention. First, Chansley committed the felonies of which he was accused while carrying a six foot (makeshift) spear.

Chansley is charged with two felonies: committing an act of civil disorder that obstructed the conduct of a federally-protected function, and obstructing an official proceeding. (Att. A at 1-2.) As demonstrated by the photographs above and corroborated by the spear found in his car after he was arrested, the felonies Chansley committed involved the use of a dangerous weapon inside the Capitol building—a six-foot spear. See Doty v. Lewis, 995 F. Supp. 1081, 1084 (D. Ariz. 1998) (referring to “a handmade spear approximately three feet long” as a “dangerous weapon”); see also United States v. Tumea, 810 F.3d 563, 567 (8th Cir. 2016) (implying that spears are dangerous weapons in the context of a supervised release condition); United States v. Cabrera, No. CR. S-05-0347 GGH, 2005 WL 3406318, at *2 (E.D. Cal. Dec. 12, 2005) (implying prohibition of dangerous weapons, including spears, into statute prohibiting the possession of firearms in federal facilities).

In addition, there is a serious risk that Chansley will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice in the course of his prosecution in Washington, D.C. The grand jury found probable cause to charge Chansley with obstructing an official Congressional proceeding on January 6, 2021. Pictures taken at the scene, and Chansley’s own unapologetic confession and media statements, leave no doubt that he did so. Chansley broke through barricades, unlawfully entered the Capitol Building, disobeyed police orders to leave, refused a police request to quell the crowd using his bullhorn, and instead ran up onto the dais where Vice President Pence had been presiding just minutes before and scrawled a threatening note. His willingness to very publicly attempt to obstruct the official duties of the United States Congress certifying the vote count of the Electoral College makes clear his complete disregard for the importance of following orders during official proceedings such as the D.C. District Court case now charging him with serious crimes.

DOJ also caught Chansley making claims to probation officers that conflicted with his open boasts of using psychoactive drugs.

Critically, Chansley also lied to PTS about his use of drugs. Pre-Trial Services believed Chansley to be a flight risk based on his three-times-a-week marijuana habit, and the United States agrees. But Chansley also told Pre-Trial Services that he had never tried any illicit substances other than that marijuana. (PTS Report at 2.) However, he has publicly detailed in interviews and though online activity that he uses peyote and mushrooms as part of his Shaman practice. He openly stated on his podcast ‘Jake Angeli – Keys for our Ascension’ that he uses illegal substances, admitting to using “psychoactive” and “ceremonial” plants such as cactus and mushrooms as part of his shaman practice. See www.podbean.com/media/player/ddgys-c51af9?from=wp&vjs=1&skin=1, at minute 25:00. On the podcast, Chansley stated, “I think I was 11 the first time I got high, and it was because God love him, my dad gave it to me.”2 Chansley also stated that after a stint in the US Navy he “dove head first” into experimenting with psychoactive substances. (Id.) He stated that his use of psychoactive substances “gave [him] such a profound spiritual experience that [he] was able to see [his] thoughts.” (Id.)

And Trump’s DOJ also questioned Chansley’s mental health, arguing that, “his public statements described [in the detention memo] demonstrate that he is unhinged from reality, while his actions at the Capitol demonstrate a willingness to act on those mistaken beliefs.”

Chansley also stated he has no mental health conditions, but publicly-available information and videos reveal a very different picture. Chansley has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality.3 He subscribes to QAnon, a group who believes a debunked and fictitious conspiracy claim that Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles are running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump.4 As an example, in a YouTube video uploaded on January 6, 2021, from approximately minute 9:00 forward, Chansley states:

So in order to beat this evil occultic force you need a light occultic force you need an occultic force that is of the side of God of love on like almost like on the side of the Angels OK as opposed to the demons all right and so as a shaman I am like a multi-dimensional or hyper-dimensional being okay I am able to perceive multiple different frequencies of light beyond my five senses and it allows me to see into these other higher dimensions that these entities these pedophiles these rapists these murderers these really high up people that they almost like hide in the shadows in nobody can see that because the third eye ain’t open okay and that’s where things like fluoride and stuff like that comes in so the horns the horns are hey man you mess with the Buffalo you get the horns bro and if you ever tried messing with the Buffalo that doesn’t work out too well for many people this right here this is coyote skin according to the Navajo the coyote is like the trickster almost like almost like a benevolent force so I’m wearing the skin of the trickster I got two tails here okay so the trickster messed with the bull got the horns okay and the face paint is representative of the Native American tradition of like donning on warpaint of some sort only this is only this is a war that is of like a spiritual nature okay so because it’s a war of a spiritual nature you need symbolism okay in the symbolism here for me is you got the blood on the sign the bullet holes Q sent me this shows the the the secret war in the behind the scene. Hey if you don’t know who Q is Q is the highest levels of the military in the intelligence community disseminating above top secret information to pay attention to the republic so we can take our country back from globalists and communists and satanists.5

In this and other videos of Chansley on YouTube, he states that when you watch television, when you listen to the radio, there are very specific frequencies that are inaudible that actually affect the brain waves of your brain. In a January 8, 2021, interview with the Washington Post, Chansley stated: “What we did on Jan. 6 in many ways was an evolution in consciousness, because as we marched down the street along these ley lines, shouting ‘USA’ or shouting things like ‘freedom’ . . . we were actually affecting the quantum realm.”6

2 “HE’S A RIOT, QAnon ‘shaman’ Jake Angeli first got high aged 11, takes psychedelic cactus & used to go to school dressed as Brad Pitt” Emma Perry, (January 8, 2021) available at https://www.the-sun.com/news/2104357/qanon-horned-shaman-jake-angeli-high-psychedelicbrad-pitt/ (last visited January 13, 2021).

3 Etzimanuel, QAnon Shaman – Jake Angeli – Interview ORF, YouTube (January 6, 2021), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22d6tRXxVeg (last visited January 13, 2021).

4 Qanon, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon (last visited January 13, 2021).

5 Etzimanuel, QAnon Shaman – Jake Angeli – Interview ORF, YouTube (January 6, 2021), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22d6tRXxVeg (last visited January 13, 2021).

6 “Trump Supporter in Horns and Fur is Charged in Capitol Riot,” Fredrick Kunkle, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/jacob-chansely-horn-qanon-capitolriot/2021/01/09/5d3c2c96-52b9-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html (last visited January 13, 2021).

A Magistrate Judge in Arizona agreed with those arguments and on January 19, the day before Biden was inaugurated, ruled that Chansley should be held pretrial.

Trump’s DOJ did that. Not Joe Biden.Trump.

And now a bunch of insurrection boosters say that Jacob Chansley, eating his organic food and suffering very real mental health challenges in Alexandria while facing felony charges that Trump’s own DOJ charged him with, should get a payout because Joe Biden’s DOJ was weaponized against him.

If Jacob Chansley was the victim of a weaponized DOJ, he was victim of weaponization by Trump’s DOJ.  

More On Iran War

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Is Frantically Searching for an Offramp From His Disastrous War, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 24, 2026. His strategic defeat is now clear for all to see.

According to news reports, Iranian and U.S. negotiators are closing in on a deal to end Donald Trump’s reckless, unconstitutional war. As the terms revealed that Trump’s war failed to attain his aims (e.g. permanently ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions), Republicans began blasting the deal. A Trump Truth Social post attempted to contain the backlash. He insisted he had told the negotiators to proceed carefully because time was on our side.

It bears repeating that Trump’s overly cheery take that we are on the verge of a deal may be nothing more than Trump spin. (Axios reported the deal could take days to complete.) Negotiations could stall at any time, leaving the Strait of Hormuz closed and no agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. A sailor signals to an F/A-18E Super Hornet in preparation for flight operations aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the U.S. Central Command area of operations on May 14. (Department of Defense photo)

The agreement reportedly under discussion would simply continue talks about Iran’s nuclear program. A final nuclear deal, if concluded, would require Iran to give up its stockpile of enriched material (or reduce the level of enrichment) and suspend enrichment for a fixed time (as under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). One imagines Iran will be happy to talk and talk and talk. The purported agreement, according to U.S. sources, would permit free shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. That would simply be a return to the status quo.

But most galling for Republicans, Trump’s agreement reportedly would unfreeze $25 billion in Iranian assets, a significant achievement for the economically hobbled Iranian regime. Recall that Republicans and Trump personally excoriated President Barack Obama’s agreement to unfreeze a mere $1.7 billion in conjunction with the JCPOA, which they claim amounted to funding Iran’s nefarious activities.

War hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) freaked out as details of the agreement dribbled out. “If it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq,” Graham warned on X. “A deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the Strait in the future will put Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shia militias in Iraq on steroids.” Graham was not done with his scathing review:

This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability the inflict massive damage to Gulf oil infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel.

Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with if these perceptions are accurate.

He was not alone. “The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith—would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught,” tweeted Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) chimed in as well, saying he was “deeply concerned” about the reported deal, the New York Times reported. “It would be a ‘disastrous mistake’ if an agreement resulted in Iran being able to enrich uranium, develop nuclear weapons, and have effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, he said.” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on CNN observed, “It doesn’t make sense to me ... now we’re talking about a posture where we may accept nuclear material remaining in Iran?”

The deal under discussion would dispel any notion that the United States “won” the war. The Wall Street Journal was quick to conclude: “The agreement, if completed, wouldn’t achieve Trump’s main goal of preventing Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”

The entire episode underscores the utter fecklessness of the Republicans in Congress, who don’t exercise their constitutional authority or conduct even minimal oversight. The deaths and injuries to U.S. troops, the deaths of thousands in the region, the physical destruction in Iran and Lebanon, the damage to the Gulf states’ oil operations, the extensive depletion of U.S. munitions, the tens of billions in costs, and soaring energy costs (and broader inflation spike) have achieved no lasting, positive result for the United States or its allies in the region. At best, we would be back to an agreement akin to the JCPOA but with a much emboldened, more dangerous, and well-funded Iranian regime.

Whether this deal gets finalized or not, Congress must conduct extensive oversight to fully investigate the Trump regime’s malfeasance, incompetence, and lack of honesty. If war crimes were committed, the officials responsible need to be held accountable. And finally, Congress needs to pass legislation to prevent this and future presidents from unilaterally blundering into unnecessary, ill-advised and illegal wars in the future.

New York Times, These Are 5 of the Main Issues to Be Resolved in an Iran-U.S. Peace Deal, Amelia Nierenberg and Ephrat Livni, May 24, 2026. President Trump says the U.S. and Iran could be close to a peace deal.

The big issues at stake include the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.The United States and Iran have signaled that they are moving closer to a deal to end the war in the Middle East. But neither country has released a copy of the possible deal and as of Sunday afternoon, it remained unclear exactly what they had agreed to — or if they had agreed to much at all.

In interviews, American and Iranian officials described basic elements of a deal differently. Notably, they portrayed discussions about the future of the nuclear program — and Iran’s existing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium — in divergent terms. 

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

 

Heather Delaney Reese via Substack, Commentary, Trump’s desperate plan to destroy our country from the inside, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, May 24, 2026. After abruptly clearing his weekend travel schedule, opting to stay in Washington, D.C., missing his own son’s wedding, the President of the United States has once again locked himself away inside the White House.

He has made no public appearances, and his schedule today showed no meetings or events except for what appeared to be an urgent visit from Vice President J.D. Vance at 12:49 pm. And while much of the country remains focused on Trump’s continued threats of violence and war, along with the increasingly erratic posts he continues to share on social media, a story was published this morning that every major news outlet in America should be covering as breaking news. Because what happened is a warning of how dangerous the days and months ahead are about to become.

Yesterday afternoon at 1:34 pm, Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield exposed the quiet and deliberate erasure of records related to the January 6th insurrection from the Department of Justice website.

But what she really uncovered was far more disturbing than a missing webpage or deleted press release. The Trump administration had begun scrubbing prosecution records tied to the people who attacked our Capitol, including one involving a man accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol attack who was also facing child solicitation charges.

Kornfield shared the discovery publicly on X, and the Department of Justice Rapid Response account responded directly. Yet instead of expressing concern or acknowledging the seriousness of the allegations involving a minor, their response began with five chilling words: “Nothing ‘quiet’ about it. We are proud.”

They were proud to erase the public record. Proud to help rewrite the history of January 6th. Proud to scrub information connected to people who violently attacked police officers defending the Capitol. And even after being reminded of the allegations tied to the solicitation of a child, they still said they were “proud.”

Everything they said was intentional. “Proud” was placed at the very beginning of the statement, and the rest of it tells us exactly how they want this moment remembered. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” they wrote. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

Every phrase in that statement should concern us all, because every phrase is doing work. The prosecution of people who attacked the Capitol becomes “weaponization.” The men convicted by juries become the “persecuted.” And the public record of their crimes, the sentencing documents, the charges, the evidence, becomes “partisan propaganda.”

This is the whole project in three sentences. They are not denying what they did. They are renaming it. They are telling us that the record itself was the lie, and that erasing it is justice. That is the language every authoritarian movement eventually reaches for, the moment it stops fearing the truth and starts calling the truth the enemy.

And this was not just a single page removed. Meryl Kornfield caught one example, the Houston man, Andrew Taake, was sentenced to 74 months for attacking police with bear spray and a metal whip while a child solicitation case sat pending against him in Texas. But the deletions swept far wider than one defendant. Among the records pulled were the prosecution releases for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the men convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep Trump in power by force.

And here is the part that turns this from another abuse of power by the Trump administration into something far more dangerous. On Thursday, a federal appeals court vacated those seditious conspiracy convictions. On Friday, the Justice Department moved to dismiss the cases entirely. And on Friday, that same department began scrubbing the press releases documenting those crimes from public view. Pardon them. Vacate the convictions. Dismiss the cases. Then erase the record that any of it ever happened.

A government methodically removing evidence of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. Not because the attack did not happen, but because they need Americans to forget who carried it out, who encouraged it, who benefited from it, and what it was truly meant to accomplish. And this is only the beginning of our shared history they intend to erase.

It’s the oldest tool there is for controlling a population. Before there were television networks to capture or websites to scrub, every regime that wanted to control the future started by seizing control of the past. Stalin’s government did not just imprison the people it purged. It removed them from photographs, cut them from the history books, erased their faces from the official record until it was as if they had never stood next to the leader at all. The Nazis burned the books first, and then rewrote the textbooks. Because a population that cannot remember what was true yesterday cannot resist the lie they are told today.

George Orwell, above, put it as plainly as it can be put: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

I am not saying this is Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. But what I am saying is that the move is always the same, and it always means the same thing. When people in power start deleting the past, it is always intentional. Either they plan to do again the very things they are trying to erase, or they do not want us to remember, compare, or have proof of how things used to be done before they changed them. Either way, or both ways, they do not want us to be able to measure what they are becoming against what once existed before them.

And they are not only erasing the record. They are erasing the debt. When Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in the January 6th attack, he did not just set them free. He released them from the court-ordered restitution they owed for the damage they caused. The full cost of that day to the American taxpayer has been estimated by the Government Accountability Office at 2.7 billion dollars. Of the nearly 3 million dollars in restitution the rioters personally owed, a CBS investigation found that only about 437,000 dollars, roughly fifteen percent, had ever been repaid. Now even that is gone. The people who smashed the windows, assaulted police officers, hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress, and helped bring the peaceful transfer of power to the edge of collapse walk free, owe nothing, and watch the bill land on the rest of us.

And we were already being set up for the next part. The 1.776 billion dollar compensation fund, which, unless stopped, will compensate people who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted under the previous administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has refused to rule out that January 6th rioters convicted of violence could be eligible to collect from it. So we must follow the full arc of what they are building. Erase the record of the crime. Erase the debt for the crime. Then take taxpayer money and hand it to the people who committed the crime, while calling them the victims. And make sure everyone watching understands the message being sent. If you are willing to carry out the next order given by Trump, even if it is illegal, harms the country, or turns violent, he will protect you, too. January 6th was not just a pardon. It was a signal. A promise to future loyalists that if they stay faithful to the regime, the regime will stay faithful to them.

This latest round of corruption is so blatant that even Republicans are struggling to defend it. Senator Thom Tillis called it bad policy, bad timing, and bad politics. Mitch McConnell called it “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong.” Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick vowed to kill it outright. And when the very people who have spent the last year defending Trump are openly calling this corruption, it tells us something important. Something is starting to crack. But we are up against the clock to preserve what they are trying to destroy before the damage becomes permanent.

And while all of this unfolds, the man who set it in motion has sealed himself inside the White House and is building something beneath it that looks less like a safety feature and more like a post-presidency contingency plan. We learned the details this week from Trump himself, who walked reporters through the construction. Beneath the new 90,000 square foot ballroom, a complex is being carved six stories into the ground. He described a drone base on the roof, a military hospital below, and a fortification that rivals anything we have seen built for an American president before.

And now, as we watch his administration continue to erase and rewrite this country’s history, it becomes impossible not to ask exactly what he believes he is preparing for. Because this bunker he is building could very well be where he plans to ride out his years after his presidency is supposed to end, if his efforts to hollow out the Constitution are not stopped in time. We need to think about how his mind works and what he wants, not simply what is legal or constitutional. Because everything they remove from the public record is a stepping stone toward whatever they plan to erase next. And the logical path this takes eventually leads to our founding documents, our institutions, and the constitutional amendments that protect all of us from authoritarian power.

He does not want to leave office. He has said as much repeatedly, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. And this bunker increasingly feels less like emergency preparedness and more like insurance. Insurance against accountability, insurance against unrest, and insurance against a country that may one day finally refuse to comply.

I try not to let my mind wander to these worst-case scenarios because I still hold on to the belief that our lawmakers and courts have lines even they will not cross. But at this moment, I think it is necessary to say all of this out loud. We have to be prepared for anything, and we need to continue reminding our elected officials that this is not politics as usual. Administrations that were truly committed to protecting our country would never have done any of the things Trump’s administration is doing now. And we need to stop playing by the same rulebook we have relied on for centuries. Trump isn’t.

We are living through another day in America that should never have happened. Governments built around democratic norms do not erase public records, and they certainly do not reward the people responsible for political violence while rewriting them as victims. And as much as I would love to say that we should rest and simply gear up for November, we do not have that luxury. We need to ensure that what they delete is never forgotten. They are betting that if they erase enough pages, pay off enough loyalists, and bury enough of it six stories underground, we will get tired and let it go. We cannot do that.

We need to keep our own records, including the names of the people enabling this corruption. They cannot delete the entire internet. The more facts, screenshots, archived pages, videos, and evidence we preserve and share, the harder it will be for them to finish their revision of history. Because one day this evidence may be needed not just for the history books but also for investigations, accountability, and eventual trials. Future generations deserve to know exactly what happened here, who enabled it, who resisted it, and how close this country came to losing itself entirely. Authoritarian movements survive by destroying evidence and exhausting the public memory. Our job is to make sure the truth outlives them.

New York Times, Times Investigation: How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency, Sharon LaFraniere and David Yaffe-Bellany, May 24, 2026. Last fall, a high-stakes struggle unfolded inside the red brick walls of an obscure federal agency.

Three companies — each with ties to the Trump family’s business empire — needed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bless their ambitions in the white-hot field of prediction markets.

A growing portion of the agency’s portfolio, prediction markets allow Americans to bet on everything from whether the United States will take over Cuba to what color tie President Trump will wear next. The moneymaking opportunities were breathtaking, but the companies’ practices were causing a stir.

Senior career officials worried about whether Crypto.com was treating small bettors fairly. They feared that a second firm, Polymarket, did not have strong enough protections against fraud. A third, an offshoot of the crypto firm Gemini, had yet to pass the agency’s required review to open for business.

Despite these concerns, Caroline D. Pham, then acting chairman of the commission, and her senior counsel intervened to help the firms get what they wanted, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

By Christmas, the agency had put two top officials who had raised questions about the companies on leave, barred them from the office and placed them under internal investigation. Three other senior officials who had enforced laws involving cryptocurrencies — another industry linked to the Trumps — suffered the same fate.

None of those officials were told what they had done wrong. But current and former agency staffers said in interviews that the commission’s work force took away a clear message: Don’t cause trouble for those industries.

The suspensions were just one of many ways in which the C.F.T.C., the primary regulator of a specialized sector of the financial markets, has been mowed down by the powerful business interests it is supposed to oversee, a New York Times investigation found.

In the past 16 months of the Trump administration, the commission has shrunk its work force, purged career officials, sharply curtailed crypto enforcement and helped out prediction markets at virtually every turn, The Times found.

New York Times, Kennedy’s Push to Curb Antidepressants Has Shaken Psychiatry, Ellen Barry, May 24, 2026. An annual psychiatric meeting was abuzz over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call to rein in the use of depression medications. Some fear it will drive patients away from care.

Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy.

This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.

A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”

“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.”

But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants.

In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.”

“It feels like the beginning of a conversation, one that we welcome,” Dr. Wills said. She added, “It would be odd to have that conversation without psychiatrists at the table.”

Outside in the corridors, some rank-and-file attendees were less diplomatic.

Many providers took issue with Mr. Kennedy’s negative characterization of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I. s, the most widely prescribed class of psychiatric medications. Clinical trials have found that most patients’ depressive symptoms improved with S.S.R.I.s, and they are considered safe enough to be prescribed by general practitioners.

A 2026 study found that 16.6 percent of U.S. adults, or roughly one in six, reported currently taking an antidepressant.

“He just doesn’t like S.S.R.I.s,” said Dr. Sung Hyon, a psychiatrist from Pasadena, referring to Mr. Kennedy. Dr. Hyon said S.S.R.I.s had been “foundational” in his practice — “boring drugs that are well established, have good safety evidence and have zero chance to cause addiction.” He called them “God’s gift to psychiatry.”

And patients know it, he added. “So many millions” of Americans already take S.S.R.I.s, he said, and the vast majority are fully aware of their downside, like sexual side effects and withdrawal symptoms.

“And they say, ‘You know what? It’s worth it,’” Dr. Hyon said. “Because there are so many of them, it would be a pretty big political firestorm if he really tried to restrict access. And there is very, very little medical evidence to do so.” 

 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy, Our Weak And Cowardly Leader Keeps Yielding To Our Adversaries And Selling Out America, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 24, 2026. While we do not yet have the details of the deal the regime is striking to-open the Strait of Hormuz what has been reported sure appears as Trump is surrendering to Iran. Here is what Lindsay Graham posted yesterday:

“It makes one wonder why the war starting to begin with if these perceptions are accurate.”

And it isn’t just Senator Graham wondering how Trump could have f-cked this thing up so badly. Here is conservative commentator Stephen Hayes mocking the White House Comms Director (yes Cheung came from the mixed martial arts world, UFC) for attacking a tweet from Mike Pompeo:

Here’s the Pompeo tweet:

Trump has been appeasing Putin and working to help Russia win its war with Ukraine since his first day in office and gotten nothing in return. He just went to China and made major concessions without getting anything in return. And now Iran - it appears he once again is yielding to an adversary, getting nothing in return for the US, and once again leaving the Iranian-Russian (and Chinese) alliance in a far stronger position. As I wrote a few days ago it is as if every chance he gets Trump works to make Russia and China great again and weaken America:Trump Is Hell Bent On Weakening America And Making Russia And China Great Again Trump Is Hell Bent On Weakening America And Making Russia And China Great AgainSimon Rosenberg  May 15Read full story

Listen to Senator Thom Tillis rail on Trump and Hegseth this morning on CNN:

Adding this second clip so you can hear how angry Senate Republicans are at Trump for working against Cassidy and Cornyn and leaving them with a disgraced Paxton in Texas. Senate Republicans are incredibly, incredibly angry at the White House right now. It is a huge problem for Trump:

The Iranian government posted this doozy yesterday:

The Wall Street Journal published this chart with a new poll they released yesterday. It shows a similar steep downward slope in both Trump and GOP approval that we saw in the data we reviewed yesterday: Image

Yesterday I shared the current Real Clear Politics generic ballot tracker showing Dems up 7.4 points, a spread bigger than Election Day 2018 in what was a blow out year for us. Interactive Polls published this historical comparison today that helps explain why Trump is so ready to surrender to the Iranians this weekend. We are running 3 points of 2018, one of the worst mid terms Rs had in many decades, and 9 points ahead of 2022, a mid-term election that was actually pretty good for us:

Have some terrific interviews and presentations for you this weekend:

National leaders Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator Ruben Gallego

Impressive House candidates Jonathan Nez (AZ-02), Denise Powell (NE-02), Bobby Pulido (TX-15) and our terrific new candidate for Governor of Ohio, Amy Acton

My weekly strategy talk, Trump and Trumpism Are Failing, And We Need To Grow More Ambitious Now, and a new interview with the DCCC’s Will Van Nuys on winning this November and new dark tactics the House Rs have rolled out in recent weeks

More Global News

New York Times, Rubio Says U.S.-India Ties Are Strong, Despite Fury Over Trump’s Actions, Edward Wong, May 24, 2026. In New Delhi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to explain why President Trump has pushed aggressive trade and immigration policies affecting India and Indians in the United States.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, said on Sunday that the Trump administration remained committed to a strategic partnership with India, apparently trying to defuse tensions from President Trump’s aggressive actions in the past year against India and Indians living in the United States.

“The U.S.-India relationship has not lost any momentum,” he said in a news conference in New Delhi on the second day of a four-day trip to India. “The relationship continues to be strong.”

Mr. Rubio, who has met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other officials on the trip, said the United States wants to continue working with India on trade and investment in advanced technologies.

And he said Mr. Trump’s efforts to impose tariffs on Indian imports to the United States — a 50 percent in initial salvos last summer — were not aimed at India specifically but were part of a global effort to create better balances of trade for the United States.

The tariffs are a tax paid by American companies that import goods from India.

“There’s a huge imbalance that’s built up and it needs to be addressed,” Mr. Rubio said of global trade. “This is not about India,” he added.

But the high tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump came after Mr. Modi refused to nominate the American president for a Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Trump has insisted that he played a crucial role in getting India and Pakistan to reach a cease-fire after each country carried out deadly military strikes against the other. 

New York Times, Russia Pummels Kyiv in Major Missile and Drone Attack, Andrew E. Kramer, May 24, 2026. Buildings rattled in the Ukrainian capital for hours early Sunday. Russia launched an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile for only the third time in the war.

Russia unleashed a prolonged missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital and nearby towns early Sunday morning, with explosions rattling buildings for hours and igniting several fires in a volley that included a rare, intermediate-range Oreshnik missile.

The firing of that missile was seen as nuclear muscle flexing, though in two previous instances in Ukraine it was launched with dummy warheads that caused only minimal damage. The authorities did not immediately disclose the scope of damage in Sunday’s strike.

Four people were killed and around 100 injured, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

In Kyiv, the bombardment damaged two entryways to the subway system — an underground refuge for thousands of people during air attacks — including in a strike on or near Kyiv’s central Independence Square, known as the Maidan and a symbol of resistance to Russia.

President Zelensky had warned that Russia planned to launch an Oreshnik, which is a type of intermediate-range ballistic missile specifically designed to carry nuclear warheads. Russia had used these missiles once in 2024 and again in January.

Memorial Day Roundup

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 23, 2026 [Trump's Monumental Pro-Confederate Tilt], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 24, 2026. President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The proposed arch obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the land that had been Lee’s plantation as a national burying ground for soldiers on June 15, 1864. After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee resigned his commission and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, fighting across the state.

In early 1864 the U.S. government bought Lee’s property at public auction after Lee defaulted on property taxes, and months later it became the logical place to establish a national cemetery after the U.S. Army under General U.S. Grant began its spring 1864 offensive to crush the Confederate forces once and for all.

As the army advanced the Wilderness Campaign, grinding through the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and on to the siege of Petersburg, the dead piled up.

The Army buried the dead and sent the wounded back to Washington, D.C. Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one’s heart bled at the piteous sight.” For many, that rest was forever. In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, the soldiers died in the summer heat.

Cemeteries in the city quickly became overwhelmed and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed to Stanton that the government begin burials at the Lee property. The National Republican newspaper called it, along with the establishment of a village of formerly enslaved Americans, “righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee.”

By August 1864 the government had buried the bodies of twenty-six U.S. soldiers around the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, and it continued to bury bodies around the house to make sure Lee would never again be able to live there. By the end of the war, more than 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

It was there, on May 30, 1868, that the first official Memorial Day ceremony took place. In those days the observance was called “Decoration Day” and was widely celebrated after the war as people put flowers on the graves of the war dead. At the 1868 event, the newly organized Grand Army of the Republic honored the occasion with a speech by then-congressman James Garfield, who had served as a major general and seen action across the war, including at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.

Garfield, who would later be elected president and lose his life to an assassin, told his comrades that the men buried at Arlington had “summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus…made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.“

They had fought, he said, to defend the fundamental principle of the United States. Before the war, Garfield said, “[t]he faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and showers and fruitful seasons; and all sprang from a single source, the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system—it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in Heaven…. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its overthrow would have brought…ruin.”

And so, he said, “[t]he Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit no for despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.”

For those who had died to defend the nation, he asked: “What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?”

“Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope…. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our Capital….

“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day.”

Garfield’s grand words obscured the extraordinary human cost of the war to defend the U.S. government. Almost seven years before, on July 14, 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict, Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote his final letter to “My Very Dear Wife,” Sarah. Ballou anticipated the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, and wanted to explain why he was willing to give up his life for his country, and what it would cost.

“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready,” he wrote. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.

“The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us.”

Ballou fell at the Battle of Bull Run. Sarah never remarried.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

U.S. Economy, Tariffs, Markets, Jobs 

Receipts via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump’s Tariffs Have Created an Economic Sh*tshow Beyond Your Wildest Imagination, Catherine Rampell, above, May 24, 2026. My very first Bulwark newsletter back in November laid out the case for why a Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s tariffs could boost the economy. Welp. The tariff refunds are finally coming out in dribs and drabs, plus interest, and yet there’s no economic boom in sight. This week’s newsletter looks at why.

The answer, in short, is that tariff-related uncertainty persists, because Trump has tried to cobble together different tariffs to replace the ones the justices took away. And so businesses remain paralyzed by uncertainty—not to mention fear of retaliation, if they do claim the refunds they’re owed.

NOT EVEN DONALD TRUMP’S FAVORITE BRANDS are safe from his economic abuse. Consider the case of Florsheim Shoes, which sells the black leather oxfords famously modeled by Trump’s cabinet members.

“The tariffs have changed fifteen times,” recounts Thomas Florsheim Jr., whose great-great-grandfather founded the brand in 1892. “I think that many businesses felt that the Trump administration was going to be pro-business. And, you know, with the tariff situation, somehow the pro-business thing got lost.”

Florsheim is CEO of Weyco Group, a publicly traded company based in Glendale, Wisconsin that sells several other footwear brands (including Nunn Bush and Stacy Adams) in addition to the family’s eponymous line. Today, Weyco employs about 350 people in the United States. These employees work in design, accounting, warehousing, IT, sales, marketing, logistics, customer service, and so on.

In other words, they do pretty much everything you can think of related to selling shoes except physically manufacture them.

That’s because Weyco shoes, like 99 percent of the footwear sold in this country, are made abroad.¹ Virtually the entire industry shifted overseas decades ago, and it is not coming back. Shoe manufacturing is relatively low on the value chain and requires demanding, labor-intensive work, which makes it prohibitively expensive at U.S. wages.

“You really can’t make shoes and sell them in the U.S. unless you want to sell shoes for more than $300,” he says. Florsheim shoes typically retail at less than half that price.

Which is why the whole tariff thing has been so frustrating. Trump’s trade wars have jeopardized the jobs of the hundreds of Americans whom Weyco actually does employ, in those twenty-first-century jobs that the United States excels at creating. And it’s not clear why domestically manufactured wingtips or penny loafers would be of critical strategic interest to U.S. national security, anyway.

Yet at times over the past year, overall tariffs on Weyco shoes reached as high as 161 percent. Which adds up. Over the ten months following “Liberation Day,” Weyco paid the government roughly $21 million in import duties. Florsheim was able to pass along a relatively small proportion of those costs to customers, raising prices just once by 10 percent. His options were limited both because (1) Weyco was already locked into a spring price list for its retailer clients long before Liberation Day, and (2) consumers wouldn’t tolerate price increases much higher than 10 percent. Beyond that point, the company risked losing sales entirely.

Last December, Weyco got hit with a surprise tariff bill for over $1 million. Thomas Florsheim decided he’d had enough.

His company sued the Trump administration, arguing

in its complaint that courts should “declare the President’s unprecedented power grab illegal,” and “reaffirm this country’s core founding principle: there shall be no taxation without representation and order the immediate refund, with interest, of all of the unlawful duties collected from plaintiffs.” Thousands of other companies filed their own suits as well.

Fortunately for Florsheim—and his company’s employees, shareholders, and customers—the Supreme Court saw things the same way. In February, the Court declared most of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. But it didn’t set up a process for giving back the illegally collected funds. The administration initially threatened not to return the money—until another court forced it to do so, which led to the creation of a convoluted, expensive process that companies must opt into if they want to recoup those illegal costs.

But now, some companies are finally seeing payouts. On Tuesday, the first $1.5 million in tariff refunds hit Weyco’s bank account. Florsheim is still waiting on the rest. So are many thousands of other companies all over the country, which are now watching rebates (and interest payments) dribble out. About $35.5 billion has been cleared for refund so far, according to a May 12 court filing.

The money is certainly welcome. But it’s hardly enough to make companies like Florsheim’s whole. It also comes nowhere close to ending the struggles caused by Trump’s trade wars, which continue to function as a boot—or maybe a black Oxford?—on the neck of the U.S. economy.

Gangster Economics

The cost of Trump’s trade wars is often measured in the dollar value of the tariffs remitted to Customs and Border Protection—i.e., the roughly $166 billion in tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court. But in reality, the cost is much greater, and often harder to quantify.

It includes lost sales; soured relationships with longtime customers, both domestically and abroad; and the endless resources spent securing warehouses, or canceling and uncanceling production orders, or scheduling and rescheduling container shipments. It includes travel spent scouting out new factory locations in lower-tariff countries, only to find that Trump has picked a fight with those places, too. Then there are the employees who were laid off and contracts that were severed as companies tried to offset their higher costs from materials, equipment, and finished goods they import.

Layer onto that the paralyzing uncertainty caused by an ever-changing set of rules, which make it hard to plan any kind of investment or expansion. And finally, not least, there is the lingering, corrosive fear of retaliation—the concern that a company might accidentally displease the president while trying to do right by their customers and shareholders.

It is for this last reason that some firms are forgoing refunds entirely, despite being entitled to them. And no wonder: Trump himself has suggested the tariffs are part of his protection(ist) racket. “If they don’t do that, I’ll remember them,” told CNBC last month, after being informed that some large companies like Amazon were not applying for refunds.

More On U.S. Media, Culture, Religion, Education

CBS Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/

Steady with Dan Rather, Commentary: A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather, right, May 24,  2026. Stephen Colbert signed off from the Ed Sullivan Theater for the final time on Thursday night.

Although the circumstances of his departure from the CBS airwaves were nothing to smile about, his grace and humor certainly are. He and his 11-year run as the host of the most watched late night talk show, “The Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” are this week’s reason to smile.

Colbert’s final weeks were a star-studded affair with guest after guest serenading the comedian with songs they had customized to the occasion, with rewritten lyrics.

Colbert, a singer in his own right, was a champion of music and musical theater. So it is not surprising that he ended his last show with a song. Not just any song, and not just with any guests.

Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, his former band leader, and Louis Cato, his current one, joined Colbert in a joyous rendition of the Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye,’ to bring the show to a close.

What a poignant moment it was with McCartney performing on the same stage where the Beatles made their American debut in 1964, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

In 2015, Colbert took the reins of “The Late Show” from the legendary David Letterman, who hosted the show for 22 years. The 2016 presidential election allowed Colbert to make a name for himself as a funny and insightful observer of American politics. He never looked back nor shied away from criticizing those in power.

While Colbert may be done with CBS, don’t think he won’t be back on TV soon and in a better place. As they say, please stand by.

The Mayday Network, What the F CBS?, Michaelle Kinney and Julie Roginsk, May 24, 2026. Yesterday afternoon over at The Mayday Network — Julie Roginsky and I shared Stephen Colbert’s appearance on the public access show in Michigan “Only in Monroe” because we wanted to make sure as many people as possible saw it. (Fair Use!) We linked to Monroe Community Media to make sure they received everyone’s support, clicks, likes etc.

And after about 100k views Paramount/CBS swooped in to block the entire video they are claiming they own.  

May 23

Top Headlines 

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump announced that the United States is close to a peace deal with Iran, though based on the initial reports, it appears Iran may have secured many of the concessions it wanted, Aaron Parnas, right, May 23, 2026. Tonight, there was a shooting near the White House that briefly put the complex on lockdown. Two people were reportedly shot, though many details remain unclear. Meanwhile, the Ebola outbreak continues to spread rapidly, and tensions inside the Republican Party are growing as Todd Blanche was reportedly shouted down by GOP senators amid signs that Trump is losing control of the Senate. 
• New York Times, One Killed in Exchange of Gunfire With Secret Service Near White House, Campbell Robertson and Clarence Williams, May 23, 2026. A gunman who opened fire near the White House was shot and killed by federal officers, and another person was wounded by gunfire. President Trump was in the White House at the time.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Defiant After Bad Week, Trump Pushes Ahead on Politically Unpopular Ideas, Luke Broadwater, May 23, 2026. President Trump continues to act like he’s politically all-powerful, even in the face of indications that he is not.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 22, 2026 [America's 'Great Society'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 23, 2026. On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
• Detroit Free Press, Stephen Colbert hosts Michigan public access show ‘Only in Monroe’ again, Julie Hinds, May 23, 2026. After his final “The Late Show” aired on CBS May 21, Stephen Colbert made a surprise appearance the next night on what you might call his last last show. Link here.

More On U.S. Immigration, Law, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Green Card Seekers Must Leave U.S. to Apply, Trump Administration Says, Madeleine Ngo and Albert Sun, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). The change is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of people. It could also lead to more family separations as spouses or relatives wait for application decisions, immigration lawyers said.

More On Trump Team

• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Yes, This Was A Very Bad Week For Trump And The Republicans, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 23, 2026. We’ve all been searching for the right words to describe the dramatic events we saw in Washington this week - meltdown, breach, collapse, FUBAR…….
• New York Times, Tulsi Gabbard Resigns as Director of National Intelligence, Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Gabbard had a difficult tenure in the Trump administration and was seldom seen in the room when the president made important national-security moves.

More On Iran War 

 

• New York Times, Iran and U.S. Officials Signal Progress as Cease-Fire Hangs in Balance, Aaron Boxerman, Leily Nikounazar and Adam Rasgon, May 23, 2026. As people across the Middle East braced for the possibility of renewed fighting, officials from both sides said there were signs that they were moving closer to an agreement.
• New York Times, Once Trump’s Co-Pilot Against Iran, Netanyahu Is Now a Mere Passenger, David M. Halbfinger and Ronen Bergman, May 23, 2026. A partner in the war, Israel has been largely left out of the peace talks, a humbling setback for its prime minister with significant risks for the country.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

• New York Times, Investigation: Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers, Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, Photographs and Video by Erin Schaff, Graphics by Asmaa Elkeurti, May 23, 2026. The reporters obtained unpublished Medicaid spending data, reviewed court filings, interviewed current and former workers, and observed autism therapy firsthand.
• New York Times, White House Approves $9 Billion for Spy Agencies to Catch Up on A.I., Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes, May 22, 2026. The C.I.A. and N.S.A. cannot fully deploy the latest models on their classified systems because of a shortage of cutting-edge chips.

More Global News

• New York Times, France Bans Israeli Minister Over Treatment of Detained Flotilla Activists, Aaron Boxerman, May 23, 2026. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, has long drawn criticism for his hard-line statements and harsh policies against Palestinian prisoners.
• New York Times, As Ebola Rages in Countryside, Congo’s Capital Strives to Carry On, Justin Makangara and John Eligon, May 23, 2026. Kinshasa residents continue to pack markets, bars and public transportation, despite growing international concern about the spread of the virus.
• New York Times, Ebola Ward in Congo Burns After Residents Turn Against Medics, Declan Walsh, Visuals by Arlette Bashizi, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). Flying in with United Nations peacekeepers, Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reached the Congolese city at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
• New York Times, ‘A Total Nightmare’: Voices From a Moscow Hit by Ukrainian Drones, Valerie Hopkins, Photographs by Nanna Heitmann, May 23, 2026. Residents who experienced attacks in recent days were shaken deeply by the conflict coming home to the capital region, the seat of the Kremlin’s power.
• Global StratView, Congressional Briefing Highlights Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia, Mesfin Mekonen, May 22, 2026. A bipartisan congressional briefing was held in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building on May 15, 2026, focusing on the worsening human rights and humanitarian situation in Ethiopia. The event was organized by Mesfin Mekonen and supported by Senator Chris Van Hollen, who was unable to attend in person.
• New York Times, Israeli Strikes Pummel Lebanon, Killing Medics Amid Fragile Truce, Sarah Chaayto and Abdi Latif Dahir, May 23, 2026. Saturday’s strikes damaged a main hospital in the Lebanese city of Tyre, as funerals for paramedics killed a day earlier were held.

Sports, Entertainment, Culture 

• The Atlantic via New York Times, Kyle Busch died after complications from sepsis, severe pneumonia, family says, Jeff Gluck, May 23, 2026. Kyle Busch suffered from severe pneumonia that progressed into sepsis, “resulting in rapid and overwhelming associated complications,” the NASCAR driver’s family said in a statement Saturday.

Top Stories 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump announced that the United States is close to a peace deal with Iran, though based on the initial reports, it appears Iran may have secured many of the concessions it wanted, Aaron Parnas, right, May 23, 2026. Tonight, there was a shooting near the White House that briefly put the complex on lockdown. Two people were reportedly shot, though many details remain unclear. Meanwhile, the Ebola outbreak continues to spread rapidly, and tensions inside the Republican Party are growing as Todd Blanche was reportedly shouted down by GOP senators amid signs that Trump is losing control of the Senate.

I spent much of today archiving January 6-related documents. If there is a document you want preserved, let me know and I will do my best to find and archive it. We cannot allow the DOJ to rewrite history.

Here’s what you missed:

President Donald Trump said the U.S. and Iran are close to reaching an agreement to end their ongoing conflict after weeks of negotiations and a fragile ceasefire. Trump stated that most terms of the deal have been negotiated, including reopening the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, above, though final details are still being discussed with regional leaders and allies. Iranian officials confirmed that progress has been made but cautioned that no final agreement has been reached yet, with talks expected to continue for another 30 to 60 days. Despite optimism, tensions remain high as Trump warned military action could resume if negotiations fail, while critics in Congress argued that a prolonged ceasefire could weaken U.S. leverage.

Iran’s official military spokesperson Ibrahim Al-Fiqar shared this AI-generated image of Donald Trump bowing before Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with the caption “The end..”

Some supporters of the Iranian government celebrated the possible peace agreement with the United States as a political and diplomatic victory for Iran. On social media, pro-government commentators argued that Iran survived the war without surrendering and forced the U.S. to negotiate, with some portraying the outcome as a setback for President Donald Trump. One widely shared post praised Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and contrasted Trump’s earlier threats with his later announcement that talks were progressing. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, appeared to indirectly reference the negotiations by comparing them to a historical conflict in which Rome ultimately “had to come to terms” with Persia.

Leaders from several Arab and Muslim-majority countries urged President Donald Trump to accept the latest proposal to end the war with Iran during a phone call on Saturday, according to Middle Eastern officials. The discussion reportedly included officials from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, among others. Although the full terms of the proposal remain undisclosed, Trump said the agreement would include reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global oil shipping route that has been heavily affected by the conflict.

According to three senior Iranian officials that spoke to the New York Times, Iran has agreed to a draft memorandum that would stop the fighting, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and end hostilities across the region, including in Lebanon. The proposed deal would reportedly lift the U.S. naval blockade, allow unrestricted commercial shipping through the strait without Iranian tolls, and postpone difficult negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program for 30 to 60 days. Iranian officials also said the agreement would release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets overseas. Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar were reportedly involved in facilitating the draft agreement, though it remains unclear whether this is the same proposal President Donald Trump referenced publicly.

Trump may be making major concessions to Iran in a proposed peace deal involving the Strait of Hormuz. Critics argue that if Iran keeps control over shipping access while gaining sanctions relief, the agreement could strengthen Tehran’s regional influence after months of war. Supporters of the deal, however, say reopening the strait could reduce tensions and stabilize global oil markets.

Iran’s state-aligned Fars News tonight: “It should be noted that American officials have acknowledged in multiple messages to Iran that Trump's tweets are primarily for promotional purposes and media consumption within the United States, and they have recommended that no attention be paid to these statements.”

CNN reported that sounds of dozens of gunshots near the White House triggered a lockdown and a major response from the United States Secret Service. Reporters and staff were ordered to shelter in place while armed agents secured the area around 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. President Donald Trump was inside the White House residence during the incident, though no injuries or details about a suspect were immediately confirmed. The lockdown was lifted shortly afterward as authorities continued investigating the reported gunfire. Watch the moment the shots were fired captured by Selina Wang from ABC:

Fox News reported that an innocent bystander may have been struck during an exchange of gunfire between a gunman and the United States Secret Service near the White House. The bystander’s condition is currently unknown, and authorities have not yet released full details about the incident.

An Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has escalated after angry residents attacked and burned treatment centers, causing 18 suspected Ebola patients to flee into the community. Health officials say tensions have grown because authorities are enforcing strict burial rules and limiting gatherings to stop the virus from spreading. The World Health Organization warned the outbreak now poses a “very high” risk within the country, with at least 900 confirmed cases and 100 confirmed deaths, though the true numbers are believed to be much higher. Complicating the response, the outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no vaccine currently exists.

Three Red Cross volunteers in Democratic Republic of the Congo died after contracting Ebola while handling bodies during a humanitarian mission before the outbreak was officially recognized. The outbreak, caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola with no approved vaccine or treatment, has spread from Congo into Uganda and now includes hundreds of suspected cases and over 170 suspected deaths. The World Health Organization described the situation as “deeply worrisome,” warning that violence and insecurity are disrupting containment efforts. In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed travel restrictions and enhanced screening measures for travelers arriving from affected countries.

New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart introduced President Donald Trump at a rally in New York, calling it an honor to appear with him. Fellow Giants player Abdul Carter criticized the appearance on social media, reposting the video and questioning why Dart participated. Both players were first-round draft picks for the New York Giants in 2025 and are considered key young pieces of the franchise. The exchange drew attention because it highlighted political tensions between teammates on a high-profile NFL team.

Senator Ted Cruz said Republican senators were “screaming” at acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during a closed-door meeting over the Trump administration’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” compensation fund. Many GOP senators reportedly feared the fund looked like political self-dealing because it was tied to President Donald Trump dropping lawsuits related to investigations into him. The backlash was so strong that Republicans postponed a key Senate vote on ICE and Border Patrol funding after concerns that many GOP senators would side with Democrats to restrict the fund. Several lawmakers from both parties criticized the proposal, arguing Congress had little oversight and warning it could potentially compensate people involved in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Emergency crews in California are racing to prevent a possible explosion or toxic spill from a 7,000-gallon tank of methyl methacrylate at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove, prompting evacuations affecting about 40,000 residents. Officials said the tank’s temperature has continued rising despite overnight cooling efforts, raising fears of an explosion, toxic vapor release, or environmental contamination. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as firefighters and hazmat teams worked to stabilize the situation and prepare for multiple disaster scenarios. While no injuries or dangerous air contamination have been reported so far, authorities remain on high alert because the chemical can cause respiratory irritation and other health risks.

According to Politico, some congressional Republicans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal housing and community development programs that support affordable housing projects. GOP lawmakers, including Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith, Shelley Moore Capito, and John Kennedy, argued the programs are valuable for local communities and should be preserved or reformed rather than abolished. The White House claimed the grants had been used for liberal policy goals, but congressional Republicans signaled they are unlikely to support cuts of that scale, especially with housing affordability becoming a major issue ahead of the 2026 elections. Lawmakers from both parties are instead working on bipartisan legislation aimed at increasing housing supply and lowering costs.

Russia launched what Ukrainian officials described as a “massive” missile attack on Kyiv after President Vladimir Putin ordered retaliation for a deadly Ukrainian strike in occupied territory. Ukrainian authorities warned that Russia may have used Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missiles, while the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv also alerted citizens to the possibility of an imminent attack. Moscow claimed Ukraine killed 18 children in a drone strike on a dormitory in occupied Luhansk, though Ukraine denied targeting civilians and said it only struck military facilities connected to Russian drone operations. The escalation comes amid intensifying long-range Ukrainian attacks on Russian military infrastructure and growing fears of a wider expansion of the war.

Video of the missile strikes tonight:

Pope Leo XIV visited southern Italy to meet families affected by decades of illegal toxic waste dumping linked to the mafia-controlled Camorra. Speaking in the region known as the “Land of Fires” near Naples, the pope condemned the “unscrupulous people and organizations” responsible for pollution tied to increased cancer rates and other illnesses. He framed the environmental damage as both a human tragedy and a moral failure, continuing the ecological priorities championed by Pope Francis. Residents and local clergy urged stronger action from authorities, saying generations of families have suffered from toxic contamination and inadequate government response.

Poland is considering action against former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro after he traveled to the United States on a journalist visa while facing 26 criminal charges in Poland. Polish officials accuse Ziobro of misusing public funds and deploying Pegasus spyware against political opponents, allegations he denies as politically motivated by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government. Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski questioned whether Ziobro improperly obtained a journalist visa and said Warsaw has expressed its concerns to U.S. authorities. Ziobro, who had previously received asylum in Hungary under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, says he will fight any extradition attempt in U.S. courts.

New York Times, One Killed in Exchange of Gunfire With Secret Service Near White House, Campbell Robertson and Clarence Williams, May 23, 2026. A gunman who opened fire near the White House was shot and killed by federal officers, and another person was wounded by gunfire. President Trump was in the White House at the time.

A man took a gun out of a bag and fired a volley of shots near the White House on Saturday evening before being shot and fatally wounded by U.S. Secret Service police officers, the Secret Service said in a statement.

A bystander was also struck by gunfire, the statement said, though it did not give details on the nature or severity of the injuries. It was unclear who fired the shot that struck the bystander.

The gunman was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. No officers were injured, the Secret Service said.

The shooting took place a little after 6 p.m. near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, at the northwestern corner of the White House grounds.

President Trump, who was in the building at the time the gunfire occurred, had made it known on Friday that he would be spending the holiday weekend at the White House.

Allison Robbert, a photographer for The New York Times, said that about 20 to 30 gunshots were heard from the north lawn of the White House.

“Journalists heard it from outside the press room and were ushered inside by Secret Service,” she said in a text message.

Selina Wang, a senior White House correspondent for ABC News, posted a video on social media of her recording a report when what sounds like gunfire can be heard in the background.

She was about three seconds into the recording when the noises are heard, and she heads to the floor for cover.

New York Times, News Analysis: Defiant After Bad Week, Trump Pushes Ahead on Politically Unpopular Ideas, Luke Broadwater, May 23, 2026. President Trump continues to act like he’s politically all-powerful, even in the face of indications that he is not.

By pretty much any estimation, President Trump has had a very bad week.

New poll numbers show his approval rating has hit a second-term low. He is weighing whether to restart a bombing campaign in an unpopular war against Iran. Gas prices are high and inching higher heading into Memorial Day weekend. And his grip over Republican lawmakers is beginning to slip after he proposed a pair of deeply unpopular spending items, prompting an unusual revolt from the Senate.

When faced with such a backlash ahead of midterm elections, many politicians would pivot, redirecting their focus to issues they are on stronger footing with.

But Mr. Trump has decided to double down, presenting himself as politically all-powerful even in the face of indications that he is not.

Over the years, Mr. Trump has often appeared to have an air of invincibility. He survived assassination attempts and won re-election despite being under multiple criminal indictments. He has successfully exacted retribution on many a perceived enemy. Now, with less than three years left in office, he seems comfortable burning whatever political capital he has in order to leave his legacy, even if it drags his party down in the process.

Rather than abandoning his plan for a $1.8 billion fund to reward allies who claim they were persecuted by Democrats, Mr. Trump has defended the proposal, suggesting he could have used the taxpayer money to enrich himself.

“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward. I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” the president wrote on social media. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

His acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, also attempted to defend the plan in a hostile meeting with Senate Republicans.

Inside the room, Mr. Blanche came under withering questioning and criticism. Several Republicans spoke up to express worry that the fund would be used to provide money to people who had attacked police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and were later pardoned by Mr. Trump.

The meeting went so poorly for Mr. Blanche that party leaders scrapped planned votes on another of Mr. Trump’s top priorities: a $72 billion immigration crackdown measure lawmakers had planned to muscle through before Memorial Day.

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 22, 2026 [America's 'Great Society'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 23, 2026. On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing all of the problems in the country. “But I do promise this,” he said. “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.

Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity that would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.

When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.

“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

More On U.S. Immigration, Law, Rights, Justice

New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Green Card Seekers Must Leave U.S. to Apply, Trump Administration Says, Madeleine Ngo and Albert Sun, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). The change is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of people. It could also lead to more family separations as spouses or relatives wait for application decisions, immigration lawyers said.

The Trump administration said on Friday that most foreigners seeking green cards will have to return to their home countries to apply, a remarkable change that could make it more difficult for hundreds of thousands of people to obtain permanent residency.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the legal immigration system, said it would grant green cards to people inside the country only in “extraordinary circumstances.” People applying for permanent residency, which is one step away from citizenship, will have to go through consular processing outside the country instead, according to a memo issued by the agency.

“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” Zach Kahler, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”

The change could upend the lives of people who entered the country lawfully through temporary visas and are seeking green cards to remain in the United States, including students, spouses of U.S. citizens and a wide range of foreign workers. The process of obtaining a green card — which gives immigrants the right to live in the country permanently and provides a path to citizenship — takes months or longer, meaning families could be separated for extended periods.

The memo was immediately met with confusion and chaos as immigration lawyers scrambled to understand which exceptions would be granted. Many also expected the policy change to be met with legal challenges.

The agency did not detail which groups would be eligible for an exception, only suggesting that refugees would not be subject. Mr. Kahler said in a statement that people who “provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path.”

It was unclear, though, which foreign workers would be exempt and if exceptions would extend to skilled foreign workers on H-1B visas, for instance.

The policy is a major escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb legal immigration and reflects how the president’s crackdown has broadened beyond immigrants living in the country unlawfully. Federal officials have in recent months sought to strip some naturalized citizens of their status and review thousands of green card holders to root out immigrants they believe should be deported.

The change is likely to lead to more families being separated as spouses or relatives wait for decisions on their applications, immigration lawyers and former homeland security officials said. It could also lead to longer processing times as consulates around the world manage an influx of new cases.

“Our consular processing system through which they would have to apply is already overburdened,” said Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at Citizenship and Immigration Services who is now the director of social policy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “So that means we could have families separated for months or years.”

About 1.4 million green cards were granted in 2024, with more than 820,000 approved for people inside the country through a process called “adjustment of status,” according to Department of Homeland Security data. Over the past two decades, more than 500,000 people have received green cards via adjustment of status each year, except for in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

More On Trump Team

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Yes, This Was A Very Bad Week For Trump And The Republicans, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 23, 2026. We’ve all been searching for the right words to describe the dramatic events we saw in Washington this week - meltdown, breach, collapse, FUBAR…….

Let’s spend the morning rummaging through the Trumpian rubble. Trump ends the week with this his worst poll numbers of the second term on FiftyPlusOne’s job approval average.

His staggering unpopularity is starting to show up now in the generic ballot. The NYT and Quinnipiac this week had Dems with an 11 point lead, and the Real Clear Politics average is now D+ 7.4, higher than it was on Election Day on 2018, an election we won by 8.6 points. Big yikes!

A generic ballot of D+ 7.4 is a 9 point shift since early 2025 in the national battlefield yielding a Senate battlefield that gives the Dems a shot to take back the majority in what is a very tough 2026 map for us. Here is a selection of recent Senate polls.

The influential University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey released on Friday not only showed it’s lowest reading in 65 years, look at this summary of their findings:

Consumer sentiment fell for the third straight month as supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continue to boost gasoline prices. Sentiment is now just below the previous historical trough seen in June 2022. The cost of living continues to be a first-order concern, with 57% of consumers spontaneously mentioning that high prices were eroding their personal finances, up from 50% last month. Lower-income consumers and those without college degrees posted particularly strong sentiment declines; these groups are more sensitive to increases in the cost of gas and other essentials. Independents and Republicans saw decreases in sentiment, with both groups reaching their lowest readings of the current presidential administration. Meanwhile, sentiment of Democrats was little changed from last month. Critically, consumers appear worried that inflation will increase and proliferate beyond fuel prices, even in the long run.

Look at these charts! Holy Trump is a huge fuck-up Batman!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! h

Here’s the lead story in the NYT this morning:

By pretty much any estimation, President Trump has had a very bad week.

New poll numbers show his approval rating has hit a second-term low. He is weighing whether to restart a bombing campaign in an unpopular war against Iran. Gas prices are high and inching higher heading into Memorial Day weekend. And his grip over Republican lawmakers is beginning to slip after he proposed a pair of deeply unpopular spending items, prompting an unusual revolt from the Senate.

When faced with such a backlash ahead of midterm elections, many politicians would pivot, redirecting their focus to issues they are on stronger footing with.

But Mr. Trump has decided to double down, presenting himself as politically all-powerful even in the face of indications that he is not.

From The Hill this morning:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) says that about half the Senate Republican Conference blasted acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at an explosive meeting in the Capitol on Thursday, summing up his GOP colleagues’ anger over a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund as “fireworks at an epic level.”

Cruz said he was surprised by the outpouring of anger and frustration directed at Blanche in the Capitol’s wood-empaneled Mansfield Room when Blanche showed up to defend the administration’s proposal to compensate people who believe they were unjustly investigated or prosecuted by the Biden-era Justice Department.

“There were fireworks at an epic level, and I got to say it’s one of the roughest meetings that I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate. There were a lot of Republican senators who were just pissed,” Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

As we’ve been discussing this week as bad as things are now for Trump and the Rs it is likely to get worse. Soon Washington will come to understand that Trump has lost the war to Iran and has done enormous harm to our national security and global standing. Orban is gone, and Putin is losing his war too. Trump is likely to be rebuked in Congress on both the Iranian and Ukrainian wars in the coming days, an extraordinary humiliation. The dramatic cuts to our health care system are going to start to be felt by more people. His greed and gluttony has made his escalating, historic corruption impossible to hide or ignore. Things almost always get worse for the party in power as we get closer to the election, and today we are already sitting at 2018 general election blow out levels with more room for Rs to fall. Ugly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For months I’ve been arguing that there were limits to what the Congressional Republicans would be willing to do. We are hitting them now, and while it won’t be neat and clear, perhaps something a like rough national unity government could emerge in the coming months, one where members of both parties begin working together, regularly to block Trump and even attempt to repeal some of the terrible things he has done. For part of what happened this week is that many Republicans began seeing Trump as we see him: old, unhinged, corrupt, reckless, failed, ridiculous, dangerous, and irredeemable……

New York Times, Tulsi Gabbard Resigns as Director of National Intelligence, Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Gabbard had a difficult tenure in the Trump administration and was seldom seen in the room when the president made important national-security moves.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and an advocate of a more restrained foreign policy, submitted a letter of resignation to President Trump on Friday, saying that she was stepping away to support her husband after he recently was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.

The departure will bring an end to Ms. Gabbard’s rocky tenure overseeing the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, during which she had been largely sidelined by the White House on significant national-security issues, including military operations in Iran and Venezuela.

Mr. Trump assembled a second administration last year with an unusual mix of foreign-policy hawks in one corner and critics of American entanglements overseas like Ms. Gabbard in the other. But Ms. Gabbard and her wing found themselves increasingly marginalized in recent months, and her departure marks the most significant exit yet from the coalition of restrainers.

In her letter Friday, Ms. Gabbard, 45, said she would remain in her post as the nation’s intelligence chief until June 30.

“My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” Ms. Gabbard said in her resignation letter, a copy of which was released by her office. “He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.” Ms. Gabbard has been married to Abraham Williams, a cinematographer, since 2015.Thumbnail of page 1Read Tulsi Gabbard’s Resignation Letter

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told President Trump in a letter on Friday that she was stepping down to support her husband after his diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer.Read Document 1 page

Mr. Trump announced that Aaron Lukas, Ms. Gabbard’s deputy, would serve as acting director of national intelligence.

It was not clear whom Mr. Trump intended to nominate to replace Ms. Gabbard, a combat veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who ran for president in 2020 before breaking with her party to support Mr. Trump in 2024.

Mr. Trump did not force Ms. Gabbard to resign on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter, but her standing and influence within the White House had continued to erode in recent months.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump thanked her for her service in the administration. “Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her,” he wrote.

Democrats, while expressing sympathy for Ms. Gabbard and her husband, made clear they had been dismayed by her performance. “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump must not treat this vacancy as another opportunity to reward loyalty over competence,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said in a statement.

Ms. Gabbard had been a controversial figure in the Trump administration. She was seldom seen in the room when Mr. Trump made major national-security decisions and was widely viewed within the administration and by lawmakers in Congress as not a key member of the president’s team.

Her problems began soon after she was narrowly confirmed to the job last year following an especially contentious confirmation hearing. Several Republican senators joined Democrats in aggressively questioning her about some of her past views, including her defenses of the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator.

As a fierce critic of the war in Iraq, Ms. Gabbard was closely aligned at times with Vice President JD Vance. But that put her out of step with Mr. Trump and many of his most influential advisers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who pressed for an increasingly aggressive foreign policy in Latin America and Iran.

Despite conflicting foreign policy views, Ms. Gabbard at times managed her relationship with Mr. Trump, and won support from him with her work on election security and her surprise appearance early this year at an F.B.I. seizure of 2020 vote ballots in Georgia.

And Ms. Gabbard pleased Mr. Trump with her criticism of Obama-era investigations of Russia election meddling. “She’s, like, hotter than everybody. She’s the hottest one in the room right now,” Mr. Trump said last July, after Ms. Gabbard amplified without evidence claims that the Obama administration had deliberately overstated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The praise came just weeks after Mr. Trump excoriated Ms. Gabbard over a video she had filmed during a trip to Asia that he saw as self-promotional, according to two people with knowledge of what had happened.

But as she variously pleased and disappointed Mr. Trump, Ms. Gabbard quickly developed a strained relationship with the C.I.A. as well as the broader U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former American officials. She presided over significant turnover at her agency headquarters in Liberty Crossing, Va., and supported efforts by Mr. Trump to rescind security clearances of intelligence officials viewed by the president and his allies as either disloyal or corrupt.

Mr. Trump had given Ms. Gabbard a mandate to shrink the size of her office, and she pursued that with vigor. She slashed the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which tracked adversarial efforts to interfere in American politics, and made other changes.

But her diminished stature in the administration became more visible in recent months. During the planning for the attacks on Iran and the January military raid to seize President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, it was the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, who emerged as the most influential voice on intelligence matters. When Mr. Trump’s closest advisers met, it was Mr. Ratcliffe who delivered the intelligence assessments, not Ms. Gabbard.

Tensions between the C.I.A. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was created after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001 to ensure better coordination of U.S. intelligence, rose throughout Ms. Gabbard’s 15-month tenure because of what some intelligence officials saw as political stunts. She stripped the security clearance of a senior C.I.A. officer who had been tapped for an overseas assignment. She ousted some respected career C.I.A. officers from posts held within her office.

There were also turf battles. Ms. Gabbard sought to move production of parts of the President’s Daily Brief — a daily compendium of the most important intelligence insights generated by U.S. spy agencies — from C.I.A. headquarters to her own. While Ms. Gabbard’s office oversees the brief, much of the work of pulling together the material for the president and other senior leaders is done at the agency.

Ms. Gabbard also was in a dispute with the F.B.I. about whether her office should have ultimate oversight over counterintelligence efforts, for which the bureau has long had primary responsibility. F.B.I. leaders also were upset by the efforts of Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counter Terrorism Center and a close aide to Ms. Gabbard, to investigate the killing of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist.

More On Iran War

 

New York Times, Iran and U.S. Officials Signal Progress as Cease-Fire Hangs in Balance, Aaron Boxerman, Leily Nikounazar and Adam Rasgon, May 23, 2026. As people across the Middle East braced for the possibility of renewed fighting, officials from both sides said there were signs that they were moving closer to an agreement.

Iranian and American officials said there was progress on Saturday in last-ditch diplomatic efforts to stave off a return to full-scale war, as a monthlong cease-fire between the two sides hung in the balance.

Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Washington and Tehran were in the “final stage” of drafting what he called a “memorandum of understanding.” He said the framework would most likely push discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, a sticking point in negotiations, to a later stage.

“Whether, in later stages over the next 30 or 60 days, we discuss nuclear matters or other issues that may be agreed upon is a separate matter,” Mr. Baghaei said in comments carried by Iranian state media. “At this stage, our entire focus is on ending the war.”

“The positions of the two sides are becoming closer,” he added. “We may be able to reach a mutually acceptable solution.”

There was no immediate comment from the White House. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled on Saturday that the two sides could be moving closer to an agreement, even as he left open the option of renewed military action. President Trump has repeatedly threatened in recent days to resume strikes on Iran.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

“There’s been some progress done,” said Mr. Rubio during an official visit to India, adding that there could “be news later today.”

“Even as I speak to you now, there’s some work being done,” he said.

Later, in an interview with CBS News, Mr. Trump said the two sides were “getting a lot closer” to finalizing an agreement.

A senior official from a regional country involved in the mediation efforts, ​and with direct knowledge of the talks, said ​on Saturday that the United States and Iran appeared close to a deal.

But the signals of progress were accompanied by threats from Iran. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator and parliamentary speaker, said that Iran’s military had been rebuilt during the cease-fire, according to Iranian state media.He went on to say that “if Trump acts foolishly and the war resumes, the response against the United States will certainly be more crushing and bitter than on the first day of the war.”

Mr. Ghalibaf reportedly made the comments during a meeting with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, who left Tehran on Saturday after meeting with Iranian officials. Mr. Munir has played a central role in mediation efforts, and his overnight visit was seen as an intensification in shuttle diplomacy.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump also spoke with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, to discuss “regional and international efforts to stabilize the cease-fire,” according to a statement by Sheikh Tamim’s office. A Qatari delegation had joined Pakistani mediators in Iran, two diplomats with knowledge of the mediation efforts said on Friday.

Mr. Trump also planned to have a call with many leaders of Arab and Muslim-majority nations on Saturday afternoon, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Turkey, according to three Arab officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

The United States, Israel and Iran agreed a cease-fire in early April after more than a month of war. The truce was intended to allow for talks on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for oil and gas shipping that Iran has effectively closed since the early days of the war, causing energy prices to soar worldwide.

New York Times, Once Trump’s Co-Pilot Against Iran, Netanyahu Is Now a Mere Passenger, David M. Halbfinger and Ronen Bergman, May 23, 2026. A partner in the war, Israel has been largely left out of the peace talks, a humbling setback for its prime minister with significant risks for the country.

In the run-up to the Feb. 28 attack on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, right, was not only in the Situation Room with President Trump, he was leading the discussion, predicting that a joint U.S.-Israeli strike could very well lead to the demise of the Islamic Republic.

Just a few weeks later, after those sanguine assurances proved inaccurate, the picture was starkly different. Israel was so thoroughly sidelined by the Trump administration, two Israeli defense officials said, that its leaders were cut almost entirely out of the loop on truce talks between the United States and Iran.

Starved of information from their closest ally, the Israelis have been forced to pick up what they can about the back-and-forth between Washington and Tehran through their connections with leaders and diplomats in the region as well as their own surveillance from inside the Iranian regime, said the two officials. Like others for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The banishment from the cockpit to economy class has potentially significant consequences for Israel, and especially for the prime minister, who faces an uphill re-election battle this year.

Mr. Netanyahu has long sold himself to Israeli voters as a kind of Trump whisperer, uniquely capable of enlisting and retaining the president’s support. In a televised speech early in the war, he portrayed himself as the president’s peer, assuring Israelis that he talked to Mr. Trump “almost every day,” exchanging ideas and advice, “and deciding together.”

He had led Israel to war in February with grand visions of achieving a goal he has pursued for decades: stopping Iran’s push for nuclear weapons once and for all. As the war began with a stunning decapitation of much of the government in Tehran, it seemed as though an even more grandiose dream might come true: the toppling of the regime.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

New York Times, Investigation: Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers, Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, Photographs and Video by Erin Schaff, Graphics by Asmaa Elkeurti, May 23, 2026. The reporters obtained unpublished Medicaid spending data, reviewed court filings, interviewed current and former workers, and observed autism therapy firsthand.

The industry has grown rapidly, straining state budgets. A focus on finances has led to overbilling, fraud and even harm.

On a sunny Wednesday morning last month, dozens of preschoolers filed into a Compleat Kidz autism clinic in Concord, N.C. One wore light-up sneakers. Another had a Spider-Man lunchbox. They settled into tiny green cubicles, each accompanied by a staff member, and started their work.

A decade ago, this Charlotte suburb had no clinics providing therapy to children with autism. Now it has 12. Inside this one, children buzzed with activity as they worked long sessions with therapists. One 6-year-old girl, exhausted after hours of therapy, fell fast asleep in her therapist’s lap.

Soon, a supervisor, Stephen Schroeder, intervened.

“How long?” Mr. Schroeder asked Courtney Evans, the therapist.

“I set the timer for 7. We’re almost done,” Ms. Evans said. A couple of minutes later, she nudged the child awake. The girl cried.

At Compleat Kidz, a fast-growing chain of autism clinics based in North Carolina, the policy is firm: Naps cannot be longer than seven minutes before children are awakened to resume therapy. The company says this is necessary to prevent fraud since clinics can be paid only when children are awake and getting services. But it also allows the clinic to bill insurers or Medicaid for more hours.

Across the United States, where treatment for autistic children was once fairly rare, thousands of clinics have sprung up, turning a once obscure therapy into a multibillion-dollar industry. The growth has been fueled by rising autism diagnoses, state insurance mandates and a federal requirement that Medicaid cover the therapy. Private equity investors have rushed into the business, buying up chains and opening new clinics.ImageSeveral instructors stand at cubicles with green walls in a large autism facility. Toys, desks and other learning materials fill the cubicles, while play areas and colorful posters line parts of the green wall.A Compleat Kidz clinic in Concord, N.C., last month. It is one of 12 nearby clinics providing therapy to children with autism, four of them within a five-minute drive of this one.

A New York Times investigation has found that this rapid expansion has played out with little regulatory oversight and brought allegations of children being harmed by profit-motivated practices. In interviews, dozens of current and former clinic workers described how clinics frequently overprescribe hours — even recommending that some families remove children from school so they can receive more therapy.

Marquisha Richards worked at two private-equity-backed chains in Texas. She said she became disillusioned about how financial considerations repeatedly drove care decisions. “The science is beautiful, but the industry is very ugly,” she said.

Nationwide, Medicaid spending on autism therapy nearly tripled between 2020 and 2024. In some states it grew much faster: Colorado Medicaid now spends more on autism therapy than on all emergency department visits. North Carolina, which spent $121 million in 2022, projects it will spend over $1 billion next year.

More Global News 

New York Times, Israeli Strikes Pummel Lebanon, Killing Medics Amid Fragile Truce, Sarah Chaayto and Abdi Latif Dahir, May 23, 2026. Saturday’s strikes damaged a main hospital in the Lebanese city of Tyre, as funerals for paramedics killed a day earlier were held.

Dozens of Israeli airstrikes pounded Lebanon late Friday and early Saturday, killing and injuring several people, Lebanon’s national news agency said, exposing the mounting strain on a truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The strikes mostly hit towns and villages in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel is occupying large swaths of territory and where tens of thousands of residents remain displaced. The Israeli military also issued new evacuation warnings on Saturday afternoon for several towns across southern Lebanon.

A truce first reached in mid-April was meant to ease weeks of violence, but near-daily airstrikes still disrupt life and deepen uncertainty for people across the country. The cease-fire formed part of a broader arrangement involving Iran, which regional mediators have spent recent days trying to turn into a more permanent agreement amid fears that it could unravel and trigger renewed American-Israeli strikes.

Saturday’s attacks come just a day after Israeli strikes killed six paramedics in two episodes in southern Lebanon within 24 hours, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Over 120 med

Global StratView, Congressional Briefing Highlights Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia, Mesfin Mekonen, May 22, 2026. A bipartisan congressional briefing was held in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building on May 15, 2026, focusing on the worsening human rights and humanitarian situation in Ethiopia. The event was organized by Mesfin Mekonen and supported by Senator Chris Van Hollen, who was unable to attend in person.

The briefing brought together members of Congress and congressional staff with a wide range of participants, including human rights advocates, journalists, policy experts, and members of the Ethiopian American community. The purpose of the session was to provide updated, evidence-based information on conditions inside Ethiopia and to encourage support for H.Res. 937.Ethiopia’s Strategic Importance and Regional Implications

Speakers underscored Ethiopia’s critical geopolitical role as Africa’s second most populous nation, with a population exceeding 135 million people. Long viewed as a key security partner in counterterrorism and regional stability efforts, Ethiopia’s internal instability was described as carrying significant risks for the broader Horn of Africa.

Participants warned that continued conflict and fragmentation could destabilize neighboring states, threaten vital Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab maritime trade routes, and create opportunities for expanded influence by geopolitical competitors, including China and Russia. Ethiopia’s recent accession to BRICS was also cited as a sign of shifting global alignments away from traditional Western partnerships.Humanitarian Crisis and Civilian Impact

Presenters described a severe and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation:

Approximately 5 million people displaced by conflict More than 10 million people facing food insecurity An estimated 4.5 million students out of school in the Amhara region alone Restricted humanitarian access to multiple conflict-affected areas

Speakers noted that the Amhara and Afar regions in particular were receiving limited formal government assistance, with humanitarian gaps increasingly filled by private donors and religious institutions, including the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Reports cited during the briefing referenced documentation from the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department, describing allegations of arbitrary detention, civilian casualties, sexual violence, drone strikes in populated areas, destruction of essential infrastructure, and attacks on religious institutions.

Some speakers referenced reports—attributed to international media sources—alleging large-scale sexual violence, including claims reported by the BBC regarding thousands of women subjected to rape in conflict zones. These figures were presented as reported allegations within ongoing investigations and advocacy documentation.Genocide Watch and Early Warning Analysis

A central voice at the briefing was Dr. Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch. Dr. Stanton, known globally for developing the “Ten Stages of Genocide” framework, has repeatedly warned of the risks of escalating ethnic violence and mass atrocity crimes in Ethiopia.

His analysis has been widely referenced in human rights advocacy circles as an early-warning framework for identifying patterns of systematic abuse, political repression, and ethnic targeting.Testimonies from Journalists and Field Observers

Photojournalist Jemal Countess, who documented multiple assignments in Ethiopia between 2020 and 2022 for Getty Images and UPI, described witnessing extensive violence during his reporting. He highlighted particularly severe conditions affecting civilians in conflict-affected areas of Oromia, including the Wollega region.

Countess described patterns of ethnic violence and human rights abuses affecting civilians, including women and children, and noted that his reporting on these events ultimately led to his inability to return to Ethiopia.Religious Persecution and Cultural Heritage Concerns

Several speakers focused on escalating attacks on Ethiopian Orthodox Christian communities, including reported killings of clergy, destruction of churches, and damage to monasteries, particularly in the Amhara region.

Scott Morgan of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable noted that Ethiopia is listed 33rd on Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List for Christian persecution. He also referenced the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), observing that Ethiopia has not yet been designated as a “Country of Particular Concern,” a status some participants argued should be reconsidered.

The discussion emphasized growing concern over threats to religious freedom and the preservation of Ethiopia’s historic Christian heritage.Regional Security Risks and Cross-Border Concerns

Blanquita Cullum of The National Security Hour highlighted Ethiopia’s historical identity as one of the world’s oldest Christian civilizations and warned that rising instability could have broader implications for regional security.

Participants also discussed concerns raised by Scott Morgan regarding Ethiopia’s alleged involvement in regional conflicts, including claims related to Sudan and the potential for cross-border escalation. The briefing referenced reports of tensions along border areas, including incidents near Kurmuk, as indicative of expanding regional instability.Policy Analysis and Governance Critique

Dr. Aklog Birara, vice chairman of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Ethiopian People, presented a detailed assessment of Ethiopia’s internal political crisis.

He argued that ethnic-based governance structures, ongoing armed conflict, and state repression have contributed to widespread instability, civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of essential services such as schools and healthcare facilities across multiple regions, including Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Afar.

Dr. Birara called for urgent international action, including independent investigations, accountability mechanisms, humanitarian access, political dialogue, and constitutional reform. He urged coordinated engagement by the United States, European Union, African Union, and United Nations.Calls for Congressional Action

Speakers converged on a unified policy recommendation: congressional support for H.Res. 937. The resolution calls for:

Condemnation of human rights violations Targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act Independent international investigations Protection of civilians and religious communities Strengthened U.S. engagement on human rights and accountability h

Advocates emphasized that timely congressional action could help elevate international attention and pressure for diplomatic and humanitarian intervention.Media, Accountability, and Advocacy Strategies

Andrew Kreig emphasized the role of media strategy, legal advocacy, and international accountability mechanisms in addressing human rights abuses. He noted that sustained documentation, strategic communication, and engagement with policymakers are essential tools for influencing government action in the United States and abroad.

Additional recommendations included submitting verified documentation to relevant U.S. agencies, strengthening engagement with congressional offices, and maintaining sustained constituent advocacy to elevate Ethiopia as a foreign policy priority.Strategic U.S.–Ethiopia Relations

Youm Fesseha of AEPAC highlighted the long-standing diplomatic relationship between the United States and Ethiopia, which dates back to 1903. He emphasized Ethiopia’s historic role as a regional partner in peacekeeping and security cooperation, as well as its continued strategic importance in counterterrorism and Horn of Africa stability.

With its large population and regional influence, Ethiopia was described as a pivotal actor in shaping broader security and development outcomes across East Africa.Closing Remarks

In closing, Mesfin Mekonen emphasized that the purpose of the congressional briefing was to provide lawmakers and staff with timely, credible, and expert-informed analysis of the evolving situation in Ethiopia.

He noted that recent developments, including violence in the Wollega region and reported targeting of ethnic communities, underscore the urgency of continued congressional engagement.

The briefing concluded with a call for informed policy responses grounded in verified information, humanitarian concern, and a commitment to human rights, accountability, and stability in Ethiopia

New York Times, As Ebola Rages in Countryside, Congo’s Capital Strives to Carry On, Justin Makangara and John Eligon, May 23, 2026. Kinshasa residents continue to pack markets, bars and public transportation, despite growing international concern about the spread of the virus.

Nations around the world are imposing strict entry restrictions on people who have been to the Democratic Republic of Congo recently because of a deadly Ebola outbreak in the country’s northeast.

But in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, most of the 20 million residents are carrying on as usual.

Open-air markets where vendors sell cassava, fish, fruit and clothes remained packed. Workers continued to cram themselves into taxis or hop on their motorcycles for morning commutes on the heavily congested roads. Patios and bars were full of patrons drinking beer and eating grilled chicken with mayo.

“I don’t know and don’t see why we should be afraid,” Malula Richard Esambo, the president of a soccer fan group in Kinshasa, said at an event in the city this week organized by the Congolese Football Association. “Kinshasa is safe for now.”

New York Times, Ebola Ward in Congo Burns After Residents Turn Against Medics, Declan Walsh, Visuals by Arlette Bashizi, May 23, 2026 (print ed.). Flying in with United Nations peacekeepers, Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reached the Congolese city at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.

Several hundred people massed at the gates of a hospital to demand the body of a suspected Ebola victim. Violence broke out when staff refused the request.

Aid is desperately scarce here in Bunia, the epicenter of an alarming Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hospitals are swamped with patients infected with a rare species of the virus.

So medical staff at one hospital on the edge of the city were relieved when an international aid group erected an isolation ward in its garden, to treat the worst cases.

That respite turned to chaos on Thursday when a furious crowd stormed the hospital, hoping to retrieve the body of a suspected Ebola victim, and the isolation ward was burned to the ground.

The melee encapsulated some of the hardest challenges facing medical workers in Ituri, the province in northeastern Congo at the heart of the current outbreak.

New York Times, ‘A Total Nightmare’: Voices From a Moscow Hit by Ukrainian Drones, Valerie Hopkins, Photographs by Nanna Heitmann, May 23, 2026. Residents who experienced attacks in recent days were shaken deeply by the conflict coming home to the capital region, the seat of the Kremlin’s power.

Vadim, like many other Russians, has relatives in Ukraine. Four years ago, as Russian troops besieged the city in the Sumy region where his cousins lived, he checked in with them regularly to ask about their safety.

Now, they are the ones checking in with him.

As Ukraine ramps up a campaign of long-range strikes on Russia, the war arrived this week for Vadim, if not on his doorstep, then on his roof. An exploding Ukrainian drone struck the top floor of his high-rise in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. Four people in all were killed and at least 15 were wounded in Ukraine’s attacks there on Sunday.

When I visited the suburb afterward, the broken glass had been swept into a corner. But residents were reeling as the conflict comes home to the capital region, the seat of the Kremlin’s power, which previously had been largely shielded from it.

Before now, “we didn’t really take the war seriously,” said Vadim, 21, who, like some others I spoke to, asked that his last name not be published for fear of official repercussions. “When it happens over there, it’s one thing. But when it happens to your house, of course it is real in a different way.”

Ukraine is using the large numbers of long-range drones and cruise missiles it now produces to conduct strikes up to 1,000 miles into Russian territory. With these attacks, Kyiv is turning the tables after Russia has targeted Ukraine’s civil infrastructure and killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians over more than four years of war.

Sports, Entertainment, Culture

The Atlantic via New York Times, Kyle Busch died after complications from sepsis, severe pneumonia, family says, Jeff Gluck, May 23, 2026. Kyle Busch suffered from severe pneumonia that progressed into sepsis, “resulting in rapid and overwhelming associated complications,” the NASCAR driver’s family said in a statement Saturday.

The statement was based on a medical evaluation provided to the family, it said.

Busch died Thursday at 41 after being hospitalized on Wednesday night, and the motorsports world has mourned the racing legend’s shocking loss in the days since.

The quick decline in his health followed a weeks-long illness through which Busch continued to race.

On May 10, Busch was competing at Watkins Glen International when he radioed his team asking for help after the race.

“Can somebody try to find Bill Heisel? He’s the Hendrick doctor guy,” Busch said.

When asked where Busch wanted to meet Heisel, a longtime sports physician’s assistant who has worked with NASCAR teams, the driver asked to do so at his motorhome.

“I’m gonna need a shot,” Busch said before he finished eighth in the race.

One week later, when The Athletic asked Busch last Saturday at Dover Motor Speedway whether he was feeling better from whatever was bothering him in the car at Watkins Glen, Busch motioned to his face.

“You can kind of hear it — I’m still not great,” he said. “But the cough was pretty substantial last week.”

Busch was doing well enough to win a NASCAR Truck Series race at Dover, then seemingly continued with his normal routine. He attended the grand opening of a karting center in Durham, N.C., on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, Busch posed for pictures with fans at the Richard Childress Racing shop, which were later posted to social media.

However, by Wednesday evening, he suddenly took a turn for the worse.

On Friday, 911 audio obtained by The Athletic and other outlets requesting recordings related to Busch revealed that an unidentified caller on Wednesday asked that an ambulance be sent to the GM Charlotte Technical Center in Concord, N.C. Busch was at the racing simulator at that facility on Wednesday, according to a source briefed on the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject.

May 22

Top Headlines

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: GOP Cancels Votes to Avoid Trump Embarrassment, Officials Discuss Seizing Voting Machines and Curbing Travel to Blue Cities, Aaron Parnas, right, May 22, 2026. House Republicans canceled a war powers vote to avoid an embarrassing rebuke of Trump after it became clear the votes were not there for him. Senate Republicans also revolted over the administration’s “weaponization” fund proposal. Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly describing Trump as a lame-duck president with waning influence. At the same time, Trump officials reportedly discussed seizing voting machines ahead of the midterms and restricting international travel to blue states. Suffice it to say: it’s a lot of news.

More On Trump Administration

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special $1.6 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• New York Times, In a Rarity, Republicans Stand Up to Trump, Luke Broadwater, May 22 2026 (print ed.). President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 21, 2026 [GOP Congress Leaders Flee DC Votes], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 22, 2026. Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.
• New York Times, Inside the Senate G.O.P. Meltdown Over Trump’s Fund, Michael Gold, May 22 2026 (print ed.). Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, went to Capitol Hill to allay Republicans’ concerns over a fund to pay people who claim government mistreatment. It did not go well.
• PoliticusUSA Daily, Analysis and Comment: Trump Threatens To Veto Any Reconciliation Bill That Doesn't Give Him Ballroom Money And Unlimited Slush Fund, Sarah Jones & Jason Easley, May 21, 2026. The White House is reportedly threatening to veto funding for ICE and border patrol unless Trump gets his ballroom money from taxpayers and an unlimited insurrectionist slush fund.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Audit Immunity for Trump Family Puts I.R.S. in a Bind, Andrew Duehren, May 22 2026 (print ed.). Federal law prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from halting an audit at the direction of the president or his aides.

More On Epstein-Maxwell-Trump Files

The late tycoon Robert Maxwell, father of Jeffrey Epstein's co-trafficker and rapist Ghislaine Maxwell, is portrayed in a file photo showing off symbols of his media empire while secretly operating as an asset for multiple nations and corrupt schemes.

• Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Robert Maxwell’s Revenge In Kentucky, Lance F Rosen, May 21-22, 2026. The Epstein human trafficking operation was the honeytrap for an Israeli espionage ring that was engaged in stealing scientific and other classified material, hacking US Government computer systems, running Kompromat to leverage politicians, targeting American political candidates, and laundering massive amounts of money from banks and billionaire business partners.
• The New Republic, Epstein’s Assistant Names Three New Abusers in Harrowing Testimony, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 21, 2026. House Oversight Chair James Comer said Sarah Kellen’s revelation was “what we’ve been waiting for.” 
• National Public Radio via KUNM-FM, Amid allegations of abuse on Epstein's 'Zorro Ranch,' New Mexico opens new probes, Daniel Montaño, May 21,2026. On International Women's Day in March, hundreds of protesters caravanned out to a spot in the desert outside of Santa Fe. Their gathering place was a ranch in the high desert of New Mexico that once belonged to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
• Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: The New Mexico Truth Commission Is Listening. The Gordons, We Hope, Are Next, Jana, May 22, 2026. The commission has subpoena power, a legal team, and a flood of tips. The Gordons' addresses are documented. The clock is running.

U.S. Media, Propaganda, Culture, Education

• New York Times, Stephen Colbert Went Out His Way: Through a Wormhole, Trish Bendix, May 22, 2026. Colbert was joined by famous friends, fellow hosts and special guests like Paul McCartney for the finale of “The Late Show.”
• National Press Club, Former CBS Radio anchor Sam Litzinger discusses end of an era, Adam Konowe, May 22, 2026. A broadcast era comes to an end today. CBS News Radio plans to shut down following the last national newscast tonight, after nearly 100 years of broadcasting.
• Scott Macfarlane via Substack, Opinion: The Closure of CBS Radio News is a Media Tragedy, Scott MacFarlane (right, Meidas touch Network Chief Washington Correspondent and  former CBS News Capitol Hill reporter), May 22, 2026, The damage is real.

U.S. Economy, Markets, Oligarchs, Media Spin

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bezos, Backlash and Zombies, Paul Krugman, right, May 22, 2026. Jeff Bezos went on CNBC earlier this week to opine about taxes and economic inequality. What he had to say wasn’t a shock: America’s 4th richest man praised billionaires and declared that he opposes taxes on the wealthy.

More Global News

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 22, 2026. Our closest allies haven’t followed Trump, thank goodness.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Republicans Found $1.8 Billion Overnight for Trump’s Thugs — So Why Are Seniors Choosing Between Food and Medicine? Tom Hartmann, right, May 2q2,2026. The GOP somehow found billions for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund overnight, but says America can’t afford insulin, affordable housing, or dignity for the elderly who built this countryEmptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Bend Might Break Offense, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 21, 2026. 2026 Mid-Term Election, Iran, War, Weaponized DOJ. 
• PoliticusUSA, The Daily News and Commentary: Kneecapping Citizens United State by State, Sarah Jones, May 22, 2026. Corporate power reset bills were filed in more than a dozen legislatures just this year. It might even be happening in your state.

More On U.S. Immigration, Law, Courts, Rights, Justice

• Michael Cohen via Substack, Commentary: Dear Weaponization Fund, Michael Cohen(right, former Trump attorney who was rutherlessly prosecuted by the First-Term Trump Justice Department after he provided testimony and best-selling books highly damaging to the president), May 22, 2026. After years of being smeared, surveilled, financially exposed, imprisoned, and silenced, I will file a claim asking whether America’s justice system became America’s political weapon. 
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: How the Broadview 6 (-2) Case Collapsed, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 22, 2026.  For months, the defendants in the Broadview 6 case had been trying to get the transcripts from the grand jury, arguing that DOJ’s theory that they had conspired to impede an officer whose car they were accused of blocking did not accord with the law.

Top Stories

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: GOP Cancels Votes to Avoid Trump Embarrassment, Officials Discuss Seizing Voting Machines and Curbing Travel to Blue Cities, Aaron Parnas, right, May 22, 2026. House Republicans canceled a war powers vote to avoid an embarrassing rebuke of Trump after it became clear the votes were not there for him. Senate Republicans also revolted over the administration’s “weaponization” fund proposal. Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly describing Trump as a lame-duck president with waning influence. At the same time, Trump officials reportedly discussed seizing voting machines ahead of the midterms and restricting international travel to blue states. Suffice it to say: it’s a lot of news.

Also, thank you to everyone who joined our paid subscriber live last night. For those who missed it, I reported exclusive details from Sarah Kellen’s congressional testimony, including the three people she named: Frederic Fekkai, former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, and photographer Patrick Demarchelier. We should learn more once the transcript is released. Our next live will be next week, if you have any issues just email me.

Last night also marked the end of Stephen Colbert’s show, and today CBS shut down CBS Radio News. Media censorship and consolidation are eroding critical institutions. Independent journalism has never been more important, and we have to fight back. I will continue doing everything I can to hold this White House accountable and defend the First Amendment. Subscribe to support my work:

Here’s the news:

Following an evening in which Senate Republicans canceled votes on a major reconciliation package and House Republicans abruptly pulled a war powers resolution, new questions are emerging about President Donald Trump’s influence over Republicans in Congress. Trump increasingly appears to be entering lame-duck territory, with his leverage on Capitol Hill showing signs of weakening outside of his role in primary endorsements and campaign politics. Recent GOP rebellions over issues like the Iran war and the administration’s proposed “anti-weaponization” fund have exposed growing divisions within the party and a reluctance among some Republicans to fully align with the White House.

We now know why Trump needed the audit settlement agreement. A ProPublica and New York Times investigation found that the IRS has argued Donald Trump improperly claimed the same major tax losses twice on his failed Chicago tower project, potentially exposing him to more than $100 million in taxes, penalties, and interest. The dispute centers on a series of aggressive accounting maneuvers Trump and his advisers used after the project suffered heavy losses during the 2008 financial crisis, including declaring the investment “worthless” and later restructuring ownership to claim additional write-offs. Tax experts cited in the report said many of the deductions appeared highly questionable and unlikely to survive scrutiny, while Trump’s representatives insist the moves were legal and supported by tax experts.

President Donald Trump has used his office for personal financial gain in many ways, including massive stock trading tied to companies affected by his administration’s policies. According to a recent ethics disclosure, Trump made more than 3,600 trades worth up to $750 million in the first three months of 2026 alone, spanning sectors like technology, banking, and entertainment. Trump’s stock transactions exceed the combined annual trading volume of all 535 members of Congress in a typical year. While aides insist Trump himself is not directly executing the trades, experts contend the transactions still represent a major ethical problem because they are carried out in his name and with his assets.

House Republicans postponed a vote on a resolution that would limit President Donald Trump’s authority to continue U.S. military operations in Iran after it became clear the measure might pass. Support for the war has weakened in Congress, including among some Republicans, as the conflict has driven up gas prices, cost billions of dollars, and resulted in U.S. casualties. Democrats accused Republicans of avoiding accountability by delaying the vote until after the Memorial Day recess, while Senate Republicans are also trying to block a similar war powers resolution.

Senate Republicans revolted over the Trump administration’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, arguing it could compensate people convicted in connection with January 6 and threatening to derail a major GOP immigration enforcement package. Several Republican senators sharply criticized the proposal, with some calling it morally wrong and politically disastrous, while Senate leaders complained they were blindsided by the Justice Department’s rollout. The backlash forced Republicans to delay action on the broader immigration bill and raised new questions about Trump’s influence over his party ahead of the midterm elections.

Rep. Ralph Norman defended the Trump administration’s proposed $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded compensation fund for people tied to January 6 cases, while dismissing the Capitol attack as “made up.” His comments come as many Senate Republicans have criticized the proposal, particularly concerns that it could benefit convicted rioters and people who assaulted police officers.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told travel executives he is seriously considering curbing international flights to airports in U.S. cities with “sanctuary” policies, a move that could force airlines to reroute flights and cause major economic disruption. The proposal could disrupt international travel at major hubs like JFK, Newark, and Dulles, alarming airline executives who warn it would create widespread economic and logistical chaos far beyond the targeted cities. Critics argue the plan reflects a poor understanding of how global air travel works, since many international passengers connect through these airports on their way elsewhere in the United States. The proposal as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to revive mass deportation policies and increase leverage over sanctuary jurisdictions.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield warned that the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda could become a major regional pandemic, potentially spreading into neighboring countries such as Tanzania, Rwanda, and South Sudan. He said the outbreak was detected unusually late, after more than 100 cases had already emerged, which delayed containment efforts and allowed the disease to spread rapidly. The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, while the CDC says the risk to the U.S. public remains low despite increased traveler screening and restrictions. Here are current numbers for the outbreak:

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is “spreading rapidly” and raised the country’s risk assessment to “very high.” The WHO said there are 82 confirmed cases and seven confirmed deaths, but believes the true scale is much larger, with nearly 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths. Neighboring Uganda has reported two confirmed cases linked to travel from Congo, including one death, while the WHO continues to rate the global risk as low.

Trump election-security adviser Kurt Olsen reportedly pushed a plan to target Dominion voting machines by exploring whether their foreign-made components could be labeled national security risks through the Commerce Department. According to the report, officials examined voting machines from Puerto Rico to investigate whether any parts originated from adversary countries, as the administration considered ways to exert greater federal control over election systems traditionally run by states. The effort reportedly advanced far enough for Commerce Department officials to study possible legal justifications before the plan ultimately collapsed.

A Texas woman filed a federal lawsuit after being arrested over a Facebook post about water-quality problems in the city of Trinidad, where she claimed residents had been hospitalized from bacteria in the water. City officials acknowledged ongoing water infrastructure issues but said the hospitalization claims were false and accused her of causing public panic. Free speech advocates and legal experts questioned the arrest, arguing the post concerned a matter of public interest protected by the First Amendment. The lawsuit alleges the arrest was politically motivated retaliation by local officials. Here’s what the water looked like:

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. told House GOP campaign chair Richard Hudson that he plans to return to Congress in June after being absent from Capitol Hill since March. Hudson said Kean sounded healthy and confirmed he still intends to run for re-election, though no details about his medical condition were disclosed. Local Republican officials in New Jersey also said they recently spoke with Kean and described him as upbeat and confident about returning to campaigning.

President Donald Trump is set to swear in Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chairman, replacing Jerome Powell, whom Trump frequently criticized for resisting rapid interest rate cuts. Later in the day, Trump will travel to New York to campaign for Mike Lawler, whose competitive swing district is expected to be a major battleground in the upcoming midterm elections.

Stephen Colbert ended The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with an emotional and comedic finale featuring appearances from fellow late-night hosts, celebrities, and musicians including Paul McCartney. Colbert reflected on the show’s connection with viewers and its role in helping audiences “feel the news” together over the years. The episode included surreal comedy bits, celebrity cameos, and a musical sendoff centered around Beatles songs before the show symbolically disappeared into a “wormhole” during its final moments. Here is the President’s response to the show ending:

Taiwan said it has not been informed of any U.S. decision to pause or adjust planned arms sales, after a senior American official suggested shipments could be delayed to preserve munitions for the conflict with Iran. The proposed package, reportedly worth up to $14 billion, remains under consideration as President Donald Trump has not yet decided whether to approve it following talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. U.S. officials said any future sales decisions would ultimately be made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

NATO allies reacted with confusion after President Donald Trump announced he would send 5,000 additional U.S. troops to Poland only weeks after ordering roughly the same number withdrawn from Europe. European officials said the abrupt reversal deepened uncertainty about America’s long-term military commitment to the continent, while U.S. defense officials also reportedly struggled to interpret the change. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted the move was part of a routine reassessment of troop deployments rather than a punishment directed at European allies.

Iran and Oman are discussing a potential system to charge ships fees for services tied to passage through the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. opposition to any payments connected to transit through the critical global shipping route. The talks suggest tensions remain high between the United States and Iran following recent military conflict, with Iran seeking ways to maintain leverage over a waterway that handles roughly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas. U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, rejected the idea, warning that any fee system resembling a toll would be unacceptable under international norms.

Sweden signaled it is open to discussing a possible NATO role in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard saying keeping the vital shipping route open is in Europe’s economic and security interests. Some NATO allies are reportedly considering whether the alliance should take a more formal role in securing the strait after Iran disrupted commercial traffic following the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. But the idea remains divisive within NATO, with countries like France arguing the alliance should not expand its mission into the Middle East.

According to Politico, Trump abruptly delayed a planned executive order on artificial intelligence after former White House AI adviser David Sacks privately warned that the proposal could slow innovation and hurt the U.S. in its competition with China. The order would have created a voluntary federal review system for advanced AI models before public release, but some tech companies and industry leaders argued the process could eventually become mandatory and overly burdensome. The last-minute objections reportedly blindsided White House staff and contributed to the administration pulling back the rollout just before the signing ceremony.

More On Trump Administration

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special $1.6 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

New York Times, In a Rarity, Republicans Stand Up to Trump, Luke Broadwater, May 22 2026 (print ed.). President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies.

For much of President Trump’s time in office, Republican lawmakers have had little appetite to stand up to his brand of vindictive politics.

Through revenge primary campaigns, bullying social media posts and the threat that he can command the G.O.P. base to go after anyone at any time, Mr. Trump has brought lawmakers in his party under his control like no president in modern history. A single critical word against Mr. Trump or his agenda could result in a full-scale retribution campaign to force a disloyal Republican from office.

But this week, in a rarity in G.O.P. politics, Mr. Trump’s taunts, bullying and threats have backfired, at least for now. Senate Republicans, after the president targeted two of their own, stood up to Mr. Trump on two of his biggest priorities: money for his White House ballroom, and a $1.8 billion fund to reward Trump supporters who claim political persecution by Democrats, such as the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. “Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.”

Then, in another sign that the party was pushing back on Mr. Trump, House Republicans canceled a vote on a resolution to halt the war in Iran, after it became clear they did not have enough votes to defeat it.

The cracks in the president’s dominance over Senate Republicans stemmed from two main sources. First, Mr. Trump asked Republican lawmakers to take up politically unpopular issues in a midterm election year.

At a time when gas prices are high, Americans are struggling to make ends meet. And as an unpopular war against Iran drags on, any Republican running for office will want to be seen as fighting for the American people, not bestowing lavish gifts upon the president and his associates, particularly ones who were convicted of crimes.

“Is it possible on May 21, 2026, Republicans finally found an ethical bridge too far?” asked Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat. “I wonder: Could it have been that golden ballroom for a billion bucks that was supposed to be freebie that Mar-a-Lago golf buddies were going to pitch in for? Or perhaps it was this incredible slush fund — I don’t know quite what to call it — it was a Capitol Police Cop Beaters Relief Fund?” 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 21, 2026 [GOP Congress Leaders Flee DC Votes], Heather Cox Richarson, right, May 22, 2026. Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or any of his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”

Republicans were angry they had no advance warning about the plan, questioned the legal basis for the fund, were unhappy with Blanche’s descriptions of how payments would work, and said they wanted no part of it. As former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.”

As many as 25 Republican senators spoke out against the slush fund and pitched ideas about how to draw some limits around it. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas News reported that senators want to know “what is Trump trying to mask by offering up this controversial fund? I mean, the optics of this are terrible. This looks bad, so is it a diversion technique? Is it some way of masking a different issue altogether?”

Dan Alexander of Forbes reported today that the tax immunity Todd Blanche is extending to Trump could save him more than $600 million on the estimated $1.4 billion he made in 2025 from crypto and licensing ventures and on the $100 million hanging over him from a previous tax bill.

Michael Gold and Carl Hulse of the New York Times reported that Republican frustration with the White House has been exacerbated by anger that Trump has intervened in Republican primaries to sink Republican incumbents he thinks have been insufficiently loyal to him.

One Republican senator texted Desiderio to say: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.”

In the end, Republicans were so angry about the slush fund and immunity agreement that Senate leadership decided not to try to pass $72 billion of funding for immigration agencies, left out of an earlier funding package, out of fear Democrats would force Republicans to vote on the slush fund.

Even before they decided to avoid the vote, Republicans had dropped from the measure the $1 billion Trump wants for security for his ballroom.

House Republicans had their own meltdown. House Republican leaders pulled a vote to stop Trump’s war on Iran based on the War Powers Act, recognizing that they did not have the votes to defeat it. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who voted with Democrats to pass such a measure last week, told Megan Mineiro, Robert Jimison, and Michael Gold of the New York Times that the next time the measure comes to a vote, it will pass.

As members head home to observe Memorial Day, the solemn remembrance of those Americans who gave their lives to defend the nation, they will likely hear an earful from their constituents about the $1.7 billion slush fund, the promise of immunity over Trump’s tax crimes, the $1 billion Trump is demanding for his ballroom, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, and now the administration’s increasing threats against Cuba and Greenland, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, and now the administration’s increasing threats against Cuba and Greenland, and about dramatically increasing prices.

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

New York Times, Inside the Senate G.O.P. Meltdown Over Trump’s Fund, Michael Gold, May 22 2026 (print ed.). Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, went to Capitol Hill to allay Republicans’ concerns over a fund to pay people who claim government mistreatment. It did not go well.

When Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, arrived at the Capitol on Thursday to meet with Republicans questioning the Justice Department fund that President Trump has said he wants to use to pay people who claim to have been unfairly targeted by the government, he may have expected a few strident complaints.

Instead, what unfolded in an ornate room just off the Senate floor on Thursday morning was a two-hour blowup in which dozens of Republican senators vented their anger and concern about the president’s fund at Mr. Blanche.

They questioned its legal basis, whom it would pay and how the process would work. And they made it clear they wanted no part of the plan, the product of a deal struck between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his own administration to use money that Congress does not control to pay off purported victims of government mistreatment, potentially including some of the rioters who violently assaulted their workplace during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

By the end, Republicans were so livid that party leaders scrapped planned votes on the party’s top priority — a $72 billion immigration crackdown measure it had planned to muscle through before Memorial Day — punting action for fear of having to cast votes on the fund.

The discussions started out on Thursday morning with a genteel if pointed statement from Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, who told reporters before Mr. Blanche showed up that he and his members were discussing whether to add language to the immigration bill to place limits on the fund.

“Our members have very legitimate questions about it, and we’ve had some conversations about if it’s going to be a feature going forward, what it might look like, and how we might make sure that it’s fenced in appropriately,” he said.

It went downhill from there. 

PoliticusUSA Daily, Analysis and Comment: Trump Threatens To Veto Any Reconciliation Bill That Doesn't Give Him Ballroom Money And Unlimited Slush Fund, Sarah Jones & Jason Easley, May 21, 2026. The White House is reportedly threatening to veto funding for ICE and border patrol unless Trump gets his ballroom money from taxpayers and an unlimited insurrectionist slush fund.

As Democratic momentum is growing toward the midterm election, Donald Trump is moving closer to open warfare with segments of his own party.

Senate Republicans have a four-seat majority. Trump has managed to get two of his party’s senators defeated or soon to be defeated in primaries (Cornyn and Cassidy), chased one into retirement (Tillis), and has ushered another foe out the door (McConnell).

Do the math, and this all adds up to Republicans no longer having a solid Senate majority.

When Trump decides that he wants taxpayers to pay for his ballroom, there are now enough Republicans to say no.

Trump’s latest corrupt act was to create a DOJ slush fund to pay those who tried to help him overthrow the government.

Trump is demanding the right to do whatever he wants. Senate Republicans want to pick the commissioners who oversee the fund and set up conditions for who can apply.

Republicans want to use the reconciliation bill that was supposed to fund ICE and border patrol to kill Trump’s slush fund and ballroom dreams.

However, the White House is threatening to veto funding for ICE and border patrol if Trump doesn’t get his money.

It's all an insane showdown that looks like the Republican Party is tearing itself apart.

ICE and border patrol need funding by June 1 for upcoming immigration operations. That June 1 deadline will not be met.

Senate Republicans claim that the standoff with Trump is not related to his “revenge tour,” but it is clear that these events are related.

Semafor reported: Broadly speaking, Trump’s sway over the Senate GOP is lower than it’s been at any point in his second term, those Republican sources said — even as his influence in party primaries peaks.

The White House had indicated to Senate Republicans this week that Trump could veto any party-line immigration bill that didn’t contain his unrelated priorities, including the East Wing money and unrestricted use of his “anti-weaponization” fund, according to four people familiar with the matter. A White House official denied to Semafor that such a message was sent.

That bold talk of vetoing a top priority came after Trump helped oust Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., in his primary before endorsing scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who’s beloved among his GOP colleagues.

If anyone believes that Trump’s meddling in Senate primaries and the refusal of Republican Senators to let him run a corrupt slush fund and pay off his supporters with taxpayer money are unrelated, they must work for the corporate media.

Trump has sent the message that he is not going to do what is right to help the Republican Party win elections, so for the first time since Trump became the leader of the party, Senate Republicans are starting to break away.

It would be an overexaggeration to call this any more than a fracture or a crack between Trump and Senate Republicans, but it is a division, and it could get very ugly very quickly.

As the media gushed over Trump’s power in the primaries, they didn’t realize that the president is also losing power over Republicans in Congress.

New York Times, News Analysis: Audit Immunity for Trump Family Puts I.R.S. in a Bind, Andrew Duehren, May 22 2026 (print ed.). Federal law prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from halting an audit at the direction of the president or his aides.

President Trump’s return to office has been an unforgiving crucible for the hidebound Internal Revenue Service. He and his aides have decimated its ranks, fired and replaced its leaders and made repeated attempts to enlist the agency in his quest for political retribution.

Now, as part of an arrangement drawn up this week by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, the I.R.S. faces its most profound legal and ethical test yet: a demand to drop any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or their “affiliates.”

Tax lawyers and former I.R.S. officials said such expansive protection would cut to the core of the agency’s mission to collect taxes in a disinterested, nonpartisan way — and could potentially run afoul of the laws governing how it does so.

“It’s just completely contrary to the notion that you’re supposed to comply with the law and the I.R.S. is there to make sure you do that,” said George Yin, a tax law professor and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “The idea that you can get a free pass from the I.R.S. or anyone can get a free pass from the I.R.S. is just completely ridiculous.”

Immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny for Mr. Trump and his family was part of a broad agreement made by the Justice Department to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the I.R.S. over the leak of his tax returns. Beyond the audit provision, the Justice Department committed to creating a $1.8 billion fund to pay victims of “weaponization,” a proposal that has been rebuked by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

While the Justice Department has said Mr. Trump himself will not be paid out of that fund, an end to any and all audits based on tax returns previously filed could be quite lucrative for the Trumps. The New York Times reported in 2024 that an adverse ruling in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million, though it is unclear if that examination is still underway.

The nine-page outline creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was agreed to and signed on Monday by Frank Bisignano, who leads the I.R.S. as its chief executive officer. The one-page addendum calling for the I.R.S. to drop any audits of Mr. Trump and his family members was released the next day and signed by only Mr. Blanche.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

The late tycoon Robert Maxwell, father of Jeffrey Epstein's co-trafficker and rapist Ghislaine Maxwell, is portrayed in a file photo showing off symbols of his media empire while secretly operating as an asset for multiple nations and corrupt schemes.

Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Robert Maxwell’s Revenge In Kentucky, Lance F Rosen, right, May 21-22, 2026. The Epstein human trafficking operation was the honeytrap for an Israeli espionage ring that was engaged in stealing scientific and other classified material, hacking US Government computer systems, running Kompromat to leverage politicians, targeting American political candidates, and laundering massive amounts of money from banks and billionaire business partners.

Former Israeli Labor Party PM Ehud Barak was deeply implicated in Epstein’s criminal operations. Billionaire Les Wexner, Epstein’s financial patron, co-founded with Charles Bronfman the Israeli intelligence front named “MEGA,” or the “Study Group.” 

Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of corrupt billionaire Robert Maxwell, (founder of “PROMIS” software), both of whom were Israeli and British intelligence assets, with Robert being played by the Russians as well) was the prime mover, the key organizer, his Pimp and manager.

Most heinous of all was the rape, brutalization, and destruction of the innocent lives of the many young girls who were their victims. These are monsters, who rejected their own humanity long ago. All of the above are verified facts, not hyperbole.

Burying the Epstein investigation is one major reason why Israel targeted Thomas Massie with an influx of so-called “outside money” totalling as much as between 9 million and 15.5 million dollars through AIPAC and RJC. (Republican Jewish Coalition) It was however not the only reason. Massie also voted with Democrats to pass a war powers resolution in order to block funding for Trump’s war of choice against Iran on behalf of Israel. Of course this all serves to protect Trump and keep him and his party in power.Massie broke with Donald Trump on both fronts, when Trump is looked upon by a majority of Israel’s far-right religious parties as their new Messiah.

Even some Israeli or Jewish-American liberals who find Trump offensive will say “he is good for Israel.” These dupes find it convenient to ignore the many documented incidents where Trump privately expressed to his aides his admiration for Adolf Hitler, and the fact that his Secretary of War is covered with Nazi tattoos and attends a Nazi-adjacent church.

None of this is a big mystery. Nor is it a “theory.” The whole world knows it. It isn’t anti-semitic to simply state that Israel ran foreign interference in our elections. Nothing which I just wrote is an expression of “hate.”

I’m Jewish, and will confess that there are certain individuals I do hate, but I am not self-hating. Everyone here knows why Massie was targeted for defeat by Trump and Netanyahu. I am concerned when someone whose analysis I value greatly won’t state the truth of who and what flooded the Gallrein campaign with cash before the vote.

Being deliberately vague about that has the smell of either fear, corruption, or both.

Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, (in the Epstein files) were the main megadonors that funded these PACs and made personal contributions to “MAGA-KY,” the funding vehicle for Gallrein in the most expensive Congressional primary race in Kentucky’s history. Don’t call it “outside money.” It is Israeli money, and the big donors are conduits.

Massie made the same point in numerous ways because he knew what he was up against. We should name the names, publish the check stubs, and most important, don’t flinch. If we don’t, the Iran war will continue endlessly and throw the entire planet into chaos.

Remember how widespread is the growing opposition to the war among disillusioned MAGA voters. If you want Trump out, you have to be on the right side of this because this is what will break him. Not just the impact of the war carnage but the economic chaos which is already ensuing.

These PACs fund candidates in both parties, but they are mostly weighted toward Trump and MAGA. They are also sabotaging the Democratic opposition through Senators they have corrupted like Schumer and Fetterman.

Let us be clear. The right-wing Trump supporting so-called pro-Israel PACs are actually in the process of destroying Israel, not defending it. They have propagandized in favor of waging permanent war in the region under false pretenses, as there was no imminent threat of Iran attacking Israel with a nuclear device.

It was a fabrication shoveled onto Trump’s plate by his “gonif” Son-In-Law Kushner and his Epstein Class business partner Witkoff.

Netanyahu is both a wanted and indicted war criminal, he is personally corrupt and facing trial, and is opposed by roughly 70% of Israelis according to polls last year.

Does that mean that 70% of Israelis are anti-semites? People should not mistake Israeli’s support for the war with Iran with their support for Netanyahu’s reelection, that is, if they ever do have another election. They want him out, but are afraid to say so or demonstrate against him in wartime.

The fear of being labeled anti-semitic for opposing Netanyahu’s regime is a control mechanism being used against Americans to suppress opposition to Trump. It is also a smear, a slander, a lie, in most cases.

Yes, there are handfuls of real anti-semites out there who will descend into Jew-baiting and offer all sorts of made up Jewish conspiracy theories, people who are idiots out defacing cemetery headstones and synogogues. There are some organized into Christian nationalist cults, or Muslims who have embraced violence that have carried out shooting attacks. They are sick people, real anti-semites, who need a scapegoat for their failed lives, careers, marriages, or whatever.

But Trump, Miller, Patel and Blanche want to lump us all in the same basket with them, and either deport or prosecute people for exercising their first amendment rights by criticizing the Netanyahu regime.

But for us to take a principled stand against a foreign government conducting unjustified and <illegal> undeclared war, commiting war crimes, engaging in war profiteering, tearing up treaties, shooting journalists, using starvation as a revenge-weapon, influencing our elections to target political opponents, assassinating heads of state, blackmailing government leaders, is emphatically not an “anti-semitic act.”

It is an act of love, not hate, to call out injustice when we see it, regardless of the race, religion, ethnic background, or the gender of the perpetrator. Likewise to tell a friend that a decision to capitulate to their fears by telling half-truths is the first step into corruption. In other words, be a “mensch.”

The world today needs more of them.

Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant Sarah Kellen looks down while walking in CongressAndrew Harnik/Getty ImagesJeffrey Epstein’s former assistant Sarah Kellen

The New Republic, Epstein’s Assistant Names Three New Abusers in Harrowing Testimony, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 21, 2026. House Oversight Chair James Comer said Sarah Kellen’s revelation was “what we’ve been waiting for.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant has provided the House Oversight Committee with the names of three new alleged co-conspirators.

Sarah Kellen appeared before the committee in a closed-door hearing Thursday. Committee Chairman James Comer described her participation as forthcoming, and shared that her testimony was “what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Sarah Kellen has been very helpful. Of all the people we have interviewed thus far, this was by far the most substantive and productive interview that we’ve had,” Comer told reporters after the hearing. “She was very brave coming forward. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to go into detail about the abuse that she endured at the hands of Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell.

“One very positive thing today is she gave us three names of people that were involved in abuse. These were new names for us,” Comer continued.

The Kentucky Republican said that the committee would be releasing the transcript of Keller’s testimony as soon as possible, but that it would need to first redact the names of several mentioned victims.

“As far as the men that were the abusers—alleged abusers—the whole world will see that,” Comer said.

Kellen began working for Epstein in 2001 and stayed on his payroll for more than a decade, during which time she said she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by the pedophilic financier. It was only through years of therapy that she said she had come to realize that she too was a victim of Epstein’s grooming and manipulation.

“The abuse happened on average on a weekly basis, and was at times violent,” Kellen told the committee, according to her opening remarks.

“It included Jeffrey entering my room in the middle of the night and putting his fingers inside me, waking me up from my sleep,” she said. “It included an occasion in Palm Beach when he trapped me in the gym by lowering the metal hurricane shutter … choked me, and violently raped me.”

Kellen explained she stayed on as Epstein’s assistant for so long because she had “nowhere else to go.”

“I had no money, no family, no education, and no sense that I deserved any better.”

Kellen was named as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors, which shielded him from federal sex-trafficking charges.

“I was not told this was happening,” Kellen said in her opening remarks of her co-conspirator status. “I was not asked about it. No one from law enforcement ever spoke with me, ever heard my side, ever asked me a single question.

“I want to start turning some of the pain and trauma into something good that can help others and bring awareness to this important topic,” Kellen told MS NOW ahead of her appearance on Capitol Hill.

Dani Bensky, another survivor of Epstein’s abuse, described Kellen’s situation to MS NOW as “complicated.”

“When you are victimized and then you are put in a position where you are manipulated to recruit, that is a very sticky, complex situation,” Bensky said. “People really need to understand what sex trafficking is and what it looks like.… It really is like a pyramid scheme.”Share This StoryRead more about Epstein:

National Public Radio via KUNM-FM, Amid allegations of abuse on Epstein's 'Zorro Ranch,' New Mexico opens new probes, Daniel Montaño, May 21, 2026. On International Women's Day in March, hundreds of protesters caravanned out to a spot in the desert outside of Santa Fe. Their gathering place was a ranch in the high desert of New Mexico that once belonged to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

One of the demonstrators at the rally at the ranch was Virginia Giuffre's brother, Sky Roberts.

Giuffre, who died by suicide in 2025, was one of Epstein's most prominent accusers and said she had been sexually abused at the ranch. Roberts referred to two investigations recently started by New Mexico officials.

Sky Roberts, second from left, addresses a crowd of hundreds of protesters during a rally at the former Zorro Ranch on International Women's day in March. His sister Virginia Giuffre accused Epstein of abuse at the ranch before taking her own life last year.Daniel Montaño/KUNM

"This is what we need to see more of state by state. I think New Mexico is taking the first initiative. I think the people of New Mexico are demanding answers, they're demanding justice," Roberts said. "It starts here and there's so much more that we can continue to fight for."

In addition to his more well-known properties, including his Manhattan mansion and his private Caribbean island, Epstein owned this property, known as the Zorro Ranch. It housed a mansion, an airstrip and 10,000 acres of scrubland.

For decades there have been suspicions – some noted by officials – and even talk-radio chatter, of crimes at the ranch, including claims bodies are buried on the grounds. Connections have been drawn to several prominent figures, and court documents place some of the earliest accusations of abuse at the ranch.

Now New Mexico officials say they're seeking the truth of what happened there with the two investigations.

The state's attorney general's office announced in February it was re-opening an old investigation that was closed in 2019 at the request of federal prosecutors in New York. New Mexico's justice department went on to perform a search of the vast property with search and rescue dogs.Democratic state Rep. Andrea Romero of Santa Fe, N.M., talks about launching a bipartisan truth commission into activity at a secluded desert ranch where financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein once entertained guests, and whether local authorities looked the other way, on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, at the state Capitol in Santa Fe. (AP Photo/Morgan Lee)

New Mexico Democratic state Rep. Andrea Romero of Santa Fe talks at the state capitol in February about launching a bipartisan truth commission into activity at Jeffrey Epstein's former ranch.Morgan Lee/AP

Also in February, the state House unanimously created what's known as the Truth Commission.

The commission is headed by Democratic state Rep. Andrea Romero. In an interview, she said the commission will focus on systemic issues that might have attracted Epstein to the state and whether anyone played a role in sweeping things under the rug.

"We don't know. I mean, that's just it. If that wasn't the case, then what was the case? What happened here?" Romero said. "We know that there are survivors that were on the record reporting abuse. Why did their case never make it to the state nor federal government to hold that to account in some way, shape or form."

Romero said the commission is funded by $2 million from settlements New Mexico reached with a bank that did business with Epstein. She said it will subpoena witnesses and compel testimony if necessary.

It's already received a flood of tips and she says it has a list of names of former ranch employees, possible co-conspirators, and the people of Stanley, the closest town to the ranch.

"We're a living community of folks that knew people that worked there, that saw this guy parading around town, where he did yoga, where he grocery shopped," she said. "This is a community that knew about these folks living here."Sky and Amanda Roberts laid an offering on the makeshift memorial for Epstein alleged victims just outside Zorro Ranch in memory of his sister, Virginia GIuffre, who had accused Epstein of abuse occurring at the ranch and elsewhere before taking her own life.

Sky Roberts laid an offering on the makeshift memorial for Epstein alleged victims just outside the Zorro Ranch in memory of his sister, Virginia Giuffre.

Republican state Representative, Andrea Reeb is also a member of the commission. She says the political will to follow through is bipartisan.

"I think everybody wants to know what happened, and everybody, of course, has sympathy for the survivors and the victims that aren't around anymore," Reeb said. "But everyone just wants to know the truth."

The commission is scheduled to release its initial report on July 31.

Contacted again recently, Sky Roberts, Virginia Giuffre's brother, said he's heartened by the state's work so far and that with enough effort, the investigations will reveal what he called "the tragedies suffered" and find justice for survivors.

Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: The New Mexico Truth Commission Is Listening. The Gordons, We Hope, Are Next, Jana, May 22, 2026. The commission has subpoena power, a legal team, and a flood of tips. The Gordons' addresses are documented. The clock is running.

Yesterday, NPR reported what readers of this publication already knew: the Truth Commission is operational, moving, and building a list.

Chair Rep. Andrea Romero told NPR the commission has received a flood of tips and has compiled names: former ranch employees, possible co-conspirators, and the people of Stanley, the closest town to the Zorro Ranch. “We’re a living community of folks that knew people that worked there,” she said. “This is a community that knew about these folks living here.”

Rep. Andrea Reeb, the commission’s Republican member and a former district attorney, confirmed the bipartisan commitment is real: “Everyone just wants to know the truth.”

The commission’s initial report is due July 31. The legal team — Fadduol, Cluff, Hardy & Conaway P.C., with a $750,000 mandate — is already in place. Subpoenas can be issued. Testimony can be compelled.

Rep. Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe), Chair, New Mexico Epstein Truth Commission. Source: New Mexico Legislature.What We Reported and What Still Stands

Last Page First documented the following in public filings before this NPR story ran:

Brice M. Gordon: remains listed as registered agent for Lee McKenzie Consultants LLC, an active New Mexico entity at 49 Zorro Ranch Road, Stanley NM 87056. That is the Epstein ranch address. The LLC was last updated December 4, 2024, sixteen months after the property sold to the Huffines family. His name has never been removed.

Source: opencorporates.com/companies/us_nm/5030960

Karen Lee Gordon: confirmed in DOJ EFTA documents as Epstein’s Little St. James Island Manager, filed formation documents for Cactus 3 Development LLC in April 2023. On that filing, she listed her personal mailing address as 20 Marie Court, Half Moon Bay, California 94019. Cactus 3 Development LLC subsequently purchased property at 1509 Golden Gate Way, Tubac, Arizona 85646. She signed her name to the formation documents. It is a public legal filing.

Source: opencorporates.com/companies/us_nm/7197080

The commission has called their absence from the process “alarming.” Commission Chair Romero has said so on the record.

🚨 CALL TO ACTION: The New Mexico Truth Commission Is Looking For Brice And Karen Gordon. We Have Three Addresses For Them. The TC Needs To Take Action Immediately.  

U.S. Media, Propaganda, Culture, Education

 

Stephen Colbert on the set of “The Late Show,” on May 5, 2026 (CBS Photo by Scott Kowalchyk).

New York Times, Stephen Colbert Went Out His Way: Through a Wormhole, Trish Bendix, May 22, 2026. Colbert was joined by famous friends, fellow hosts and special guests like Paul McCartney for the finale of “The Late Show.”

Welcome to Late Night Roundup, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.

The series finale of “The Late Show” aired on Thursday, in a love fest largely devoid of swipes at CBS, which had announced the cancellation last year, citing financial reasons. The host Stephen Colbert addressed his audience in studio ahead of the show as he normally would, but included home viewers this time, to share how the staff have referred to the show as “the joy machine.” The bandleader Louis Cato called theirs “a reciprocal emotional relationship” with the audience.

“That’s exactly right,” Colbert said. “Because we love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you.”

“Now, on night one of ‘The Colbert Report’ back in the day, I said, ‘Anyone can read the news to you, I promise to feel the news at you.’ And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here was different. We were here to feel the news with you, and I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

The episode officially opened with a superstar mash-up of late night hosts past and present to introduce Colbert for the last time.

“If you’re just tuning in to ‘The Late Show,’ you missed a lot,” Colbert said at the top of his monologue.

He expressed his gratitude for getting to be a part of history at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where “The Beatles made their American debut here, and this is true — this is true: Backstage, Elvis used the bathroom and didn’t die.”

“Can’t take this for granted. Though, actually technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public-access station in Monroe, Michigan, for an audience of 12 people, and show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

His famous friends Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd and Tim Meadows interrupted Colbert’s monologue, each hoping to be his final guest. Tig Notaro and Ryan Reynolds popped up in the audience, too, during Colbert’s regular segment, “Meanwhile.”

Keeping the joke going, Colbert’s supposed finale plans were thwarted when his intended final guest, an unseen “Pope Leo,” refused to come out of his dressing room. Luckily, Paul McCartney just happened to be hanging around the theater and made for a “perfect last guest.”

McCartney gave Colbert a framed, signed photo of The Beatles playing on the same stage for the first time in 1964.

“Wow,” Colbert said, then, pretending to read aloud: “To Stephen, you’re better than The Beatles, Paul McCartney.”

As the episode neared its end, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jon Stewart and Andy Cohen showed up to help Colbert through a wormhole portal that opened up to swallow his show, followed by his “Strike Force Five” co-hosts — “Jimmy, Seth, John, Handsome Jimmy!” Colbert called them — who came by to see him off.

“Without you, where will Americans turn to see a middle-aged white man make jokes about the news?” — SETH MEYERS

“But why aren’t you guys being pulled in, too?” Colbert asked.

“Actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away after about three days.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, referring to ABC’s pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live” off air the briefly after Kimmel made comments about Charlie Kirk

“At some point, this may come for all of our shows. But, Stephen, what’s important to remember is tonight it is going to eat you.” — JOHN OLIVER

Editors’ PicksGhosts of the Gulf: The Unsung Revolutionary War Campaign‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Review: Baby Yoda Takes the Silver ScreenLuminous New Historical Fiction

The wormhole sucked Colbert up then spat him out into a jam session on one of his favorite songs, Elvis Costello’s “Jump Up.”

Colbert sang alongside Jon Batiste, Cato the bandleader, and Costello himself, who all joined McCartney back onstage for one big performance of The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” as staffers and friends took the stage.

In the final moments, Colbert gave McCartney the nod to cut the power from the control room. Once done, the wormhole turned the Ed Sullivan Theater into a miniature version of itself inside a musical snow globe playing the show’s theme song while being sniffed by one last celebrity, Colbert’s Boykin Spaniel, Benny.

National Press Club, Former CBS Radio anchor Sam Litzinger discusses end of an era, Adam Konowe, May 22, 2026. A broadcast era comes to an end today. CBS News Radio plans to shut down following the last national newscast tonight, after nearly 100 years of broadcasting.

In the latest Update-1 podcast, former CBS Radio anchor and reporter Sam Litzinger, a National Press Club member, talks with Broadcast Podcast team co-chair Mike Hempen about his nearly 20 years at the network, its history and tradition.

Litzinger discusses the legendary Edward R. Murrow and the Murrow Boys, and offers thoughts on the future of radio news.

Update-1 is produced by Mike Hempen. Besides playing on Press.org, Update-1 can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube Music, Audacity and TuneIn by searching for “NPC Update-1.”

Scott Macfarlane via Substack, Opinion: The Closure of CBS Radio News is a Media Tragedy, Scott MacFarlane (right, Meidas touch Network Chief Washington Correspondent and  former CBS News Capitol Hill reporter), May 22, 2026, The damage is real.

A foundation of American history, journalism and mass media is being imploded The loss of CBS Radio News is the media equivalent of imploding Wrigley Field or boarding-up the Louvre.  

U.S. Economy, Markets, Oligarchs, Media Spin

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bezos, Backlash and Zombies, Paul Krugman, right, May 22, 2026. Jeff Bezos went on CNBC earlier this week to opine about taxes and economic inequality. What he had to say wasn’t a shock: America’s 4th richest man praised billionaires and declared that he opposes taxes on the wealthy.

More surprising, perhaps, was how unprepared he was. Most of us, if we planned to spend almost an hour on national TV making pronouncements about taxes, would make at least some effort to get our facts right. Bezos didn’t.

But Bezos obviously suffers from billionaire brain, which I defined last year as

that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.

What was more interesting than the content of Bezos’s remarks was the fact that he chose to give the interview at all. Andrew Ross Sorkin, the interviewer, opened the discussion by saying

In these days, it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, about the billionaire class, about wealth inequality and policy and everything else. And it’s taken a uniquely critical turn, I think.

Indeed. The critical turn has been especially severe for tech oligarchs like Bezos. And Bezos is obviously feeling the heat, sufficiently so that he’s trying — incompetently — to improve his image by “informing” the rest of us about how taxes and all that really work.

I’ll get to Bezos’s likely motivations shortly. First, however, let’s talk about the substance of his remarks.

Public discourse about taxes and inequality is, even more than discussion of other economic topics, infested with zombies — ideas that should be dead, having been proved wrong again and again, but that keep shambling along, eating people’s brains. What sustains the zombies is, of course, billionaire money, which keeps false claims in circulation as long as they seem to justify low taxes on the superrich.

Sure enough, it took Bezos only a couple of minutes to peddle a classic zombie lie about who pays taxes:

We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent.

These numbers aren’t remotely right unless Bezos is referring solely to federal income taxes — which are only part of the overall tax system. About 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes — FICA on your paycheck — than in income taxes:

Furthermore, state and local taxes generally fall more heavily on the working and middle classes than on the elite. As a result, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has showed that the overall burden of taxes is only slightly higher for the affluent than it is for the working and middle classes:

These numbers are for 2019. Since then, the tax system has become even less progressive as a result of Donald Trump’s tariffs, which fall most heavily on lower incomes, and his tax cuts for the rich.

So Bezos doesn’t understand the most basic facts about taxes, nor did he make any effort to inform himself. He went instead with some numbers he thinks he heard somewhere — numbers that tell a story he wants to hear. As I said, billionaire brain.

Bezos also made some assertions about his own taxes:

These people sometimes say that, that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes.

Seriously, does he want to go there? Yes, Bezos pays taxes. But ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018 these taxes were less than 1 percent of his true income.

Bezos also decried corporate welfare. Again, does he want to go there? Amazon, like the oligarch who runs it, pays remarkably little in taxes as a share of its income:

I could go on: there was a lot of arrogant ignorance in that interview. But in a way the most interesting question is why Bezos gave it at all.

The answer, almost surely, is that Bezos is feeling the heat. There is a broad political backlash brewing against the excessive power of billionaires and the corrupting effect of their money on our democracy. This backlash is especially severe for tech oligarchs. A decade ago, Bezos and other tech billionaires were popular, almost folk heroes. No longer:

That slight uptick in 2025 is probably just a statistical blip — and there’s now a huge backlash brewing against AI. Here’s Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, trying to hype AI in a college commencement address:

Last year Bezos and other tech billionaires evidently believed that they could insulate themselves from criticism — and secure their wealth against both taxation and regulation — by allying themselves tightly with Donald Trump. Notably, Amazon, along with Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft is one of the companies paying for Trump’s grotesque ballroom.

But Trump is now exploring new frontiers in presidential unpopularity, and Republicans are facing a wave of public revulsion so strong that it will probably overwhelm even their strenuous efforts to rig the midterm elections.

So paying court to the mad king isn’t looking like the smart political move Bezos and his ilk thought it was. How, then, can they defend themselves against the threat of taxes and regulations that might make them slightly less rich?

Well, Bezos evidently thought that the threat to his billions was sufficiently important to justify going on CNBC to lecture the rest of us about the evils of taxation — but not sufficiently important for him to learn a few facts first.

Somehow, I don’t think this new political strategy will work.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, May 19, 2026.

More Global News

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 22, 2026. Our closest allies haven’t followed Trump, thank goodness.

Donald Trump doing a bang-up job weakening the U.S. by waging a counterproductive and illegal war, bending the knee to Russia and China, thwarting green energy investment, ballooning the debt, fostering unprecedented corruption and instability, hobbling international trade, stomping out dissent, persecuting enemies, attacking civil society, and corrupting the rule of law.

His empty-handed return from the China summit after lavishing (unreciprocated) praise on China’s President Xi and throwing doubt on support for Taiwan reflects America’s decline. We are in no sense leading the Free World. (Amazon founder and owner/destroyer of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos must be a shameless sycophant and an ignoramus if he thinks Trump is more “mature” than he was in his first term.)

America’s claim to exceptionalism (built on its defense of a stable global order, generosity in humanitarian aid, and opposition to thugs) and its reputation for can-do optimism have been severely frayed under Trump. Across all political ideologies, Pew found: “Majorities of Black (66%), Hispanic (64%) and white adults (57%) say the country’s best years are behind us, as do 53% of Asian adults.” Frankly, their conclusion is not unreasonable. Unless we get off the MAGA freight train barreling toward irreversible decline and permanent chaos, America’s future will be bleak.

Given the betrayal by the U.S. and the threats from Russia and China, the EU deserves more recognition for upholding democratic values and at least partially filling the vacuum created by Trump’s retreat from reality.

As Matthias Matthijs and Nathalie Tocci write, Trump’s erratic, aggressive, and unhinged behavior “has jolted European leaders into working more effectively as a bloc and taking stronger action to shore up their own defense, trade, energy security, and democratic resilience.” The authors urge European leaders to build on the anti-Trump backlash to craft a pro-democracy agenda that includes proposals to “strengthen the rule of law, protect European borders while remaining open to regular immigration, continue to boost the continent’s defense, pursue greater energy security by transitioning from fossil fuels and diversifying their energy sources, and seek economic renewal through significantly higher investment and deeper single-market integration.”

This week, EU leaders managed to clear the way for a trade deal with the U.S. to accompany their own bilateral deals with other trading partners (e.g. Mexico, India). While Trump has abandoned the idea that we prosper when we support a free trade network, the EU has created its own parallel free trade agreements, leaving Trump to flail and America to lose markets.Subscribed

European powers’ most impressive accomplishment may be its consistent support for Ukraine. Unlike Trump, they have not abandoned Ukraine nor forced it toward capitulation. The EU’s steadiness has allowed Ukraine to gain ground and further batter Russia. Trump picked the losing side (Russia), while European powers stuck with Ukraine, which has established drone superiority and become arguably the most potent military force in Europe.

America under Trump is becoming the dispensable nation.

The contrast between the U.S. under Trump and European powers could not be more vivid. America may be in an authoritarian tailspin, but European countries, as historian Anne Applebaum recently noted, have adhered to “the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the idea that governments are accountable to citizens.” While Trump genuflects to Russia and China, runs roughshod over democratic institutions, and systematically destroys our international reputation, we can be relieved that those democratic attributes continue to flourish somewhere on the planet.

We should not be surprised that as Trump and his ilk have followed Putin’s model of deriding the EU and showing disdain for their liberal values. The endurance and success of democratic allies that Trump has abused no doubt rankles him. As Applebaum recalled: “At a speech in Munich last February, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared that America and Europe are bound together not by values, not by a commitment to democracy, but by Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry—by blood, soil, DNA and the distant past, in other words, not the present or future.” Applebaum noted that Rubio, like Vladimir Putin, baselessly denigrated “modern Europe as a continent overwhelmed by migrants, crime, and decay.”

Vice President JD Vance joined the chorus and accused Europe of “civilizational suicide” by letting in too many immigrants. In words that thrill neo-Nazis (and echo the original ones), he insisted that you just can’t allow “culturally incompatible” immigrants come into an Aryan German country. (Does he know the U.S. became the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation after taking in 10. 4 million immigrants between 1861 and 1890, another 14.5M between 1900 and 1924, and 70M since 1965?)

MAGA disdain for Europe is remarkable, considering they claim to be saviors of “Western civilization,” the intellectual and cultural heritage of Europe. They fawn over cathedrals and cultural contributions, but are unremittingly hostile to Europe’s liberal political traditions being incorporated into our political DNA. MAGA cultists, not left-leaning Democrats, threaten to undermine the most significant achievements of Western civilization (e.g., respect for the individual, tolerance, rejection of absolute monarchy).

To be certain, the EU has its problems (e.g., productivity, the rise of antisemitism) but it must be doing something right if its violent crime rate is a fraction of the U.S., its people live longer, and 7 of the 10 happiest countries in the world are EU members.

In short, the EU is punching above its weight. We should salute European leaders who have steered clear of Trump’s illegal war, defended Ukraine against bullies in the Kremlin and the White House, stood up for human rights (whether in Kyiv or Gaza), continued to advance clean energy, and refused to give AI and tech billionaires free rein to invade their people’s privacy and manipulate them through opaque algorithms.

European powers remind Americans that free people have agency to reject the siren call of nationalism, racism, isolationism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Refusing to capitulate to Trump’s demands or cower from his bullying, the EU has remained undaunted and courageous in upholding humane, democratic, tolerant, and fact-based government at home while supporting a rules-based order internationally.

We should be rooting (as the world rooted for Britain before the U.S. entered WWII) for the countries that bequeathed us Western civilization to prosper, innovate, and thrive. The EU cannot replace the U.S., but it deserves high praise for stepping into the breach when America lost its bearings.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Republicans Found $1.8 Billion Overnight for Trump’s Thugs — So Why Are Seniors Choosing Between Food and Medicine? Tom Hartmann, right, May 2q2,2026. The GOP somehow found billions for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund overnight, but says America can’t afford insulin, affordable housing, or dignity for the elderly who built this country…

Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes, replace 150,000 lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build 10,000 new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund 70 community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of 2,500 new teachers for ten years.

Instead, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche blatantly refused to rule out paying chunks of this money to January 6 rioters who assaulted police officers or to Trump himself, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to serve 22 years for seditious conspiracy until Trump pardoned him, told Reuters he’s planning to apply for between $2 and $5 million.

Two Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have sued to block the payouts, describing the fund as a “taxpayer-funded slush fund” for Trump followers who engaged in violence against cops.

Aubrey’s framing got me researching what else $1.8 billion in actual public money could do. Let me extend her list, because the media is failing entirely to put this into a meaningful context.

— That $1.8 billion could cover the average cost of weatherizing and insulating roughly 200,000 low-income homes, dropping monthly heating and cooling bills for working families through the kind of winters Louise and I weathered up in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now here in Oregon.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Jeff Bezos to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could fund a year of high-quality universal pre-K for roughly 144,000 three- and four-year-olds, the single most cost-effective investment we know of for closing achievement gaps and giving working parents a fighting chance.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Elon Musk to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at zero for every Type 1 diabetic in America for years, ending the rationing that is killing young people whose parents can’t choose between rent and a vial.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Mark Zuckerberg to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

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— It could pay for a full course of trauma-informed counseling for every one of the roughly 400,000 American children currently in foster care, with money left over to pay the social workers who are quitting in droves because their caseloads have become unmanageable.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress who gave more than $100 million to put Trump back in the White House, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could fund the entire National School Lunch Program’s free-and-reduced shortfall for a generation of poor kids, ending the practice of stamping a child’s hand or throwing their tray in the trash because Mom is two weeks behind on the cafeteria bill.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Timothy Mellon, the reclusive railroad heir who gave $165 million to elect Donald Trump, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could let the EPA replace something on the order of 380,000 lead home water pipes at the agency’s $4,700 average cost, getting toxic plumbing out from under hundreds of thousands of homes whose kids are right now being poisoned every time they drink from the tap.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the Uline shipping magnates who poured over $133 million into MAGA-aligned causes in 2024, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could retrofit every elementary school in America that still has lead paint, asbestos tile, or a roof that leaks every time it rains, the buildings where we are right now sending kids to learn to read.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Ken Griffin, the hedge-fund billionaire who spent $12 million just to kill a marijuana legalization initiative in Florida, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could let the VA hire enough mental-health professionals to clear the appointment backlog for every veteran in this country, the men and women we sent to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and then expected to wait six months for a counselor.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir founder who personally manufactured the political career of J.D. Vance, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could buy enough domestic-violence shelter beds, hotline funding, and transitional housing to clear the wait list that every shelter in this country runs every single night, the battered women and abused children currently sleeping in cars because there’s no room and no money.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone CEO who has spent tens of millions propping up the Republican Party while his firm gobbles up American housing stock and rents it back to working families at extortionate rates, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could extend rural broadband to every last farm, hollow, and reservation in America that still doesn’t have it, the kind of investment Dwight Eisenhower would have signed in a heartbeat and that today’s Republicans have repeatedly blocked.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Jeff Yass, the trading-firm co-founder who gave more than $100 million to Republican causes in 2024 and who happens to hold a major stake in TikTok’s parent company, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

That’s the choice in front of us, and it is not theoretical. A real $1.8 billion sits in a real account, taken from real taxpayers, and it’s going to be handed to people who tried to violently overthrow an American election.

It’s not being handed to the children currently drinking lead in Newark and Flint and Chicago, or the working mother in Louisville who skipped her insulin doses last month, or the veteran in Phoenix who hanged himself in March while waiting for a VA appointment.

The Trump regime and the GOP have made a choice, openly, brazenly, on camera, and the choice is to compensate the rioters and let the rest of us drink the lead.

The fix isn’t complicated, and the ProPublica reporting is now five years old and still ignored. When the twenty-five wealthiest Americans grew their wealth by $401 billion over five years and paid a true federal income tax rate of 3.4 percent, the money to do all of this exists.

It’s sitting in unrealized capital gains the IRS isn’t allowed to touch, in family trusts and step-up-in-basis loopholes, and offshore shell companies. It’s the money that built the slush fund (Lawrence O’Donnell calls it a “Thug Fund”) that Trump is about to hand to his rioters, and it’s the money our kids are not getting because the Mellons and Adelsons and Uihleins and Yasses paid for a Republican-controlled Congress that promised it would never come for them and their money bins.

Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative that you do not want one penny of your tax money paid to the people who beat Officer Brian Sicknick and the four other cops who died as a result of the riot.

Tell them you want a billionaire wealth tax of the kind Bernie Sanders and economists Saez and Zucman have already costed out. Check your registration at vote.org, find your state lawmakers at openstates.org, and start showing up, because the 2026 midterms are coming and this is the fight.

And if this piece moved you, share it. Send it to the friend who tells you both parties are the same. Send it to the cousin who thinks Trump is “draining the swamp.” Consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report so Louise and I can keep doing this work the way it has to be done.

The billionaires already have their voice and their advocates. We have to be ours.

May 21

Top Headlines

 

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

Comment posted on X (formerly Twitter) by convicted (and then pardoned) pro-Trump insurrectionist Enrique Tarrio, right, leader of The Proud Boys gang of pro-Trump thugs, as he seeks up to $5 million from U.S, taxpayers from the new Trump-Justice Department $1.8 billion slush fund, as reported by the Emptywheel site of Dr. Marcy Wheeler, a national security analyst specializing in U.S. courts and their impacts.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Returns of 1776: “Just Pay Your Taxes So I Can Enjoy Your Money,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 21, 2026. Presidential Election, Financial Fraud, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Blast Trump's Weaponization Fund, January 6th Defendants Rush to Get Money, Iran Rebuilds, Ebola Grows, Aaron Parnas, right, May 21, 2026. Republicans are beginning to publicly turn against Trump’s $1.8 billion weaponization fund, the slush fund created for his allies, as Jan. 6 defendants and supporters rush to cash in before Congress can shut it down. Mike Lindell says he wants $400 million, while the former Proud Boys leader says he wants $5 million because he is “not greedy.” At the same time, the Ebola outbreak is rapidly spreading, and experts warn the United States is not doing enough to contain it.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Republicans Revolt Against White House as Congress is Sent Home Early, Ebola Outbreak Rapidly Grows due to Trump Cuts, Epstein News, Aaron Parnas, May 21, 2026. Republicans on Capitol Hill are openly revolting against Donald Trump’s “weaponization” fund, and the fallout has become so severe that both the Senate and House are leaving Washington until June because the votes to fund ICE, CBP, or support the proposal are no longer there
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Don’t Count Democracy Out Just Yet, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 21, 2026. We’ve overcome bigger challenges before.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Is a Big Fish in a Small MAGA Pond, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 21, 2026. The legacy media never tires of telling us that Donald Trump has an iron grip on the MAGA Republican Party.

Trump's $1.8b Taxpayer-paid Slush Fund For Pro-Trump Insurrectionists, Fraudsters, Media Influencers

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

Comment posted on X (formerly Twitter) by convicted (and then pardoned) pro-Trump insurrectionist Enrique Tarrio, right, leader of The Proud Boys gang of pro-Trump thugs, as he seeks up to $5 million from U.S, taxpayers from the new Trump-Justice Department $1.8 billion slush fund, as reported by the Emptywheel site of Dr. Marcy Wheeler, a national security analyst specializing in U.S. courts and their impacts.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Returns of 1776: “Just Pay Your Taxes So I Can Enjoy Your Money,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 21, 2026. Presidential Election, Financial Fraud, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ (continued from above).
  New York Times, How the $1.8 Billion Trump Fund May Violate Past Practice and Policy, Devlin Barrett, May 21, 2026 (print ed. The fund that could offer payouts to Trump allies who accuse the government of mistreatment is not only highly unusual but also appears to violate the administration’s own policies.
• New York Times, News AnalysisTrump’s Government Moves to Spare an Unhappy Taxpayer Named Trump, Peter Baker, May 20, 2026. No president has ever used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies as expansively and openly as Mr. Trump has.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 8, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 21, 2026. Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn sued President Donald J. Trump, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today to block the creation of the fund to pay off those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Fund Puts Blanche in a Tight Spot as He Aims to Lead Justice Dept., Glenn Thrush, May 21, 2026. Once seen by some as the most conventional of President Trump’s political appointees, Todd Blanche has taken off the gloves in his new role as acting attorney general.

More On Trump Administration

• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: Trump And Trumpism Are Failing, And We Must Grow More, Simon Rosenberg, May 21, 2026. We just got our first poll of Trump at 31% approval. He just keeps falling......
• New York Times, Nimitz Aircraft Carrier Enters Caribbean as Trump Pressures Cuba, Eric Schmitt, Updated May 21, 2026. The carrier arrived in the southern Caribbean on the same day that the Justice Department announced charges against Raúl Castro.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Maureen Galindo, left, has made such inflammatory anti-Zionist remarks in Texas primary race for a congressional seat against rival Johnny Garcia, right, that he and national Democrats allege that her heavy funding from mysterious sources is by Republicans hoping to sabotage the Democratic brand (Photo via Getty Images). 

• CBS News, Texas Democrat Maureen Galindo under fire after saying she'd make ICE jail a "prison for American Zionists," Anne Bryson, May 21, 2026. A Democratic House candidate in Texas is facing widespread condemnation and accusations of antisemitism from both parties for comments she posted on social media, including a pledge to turn an immigration detention facility into a "prison for American Zionists" if elected — drawing allegations from top Democrats that her campaign may be backed by conservative groups.
• New York Times, Colorado Governor Censured for Commuting Sentence of Election Denier, Jack Healy, May 21, 2026 (print ed.). The Colorado State Democratic Party, reflecting the anger of rank-and-file Democratic voters, rebuked Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday over his decision to release Tina Peters from prison.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Freedom’s Not Just Another Word, William Kristol, right, May 21, 2026. There’s so much infuriating and dispiriting news to share—as we do every day. But precisely because the world seems to be getting more somber, more bleak, more dangerous, I feel duty bound to bring your inspiring news when I can. So I want to say a word about the Freedom House dinner I attended last night.
• The New Republic, DNC’s 2024 Autopsy Is Out—and It Completely Misses the Point, Hafiz Rashid, May 21, 2026. The Democratic National Committee has finally released its report on what went wrong in the 2024 election. Read the full report here.
• New York Times, D.N.C. 2024 Election Autopsy Reopens Wounds of Harris Loss, Shane Goldmache, rReid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer, May 21, 2026. The report partly blamed aides to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris for her defeat. But it was widely seen as a poorly executed examination, bringing fresh scrutiny to Democrats.
• New York Times, 5 Takeaways From the Democrats’ Autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 Loss, Tim Balk, May 21, 2026. A draft report released by the Democratic National Committee argued that Ms. Harris did not sufficiently separate herself from President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
• The New Republic, The Perfect Judge Will Rule on Trump’s Shady $1.8 Billion Slush Fund, Hafiz Rashid, May 21, 2026. Judge Richard Leon has ruled against Trump more than once before this case.Judge Richard LeonUnited States District Court.
• The New Republic, Where the Hell Is This Missing Republican Representative? Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 21, 2026. Nobody seems to know where Representative Tom Kean Jr. is.
• NPR, Liberal U.S. mayors team up with European counterparts to fight authoritarianism, Brian Naylor, May 21, 2026. Right-wing populists in the U.S. have been building political ties across the Atlantic Ocean for years to support and learn from one another. Think President Trump, who developed a close relationship with former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

U.S. Media, Propaganda, Foreign Hacking

• New York Times, Bluesky Says Kremlin Is Hacking Its Platform to Spread Propaganda, Steven Lee Myers, May 21, 2026. The company said it was fighting Russian efforts to hijack real users’ accounts to post fake content, an apparently novel tactic.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran and Oman in Talks Over Strait of Hormuz Ship Payment System, Ephrat Livni, Vivian Nereim, Erika Solomon and Farnaz FassihiMay 21, 2026. The discussions suggest that the United States and the Iranian government may not be close to reaching a deal to end a war that has badly damaged the global economy.

More Global News

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Challenging the Narrative of European Decline: Revised, Free Repost, Paul Krugman, right, May 21, 2026. I do not think that word “productivity” means what people think it means. 

Top Stories

 

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

 

Comment posted on X (formerly Twitter) by convicted (and then pardoned) pro-Trump insurrectionist Enrique Tarrio, right, leader of The Proud Boys gang of pro-Trump thugs, as he seeks up to $5 million from U.S, taxpayers from the new Trump-Justice Department $1.8 billion slush fund, as reported by the Emptywheel site of Dr. Marcy Wheeler, a national security analyst specializing in U.S. courts and their impacts.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Returns of 1776: “Just Pay Your Taxes So I Can Enjoy Your Money,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 21, 2026. Presidential Election, Financial Fraud, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ.

In general, I am solidly of the belief that people with no reporting or messaging purpose to be at Elon Musk’s Nazi bar should avoid it like the plague on civilization it is.

But this week, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s primaries (and Trump’s endorsement of corrupt Ken Paxton over the more electable John Cornyn) and more importantly, DOJ’s announcement of a $1,776 billion slush fund to pay terrorists, cop assailants, and child sex predators, it’s worth a peek.

People on Bluesky, still seeking to outsource beating fascism to prosecutors, seem to have no idea what a softball this slush fund is for political messaging (and as a result, many are simply checking out rather than exploiting the opportunity).

Make no mistake. Xitter [Editor's Note: the columnist means "X," formerly known as "Twitter" before its purchase by ultra-right propagandist Elon Musk] remains a swirling shithole of far right nutbags. But this week it is the venue in which a crucially important political drama is playing out.

That’s because the Jan6er victimization industry, largely composed of a bunch of grifters exploiting rubes who were already induced by Donald Trump to throw their lives away, has long used Xitter to pitch their campaign. Unsurprisingly, one after another Jan6er is making their case for a payout, using a variety of conflicting tactics: blatantly lying about the crimes they or a loved one committed on January 6 or, alternately, claiming that the privileges Jan6ers got during COVID lockdowns in prison were unprecedented rather than better than other pre-trial suspects in the same DC prison; complaining that their own boasts about their role in the attack led to adverse life consequences, including shaming; or choosing instead to declare that they are authentic Jan6ers who never denied allegiance to Trump. As Xitter has emptied out of normal human beings, these appeals have normally met with great success.

But Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche and Jan6er defense attorney Stan Woodward chose an inauspicious moment to attempt one of the most corrupt gambits in American history, and so even if these appeals from the victimization industry might have normally worked, they’re facing headwinds now.

Republicans in Congress are panicking because Trump continues to chase high ticket projects to feed his vanity and corruption even while voters grow increasingly furious at Trump’s refusal to deliver on his primary campaign promise: to bring down costs.

The big problem for Trump and Republicans is that the president said he would lower prices on day one, and then he went and actively made decisions that produced the opposite outcome — and took credit for them. Basically everything about the current political environment is downstream of these decisions. {Excerpt continued below.]

 

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty ImagesU.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

Background: National Public Radio via KUNR, Officers Give Harrowing Testimony On Their Experience Defending The Capitol On Jan. 6, Brian Naylor, July 27, 2021. Four police officers testified Tuesday about the physical and verbal assaults they faced responding to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in a highly emotional hearing.

The four officers — Pfc. Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell of the U.S. Capitol Police, and Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department — each gave opening statements and answered questions from committee members.

Gonell recounted the events of that day and the impact it has had on law enforcement officers: "For most people, Jan. 6 happened for a few hours," he said. "But for those of us who were in the thick of it, it has not ended."

It was the first hearing held by the Democratic-led House select committee investigating the attack by pro-Trump rioters who were trying to stop the certification of the presidential election, which Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Lawmakers on the panel lauded the officers' heroism and blasted colleagues who have denied the events of that day.What the officers saw, felt and heard

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Blast Trump's Weaponization Fund, January 6th Defendants Rush to Get Money, Iran Rebuilds, Ebola Grows, Aaron Parnas, right, May 21, 2026. Republicans are beginning to publicly turn against Trump’s $1.8 billion weaponization fund, the slush fund created for his allies, as Jan. 6 defendants and supporters rush to cash in before Congress can shut it down. Mike Lindell says he wants $400 million, while the former Proud Boys leader says he wants $5 million because he is “not greedy.” At the same time, the Ebola outbreak is rapidly spreading, and experts warn the United States is not doing enough to contain it.

Tonight is the final episode of Stephen Colbert’s show. It’s a sad moment and one that comes amid growing attacks on the media in this country.

Today’s schedule is packed. I’m heading to Capitol Hill now to meet with lawmakers, and I’ll have my evening update around 5:30 p.m. EST, including an interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom. Our paid subscriber live will begin around 6:45 p.m., and you should receive an email notification when it starts. I’m also in talks to livestream with someone currently in Iran to bring you some of the first images directly from the ground there.

We are expanding rapidly. We are bringing you more reporting, more updates, and more independent journalism despite growing attacks and censorship. Subscribe today, gift a subscription, or upgrade your membership to help us keep building and so that we have the resources to keep growing.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

This week, the Trump Administration established the so called “anti-weaponization fund” as part of a settlement tied to Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The Department of Justice announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund and then quietly added a separate addendum that purportedly ends all pending tax audits and investigations involving Trump, his family, and his businesses. The addendum was signed solely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer. As I noted in yesterday’s deep dive, the fund has major issues. But, that has not stopped January 6th defendants from already seeking millions.

CNN’s interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche drew attention after he defended the possibility that some Jan. 6 defendants, including those convicted of assaulting police officers, could receive money from the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion compensation fund. When asked if he was comfortable with people convicted of hurting police getting taxpayer money, Blanche replied, “Just to be clear, people that hurt police get money all the time.” Critics argued the comment minimized violence against law enforcement during the Capitol attack, while supporters said the fund addresses what they see as government overreach in Jan. 6 prosecutions.

Reuters reports that Jan. 6 defendants and Trump allies are already preparing claims against the Trump administration’s new $1.8 billion “weaponization” compensation fund, with some hoping for multimillion-dollar payouts. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said he plans to apply for between $2 million and $5 million, saying, “I’m not greedy. But my life was all fucked up because of this.” The report also notes that some defendants convicted of assaulting police officers could still qualify for compensation, while critics and lawmakers from both parties are questioning the legality and ethics of using taxpayer money for the fund.

The civil lawsuit filed by former Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Danny Hodges challenging Trump’s $1.7 billion “anti-weaponization” fund has been assigned to Judge Richard Leon. Leon is also overseeing the legal fight over Trump’s White House ballroom project, where he sharply criticized the administration’s arguments in a recent ruling. “National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Leon wrote when ordering a halt to above-ground construction work on the ballroom.

• Mike Lindell said he is going to file a claim for compensation from Trump’s $1.8 billion theft of taxpayer money, and said he and his company lost $400 million from persecution.
• $30 million. That’s what one Jan. 6 defendant told CNN he hopes to receive from the U.S. government through President Trump’s new $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” compensation fund.

U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is rebuilding its military capabilities much faster than expected after recent U.S.-Israeli strikes, including restarting drone production during the current ceasefire. Intelligence assessments suggest Iran could restore its drone attack capacity within six months and still retains significant missile, drone, and coastal defense capabilities despite heavy damage. Officials say Iran’s rapid recovery is partly due to support from countries like China and Russia, as well as the fact that the strikes did not destroy as much infrastructure as initially claimed. The findings contrast with Pentagon testimony asserting that 90% of Iran’s defense industrial base had been eliminated and that recovery would take years.

A New York Times investigation reports that Reynolds American donated $5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC shortly before the Trump administration introduced a vape policy favorable to the tobacco industry. Days after company executives met with President Trump and complained about FDA regulation of e-cigarettes, the FDA issued guidance that could allow flavored vapes and stronger nicotine pouches back onto the market while targeting illegal imports. The report notes there is no direct evidence linking the donation or lobbying to the policy change, but the sequence of events has raised concerns about industry influence on health policy. The FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, reportedly resigned soon after the policy announcement, saying he could not support the agency’s decision.

Bruce Springsteen appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show last night and blasted President Trump and Paramount’s leadership over the cancellation of “The Late Show.” “I’m here in support tonight for Stephen, because you are the first guy in America who lost his show because we got a president who can’t take a joke…. and because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass to get what they want. Stephen, these are small minded people. They got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.”

An Air France flight headed to Detroit was diverted to Montreal after a passenger from Congo boarded despite U.S. Ebola-related travel restrictions. U.S. authorities said the passenger should not have been allowed on the plane because recent travelers from Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan face temporary entry limits due to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in central Africa. The CDC and Department of Homeland Security are now requiring affected travelers to enter through Washington-Dulles Airport, where enhanced health screening measures are in place. The outbreak has already caused more than 139 suspected deaths and over 600 suspected cases, while health officials warn that a vaccine for the current Ebola strain is still months away from testing.

Public health experts are warning that the U.S. response to the growing Ebola outbreak in central Africa has been severely weakened by major cuts to global health funding, the dismantling of USAID programs, and layoffs across federal health agencies. The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has already caused hundreds of suspected cases and more than 100 deaths, but experts say the U.S. has largely stepped back from the international response despite previously playing a leading role in containing outbreaks. Scientists and former officials argue that shutting down key research labs, reducing surveillance programs, and withdrawing support from the World Health Organization have made the crisis harder to control and increased the risk of wider spread.

Walmart reported strong first-quarter revenue growth, driven largely by higher-income consumers and gains in e-commerce and memberships, but warned that rising fuel and living costs are putting pressure on shoppers. The company’s weaker-than-expected guidance suggests many Americans, especially lower-income households, are struggling to keep up with inflation, which recently hit its highest level in nearly three years. Walmart executives noted that higher gas prices, fueled by the Iran war, are hurting both consumers and businesses, and those pressures may intensify as tax refunds fade. The retailer is also continuing to compete with Amazon by investing in technology and AI while monitoring the potential impact of tariff refunds.

An American passenger quarantined in Nebraska after exposure to hantavirus on the Hondius cruise ship described the isolation facility as feeling like a “prison,” though he acknowledged the need for quarantine. The outbreak aboard the cruise infected up to 11 people and killed three passengers, prompting U.S. health officials to place 18 Americans under a mandatory 42-day quarantine due to the contagious Andes strain of hantavirus. Some passengers say they were initially told they could isolate at home but later received federal orders requiring them to remain at the Omaha facility, with penalties for leaving early. The CDC defended the quarantine site as an appropriate and well-equipped location for monitoring exposed individuals during the incubation period.

Trump said he plans to speak directly with Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s leader, a move that would break with decades of diplomatic precedent and could sharply escalate tensions with China. No sitting U.S. president has publicly held direct talks with a Taiwanese president since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, though Trump previously spoke with former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen after his 2016 election win. Taiwan welcomed the possibility of a call, while analysts noted Trump’s reference to the “Taiwan problem” echoed language commonly used by Beijing even as the U.S. continues supporting Taiwan militarily and economically.

Newly released body-camera footage shows ICE agents in Oregon violently stopping a van of farm workers, smashing windows, detaining passengers without warrants, and using facial recognition software to identify them during a 2025 operation later criticized by a federal judge. The footage, revealed in an ongoing class-action lawsuit, shows agents ignoring workers’ requests for lawyers and relying on facial recognition scans that produced inaccurate matches, including misidentifying one woman as “Maria.” U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai later ruled the arrests appeared unlawful, criticized ICE’s use of unreliable facial recognition technology, and said agents failed to give passengers meaningful time to comply before breaking the van’s windows.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is urging the European Union to offer Ukraine an “associate membership” status that would allow participation in E.U. institutions without voting rights, while also reviving peace negotiations with Russia. The proposal comes as U.S.-led talks stall and Europe considers taking a larger diplomatic role in resolving the war in Ukraine. Ukraine strongly supports closer integration with the E.U., viewing it as a key security guarantee, though some European officials worry the plan could weaken the bloc’s strict membership standards. Meanwhile, European leaders are debating who could represent the E.U. in future talks with Russia, with names like Angela Merkel and Mario Draghi being discussed.

A Florida man, Richard Knight, is scheduled to be executed for the 2000 murders of a woman and her 4-year-old daughter after being convicted on two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors said Knight fatally stabbed Odessia Stephens and the child after an argument over him moving out of their home, and he later confessed to another inmate while in jail. If carried out, the execution would be Florida’s seventh of 2026, continuing the state’s recent surge in executions under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Knight’s recent appeals were rejected by the Florida Supreme Court, though a final appeal remained pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tennessee is preparing to execute Tony Carruthers for the 1994 murders of three people, though his attorneys argue the trial was unfair and question his mental competency and the state’s lethal injection procedures. Carruthers was convicted largely based on testimony from alleged informants and acquaintances rather than physical evidence, and he was forced to represent himself after repeated conflicts with court-appointed lawyers. His defense team also claims misleading medical testimony about the victims being buried alive heavily influenced the jury and that Carruthers now suffers from delusions that make him incompetent for execution. The case comes amid renewed scrutiny of Tennessee’s execution system after past revelations that lethal injection drugs had not been properly tested.

A Paris appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter for the 2009 crash of Flight AF447, which killed all 228 people aboard in France’s deadliest air disaster. Prosecutors argued the companies failed to properly address earlier warning signs, including issues with iced-over sensors and inadequate pilot training, which contributed to the plane stalling over the Atlantic. The court ordered both companies to pay the maximum fine of €225,000, though many victims’ families said the conviction itself mattered more than the relatively small financial penalty after nearly 17 years of legal battles..

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Republicans Revolt Against White House as Congress is Sent Home Early, Ebola Outbreak Rapidly Grows due to Trump Cuts, Epstein News, Aaron Parnas, right, May 21, 2026. Republicans on Capitol Hill are openly revolting against Donald Trump’s “weaponization” fund, and the fallout has become so severe that both the Senate and House are leaving Washington until June because the votes to fund ICE, CBP, or support the proposal are no longer there.

Meanwhile, communities say nearby data centers are turning their water brown, Epstein’s former assistant identified three people allegedly involved in abuse, and doctors on the ground warn the Ebola outbreak is rapidly worsening because aid cuts left them unable to contain it.

Here’s the news:

Senate Republicans delayed a vote on a major immigration funding package after internal disagreements over President Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for the Justice Department. GOP senators raised concerns about both the substance and oversight of the fund during a closed-door briefing with DOJ officials, leading Senate leaders to postpone action until June. The broader bill would provide about $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, but additional controversial requests, including funding for White House ballroom security, complicated negotiations further. As Congress leaves for the Memorial Day recess, lawmakers are now expected to miss Trump’s June 1 deadline for passing the package. According to reports, at least 25 Republican Senators spoke up against the fund in the meeting:

The House is also heading out of Washington today after the Senate declined to move forward with the ICE and Border Patrol funding bill. House leadership had been waiting for the Senate to act first on the legislation. Members were notified that the final House votes of the week will take place at 4:30 p.m., including a vote on an Iran war powers resolution. Mike Johnson refused to attend a meeting with Donald Trump today, the first time a Speaker has told the President “no.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski said: “The White House dropped a bomb in the middle of a pretty well planned out reconciliation to deliver on President Trump’s priorities.” Meanwhile, Senator Bill Cassidy said the administration “put itself in this spot.” One other Republican said: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.” Many Republicans believe Trump brought this on himself by creating more “free agents” through efforts to purge members seen as insufficiently loyal.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged frustration within the GOP conference, saying the issue created a “more complicated and bumpy path” for the reconciliation package. He also criticized the administration for failing to consult Senate Republicans before unveiling the fund, suggesting lawmakers would have warned them about the political fallout. Despite the tensions, Thune said Republicans are now focused on managing the situation and moving forward.

Senator Thom Tillis sharply criticized the Trump administration’s proposed $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, calling it a “payout pot for punks” and vowing to keep it out of the GOP reconciliation bill. Tillis argued that some potential beneficiaries, including people tied to Jan. 6 or extremist groups, “deserve to be in prison” rather than receive restitution. He warned fellow Republicans that the fund is “bad policy, bad timing, and bad politics,” especially heading into November, and urged GOP senators who share his concerns to speak out publicly. The comments highlight deepening Republican divisions over the controversial DOJ proposal.

The White House circulated a one-page memo to Senate Republicans defending the proposed $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund ahead of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s briefing with GOP senators. The document emphasized that the fund would have “no partisan restrictions,” meaning Democrats could also apply, and cited examples of potential claimants including Americans affected by government censorship, parents at school board meetings, churchgoers targeted by the FBI, and senators “whose records were secretly subpoenaed.”

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said Sarah Kellen, a former assistant to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein identified three previously unknown individuals allegedly involved in abuse during a closed-door interview with the committee. Comer described the deposition with Kellen, Epstein’s former personal assistant, as the “most substantive and productive interview” the panel has conducted so far. He said the committee plans to release the transcript quickly and suggested the new names could expand the scope of the investigation. The comments mark a potentially significant development in the House Oversight Committee’s ongoing inquiry into Epstein’s network and alleged associates.

Rep. AOC highlighted alleged water contamination in Morgan County, Georgia, which residents say began after the construction of a Meta AI data center nearby. Holding up jars of discolored water, Ocasio-Cortez said multiple families now rely on shipped-in water for cooking and bathing because their well water is no longer safe or usable. She argued the situation illustrates the environmental costs that large AI infrastructure projects can impose on rural communities. Meta has previously faced scrutiny over the water and energy demands of its expanding data center operations.

Aid groups and health officials say sweeping cuts to U.S. and Western foreign assistance left the Democratic Republic of Congo dangerously underprepared to respond to its latest Ebola outbreak, despite the country’s extensive experience managing the disease. The outbreak has rapidly worsened, with nearly 600 suspected cases and 139 deaths reported, while responders face shortages of staff, surveillance systems, protective equipment, and funding. Critics, including former USAID official Atul Gawande, argue the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID and global health programs weakened preventive systems that previously helped contain outbreaks quickly. The administration disputes that claim, saying U.S. Ebola support continues, but aid organizations warn the combination of funding cuts, regional conflict, and fragile health infrastructure has created a “perfect storm” for the crisis to spread.

A federal judge in Maine dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit accusing the state of failing to provide voter registration data. U.S. District Judge Lance Walker wrote that disputes over voter roll access are typically resolved through cooperation and negotiation between states and the federal government, not through litigation. Walker criticized the Justice Department’s approach, saying it ignored the traditional balance between sovereign authorities. The ruling marks the eighth time a federal judge has thrown out a DOJ lawsuit on this issue nationwide.

The head of the International Energy Agency warned that global oil markets could enter the “red zone” by July or August as demand rises, stockpiles shrink, and Middle East exports remain disrupted because of the Iran crisis. IEA chief Fatih Birol said the most important step to ease the energy shock would be a full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, while cautioning that no major recovery in regional oil production is expected for at least a year. He described the current turmoil as more severe than previous oil shocks in 1973, 1979, and 2022, warning that countries may increasingly turn toward renewable energy, nuclear power, and more secure oil suppliers.

Gas prices heading into Memorial Day weekend have climbed to their highest levels in four years, with the national average reaching $4.56 per gallon as summer travel demand increases and oil markets remain strained by the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In Florida, average gas prices rose to $4.51 per gallon, while Gainesville matched the national average at $4.56. AAA and the Energy Information Administration said gasoline demand has ticked upward even as domestic supply and production declined, contributing to higher prices at the pump. Analysts warn prices could stay elevated throughout the summer travel season if global oil disruptions continue.

A Pentagon assessment found that the U.S. bore the majority of the missile-defense burden during recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, firing far more advanced interceptors to defend Israel than Israel used itself. According to officials, the U.S. expended more than 200 THAAD interceptors and over 100 naval missile interceptors, significantly depleting American stockpiles and raising concerns about military readiness in other regions, particularly Asia. Analysts and some U.S. officials said the imbalance highlighted how heavily Israel relied on American support while conserving its own high-end missile defenses during the conflict. The report also described growing tensions between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over whether to restart military operations against Iran amid concerns about strained U.S. resources and global energy disruptions.

The Democratic National Committee released its long-delayed 2024 election autopsy report after backlash over an initial attempt to keep it private. The report argues Democrats lost ground with key groups including Latino, male, and rural voters, and criticizes the Harris campaign for relying too heavily on urban and suburban turnout while neglecting rural America. Notably, the 192-page report avoids major topics that many Democrats blamed for the loss, including Joe Biden’s age, Gaza, and questions about racism or sexism affecting Kamala Harris’ campaign. Here is the report.

DNC Chair Ken Martin apologized to party members after the release of the DNC’s delayed and controversial 2024 autopsy report, taking responsibility for the fallout and calling the handling of the report a “major mistake.” During a call with DNC members, Martin said report author Paul Rivera no longer works with or advises the DNC “in any capacity.” Martin urged members to move forward with him and the party, but did not allow members to respond or weigh in during the call. The episode underscores ongoing tensions within the Democratic Party over how to assess and address its 2024 election losses.

Aimee Bock, founder of the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future, was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison after being convicted in what prosecutors described as one of the largest Covid-era fraud schemes in the country. Authorities said more than $250 million in federal aid was stolen through fraudulent meal reimbursement claims, with Bock ordered to pay over $242 million in restitution. Federal officials also announced new fraud charges against 15 additional people tied to separate schemes involving childcare, Medicaid, and autism services, alleging more than $90 million in additional taxpayer losses.

Trump abruptly postponed signing a planned executive order on artificial intelligence after publicly criticizing parts of the policy crafted by his staff. The order would have created a voluntary federal review process for advanced AI models before public release, involving agencies such as the Treasury Department, the NSA, and the White House cyber office. Trump said he delayed the order because he feared it could slow U.S. competitiveness against China and act as a “blocker” to AI innovation and job growth. The delay also came as several major tech CEOs, including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg, were unable to attend the planned White House signing ceremony.

A federal arts commission approved a revised version of President Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, despite overwhelming public opposition and ongoing legal challenges. The updated design removes an underground tunnel and viewing platform but keeps Trump’s preferred golden statues atop the structure, including a large Lady Liberty figure. Critics, including preservation groups and Democratic lawmakers, argue the project lacks required congressional approval and would disrupt the solemn character of the Arlington and Lincoln Memorial area. Supporters on the Commission of Fine Arts defended the proposal as part of Washington’s evolving architectural tradition and a centerpiece for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

Senator Susan Collins sharply criticized Donald Trump’s proposal to cut roughly $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health budget, calling the move “inexplicable” during a Senate hearing with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Collins argued the cuts would damage America’s leadership in biomedical research and hurt jobs, innovation, and research institutions in states like Maine. Her comments reflect growing Republican resistance to steep NIH reductions proposed by White House budget officials, especially because lawmakers view NIH funding as economically and politically valuable to their home states. The clash also comes as Collins faces a competitive reelection race in Maine, where protecting federal research funding is expected to be a central campaign issue.

NOAA is forecasting a below-average 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, driven largely by the expected return of El Niño, which typically suppresses hurricane activity by increasing disruptive wind shear over the Atlantic. Forecasters expect between eight and 14 named storms, including three to six hurricanes and up to three major hurricanes, making this the first below-average NOAA forecast since 2015. While Atlantic waters remain warmer than normal, they are not as extreme as in recent years, when unusually high ocean temperatures helped fuel intense storms despite El Niño conditions. NOAA says no tropical activity is expected through the end of May, though early-season storms, if they develop, are more likely to form near the Gulf Coast or U.S. Atlantic coast.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Don’t Count Democracy Out Just Yet, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 21, 2026. We’ve overcome bigger challenges before.

The Trump administration’s AI policy has been all over the map—from its initial “let ’er rip to win the AI race against China” posture to its declaration of war earlier this year against the frontier lab Anthropic. Now, Politico reports, the administration is about to drop a major AI executive order—one that could demand federal review of advanced AI models before they are released.  More on that when it materializes. Happy Thursday.

 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Is a Big Fish in a Small MAGA Pond, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 21, 2026. The legacy media never tires of telling us that Donald Trump has an iron grip on the MAGA Republican Party.

Yes, he certainly can knock off infidel Republicans in red state primaries. However, the underlying assumption of these stories — that Trump remains a powerhouse in American politics — defies reality. Instead of a colossus, he has become a big fish in a shrinking, fetid pond of MAGA loyalists.

In doing so, he cuts off an escape route for Republicans in general elections, making it virtually impossible for Republicans to create any daylight between themselves and Trump as the latter hits new polling lows each week. The primary results Tuesday and his decision to endorse MAGA scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hold several critical lessons as we move closer to the midterms. 

It’s the MAGA voters

While it would be lovely to pretend that Trump voters have gone through some self-reflection, the number of Trump cultists in the Republican primary electorate is shockingly high. These voters dumped Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and, on Saturday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

It would be a mistake to deny these voters agency; they want crazed, extreme leadership drenched in white supremacy.

These voters pose a significant problem for any segment of Republicans who want to turn the page after Trump leaves (or after the midterms). This group may understand that a lawless, conspiracy-minded cult is unfit to govern and unelectable nationwide, but MAGA loyalists will remain an albatross around their necks, vigorously opposing any normalization of the party.

Perhaps defeat in general elections will awaken MAGA voters, but we should be honest about the depth of the problem. The threat to democracy, sanity, and decency comes not from just Trump or elected Republicans — but from millions of voters. Since they appear to be utterly unreachable in the short term, democracy defenders must deliver a robust turnout of the rest of the electorate to swamp the hardened MAGA contingent.

Trump endangers Republicans in competitive races

By weeding out any normal Republicans (forcing dozens of retirements and primarying any Republicans with a smidgen of spine), Trump makes it impossible for the rest and the party as a whole to maintain any daylight between them and Trump.

In the near term, Trump’s insistence on pushing forward the most extreme, unhinged candidates and forcing the party to pursue a wholly unpopular agenda will drag down Republicans’ chance of victory in November’s general elections. It is one thing for Massie to lose in a deep red Kentucky district; it is quite another to put in play Texas with a nominee like Paxton. No wonder Senate Republicans are freaking out.

Democrats surely can make the case that it is not just Trump but all Republican electeds who are pro-war and utterly indifferent to Americans’ economic travails. If Americans are disgusted by egregious corruption, including a $1.8B slush fund (accessible even to felons who attacked our police), then they should hold Republicans — who refuse to criticize (let alone stop) the plundering, responsible. We face not only the most corrupt president in history, but the most corruption-friendly party in memory. (At least Tammany Hall delivered jobs and services to the masses.)

There should be no hiding for Republicans their complete subservience to a president whose poll numbers continue to dive. Trump wants no one in office not entirely supportive of him and all of his whims; Democrats should make sure the anti-Trump electorate understands this.Subscribed

Six for 2026

Democrats will have a field day running against Trump’s tariffs/price surge, the unnecessary and counterproductive war, corruption and cronyism — all of which Republicans enabled. However, Republicans’ jaw-dropping lack of accomplishments and obsession with things that are irrelevant to, or antagonistic to, ordinary Americans’ concerns (e.g. Jim Crow gerrymandering, ballrooms, billions more for the widely hated ICE) leave an opening for Democrats to construct a short, powerful agenda.

“Six for 2026” could include some basic objectives that go to the overarching issues of cost, corruption, and chaos:

1. Investigate and end the massive corruption
2. Reclaim tariff power and push for return of illegal tariff monies to consumers
3. Reverse cuts to Medicaid and reissue Affordable Care Act subsidies
4. Cut off offensive combat operations against Iran and conduct a full accounting of the decision and execution of the war
5. Rein in ICE and return to a reasonable budgeting plan
6. Agree to regulate and give residents a say in massive data centers (a growing bipartisan opposition to gargantuan facilities that drive up energy costs and create environmental hazards makes this a potent issue).

In sum, Trump is making the Republican Party crazier and less electable by the day. Whatever the results in November, the GOP contingent in the House and Senate will be more extreme and more beholden to their cult leader. The fringe in the Republican Party is unquestionably the mainstream.

Democrats therefore have the chance to assemble the widest coalition in recent history, underscore the depravity of the MAGA party, and present a sane alternative in step with the concerns of the overwhelming number of voters.

Trump's $1.8b Taxpayer-paid Slush Fund For Pro-Trump Insurrectionists, Fraudsters, Media Influencers

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).  

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Returns of 1776: “Just Pay Your Taxes So I Can Enjoy Your Money,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 21, 2026. Presidential Election, Financial Fraud, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ.

In general, I am solidly of the belief that people with no reporting or messaging purpose to be at Elon Musk’s Nazi bar should avoid it like the plague on civilization it is.

But this week, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s primaries (and Trump’s endorsement of corrupt Ken Paxton over the more electable John Cornyn) and more importantly, DOJ’s announcement of a $1,776 billion slush fund to pay terrorists, cop assailants, and child sex predators, it’s worth a peek.

People on Bluesky, still seeking to outsource beating fascism to prosecutors, seem to have no idea what a softball this slush fund is for political messaging (and as a result, many are simply checking out rather than exploiting the opportunity).

Make no mistake. Xitter remains a swirling shithole of far right nutbags. But this week it is the venue in which a crucially important political drama is playing out.

That’s because the Jan6er victimization industry, largely composed of a bunch of grifters exploiting rubes who were already induced by Donald Trump to throw their lives away, has long used Xitter to pitch their campaign. Unsurprisingly, one after another Jan6er is making their case for a payout, using a variety of conflicting tactics: blatantly lying about the crimes they or a loved one committed on January 6 or, alternately, claiming that the privileges Jan6ers got during COVID lockdowns in prison were unprecedented rather than better than other pre-trial suspects in the same DC prison; complaining that their own boasts about their role in the attack led to adverse life consequences, including shaming; or choosing instead to declare that they are authentic Jan6ers who never denied allegiance to Trump. As Xitter has emptied out of normal human beings, these appeals have normally met with great success.

But Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche and Jan6er defense attorney Stan Woodward chose an inauspicious moment to attempt one of the most corrupt gambits in American history, and so even if these appeals from the victimization industry might have normally worked, they’re facing headwinds now.

Republicans in Congress are panicking because Trump continues to chase high ticket projects to feed his vanity and corruption even while voters grow increasingly furious at Trump’s refusal to deliver on his primary campaign promise: to bring down costs.

The big problem for Trump and Republicans is that the president said he would lower prices on day one, and then he went and actively made decisions that produced the opposite outcome — and took credit for them. Basically everything about the current political environment is downstream of these decisions.

You can see this in the numbers. Today, 64% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, and 69% disapprove of how he is managing the cost of living, per the Times‘ poll. Among independents in the new poll, 70% disapprove of Trump’s job performance overall — up from 62% in January. The most recent NYT/Siena measurement of Trump’s tariffs specifically, from January, found Americans opposed them 55% to 38%.

On the war in Iran, Americans say the president made the wrong decision by 64% to about 30%, and 65% disapprove of his handling of the war specifically. Among independents, nearly three-quarters say going to war was wrong. And 59% of voters now say higher gas prices have caused them financial hardship — up eight points from April.

These are the types of numbers you get only when you are betraying the coalition that put you in office.

The bunker-ballroom was itself already a bridge too far — and Trump’s defeat of Bill Cassidy in a primary only made it easier for Cassidy to publicly oppose the grift. Trump’s pardon of cop assailants and seditionists has always caused discomfort for a range of Republicans, even if vocal complaints were normally limited to those like Thom Tillis who’ve already declined to run again in the world of absolute Trump fealty.

This time, however, Trump’s attempt to reward the criminals who attacked Congress comes with a price tag. It steals money from law-abiding taxpayers and puts it into the hands of confessed or convicted criminals, upending everything on which GOP power is built: opposition to taxes, false claims to fight crime, and grievance.

I promise you. It will not help that a convicted (now pardoned) seditionist, adjudged to be a terrorist by a Trump-appointed judge — a guy whose plans to attack the Capitol included consideration of a document entitled “1776 Returns,” the same symbol of rebellion symbolically chosen for the amount of this slush fund — is telling people like me to “Just pay your taxes so I can enjoy your money.”

According to Reuters, Tarrio thinks he’s entitled to up to a $5 million reward for organizing the men who kicked off the attack on the Capitol (or, as I suggest, for refusing to snitch out Trump, as he formerly has claimed he was invited to do). And unless Congress finds a way to prohibit the spending of this money — and possibly even if they do do that! — then criminals like Tarrio will continue to demand that taxpayers fund his crime.

As Punchbowl describes, the discomfort with Trump’s self-dealing extends well beyond those, like Cassidy, who’ve been liberated to speak up against it.

Senate Republicans are preparing to buck President Donald Trump on two of his long-running obsessions: the White House ballroom project and the “weaponization” of federal agencies against his allies.

It’s a risky gambit, taking on an emboldened president who’s busier settling scores against members of his own party than he is in taking on Democrats.

But Republican leaders are making clear they’d rather risk a Trump outburst than participate in what they see as a campaign of political self-sabotage.

That means scrapping plans to fund security for Trump’s controversial East Wing ballroom. Senate Republicans are also using the reconciliation bill to restrict Trump’s new $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who believe they were unfairly targeted by the feds.

Both are politically toxic for vulnerable Republicans in a midterm year defined by affordability issues and high costs.

In most cases, the only Republicans who are publicly speaking out against these initiatives are the victims of Trump’s revenge tour or otherwise not seeking reelection. But GOP leaders’ decisions on both the ballroom and weaponization fund make clear that they feel the same way.

“People are concerned about paying their mortgage or rent, affording groceries and paying for gas, not about putting together a $1.8 billion fund for the president and his allies to pay whomever they wish with no legal precedent or accountability,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who just lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

“Imagine that — a fund that is set up to compensate people who assaulted Capitol Police officers,” added Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who isn’t running for reelection. “How absurd does that sound coming out of my mouth?”

Scott MacFarlane even got far right Clay Higgins — who wrote a sentencing memo supporting one of the cop assailants, Ryan Nichols — to express some caution about the slush fund; it probably doesn’t help that Nichols was recently arrested for pulling a gun on someone holding a Bible during a dispute in a church parking lot.

And the GOP push to fund ICE goons via reconciliation creates easy tactics to exploit. Democrats have already forced several votes on Trump’s Terrorist Slush Fund, and Democrats can introduce a poison pill to reconciliation if Republicans don’t pre-empt it. Republicans went from thinking they could claim Democrats refused to fund immigration to scrambling to avoid voting in favor of payouts to cop assailants.

Which is to say the last thing Republicans in Congress need is a bunch of wailing Jan6ers declaring that they should be paid by taxpayers for the crimes they committed.

Wade into the Nazi bar for a peek or continue to avoid it.

But whichever you choose, I beg of you: Find at least one way to embarrass a Republican politician or family member that Donald Trump plans to steal money from law-abiding tax payers to pay off people who brutally assaulted cops. Trump created a messaging gift, and messaging may be the one way to prevent or punish this corruption.

Try it! You just might get an adjudged terrorist to say something that will hurt Republicans in response!

Update: Dems have submitted bills in both the House and Senate to tax any payouts from the Terrorist Slush Fund at 100%.…

New York Times, How the $1.8 Billion Trump Fund May Violate Past Practice and Policy, Devlin Barrett, May 21, 2026 (print ed. The fund that could offer payouts to Trump allies who accuse the government of mistreatment is not only highly unusual but also appears to violate the administration’s own policies.

The $1.8 billion fund created by the Trump administration this week to pay people who claim mistreatment by the federal government appears to violate longstanding Justice Department standards and practices, as well as a policy directive issued by the administration last year, legal experts said on Wednesday.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, defended the fund at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, calling it “unusual” but insisting it was appropriate and reflective of past settlements.

Justice Department veterans have been deeply skeptical of those claims, particularly when it comes to a provision in the deal that offers President Trump, his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization immunity from tax penalties. They have also been critical of the decision to resolve a lawsuit filed by one group of people in a way that gives more than a billion dollars to an entirely different category of people.

“I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity,” said Jennifer Ricketts, a former branch director in the department’s civil division. “That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president.”

Justice Department veterans also said the new fund appeared to contradict a specific policy instituted by the Trump administration last year under former Attorney General Pam Bondi that largely prohibited payments to groups not involved in an underlying lawsuit.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

The deal struck between the president’s lawyers and his own administration, without oversight of a judge, could involve major payouts to people who had not sued the government, as well.

“I’ve just never seen litigation risk outside the four corners of the complaint being used as justification for something in a totally unrelated lawsuit,” Ms. Ricketts added.

Here is more about how the fund could work.

 

New York Times, News AnalysisTrump’s Government Moves to Spare an Unhappy Taxpayer Named Trump, Peter Baker, May 20, 2026. No president has ever used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies as expansively and openly as Mr. Trump has.

It is hard to imagine that any previous president would have thought he could engage in such an audacious act of self-dealing.

Sue the government he runs, then settle the lawsuit with himself by barring the Internal Revenue Service from auditing his past returns. And as part of that deal, hand over $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to his allies.

President Trump has used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies more expansively and openly than any past occupant of the White House. Any review of history would suggest that it is not even close.

But as Mr. Trump, the only convicted felon ever elected president, heads deeper into his second term, he seems even less inhibited by the rules, written or unwritten, that governed his predecessors. While deeply unpopular with the general public, he has demonstrated as recently as this week that he remains the undisputed master of his own party, and therefore appears to feel that he can do as he likes without fear of Congress standing in his way.

His self-granted writ of immunity from I.R.S. audits amounts to a get-out-of-audits-free card, essentially the equivalent of pardoning himself for any past offenses and forgiving any tax debt or penalties. While the status of any now-short-circuited audits is not publicly known, his action could theoretically save him from paying $100 million or more, based on past estimates of what his liability might have been under an unfavorable I.R.S. decision.

The I.R.S. audit immunity for himself, along with the taxpayer payout to his supporters — potentially including those who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn an election that Mr. Trump lost — stand out in their brazenness, yet not in what they say about his underlying approach to governance in his sixth year in office.

Mr. Trump has so blurred the lines between his financial interests and his public office that it is hard to define where the lines lie anymore, or if they still exist. He, his family and his friends have made a fortune in the 16 months since he returned to power in ways that once would have been seen as conflicts of interest and possibly generated investigations.

“Presidents have had corrupt, even criminal, family members,” said Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, citing, among others, Hunter Biden. “But none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved.”

She added: “They have won the presidency twice, emasculated Congress, created a supportive high court, and reshaped the law and institutions to absolve them of any wrongdoing, while making billions of ill-gotten dollars.”

 

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty ImagesU.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

Background: National Public Radio via KUNR, Officers Give Harrowing Testimony On Their Experience Defending The Capitol On Jan. 6, Brian Naylor, July 27, 2021. Four police officers testified Tuesday about the physical and verbal assaults they faced responding to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in a highly emotional hearing.

The four officers — Pfc. Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell of the U.S. Capitol Police, and Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department — each gave opening statements and answered questions from committee members.

Gonell recounted the events of that day and the impact it has had on law enforcement officers: "For most people, Jan. 6 happened for a few hours," he said. "But for those of us who were in the thick of it, it has not ended."

It was the first hearing held by the Democratic-led House select committee investigating the attack by pro-Trump rioters who were trying to stop the certification of the presidential election, which Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Lawmakers on the panel lauded the officers' heroism and blasted colleagues who have denied the events of that day.What the officers saw, felt and heard

The Metropolitan Police's Fanone described his experience heading to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to assist the Capitol Police. He said the scene he found as he worked his way to the Capitol's West Front, where thousands of rioters were violently clashing with police, was "nothing short of brutal."

Fanone decried those in Congress who are "downplaying or outright denying what happened" that day, saying, "I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them."

"The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful!" Fanone shouted as he pounded the witness table. "Nothing, truly nothing has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day. And in doing so betray their oath of office."

Hodges repeatedly called the members of the mob attack on the Capitol "terrorists" and later, when pressed on why he used that term, cited the section of U.S. Code defining domestic terrorism.

He said that to his "perpetual confusion, I saw the 'thin blue line' flag, the symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us."

The Capitol Police's Dunn said he was in the speaker's lobby outside the House chamber when one of the insurrectionists said that "Trump invited us here" and that Donald Trump was still the president.

"Nobody voted for Joe Biden," Dunn said the man told him. Dunn said he responded that he had voted for President Biden, asking, "Does my vote not count?"

He told the panel a woman in a pink MAGA shirt then yelled, "You hear that guys? This n***** voted for Joe Biden." Dunn said that the crowd of around 20 people joined in screaming, "Boo, f****** n*****!" Dunn continued, "No one had ever, ever called me a n***** while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer."

Asked what he was fighting to protect on Jan. 6, Hodges responded, "democracy." He added, "It was for democracy, it was for the men and women of the House and Senate, it was for each other, and it was for the future of the country."

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Hodges and the other officers they were "heroes to all of America," adding, "Those who attacked you and beat you are fascist traitors to our country and will be remembered forever as fascist traitors."What the witnesses want from the committee

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 8, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 21, 2026. Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn sued President Donald J. Trump, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today to block the creation of the fund to pay off those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The lawsuit begins: “In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.”

The suit continues: “The fund…is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.”

Both Hodges and Dunn defended the Capitol and the lawmakers in it on January 6. Hodges was the man in the infamous photograph of the rioters crushing a police officer between metal doors. The officers claim the standing to sue because they have had to live with death threats and harassment since January 6 from MAGA Republicans and the plan to pay off rioters “will both compensate and empower the very people making those threats. Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the Fund to arm and equip themselves. The Fund will grant their past acts of violence legal imprimatur. And, most chillingly, the Fund will signal to past and potential future perpetrators of violence against Dunn and Hodges that they need not fear prosecution; to the contrary, they should expect to be rewarded.”

The lawsuit covers what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beginning shortly after noon, when rioters tried to break into the building to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. “Hours of hand-to-hand combat ensued,” the lawsuit recounts, “as police officers tried to prevent the rioters from entering the building and killing elected officials and their staff.”

On the west front of the Capitol, rioters broke down barriers made of bike racks, signs, and snow fencing and pushed forward to a line of police officers. “Rioters assaulted officers, sprayed them with chemicals, and hit them with pipes, tools, and the bike racks and stolen police equipment that were now strewn about.” After 2:00 the rioters broke through the line of officers, smashed windows, and forced their way into the building, opening the doors for their comrades.

“As rioters stalked the halls, staffers, journalists, and members of Congress hid in offices, hoping not to be found by people screaming ‘hang Mike Pence!’ and ‘Where’s Nancy [Pelosi]?’” They forced their way into the Senate chamber just minutes after Vice President Mike Pence left it.

Meanwhile, officers continued to fight against the advancing mob. “Rioters punched police, speared them with flagpoles, attacked them with tasers and stolen riot shields, and tried to drag them into the crowd. For three hours in the enclosed tunnel connecting the Capitol to the inaugural stage, rioters engaged in an almost medieval style of combat, pushing exhausted and outnumbered police to get into the building in a “heave-ho” rhythm, nearly crushing officers as they did. Through all of this, amid the fighting and screaming, flash bangs exploded, fire retardant shot into the air, and chemical spray filled the tunnel. Many officers were injured in this fight to defend this entrance, some gravely.”

Hodges was “hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes. Hodges shook him off, and eventually made his way to the tunnel connecting the Capitol building to the inaugural stage. There, he joined in some of the most furious fighting that day, as police tried to stop the mass of rioters from flooding into the building. In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, ‘this could be the end.’”

After several hours, national guard forces, including from Virginia and Maryland, helped the officers to get control and expel the rioters from the Capitol.

The lawsuit recounts the events of the day in detail, making it clear exactly who it is that Trump wants to reward with almost $2 billion in taxpayer money.

Hodges and Dunn are not the only people going after what is not just “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” but the most brazen act of presidential corruption in American history. By far.

In the House, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) today introduced the “No Taxpayer-Funded Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2026,” which would prohibit the use of federal funds to pay off anyone claiming to have faced “weaponization” of the law by the federal government, including any of the January 6 rioters. “Congress must reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for massive partisan corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government,” Raskin said.

Democrats also demanded the Department of Justice preserve any and all documents and communications about the agreement. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas Touch reported that even Republicans hate the slush fund and non-prosecution agreement, telling Nicolle Wallace of MS NOW: “There are so many Republicans coming out against this thing. It appears to me this slush fund is like as popular as poison ivy…. Nobody is claiming ownership of this thing. I have zero statements of support for this fund from any congressional Republican.”

Yesterday, before news broke of acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s addendum to the original agreement, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Adam Schiff of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent a memo to the Department of Justice asking whether Blanche was following the advice of ethics lawyers in the department in his handling of issues having to do with Trump, as he had promised to do in his confirmation hearings.

Lawyer George Conway posted that Blanche never intended to carry out that promise. It is clear that members of the Trump administration never intended to honor the Constitution or serve the American people, raising the question of what exactly they do intend.

For Trump, making money is clearly a major part of it. The anger over the slush fund has pushed out of the news a growing outcry over the news from earlier this week that Trump bought and sold at least $220 million in stocks like those of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft while making policy and public announcements that affected the value of those stocks.

Trump is also into building monuments to himself in the nation’s capital: the repainted reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, and the Triumphal Arch behind the Lincoln Memorial that would frame the home of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump has paid special attention to the ballroom he intends to build on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be, saying it will be done by September 2028. Republicans tried to get $1 billion put into a reconciliation bill to fund what Trump claimed was security measures for the ballroom. Unlike most measures that come before the Senate, a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered and so needs only 51 votes rather than 60 to pass.

But Democrats recently stopped that Republican plan by noting that Republicans failed to give the required instructions to all the relevant committees. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with them and said the request could not go into a budget reconciliation measure. Senate Republicans, who were uncomfortable with the request anyway, removed it.

Trump apparently did not get the memo. Today he insisted that Republicans replace the Senate parliamentarian with a Trump loyalist. His social media account posted: “Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ‘Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an ‘iron fist.’ Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans but not to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?”

He went on to demand the Senate force through the SAVE America Act that would significantly restrict voting and to call for the Senate to “kill the Filibuster, which would give us everything!” He went on: “If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again.”

But Senate Republicans are signaling they might not want to play ball with a president whose approval ratings showed up today at an abysmal 34% and who is demanding loyalty to himself alone, rather than working for the party. On Meet the Press Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reacted to the defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s Republican primary after Trump backed his rival by saying: “This is the party of Donald Trump.”

Trump made that clear yesterday when, after waffling for months, he endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in a primary runoff over Senator John Cornyn’s seat to be held next week. Trump called Paxton “a true MAGA Warrior” and complained that Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis noted that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico “has to be doing the happy dance.” “This is going like Dem[ocrat]s would have scripted it,” Dennis wrote. “A late Trump endorsement after Cornyn/Senate Republicans incinerated ~$100 [million] trying to nuke Ken Paxton as an impeached adulterer who violated ethics left and right.”

House Republicans also have borne the pressure of Trump’s wrath. Yesterday representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who helped to lead the charge for the release of the Epstein files, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in what was the most expensive House primary ever. Ed Gallrein, who won the primary, vows that he will do whatever Trump tells him to. Trump-backed primary candidates also won in Georgia and Alabama.

White House spokesperson Steven Cheung posted: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. F*ck around, find out.” But as political commentator Jessica Tarlov noted, Massie’s district went for Trump by 35 points in 2024, but Gallrein won by just ten points after outside money spent an astronomical $35 million on the race when winning a primary usually costs between $100,000 and $500,000.

Tarlov added that Trump isn’t offering much of a platform for Republicans to run on. She said, it’s basically “I want absolute loyalty. I want to trade stocks, make hundreds of millions of dollars. I want my 1776 fund to make sure J Sixers, you know, get the money that they’re owed. I want immunity for me and my family from an audit forevermore…. I want to get rich, and I don’t care that you are poorer.”

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Fund Puts Blanche in a Tight Spot as He Aims to Lead Justice Dept., Glenn Thrush, May 21, 2026. Once seen by some as the most conventional of President Trump’s political appointees, Todd Blanche has taken off the gloves in his new role as acting attorney general.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has tried to tread an ever-narrowing path between his role as a top Justice Department official and the job that got him there in the first place — as President Trump’s doggedly loyal former lead defense lawyer.

Allies of Mr. Blanche thought he could achieve two seemingly irreconcilable goals when he was elevated to temporarily replace Pam Bondi after her ouster in April: restoring stability and competence to the department and taking a handful of actions that were sufficiently drastic to convince the boss he was tough enough to make his title permanent.

So far, however, Mr. Blanche has exhibited few of the modest moderating tendencies he exhibited during more than a year as Ms. Bondi’s top deputy. Under Mr. Blanche, the pace of investigations against Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies has accelerated — most strikingly, the indictment of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for posting on social media an image of seashells that prosecutors cast as threatening. Mr. Blanche has used his new perch to boost debunked election conspiracy theories promoted by the president.

But the moves that most starkly illustrated Mr. Blanche’s evolving approach came this week. In announcing on Monday a $1.8 billion fund that would benefit those who claim they were targeted by the federal government, he effectively forged a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to Trump allies, among them supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Mr. Blanche said in a statement.

It was instantly labeled a “slush fund” by Democrats. The head of one prominent good-government group described the plan as “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

Then came a stealthy stunner. The department inserted a supplement to the fund agreement that granted Mr. Trump, his family and their businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, an extraordinary move that could shield the president from significant financial liability — issued under Mr. Blanche’s signature.

But while Mr. Blanche’s name is on the documents, and he has defended the actions as lawful and necessary, his precise role in formulating these policies remains unclear.

During an interview with CNN on Wednesday, he suggested that Mr. Trump’s “outside counsel” and department lawyers, but “not me,” had been involved in drafting the settlement, including the provision shielding the president from I.R.S. scrutiny.

The fund proposal has been under broad consideration for months, although not necessarily linked to the I.R.S. case. Some far-right Trump supporters, including the department’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, have been pushing the idea of providing compensation for legal bills and other expenses, according to current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

It remains unclear if the fund, which is likely to draw a rush of applications, can withstand legal and political challenges.

Mr. Blanche and his team have provided few details about its operation. Most importantly, it is unclear how they would define weaponization when many of those targeted for investigation were either involved in potential offenses, had evidence needed to pursue legitimate inquiries or were convicted by juries and judges for crimes that were exhaustively documented by witnesses and visual evidence.

More On Trump Administration

New York Times, Nimitz Aircraft Carrier Enters Caribbean as Trump Pressures Cuba, Eric Schmitt, Updated May 21, 2026. The carrier arrived in the southern Caribbean on the same day that the Justice Department announced charges against Raúl Castro.

The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships entered the southern Caribbean Sea on Wednesday and will remain in the region for at least a few days as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Cuban government, according to the military’s Southern Command and a U.S. official.

Right now, the administration intends to use the Nimitz, and its wing of fighter jets, as a show of force, not as a platform for major military operations, as the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford did during the commando raid to seize President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in January, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

The Nimitz has spent the past several weeks sailing along the South American coast on a previously scheduled training deployment, in recent days conducting exercises with the Brazilian navy.

Still, it hardly seemed coincidental that the Pentagon timed the arrival of the carrier into the southern Caribbean on the same day that the Justice Department announced charges against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba.

“Welcome to the Caribbean, Nimitz Carrier Strike Group!” the Southern Command posted on social media Wednesday. “U.S.S. Nimitz has proven its combat prowess across the globe, ensuring stability and defending democracy from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf.”

Much of firepower the Pentagon amassed in the Caribbean for the Maduro raid left the region soon after to form the backbone of American might in the Iran War. But the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima remains in the region, according to the Navy.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: Trump And Trumpism Are Failing, And We Must Grow More, Simon Rosenberg, May 21, 2026. We just got our first poll of Trump at 31% approval. He just keeps falling......

Our proud and patriotic paid subscribers gathered last night, and as I do in these Wednesday night get togethers I tried to take a step back from the day to day and offer my broad assessment of where we are in our fight against MAGA and for freedom and democracy, here and everywhere. A video recording and rough transcript can be found above.

I focused on three main topics last night:

Anyone who thinks Trump is winning is not paying attention

The 6 big shocks that have and continue to hit Trump and the GOP

We need to keep expanding our coalition and our maps, restore our ambition and take more away from them, and leave the era of overly restrictive targeting behind…

Let’s get to it……

I began by recapping yesterday’s post: "Anyone Who Thinks Trump Is Winning Isn't Paying Attention Anyone Who Thinks Trump Is Winning Isn't Paying Attention," Simon Rosenberg, May 20, 2026. Read full story, where I make two main points:

1 - Trump’s taking out of sitting Senators and House Members has weakened his grip over Congressional Republicans, and they are starting to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular Trump and his failed Presidency. Bills to rein in the war and support Ukraine will be coming to votes soon - extraordinary potential rebukes of him. In recent days Senate Rs have said no to the SAVE Act, no to the ballroom, no to firing the Senate parliamentarian, no to the slush fund. Trump may have sold these interventions as wins but they have done much to undermine his power in Washington - a very dangerous development for such a venal, corrupt and potentially very vulnerable leader.

2 - At a strategy level creating a tighter connection between the GOP’s battleground candidates and a wildly unpopular Trump is a disaster, as it was in 2018 and 2022.The 6 Shocks That Are Weakening Trump’s Brand, And Why Things Are Likely To Get Worse For Trump

In the video I argue there are five shocks that are weakening Trump. This morning as I began writing I realize there are six.

First came the tariffs and higher prices, downward pressure on farmers and small businesses, a slower economy. Next came the big ugly, and direct cuts to health care and food assistance, with tax cuts for him and his buddies. Next came Epstein (a new one in my formulation), then the siege of Minneapolis and the killing of Americans on the street. Then the war, and now what I call an emerging new “corruption” shock.

Trump had the worst week of polling of his 2nd term this week. Most major polls now find him in the mid to high 30s, and his disapproval in the high 50s to low 60s. The country has rejected the war, and it has driven him to new lows in approval. This morning we got our first poll of Trump at 31%:

But what changed these last few weeks is that we are starting to see his plummeting approval translate into real danger for Rs in the election itself. We’ve had Senate polls showing Dems ahead in Senate races in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Texas - results that if they hold means the Senate flips. We’ve now had polls showing Collins down 5 and 8 points to Platner - a place that is usually place of no return for a sitting Senator. And we’ve started seeing polls showing Democrats with enormous leads in the generic ballot. The NYT and Quinnipiac had it +11 D this week, and there have now been 6 polls showing Dems with double digit generic ballot leads in recent weeks. Here is what the GOP political ecosystem is seeing today on their main data site, Real Clear Politics. Look at the steep downward trajectory for the Rs -

We just need to be very clear about what this all means. A 7 point Dem generic ballot lead is equal to where we were on Election Day in 2018 in what was a blow out election for us, and things almost always get worse for the incumbent party as we get closer to the election. Two of these six shocks are almost certainly going to get worse for Trump - the corruption shock (given what’s happened in the past few weeks) and the gutting of domestic and global health care, humanitarian aid, and food assistance. While these stories detail the rising global threat, every day we get closer to election the dramatic domestic cuts to the ACA, Medicaid, SNAP are going to be more acutely felt and become more dangerous for Republicans.

So as bad as things are for the Rs right now - and they are bad - they could get much worse for them in the coming months. It is clearly a year of opportunity for the pro-democracy movement in the US.

Due to time retrains this morning I won’t be able to give this the full treatment but essentially it has become clear that we need a far more expansive understanding of how to gain power and keep it if we are to truly defeat MAGA in the years to come. We left too many states, communities, places and tactics behind, including partisan voter registration and long term strategies to gain control of state legislatures and state Supreme Courts to counter their illicit gerrymandering in this new post-Callais world.

The imperative of learning once again how to compete and win in red places and red states and take back power from MAGA has been at the core of our work here at Hopium since we launched in March of 2023. It is what drove the creation of our Audacious Expansion Fund and our candidate work over the last two cycles.. It is what drove my original “expand our coalition” memo, Get to 55, in 2023. It is what is going to drive all of our work in the days, weeks, and months ahead. For we need more; we need to grow; we need to restore ambition and overcome what had become a reckless narrowing of our understanding of how to win elections and gain power.

That’s what we talked about last night. Enjoy the discussion, share it with others, hit like so more will see it, and now……

Maureen Galindo, left, has made such inflammatory anti-Zionist remarks in Texas primary race for a congressional seat against rival Johnny Garcia, right, that he and national Democrats allege that her heavy funding from mysterious sources is by Republicans hoping to sabotage the Democratic brand (Photo via Getty Images).

CBS News, Texas Democrat Maureen Galindo under fire after saying she'd make ICE jail a "prison for American Zionists," Anne Bryson, May 21, 2026. A Democratic House candidate in Texas is facing widespread condemnation and accusations of antisemitism from both parties for comments she posted on social media, including a pledge to turn an immigration detention facility into a "prison for American Zionists" if elected — drawing allegations from top Democrats that her campaign may be backed by conservative groups.

Maureen Galindo is running against Johnny Garcia in next week's Democratic primary for Texas' 35th Congressional District, which covers parts of San Antonio and the surrounding areas. Republicans are angling to pick up the seat, which is currently held by a Democrat but was made much more favorable to the GOP in Texas' redistricting effort last summer.

In an Instagram post last week, Galindo wrote that she will "turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists)."

Galindo wrote in the same post — referring to herself in the third person — that "when Maureen gets into Congress, she'll write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic, since it's Zionists harming the Semites."

Her social media feed also includes attacks on "billionaire Zionists," and a suggestion that "Zionist associated candidates and politicians" deserve "treason trials."

Galindo has denied that she is antisemitic, instead saying she is opposed to "Zionist Jews."

The comments have drawn stiff criticism from Texas Democrats, with Garcia calling them "conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric" and gubernatorial candidate James Talarico telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he would not campaign with Galindo.

Republican Carlos De La Cruz, who is facing off against state Rep. John Lujan in the GOP primary, wrote on X: "This rhetoric is disgusting and has no place in Texas."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that Galindo's comments were "extremely dangerous" and "vile," and have "no place in Democratic politics."

Many Democrats have also alleged that Galindo has been propped up by conservative funders. They point to Lead Left PAC, a political action committee founded less than a month ago that has reported more than $800,000 in pro-Galindo and anti-Garcia spending, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

Lead Left PAC identifies itself as an anti-Trump organization, and its donors are not public. But Punchbowl News reported earlier this month that its website contained metadata linking it to WinRed, a digital fundraising platform used by Republican candidates and GOP-aligned groups. The New York Times also raised questions about whether Lead Left PAC is linked to Republicans. (CBS News has not independently confirmed that reporting.)

"House Republican leadership must immediately cease propping up this antisemitic candidacy, pull spending in the race and forcefully condemn these comments," Jeffries and DelBene said in their statement condemning Galindo's comments.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called Galindo's comments "bigoted garbage and antisemitism" — and wrote in a post on X that "the donors behind the Republican super PAC funding her should be exposed."

Galindo told CBS News in an email: "I have literally no clue about the PAC, I'm just continuing my autonomous grassroots efforts." She also insisted her comments on social media had been misrepresented by a local media outlet, but reiterated that she wants to imprison "billionaire American Zionists [who fund the genocidal prison systems] involved in trafficking."

Asked about allegations that Republicans have backed Galindo, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Wednesday: "Of course not. I didn't even know this person existed."

"I don't know anything about it, except that these crazy comments surfaced yesterday, and a number of people sent it to me, and I thought this is a perfect example of where the Democratic Party is going," he said. "We say all the time: This is not your father's Democratic Party."

Both Democratic and Republican operatives are frequently accused of intervening in each other's primaries, aiming to prop up fringe candidates they view as easier to defeat.

CBS News has reached out to Lead Left PAC for comment.

Galindo, a sex therapist, and Garcia, a former sheriff's deputy, advanced to next week's Democratic primary runoff after no candidate won 50% of the vote in the initial round of the primaries. The Republican runoff candidates are De La Cruz, a small business owner and Air Force veteran, and Lujan, a state lawmaker and former sheriff's deputy.

President Trump and Johnson have endorsed De La Cruz, whose sister currently represents another U.S. House district.

The 35th District is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Greg Casar, but Texas' redistricting campaign dramatically changed the district's boundaries, transforming it from a deep-blue seat that stretches from Austin to San Antonio to a red seat that juts south and west of San Antonio. Casar is this year's Democratic nominee in the Austin-area 37th District.

 

New York Times, Colorado Governor Censured for Commuting Sentence of Election Denier, Jack Healy, May 21, 2026 (print ed.). The Colorado State Democratic Party, reflecting the anger of rank-and-file Democratic voters, rebuked Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday over his decision to release Tina Peters, above, from prison.

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, was censured by his own party on Wednesday night over his decision to free Tina Peters, a high-profile election denier and supporter of President Trump who had been serving a nine-year prison sentence for tampering with voting machines.

The censure by the Colorado State Democratic Party came after more than 700 infuriated Democrats signed onto a grass-roots effort to rebuke Mr. Polis for commuting Ms. Peters’ prison sentence last week. The censure measure, voted on during a state party central committee meeting on Wednesday night, passed with 89.8 percent support.

Ms. Peters had been perhaps the highest-profile election denier still in prison — in her case, for actions related to a failed effort to prove that voting machines under her control had been used to rig the 2020 election.

Dozens of Democratic leaders in Colorado — and some Republicans — spent months beseeching Mr. Polis in public and private to reject Ms. Peters’ application for clemency. They argued that despite her age, 70, and status as a first-time felon, Ms. Peters posed a threat to elections and democracy and was unrepentant.

Mr. Polis, however, said he believed Ms. Peters had been given an unfairly harsh sentence because of her embrace of election conspiracy theories, not the severity of her crime.

Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for Mr. Polis, responded to the censure by saying in a statement that “sometimes the right thing isn’t the popular thing with everybody.”

“Democracy is strongest when disagreement is met with debate and dialogue, not censorship,” he added.

The commutation Mr. Polis issued last Friday clears the way for Ms. Peters to be freed from a state prison in Pueblo, Colo., on June 1, after serving fewer than two years.

Democrats have been fuming ever since, searching for some way to punish the lame-duck governor, who has at times rankled Democrats by vetoing their bills, endorsing the vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and fighting in court to cooperate with federal immigration subpoenas. “The man is wildly out of touch with the party he effectively leads,” Ian Coggins, 33, a political consultant and local Democratic captain who started the censure effort, said in an interview.

On Wednesday night, more than 250 party activists and state and local officials joined a Zoom meeting where many slammed the governor for what they called “conduct detrimental” to their party.

Supporters of the censure demanded a formal investigation into the governor’s action, and wondered whether the commutation would affect Denver’s bid to host the Democratic National Convention in 2028.

“We cannot as a party or state allow this commutation to go unheeded,” Andrew Brandt, one of the Democrats on the Zoom meeting, said.

But a few argued that censure was unnecessary, and that Democrats in Colorado should focus on the midterm elections. In November, voters will decide who will succeed Mr. Polis as governor, a seat that political analysts expect Democrats to hold. In more challenging races, Democrats are also trying to flip two Republican-held congressional seats.

“The governor made a brave decision, unpopular as it is,” Ann la Plante, a criminal defense lawyer in Greeley, Colo., said.

Mr. Polis is hardly the first politician to be censured by his own party’s loyalists.

Republicans in Arizona censured then-Senator John McCain in 2014 over his voting record, and seven years later, censured his wife, Cindy, as well as a former Republican senator who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr. over Mr. Trump in the 2020 election. In 2022, Arizona Democrats censured Senator Kyrsten Sinema for opposing efforts to get rid of the filibuster.

Like those earlier censures, the Colorado Democratic Party’s action on Wednesday is largely symbolic. It does bar Mr. Polis from speaking at Democratic Party events, such as the upcoming DemFest in Denver, a showcase for candidates.

New York Times, D.N.C. 2024 Election Autopsy Reopens Wounds of Harris Loss, Shane Goldmache, rReid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer, May 21, 2026. The report partly blamed aides to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris for her defeat. But it was widely seen as a poorly executed examination, bringing fresh scrutiny to Democrats.

The Democratic National Committee on Thursday released a nearly 200-page draft of an internal autopsy of what went wrong in the 2024 campaign, ending months of speculation that had created an embarrassing public spectacle for the party as it seeks to regain control of Congress.

The draft report places blame for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat partly on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s political operation, arguing that it did not position her for success in the race after Mr. Biden dropped out. It also critiques the Harris campaign for failing to distance itself from Mr. Biden, and for not producing an effective strategy to make a dent in Donald J. Trump’s rising approval ratings.

The release was an extraordinary turn of events for the party, which all but trashed its own report as incomplete and inaccurate, releasing the document only after months of mounting headaches from keeping it secret. The episode drew unwanted attention to the committee’s internal struggles at a time when it should be focused squarely on the midterms and preparing for the looming 2028 cycle.

New York Times, 5 Takeaways From the Democrats’ Autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 Loss, Tim Balk, May 21, 2026. A draft report released by the Democratic National Committee argued that Ms. Harris did not sufficiently separate herself from President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

A draft of an internal Democratic autopsy of the 2024 presidential election released Thursday argues that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign failed to make an “affirmative case” for her, did not sufficiently separate her from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and was hurt by a Trump ad attacking her for supporting surgery for transgender inmates.

The draft report released by the Democratic National Committee, which is missing many sections and is filled with annotations questioning its methods, suggested that the Harris campaign missed opportunities to dent Donald J. Trump’s standing with voters.

Still, it says, the late campaign switch to Ms. Harris from Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket helped Democrats running in other races.

Here are five takeaways from the report.It said the Harris campaign did not make an ‘affirmative’ case for her.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Freedom’s Not Just Another Word, William Kristol, right, May 21, 2026. There’s so much infuriating and dispiriting news to share—as we do every day. But precisely because the world seems to be getting more somber, more bleak, more dangerous, I feel duty bound to bring your inspiring news when I can. So I want to say a word about the Freedom House dinner I attended last night.

Freedom House is an organization dedicated to defending democracy and promoting human rights, to fighting for a world in which all are free. It was founded in late 1941 to counter the original America First movement and to support U.S. involvement in the fight against fascism. Over its eighty-five years, it has stood firm against Nazism and Communism and the many other variants of authoritarianism that have disfigured the global landscape. It has supported democracy, human rights, and dissidents fighting for freedom.

It was a bipartisan enterprise from its beginning. Its original chairmen were Wendell Willkie, who’d been the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband had defeated Willkie in that contest. Among its other founders were prominent anti-fascists like the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?” has enjoyed a new burst of well-deserved attention of late, and Rex Stout, whose Nero Wolfe mysteries deserve their continued fame.

Last night’s dinner program honored courageous dissidents from authoritarian and totalitarian countries, with moving tributes to their courage and the causes for which they have fought. It also featured expressions of confidence in the ultimate success of those causes, despite the depressing trends of the last two decades of democratic backsliding, documented best by Freedom House’s annual reports.

But for me, the dinner was less about the program and more about reconnecting with men and women, from left and center and right, who have tried to fight, mostly arm-in-arm, sometimes arguing with each other, for freedom. I caught up with former staffers for John McCain and for Nancy Pelosi, with men and women who’d served in administrations from Reagan’s to Biden’s, with career diplomats and trouble-making activists from America and abroad.

We’re not here to cheer for one party or the other. We’re here for democracy. And we’re building a community. Join us.Subscribed

Our current president was not much mentioned—but of course his non-freedom-loving shadow hovered over the dinner. One of yesterday’s leading foreign policy stories was Putin’s visit to China, following on Trump’s paying court to Xi Jinping last week. So the fact that freedom today has powerful enemies working against it was front and center in everyone’s mind. And the people with whom I spoke were clear-eyed about the moment in which we’re living and the challenges we face at home and abroad.

At one point last night I was commenting on how daunting some of those challenges seem. My interlocutor quite correctly pointed to the world of eighty-five years ago, when Freedom House was being founded. In May 1941, Great Britain stood alone. Nazi Germany was unchecked in continental Europe and still in alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Imperial Japan was dominant in East Asia. Our challenges pale by comparison.

But one thing the founders of Freedom House did have going for them was an American president who was on the side of freedom. That’s not the case today. But that hasn’t stopped the brave Ukrainians from holding their own without much help from us. It hasn’t deterred the people of Hungary from defeating Viktor Orbán contrary to the wishes of our government. It hasn’t stopped dissidents around the world like Jimmy Lai, unjustly imprisoned by Beijing and honored last night, from facing cruel persecution in order to stand for freedom.

Last night we heard references by several speakers to the fact that this is our 250th anniversary. We are, sadly, not now holding high the Declaration of Independence’s torch of freedom. But the fact that so many others around the world are inspired by its principles is an ironic but powerful confirmation of their universality. Perhaps it’s not the case that America is an indispensable nation. But it seems as clear now as ever that the principles of the American Revolution, of the Declaration, are indispensable principles. It was heartening to spend an evening with men and women who are committed to them.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Last Full Measure, Quietly Remembered… A Memorial Day reflection from MARK HERTLING.
• The Assault On Multiracial Democracy in the South… JUSTIN JONES joins TIM MILLER to talk about voting and elections in the South since the Supreme Court disemboweled the Voting Rights Act.
• Trump Wants to Be . . . What?!… JVL and ANDREW EGGER break down why Trump said he wants Benjamin Netanyahu’s job.
• An Ebola Survivor on the Ebola Outbreak… Dr. CRAIG SPENCER joins JONATHAN COHN to talk about the hemorrhagic fever epidemic in Central Africa.

Quick Hits

NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR THE BALLROOM: Donald Trump still wants $1 billion in taxpayer money for “security improvements” to his East Wing ballroom plans, but it’s looking like he won’t get it. Senate Republicans quietly threw in the towel on squeezing the East Wing funds into their forthcoming immigration-spending reconciliation bill, with several GOP senators expressing deep skepticism over the line item and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruling against its inclusion in the reconciliation bill at all. “We were told that the ballroom money is out,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters after the GOP’s regular conference lunch Tuesday.

The president won’t be thrilled. Just hours before, he had been publicly flogging Senate Majority Leader John Thune to go to total war with MacDonough: “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced? . . . The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us.” What a shame!

SUING THE SLUSH FUND: It’s not clear yet who will have standing to sue over Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—but people are already giving it a try. Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the attack, former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and D.C. policeman Daniel Hodges, filed suit yesterday to block the creation of the fund, which they called “a slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” Politico has more:

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, argues that the fund violates the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on use of federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The officers’ complaint also alleges that the Justice Department has no legal authority to create the fund, announced Monday as part of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over the leak of his tax returns during his first term.

The Justice Department will likely argue that the officers don’t have standing to bring the suit. The complaint contends that Dunn and Hodges have faced ongoing harassment, including death threats, from participants in the riot. The officers allege that they have a personal stake in the dispute over the fund because it will be used to provide financial support that is likely to fuel that sort of harassment in the future.

Hodges was one of the indelible faces of the violence of the riot—the officer who was captured on video screaming in pain as the mob of rioters crushed him against a doorframe. Read the whole thing.

HOW WE GOT HERE: Amid all the (justified) complaining over Trump’s ridiculous abuse of the Judgment Fund this week, we shouldn’t ignore one crucial fact: Congress didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Although “very few people had given the Judgment Fund much thought until this week,” the New York Times notes, “legal experts had long warned that it was ripe for abuse”:

“The integrity of the Judgment Fund is dependent on the good faith of executive branch officers,” Paul F. Figley, a former Justice Department official who helped administer the fund from 1978 to 2006, wrote in 2015 in an article in The Journal of Constitutional Law. Its title was telling: “The Judgment Fund: America’s Deepest Pocket and Its Susceptibility to Executive Branch Misuse.”

“It serves a good purpose,” Mr. Figley said in an interview this week. “But it’s subject to manipulation.”

Professor Bagenstos, who served as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, wrote in January about the danger posed by the Judgment Fund.

“An administration that wished to spend money on projects or beneficiaries not authorized by Congress,” he wrote, “could simply encourage its desired recipient to bring a lawsuit against the United States and then settle that lawsuit (no matter how frivolous) by making a payment from the Judgment Fund.”

Odds are we won’t be so lucky, but it sure would be nice if the aftermath of Trump 2.0 included a major reckoning with how much of our legal plumbing relies on “the good faith of executive branch officers,” and a serious attempt to change it—in a way we didn’t really get during the Trump interregnum. Read the whole thing.

The New Republic, DNC’s 2024 Autopsy Is Out—and It Completely Misses the Point, Hafiz Rashid, May 21, 2026. The Democratic National Committee has finally released its report on what went wrong in the 2024 election.

The Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 presidential election has finally reached the public—and it leaves a lot to be desired.

CNN published the report Thursday after months of the DNC refusing to release it, with Chair Ken Martin saying it would be a “distraction,” back in December. On Wednesday, Martin repeated that assessment, and added, “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime—not even close—and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced.

“After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word,” Martin said.

The report doesn’t examine many of the major criticisms of the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign, from President Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection to the impact of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which the Biden administration failed to stop. Another glaring omission was the impact of Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president late in 2024 without anything close to a primary or electoral process.

It also includes multiple errors—it cites Washington Governor Bob Ferguson as a candidate who supposedly did things right, only to point out later that he underperformed Harris at the polls. In other discrepancies, it has conflicting vote percentages written for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race and misspells the names of multiple Democratic politicians.

The solutions the report offers are minimal. One paragraph states, “Building to win requires new thinking, and building to last requires thinking about more than the next election. It requires finding the best way to connect with the right voters in the right places, and if 2024 has proven anything, there is enough money to do it all the right way.” But what that means doesn’t get much elaboration.

Martin seems to be right about the report’s flaws. But hiding it and not commissioning a new one—or at least not editing this one to a passable standard—is a scandal in itself. At a time when Republicans are polling at historic lows, Democrats need to capitalize and offer a better vision for the country. This isn’t it.

Read the full report here.

The New Republic, The Perfect Judge Will Rule on Trump’s Shady $1.8 Billion Slush Fund, Hafiz Rashid, May 21, 2026. Judge Richard Leon has ruled against Trump more than once before this case.Judge Richard LeonUnited States District Court

The lawsuit filed against President Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund has been assigned to a judge already on the president’s bad side.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon will be overseeing the case against Trump’s slush fund too. Leon has previously drawn Trump’s ire not only by delaying the construction of the White House ballroom, but also by striking down the president’s executive order to target law firm WilmerHale.

On March 31, Leon issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking construction on the ballroom, saying in his ruling, “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Just over two weeks later, Leon ruled that Trump could work on the underground, national security–related parts of the project but not on the aboveground ballroom.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Leon said in his ruling, criticizing Trump for trying to go around his earlier injunction by claiming the ballroom’s bulletproof glass, bomb shelters, and other security measures were for national security reasons.

This infuriated Trump, who called Leon a “Trump Hating” judge who was “highly political” and accused him of having “gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built.”

Now Leon will be in charge of examining whether a slush fund to pay Trump’s political supporters who run afoul of law enforcement is constitutional. Considering how much criticism is already being raised against the fund, even from Republicans, Trump may soon be writing another angry screed on Truth Social. Share This Story

The New Republic, Where the Hell Is This Missing Republican Representative? Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 21, 2026. Nobody seems to know where Representative Tom Kean Jr. is.

The New Jersey Republican has been missing in action since March 5, has so far missed 88 House votes, and hasn’t been seen in Washington for more than 75 days. But residents in Kean’s affluent suburban hometown of Westfield claim that the lawmaker isn’t home, either.

Three neighbors who spoke to NOTUS’s Jose Pagliery said that the lawmaker’s two-story Tudor-style house has been dark for weeks. Further still, Kean’s wife is nowhere to be found: Local residents said they couldn’t recall the last time they saw Mrs. Kean walking the family dog, or the last time her car was parked in the driveway.

Pagliery reported that a lone black Ford F-150 sat outside of Kean’s home, coated in yellow pollen. No one answered the two Reolink digital doorbells when Pagliery rang.

Kean offered a meager explanation late last month for his sudden disappearance, confessing to House Speaker Mike Johnson (after a small pressure campaign fronted by journalists and tristate lawmakers effectively forced him to pipe up) that he had been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

At the time, Kean promised that he would return to work shortly. It has been nearly four weeks since then.

NPR, Liberal U.S. mayors team up with European counterparts to fight authoritarianism, Brian Naylor, May 21, 2026. Right-wing populists in the U.S. have been building political ties across the Atlantic Ocean for years to support and learn from one another. Think President Trump, who developed a close relationship with former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Now, 10 U.S. mayors from liberal cities are following suit, joining a group called the Pact of Free Cities, where they can share strategies with their European counterparts on how to defend democracy and fight authoritarianism.

The American cities, including Boston, Chicago, San Antonio and Cincinnati, joined the pact virtually or in person last week for its annual meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia.

"I've joined the Pact of Free Cities because of the actions of the Trump administration that continue to not just have democratic institutions and democratic values backslide in our country, but also the destruction of long-standing relationships all over the world, but particularly with our European counterparts," said Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval.

The mayors of Bratislava, Budapest, Prague and Warsaw founded the group in 2019 to stand up for progressive values and brainstorm on how to deal with what they see as hostile national governments.How to defeat a right-wing populist

Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony told fellow mayors at the Pact of Free Cities meeting how Hungarian voters swept the nation's autocratic leader, former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, from power after 16 years.Courtesy: the city of Bratislava/Courtesy: the city of Bratislava

At last week's meeting, Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest, shared lessons from the recent defeat of Orbán, who many political analysts say developed an authoritarian playbook that has informed some of Trump's efforts to undermine the U.S. system of checks and balances. Karácsony said one of the turning points came last year when the Hungarian government tried to ban the annual Pride parade in Budapest.

U.S. Media, Propaganda, Foreign Hacking

New York Times, Bluesky Says Kremlin Is Hacking Its Platform to Spread Propaganda, Steven Lee Myers, May 21, 2026. The company said it was fighting Russian efforts to hijack real users’ accounts to post fake content, an apparently novel tactic.

Ben Gilbert describes himself on Bluesky, the social media app, as an “economist, lit and guitar nerd, rugby fan, owner of excessive pets.” A professor at the Colorado School of Mines, he rarely posts, but when he does, the subjects reflect his expertise in natural resources.

So it was odd when a video purporting to be a news report appeared on his account last month, blaming France’s financial and political support for Ukraine for police staff shortages at home.

Without his knowledge, Mr. Gilbert said, he had fallen victim to Russia’s latest tactic to try to spread its propaganda in the West.

His account, like hundreds of others on Bluesky, had been hijacked and used to post fake news articles, according to the company and researchers at Clemson University working with a collective of internet monitors who track Russian influence operations and call themselves the dTeam.

The compromised Bluesky accounts included those of people who are influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous. They were journalists and professors, a pollster in Texas, an anime artist and a filmmaker in Hollywood, whose account posted a video doctored by artificial intelligence to impersonate a Canadian police official criticizing France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson linked to the Social Design Agency, a company in Moscow, shows how Russia continues to seek new ways to erode public support for Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022.

Bluesky has grown more prominent as a rival platform to X since X’s owner, Elon Musk, threw his political support behind President Trump before the 2024 election. With 42 million users, though, Bluesky trails far behind X’s nearly 600 million.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

While Russians have long flooded social media platforms with fake accounts and content, hacking into real accounts appeared to be a novel strategy.

“They are clearly still experimenting,” said Darren L. Linvill, a director of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub. “They’re always experimenting.”

Bluesky has been tracking the activity and removing the posts — as many as a couple of thousand. They came in waves beginning in April and continuing until at least last week.

In a statement, the company called Russian influence operations “an industrywide problem.” “We dedicate significant resources toward detecting and disrupting coordinated inauthentic campaigns,” the statement said.

Mr. Gilbert of the Colorado School of Mines, a public research university near Denver, learned of the post on his account when The New York Times contacted him. “I just deleted it,” he wrote in an email.

In other cases, Bluesky has suspended accounts until the owners stepped forward to reset them. Many targets learned of the hacking only when they were locked out of their accounts. One of them was Pamela Wood, a political reporter at The Baltimore Banner. 

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran and Oman in Talks Over Strait of Hormuz Ship Payment System, Ephrat Livni, Vivian Nereim, Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi, May 21, 2026. The discussions suggest that the United States and the Iranian government may not be close to reaching a deal to end a war that has badly damaged the global economy.

Iran has discussed partnering with the Gulf state of Oman — an American ally — in a system charging fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, ignoring the Trump administration’s warnings against demands for payment to pass through the critical international waterway.

It is unclear whether anything concrete will come out of the discussions. But the talks appear to signal that the United States and Iran are no closer to ending a war that has badly damaged the global economy despite repeated claims to the contrary by President Trump. At least publicly, neither side has shown a willingness to compromise.

After coming under attack by American and Israeli forces in late February, Iran brought commercial traffic in the strait to a near halt, crippling international shipping and driving up energy prices. With its leverage over the global economy established, Iranian officials began discussing ways to maintain a hold on the waterway and use it to generate revenue.

On Wednesday, amid the discussions with Oman, Iran’s newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority said on social media that it had “defined the boundaries of the Strait of Hormuz management supervision area” and that passage would require a permit from the authority. The Gulf of Oman is adjacent to the strait and needs to be traversed before reaching it from the east.

Mr. Trump has at various points over recent months condemned the possibility of any Iranian tolls and floated the notion that the United States could itself charge them as the self-declared winner of the war. He also suggested that the revenue might be shared.

More Global News

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Challenging the Narrative of European Decline: Revised, Free Repost, Paul Krugman, right, May 21, 2026. I do not think that word “productivity” means what people think it means. 

A number of people have asked me to put some of my recent writing on European economic performance outside the paywall. Here is the central argument, revised to include data I think is slightly more informative.

I’m still in Europe, where one of the luxuries I’m experiencing is not having to think about Donald Trump and the nightmarish state of U.S. politics 100% of the time — more like 90%, but still. And by way of luxuriating in the slight emotional distance, I’ll postpone my next primer on healthcare for another week and talk more this week about European economic performance.

Last week I wrote about the question of whether Europe is really falling behind the United States economically. I argued that the conventional narrative of clear relative decline is wrong. And I followed up with a small formal model of the underlying logic of the situation as I see it.

I’m gratified to have started a wider discussion, with smart observers like Noah Smith and Luis Garicano weighing in. Judging from the conversation so far, however, I need to do more to explain my central point — which is that widely used comparisons of productivity growth can’t be used to judge European versus U.S. economic success.

In today’s post, then, I’ll try to offer more explanation, backed by some additional data and what I hope are useful analogies.

Below I will address the following:

1. Comparing Europe with America

2. The US-Europe paradox: Slow European growth, but without a growing gap

3. Explaining the paradox

4. What Europe should and shouldn’t worry about 

May 20

Top Headlines

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

• New York Times, DOJ Hands Trump, His Famaly and Businesses Immunity From Tax Investigations, Alan Feuer, Andrew Duehren and Glenn Thrush, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). I.R.S. to Drop Trump Family Audits. As part of the Justice Department’s compensation fund deal, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving President Trump’s tax returns, that are pending.
• New York Times, Jan. 6 Police Officers Sue to Block Trump’s Payout Fund, Luke Broadwater, May 20, 2026. The two officers accused the administration of creating a “slush fund” to reward rioters and groups that committed violence on behalf of President Trump.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Charges Former Cuban President Raúl Castro With Murder, Alan Feuer, Frances Robles and David C. Adams, May 20, 2026. The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Slush Funds and Suckups, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 20, 2026.  The details of Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund get more outrageous by the day. Not that Republicans mind.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Ballroom funding DIES and Trump’s Weaponization Fund is NEXT, Aaron Parnas, right, May 20, 2026. Watch now Major Update: Trump's Ballroom Funding is Dead and Deep Dive into How the "Weaponization Fund" is Likely Next. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Capitol Police Officers Work to Block Trump's $1.8 Billion Fund, GOP Concerned Massie's Loss Will Backfire, Gas Prices Soar, Aaron Parnas, right, May 20, 2026. Capitol Police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s proposed taxpayer-funded compensation program for January 6 defendants, while the Republican Senate majority leader has publicly broken with Trump over the idea. At the same time, concern is growing on Capitol Hill that Trump’s successful effort to oust Thomas Massie could ultimately backfire, with some Republicans worried Massie may become an anti-establishment spoiler figure in future GOP politics.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• New York Times, Trump’s Spring Revenge Tour Routed G.O.P. Foes. But Fall Headwinds Loom, Shane Goldmacher, May 20, 2026. He has used his sway with his base to oust wayward Republicans more than he has made inroads with the independents his party needs to defeat Democrats in November.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Republicans Might Finally Consider Their Legacy, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 20, 2026. Losing loyalists could use their remaining time in office to do the right thing.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Suckups, William Kristol, May 20, 2026. Obsequiousness, it turns out, is a competitive sport.
• Axios Hill Leaders, 1 big thing: The wheels fall off, Hans Nichols, May 20, 2026. Congressional Republicans are countering President Trump's meddling in their primaries with a revenge tour of their own.'
• New York Times, ‘Good Looking Men’, the Iran War and Déjà Vu at Trump’s Coast Guard Speech, Shawn McCreesh, May 20, 2026. President Trump’s commencement address was a mixture of jokes and praise for the seafaring life of the Coast Guard graduates. But there were detours into choppy waters.
• Politico, Barney Frank, who led sweeping financial reforms, dies at 86, May 20, 2026. “This country has never had a congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him,” President Barack Obama said at the time of his retirement.
• Politico, Progressive firebrand Chris Rabb wins Democratic primary for the nation’s bluest House seat, Lisa Kashinsky, May 20, 2026. The self-styled “troublemaker” and unabashed progressive was backed by members of the “Squad.”
• Politico, DR Congo World Cup team still planning US trip despite Ebola outbreak,  Sophia Cai, May 20, 2026. World Cup organizers are confronting a new logistical hurdle ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup: how to safely host the Democratic Republic of Congo’s national team in the United States amid heightened public health restrictions tied to an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa.
• Politico, RFK Jr. fires leaders of group that determines what insurers must cover, Carmen Paun, May 20, 2026. The health secretary has said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force erred by failing to recommend screening for Alzheimer's disease. The firing of task force members has raised concerns that Kennedy wants the panel to endorse his personal views about what’s preventive.

More On U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability 

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

 

• New York Times, With Trump’s Settlement, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away, Russ Buettner, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). The tax service argued that the Trump Organization tried to claim the same losses twice. The president said the audit was a “disgrace.”  
• New York Times, Prison to Pardons to Payouts: Jan. 6 Rioters Are Elated at Trump Compensation Fund, Alan Feuer, May 20, 2026. The possibility that people who ransacked the Capitol could get money from the government they attacked is the latest head-spinning twist in President Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 19, 2026 [Weaponizing, Lootiing?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 20, 2026. Yesterday the Department of Justice announced it is creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate what it calls victims of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.” 
• Meidas Touch Network, Analysis; The Attorney Who Surrendered a Billion Dollars Without Filing a Single Motion, Dina Doll, May 20,2026. On May 12, Donald Trump stood at the White House and said out loud, about his acting Attorney General: “He kept me out of jail for years.” That man now runs the Justice Department.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Personal Attorney Todd Blanche Attempts to Pardon His Boss, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 20, 2026. 2024 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Vance confronted with Popular Information report on Trump stock purchases, Judd Legum, right, May 20, 2026. Vance attacks reporter, offers sarcastic and contradictory response.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Slush Funds, Andrew Egger, May 20, 2026. Someday I’ll need to take a break from writing about Donald Trump’s outrageous “anti-weaponization fund”—Lord knows there are plenty of other outrages clamoring for our attention. But there’s no helping it for now: The thing just keeps getting more ridiculous day after day.
• Public Notice, Opinion: Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms, Liz Dye, May 20, 2026. At the very least, it'll make the midterms messy.

Global News

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, less than a week after a visit from President Trump. Mr. Xi hailed “a new phase of more active engagement and faster development” between the countries. Pool photo via Reuters by Maxim Shemetov).

• New York Times, Days After Hosting Trump, Xi Deepens Ties With Putin, David Pierson and Ivan Nechepurenko, May 20, 2026, China’s leader Xi Jinping called for a halt to fighting in the Middle East, ignored Russia’s war in Ukraine and took a veiled swipe at the United States.
• The Morning Dispatch, Israeli Minister Claims ICC Prosecutor Requested Arrest Warrant, Staff Reports, May 20, 2026. Bezalel Smotrich, the ultranationalist Israeli finance minister, claimed on Tuesday that a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court (ICC) told him that the prosecutor had “submitted a secret request for an international arrest warrant against me.”

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Investigation: Early War Goal Was to Install Hard Line Former President as Iran’s Leader, Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, Updated May 20, 2026. An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran, U.S. officials said, was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power.

More On U.S. Crime, Terror Attacks, Media, Law, Rights, Justice

• Politico, Former federal prosecutor indicted for stealing copies of unreleased Jack Smith report, Josh Gerstein, May 20, 2026. Carmen Lineberger is accused of sending the report to her private email account, in violation of Judge Aileen Cannon’s order.
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Former AUSA Accused of Being Marginally as Criminal as Trump Is, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 20, 2026. DOJ has charged former prosecutor, Carmen Mercedes Lineburger, for attempting to liberate documents pertaining to Trump’s theft of government documents.
• New York Times, The San Diego Mosque Shootings Were a Crime Made for and by the Internet, Tim Arango, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Madison Malone Kircher and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). Authorities said the teenagers who killed three men met online, posted their writings there and livestreamed the killings.
• New York Times, Guest Essay: The Truth About E. Jean Carroll, Ivy Meeropol (the director of the documentary “Ask E. Jean”), May 20, 2026. Back in the mid-90s in New York City, E. Jean Carroll was an accomplished gonzo journalist and a funny, sharp advice columnist for Elle magazine — “Auntie E” to her readers. She also had a daily cable TV advice show. She was so recognizable that when Donald Trump ran into her at the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue early one evening he said, as she has recalled, “Hey, you’re that advice lady!” She was 52 at the time.

U.S. Economy, Markets, Inflation, Federal Reserve, Tariffs

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: From Dropping Bombs to Dropping Bonds, Paul Krugman, right, May 20, 2026. The economic costs of the Iran debacle keep rising.
• The Morning Dispatch, CFTC Sues Minnesota Over Prediction Markets Ban, Staff Reports, The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal agency, sued Minnesota on Tuesday to block a new state law banning prediction markets.

Top Stories

 

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

New York Times, DOJ Hands Trump, His Famaly and Businesses Immunity From Tax Investigations, Alan Feuer, Andrew Duehren and Glenn Thrush, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). I.R.S. to Drop Trump Family Audits. As part of the Justice Department’s compensation fund deal, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving President Trump’s tax returns, that are pending.

The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.

The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion compensation fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.

The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.

The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal.

That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.

The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.

A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions.

Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.

But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.Editors’ PicksDo You Even Thinketh, Bro?Sex, Death and ‘Devils’ at CannesA 16th-Century Sketch Claims to Depict Anne Boleyn. A.I. Says It’s Her Mom.

It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.

Neither the Justice Department nor the I.R.S. responded to requests seeking comment. The top lawyer at the Treasury, Brian Morrissey, resigned on Monday after the Justice Department announced the settlement with Mr. Trump.

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition appears to include a carve out for the attorney general.

Brandon DeBot, a senior attorney adviser at New York University’s Tax Law Center, said in a statement that the audit protection may still be illegal.

“The I.R.S. would need to act to make the release of claims effective, which could raise additional questions about whether there has been unlawful political interference in the audit process,” he said. “The settlement and general release of claims is a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.”

The disclosure of the provision came as blowback appeared to be mounting over the creation of the fund, including from a few Republican lawmakers typically wary of incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, offered rare criticism of the president, saying he “was not a big fan” of the fund and adding that he did not see a “purpose” to it.

The Times reported last week that Mr. Trump’s talks with the Justice Department and the I.R.S. had included a measure calling on the I.R.S. to drop any audits of the president, his relatives or businesses. But that provision did not appear in the nine-page agreement laying out the terms to dismiss the lawsuit, which the department released on Monday.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Even as the original nine-page agreement offered scant details of how disbursement would work or who would be eligible, it said that claimants could seek money from the government for having faced reprisals for “personal, political and/or ideological reasons.” It stated that a five-person commission would consider claims based on criteria like damages a person had incurred or any time they spent in federal custody.

The main agreement also indicated that claims would largely be handed out in secrecy, requiring the fund managers to provide the attorney general on a quarterly basis with a “confidential written report” of those who received any money. The fund would stop processing claims no later than Dec. 1, 2028, just weeks before Mr. Trump is scheduled to leave office.

Frank Bisignano, the chief executive of the I.R.S., signed the original, nine-page settlement. The provisions granting Mr. Trump immunity from existing audits, though, was signed only by Mr. Blanche, who has stepped up carrying out Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against his enemies.

During an appearance before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday, Mr. Blanche defended the fund.

At one point, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, repeatedly accused Mr. Blanche of behaving more like a Trump defense lawyer than an independent guardian of the public interest.

Mr. Blanche pushed back, asserting that he was “the acting attorney general.”

Mr. Van Hollen replied, “Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president’s personal attorney, and that’s the whole problem.”  

New York Times, Jan. 6 Police Officers Sue to Block Trump’s Payout Fund, Luke Broadwater, May 20, 2026. The two officers accused the administration of creating a “slush fund” to reward rioters and groups that committed violence on behalf of President Trump.

Two police officers who defended the Capitol against a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, sued the Trump administration on Wednesday to try to block the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion fund that they say will be used to reward the rioters and right-wing militia groups.

The lawsuit, filed by former Officer Harry Dunn of the U.S. Capitol Police and Officer Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police, alleges that the Trump administration has created a “slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” It names as defendants President Trump, as well as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The suit contends the administration has exceeded its statutory authority by creating the fund without the authorization of Congress.

Trump administration officials have portrayed the fund as a way to compensate people who claim they were unfairly targeted for prosecution by the Biden Justice Department and Democrats, but it has generated widespread opposition, including from some Republicans. Critics see it as nothing more than a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to Mr. Trump’s allies.

“Although Trump and his cronies have been secretive about the fund’s ends, reporting leaves no doubt that it will be used, among other purposes, to pay the nearly 1,600 people charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” the lawsuit says.

The White House referred questions on the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Dunn and Mr. Hodges were among the officers who testified before Congress about the violence they witnessed as the mob sought to stop lawmakers from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential victory.

Mr. Dunn, who is running as a Democrat for a congressional seat in Maryland, said in an email that he had been subjected to threats after speaking out against the violence, but was undeterred from pursuing the lawsuit.

“We have already been subjected to countless death threats, in addition to all the violence we faced on Jan. 6,” he said. “And for what? For speaking the truth. I guarantee you somebody is watching this right now and typing death threats against us. This will only continue to embolden — and potentially arm — a militia that Donald Trump will have on retainer.”

The officers are represented by Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, and Samuel T. Ward-Packard.

“This fund creates enormous physical dangers for Officers Dunn and Hodges, who risked their lives on Jan. 6, 2021, and who continue to do so by refusing to let that day be forgotten,” Mr. Ballou, the founder of the Public Integrity Project, an anti-corruption group, said in a statement. “The fund is stunningly, blindingly illegal, and the defendants must be prohibited from transferring money to this corrupt and illegal monstrosity.”

More than 150 officers were injured during the violence on Jan. 6. Some were hit in the head with baseball bats, flagpoles and pipes. One lost consciousness after rioters used a metal barrier to push her down as they marched to the building.

Upon winning a second term in office, Mr. Trump issued nearly 1,600 pardons and 14 commutations for those involved in the assault on the Capitol.

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Charges Former Cuban President Raúl Castro With Murder, Alan Feuer, Frances Robles and David C. Adams, May 20, 2026. The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.

The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government at a moment when President Trump has been seeking to topple it.

The charges brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the vast powers of the U.S. criminal justice system, saddling him with a possible maximum penalty of life in prison. They also raised the possibility that the United States could be paving the way for its military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.

The indictment, which also accused five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the planes, was secretly returned last month by a federal grand jury and built on earlier charges, first filed in 2003, against one of them.

At a news conference in Miami, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, accused Mr. Castro and the pilots of killing four people when the Cuban military shot down the planes on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that often scoured the seas for Cubans fleeing the country.

Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were brought from the sky, claiming that the organization had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights. The indictment said that Raúl Castro was also responsible because he and his brother were “the final decision makers” in the Cuban military chain of command.

Mr. Blanche portrayed the charges against Mr. Castro as a historic step toward holding the leaders of Cuba’s government accountable for its past wrongs.

“My message today is clear,” he said. “The United States and President Trump does not — and will not — forget its citizens.”

Mr. Blanche sidestepped questions about whether the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action, saying that the decision rested with Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team. Mr. Trump himself refused to say on Wednesday whether he would use the military to extract Mr. Castro from Cuba, telling reporters, “I don’t want to say that.”

Beyond military force, however, there were not many options to get Mr. Castro to the United States to face charges. Mr. Blanche said that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, though it was unlikely that the Cubans would turn him over. In a statement, Mr. Blanche nonetheless said he expected Mr. Castro to eventually show up in the United States, whether “by his own will or another way.”

The Cuban government, in a statement, rebuked the United States.

“It is highly cynical for this accusation to be made by the very same government that has murdered nearly 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in international waters of the Caribbean and the Pacific, far from United States territory, through the disproportionate use of military force,” it said.

Since retaking office, President Trump has made no secret of his desire to expand U.S. territory and oust leaders he dislikes. After the successful military operation in Venezuela and the so far unsuccessful efforts to secure Greenland or the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump has made it clear that Cuba is his next target.

Cuba is facing a moment of rising crisis as the country’s oil supplies for domestic use and power plants have been exhausted after Mr. Trump effectively imposed a blockade on fuel shipments from any country. On Wednesday, the aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships entered the southern Caribbean Sea, where it is expected to remain for at least a few days, according to the military’s Southern Command and a U.S. official.

The indictment also followed an unusual visit by John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, who met with senior Cuban officials, including Mr. Castro’s grandson, about a week ago. In the talks, he warned the government that it had to make economic changes and stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts on its soil.

In the 30 years since the planes were downed, Cuban American lawmakers, exile activists, survivors of the episode and family members of the victims have called for Raúl Castro, who was the minister of defense at the time, to be criminally charged. But Mr. Blanche had little to say when asked by reporters why an indictment in the case had been returned now.

In a Feb. 13 letter to Mr. Trump, four Republican members of Congress requested that the Justice Department consider indicting Mr. Castro. The letter cited news reports indicating that he had approved the shoot-downs, which the members called “coldblooded murders.”

“We believe unequivocally that Raúl Castro is responsible for this heinous crime,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is time for him to be brought to justice.”

In an interview this year, José Basulto, who ran Brothers to the Rescue, complained that U.S. authorities had not yet acted to hold Mr. Castro accountable.

“Believe me, the thing which is most true is that for 30 years that has elapsed since then, the delay in justice has been the biggest injustice that has taken place,” he said.

Two former federal prosecutors familiar with the case said that past administrations did not have the political will to file charges against such a high-ranking member of an adversarial government.

The renewed push to bring charges appears to have gained momentum in the last year, when one of the pilots charged in the indictment, Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez, 64, was discovered to be living in Florida. He was arrested in November on charges of immigration fraud after he filed for permanent residency but failed to admit his 30-year-long service in the Cuban Air Force as a highly trained MiG pilot.

Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, said the charges appeared to be an attempt by the Trump administration to create a pretext for military action against Cuba.

“I cannot call it another word than a circus — a circus they are now mounting as one more action to justify military aggression against Cuba,” Mr. Guzmán said in an interview.

Mr. Guzmán added that Brothers to the Rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military shot down its planes, and that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. authorities to stop the group’s flights over Cuba, including in a letter from Fidel Castro to President Bill Clinton, a point supported by declassified U.S. documents from the time.

“How many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action?” he asked.

While the investigation into Mr. Castro had been going on for weeks, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Quiñones unsealed the charges on Wednesday. It coincided with Cuban Independence Day, commemorating the end of the U.S. military occupation of the island in 1902.

The news conference was held at the Freedom Tower, where Cubans escaping the communist revolution were processed and received aid. In attendance were influential officials from South Florida, among them mayors, local Cuban American politicians and former prosecutors, including some who had worked on previous efforts to indict Raúl Castro that never bore fruit.

The presence of public officials at a news conference where a criminal indictment was announced was an unusual move, highlighting the political nature of the charges.

Maggie Khuly, 80, the sister of one of the four dead Cuban Americans who were shot down on Feb. 24, 1996, called the charges bittersweet. “It’s good in that justice in our case seems to be progressing,” she said. “It’s bitter in the sense that it’s taking 30 years and you know no good justice would ever be achieved unless we have our dead people back, which is impossible.”

One of the survivors, Sylvia Iriondo, 85, a real estate agent, recalled the specifics of the day, noting how Mr. Basulto had turned to her and said, “We’re next and they’re going to shoot at us,” after he spotted smoke from one of the downed planes. She pulled out a finger rosary as Mr. Basulto flew them to the safety of U.S. airspace.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Slush Funds and Suckups, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 20, 2026.  The details of Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund get more outrageous by the day. Not that Republicans mind.

Another month of iced-over war in Iran, another thirty-day extension of America’s sanctions waiver on Russian oil to try to take some of the pressure off the world’s Strait-of-Hormuz energy shock. We’re with Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen on this one: “Every additional dollar the Kremlin earns from this license helps [Vladimir] Putin finance his illegal war against Ukraine and kill innocent Ukrainians.” Happy Wednesday.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Ballroom funding DIES and Trump’s Weaponization Fund is NEXT, Aaron Parnas, right, May 20, 2026. Watch now Major Update: Trump's Ballroom Funding is Dead and Deep Dive into How the "Weaponization Fund" is Likely Next.

I am tracking two major stories today. First, the ballroom funding in Congress is dead. The $1 billion will not be provided for the ballroom.

Second, I spent the day speaking with lawyers, and I want to provide a deep dive into how Donald Trump’s weaponization fund and the audit settlement agreement can and likely will be undone. And then I have some bullets at the end for other stories. It’s a longer update, but these are the stories defining the day. No other news organization will tell you what I am about to share.

I promised we would be expanding, and we are. The reporting, interviews, investigations, live shows, and the team behind them are growing rapidly. But this work takes resources, and we need your help to keep pushing forward. Subscribe today, gift a subscription, or upgrade your membership to help us continue building independent reporting that fights back.Subscribed

Ballroom funding:

U.S. Republican Senator John Kennedy said Wednesday there was not enough support in the Senate to spend $1 billion on a planned White House ballroom and related security measures, and that the proposal would not be included in a $72 billion immigration enforcement bill. Speaking to reporters after a meeting of Republican senators, Kennedy said, “We were told that, and again, I haven’t looked at the text, but we’re told that the ballroom money is out.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there were “a couple snags” Republicans were still trying to resolve, including issues related to the East Wing modernization project. One issue, however, now appears settled: the ballroom funding is dead. The weaponization fund and audit agreement could be next.

Weaponization Fund and Audit Agreement:

This week, the Trump Administration established the so called “anti-weaponization fund” as part of a settlement tied to Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The Department of Justice announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund and then quietly added a separate addendum that purportedly ends all pending tax audits and investigations involving Trump, his family, and his businesses. The addendum was signed solely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer.

Well, the fund has some major problems, and here’s why. First, this was not a court approved settlement. That matters because people have tried comparing this to Keepseagle v. Vilsack, but Keepseagle was a real class action that had been litigated for years. It went through judicial approval under Rule 23, the court had to determine the settlement was fair and lawful, and the judge maintained ongoing supervision over the claims process. None of that appears to exist here. There is no certified class, no court approval, and no judicial oversight. Here is what the lead lawyer in Keepseagle had to say:

That creates a major constitutional problem because Congress controls appropriations, not the Department of Justice. A future administration could come in and declare the fund ultra vires because the DOJ cannot simply create a multi billion dollar compensation structure through a private settlement agreement without congressional authorization or judicial approval. And once the money is spent, recovering it becomes extremely difficult. If people receive payments and spend them, clawing that money back later is next to impossible.

So what happens now? Well, the program likely has to be blocked in court or by Congress. Former Capitol Police officers already filed a lawsuit today seeking to stop the fund, though standing could become an issue. Congress could also intervene directly if either chamber flips in November. A Democratic controlled House or Senate could sue the DOJ for misappropriation of funds or pass legislation shutting the program down entirely. And notably, several Republicans are already skeptical. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said, “We’re gonna kill it.” Rep. David Schweikert said, “I have big concerns about it.” Rep. Don Bacon asked, “How did President negotiate with himself?” Here’s a full letter from Fitzpatrick: Image

Audit agreement: The audit agreement appears even weaker. Because it was structured as a private settlement without court approval, a future DOJ can likely void it outright. While IRS statute of limitations rules may complicate future audits, those timelines can be extended significantly in cases involving substantial underreporting or suspected fraud. In cases involving alleged tax fraud, there is effectively no statute of limitations. So if a future administration revisits this agreement and determines fraud occurred, audits and potential prosecutions could still happen.

Important point: And one final point that stood out to me: the Treasury Department’s general counsel reportedly resigned the day this was announced, and more than half of the Justice Department attorneys involved reportedly resigned as well. It raises an obvious question about how much institutional support actually exists for this arrangement. Because at the end of the day, this is the kind of agreement courts usually scrutinize very closely, especially since Trump’s lawsuit involved alleged Privacy Act violations while the settlement attempts to shield audits involving Trump’s family and businesses and extends benefits far beyond the actual plaintiffs in the case.

Other news: 

SpaceX confirmed Wednesday that it plans to go public in what could become the largest IPO in history and potentially make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. According to a new securities filing, the company generated $18.6 billion in revenue in 2025 but also posted a $4.3 billion quarterly loss earlier this year, with shares expected to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker “SPCX.” The filing also revealed that Musk will retain roughly 85% voting control after the IPO, while the company continues expanding across rockets, Starlink internet services, artificial intelligence, and X, formerly Twitter. The offering is expected to launch next month and could value SpaceX at roughly $2 trillion, surpassing the record-setting Saudi Aramco IPO.

NBC News reports that former USAID, CDC, and White House officials believe the dismantling of USAID slowed the detection and response to the growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Officials said USAID programs previously helped with laboratory support, surveillance, protective equipment distribution, and local health worker coordination, but many of those systems unraveled after the Trump administration cut most USAID programs last year. The State Department denied the changes affected the response and said the U.S. has committed $23 million in aid, while the CDC has expanded its role on the ground. Health officials and aid workers, however, warned the response has been too slow and that hospitals in Congo and Uganda remain dangerously under supplied as cases and deaths continue to rise.

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration says it can build President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot arch near Arlington Cemetery without new congressional approval by relying on a 1925 authorization tied to the Arlington Memorial Bridge project. Officials argue the arch fulfills a century-old vision for Columbia Island, while critics—including lawmakers, legal experts, and preservation groups—say the claim is legally baseless and an attempt to bypass Congress. The proposal has already sparked lawsuits and comparisons to other Trump construction projects that courts said required explicit congressional authorization. Despite some design revisions, the administration is continuing to seek approval from federal commissions while preparing for possible legal challenges.

The Justice Department indicted former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and five former Cuban military pilots over the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group. Prosecutors allege Castro, who was Cuba’s defense minister at the time, was part of the chain of command that authorized Cuban military aircraft to fire missiles at the planes, killing four men, including three U.S. citizens. The indictment was announced in Miami on Cuban Independence Day and marks one of the most politically charged legal actions in modern U.S.-Cuba relations, though Cuba is not expected to extradite Castro. The move comes as the Trump administration escalates pressure on Cuba amid worsening economic conditions and widespread power outages across the island.

A report from the New York Times claims Benjamin Netanyahu and the Trump administration explored a plan to help former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad return to power during the recent conflict with Iran. According to the report, an Israeli strike near Ahmadinejad’s home was allegedly intended to help him escape what was described as house arrest, though Iranian media disputed that account and dismissed the broader claims as implausible. The episode underscores how the U.S. and Israel may have overestimated internal opposition to Iran’s government and their ability to destabilize the regime through military strikes alone. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has continued weighing additional strikes on Iran while pressuring Tehran over uranium enrichment and the Strait of Hormuz.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir sparked international outrage after posting a video showing him taunting and abusing detained activists from a Gaza flotilla intercepted by Israel. The footage showed bound activists kneeling on the ground at Ashdod port while Ben Gvir waved an Israeli flag, shouted slogans, and blasted Israel’s national anthem over loudspeakers. Governments including Italy, France, Spain, Ireland, and South Korea condemned the treatment of their citizens, with several countries summoning Israeli ambassadors in protest. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a rare public rebuke, saying Ben Gvir’s conduct did not reflect Israel’s values, while even Trump administration officials reportedly criticized the stunt as “despicable.”

Students at Glendale Community College loudly booed school officials after an AI system used to read graduates’ names during commencement malfunctioned and skipped several students entirely. College president Tiffany Hernandez acknowledged during the ceremony that the school was using a new AI reader and apologized, telling graduates the skipped students would still be allowed to walk across the stage and take photos. The college later issued a formal apology, calling the issue a technical malfunction. The incident comes amid growing backlash at commencement ceremonies over speeches and technology centered on artificial intelligence, including recent boos directed at former Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona.

Authorities in Texas pulled a Tesla Cybertruck from a lake after the driver intentionally drove it into the water to test the vehicle’s “Wade Mode” feature. Police said the truck became disabled and started taking on water, forcing the driver and passengers to abandon it before calling for help. The driver was later arrested on charges related to operating a vehicle in a closed section of the park and multiple water safety violations. Tesla’s manual says Wade Mode is designed for shallow freshwater crossings and warns drivers that the vehicle can still sink in muddy or unstable underwater conditions.

PepsiCo announced it will raise prices on some smaller bags of chips, including products from Lay’s and Doritos, by roughly 10 to 20 cents beginning in late June. The company said the increases are tied to broader cost pressures and not the Iran war, while maintaining that prices on larger take home snack bags, which were recently reduced by up to 15%, will remain lower. PepsiCo executives previously credited those larger bag price cuts with helping drive sales growth as consumers pushed back against inflation and higher grocery costs. The move comes as economists warn lower and middle income consumers are continuing to cut back spending while inflation continues to outpace wage growth.

Trump officials are experiencing inflation in real time:

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin used a summit in Beijing to sharply criticize U.S. foreign policy, warning the world was drifting back toward the “law of the jungle” and condemning American missile defense plans and broader global strategy. The meeting highlighted the deepening relationship between China and Russia as both countries face growing tensions with the West, with the two leaders signing agreements covering trade, technology, scientific research, and energy cooperation. While the summit showcased increasingly close ties between Beijing and Moscow, the two sides reportedly failed to finalize a major pipeline agreement that would have expanded Russian gas exports to China. The meeting also underscored China’s growing geopolitical influence, coming just days after President Donald Trump visited Beijing and amid continued global conflicts involving Ukraine, Iran, and the Middle East.

According to Politico, Senators are signaling growing interest in pursuing federal legislation to regulate prediction markets, including platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket that allow users to place low cost bets on sports, politics, and other events. During a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn said there was interest among lawmakers in “getting something on the books,” while Sen. Ted Cruz acknowledged growing legal disputes over whether prediction markets are effectively bypassing state gambling laws.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Capitol Police Officers Work to Block Trump's $1.8 Billion Fund, GOP Concerned Massie's Loss Will Backfire, Gas Prices Soar, Aaron Parnas, right, May 20, 2026. Capitol Police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s proposed taxpayer-funded compensation program for January 6 defendants, while the Republican Senate majority leader has publicly broken with Trump over the idea. At the same time, concern is growing on Capitol Hill that Trump’s successful effort to oust Thomas Massie could ultimately backfire, with some Republicans worried Massie may become an anti-establishment spoiler figure in future GOP politics.

The consequences of Trump’s pressure campaign are already emerging, as Bill Cassidy broke with Republicans and helped advance a war powers resolution on Iran shortly after losing his primary.

In other news, there is a major media development today as James Murdoch moves to acquire a large stake in Vox Media, including Vox.com, New York magazine, and its podcast network.

It is a reminder of why independent media matters so much right now. I will never sell out or hand this platform over to corporate or political interests. We need to keep building truly independent media in this moment, and I am committed to continuing that work no matter how difficult it becomes. Subscribe, upgrade your subscription, or gift a subscription today.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky Republican primary after years of clashing with Donald Trump and GOP leadership, despite remaining popular with a loyal base of libertarian and anti-establishment conservatives. The primary election was the most expensive in American history with Donald Trump and special interests like AIPC, crypto, and AI spending millions to try to oust Massie.

Many voters who once supported him came to see him as too contrarian and too willing to oppose mainstream Republican priorities. At the same time, his campaign energized a smaller faction on the right focused on anti-war politics, libertarian ideas, distrust of institutions, and skepticism toward Trump’s direction of the GOP. The piece suggests Massie’s defeat may mark both the consolidation of Trump’s control over Republicans and the emergence of a new dissident conservative movement.

There is deep concern on Capitol Hill this morning following Thomas Massie’s loss that Trump’s recent campaign against Republicans who opposed him has strengthened his control over the GOP but may also be undermining his ability to pass legislation and maintain party unity. Several Republican senators who no longer fear political retaliation are beginning to break with him on key issues, creating problems for his agenda in Congress. Critics inside the party argue Trump is prioritizing personal revenge and political feuds over voter concerns like inflation and the economy. While Trump is winning internal battles, those victories could hurt Republicans in the 2026 elections if voters see little legislative progress.

But, that’s not all—there is further concern that Massie could try to play spoiler for Republicans in 2028 by running as an independent candidate for President to siphon off votes from the GOP nominee, whoever that may be.

According to the New York Times, James Murdoch is buying roughly half of Vox Media through his investment firm Lupa Systems in a deal worth more than $300 million. The acquisition includes New York magazine, Vox.com, and Vox Media’s podcast network, but excludes sites like The Verge and Eater, which will remain separate. Murdoch said he wants to focus on “thoughtful journalism” and creator-driven media rather than traditional daily news, positioning the company around podcasts, long-form reporting, and cultural coverage. The deal reflects broader changes in digital media and consolidation under the Murdoch family.

The Senate narrowly advanced a resolution that would require Donald Trump to obtain congressional authorization to continue military action against Iran, marking a rare bipartisan rebuke of his handling of the conflict. Four Republicans joined most Democrats in supporting the measure, including Bill Cassidy shortly after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

We have new images from the White House this morning depicting the demolition of the East Wing and ongoing construction projects:

Soaring gas prices ahead of Memorial Day are becoming a major political and economic problem in the U.S., largely driven by the war with Iran and instability in global energy markets. Average gas prices are nearing record highs, with analysts warning they could hit $5 per gallon if disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continue. The rising cost of fuel is worsening inflation, squeezing household budgets, and hurting public confidence in Donald Trump’s economic leadership despite emergency measures by the administration to lower prices.

Donald Trump claimed that California’s elections are “rigged” while criticizing his repeated losses in the state, saying: “If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would've won California. But it's a rigged vote.”

Trump spoke about his popularity in Israel while discussing support for his policies there, saying: “I’m right now at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister, so maybe after I do this, I’ll go to Israel and run for prime minister.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly distanced himself from Donald Trump’s proposed taxpayer-funded compensation program for January 6 defendants, bluntly saying he was “not a big fan” of the idea.

Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic primary for governor of Georgia and is now seeking to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. If elected, she would also become Georgia’s first woman and first Black governor. Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and Biden administration official, campaigned on issues including Medicaid expansion and education funding, while Republicans advanced Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and businessman Rick Jackson to a runoff. The race is expected to test whether Georgia remains a competitive swing state after narrowly backing Democrats in 2020 before returning to Donald Trump in 2024.

Chris Rabb won the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s heavily Democratic 3rd Congressional District, putting him on track to replace retiring Rep. Dwight Evans. Rabb, a prominent progressive backed by members of the “Squad,” defeated establishment-backed rivals including state Sen. Sharif Street and physician Ala Stanford. His campaign emphasized left-wing positions on issues like Gaza and criticism of establishment Democratic politics, while also highlighting support from groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party. The result was seen as both a victory for progressives nationally and a setback for Philadelphia’s traditional Democratic political machine.

Jeff Bezos praised Donald Trump as being “more mature” and “more disciplined” in his current presidency compared with his first term, while also saying Trump deserves credit for being right on a number of issues.

Jeff Bezos defended layoffs and cost-cutting at The Washington Post by arguing that the newspaper must operate as a financially sustainable business rather than depend on outside support. When asked whether the Post should instead function more like a public trust, Bezos rejected the idea, saying profitability is tied to relevance and public demand. He argued that if readers are unwilling to pay for the product, it signals the journalism is not compelling or valuable enough.

The Justice Department is expected to indict former Cuban leader Raúl Castro over his alleged role in the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes operated by the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, which killed four people, including three Americans. The case has been pursued intermittently by U.S. prosecutors for more than 30 years, dating back to investigations tied to Cuban espionage operations in Florida during the 1990s. Former prosecutors say the attack was a deliberate operation by the Cuban government meant to intimidate dissidents and Cuban exile groups, and the indictment represents a long-awaited effort to hold senior Cuban officials accountable. The move also reflects renewed hardline Cuba policies under the Trump administration and pressure from Cuban-American political figures in Florida.

Donald Trump mistakenly claimed that former President Barack Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan, even though the actual withdrawal was carried out under Joe Biden in 2021.

An American doctor exposed to Ebola while treating patients in Uganda will be hospitalized in Prague for observation, though he is not showing symptoms. The Czech Health Ministry said the doctor will remain isolated for three weeks at Bulovka University Hospital under strict safety measures and emphasized there is no risk to the public. The hospitalization comes amid a growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda that the World Health Organization recently declared a global health emergency, with more than 130 deaths reported. U.S. authorities are evacuating exposed healthcare workers, while another infected American doctor is being treated in Berlin.

European leaders welcomed a long-delayed trade agreement between the EU and the U.S. that would reduce some tariffs and stabilize transatlantic trade relations after months of tension with President Donald Trump. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other EU officials framed the deal as a sign of stability and cooperation, though some lawmakers expressed skepticism about whether it was truly favorable for Europe. The agreement would lower EU tariffs on certain American goods while the U.S. keeps tariffs on most European exports capped at 15 percent. Despite public optimism, concerns remain over whether the Trump administration will fully honor the agreement and whether the European Parliament will approve it next month.

Federal agents raided the homes of several California immigration activists connected to VC Defensa, a grassroots group that monitors ICE activity and warns immigrant communities about raids. The activists say the raids were meant to intimidate them and suppress their organizing work, while the government claims it is investigating possible interference with federal law enforcement during earlier immigration protests. The group’s leader, Leonardo Martinez, described the operations as politically motivated retaliation tied to their efforts to disrupt ICE arrests and support undocumented families. The broader conflict reflects escalating tensions between the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and local activist networks in California.

According to The Guardian, Britain’s deputy ambassador to the U.S., James Roscoe, unexpectedly left his post in Washington amid an investigation into leaks from the UK government’s national security discussions about U.S. military strikes on Iran. Roscoe had briefly served as acting ambassador after Peter Mandelson departed and was considered a candidate for the permanent role before another diplomat was chosen instead. The leak investigation centers on reports that senior British officials were divided over whether to allow the U.S. to use British bases for operations against Iran, a highly sensitive issue protected under the Official Secrets Act.

Ron Shinnick, the mayor of the small Georgia town of Cohutta, resigned shortly after firing the town’s entire police department in the middle of a dispute involving his wife and local officers. Shinnick said he was stepping down because of family health concerns, but the controversy centered on his decision to dismiss the police chief and all 10 officers after tensions over complaints against his wife, the former town clerk. The town council quickly reversed the firings, arguing Shinnick had violated town procedures, and considered pressuring him to resign before he eventually stepped down voluntarily.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

New York Times, Trump’s Spring Revenge Tour Routed G.O.P. Foes. But Fall Headwinds Loom, Shane Goldmacher, May 20, 2026. He has used his sway with his base to oust wayward Republicans more than he has made inroads with the independents his party needs to defeat Democrats in November.

The defeat of Representative Thomas Massie, right, on Tuesday served as an emphatic exclamation point on an extraordinary three-week vengeance tour that displayed President Trump’s enduring sway over his own party.

Yet Mr. Trump’s viselike hold on the Republican base — a full decade after he locked up his first presidential nomination — poses a distinct conundrum for the party ahead of the fall’s critical midterms. He has appeared more keen to leverage his popularity with the MAGA base to oust wayward Republicans than to repair his image among the independents his party will need to defeat Democrats this fall.

For years, Mr. Trump has imposed party discipline by electoral force. His message to any Republicans considering breaking with him in 2026 is unmistakable: Cross me at your peril.

The example making began in Indiana, where Mr. Trump recruited challengers who ousted five state senators who had refused to succumb to his pressure to draw new congressional districts in the state more favorable to the G.O.P. It continued in Louisiana, where Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted five years ago to convict Mr. Trump during his second impeachment trial, won a measly 25 percent of the vote in his re-election run, failing even to advance to a runoff after the president threw his weight behind a challenger.ImageBill Cassidy greets several people.Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, took veiled swipes at the president in his concession speech on Saturday in Baton Rouge, La. Mr. Cassidy voted to convict Mr. Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial.Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

It concluded on Tuesday in Kentucky, where Mr. Massie, one of Mr. Trump’s most outspoken critics still inside the G.O.P. tent, went down in defeat in the most expensive House primary in recent history. As a bonus for Mr. Trump, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia who as secretary of state had refused to help him “find” votes to change the outcome of the 2020 election, failed to advance to a runoff.

The impending sweep left Mr. Trump feeling emboldened even before the Kentucky results were in. Earlier on Tuesday, he endorsed Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and a MAGA loyalist, for Senate in Texas over the incumbent, Senator John Cornyn. The president disregarded months of fierce lobbying by Senate Republican leaders that Mr. Paxton could endanger the party’s hold on the seat.

“MAGA is most of the Republican Party,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday as he teased his coming endorsement. “The RINOs are gone, to a large extent.”

Then there is the flip side of the Trump effect: If Republicans cannot win primaries without him, his deepening unpopularity with independent voters threatens their chances of surviving in November.Editors’ PicksDo You Even Thinketh, Bro?Sex, Death and ‘Devils’ at CannesA 16th-Century Sketch Claims to Depict Anne Boleyn. A.I. Says It’s Her Mom.

The numbers are stark.

However wildly popular Mr. Trump is with Republicans — he garnered 82 percent approval inside the party in a recent New York Times/Siena poll — he is just as unpopular with the independent voters who so often decide general elections.

The same survey showed him with a meager 26 percent approval rating among independents.

How bad is that?

It is actually lower than former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 28 percent approval rating among independent voters that the Times poll found in the aftermath of his disastrous debate in the summer of 2024, shortly before he quit the race.ImageKen Paxton signs a white sign that says “Paxton, U.S. Senate,” in a room full of people.Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, on Tuesday received an endorsement of Mr. Trump, who opted to throw his support behind a MAGA ally rather than Senator John Cornyn in the final days of their runoff race.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times

Mr. Massie, in a defiant concession speech, mocked Mr. Trump’s focus on extraneous and extravagant projects, such as a White House ballroom, as voters struggle economically.

“By the way, while gas is almost $5 and diesel is almost $6, they’re talking about this big ballroom they’re going to build,” Mr. Massie said. “It looks like the Roman Empire, architecture from the Roman Empire. I see a few analogies there, and people are just trying to make ends meet.”

The thoroughness of Mr. Trump’s remodeling of the Republican Party was clear even in the races that were not as obviously part of his revenge tour.

In Kentucky, the retiring Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been an occasional Trump antagonist, is now likely to be replaced by Representative Andy Barr, a staunch Trump ally who coasted to the nomination with Mr. Trump’s support. In Georgia and Alabama, the Republicans who advanced to each state’s runoff for Senate are running as unalloyed pro-Trump candidates.

“The grass roots underneath Donald Trump are unlike anything I’ve seen in my 40 years of politics,” said Michael Caputo, a Trump-allied Republican strategist who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “Coming up against him today, it’s like, ‘Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.’”

But Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Republicans in battleground races this fall who yoke themselves to Mr. Trump are effectively “tying yourself to the railings of the Titanic.”ImagePresident Trump, who is wearing a white hat that says “USA,” descends the staircase of an airplane.Mr. Trump has long mocked Republicans who chose to distance themselves from him instead of embracing him.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Still, Mr. Madrid said, he understood the impulse to align with the president to survive party primaries.

“There is this resilience with the base — it’s nothing short of remarkable,” Mr. Madrid said. “Through pandemic, through recession, through war, through the Epstein files.”

Nearly all of Mr. Trump’s Republican critics tend to add “former” to their job title, whether they quit, try to curry favor after crossing Mr. Trump or, like Mr. Massie, stay defiant to the end.

“You can take the Marjorie Taylor Greene way out, you can take the Cassidy way out or you can take the Massie way out,” Mr. Madrid said. “Those are three different ways to go out — but either way, you are going out.”

In no primary race this spring was the president more personally engaged than he was in his drive to defeat Mr. Massie. He campaigned there himself. On the eve of the election, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unusual detour from overseeing the war in Iran to northern Kentucky to make the case against Mr. Massie, who has been the conflict’s loudest Republican critic in Congress.

Recently, Mr. Trump filmed a video sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and called Mr. Massie the “worst congressman in the history of our country.”

In other words, he elevated him as a political enemy above any Democrat. The president was so enamored with the phrase that he used it twice in a period of about 30 seconds.

Mr. Trump has long treated political cleansing of his own party as crucial to his own projection of power, even when that has meant losing seats to the opposing party.

In 2018, he held an infamous news conference at the White House the day after Republicans lost their House majority in a wipeout. The president proceeded to mock those Republicans who had distanced themselves from him, seeming to almost relish their defeats at the hands of Democrats.ImageA campaign sign that reads “Thomas Massie, United States Congress” is partly obscured by American flags.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Republicans Might Finally Consider Their Legacy, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 20, 2026. Losing loyalists could use their remaining time in office to do the right thing.

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreRepublicans Might Finally Consider Their LegacyLosing loyalists could use their remaining time in office to do the right thingJennifer RubinMay 20 READ IN APP Rep. Buddy Carter (GA), placed third in last night’s Georgia Senate race primary

Representative Earl “Buddy” Carter, a Trump acolyte, gave up his secure House seat to run for the Georgia Senate seat. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who faces a runoff against MAGA wackadoodle and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, may join him in the ranks of the unemployed — an outcome that became increasingly likely yesterday, after the scandal-ridden Paxton received Trump’s late endorsement — along with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who finished a humiliating third in his primary. (In backing Rep. Julia Letlow, Donald Trump exacted revenge for Cassidy’s vote to impeach for the violent Jan. 6 insurrection.)

A batch of vulnerable incumbent House (e.g., Mike Lawler of New York, Jen Kiggins of Virginia) and Senate Republicans (e.g., Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio) may find that they, too — despite genuflecting to Donald Trump, ignoring their constitutional obligations, subjecting their constituents to untold hardship, and abandoning all common sense and decency — have nothing to show for their servility.

Some Republicans headed for defeat either in the primary or general election may have convinced themselves that they were serving the public good in slashing taxes for the rich while cutting healthcare for everyone else; tolerating an illegal, utterly counterproductive war; or letting abusive, lawless ICE agent go after hard working immigrants. (But not even such self-rationalizers, I suspect, can justify their record of turning a blind eye to Trump’s jaw-dropping corruption, persecution of political enemies, self-indulgent monuments, and the rest of the authoritarian excess funded by the taxpayers.) Texas Senator John Cornyn, who failed to gain Trump’s endorsement, faces a run-off against attorney general Ken Paxton next week (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

However, for some lawmakers such as Cornyn (a previously establishment Republican who favored fiscal sobriety and getting tough on Russia) and Cassidy (a moderate, who backed the Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, and this week voted to advance a war powers resolution), one can surmise that they knew much of what they were voting for (or refusing to vote against) violated principles they once espoused and/or ran afoul of the Constitution. One need only look at their pre-Trump careers and efforts to evade rather than justify Trump’s actions to conclude they knew he was a menace to the country and to our democracy.

The less cultist senators — especially Cassidy in his reprehensible vote to confirm RFK, Jr. (who has promulgated vaccine skepticism and other dangerous quackery) — surely grasped that the nominees they voted to confirm for Cabinet posts (e.g. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Kash Patel) were unfit and unprepared to hold powerful, critical jobs that require life or death decision-making. Do Cassidy, Cornyn, and others who may lose despite their self-debasement think it was worthwhile? Do they imagine they will be remembered for anything other than their cowardice and capitulation when America was most at risk?

In countenancing or actively promoting the devastation of USAID, evisceration of medical research and our national health system, savage cuts to Medicaid, extra-judicial killings, and an utterly unnecessary war, they have shared responsibility for the deaths of thousands of people (in the case of USAID, hundreds of thousands). They bear blame, as well, for the trauma and torture inflicted on deported immigrants, the breakup of immigrant families, the senseless deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and the hunger experienced by seniors and children cut off from food assistance — none of which they lifted a finger to prevent, despite knowing the likely consequences of Trump’s cruel agenda. And, to the extent they once mouthed platitudes about the rule of law, they too played a role in the weaponization and corruption of the Department of Justice.

We may never know, absent death-bed confessions, what regrets they may have. But at least for those who wash out in the primaries there is time, if not to atone, then at least to curtail the death, suffering, and hardship they will leave in their wake.Subscribed

Republican losers in primaries do have a choice between now and January. (Even the general election losers have time in the lame duck session). They might sit down with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has undergone a partial liberation for Trump sycophancy after his decision not to run for re-election, although his refusal to vote for the War Powers Act or rein in ICE (let alone Trump’s corruption) hardly make him a profile in courage.

Cassidy and, if defeated, Cornyn might enter a pact with Tillis (along with libertarian Sen. Rand Paul on some issues) to ameliorate the worst of the harm the Republican senators have enabled. They could actually promote once dearly-held conservative principles to claw back the tariff power, pass the War Powers Act (as Cassidy has now proven he is prepared to support), short-circuit Trump’s ballroom and other gross monuments to himself, insist that aid to Ukraine and defense sales to Taiwan proceed, put the kibosh on the Trump clan’s disgusting corruption, and block confirmation of acting attorney general Todd Blanche — should he get nominated for the permanent job.

They could, in short, for just a few months live up to their oaths of office, rein in a tyrannical president, try to arrest America’s international decline, and end the orgy of ethics violations they have allowed to multiply. At the very least, they could stop pretending not to have seen Trump latest racist, insane babbling on Truth Social or witnessed his vile threats against critics who engage in activity protected by the First Amendment. (By the way, it would make for some handwringing, foot shuffling and brow furrowing for incumbents like Sullivan and “concerned” Collins, if their occasional CYA votes against Trump had the potential to carry the day with votes from other Republican defectors.)

We should not get our hopes up. To reverse course so dramatically would confirm their critics’ worst accusation, namely, that for the sake of preserving their own careers they refused to abide by the Constitution and work on behalf of what they knew were the interests of the country and their constituents. But on the theory that “the time is always right to do right,” they might try voting their conscious a try.

If nothing else, Carter’s and Cassidy’s political demise (and Cornyn’s potential defeat) should prompt a tiny bit of reflection among Republicans (whether facing defeat or retiring) who have gone along with Trump’s noxious agenda to get along. If they don’t even get to keep their jobs, were their final years in public life worth it? If they conclude they needlessly sold their souls, they might share their confession with voters, especially those who might reflect on the damage their votes for Trump have inflicted on others.Trump and Blanche during Trump’s 2024 trial.  

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Suckups, William Kristol, right, May 20, 2026. Obsequiousness, it turns out, is a competitive sport.

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham said “there is no room” in the Republican party to oppose Donald Trump. “This is the party of Donald Trump.”

That’s a pretty good entry in the sycophancy sweepstakes. So what do you do if you’re Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.)? You’re a wealthy business executive serving your first term in the House. You’re proud that you graduated with a degree in government—magna cum laude—from Harvard, where you were also the chair of the undergraduate council student affairs committee. You went on to work at McKinsey, and then on to Harvard Business School, where you were named a Baker Scholar for academic achievement. You succeeded in the casino business. Now you’ve got yourself into Congress, and you have an eye on higher office. You’ve tried to distinguish yourself in your first term by your rampant anti-Muslim bigotry. But will that be enough?

So after the defeat two weeks ago of non-Trump-compliant state representatives in Indiana, and of pro-impeachment Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, and pro–releasing the Epstein files Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky, what’s there to do but to try not only to echo but to surpass Sen. Graham? So Fine tweeted, “This is @realDonaldTrump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.”

Edward Feser, a conservative Catholic philosophy professor at Pasadena City College, commented on Fine’s remark by way of a quotation from Book V of Aristotle’s Politics:

A tyrant . . . [favors] those who keep him company in an obsequious spirit, which is the function of flattery. This makes tyranny favor the baser sort, in the sense that a tyrant loves to be flattered, and no man of free spirit will oblige him. Respectable men . . . refrain from flattery.

Fine had no hesitation in choosing flattery over respectability. And who can say, in the age of Trump and the party of Trump, that his choice was a foolish one?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has always thought of himself as a respectable man. He never went so far as to be a profile in courage—never standing up to Trump on any important matter, and as Cornyn said over and over again, voting with Trump 99 percent of the time. In the last year, desperate to keep his seat, he too tried to resort to flattery, though he could never quite embrace sycophancy as enthusiastically as some of his colleagues. In any case, it wasn’t enough. Yesterday, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Cornyn, which presumably dooms Cornyn in next week’s Senate primary runoff.

Cornyn’s colleague, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), also an establishment type who would like to think of himself as a Respectable Republican™, said of Trump’s tossing Cornyn overboard, “It saddened me. I don’t know what you can complain about on John Cornyn . . . And I don’t know anything that he’s done that’s offensive in a significant way to the president.”

But being inoffensive à la Cornyn wasn’t enough for Trump. And I’d add that being saddened by Trump, à la Moran—but doing nothing to oppose or stop him—isn’t enough to allow you to claim to deserve respect.

For if I can extend Aristotle’s thought (and if he’ll forgive me the presumption), to be respectable is not simply to refuse to engage in flattery. It’s also to also refrain from being an accomplice to or enabler of flattery. Even if you don’t abase yourself, you are empowering others who do. So shed no tears for Cornyn, or Cassidy, or all the other Respectable Republicans™ who have gone along with Trump and with their colleagues who have bowed before Trump.

Today’s Republican party is no party for respectable men. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and his deputy Gabriel Sterling, who courageously and honorably stood up to Trump in 2020, were crushed in GOP primaries yesterday.

Four years ago, in her opening remarks at the House January 6th Committee hearings, Liz Cheney warned: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

For now, Donald Trump is still here, and Republican dishonor is greater than ever.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Empire Putin Tried to Rebuild Is Coming Apart… Russia’s “little brothers” are growing up, argues CATHY YOUNG.
• How to Fix America’s Geriatric Politician Problem… Sure, some people can work well into old age. But we still need age limits on candidates for office, writes JILL LAWRENCE.
• Trump Is Looting Us in Broad Daylight… On the flagship pod, MARTHA RADDATZ, JVL, and SARAH join TIM MILLER to talk about Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer slush fund.
• Trump’s Slush Fund Isn’t Just Corrupt—It’s a Crime… ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Illegal News to discuss the outright fraud that is the slush fund, and the release of his new book, Liar’s Kingdom.

Quick Hits

BAD TO WORSE TO WORSE TO WORSE TO . . . : Believe it or not, we still haven’t managed to tell you about every outrageous development we got yesterday in the Trump slush-fund affair. In addition to everything Andrew laid out above, the New York Times also reported that career lawyers at the IRS were laying the groundwork to fight Trump’s suit—before their Trump-mook bosses decided to throw in the towel and settle instead:

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they saw as flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and advising the Justice Department to move to dismiss it, according to two people familiar with the memo. That memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, and it is unclear if they passed it along to its intended recipients at the Justice Department, according to the people, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal government deliberations.

No lawyers from the Justice Department ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or disputed any of Mr. Trump’s claims, which demanded at least $10 billion from the I.R.S. for not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax information. . . . The existence of the internal memo, which has not been previously reported, shows that the Trump administration disregarded readily available defenses to a lawsuit filed by the president against an agency he controls.

Read the whole thing.

NEWSOM A NO ON IMPEACHMENT: Andrew and Bill may have reached the conclusion that impeachment for Donald Trump is not only acceptable but a governing imperative for Democrats. But actual elected Democrats aren’t quite there yet—at least not all of them.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently sidestepped the possibility when asked if Trump deserved impeachment for launching what Jeffries called a “reckless” war in Iran. Senate Democratic leadership has been similarly mute, even as some of the party’s members embrace impeachment. On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked about impeachment during a quick press briefing following a speech he gave at the Center for American Progress’ Ideas conference. To his credit, he didn’t evade an answer:

I fear that if you don’t have the Senate, what are you producing except a lot of headlines and fundraising appeals? To the extent, accountability comes in many different forms. But we’ve been there, done that, on multiple occasions. I know the base, I know a lot of people feel very strongly about that, but if there is an agenda that I would be promoting that wouldn’t be on the top of the agenda. The broader issue, the direct issue, around the corruption, the graft, and the grift has to be addressed immediately and put to an end. That to me would be the top priority going in at the same time we design our version of Project 2029.

Newsom has his eyes set on running for president in 2028—though he scurried away ever so playfully when I pressed him on that. So his reluctance to embrace the bluntest instrument for going after Trump suggests that there isn’t really that big a yearning for impeachment coming from the party’s base—or at least, that’s Newsom’s judgment. And yet, a few more weeks of the president setting up slush funds for J6ers and eight-figure insider trading could change the internal party politics here.

Newsom didn’t hold back on those fronts, warning that Trump “will pardon the vast majority of the people in the White House, in the administration, members of the cabinet, his family.” But, he stressed, “being anti-Trump is not a governing strategy.”

—Sam Stein

PEOPLE AGAINST ROBOTS: Anti-AI sentiment is turning into one of the most powerful forces in politics,¹ and politicians’ eagerness to channel it is growing, too. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who is running for South Carolina governor in a crowded Republican field, announced this week that she would back a one-year data center moratorium in the state, followed by a new regulatory regime requiring data centers to supply their own electricity rather than rely on local grids, which would potentially drive up residents’ utility prices.

“The rules are simple,” Mace said in a statement. “Data centers pay their own way or they do not come here.”

It’s a suggestion that echoes similar pitches made recently on both sides of the aisle. Farther south, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this month establishing similar utility-infrastructure requirements on data centers. Meanwhile, Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders continue to champion a more maximalist policy: a national moratorium on new data-center construction “until strong national safeguards are in place.”

 

New York Times, ‘Good Looking Men’, the Iran War and Déjà Vu at Trump’s Coast Guard Speech, Shawn McCreesh, May 20, 2026. President Trump’s commencement address was a mixture of jokes and praise for the seafaring life of the Coast Guard graduates. But there were detours into choppy waters

On Wednesday at noon, President Trump returned to this little Connecticut town to give the commencement address to the United States Coast Guard Academy for his second time as commander in chief.

“I’m thrilled to become the first president to ever give a second keynote address to this storied institution,” he said to a sea of young men and women in starchy crisp whites. “I am very proud of that honor.”

In fact, he is not the first president to ever give a second keynote address to this storied institution. Bill Clinton did it twice. So did George W. Bush. And Barack Obama.ImageAlthough the president talked up the role of the Coast Guard in the Iran war, the cadets mostly played it cool, with scattered applause.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The last time Mr. Trump spoke here, it was 2017. He was having a very different presidency, beset by very different crises. And yet …

“You have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight,” Mr. Trump said in 2017.

“Whatever danger comes our way, you will fight, fight, fight,” he said Wednesday.

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” Mr. Trump said in 2017.

“The fake news, look at all of them back there,” he said Wednesday.

“I’ve accomplished a tremendous amount in a very short time as president, jobs pouring back into our country,” Mr. Trump said in 2017.

Various businesses were “all pouring back into our country right now,” he said Wednesday.

It was déjà vu on the Thames (that is seriously what the little river here is called).Editors’ PicksCan a Windbreaker Be Fashionable?Tiny Love Stories: ‘A Misdirected Midlife Crisis’Celebrating 50 Years of Great American Wines

Mr. Trump’s commencement address on Wednesday was mostly a mixture of jokes, high praise and written remarks about the danger and derring-do of the seafaring life the Coast Guard graduates had chosen for themselves. But, just like nine years ago, there were detours into choppy waters.

The last time he spoke here, a runaway crisis was consuming his presidency. The consequences of his decision to interfere in an F.B.I. investigation led by James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, were metastasizing. He complained that day about “the way I’ve been treated lately.” Now he was back, and a runaway crisis was consuming his presidency.

Not even two minutes into the speech, he brought it up: his war in Iran.

“Everything’s gone,” he declared. “Their navy’s gone, their air force is gone, just about everything.” (Last week, The New York Times reported on the existence of evidence showing Iran had restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz).ImageMr. Trump speaking in at the ceremony on Wednesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

“The only question is,” Mr. Trump continued, “do we go and finish it up, or are they going to be signing a document? Let’s see what happens.”

He kept sailing back to this topic at points throughout his 53-minute speech.

“We will not let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said half an hour in, “and we have great support. You wouldn’t know that by reading the fake news, but we have great support.” (This week, a New York Times/Siena poll found that most voters think he made the wrong decision in taking the country to war with Iran and feel that it has not been worth the costs).

The president tried tailoring the war talk to interest his audience at hand. “The Coast Guard has also played an important role in Operation Epic Fury to ensure that the Iranian regime never obtains a nuclear weapon,” he said.

In some ways it was not the ideal scenario for him to gin up a public show of support for war. There was scattered applause from time to time, but the cadets mostly just played it cool.

The president got the most out of the crowd when he was being apolitical, hamming it up with the coasties as he welcomed them onstage and teased them about how attractive they were. “I hate good-looking men,” he growled, after a young man named Matthew came up to shake his hand. A cadet named Thomas walked up next. “Look at the muscles on this guy,” Mr. Trump observed.ImageMr. Trump greeting a Coast Guard cadet onstage during Wednesday’s ceremony.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

He said he enjoyed examining these fine specimens up close: “I like to see what these guys are like!”

He next asked a woman named Savannah up to the stage. “If I didn’t invite her up,” he said, “they’d accuse me of discrimination.” (His administration fired the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Adm. Linda L. Fagan, within 24 hours of his inauguration; she was the first female officer to lead a branch of the American armed forces). He invited one more woman up to the stage after Savannah.

He loved speaking at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy so much, he said, “We’re going to have to try it maybe a third time, too — to keep that record intact.”

Politico, Barney Frank, who led sweeping financial reforms, dies at 86, May 20, 2026. “This country has never had a congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him,” President Barack Obama said at the time of his retirement.

Barney Frank, a sharp-tongued Massachusetts Democrat who became the first LGBTQ+ member of Congress to out himself, has died, according to his longtime friend Jim Segel. He was 86.

Frank came out to a Boston Globe reporter in May 1987, a first for a sitting member of Congress. “Representative Frank Discloses He is Homosexual” was the formal-sounding New York Times headline.

“I don’t think my sex life is relevant to my job, but on the other hand, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m embarrassed about my life,” Frank said. He was 47 years old and had been in Congress for six years at that point.

In 2012, he became the first member of Congress to marry someone of the same gender, longtime partner James Ready, in a wedding officiated by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. By then, the world had moved forward a bit, but Frank wanted to push his colleagues on Capitol Hill to grow with him.

“I did want to get married while I was still in office,” he said. “I think it’s important that my colleagues interact with a married gay man.”

During Frank’s four years as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, he helped steer Congress’ reaction to the 2008 subprime mortgage catastrophe, which had sent the economy spiraling into recession. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which was designed to help the financial system avoid a repeat of that disaster, bore his name and brought a lot of heat his way from Wall Street.

“This country has never had a congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him,” President Barack Obama said about Frank’s retirement, adding: “He has stood up for the rights of LGBT Americans and fought to end discrimination against them. And it is only thanks to his leadership that we were able to pass the most sweeping financial reform in history designed to protect consumers and prevent the kind of excessive risk-taking that led to the financial crisis from ever happening again.”

It was often said about him: Barney is frank. During his 32 years in Congress, Frank was a cerebral champion of progressive causes with a caustic wit and no tolerance for fools or mindless chit-chat.

President George W. Bush dubbed him “saber tooth,” perhaps the most fitting of the many nicknames that Bush came up with.

“My verbal skills, both oral and written, are highly developed and the rest is abysmal. In politics, that played to my strengths,” Frank wrote of himself.

Politico, Progressive firebrand Chris Rabb wins Democratic primary for the nation’s bluest House seat, Lisa Kashinsky, May 20, 2026. The self-styled “troublemaker” and unabashed progressive was backed by members of the “Squad.”

Chris Rabb, a progressive state representative and self-styled “rabble-rouser,” clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday for the nation’s bluest House district.

Rabb is all but guaranteed to succeed retiring Rep. Dwight Evans in Pennsylvania’s 3rd District. It’s a major win for the party’s left flank and a significant blow to the city’s storied political machine, which split between two other candidates in the race.

The progressive five-term state lawmaker toppled state Sen. Sharif Street, a former state Democratic Party chair and scion of a prominent North Philadelphia political family who had the backing of much of the city’s establishment. He also defeated Evans’ preferred successor, Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon who was running her first political campaign.

The race became a microcosm of the ideological and stylistic fights roiling the party nationally and a proxy battle between its progressive and center-left wings.

In a field where each candidate claimed progressive bona fides, Rabb tacked furthest to the left. He racked up endorsements from members of the “Squad,” won the backing of the local chapters of the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America and held rallies with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and polarizing left-wing political streamer Hasan Piker.

He pushed his rivals to join him in calling Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” and attempted to tie his competitors to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has become a lightning rod in Democratic primaries. AIPAC said it was not involved in the race.

His victory is as much an exclamation point for progressives as it is a remarkable rebuke of Philadelphia’s Democratic machine.

In an interview ahead of Election Day, Rabb said his win would signal “that the era of establishment politics is coming to an end.” Nationally, he said it would show that “folks who are framed as radical or far left by mainstream media and establishment politics … are very much in the moral center.”Filed Under:

Politico, DR Congo World Cup team still planning US trip despite Ebola outbreak,  Sophia Cai, May 20, 2026. World Cup organizers are confronting a new logistical hurdle ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup: how to safely host the Democratic Republic of Congo’s national team in the United States amid heightened public health restrictions tied to an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa.

The Congolese national team has canceled the portion of its pre-World Cup training camp that was scheduled to take place this month in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But the team still intends to travel to Europe and then Texas before the tournament begins in June, team officials told West Wing Playbook.

The team claimed one of the last slots for the World Cup and announced its roster earlier this week.

“Our team’s preparation program is proceeding as planned in Europe and Houston,” a spokesperson for the DRC team said in a statement. “It is the Kinshasa leg that has been cancelled due to health restrictions.”

The Trump administration and FIFA are working to ensure the Congolese team can enter the United States for its training camp and tournament matches.

“We’re actively working with FIFA to ensure that there is safe traveling, safe passage, and ensuring that travelers and the American public remain safe throughout,” said Satish Pillai, incident manager for CDC’s Ebola response, on a call with reporters today.

The concerns follow the World Health Organization declaring Ebola an international public health emergency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposing a 30-day travel restriction on non-U.S. passport holders who have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and South Sudan within the previous 21 days.

Politico, RFK Jr. fires leaders of group that determines what insurers must cover, Carmen Paun, May 20, 2026. The health secretary has said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force erred by failing to recommend screening for Alzheimer's disease. The firing of task force members has raised concerns that Kennedy wants the panel to endorse his personal views about what’s preventive.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired the leaders of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an influential group of external experts who decide which medical services are preventive and must be covered fully by insurers under the Affordable Care Act.

The move has raised concerns among public health advocates and patient groups that Kennedy wants the task force to endorse his personal views about what’s preventive. In some cases, Kennedy’s views aren’t in line with mainstream public health assessments.

Kennedy told lawmakers last month that the task force has been “lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years,” and that he was planning to bring in new members “who have a clear mission.”

At an April hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, he cited the task force’s failure to recommend early screening for Alzheimer’s disease as an example of a decision he disagreed with. “If it had been doing its job, we would have early screening,” he told Ohio Republican Troy Balderson.

Some advocates for people with diseases are already lobbying to expand the range of services the task force says should be fully covered and are hoping Kennedy will help. For example, the American Association of Kidney Patients, whose corporate members include drugmakers AstraZeneca, Novartis and Sanofi, has warred with the task force for years over whether to expand screening for kidney disease.

But some patient groups and lawmakers have pushed back against Kennedy’s critique, including Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who in a different hearing with Kennedy last month praised the task force’s work on prevention of breast and cervical cancers, among other health issues.

The firing of John Wong, who chaired the group, and Esa Davis, the deputy chair, comes days before a May 23 deadline for nominations to be submitted for new task force members. The fired task force leaders would have typically been involved in selecting new leaders of the group, which is made up of 16 experts in primary care.

HHS has canceled most of the task force meetings scheduled after President Donald Trump took office, preventing the group from making any draft recommendations for preventive services. To Barrasso, Kennedy acknowledged he’d been slow to get it up and running and said he was seeking to ensure task force members have a broader range of medical expertise. “We just want to get the best people and have a more representative group of specialties,” he said.

In letters dated May 11, which POLITICO obtained, Kennedy told Wong and Davis that their appointments to the task force had been terminated, effective immediately.

That decision followed a review of current appointments to the task force that is part of the Department of Health and Human Services’ “implementation of updated governance and oversight procedures” for the task force and for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, according to the letters.

AHRQ is part of HHS and supports the task force.

The decision to terminate the two USPSTF leaders was made to “avoid uncertainty that could jeopardize the validity of future Task Force actions,” the letters state.

They note that it was an administrative decision and didn’t reflect the performance of the two leaders.

More On U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability

 

 

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

 

New York Times, With Trump’s Settlement, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away, Russ Buettner, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). The tax service argued that the Trump Organization tried to claim the same losses twice. The president said the audit was a “disgrace.”  

A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.

The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.

Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.

It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.

Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.

The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.

Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.

In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.

In 2009, the Trump casinos were headed toward another bankruptcy. After the casino bondholders rebuffed Mr. Trump’s offer to buy them out, he notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that he had “determined that his partnership interests are worthless and lack potential to regain value” and was “hereby abandoning” his stake.

That notice used the exact precise wording of what tax laws refer to as abandonment, which opened the door to Mr. Trump suddenly declaring all the losses on the business that he had not been allowed to use in prior years.

Those findings by The Times and ProPublica resulted from the leak of Trump tax information over which the president, as well as two of his sons, sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion, accusing the agency of not doing enough to prevent the disclosures.

New York Times, Prison to Pardons to Payouts: Jan. 6 Rioters Are Elated at Trump Compensation Fund, Alan Feuer, May 20, 2026. The possibility that people who ransacked the Capitol could get money from the government they attacked is the latest head-spinning twist in President Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6.

Antony Vo was at a friend’s house on Monday morning when a fellow pardoned Jan. 6 rioter sent a message: The Trump administration had just created a fund to compensate people who believed they had been wronged by the federal government — including those, like him, who had stormed the Capitol five years ago.

Mr. Vo, who briefly fled the country to avoid his prison sentence stemming from the riot, said he did not know at first that the fund had come about as part of a larger deal by President Trump to withdraw an extraordinary lawsuit filed against the Internal Revenue Service. But the origins of the fund, he said, were less important than how it made him feel: surprised, relieved and grateful all at once.

“I’m glad it turned into something,” he explained, “that could help people who have been hurting for quite a while now.”

That reaction, it turns out, appeared typical among the so-called Jan. 6ers who have long joined Mr. Trump in claiming that the efforts to hold them accountable for disrupting the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election amounted to mistreatment by the criminal justice system.

Some felt that the fund validated their self-image as victims of the government. Others felt elated — albeit somewhat stunned — at the prospect of a payout. And not a few felt a bit confused at how the process of filing claims and receiving checks could play out.

“So many questions,” said Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years on a seditious conspiracy conviction arising from the riot. “But it’s a good direction.”ImageEnrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted in connection with Jan. 6, has called the potential payouts “a good direction.”Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

The formal decision of whether to offer restitution to the rioters had been kicking around the Justice Department for months, delayed by internal wrangling. But in some sense, it had appeared inevitable that the Trump administration would ultimately funnel money to those who joined the mob on Jan. 6 given the president’s relentless efforts to whitewash the events of that day.

In one of the first official acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping proclamation that granted pardons to — or dismissed the charges against — all of the nearly 1,600 people indicted in connection with Jan. 6. He then began an aggressive purge of the federal agents and prosecutors who were handed the task of building criminal cases against the people who took part in the attack.

The possibility that people who ransacked the Capitol, smashing windows and fighting with the police, could get money from the same federal government they attacked was the latest head-spinning twist in the effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, did not rule out violent rioters receiving payouts from the fund.

It has not been lost on many Jan. 6ers that by deeming them worthy of reparations, the most powerful officials in the country have effectively validated their claims of having been wronged by the federal government — claims that, in many instances, were roundly rejected by the judges of both parties who oversaw their cases.

“This is the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE acknowledging the possibility that Americans were targeted through political abuse of government power,” Tommy Tatum, a Mississippi man who was charged with civil disorder for interfering with the police on Jan. 6, wrote on Monday in a post on social media. “That is historic.”

In a typical Trumpian move, the president has both played down his knowledge of the compensation fund and praised it as necessary, telling reporters that while he did not know much about the proposal, it was put in place to reimburse people “that were horribly treated.”

“These were people that were weaponized and really treated brutally by a system that was so corrupt with corrupt people running it,” he said.

The fund has spawned wide blowback, including criticism from some Republicans. Critics have said the real corruption comes from Mr. Trump and the Justice Department, which hashed out details of the fund in a settlement agreement that was never filed to the federal judge who oversaw the suit against the I.R.S.

At the same time, experts on far-right extremism have raised concerns that giving money to people who stormed the Capitol — especially to those who assaulted the police — would only bolster political violence.

“It proves that extremism pays — literally,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a nonprofit group that seeks to counter antisemitism and far-right extremism. “Over the last decade, we’ve seen this trajectory of conspiracy theories on the fringes moving to the mainstream and being normalized because of Trump and other elected leaders.”

“Now,” Ms. Spitalnick added, “they’re not just being normalized, they’re actually being encouraged by financial incentives.”

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 19, 2026 [Weaponizing, Lootiing?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 20, 2026. Yesterday the Department of Justice announced it is creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate what it calls victims of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

First of all, the insistence of Trump cronies that the Department of Justice and federal judges “weaponized” the law against them under former president Joe Biden—or under former president Barack Obama—is another example of regime officials blaming others for what they, themselves, are doing as Trump’s appointees try to manufacture criminal cases against those Trump considers his enemies. Trump’s attacks on the justice system are designed to convince his followers that he hasn’t really committed the crimes for which he has been indicted, and sometimes convicted, and they help to undermine faith in the rule of law, weakening our democracy.

Second of all, though, what this agreement is not, is a settlement of Trump’s case against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), although that term is being widely used to describe it. Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages after a contractor leaked his tax information—along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers—during his own first term after it became clear that the judge to whom the case was assigned seemed inclined to say that the case could not move forward because Trump could not be in charge of both sides of the suit.

The recognition that this is not a legal settlement is important. The Trump administration maintains it is doing what the Obama administration did in establishing a compensation fund to settle the case of Keepseagle v. Vilsack, when the Department of Justice established a $760 million fund as a settlement of a long-running class action suit charging that the Department of Agriculture had systematically discriminated against Indigenous farmers and ranchers.

Unlike the Keepseagle settlement, though, Trump’s fund is not part of a legal settlement.

In her order dismissing the suit, Judge Kathleen Williams noted that because Trump’s dropping of the suit “does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources’ and the ‘fair administration of justice,’ neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

Judge Williams was not alone in her skepticism about the deal. Andrew Duehren of the New York Times reported today that career lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service thought the agency should fight Trump’s suit, noting that the statute of limitations for such a suit had run out, the Justice Department has previously taken the position that people cannot sue the IRS for the actions of a contractor, and the Justice Department settled a similar case from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin with a public apology rather than a monetary payoff.

The document that purports to be a “settlement” has the words “settlement agreement” written in capital letters across the top of it, but the important word is “agreement.” It is not the settlement of a legal case: Trump dropped the case when it looked like the judge would throw it out.

It is simply an agreement between Trump and his own appointees at the Department of Justice.

And what an agreement it is. It says that Trump and his older sons who also brought (and dropped) the suit “will receive a formal apology from the United States, but will not receive any monetary payment or damages of any kind.” The agreement sets up a fund made up of five people, four of whom Trump’s hand-picked attorney general will choose. The fifth will be chosen “in consultation with congressional leadership,” but Trump can remove any one of them “without cause.”

That group has complete say over how it decides to grant or deny claims, but what it does will be confidential, overseen only by the Department of Justice. The fund ends in December 2028, just after the 2028 presidential election. If all the money isn’t spent by then, Trump gets to decide to which federal account it goes.

In essence then, the settlement gives Trump full control over almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to spend however he wants, without oversight. The Department of Justice document establishing the fund declares that “[o]nce the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

On the agreement, the signature of the lawyer representing the United States is not that of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, but rather that of Stanley E. Woodward Jr., who has been a key defense attorney for people in Trump’s orbit accused of committing crimes, including Kash Patel, now FBI director; Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro; and Walt Nauta, the Trump aide indicted for his actions surrounding Trump’s retention of classified documents. Woodward also has represented a number of those charged with crimes relating to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

With the announcement of the agreement, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned.

The agreement says the amount dedicated to the fund “does not represent the value of any current claim by [Trump], but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” and thus “is not taxable income” for the Trumps, “who receive no economic benefit” from the agreement. But the number the Justice Department released for the establishment of the fund puts the lie to the idea the number was random. It is $1.776 billion, linking the fund directly to the attempt of Trump and his cronies to destroy American democracy and begin it again, on their terms.

Famously, on January 6, 2021, newly-elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted, “Today is 1776.” During the attack, the rioters shouted “1776.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that Trump and his loyalists “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

As political scientist Jonathan Ladd noted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits compensation for those who engaged in insurrection. It says that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…, but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” In his comments to Sargent, Raskin noted that if the fund pays off the January 6 rioters, the government will be doing precisely that: “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee today, facing senators for the first time since taking over for fired attorney general Pam Bondi. He refused to rule out paying money to rioters who had attacked police officers.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “an individual who after being pardoned by the president went on to molest two children, and that person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds that he was hoping to get from your slush fund. Can you commit to making the rule so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?” Blanche accused Van Hollen of “obviously lying” because no such fund existed until yesterday.

But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.

Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.

Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”

Then, today, the plot got even thicker.

A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.

Trump’s comments in that press conference have invited commentary suggesting he is turning the White House into a fortress. Describing the ballroom, he said: “Between the drone-proofing, the missile-proofing, we have ah, and the drone capacity upstairs, we can have all sorts of military—I hate to use the word snipers—but we have great sniper capacity. It’s built for our snipers, not enemy’s snipers, our snipers. And because of the height we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington.”

Meidas Touch Network, Analysis; The Attorney Who Surrendered a Billion Dollars Without Filing a Single Motion, Dina Doll, May 20,2026. On May 12, Donald Trump stood at the White House and said out loud, about his acting Attorney General: “He kept me out of jail for years.”

That man now runs the Justice Department.

And what he just did with that power may be the most legally consequential act of self-dealing in American history.Subscribed

Here is what happened. Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in January. So what did Blanche do to defend the American people he was now supposed to represent?

Nothing. Trump filed three motions. Blanche didn’t file a single piece of paper.

After Trump asked for an extension, Judge Kathleen Williams questioned whether she could even constitutionally review the case. She ordered both sides to separately explain, in their own words, whether they were genuinely adversarial, a basic constitutional requirement for any federal lawsuit, since it appeared Trump was suing himself. She cited Trump’s own words admitting as much.

The deadline was Wednesday.

A typical defense lawyer would have seized that opening. A motion to dismiss. A jurisdictional challenge. Something. Any private attorney who let that opportunity pass would face a malpractice claim before the ink dried.

Instead, Blanche rushed a settlement through two days before the deadline.

First: a permanent end to any IRS audit of Trump, his businesses, and every member of his family. Every pending audit. Every past return. Gone. Forever. The one-page addendum Blanche signed declared the federal government forever barred and precluded from pursuing any and all claims that have been or could have been asserted against Trump, his family, or his businesses, including the Trump Organization and all related trusts, companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.

All of it. Untouchable. Permanently.

A typical lawyer would be sued for malpractice for far less.

Then came the fund.

Blanche created a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, that number is not an accident, to be distributed by a five-member commission that he, the acting attorney general, appoints.

There is no precedent in American history for a government fund that could pay the people who tried to destroy it. Until now.

I recently interviewed Officer Michael Fanone for the MeidasTouch Network. He is still telling his story. He should not have to be.

Capitol Police Officer Fanone was tased at the base of his skull and beaten until he suffered a heart attack on the steps of the Capitol. He still lives with traumatic brain injury. Officer Brian Sicknick was struck with a chemical irritant and collapsed; he died the following day. Officer Harry Dunn described being called racial slurs while being crushed in a doorway. Officer Aquilino Gonell testified that he believed he was going to die. Four officers who survived that day later died by suicide.

That Fanone still has to speak out, still has to walk into rooms and recount the worst moments of his life so that the truth doesn’t disappear entirely beneath the lies of Trump and his Republican allies, is itself an indictment. His testimony should be history by now. Instead, it is resistance.

These are the people on one side of January 6th.

When asked before Congress whether people convicted of attacking those officers could receive payments from the fund, Blanche declined to rule it out.

Now consider the timing.

This settlement did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived as the midterms take shape. Men who demonstrated on January 6th that they would violently overturn an election result are now potentially being paid before voters go to the polls again. This is not simply a corruption story. A corruption story is about the past. The purpose of the Department of Justice is to keep us safe, yet this action makes me feel very unsafe. I don’t need to imagine what a funded, rewarded, newly legitimized network of political violence looks like six months from now. We already saw it once.

Now they will be paid for it, out of a billion-dollar fund. A permanent shield. A payment to the people who tried to burn it all down. The Justice Department did not defend this country. He turned it into a weapon against the people it was built to protect. And the man who did it is still the acting attorney general.

Dina Doll is an experienced attorney and legal analyst. She hosts the MissTrial podcast on MeidasTouch and co-hosts Unprecedented on Legal AF. Dina also serves as the legal expert for Access Hollywood’s Trial Files and provides regular legal commentary for CNN, NewsNation, and other national media outlets. In addition to her media work, she is a delegate to the California Democratic Party, a community activist, and a City Library Commissioner.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Personal Attorney Todd Blanche Attempts to Pardon His Boss, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), May 20, 2026. 2024 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection, Weaponized DOJ.

After Todd Blanche finished testifying before the Appropriations Committee yesterday — testimony that was closely focused on the Terrorist Slush Fund he and Stan Woodward had set up to reward Trump’s favorite criminals — Josh Gerstein noticed this document posted with no explanation to DOJ’s website.

It is intended to be, I’m fairly sure, a pardon for all federal crimes Trump had committed before yesterday.

I’ll do a follow-up that explains how we got here at more length. But as important background, consider the several kinds of legal jeopardy Trump is known to face:

Tax crimes for refusing to pay his taxes, which may have been partly exposed by the leaked tax returns Charles Littlejohn liberated The January 6 and document theft crimes for which he was already charged (the latter would require successful appeals of Aileen Cannon’s order throwing the charges out); in recent days, John Solomon has been in a panic that the January 6 charges were dismissed without prejudice Any other crimes discovered as part of the January 6 investigation; significantly, Jack Smith investigated how Trump raised money in the guise of election integrity, then spent it on a slew of things that had nothing to do with election integrity Cryptocurrency fraud (for which Trump is currently being sued by Justin Sun; in response to which World Liberty has sued Sun) Bribery in plain sight Foreign influence peddling The rampant insider trading disclosed by Trump’s most recent disclosure form

Which is to say, Trump’s known or suspected crimes go well beyond just the two indictments charged in 2023.

Start at the beginning. This document, which was signed after the original “settlement” and Terrorist Slush Fund, suggests that Blanche created this document solely as part of setting up the Terrorist Slush Fund, as a “relevant requirement[] for the Fund.”

Bullet C claims to absolve the Plaintiffs, which already includes Trump and his spawn, of all crimes. It’s not just him and his spawn though. It includes family and related corporations, broadly defined, and so would include Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures, his failing social media company, Trump Organization, and anything else they’ve got hidden somewhere. C1 includes anything before the Agency, so presumably the IRS. But C2 also includes anything Trump would call “Lawfare and/or Weaponization,” which in his usage means, “being held accountable for his crimes.” C3 also includes things (with tax returns specifically included) before other agencies, which would include the SEC and FEC, under which agencies some of Trump’s other crimes would be investigated.

Donald Trump has committed a broad swatch of crimes, including crimes committed as a private or corporate person after becoming President.

And his personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, in his role as Acting Attorney General, just claimed to absolve him of all those crimes.

There may be legal loopholes in this attempted pardon. But the intent of it is fairly clear.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Vance confronted with Popular Information report on Trump stock purchases, Judd Legum, right, May 20, 2026. Vance attacks reporter, offers sarcastic and contradictory response.

On Monday, Popular Information broke the news that President Trump publicly praised two companies, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Apple, the same day he bought their stock. Trump took a tour of a Thermo Fisher facility and called on large pharmaceutical firms to partner with the company on the same day he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock.

In a third example from Popular Information’s report, Trump bought between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock and, the next day, touted Micron as “one of the hottest companies” in an interview on Fox News. Trump also encouraged people to “go out and buy a Dell computer” nine days after buying between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Popular Information’s investigation was based on Trump’s 113-page financial disclosure that was belatedly disclosed on May 14. The filing revealed that Trump had engaged in thousands of stock trades in the first three months of 2026. The hyperactive trading was an egregious violation of the presidential norm to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest. In June 2016, in recognition that a president could not ethically trade individual stocks, Trump liquidated his stock portfolio.

Some major media outlets picked up the story. For example, MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow extensively covered Popular Information’s investigation during her Monday night show. You can watch that clip here:

It was also covered in detail on Morning Joe on Tuesday morning:

By Tuesday afternoon, J.D. Vance, appearing at the White House press briefing, was confronted by journalist Andrew Feinberg with Popular Information’s reporting:

FEINBERG: The president's financial disclosures were released recently, and they showed a lot of stock trades in companies that he has talked up at events, official events… [H]ow can you and your administration argue to Americans that you're cleaning up corruption… when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them and enriching himself?

Vance responded by scolding the reporter for not being “objective.” He then quipped that Trump does not have a “Robinhood account” and it was “absurd” to suggest he was “buying and selling stocks.”

Of course, no one has alleged Trump had an online brokerage account or that he personally executed the trades. Vance’s response was a deflection to avoid the incoherence of his own position.

“I am a big fan of banning members of Congress from trading stocks,” Vance continued, “So is the president of the United States.” Vance did not explain why members of Congress should be banned from trading stocks but not the president.

Popular Information is a three-person newsletter, but we can rattle the cages of the most powerful people in the world.

Other major media outlets have not only failed to report on the damning timing of Trump’s stock trades, but have failed to mention Trump’s May 14 financial disclosure at all. Media outlets who have ignored the story completely include Business Insider, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NPR, PBS, Politico, and Semafor.

The decision of outlets that employ hundreds of journalists to skip coverage is inexplicable. A sitting president trading hundreds of millions of dollars worth of individual stocks is undeniably newsworthy.

The real meaning of “independence”

Even among media outlets that covered Trump’s stock transactions, the coverage lacked critical context.

For example, the most widely distributed article about Trump’s trades was published by the wire service Reuters. The piece notes that Trump “disclosed a flurry of ‌at least $220 million in financial transactions earlier this year in the securities of major U.S. companies.” It also, appropriately, publishes the Trump Organization’s response:

President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial ​institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions. Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment ‌processes ⁠and systems administered by those institutions.

Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments. They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management ​of any kind.

The piece fails to note, however, that the federal government has a formal mechanism to ensure that the assets of public officials are “independently managed.” It is called the Qualified Blind Trust Program.

Under a Qualified Blind Trust (QBT), there is an independent trustee with no prior relationship to the government official. The independence of the trustee must be certified by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Once certified, there is no communication permitted between the official and the trustee, except written communication approved in advance by the OGE. And, critically, the official is not informed about the investment decisions of the trustee. That is what makes it blind and avoids conflicts of interest.

Trump did not elect to have a QBT and the management of his assets has nothing in common with a QBT. Trump’s assets are in a revocable trust, managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr., whom he speaks to frequently. Trump Jr. may have selected a “third-party financial institution” to help manage his father’s stocks, but that advisor is not legally independent. The statement says that Trump does not receive “advance notice of trading activity,” but it does not specify whether Trump speaks with Trump Jr. or whomever is trading on his behalf. There is nothing preventing Trump from doing so.

Moreover, nothing about the arrangement prevents conflicts because it is not blind; Trump knows exactly what stocks he owns. As part of his financial disclosure, Trump certified that the listing of his stock trades and current holdings is correct.

That is how you know that Trump continues to be legally in control of his stocks. He is signing this document. If the stocks were really independently managed, the document would be filed by the independent manager and not made public.

In a May 15 post on X, Eric Trump, another Trump son, sought to mislead the public about these facts, claiming that his father’s assets were “in a blind trust” and only invested in “broad market indexes.” Both of these claims are demonstrably untrue.

The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, and Variety all published stories about Trump’s stock trading without mentioning Trump’s failure to use a blind trust. Forbes published Eric Trump’s claims without noting they were false.

Meanwhile, NOTUS, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Fortune all reported that Trump failed to establish a blind trust.

I’ve been doing campaign finance research since 1997. The bad news is that the influence of big money on our political system has not waned. The good news is that, with the right training, it is easier than ever to access public information about who is trying to buy influence.

With the midterm elections approaching, I’m pulling back the curtain on the research methods I’ve developed over nearly 30 years. I am hosting a webinar that will cover:

• Exactly how money will flow into the 2026 midterm elections.
• How to efficiently and accurately identify what corporations and individuals are donating to any candidate or cause.
• When and where new information will become available as election day approaches.
• The tactics that powerful people and corporations use to try to hide their spending.
• In the second half of the webinar, I’ll answer questions directly from the audience. The webinar will take place Friday, June 5 at 1 p.m. Eastern.

This webinar is free for all paid subscribers of Popular Information. Click the button below to register. 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Of Slush Funds, Andrew Egger, May 20, 2026. Someday I’ll need to take a break from writing about Donald Trump’s outrageous “anti-weaponization fund”—Lord knows there are plenty of other outrages clamoring for our attention. But there’s no helping it for now: The thing just keeps getting more ridiculous day after day.

The big news in this department was the remarkable “supplement” to the settlement agreement that the Justice Department quietly revealed yesterday: a one-page document stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from prosecuting tax claims against anyone in the Trump family or Trump’s businesses.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave no explanation for this utterly shameless attempt to place the president and his associates permanently above the law. And why would he have? We don’t need explanations for what is obvious on its face: Blanche is auditioning for the permanent AG job by giving Trump constant reassurances he’ll run the Justice Department exactly like he used to run Trump’s criminal defense teams: with an eye to protecting the boss above all else. At long last, Trump has the attorney general he’s been craving ever since Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation all those years ago: a guy who knows his proper throne-sniffing place.

But somehow even this development didn’t get my blood boiling as much as another, objectively smaller development yesterday: Vice President JD Vance’s turn in the White House Briefing Room defending the settlement fund in questions from reporters. All these guys are rotten, but there’s something about Vance’s shtick of couching his own utterly cynical amorality in a posture of faux-earnest aw-shucks folksy reasonableness that bothers me even more than the no-pretense in-your-face corruption.

If it bothers you too, then Bulwark+ is the place for you. Join us.Subscribed

You’d never see Trump, for instance, managing to formulate this sort of soullessly galaxy-brained thought about the J6ers: “One of the interesting things about the American media is there is a fascination with prisoner rights. . . . You know who never gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to disproportionate sentencing? People who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protest.”

Incredibly, Vance repeatedly declined to rule out the possibility of giving “anti-weaponization” money to people convicted of violent attacks on Capitol Police.

“You previously told me that anyone who assaulted a police officer on January 6th should go to prison,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the vice president. “So why not rule out giving them taxpayer-funded money?”

“What I said,” Vance replied, “is we’re going to look at everything case by case. . . . There are people who, I don’t know their individual circumstances, and I don’t rule things out categorically when I know nothing about a person’s individual circumstances.”

“We do have people who were accused of attacking law enforcement officers—that doesn’t mean that we’re going to completely ignore some of the claims they’re going to make,” Vance said at another point. “We’re going to evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis.”

This posture is so tiresome. Here is something we know categorically about the “individual circumstances” of those who assaulted police officers on January 6th: They all assaulted police officers on January 6th. Vance, an educated human being with a sharp mind capable of abstract thought, is not actually having genus–species difficulties here. Rather, he is compelled to squirm and gyrate like this because he doesn’t want to say the obvious actual reason why Trump doesn’t want him to rule out money for violent rioters. This has nothing to do with invented or imagined ameliorating circumstances. Trump, as he has made clear all along, simply thinks attacking police on his behalf is behavior that should be rewarded, not punished.

This was clear on the day of January 6th itself, when Trump had to be dragooned by those around him into denouncing the violence at all—which he finally did in the most laughably perfunctory way imaginable. As the dust settled on the wreckage of the riot, Trump was openly exultant: “Go home with love & in peace,” he tweeted that night. “Remember this day forever!” It was clear again last year when Trump pardoned every January 6th criminal—the violent included—on his first day back in office. It would have been easy for the president simply to pardon everyone who stormed the Capitol nonviolently (lol) on his behalf.

He pardoned them all because he approved of what all of them had done. Now he plans to pay them with your money, too. And the vice president has the temerity to wag an admonishing finger at you for caring.

Public Notice, Opinion: Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms, Liz Dye, May 20, 2026. At the very least, it'll make the midterms messy.

On Monday, President Trump “settled” a lawsuit he filed against himself for the low-low price of $1.8 billion of your tax dollars. But he’s not pocketing any of that money, perish the thought!

In an act of characteristic selflessness, Trump is giving it all away to his most loyal supporters, the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and were cruelly victimized by the Biden Justice Department’s campaign of “Lawfare and Weaponization.”

And it’s not just J6-ers invited to queue up for cash. Step right up and collect your payday, clinic harassers, anti-vaxxers, and patriots targeted “based on improper ideological criteria.”

Papa Trump is about to make it rain. Suing yourself is the ultimate act of onanism

The grift was originally conceived as a plan to enrich Trump himself.

In 2024, the president’s sweatiest lawyer, Daniel Epstein, went on Fox Business and announced that he was suing the government for $100 million. In fact, what he did was file an administrative complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) alleging various abuses in connection with the raid that turned up hundreds of sensitive government documents at Trump’s private club.

The claim was hopelessly defective — FTCA claims are almost impossible to win against law enforcement officials — and yet last October it emerged that Trump was “settling” with his own administration for $230 million.

In January, Trump struck again.

This time it was a demand for $10 billion from the IRS over the 2020 disclosure of his tax returns by an contractor who leaked thousands of returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica and the New York Times. That suit was even more defective than the first: damages are limited by statute to $1,000 per disclosure, the statute of limitations is two years from the date the disclosure is discovered, and Trump himself controlled the IRS at the time.

There’s also the minor matter that the Constitution limits courts to adjudicating live cases and controversies, and the president openly admitted that he was negotiating with himself because he runs both teams.

Judge Kathleen Williams appointed six learned lawyers to evaluate whether she had jurisdiction to hear a case where the plaintiff and defendant are the same person. The panel suggested that further inquiry was necessary to asses the independence of the lawyers running the DOJ’s case, pointedly noting that the government vigorously fought off similar suits from other victims of the 2020 leak. The New York Times reports that the IRS’s lawyers drafted a 25-page memo in April rubbishing Trump’s suit and urging the Justice Department to fight it.

Instead, the DOJ strategized to cut Judge Williams, a Biden appointee, out of the loop entirely. No attorney for the Justice Department entered an appearance in the case, and a supposedly joint motion to slow proceedings down for 90 days was signed by Trump’s lawyers alone. Procedurally, this ensured that Trump could walk away from the case at any time, without needing the court to punch his ticket.

Under normal circumstances judges have to grant a motion to dismiss a case — which gives them some modicum of discretion to police the terms of any settlement. But when the defendant has neither entered an appearance nor answered the complaint, the plaintiff can simply declare his intent to dismiss and walk away. And so, before Judge Williams could make the government do anything or answer any unpleasant questions, Trump did just that.The stitch up

On Monday, Acting AG Todd Blanche announced that he was “settling” Trump’s IRS and FTCA claims by establishing an “Anti Weaponization Fund” to compensate the victims of Biden’s dastardly depredations.

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” he simpered. “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

The gambit is a three-fer. It allows Trump to sidestep the blowback from literally cutting himself a check from the Treasury, retcon the January 6 attackers into victims, and take credit for righting what a historic wrong. Then he can graciously accept an apology and donate his imaginary court winnings to his supporters, while simultaneously siphoning off a mountain of cash to dole out at his whim with minimal government oversight.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comCOONS: Will you commit to making reports fully public so Americans know who is getting taxpayer dollars out of this settlement fund? BLANCHE: There are privacy laws that may prevent some of the information from being fully public.

Plus, as an added bonus, the DOJ went back and added a clause barring the government from investigating the Trump family for tax crimes, putting an end to a decades-old audit dispute which could potentially have cost Trump $100 million.

The entire exercise is an elaborate troll, right down to the $1.776 billion price tag, a figure which supposedly represents “the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” — and, no, they will not be showing their math.

The slush fund will be controlled by a five-member board appointed by Trump and will sunset in the last month of his term. The only oversight of the fund, which is a government agency, will be the attorney general, and Blanche refused to even agree that money shouldn’t go to people convicted of violent felonies against police officers.

It is, as many people have commented, a vehicle for Trump to pay his supporters for the last attack, and maybe prepay for the next one using tax dollars. It’s also flagrantly illegal.

The money is being looted from the Treasury Judgment Fund, which Congress established in 1956 to pay court judgments against the United States. It’s an indefinite appropriation — that is, an elastic pot of cash that doesn’t require an act of Congress to fill it — hence Trump’s ability to reach in and snatch $1.8 billion without legislative input.

Under 31 U.S.C. § 1304 and the implementing regulations, payments from the Judgment Fund must be final, monetary, and authorized by law. A 1989 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum was explicit that the Judgment Fund is available only for “direct payment of specified sums of money.” Blanche’s order creates an ongoing administrative apparatus, covering per diems, staff salaries, travel expenses, facilities, and administrative services — none of which would appear to qualify. And because the $1.8 billion “projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” is a number chosen solely as a troll and untethered to any pending or contemplated litigation, it can’t be a “final” valuation as required by the statute.

The “settlement” also violates the DOJ’s own transparency rules. The Justice Manual (the agency’s internal rulebook) and 28 C.F.R. § 50.23 state that, with rare exceptions, the agency “will not enter into final settlement agreements or consent decrees that are subject to confidentiality provisions, nor will it seek or concur in the sealing of such documents.” But Trump can give the money to anyone he wants, with no oversight other than “a confidential written report that includes the name and address of each claimant who has received any relief” submitted quarterly to the AG.

The only legal authority the government cites is Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a class action filed by Native American farmers alleging persistent discrimination by the Department of Agriculture, which ended with a trust fund to pay discrete sums to people who had actually applied for and been denied loans.

“Previous cases have been settled on similar terms,” Blanche insists, shamelessly pretending that a class action lawsuit on behalf of victims of racial discrimination, litigated for years by adverse parties, resolved by a court-approved settlement, is exactly the same as Trump’s former personal lawyer granting him amnesty for wholly unrelated tax claims going back a decade plus a ten-figure slush fund in exchange for abandoning his bumptious legal claims before a judge could get anywhere near them.

Just hours after the deal was announced, Brian Morrissey, the general counsel for the U.S. Treasury who was appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, resigned.

Axios Hill Leaders, 1 big thing: The wheels fall off, Hans Nichols, May 20, 2026. Congressional Republicans are countering President Trump's meddling in their primaries with a revenge tour of their own.

Why it matters: Politically, Trump had a successful week, picking winners and settling scores. Legislatively, it's turning into a disaster.

He's on the edge of an Iran war rebuke: House Democrats are one step closer to finally getting a successful Iran war powers vote as their last holdout plans to flip and at least one Republican says they may follow suit. His "anti-weaponization" fund is taking heat: Republicans in both chambers put him on notice that the nearly $1.8 billion carveout will be subject to legislative scrutiny. And the ballroom money is out (for now), but there's still an open question about whether any of the other funding for the Secret Service will survive.

Zoom in: The anti-weaponization fund is "kryptonite" for Republicans, and they are exploring ways to restrict — or regulate — it, according to one GOP senator.

Questions about the fund — where the money is coming from and whom it can be paid to — were repeatedly raised during a closed-door Senate GOP lunch today. "There's going to be an attempt to address the questions that are out there on it," agrees Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). He adds that the questions and potential amendments would be coming from "our side" rather than from Democrats.

In the House, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) says he will "try to kill" the fund.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) says he will "likely" sign a discharge petition from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) to force a vote to impose restrictions on the fund.

Between the lines: House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed aside concerns about party conformity today. He told reporters that lawmakers shouldn't be "trying to carve out their own lane and do something that's destructive."

"You have to give up your personal preferences sometimes, because you're in a deliberative body," Johnson added.

But Johnson's members are pushing back: "A yes-man mentality, it's not good for the president, it's not good for our party, not good for Congress," retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) tells us.

"We don't report to any party or any person here in D.C.," says Fitzpatrick, who was the target of barbs from Trump today over failing to be in lock-step. Fitzpatrick says he's not worried about Trump finding a primary challenger to run against him. "He should make his case and not threaten [Fitzpatrick]," Bacon tells us, about Trump.

What's next: Senate GOP leaders are expected this evening to release the text of a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next 3 1/2 years.

"We're focused on a very narrow bill," Rounds says. Democrats are preparing amendments aimed at imposing restrictions on the "anti-weaponization" money — what they are calling a "slush fund." The vote-a-rama could begin as soon as tomorrow.

Scoop: Sen. John Fetterman's chief of staff resigned today, a source familiar with the move told Axios' Holly Otterbein. Go deeper.

Sen. John Fetterman's chief of staff resigned Wednesday, a source familiar with the move told Axios.

Why it matters: The Pennsylvania Democrat has had a serious staff retention problem as he's faced scrutiny over his health struggles and changing political brand.

Driving the news: Cabelle St. John has served on Fetterman's team since he first came to Washington about three-and-a-half years ago. She became his chief of staff in 2025.

Her official last day will be in the coming weeks. Fetterman, who was once a darling of the progressive movement, has seen major turnover as ex-aides have grown frustrated with his steadfast support for Israel and warmer approach toward President Trump. Former staff have also complained about working with him on an interpersonal level.

 

Politico, Former federal prosecutor indicted for stealing copies of unreleased Jack Smith report, Josh Gerstein, May 20, 2026. Carmen Lineberger is accused of sending the report to her private email account, in violation of Judge Aileen Cannon’s order.

A former Justice Department prosecutor has been charged with sending herself copies of an unreleased volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into President Donald Trump.

Carmen Lineberger, 62, entered a not guilty plea to four charges related to stealing and concealing government records in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday. She was released on her own recognizance, court records show.

The indictment says Lineberger, who was the managing assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Pierce, Florida, received a copy of the restricted Smith report volume by email last year and sent it and other internal DOJ messages to her personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has barred public release of that volume of Smith’s report, which discusses his investigation into the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

An attorney for Lineberger, Tama Kudman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The indictment returned Tuesday says Lineberger sought to cover her tracks by using the file names “Chocolate_ Cake_Recipe.pdf” and “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf” for the internal government records she moved to her personal accounts.

However, the charges and a Justice Department press release don’t make any claims about why Lineberger moved the documents to her private emails. The indictment also doesn’t provide details of what, besides the report, was in emails and documents she moved to personal accounts.

Lineberger faces one felony count of obstruction of justice, one felony count of concealing government records and two misdemeanor counts of stealing government property valued at under $1,000. The maximum sentence if convicted on all charges is 25 years in prison, although federal defendants typically receive significantly shorter terms under federal sentencing guidelines.

The case is being handled by prosecutors from the Northern District of Florida, likely because Lineberger’s ties to people in the U.S. Attorney’s Ooffice for Southern Florida could create a conflict of interest.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Former AUSA Accused of Being Marginally as Criminal as Trump Is, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 20, 2026. DOJ has charged former prosecutor, Carmen Mercedes Lineburger, for attempting to liberate documents pertaining to Trump’s theft of government documents.

As a managing AUSA, she received the Jack Smith report on January 16, 2025. Of some interest, the indictment (on which Todd Blanche’s name appears) claims that there was an pending criminal prosecution that day. There was; but it was of Walt Nauta. Aileen Cannon had already dismissed the case against Trump.

Judge Cannon issued an order prohibiting DOJ from sharing the report on January 21.

Lineburger is accused of two more actions:

On September 22, 2025: Saving electronic messages (seemingly not the Jack Smith Report) to a “Chocolate_Cake_Recipe.pdf” file and sending it from her DOJ account to a Hotmail account. On December 1, 2025: Renaming the Report itself “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf” and sending it to her Gmail account.

For those two acts, she is charged with:

18 USC 641: Stealing the Chocolate Cake PDF sent on September 22.

18 USC 1519: Obstructing the proper compliance with Judge Cannon’s January 21 order, apparently by renaming the Jack Smith Report, “Bundt Cake.”

18 USC 2071: Concealing a document deposited with a Clerk of the Court with the intent of taking it away, for her actions on December 1.

18 USC 641: Stealing the Bundt Cake PDF.

Now, there are likely defenses to all of these charges, not least that DOJ has stopped charging 641 (Josh Schulte got a 641 charge dismissed in his first trial). And obviously there will be some hilarious selective prosecution issues.

But for now, I have two main questions about this.

First, how did they find her? Did she send these documents to a journalist? Did the FBI find out about it as a reporter tried to report out the story? Has DOJ been scanning DOJ files for evidence of Trump’s crimes, to make sure none of that goes missing?

Relatedly, what led Lineburger to take the actions she did when she did? Notably, both the September 22 date and the December 1 came in the same period when DOJ was indicting (and trying to reindict) Jim Comey.

Keep in mind that the Jack Smith stolen documents report almost certain explains why the current FBI Director — the guy who accused Jim Comey of lying to Congress? — demanded immunity before fully testifying to a grand jury.

And there’s the possibility that Lineburger wasn’t trying to convert these documents to her own use at all. It’s possible she was trying to share it, legally, as a whistleblower, with Congress.

Global News

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, less than a week after a visit from President Trump. Mr. Xi hailed “a new phase of more active engagement and faster development” between the countries. Pool photo via Reuters by Maxim Shemetov).

New York Times, Days After Hosting Trump, Xi Deepens Ties With Putin, David Pierson and Ivan Nechepurenko, May 20, 2026, China’s leader Xi Jinping called for a halt to fighting in the Middle East, ignored Russia’s war in Ukraine and took a veiled swipe at the United States.

Less than a week after holding talks with President Trump, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Beijing on Wednesday, casting the two countries’ relationship as a stabilizing force in a world thrown into tumult by the United States.

“The tide of unilateral hegemony is running rampant,” Mr. Xi said to Mr. Putin, according to Chinese state media. It was an oblique reference to the United States, which this year launched a war in Iran and violently seized the leader of Venezuela.

Speaking to Mr. Putin inside the Great Hall of the People, Mr. Xi called for a “complete cessation of hostilities” in the Middle East, warning that it would be “unacceptable” if fighting renewed. The Trump administration has been considering relaunching strikes, which have been paused since a cease-fire was announced last month, to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Mr. Xi acknowledged the pain the crisis is inflicting on China, which relies on the strategic waterway for about 40 percent of its oil imports. There is also growing concern that Iran’s ongoing shutdown of the strait could devastate global trade, the chief engine of China’s economy.

“An early end to the conflict would help reduce disruptions to energy supply stability, the smooth operation of industrial and supply chains, and international trade order,” Mr. Xi said.ImageTwo men facing a crowd of people waving flags and holding bouquets. Soldiers in dress uniform holding guns stand behind them.Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi attending a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday. Mr. Xi hailed “a new phase of more active engagement and faster development” between the countries. Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

The two countries were eager to show they had enhanced ties. Mr. Xi hailed “a new phase of more active engagement and faster development” between the two countries.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China and Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Mr. Putin was equally effusive and opened his remarks to Mr. Xi — whom he again called “my dear friend” — with a Chinese proverb expressing longing: “One day apart feels like three autumns.”

The Russian leader also signaled that his relationship with Mr. Xi remained close, noting that they “constantly seek to coordinate our positions.” He cast the two countries as equals working together to forge “a more just and democratic world order.”

“A difficult process of shaping a polycentric world based on a balance of interests of all countries is underway,” Mr. Putin said, likely referring to what he argues is the erosion of U.S. global dominance.

But beneath that show of solidarity lies an uneven relationship. Russia has become increasingly dependent on China since launching an invasion of Ukraine four years ago that has turned into a costly stalemate, as Russian soldiers struggle to gain ground and the country’s economy falters.

Russia also relies heavily on China for dual-use technologies — civilian capabilities that can be applied to the battlefield. Mr. Putin will want to ensure that China maintains that supply.

At the same time, the oil shortage caused by the war in Iran has only enhanced Russia’s position as an energy supplier to China. Mr. Putin stressed that Russia “remains a reliable supplier of resources amid the Middle East crisis, while China acts as a responsible consumer of these resources.”

Mr. Putin, who is traveling with Russian energy executives, has been urging China for years to agree to open another major gas pipeline between the two countries. Known as Power of Siberia 2, the pipeline would link Siberian extraction sites with northwest China through Mongolia. Beijing is concerned the pipeline would make China too dependent on one nation for energy supplies. The project has been stalled amid disputes over key details, including how much China will pay for the gas. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

The Morning Dispatch, Israeli Minister Claims ICC Prosecutor Requested Arrest Warrant, Staff Reports, May 20, 2026. Bezalel Smotrich, the ultranationalist Israeli finance minister, claimed on Tuesday that a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court (ICC) told him that the prosecutor had “submitted a secret request for an international arrest warrant against me.”

At a press conference, Smotrich called the ICC “antisemitic” and said the “secret” warrant amounted to “a declaration of war” but did not specify what he would have been charged with. The ICC had not issued new arrest warrants, an ICC spokeswoman said later Tuesday, but she did not say whether a prosecutor had requested one against Smotrich. In May 2025, former and current ICC officials told the Wall Street Journal that prosecutors were pursuing criminal cases against both Smotrich and far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over their alleged role in expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank—a possible violation of the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on an occupying power transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.

Smotrich also announced that he would order the evacuation and demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. It was not clear whether Smotrich had the authority to order the demolition, but he signed the order later that day, citing his authority as finance minister and as a minister in the Defense Ministry. In 2018, Israel’s High Court of Justice allowed the government to demolish Khan al-Ahmar, ruling that because the village was built without Israeli zoning approval or building permits, it was an illegal settlement. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes in Gaza.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Investigation: Early War Goal Was to Install Hard Line Former President as Iran’s Leader, Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, Updated May 20, 2026. An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran, U.S. officials said, was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power.

Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.

It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views.

But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.

He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.ImageSmoke from explosions in Tehran on Feb. 28, the first day of U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.

How Mr. Ahmadinejad was recruited to take part remains unknown.

The existence of the effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government. It underscores how Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went into the war not only misjudging how quickly they could achieve their objectives but also gambling to some degree on a risky plan for leadership change in Iran that even some of Mr. Trump’s aides found implausible. Some American officials were skeptical in particular about the viability of putting Mr. Ahmadinejad back into power.

“From the outset, President Trump was clear about his goals for Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and weaken their proxy,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in response to a request for comment about the regime change plan and Ahmadinejad. “The United States military met or exceeded all of its objectives, and now, our negotiators are working to make a deal that would end Iran’s nuclear capabilities for good.”

A spokesperson for Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, declined to comment.

U.S. officials spoke during the early days of the war about plans developed with Israel to identify a pragmatist who could take over the country. Officials insisted that there was intelligence that some within the Iranian regime would be willing to work with the United States, even if those people couldn’t be described as “moderates.”Editors’ PicksHow to Have a Difficult ConversationGhosts of the Gulf: The Unsung Revolutionary War CampaignI Think Someone Is Living in the Storage Unit Next to Mine. What Should I Do?

Mr. Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by U.S. forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Mr. Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.

In recent years, Mr. Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have swirled about his loyalties. He was disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his aides were arrested and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s movements were increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak section of eastern Tehran.

More On U.S. Crime, Terror Attacks, Law, Rights, Justice

New York Times, The San Diego Mosque Shootings Were a Crime Made for and by the Internet, Tim Arango, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Madison Malone Kircher and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, May 20, 2026 (print ed.). Authorities said the teenagers who killed three men met online, posted their writings there and livestreamed the killings.

The teenagers met online and bonded over shared hatreds. When they realized they both lived in the San Diego area, they met in person.

And when they decided to kill, they apparently livestreamed themselves. A video that they appear to have recorded shows them dressed in camouflage tactical gear, affixed with a white supremacist symbol, as they approached a mosque on Monday and opened fire, killing three people.

San Diego police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday that the teenagers had been radicalized online and that one of them had access to an arsenal of weapons at home.

After the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego, investigators discovered a document that laid out their bigoted worldview, Mark Remily, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Diego field office, said at a news conference.

Mr. Remily said that in the car in which the teenagers were found dead, investigators discovered “writings and various ideologies outlining religious and racial beliefs of how the world they envision should look. These subjects did not discriminate on who they hated.”

The attack was yet another example of how the combination of alienated young men with access to guns and a hateful online community that welcomes them can lead to a spasm of real-world violence.

While the police in San Diego have not publicly named either suspect, two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter identified them as Cain Clark, 17, a former high school wrestler; and Caleb Vazquez, 18.

Minutes after the Monday afternoon attack, police officers found them dead in a white BMW, along with a gas can bearing Nazi S.S. insignia. The police have said the teenagers died from gunshots, and a video that has appeared online appears to show one shooting the other before turning the gun on himself.

James Canning, a spokesman for the San Diego Unified School District, said Mr. Clark had been scheduled to graduate this year from iHigh Virtual Academy, an online school within the district. Mr. Clark was a member of the wrestling team at Madison High School last year, but had not been involved in extracurricular activities this year, Mr. Canning said. He said that Mr. Clark had not had any disciplinary infractions since elementary school.

The San Diego police had been searching for the teenagers for two hours before the shooting, scouring California’s second largest city after Mr. Clark’s mother called the police and said her son was missing, and possibly suicidal. She also said she couldn’t find several of her guns, that her car was missing and that her son was probably with a friend.ImageFlowers surround a tree at a memorial.A memorial in front of the Islamic Center of San Diego on Tuesday.Credit...John Francis Peters for The New York Times

Mr. Remily said on Tuesday that the F.B.I. had searched three homes linked to the teenagers and had confiscated more than 30 guns, including pistols and rifles, as well as ammunition and tactical gear. They even discovered a crossbow at one of the homes. Mr. Remily said the weapons were registered to the parents of one of the suspects.

No one answered the door at the light blue house in the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego where Mr. Clark is believed to have lived. A Ford F350 sat in the driveway, near trash barrels and a can for cigarette butts.

Efforts to reach relatives and associates of Mr. Vazquez were unsuccessful Tuesday. A man who answered the door at the family’s duplex in a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood said he would not speak with a reporter. Neighbors said they had seen detectives and police officers at the home overnight and on Tuesday morning.

Two of Mr. Clark’s former wrestling teammates described him on Tuesday as “awkward,” and someone they did not get to know well.

Yael Cruz, a 17-year-old senior at Madison High School, said Mr. Clark had taken online classes, and that their conversations were often about video games. At school on Tuesday, Mr. Cruz said his classmates were in disbelief. He said teachers did not directly address the situation, but offered support for those who needed it.

In the hours after the shooting, a 75-page document began circulating online that appeared to have been written by Mr. Vazquez and Mr. Clark and is similar to what Mr. Remily, the F.B.I. agent, described at the news conference on Tuesday afternoon.

The document was shared on a web forum that is notorious for circulating hateful content. It contains images of Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols — including the one the shooters wore — and describes how the young men were inspired by a man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. They also cited as inspiration a shooter who carried out a racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022.

One of the sections lays out an expansive list of hatreds, attacking Jews, Muslims, gay people, and also includes racist and misogynistic passages. In a section purportedly written by Mr. Vazquez, he complained about being short, blaming his stature for his lack of success with women.

The document lists mass killers, many of whom have been lionized in dark corners of the internet and some who became notorious for streaming their massacres to the web as they committed them.

As the document was surfacing online, so, too, was a video of the attack that appears to have been recorded by the two young perpetrators.

The version of the footage analyzed by The New York Times was not the original copy. The recording shows a second phone, where a video of the attack is playing. There is no audio, and at several points the video cuts out, lags or the users minimize the picture. However, several features visible in the video — including the make and model of the shooters’ vehicle, the interior of the Islamic Center and the streets outside it — indicate that it was likely filmed by the gunmen.

The video shows the two teenagers getting out of a car out with long guns raised, running toward a building, shooting in and around it. A person’s legs and a pool of blood can be seen on a sidewalk.

In all, three men were killed at the mosque: Amin Abdullah, a security guard at the Islamic Center; Mansour Kaziha, manager of the mosque store; and Nader Awad.

The video continues. Back in the car, the camera is pointed at the driver, who aims a handgun at the passenger and fires at least once. Seconds later, he turns the gun toward himself, pulls the trigger and slumps onto the steering wheel.

New York Times, Guest Essay: The Truth About E. Jean Carroll, Ivy Meeropol (the director of the documentary “Ask E. Jean”), May 20, 2026. Back in the mid-90s in New York City, E. Jean Carroll was an accomplished gonzo journalist and a funny, sharp advice columnist for Elle magazine — “Auntie E” to her readers. She also had a daily cable TV advice show. She was so recognizable that when Donald Trump ran into her at the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue early one evening he said, as she has recalled, “Hey, you’re that advice lady!” She was 52 at the time.

Still, I confess that I didn’t know who E. Jean Carroll was when I saw her on the cover of New York magazine in 2019, when she told that story of meeting Mr. Trump and how the encounter led to a sexual assault. By then, he had become the president of the United States. After the article was published, Mr. Trump denied her account, and she sued him for defamation for saying that she was “totally lying” and that he had never met her and suggesting that her accusation was politically and financially motivated. In 2022, after New York State passed the Adult Survivors Act, reopening the time period during which people could bring a claim of sexual abuse, she sued him again, adding a claim of battery to a new defamation claim based on statements Mr. Trump made that year.

In 2019, I contacted her and asked if she would consider being the subject of a documentary. I had a gut instinct that she was a voice in the wake of the #MeToo movement that we needed to hear. Little did I know about the wildly uncertain and, at times, terrifying ride I was about to go on with E. Jean and her lead attorney, Robbie Kaplan, during which I had a window into the challenges people can face when crossing Mr. Trump.

I called it the Trump effect.

E. Jean and I spent the pandemic getting to know each other, and later I did some filming at her home as she prepared to take Mr. Trump to court on her claims of sexual abuse and defamation (which he had continued to deny). E. Jean’s lawyers were less than thrilled. The last thing they wanted was a camera crew hanging around their client, especially because Mr. Trump argued that E. Jean was somehow benefiting from the attention.

I attended the trial in 2023 as an observer. On the third day, while she was on the stand, one of E. Jean’s lawyers asked her, “Has anyone reached out to you, Ms. Carroll, about potentially filming a documentary about you?” She said yes, many filmmakers had. She said she ignored them all, except one — me. I was shaking with fear when she said my name. (No, I wasn’t paying her to participate in the film.)Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The jury in that trial found Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The jury awarded E. Jean $5 million in damages. The next day Mr. Trump appeared on a rowdy CNN town hall event and mocked E. Jean again. He wondered aloud, “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?” He called her a “wack job” to laughs from the audience.

E. Jean and Ms. Kaplan filed an amendment to the original 2019 defamation lawsuit, claiming Trump had defamed her again. While the trial for that case, which began on Jan. 16, 2024, was going on, Mr. Trump continued to go after E. Jean on Truth Social. On Jan. 26, a jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay $83 million, though an appeals court recently ruled that payment will be put on hold pending action by the Supreme Court.

As we approached completion of the film, a series of problems started arising with the documentary project. We abruptly lost the rights to a song we’d been using for months as E. Jean’s theme song. We had to reschedule the mix, hire a composer to write a new song and spend more of our dwindling budget to do so. Some of our producers, and most upsetting, crew members with green cards, decided to pull their names from the credits.

By summer 2025, a few months into the second Trump administration, “Ask E. Jean” was ready for the world to see. I felt optimistic. The Telluride Film Festival gave us a dream launchpad for the film on Labor Day weekend.ImageE. Jean Carroll sitting on a rock, her bare feet in a stream.Credit...Justine Kurland for The New York Times

We were told how exciting the film was and what a hoot E. Jean is. Yet we received no offers from distributors at the festival to release it.

We then picked up the best documentary award at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, an audience award at Sun Valley.

We thought we had a deal from a distributor, but then we were ghosted. To be clear, the landscape for most documentary filmmakers is grim. Many award-winning and excellent films do not get distribution or streaming deals. Yet given everything we had to go through to make the documentary, the collapse of the deal felt suspect. I blamed the Trump effect. But we’ll probably never really know.

Another film out of Telluride from a year earlier that the big studios and streamers wouldn’t touch was “The Apprentice,” starring Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump. (It was later picked up by an independent distributor). It seemed to me to be part of a larger pattern of people being afraid to cross the Trump administration, which is quick to go after its critics — from Jimmy Kimmel to “60 Minutes” to “The View.”

Stephen Colbert’s final episode, a premature retirement that many believe was politically motivated, will run Thursday. As it happens, the next day “Ask E. Jean” will open in New York. Our band of brave and generous people, mostly women, who invested in our film, regrouped and we are working with the independent distributor Abramorama to release the film across the country.

We are all hungry for inspiration. I didn’t know how much I craved it when I first reached out to E. Jean. Along the way, I was able to see how women forging bonds together can be a powerful antidote to fear. I saw how we can stand up to bullies and win. I saw how inspiration spreads and can take on a life of its own. The women of the #MeToo movement told their stories, which then gave E. Jean strength to tell hers. And now E. Jean telling her story provides strength to countless others, myself included.More on free speech under the Trump administration

 Stephen Colbert on the set of “The Late Show,” on May 5, 2026 (CBS Photo by Scott Kowalchyk).

U.S. Economy, Markets, Inflation, Federal Reserve, Tariffs

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: From Dropping Bombs to Dropping Bonds, Paul Krugman, right, May 20, 2026. The economic costs of the Iran debacle keep rising.

Busy day, so just a note on the latest bad news.

This morning’s economic headlines are largely about spiking interest rates. “The global bound rout is accelerating,” says the Wall Street Journal. “Bond yields hit highest level since 2007 as inflation fears set in,” writes the New York Times. (Falling bond prices mean higher interest rates.)

There’s some hyperbole in these headlines. It’s true that the 30-year interest rate is at an almost 20-year high. But economists usually focus on a different long-term interest rate, the rate on 10-year bonds. And while that rate is up sharply since the Iran War began, it’s only roughly as high now as it was when Donald Trump took office, and below its recent peak in 2023.

Still, why are rates spiking, and what does their rise portend?

Interest rates are up because inflation, which was declining until Trump returned to the throne, has surged again:

Investors are responding to the fact that the current rise in inflation looks a lot like the rise in inflation during 2021-2023, which was the result of supply chain disruptions. Back then the Federal Reserve was compelled to raise short-term interest rates to curb inflation. Longer-term interest rates, which largely reflect expected future short-term rates, followed suit.

Now we’re seeing a remake of that movie, with one big plot difference. The inflation spike of 2021-22 was overwhelmingly the result of factors outside Joe Biden’s control — surging demand as the world recovered from Covid and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The current inflation surge, by contrast, is all Trump, caused by his self-defeating tariffs and the gratuitous debacle in Iran. And the inflation outlook is worsening by the day as the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil normally passes, remains closed.

Until now, markets have been complacent about the implications of the Iran war. Investors have allowed themselves to be lulled by Trump’s repeated assurances that either victory or a negotiated settlement were just around the corner. But they are now waking up to the reality of the debacle. And their awakening has transformed expectations about future monetary policy. On the eve of the bombing, markets were virtually certain that the Fed would cut short-term rates by December. Now they’re virtually certain that rates will either rise or at best stay the same. Moreover, the market will be watching closely to see how Kevin Warsh, Trump’s new Fed chair, responds to this new reality.

Warsh’s job, as Trump sees it, is to support him politically by cutting interest rates, regardless of the economic evidence. Warsh will surely face especially intense pressure from his patron to deliver lower rates because rising interest rates will deepen Americans’ anger over Trump’ management of the economy. Surging gas and grocery prices have already caused Trump’s economic approval to crater:

Now the pain will be greatly intensified by soaring interest rates on mortgages, car loans, and more. And rising rates tilt the economy toward a slowdown, possibly even a recession. So I’m sure we’ll see many ALL CAPS posts from Trump demanding drastic interest rate cuts NOW NOW NOW.

But what the markets are telling us is that in the face of rising inflation, they strongly expect that most members of the Fed’s monetary committee will vote either to raise rates or at best to leave them unchanged. So will Warsh start his tenure by being repeatedly outvoted, rapidly losing credibility within the institution he’s supposed to run? Or will he, as Trump will surely see it, betray his master? All I can say to Kevin Warsh is, “just deserts.”

One thing is clear: The markets are finally waking up. And the economic and political fallout from Trump’s decision to emulate his idol Putin by launching what he believed would be a short, victorious war is just getting started.

The Morning Dispatch, CFTC Sues Minnesota Over Prediction Markets Ban, Staff Reports, The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal agency, sued Minnesota on Tuesday to block a new state law banning prediction markets.

The bill passed both chambers of the Minnesota Legislature with bipartisan support, and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed it into law on Monday. The law also blocks people from assisting prediction market operations, including by hosting ads for the platforms. While the law takes effect August 1, the CFTC is seeking a preliminary injunction to block enforcement until the case is decided on the merits. The CFTC accuses Minnesota of “criminalizing trading in many CFTC-regulated markets with a broader reach than any other state the CFTC has sued to date.” The CFTC has the authority to regulate commodity derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936. The agency has previously argued that event contracts fall within its jurisdiction, and that state efforts to regulate prediction markets infringe on its “exclusive jurisdiction” over the industry.

The CFTC also emphasized that Minnesota is one of the country’s “largest agricultural producers,” and argued that farmers rely on prediction markets to forecast outcomes such as local weather events, which the new law would prohibit. The CFTC also announced it is investigating more than $800 million in oil futures trades placed minutes before Trump’s March 23 Truth Social post postponing strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, which sent crude prices down as much as 13 percent. Yesterday, prediction market platform Polymarket launched event contracts tied to private company valuation milestones and IPO timing, and will use the Nasdaq Private Market as its exclusive data provider. 

May 19

Top Headlines

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Justice Department Forever BANS IRS Audits of Trump, his Companies, and his Family; Pentagon War Games Protests, GOP Furious at Trump, Aaron Parnas, right, May 19, 2026. In a stunning and unprecedented settlement, the DOJ has permanently barred the IRS from auditing Donald Trump, his companies, or his family over any past unpaid taxes, a move critics are calling one of the clearest examples of political corruption in modern American history.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How to Rob Taxpayers of $1.8 Billion Without Really Trying, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 19, 2026. Start by completely bypassing Congress and the Constitution.
• New York Times, Midterms Live Updates: Rep. Thomas Massie, Frequent Trump Critic, Ousted in Primary, Kellen Browning, May 19, 2026. Mr. Massie, a Republican who frequently clashed with President Trump, lost to a Trump-backed challenger. The race was a closely watched test of the president’s power to punish his critics.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• The Atlantic, Opinion: T's $1.8b slush fund is worse than stealing, Jonathan Chait, right, May 19, 2026. Recasting the January 6 insurrection as the work of heroic patriots remains the president’s highest priority.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 19, 2026. ‘Trust’ takes a holiday.
• The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump Takes the Turn, Jonathan V. Last, May 19, 2026. The president and the Democrats are racing on different tracks.
• New York Times, Justices Hint at Strains as Supreme Court Comes Under Scrutiny, Ann E. Marimow and Aishvarya Kavi,.May 19, 2026 (print ed.). Traveling across the country, justices defend the role of the court even as strained relations among its members emerge in writing and remarks.

News Roundups 

 

President Donald Trump speaks at the site of ongoing construction of the planned White House ballroom in Washington, D.C. (Reuters photo by Kevin Lamarque).

• Meidas Touch Network, Tuesday Afternoon News and Comment: Trump’s Golden Ballroom Cannot Stop a War, Ben Meiselas, right, May 19, 2026. Here are the top stories we are tracking today.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Top Trump Lawyer Resigns After Weaponization Fund, Republicans Break Over Ballroom, Multiple Public Health Crises, Aaron Parnas, right, May 19, 2026. We are tracking a rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak, the Trump administration’s rollback of protections against toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water, and the removal of restrictions on cyanide bombs used to kill wildlife. At the same time, a top Treasury lawyer has resigned following the creation of the controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.

More On U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability

 

• The Hartmann Report, Investigative Commentary: What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution? Thom Hartmann, right, May 19, 2026. From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power…
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Ultra-Corrupt Settlement Fund Is Even Worse Than We Thought, Andrew Egger, right, May 19, 2026. When I wrote Friday about the news that Donald Trump was about to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for the creation of a $1.776 billion taxpayer-cash slush fund for his allies who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the law against them, I noted that nothing was yet set in stone. At that moment, it still seemed possible that this obscene settlement—Trump’s biggest, most lawless, most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet—might yet give them cold feet.

Epstein-Trump Files, Coverup

• The Pugilist, Investigative Comment and Opinion: Jeffrey Epstein Was CIA. The Communications Network at Zorro Ranch Proves It, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, right, May 19, 2026. The DOJ's own files show Epstein built a military-grade encrypted link to satellite orbit at Zorro Ranch. The contractor who built it now holds a Pentagon missile defense contract.

More On Iran War

 

• New York Times, Trump Threatens Iran and Then Pulls Back, All in the Same Day, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, May 19, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump has repeatedly said he’ll restart military action against Iran, only to stop short of plunging the United States directly back into an unpopular war.
• New York Times, Senate Votes to Take Up Measure to Force Trump to End Iran War, Megan Mineiro, May 19, 2026. With four Republican backers, Democrats won a vote to advance a resolution that would force the president to end hostilities or win authorization from Congress.
• Politico, EU finance ministers tell US to end Middle East war, Gregorio Sorgi and Giorgio Leali, May 19, 2026. Top officials used the G7 gathering in Paris to warn Scott Bessent of the economic consequences of the war in Iran.
• Everything Is Horrible, Opinion: Europe Should Not Help Trump In Iran, Noah Berlatsky, May 19, 2026. Thomas Friedman is a dope

In-Depth Scrutiny of Trump 'Justice'

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Darin Smith’s Misconduct Endangered a Murder Prosecution; 46 Republicans Confirmed Him Anyway, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 19, 2026. Last Friday, three judges in Wyoming, including Chief Judge Kelly Rankin, dismissed felony cases against nine people because of misconduct from then Acting US Attorney Darin Smith. 
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Ellis Boyle’s Threat Prosecution Hobby, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 18, 2026. The Trump groupie auditioning to be confirmed in his current role of US Attorney for Eastern District of North Carolina, Ellis Boyle, has announced that he charged another person for threats, Christopher James Hill. Hill is the fourth person Boyle charged with threats against Trump or an aide.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Trump’s Push to Defeat Massie Is the Most Expensive House Primary in Recent Years, Theodore Schleifer and Matt Zdun, May 19, 2026. The Republican primary in Representative Thomas Massie’s district has drawn vast spending, but it is just one of several contests on Tuesday that will test the power of big money.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Six States Vote Today, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 19, 2026. Welcome To The Post-USAID World, Non-Voters And Indies Turn On The Rs.

U.S. Religion, Culture, Media, Education

 

 

An aerial view of the crowd at Rededicate 250 (Graeme Sloan via Getty Images). 

• The New Republic, Commentary: Trump Gives Bizarre Message to Half-Empty Christian Nationalist Event, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 18, 2026. Barely anyone attended the event, and even Donald Trump was absent.
• The New Republic, Commentary: Trump Treated His Evangelical Supporters Like Dogs This Weekend, Hafiz Rashid, May 18, 2026. The president went golfing instead of attending a nine-hour prayer festival on Sunday.
• Letters From Leo, Opinion: Joined By Anti-Catholic Pastors, Barron and Dolan Speak at Trump’s Prayer Rally, Christopher Hale, May 18-19, 2026. Pastor Robert Jeffress, who calls the Catholic Church “satanic,” headlined the same Trump-backed rally. Ten days earlier, Dolan had called Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo “very unfortunate” on Fox News.
  Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Shrinking, Aging GOP, William Kristol, right, May 19, 2026. In the great 1939 movie Ninotchka, Greta Garbo plays Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a stern and committed (if young and beautiful!) Soviet apparatchik sent abroad on a sensitive state mission. At one point, the rather disturbing question of Stalin’s show trials and executions comes up. The loyal Ninotchka is unfazed. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians,” she explains.

Global News

• Emptywheel, Analysis: The Alleged Polish Criminal Trump Harbors While Deporting Grannies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 19, 2026. For over a year, Donald Trump has spent enormous resources deporting grannies and day laborers who have contributed to the US for decades, claiming they pose a national security threat. Which makes it all the more notable that Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau cited national security when choosing to grant a journalist visa to fugitive former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

Top Stories

 

 

U.S. Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, center, serving without Senate confirmation, is Donald Trump's former criminal and civil fraud defense attorney and current bagman who resists calls to recuse from his work advancing the President's agendas corruptly enriching himself and his political allies and seeking to imprison critics on trumped-up charges.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Justice Department Forever BANS IRS Audits of Trump, his Companies, and his Family; Pentagon War Games Protests, GOP Furious at Trump, Aaron Parnas, right, May 19, 2026. In a stunning and unprecedented settlement, the DOJ has permanently barred the IRS from auditing Donald Trump, his companies, or his family over any past unpaid taxes, a move critics are calling one of the clearest examples of political corruption in modern American history.

We also have an exclusive report on a Pentagon exercise wargaming mass protests inside the United States in response to potential military action abroad. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are erupting over Trump’s last-minute endorsement of Ken Paxton, a move that is deepening fractures inside the GOP just days before a critical runoff election. And that is only the beginning.

I also am joined by Dr. Lina Moses to discuss the rapidly escalating Ebola outbreak. Dr. Moses has spent years on the ground fighting Ebola outbreaks and is one of the leading experts on the virus and the global risks it poses.

Thursday night at 6:45 PM EST is our next paid subscriber live. Then, next Wednesday the 27th, we launch the very first episode of our new Substack-exclusive live show with Jessica Tarlov.

Everything we are building is growing fast. The reporting, the interviews, the investigations, the live shows, and the team behind all of it are expanding rapidly. 

Here’s the news:

The Justice Department quietly expanded its settlement with Donald Trump to include a sweeping protection against future IRS scrutiny. A newly posted addendum, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, states the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing audits or tax examinations involving Trump, his family, related individuals, trusts, or businesses for returns filed before the settlement date. Former IRS officials called the move unprecedented and warned it could shield Trump from accountability over potentially unpaid taxes. The provision was not included in the original settlement announcement, raising questions about how and why it was added later.

According to sources, the United States Pentagon is currently conducting an exercise titled “Resilient Guardian” in which the Department of Defense is preparing for possible national protests erupting due to military action abroad. This war-game type scenario, while common within the Pentagon, shows that the military is at least preparing for a scenario in which unpopular actions by the U.S. military lead to protests erupting. The scenario includes the following fake press releases outlining the protests and responses from law enforcement.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen confronted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over criticism from Jeffrey Epstein survivors, saying many felt frustrated that the Justice Department keeps urging people to come forward while failing to meet directly with victims. Blanche pushed back immediately, calling the claim “false” and asserting that he had personally met with survivors as well as many of their attorneys.

Epstein survivors blast Todd Blanche for suggesting he met with them or their lawyers. “Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has not met with any of us.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche angrily defended his role during a tense Senate exchange, insisting that senators refer to him by his current office rather than his past relationship with Donald Trump. Blanche said, “I am the Acting Attorney General,” arguing that describing him primarily as Trump’s former lawyer unfairly undermines the authority and independence of his position. The outburst reflected growing scrutiny over whether Blanche can act impartially while overseeing matters involving the president he once represented personally.

Sen. Jeff Merkley repeatedly pressed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on whether the Justice Department considers the Jeffrey Epstein investigation open or closed. Blanche avoided giving a direct answer, instead challenging Merkley’s use of the term “Epstein investigation” and saying he did not understand what investigation Merkley meant. Merkley pointed out that the FBI had publicly stated in July 2025 that it had closed the Epstein investigation and asked again for clarification.

A new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is alarming health officials because it involves the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments. Reported cases have surpassed 500 with at least 131 deaths, and one American doctor working in Congo has tested positive. Unlike the more common Zaire strain targeted by existing Ebola vaccines, Bundibugyo requires different medical countermeasures that are still far from ready. Experts warn the virus is severe and often fatal, though early supportive care can improve survival rates.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s World Cup team still plans to travel to the United States despite a worsening Ebola outbreak that has triggered international health concerns and new U.S. travel restrictions. The team canceled its training camp in Kinshasa due to health measures but says preparations in Europe and Houston will continue ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. U.S. officials, FIFA, and the CDC are coordinating to allow the team’s safe entry while trying to prevent potential spread of the Bundibugyo Ebola strain, which currently has no approved vaccine or treatment. The situation has created a major new logistical and public health challenge for World Cup organizers as the tournament approaches.

President Donald Trump has endorsed Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Texas’ closely watched Republican Senate runoff, delivering a major late boost to Paxton just days before the election. Trump praised Paxton as a “true MAGA Warrior” while criticizing Cornyn for not backing him during difficult periods. The endorsement is seen as a victory for the MAGA wing of the GOP, which pushed Trump to support Paxton despite concerns among establishment Republicans that Paxton’s legal controversies and personal scandals could make the seat more vulnerable in the general election. Senate Republicans are not happy with the endorsement with some saying this cost Republicans Texas:

U.S. soldiers who survived a deadly Iranian drone strike on a base in Kuwait say Army leadership ignored repeated requests for stronger medical and defensive support before the attack, which killed six American service members and wounded 20. Survivors told CBS News they lacked adequate doctors, ambulances, medical supplies, and drone protection, with some believing at least one soldier, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, might have survived with faster or better treatment. The Pentagon disputes claims of negligence, saying it took “extraordinary steps” to protect troops and noting that an investigation is still underway. The accounts are intensifying scrutiny of how the U.S. military prepared personnel for Iran’s retaliatory attacks during Operation Epic Fury.

Donald Trump is again threatening military action against Iran, warning that the U.S. could launch “a big hit” within days if Tehran refuses to accept major concessions in negotiations to end the Middle East conflict. Trump said he recently canceled a planned strike at the last minute after Iran submitted another peace proposal through Pakistani mediators, but analysts say repeated threats without follow-through are weakening U.S. credibility. The conflict remains deadlocked, with Iran continuing restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz while both sides avoid returning to full-scale war despite escalating rhetoric. The ongoing standoff is fueling global economic fears, driving up oil prices, and creating political pressure on both the Trump administration and Iran’s leadership

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins admitted today that the Trump administration has “no plan in place” to create a national strategic fertilizer stockpile:

Black political leaders and the NAACP are launching a new campaign called “Out of Bounds,” urging Black student athletes and fans to boycott major Southern college sports programs in response to Republican-led redistricting efforts they say weaken Black political representation. The campaign targets powerhouse athletic schools in states like Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Georgia, arguing that institutions profiting from Black athletes should oppose efforts to dilute Black voting power. Leaders including Hakeem Jeffries compared the effort to historic athlete-driven civil rights activism and tied it to broader Democratic resistance against voting-rights rollbacks. The strategy reflects growing frustration among Black leaders who feel legal and legislative avenues to challenge Southern redistricting have become increasingly ineffective.

Republican primaries across states like Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania are becoming a major test of President Donald Trump’s influence over the GOP, especially in races targeting Republicans who have broken with him. In Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie, right, is facing a heavily funded challenge from Trump-backed candidate Ed Gallrein after repeatedly opposing parts of Trump’s agenda and pushing for the release of Jeffrey Epstein files. Georgia’s crowded gubernatorial and Senate races are also drawing national attention, with Democrats hoping to capitalize on competitive statewide contests and concerns over voting rights and redistricting.

The Justice Department has charged seven Chinese executives and four major shipping container manufacturers with allegedly conspiring to fix prices during the COVID-19 pandemic, accusing them of exploiting global supply chain chaos for profit. Prosecutors say the scheme artificially drove up shipping container prices and affected roughly $35 billion in global commerce, worsening shortages and costs for consumers during the pandemic. One defendant was recently arrested in France and is awaiting extradition to the United States. The case is part of a broader wave of DOJ investigations tied to the pandemic and reflects the Trump administration’s continued focus on China and alleged COVID-era misconduct.

The past month has been a whirlwind—from fighting AI to ensuring data brokers don’t have my information, I am glad I have DeleteMe in my corner. With a newborn in tow, making sure that my family and our information is protected is top of mind. It’s why I am continuing my partnership with DeleteMe. For many months DeleteMe has helped protect my personal information and remove it from data broker websites. Now with threats even greater, I know DeleteMe has my back and I want you to protect yourself too. You can use my code AARON at this link to protect yourself and your loved ones this year.

Good news:

German golfer Leonie Harm has won her first professional title on the Ladies European Tour, 13 years after nearly dying in a crash caused by a drunken driver. Harm suffered devastating injuries as a teenager, including collapsed lungs, a skull fracture, brain injuries, and multiple broken bones, with doctors unsure she would walk again. She later endured additional personal hardships, including the death of her mother and struggles that nearly pushed her out of professional golf. Harm called her victory at the German Masters a testament to resilience, self-forgiveness, and perseverance through years of physical and emotional challenges.

More than 200 volunteers helped restore 20,000 native oysters to waters off Portsmouth, England, in what organizers say is the UK’s largest-ever subtidal oyster reef restoration project. Led by conservation groups and marine scientists, the effort aims to rebuild historic oyster reefs that once supported local ecosystems, jobs, and coastal communities before populations collapsed over the last century. Oysters play a major environmental role by filtering water, supporting biodiversity, and protecting coastlines from erosion. Organizers say the project also reflects growing public enthusiasm for large-scale marine restoration and conservation efforts.

Conservationists and local communities in India’s remote Nagaland state are helping the critically endangered Asian giant tortoise make a comeback after decades of decline from hunting and habitat loss. A captive breeding program that began with just 13 tortoises has now produced more than 100 animals, many of which have been released into tribal forest reserves protected by local “Tortoise Guardians.” Unlike past government-led efforts, the project relies heavily on Indigenous communities and local youth to monitor and protect the species in the wild. Conservationists say the model is proving so successful that neighboring regions are now working to replicate it. 

New York Times, Midterms Live Updates: Rep. Thomas Massie, Frequent Trump Critic, Ousted in Primary, Kellen Browning, May 19, 2026. Mr. Massie, a Republican who frequently clashed with President Trump, lost to a Trump-backed challenger. The race was a closely watched test of the president’s power to punish his critics.

Here’s the latest.

Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, right, one of President Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics, lost his re-election bid to a Trump-backed primary challenger. It was a major victory for the president that underscored his enduring influence over Republican voters and his ability to enact retribution against party rivals.

Mr. Trump and his allies were intent on ousting Mr. Massie, who has broken with Mr. Trump over the Iran war and the Epstein files. The president recruited Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, to run against him, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth campaigned for Mr. Gallrein in the closing days. The race ballooned into a $33 million affair that became the most expensive House primary in recent years.

Other races playing out on Tuesday in Kentucky and five other states — Georgia, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Idaho and Oregon — were testing the strength of Mr. Trump’s endorsement at a time when he faces plummeting approval ratings, high gas prices and an unpopular war in Iran. But he scored another early victory on Tuesday evening when another ally, Representative Andy Barr, easily won a primary for Senate in Kentucky to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, who is retiring.

Mr. Trump was already looking ahead to next week: Earlier Tuesday, he endorsed Ken Paxton, the hard-line, scandal-plagued Texas attorney general running for Senate, in a primary runoff with Senator John Cornyn, infuriating some Republican senators.

Polls have closed in Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama and Pennsylvania. Voters were still casting ballots in Idaho and Oregon.

In contested Senate primaries, Mr. Trump backed Representative Barry Moore in Alabama, and intervened in Kentucky earlier this month, asking a rival of Mr. Barr, Nate Morris, to leave the Senate race and serve as an ambassador instead. Mr. Barr defeated Daniel Cameron, a former state attorney general and one-time disciple of Mr. McConnell, on Tuesday.

In Georgia’s governor race, Mr. Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was facing a billionaire opponent. Georgia Republicans also cast ballots on Tuesday to pick a challenger to Senator Jon Ossoff, the incumbent Democrat, while Pennsylvania Democrats voted on nominees for several House districts they are hoping to flip.

Here’s what to know:

• Texas Senate: Senate leaders and national Republicans who see Mr. Paxton as the far weaker candidate in a general election had urged Mr. Trump to support Mr. Cornyn. Party leaders have warned that it could cost $100 million to elect the scandal-singed Mr. Paxton, who has survived indictment, impeachment and accusations of marital infidelity, and some fear that Mr. Paxton could lose to James Talarico, the Democratic nominee.
• Georgia Senate: The most vulnerable Democratic incumbent up for re-election this year is Mr. Ossoff. Republicans are voting to select his challenger on Tuesday, but if none of the three major candidates gets a majority, a runoff will be scheduled for next month.
• Georgia governor: Gov. Brian Kemp is term-limited, and both parties are holding contested primaries. The Republican side features three main candidates: Mr. Jones; Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who is perhaps best known for pushing back on Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election; and Rick Jackson, a billionaire who has flooded the airwaves using his personal fortune. On the Democratic side, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is part of a crowded field.
• Pennsylvania House: Democrats will select their challenger to Representative Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican who narrowly flipped a House seat in the Allentown area in 2024. Bob Brooks, who leads a firefighters union and has the backing of Senator Bernie Sanders and Gov. Josh Shapiro, is facing Ryan Crosswell, a veteran and former Justice Department official, and Lamont McClure, a former county executive. Mr. McClure received a late infusion of support from a mysterious super PAC with some G.O.P. ties.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How to Rob Taxpayers of $1.8 Billion Without Really Trying, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 19, 2026. Start by completely bypassing Congress and the Constitution.

For the second time in two months, Donald Trump is walking back maximalist threats against Iran by claiming another nation talked him out of an attack he was totally going to make. In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump said that the Emir of Qatar, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the president of the United Arab Emirates had asked him to “hold off on our planned Military attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran” in the hope that “a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond.”

Hope springs eternal! Happy Tuesday. 

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice 

 

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

The Atlantic, Opinion: T's $1.8b slush fund is worse than stealing, Jonathan Chait, right, May 19, 2026. Recasting the January 6 insurrection as the work of heroic patriots remains the president’s highest priority.

Among the very first things Donald Trump did upon assuming the powers of the presidency for the second time was commute the sentences of, and grant pardons to, everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Republican allies expressed moderate disappointment but vowed to move past this ugly blemish. Senator Susan Collins called it a “terrible day for our Justice Department.” Senator Tommy Tuberville admitted, “It’s a hard one, because we work with them up here,” referring to Capitol Police who were viciously beaten by Trump’s allies. Tuberville concluded, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to get Jan. 6 behind us.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Republicans were “not looking backwards; we’re looking forward.”

It was not, however, just one terrible day. Trump’s loyalty to his most violent and criminal supporters was a signal of his highest priority, and has been a reliable guide to his decisions ever since. The impulse to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, appears to be the inspiration even for the establishment of a $1.8 billion Treasury Department slush fund for victims of so-called weaponization of government.

Last week, when the administration floated the notion of disbursing payments to alleged victims of government weaponization, cynics assumed that Trump meant to divert the money to himself. But this assessment may have turned out to be too naive. Trump already has ample ways to profit from office, including from stock trading with the benefit of inside knowledge and by accepting gifts from client states. The Justice Department told reporters yesterday that Trump, his sons, and his family business would not receive payments from the fund. The recipients will almost surely be insurrectionists and other allies.

How, exactly, can Trump hand out taxpayer dollars at his whim? The putative mechanism is a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2020, an IRS contractor leaked a few years of Trump’s tax records. (Before Trump, major presidential candidates had for decades voluntarily released their returns, an essential step in demonstrating that they had no conflicts of interest.)

The contractor was caught and sent to prison. Trump nevertheless sued for the offense of being subjected to a portion of the scrutiny his fellow candidates have voluntarily undergone. Because Trump runs the IRS, it is no longer in a position to place any limits on his demands. He has already exploited the loophole of suing his own government to pay a series of allies investigated for or convicted of committing crimes out of loyalty to him. The recipients include the family of Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed on January 6 while smashing her way into a corridor behind which members of Congress had taken shelter from the mob.

Trump’s Justice Department describes the forthcoming payouts as a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The process is, in fact, the opposite of systemic. It is designed to be controlled personally by Trump, and sheltered from any judicial scrutiny.

If the government were actually compensating victims of lawfare, it would direct payments to James Comey, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and other targets of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions. Trump has described his actions as turnabout—“I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”—which, given that he has called his own prosecutions political targeting, is tantamount to confessing that he is targeting his enemies.

But, of course, nobody entertains for a moment the thought that the fund could conceivably reward an actual victim of weaponization. To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.

Asked by a reporter yesterday whether people who committed violence against police officers should receive payments, Trump replied, “It’ll all be dependent on a committee. A committee’s being set up of very talented people, very highly respected people.” The committee is being selected entirely by Trump, who retains the power to replace any member who displeases him, and who in any case has argued in multiple contexts that he is entitled to exert full control over any decision by the executive branch.

The most dystopian explanation for this scheme comes from sources who sketched it out to ABC News last week. As ABC’s reporters characterized it, the sources described the fund as “a hybrid between a victim compensation fund—similar to the civil claims process that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—and a truth-and-reconciliation-style commission.”

Trump’s commission is deviously inverting the original and most famous truth-and-reconciliation commission. South Africa established its commission to document the crimes committed under its apartheid regime. Rather than uncovering the truth to facilitate the state’s transformation from authoritarianism into democracy, Trump is doing the reverse, inscribing his lies into the historical record in an effort to undermine democracy.

It is common to describe Trump’s steps as vengeance, but he has more in mind than merely settling old scores. This obsession drove Trump to support a successful primary challenge to Senator Bill Cassidy, whose offense was casting a symbolic vote to impeach him after January 6. Cassidy had long since surrendered any independent impulses, to the point of violating his own pro-vaccine convictions to cast a humiliating, decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. Yet Cassidy’s penitence did not satisfy Trump.

Trump considers it essential both to intimidate anybody who would stop him from carrying out illegal orders—hence his attempts to imprison Democrats who truthfully advised military members that they should not obey illegal orders—and to reward anybody who does follow them. He has reportedly promised mass pardons before he leaves office. Trump could have waited until after the 2028 elections to set up his slush fund, but he is doing it now in a high-profile way, presumably to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.

The government’s operating ethos during Trump’s second term has followed the dictum that the president and his allies are immune from the law, while his enemies can expect to be hounded. As his party watches silently and cowers, his intentions grow only more naked.

 

 "Hey," writes  Jeff Tiedrich, below, posting picture above, "you know who else set up a slush fund in order to enrich themselves and the violent thugs who did their bidding? of course you do...."

From Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion" by Jeff Tiedrich, right, May 19, 2026. "So, who exactly is eligible to receive money from this fun fund full of slush, and who gets to decide how much? Can Donny put himself on the list? What about Don Jr. and Eric? Can they come running with their hands out, claiming that Sleepy Joe treated them so unfairly?"

As usual, Donny and his flunkies are keeping their greedy machinations as opaque as possible. “There’s no transparency. The five members of the fund appear to have total discretion to award money to whomever they choose. There does not appear to be any oversight mechanism,” [former DOJ pardon attorney] Liz Oyer said, adding, “There’s no process for public input. It appears that these five people have complete discretion to give away our money to whomever they choose.”

Oh, and the families of the Capitol Police officers? The families of the Capitol Police officers who were beaten or killed as a result of the riot did not receive a cent but the people who assaulted them are about to be millionaires...

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 19, 2026. ‘Trust’ takes a holiday.

After dozens of cases in which Department of Justice lawyers made misrepresentations to courts, defied orders, and defended arbitrary and capricious actions (and tens of thousands of instances in which courts knocked down DOJ lawyers’ defense of illegal ICE detentions), DOJ has worn out its welcome in federal courts. Long gone are the days in which courts, juries, and the public could trust the word of DOJ lawyers.

The DOJ’s statement of values includes this whopper: “We work each day to earn the public’s trust by following the facts and the law wherever they may lead, without prejudice or improper influence.” That no longer passes the straight-face test.

Trust? You people want me to trust you?! That was the tenor of a blistering opinion from U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy for the district of Rhode Island in quashing the Trump regime’s subpoena for documents relating to minors’ gender-affirming care. She did not buy DOJ lawyers’ argument that it needed such records for a “fraud” audit.

You can understand her frustration:

DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case. It has misrepresented and withheld information to both this Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas (the “Texas court”). It did so in an obvious effort to shield its recent investigative tactics—previously rejected by every other court to review them—from this Court’s review, in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions. Its representatives have, under oath, misrepresented salient facts. It has misled the parties with whom it was negotiating in Rhode Island, who have now been placed in an untenable and unprecedented procedural position. And when its attorneys came to this Court to explain their conduct, the senior attorney—who was present at many of the events that took place in this case—sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations.

In addition to all that, McElroy revealed that the entire theory of DOJ’s investigation was a ruse. The ostensible purpose of the subpoena — to facilitate the investigation of fraud in “off-label” prescriptions — makes no sense, McElroy pointed out, because “off-label prescribing by physicians is lawful.” She explained, “[I]t is therefore logically impossible to construct an aiding-and-abetting, facilitation, or conspiracy theory predicated on nothing more than the physician’s own lawful prescribing act.”

McElroy flatly declared DOJ had operated in bad faith, simply to harass patients. “The evidence of improper purpose here is in the DOJ’s own public record and detailed in the decisions of the seven other federal courts that have considered identical subpoenas,” she wrote. “The Administration has publicly characterized gender affirming care for minors as abuse, directed the DOJ to bring its practice to an end, and celebrated when hospitals curtailed such programs as a result of this subpoena campaign.”Subscribed

Bad faith. Untrustworthy. As we have written, this regime long ago forfeited the “presumption of regularity” normally extended to the government. McElroy agreed:

[T]he discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling. The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that “[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.”

McElroy is no outlier. Scenes of exasperated judges berating unethical, sloppy, and/or blatantly deceptive DOJ conduct have played out around the country.

In a massive survey of 327 judges, “elite” lawyers, and law professors, Bright Line Watch and the Safeguarding Democracy Project found that: “Eight in ten legal experts report that federal officials fail to comply with court orders somewhat or very often, and nearly nine in ten say political appointees in the Trump DOJ mislead federal judges somewhat or very often.”

Juries have picked up on the department’s untrustworthiness as well, refusing to indict an unprecedented number of defendants (e.g., Letitia James, the sandwich thrower, anti-ICE protesters, military veterans serving in Congress). DOJ cannot persuade ordinary citizens to pursue Trump’s enemies even when no defense lawyer or defendant is present.

It does not help the department’s reputation when it flagrantly violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act by withholding documents. It does not “earn the public trust” when it tries to shield its lawyers from state bar disciplinary hearings.

It sure does not inspire trust when there are reasonable questions whether acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, fully followed ethics officials’ direction to recuse himself from past representation of Trump. As CNN reported, he nevertheless selected conspiracy monger Joe diGenova, a former US attorney, to probe wild accusations of a plot “against Trump spanning from the 2017 Russian election interference probe to the aborted Special Counsel Jack Smith prosecutions,” including the investigation of Trump nemesis, former CIA director John Brennan. Blanche has not recused himself from the Brennan investigation.

One need look no further to confirm the rot at DOJ’s core than the reported settlement negotiations involving DOJ, the IRS, and Trump to “settle” his $10B suit against the IRS for $1.7B. That eye-popping sum of taxpayer money would go to a slush fund under a Trump-controlled commission to “compensate” alleged victims of the Biden administration, including Jan. 6 criminals (whom Trump later pardoned). Good government groups have flagged the scheme as staggeringly corrupt, potentially running afoul of the Emoluments Clause, and exposing any IRS agents who agreed to drop audits to criminal liability.

So, let’s dispense with the notion that the weaponized, rogue department now run by Todd “I love you, sir” Blanche is even trying to earn “the public trust.” In two years, the department has trashed its sterling reputation built over decades.

When Trump leaves office, the new attorney general will need to conduct a thorough housecleaning (and make enumerable referrals for discipline to state bars) to root out Trump’s flunkies who misled courts, defied judges, worked to exact political revenge, and plundered the treasury. Otherwise, the DOJ will never recover the trust of the public, juries, or judges.

More U.S. Scandals, Corruption, Probes, Accountability

 

The Hartmann Report, Investigative Commentary: What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution? Thom Hartmann, right, May 19, 2026. From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power…

Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army.

It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant.

Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was.

I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

Become part of the movement

Consider what we learned just yesterday morning. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration. It’s an unprecedented mechanism that lets the president pay his own supporters — or fund his own private army — out of a government agency he controls with taxpayer money, with no functional constraints on who he can give that money to.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it plainly what it is, a political grievance fund Trump can use to pay off his friends, and the obvious beneficiaries are the roughly fifteen hundred people he already pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th.

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal:

“[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The men who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election engaged in exactly the kind of insurrection that language was written to address — several were even convicted by juries for seditious conspiracy — and now Trump wants to write them checks that could be as much as $1 million per person.

This isn’t some obscure or gray area of the law or the Constitution: that’s the document telling us all “No” in language a child could understand, and the answer coming back from the Trump regime is a number chosen, with a wink, to evoke 1776.

It would be one thing if this were an isolated outrage, but it isn’t. Instead of the exception, this kind of criminal activity is now the norm: this is the most corrupt, lawless administration in American history and, so far, they’re getting away with almost all of it. For example:

— Article I of the Constitution gives the power to make war exclusively to Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Act that Congress passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 spells out the only exception, which is that a president may use force when the nation has been attacked or such an attack is imminent, and even then he must come to Congress within sixty days for permission to continue.

Iran represented no threat to the US, there was no attack or imminent attack, and yet Trump bombed the country anyway without even notifying, much less asking permission from, Congress. And now far more than 60 days have passed and he and the toadies in his regime are giving the middle finger to us, the Constitution, and the law.

— Trump’s also been bombing small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September of 2025, killing well over a hundred people he’s never bothered to identify, charge, or even produce a shred of evidence against. This is a naked violation of both US laws against murder and is an explicit war crime under international law and treaties.

When the Senate unsuccessfully tried to rein him in, he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media sewer that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional” — as if he’s ever read the Constitution — and that the five Republicans who voted to constrain him should never be elected to office again.

Human Rights Watch described these strikes flatly as a campaign of “extrajudicial executions” carried out “without any credible legal basis.” The worst of them, the September 2nd strike, became what military lawyers call a double-tap, because after the first missile left two men clinging to the burning wreckage for forty minutes, the order came down, according to the ACLU’s account of the reporting, to hit them again and finish them off.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Ultra-Corrupt Settlement Fund Is Even Worse Than We Thought, Andrew Egger, right, May 19, 2026. When I wrote Friday about the news that Donald Trump was about to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for the creation of a $1.776 billion taxpayer-cash slush fund for his allies who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the law against them, I noted that nothing was yet set in stone. At that moment, it still seemed possible that this obscene settlement—Trump’s biggest, most lawless, most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet—might yet give them cold feet.

But no: Yesterday, they made the thing official. In fact, it’s somehow even worse than advertised.

It’s impossible to overstate this basic fact: Everything about the settlement fund, from the circumstances of its creation to the claims it makes about its own enforcement, is deliberately structured to short-circuit all outside accountability, government oversight, or judicial review. As I wrote Friday, there was a reason Trump’s guys (who happened to be both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the case) were hustling to reach the settlement quickly: The judge in the IRS case had been signaling her suspicion that Trump and his government were not actually on opposite sides of the claim, suggesting she was considering throwing out the case altogether. If they wanted to carry out the heist, time was of the essence.

The Justice Department’s enforcement order, released yesterday, and the settlement terms released last night carry on in this dubious fashion. According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the United States loses custody and control of the $1.776 billion the minute it hits the settlement account created for the purpose: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” he wrote in the order, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

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Meanwhile, the terms of the settlement fund make clear that the money’s disbursement—which, again, Trump’s United States government is trying to wash its hands of any liability for—will be a complete black box. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims,” the settlement reads. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.”

Not only can the fund’s members keep secret how they’re making disbursement decisions, they can also keep a lid on who’s getting paid. The requirements for this are astonishingly open-ended: “To be eligible for relief,” the settlement states, a claimant must merely “assert at least one legal claim stating that the claimant was a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization.” Meanwhile, the only person the fund’s administrations will be required to brief on who got how much money is the attorney general—in a “confidential written report,” and even then only quarterly.

The cherry on top of this shit settlement sundae is this claim: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which is stated to be “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—in other words, by Trump, Trump, and Trump.

The first opportunity to head off this disaster seems already to have passed. Nearly a hundred Democratic lawmakers signed an amicus brief filed in court Monday urging the judge not to dismiss the case as the parties requested, but to insist on weighing in on the terms of the settlement. But Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in a brief order yesterday that she lacked the power to do this—the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, she said, so she had no authority to adjudicate it.

Once again, then, Trump’s aptitude for unprecedented shamelessness seems to have exposed yet another piece of our government that ultimately runs on the honor system: If a corrupt president wants to dip into the Treasury for literally any purpose whatsoever, all he has to do is sue the government, then settle with himself outside of court to create a payout fund for whatever purpose he might desire.

“It is Congress who appropriates money and it is the executive who spends it,” Matt Platkin, the former attorney general of New Jersey who is representing the Democratic lawmakers in the suit, told The Bulwark yesterday. “Put aside all of the potential corruption with this case—if the president can just sue himself and then settle with himself . . . and then spend huge amounts of money outside of that appropriations process, why would any president ever go to Congress for money ever again?”

It’s a great point—and one that reminds us that, ultimately, the responsibility for reining in this rampaging president falls not with the courts, but with Congress. It is not just the courts but Congress as well that Trump is cutting out of the loop with his obscene and indefensible settlement. Even here, Trump requires at least the legislature’s tacit permission to spend this money: They could pass a bill today to block a penny of that money from going out the door. Because of the funhouse-mirror world we live in and the villainous, power-hungry president we have, that bill would need to have the supermajority support required to overcome a presidential veto, but they do still have the power, if only they were to choose to exercise it.

But that funhouse-mirror reality is enough to prove on its own that just blocking the money wouldn’t go far enough. Trump is not merely asserting the power to jailbreak $1.8 billion from the Treasury to parcel out to his fans and allies. He is trying to create an upside-down new status quo where his single say-so is enough to overturn the will of two thirds of Congress minus one on all spending matters that really, really matter to him. It’s utterly un-American. It’s emperor stuff. If they had a shred of dignity left, they’d impeach the son of a bitch today. 

News Roundup 

 

President Donald Trump speaks at the site of ongoing construction of the planned White House ballroom in Washington, D.C. (Reuters photo by Kevin Lamarque).

Meidas Touch Network, Tuesday Afternoon News and Comment: Trump’s Golden Ballroom Cannot Stop a War, Ben Meiselas, right, May 19, 2026. Here are the top stories we are tracking today:

• Iran threatens to fire hundreds of missiles per day at Gulf energy infrastructure if U.S. strikes resume
• Trump holds a chaotic press event outside his Golden Ballroom construction site, claims the building will protect all of Washington
• Trump boasts the ballroom roof will host snipers with a clear view of all of Washington
• Putin lands in China as Trump’s global standing crumbles
• 30-year Treasury yield hits highest level since 2007
• Government waste, fraud, and abuse rose 13% under Trump and DOGE
• Alligator Alcatraz closes after burning $1 billion to house 1,400 immigrants
• Todd Blanche melts down before the Senate while defending Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund
• John Cornyn gets humiliated as Trump endorses Ken Paxton over him
• Two U.S. KC-135 tankers collided over Iraq amid possible enemy fire and the Pentagon covered it up
• 5,000 U.S. troops being withdrawn from Europe

Let’s get into it.Trump’s golden ballroom continues to take a dark turn

This morning we learned from the New York Times that Iran is preparing to continuously fire hundreds of missiles per day at Gulf energy infrastructure, including refineries, ports, and water desalination plants, the moment the United States resumes its strikes. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard went further, threatening to return the United Arab Emirates to the era of riding camels and saying they would occupy Abu Dhabi if necessary. The Houthis are already taking initial steps toward shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which would open up a second maritime front against the United States. This is a serious, credible escalation threat.

Amid all of this, Trump rushed outside the White House, stood in front of a construction site, and held a press conference about his Golden Ballroom.

Priorities!

Trump stood amid the rubble and scaffolding of a construction project he claims will one day be a magnificent golden ballroom, a project he also wants $1 billion of your tax dollars to pay for (so much for it being free!), and he told reporters that the roof of this ballroom will be the greatest drone empire anyone has ever seen, that it will protect all of Washington, D.C., and that if a drone hits it, it simply bounces off. He also said it will function as a drone port. He is very proud of this.

Then he explained the building’s architectural influences. That side is Rome. That side is Greece, because Greece likes triangles. Parts of the building, he told us, were taken from different glamorous places around the world. You have two facades. This is what he wanted to talk about while Iran was threatening to fire hundreds of missiles per day at our Gulf allies.

And then he got to the snipers. Trump explained that because of the height of the ballroom roof, his people will have a clear view of all of Washington. He said that the sniper capacity is for our snipers, not enemy snipers. Enemy snipers are not allowed on the roof. Just our snipers. He wanted to make sure we understood that distinction. He also noted the ballroom is a shield. If a drone hits it, it bounces off. It is also a drone port. And snipers live there. Please, someone invoke the 25th Amendment.

Between Trump’s comments about the roof and comments made about the bunker underneath, it certainly seems that the ballroom is a lot more sinister than your everyday Trump vanity project.

Trump then looked directly at the camera, held up a poster of the ballroom rendering, and said: look at me holding this. I look so thin. You don’t have to look at my waist. You saw my waist all over President Xi in China.

When a reporter asked how close he came to striking Iran the day before, Trump said he was an hour away. Then he said he got a call — “Sir, could you wait? We think we are close to a deal” — and he stood down. He then said he’d give Iran two, three, maybe four days. Or until Friday. Or Saturday. Or early next week. Or maybe a limited period of time. Two weeks? He is not sure.

A reporter also asked whether he planned to explain any of this to the American people, given how deeply unpopular the Iran campaign has become. Trump said he does not have enough time to explain it. He’s just “getting it done.” No explanation to Congress. No explanation to the public. He’s focused on the ballroom.

And Trump told everyone: I paid for all of this myself. This is my gift to you. Meanwhile, he is seeking $1 billion in taxpayer funding for the project. A gift to himself, paid for by you.The Pentagon cover-up

Here is what’s actually happening behind the scenes with Iran, and it is far more serious than Trump’s ballroom press conference would suggest.

The New York Times confirmed yesterday what I was reporting over the weekend. Iran has been studying U.S. fighter and bomber flight patterns, possibly with Russian assistance. That intelligence made American operations more predictable and significantly increased the effectiveness of Iran’s air defenses. We have already lost an F-15E. An F-35 has been damaged. The Pentagon paused additional strikes in part because military officials warned that the risk to American aircraft and pilots was rising. This is getting harder, and the administration does not want to tell you that.

Trump also extended the removal of sanctions on Russian oil. Russia may be actively helping Iran shoot down American planes, and Trump’s response is to give Russia economic relief. Not to mention, this is at a time when Ukraine is making serious gains against Russia in the war. Amid all of this, Trump is giving Russia a financial lifeline.

Remember when Scott Bessent said they’d only extend those sanctions once? Yeah, another lie. Putin is laughing all the way to the bank.Putin in China

While all of this was unfolding, Vladimir Putin arrived in China for a two-day visit. He was greeted at the airport by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — notably more senior a reception than Trump received on his China visit. They are expected to sign 40 documents together and announce a vision of a multipolar world order, a direct, public message that the era of American dominance is being challenged.

Putin is being welcomed by senior officials, signing sweeping agreements, and cementing the Russia-China axis. Meanwhile, the American president is outside the White House telling us his ballroom can repel ballistic missiles and explaining which side is Rome and which side is Greece.NATO and Trump’s withdrawal from Europe

We also learned today that NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, U.S. General Alexus Grynkewich, confirmed that 5,000 American troops will be withdrawn from Europe. This comes as Russia has made clear it intends to redraw the European security order by force. Pulling American troops from the continent at this moment is not strength. It is a gift to Putin, and it follows a now-familiar pattern of this regime making every decision as if it were designed in the Kremlin.So about that “fraud, waste, and abuse…”

Let’s talk about DOGE for a moment. Remember that?

The Government Accountability Office, the independent federal watchdog, released its latest audit this week, and federal waste, fraud, and abuse rose 13% last year. Not fell. Rose. Despite Elon Musk and DOGE claiming they would cut $1 trillion from the federal budget, improper overpayments alone hit $153 billion in fiscal year 2025. That is an $18 billion increase from the year before.

And then there is Alligator Alcatraz, which just closed after one year in operation. The Trump administration spent $1 billion to house 1,400 immigrants in that facility. That is $714,285 per occupant. For a year. The military-industrial complex got paid. The American people got fleeced. This is the administration that told you they were going to end government waste. The call is coming from inside the house.

Meanwhile, the 30-year Treasury note yield rose to 5.18% today, the highest it has been since July 2007. These yields are unsustainable. The debt is surging. The Treasury Department is already, I believe, quietly taking emergency measures behind the scenes. This is not abstract. This is what happens when a country runs reckless fiscal policy with no serious plan to address it.The tanker cover-up

I also want to make sure we do not let this one slip through the cracks, because as I have said from the beginning of covering this administration that everything is a lie and a cover-up.

Remember the two U.S. KC-135 Stratotanker planes that collided over Iraq on March 12th, killing six Americans? The Pentagon told us the skies were friendly and no hostile fire involved. Just a tragic accident in congested airspace. But initial intelligence reports detected Iranian-backed militia anti-aircraft fire in the area at the time, which strongly suggests the pilots may have taken evasive action — and that is what caused the collision. Military leadership dismissed those initial reports as mistaken. The investigation is expected to conclude it was avoidable pilot error. That framing, reported by The Atlantic, protects the official story. It also buries the possibility that six Americans died because Iranian-backed forces fired on them and the administration does not want you to know that.Blanche is melting down at today’s Senate hearing

Trump’s former personal criminal attorney and current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is before the United States Senate today, just one day after the announcement of a $1.776 billion fund for Trump’s allies, including January 6 defendants. Even already, it’s been a total mess. Blanche has been making a fool of himself, just as other Trump officials have before Congress.

Senator Van Hollen asked Blanche whether individuals who physically assaulted Capitol police officers on January 6 would be eligible for the fund. Blanche said anyone in this country is eligible to apply. Van Hollen asked whether there would be any rules barring violent offenders from the fund. Blanche said he is not one of the commissioners. Van Hollen reminded him that he is quite literally the one appointing the commissioners.

Senator Reed noted that the Treasury Department’s general counsel resigned the very day Trump signed the executive order creating this fund — the same order that requires Treasury certification for payments — and asked Blanche whether that was a coincidence. Blanche said he didn’t know. How convenient!

Senator Murray called it what it is: a slush fund to enrich the president’s allies using tax dollars. Blanche rejected the characterization. Murray said it plainly: this is corruption. Blanche denied it. But when Senator Merkley raised the principle that using the Justice Department to pursue a president’s political enemies represents a breakdown of democratic governance, Blanche agreed completely — then pivoted immediately to complaining about the Biden administration, saying that’s what they were doing. But not him! These are not serious people. But they are dangerous.

At one point Van Hollen was reading directly from Blanche’s own transcript back to him, and Blanche disputed it. You said that. I’m reading your words. That’s not what I said. I’m reading from your transcript, Van Hollen noted.

Then there was the Ghislaine Maxwell exchange. Senator Reed raised the fact that Blanche visited Maxwell in prison, and shortly afterward she was transferred to a far more comfortable facility, one where she reportedly had her own room, access to a private shower, and pet therapy. Blanche pushed back on the characterization of her original prison, insisting she went from a low-security facility to another low-security facility. That is a blatant lie. Maxwell went from a low-security prison to a minimum-security facility widely known as “Club Fed.” Reed’s emphasized that Trump needed someone to go talk to Maxwell and find out what she would say if asked about Jeffrey Epstein, and Blanche was the perfect person for that job. Blanche did not deny the visit.

On Epstein, Van Hollen pressed Blanche on why he has been publicly calling for survivors to come forward with more evidence while apparently never meeting with them directly. Blanche claimed he had met with many of their lawyers. Shortly after, Epstein survivors released a letter stating clearly that Blanche has not met with any of them. Van Hollen asked Blanche whether he knew that lying to Congress is a criminal offense. Blanche was putting the “criminal” in criminal attorney today.

And when Van Hollen asked whether Blanche could commit that the Justice Department would not recommend pardons for individuals named in the Epstein files, Blanche said that hundreds of thousands of people are named in those files. That’s a no.

Brilliant work today by Senator Van Hollen. Blanche was Trump’s criminal defense lawyer. Now he is Trump’s personal retribution prosecutor and chief grift dispenser. He does not act like an Attorney General because he is not functioning as one.Cornyn’s Humiliation

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has spent years groveling for Trump’s endorsement in the Texas Senate race. His pinned tweet is a photo of himself with Trump. Just this week he was pushing a bill to name a highway after the man. And today, Trump endorsed his opponent, Ken Paxton.

As Ron Filipkowski put it: Trump endorsed serial fraudster and habitual adulterer Ken Paxton for Senate, because they have a lot in common.

Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House, who has faced years of securities fraud allegations, who had an affair and was reported to authorities by members of his own staff, is now Trump’s chosen candidate. Cornyn’s groveling got him absolutely nothing. And this is good news for Democrats: James Talarico is running for that seat, and Paxton in a general election is a far better matchup for Democrats than Cornyn would have been. The humiliation of Cornyn is a gift. Democrats now have a real shot at winning a Senate seat in Texas.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Top Trump Lawyer Resigns After Weaponization Fund, Republicans Break Over Ballroom, Multiple Public Health Crises, Aaron Parnas, right, May 19, 2026. We are tracking a rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak, the Trump administration’s rollback of protections against toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water, and the removal of restrictions on cyanide bombs used to kill wildlife. At the same time, a top Treasury lawyer has resigned following the creation of the controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.

On today’s schedule, I’ll be meeting with New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and later interviewing California Governor Gavin Newsom. I’ll also be closely following Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s hearing on Capitol Hill and all the major developments throughout the day.

Most importantly, I want this space to be collaborative. I want to make sure we are covering the stories that actually matter to you, not just the ones large media companies decide are convenient or profitable. If there is an issue you think deserves more attention, or a story you believe is being ignored, please reach out. We are building a real community centered on facts, accountability, independent reporting, and honest coverage without spin or selective outrage. If you value this work, subscribe, share the platform, and help us continue growing something much bigger in the weeks and months ahead.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is expected to face intense questioning from Senate lawmakers over the Justice Department’s new $1.776 billion compensation fund for people who claim they were politically targeted under the previous administration. Critics argue the unprecedented fund could allow Donald Trump to direct taxpayer money toward political allies, including January 6 defendants and others connected to investigations involving Trump. Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, has aggressively aligned the Justice Department with Trump’s political agenda through investigations, policy rollbacks, and high-profile prosecutions.

Blanche defended the administration’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund by arguing that, while unusual, the program is not unprecedented and is not designed exclusively for Republicans. Blanche said: “By the way, it is true that this is unusual. But it is not unprecedented. It’s not limited to Republicans. There’s no limitation on the claims.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen sharply criticized Blanche during the budget hearing, accusing him of politicizing the Justice Department and advancing Trump’s personal agenda with taxpayer money. Referring to Blanche’s past comments about the 2020 election, Van Hollen said: “Two days ago, you even suggested there was ‘a ton of evidence’ the 2020 election was rigged against Trump. And here you are at a budget hearing asking for taxpayer funds when you're using them to punish Trump's adversaries, reward his friends, and pursue his personal vendettas.”

The Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned shortly after the Trump administration created a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” intended to compensate people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration. The fund could potentially benefit Trump allies, including some connected to the January 6 Capitol attack, and would be financed through a federal settlement account that does not require direct congressional approval. Morrissey’s resignation appears tied to internal concerns over the legality or ethics of the program, even though, according to the New York Times, his public resignation letter reportedly praised Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Even some Republicans are beginning to publicly question Trump’s new $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, with John Kennedy saying he still has “a lot” of concerns about how it would work. Kennedy specifically questioned where the money would come from, who would qualify for compensation, and how the administration defines “weaponization,” asking: “I need to know where the money is going to come from. I need to know who would qualify. I need to know the definition of weaponization. I need to know who’s been weaponized against?”

The Trump administration announced plans to roll back or delay Biden-era limits on several PFAS “forever chemicals” in drinking water, arguing the earlier regulations were developed too quickly and could face legal challenges. Environmental and public health advocates strongly criticized the move, warning that weakening the standards could increase exposure to toxic chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, and other serious health problems for millions of Americans. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the plan as part of a broader “clean water mandate,” despite accusations that it contradicts promises to remove toxic chemicals from drinking water.

According to Reuters reporters Hümeyra Pamuk and Jonathan Landay, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau allegedly intervened to help former Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro obtain a U.S. visa while he was in Hungary after being granted asylum by former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The report says the visa was approved shortly before Hungary’s new pro-EU government under Péter Magyar took office, after Magyar had pledged to extradite Ziobro back to Poland.

The story is politically sensitive because Ziobro faces criminal charges in Poland, making alleged U.S. assistance highly unusual given Poland’s status as a close U.S. ally. If accurate, the move could deepen tensions between the Trump administration and European governments over support for nationalist and conservative political figures in Europe. The episode also highlights how immigration and visa powers can become tools of geopolitical and ideological alignment.

Senator Roger Wicker criticized the Trump administration’s reported decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Poland, saying he is “not at all happy about” the move and emphasizing that administration officials had not consulted him beforehand. Wicker’s comments signal growing concern among Republican defense hawks who view Poland as a key NATO ally and an important frontline deterrent against Russia.

An Ebola outbreak centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province has killed at least 131 people, with officials warning the true number of cases may be much higher due to under-detection. Health experts from the World Health Organization say the virus is spreading faster and farther than initially believed, reaching neighboring Uganda and other provinces amid insecurity, population movement, and weak health systems. Residents in affected areas described widespread fear and limited access to protective supplies such as masks, while authorities and aid agencies are rushing medical equipment and urging preventative measures. The outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no approved vaccine currently exists, making containment especially difficult.

The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda has been worsened by foreign aid cuts, ongoing conflict, and weak health systems, making it harder to detect and contain the virus early. International organizations and European agencies are sending medical supplies and experts to support the response, while concerns remain about the outbreak spreading further in unstable regions. Global health leaders say the crisis highlights the urgent need for stronger investment in public health preparedness and international cooperation to prevent future epidemics.

Houston health officials are closely monitoring the Ebola outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo as the city prepares to host World Cup visitors, including the Congolese national soccer team, which is expected to base operations there during the tournament. Experts stressed that Ebola is highly deadly but difficult to spread because transmission requires direct contact with bodily fluids, and they emphasized that the current risk to Americans remains low.

According to NOTUS, Donald Trump reportedly pressured Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she ruled that funding tied to Trump’s proposed White House ballroom could not be included in Republicans’ reconciliation bill. The parliamentarian determined the provision violated Senate budget rules, though Republicans are now trying to rewrite the language to keep the funding alive. Thune publicly rejected the idea of firing MacDonough, emphasizing that disputes with the parliamentarian are common during reconciliation fights and that he would follow the normal Senate process.

Senate Republicans are reportedly considering scaling back the proposed $1 billion allocation for Secret Service and ballroom-related security upgrades in the reconciliation bill after facing resistance from rank-and-file GOP lawmakers.

Voters across six states are heading to the polls in closely watched primaries, with the biggest spotlight on Kentucky, where Donald Trump is aggressively trying to unseat Republican Congressman Thomas Massie after repeated clashes over spending, foreign policy, and oversight issues. The race is being treated as a major test of Trump’s influence over the Republican Party, especially as Massie remains one of the few prominent Republicans willing to publicly oppose him.

The broader election landscape also includes competitive Senate and gubernatorial primaries in states like Georgia, Alabama, and Pennsylvania, while national controversies surrounding Trump’s policies, refugee admissions, redistricting, and the new $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund continue shaping the political environment. The primaries could provide an early signal of how strongly Trump still controls GOP voters heading into the midterm election cycle.

A federal judge in New York barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out most immigration arrests inside or around key Manhattan immigration courthouses, ruling that immigrants must be able to attend hearings without fear of detention. The decision came after lawsuits from civil rights groups argued that the Trump administration’s courthouse arrest tactics undermined due process and discouraged people from pursuing asylum or immigration claims. The ruling allows exceptions only in rare public safety situations and reflects growing backlash against aggressive immigration enforcement methods that have sparked protests and public criticism.

NBC News tested one of the first Trump Mobile phones nearly nine months after its originally promised release date, highlighting delays surrounding the launch. The device appears heavily branded around Donald Trump’s political identity, arriving preloaded with Truth Social, featuring an American flag design with 11 stripes on the back, and packaging labeled “Proudly Assembled in the USA.”

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm said its assets under management surged from $200 million to $3.5 billion within a year, driven by an aggressive series of investment deals and acquisitions. It comes amid new deals that he has earned because of his father’s position as President of the United States.

China is hosting Putin soon after Trump’s visit to Beijing, showing that Xi is trying to strengthen ties with both Russia and the U.S. at the same time. Putin appears to need China more than ever as the war in Ukraine drags on, hurting Russia’s military strength, economy, and domestic support. China benefits from keeping Russia close because it gains economic leverage, energy access, and a stronger partner against Western influence, even if Russia is becoming weaker overall. The situation also raises concerns about Taiwan and global security, since changes in U.S. policy could encourage both Russia and China to act more aggressively in their regions.

NATO air policing forces reportedly carried out the first-ever air-to-air combat interception and shootdown of a drone over Estonia, with Romanian military aircraft said to be involved in downing a Russian drone. If confirmed, the incident would mark a significant escalation in NATO’s direct operational engagement near its eastern border and highlight growing tensions between Russia and alliance members in the Baltic region. The event also underscores increasing concern over Russian drone activity and NATO’s willingness to respond militarily to perceived airspace threats.

A security guard named Amin Abdullah was killed while protecting children and staff during a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where authorities say his actions likely saved lives. Police identified two teenage suspects who were later found dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and investigators are treating the attack as a possible hate crime linked to anti-Muslim rhetoric. Community leaders and advocacy groups described the shooting as part of a broader rise in Islamophobia and condemned inflammatory language from public figures. The attack shocked the local Muslim community and sparked calls for greater tolerance, unity, and protection against religious hate.

Interpol’s cybercrime chief warned that AI tools are making cybercrime dramatically easier and more profitable by allowing even inexperienced users to carry out large-scale scams, phishing attacks, and fraud. Widely available AI chatbots and “phishing-as-a-service” kits are lowering technical barriers, enabling organized crime groups to scale operations and automate convincing fake emails, deepfakes, and online scams. Officials say AI is accelerating existing forms of cybercrime rather than creating entirely new ones, while also helping criminal networks outsource technical expertise. The growing threat has sparked international concern and intensified debates over regulating advanced AI systems that could potentially outperform human hackers.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said he was informed that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are seeking a secret arrest warrant against him, though the court has not confirmed the claim. The possible warrant appears tied to accusations related to the Gaza conflict, following earlier ICC warrants issued against Israeli leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Smotrich condemned the move as politically motivated and linked it to Palestinian efforts to pursue international legal action against Israel.

Israeli forces intercepted a large activist flotilla attempting to reach Gaza and challenge Israel’s long-standing naval blockade, stopping dozens of boats in international waters near Cyprus. Organizers said the mission aimed to draw attention to worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, while Israel described the flotilla as a political provocation and defended the blockade as necessary for security against Hamas. Several countries, including Turkey and Indonesia, demanded the release of detained activists, and critics accused Israel of violating international law by intercepting the vessels far from Gaza’s coast. The incident intensified international debate over Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, the legality of Israel’s blockade, and the growing global activism surrounding the conflict.  

U.S. Religion, Culture, Media, Education 

 

An aerial view of the crowd at Rededicate 250 (Graeme Sloan via Getty Images). 

The New Republic, Commentary: Trump Gives Bizarre Message to Half-Empty Christian Nationalist Event, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 18, 2026. Barely anyone attended the event, and even Donald Trump was absent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A video of trump plays on a screen while people watch (Matthew Hatcher via AFP and Getty Images)

The New Republic, Commentary: Trump Treated His Evangelical Supporters Like Dogs This Weekend, Hafiz Rashid, May 18, 2026. The president went golfing instead of attending a nine-hour prayer festival on Sunday.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Pope Leo XIV (Vatican photo).

Letters From Leo, Opinion: Joined By Anti-Catholic Pastors, Barron and Dolan Speak at Trump’s Prayer Rally, Christopher Hale, right, May 18-19, 2026. Pastor Robert Jeffress, who calls the Catholic Church “satanic,” headlined the same Trump-backed rally. Ten days earlier, Dolan had called Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo “very unfortunate” on Fox News.

On Sunday, May 17, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the retired archbishop of New York, and Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lent their voices to “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the Trump-backed prayer festival on the National Mall. Barron took the stage in person, while Dolan participated via a pre-recorded video.

The event was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership with the White House.

The program featured Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard by video, alongside evangelist Franklin Graham, White House faith adviser Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, and pastor Robert Jeffress. PBS reported in advance that the gathering had been criticized for promoting Christian nationalism.

Father Mike Schmitz, the Minnesota priest whose “Bible in a Year” podcast has built one of the largest Catholic audiences in America, was originally announced as a speaker. In early April, his team informed the White House he would be unable to attend. The lineup that emerged in his absence made clear why his judgment was sound. About Father Mike Schmitz - bulldogCatholic Father Mike Schmitz, the Minnesota priest behind Ascension’s “The Bible in a Year” podcast, withdrew from the “Rededicate 250” speaker lineup in early April. His podcast has built one of the largest Catholic audiences in the United States. (Bulldog Catholic / Newman Catholic Campus Ministries)

Anyone tuning in expecting an ecumenical day of national prayer encountered something else: a stage built by Christians who have spent decades telling American Catholics their Church is a fraud.

Consider the two most visible of them.

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, has been calling the Catholic Church satanic since at least 2010.

In a sermon series at his own parish, he told his congregation that “much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion” — what he called the “Babylonian mystery religion” that “spread like a cult throughout the entire world.”

He has never retracted any of it. Last month, with Trump publicly attacking Pope Leo XIV as “weak on crime” for opposing the Iran war, Jeffress went on Fox News and announced that the president understands the Bible better than the pope.

Eric Metaxas, also a Religious Liberty commissioner, used his time at the microphone to argue that God had “raised up a great man” — Donald Trump — to finally build a ballroom on the White House grounds, two centuries after the British burned the building in the War of 1812.

The audience laughed, but Metaxas was not joking.

He has spent the last several years describing Donald Trump as an instrument of divine providence. Guests on his radio show have called Pope Francis “an atheist who is cynically trying to destroy the church from within.” In his celebrated biography of Martin Luther, the Reformation appears as the rescue of “the true Gospel” from its “crushing welter of ecclesiastical and political medieval structures.”

This is the stage Cardinal Dolan addressed by video. “In every chapter of the American story,” he said, “our faith in God has been the bedrock of our greatness, the source of our success.”

Bishop Barron, speaking from the platform, echoed the theme: “As we reflect on our history, we can see this consistent thread, the conviction that human dignity, equality, rights, freedom, and the rule of law are all grounded in God.”

Read aloud in a parish hall, those lines would not raise a Catholic eyebrow. The trouble is everything that surrounded them on Sunday’s program. Decades of public ministry by the men who shared that stage with Dolan and Barron have been built on the conviction that the Catholic Church is a counterfeit faith. The price of access to that platform on Sunday was Catholic legitimacy, and two American bishops of the Church handed it over.

Ten days earlier, Cardinal Dolan had sat across from Martha MacCallum on Fox News to discuss Trump’s series of attacks on Pope Leo XIV — the president’s claim that the pope was “weak on crime” for opposing the Iran war, his social-media taunts, his charge that Leo was “terrible for foreign policy.”

Dolan called the president’s remarks “very unfortunate.” He invoked his “love and respect and admiration and tremendous devotion” for the Holy Father.

Then on Sunday, the same cardinal sent a recorded message to a White House festival featuring the pastor who had just told that same network that Donald Trump understands the Bible better than Leo XIV does.

No coherent theory of conscience explains both gestures. They came from the same man, in the same media ecosystem, performed for two different audiences in the span of a week and a half.

Pope Leo XIV has spent his first year insisting that the Church belongs to no political faction, that the fusion of God and flag now branded as “Christian nationalism” is a counterfeit faith, and that the “inhuman treatment” of migrants by his own country’s government violates the Gospel.

His friends in the American hierarchy are supposed to back that vision. On Sunday, two of the most visible American prelates instead chose to share a podium with the men leading the public attack on him.

Father Schmitz, whose participation would have delivered far more Catholic households to organizers than either bishop, understood what the stage was for and pulled out. That is the contrast worth marking.

A campus priest with a podcast read the room with sharper institutional judgment than the cardinal of New York and the bishop appointed to chair the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis.

American Catholicism survived the Know-Nothings, the Klan, and two centuries of evangelical Protestantism that refused to admit Catholics belonged in the American story. The Church did not survive by negotiating the terms of its own faith for political access.

What was offered on Sunday was the oldest deal in American religious life: a seat at the table on the condition that the new guest agree not to notice that the men around him have spent their lives insisting he should not be at it.

Father Mike Schmitz refused that deal. What the cardinal of New York and the bishop of Winona-Rochester did on Sunday morning was something else.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and countless people of goodwill — who refuse to let the Church be laundered into the religious infrastructure of an administration attacking the pope. We believe the price of Catholic access to American power cannot be silence about men who have spent their lives insisting that Catholics are not real Christians.

In an era when bishops are being asked to perform alongside the people most hostile to their Church, we remain rooted in a faith that does not negotiate its own legitimacy for proximity to a podium.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Shrinking, Aging GOP, William Kristol, right, May 19, 2026. In the great 1939 movie Ninotchka, Greta Garbo plays Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a stern and committed (if young and beautiful!) Soviet apparatchik sent abroad on a sensitive state mission. At one point, the rather disturbing question of Stalin’s show trials and executions comes up. The loyal Ninotchka is unfazed. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians,” she explains.

Donald Trump’s Republican party, like Joseph Stalin’s Communist Party, has many loyalists committed to faithfully executing the bosses’ orders. They include high-ranking United States senators like majority leader John Thune, who is laboring this week to deliver votes for Trump’s ballroom. And they include primary voters like those in Louisiana who last weekend purged Bill Cassidy for the sin of crossing Trump five years ago. And tonight we’ll find out if Republicans in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District follow the lead of their counterparts in Louisiana, punishing Rep. Thomas Massie for incurring Trump’s displeasure, in this case by insisting on accountability for the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

It is, as Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday, Trump’s party. The new New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump with the approval of 37 percent of all Americans, with 59 percent disapproving. But 76 percent of Republicans and Republican learners continue to approve of their leader, with only 19 percent breaking ranks. What’s more, a majority of Republican voters still want their next presidential candidate to follow Trump’s lead rather than move in a new direction.

But the younger you are, the less likely you are to be a true believer. Just 61 percent of Republican voters under 45 approve of Trump, while 33 percent disapprove. By contrast, among those 45 and up, 83 percent approve and just 13 percent disapprove. Only a third of younger Republicans want the next nominee to follow Trump’s lead, by contrast with two-thirds of their parents and grandparents. And polling for today’s primary in Kentucky shows a massive generation gap, with older voters in overwhelming support of Trump’s choice, and younger voters willing to buck Trump’s orders.

So it is Trump’s party. But Trump’s party does seem to be an aging one and a shrinking one.

Which brings us back to Ninotchka. As the stern young Communist is exposed in Paris to the charms of the West (and of the debonair Count Léon d’Algout), she loses her faith. She discovers life beyond Stalinism, falls in love with the Count, and after various entertaining plot twists, she ends up living happily with the Count, having fled Stalin’s Russia.

Real life, sadly, does not always follow the path of romantic comedy. But sometimes it does. And there do seem to be a fair number of young Republican Ninotchkas ready to defect from Trumpism. If only Democrats could learn to be as charming and seductive as Count Léon d’Algout!

We’ve begun a campaign to pass HR 2913 - The Ukraine Support Act - through the House and then work to get something similar through the Senate. Learn more here, and please call your House Rep every day until it passes. This one really matters people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Europe Is a Platform, Not a Burden… The Trump administration is hurting American alliances and trust because they can’t understand why our forces in Europe matter, observes MARK HERTLING.
• Tulsi Gabbard’s Office Shouldn’t Exist… And her tenure in it proves exactly why, argues JOHN SIPHER.
• Ivanka Trump Doesn’t Understand Her Favorite Philosophy… Author Ryan Holiday slammed Trump’s daughter for reducing Stoicism to a bauble, showing along the way how nonpolitical influencers can find their anti-authoritarian voice, writes MATT JOHNSON.
• ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Review… Star Wars is back on the big screen with a small-screen adventure; SONNY BUNCH reviews.
• Voters Are Realizing Trump Doesn’t Care About Them… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on the flagship podto talk about recent polls exposing the late realization by some voters that Trump is only out for himself.

Quick Hits

MAKE AMERICA PFAS AGAIN: As early as October 2024, Donald Trump was already reassuring his base—and more to the point, his industrialist supporters—that there were limits to how far he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” project go. “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines,” Trump said that month at his Madison Square Garden rally. “The only thing I don’t think I’m going to let him even get near is the liquid gold that we have under our feet.”

Trump would end up carving out a lot more exceptions than that. Even as Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has campaigned loudly against the number of harmful chemicals modern Americans eat, drink, and breathe, other parts of the government keep quietly working to roll back controls on some of those very same chemicals. Earlier this year, the administration took a series of actions intended to protect U.S. production of the weedkiller glyphosate—aka Roundup. And this week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to roll back Biden-era limits on four types of “forever chemicals” in drinking water. WaPo has more:

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the EPA signaled its plans to rescind the 2024 protections against per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS. More than a year later, the agency has issued its formal proposal. . . .

Zeldin said the administration of President Joe Biden had rushed those regulations before the end of his term and not followed procedure, leaving them open to being struck down in court.

If finalized, the EPA’s proposal would end the Biden-era drinking water limits for four toxic PFAS compounds: GenX, PFHxS, PFNA and PFBS. The agency said in a statement that it would evaluate those PFAS and issue new regulations, while stating it “cannot predetermine the outcome” of that process.

That’s our Frankenstein federal government for you: Depending which cabinet secretary you ask, fluoride should stay out of our drinking water, while PFAS can stay in. Read the whole thing.

FUN WITH BALLOTS: How might Donald Trump try to meddle in this year’s midterm elections? There are all sorts of catastrophic interventions he might try. But it’s safe to say that, at a minimum, he’ll take any election-administration mistakes states might make—no matter how innocuous or how minor—and flog them mercilessly to convince his base there’s more Democratic election-stealing underway.

We got a small taste of that yesterday, after Trump got wind of an administrative error in Maryland last week that resulted in a vendor mailing some voters the wrong party’s primary ballots.

The error was more of a headache for administrators than anything else, requiring them to mail out an additional batch of mail-in ballots. “While it is possible only a small number of voters received the wrong ballot,” the state Board of Elections said in a statement, “and most voters received the correct ballot, all voters must be issued a replacement ballot.” Nobody has put forward any theory for how this mixup—which temporarily put a batch of Democratic ballots in the hands of registered Republicans who can’t use them¹ and vice versa—might have resulted in partisan advantage for either party. Nevertheless, the president saw fit to pop off on Truth Social with a lie-studded outburst promising a Justice Department investigation:

In Maryland, they sent out 500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots, and they got caught! . . . In addition, many of these Ballots went to Democrats, so any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance! This was done by the Corrupt Governor of the State, Wes Moore. He allowed this to happen in order to make sure that Democrats win.

“I’m sure this has gone on for years,” the president concluded. “I’m going to ask the Attorney General of the United States, and the DOJ, to bring an immediate investigation into this situation.” You know, like they do in healthy democracies. 

The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump Takes the Turn, Jonathan V. Last, May 19, 2026. The president and the Democrats are racing on different tracks.

There comes a point in every autocratic regime where popular legitimacy curdles. The regime, which began by insisting that it represented the will of the people, becomes so unpopular that it seeks to stay in place through the exertion of raw power.

This turn sets off a race. The opposition tries to build enough popular legitimacy to dislodge the autocrat through political means; the autocrat tries to leverage enough institutional power to retain control over the government even in the face of a disgruntled majority.

That’s where we are, right now. And I have a chart¹ that makes this clear as day:

Trump gets more unpopular but . . . Republican prospects in the House get better.

So let’s talk about what levers the regime is using: the courts, the media, intimidation, and incentives.

(1) The courts. This isn’t as simple as a single decision on redistricting. What we’ve seen is a wild asymmetry. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Texas can redistrict mid-cycle. The Supreme Court of Virginia rules that Virginia cannot.

The U.S. Supreme Court rushes out the Callais decision, allowing Southern states to eliminate black districts in time for this year’s election; then the justices refuse to even hear an appeal on the Virginia decision. And the Florida Supreme Court is almost certainly going to allow Gov. Ron DeSantis’s end run around redistricting to stand.

The overall effect is a three-tiered system:

An activist SCOTUS intent on conveying electoral advantage to Republicans.

Partisan red state courts that allow Republican majorities to do as they please.

Cautious blue state courts that are intent on following processes to (and even past) the letter of the law, even if it advantages Republicans.

There is no reason to believe that these dynamics will shift once the legal fights move from redistricting to voting processes, vote counting, election certifications, and the seating of House members.

(2) Media capture. Trump’s allies in corporate media continue to prostrate themselves. David Ellison’s Paramount has feted Trump both on air and off, and will soon add control of CNN to its CBS holding. X owner Elon Musk traveled with Trump to China.²

Controlling not just partisan media, like Fox, but mainstream media, like CBS News, allows the regime to position its own narrative. Witness the way CBS has dutifully tried to help Trump sell his wildly unpopular war in Iran: giving softball interviews not just to Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio, but even to Bibi Netanyahu.

Imagine how CBS would cover, say, lawsuits attempting to prevent the seating of “DEI” House members elected in majority-minority districts next January.

(3) Intimidation. The criminal indictment of James Comey. The absurd lawsuit against the Atlantic. The investigation of Jerome Powell. The smearing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The investigation of Renée Good’s partner. The attempt to demote Mark Kelly. Threatening of the state of Colorado over the imprisonment of Tina Peters.

The regime’s goal is not to succeed with any of these vendettas, but to serve notice that any form of resistance may incur financial, professional, and reputational costs. With the understanding that while some people—like Comey—may dig in, resist, and win, the marginal citizen will likely feel pressure to keep quiet.

For every Jim Comey in the world there is at least one Tim Cook.

(4) Incentives. Trump has shown his allies and foot soldiers that he will protect and enrich them. His mass pardon of January 6th criminals demonstrated that people who break the law on his behalf will be protected from accountability—as did his campaign against the state of Colorado on behalf of Tina Peters.

The $1.8 billion taxpayer fund he created this week to funnel public money directly (an unaccountably) to supporters is another promise: If his people break laws for him, there may be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Trump’s slush fund could be used for many things. He could enrich his family and friends. He could reward apparatchiks for prior loyalty.

Or he could use it to pay individuals for services rendered.

For instance: In 2020, Trump called the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and asked them not to certify their election results. In 2026, such a call could include an offer for payment from the Trump fund.

The fact that Trump is making all of these moves openly is an admission that he no longer regards popularity as achievable. He is willing to sacrifice public approval for stronger controls over the levers of institutional power.

His gamble is that in an illiberal democracy, a corrupt regime can retain power from the minority position, so long as the opposing majority is not too big.

So that’s the race. Can Trump gain enough leverage over the system before the opposition builds a big enough movement to dislodge him?

 

New York Times, Justices Hint at Strains as Supreme Court Comes Under Scrutiny, Ann E. Marimow and Aishvarya Kavi,.May 19, 2026 (print ed.). Traveling across the country, justices defend the role of the court even as strained relations among its members emerge in writing and remarks.

In Pennsylvania earlier this month, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. insisted the public is misguided to think of Supreme Court justices as political actors.

In Florida last week, Justice Clarence Thomas, who has served since 1991, waxed poetic about his deep friendships with justices from an earlier era, saying there is nothing “negative” about his relations with the newer crop of colleagues while acknowledging the court is now “different.”

And in Washington on Monday night, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the court for disrupting its normal practices through quick-turn, often unexplained emergency orders and warned that the public loses confidence in the court when its decisions appear political.

As the justices have traveled the country this month for public appearances, a traditional part of the court’s schedule after finishing oral arguments for the term, they have seemed intensely aware of a public debate about their relationships with each other and the court’s own legitimacy.

“It is so important for the public to perceive us as neutral, nonpartisan,” because “public confidence is really all the judiciary has. That’s our currency,” Justice Jackson said during a wide-ranging conversation with a federal judge from South Carolina at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting in Washington.

“It’s incumbent upon us to do things, to act in ways that shore up public confidence.”

Justice Jackson’s comments hint at what appear to be frayed relations among some of the justices as the court prepares to issue its final rulings, many in deeply consequential cases, before the term ends in late June or early July.

The tensions come as the court is being pummeled with criticism from across the political spectrum. President Trump is still fuming on social media over the court’s decision to invalidate his sweeping tariffs and musing about the likelihood of a major ruling against his effort to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship.

The president has called out two of his own nominees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, for voting against his tariffs, saying they should have been “loyal to the person that appointed them.”

From the left, civil rights organizations and Democrats have decried the court’s significant weakening of the landmark Voting Rights Act last month. The decision has set off Republican-led redistricting efforts to break up majority-Black districts across the South and prompted sharp exchanges between some of the justices.Soon after the ruling, Chief Justice Roberts defended the court during a judicial conference in Hershey, Pa., and pushed back on what he said was a misunderstanding about its role.

“At a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions,” Chief Justice Roberts said. “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

Justice Barrett made a similar point during a book talk at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

“I think the casual reader about the Supreme Court or its decisions might have the impression we’re just kind of up there, politicians in robes. That’s not how the court functions, and I think if you listen to some oral arguments, you see what the court’s about,” she said.

The decision in the Louisiana matter was 6 to 3 and divided along ideological lines, as is frequently the case in the most controversial rulings.

In response, Justice Elena Kagan stoically read parts of her lengthy dissent aloud from the bench, a rare moment for the liberal justice known for seeking compromise, signaling her strong disagreement.

The decision, she said, provided the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson signed on to the dissent.

A follow-up ruling expediting the Louisiana decision in a way that allowed Republicans in the state to quickly redraw its maps ahead of the midterms, led to sharp accusations from Justice Jackson that the majority was playing politics.

More On Iran War

 

New York Times, Trump Threatens Iran and Then Pulls Back, All in the Same Day, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, May 19, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump has repeatedly said he’ll restart military action against Iran, only to stop short of plunging the United States directly back into an unpopular war.

A bomb being loaded onto a U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber at an air base in the United Kingdom.A U.S. military official said that Iran had been able to study the flight patterns of American fighter jets and bombers.Credit...Jack Taylor/ReutersTyler PagerEric Schmitt

President Trump said Monday that he had authorized a new wave of attacks against Iran this week but that he was holding off to make room for “serious negotiations,” after he said three Gulf leaders requested more time to work out a nuclear deal.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch new strikes, only to pull back at the last minute from plunging the United States back into an unpopular, expensive war. On Monday, he confirmed plans to strike and canceled them at the same time.

“We were getting ready to do a very major attack tomorrow, and I put it off for a little while, hopefully maybe forever, but possibly for a little while, because we’ve had very big discussions with Iran, and we’ll see what they amount to,” Mr. Trump told reporters.

When Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, he estimated that it would end in four to five weeks. The conflict is now in its third month, and Mr. Trump is caught between dueling impulses: to force Iran into submission, and to declare victory and move on.

The result has been wildly contradictory statements about the war — at one point Mr. Trump said the war was “over” but the United States still needed to finish the job — and bombastic threats like the one he issued in April, when he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” (He backed down before his self-imposed deadline.)

U.S. military officials say that the Iranian regime has demonstrated enormous resilience and the ability to inflict significant damage to the region and on the global economy. And so far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched.

Still, the military campaign has hit Iran hard: the Pentagon estimates it has destroyed some 13,000 targets, eviscerated the country’s Navy and killed high-level military and intelligence leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years.

New York Times, Senate Votes to Take Up Measure to Force Trump to End Iran War, Megan Mineiro, May 19, 2026. With four Republican backers, Democrats won a vote to advance a resolution that would force the president to end hostilities or win authorization from Congress.

The Senate on Tuesday agreed to take up a measure that would force President Trump to end the war in Iran or win authorization from Congress to continue it, after a handful of Republicans joined Democrats in pushing forward with a resolution the G.O.P. has managed to block for months.

Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who lost his primary over the weekend after Mr. Trump targeted him for defeat, was the latest member of his party to switch his vote and side with Democrats in an effort to limit the president’s war powers. That, combined with the absences of several other Republicans, was enough to push the resolution forward.

The vote was 50 to 47 to advance the resolution, allowing it to be debated and receive a vote in the coming weeks. It was the eighth attempt by Democrats and a single Republican to rein in Mr. Trump’s war powers since he began the military campaign, now in its third month, which a majority of Americans say he should never have launched.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was again the only Democrat to vote with Republicans to beat back the measure, while Mr. Cassidy was one of four Republicans who sided with Democrats to push it forward. Mr. Cassidy said after the vote that the Trump administration had “left Congress in the dark on Operation Epic Fury,” referring to the administration’s name for the operation.

“In Louisiana, I’ve heard from people, including President Trump’s supporters, who are concerned about this war,” he added in a statement. “Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”

The sliver of G.O.P. skepticism to the president’s handling of the Iran conflict widened last week, fueled in part by Mr. Trump ignoring a statutory deadline to seek permission from Congress to carry on combat operations past 60 days. In both the House and Senate, efforts to advance a war powers resolution were narrowly defeated.ImageSenator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, voted with Democrats on the measure. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

On Tuesday, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, both of whom rejected the administration’s claim that the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran has pushed off the 60-day deadline, joined Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who opposes foreign military intervention, in voting with Democrats to bring the measure to the Senate floor.

It was not immediately clear when the Senate could vote on passage of the war powers resolution, which, even if approved by both chambers, would still be subject to an all-but-certain veto.

With three G.O.P. senators absent — Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas — the majority was unable to beat back the resolution as they have seven times since the war began. Still, Mr. Cassidy’s defection was the latest sign of growing Republican resistance to Mr. Trump’s handling of the conflict and to his refusal to engage with Congress on it.

“The momentum is moving our way slowly,” said Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democrat leading the weekslong effort to pressure Republicans into voting to end the war.Image

Politico, EU finance ministers tell US to end Middle East war, Gregorio Sorgi and Giorgio Leali, May 19, 2026. Top officials used the G7 gathering in Paris to warn Scott Bessent of the economic consequences of the war in Iran.

 Top European finance ministers privately pleaded with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to end his country’s war in the Middle East to prevent the conflict from dragging the continent deeper into economic calamity.

During the G7 gathering of finance ministers in Paris Monday and Tuesday, Bessent was told the conflict with Iran is fueling a surge in oil prices in the European Union, hitting economic growth and threatening a full-blown food crisis.

Germany, France, Italy and the European Commission joined forces to deliver the message during a closed-door discussion on the economic consequences of war in the Middle East, according to three officials briefed on the talks who were granted anonymity to speak freely.

“It’s not only the Europeans who think that. We all think that it must end as soon as possible,” French Finance Minister Roland Lescure, who chaired the meeting, told reporters during a press conference after discussions concluded Tuesday.

“We all know that the sooner we reopen the Hormuz Strait, the sooner the economic aspect of this geopolitical conflict will be resolved, the better off we will all be,” he added.

But the U.S. laid blame for Europe’s economic predicament on national governments.

“It’s [a] tired old tactic to try and blame their government’s abysmal approval ratings on external forces, rather than looking inward. They made themselves irrelevant,” a U.S. official told POLITICO, responding specifically to criticism from Germany.

Finance ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States took part in the two-day discussions focused on trade imbalances, combating financial crime and regulating new artificial intelligence models such as Mythos.

Ministers also discussed the financial fallout of the Middle East conflict, which has triggered a surge in energy and fuel prices and an economic slowdown across Europe. The European Commission is expected to downgrade EU growth estimates on Thursday — a stark contrast to the U.S., which is less vulnerable to higher energy prices.

In-Depth Scrutiny of Trump 'Justice'

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Alleged Polish Criminal Trump Harbors While Deporting Grannies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 19, 2026. For over a year, Donald Trump has spent enormous resources deporting grannies and day laborers who have contributed to the US for decades, claiming they pose a national security threat. Which makes it all the more notable that Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau cited national security when choosing to grant a journalist visa to fugitive former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau instructed senior State Department officials to facilitate and approve a visa for a fugitive former Polish cabinet minister, allowing him ​to flee to the United States from Hungary, three people familiar with the matter said.

Poland is seeking to prosecute former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, the architect of changes to the Polish judicial system that ‌the EU has said undermined the rule of law during the 2015-2023 rule of the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS).

[snip]

While the Trump administration has made it a priority to support ​conservative views in Europe, granting a visa to a politician facing criminal charges by a U.S.-allied government is highly unusual.

Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orban granted Ziobro asylum in January. Warsaw ⁠had hoped that Orban’s defeat by pro-EU rival Peter Magyar in an April election would see Ziobro returned to Poland. Magyar had said that he would extradite him to Poland on his first day in office.

Instead, Landau directed senior officials from ​the State Department’s Consular Affairs Bureau in Washington to instruct the U.S. embassy in Budapest to issue a visa for Ziobro, said three sources, one of whom said it was a journalist visa.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss non-public details ​about the case.

As a result of Landau’s intervention, the former justice minister was able to secure his visa ahead of Magyar’s May 9 swearing-in.

[snip]

In directing the senior officials in the Consular Affairs Bureau to issue the ​visa, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat justified the urgency by presenting the matter as “a national security issue,” one source added. Reuters could not determine the rationale for labeling it a national security matter.[my emphasis]

It may be that Laundau cited national security because the US (or Israel) has some unique sensitivity to what Ziobro did with the Pegasus spyware he used against political opponents. It may be that Landau knows a contempt for rule of law is a foundational Trump value.

But I find it telling that Ziobro got set up on his journalist visa so he could broadcast back into Poland immediately after he arrived in the US.

Ziobro, left, began working as a TV commentator for Polish broadcaster TV Republika, the network announced on May 10.

“I’m in the United States … It’s an incredibly complex, beautiful country, the world’s strongest democracy,” Ziobro said in a May ​10 appearance on TV Republika.

And while this story came out mid-afternoon US time, just as Trump’s own unprecedented abuse of a justice fund was breaking news, the timing of the intervention is more notable.

As Reuters notes, Ziobro got sanctuary in the US — he had a visa in hand by May 9 — before the US made a last minute decision to withhold 4,000 troops from Poland on May 14.

The Pentagon has abruptly withdrawn thousands of soldiers from a planned deployment to Poland, officials said Thursday, part of a larger troop reduction that comes as President Donald Trump has expressed anger over Europe’s refusal to aid in the war with Iran.

Soldiers and equipment from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, had already arrived in Poland to start a planned nine-month deployment on a mission to deter Russian aggression in Europe, U.S. defense officials said, prompting a scramble to halt soldiers departing from Fort Hood in Texas and arrange the return of hundreds of personnel who reached Poland.

Long scheduled deployments are rarely canceled and fewer still after they begin. Some U.S. military leaders in Europe were caught off guard with the decision after learning about it through a Defense Department memo distributed earlier this week, two U.S. defense officials said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decisions and military movements.

About 4,000 soldiers plus heavy vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were expected to be deployed for exercises in the region, serving as training and a message to Moscow.

So in the wake of defeat by Russia’s puppet Viktor Orbán, Trump has picked up where Orbán left off, shielding Ziobro, who wants Poland to follow Orbán’s model, even granting him a perch from which to disrupt Poland from afar.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Darin Smith’s Misconduct Endangered a Murder Prosecution; 46 Republicans Confirmed Him Anyway, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 19, 2026. Last Friday, three judges in Wyoming, including Chief Judge Kelly Rankin, dismissed felony cases against nine people because of misconduct from then Acting US Attorney Darin Smith. Those nine were:

26-cr-28: Michael Scott Harper, accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm 26-cr-30: Cheyenne Swett, accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm 26-cr-31: Richard Allen, accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm and an unregistered firearm 26-cr-33: Brian Joseph Johnson, accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm 26-cr-34: Dennison Jay Antelope, accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm 26-cr-35: Matthew Christopher Jacoby, accused of methamphetamine possession with intent to distribute 26-cr-36: Matthew Miller, accused of meth and cocaine possession with intent to distribute 26-cr-38: Wolf Elkins Duran, accused of possession of CSAM, subsequent violation 26-cr-39: Jose Benito Ocon, accused of murder

The judges dismissed these indictments, without prejudice, because someone who was called for grand jury duty informed defense attorneys that Smith addressed the entire panel of prospective jurors and described, among other things, that all the defendants were murderers, not just Ocon, who would be accused of murder.

Witness 1 further relayed that in explaining the process, Smith stated the following. He stated the proceedings are different than a normal jury trial. He stated the defendants were not going to be run of the mill criminals seen in state court. He stated the grand jurors were going to hear cases where the defendants were bad people. He described the defendants as “bad guys” who “did what you are going to hear about.” He stated the defendants were “murderers” and that the deliberations “won’t take long” to determine they committed the alleged crimes based on the evidence provided to the grand jury. He stated the last grand jury was able to come back in 3 minutes based on the evidence provided to them.

The US Attorney’s Office conducted an investigation and discovered further improper comments from Smith:

During a break, an AUSA saw USA Smith handing out business cards and invited the grand jury members to reach out to him. USA Smith reports no grand jurors have reached out to him. After a presentation and a vote, but before going on the record for the next case, the foreperson asked something to the effect of “are you going to give us a hard case?” At that point, USA Smith stood up and said something to the effect of, “like I told you guys before, we’re only giving you ‘slam dunks[.]'” The AUSA who witnessed this corrected that statement by telling the grand jury there would be hard cases and then left the room. USA Smith asked for the list of grand jurors. However, he reports that he has not done anything with it.

Smith also told the new grand jury that “the last grand jury was able to come back in three minutes.” While the investigation did not produce evidence of how long the grand jury deliberated, “minimal questions were asked, and the presentation of evidence was relatively brief. In at least two cases, no factual questions were asked at all.”

In dismissing these cases, the judges described that the dismissals would not be prejudicial to the government because, “It may now take the case to new grand jury and start with a clean slate.” The judges, at least, expect these men may all be charged again. But the defendants are asking the judges to reconsider dismissing the cases without prejudice, partly as a way to ensure Smith is punished for his misconduct.

All this was predictable. Smith is a homophobe ideologue with no experience as a prosecutor.

Democrats have condemned Smith, saying he lacks the experience necessary for the job and threatens to impose a discriminatory approach to federal law enforcement in the state where gay college student Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder galvanized the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

“Darin Smith is an unqualified insurrectionist with no experience in federal or criminal litigation. Not only does his lack of a resume disqualify him, there are serious doubts about his ability to fairly uphold the rule of law for all Americans,” said Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee.

[snip]

In written questions submitted to lawmakers on the Senate judiciary committee, Smith, who was admitted to the Wyoming bar in 2000, acknowledged that prior to taking the job of US attorney, he had never before appeared in court as part of a criminal or civil proceeding, questioned a witness before a grand jury or applied for a warrant.

Responding to a question that asked him to describe the “10 most significant litigated matters which you personally handled”, Smith replied: “My legal practice has emphasized counseling, planning, and transactional work aimed at avoiding litigation. As a result, I have not personally handled 10 significant litigated matters that proceeded to verdict, judgment, or final decision.”

Between 2018 and when he began as interim US attorney, Smith listed on his questionnaire that he held positions at the Family Research Council, a Washington DC-based group that advocates for conservative Christian policies.

He’s also a Jan6er.

Smith told US senators he was on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, but said he did not enter the building. He maintains that the election in which Trump lost his bid for a second consecutive term was affected by “imperfections”, and believes that the attack on the Capitol was set up by unnamed actors.

“From my vantage point, I thought it was apparent that certain individuals acted as agitators, intentionally misleading others and escalating tensions, which created conditions resembling entrapment,” he said in a questionnaire.

Asked whether he agreed with Trump’s pardons of rioters convicted of attacking police officers, Smith said: “I believe that our constitution gives every president the power to pardon any individual for offenses against the United States.”

Smith’s shenanigans have set off an exodus of real attorneys, just like the ones we’ve seen in other US Attorneys office (and I assume the AUSAs who testified against him will depart if they have not already).

Five attorneys have left or are leaving the office since Smith began working as interim U.S. Attorney last August, the office spokeswoman Lori Hogan confirmed Monday following a Cowboy State Daily email inquiry.

U.S. attorney Nicole Romine, assistant U.S. attorney Jasmine Peters, criminal assistant U.S. attorney Ariel Calmes, criminal assistant U.S. attorney Paige Hammer have left the office within the past month.

Jeremy Gross, a civil assistant U.S. attorney, is expected to leave in June, Hogan noted.

And both the tribal authorities at Wind River Reservation (at least one of these defendants, Ocon, whose alleged murder sounds like a meth and booze spree gone badly awry, is an enrolled member) strongly opposed Smith after his misconduct became public.

Nevertheless, 46 Republicans still voted to confirm Smith in a larger package of Trump nominees last night.

Thom Tillis, who had earlier said Wyoming could have this guy if they wanted him, was among 11 Senators — 4 of them Democrats — who did not vote.

“If you want somebody like that presiding over cases solely in that state, knock yourself out,” [Tillis] said. “They want ’em, they can have ’em.”

The Senate had one job here: to ensure that the people of Wyoming get a top Federal prosecutor who’ll maintain rule of law in the state. Instead, Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso have saddled their constituents with a menace to the work of law enforcement.

And Smith’s antics and confirmation will further degrade any presumption of reality owed to this DOJ.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Ellis Boyle’s Threat Prosecution Hobby, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 18, 2026. The Trump groupie auditioning to be confirmed in his current role of US Attorney for Eastern District of North Carolina, Ellis Boyle, has announced that he charged another person for threats, Christopher James Hill. Hill is the fourth person Boyle charged with threats against Trump or an aide

Richard David Warren: Threats (apparently against Tom Homan and Todd Lyons) on June 2, 2025, indicted by Lori Warlick on April 21, 2026, arrested May 7, announced May 8. Jim Comey: Threats alleged on May 15, 2025, indicted by Matthew Petracca on April 28, 2026, announced same day in big presser. Daniel R. Swain: Threats alleged in complaint obtained by Secret Service affiant on April 30, announced May 4, 2026. Christopher James Hill: Threats alleged from October 3-13, 2025, indicted by Kevin Gerarde on April 23, 2026, arrested May 5, announced May 18, 2026.

Now, I’m not saying that Boyle is sucking up to Donald Trump by charging all these threats (though it appears he charges very little that doesn’t fit Trump’s priorities, and every single foreigner has been labeled as such in his announcements). There are genuinely a lot of threats out there.

But I do find the flood of recent threat cases to be of some interest, given that they should resemble each other.

For example, in no other case did Boyle, left, announce the charges right away, much less with the Acting Attorney General — not even Daniel Swain who was arrested as an imminent threat based on the delusional threats he had written on his car windows. Hill was arrested weeks ago, but they just announced his indictment today, upon his pretrial release.

With Hill — the guy indicted on roughly the same schedule as Comey — they didn’t describe the alleged threat. (His release conditions order mental health treatment and prohibit social media use.) With Warren, who made threats on the same day against two DC officials — probably Tom Homan and Todd Lyons — they barely describe the threats.

Comey is the only one for whom there is a forfeiture allegation (though my guess is that he’s far more affluent than the other defendants).

They were all charged by different people, though that may partly be a factor of division: Swain and Hill were charged in the Southern Division, whereas Comey was charged in the Eastern Division. Warren was charged in Eastern Division too, but he hasn’t been indicted yet; AUSA Logan Liles is prosecuting him.

Aside from the glitzy press conference, all of those differences can be readily explained.

But one thing cannot, in my opinion.

Hill was charged with 18 USC 875(c). But the language about the threat described it as a “threat to kill and injure the person of another.”

Swain was charged with 18 USC 871(a), which USSS described as a threat against the President of the United States.

Three of the charges against Warren are threats to intimidate, but the two that aren’t — 18 USC 876(c) — called those threats (to kill both) a threat.

With Comey, notably, the AUSA flown in from NJ described his 86 47 threat, for which he was charged with both 18 USC 871(a) and 18 USC 875(c), in more detail than the others, and described that, “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the social media post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm.”

It’s not even described as the same crime.

Jim Comey’s indictment looks flimsy in isolation. It also looks like overkill, especially when compared to what else Ellis Boyle was approving in the very same weeks.

Update: Boyle was among the slew of people — including the potentially even more disqualified Darin Smith whose misconduct got nine felony indictments dismissed last week — confirmed in a mass vote today.

Slate, Executive Disfunction, Legal Analysis: 1 of 14,17118 May Slate.com - SCOTUS and mifepristoneInboxCynthia Caples 8:49 AM (7 minutes ago) to Dianne, Hardisons, Sara, Martha, Alexandra, mwolf, me, Ira, Ronald, Karima, Hill, sadiachodhuryIs the Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Actually a Feint?By Reva Siegel and Mary ZieglerMay 18, 2026 4:50 PM----Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.

Last week the Supreme Court temporarily ended the latest crisis around mifepristone, a drug used in most abortions nationwide, but one thing remains clear: Some conservative judges are tempted to reenter the fray on reproductive rights, despite Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s promise that in overturning Roe, the court was getting out of the abortion business.

The case involved a challenge brought by Louisiana to a 2023 Food and Drug Administration decision allowing telehealth access to the drug. Louisiana contended that the FDA had inadequately reviewed safety risks in removing the in-person dispensing requirement, and the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, blocking telehealth access nationwide as the litigation continued. At the request of mifepristone’s manufacturers, Danco and GenBioPro, the Supreme Court agreed to stay the 5th Circuit’s order until it issues a final decision in the case.

But don’t be fooled into believing that the threat to mifepristone is over. The anti-abortion movement is still working through the courts and through the Trump administration to impose national limits on mifepristone that voters would never endorse. As importantly, the Louisiana case provides clear evidence that a campaign that presents itself as pro-woman is actually just pro-punishment.

There are now several cases attacking mifepristone in the lower courts, some of them more ambitious than Louisiana’s. The attorneys general of Texas, Florida, Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas are all challenging FDA regulation of mifepristone. Individual lawsuits brought by anti-abortion attorneys insist—as did Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent from Friday’s stay of the 5th Circuit ruling—that the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law, makes it a crime to mail abortion pills.

The anti-abortion movement is pressuring the FDA to change regulation of medication abortion. Abortion foes feel optimistic now that Marty Makary, the former FDA commissioner, is out. Kyle Diamantas, a lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. who is now serving as the interim leader of the FDA, immediately reached out to anti-abortion groups and seemingly reassured them that there would be movement on efforts to restrict mifepristone.

And the Louisiana case will inevitably return to the justices next year. Given the lack of explanation in the court’s order, we can’t be sure how the justices voted or what their reasoning was. The state’s case for standing—a perennial problem for abortion opponents in recent cases—is weak. But the dissenting opinions from Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito make clear the court was debating other issues as well.

Alito charged that FDA telehealth regulations and state laws shielding doctors who advise patients across state lines amounted to “the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs”—a claim that might equate Dobbs with criminalization. Alito would have allowed the 5th Circuit to suspend the telehealth FDA decision to “spur … the FDA into moving on its safety review,” but at least for now, he couldn’t persuade other justices to join him. Because of a major anti-abortion push, the agency is presently engaged in a politicized review of mifepristone’s safety, including telehealth access to the medication. Issues of drug safety are usually resolved by the FDA, not the courts.

If the FDA does not reimpose the in-person dispensation requirement, the Supreme Court might yet intervene. Given Donald Trump’s dismal poll numbers, some justices might be reticent to be seen as creating a new national abortion restriction—with special bite in Trump-voting states—months before the midterm. But by the year’s end—when those midterms are over—they may be willing to intervene if the FDA hasn’t already acted.

The strategy of abortion opponents in the Louisiana case is shaped by the need to reckon with an American public that overwhelmingly supports abortion access. The Trump administration could propose legislation and policies banning access nationwide, but the president has recognized the political risk and so far refused.

In the Louisiana case, even the anti-abortion movement has adapted its messaging to take account of public opinion. Instead of talking about protecting unborn life, the movement talks about protecting women’s health: It claims telehealth and mifepristone are unsafe for women, just as it used to argue that clinic procedures were unsafe for women—an abortion-hurts-women strategy the movement adopted long ago when it realized that the public rejected campaigns that attacked women and doctors.

But the Louisiana case shows that this talk about protecting women’s health is double-talk—movement code for protecting unborn life. In making the case for standing, Louisiana expressed its interest as enforcing state law punishing “the termination of the life of an unborn human being.” Both of the justices dissenting in the Louisiana case similarly fixated on the criminal law, with Thomas embracing the recently concocted claims of the anti-abortion movement that the Comstock Act is a categorical ban on mailing abortion-related materials—a claim that we have shown is flat wrong as a matter of text, doctrine, and history. Neither Thomas nor Alito expressed an ounce of concern about women’s health—nominally the question at issue in the FDA case.

It may not be surprising to know that Louisiana’s real priority is fetal rights, not women’s health. The problem is that abortion opponents today too often equate protection of fetal rights with intensifying criminal penalties for abortion providers and even people who have abortions—and devote few resources to the health of women and the children they bear.

In the wake of Dobbs, the so-called abortion-abolitionist position—which requires the punishment of women for abortion—is gaining support in the anti-abortion movement. The states that most harshly punish abortion—and seem most open to abolitionist bills—often invest the least in healthcare. Louisiana’s legislative priorities are emblematic. The state is one of two that has voted bills punishing women for abortion out of committee. Louisiana, which has serious gaps in access to maternity care, had the highest rate of maternal mortality in the nation last year.

Mifepristone access will remain under fire for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling may not have told us much about what a majority of the justices were thinking, but it did help expose what the case was really about: the state’s interest in punishment.

Epstein-Trump Files, Coverup

The Pugilist, Investigative Comment and Opinion: Jeffrey Epstein Was CIA. The Communications Network at Zorro Ranch Proves It, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, right, May 19, 2026. The DOJ's own files show Epstein built a military-grade encrypted link to satellite orbit at Zorro Ranch (shown above). The contractor who built it now holds a Pentagon missile defense contract.

The buildings at the main house of San Rafael Ranch, formerly Zorro Ranch. The circled area shows the 9-foot transmission tower, which is still under an active FCC licenses despite new ownership at the ranch. The building on which this tower is located is the same “HVAC” building that is equipped with a sally port, the type of double interlocking entrance you only see in prisons. It is also the only building at the ranch that has bars on all the windows, and those windows are evenly spaced.

In March 2016, a Stanley, New Mexico rancher named William sat down and wrote a straightforward technical memo. He had been asked by Brice Gordon, ranch manager at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, to evaluate options for a new internet connection at the property. William knew the area, knew the terrain, and knew exactly what was available.

He laid out three options.

Plan A was ideal: tap into the Singleton Ranch’s existing fiber feed site, just a short distance away with gigabit fiber available and a clear radio shot. The Singleton negotiation was already underway. William had been in contact with Vito, the Singleton manager, who had briefed the family. CenturyLink contacts had confirmed gigabit availability in the Galisteo area. This was a clean, fast, affordable solution — estimated between $75,000 and $150,000 to build, with monthly service costs that were entirely manageable.

Plan B was a solid fallback: find any nearby property with CenturyLink gigabit fiber access, lease it, and build a short microwave hop. William had done exactly this on his own ranch. He called it the best alternative.

Plan C was Sandia Crest — the 10,620-foot peak visible from Albuquerque, 27 miles away. William was direct about it. “Difficulty of access, expense, and such a large distance makes it less than ideal for a point to point radio shot,” he wrote. It would require “incredibly expensive industrial/military grade equipment.” Signal throughput would be no better than 30%.

Within 48 hours of receiving William’s report, Jeffrey Epstein had made his choice.

He chose Plan C.

The documents recording that choice — and everything that followed — are sitting in the DOJ’s publicly available Epstein file archive. They have been there since the files were released. Almost no one has read them. What they reveal is not merely a connectivity decision. It is the operational signature of an intelligence asset building covert communications infrastructure, surrounded by the men who built him, protected by the institutions that owned him, and connected — literally, through a satellite uplink with direct-to-orbit authorization — to wherever his handlers needed the data to go.

“We Don’t Need 1g”

The email thread begins on March 22, 2016, when Brice Gordon forwarded William’s report to Epstein at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., copying Richard Kahn of HBRK Associates at 575 Lexington Avenue in New York. Kahn was not a ranch facilities manager. He was Epstein’s New York-based project coordinator, and his involvement in a rural New Mexico internet installation tells you everything about what this project actually was.

Epstein’s response arrived the following morning in two messages. At 7:04 AM: “we do not need a gigabit k itsl sllly.” The garbled characters are typos — he meant “it’s silly.” At 7:56 AM, a second message: “we shoot dragon wave further, makes little sense.”

DragonWave is not consumer equipment. It is carrier-grade, military-specification microwave backhaul hardware used by telecom operators and government networks. Its defining property is hardware-level AES encryption built into the radio layer — below the IP stack, invisible to standard network monitoring — combined with hardware-bound authentication that makes interception effectively impossible. Epstein was not asking about DragonWave because he had looked it up. He was referencing existing DragonWave infrastructure he already had — at Little St. James, his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was asking why the same architecture couldn’t simply be extended to New Mexico. And he was doing it at the moment he was moving his entire center of operations from the island to the ranch, coincident with the Southern District of New York and the Miami Herald both digging into his child sex trafficking operation. Epstein guesses, correctly, that New Mexico would never subject him to such scrutiny.

On March 25, Epstein told Gordon that if technical difficulties arose, they should bring in “the lsj guy” — Hector Cintron, who worked for Choice Communications in the U.S. Virgin Islands at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Cintron appears directly in the project correspondence that followed. The island infrastructure and the New Mexico infrastructure were being designed and managed as one unified system.

A man who wants high-speed internet for a vacation ranch does not call gigabit bandwidth silly. A man who wants a specific, narrow, encrypted channel for transmitting particular data to a particular destination does.

This was not, as some people have said in comments on the previous two Epstein-Zorro-Radio-Towers stories I’ve done, “rich guy internet.”

Epstein dismissed bandwidth twice because bandwidth was never the point.

Spying was.

The Company That Built It

The company selected to design and build the Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest system was Future Technologies Venture, LLC, headquartered in Suwanee, Georgia. As with the architects and the builders of the ranch’s main house, they are primarily military industrial contractors, and among their largest clients is the pentagon. As I said before when writing about the architect and builder, I will say again now about Future Technologies Venture, LLC: If Epstein were merely a rich eccentric creep raping kids on video for fun, he would not likely have run the operation through major proxies for the United States government.

The lead contact at Future Technologies Venture was Chris Cappiello, then Director of Business Development, now Chief Revenue Officer. Between April and May of 2016, Cappiello personally ran the link budget calculations, verified the Sandia Crest tower coordinates, designed the 11GHz HAAM system, and coordinated with Hector Cintron at Little St. James and with Richard Kahn throughout the buildout. His brother Peter Cappiello is CEO, based in the New York City metropolitan area.

The April 15, 2016 engineering calculation preserved in the DOJ archive is precise: Sandia Crest tower to ZDC Main tower, 26.8 miles, 99.997% reliability at 227 Mbps. ZDC Main tower to Main Residence, 2.17 miles, 99.999% reliability at 297 Mbps. Cappiello also flagged a direct option: Sandia Crest tower to Main Residence, bypassing the intermediate tower entirely, at 27.53 miles. Epstein chose the direct link.

Future Technologies’ connection to the Epstein operation predated Zorro Ranch. Between 2009 and 2010, the company had built DragonWave microwave backhaul infrastructure across the U.S. Virgin Islands for Choice Communications — Hector Cintron’s employer. When Zorro Ranch needed the same architecture, both Cintron and Future Technologies were the natural call. This was not a new vendor relationship. It was an existing network being extended.

The company describes itself as a specialist in “mission-critical connectivity infrastructure” for “extremely remote outdoor sites” and government environments. “Critical Connectivity. Built Right.” reads the banner on their LinkedIn page. In December 2025, Future Technologies announced it had been selected for the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD IDIQ contract — the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense program, a multiple-award vehicle with a $151 billion ceiling covering next-generation missile defense systems under the Golden Dome initiative. Chris Cappiello, the man who designed Epstein’s encrypted link to Sandia Crest, now oversees Future Technologies’ Federal sales segment.

The Signal Mirror

On May 21, 2016, Future Technologies conducted a physical site visit at Zorro Ranch. The findings were forwarded to Richard Kahn, who relayed them to Epstein on May 23.

Line of sight from Sandia Crest to the main house had been confirmed by flashing a signal mirror toward the peak. Conditions were too hazy for any other method.

The dish on the Sandia tower was to be placed at 72 feet. The main house dish was to be set at approximately 30 feet — requiring either a new pole or an extension of the existing one. The report flagged that at 30 feet, the pole “will extend past the apex of the mechanical building roof and will be visible from the back parking area.” This, the report stated, “will need to be brought to Jeffrey’s attention.”

Epstein was personally managing the visual concealment of a satellite dish installation at his New Mexico ranch. Future Technologies was instructed to contact Sierra Nevada Property Management directly to coordinate installation on the Sandia Crest tower — the tower controlled by Dennis Vanderhoof, whose FCC licenses THE PUGILIST has previously reported.

To Orbit

Those licenses matter because of what they authorized.

TeleBEEPER of New Mexico, Inc., headquartered at 4545 McLeod NE in Albuquerque, held satellite earth station license E940533 with direct-to-orbit uplink capability. In November 2011, TeleBEEPER filed with the FCC’s International Bureau — file number SES-STA-20111130-01406 — for Special Temporary Authority to extend that license pending permanent authority. The FCC granted the extension on December 6, 2011. The uplink capability was being actively maintained and renewed approximately four years before the Zorro Ranch buildout began.

The system build this creates is not a ranch internet connection. Data transmitted from the Zorro Ranch main house travels 27.53 miles by encrypted military-grade microwave to the Sandia Crest tower. From there it reaches Vanderhoof’s satellite earth station. From there it goes to orbit. From orbit it can reach anywhere on the planet, untraceable to Zorro Ranch.

William, the local rancher who wrote the original memo, described Sandia Crest as yielding “30% of the bandwidth thru.” That was precisely the point. Epstein was not moving large files. He was not streaming video. He was transmitting something specific, something narrow, something that required hardware-level encryption below the IP stack and a pathway to orbit. He called gigabit bandwidth silly because he didn’t need gigabit bandwidth. He needed something that couldn’t be found.

The Men Who Built Him

William, the Stanley rancher who wrote the technical memo, is Bill Patterson. His phone number — 505-832-6236 — appears in both the Patterson Ranch Airport FAA registry and the business listing for Komtek Communications, located at 3762 NM-41 in Stanley, New Mexico. Komtek Communications was incorporated in New Mexico in 1977, revived in 1993 — the year Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch — and permanently shuttered in 2001, when Epstein’s legal exposure began. Patterson Ranch Airport was permanently closed with the FAA in September 2008, the same year Epstein’s federal prosecution concluded. Survivors of Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring have reported being flown into a nearby neighboring ranch. Epstein’s Zorro Ranch had a runway, but it was grass. Patterson’s runway was paved, and flight records over the years show the most traffick coming and going from White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was detonated and where the United States military has continuously tested weapons ever since.

The name Komtek bears a striking resemblance to Commtouch, the Israeli email infrastructure company co-founded by Isabel Maxwell — daughter of Robert Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine — a company with documented ties to Israeli Unit 8200 intelligence alumni. Whether that naming parallel is coincidence, homage, or signal is a question this reporter cannot yet answer. What is not in question is that Bill Patterson, operator of a communications company whose corporate timeline mirrors Epstein’s New Mexico presence precisely, was the man who laid out the three options and watched Epstein choose the covert one. Also noteworthy, a small dirt road near Zorro Ranch is named Komradt.

The only things that show up today when you search for Zorro Ranch on Google Maps are these — “Young Place” on the San Cristobal Ranch, today owned by the heirs of OSS officer and Teledyne founder Henry Singleton; “Hidden Art,” a public art piece hidden in an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere by artist Robert Harkness, who died shortly after making it; “Patterson Ranch Airport” on William “Bill” Patterson’s Ranch; and his company, “Komtek Communications” — which means someone secretly geotagged them as a breadcrumb trail. (I had to add the Zorro Ranch location myself.)

The Singleton Ranch (San Cristobal Ranch) was Plan A. Henry Singleton, who died in 1999, founded Teledyne — one of the most significant defense electronics conglomerates in American history, whose subsidiaries included the largest producer of military reconnaissance drones, missile guidance systems, and classified NASA and Defense Department engineering programs. He built his ranching empire in the Galisteo Basin beginning in the 1970s. He and his son Will appears in Epstein’s black book. Epstein had the modem number for Singelton’s San Cristobal Ranch in the book, too. Singleton’s ranch manager Vito was in active negotiation to provide Epstein with access to the ideal communications relay point. Singleton served in the Office of Strategic Services — the OSS, predecessor to the CIA — in Europe in 1944 and 1945.

Donald Barr also served in the OSS, at headquarters in Washington, D.C., during the same final year of the war. After the war, Barr became headmaster of the Dalton School in New York. In 1973 — the same year he published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about oligarchs who traffic children on a distant planet — he hired a young Jeffrey Epstein, who had no college degree, to teach mathematics. Investigative reporter Kait Justice has reported that Barr likely identified and began cultivating Epstein for intelligence recruitment years earlier, possibly when Epstein was as young as ten years old. Donald Barr is the father of William Barr, who served as Attorney General of the United States during Epstein’s 2019 arrest, incarceration, and death in federal custody.

Two OSS veterans. One recruited Epstein as a child and installed him in elite institutions. The other owned the ranch next door and employed the man whose fiber site was Epstein’s first choice for his covert communications relay.

Neither connection has been seriously investigated by any official body.

I am guessing none ever will, because at the bottom of it is the entire reason the full Epstein files have never been released.

What This Is

The standard framing of Jeffrey Epstein as a Mossad asset is well-supported. Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, sold Israeli-backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories in 1985. His eldest daughter, Christine Maxwell, built the FBI’s post-9/11 counterterrorism data warehouse through her company Chiliad. Isabel Maxwell, Christine’s twin sister, co-founded Commtouch with Israeli Unit 8200 alumni. Ghislaine ran the human intelligence operation. The Israeli intelligence network around both Maxwell and Epstein is documented and substantial.

But the intelligence infrastructure supporting Epstein (and Maxwell) at Zorro Ranch points somewhere else, or somewhere additional. It points the United States military intelligence, plain and simple. The contractor who built his encrypted link to orbit is American, headquartered in Georgia, and now holds a Missile Defense Agency contract. The satellite uplink was authorized by an American FCC license. The project was managed out of a New York office. The man who recruited Epstein as a child served in the American OSS, and his own son was in charge of the federal justice department when Epstein died (or didn’t?) in its custody. The man whose ranch provided the ideal relay point was OSS, built American missile guidance systems and military drones. And just up the road, another former OSS guy, Karl Ingwer, sold his New Mexico ranch to the strangest duo of all time: Donald Rumsfeld and Dan Rather.

Intelligence operations of this type — long-running, multigenerational, protected across multiple administrations by the children of the men who built them — do not belong to one agency or one country. They belong to the network. The network has Israeli components and American components and private-sector components, all of them running simultaneously, all of them providing institutional protection to each other because exposure of any one thread risks unraveling the rest. And in its middle and later years, the same network had Soviet/Russian components.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a financier who stumbled into intelligence work. He was an asset identified in childhood by an OSS veteran, cultivated through elite institutional access, funded through the Mega Group (private capital in the United States in support of Israel), equipped with Israeli surveillance infrastructure, given American defense-contractor communications architecture, embedded between a CIA-lineage defense titan’s ranch on a ranch sold to him by the then sitting governor of New Mexico, and protected unto death by the son of the man who first found him.

The files were always public. The documents were always there. The story was always visible to anyone who looked.

But those who would cover up the most damning truth have been banking on Americans focusing only on the horrific stories of the abuse that happened under Epstein’s watch. They’ve counted on Americans blaming only two people, two individuals — Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — and leaving it at that. The powers that be have enacted a massive narrative control project, using their own assets and helpers in the media and government, to convince us all that there’s nothing to see here expect a couple of rich, depraved individuals and their handful of similar friends, who hurt kids and now must pay. They have kept the network and who it served completely out of the story. And for the most part, they’ve been successful.

Until now.

Please note: The FCC licenses for the industrial/military grade microwave radio network Epstein built are still active, and the system is still up and running under the ranch’s new ownership. The owners are Mary Catherine and Donald Huffines. Donald Huffines is currently running to be state comptroller of Texas. He is endorsed by Donald Trump. Mary Catherine and Donald Huffines secretly met with top Russian official in 2018, to help Rand Paul hand-deliver a letter to Vladimir Putin from Trump, and to negotiate for the release from US custody of Maria Butina, a Russian spy. If Donald Huffines wins the comptroller’s race, he will be in control of the 8th-largest economy in the world. Texas’ economy is larger than Russia’s. And just a few steps from the entrance to “San Rafael” Ranch (formerly Zorro Ranch) in New Mexico, “Komradt” road leads to the ranch still owned by the family of Bruce King, the governor who sold Zorro to Epstein

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Trump’s Push to Defeat Massie Is the Most Expensive House Primary in Recent Years, Theodore Schleifer and Matt Zdun, May 19, 2026. The Republican primary in Representative Thomas Massie’s district has drawn vast spending, but it is just one of several contests on Tuesday that will test the power of big money.

President Trump’s drive to exile one of his last remaining Republican critics in Congress has become the most expensive House primary contest in recent years, blitzing voters in northern Kentucky with pointed and sometimes ugly advertisements.

Nearly $33 million has been spent on ads and other media in the race between Representative Thomas Massie, an outspoken critic of the president on the Epstein files and the war with Iran, and his Trump-backed challenger, Ed Gallrein, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. That’s the highest total spent on a House primary race since the firm started keeping track in 2018.

U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a whistleblowing Republican from Kentucky, is competing in a Republican primary May 19 against Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein

The Kentucky race is just one of several primary contests on Tuesday that will test the power of big money. Here’s a look, with help from AdImpact data and federal and state financial filings:The must-watch House contest in Kentucky

Supporters of Mr. Trump, as well as pro-Israel groups that are unhappy with Mr. Massie over his opposition to the war with Iran, have spent heavily to defeat the congressman.

They and other advertisers have laid out nearly $19 million against Mr. Massie or in favor of Mr. Gallrein. Last summer, Mr. Trump’s aides even started a super PAC, MAGA KY, for the purpose of ousting Mr. Massie, drawing support from the Republican megadonor Paul Singer and a super PAC heavily funded by Miriam Adelson, another megadonor and supporter of Mr. Trump. Two pro-Israel groups, including one tied to the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent over $9 million against him.

But Mr. Massie has had his own financial backing, including from a mysterious new super PAC that has spent $6.5 million in the final six weeks of the race. That group, Kentucky 4th PAC, has not disclosed any donors.Sign up to get Theodore Schleifer's articles emailed to you. Theodore Schleifer is a political reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. Get it sent to your inbox.

The race is also notable because the two sides have hurled A.I.-generated deepfake ads at each other. In one pro-Massie ad by Kentucky 4th PAC, Mr. Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL, is depicted in an A.I. video leaving Mr. Trump on a battlefield.

In a pro-Gallrein ad by MAGA KY, an A.I.-produced Mr. Massie is depicted holding hands and later having a meal with Representatives Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Groups spent at least $1.7 million on deepfake ads that were collectively seen more than 49 million times, according to a New York Times analysis of AdImpact data as of Monday morning.The messy Republican primary for Senate in Georgia

The party’s primary race for Senate in Georgia is also important: Whichever Republican emerges will take on Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, in one of this year’s top contests.Editors’ PicksIn Italy, Princess Catherine Puts Her Wardrobe to Work36 Hours on the Amalfi Coast, ItalyCook Recipes From Restaurants on Our List of 100 Best in NYC

But so far on the financial front, it has been sleepier — in part because Mr. Trump has not endorsed a candidate in the race, and the top three Republican candidates have all emphasized that they support the president

The candidates, Representatives Mike Collins and Buddy Carter and Derek Dooley, a former football coach, have each raised roughly $4 million, though Mr. Collins and Mr. Carter chipped in more money themselves. Super PAC activity has been relatively minimal, but a group aligned with Gov. Brian Kemp, Hardworking Americans Inc., has spent $2 million to help Mr. Dooley, the governor’s preferred candidate. The race is likely to go to a runoff.

The eventual winner will need national Republicans to parachute more cash into Georgia. Mr. Ossoff has raised nearly $60 million since 2025 through his main campaign committee, the largest sum of any Senate candidate this cycle. Nearly $33 million has been spent on ads and other media in the race between Representative Thomas Massie, left, a rare Republican critic of President Trump, and his Trump-backed challenger, Ed Gallrein.Kenny Holston/The New York Times; Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesThe costly G.O.P. contest for governor in Georgia

The other race in Georgia has been the big-spending election. That’s the Republican primary for governor, in which Rick Jackson, a billionaire with no previous political experience, has contributed more than $83 million of his own money to his campaign.

That includes more than $217,000 in non-monetary contributions for things like legal services, meals and helicopter rides. Mr. Jackson has raised less than $300,000 for Tuesday’s election from donors other than himself.

One of his top rivals, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones — who was endorsed by Mr. Trump months before Mr. Jackson entered the race — has also self-funded his campaign, loaning himself $19 million. He has raised $4.5 million in the primary.

The third major candidate, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, lent himself $6.3 million and has raised $1.1 million.

The race is also expected to go to a runoff.The Republican race in Kentucky to succeed Mitch McConnell

In Kentucky, where Republicans are holding a Senate primary for the seat of the retiring Senator Mitch McConnell, the heavy favorite is Representative Andy Barr, who won a late endorsement from Mr. Trump and has been a strong fund-raiser.

Mr. Barr has drawn $16.5 million in super PAC support and pulled more than $8.1 million into his main campaign committee.

Mr. Barr had faced a well-funded challenge from Nate Morris, a businessman and political neophyte backed by Elon Musk, who put $10 million into a super PAC supporting Mr. Morris. But Mr. Musk’s effort fizzled, and Mr. Morris recently dropped out of the race.The G.O.P. primary that will (probably) choose Alabama’s next senator

In Alabama, Republicans are choosing their nominee to seek the seat of Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is running for governor instead.

Representative Barry Moore is the favorite, thanks to his endorsement from Mr. Trump. He has also enjoyed about $6.8 million in spending from a group affiliated with Fairshake, the main super PAC for the cryptocurrency industry and one of the biggest spenders in the midterms. 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Six States Vote Today, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 19, 2026. Welcome To The Post-USAID World, Non-Voters And Indies Turn On The Rs.

Morning all. Going to be a busy week (as they all are). Six states have primaries tonight - Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. We will be tracking them all but particularly Rep. Massie’s re-election in Kentucky, our Supreme Court races in Georgia, and the Dem House primaries in Pennsylvania.

To talk about this consequential political week I’ll be hosting/participating in four live events in the next few days: (all times ET):

Today, Noon - I’ll be joining writer and commentator Matt Lewis.

Wed, 915am - Coffee with the Contrarians. Will be a comprehensive review tonight’s primary results.

Wed, 7pm - Hopium paid subscriber weekly get together. Register here.

Fri, 3pm ET - ASDC President Jane Kleeb joins us live to talk Nebraska in 2026 and to review the progress the DNC/ASDC is making in rebuilding the state party infrastructure across the country and our collective efforts to “expand the map.”

With new nominees emerging from primaries tomorrow we will be expanding our Winning The House campaign to includes some new, exciting candidates. The first two - Bobby Pulido in TX-15 and Denise Powell in NE-02. Look for more tomorrow and a big thanks to our Hopium community. We’ve now hit $1m raised for our battleground House candidates this cycle, and more than $3m for all of our candidates and party committees! Still have much more to do! Denise Powell and Bobby Pulido

The MAGA Eugenicists At The White House/HHS/CDC Are About To Get Tested - The sudden, unexpected withdrawal of the US from the fragile global public health and aid ecosystem was always inhumane, reckless, and dangerous. Estimates are that 14m of the poorest people in the world will now die due to Trump/Musk and the white supremacists/eugenicists in the regime. The disruption of global fertilizer supplies, higher energy supplies, a more virulent summer El Niño, and the degraded post-USAID humanitarian aid ecosystem may result in dire food shortages later this year across the developing world (and much higher prices here). And now we have a deadly rare form of Ebola spreading in Africa, one which cannot be treated or even caught through existing available tests, that we now know spread unchecked in the weakened post-USAID global health system:

Simply this story is a must read (gift link). An excerpt:

As soon as Ebola was identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda late last week, the severity of the outbreak was clear. There were already hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of suspected deaths.

Shortly after the outbreak was announced, the World Health Organization declared it a global health emergency.

But by then, the virus had already been circulating for weeks.

Congo has surveillance systems meant to identify outbreaks early so that they can be effectively contained. The country has added several laboratories in recent years and has extensive experience with previous, devastating Ebola outbreaks.

And yet, precious time was lost when officials in Ituri, the province at the heart of the current outbreak, did not raise the alarm when patients began to show symptoms. Samples may not have been sent quickly enough to Kinshasa, the capital, for testing.

“The alert was out very late,” said Dr. Marie-Roseline Belizaire, a doctor and epidemiologist who is leading the World Health Organization’s response to the outbreak. Typically, high numbers of cases are picked up much earlier by health officials or in news reports. This time, it was weeks before health officials knew for certain that they were dealing with an Ebola outbreak.

The consequences of such a long delay could prove catastrophic. There are no vaccines or treatments for Ebola Bundibugyo, the rare species of the virus that is responsible for the current outbreak, and tests that can be used in the field are hard to come by. And in Ituri, contact tracing is likely to be very difficult.

Here’s the Washington Post this morning - Why this Ebola outbreak will be so difficult to contain (gift link):

Public health authorities and experts warn the world is confronting a dangerous convergence of factors that could make the latest Ebola outbreak extraordinarily difficult to contain: a fast-moving epidemic in a conflict-ridden region, involving a strain with no approved vaccine, at a moment when the global health infrastructure built after past Ebola crises has been weakened by funding cuts and political upheaval.

The concern comes as the United States on Monday tightened entry rules for some travelers and disclosed that an American infected with the deadly disease was flown to Germany for treatment.

This outbreak comes just two weeks before the world starts arriving in the US for the World Cup which kicks off on June 11th. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak began, is one of the teams traveling here in the next few weeks.

Trump is already facing three “Vietnams,” three crises where he can no longer win but where he cannot withdraw due to being perceived as weak - the war, the tariffs, and ICE/mass deportations. It is possible that in the coming days a fourth Vietnam develops for the regime - the MAGA/eugenicist cuts to public health, health care, and humanitarian aid here in the US and around the world.Subscribed

Meanwhile here is new Politico reporting on Trump’s next imperialist adventure. The easy success of the taking of Venezuela continues to drive Trump’s extraordinary recklessness:

The Trump administration has been dancing around the question of whether it will carry out military strikes against Cuba. I am told it is increasingly willing to take such a step.

That’s a significant escalation from a few months ago, when officials were primarily focused on using economic and diplomatic pressure to squeeze the communist regime in Havana.

A U.S. official and a person familiar with the administration’s discussions on Cuba told me that President Donald Trump and his aides have grown frustrated that the U.S. pressure campaign, which includes starving the island of fuel, has not led Cuba’s leaders to agree to significant economic and political reforms. So they’re taking the military option more seriously than previously.

“The mood has definitely changed,” said the person familiar with discussions, whom, like others, I granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. “The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”

We’ve also seen renewed efforts by the Trump regime this week to take Greenland:

Going to be a wild World Cup!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And of course there is this too…….

Indies and Non-Voters Breaking Hard Towards The Dems - G. Elliot Morris has a terrific new analysis of that new NYT poll we discussed yesterday, Independents and 2024 non-voters have swung back left:

The Democrats also posted an 11-point margin among registered voters in the NYT poll’s “generic ballot” question, which measures support for U.S. House candidates across the country. That matches our January–February Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls. Our May poll comes out next week.

But the result that should really cause you to update your beliefs about this year’s midterms is not in the topline or the Times’ official reporting, but hidden deep in the poll’s crosstabs.

A big story of the 2024 election was that Donald Trump made inroads with non-voters who traditionally leaned Democratic, and even got some of them to turn out for him. But now It’s looking like he has squandered those gains and put his party on the path to midterm defeat in the House — and possibly the Senate.

According to the Times‘ poll, political independents now favor the Democrats in their congressional races by 18 percentage points. And Americans who did not vote in the 2024 election give the Democratic Party a 31-point margin:

The Times numbers are not outliers.

In our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling, the Democratic margin on the generic congressional ballot now stands at +17 points among political independents and +20 points among 2024 non-voters, as of our April 2026 wave. Those margins have widened across eleven months of monthly polling, from May 2025 through April 2026 — with some month-to-month wobble, but a clear and durable trend in one direction.

Two takeaways from this analysis: 1) this is a year of extraordinary opportunity for us 2) the partisan voter registration test the DNC has begun in Arizona should be rolled out nationwide as soon as possible.

Which is why it is time…..To Get To Work Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Global News

Eeverything Is Horrible, Opinion: Europe Should Not Help Trump In Iran, Noah Berlatsky, May 19, 2026. Thomas Friedman is a dope.

The US mainstream media produces many articles very critical of Donald Trump. But reporters and editors are reluctant to inform their readers of certain core truths. For example: Trump lies all the time, he has no idea what he’s doing, he is motivated, not by care for Americans or American interests, but by hate, blind ego, and self-aggrandizement. Trump is generally portrayed as a more-or-less normal president who tweets too much and makes many strategic errors, rather than as an ignorant mass-murdering authoritarian psychopath.

Many critics have pointed out that when media misrepresents the president, they misinform the public and average voters, who then make poor decisions at the ballot box. Those critics are correct.

But I think another, perhaps less discussed downside is that the elites who misrepresent Trump end up believing their own bullshit. This is dangerous because elites are…well, elites. They’re influential. Their opinions matter, and can affect policy outcomes and choices—especially, perhaps, in foreign policy, where (as Elizabeth Saunders has pointed out) elites are able to make decisions with little public input, since the public mostly doesn’t care that much about what happens overseas.

This problem of elite self-bamboozlement is well-illustrated in a recent opinion piece by perpetual New York Time columnist, tireless Dubai shill, and billionaire-by-marriage Thomas Friedman.

Friedman argues earnestly that Europe should sweep in, open the Strait of Hormuz and save Donald Trump from himself. He opens his column by admitting that Trump and Netanyahu are “reckless egomaniacs”—but he insists that this is a problem mainly because it alienates Europeans and makes them unwilling to do the right thing.

Dear NATO Members: I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being “humiliated” by Iran. I get it.

Now get over it.

The bulk of the rest of the column is about how the Iranian regime is evil (it is!) and how the United Arab Emirates is a model for an enlightened Arab future (it is not!) Friedman worries that if Iran keeps control of the Strait, it will gain more power and more wealth and can advance despotism across the region. “It is difficult to see how this war ends in a peace deal that doesn’t give a new lease on life to Iran’s Islamic regime,” Friedman worries.

Again, the despotic Iranian regime is cruel and violent. It is an active sponsor of terror proxy groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis; it brutally represses internal dissent; it is grotesquely misogynist. In stupidly losing his stupid war, Trump has given Iran a massive strategic victory. This is, as Friedman says, bad.

Friedman concludes that Europe must help Trump snatch victory from the jaws of rank incompetence. But the pundit doesn’t ever seriously consider the possible dangers of aiding Trump, much less the possible downsides of rewarding him.Upgrade to paidSave Trump, get kicked in the face

Trump has shown over and over that he is completely untrustworthy. He’s also made it very clear that he loves Putin, despises NATO, and wants to invade Europe and take its territory.

This is, to put it mildly, a poor basis for military collaboration. Friedman writes as if Trump’s betrayals and belligerence are in the past, and Europe just has to ignore them and move forward into a high-stakes shared military operation where they rely on Trump not to betray them.

But how can Europe trust Trump? He’s still issuing daily threats to Iran as he first promotes the cease fire, claims he has a deal, claims he will destroy Iran, backs down, pivots, and generally is an irresponsible firehose of nonsense and spittle. If you were France or Germany, would you want to send your troops and equipment into a volatile situation where you can’t be sure from day to day whether your supposed ally is going to drop bombs or unilaterally ignite a shooting war? If your troops get in trouble, could Trump be counted on to help them out? Can you be sure his “help” wouldn’t make things worse?

That’s hardly the only concern. A joint military operation with the US would presumably involve sharing ship movements, force strength, and other sensitive information with your supposed ally. But we know that Trump treats classified intelligence as a business opportunity, and that he can be persuaded to do almost anything by Putin, Netanyahu, or any other strongman who says, “I am strong! Be strong like me!” or the equivalent.

If Trump didn’t pass on classified intelligence to other bad actors, he might just use it as a bad actor himself. He has threatened to invade Greenland, and has been bullying that nation again literally this week. Can Europe be sure that Trump wouldn’t use knowledge of European military activity in negotiations? Can it be sure Trump wouldn’t use such knowledge to mount an invasion?

These aren’t implausible or impossible scenarios. We are in this mess in Iran because Trump launched an incredibly foolish war of aggression with no planning or preparation. He is erratic, impulsive, violent, and dangerous. If Europe sends troops to Iran, they are to some degree putting themselves in Trump’s hands. Only fucking fools (like the US electorate) would do that.Upgrade to paidTo save Trump is to encourage Trump

Friedman talks extensively about the dangers of empowering Iran. And those dangers are real. Again, Iran’s regime is a bad regime and they do bad things in the world and to their own people. Handing them more power is dangerous and will make the world less safe.

But you know who else is a bad regime doing bad things in the world and to its own people? As a hint, it is the regime that joined with Israel to launch a war of aggression in Iran! It’s also the regime that is threatening to invade Greenland, that has threatened to annex Canada, that is still murdering fisherman in the waters around Venezuela, that launched a horrific genocide by shutting off aid to nations in Africa and Asia, that is providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s ongoing wars and atrocities, that is maybe possibly planning an attack on Cuba, that has launched a bizarre string of insults at the Pope.

The US has engaged in imperial brutality and ugly covert operations for many years. But Trump has doubled and tripled down on treating the world as a big target for the US to bomb, invade, and defile. And when one of his hair-brained exercises in cruelty and belligerence seems to be effective—as when he kidnapped Venezuela’s leader—he is encouraged and empowered to escalate other hair-brained exercises in cruelty and belligerence.

As a result, if Europe did manage to open the Strait and reduce Iranian influence, it would not be a win—because it would make Trump feel cool and powerful and special, and when Trump feels cool and powerful and special, he runs off and drops bombs on random countries, threatens allies, sows chaos, and sends gestapo militias into American cities. (It’s not an accident that there have not been further ICE surge during the Iran fiasco.)

A win for Iran is very bad. There’s every reason to believe that a win for Trump could be significantly worse.We’re the baddies

This is not difficult to understand; Trump has provided ample evidence that he is untrustworthy, reckless, cruel, and evil. And Friedman and his ilk will, if pressed, admit that Trump is all of those things.

But they refuse to take the next step, which is to acknowledge that a reckless fascist in charge of America means that America is a reckless fascist nation, and that other nations need to treat it as such. It would be irresponsible for European leaders to act as if the US under Trump is a force for good, or that it has even vaguely good intentions. If Europeans are worried about unpredictable and violent authoritarian theocracies, then they should certainly be worried about Iran. But they should be even more worried about the US, whose leader commands exponentially more firepower, and whose behavior is much more erratic than that of the mullahs.

“We will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger,” Friedman intones. And that’s not wrong. But there are whirlwinds and whirlwinds, and there are some pretty clear advantages to the world and to America to have Trump bogged down and humiliated in a stalemate he can’t win and can’t extricate himself from. Trump is a vile fascist and warmonger, and that means his victories are losses for the world and losses for America. They are losses for Europe too, which is why European leaders are unlikely to join Thomas Friedman in the comforting self-delusion that Iran is currently the most dangerous threat to world peace and stability.

It’s good that Europe has figured out that Trump is a flaming garbage fire and that they want to stay away from the rancid and poisonous fumes. It’s less good that Thomas Friedman—who is in fact influential, and whose views and approach are fairly representative of the media—cannot figure out that a fascist in control of the largest armory on earth is in fact dangerous on his own merits, not just because he lost a war to Iran. The oh-so-serious foreign policy knowers have spent so long priding themselves on the nuance of their parsing that they are unable to recognize a generational threat to global security when it takes a giant shit in the Oval Office.

And you know what? That kind of sweeping ignorance, and that inability to see or say the obvious, makes Thomas Friedman, in his own small way, a threat to global security too.

Global News

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Alleged Polish Criminal Trump Harbors While Deporting Grannies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 19, 2026. For over a year, Donald Trump has spent enormous resources deporting grannies and day laborers who have contributed to the US for decades, claiming they pose a national security threat. Which makes it all the more notable that Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau cited national security when choosing to grant a journalist visa to fugitive former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

May 18

Trump DOJ Creates $1.8b Taypayer Paid Slush Fund To Reward Cop-Bashing, Pro-Trump Insurrectionists

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• New York Times, By ending his I.R.S. lawsuit, Trump could avoid judicial review of a billion-dollar settlement, Alan Feur and Andrew Duehren, May 18, 2026. President Trump withdrew his lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion against the Internal Revenue Service in an effort to skirt oversight by the judge in the case as he moves toward arranging a fund to funnel taxpayer money to his allies and supporters. 
• Meidas Touch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Trump's Robbery in Plain Sight, Ben Meiselas, right, May 18, 2026. While American families struggle with surging inflation, Trump's DOJ is handing $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to January 6th criminals and MAGA loyalists. 

More Trump Scandals, War-Mongering, Vengeance

President Trump, amid threats May 17 to renew all-out U.S. war against Iran, broadcast on his Truth Social network an image portraying him as about to press what could be a nuclear war button inside a high-tech bunker

• New York Times, Trump threatens Iran as tensions surge again in the Middle East, Aaron Boxerman, May 18, 2026. President Trump threatened renewed war with Iran on Sunday night in his latest ultimatum to the country, which has so far resisted U.S. demands to largely shut down its nuclear program.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Judd Legum, right, May 18, 2026. Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.
• The Contrarian, Trump’s Illegal $1.7 Billion Cash Grab, Norman Eisen, right, and Gabriel Lezra, May 18, 2026. And other corruption scandals: A Contrarian Top 10 list. “Follow the money.”
• New York Times, Hegseth will campaign for a House candidate, an extraordinary breach of decorum, Eric Schmitt, May 18, 2026. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a highly unusual move, is scheduled to campaign in Kentucky on Monday alongside Ed Gallrein, a former member of the Navy SEALs who is challenging Representative Thomas Massie in Tuesday’s Republican primary.
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Todd Blanche Attempts to Absolve Himself of Complicity in Bribes to Child Sex Abuse Victims, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 18, 2026. As ABC first warned, Donald Trump has attempted to dismiss his lawsuit against himself the IRS and instead invented a slush fund to reward terrorists, cop assailants, and child sex predators.
• PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Questions About Trump's Health Are Getting Louder And Democrats Need To Speak Out, Jason Easley, right, May 18, 2026. The questions about Trump's health are growing so large that even the corporate media is beginning to discuss them. Top Democrats need to break their silence and lead the conversation.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It’s Trump’s Party and He’ll Crash If He Wants To, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 18, 2026. The GOP has never been more Trump’s party. Midterm voters will surely notice.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: The rapidly declining mental state of the most powerful man on Earth, Heather Delaney Reese, May 18, 2026. Trump is unraveling in real time.

More Top Headlines

 

A 22-foot effigy of Donald Trump, wrapped in gold leaf, now stands at his Doral golf course in Miami. The president boasted about it on Truth Social with the all-caps line: “The Real Deal — GOLD,” even as he picks fights with other world leaders, such as Pope Leo XIV.

• New York Times, Trump’s Approval Sinks Amid Unpopular War, Darkening G.O.P. Prospects, Lisa Lerer, Ruth Igielnik and Camille Baker, May 18, 2026. With the midterms nearing, President Trump’s approval rating has hit a second-term low as voters question his handling of the economy, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.

U.S. Law, Immigration, Crime, Rights, Race, Justice

 

• The Contrarian, Opinion: The MAGA Supreme Court is Incompatible with Democracy, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 18, 2026. Congress must act.
• New York Times, Over 100,000 Family Separations in Deportation Push, Report Estimates, Miriam Jordan and Jeff Adelson, May 18, 2026. The Brookings Institution suggests that federal statistics are an undercount because immigrant parents are not being asked about or not disclosing their American children.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Jury Rejects Musk’s Claim Against OpenAI, Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, May 18, 2026. Elon Musk accused OpenAI of putting commercial gain over the public good. Jurors decided his claims were barred by the statute of limitations.
• New York Times, Abortion Pill Lawsuit Leaves Trump Silent, and in a Political Bind, Pam Belluck and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, May 18, 2026. Louisiana wants the Food and Drug Administration to curtail access to the medication. Doing so could cost Republicans at the polls.

News Roundups 

Late night on May 17 to 18, President Trump posts on his Truth Social network included portrayals of him pushing a button apparently to launch a nuclear war (above left) and capturing a chained Extra-Terrestial  (ET) alien from outer space located in desert location seemed like Area 51 in New Mexico, an iconic locale for those who believe ET's have long visited Earth and assimilated in various guises into the planet's workaday world almost unnoticed aside from the most discerning leaders and researchers. Trump has sought to reassure those believers that he is the savior who will protect Planet Earth from the ETs.

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: "As Bad as it Gets”—Americans Rebuke Trump White House, Trump Posts Content of Him Launching Nuke, Ebola Outbreak Grows, Aaron Parnas, right, May 18, 2026. “It’s as bad as it gets.” That is the warning emerging this morning as Americans increasingly turn against the Trump White House over Iran, the rising cost of living, political chaos, and growing fears about instability at home and abroad.
• Meidas Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates: Two Nuclear Sites on Fire, Trump Targets Epstein Allies, and the Cuba War Pretex, Ben Meiselas, right, May 17, 2026. The Trump regime is running the same tired Ponzi scheme playbook and hoping you don't notice.
• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: NYT Has Generic Ballot +11 D, Ukraine's Big Battlefield Win, Mortgage Rates And Brent Crude Rising - Trump's Failures Just Keep Mounting, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 18, 2026. If you choose to look the evidence of Trump’s mounting failures are all around us……

More Global News

• New York Times, In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland, Jeffrey Gettleman, Maya Tekeli, Anton Troianovski and Eric Schmitt, May 18, 2026. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.
• New York Times, Eager for Arms Deal, Taiwan Stresses Need for U.S. Support, Minho Kim, May 18, 2026 (print ed.). After President Trump hinted that weapons sales to Taiwan could figure in negotiations with China, officials emphasized their island’s strategic importance.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Trump Threatens Iran as Tensions Surge Again in Middle East, Aaron Boxerman, May 18, 2026. The president has sought to force Iran to accept his terms on its nuclear program or else face renewed war. An emboldened Iran has rebuffed Trump’s demands.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• The Tilt via New York Times, A Crack in the Polling Floor Puts Trump in New Territory, Nate Cohn, May 18, 2026. A 37 percent approval rating in a new Times/Siena poll suggests the G.O.P. is facing a big midterm problem despite recent redistricting gains.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Live by Trump, Die by Trump, William Kristol, right, May 18, 2026. “This is the party of Donald Trump.” So Sen. Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Meet the Press yesterday, in the wake of Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Louisiana Republican primary.
• New York Times, South Carolina Republicans to Debate New House Maps Despite Qualms, Eduardo Medina, May 18, 2026. Under pressure from President Trump, the legislature will consider new House districts this week. Some in the G.O.P. worry changes would be too costly and could backfire.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: A Tale of Thucydides, Paul Krugman, right, May 18, 2026. China shouldn’t worry — Trump is too weak and unfocused to be a threat.
• WLWT News 5 (Cincinnati, OH), Final polls published before Kentucky's primary election show deadlocked race between Massie, Gallrein, Kurt Knue, May 18, 2026. After several months of campaigning, the most watched Republican House primary race in the country is now drawing to a close.
• Courthouse News Service, NY Rep. Mike Lawler recounts antisemitic insults from Rand Paul’s son at DC bar, Benjamin S. Weiss, May 13, 2026. The Republican congressman said he was out at a local Washington bar with a reporter and a friend when a man identifying himself as William Paul went on a “ten-minute diatribe” in which he said he hated Jewish and LGBTQ people.

U.S. Religion, Media, Culture, Education

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 17, 2026 [Taxpayers Pay For Evangelical Rally At National Mall], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 18, 2026. Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Christian Nationalists Hit the Mall, Andrew Egger, right,   May 18, 2026. Yesterday, a consortium of right-wing Christians gathered on the National Mall for “Rededicate 250,” an event billed as “a National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” I would have liked to attend the event, to deliver you a firsthand report on the vibes, but I was prevented: I spent my Sunday at church.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Suspect’s Mother Warned Police of Missing Guns Before Mosque Attack, Tim Arango, Neil Vigdor and Pooja Salhotra, May 18, 2026. Three people were killed in the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, and two suspects later killed themselves.

Trump DOJ Creates $1.8b Taypayer Paid Slush Fund To Reward Cop-Bashing, Pro-Trump Insurrectionists 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

New York Times, By ending his I.R.S. lawsuit, Trump could avoid judicial review of a billion-dollar settlement, Alan Feur and Andrew Duehren, May 18, 2026. President Trump withdrew his lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion against the Internal Revenue Service in an effort to skirt oversight by the judge in the case as he moves toward arranging a fund to funnel taxpayer money to his allies and supporters. 

Under the terms of the agreement released by the Justice Department, a group of five people selected by the Attorney General [Todd Blanche, right, Trump's personal lawyer defending him from criminal and civil fraud charges] will oversee the $1.776 billion compensation fund. The department said that it plans to tap an account used for settling lawsuits to seed the fund.The dismissal is the latest legal turn in an extraordinary attempt by Mr. Trump to win billions of dollars in damages from a government agency he controls.

Administration officials have in recent days considered creating a roughly $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies, but not Mr. Trump directly, who say they were wronged by the Biden administration. That fund appears to be part of private deal, reached outside the purview of the court, to resolve both Mr. Trump’s I.R.S. lawsuit and his separate administrative claims against the Justice Department, according to people familiar with it who described it to The New York Times last week.

The move by Mr. Trump was a remarkable end-run around the legal system, effectively stripping Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who has been overseeing the case in the Southern District of Florida, of her normal role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump essentially freed his hand to reach a deal with administration officials without any judicial oversight.

Judge Williams had been considered dismissing Mr. Trump’s suit on her own because he effectively controls both his personal lawyers bringing the complaint and the government lawyers who are supposed to respond to it.

She had ordered the Justice Department, which has yet to make an appearance or filing in the case, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers to brief her by Wednesday to explain whether they were actually in opposition — or were colluding to achieve a mutually agreeable outcome.

In their filing on Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said their dismissal meant that “no judicial analysis is appropriate” for the suit.

The substance of Mr. Trump’s suit stems from the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. Mr. Trump, two of his sons and his family business argue that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from leaking tax information to The Times and ProPublica.

While federal law allows for people to sue the I.R.S. when their tax information is leaked, legal experts saw clear flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and said that the Justice Department had defended other, similar cases brought by plaintiffs who were not the president. 

Meidas Touch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Trump's Robbery in Plain Sight, Ben Meiselas, right, May 18, 2026. While American families struggle with surging inflation, Trump's DOJ is handing $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to January 6th criminals and MAGA loyalists. 

We need to start today with what may be one of the most brazen acts of corruption this administration — or any administration, quite frankly — has ever committed.

Top stories we’re tracking today:

• The DOJ creates a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a taxpayer-funded slush fund for January 6th insurrectionists and MAGA loyalists
• Putin arrives in Beijing tonight to sign ~40 agreements with China, including a declaration on a multipolar world
• Iran launches the Persian Gulf Strait Authority along with a corresponding social media account, formalizing official control over the Strait of Hormuz
• Trump posts delusional social media fantasy about Iranian surrender while real negotiations collapse
• CPI inflation on track to hit 5% this year
• Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, the governor of Louisiana, makes a surprise appearance in the country
• Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is out on the campaign trail in Kentucky today, in clear violation of the Hatch Act
• Democrats hit their highest generic ballot lead ever — plus 11 — as Trump’s approval hits a historic low

Let’s get into it.The $1.776 billion slush fund that is possibly the biggest presidential scandal of all time

This is one of the most corrupt things this administration has done — and the bar is extraordinarily high at this point. Let me actually broaden that. This is one of the most brazen acts of corruption this administration administration has ever committed in history.

The Justice Department announced today the creation of something called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Here is what it actually is: Trump filed a personal lawsuit against the IRS. A federal judge was about to investigate whether the case was collusive — essentially, whether Trump was suing his own government to force taxpayers to pay him. So before that investigation could proceed, the Trump regime dismissed the case and simultaneously used the settlement as justification to create a $1.776 billion fund controlled by the Attorney General, with commission members appointed by and removable by the President himself.

That money, your tax dollars, will now be distributed to January 6th insurrectionists and anyone else the Trump regime decides was a “victim of weaponization.” Todd Blanche, below right, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, is now the one running this fund. The recipients will not be made public (unless they brag about it on social media, I guess)

They’re comparing this to the Keepseagle settlement, which provided relief to Native American farmers who suffered decades of documented, systemic discrimination by the federal government. That comparison is obscene. Keepseagle was a genuine civil rights remedy. This is a president using the Justice Department to reward the people who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to overturn an election and making every American taxpayer foot the bill. Republicans in Congress will say nothing. Not a word.

They are robbing the American people in plain sight. This should be one of the biggest scandals in American history, and we are going to keep covering it until the people responsible are held accountable.Putin and Xi are signing ~40 deals. Trump got zero.

Now to the humiliation unfolding in real time on the world stage.

Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing tonight, where he and Xi Jinping are expected to sign approximately 40 written agreements. Forty. They are adopting a joint declaration on the formation of a multipolar world and a new type of international relations. They’re discussing the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. Trade between the two countries hit nearly $240 billion last year and has been almost entirely shifted to rubles and yuan, structurally protected, they say, from U.S. influence. Oil exports from Russia to China jumped 35% in just the first quarter of this year.

Think about what that means. Trump flew to the Middle East, made grand proclamations, and Xi Jinping gave him nothing. No real deals, no strategic wins. Xi looked Trump in the face and essentially said: the United States is a nation in decline. And Trump nodded along. Now Xi and Putin are formalizing a new world order together, one explicitly designed to diminish American global influence, and they’re signing the paperwork to prove it.

The declaration itself, “on the formation of a multipolar world,” is a direct message to Washington. It’s not subtle. Russia and China are telling the world that the era of American dominance is over. Heck, Xi said it to Trump’s face when he was in Beijing. And Trump is over here posting deranged surrender fantasies on Truth Social.Iran formalizes its control over the Strait

While Trump posts memes, Iran continues to make moves in reality.

Iran has officially launched the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a new governmental body asserting full legal control over navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. They’ve created a corresponding social media account, declared that passage through the strait now requires coordination with Iranian authorities, and made clear that ships transiting without permission will be considered in violation of Iranian law.

They’ve also launched something called “Hormuz Safe,” a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies that want to transit the strait. They’re projecting $10 billion in revenue from it.

This is the country Trump claimed to have defeated. The country whose navy he said is “resting at the bottom of the sea.” The Islamic Republic is not only still standing. It is now the gatekeeper of one of the most critical shipping lanes on the planet, and it is charging for the privilege of passage.Trump’s social media fantasies vs. reality

Here’s what Trump actually posted this morning: a lengthy fantasy about Iran’s military walking out of Tehran with their hands up, shouting “I surrender,” waving white flags, signing “documents of surrender.” It reads like something a 12-year-old would write after losing a video game.

Meanwhile, the real-world situation is this: Iran rejected the latest U.S. framework, which demanded they hand over 400 kilograms of enriched uranium, limit themselves to one nuclear facility, and accept a 25% withholding of their frozen assets, all before the U.S. would even discuss ending the war. Iran’s position is equally firm: full return of frozen funds, U.S. war compensation, and an end to hostilities before nuclear talks begin. Neither side is moving.

A senior U.S. official told Axios that if Iran doesn’t engage meaningfully on the nuclear program, the next conversation will happen “through bombs.” The New York Times is reporting that U.S. and Israeli officials are making their most intensive military preparations since the ceasefire.

Let’s be honest about what happened here. Trump declared a ceasefire unilaterally after threatening to bomb Iran into oblivion. He reposted Iran’s own framework from their foreign minister. He briefly accepted their terms to halt the fighting. Then he pretended he never agreed to anything. Now he’s demanding total surrender from a country that still controls its nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, its Shaheed drones, and the Strait of Hormuz — and acting confused when they won’t comply.

You either escalate this into a full-scale war with catastrophic consequences for the global economy, or you make concessions. There is no third option where Iran capitulates because of a Truth Social post. The entire world sees this. Iran sees it. Their foreign ministry literally posted an AI-generated mockery of Trump as a circus ringleader surrounded by his own unhinged meme posts. China sees it. Russia sees it. Our allies see it. Bullying allies while enemies sign deals

When Trump comes home feeling like the weakling he is, his go-to move is to bully allies.

Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary at the Department of Defense, announced this morning that the U.S. is “pausing” the Permanent Joint Board on Defense with Canada. His message was Canada hasn’t been spending enough on defense, so we’re downgrading the relationship. The same Canada that Trump has spent months trying to humiliate, calling the 51st state, attacking economically, alienating culturally. You abuse a neighbor for a year and then act shocked when they start looking toward Europe instead of Washington.

Meanwhile, Trump’s envoy to Greenland, the Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, has arrived on the island to pressure its government into accepting a deal that would give the U.S. permanent military basing rights, veto power over major foreign investments, and control over the territory’s vast natural resources. Greenlandic officials are reportedly terrified these demands would limit their sovereignty for generations. Secret talks are now underway because Trump manufactured a crisis by threatening to seize a sovereign territory belonging to an ally.

China gets a new world order declaration. Russia gets 40 trade deals. Canada gets humiliated. Greenland gets the governor of Louisiana showing up to threaten them. This is Trump’s foreign policy.Inflation keeps getting hotter

We told you this was coming, and people called us hyperbolic. CPI inflation is now on track to hit 5% this year, possibly as high as 5.2% by the November midterms. That would be more than double the February 2026 reading. Monthly inflation has been running hot, and the trend lines are not improving. PPI wholesale prices are already running at 6%.

People cannot afford groceries. They cannot afford gas. Credit card delinquencies are rising. Student loan delinquencies are rising. The economic pain is real and it is accelerating. Trump’s big priority today, by the way, is reportedly adding a helipad to the White House South Lawn because the new Marine One helicopters might damage the grass.The American people are paying attention

Here’s where we leave things today. The latest Siena poll has Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot, 50% to 39%. That is the highest lead Democrats have ever recorded in that poll. It matches similar numbers in a recent AtlasIntel poll. Trump’s approval rating has hit its lowest point ever, sitting at minus 22.

The American people are watching. They see the corruption. They see the inflation. They see the foreign policy disasters. They see a man who lost a war, lost the respect of the world, and is now using taxpayer money to reward his criminal allies while families struggle to pay their bills.

More Trump Scandals, War-Mongering, Vengeance

President Trump, amid threats May 17 to renew all-out U.S. war against Iran, broadcast on his Truth Social network an image portraying him as about to press what could be a nuclear war button inside a high-tech bunker

New York Times, Trump threatens Iran as tensions surge again in the Middle East, Aaron Boxerman, May 18, 2026. President Trump threatened renewed war with Iran on Sunday night in his latest ultimatum to the country, which has so far resisted U.S. demands to largely shut down its nuclear program.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post that Iran had to move fast “or there won’t be anything left,” adding “the Clock is Ticking.” He did not set a deadline and over the past two months, Mr. Trump has made similar threats to Iran without following through.

Negotiations between the United States and Iran have been stalled for weeks. Mr. Trump has repeatedly warned that he could soon order a renewed assault on Iran unless its leaders made concessions in the talks.

Iran has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. terms for a deal to curb uranium enrichment and end attempts to blockaded the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for shipping oil and gas. The turmoil over the strait has roiled markets and sent the price of oil soaring.

On Monday, Iran said it had handed yet another counterproposal to the United States in the negotiations. The Iranian foreign ministry said that the talks were still continuing through Pakistan, which has been mediating between the two sides.

Asked about Mr. Trump’s threats, Esmaeil Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman told reporters: “Don’t worry, we know very well how to respond.” He did not elaborate further, although Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened fierce retaliation if attacked again by the United States and Israel.

The Pentagon is planning for the possibility that Operation Epic Fury — which was paused when the president declared a cease-fire last month — will pick up again in the coming days.

Two Middle East officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the United States and Israel are engaged in intense preparations — the largest since the cease-fire took effect — for the possible resumption of attacks against Iran as early as this week.

The war began in late February with a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that drew much of the Middle East into the conflict.

But analysts say the United States has faced a tough dilemma since a cease-fire was declared last month. U.S. and Israeli war planes could again start attacking Iran from the air, but many military analysts say bombing alone is unlikely to force Iran to agree to American demands. 

 

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Judd Legum, right, May 18, 2026. Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust. Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr. There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to support independent accountability journalism.Subscribed“I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding.”

Thermo Fisher was not the only company featured in Trump’s official remarks and his investment portfolio that day.

After touring the Thermo Fisher facility in Ohio, Trump traveled to Kentucky and delivered a speech that afternoon. During his remarks, Trump singled out Apple and CEO Tim Cook for praise. “Apple, a great company, $2.5 billion to manufacture 100 percent of the glass for iPhones and Apple Watches right here in Kentucky factories,” Trump declared. “Apple [is] spending $650 billion on new plants all over the United States. Think of that. Who the hell else could have done this, nobody else. Nobody else. I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding. Nobody else could… he’s done a good job, Tim Cook.”

The same day, March 11, Trump purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of Apple stock. The entry on the disclosure form is also marked “UNSOLICITED.”

Trump had purchased between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 of Apple stock in an “UNSOLICITED” purchase on March 2. In total, Trump purchased between $2 million and $7.2 million in Apple stock during the month of March 2026, including five unsolicited purchases. (He sold smaller amounts of Apple stock on March 6 and March 27.)

During the speech, Trump also worked in another plug for Thermo Fisher. “I just came from Thermo Fisher Scientific in Reading, Ohio, right across the way, the great American company that’s investing $2 billion in domestic manufacturing,” Trump told the crowd.“One of the hottest companies”

On March 25, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock. The transaction was marked “UNSOLICITED.”

The next day, Trump called in to Fox News’ popular talk show, The Five. In the interview, he said he had recently met with Micron’s top executive and talked up the company’s prospects. “I just left the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies,” Trump said.

Overall, Trump purchased between $217,000 and $530,000 in Micron between March 2 and March 25, including four unsolicited transactions. The fact that Trump touted Micron after building up a large position in its stock has not been previously reported.“Go out and buy a Dell Computer”

There was also overlap between Trump’s public remarks and his investment in Dell Technologies. On February 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell Technologies stock.

During an economic speech in Georgia nine days later, Trump told the audience to “go out and buy a Dell computer,” saying the company made “phenomenal products.” Trump praised Dell CEO Michael Dell, and his wife, for financially supporting “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The proximity of Trump’s February 19 speech to his purchase of at least $1 million in Dell stock has not been previously reported.

Trump also purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Dell stock on March 2 and again on March 11. Both of those transactions were marked “UNSOLICITED.” He made a final purchase of Dell stock, valued between $1,000 and $15,000 on March 23.

Trump also continued to encourage people to buy Dell computers. He pitched Dell products on February 27, March 9, April 16, and May 8. The May 8 remarks, delivered at a Mother’s Day event, helped propel Dell’s stock to an all-time high.

Other Trump stock purchases appear well timed to take advantage of Trump administration policies. For example, NOTUS reported that Trump “purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.” Similarly, NOTUS found that Trump, on January 6, purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another chip-maker that was approved to do business with China on January 13.

By law, Trump was required to report all of these trades within 45 days. He missed that deadline for many of his trades. As a result, Trump was fined $200.

I’ve been doing campaign finance research since 1997. The bad news is that the influence of big money on our political system has not waned. The good news is that, with the right training, it is easier than ever to access public information about who is trying to buy influence.

With the midterm elections approaching, I’m pulling back the curtain on the research methods I’ve developed over nearly 30 years. I am hosting a webinar that will cover:

• Exactly how money will flow into the 2026 midterm elections.
• How to efficiently and accurately identify what corporations and individuals are donating to any candidate or cause.
• When and where new information will become available as election day approaches.
• The tactics that powerful people and corporations use to try to hide their spending.
• In the second half of the webinar, I’ll answer questions directly from the audience. The webinar will take place Friday, June 5 at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Todd Blanche Attempts to Absolve Himself of Complicity in Bribes to Child Sex Abuse Victims, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), May 18, 2026. As ABC first warned, Donald Trump has attempted to dismiss his lawsuit against himself the IRS and instead invented a slush fund to reward terrorists, cop assailants, and child sex predators.

Plaintiffs President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and The Trump Organization, LLC (collectively, “Plaintiffs”), by and through undersigned counsel, hereby give notice of the voluntary dismissal of this action with prejudice pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A)(i).1

1 Although Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) filings are sometimes colloquially styled as “motions,” the Eleventh Circuit has made clear that a Rule 41(a)(1)(A) dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction. See Est. of W. v. Smith, 9 F.4th 1361, 1367–68 (11th Cir. 2021); Anago Franchising, Inc. v. Shaz, LLC, 677 F.3d 1272, 1277–78 (11th Cir. 2012). Plaintiffs accordingly file this document as a Notice rather than a motion, as the notice does not require judicial action. Est. of W., 9 F.4th at 1368.

Some likely recipients are already celebrating.

And while Todd Blanche claims the slush fund he’s setting up must avoid fraud…

At the Attorney General’s direction, the Fund can be audited. The Fund must take steps to protect private information and avoid fraud. The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 15, 2028.

The fine print absolves DOJ of any fraud committed with the fund.

Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of funds.

As I noted, Andrew Paul Johnson attempted to silence the young boy he sexually molested by promising him a share of payout he expected from being a Jan6ers.

Andrew also told [redacted] that since he was pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and he was being awarded $10,000,000 as a result of being a “jan 6’er”. Andrew did tell [redacted] that he would be putting him in his “will” to take any money he had left over. This tactic was believed to be used to keep [redacted] from exposing what Andrew had done to him.

There will be Jan6ers everywhere planning new crimes with money they win, at the same time as Blanche is moving to kill the convictions of the Oath Keeprs and Proud Boys, including those who were adjudged to be terrorists.

And Blanche is attempting to absolve everything that happens after the slush fund gets created.

Update: I forgot a key detail. Blanche is announcing this criminal slush fund the day before he testifies before the House Appropriations Committee. The Subcommittee is stacked with Republicans who represent far right districts (including Andrew Clyde, who said Jan6 was just tourism), so Blanche may be hoping to get the appearance of Congressional buy-in.

The Contrarian, Trump’s Illegal $1.7 Billion Cash Grab, Norman Eisen, right, and Gabriel Lezra, May 18, 2026. And other corruption scandals: A Contrarian Top 10 list.

“Follow the money.”

That advice from All the President’s Men has never been more apt than in this second Trump administration. That’s why my Contrarian colleagues and I published our original and then our updated top 10 list of Donald Trump and his cronies’ worst corruption scandals. (White House photo)

Since then, every entry has either metastasized or made room for something worse — which is why we have put together this third edition of the list. It features a new king of the (dung) hill. Trump’s own Justice Department is reportedly negotiating to hand him a $1.7 billion fund dressed up as the “settlement” of a lawsuit in which he sits as both plaintiff and defendant — which we are fighting back on in court, thanks as always to your paid subscriptions.Subscribed

And there is so much more, as you will see below, from putrescent pardons to family funny business and from gold cards to gold phones.

1. Pickpocketing the Public

Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, as detailed in my weekly column and our Contrarian Q&A. It’s a preposterous case he brought because he knew no one in his administration would stand up to him — and he was right. His own Justice Department is now poised to settle the case by creating a $1.7 billion fund at his behest for supposed “weaponzation” victims of the prior administration. This is a smash-and-grab job, pure and simple: Trump wants to raid the American treasury to line his allies’ pockets, even potentially funneling money into his own related entities.

Now Trump is trying to escape court supervision by dismissing his complaint. Well, we won’t let him. At Democracy Defenders Action, we are proud to represent over 90 members of Congress together with Platkin LLP. We have just filed a legal brief in the case explaining that the court has the power to put a stop to these shenanigans and should do so.

2. Putrid Pardon Ploys

The second spot on our list is occupied by Trump’s worst pardons, serving the same transactional logic: reward loyalty, pay back donors, neutralize perceived enemies. And if his clemency for nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 cop assaulters and other insurrectionists were not bad enough, Trump is now considering another wholesale abuse of this constitutional authority. He wants to grant 250 pardons for our 250th anniversary, turning the pardon power into a promotional ploy.

Sometimes Trump skips the pardon entirely and gets straight to the corruption. The DOJ is reportedly preparing to drop its bribery case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, right, who was indicted in 2024 for an alleged $265 million scheme to bribe officials and defraud American investors, after Adani hired one of Trump’s personal lawyers, Robert J. Giuffra Jr. Giuffra reportedly walked DOJ officials through 100 slides at an April meeting and offered a “sweetener”: drop the charges, and Adani invests $10 billion in the U.S. economy and creates 15,000 jobs. At that same meeting, Giuffra reportedly worked to kill the Securities and Exchange Commission’s parallel civil case (the SEC announced its Adani settlement last week) and a Treasury Department investigation (Treasury will reportedly announce its own deal within days). That’s Trump’s Justice Department, folks.

3. Trump’s Terrible Trades

Ethics and stock market experts alike were stunned by a May 14 Trump ethics filing revealing that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter, “a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration,” according to Bloomberg.

Trump has not moved his assets into a blind trust or put them into diversified mutual funds — both structures would mean his net worth would be insulated from his official decisions. Instead, we got the news of trades involving companies in which Trump has had heavy decision-making authority, including Intel and Nvidia. He also appears to have invested on every side of the odious Paramount-Warner merger, which is under review by his administration. “A spokesperson for the Trump Organization earlier said that the president’s holdings are independently managed by third-party financial institutions,” the Tribune News Service reported. “Trump, his family members and his company play no role in making transactions … receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input.” But “this is an insane amount of trades,” said one Wall Streeter. Ya think?

4. Eric Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Roadshow

Trump’s son Eric, above right, is not-so-quietly doing his level best to become a big boy corporate executive — but his ventures often seem to need somethingfrom his dad’s government. For example, he tagged along on the president’s diplomatic trip to Beijing, supposedly in his “personal capacity.” But two companies that have been linked to him are entangled with Chinese firms. Eric was, until recently, a board “observer” at ALT5 Sigma, a crypto company that recently signed an MOU with Chinese company Nano. And he also has a significant ownership stake in American Bitcoin Corp, which has reportedly received preferential treatment from Chinese company Bitmain. Separately, Republicans in Congress have said both those Chinese firms pose national security risks.

Meanwhile Eric’s “let’s create a Terminator” startup just landed a $24 million contract to build battlefield humanoid robots for the Pentagon; and he and Don Jr. have an interest in a drone company that’s trying to sell its tech to Gulf states that are caught in the Iran war crossfire — which, of course, their father started. Being a Trump is the grift that keeps on giving.

5. More Trump Crypto, Fewer Problems

The Trump family crypto vehicle keeps spawning new schemes. The latest, WorldClaw, is an AI-services platform that takes payment in Trump-affiliated WLFI stablecoin, requiring members to invest in these functionally worthless assets to pay for its services. But that’s not even the worst part: the company is conducting a raffle for dinner with Donald Trump Jr. at his father’s Florida home — but is explicitly excluding U.S. residents from entering. Meanwhile, there’s a pending Commerce Department inspector general investigation we demanded with Platkin LLP into whether the administration’s reversal on AI chip exports to a United Arab Emirates-backed company was quid pro quo for a $500 million WLFI investment. Despite all of this — and all the additional crypto corruption we’ve meticulously detailed — Congress just advanced landmark crypto market structure legislation out of the Senate Banking Committee, but it refused to include a single ethics provision that we called for to address any of Trump’s massive conflicts.

6. The Meme Coin Grift

Trump held another exclusive dinner for top buyers of his meme coin in April. The coin has been carnage: The Trump coin has dropped roughly 97% in value since its peak around the inauguration, and the Melania coin is down about 99%. Retail investors have lost an estimated $4.3 billion while a handful of Trump-linked insiders walked away with hundreds of millions through early-deployment wallets. Running a pump-and-dump scheme to fleece normal people into buying a worthless piece of internet code branded with Trump’s likeness — that’s almost too on the nose (or the face).

7. The Epstein Files Cover-Up

Democracy Defenders Fund has built a case that the DOJ is openly defying the Epstein Files Transparency Act — and on April 23, the OIG officially launched an audit in direct response to our three complaints. We are also litigating in court to force the release of key files, and our running review keeps cataloguing the missing 3 million pages and the DOJ-buried records NPR exposed. The cover up directly implicates Trump’s Cabinet. We also demanded Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick resign after the released files contradicted his sworn statements about Epstein. We’ve documented how banks were repeatedly forced to confront dozens of pages of horrific allegations as they did business with Epstein and how Epstein kept Steve Bannon in the loop as he advised on how a Russian oligarch could avoid U.S. sanctions. This scandal is not going anywhere — and neither are we.

8. Fool’s Gold from Phones to Cards

The Trump Gold Card has gone from corrupt to corrupt and pathetic. According to The Hill, the year-old program, which Lutnick claimed would raise $100 billion and attract 80,000 buyers, has seen exactly one applicant approved — at $1 million, down from Trump’s original $5 million pitch. But don’t worry: We are still in court to stop the scheme from displacing the scientists, researchers, and physicians the EB-1 and EB-2 categories were designed to prioritize.

Then there is the golden Trump phone. After buyers put down a $100 deposit, delivery was repeatedly delayed for a year and the terms of service were changed, making many angry. The phone is finally said to be coming, but we’ll believe it when we see it.

9. Trump’s Foreign Real Estate Boom

The Trump Organization just unveiled plans for Trump Tower Tbilisi — a 70-story skyscraper that would become Georgia’s tallest building and the centerpiece of a $2 billion development. The Tbilisi deal lands amid an exploding string of foreign licensing arrangements signed since Trump’s re-election, with the family’s foreign licensing income surging by 650% in 2024 (and continuing to climb). This part of Trump’s racket is not getting as much attention as some of the flashier schemes — but it’s no less corrupt.

10. Trump’s D.C. Renovation Racket

Trump’s vanity project pipeline keeps growing: first, he demolished the East Wing to create the ballroom he continues to obsess over. We sued over his illegal dumping in a public golf course and park of the debris from the demolition containing toxic substances. Next, he tried to rename the Kennedy Center and close it for renovation — moves we are also fighting in court.

Now we can add the latest fiasco, his deranged decision to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue“ — a project that will apparently cost a whopping $13.1 million. There was, of course, no bidding process for that project, which went to a company that had never previously held a federal contract. At first, Trump bragged about funneling this money to people who “worked for me in the past, doing swimming pools.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum admitted under questioning that he wasn’t “familiar” with the firm. Trump’s claim was such a corruption self-own that he felt it necessary to backtrack, later saying “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before.” Sure, man.

Honorable Mention: Trump’s Qatari Boeing

The Qatari plane situation has only grown more brazen. The Air Force is now apparently targeting July 4, the country’s 250th anniversary, to deploy the $400 million flying emoluments clause violation. And remember — it’s not just that $400 million: You, the taxpayer, paid nearly $1 billion to retrofit the plane, money we pulled from a nuclear weapons program. This gaudy new plane is so clearly a gift that officials are reportedly even trying to move up delivery to align with Trump’s June 14 birthday.

Gabriel Lezra is senior policy strategist at Democracy Defenders Action and Democracy Defenders Fund. Norm Eisen is the publisher of the Contrarian. 

 

Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: The rapidly declining mental state of the most powerful man on Earth, Heather Delaney Reese, May 18, 2026. Trump is unraveling in real time.

On a Sunday afternoon, in between rounds of golf and relaxing inside the White House, the President of the United States spent hours posting content on social media that would have triggered immediate intervention under any other presidency. He shared a fake image of himself in a spaceship, his finger on a glowing red button, a mushroom cloud rising from the surface of the Earth below him with the words “TARGET DESTROYED” on screen. He posted himself walking on a military tarmac beside a shackled alien. He shared an image of the entire Middle East draped in the American flag, with arrows converging on Iran from every direction, an annexation fantasy of an entire region. He posted a fake image of former President Biden, who has been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, depicted as a corpse floating in sewage. And he shared videos of himself launching missiles from battleships with the words “fire, bomb” stamped across the footage.

Every president since 1945 has understood that the visual of nuclear annihilation is sacred ground. You do not joke about it. You do not fantasize about it. You do not post it on social media. The mushroom cloud is the line every American leader has known not to cross, because the moment a sitting president treats nuclear war as a personal flex, the credibility of every deterrent we have begins to erode. He crossed that line because there is no one left to stop him. The filters are gone. The staff who used to intervene are gone. The advisors who used to take the phone away are gone. What we saw is not a series of separate incidents. It is one window into a single day in the life of the most powerful man on the planet.

But even as he unravels in public, the structures beneath him are still holding where they can. This weekend, the Senate parliamentarian blocked the billion-dollar ballroom funding the administration tried to slip into the GOP budget bill, ruling it needed sixty votes to move forward, votes Republicans almost certainly do not have. A Senate official read the rules and refused to bend. That is what the resistance looks like when it works. People are still following the rules. Legally resisting. Every voice that keeps going makes it harder for them to finish what they started. And the man at the top is coming apart in front of the whole world. November is coming.

We are living through a pivotal moment for our country, and my goal is to reach as many people as possible with clear, factual information about what is happening. The more people who understand what is unfolding, the better our chances of pushing back against chaos, cruelty, and corruption ahead of the midterms.

 

President Trump, a close friend and collaborator of the late financier, child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, has launched all-out efforts against those Republicans like Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie who pushed the Trump Justice Department to disclose devastating documents about Epstein, his fellow rapist Ghislaine Maxwell and their associates, including Trump -- with the latter mentioned in the disclosures an estimated one million times before Trump's Justice Department blocked any further disclosures.

 

New York Times, Hegseth will campaign for a House candidate, an extraordinary breach of decorum, Eric Schmitt, May 18, 2026. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, shown above in a White House file photo, in a highly unusual move, is scheduled to campaign in Kentucky on Monday alongside Ed Gallrein, a former member of the Navy SEALs who is challenging Representative Thomas Massie in Tuesday’s Republican primary.

Even for Mr. Hegseth, who has stretched the boundaries of partisan politics in his job leading the Pentagon, it would be an extraordinary breach of decorum for a serving defense secretary to campaign for a political candidate. Pentagon officials typically stay far away from such activities to maintain the military’s apolitical image.

Mr. Hegseth’s top aides, who noted that the secretary will also travel to Fort Campbell, Ky., on Monday to award Purple Heart medals to soldiers, pushed back on any notion of impropriety about the campaign stop.

“Secretary Hegseth is attending this event in his personal capacity,” Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement. “No taxpayer dollars will be used to facilitate his visit. His participation has been thoroughly vetted and cleared by lawyers, including the Department of War Office of General Counsel, and does not violate the Hatch Act or any other applicable federal statute.”

Mr. Massie, right, has voted repeatedly against President Trump’s policies, including the war in Iran and his tax legislation, and the president has promised to replace him. Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Gallrein in October. 

More Top Stories

 

A 22-foot effigy of Donald Trump, wrapped in gold leaf, now stands at his Doral golf course in Miami. The president boasted about it on Truth Social with the all-caps line: “The Real Deal — GOLD,” even as he picks fights with other world leaders, such as Pope Leo XIV.

New York Times, Trump’s Approval Sinks Amid Unpopular War, Darkening G.O.P. Prospects, Lisa Lerer, Ruth Igielnik and Camille Baker, May 18, 2026. With the midterms nearing, President Trump’s approval rating has hit a second-term low as voters question his handling of the economy, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.

Most voters think President Trump made the wrong decision to go to war with Iran, a New York Times/Siena poll found, leaving the Republican Party on rocky political footing heading into the midterm elections as his approval rating sinks and economic concerns rise.

Majorities of voters said that the war was not worth the costs and held deeply pessimistic views about the economy.

Mr. Trump’s approval rating — a key historical predictor of how a president’s party will fare in an election — has sunk to a second-term low in Times/Siena polls of 37 percent amid the deeply unpopular Middle East conflict.

Nearly two-thirds of voters said that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents. Less than a quarter of all voters thought the conflict had been worth the costs. 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It’s Trump’s Party and He’ll Crash If He Wants To, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, May 18, 2026. The GOP has never been more Trump’s party. Midterm voters will surely notice.

A month and a half ago, Donald Trump reached into his bag of negotiatin’ tricks and pulled out a few threats of genocide: If the “crazy bastards” of Iran wouldn’t “Open the Fuckin’ Strait,” the president warned, a “whole civilization” would die. Didn’t work then, but maybe second time’s the charm: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking,” Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday, “and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.” Happy Monday.

U.S. Law, Immigration, Crime, Rights, Race, Justice

 

The Contrarian, Opinion: The MAGA Supreme Court is Incompatible with Democracy, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 18, 2026. Congress must act.

 The MAGA Supreme Court majority put a stake through the Voting Rights Act, at least for now, and unleashed a frenzy of chaotic redistricting in the South designed to erase 60 years of voting rights progress. The MAGA justices aggrandized power specifically delegated to Congress in the 14th Amendment (“The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”) and the 15th Amendment (“The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”) to themselves, dismissing Congress’s clear intent to prohibit redistricting that has the effect of diluting minority voting power.

Carolyn Shapiro exposed the power grab:

Congress’ clear command in the 1982 VRA amendments that it was protecting minority voters from redistricting that had the effect of reducing their voting power relative to other voters should mean that a state’s desire to advantage one party over another is irrelevant to Section 2 liability. … [I]it essentially incorporates the law of unconstitutional intentional discrimination into Section 2 – precisely what Congress was trying to avoid. But Callais also all but holds that Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment is limited to restricting discriminatory intent, not discriminatory effects.

The Voting Rights Act antagonists did not have the nerve to strike down the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional. The VRA therefore remains nominally on the books but of virtually no value. (We will see how seriously the MAGA majority takes Callais’s assurance that intentional discrimination can still be prohibited; after all, that is precisely what the three-judge panel found in striking down Alabama’s map.) In sidelining Congress and claiming authority to dictate remedies needed to fulfill the promise of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Callais majority sparked a massive movement in defense of voting rights, which was kicked off at Saturday’s All Roads Lead to the South protest. The Rev. Bernice A. King speaks at Saturday’s All Roads Lead to the South rally in Alabama. (Photo courtesy of Melissa Bender)

The MAGA justices’ reactionary judicial activism is rooted in an insidious sleight of hand. Callais is just their latest willful misreading of the post-Civil War amendments, which never sought to outlaw the race-conscious remedies needed to guarantee the ex-enslaved full citizenship. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson documented in her pristine originalist interpretation, the canard of a “colorblind society” does not derive from the intent, legislative history, or text; it is an invention that comes from deliberately rewriting the 14th and 15th Amendments and the VRA in service of white Republican power.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. takes umbrage at the notion the court has become “political.” Gosh, where would people get that idea? Steve Vladeck explained:

[T]he Court inserted itself into the midterm cycle—and set off this race to the bottom—knowingly (if not deliberately), both in what it ruled in Callais and in its willingness to issue the judgment immediately. That latter development was an unmissable signal that it was not averse to having this exact kind of chaos unfold on the ground—a point Justice Jackson made explicitly in her dissent from last Monday’s order. In her words, “as always, the Court has a choice.” …

This, to me, is the key point: whatever one thinks of the ruling in Callais, the Court chose this chaos.. .. Worse than that, all of these developments rather fatally undermine what I’d always understood to be the animating purpose of the so-called “Purcell principle”—which makes sense only as a strong norm against federal judicial intervention in the middle of election cycles. The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is.

Having discarded any pretense of political neutrality or consistency, MAGA justices should prepare to reap the whirlwind. They should anticipate that a backlash against Jim Crow will seek to end judicial intrusion into partisan politics and policy matters (e.g., commandeering voting rights remedies, superseding administrative rules with nebulous doctrines such as the Major Questions doctrine) and to re-assert the authority of the elected branches of government.

Democrats should be candid and uncompromising about their plans. An unhinged court, beginning with Shelby County, has exceeded the Plessy court in cementing white supremacy. Proposals to expand seats on the court are not simply designed to match the number of federal circuits; imposing term limits is not merely intended to prevent infirmed justices from lingering on the court. Democrats are prepared to do these things and potentially curtail the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction because the court has become a rogue threat to democracy. That message was on display in a demonstration of grassroots political power on Saturday: Democracy belongs to the people, not to right-wing justices putting their thumbs on the scale for Republicans.

Dramatic reform measures would not be necessary if the MAGA justices had not willfully misinterpreted post-Civil War amendments or played fast and loose with the Purcell doctrine. Had MAGA justices not trashed stare decisis to achieve partisan aims, manipulated the shadow docket to disguise executive power grabs, and brazenly dispensed with any pretense of partisan neutrality, serious judicial reform would not be essential.

Saturday’s Day of Action gave us a preview of the fierce political backlash against Jim Crow that can check judicial tyranny. Democracy defenders must turn out in overwhelming numbers but also apply a litmus test for every candidate for federal office: Will you rein in partisan judicial hacks who made hash of separation of powers and endangered multi-racial democracy?

Democrats will not have the opportunity to control Congress and the presidency until 2029. Nevertheless, they must start now to focus voters’ attention, as they did on Saturday, on MAGA justices’ quest to displace the voters’ elected representatives (i.e., overriding the VRA’s intent) in service of Jim Crow. MAGA justices delegitimized the Supreme Court; it’s up to the voters, through the elected branches, to end their foray into judicial imperialism that threatens multi-racial democracy.

Arrogant judicial partisans steeped in myths about the 14th and 15th Amendments have revealed their hostility to pluralistic democracy. If voters want their democracy back, they will have to elect a Congress and president willing to reassert popular sovereignty essential to our constitutional order. Judging from the democratic fervor on Saturday, voters appear up to the task.

 

New York Times, Over 100,000 Family Separations in Deportation Push, Report Estimates, Miriam Jordan and Jeff Adelson, May 18, 2026. The Brookings Institution suggests that federal statistics are an undercount because immigrant parents are not being asked about or not disclosing their American children.

Ledy Ordonez was on the job at a San Antonio seafood wholesaler last July when immigration agents entered the facility, taking her and about a dozen others into custody. The single mother remains in detention, separated from her only child, Alonzo, a U.S.-born 2-year-old now in the care of a friend.

“He can walk and talk now,” Ms. Ordonez said from a detention center in Texas. “I’ve missed so much.”

A new analysis suggests that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And roughly three-quarters of those children, like Alonzo, are likely U.S. citizens, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution that were shared with The New York Times.

The Brookings estimate of the number of children who are U.S. citizens is more than double the amount that would be expected over the same time period based on official Department of Homeland Security data. The researchers, whose report is based on a statistical analysis of the detainee population, argue the official statistics are an undercount because of how the government collects that information.

The findings point to a scale of family separations that far eclipses that of the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents immediately after crossing the southern border.

D.H.S. did not directly respond to questions about the number of parents who had been detained or the analysis suggesting that the official statistics did not reflect the full number of U.S.-born children whose parents had been arrested.

D.H.S. said in a statement that parents are given a choice of being removed with their children or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee. 

 

New York Times, Live Updates: Jury Rejects Musk’s Claim Against OpenAI, Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, May 18, 2026. Elon Musk, above, accused OpenAI of putting commercial gain over the public good. Jurors decided his claims were barred by the statute of limitations.

A jury on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company he co-founded, had violated its original mission by putting commercial interests over the good of humanity.

The closely watched case, which unfolded over the course of more than three weeks, had the potential of upending the fast-growing A.I. landscape. Mr. Musk accused OpenAI and its leaders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of “stealing a charity” by attaching a commercial company to the start-up’s original nonprofit and taking billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft. He also accused the executives of unjustly enriching themselves through the nonprofit.

But the nine-person jury in Oakland, Calif., didn’t rule on the merits of the argument. Instead, it found that Mr. Musk did not bring his lawsuit until after the three-year statute of limitations expired, nullifying his claim. Mr. Musk filed his suit against the $730 billion artificial intelligence start-up in the summer of 2024, but the jury found that he was aware of the behavior discussed in his complaint against OpenAI as far back as 2021.

That means that the jury found that OpenAI; Mr. Altman, its chief executive; and Greg Brockman, its president, were not liable for the claims Mr. Musk brought against the company.

Mr. Altman is now free to solidify his control of OpenAI, which appears headed toward one of the largest initial public offerings in history. The company also will be free to pursue a data center expansion plan that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Mr. Musk had asked for $150 billion in damages and wanted Mr. Altman to be kicked off OpenAI’s board of directors. He also wanted to unwind a move that OpenAI made to become a for-profit company ahead of an initial public offering as early as this year.

Though Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and Mr. Musk all attended portions of the proceedings, they were not in the courtroom for the verdict.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

OpenAI reaction: In the hallway outside the courtroom, lawyers for OpenAI hugged and congratulated one another with big slaps on the back. William Savitt, OpenAI’s lead counsel, said outside the courthouse that he was “delighted” by the verdict. “I can’t say whether Mr. Musk will appeal, but we are very, very confident in our case,” he said.

Musk response: Marc Toberoff, one of Mr. Musk’s lawyers, gave a one-word comment on the decision: “Appeal.” Mr. Musk’s lead counsel, Steven Molo, told Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that Mr. Musk intended to appeal.

Microsoft not liable: The jury’s decision means that Microsoft, OpenAI’s chief partner and another defendant in the case, is also not liable for Mr. Musk’s claims. His suit accused Microsoft of aiding and abetting OpenAI in breaching its founding agreement. In a statement, Microsoft said, “The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear and we welcome the jury’s decision to dismiss these claims as untimely.”

Remaining claims: Some of the claims made in Mr. Musk’s suit still remain. The suit also made antitrust claims against Microsoft and OpenAI, and these were slated for a potential second stage of the trial. Judge Gonzalez Rogers has previously said that the second stage of the trial based on antitrust claims was unlikely to happen, because there is plenty of competition in the A.I. market.

Major stakes: The trial’s outcome had the potential to disrupt the A.I. race. A win for Mr. Musk, who has his own for-profit lab, xAI, would have been a win for OpenAI’s competitors, including industry giants like Google and young companies like Anthropic, as well as international competitors such as China’s DeepSeek.

 

New York Times, Abortion Pill Lawsuit Leaves Trump Silent, and in a Political Bind, Pam Belluck and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, May 18, 2026. Louisiana wants the Food and Drug Administration to curtail access to the medication. Doing so could cost Republicans at the polls.

With the midterm elections less than six months away, Republicans are facing challenging political headwinds, including an unpopular war, escalating inflation and President Trump’s sinking approval ratings. Now another issue is putting the administration in a political bind.

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which established a national right to abortion in 1973, it remains widely available, and the number of abortions per year has actually increased slightly. Much of that is due to the availability of abortion pills. The Food and Drug Administration has so far not walked away from a decision made during the Biden administration to allow access to the abortion pill mifepristone through the mail.

But a lawsuit against the F.D.A. now threatens that access, and the Trump administration has remained strikingly silent about it, even as the case reached the Supreme Court this month.

The suit, brought by the state of Louisiana, led a federal appeals court to temporarily bar a policy allowing abortion providers to prescribe mifepristone through telemedicine and send it by mail. Responding to emergency appeals from two mifepristone manufacturers, the Supreme Court twice paused that ruling and then, last week, restored telemedicine and mail access indefinitely while litigation continues in the lower courts.

Through all the back-and-forth, President Trump, who calls himself “the most pro-life president in history” stayed mum. His Justice Department, whose job it is to defend the F.D.A. in the case, declined to submit a brief to the Supreme Court, a highly unusual decision.

“That they’re the folks who are most directly affected by the litigation and they’re not filing anything — that is shocking,” said Samuel Bagenstos, who was the general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., during the Biden administration. “I think it reflects this very difficult political position that the Trump administration is in.”ImageA person holds a box of mifepristone pills above a large cardboard box.Mifepristone is the first pill taken in a two-drug medication abortion regimen that has become the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States. Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Strategists for both parties say the president is navigating a tricky political calculus. A majority of the public favors widespread access to abortion pills. Mr. Trump can stay quiet about the case and incur the wrath of anti-abortion leaders who view his silence as a betrayal and might stay home from the polls in November. Or he can voice his support for restricting access, which would inevitably fire up Democrats and independents to vote in greater numbers. For the moment, at least, he has chosen to remain quiet.

But the case is still energizing both sides.

“They don’t want this going into the midterm election? Well, unfortunately, they just got it,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative group that opposes abortion and has been increasingly frustrated by the president’s inaction on the issue in his second term. He added: “It’s only going to stay in the news. It’s only going to become more of the narrative going into the midterms.”

Mini Timmaraju, the president and chief executive of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement that the case underscores the importance of voting this fall.

“Mifepristone is safe, effective and backed by decades of evidence, but anti-abortion extremists dragged this baseless case through the courts as part of their efforts to ban abortion nationwide,” she said, adding: “This is exactly why the midterm elections are critical. We need leaders at every level of government to stop these attacks.”

More than 100 studies and years of F.D.A. reviews have consistently found that mifepristone is safe and that serious complications from taking it are rare. It is the first pill taken in a two-drug medication abortion regimen that has become the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States. Pills are now mailed to about 100,000 patients per year in states that have banned or severely restricted abortion.

The F.D.A. eased restrictions on the strictly regulated drug in 2021, dropping a requirement that patients get mifepristone in person and allowing doctors to prescribe it via telemedicine and send it through the mail. 

News Roundups 

 

Late night on May 17 to 18, President Trump posts on his Truth Social network included portrayals of him pushing a button apparently to launch a nuclear war (above left) and capturing a chained Extra-Terrestial  (ET) alien from outer space located in desert location seemed like Area 51 in New Mexico, an iconic locale for those who believe ET's have long visited Earth and assimilated in various guises into the planet's workaday world almost unnoticed aside from the most discerning leaders and researchers. Trump has sought to reassure those believers that he is the savior who will protect Planet Earth from the ETs.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: "As Bad as it Gets”—Americans Rebuke Trump White House, Trump Posts Content of Him Launching Nuke, Ebola Outbreak Grows, Aaron Parnas, right, May 18, 2026. “It’s as bad as it gets.” That is the warning emerging this morning as Americans increasingly turn against the Trump White House over Iran, the rising cost of living, political chaos, and growing fears about instability at home and abroad.

At the same time, U.S. and Israeli officials are reportedly preparing for the possible restart of the war with Iran, questions about Trump’s fitness and judgment are intensifying after another night of bizarre social media posts involving aliens and nuclear attacks, and global concern is mounting as the Ebola outbreak continues to spread.

Here’s the news:

Donald Trump’s age and behavior are drawing increasing concern as he approaches 80, though the scrutiny remains far less intense than what Joe Biden faced during his presidency. Recent incidents including erratic late-night social media posts, apparent fatigue at public events, rambling speeches, angry outbursts, and increasingly impulsive rhetoric have raised questions about Trump’s judgment, stability, and mental sharpness. For example, overnight yesterday Trump went on a Truth Social posting spree depicting himself with an alien and launching a nuclear strike:

Unlike Biden, whose quieter demeanor and visible frailty made concerns about aging more obvious, Trump’s loud personality and nonstop media presence have helped mask signs of decline in the eyes of many supporters and political allies. The situation also reflects a broader political pattern in which both parties have often defended or minimized concerns about the fitness of their own leaders while attacking the opposing side over similar issues.

A new New York Times/Siena poll shows President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a second-term low of 37%, driven largely by widespread opposition to the war with Iran and growing economic anxiety. Nearly two-thirds of voters said going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, including a strong majority of independents, while most respondents also disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy and cost of living. Although Republicans largely continue to support Trump and the war effort, Democrats currently hold a significant advantage in hypothetical 2026 midterm voting, reflecting rising dissatisfaction among independent voters. The poll also found increasing concern over inflation, gas prices, and financial hardship as the conflict with Iran continues and energy costs rise.

The World Health Organization has declared the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a public health emergency after more than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths were reported. Health officials say a small number of Americans working in the outbreak region may have been exposed, and plans are being discussed to medically evacuate at least one symptomatic individual for quarantine and treatment. Experts warn the outbreak could be especially difficult to contain because it involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which currently has no approved vaccine or treatment, and is spreading in a highly mobile region with fragile healthcare infrastructure. While officials stress the risk to Americans remains low because Ebola spreads through bodily fluids rather than the air, public health agencies are rapidly mobilizing staff and resources to prevent wider transmission.

Last year, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ordered a major federal research facility studying Ebola and other dangerous infectious diseases to halt all experimental work indefinitely. The Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland was instructed to stop research on diseases including Ebola, Lassa fever, SARS-CoV-2, and Eastern equine encephalitis after officials cited concerns about problems involving contract staff and the lab’s “safety culture.” The shutdown affects one of the few high-security biosafety level-4 laboratories in the world capable of studying the deadliest pathogens and performing advanced imaging on infected animals. Public health experts warned the pause could seriously disrupt infectious disease research, delay preparedness efforts, and increase costs to restart critical scientific work in the future.

Several graduates from George Washington University put up their middle fingers toward Donald Trump’s motorcade as he traveled from the White House to his golf club in Virginia.

Donald Trump has moved to voluntarily dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, according to a new court filing, though the filing reportedly does not mention the widely discussed proposal for a $1.776 billion compensation fund tied to Trump allies and January 6 defendants.

 

The House Oversight Committee is set to interview former prison guard Tova Noel, above, who was on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody in 2019. Noel is believed to have been one of the last people to see Epstein alive and was previously accused, along with another guard, of falsifying prison records by failing to conduct required inmate checks while allegedly browsing the internet instead. Although Epstein’s death was officially ruled a suicide, long-running conspiracy theories and renewed attention from recently released Justice Department files have led lawmakers to revisit questions surrounding the circumstances of his death.

Investigators previously examined Noel’s finances and internet activity and found no evidence she was bribed or directly involved in wrongdoing, though lawmakers say they still want answers about security failures and inconsistencies in testimony and surveillance evidence.

Donald Trump faced criticism after a White House-backed religious event on the National Mall reportedly drew sparse attendance, with photos and video showing large sections of empty seats during his prerecorded video address. The event, called “Rededicate 250,” was promoted as a day of prayer, worship, and patriotic celebration tied to upcoming American anniversary commemorations and featured appearances from religious leaders and Trump administration figures.

Trump did not attend in person and instead delivered a recycled video message while reportedly spending the day golfing, which critics mocked online. Organizers framed the event as part of a broader campaign to promote faith and national unity, though the low turnout became the dominant focus of media coverage and social media reaction. Here is the recycled message:

Donald Trump’s special envoy to Greenland has arrived in Greenland today:

South Carolina Republicans are preparing to debate new congressional maps aimed at helping the GOP win all seven of the state’s U.S. House seats by targeting the district held by longtime Democratic Representative James E. Clyburn. While Trump has pushed hard for redistricting after a recent Supreme Court ruling weakened the Voting Rights Act, some Republican lawmakers worry the move could backfire politically, increase Democratic turnout, and create costly election delays. Critics inside and outside the party argue the effort amounts to partisan gerrymandering, while supporters claim South Carolina’s increasingly conservative electorate justifies the changes. The debate reflects broader national tensions over redistricting and the growing pressure Republican officials face from Trump and his allies ahead of the midterm elections.

According to a report from The New York Times, the United States and Israel are conducting what officials described as their most intensive military preparations since the April ceasefire with Iran. The report says renewed strikes on Iran could resume as early as this week if negotiations fail to produce a breakthrough. The reported planning reportedly includes options for expanded bombing campaigns and possible operations targeting Iranian nuclear material and military infrastructure. The heightened preparations come amid stalled diplomacy, disputes over Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz, and ongoing regional tensions involving U.S., Israeli, and Iranian forces.

Reports from Tasnim News Agency claim that the United States has agreed, or is considering agreeing, to lift sanctions related to Iranian oil sales as part of ongoing negotiations over a broader ceasefire and nuclear framework. However, there has been no official confirmation from the U.S. government, White House, or Treasury Department that such an agreement has been finalized.

According to NBC News, an undocumented family deported to Mexico after seeking medical care for their U.S.-citizen daughter, who is recovering from a rare brain tumor, has been denied humanitarian parole to return to the United States for her treatment. Since losing access to her specialized doctors and therapy team in the U.S., the 12-year-old’s condition has worsened significantly, including seizures, paralysis-related pain, cognitive regression, and recurring neurological symptoms. Her mother says medical providers in their part of Mexico are unable or unwilling to manage the girl’s highly unusual condition, while the family’s legal advocates continue seeking congressional support and possible future parole applications.

Donald Trump is reportedly considering adding a permanent helipad to the White House South Lawn to accommodate newer presidential helicopters whose powerful engines can damage the grass during landings. According to the report, the proposal follows several other controversial White House renovations under Trump, including paving over much of the historic Rose Garden, installing large flagpoles, redesigning parts of the Oval Office with gold decor, and beginning construction on a massive new ballroom. Officials and aviation sources say the newer VH-92A Patriot helicopters generate enough heat and force to scorch the lawn, creating logistical problems for Marine One operations. Critics, including former military personnel, argue that a permanent helipad would further alter the historic appearance of the White House grounds and damage an iconic public space.

Experts warn that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and proposed IRS data-sharing with immigration authorities could lead to as much as $479 billion in lost federal tax revenue over the next decade. Fear of deportation and the loss of tax benefits, including the child tax credit for undocumented parents of U.S.-citizen children, have reportedly discouraged many undocumented immigrants from filing taxes this year. Tax professionals serving immigrant communities say they have seen dramatic drops in clients, with some losing up to 75% of their usual business. Analysts say the decline in tax compliance could hurt both government revenue and millions of children who may lose access to financial support programs designed to reduce poverty.

Rep. Jamie Raskin sharply criticized a proposed settlement between Donald Trump and the IRS that could create a $1.776 billion compensation fund for people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration. Raskin called the proposal an illegal and unconstitutional “political slush fund,” arguing that only Congress has the authority to appropriate federal spending. According to reports, the fund could potentially compensate Trump allies, including some individuals charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack, through a commission with broad authority to settle claims. Raskin said Democrats are prepared to challenge the proposal both politically and legally, arguing that using federal funds to compensate participants in an insurrection could violate the Fourteenth Amendment. 

The Kremlin said peace talks with Ukraine could resume despite President Donald Trump’s concerns that recent Russian strikes on Kyiv may hinder negotiations. Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks on Moscow and surrounding regions, killing several people and damaging infrastructure, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as justified retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities. Analysts say the strikes demonstrate Ukraine’s growing ability to reach deep into Russian territory, increasing pressure and anxiety within Russia but are unlikely to force immediate concessions from the Kremlin. The attacks also targeted Russian oil facilities, aiming to weaken a major source of funding for Russia’s war effort.

Xi Jinping is preparing to host Vladimir Putin in Beijing just days after meeting with Donald Trump, highlighting China’s growing role at the center of global diplomacy. The visit underscores the increasingly close relationship between China and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, with China providing major economic support through expanded trade and large purchases of Russian energy exports. Analysts say energy security and Taiwan are likely key topics, especially as China seeks to strengthen oil and gas supplies amid instability in the Middle East and tensions over Taiwan. The meetings also reflect ongoing Western concerns that China’s partnership with Russia is helping sustain the war in Ukraine while reshaping global geopolitical alliances.

According to Politico, China has agreed to purchase at least $17 billion in additional U.S. agricultural products annually through 2028 following talks between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing. The agreement includes expanded access for U.S. beef and poultry exports, continued large-scale soybean purchases, and an initial Chinese order for 200 Boeing aircraft. The two countries also agreed to create new trade and investment coordination boards and discussed cooperation on issues including Iran and reopening the Strait of Hormuz shipping route. While the White House presented the deals as major outcomes from the summit, some details, including tariff reductions and trade terms, have not yet been fully confirmed by the Chinese government.

An asteroid named 2026JH2, estimated to be about the size of one to two school buses, is expected to make a very close but completely safe flyby of Earth on Monday. The asteroid will pass within about 91,600 kilometers of Earth, roughly one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon, making it one of the closer known asteroid approaches in recent years. Scientists say there is no risk of impact, noting that objects of this size pass near Earth fairly regularly, though improved detection systems now allow astronomers to spot more of them in advance. Researchers also say the event highlights both advances and limitations in planetary defense, especially after the collapse of the Arecibo telescope and ongoing repairs to other radar systems used to track potentially hazardous asteroids.

Two U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler jets collided and crashed during an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, but all four crew members safely ejected and survived. The aircraft, assigned to Electronic Attack Squadron 129 based in Washington state, were performing an aerial demonstration when they appeared to make contact midair before crashing near the base in a fireball. Officials said no spectators or personnel on the ground were injured, and the incident is now under investigation. The crash occurred during the return of the “Gunfighter Skies” air show, which featured military demonstrations including performances by the United States Air Force Thunderbirds.

Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist, was released from a Tehran hospital after more than two weeks of treatment following a medical emergency that began when she collapsed in prison. Her supporters said she still requires ongoing care and physiotherapy at home. Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2023 while imprisoned, has faced repeated arrests in Iran due to her activism and was most recently detained in December in Mashhad. Her family says her health has worsened because of harsh prison conditions, including alleged beatings during her arrest, and she continues to suffer from serious heart and lung conditions.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: NYT Has Generic Ballot +11 D, Ukraine's Big Battlefield Win, Mortgage Rates And Brent Crude Rising - Trump's Failures Just Keep Mounting, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 18, 2026. If you choose to look the evidence of Trump’s mounting failures are all around us……

As Putin heads to China for meetings with Xi we are getting more information about the extraordinary success Ukraine had in breaching the air defense systems protecting Moscow this weekend, in what is now clearly one of Ukraine’s most significant achievements of the war. From Politico:

KYIV — Ukraine hit Russia with more than 1,300 drones over the weekend, penetrating Moscow’s heavy air defenses and successfully hitting targets in and around the capital.

While Ukrainian drones have penetrated Moscow’s air defenses before, this time they hit a wide range of targets, including industrial plants and an oil refinery. Three people were killed and 12 wounded, Russian authorities said.

“This is significant also because the Moscow region is the most heavily saturated with Russian air defense systems,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.

Brent crude starts the day at almost $110 a barrel, one of its highest levels of Trump’s failed war:

Trump’s failed war is causing mortgage rates to surge in the US and Europe. Here’s the homepage of the FT right now:

Mortgage costs across Europe and North America have risen sharply as the economic impact of the Middle East war spills into housing markets, piling pressure on borrowers wanting to buy a new home or refinance.

The jump has come even though central banks have refrained from raising interest rates. Mortgage lenders are responding to increases in governments’ borrowing costs and betting that official rates will eventually need to rise to contain the threat of inflation.

In the US, the conflict has driven the 30-year mortgage rate to 6.36 per cent, above levels seen in September 2025, before the Federal Reserve began a cycle of three quarter-point rate cuts.

In the yes the main stream media is now regularly acknowledging what a complete f-ck up Trump is news category here's The Guardian’s home page right now. It’s something that immigration advocates have been warning about for years: undocumented immigrants pay an enormous amount of taxes, draw little in social services, and have helped significantly lower our ballooning annual budget deficit. That dynamic is now being reversed, and it’s more evidence of how damaging mass deportation is and will be to the American economy:

The NYT dropped a bit of a polling bomb on Trump and the Rs this morning clocking in with a new poll showing significant erosion for Trump and Dems jumping 6 points in the generic ballot to +11:

The Real Clear Politics generic ballot average - will you be voting Dem or R in the Congressional elections this fall? - just crossed D+7 for the first time this cycle. It was +4 before the war began, and note that we have now seen five polls in recent weeks with the generic ballot +10 Dem or more. Commentator Bill Scher reminded us this morning that this average was +7.3 Dem right before the midterm Dem blowout election of 2018.

Last week’s revelation that Trump made already made 3,700 stock market trades while in office almost ensures that his unprecedented, vainglorious corruption — ballrooms, golf courses, arches, self-enrichment, direct theft from tax payers, shakedowns of corporations, selling of pardons — becomes a top tier issue in the election this year. Judd Legum has a new deep dive into Trump’s new financial disclosure report (the one that documented the 3,700 stock trades) that has some jawdropping new reporting:

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust. Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr. There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets.

Here’s an excerpt from that Bloomberg article (sorry, paywall):

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general.

The White House dismissed questions about potential conflicts, with spokesman David Ingle saying that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public.” He added: “There are no conflicts of interest.”

Yes, the failures are mounting and so is willingness of the main stream discourse to acknowledge what a complete f-ck up Trump is and just go there….

and that my friends is why it is time now…..To Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Meidas Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates: Two Nuclear Sites on Fire, Trump Targets Epstein Allies, and the Cuba War Pretex, Ben Meiselas, right, May 17, 2026. The Trump regime is running the same tired Ponzi scheme playbook and hoping you don't notice.

A massive explosion was reported near Sdot Micha Air Base in Beit Shemesh, Israel, a site widely believed to house missile and nuclear assets. Israeli outlet Kan News said the blast was a “controlled explosion” at a nearby civilian factory.

Hi all, Ben here. It’s Sunday, and as usual, there is a lot happening and so much that is slipping under the radar when it comes to the corporate media. Let me walk you through what we’re tracking this afternoon.

Top stories:

• A drone struck a nuclear power plant in the UAE, and a mysterious explosion rocked a suspected Israeli nuclear and missile storage site
• The Trump regime is laying the groundwork for a Cuba invasion using Axios as its propaganda vehicle
• Eleven U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft are departing the Middle East, the same pattern we saw right before the Iran strikes
• Trump is retaliating against Thomas Massie and other Republicans who pushed for the release of the Epstein files
• Ukraine launched one of its largest-ever drone strikes on Russia, reaching the Moscow region
• Todd Blanche confirms the DOJ is laser-focused on “proving” the 2020 election was stolen
• Mike Johnson tells Americans to wait on kitchen table issues until the Strait of Hormuz is open — the same Strait of Hormuz that was open before Trump’s war

Let’s get into it.Two nuclear sites hit in 24 hours… Where’s the coverage?

Let’s start with what should be the biggest story of the weekend. In the past 24 hours, two nuclear sites in the Middle East have been struck, and the silence from corporate media is blowing my mind, though it’s not exactly surprising at this point.

In Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation confirmed that a drone hit an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant. UAE defense officials say they intercepted two of the three drones targeting the facility but were unable to stop the third. Authorities report no injuries and say radiological safety levels were not affected, but the facility was on fire, fire and rescue teams were responding, and this happened at a nuclear power plant.

Then there’s Israel. A massive explosion near the Sdot Micha Air Base in Beit Shemesh, widely understood to be where Israel stores its nuclear weapons and missiles, sent up what looked like a mushroom cloud. Israel is calling it a “controlled explosion” at a civilian factory nearby. But here’s the thing: if you’re conducting a planned detonation near a nuclear weapons facility that’s going to produce a visible mushroom cloud, you tell the local population first. There was no such notice. Experts are raising serious doubts about the official explanation, and they have every reason to.

Two nuclear sites in under twenty-four hours. Is it just me or should this be a much bigger story?The Cuba playbook: Same Ponzi scheme, different country

Right on cue, while the Middle East is literally on fire, what does the Trump regime do? It pivots as it always does. When one catastrophe becomes too much to manage, the machine generates a new threat, a new enemy, a new pretext. This time: Cuba.

Axios published an “exclusive” Sunday morning claiming Cuba has acquired over 300 military drones from Russia and Iran and has reportedly discussed using them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. naval vessels, and possibly Key West. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Havana just this past Thursday, ostensibly to warn Cuba against any aggression.

Within hours, MAGA Republican congressmembers from Florida — Díaz-Balart, Gimenez, and Salazar — were pounding the table about the existential Cuban threat, 90 miles from Florida’s shores.

But let’s slow down for a second, because there are a few things worth noting here.

First, as former U.S. diplomat and intelligence officer Ned Price pointed out, the framing of this story is doing a lot of work. The headline screams “offensive threat” from Havana. The actual substance, buried deep in the article, is that U.S. officials are reportedly worried Cuba might respond with drones if attacked. That is a fundamentally different situation. That’s called deterrence. It is not a pretext for invasion — unless you need one.

Second, where did Cuba get these drones? From Russia and Iran, according to the report. And who is Donald Trump? The man who removed thousands of U.S. troops from Poland, who attacked NATO, who lifted sanctions on Russia, and who stood aside while Russian ships sailed through what was supposed to be a blockade of Cuba. What did anyone think was on those ships? If you allow Russia to resupply Cuba and then act shocked that Cuba has Russian military hardware, you are either incompetent or you planned it this way.

This is the Venezuela playbook. This is the Iran playbook. Generate a threat, get your media partners to amplify it, activate your congressional allies to demand action, and move the country toward another war before anyone can stop to ask what the plan actually is. The MAGA Florida contingent is already getting in position, probably calculating this will help close the gap with Latino voters who have been drifting away from Trump. It is cynical, it is transparent, and they genuinely think you’re too distracted to notice. This sort of “wag the dog” posturing may have worked in the past. I hope Americans see through it in 2026.In plane sight

Here’s something else that should be getting more attention. Eleven U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft are departing the Middle East, heading toward Europe. This exact mass-departure pattern occurred a few hours before the strikes on Iran began on February 28th. It happened again last week before Trump reportedly called off strikes at the last minute.

Operation Epic Fury has been declared “concluded.” But concluded doesn’t mean over. It means the next phase hasn’t been officially named yet. We’ll be watching this closely.Trump’s Epstein revenge tour

Let’s talk about Rep. Thomas Massie, right. Trump posted a full-throated attack on the Kentucky congressman Sunday, calling him the worst Republican in history and urging Kentucky voters to throw him out in Tuesday’s primary. The stated reason is that Massie voted against tax cuts and border wall funding. But we all know the real reason.

Massie, along with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace, pushed hard for the release of the Epstein files. They wanted transparency on the child sex trafficking network those files could expose. Trump privately told allies those were “my friends.” And then, systematically, Trump and the MAGA apparatus turned on every single one of them.

Think about what has been unleashed against Massie simply because he dared push for that release. Tens of millions of dollars in outside spending. Coordinated smear campaigns. Attacks from some of the most powerful figures in government and media. Members of his own party mobilizing to destroy him. And this is happening to a sitting member of Congress who is, in many ways, even more conservative than Donald Trump himself. Whether you agree with Massie on anything else is beside the point entirely.

Because if this is what happens to a powerful elected official with a national platform and millions of supporters when he challenges entrenched interests, imagine what Epstein survivors face when they consider coming forward. The money. The political power. The government connections. The defense and media apparatus. The coordinated intimidation. If anything makes clear why so many survivors remain silent for years, or never speak at all, it’s watching what’s being done to Massie right now. That right there tells you everything about who this regime is protecting and why.The DOJ is still focused on…the 2020 election

Todd Blanche appeared on Fox Sunday morning to tell Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is “very focused” on determining whether the “right people” voted in the 2020 election. When pushed on whether there will ever be a definitive answer on whether the election was stolen, Blanche said he couldn’t promise that.

Of course he can’t promise it. Because it wasn’t stolen. Sixty-plus courts said so — Trump-appointed judges, Bush-appointed judges, Reagan-appointed judges — all of them looked at the evidence and found nothing. But the DOJ isn’t looking for truth. It’s looking for a story. The “right people” language is not subtle. In MAGA world, the right people are the people who voted for Trump. That’s what your Justice Department is working on while Americans are worried about healthcare costs and grocery prices. While actual criminals roam the streets. While Epstein’s associates remain free.

And meanwhile, Mike Johnson went on Fox to explain that kitchen table issues will have to wait until the Strait of Hormuz is open. The same Strait of Hormuz that was open before this administration started bombing Iran. You created the problem, you’re now telling us to be patient while you solve it, and you want credit for the solution. This is the participation trophy approach to geopolitics.The Senate Parliamentarian kicks Trump in the ballroom

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the Republican bill’s provision to spend $1 billion on Trump’s ballroom does not comply with the Byrd Rule, meaning it would require 60 votes to pass, not a simple majority. Senate Budget Committee Democrats confirmed the ruling Sunday, and Senator Merkley made clear that Democrats are prepared to challenge any changes Republicans make to try to get it through anyway.

A billion dollars for a ballroom that was supposed to be free. In the middle of a reconciliation bill that’s supposed to be about fiscal policy. The parliamentarian at least had the decency to call it what it is. Whether Republicans try to jam it through another way remains to be seen, but Democrats have put them on notice.Ukraine brings the war home to Moscow

Finally, Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks of the entire war overnight, sending more than 1,000 drones deep into Russia. At least four people were killed in the Moscow region, debris fell on Sheremetyevo, Russia’s largest airport, and Ukrainian drones flew over 500 kilometers from Ukraine’s border, penetrating the densest concentration of Russian air defenses in the world.

President Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes and called them entirely justified, direct retaliation for Russia’s repeated ballistic missile and drone attacks on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Ukrainian civilians. Experts say the scale of the strike makes clear Ukraine has the capacity to reach Russia’s capital at significant scale, bringing the reality of this war home to ordinary Russians in a way the Kremlin cannot ignore.

Russia had launched 287 drones at Ukraine overnight, wounding eight people and damaging residential buildings across multiple regions.

There is no peace process. There is no ceasefire. There is a war, despite Trump’s claims he would end it within 24 hours, and Ukraine is prosecuting it.

That’s the update for Sunday afternoon. Let me know what you think in the comments. Ron Filipkowski will be back later with his full weekend bulletin, so stay tuned. Thanks for being here. 

More Global News

 

New York Times, In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland, Jeffrey Gettleman, Maya Tekeli, Anton Troianovski and Eric Schmitt, May 18, 2026. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.

An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:

The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.

The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.

The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.

The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.

The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.

If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”

“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

New York Times, Eager for Arms Deal, Taiwan Stresses Need for U.S. Support, Minho Kim, May 18, 2026 (print ed.). After President Trump hinted that weapons sales to Taiwan could figure in negotiations with China, officials emphasized their island’s strategic importance.

President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan said on Sunday that weapons sales from the United States remained a crucial element for maintaining peace and stability in the region, comments made after President Trump suggested a multibillion dollar weapons deal with the island could be used as a “negotiating chip” with China.

Mr. Lai made a point to thank Mr. Trump for his support since his first term as president, including “a sustained increased in the scale and value of arms sales to Taiwan, assisting us in strengthening our self-defense capabilities.” Continued U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, he said, “remain indispensable and are a vital element for preserving regional peace and stability.”

He also said that “the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait will not be sacrificed or bargained away.”

The Taiwanese president’s social media post came days after Mr. Trump’s remarks appeared to raise new doubts about the reliability of U.S. support for Taiwan. The island has been waiting for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air defense systems intended to fortify the island against military threats from China, which claims the island democracy as its territory.

Ever since 1979, the year Washington broke off diplomatic ties with Taiwan and shifted recognition to Beijing, Taiwan’s status in U.S. policy has rested on nuanced formulae and carefully chosen words. In 1982, the Reagan administration made a series of commitments to Taiwan, including one about not consulting with China on arms sales to Taiwan, and for decades it has been understood that Washington would not negotiate the subject with Beijing.

Mr. Trump appeared to minimize that commitment in remarks to reporters on his way home Friday from a summit with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

Mr. Trump told reporters that he and Mr. Xi had talked about the arms sale issue “in great detail” after Mr. Xi brought it up.

“So what am I going to do?” he said. “Say ‘I don’t want to talk to you about it’? Because I have an agreement that was signed in 1982? No, we discussed arms sales.”

Asked about Mr. Trump’s comments, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said on Sunday that past administrations had also paused arms sales to Taiwan, adding on ABC’s “This Week” that the president was considering how to approach the issue of weapons exports.Editors’ PicksThe Pleasure of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Is in the ComparisonsThese Women Want to Dress Your BedCook Recipes From Restaurants on Our List of 100 Best in NYC

Mr. Greer, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” also said that there was “no change” in U.S. policy toward Taiwan, seemingly contradicting Mr. Trump’s earlier statements.

Alexander Yui, Taiwan’s representative to the United States, said on Sunday that Mr. Trump needed to hear Taiwan’s side after his discussion with the Chinese leader, emphasizing that Taiwan was on the defensive and not an aggressor.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Trump Threatens Iran as Tensions Surge Again in Middle East, Aaron Boxerman, May 18, 2026. The president has sought to force Iran to accept his terms on its nuclear program or else face renewed war. An emboldened Iran has rebuffed Trump’s demands.

President Trump threatened renewed war with Iran on Sunday night in his latest ultimatum to the country, which has so far resisted U.S. demands to largely shut down its nuclear program.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post that Iran had to move fast “or there won’t be anything left,” adding “the Clock is Ticking.” He did not set a deadline and over the past two months, Mr. Trump has made similar threats to Iran without following through.

Negotiations between the United States and Iran have been stalled for weeks. Mr. Trump has repeatedly warned that he could soon order a renewed assault on Iran unless its leaders made concessions in the talks.

Iran has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. terms for a deal to curb uranium enrichment and end attempts to blockaded the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for shipping oil and gas. The turmoil over the strait has roiled markets and sent the price of oil soaring.

On Monday, Iran said it had handed yet another counterproposal to the United States in the negotiations. The Iranian foreign ministry said that the talks were still continuing through Pakistan, which has been mediating between the two sides. h

Asked about Mr. Trump’s threats, Esmaeil Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman told reporters: “Don’t worry, we know very well how to respond.” He did not elaborate further, although Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened fierce retaliation if attacked again by the United States and Israel.

The Pentagon is planning for the possibility that Operation Epic Fury — which was paused when the president declared a cease-fire last month — will pick up again in the coming days.

Two Middle East officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the United States and Israel are engaged in intense preparations — the largest since the cease-fire took effect — for the possible resumption of attacks against Iran as early as this week.

The war began in late February with a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that drew much of the Middle East into the conflict.Editors’ PicksThe Pleasure of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Is in the ComparisonsThese Women Want to Dress Your BedCook Recipes From Restaurants on Our List of 100 Best in NYC

But analysts say the United States has faced a tough dilemma since a cease-fire was declared last month. U.S. and Israeli war planes could again start attacking Iran from the air, but many military analysts say bombing alone is unlikely to force Iran to agree to American demands.

The two countries could launch a special forces operation to try to seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which the U.S. and Israel fear could be used to build a nuclear weapon. But such a raid could risk the lives of American soldiers, further straining domestic U.S. support for an unpopular war.

For the past month, Mr. Trump has instead opted for a pressure campaign — so far unsuccessful — to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States briefly launched what Mr. Trump called “Project Freedom” to help escort ships trapped in the waterway to safety. Just a day later, the initiative was suspended to allow for further negotiations with Iran.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

The Tilt via New York Times, A Crack in the Polling Floor Puts Trump in New Territory, Nate Cohn, May 18, 2026. A 37 percent approval rating in a new Times/Siena poll suggests the G.O.P. is facing a big midterm problem despite recent redistricting gains.

Over the last decade, it’s often been said that President Trump’s support has a low ceiling but a high floor.

In this morning’s latest New York Times/Siena poll, whether Mr. Trump really has a high floor is starting to be put to the test.

Just 37 percent of Americans approve of his performance as president, a drop of four percentage points from the last Times/Siena poll in January and his lowest approval rating in any Times/Siena survey in either term.

A four-point decline isn’t necessarily huge, but it puts Mr. Trump’s ratings in new political territory. While recent presidencies have often been unpopular and polarizing, no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average. If there has been a floor during this partisan era of politics, Mr. Trump’s ratings today have fallen to it.

While it’s too soon to say whether the war in Iran and high gas prices will ultimately break the floor in Mr. Trump’s support, the poll leaves no doubt that these issues could pull his approval ratings down even lower. Just 28 percent of voters approve of his handling of the cost of living, and only 31 percent approve of his handling of the war. Just 30 percent say he made the “right decision” in choosing to attack Iran.

The most immediate political consequence is that Democrats appear increasingly well positioned for the midterm elections in November. The poll shows Democrats have a double-digit lead, 50 percent to 39 percent, when registered voters are asked which party’s candidate they’ll support for Congress. That’s a notable shift from Times/Siena polls earlier this cycle — which showed Democrats up two to five points.

Anything like it would easily overcome the Republicans’ redistricting advantage in the House and suggest that Democrats could be highly competitive in the Senate. And although there’s still a long time until the election, Democrats held an even larger 14-point lead among those who said they were “almost certain” or “very likely” to vote.

As in other recent Times/Siena polls, the survey found that young and nonwhite voters have snapped back toward the left. Democrats have regained their usual, pre-Biden advantage among both groups in the race for control of Congress as well as in party identification. Mr. Trump’s approval rating among both groups is abysmal: Among voters 18 to 29 years old, only 19 percent approve of his performance; just 20 percent of Hispanic voters say the same.

The possibility that Mr. Trump’s floor is cracking raises the prospect of even more significant, longer-term political consequences. If the war and high prices persist, Mr. Trump’s troubles could start to look less like other recent polarizing presidencies and more like those of George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, in which quagmire abroad and economic challenges at home did significant political damage to their parties.Of course, Iran is not doomed to be another Iraq, Vietnam or Korea. For now, there’s a cease-fire; there could be a diplomatic solution at any time. If prior wars are any indication, Mr. Trump has time to resolve these challenges before his approval ratings fall into the lower 30s or beyond.

The case of George W. Bush is instructive. At almost the exact same stage of Mr. Bush’s second term, the combination of the war in Iraq and high gas prices dragged his approval rating to about where Mr. Trump’s ratings are today. His ratings ultimately fell into the 20s, but it didn’t happen overnight. On average, Mr. Bush’s approval rating fell by less than one point per month for the rest of his term — which so happens to be the rate that Mr. Trump has been losing support over the last few months. For his approval rating to keep falling, Mr. Bush had to lose the support of longtime fans and Republicans. It can take a while.

If the conflict lasts long enough for Mr. Trump to keep bleeding support, Republicans might face something a lot worse than a bad midterm. A midterm defeat was likely even before the war began — it’s the usual fate of parties in power, after all — but the president’s party usually rebounds relative to that for the next presidential election. If Mr. Trump’s approval rating stays in the 30s, it won’t be so easy to assume Republicans will rebound. In the polling era, there are no examples of the president’s party retaining the White House when the president’s approval rating is under 40 percent. More often, the election is a rout. 

 

President Trump, who celebrates his 80th birthday at a martial arts tournament scheduled next month at the White House, fell asleep multiiple times at a White House women's health event on May 11, 2026.  

PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Questions About Trump's Health Are Getting Louder And Democrats Need To Speak Out, Jason Easley, right, May 18, 2026. The questions about Trump's health are growing so large that even the corporate media is beginning to discuss them. Top Democrats need to break their silence and lead the conversation.

Trump has been to the dentist three times in the last year. The White House has offered no explanation. Trump had an MRI on a body part, but no information was made public.

Both of Trump’s hands are now swollen and covered in makeup. The White House claims it is from shaking hands, but it is BOTH HANDS. The White House either offers flimsy excuses or says nothing.

Trump’s trip to China was a complete flop. The president could barely walk down the steps to depart the plane. The Chinese claimed that Trump was unenergetic and quiet. They thought that Trump wasn’t engaged and prepared. The media acts like this is business as usual. The White House says nothing, and everyone moves on.

We document Donald Trump’s decline in this space because it is being willfully ignored by the powerful in both politics and the media.

Among the powerful are Democrats who see that Trump is declining, yet most of the people at the top of the party choose to say little or nothing at all.

Every person, if they are lucky, will get older, so when evaluating Trump’s decline, the basis should not solely be his biological age.

This person is the President Of The United States, so questions need to be asked. The changes in Trump have been obvious, and they are impacting the country, as we will discuss below.

The question that should be asked isn’t, " Can Donald Trump do the job?” Trump already has the job. That question should have been asked in 2024. The appropriate current question should be, is Donald Trump doing the job? A secondary question: What does Trump think the job is?

What is obvious is that Trump is aging rapidly in his second administration.

Jonathan Lemire wrote about some of these changes in The Atlantic:

But as Trump turns 80 next month, his recent behavior should prompt even more questions than usual about his stability, judgment, and mental sharpness.

Among the points of concern: a late-night social-media storm a few days ago featuring more than 50 messages, many strewn with dangerous or nonsensical misinformation, which followed a similar Truth Social broadside weeks earlier; an apocalyptic threat to wipe out a civilization; more and more insults (“nasty,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “treasonous”) hurled at reporters; appearing to fall asleep in public, sometimes twice in one week; deep bruises on his hands, which are covered in makeup and accompanied by confusing explanations; and long, odd tangents in speeches that seem longer and odder than his usual tangents.

Never known for his ability to self-censor, Trump seems to have completely abandoned any sort of filter, tossing out messages from one extreme (He’s glad that Robert Mueller is dead!) to the other (actually, Trump is Jesus and shall heal the sick).

Most of Trump’s events now take place with him seated behind a desk. Trump doesn’t hold the sort of structured press conferences that the media criticized Biden for not holding. Instead, Trump will sit in the Oval Office and take questions in a controlled environment with hand-picked reporters after staged events. Other times, Trump will engage with reporters for a few minutes before he leaves the White House.

These events are designed to promote the myth that Trump is the same without putting the president in an environment that is not tightly controlled.

Trump is clearly not well. At best, he is aging. At worst, he is dealing with illness.

Democrats aren’t doing anyone any favors by sticking to general comments about Trump, like calling the president unhinged.

It is time for Democrats to step up at the highest levels and tell the country the truth about the declining president.

If Democrats want power back and want to be trusted, they need to be the opposite of Trump’s gaslighting party and confirm what most Americans already see.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Live by Trump, Die by Trump, William Kristol, right, May 18, 2026. “This is the party of Donald Trump.” So Sen. Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Meet the Press yesterday, in the wake of Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Louisiana Republican primary.

Graham is right. The Republican party is unquestionably and unambiguously Trump’s party. And the GOP will be dragged down by him, burdened by his dead weight, as it sinks this fall beneath the political waves.

As Graham was confirming that the GOP is Trump’s party yesterday, CBS News released its latest survey, conducted by YouGov, of more than 2,000 adults last week.

The first question asked was, as usual, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?” Here are the answers from this poll so far this year:

January 2026: Approve 41 percent, disapprove 59 percent.February 2026: Approve 40 percent, disapprove 60 percent.March 2026: Approve 39 percent, disapprove 61 percent.April 2026: Approve 38 percent, disapprove 62 percent.May 2026: Approve 37 percent, disapprove 63 percent.

Yes, the movement of American public opinion away from Trump has been frustratingly slow. But unlike in the last half of 2025, when Trump’s numbers were basically stable at around 41 percent to 59 percent, the movement this year has been real. The decline to 37 percent approval (and the climb to 63 percent disapproval) has been slow but steady, gradual but inexorable. One percentage point a month adds up. (And this morning, a new New York Times/Siena poll has very similar numbers, with Trump at 37 percent approval, 59 percent disapproval.)

When you dig into the CBS poll, it gets worse for Trump. Separating those who approve or disapprove of Trump strongly from those who do so only tepidly, here’s what you get:

• Strongly approve: 20 percent.Somewhat approve: 17 percent.Somewhat disapprove: 11 percent.Strongly disapprove: 52 percent.
• Sitting at 20 percent vs. 52 percent among the voters with the strongest opinions is not a strong position.
• And when asked, “How much do you think Donald Trump cares about the needs and problems of people like you?” Americans responded:
• A lot: 18 percent.Some: 17 percent.Not much: 14 percent.Not at all: 51 percent.
• These are very bad numbers for Donald Trump. And these are very bad numbers for the Republican party.

As Ron Brownstein points out, “Trump is consistently in a much deeper hole now than other recent presidents who had bad mid-terms.” A party’s performance in a midterm, especially when that party has controlled both the presidency and Congress for the preceding two years, tends to correlate pretty reliably with the president’s approval rating. This makes sense. After all, in November, voters have to decide whether they want the next Congress to continue to go along with that president or to check him.

And that correlation will presumably hold all the more tightly when the congressional party is visibly tied at the hip to their president. Which, as Lindsey Graham said yesterday, today’s Republican party is.

So for all the complexities of the tasks we face confronting the ongoing disaster of Trump and Trumpism, the short-term political task today is pretty simple. The pro-democracy movement has to try to continue to drive down Trump’s approval, to the degree possible. At the very least, it has to get out of the way as Trump’s own actions lead to public disapproval.

And the short-term task of the Democratic party is also pretty simple: Tie Republican incumbents and candidates as tightly as possible to their president. This means among other things making them vote over and over for Trump’s unpopular policies and for his unpopular vanity projects. The best way to make sure Trump’s enablers pay a price is to make them continue, visibly and embarrassingly, enabling their leader. (And if some of them grow sick of doing so, or decide it’s in their political interest to allow a little space between themselves and the president, all the better. Some coverage of “Republicans in disarray” would be fine too.)

The closest parallel to this year could well be 2006. Republicans went into those midterms with control of both houses. Most polls had President George W. Bush around 37 percent approval on election day. Democrats took control of both houses, gaining thirty-one seats in the House and six in the Senate. They won the national popular vote in the House by eight points.

Trump and his party will be able to do a lot of damage over the next six months. They’ll be able to do a lot of damage for the subsequent two years even if Democrats do win Congress. But perhaps the tide has turned.

I haven’t gone all Victorian poetry for a while, so if you’ll permit the indulgence, I’ll close with some lines from Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say not the struggle nought availeth”:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,Seem here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in, the main,

And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light,In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,But westward, look, the land is bright.

You could scroll towards pending doom / Alone and lonely in your room / The apps will serve you shock and schlock / At every hour of the clock. / OR: You could join in Bulwark+ / Our glad community based in trust / Come hang with us, your news to chew / And help defeat this MAGA crew.

New York Times, South Carolina Republicans to Debate New House Maps Despite Qualms, Eduardo Medina, May 18, 2026. Under pressure from President Trump, the legislature will consider new House districts this week. Some in the G.O.P. worry changes would be too costly and could backfire.

This week, South Carolina’s legislature will begin debating whether to redraw congressional districts to help Republicans win all seven of the state’s House seats and displace its only Democratic House member.

For Republican lawmakers, the answer isn’t an easy yes.

Although President Trump has been lobbying hard for the Republican-dominated legislature to tilt the playing field after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act last month, the special session is expected to be contentious.

Some South Carolina Republicans have been reluctant to charge into the national redistricting wars for reasons both practical and philosophical.

Representative James E. Clyburn, a powerful Black Democrat who has funneled vast resources into the state over the years, is tremendously popular. Republicans worry that he would win even in a district redrawn to exclude some of his supporters. Those supporters, currently packed together into Mr. Clyburn’s district, could vote for other Democrats once they are spread out, increasing the risk that Republicans would lose a seat.

Some Republican state senators say the effort is a bad idea for other reasons: Early voting starts on May 26, so there is not enough time to sufficiently consider new districts. Overseas ballots have already been cast. It would cost millions of dollars to push congressional primaries to August. And the redistricting fight might boost Democratic turnout and hurt down-ballot Republican candidates.

Five Republicans in the State Senate, most notably Shane Massey, the leader of the chamber, voted with Democrats last week to block a resolution that would have brought lawmakers back to the capital, Columbia, to consider redistricting. They argued that their congressional map was already constitutional.

But on Friday, Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, ordered lawmakers back for a special legislative session to address redistricting and the state budget. Mr. McMaster was the first statewide elected official to endorse Mr. Trump in 2016, during his first presidential bid, but he has faced pressure from the Republican base to do more about redistricting.

If Republican lawmakers want to pass a map, they essentially have to do it this week.

Looming large in the background is Mr. Trump. It did not go unnoticed in Columbia that many of the Republican state senators in Indiana who voted down Mr. Trump’s plan on redistricting lost their primaries this month to challengers he had endorsed.Editors’ PicksThe Pleasure of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Is in the ComparisonsThese Women Want to Dress Your BedCook Recipes From Restaurants on Our List of 100 Best in NYC

Among the most vocal about partisan gerrymandering in South Carolina are the leading Republican candidates for governor, all of whom are eager for the president’s endorsement.

Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who is Mr. McMaster’s preferred candidate, said in an interview that if Democrats really believed the new districts would gain them a seat, they would vote for it. Republicans, she added, needed to move to redistrict at full speed.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: A Tale of Thucydides, Paul Krugman, right, May 18, 2026. China shouldn’t worry — Trump is too weak and unfocused to be a threat. 

When the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations met in Beijing, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping spoke about the lessons of history:

Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, spoke about fast food:

Just as many Chinese now love basketball and blue jeans, Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest fast food chains in the United States, all combined. That’s a pretty big statement.

I’m old enough to remember when we were a serious country.

Anyway, should China in fact worry about the Thucydides trap? Not while someone as pathetic as Trump is in charge.

The Thucydides trap refers to the theory, originally propounded by the Greek historian for the war between Athens and Sparta, that conflicts erupt when a declining power is confronted by a rising rival. So Xi was implicitly insulting the United States, portraying it as a nation in decline. Someone presumably explained this to Trump, who went on Truth Social to declare that Xi was talking about U.S. decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” not now that he has made us “the hottest Nation anywhere in the world.”

In reality, the widespread Chinese view that America is in decline has only grown stronger under Trump II. According to the New York Times,

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

And that was before the debacle in Iran.

So, as in the Thucydides trap, will a declining America lash out at a rising China? Not under current management, or at least not in any effective way.

Trump and his officials constantly denigrate his predecessor. Denouncing Joe Biden has become their all-purpose response to questions about Trump’s policy failures and cratering polling. But the Biden administration was, in fact, serious about responding to China’s technological and industrial challenge. Notably, the CHIPS and Science Act was explicitly intended in large part as a way to respond to China’s inroads in information technology by boosting the U.S. technology sector, while the Inflation Reduction Act’s promotion of industries associated with renewable energy was an attempt to blunt the impact of growing Chinese dominance in electrotech.

Trump, however, has moved rapidly to cancel Biden’s industrial policy, a turnaround that has, among other things, led to a marked slump in manufacturing construction:

Having abandoned industrial policy, Trump has turned to trade deals. The fact sheet released by the White House after his trip to Beijing proclaimed that

President Trump negotiated a sweeping package of commitments that will drive high-paying American jobs and open new markets for U.S. goods.

The main component of this package was a Chinese commitment to buy $17 billion a year of U.S. agricultural products, on top of an earlier commitment to buy more soybeans. Actually, I should put “commitment” in scare quotes: China made similar promises during Trump I, and completely failed to deliver. But suppose that the Chinese actually come through this time. How big is this “sweeping package”? Adding the extra $17 billion to a best guess at the value of the promised soybean purchases, and comparing it with existing U.S. exports, it looks like this:

So by abandoning Biden’s efforts and pursuing what he considers the art of the deal, Trump has in effect traded a serious effort to keep America competitive in advanced technology game for a hill of soybeans — and a small hill at that.

I could go on, but you get the point. The global scene right now isn’t dominated by a conflict between a rising and a declining superpower, because the declining power is led by a man who has no idea what makes great powers great, is easily distracted by trivia, is focused on self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, and fantasizes about himself as Jesus. If you want classical analogies, think of America right now as the Roman Empire under Caligula, although Caligula didn’t do anything like as much damage …

WLWT News 5 (Cincinnati, OH), Final polls published before Kentucky's primary election show deadlocked race between Massie, Gallrein, Kurt Knue, May 18, 2026. After several months of campaigning, the most watched Republican House primary race in the country is now drawing to a close.

On Tuesday, the voters of Kentucky's 4th Congressional District will decide if they want to give Rep. Thomas Massie an eighth chance on the ballot as the district's Republican nominee.

Massie has represented the district, which encompasses a stretch of northern Kentucky from Appalachia to Louisville's northeastern suburbs, since 2012. Throughout that time, the district has been an overwhelmingly safe Republican seat, allowing the representative to avoid having to compete in any significantly competitive races, both in the primary and general elections.

However, that has now changed this year as President Trump has fixated his full political attention squarely on unseating Massie from the GOP's ranks. Businessman and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein is challenging Massie for the seat with Trump's backing, with the representative now squarely at the center of national Republican primary politics for the first time in his career.

Just a month ago, polls conducted throughout early April showed Massie with a notable lead in the race. A poll from Quantus Insights that was conducted during the first week of April showed Massie leading by nine percentage points. Similarly, a poll from the Public Polling Project conducted during the same time frame showed Massie with a five-point lead.

However, both polling organizations now paint a significantly different picture in the race as it wanes into its final days. The second poll that was published by Quantus Insights earlier this week showed Gallrein with a comfortable eight-point lead. Meanwhile, the Public Polling Project's second poll that was published showed Massie with just a one-point lead in the race.

Further highlighting how much Massie's lead appears to have eroded, a third poll that was published this week by the Neighborhood Research Corporation showed the race to be evenly deadlocked with Election Day just days away.

Massie's rise and and fall in popularity among top GOP brass in Washington marks a wider story of intraparty ideological movements within the party that have come and gone with time. At the time that the congressman was sworn in to his first term in office, Massie's ascension came amid the backdrop of the rapidly growing political force of the Tea Party, a movement that hawkishly championed strict reductions in federal spending. In the early 2010's, the movement managed to successfully challenge and replace Republican incumbents throughout the country, including — most notably — former sitting GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

As he was running to replace then-outgoing Rep. Geoff Davis in 2012, the Tea Party enthusiastically threw their support behind Massie in the race, with the Lewis County native seen as a like-minded individual in the movement as it sought to increase its represen

GIVE THE TIMESLiveUpdated May 18, 2026, 2:47 p.m. ET3 minutes ago

Courthouse News Service, NY Rep. Mike Lawler recounts antisemitic insults from Rand Paul’s son at DC bar, Benjamin S. Weiss, May 13, 2026. The Republican congressman said he was out at a local Washington bar with a reporter and a friend when a man identifying himself as William Paul went on a “ten-minute diatribe” in which he said he hated Jewish and LGBTQ people.

New York Representative Mike Lawler on Wednesday shared his side of a “reprehensible” interaction with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s son at a D.C. bar this week, during which he hurled antisemitic and homophobic insults at the congressman.

Lawler’s take on the incident comes hours after media reports that a drunken William Paul accosted him and a journalist at the Tune Inn bar in Washington and blamed Jewish people for Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie’s difficult primary fight, among other things.

Speaking to reporters on the Capitol steps Wednesday afternoon, Lawler said he’d gone to get something to eat at the popular Hill spot with a friend and a journalist when he was approached by Paul, who identified himself as the Kentucky senator’s son. He said Paul interjected into his conversation that if Massie lost his reelection campaign “it’s because of my people.”

“I asked him, who is my people?” said Lawler. “And he yelled out, ‘Jews.’”

The congressman, who is of Irish-Italian descent, told Paul he is not Jewish, and said the senator’s son then apologized. “He goes, ‘oh, I’m sorry to accuse you of that,’ which is just a remarkable statement in and of itself,” Lawler added.

Paul proceeded to go on a “10-minute diatribe,” the New York Republican said, about Israel and Jews which he said played into “typical antisemitic tropes that so many people rely on.”

“At one point, [he] said that he hates Jews and hates gays and doesn’t care if they die,” Lawler said. “And I think that’s fucking disgusting.”

NOTUS first broke the news of Paul’s tirade against the congressman — one of their reporters was present with Lawler at the Tune Inn when he was accosted. But the Empire State Republican said he had not spoken yet with Paul’s father.

A spokesperson for Paul’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Lawler, meanwhile, said his interaction with the senator’s son ended quickly, after which the younger Paul gave him the middle finger “and then tripped on his way out the door.”

“I think it speaks to a larger issue in society and what we’re seeing among young people and online,” Lawler said. “This is the level of hatred and vitriol that some of my Jewish colleagues experience, but also that many of my constituents experience.”

Lawler has been a leading voice in Congress for countering what he’s said is a trend of rising antisemitism in the U.S. — and like many lawmakers has tied hatred of the Jewish people to criticism of Israel and its war in Gaza. Last month he penned a resolution with New Jersey Representative Josh Gottheimer condemning what they called “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric” from online personalities Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.

The lawmakers accused Piker, a massively popular Twitch streamer; and Owens, a former Daily Wire contributor who has since gone independent, of disseminating antisemitic “disinformation, commentary and political viewpoints to their millions of viewers."

U.S. Religion, Media, Culture, Education

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 17, 2026 [Taxpayers Pay For Evangelical Rally At National Mall], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 18, 2026. Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.

The “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from one that champions the Enlightenment values of natural rights, equality, and self-government to one that requires Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders.

This was not Congress’s intent when it established a bipartisan America250 commission in 2016 “to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” But shortly after he took office for the second time in January 2025, Trump and his loyalists began to take over the planning for the nation’s birthday celebration.

As Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore of Mother Jones explained, right-wing operatives, including the company that staged the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, jumped into the management of America250. But Trump chafed under the idea of congressional oversight and a pretense of bipartisanship, so in December 2025 he created his own new organization, Freedom 250.

Congress appropriated $150 million for the Department of the Interior to distribute to organizations for celebrations of the 250th. Of that money, America250 has been allocated $50 million and Freedom 250 has been allocated $100 million, although as of February, America250 had received only $25 million. Freedom 250 has also solicited donations in exchange for access to Trump. According to Karissa Waddick of USA Today, sponsors include ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Deloitte, Palantir, and IndyCar. Donors can also request anonymity.

As Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times explained in February, Freedom 250 has planned events that showcase Trump rather than important events and themes in the nation’s history. Those include an IndyCar race around the National Mall, the construction of a triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn on Trump’s 80th birthday in June, and today’s “Rededicate 250” event.

President Trump was golfing today, but he, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, spoke on video to the crowd, assuring them that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke in person. All but one of the nineteen clergy and faith leaders who spoke were Christian, and most were right-wing evangelical Protestants.

The video of Trump the organizers played was the same one he recorded three weeks ago for “America Reads the Bible.” The passage was 2 Chronicles 7:11–22, one Christian nationalists believe marks the U.S. as a Christian nation, when the Lord says to Solomon: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

But the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that. In the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate just a decade after the Constitution went into effect, U.S. leaders said “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and has “no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of” Muslims. They went on to say that “no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between” the U.S. and Tripoli.

Thomas Jefferson, the key author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, both wrote explicitly about the importance of keeping the government separate from religion. Jefferson wrote that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”

In 1785, Madison explained that what was at stake in keeping the state and religion separate was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights, including those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.

Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Rather than basing the United States on religion, the nation’s founders and framers, as well as Americans of later generations, sought to instill in Americans reverence for the nation’s core political values, especially the right of self-government and the checks and balances that made that self-government possible. In speeches and memorials, novels and poems, they emphasized the sacrifices Americans had made to protect the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That civic religion unified the nation, but it did more than that. It also instructed Americans on the rights and duties of citizens who live in a nation that rests on “We the People.” They must think for themselves, question elected officials, and take an active role in their government.

Replacing Americans’ civic identity with Christian nationalism destroys that vitally important understanding of the role of citizens in a democracy. Instead, it demands that Americans do as they are told, turning them into subjects.

The theme of obeying the leader runs deep in Trump’s politics, and in MAGA more generally. The Bible passage Trump read on video today emphasizes obedience, warning the chosen people that if they “forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you,” then they will be destroyed. Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin read the same passage at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that overturning democracy for Trump was obeying the Lord. Laura Jedeed of Firewalled Media reported that vendors at today’s event handed out buttons that said: “WIVES SUBMIT, HUSBANDS LOVE, CHILDREN OBEY.”

But blindly obeying authority has never been the story of America.

From its origins in resistance to the British government, the story of America has been the opposite of obeying. It has been about questioning, debating, criticizing leaders, and working to build “a more perfect Union,” as the Framers charged us to do. The story of America is how those who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders however imperfectly they lived them, have struggled to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our government, come true. 

New York Times, Live Updates: Suspect’s Mother Warned Police of Missing Guns Before Mosque Attack, Tim Arango, Neil Vigdor and Pooja Salhotra, May 18, 2026. Three people were killed in the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, and two suspects later killed themselves.

A mother warned the San Diego police that her teenage son and a companion had taken several guns from her home on Monday, two hours before a deadly shooting rampage at a nearby mosque.

Three men were killed in the attack, including a security guard who officials credited with preventing a more deadly massacre at the mosque, the Islamic Center of San Diego. Two suspected shooters — including the woman’s son — were found dead in a car nearby, the police said.

The suspects appeared to have died from self-inflicted gunshots, the San Diego police chief, Scott Wahl, said in a news conference. The chief said one suspect was 17 and the other 18, correcting himself after earlier saying they were 17 and 19.

Investigators recovered anti-Islamic writing in the car, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter who were not authorized to share details publicly. The words “hate speech” were written on one of the firearms used in the attack, the two officials said, and one of the suspects had left a suicide note.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Christian Nationalists Hit the Mall, Andrew Egger, right, May 18, 2026. Yesterday, a consortium of right-wing Christians gathered on the National Mall for “Rededicate 250,” an event billed as “a National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” I would have liked to attend the event, to deliver you a firsthand report on the vibes, but I was prevented: I spent my Sunday at church.

Online later, however, I got the gist. “Rededicate 250” was what you’d have expected from this crew: a full-throated embrace of the MAGA iteration of the faith by the Trump administration, an uneasy amalgam of rudimentary Christian doctrines summoned up to bless smashmouth Trumpian politics. A host of administration officials and allies spoke via recorded video or from the stage: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, House Speaker Mike Johnson. Even Trump was beamed in on video to read some Scripture—a recycled video from a few weeks ago, it turns out, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind.

Over and over, the speakers hammered the inseparable connection between the defense of the faith and the aims of the modern Republican party. They, the onstage speakers, were on the side of the angels—and no one had any doubt who was on the opposing team.

“We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation,” Johnson said. (Ostensibly, he was praying.) “These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins. Father, we reject that.”

MAGA Christianity: Now featuring 100 percent less repentance of sins!

Others were even less subtle. Author and radio host Eric Metaxas—long one of the most insufferable voices on the Christian right—exulted that “it’s hard to believe it took two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.” (He later claimed that this, as opposed to his usual Trump-worshiping shtick, had been a joke.)

I have to give the organizers credit for one thing: They were smart to pick the date they did. Two hundred fifty years ago yesterday, as the American colonies barreled toward war with Britain, the Continental Congress proclaimed a national “Day of Fasting, Prayer, and Humiliation,” declaring it the “indispensable duty of these hitherto free and happy colonies, with true penitence of heart, and the most reverent devotion, publicly to acknowledge the over ruling providence of God; to confess and deplore our offenses against him; and to supplicate his interposition for averting the threatened danger, and prospering our strenuous efforts in the cause of freedom, virtue, and posterity.”

Christianity and America have always stood both in harmony and in tension: The faith is in the country’s bones, yet the country has chosen from the beginning to hold faith and politics forcibly apart. In another universe, this event could have been a very different affair, along the lines of the longstanding National Prayer Breakfast—a bipartisan rededication to the importance of humbling ourselves and seeking the wisdom, blessing, and grace of God.¹ But that approach has been dying a dual death: increasingly pushed aside for MAGA Christianity boosterism on the right, increasingly abandoned to die a death of neglect on the left.

It constantly dismays me to see my faith so deployed in modern right-wing politics—stripped bare, deracinated, cheapened into a bauble of cultural-political identification. We love our Christians, don’t we folks? I also worry that we are seeing a vicious cycle. In the minds of many irreligious types on the left, these sorts of charlatans are increasingly the only “Christians” they see. The more tightly the religious right tries to tie Christianity to the doomed and dying MAGA project, the less they can be surprised if whatever movement vanquishes MAGA turns out to be hostile not only to MAGA, but to Christianity itself.

This, of course, would suit the charlatans just fine: Their pitch to believers relies on them being, to a significant extent, the only game in town. But for those believers who made their peace with Trump for years on the spurious argument that he was the only thing standing between them and a political movement hostile to their faith, I worry that they may meet their destiny on the road they took to avoid it.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Corrupt Is Trump? Here Are the Numbers… He’s the swampiest swamp creature ever, writes MONA CHAREN.
• The Hard Right Hates Neil Gorsuch… It’s all about the constitutionalists vs. the nativists, explains Daniel Ruggles.
• Ending the War Will Require Force… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN survey a wide range of jackassery, from Trump’s attack on longtime Mitch McConnell aide Robert Karem and his mismanagement of the Defense Department to the Iran intelligence leak, the Trump–Xi summit, Trump’s designs on Cuba, and the implications of Turkey’s newly unveiled ICBM.
• What Can ‘A Man for All Seasons’ Tell Us About Today? SONNY BUNCH joins MONA CHAREN to talk about the 1960s classic that was a conservative touchstone.
• From Bunker Hill to Normandy, JD Vance Is Wrong About America… On How to Fix It, REP. JAKE AUCHINCLOSS joins JOHN AVLON to lay out a new “patriotic center” for Democrats—from taxing social media companies to fund education, to rebuilding America, fixing housing, confronting China, regulating AI deepfakes, and reclaiming patriotism from Trumpism.

Quick Hits

DOWN GOES CASSIDY: Donald Trump may have shed basically every non-Republican voter from his coalition by now, but that’s cold comfort for the Republican elected officials he’s decided to punish. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) limped to a distant third-place finish in Louisiana’s GOP primary Saturday, capturing only 25 percent of the vote—a stunningly poor showing for a Senate incumbent. Two MAGA challengers, Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a runoff without him.

Cassidy, a doctor and two-term senator, now approaches the end of his political career as a cautionary tale in the impossibility of living with one foot in the MAGA camp. He earned Trump’s undying enmity in 2021, when he was one of seven GOP senators to vote to convict the president in his impeachment trial after January 6th. But he also made periodic, wan attempts to shake Trump off his vengeance tour—most notably, by convincing himself last year to set aside his misgivings and vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. It didn’t work: Kennedy quickly and remorselessly broke the vaccine-policy promises he made Cassidy in exchange for his vote, and Trump made sure to crush Cassidy in his primary anyway.

The question now is how Cassidy will choose to spend the eight months before his term ends. At this point, he truly has no reason left to make nice with the president, who issued a gloating Truth Social post after his defeat: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected,” Trump wrote, “is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”²

“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution,” Cassidy said in his concession speech. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power . . . that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

THE PARLIAMENTARIAN VS. THE BALLROOM: Senate Republicans’ plan to earmark a cool billion for Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project has run into a familiar and formidable foe: the Senate parliamentarian, the once-obscure functionary who is tasked with ruling what can and can’t be passed under simple-majority budget-reconciliation votes—and therefore along party lines. NBC News reports:

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” Senate Democrats said after their meeting with the parliamentarian. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.” . . .

It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likely won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.

Read the whole thing.

ENERGY SHOCKS WORSENING: It’s been clear for a while, and it’s getting clearer: The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a bonanza for American energy producers and a catastrophe for American energy consumers. As energy shocks pile up around the world, more and more international buyers are clamoring for American oil and gas—and with producers unable to just snap their fingers and pull enough out of the ground for everybody, an international bidding war is now underway for every single barrel. The Wall Street Journal has more:

For now, the U.S. has been able to meet needs at home and replace some of the missing Gulf barrels. No nation in the world’s history has ever exported as much energy: It shipped 14.2 million barrels of crude and products a day late last month—the rough equivalent of one out of seven barrels consumed globally in ordinary times.

But trouble is brewing. U.S. oil producers are barely stepping up their output, refineries are running at full-throttle, and domestic stocks are getting depleted fast. The upshot: American consumers are set to keep paying more for fuel to stay inside the U.S.’s borders.

“This is all just going to end so badly,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at commodities- and shipping-data provider Kpler. “We have to essentially get squeezed to the point where prices move higher to stop the barrels leaving.”

May 17

Top Headlines

President Trump met with President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, May 14, 2026, after a flurry of actions.

• New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Makes a High Risk Move to Win Over Xi, Chris Buckley, May 17, 2026 (print ed.). The president said a potential arms deal for Taiwan was a “very good negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. His words raise questions about the reliability of U.S. support.
• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: Trump Is A Fool, A Coward, And A Traitor, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 16-17, 2026. Trump continues to bow to and appease global strongmen, doing enormous harm to America and freedom and democracy everywhere.
• New York Times, To Critics, Trump Remarks Reveal a Billionaire Out of Touch, Erica L. Green, May 17, 2026. The president has never pretended to be an ordinary American, but a recent “truth bomb” has opened him to criticism that he doesn’t grasp the economic strain of his war with Iran.
• The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Investigative Commentary: Jeffrey Epstein Donated Money 8 to 1 to Democrats versus Republicans, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, right, May 17, 2026. That Doesn't Mean What You Think.

U.S. Crime, Courts, Insurrection, Law, Rights

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special narly $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump’s Idea of Charity: Terrorists, Cop Assailants, and Child Sex Predators, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 15, 2026. Remember back in February, when Trump claimed he was going to donate to “very good charities” any money he got by settling his own lawsuit against the IRS because a contractor stole his tax records from the IRS during his own first term?
• The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News and Comment: MAGA Infighting Erupts, Trump's Stock Trading Exposed, Large Protests Against SCOTUS Across the South, Aaron Parnas, right, May 17, 2026. Donald Trump is now escalating his attacks on Lauren Boebert as internal MAGA infighting intensifies. Marjorie Taylor Greene appears increasingly isolated, and Boebert may be next. At the same time, massive marches swept through Alabama today in protest of recent Supreme Court decisions affecting voting rights.

U.S. Scandals, Probes, Coverups

 

An undated photograph released by the Justice Department showing Kathryn Ruemmler with Jeffrey Epstein. Ms. Ruemmler’s name appeared in over 10,000 documents released in January by the Justice Department pertaining to Mr. Epstein (Photo via  U.S. Department of Justice).

• New York Times, Investigation: How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image, Robert Draper, May 17, 2026. Terakeet, a reputation management firm, used online tricks to downplay the friendship of the Goldman Sachs general counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn’t enough.
• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Kash Patel holds a _____-up Pearl Harbor snorkel party, Jeff Tiedrich, right, May 17, 2026. Here’s another heartwarming tale of what government looks like when everyone in it is a s________ believes they have the right to do whatever they want.
• Eyes On ICE, ICE Kills With Indifference Commentary:: Agency Fails to Protect a Vulnerable 2-Year-Old, Then Blames the Detained Mother, Staff Report, May 17, 2026. Orlin Hernandez Reyes should be alive.
• Last Page First, Investigation: The New Mexico Governor on Epstein's List Was on Hunter Biden's Board When Russian Money Arrived, Jana, May 17, 2026 (Part Seven of the Zorro Ranch Road Series). Nearly 600 Epstein files on a Pentagon biodefense CEO. A governor on the board when Russian money arrived. The laptop connected it. Nobody assembled the full chain until now.A Note On Names, And What The Outlets Missed.

News Roundups

• Meidas Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates: Two Nuclear Sites on Fire, Trump Targets Epstein Allies, and the Cuba War Pretex, Ben Meiselas, right, May 17, 2026. The Trump regime is running the same tired Ponzi scheme playbook and hoping you don't notice.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Gets A Brutal New CBS Poll, WHO Declares Global Health Emergency, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 17, 2026. New Interviews with PA Gov. Josh Shapiro and Ohio's Amy Acton; and Two big things to work on this week. 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Race, Rights, Governance

• New York Times, Trump Flexes Hold on G.O.P., Even as It Braces for Midterm Backlash, Tim Balk, May 17, 2026. The defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy showed the president’s dominance in his party at a moment when a broader range of views about Mr. Trump could be a major liability for November.
• New York Times, Lamar Alexander Wants Republicans to Stand Up to Trump, Carl Hulse, May 17, 2026. In a new memoir, the former senator, governor and cabinet member says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6 and calls on Congress to assert its power.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 16, 2026 [U..S. Race Politics Ramps Up], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 17, 2026. Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
• New York Times, For Trump, Soaring Prices Test Voters’ Finances and Patience, Tony Romm and Ben Casselman, May 17, 2026. Just months before another election that may hinge on the economy, the war in Iran has sent gas and other goods soaring. 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary: Pete Buttigieg Totally Wrecks Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy,.Jason Easley, May 17, 2026. Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spends most of his time blaming Pete Buttigieg for his failures. On Sunday, Buttigieg wrecked the unqualified Duffy.
• Meidas Touch Network, Trump has 1130 PM PSYCHO MELTDOWN and QUICKLY CAVES!!! Ben Meiselas, May 17, 2026. 

More On Iran War

 

• New York Times, The Iran War Is Crippling One of the World’s Wealthiest Nations, River Akira Davis, May 17, 2026. Iranian attacks and the stoppage of seaborne transit have paralyzed Qatar’s vital gas exports, stalling the economic pivots intended to anchor the country’s growth.

U.S. Sports, Music, Race, Culture

• MS NOW, Opinion: Caitlin Clark is too experienced to make this rookie mistake, Keith O'Brien, May 11, 2026 (featured May 17). There are many reasons Caitlin Clark should have thought twice before making an appearance with country music star Morgan Wallen.
• New York Times, Clavicular Strikes Plea Deal With Prosecutors After Alligator Shooting, Pooja Salhotra, May 15, 2026. The social media personality pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months of probation. The deal allows him to avoid jail time.

Top Stories

 

 

President Trump met with President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, May 14, 2026, after a flurry of actions fro

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Makes a High Risk Move to Win Over Xi, Chris Buckley, May 17, 2026 (print ed.). The president said a potential arms deal for Taiwan was a “very good negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. His words raise questions about the reliability of U.S. support.

President Trump has described a potential multibillion-dollar weapons sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China, raising new doubts about the pace and scale of American military support for the island democracy.

Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.

Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing. He was asked in an interview with Fox News whether he would approve the Taiwan deal.

“No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: Trump Is A Fool, A Coward, And A Traitor, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 16-17, 2026. Trump continues to bow to and appease global strongmen, doing enormous harm to America and freedom and democracy everywhere.

I try to keep it light on the weekends but we are getting a clearer picture now of what happened in China, and where our addled, weakened, desperate leader is headed. In an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier yesterday Trump threw Taiwan under the bus, and gave it the “stop being so uppity” Ukraine treatment:

Whether through compromise, or a deep desire to be like them, Trump has a history of yielding to and appeasing strongmen. He has done it for years with Putin, giving him so much and getting nothing in return for the US. He did with Bibi in February, yielding to his ill-thought through total war with Iran.

He’s now doing that with Xi on Taiwan, again, yielding so much and getting nothing in return for the United States. He just gets played like a fool again and again, and accelerates our global geopolitical and economic decline. He gets admission to this club of autocrats, and as he walks in the door they pick his pockets, give him the table without a view of the stage, and howl with laughter for at their ridiculous good fortune.

In that interview when asked about the pain the war is bringing to our economy he repeated his magical thinking, [like] “COVID is just going to go away one day” line about short term pain, long term gain. We are way, way passed that now Mr. Trump:

• Brent crude starts the day at one its highest points of the war:
• Gas prices remain high across the US:
• Inflation has exploded in the US, and interest rates are now at a 20 year high:
• Farmers in the US are getting crushed:

From the article {in Axios]:

Farmers across the Midwest are entering planting season under mounting financial pressure, as the Iran conflict drives up diesel and fertilizer prices — deepening an agricultural downturn that some say is the worst since the crisis of the 1980s.

Why it matters: Rising fuel and fertilizer costs threaten to push more family farms out of business, drive up food prices and further strain rural economies already battered by trade disruptions, inflation and extreme weather.

The big picture: Mark Mueller — a northeast Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association — tells Axios that the current landscape is more challenging than at any time since the 1980s farm crisis, when interest rates soared and exports plunged, triggering agricultural bank failures.

The stresses are showing, with rising bankruptcies and lenders becoming more reluctant to provide farmers with operational loans.

“There’s going to be fewer farmers next year than there is this year,” Mueller says.

Zoom in: Farmers are grappling with a confluence of forces, including:

• Skyrocketing energy prices triggered by President Trump’s Iran war, which led to the shuttering of Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for fossil fuels.
• Spiking fertilizer prices and shortages after the Iranians blocked shipments through the strait.
• Disrupted export markets tied to Trump’s tariffs and Chinese import restrictions.
• Global drought and other weather pressures, including climate change.

What they’re saying: “What makes this moment particularly hard is that farmers can’t pivot quickly,” says Cornell University agricultural economist Wendong Zhang.

“Farmers have some tools, but none are quick fixes.”

This morning Iran announced the creation of a permanent toll system in the Strait of Hormuz, something that will strengthen Iran-China-Russia, and weaken the US, our European and Asian allies, and Trump’s Gulf Arab business partners:

We have to be clear eyed about what Trump is doing and who he is. He imagines himself to be like MBS, Bibi, Putin, and Xi. He envisions a world run by a handful of strongmen, with the US taking the Americas and leaving the rest to Putin, Xi, Bibi, and others.

As we discussed yesterday he is trying to help Putin win in Ukraine, and Xi now take Taiwan. He has floated the idea this week of taking full possession of Venezuela and making it the 51st state. He will soon seize Cuba, as he did Venezuela.

He is working furiously, with the help of the corrupt Roberts Court, Chief Justice John Roberts is shown at right, to install minority rule here in the US for the Republican Party. He is literally working to bring an end to the 2nd Reconstruction/VRA era, the 80 year era of Pax America and the Four Freedoms (and American dominance), and the end of American democracy itself.

He is the least American leader we have ever had, operating from a radical and ridiculous vision, one that is leaving America less prosperous, less safe, and less free; all while he builds his ballrooms, golf courses and golden statues, enriches himself, dances with dictators and let’s the rest of be grateful for the pain he has inflicted on us and for his surrendering the great idea of America itself, of freedom and democracy, to oligarchs, criminals, charlatans, and autocrats.

Despite his fantasies Trump is no strongman. He is a fool, a coward, and a traitor. The strongmen of the world laugh at him, and now at this once great country too.

And I am really fucking angry about it all this morning…….

It’s why…..It’s Time To Get To Work Everyone……

 

. New York Times, To Critics, Trump Remarks Reveal a Billionaire Out of Touch, Erica L. Green, May 17, 2026. The president has never pretended to be an ordinary American, but a recent “truth bomb” has opened him to criticism that he doesn’t grasp the economic strain of his war with Iran.

With his generational wealth, his 20-acre Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., and his lucrative family businesses around the world, President Trump has never purported to be an ordinary American.

Instead, he has argued that he could use his business savvy to help lift up the country’s forgotten men and women.

But in recent weeks, as Americans feel deep economic strain from the war he launched in Iran, Mr. Trump’s actions and words have opened him up to accusations that he is either out of touch with — or indifferent to — the lives of everyday Americans.

The costs are ballooning from his renovation, re-decoration and building spree in Washington, D.C., and at the White House. He goes on social media posting frenzies that often focus on his pet projects, gripes and personal triumphs, including a 22-year-old newspaper review of his television show, “The Apprentice.” But perhaps the most striking example came on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump was asked whether the economic hardship Americans are feeling would motivate him to make a deal to end the war.

“Not even a little bit,” he said.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” Mr. Trump continued, a stunningly frank admission that came after weeks spent either downplaying the conflict’s economic toll or simply asking Americans to be patient. His only consideration, Mr. Trump said, was preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon: “That’s all.”

That same day, the Labor Department reported that last month, inflation in the United States accelerated at its fastest rate in three years, and gas reached more than $4.50 a gallon.

Democrats immediately seized on the remark, which will undoubtedly be used in attack ads during the midterm campaigns, and said it was a sign of the disconnect between the priorities of the president and those of the electorate.

“Donald Trump just said the quiet part out loud: he doesn’t care about Americans who are struggling to make ends meet in his economy,” Rosemary Boeglin, the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

Even Mr. Trump’s allies struggled to defend the statement. Vice President JD Vance, asked this week whether he agreed with the president, said: “Well, I don’t think the president said that, I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said.”Editors’ PicksRailway, Meet Milky Way: 5 Great Stargazing TrainsHayden Panettiere Can’t Escape the DramaThe Villains Who Shaped ‘Survivor’

But in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Mr. Trump doubled down.

“That’s a perfect statement,” he said. “I’d make it again.”

He acknowledged that there is a “short-term pain,” associated with the war, but said, “the pain is much less than people thought.”

The White House said that Mr. Trump was focused on defending the United States’ longstanding security.

 

 Donald Trump with Prince Andrew. Money would not have worked very well to control either of them. So Epstein used something else entirely.

The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Investigative Commentary: Jeffrey Epstein Donated Money 8 to 1 to Democrats versus Republicans, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, May 17, 2026. That Doesn't Mean What You Think.

Every major media outlet that has covered Jeffrey Epstein’s political giving has told you the same thing: he donated overwhelmingly to Democrats. Federal Election Commission records confirm it. From 1989 through the early 2000s, Epstein directed roughly $147,000 to Democratic candidates and committees — eight dollars for every one dollar that went to Republicans. The Washington Times called it his “overwhelming investment in the Democratic machine.” Fox News has returned to the figure repeatedly, using it as a cudgel against Democrats who have pressed for full release of the Epstein files.

• The coverage is factually accurate.
• But the interpretation is precisely wrong.
• What the donation record actually shows is not who Epstein owned.
• It shows who he needed to pay to control, and who required other means of coercion.Two Currencies of Compromise

Epstein did not operate a single system of influence. He operated two, running simultaneously, targeting different kinds of people in different ways.

The first system was financial. Campaign contributions, fundraiser access, research and institutional giving, the implicit promise of continued generosity and the implicit threat of its withdrawal. This system left records — FEC filings, donor lists, fundraising invitations. It was, by design, a system for managing people who could be managed with money, perhaps because they needed money more, or perhaps because money was the only way to influence them. In the 1990s, that meant the Democratic Party infrastructure: the Senate committees, the Justice Department under Clinton, the oversight mechanisms that Epstein needed to keep at bay as federal investigators in Florida began to close in.

Epstein wrote checks to Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. He gave $32,000 to the DNC. He gave $29,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. These were not expressions of ideological solidarity. Jeffrey Epstein had no ideology. He was a psychopath. The payments were, rather, control tactics dressed in the language of civic participation.

The second system Epstein used to control people left no FEC records.

It left something else entirely: Cameras. Photos, videos. Recordings of terrible men doing terrible things. And while men of all political stripes were indebted to Epstein in this way, there’s sociological evidence to support the idea that conservative men, already very wealthy men, and men with more to lose if the world discovered their double lives, are both more vulnerable to this type of blackmail, and also more likely to be republicans.The Science of the Gap

To understand why the camera worked better than the check on the Republican men in Epstein’s orbit, you need to understand something that sociologists and historians of sexuality have documented across decades of research: the more rigidly a man’s public identity is built around sexual propriety, the more devastating — and therefore the more valuable to a blackmailer — the evidence of his private behavior becomes.

University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel L. Perry, in his 2019 Oxford University Press book Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, documents what he and his collaborators call “moral incongruence” — the experience of behaving in ways that contradict one’s stated moral values. Perry and psychologist Joshua Grubbs, in their landmark 2019 review published in The Journal of Sex Research, find that moral incongruence is not merely a personal struggle but a measurable, predictable phenomenon: religious and politically conservative men are significantly more likely to experience it, more likely to suffer shame and psychological distress as a result, and more likely to do anything to conceal it. A 2020 peer-reviewed study in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, on which Perry is a co-author, found that the highest levels of pornography consumption among American men occur among evangelical Protestants living in politically conservative states — precisely the overlap of personal religious identity and political community that characterizes the Republican donor and officeholder world Epstein navigated.

This is the structural logic of Jeffrey Epstein’s kompromat target versus his financial bribery targets.

British historian Angus McLaren, in his Harvard University Press book Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History, traces sexual blackmail from its emergence in the late eighteenth century through the Victorian era and into the twentieth century, documenting a consistent pattern: the higher the social premium placed on sexual respectability, the more powerful the leverage created by its violation. The men most vulnerable to sexual blackmail across history have not been the most transgressive — they have been the most publicly respectable. The gap between the public self and the private one is the instrument of control. Epstein did not invent this. He industrialized it.

The Russian intelligence tradition named and theorized what Epstein practiced. Alena V. Ledeneva, a political scientist at University College London whose How Russia Really Works (Cornell University Press) remains the definitive academic study of kompromat, defines the practice as operating through precisely this gap: it works not because it reveals criminality but because it reveals incongruence — the distance between who a man presents himself to be and what he actually does in private. The KGB understood this in the 1930s. The FSB has practiced it ever since. Ledeneva notes that kompromat is most effective not when released, but when held — the threat of release produces compliance indefinitely, while release itself ends the leverage. A man who knows he’s been compromised by a camera is more useful to an intelligence operation that uses kompromat than is a man destroyed by one.

This is why the Republican men who passed through Epstein’s properties received no campaign checks. The check is a one-time transaction that the world can see. The “IOU” appeals to a person’s sense of reciprocity and honor and guilt.

But the camera? The camera is a permanent relationship with the threat of one’s own unbearable, intolerable hypocrisy.The Infrastructure of Silence

Investigators who searched Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion documented surveillance equipment, cameras, and recording devices positioned throughout the property. His Manhattan townhouse — the largest private residence in New York City — contained a vast and sophisticated surveillance infrastructure whose full contents have never been made public. Zorro Ranch, same.

Epstein understood, with operational precision, that video evidence of powerful, hypocritical people in compromising situations is worth more than any campaign check — and cannot be returned, donated to charity, or publicly renounced. Men like Donald Trump didn’t get campaign donations from Epstein, likely because the photo and video Epstein collected of him was far more valuable in the case of a rich man with secrets that could destroy him with his base. Same for Prince Andrew. He received no Epstein donations. He didn’t need them. But he did have a giant gulf between the man he actually was, and the man he needed to be seen as.

Epstein’s goal was always to control people, whether they were the child victims of his rapes or the powerful people he backed into corners they did not see until it was already too late to run.The Redaction That Speaks

When the DOJ released the final tranche of Epstein files in early 2026, its stated policy was clear: redact women to protect victims. The faces of men would not be redacted unless it was technically impossible to redact the woman without obscuring the man beside her.

One exception was made. In a text message exchange between Steve Bannon and Epstein, a news photograph of Donald Trump had his face covered with a black box. There was no woman in the image requiring protection. There was no stated justification. There was only the black box, applied by a Justice Department that reports to Donald Trump.

While this doesn’t prove there is much more damning photo and perhaps video evidence of Trump in the files — and perhaps elsewhere, in the hands of whomever Epstein worked for, or whomever took over for that entity — the order to redact Trump could only really come out of either a mistaken belief he was a child sex trafficking victim, or a mandate to protect him at all costs.

The Correct Question

The press has spent years asking which politicians took Epstein’s money. The eight-to-one Democratic ratio has been weaponized, analyzed, and returned to so many times that it has calcified into conventional wisdom: Epstein was a Democratic operator, his money followed Democratic power, and therefore Democratic politicians bear primary accountability for his protection and his longevity.

This framing serves a partisan, overly simplistic purpose. It is not an accident that it has dominated coverage.

But the correct question is not who got the check. The correct question is who got controlled, by any means. Not just financial. Epstein knew there were many ways to control a person.

And he used them all. 

U.S. Crime, Courts, Insurrection, Law, Rights

 

Trump plans special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump’s Idea of Charity: Terrorists, Cop Assailants, and Child Sex Predators, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, May 15, 2026. Remember back in February, when Trump claimed he was going to donate to “very good charities” any money he got by settling his own lawsuit against the IRS because a contractor stole his tax records from the IRS during his own first term?

Speaking with reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One, Trump said he is considering settling the case and giving the proceeds to “established and respected charities.”

“We’re thinking about doing something for charity where I’ll give money to charity,” he said. “We can make it a substantial amount. Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”

Trump added, “If I pay myself, that somehow will never look good.”

“A lot of outside people said, ‘What a great idea,’ because nobody cares how much if it goes to a good charity,” Trump said. “So you settle by giving charities a lot of money and I think we’re going to do something like that. We’re looking to do something like that.”

Yesterday, ABC reported that the settlement now envisions rewarding Trump $1.7 billion to award to Jan6ers (some shown above).

President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.

If the $1.7 billion were split evenly among the 1,600 criminals and those charged, it would work out to be over a million dollars a person. And that’s on top of the restitution payments for the damage the mob did to the Capitol, of which many convicted criminals were excused with Trump’s pardon. Taxpayers have been stuck cleaning up after Trump’s criminals.

And consider the kind of people who would benefit from this corrupt payoff.

Some number — around a dozen? — are seditionists and adjudged terrorists from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers whom juries found to be attacking the country. Todd Blanche is already working to make their convictions go away, which will allow them to rearm Now, Trump wants to pay those guys a million dollars for their criminal ways.

Then there are the cop assailants. During police week, Trump is floating the idea of paying people who beat cops and in a few cases, nearly killed them — people like Danny Rodriguez who went to January 6 expecting there might be casualties and then responded directly to Rudy Giuliani’s call for trial by combat by making throat slicing gestures. Rodriguez went on to tase Michael Fanone, causing a heart attack.

That’s what Trump wants to reward with a million dollar payoff.

Several of these people have seriously threatened top government officials, too. Taylor Taranto (using an address that Trump made public on Truth Social) drove his armed van to Kalorama and started stalking Barack Obama. “Gotta get the shot, stop at nothing to get the shot. This is where other people come to get the shot,” the mentally ill Navy veteran was chanting. And Chris Moynihan sent text messages threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries: “I cannot allow this terrorist to live … I will kill him for the future,” (which crime Trump’s DOJ chose to ignore, meaning Moynihan got off with just a misdemeanor offense).

Finally, there are the child sex predators. Andrew Paul Johnson, for example, started molesting two children, including a boy of the age of 11, after January 6.

Both of Johnson’s young victims — a young boy and a young girl — testified at his trial, where they described how Johnson used his role as a trusted “father figure” to subject them to physical sexual abuse and explicit messages.

Johnson first came into the picture in 2023, after the boy’s mother met Johnson at a political rally. The mother, who was raising two boys alone, let Johnson stay on the couch in her home.

She testified that she believed Johnson, who worked as a handyman, could help fix things around the house.

By that point, Johnson had already been charged for his role in the Capitol attack, but his case was still working its way through the courts. On the political right, riot defendants like Johnson were widely portrayed as victims, “hostages” and “political prisoners.”

One night, the boy was watching “a scary movie” with Johnson, when he fell asleep.

“I woke up in the morning and he was touching me — I felt him touching me in my private area,” the boy testified. He was 11 years old at the time.

“Did you say anything to him?” Assistant State Attorney Kasey Whitson asked.

“No ma’am,” the boy replied. “I was too nervous, like, I was scared.”

Later that year, the boy again woke up to Johnson touching him. This time, Johnson swore him to silence.

“He said not to tell anybody,” the boy said. His mother remained unaware of the abuse.

When the boy told him that fondling his genitalia was wrong, Johnson used his expectation of a payoff to try to silence the child.

Andrew also told [redacted] that since he was pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and he was being awarded $10,000,000 as a result of being a “jan 6’er”. Andrew did tell [redacted] that he would be putting him in his “will” to take any money he had left over. This tactic was believed to be used to keep [redacted] from exposing what Andrew had done to him.

It’s not just that these monsters are recidivist criminals. It’s that Trump’s coddling of them has led them to believe they have impunity for other crimes.

And Trump wants to steal $1.7 billion from taxpayers — basically a $5 tax on every American — and give it to these criminals.

That’s his idea of charity. plenty of reason to be worried about their financial well-being, said David Tinsley, an economist at the Bank of America Institute.

U.S. Scandals, Probes, Coverups

An undated photograph released by the Justice Department showing Kathryn Ruemmler with Jeffrey Epstein. Ms. Ruemmler’s name appeared in over 10,000 documents released in January by the Justice Department pertaining to Mr. Epstein (Photo via  U.S. Department of Justice).

New York Times, Investigation: How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image, Robert Draper, May 17, 2026. Terakeet, a reputation management firm, used online tricks to downplay the friendship of the Goldman Sachs general counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn’t enough.

Senior members of Terakeet, a reputation management firm, huddled in April 2024 to discuss what they could do for their new and potentially biggest client, Goldman Sachs, and its general counsel. She was suddenly the subject of unwanted publicity for her association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Terakeet’s chief executive and co-founder, Mac Cummings, described the counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to the others at the meeting as a “friend of mine” and the “executive sponsor” of the Goldman Sachs account, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Cummings added with some hyperbole that Ms. Ruemmler, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration, was “the most accomplished, brilliant lawyer in the United States, possibly the world,” and that she “probably will be at some point a Supreme Court justice of the United States — she is cool, she is fun, she’s interesting.”

There was just one problem, Mr. Cummings said. After leaving the White House, Ms. Ruemmler had entered private practice and met with Mr. Epstein.

“She’s done nothing wrong,” Mr. Cummings told his subordinates. “But like the other thousands of people that met him over the course of the last 20 years, her name is on something, her name is in a news article, which isn’t really helpful when you’re trying to be in the C-suite of Goldman Sachs. So that’s probably an area that we’re going to zone in on.”ImageMs. Ruemmler, right, in the Roosevelt Room with members of the Obama administration in 2014.Credit...Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Zone in on Ms. Ruemmler’s troubles they did. Over the next 20 months, according to internal documents and interviews with individuals involved in the work, Terakeet’s team went to remarkable lengths to address what one memo characterized as her “association risk problem.”

Specifically, Terakeet created and posted positive online content about Ms. Ruemmler that was aimed at appearing above the mostly negative content about her association with Mr. Epstein. The goal was that at least 80 percent of the first 30 Google search results would be favorable.

To pull this off, the firm, based in Syracuse, N.Y., resorted to the furtive, algorithm-placating digital tradecraft that has made it one of the most exclusive and expensive players in the booming world of reputation management firms that combine public relations and technical skills to maintain a preferred narrative online. (Mr. Epstein himself tried to do the same sanitizing of his digital presence, although not with Terakeet, with seemingly similar, unsuccessful results.)

Ms. Reummler declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Cummings declined to be interviewed on the record. He did, however, issue a statement describing his firm’s work. “Terakeet’s technology is built on a simple mandate: organizations must tell their own story,” the statement said. “If they do not, third-party bias combined with generative AI will shape it for them.”ImageMac Cummings, chief executive and co-founder of Terakeet, in 2012.

Over the years, his company’s client roster has included MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital.

Many of these were primarily “growth” clients who used Terakeet’s optimization expertise to fortify their brand. Others were dogged by controversy and fell into the “reputation” client category. Most wished to build and protect their brands at the same time. One prospective client, The New York Times, entered into discussions with Terakeet last year about how the firm could help combat online attacks aimed at Times employees. The Times ultimately decided not to enlist its services.

Terakeet occasionally works free of charge for causes such as the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York, but on average most clients can expect to be billed in the range of $5 to $10 million annually, according to people familiar with the company. The fees are considerably more than what other reputation management firms charge.

“We charge high fees, but nothing like that,” said Sam Michelson, the chief executive of Five Blocks, a New York firm that has competed with Terakeet for clients in the past.

In its early years, Terakeet focused on providing search engine optimization services to drive online traffic to a client’s website, including in 2007, when it assisted in digital fund-raising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The firm did similar work for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama. In 2016, according to federal disclosures, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential campaign paid the firm $10,000 to perform technology services in battleground states.

Terakeet also maintained a small list of clients contending with minor blemishes on an otherwise positive public image, such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which had been embarrassed by a ProPublica story in 2021 detailing how the nonprofit accumulated billions of dollars in a reserve fund while the families of patients faced financial hardship.

Ms. Ruemmler presented a far different challenge for Terakeet. The story of how the firm tried and ultimately failed to diminish Mr. Epstein from her public profile represented an all-out effort to mute the immutable. In the end, all Terakeet could do was prove the adage coined by the billionaire Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

This account is based on internal Terakeet documents, audio recordings of company meetings and interviews with 20 current and former employees. Since those who work at Terakeet are required to sign nondisclosure agreements, they described their confidential work on the condition of anonymity.

Terakeet’s grip on Ms. Ruemmler’s reputation began to slip last November, when the House Oversight Committee made public several thousand documents it had obtained from the estate of Mr. Epstein. The tranche included emails from Ms. Ruemmler referring to the convicted sex offender as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.”

“We are not defending Jeffrey Epstein, full stop,” Mr. Cummings told the Terakeet team a few days after the documents were disclosed, according to a person who was present at the meeting. Though Goldman Sachs continued to stand by its general counsel, members of the team assigned to the account at Terakeet said they began to wonder if more trouble was coming.

They did not have to wait long. On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 30, the Justice Department released 3.5 million pages pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Ms. Ruemmler’s name appeared in over 10,000 of them. In some of the exchanges, she discussed traveling to France with Mr. Epstein, expressed appreciation for the lavish gifts he had bought her and offered him legal advice.

 

FBI Director Kash Patel, above, has been exposed as orchestrating a snorkling party last summer amidst the wreckage of one of the most revered locales in U.S. Navel history, the Pearl Harbor underwater graveyard of more than 900 U.S.S. Arizona personnel killed during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941 that prompted U.S. entry into World War II. The battleship U.S.S. Arizona is shown below following its 1931 modernization.

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Kash Patel holds a _____-up Pearl Harbor snorkel party, Jeff Tiedrich, right,May 17, 2026. Here’s another heartwarming tale of what government looks like when everyone in it is a s________ who believes they have the right to do whatever they want.

It seems that last summer, our bourbon-brained FBI director had a hankering to splash about in the water.

So, go find the nearest swimming pool and jump in, right? Problem solved!

Sorry, no. that plebeian s____ might satisfy you or me — or the occasional gorilla — but that’s not how a prime übermensch like Kash Patel rolls.

What Kash did was to round up a bunch of his buds, commandeer two Navy SEAL boats and sail all the way out to Pearl Harbor for a f____-up snorkel party, right next to the sunken remains of the U.S.S. Arizona: 

 

Last summer, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, capped a whirlwind South Pacific trip with a snorkel trip in Hawaii.

There, Navy SEALs used two boats to transport and escort Mr. Patel and nine other people on what a Defense Department email called a “V.I.P. Snorkel” next to one of the military’s most sacred sites, the underwater tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona that holds the remains of more than 900 Navy sailors and Marines who died at Pearl Harbor.

That’s right — while the average American struggles to pay for basic goods and services, there’s Three Sheets to the Wind Kash, wasting god-knows-how-many taxpayer dollars to have a fun afternoon desecrating the site of an underwater tomb.

It cannot be overstated just how f____-up this stunt was. There are rules and regulations that forbid exactly this.

Out of respect for the dead entombed in the wreck of the Arizona, rules bar visitors even from wearing swimwear at the memorial. With some exceptions over the years for dignitaries, the only people allowed in the water around the tomb are military and National Park Service divers interring the remains of the last Arizona survivors in the wreck, or conducting annual maintenance surveys, according to a former Navy officer and a former National Park Service official familiar with restrictions at the site.

The memorial is such a hallowed place that you can’t even walk around in a bathing suit. They will throw your disrespectful a__ right out of there. Yet here’s Three Sheets Kash and nine of his pals, splish-splashing about. with snorkels, for f___ sake. How gross is that?

And it’s not like Old Bug Eyes didn’t know where he was. The wreck of the Arizona — along with the remains of some nine hundred sailors and marines — is a well-marked historical monument. The ship itself just below the surface of the water. you can plainly see its outline.

The Pacific Ocean covers 63.8 million square miles. Drunkie McSnorkelcould have literally picked any other spot at random and had equally as good a time. so why would he deliberately choose to dishonor the watery tomb of heroes who gave their lives defending their country?

It’s because Kash Patel is a self-entitled ____ who believes he has the right to do whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants.

 

Trump FBI Director Kash Patel, shown carousing on a U.S. taxpayer-funded trip to Italy in February where he joined the lockerroom celebrations of the victorious U.S. Men's Olympic Hockey Team.

Did it ever occur to Kash that what he was doing might have been wrong? Oh, you sweet, innocent babe in the woods. why would you even ask that? that’s not how self-entitled _____works.

So, just how f____-up was Kash’s snorkelpallooza? Let’s ask William M. McBride, a Navy veteran and professor emeritus of history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

“This is a war grave with the same legal status as Arlington National Cemetery,” Mr. McBride said in an interview. “Snorkeling around Arizona is as disrespectful as playing kickball on top of the graves at Arlington.”

Funny that McBride would mention Arlington, because remember this?

 

Preznit F____wit is way too decrepit to be playing kickball, but he had no problem trampling all over the graves of fallen heroes when he wanted to hold a photo-op at Arlington National Cemetery during the presidential 2024 campaign. when an Arlington staffer — a US Army sergeant — tried to stop this abomination from taking place, Donny’s thugs roughly shoved her out of the way.....

Just as with the site of the sunken USS Arizona, Arlington has explicit rules: 

Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families. Services or any activities inside the Cemetery connected therewith shall not be partisan in nature.

Donny had no business trampling all over hallowed graves. And our Self-Entitled ___Chief has surrounded himself with kindred spirits. The piss-drunk warmonger with the fifty-thousand-dollar makeup studio. The dead-bear-cub-kidnapping maniac. The soulless Nazi vampire who literally hates everyone.

The haughty, out-of-touch plutocrat who pretends he’s just some struggling soybean farmer. The reality show never-was who just took a seven-month taxpayer-funded vacation. And the bourbon-chugging FBI director who thinks nothing of frolicking atop a war memorial. Every single one of them believes they have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want.

‘Oh, it’s a dead whale. Let me chainsaw its head off and tie it to the top of my car.’

Who even thinks of doing such a thing? 

Donny has coarsened our everyday life. He’s created a permission structure where any and all abhorrent behavior is allowed — nay, encouraged. It starts at the top, with Donny his merry band of sewer clowns, and trickles all the way down to the dumbest MAGA ____ at the bottom of the totem pole.

 

 

Eyes On ICE, ICE Kills With Indifference Commentary:: Agency Fails to Protect a Vulnerable 2-Year-Old, Then Blames the Detained Mother, Staff Report, May 17, 2026. Orlin Hernandez Reyes should be alive.

The detention apparatus of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates on a grim transactional calculus. Human beings are reduced to inventory. The bureaucratic machine prioritizes quotas over rights.

The preventable murder of two year old Orlin Hernandez Reyes exposes this system. It is the lethal byproduct of an agency that kills with indifference. A direct extension of the border regime that treats migrant families as disposable labor inventory and children as collateral in the enforcement of lines designed to fracture worker solidarity.

• Go Fund Me started to transport his broken body body to mother in Honduras:
• Deep dive: A look at the 287(g) program and its implications for local NC law enforcement | WHQR
• The Abduction and the Duty of Care

When ICE detained Wendy Hernandez Reyes under the 287(g) program they assumed absolute duty of care for her son Orlin. By separating mother from child the government took legal and moral responsibility.

At just two years old Orlin was defenseless. ICE treated him as a logistical liability to be offloaded quickly.The Fatal Hand Off

ICE placed Orlin with his uncle Samuel Maldonado Erazo. This transfer showed catastrophic negligence. Fundamental vetting was abandoned. The agency delivered the toddler directly to his abuser. ICE blames mother for 'abandoning' 2-year-old who was allegedly murdered months after deporting her - AOL

ICE blames mother for ‘abandoning’ 2-year-old who was allegedly murdered months after deporting her - AOL

A Mother’s PleaBroken beyond repair hear her words and please don’t look away. Her son should be alive In this video she exposes ICE refusal to reunite her with her son:Orlin Should Be Alive

The evidentiary record shows severe sustained trauma including sexual assault and multiple broken bones. Defensive wounds on a two-year-old tell their own horror story.

Video Evidence: Full Report on the Abuse and Deportation ChainUnivision coverage detailing the timeline of horrors:

Short Video: Child Dies from Abuse While Mother Detained by ICEThe Bureaucratic Indifference

ICE’s own press release attempts to shift blame onto the detained mother. They claim she abandoned her son. This is grotesque. They detained her. They stripped her of power to protect him. They ignored her explicit warnings.State-Sanctioned Homicide

By severing the bond between mother and child under the guise of "enforcement," ICE knowingly placed a highly vulnerable toddler into a dangerous environment. They manufactured a crisis, ignored the glaring red flags, and washed their hands of the aftermath. Now, rather than taking accountability for their undeniable role in a thoroughly preventable death, they are using their public relations machine to victim-blame a grieving, powerless mother. This goes far beyond bureaucratic indifference—it is structural violence resulting in the death of a child.

News Roundups

Meidas Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates: Two Nuclear Sites on Fire, Trump Targets Epstein Allies, and the Cuba War Pretex, Ben Meiselas, right, May 17, 2026. The Trump regime is running the same tired Ponzi scheme playbook and hoping you don't notice.

A massive explosion was reported near Sdot Micha Air Base in Beit Shemesh, Israel, a site widely believed to house missile and nuclear assets. Israeli outlet Kan News said the blast was a “controlled explosion” at a nearby civilian factory.

Hi all, Ben here. It’s Sunday, and as usual, there is a lot happening and so much that is slipping under the radar when it comes to the corporate media. Let me walk you through what we’re tracking this afternoon.

Top stories:

• A drone struck a nuclear power plant in the UAE, and a mysterious explosion rocked a suspected Israeli nuclear and missile storage site
• The Trump regime is laying the groundwork for a Cuba invasion using Axios as its propaganda vehicle
• Eleven U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft are departing the Middle East, the same pattern we saw right before the Iran strikes
• Trump is retaliating against Thomas Massie and other Republicans who pushed for the release of the Epstein files
• Ukraine launched one of its largest-ever drone strikes on Russia, reaching the Moscow region
• Todd Blanche confirms the DOJ is laser-focused on “proving” the 2020 election was stolen
• Mike Johnson tells Americans to wait on kitchen table issues until the Strait of Hormuz is open — the same Strait of Hormuz that was open before Trump’s war

Let’s get into it.Two nuclear sites hit in 24 hours… Where’s the coverage?

Let’s start with what should be the biggest story of the weekend. In the past 24 hours, two nuclear sites in the Middle East have been struck, and the silence from corporate media is blowing my mind, though it’s not exactly surprising at this point.

In Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation confirmed that a drone hit an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant. UAE defense officials say they intercepted two of the three drones targeting the facility but were unable to stop the third. Authorities report no injuries and say radiological safety levels were not affected, but the facility was on fire, fire and rescue teams were responding, and this happened at a nuclear power plant.

Then there’s Israel. A massive explosion near the Sdot Micha Air Base in Beit Shemesh, widely understood to be where Israel stores its nuclear weapons and missiles, sent up what looked like a mushroom cloud. Israel is calling it a “controlled explosion” at a civilian factory nearby. But here’s the thing: if you’re conducting a planned detonation near a nuclear weapons facility that’s going to produce a visible mushroom cloud, you tell the local population first. There was no such notice. Experts are raising serious doubts about the official explanation, and they have every reason to.

Two nuclear sites in under twenty-four hours. Is it just me or should this be a much bigger story?The Cuba playbook: Same Ponzi scheme, different country

Right on cue, while the Middle East is literally on fire, what does the Trump regime do? It pivots as it always does. When one catastrophe becomes too much to manage, the machine generates a new threat, a new enemy, a new pretext. This time: Cuba.

Axios published an “exclusive” Sunday morning claiming Cuba has acquired over 300 military drones from Russia and Iran and has reportedly discussed using them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. naval vessels, and possibly Key West. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Havana just this past Thursday, ostensibly to warn Cuba against any aggression.

Within hours, MAGA Republican congressmembers from Florida — Díaz-Balart, Gimenez, and Salazar — were pounding the table about the existential Cuban threat, 90 miles from Florida’s shores.

But let’s slow down for a second, because there are a few things worth noting here.

First, as former U.S. diplomat and intelligence officer Ned Price pointed out, the framing of this story is doing a lot of work. The headline screams “offensive threat” from Havana. The actual substance, buried deep in the article, is that U.S. officials are reportedly worried Cuba might respond with drones if attacked. That is a fundamentally different situation. That’s called deterrence. It is not a pretext for invasion — unless you need one.

Second, where did Cuba get these drones? From Russia and Iran, according to the report. And who is Donald Trump? The man who removed thousands of U.S. troops from Poland, who attacked NATO, who lifted sanctions on Russia, and who stood aside while Russian ships sailed through what was supposed to be a blockade of Cuba. What did anyone think was on those ships? If you allow Russia to resupply Cuba and then act shocked that Cuba has Russian military hardware, you are either incompetent or you planned it this way.

This is the Venezuela playbook. This is the Iran playbook. Generate a threat, get your media partners to amplify it, activate your congressional allies to demand action, and move the country toward another war before anyone can stop to ask what the plan actually is. The MAGA Florida contingent is already getting in position, probably calculating this will help close the gap with Latino voters who have been drifting away from Trump. It is cynical, it is transparent, and they genuinely think you’re too distracted to notice. This sort of “wag the dog” posturing may have worked in the past. I hope Americans see through it in 2026.In plane sight

Here’s something else that should be getting more attention. Eleven U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft are departing the Middle East, heading toward Europe. This exact mass-departure pattern occurred a few hours before the strikes on Iran began on February 28th. It happened again last week before Trump reportedly called off strikes at the last minute.

Operation Epic Fury has been declared “concluded.” But concluded doesn’t mean over. It means the next phase hasn’t been officially named yet. We’ll be watching this closely.Trump’s Epstein revenge tour

Let’s talk about Rep. Thomas Massie, right. Trump posted a full-throated attack on the Kentucky congressman Sunday, calling him the worst Republican in history and urging Kentucky voters to throw him out in Tuesday’s primary. The stated reason is that Massie voted against tax cuts and border wall funding. But we all know the real reason.

Massie, along with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace, pushed hard for the release of the Epstein files. They wanted transparency on the child sex trafficking network those files could expose. Trump privately told allies those were “my friends.” And then, systematically, Trump and the MAGA apparatus turned on every single one of them.

Think about what has been unleashed against Massie simply because he dared push for that release. Tens of millions of dollars in outside spending. Coordinated smear campaigns. Attacks from some of the most powerful figures in government and media. Members of his own party mobilizing to destroy him. And this is happening to a sitting member of Congress who is, in many ways, even more conservative than Donald Trump himself. Whether you agree with Massie on anything else is beside the point entirely.

Because if this is what happens to a powerful elected official with a national platform and millions of supporters when he challenges entrenched interests, imagine what Epstein survivors face when they consider coming forward. The money. The political power. The government connections. The defense and media apparatus. The coordinated intimidation. If anything makes clear why so many survivors remain silent for years, or never speak at all, it’s watching what’s being done to Massie right now. That right there tells you everything about who this regime is protecting and why.The DOJ is still focused on…the 2020 election

Todd Blanche appeared on Fox Sunday morning to tell Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is “very focused” on determining whether the “right people” voted in the 2020 election. When pushed on whether there will ever be a definitive answer on whether the election was stolen, Blanche said he couldn’t promise that.

Of course he can’t promise it. Because it wasn’t stolen. Sixty-plus courts said so — Trump-appointed judges, Bush-appointed judges, Reagan-appointed judges — all of them looked at the evidence and found nothing. But the DOJ isn’t looking for truth. It’s looking for a story. The “right people” language is not subtle. In MAGA world, the right people are the people who voted for Trump. That’s what your Justice Department is working on while Americans are worried about healthcare costs and grocery prices. While actual criminals roam the streets. While Epstein’s associates remain free.

And meanwhile, Mike Johnson went on Fox to explain that kitchen table issues will have to wait until the Strait of Hormuz is open. The same Strait of Hormuz that was open before this administration started bombing Iran. You created the problem, you’re now telling us to be patient while you solve it, and you want credit for the solution. This is the participation trophy approach to geopolitics.The Senate Parliamentarian kicks Trump in the ballroom

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the Republican bill’s provision to spend $1 billion on Trump’s ballroom does not comply with the Byrd Rule, meaning it would require 60 votes to pass, not a simple majority. Senate Budget Committee Democrats confirmed the ruling Sunday, and Senator Merkley made clear that Democrats are prepared to challenge any changes Republicans make to try to get it through anyway.

A billion dollars for a ballroom that was supposed to be free. In the middle of a reconciliation bill that’s supposed to be about fiscal policy. The parliamentarian at least had the decency to call it what it is. Whether Republicans try to jam it through another way remains to be seen, but Democrats have put them on notice.Ukraine brings the war home to Moscow

Finally, Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks of the entire war overnight, sending more than 1,000 drones deep into Russia. At least four people were killed in the Moscow region, debris fell on Sheremetyevo, Russia’s largest airport, and Ukrainian drones flew over 500 kilometers from Ukraine’s border, penetrating the densest concentration of Russian air defenses in the world.

President Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes and called them entirely justified, direct retaliation for Russia’s repeated ballistic missile and drone attacks on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Ukrainian civilians. Experts say the scale of the strike makes clear Ukraine has the capacity to reach Russia’s capital at significant scale, bringing the reality of this war home to ordinary Russians in a way the Kremlin cannot ignore.

Russia had launched 287 drones at Ukraine overnight, wounding eight people and damaging residential buildings across multiple regions.

There is no peace process. There is no ceasefire. There is a war, despite Trump’s claims he would end it within 24 hours, and Ukraine is prosecuting it.

That’s the update for Sunday afternoon. Let me know what you think in the comments. Ron Filipkowski will be back later with his full weekend bulletin, so stay tuned. Thanks for being here. 

The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News and Comment: MAGA Infighting Erupts, Trump's Stock Trading Exposed, Large Protests Against SCOTUS Across the South, Aaron Parnas, right, May 17, 2026. Donald Trump is now escalating his attacks on Lauren Boebert as internal MAGA infighting intensifies. Marjorie Taylor Greene appears increasingly isolated, and Boebert may be next. At the same time, massive marches swept through Alabama today in protest of recent Supreme Court decisions affecting voting rights.

We also learned that Trump made more than 3,700 stock trades during the first quarter of 2026 alone, raising major new ethics questions about conflicts of interest and presidential financial activity.

Meanwhile, there still is not nearly enough coverage of the proposed $1.7 billion compensation fund tied to Trump’s lawsuit against the federal government, money critics say could ultimately benefit his political allies, including January 6 defendants.

Legal experts and watchdogs are warning that the implications are enormous because it could normalize the idea of a president using the machinery of government and the courts to financially reward allies and supporters. This is not a minor story. It cuts directly to questions about presidential power, accountability, and the future boundaries of executive authority.

But like so many stories in today’s nonstop news cycle, it is already beginning to fade from public attention. That is exactly why independent media matters right now more than ever. Independent outlets are often the only ones willing to stay focused on stories long after the headlines move on.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Gets A Brutal New CBS Poll, WHO Declares Global Health Emergency, Simon Rosenberg, right, May 17, 2026. New Interviews with PA Gov. Josh Shapiro and Ohio's Amy Acton; and Two big things to work on this week.

We got fresh confirmation of Trump’s extraordinary political decline this morning from a MAGA friendly source, CBS News:

This data from the CBS poll should worry every Republican candidate running this November: 

Within hours of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy finishing third in his primary re-election last night the WHO declared a global health emergency over an outbreak of an un-treatable Ebola strain in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda:

The World Health Organization declared late Saturday that the spread of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda was a global health emergency, a day after Africa’s leading public health authority first announced an outbreak in a province in northeastern Congo linked to dozens of suspected deaths.

By Saturday, cases had also been confirmed in Kinshasa, Congo, and in Kampala, Uganda, the capital cities of each country, the W.H.O. said. In Congo’s Ituri Province, where the outbreak was first identified, 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths attributed to the virus had been reported, although only eight cases had been definitively linked to the virus through laboratory testing.

The scale of the outbreak could be far larger than currently detected and reported, the W.H.O. said in declaring a “public health emergency of international concern.” Eight of 13 samples collected in various areas tested positive, the agency said.

……..

The risk of the outbreak spreading was being exacerbated by a humanitarian crisis, high population mobility and a large network of informal health care facilities in the area of the outbreak, the agency said. There is no approved vaccine or therapeutics for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola behind the outbreak, according to the W.H.O.

As a way of endearing himself to Trump, angry over Cassidy’s vote to Impeach him in 2021, Senator Cassidy, a doctor and Chair of the Senate committee that oversees our health care system, shepherded Bobby Jr and his band of anti-science, anti-vaxx grifters into power at HHS/CDC/NIH. Cassidy’s rancid betrayal of our public health was rewarded with him losing his primary last night against two other Republicans and the emergence of two separate outbreaks of deadly viruses that are exposing the extraordinary recklessness of what the soon to be former Senator enabled.

Here’s The NYT:

Some global health experts said they were alarmed that the first reports of the outbreak emerged so late in its development.

“It’s pretty stunning to have first notice of an outbreak in D.R.C., which is very experienced, and have it be so large,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Outbreaks are typically picked up much earlier by the World Health Organization, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or by news reports, she said.

……..

American officials have said that aid cuts by the Trump administration hampered the ability of the authorities in Uganda to curtail an Ebola outbreak in that country early last year.

“It’s possible that we’re starting to see the consequences of severe and sudden cuts to global health programs that have eroded surveillance and allowed deadly viruses to spread undetected,” Dr. Nuzzo said.

In the coming days we will need to use these deadly outbreaks to force a debate about the reckless intentional dismantling of our global and domestic public health care systems. Here’s The Guardian’s home page right now:

Perhaps a newly liberated Senator Cassidy will lead the charge.

Over the last two days we’ve focused (here, here) on another Trumpian disaster - his ridiculous performance at the China Summit. Look at this headline from the Washington Post this morning. No hiding what a disastrous stretch this has been for Trump, and for America:

We have two ways to fight Trump in the coming days. The first is to flip those two Supreme Court seats in Georgia on Tuesday. The early vote has been very encouraging. We’ve hit our $50,000 fundraising target - thank you all. But we need to keep pushing for defeating two Federalist Society judges will be a powerful symbolic response to the GOP’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and its ongoing attempt to rig the midterms. You can get links to our recent conversations with our two intrepid candidates, Jen Jordan and Miracle Rankin, and info on how to donate/help below.

The second thing we can do this week is to build support for HR 2913, The Ukraine Support Act. In Friday’s post we detailed what’s in this bill and why it is so important we pass it when it comes up for a vote in early June. I am asking every member of this community to call their House Rep every day until it passes, and your Senators too, asking them to work to pass something similar in the Upper Chamber.

On a related note in the last twenty-four hours Ukraine has struck deep into the heavily fortified Moscow region, as Zelenskyy works to keep taking the war to Putin:

Meidas Touch Network, Trump has 1130 PM PSYCHO MELTDOWN and QUICKLY CAVES!!! Ben Meiselas, May 17, 2026.  

 

Bill Richardson, the late New Mexico governor, U.S. Secretary of Energy, investor and globe-trotting special envoy, is referenced above in a graphic created for the Last Page First site that has been investigating ties of the late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that relate to Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico and suspicious activities occurring there and with powerful figures with global ties.

Last Page First, Investigation: The New Mexico Governor on Epstein's List Was on Hunter Biden's Board When Russian Money Arrived, Jana, May 17, 2026 (Part Seven of the Zorro Ranch Road Series). Nearly 600 Epstein files on a Pentagon biodefense CEO. A governor on the board when Russian money arrived. The laptop connected it. Nobody assembled the full chain until now.A Note On Names, And What The Outlets Missed.

There are two men named Wolfe in this piece. Michael Wolff — two f’s — is the journalist who lunched with Richardson at Epstein’s house in March 2013. Nathan Wolfe — one f — is the virologist who founded Global Viral and Metabiota. They are not connected in any document. What connects them is that the same archive placing Richardson, shown at right as U.S. Energy Secretary, at Epstein’s house contains nearly 600 files on the founder of a company that was simultaneously briefing Hunter Biden’s fund on Pentagon biodefense operations in Ukraine.

In March 2022, some outlets reported that Nathan Wolfe had thanked Jeffrey Epstein in the acknowledgments of his 2012 book. That was their source. One page of one book. Gateway Pundit, NaturalNews, and The Exposé ran it. They were dismissed as conspiracy blogs and the story died.

Nearly 600 references to Nathan Wolfe appear in the DOJ Epstein archive.

Dated emails, study proposals, scheduling chains, an offer of an apartment and a car, appearances in the same day’s schedule as Ehud Barak, Peter Mandelson, and the CEO of Barclays. Those outlets had a book page. This piece has the archive.

Two threads. One archive. None of it put together until now.

What the Hunter Biden laptop and the Epstein archive contain together is the full assembly.

Already reported:

• Wolfe thanked Epstein in The Viral Storm (2012). First noted by The Exposé, March 2022.

• Hunter Biden’s RSTP invested in Metabiota. NY Post, Gateway Pundit, NaturalNews, and The Exposé, March 2022.

• In-Q-Tel invested in Metabiota. The Exposé, NaturalNews, 2022.

• Neil Callahan on Metabiota’s board of advisors. The Exposé, 2022.

• Rosemont Realty took $40M from Yelena Baturina via Inteco Management AG, 2012. Daily Mail, October 2022.

• Richardson met Epstein nine times 2010-2018, including the March 2013 Wolff lunch. Santa Fe New Mexican, February 2026.

• Guttieri Ukraine Science memo (partial fragments, no full email chain or headers). Gateway Pundit, NaturalNews, and The Exposé, 2022.

Never assembled until now — all connections first made by Last Page First:

• Richardson appointed Burrell to the NM Mortgage Finance Authority in 2010. Nine months later Burrell confirmed Richardson accepted the Rosemont board position.

• Richardson was on Rosemont Realty’s board when Baturina’s $40 million arrived in 2012. The governor was a board member of the company that took Russian money.

• In April 2011 — the same month Burrell was deploying Richardson to Asia for Rosemont — Epstein described Richardson to a foreign contact as a “close friend” who “is willing to help.” Two networks using the same man simultaneously.

• Richardson deployed to Asia to close Chinese institutional investment deals for Rosemont — confirmed in laptop emails. Hunter personally invited Chinese state-owned financial executives to visit Santa Fe.

• Garrett Thornburg — Richardson’s “good friend” by Richardson’s own words, a Bear Stearns alumnus who built a major investment operation out of Santa Fe — was appointed by Richardson to the Commission to Save the College of Santa Fe. Richardson’s own Director of Cabinet Affairs and Deputy Communications Director, Allan Oliver, went directly to the Thornburg Foundation when he left government. The pattern of state appointments and staff movement toward financial figures in Richardson’s Santa Fe network has never been documented.

• Nearly 600 EFTA documents on Nathan Wolfe — actual emails, study proposals, scheduling chains, the apartment and car offer. Those outlets had a book acknowledgment. This is the archive.

• Full Guttieri Ukraine memo with complete email chain and headers. Gateway Pundit, NaturalNews, and The Exposé had fragments in 2022. This piece has the full documented sequence including Pozharskyi’s follow-up questions and Archer’s “discrete nature of your Board role” response.

• Full DeLoche In-Q-Tel chain — Hoyem, O’Toole (just left DHS S&T), Gillman Louie, Callahan’s “guys in VA at the shop.”

• Wolfe walked into the RSP office on October 2, 2014 — confirmed in Katie Dodge’s calendar — while Hunter’s fund was brokering his CIA introduction.

• Burrell arrested September 2024 — $1.5M bad check to a casino, ankle shackles on Nantucket, multiple foreclosures. Richardson appointed him to a state financial authority.I. The Appointment

The story of how Bill Richardson ended up at Jeffrey Epstein’s lunch table starts not with Epstein but with a Kerry campaign staffer named Dan Burrell.

Burrell spent the 2004 presidential campaign traveling the Southwest with John Kerry as a senior staffer. That’s where he met Richardson — then governor of New Mexico — along with Diane Denish and Javier Gonzales. After the campaign, Burrell went to Yale Law School, spent time in California commercial real estate, and came back to the Southwest. In 2008, he and private equity partners purchased a Santa Fe company called BGK Properties and renamed it Rosemont Realty. The office was at 330 Garfield Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501.

In 2010, Governor Bill Richardson appointed Dan Burrell to serve on the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority. Documented in the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Taos News in reporting on Burrell’s September 2024 arrest. 

Dan Burrell, left, CEO of Rosemont Realty, arrested on Nantucket, September 20, 2024 (Photo: Jason Graziadei / Nantucket Current). More background below:

Richardson gave Burrell a state appointment in 2010. Nine months later, Burrell put Richardson on the board of his company — where Hunter Biden sat on the advisory board from 2010 to 2014. The sequence is documented across two independent sources: the Santa Fe New Mexican's 2024 arrest coverage of Burrell and the Hunter Biden laptop archive.

Three months after the board confirmation, Burrell went to Taiwan and China to pitch institutional investors — Fubon, China Development Financial Holding Corporation, China Investment Corporation. On April 27, 2011, he sent a follow-up to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, Thornton AI contacts, and the Chinese financial contacts:

“I met with Governor Richardson yesterday and have confirmed his willingness to make a trip to Taiwan and China in September. He is very well known in the region because of his work in Korea and Japan, so I think this could help us considerably in moving investment forward. Bringing him to Asia, however, comes with an opportunity cost as we have limited time allocation for these types of trips from the Governor. This will make it very important that we have re-qualified our contact list from the last trip and bring him in basically for close meetings.”

In 2012, Rosemont Realty completed a $69.7 million commercial real estate investment plan across seven US cities. The largest single investor was Yelena Baturina — billionaire widow of the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, charged by a senior US diplomat with presiding over a network of corruption. Baturina invested $40 million through her Swiss company, Inteco Management AG. The Daily Mail reported this in October 2022 from emails uncovered by the Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery. What the Daily Mail did not report was that Bill Richardson was on Rosemont Realty’s board when that money arrived. The governor Richardson had appointed to run a state financial authority was simultaneously a board member of the company that took $40 million from the wife of Moscow’s corrupt former mayor.

Richardson was not the only Santa Fe financial figure connected to his state appointment power. Garrett Thornburg founded Thornburg Investment Management in Santa Fe in 1982 after leaving Bear Stearns, where he was a limited partner and founding member of the public finance department. Jeffrey Epstein also came from Bear Stearns. Both men left and built major financial operations in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Richardson called Thornburg “a good friend” on the record, in a meeting documented by the Santa Fe Reporter in 2007. Richardson appointed Thornburg to the Commission to Save the College of Santa Fe. Richardson’s own Director of Cabinet Affairs and Deputy Communications Director, Allan Oliver, went directly to the Thornburg Foundation when he left government.

In August 2012, the Zorro Ranch schedule listed Richardson in Santa Fe on August 6 and 7, with his assistant Caitlin Wakefield coordinating his availability for a ranch visit. Wakefield's phone number appears in the DOJ Epstein files, the Hunter Biden laptop, and a third intelligence archive — explained in Caitlin Part 1. That's three separate archives containing the same assistant's contact information.

[Snip]

 

Zorro Ranch, above, renamed Rancho de San Rafael, is a large private property located near Stanley, New Mexico, United States, about 30 mi (48 km) south of Santa Fe. According to a description on Wikipedia: It was owned by the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from 1993 until his death in 2019. In 1999, Epstein built a mansion on the property. The sprawling compound eventually included a private airstrip, a helicopter pad, and an airplane hangar. The estate of Jeffrey Epstein sold off the property in 2023 to Dallas real estate magnate and former state senator Don Huffines. External videosJeffrey Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch in 1993, reportedly for around $12 million, from the former New Mexico Governor Bruce King. Epstein built a huge mansion at the ranch, with a living room the size of an average American home. He stated in a 2019 interview conducted by Steve Bannon[that he became interested in New Mexico as an investor after 1990, when he learned that many scientists who had previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory were working at private spin-off firms doing pure and applied research, such as the Santa Fe Institute.The 10,000 acres included 1,200 acres leased from the state (Land Commission of New Mexico). The ranch was allegedly used as a location for sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors. Annie Farmer, the sister of Marie Farmer, alleged that in 1996 that she had been sexually abused by Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell at the ranch, [16] In the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, a judge ruled that Annie's allegations about Epstein and Maxwell did not constitute "illegal sexual activity".

Epstein bought Zorro Ranch from the family of former Governor Bruce King in 1993 — roughly 8,000 acres outside Stanley, sixty miles south of Santa Fe. Richardson became governor a decade later, governing from 2003 to 2011.

The ranch had a main house, a private airstrip, and guest accommodations. Federal documents referenced a research facility on the property during the 2019 arrest proceedings. No document in the public EFTA release confirms its full scope. Federal agents searched the ranch in March 2026. No public findings have yet been released.

Rosemont Realty operated at 330 Garfield Street, Santa Fe. Burrell’s office. Richardson’s board position. Hunter’s advisory role. The company that took $40 million from Moscow’s oligarch widow. Hunter flew into Albuquerque on September 26, 2010, and stayed at Burrell’s house at 23 Calle Ventoso West. His assistant passed the address to his Secret Service detail. Santa Fe was not where some of this happened. It was where all of it was coordinated from.

Thornburg Investment Management operated around the corner, out of the same small financial district that Garrett Thornburg built after leaving Bear Stearns in 1982 — the same bank Epstein came from. Richardson called Thornburg a good friend. He appointed Thornburg to a state commission. His own cabinet communications director went to the Thornburg Foundation. The geography is tight. The relationships are documented. The overlap has never been mapped.

[Snip]

On September 20, 2024, Dan Burrell was arrested on Nantucket on a warrant out of Las Vegas. He was accused of writing a bad check to a casino for $1.5 million. The arrest came one day after his island mansion sold at foreclosure auction for $12.5 million.

He appeared in Nantucket District Court in handcuffs and ankle shackles. He asked if he could post his $10,000 bail by check since the banks were closed. The court said they would hold him until the check was verified.

He had warrants in Colorado and Nevada. He had defaulted on more than $75 million in loans — used to pay off divorce payments, buy a yacht, purchase luxury properties. His Taos Valley Ranch, acquired in 2019 and promised to become a therapy retreat for screen-addicted teenagers, was seized by Century Bank after an $18 million foreclosure auction. His Aspen mansion had already been sold.

What the documents show is that a governor on Epstein’s access list sat on the board of a Santa Fe real estate company backed by Hunter Biden’s fund. The governor’s own appointee arranged it. That same company took $40 million from the wife of Moscow’s corrupt former mayor while the governor sat on its board. The governor was deployed to close deals with Chinese state-owned financial institutions and described by Epstein to a foreign contact as a close friend willing to help. His assistant’s phone number appears in the Epstein archive, the Biden laptop, and a third intelligence archive.

The founder of a Pentagon biodefense subcontractor met with Epstein and proposed a hypersexuality study while his vice president briefed Hunter Biden’s fund on Pentagon biodefense infrastructure in Ukraine. The same fund brokered his CIA introduction. The same fund’s co-founder sat on the company’s board and called CIA headquarters “the shop.”

The Zorro Ranch search in March 2026 has produced no public findings. Burrell’s financial collapse is still in courts across multiple states. The Thornburg thread has not been pulled to its end.

Richardson is gone. The documents are not.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Race, Rights, Governance

 

New York Times, Trump Flexes Hold on G.O.P., Even as It Braces for Midterm Backlash, Tim Balk, May 17, 2026. The defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy showed the president’s dominance in his party at a moment when a broader range of views about Mr. Trump could be a major liability for November.

President Trump’s push to oust Republican lawmakers who have crossed him claimed its most prominent name yet in Louisiana this weekend, reinforcing Mr. Trump’s dominance in the party, even as the G.O.P. braces for a potential backlash to his presidency in the midterm elections.

For the second time this month, Republican primary voters sent a message about the price of defying the president, this time by retiring Senator Bill Cassidy, right, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The outcome in Louisiana on Saturday followed losses by a group of Indiana state lawmakers whom the president targeted for political payback. And it arrived just ahead of another big test on Mr. Trump’s retribution tour: a House primary in Kentucky on Tuesday.

In each case, Mr. Trump trained his ire at Republicans for different reasons. He endorsed against the Indiana lawmakers after they opposed a redistricting plan, turned on Mr. Cassidy over the 2020 election and subsequent impeachment vote, and is now trying to take down Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who has criticized him over the Epstein files and the war with Iran.

But the moves combine to form a picture of a second-term president who brooks little dissent in his party — and whose sagging standing with the general public is doing little to deter him from asserting his influence on a party in his thrall.

“You get on the wrong side of Donald Trump in one of these primaries, and it’s highly likely to be a bad day for you,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and CNN analyst. “Donald Trump’s word and judgment in a Republican primary is the thing that matters the most. In many cases, it is the alpha and the omega.”

As voters cast their ballots in Louisiana on Saturday, Mr. Trump signaled interest in a new potential target, assailing Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado over her support for Mr. Massie.

“Even though I long ago endorsed Boebert, if the right person came along, it would be my Honor to withdraw that Endorsement, and endorse a good and proper alternative,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. (In response, Ms. Boebert posted that she was still “MAGA” and was simply standing with a friend in Mr. Massie.)

It is a risky approach for Mr. Trump, whose party is hurtling into midterm headwinds posed by high consumer prices, the unpopular war with Iran and a concern among some swing voters that the president is distracted from pocketbook issues, consumed by overseas conflicts and various feuds. Polls show that Mr. Trump’s approval rating is well underwater, an indicator of danger for the G.O.P. this fall.Now, vulnerable Republicans may feel that they have even less space to dissent from the administration. Even as some prominent voices in Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement have rebelled since the war broke out, the president’s hold on the party’s base has appeared durable.

“It’s an important reminder that while overall his popularity’s pretty low, he still remains extremely popular amongst his Republican base,” Jon Fleischman, a Republican strategist in California, said of the result in Louisiana.

The next test of Mr. Trump’s influence will come this week when Mr. Massie, a longtime Trump critic from a deep-red state, faces Ed Gallrein, a farmer and former Navy SEAL. Mr. Massie led the charge among congressional Republicans to release files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, taking on Mr. Trump over his initial resistance. More recently, Mr. Massie has accused Mr. Trump of violating campaign promises by starting the war with Iran.

Mr. Trump, in turn, has endorsed Mr. Gallrein, campaigned with him in Kentucky and showered Mr. Massie with insults, calling him a “RINO,” short for Republican in name only.

In some ways, Mr. Massie is a challenging target for Mr. Trump: The seventh-term congressman has a unique pull on an independent-minded section of rural Kentucky, local Republicans say, and he has fended off challenges before.

New York Times, Lamar Alexander Wants Republicans to Stand Up to Trump, Carl Hulse, May 17, 2026. In a new memoir, the former senator, governor and cabinet member says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6 and calls on Congress to assert its power.

Lamar Alexander, left,  played a crucial role in short-circuiting the first impeachment trial of President Trump when, as an influential Republican senator from Tennessee, he opposed calling witnesses and said the president’s attempts to pressure Ukraine didn’t meet the test for removal from office.

His role in the second impeachment might have been quite different had he remained in office just a few more weeks.

In his new memoir, “The Education of a Senator,” Mr. Alexander, 85, who is also a former governor, cabinet secretary and presidential candidate, writes with disgust about how the president exhorted the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and penetrated the Senate chamber in an effort to block certification of the election.

He asserts that the president undermined the Constitution and assaulted the hallowed concept of the peaceful transfer of power.

“If those actions do not constitute a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ I do not know what does,” Mr. Alexander wrote in the book, which is subtitled “From J.F.K. to Trump.”ImageSenator Lamar Alexander smiles while giving a sideways glance from a booth.Mr. Alexander at the Capitol on the day of the first impeachment trial of President Trump in February 2020. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

But Mr. Alexander had just left office and did not have the chance to weigh in against Mr. Trump, with whom he had an off-again, on-again relationship.

Ever the careful statesman, the ex-senator said in an interview that it would be “self-righteous and disingenuous” for him to declare how he would have voted on the second impeachment when he was not on the jury.

But he does render a verdict on the conduct of his former colleagues as Mr. Trump has steamrolled over a compliant Senate in his second term. He finds them guilty of failing to assert themselves as the Constitution intended.

“To me, the most disappointing difference between the first and second Trump terms was not what Trump did, but what the Senate majority did not do,” Mr. Alexander wrote. “Republican senators rarely checked abuse of presidential authority.”

From Mr. Alexander, those amount to fighting words from an understated, die-hard institutionalist and loyal Republican who spent years running key committees and experienced Washington from both the legislative and executive branch perspectives.

The former senator thinks the current occupants of the Senate could do with a constitutional refresh, and says he knows how he would approach it.

“I think I’d organize a bipartisan breakfast meeting every week of senators, and we would read Article One to each other,” Mr. Alexander said. “Article One says Congress shall be in charge of spending, in charge of taxes, in charge of tariffs, in charge of declaration of war. The least a Senate can do is preserve its constitutional prerogatives.”

Mr. Alexander arrived in the Senate in 2003 with an extraordinary amount of political experience for a freshman. Beginning his Washington career in 1967, he served on the staff of Senator Howard Baker, a revered leader both on Capitol Hill and in Tennessee, and then as an aide in the White House.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 16, 2026 [U..S. Race Politics Ramps Up], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 17, 2026. Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)

Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.

But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.

Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.

On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.

And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voted rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.” 

New York Times, For Trump, Soaring Prices Test Voters’ Finances and Patience, Tony Romm and Ben Casselman, May 17, 2026. Just months before another election that may hinge on the economy, the war in Iran has sent gas and other goods soaring. 

Swept into power by voters who were frustrated with the nation’s economic trajectory, President Trump promised at his inauguration to “bring prices down.”

But that was January 2025, more than a year before the White House would forge ahead with an agenda that has sent inflation roaring back, testing the patience — and the finances — of a cost-wary American electorate once again.

For Mr. Trump, the nation’s political and economic strains are laid bare in a series of dour reports released over the past two weeks. Consumer prices last month rose at their fastest clip in about three years, outpacing workers’ wages, while businesses saw their costs increase at a rate not seen since 2022.

Americans are racking up more debt. Families are saving less. And a key measure of consumer confidence dipped to an all-time low this month. The anxiety has bled into recent political polls, which have registered broad public disapproval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy.

At the heart of matter is the war with Iran, which sent the average gallon of gasoline to about $4.52 nationally, according to AAA. That is a more than 40 percent jump from a year ago, an uptick that has cut across the global economy, affecting everything from the cost of workers’ daily commutes to the prices of goods at grocery stores.

Yet the president has largely dismissed those recent signals, telling reporters at one point last week: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

Mr. Trump had been asked about the extent to which the economy factored into his plans to end the war, and responded that disarmament was his sole concern. Otherwise, the president has maintained that the U.S. economy is strong and will rebound quickly once the war concludes, precipitating a rapid fall in gas prices in the United States.

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised Mr. Trump, said the recent turbulence was not a “surprise.” But he acknowledged that voters might not be forgiving come November’s midterm election, given that the president promised he would bring down the cost of living.

“Republicans could face a tsunami election in November if inflation continues to stay high,” said Mr. Moore, who described gas prices as “the chief gauge people use to determine how the economy is doing.”

The jump in fuel costs is only the latest blow for American families, who have suffered through years of rising prices, high interest rates and a softening labor market — as well as much longer-running concerns about the affordability of housing, child care and other essentials. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary: Pete Buttigieg Totally Wrecks Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy,.Jason Easley, May 17, 2026. Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spends most of his time blaming Pete Buttigieg for his failures. On Sunday, Buttigieg wrecked the unqualified Duffy.

Pete Buttigieg was well-regarded as the Secretary of Transportation during the Biden administration. Buttigieg showed both seriousness and knowledge for the position. Importantly, Buttigieg took transportation issues and the nation’s declining infrastructure seriously.

As is the case with almost all people whom Trump selected for his administration, the current president chose appointees and cabinet officials based on loyalty to him instead of qualifications and competency for the job.

Trump chose reality TV star and Fox News backbencher Sean Duffy to be the Secretary of Transportation. Duffy is a Trump loyalist and former House Republican who was most known for complaining that he was underpaid.

Duffy didn’t have any legislative or oversight history in transportation as a member of Congress.

By any measure, Duffy’s tenure as Secretary of Transportation has been rough. From deadly mid-air collisions to lengthy TSA lines to skyrocketing costs in jet fuel, which have led to increased airfares, trucking issues caused by tariffs/high fuel prices, and now the closure of Spirit Airlines, Duffy has not been a good Transportation Secretary.

Duffy’s has responded to all of these challenges by blaming Pete Buttigieg, and on CNN’s State Of The Union, Buttigieg responded.

CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “ Now Secretary Duffy is criticizing you on social media. He's making videos about you. He said that the, quote, "radical miserable left" hates his road trip because they don't want people to celebrate America. Your response?”

Buttigieg delivered a classic response.

Buttigieg answered Bash:

 I love road trips. I love America. I actually took a taxpayer-funded road trip lasting about seven months. It was in Afghanistan. This is something very different. This is not about patriotism, and it is an embarrassment to have him going around saying that a road trip, quote, "fits any budget" at a time when more and more Americans cannot afford a road trip because of the explosion in diesel prices and gas prices caused directly by the Iran war and by the Trump administration.

To make road trips unaffordable and then go around celebrating your own road trip is exactly what people are so frustrated about. And part of why the Duffy road trip scandal has been such an embarrassment to the Trump administration is that it's happening at the same moment that Trump is alienating voters by making it clear that he doesn't care. He even specifically said, right, when he was asked recently, that Americans' financial situation is not something he's focused on, not something that's on his mind. And this administration never misses a chance to show it. Then, of course, you have the issue of the corruption involved.

I mean, the fact that you have a transportation industry lobbyist running an effort to funnel money from corporate sponsors regulated by the Department of Transportation to pay for this project is just nakedly unfair, wrong, and part of what people are so frustrated about in Donald Trump's pay-to-play Washington.

And I think the third thing that, that is really on people's minds is what's going on over there? If they're doing stuff like this and posting memes all day, are they attending to the actual issues that Americans are most concerned about in transportation?

You know, we just saw, quietly, a Friday news dump out of the Department of Transportation at the end of last week saying that they were going to cut the target for air traffic control hiring, slash the air traffic control targets by about 2,000. I'm very puzzled by this. I don't know why you would be cutting down targets for air traffic control when pretty... The one thing I think most of us agree on is that there's a shortage around air traffic control. Maybe it's because they've been struggling to hire.

I noticed that under my successor, the pace of hiring air traffic controllers slowed down dramatically to less than a dozen net new certified professional controllers compared to what we were doing on my watch. Maybe it's got something to do with that. I don't know. But clearly, the priorities are out of whack, and the priority should be making sure that Americans have safe and affordable transportation.

Buttigieg is far from alone as a former public official who is constantly being blamed by the current administration for its failures.

Just last week, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) got fed up with Trump’s HUD Secretary during a hearing because he insisted on blaming Biden like a verbal tic instead of explaining what his policies were and if they are working.

It seems like Donald Trump can’t go a day without blaming Joe Biden for the dumpster fire of a Trump presidency.

Buttigieg brought up a really important point. These Trump officials are blaming the previous administration, while not doing their jobs.

Democrats need to be aggressive in shooting down this nonsense because voters aren’t buying the Trump blame game, and the best way to stop it is to fight

More On Iran War

New York Times, The Iran War Is Crippling One of the World’s Wealthiest Nations, River Akira Davis, May 17, 2026. Iranian attacks and the stoppage of seaborne transit have paralyzed Qatar’s vital gas exports, stalling the economic pivots intended to anchor the country’s growth.

In Qatar, a desert peninsula protruding into the Persian Gulf, natural gas turned the country from a pearl-diving backwater into one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Qatar spent three decades building supply lines, shipping tens of billions of dollars of liquefied natural gas each year through the Strait of Hormuz to ports across Asia and Europe.

The state, which derives more than 60 percent of its revenue from gas and gas-related exports, used that money to transform the peninsula into a gleaming metropolis. Unpaved desert roads were replaced by monolithic corporate skyscrapers, at the base of which irrigation systems water perennial blankets of grass and fuchsia flowers.

Gas wealth funded a metro system linking the capital, Doha, to Lusail, a northern city that is home to a Parisian-style mall and a theme park with artificial snow. The riches were also funneled into the world’s most expensive World Cup, and a $600 billion sovereign wealth fund with stakes in everything from Heathrow Airport in London to the Empire State Building in New York.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz means virtually no gas has left Qatar’s shore for more than two months. The nation is also cut off from the sea routes through which it imports everything from vehicles to produce. Fears of regional instability have hurt tourism and eroded business sentiment.

Ras Laffan, Qatar’s industrial center for gas production, is shuttered, and roads are blocked. In this vast port north of Doha, loading cranes stand paralyzed. Throughout the capital, hotels and boutiques sit in noticeable silence. Qatar’s growth forecasts have been slashed amid the cessation of L.N.G. trade.

For Qatar, gas shipments “are nothing short of foundational,” Ahmed Helal, a managing director at the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm, said in an interview in Doha recently. “Nothing you see here would have been possible without the wealth of energy,” he added. “That is why Qatar is quickly falling into a very challenging fiscal situation.”

Qatar’s economic transformation started in the 1990s. It made a large bet on supercooling gas from the North Field — the world’s largest natural gas reservoir, in Qatar’s northeast — to minus 162 degrees Celsius. This turned the fuel into a liquid, allowing Qatar to bypass regional pipelines and ship gas to every corner of the globe.Editors’ Picks‘He Didn’t Sound Like Someone to Be Messed With’Quiz: Wait, Is That Poison Ivy?Las Vegas Arts District: An Antidote to the Glitz

It was the birth of an energy superpower. Kicked off by its first shipment of 60,000 tons to Japan in 1996, Qatar’s production capacity had jumped to 77 million tons by 2010. For most of the next decade, Qatar was the wealthiest country in the world per capita.Image

U.S. Sports, Music, Race, Culture

MS NOW, Opinion: Caitlin Clark is too experienced to make this rookie mistake, Keith O'Brien, May 11, 2026 (featured May 17). There are many reasons Caitlin Clark should have thought twice before making an appearance with country music star Morgan Wallen.

The internet unleashed its fury on Indiana Fever shooting guard Caitlin Clark over the weekend after she walked on stage Saturday night with country music star Morgan Wallen as he greeted a packed arena in Clark’s backyard: Indiana.

At issue for Clark are Wallen’s personal history and his choices. In 2020, Wallen ran afoul of Covid lockdown restrictions. The same year, he got kicked out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse in Nashville and was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. In 2024, he was arrested again — this time for throwing a chair off the balcony of another Nashville honky-tonk, a six-story bar. The piece of furniture crashed to the street below, narrowly missing two police officers. He entered a “conditional plea” and was sentenced to seven days at a DUI education center.

The biggest reason why Clark should have stayed home Saturday night is a 2021 video in which Wallen can be heard shouting the N-word.

This behavior alone probably should have been enough to make Clark — the WNBA’s most marketable star — think twice about appearing with Wallen. But the biggest reason Clark should have stayed home Saturday night is a 2021 video posted by TMZ in which Wallen can be heard shouting the N-word and other obscenities. As journalist Sarah Spain wrote on social media over the weekend about Clark, “If Morgan Wallen using the N word wasn’t enough for you to stop supporting him — (forget all the other terrible s*** he’s done!) — I don’t know what to tell ya.”

A week after TMZ published its video, and after his record label suspended him indefinitely, Wallen called his use of that racial epithet “unacceptable and inappropriate.” He blamed it on his drinking — “a bender” — and promised to do better.

Since the weekend, Clark’s fans have pointed out that other celebrities and prominent athletes —including Drake, Peyton Manning, Myles Garrett, Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift’s fiance Travis Kelce — have walked on stage with Wallen in recent months without controversy. If Hall of Famer Manning can stand next to Wallen in his throwback University of Tennessee football uniform, and NFL champions Mahomes and Kelce can bro it out with Wallen and be cheered, then why can’t Clark do the same? Isn’t that a double standard?

Absolutely, it is. But Clark’s fans are missing an important point here: None of the above stars has been dubbed a great white hope, a mantle that Clark has been shouldering since 2024. That’s the year she became the all-time leading scorer in women’s college basketball, the Indiana Fever’s No. 1 draft pick, the face of the WNBA, the player most fans wanted to see and Time magazine’s athlete of the year, spawning what one WNBA official called the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”

That level of fame, complicated by racial politics, comes at a cost. It means that everything Clark does gets scrutinized to determine what it might say about her, about us and about race in America. Clark should know that most of all. She’s been living in the unforgiving glare of the spotlight since before she played a minute in the WNBA. Even the NCAA tournament runs during her last two college seasons were seen by some as racial dramas, as she and her mostly white Iowa Hawkeyes teammates tipped off against mostly Black teams including South Carolina and LSU.

Clark shouldn’t have been anywhere near that stage.

Personally, I’m OK with hard feelings in a multibillion-dollar business. By 2024, Clark had become bigger than the game. People who didn’t care about sports cared about her. The numbers proved it, and criticism or not, she was absolutely worthy of being on the cover of Time. But if you’re grateful for the opportunity of being a transcendent star in the polarized 2020s — as Clark says she is — then you need to make smarter choices.

New York Times, Clavicular Strikes Plea Deal With Prosecutors After Alligator Shooting, Pooja Salhotra, May 15, 2026.The social media personality pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months of probation. The deal allows him to avoid jail time.

Clavicular, the online star of a looks-obsessed male subculture, was sentenced on Friday to six months of probation in a case involving the apparent shooting of a dead alligator in the Florida Everglades near Miami.

The social media personality, whose real name is Braden Peters, pleaded no contest to the charge of unlawfully discharging a firearm in public, a misdemeanor. As part of a plea agreement, he avoided jail time but must complete 20 hours of community service and take a firearms safety course. If Mr. Peters successfully adheres to the terms of the deal, the charge will be removed from his record.

Mr. Peters, 20, is known for livestreaming in public, but the community service must not be streamed, the court records state.

Jeffrey Neiman, a lawyer for Mr. Peters, said in a statement that his client had “accepted responsibility for his conduct and reached a resolution that appropriately reflects the circumstances of this incident.” He added, “No individual was injured, and the alligator involved was already deceased prior to the events at issue.”

Mr. Peters rose to internet stardom as the leader of the “looksmaxxing” subculture, an online community of young men seeking to optimize their physical appearance, sometimes through extreme and dangerous lengths like surgery and unproven supplements. Thousands of people regularly watch Mr. Peters’s livestreams.

In March, the same platform that gave him fame got him into trouble after a video circulated online showing Mr. Peters and a group of other young men in an airboat in the Florida Everglades, firing gunshots at an alligator that appeared to be dead.

 

See our News Reports section for earlier clips during this unusually heavy news period.