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

June 8

Top Headlines

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy case” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston). 

• New York Times, How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept., Devlin Barrett (covering the Justice Department and the F.B.I., with this article is drawn from reporting in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice).” June 8, 2026. The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges. (Excerpt continued below)
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Blanche: “Not a Crime to Party with Mr. Epstein,” Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Cathy Young, June 8, 2026. To defeat Todd Blanche, talk about Jeffrey Epstein.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

• New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Signals It Will Halt Strikes Against Israel After Hours of Attacks, Aaron Boxerman and Farnaz Fassihi, June 8, 2026. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had concluded its latest military operation against Israel after both countries traded strikes and an uneasy two-month truce broke down.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Resuming War Is a Short-Term Political Boon for Netanyahu, but Grim Choices Await, David M. Halbfinger, June 8, 2026. If President Trump forces Israel to stand down against Iran, analysts say, it could leave Israel hindered from responding forcefully to attacks by Hezbollah.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Begs Iran and Israel to Stop Shooting, GOP Calls to Cut Funding to California After Pratt Loss, Knicks Fans Lash Out at Trump, Aaron Parnas, right, June 8, 2026. The conflict between Israel and Iran has escalated, with both countries exchanging direct strikes for the first time since the April ceasefire. Trump is urging restraint, but events appear to be moving beyond his influence.
• The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News and Commentary: Sunday Night Update: Epstein Files Come to DC for Trump's Birthday, CBS Caves to Trump, Iran War, Trump Blames Weather for Melt Down, Aaron Parnas, right, June 7, 2026. I just got home from the Epstein Reading Room, which has moved to Washington, D.C., for the President’s birthday. It is a powerful and emotional experience, and I’ll be there throughout the week, so I hope to see some of you there.

More On Trump's Meltdown Against Fact-Checking

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 7, 2026 [President v. Press], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 8, 2026. Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped yesterday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: Donald Trump has chosen his next enemy, Heather Delaney Reese, right, June 8, 2026. At 2:50 PM Friday afternoon, the President of the United States completely lost control on camera.

More On U.S. Law, Corruption, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy case” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston). 

• New York Times, How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept., Devlin Barrett (covering the Justice Department and the F.B.I., with this article is drawn from reporting in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice).” June 8, 2026. The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges. (Excerpt continued from above)
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Blanche → Epstein, William Kristol, right, June 8, 2026. There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: How to Kill the Blanche Nomination, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 8, 2026. Democrats must focus on the most powerful issue.

U.S. Military, Religion, Foreign Affairs

• Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: Christo-fascist pseudo-War Secretary and drunkard de-recognizes dozens of religious sects, Wayne Madsen, right, June 7-8, 2026. Hegseth irritates Mormons while cutting Pentagon's recognition of Unitarians.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Maine's Democratic candidates in the primary on June 9 are, from left to right, Troy Jackson, a former president of the State Senate; Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state, and Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the State House (Photos by Amanda Sabga/Reuters; and Cliff Owen and Joel Page, via Associated Press).

• New York Times, Graham Platner Announced His Picks for Maine Governor. Will It Sway the Race? Jenna Russell, June 8, 2026. The crowded race for governor has barely qualified as background noise in recent months, drowned out by the high-stakes, turbulent campaign for U.S. Senate.
• The Opposition via The Bulwark, Opinion: The Platner Blame Game, Lauren Egan, June 7-8, 2026. Before we get into today’s edition, I wanted to give a refresher of what this space is all about. This newsletter is not an expression of my preferred politics. I spend my days talking to officials and strategists across the left’s ideological spectrum to bring you some of the best-sourced journalism out there on the inner workings of the Democratic party. Which means sometimes you’re going to read things that you don’t want to hear. 
• BIG: The Monopoly Roundup: Graham Platner and Stock Market Democrats, Matt Stoller, right, June 7-8, 2026. Lots of news happened on the monopoly front. Bernie Sanders suggested nationalizing big AI firms, states look like they are preparing to try and block the Paramount-Warner merger, and the stock market fell sharply on Friday.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Vance Never Met a Racial Controversy He Didn’t Like, Cathy Young, June 8, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who used D-Day commemorations in Normandy to lecture Europe on resisting a new “invasion,” wasn’t the only Trump administration figure to annoy our allies with anti-immigration harangues in recent days.
• New York Times, Progressive Challenger Overtakes Spencer Pratt in Race for L.A. Mayor, Shawn Hubler, June 8, 2026 (print ed.). Nithya Raman pulled into second place in the race to see who will face Mayor Karen Bass in November. There are more votes to be counted.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Mike Johnson Has Surrendered His Power As Speaker Of The House To Trump, Jason Easley, right, June 8, 2026. It turns out that the idea that Trump is the real Speaker of the House wasn't completely a joke, as Mike Johnson has surrendered some of his powers as Speaker to Trump.

Markets, Inflation, Economies, Jobs

• New York Times, Opinion: How to Fish Better, Paul Greenberg, June 8, 2026. We humans are capable of enormous devastation, but every now and then, we’re able to agree to stop the worst of our transgressions.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Polymarket sponsoring election conspiracies from far-right influencers, Judd Legum, right, June 8, 2026. Polymarket, one of the dominant players in the prediction market industry, promotes itself as a source of objective truth. However, as Semafor first reported, in the wake of the California primary election last Tuesday, Polymarket has sponsored posts from far-right influencers on X pushing election conspiracies and disinformation. Popular Information has uncovered a network of at least 16 influencers¹, with a collective audience of 13 million, publishing election-related misinformation in posts sponsored by Polymarket.
• New York Times, Europe Watches Its Economic Recovery Fade Into the Distance, Eshe Nelson, June 8, 2026. As the war in Iran persists, signs point to a prolonged period of higher prices and slower growth rather than a quick shock.

More Global News

• New York Times, Opinion: In Russia, Rage Is Boiling Over, Andrei Zakharov (a Russian journalist and the author of “The Russian Cyberpunk"), June 8, 2026. Over the past year, Russian authorities have been blocking popular messaging apps and coercing citizens to migrate to MAX, a new state-endorsed messenger platform. The messages there are presumed to be fully accessible to the F.S.B., the state security agency that succeeded the Soviet K.G.B. 

Sports, Culture, Entertainment, Religion

• The Athlletic via The New York Times, This World Cup is uniquely challenging: it’s not the heat, the altitude or travel – it’s the combination, Alan McCallBy, Updated June 7, 2026. This article introduces The Athletic’s World Cup performance series, in which Alan McCall draws on more than 20 years of experience across elite football to explain the science behind the challenges teams are facing this summer and the strategies they will use to deal with them. He begins unpacking the unique challenges of preparing for a World Cup that spans three countries and a dizzying range of conditions.

Top Stories

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy case” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston). 

New York Times, How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept., Devlin Barrett, June 8, 2026. The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges.

It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June of last year.

Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down.

Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside F.B.I. headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Mr. Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials.

To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicization of the Justice Department — and the internal resistance to it.

New details of how that period unfolded show how Mr. Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with U.S. attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

(Excerpt continued below)

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Blanche: “Not a Crime to Party with Mr. Epstein,” Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Cathy Young, June 8, 2026. To defeat Todd Blanche, talk about Jeffrey Epstein.

This weekend saw a series of worrisome escalations between Israel and Iran, with the battered, beleaguered ceasefire in the region threatening to give way entirely. On Sunday, Israel carried out strikes against Hezbollah forces in Beirut, prompting Iran to fire missiles at Israel for the first time since April.

President Donald Trump urged Israel not to return fire and for both sides to “stop shooting,” but Israel nevertheless responded, launching airstrikes against Iran itself early Monday morning. As we put this newsletter to bed, however, the growing tit-for-tat escalations seemed to have ended for now: Iran announced a “suspension” of further attacks within the last few hours. Happy Monday.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Signals It Will Halt Strikes Against Israel After Hours of Attacks, Aaron Boxerman and Farnaz Fassihi, June 8, 2026. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had concluded its latest military operation against Israel after both countries traded strikes and an uneasy two-month truce broke down.

Iran signaled that it was ready to wind down a military escalation with Israel on Monday after the adversaries traded attacks for hours, shattering a fragile two-month cease-fire and bringing the Middle East back to the precipice of full-blown war.

In remarks carried by Iranian state television on Monday afternoon, Iran’s military said that it was ceasing its attacks for now. But it warned that if Israel resumed its own strikes, including in southern Lebanon, “much harsher and more forceful actions than before will follow.”

Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel on Sunday night in retaliation for an Israeli strike near the Lebanese capital, Beirut, against its ally Hezbollah. The Israeli military said on Monday morning that it had launched two waves of airstrikes across Iran, including against the country’s largest petrochemical complex, prompting further Iranian missile attacks on central Israel.

President Trump on Monday called on both countries to “immediately stop” the attacks. He also promised that a final deal to end the war in the Middle East was on the way, although the president’s predictions of an agreement with Iran have frequently failed to materialize.

More than 18 hours into the escalation, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had yet to comment publicly on the crisis. Mr. Trump told Axios on Sunday night that he was planning to call Mr. Netanyahu to ask him not to retaliate.

The fighting left Israelis and Iranians bracing for a return to the all-out conflict that began in February with the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. Mr. Trump has been unable to extricate the United States from the widely unpopular war with Iran, which has jacked up global oil and gas prices.

Here’s what else to know:

• Energy markets: The price of oil jumped after Israel and Iran exchanged strikes but pared back much of those gains. Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was almost 2 percent higher to about $95 a barrel, and West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. marker, was up around 2 percent to around $92 a barrel. Read more ›
• Yemen: The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen fired a ballistic missile at central Israel on Monday and announced a naval blockade against Israel in the Red Sea, although it was unclear what that threat would mean in practice. Earlier Houthi attacks in the Red Sea snarled global shipping and prompted a U.S.-led bombing campaign.
• Israeli politics: For Mr. Netanyahu, a resumption of fighting with Iran may offer some short-term advantages at home, though it could also further inflame regional tensions. Read more ›

New York Times, News Analysis: Resuming War Is a Short-Term Political Boon for Netanyahu, but Grim Choices Await, David M. Halbfinger, June 8, 2026. If President Trump forces Israel to stand down against Iran, analysts say, it could leave Israel hindered from responding forcefully to attacks by Hezbollah.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a resumption of fighting with Iran offered clear advantages — at least in the short term.

It showed his restive political base that he was willing to stand up to President Trump, who had scolded Israel on Sunday for bombing the outskirts of Beirut and, when Iran fired missiles at Israel in response, argued that Israel should exercise restraint.

Resisting Mr. Trump — or at least making a show of doing so, since it was unclear just what the two leaders said when they spoke Sunday night — was vital to Mr. Netanyahu, who is trailing in the polls heading into a difficult re-election fight. Just a week ago, Mr. Trump had humiliated him in an angry, profanity-laced phone call in which, the president later confirmed, he had called Mr. Netanyahu “crazy.”

Mr. Netanyahu also fears that the peace deal the Trump administration is pursuing with Iran would prove disastrous for Israel by, among other things, tying its hands in dealing with Hezbollah, the militant group that dominates Lebanon. If an exchange of airstrikes with Iran carries the risk of spiraling into a return to full-blown warfare, it could also make any broader peace agreement more difficult to achieve.

Some Israeli analysts suggested that a few days of Israeli attacks could help achieve better terms with Iran in those talks, by inflicting fresh wounds and pain.

The conspiracies involve the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Like other California races, all candidates competein a single primary and the top two candidates advance to the general election. Early returns on election night showed incumbent Karen Bass (D) leading the field and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt (R) in second place. Pratt has gained a following through viral AI-generated videos depicting him as Batman and Bass as the Joker.

But California’s vote-counting process has been slow and later returns have favored another candidate, Nithya Raman (D), over Pratt. Many Californians vote by mail, and these ballots take longer to count. Based on the breakdown of the mail-in ballots, most analysts expect Raman, not Pratt, to advance to the general. 

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Begs Iran and Israel to Stop Shooting, GOP Calls to Cut Funding to California After Pratt Loss, Knicks Fans Lash Out at Trump, Aaron Parnas, right, June 8, 2026. The conflict between Israel and Iran has escalated, with both countries exchanging direct strikes for the first time since the April ceasefire. Trump is urging restraint, but events appear to be moving beyond his influence.

Meanwhile, Republicans are furious after Spencer Pratt fell out of the top two in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Trump is claiming fraud without evidence, even as new polling suggests he is losing support among key voting blocs ahead of the midterms. And there’s much more to cover.

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Here’s the news:

Iran war erupts with new fighting: Israel and Iran exchanged direct military strikes for the first time since their April ceasefire, raising fears of a broader regional conflict. Iran launched three waves of attacks targeting Israel, while Israel responded with strikes on military and infrastructure targets inside Iran. Explosions were reported in Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, and at a petrochemical facility in southwestern Iran. The escalation followed Israeli strikes in Beirut that were linked to alleged Hezbollah activity.

President Donald Trump publicly called on both countries to stop fighting and said they should “immediately stop shooting.” He stated that the United States is trying to broker a deal to end the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump also said the U.S. could work with Iran to remove and destroy enriched uranium if an agreement is reached. At the same time, he warned of severe military action if diplomacy fails. Trump seemingly has lost control over Israel and Iran overnight and all he can now do is hope they “stop shooting.”

Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the war “was over.” Both sides claimed military successes while reporting limited casualties. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted key Israeli air bases, including Nevatim and Tel Nof. Israeli officials said their forces struck Iranian missile sites and other military targets. Iranian authorities reported no casualties from several of the reported Israeli attacks, while Israeli emergency services said there were no known deaths from the Iranian missile barrages. Here is a video of one of the Iranian ballistic missile launches:

The conflict is beginning to affect regional transportation and global markets. Iranian authorities closed airports across western Iran and suspended operations at major Tehran airports. Oil prices surged sharply as traders reacted to fears of wider instability in the Middle East. Houthi forces in Yemen also claimed missile attacks on Israel and threatened Israeli linked shipping in the Red Sea.

Diplomatic efforts remain active, but tensions are high and mistrust is growing. Iranian officials said they are still exchanging messages with the United States despite deep skepticism about Washington’s role. U.S. officials are monitoring the situation closely, though there has been no direct American military involvement in the latest exchanges. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem instructed government personnel and their families to shelter in place as a precaution.

Trump further claimed this morning that Israel and Iran want a ceasefire. If that’s the case, then there can not be a ceasefire in place currently:

Oil prices jumped more than 4 percent after Israel and Iran exchanged direct military strikes for the first time since their April ceasefire, raising fears that the conflict could expand and threaten energy supplies from the Middle East. Brent crude rose above $97 per barrel while U.S. crude climbed above $94, reflecting investor concerns about regional instability and the possibility that diplomatic efforts are breaking down. President Trump was briefed on the renewed fighting, and both U.S. and Iranian officials signaled that prospects for a negotiated agreement have become more difficult. At the same time, OPEC+ approved another increase in oil production for July, but the additional supply was not enough to offset market concerns about escalating geopolitical risks and potential disruptions to global energy flows.

Trump claims fraud in California:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman are projected to advance to the November runoff election for mayor. With most votes counted, Bass led the field with roughly 35 percent of the vote. Raman followed with about 27 percent, narrowly ahead of Republican reality television personality Spencer Pratt. Because no candidate received more than 50 percent, the race moves to a head to head general election.

Bass is seeking a second term after winning the mayor’s office in 2022. Her administration has faced several major challenges, including devastating wildfires, immigration related protests, and ongoing concerns about homelessness. Critics have questioned aspects of her leadership during these crises. Supporters point to improvements such as a reported decline in street homelessness across Los Angeles. Donald Trump, overnight, claimed fraud after his endorsed candidate, Pratt, lost:

Raman emerged as Bass’s strongest challenger despite entering the race as a city councilmember rather than a citywide officeholder. Polling before the election showed a very competitive contest among Bass, Raman, and Pratt. Raman’s advancement reflects voter interest in an alternative Democratic leadership option. The runoff is expected to focus heavily on the city’s recent performance and future direction.

Republicans, after Pratt’s loss, called for the cutting of federal funds to California:

All other news:

President Trump’s planned attendance at Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden has sparked frustration among some New York Knicks fans, largely because of the extensive security measures expected to accompany his visit. The team has advised fans to arrive at least two hours early, prompting complaints about long delays and disruptions on what is already a historic night for the franchise’s first home NBA Finals game since 1999. Some fans objected to Trump’s presence on political grounds, while others simply argued that thousands of attendees should not have to alter their plans because a president is attending. Despite the backlash, the game remains one of the biggest sporting events in New York in decades, and Trump’s appearance is likely to draw both cheers and boos from the crowd.

House Republicans are exploring a third major budget reconciliation bill before the August recess as a way to advance additional parts of President Trump’s agenda ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Potential priorities include defense spending, healthcare reforms, energy policy changes, housing initiatives, and efforts to reduce government waste, though lawmakers remain divided over what should be included. The effort faces significant political and procedural hurdles because Republicans hold only a narrow House majority, meaning a handful of defections could derail the legislation. Conservative members are pushing for deeper reforms and spending cuts, while party leaders argue the bill is still achievable if Republicans remain unified and move quickly.

New polling suggests President Trump may be losing support among young women, a group that shifted toward Republicans in 2024 and helped fuel his electoral success. Growing frustration over economic conditions and perceptions that key campaign promises have not been fulfilled appear to be driving the decline. Political strategists are increasingly concerned because young female voters can be influential in competitive suburban and swing districts. If the trend continues, it could become a significant vulnerability for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

A federal lawsuit is seeking to block a planned UFC event on the White House South Lawn that is scheduled for June 14 and coincides with Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and celebrations for the United States’ 250th anniversary. The plaintiffs argue that the administration improperly authorized the event because National Park Service rules prohibit sporting events on federal parkland, Congress did not approve certain temporary structures, and no environmental review was conducted before construction began. The White House has dismissed the lawsuit as politically motivated and says the event is comparable to other permitted public gatherings held on White House grounds and nearby federal property. Preparations are already underway, including construction of a UFC octagon and seating for thousands of spectators, while organizers have said tens of thousands of additional attendees could watch from the nearby Ellipse

Maine voters are heading into a closely watched Senate primary that is expected to make Democrat Graham Platner the party’s nominee against longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins. Democrats view Maine as one of their best opportunities to gain a Senate seat, and Platner has built strong grassroots enthusiasm through a populist message focused on economic inequality, healthcare, and opposition to foreign military spending. However, his campaign has been overshadowed by a series of controversies, including offensive past online posts, questions about a tattoo linked to Nazi imagery, allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women, and reports of abusive conduct that he denies.

Senator Mike Lee voiced his displeasure with Pete Hegseth failing to classify the Church of Latter-day Saints as Christian:

A major development in the Texas Senate race came when attorney Dan Cogdell, who helped defend Ken Paxton during his 2023 impeachment trial, endorsed Democratic candidate James Talarico. Cogdell said Paxton has lost sight of serving Texans and argued that Talarico is better positioned to unite Democrats, independents, and Republicans. The endorsement highlights continuing divisions within Texas Republicans following Paxton’s contentious Senate primary victory and could help Talarico appeal to moderate and anti-Paxton voters. Democrats see the race as a potential opportunity, while Republicans remain concerned that Paxton’s legal controversies and political baggage could make the seat more competitive than usual.

A powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the southern Philippines near General Santos City, causing widespread destruction and leaving at least 19 people dead, more than 130 injured, and several others missing. Buildings collapsed across the region, including parts of a Jollibee restaurant, a commercial complex, and a high school, while power outages and infrastructure damage complicated rescue efforts. Authorities warned residents to stay out of damaged buildings because of ongoing aftershocks, and tsunami alerts were briefly issued for parts of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia before the threat largely subsided. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. activated emergency response measures, opened evacuation centers, and suspended classes in affected areas as rescue crews continued searching for survivors.

Six people were injured in a stabbing attack inside New York City’s Penn Station on Sunday evening, and authorities quickly took a suspect into custody. One victim suffered serious injuries, two were moderately injured, and several others sustained minor wounds, with victims transported to local hospitals for treatment. Investigators have not yet released details about a motive or whether the victims were specifically targeted, and the incident remains under investigation by law enforcement. The attack occurred just one day before Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, which sits directly above Penn Station and is expected to draw large crowds, including Donald Trump, though officials have not indicated any changes to planned security arrangements.

Former senior CIA official David Rush is accused of stealing more than $40 million in gold bars and other valuables from the agency, and investigators now allege he also created a fake classified "special access program" to divert millions of dollars in government funds. According to officials, Rush allegedly used the secrecy surrounding the fabricated program to persuade colleagues to transfer money through a fraudulent government contract tied to continuity of government operations. He has also been charged with theft of public funds related to allegedly falsifying his military and educational credentials and improperly claiming about $77,000 in military leave benefits. The case has raised serious questions about oversight, internal controls, and employee vetting within the CIA, particularly because Rush reportedly worked on highly sensitive intelligence programs and held senior positions for nearly two decades.

Global airline leaders are now openly acknowledging that the aviation industry's goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is unlikely to be achieved. The industry's plan depended heavily on the rapid development of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), but production remains far below targets, with SAF expected to supply less than 1 percent of aviation fuel demand this year despite a goal of 65 percent by 2050. Willie Walsh, head of the airline trade group IATA, blamed governments, fuel producers, aircraft manufacturers, and delays in air traffic system reforms for the shortfall, arguing airlines cannot meet the target on their own. The industry is now calling for a new, more realistic decarbonization timeline, while critics say the admission reinforces long standing concerns that aviation's climate pledges relied on technologies and fuel supplies that were never likely to scale quickly enough.

Good news:

At age 72, Irma Garcia achieved a lifelong goal by earning her bachelor’s degree from George Mason University after decades of balancing work and raising three daughters as a single mother. After moving from Puerto Rico to the Washington, D.C. area in 1978, she completed an associate degree but postponed further education to support her family, eventually returning to school through a program for older adults. Garcia credits her success to perseverance, self confidence, strong family support, and a love of salsa dancing that helped keep her motivated. Her story has inspired many people as a reminder that it is never too late to pursue long held dreams and educational goals.

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine called intismeran, when combined with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda, reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 49 percent and reduced the risk of cancer spreading by 59 percent in a five year follow up study. Nearly 69 percent of patients receiving the combination remained cancer free after five years, compared with about 49 percent of patients who received immunotherapy alone, while overall survival was 92 percent versus 71 percent. The vaccine is customized for each patient using genetic information from their removed tumor, helping the immune system identify and attack any remaining cancer cells. Researchers view the results as one of the strongest demonstrations yet that personalized mRNA cancer vaccines can improve long term outcomes, and larger phase 3 trials are already underway to confirm the findings and explore use against other cancers.

Hospice staff in London fulfilled a dying woman’s final wish by reuniting her with her long lost brother, whom she had not seen in nearly 15 years. After months of searching, staff discovered that her brother was actually volunteering at one of the hospice charity’s own thrift shops, leading to an emotional reunion. The siblings, both of whom have learning disabilities, had lost contact after changes in his living arrangements following the death of a caregiver. The story highlights how hospice care can focus not only on medical needs but also on helping patients achieve deeply personal goals and reconnect with loved ones during the final stages of life.

Six years after a farmer illegally dredged part of England’s River Lugg, removed riverbed gravel, and cut down dozens of trees along a key salmon habitat, the damaged ecosystem is showing signs of recovery. The farmer was convicted, jailed, fined, and ordered to restore the area after a judge described the destruction as ecological vandalism on an industrial scale. New vegetation, trees, and wildlife are returning to the riverbank, and environmental monitoring has found improving conditions along with the return of several fish and bird species. Conservationists say the recovery demonstrates nature’s resilience when given time and protection, although restoring the full biodiversity of the river ecosystem will likely take many more years.

The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News and Commentary: Sunday Night Update: Epstein Files Come to DC for Trump's Birthday, CBS Caves to Trump, Iran War, Trump Blames Weather for Melt Down, Aaron Parnas, right, June 7, 2026. I just got home from the Epstein Reading Room, which has moved to Washington, D.C., for the President’s birthday. It is a powerful and emotional experience, and I’ll be there throughout the week, so I hope to see some of you there.

Meanwhile, Trump is blaming the weather for walking out of his interview, Scott Pelley says Bari Weiss directly intervened in a politically sensitive story at CBS, Iran and Israel are exchanging fire again, and much more.

The Pelley story is especially disturbing. Pelley alleges that Bari Weiss pushed 60 Minutes staff to portray protesters as more violent and to characterize Renee Good as driving toward the officer who shot her, despite his view that the available video evidence did not support that description.

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Here’s the news:

Just in time for Donald Trump’s birthday, the Institute for Primary Facts is moving its “Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room” from New York to Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown area, where it will be open June 9–14. The exhibit contains more than 3.5 million pages of unsealed court records and investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein, printed into over 3,400 volumes weighing more than 17,000 pounds. Organizers say the installation is intended to highlight the documented relationship between President Trump and Epstein and to preserve public access to the records. While the public can visit the exhibit in the afternoons, access to the actual documents will be restricted due to sensitive victim information, with special morning access available for journalists, lawmakers, survivors, and advocates. I visited today:

Trump said he became irritated during this morning’s interview with NBC because it was raining during the event. The interview, conducted by Kristen Welker, covered topics including Iran, the economy, and election-related issues, and ended with Trump criticizing several major news organizations before leaving early. Afterward, Trump told reporters that the rain contributed to his frustration, although the interview took place inside a barn. NBC's Welker later said the interview faced weather-related logistical challenges but still resulted in a substantial discussion on major policy issues.

Scott Pelley, recently fired from CBS News, told The New York Times that “CBS News is on fire” and argued that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss should be removed, criticizing both her leadership and what he described as political influence over editorial decisions. He said the shakeup at 60 Minutes—including the dismissal of top producers and correspondents—has devastated staff and undermined the program’s independence, while CBS denies any political interference and says its decisions are aimed at strengthening the show. Pelley specifically alleged that Weiss attempted to influence coverage of a politically sensitive story involving federal immigration enforcement, though CBS maintains her feedback was intended only to improve fairness and accuracy. The dispute reflects a broader struggle over the future direction of 60 Minutes and CBS News, with Pelley publicly defending the program’s traditional culture and journalistic autonomy.

Pelley accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of trying to influence a segment about the fatal shooting of Minneapolis protester Renee Good. Pelley claims Weiss pushed for language suggesting Good was “driving toward” an immigration officer and for protesters to be portrayed as more violent, which he says was not supported by video evidence. CBS rejected the allegations, saying Weiss’s feedback was intended only to improve the story’s fairness and accuracy and was not politically motivated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly taking a limited role in the day-to-day management of the Department of Health and Human Services, with current and former officials describing a leadership vacuum at the agency. According to people cited in the report, Kennedy remains focused on a narrow set of priorities, particularly vaccine-related issues, while delegating many operational decisions to senior adviser Stefanie Spear. The department is facing multiple leadership vacancies, including the absence of a permanent surgeon general and recent departures from key health agencies. Some staff members expressed concern that the lack of active leadership could hamper the department’s ability to respond effectively to public health emergencies such as the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Israel carried out airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut despite an existing ceasefire with Lebanon, killing at least two people and injuring about 20 others. Iran responded by launching missiles toward Israel, marking the first direct attack since the April ceasefire. The Israeli military reported intercepting the missiles and later warned of a second barrage. The exchange has sharply increased fears of a broader regional conflict.

Iranian officials described the missile launches as retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and warned that further Israeli action would trigger stronger responses. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other Iranian leaders said Israel had crossed “red lines” and threatened additional military action if the conflict escalates. Iran also warned that US bases and assets in the region could become legitimate targets. These statements reflect growing tensions between Iran, Israel, and the United States.

President Donald Trump urged restraint from both sides and emphasized that the missile exchange could jeopardize ongoing negotiations with Iran. He said Iran had “shot its missiles” and should return to the negotiating table rather than continue military escalation. Trump also expressed dissatisfaction with Israel’s strike on Beirut and reportedly planned to urge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate further. His comments suggest the United States is trying to prevent the confrontation from expanding into a larger war.

The crisis has already affected the wider region, with Iran closing airspace over western parts of the country and both Syria and Iraq temporarily restricting air traffic. Israeli military officials vowed to continue and intensify operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon despite the Iranian response. Meanwhile, military and political leaders on all sides exchanged warnings and threats, signaling that the situation remains highly volatile. Regional governments and international observers are closely watching for signs of either de-escalation or a wider conflict.

Many criticize the President’s handling of the crises:

Sen. Mark Warner sharply criticized acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, calling him a “national security risk” and arguing that his lack of intelligence or national security experience makes him unfit for the role. Warner warned that Pulte could misuse intelligence claims to justify federal intervention in elections, though he offered this as a hypothetical concern rather than citing evidence of planned actions. President Donald Trump appointed Pulte to the temporary position after Tulsi Gabbard announced her departure, but Trump has not formally nominated him for the permanent post. Warner and other critics contend that Pulte lacks the qualifications normally expected for the job, and Warner predicted he is unlikely to receive a formal nomination or Senate confirmation.

Trump plans to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden after being invited by Knicks owner James Dolan. His appearance is expected to trigger heightened security measures that could disrupt normal fan activities around the arena. Some Knicks fans have expressed frustration about those disruptions and about Trump's attendance itself. The controversy has become a talking point ahead of the game, drawing attention away from the on-court matchup.

The New York Knicks have canceled all fan watch parties outside Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals because President Donald Trump is expected to attend the game. The decision was made due to the significantly increased security requirements that accompany a presidential visit. Fans attending the game have been advised to arrive early and expect additional security screening. The Knicks enter Game 3 with a 2–0 series lead over the San Antonio Spurs.

A Virginia military veteran and a political organizer have filed a lawsuit seeking to block a planned UFC event tied to the “America 250” celebration, arguing that it is effectively a celebration of President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday rather than a national commemorative event. The lawsuit contends that using federal monuments and White House grounds for a privately financed, for-profit sporting spectacle violates rules governing national parkland and improperly benefits private parties, including UFC and its business partners. The plaintiffs also argue that staging UFC-related events near sites such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is inappropriate and disrespectful. The White House and federal officials have rejected the claims, calling the lawsuit baseless and comparing the event to other public gatherings that have been held on federal grounds.

According to the Telegraph, Trump is reportedly considering a plan for the United States to purchase the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, bypassing the United Kingdom’s stalled effort to transfer sovereignty of the territory. The proposal is aimed at securing long-term control of the strategically important Diego Garcia military base, which has become increasingly significant amid tensions and military operations involving Iran. Some U.S. officials reportedly oppose handing the islands to Mauritius because of concerns about the country’s ties to China and the potential security risks that could pose. Meanwhile, Chagossian representatives continue to push for a resolution that recognizes their right to return to their homeland, while the UK maintains that any sovereignty agreement depends on continued U.S. support.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with key European allies in London, including Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz, to discuss military support and European security amid the ongoing war with Russia. The talks came after a week of successful Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia and after Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected Zelenskyy’s proposal for direct peace talks. Zelenskyy expressed confidence that Ukraine would continue resisting Russia and emphasized the need for stronger air defenses, while Ukrainian officials reported that Russian advances on the battlefield appear to have slowed. The meeting also followed a Russian drone strike near the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant; although a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel was damaged, authorities and international monitors reported no increase in radiation levels.

More On Trump's Meltdown Against Fact-Checking

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 7, 2026 [President v. Press], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 8, 2026. Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped yesterday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.

Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.

As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”

Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”

One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “[a] country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.

Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.

Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.

But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.

Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”

As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”

In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.

Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.

Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.

They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”

Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Club (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”

The lawsuit notes that “[f]ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.

The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.

Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment. 

Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: Donald Trump has chosen his next enemy, Heather Delaney Reese, right, June 8, 2026. At 2:50 PM Friday afternoon, the President of the United States completely lost control on camera.

While being asked questions for an interview released this morning, Donald Trump lost his temper multiple times. For more than 40 minutes, he told lie after lie while his anger became impossible to hide. And when Trump could no longer tolerate being fact-checked and asked for evidence supporting his many false claims, he ripped off his microphone, stood up and stepped on it while leaning into the journalist’s face and continuing to berate her. This was one of the most disastrous interviews of his entire political career. And what happened next confirmed one of my worst fears.

The journalist was Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press, and the interview was taped Friday ahead of Trump’s event at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, inside a barn the White House itself had requested for the setting. He had flown to this swing state to sell the country on the economy and the war. What the country got instead was more than 40 minutes of a man incapable of sitting through a difficult question. A man who could not tolerate having his claims challenged, his statements fact-checked, or being asked to provide evidence for what he was saying.

She started with Iran. As Sunday would mark 100 days since the first strikes. His own Secretary of State had already declared the war concluded. And yet, just this week, Iran had attacked American allies in the region.

So Welker asked a simple, direct question. “Is the United States at war with Iran?” And Trump responded: “Well, they’ve been largely decapitated. And I call it a military exercise because people would rather have it called that. It’s not a big war for us.” That answer may seem strange on its own, but it was one of several moments in the interview where Trump revealed far more than he intended.

He calls it a military exercise because people would rather he call it that. So my question is simple: who are these people who get to decide what the President of the United States is allowed to call his own war? He is supposed to be the one who decides. He is supposed to be the end of the line. The last word. The person the entire structure answers to. And instead, he sat in a barn in Wisconsin and admitted, out loud and on camera, that other people tell him what to call the thing he ordered.

This is the pattern we keep seeing, over and over again, in ways both large and small. He is the face of a movement that is being run from somewhere behind him. No doubt he is still involved. No one is saying he is innocent of any of it. But Friday’s interview reinforced many of my deepest concerns, including that, for better or worse, he is not the one calling the shots.

She pressed him on the blockade, on whether that alone made it a war under international law. And he would not even commit to an answer about his own war: “I don’t consider that a war, but if you want to define it as such, I guess you can.” So she asked him how he defines it. And he said: “I don’t define it at all. I don’t think about it. I just do what I have to do.”

The President of the United States, asked whether his country is at war, says he does not think about it. He just does what he has to do, and other people can call it whatever they like. Then he reached for the line he has been selling for nearly a decade now, the one where whatever deal or plan he is being pressed to explain is always just around the corner. Iran is no different. A deal is supposedly close. Progress is supposedly being made. And yet, in the same breath, he says that if there is no deal, “we’ll do it one way or the other. Either way, we win.”

That is not the language of strength. It is the language of a man who has no idea what he is doing and is hoping nobody in the room is paying close enough attention to notice.

It is the same trick he has been running since the day he came down that escalator ten years ago. Everything is two weeks away. Everything is a concept of a plan. Gas prices come down the moment the war ends. The war ends the moment the deal is signed. The deal is always, always just about to be signed. He has been showing us who he is for ten years. All we have to do is look back. He does not deliver what he promises. He never has.

Then came one of the oddest stretches, the one where he forced himself to look like he cared. He talked about the thirteen Americans who have been killed, and he said it the way someone says what they know they are supposed to say. Thirteen is too many. He does not want to lose anyone. And in nearly the same breath, he insisted our troops are not in any danger. He is trying to walk a line he cannot walk. He wants us to believe he is a tough, detached wartime leader floating above it all, but he also knows a president is supposed to mourn the dead. So he performs both at once and somehow means neither.

When she asked who is even leading Iran now, he answered about the country’s new supreme leader like this: “Younger. I think more rational. Injured. He’s pretty badly injured. So there’s a certain bravery there.”

It was one of the strangest moments of the entire interview. The new leader is Mojtaba Khamenei. And according to Iranian state media, during the strikes Trump himself ordered on February 28, Khamenei lost his father, his mother, his wife, and his son. He was reportedly so badly wounded that our own Defense Secretary later said he was likely disfigured. Yet Trump sat there describing him as rational, brave, and someone he believes he can work with. The disconnect was staggering. This is not some distant political rival or negotiating partner sitting across a conference table. This is a man who, according to those reports, watched his family be wiped out in an attack that Trump himself authorized and survived with severe injuries. Whether Trump fully understands that reality or not, it is the reality.

And that gets to something that surfaced again and again throughout this interview. Trump talks about war as though it exists on paper. As though it is a negotiation, a headline, a television segment, or a talking point that can be reshaped whenever it becomes inconvenient. But wars create consequences. They create enemies. They create grief. They create people who spend the rest of their lives carrying the scars of decisions made by powerful men thousands of miles away. Throughout the interview, he seemed detached from that reality. He spoke about events he helped set in motion as though they were happening somewhere outside of him, disconnected from his choices and responsibility. It was another reminder that one of Trump’s defining traits has always been his inability to reckon with the consequences of his own actions. He moves on to the next promise, the next grievance, the next performance.

She kept pressing, because that is her job. She reminded him that he has been saying for months that Iran is desperate to make a deal, and she asked the obvious question: if they are so desperate, why have they not made one? And that was when you could see the interview begin to turn. His answers grew shorter. His irritation became harder to hide. His face flushed. Every so often, he glanced away from the cameras, as if he was looking for reassurance, direction, or a way out of the conversation. Then he would turn back and keep talking, trying to regain control of the exchange. It was a remarkable thing to watch because the question itself was not unfair, hostile, or complicated. It was the natural follow-up to a claim he has been making for months. But that is often the problem for Trump. He knew the truth was about to catch up to him with a camera rolling.

For her part, Kristen Welker was extraordinary. She showed us why journalism is so important, and why it is not just about the questions themselves. It is about the delivery, the patience, the steadiness, and the basic humanity required to sit across from someone like this and refuse to let go of the truth. She walked into that interview knowing she was not going to get the truth the way most of us think about it. She was going to get the truth the way Donald Trump tells it, which is to say she was going to get him, on the record, being exactly who he is. Her job was to keep him talking, to keep pressing, and to keep asking the questions that millions of Americans would ask if they had the chance. She did it brilliantly. Without journalists like her, we lose our ability to hold power accountable. It is the reason a free press is written into the First Amendment alongside the freedoms to speak, worship, and assemble. The founders understood something we are in danger of forgetting: if no one is allowed to question those in power, freedom becomes little more than a slogan. That protection appears at the very beginning of the Bill of Rights for a reason.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.Subscribed

She asked him how long he is willing to give Iran. He would not answer that either. He just kept reaching for comparisons that do not hold, telling her, “you were in Vietnam for 19 years, and you’re telling me about three months.” He is desperate to measure this against wars that lasted decades so that his looks brief and brilliant, and he does not want anyone doing the simple work of noticing that the comparison makes no sense. He does not want to admit what this actually was. Because the whole thing was a distraction. This was the war he thought would turn him into a wartime president, the one who saved the world from a nuclear weapon. And it did not work, because the truth came out, and the truth was never what he said it was. He is the one who tore up the agreement that was actually working. This is on him. All of it.

Then she pulled the camera back to the big picture, and asked the question that began the unraveling. She reminded him that one of his most consistent promises, going all the way back to 2015, was no new wars, and she asked him directly whether he had broken that promise. He said: “No.”

And here is the thing. Earlier in the very same conversation, he had counted the dead and said the number “includes two wars. That’s Venezuela, and that’s Iran.” He named them himself. Two wars. Out of his own mouth. And now, asked if he broke his promise of no new wars, he says no. “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

She told him, correctly, that he had said it over and over. And this is where he started to lose himself, because the anger was rising and he does not handle being pushed back. He does not want a journalist. He wants someone who will go in there and flatter him, tell him whatever he wants to hear, walk him gently through the questions, and lead him when he cannot get there on his own. He did not have that on Friday, and it showed. He told her: “I know you, you’re a big liberal, a big progressive.” “No,” she said. “I’m just a journalist.”

This is exactly how he wants all of us to think about the press. She asks him questions, so she must be the enemy. She must be a partisan. She cannot simply be a reporter doing her job, because in his world there is no such thing. And then he went off on the country itself, insisting we were finished before he arrived. “We were a dead country,” he said. “A year ago, couple of years ago, we were a dead country. Now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.” He used it to justify the war, to justify everything, and then he added: “So when you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything.”

And then he became even more agitated and reached for what may have been the ugliest moment of the entire interview, a threat disguised as a warning about Iran: “There will be no Kristen. There will be no NBC. There will be no Meet the Press. You will end the Meet the Press string.”

By this point, he was visibly angry. His frustration was no longer something he was trying very hard to hide. She tried to move him to the economy, to the seventy percent of farmers who say they cannot afford fertilizer, and he cut her off and snapped: “Are you ready? Are you ready? Am I allowed to talk? You keep asking questions, and you don’t listen to the answers.” He insisted the farmers are doing great, that they all love him. It was just more spin, and performance, and not one real answer for the people he claims adore him.

Then she asked about the weaponization fund, the one his own people have said is effectively dead, and whether he was backing away from it. He would not answer directly. Instead, he did what he always does when cornered: he made himself the victim. Within moments he was defending the January 6 attackers, arguing they should be compensated, blaming crooked cops, dirty cops, maybe the FBI, and eventually circling back to his old obsession with James Comey. Welker kept reminding him there was no evidence for what he was claiming. He did not care. He insisted the rioters were “being ushered into the building,” describing an attack that millions of us watched unfold in real time, wondering whether the country would survive the day. “Try looking at the tapes one time,” he told her. We have looked at the tapes. We watched the windows shatter, the officers attacked, and lawmakers flee for safety. And as the interview went on, one thing became impossible to miss: every time Welker mentioned evidence, he grew angrier. Facts were not something he was engaging with. They were something he was trying to overpower.

And that is what finally broke him, because she kept saying it, calmly, accurately. There is no evidence. It has not been presented in a court of law. And that is when he detonated, and arrived at the one thing he cannot survive being questioned about, which is elections. “The election was rigged,” he said. “It was a dirty election. And it’s happening again right now in California.”

She told him he had never presented evidence that 2020 was rigged. She asked where the evidence was. “It’s four days,” he said. She pointed out that Republicans are actually doing well in California. “No they’re not,” he said. “They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.” She told him that is simply how California counts its votes. “Do you know why they’re doing that?” he said. “Because they’re cheating on the election.” She asked him, directly, if he had any evidence to support that. And his entire answer, the whole of it, was this: “All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look.”

She said, again, that is not evidence. And then he turned the whole thing on her. “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked.” She said, evenly, “To be fair, I’m not crooked. But let’s continue.” And he said, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” She said, again, “Let’s continue.” He told her, “You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Do you know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.” He told her she had no credibility. He said, “We’re like a third world country.” And then, finally:

“Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

She did not give up, even then. “Mr. President, let’s, please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin,” she said. He was unmoved. “I sat in the rain with you for an hour,” he told her. “On and off in the rain, and I’ve given you enough time. You ought to straighten out your press, because you know what?” And then he left her, and left the country, with this: “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

I want to be very clear about that last line, because it is the hinge of the whole interview. It was not just something he said on his way out. It was the point. He could not answer the questions, so he attacked the person asking them. He could not prove what he was saying, so he blamed the press for pointing that out. Over and over again, that is where he went. The problem was never his lie. The problem was the person who would not let him get away with it.

And that is the part that confirmed one of my worst fears. Because he is not just saying this in interviews anymore. He is not just angry in front of cameras. He is using the power of the presidency to act on it. The words matter because they show us what he believes. And what he believes is that any press that challenges him is dishonest, and any person who fact-checks him is the enemy. The clearest example may be what the White House is doing. They now have an expanded section on their official website called Media Offenders with a rotating Media Offender of the Week and an Offender Hall of Shame. There is even a form inviting the public to report journalists, and an email list supporters can join to receive alerts about the next ones. The government even has categories such as “Conspiracy Theories” and “Left-Wing Lunacy.”

And what struck me was how familiar that language sounded. In the very same interview, Trump used nearly identical language himself, calling the people who investigated him “radical left lunatics.” And that is why I keep coming back to the same concern. The interview was not simply a man losing his temper because a journalist would not stop asking questions. It was a glimpse into how this administration sees criticism itself. Not as something to answer or to debate. But as something to discredit, isolate, and eventually silence. The anger we watched in that barn was not separate from what is happening elsewhere.

And they are not just coming for the mainstream media. They now have a category called Leftist Influencers, and the names on it are independent voices. David Pakman. Ed Krassenstein. Brian Tyler Cohen. These are not networks with billion-dollar parent companies. These are people, individuals, reader-supported, sitting where I sit, doing what I do every night. The government of the United States has put their names on a public website and pointed at them. There is no charge or trial. There is no law attached to any of it. The only purpose of putting a private citizen’s name on a government enemies list is to mark them, and to tell the people who take their cues from this administration exactly who is fair game.

We know where this is heading. It never stops at the first target. That is the one lesson history refuses to stop teaching us. They start with the people who are easiest to isolate, the loudest critics. And once that is tolerated, once the country shrugs and scrolls past, the list grows. It always grows. The press becomes the enemy, then the professors, then the judges who rule the wrong way, then the election officials who count the votes honestly, then anyone who says a single word out of line. You do not have to write a post like this every night to end up on the wrong side of a government that has decided dissent is a crime. You do not have to do anything at all. Eventually the circle widens until it reaches the people who were sure it never would, the ones who kept their heads down and assumed silence would keep them safe. It will not. It never has. These movements do not stop until they have total control, and they do not get there by coming for everyone at once. They get there by coming for us one group at a time, while the rest of us convince ourselves it is not our turn yet.

So what do we do? We do the thing he is most afraid of, which is refuse to be isolated. The whole point of an enemies list is to make each name on it feel alone, to make the rest of us decide it is safer to look away. So we do the opposite of what he wants. We get louder. When he attacks a journalist for doing her job, that is our call to support her, to tell her network, her producers, and her advertisers that this is the work we want. And when he hands us a list of the voices he wants silenced, he hands us, without meaning to, a list of the people worth paying attention to. When we see a name on that list, we support it if we are able. Because money and attention are the only two things this movement truly understands, and both are still in our hands. There are far more of us than there are of them, and the moment we stop letting them pick people off one at a time is the moment this strategy starts to fail.

That is also why I keep this work free and reader-funded, and why I am so grateful to those of you whose paid subscriptions make it possible. You are the reason I can be here every night writing these posts and reaching people who may not hear this perspective anywhere else. But tonight I am asking you to think beyond my voice. Think about the journalists, independent publications, local newspapers, writers, and creators who are still doing the difficult work of telling the truth. If you already support this work, thank you. Truly. But if you are able, consider supporting some of the other voices doing this work as well, especially the ones being singled out and targeted. A free press survives because ordinary people decide it matters enough to sustain. That has always been true. It is true now. And it is going to matter even more in the months ahead.

We are in the fight of our lives for our country. The next five months are going to test us. There will be days when it feels overwhelming. There will be days when the headlines make it seem like the people abusing power are winning. But if we are paying attention, there are signs almost every day that the American people are not giving up.

Just a few hours ago in Los Angeles, news outlets reported that Spencer Pratt will not be on the ballot for mayor in November. Enough people looked past the noise, recognized him for what he was offering, and said no to putting another gravely unqualified politician in government. It was one election in one city, but it was also a reminder that we are not powerless. We still have choices. We still have a voice. And when enough of us use it, we can still change the outcome. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More On U.S. Law, Corruption, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy case” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston). 

New York Times, How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept., Devlin Barrett (covering the Justice Department and the F.B.I., with this article is drawn from reporting in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice).” June 8, 2026. The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges.

It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June of last year.

Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down.

Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside F.B.I. headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Mr. Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials.

To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicization of the Justice Department — and the internal resistance to it.

New details of how that period unfolded show how Mr. Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with U.S. attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

(Excerpt continued from above)

Asked for comment on this account and the roles of Mr. Patel and other officials, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, said the department “enforces federal law fairly, consistently and without regard to politics,” adding that all investigative and prosecutorial decisions “are grounded in evidence and the law.”

On July 14, barely a month after Mr. Patel told millions of podcast listeners about a supposed vault of dirty secrets, Todd Gilbert became the interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.

Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.

Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.

His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va. It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.

The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.

To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials.

To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein’s monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life.

From the start, F.B.I. leadership wanted near-daily updates on the case — a level of attention usually reserved for national crises. The Virginia prosecutors were confused why the case received so much interest from Mr. Patel and so little from their actual boss, the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who had been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Mr. Gilbert tried repeatedly to get advice and instruction from Mr. Blanche, even driving to Washington unannounced to try to speak to him. Instead, one of Mr. Blanche’s deputies, Aakash Singh, urged Mr. Gilbert to pursue the case aggressively. But Mr. Singh did not address many of Mr. Gilbert’s legal and factual questions. One senior Justice Department official said Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Blanche eventually did speak about the case.

Mr. Gilbert’s team decided that the law gave his office jurisdiction over only one of the issues Mr. Patel had directed him to investigate — whether the documents in the burn bags had been mishandled as part of a criminal scheme to hide them.

The other two prongs he was assigned — whether Mr. Comey had lied in congressional testimony in 2020 about leaks and Russia-related intelligence, and whether Mr. Brennan had lied to Congress about a 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference that referenced a dossier compiled by a former British spy — had no legitimate venue in western Virginia, they concluded.

Mr. Gilbert angered the administration by resisting pressure to impanel a grand jury to investigate the burn bag case, since he and his team did not believe there was yet a sufficient factual basis for that step.

A related disagreement over personnel assignments in his office also hurt his standing. In mid-August, Sergio Gor, a powerful White House official, called Glenn Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican governor, and told him that Mr. Gilbert was going to be fired and that the governor should not try to stop it.

Mr. Gilbert lasted just 37 days as a U.S. attorney. After his departure, prosecutors in his office wrote a lengthy legal analysis, called a declination memo, detailing why no criminal charges were warranted in the burn bag case. The senior F.B.I. agent on the investigation endorsed the memo’s conclusions.

At that point, a number of current and former law enforcement officials concluded that the administration had embarked on a new kind of fishing expedition — not for dirt on the people they did not like, but to find a prosecutor willing to file charges based on the threadbare evidence they already had.

Resistance by officials in western Virginia did not stop the pressure campaign from senior administration officials. Instead, that pressure simply migrated across the state, to the federal prosecutor’s office in Alexandria, Va.

Mr. Trump’s pick to lead that office, Erik Siebert, was an experienced lawman, and unlike Mr. Gilbert, he had allies among the Justice Department’s leaders. Mr. Siebert’s law enforcement career began as a D.C. police officer, and he heartily embraced Mr. Trump’s agenda.

But in the summer of 2025, Mr. Siebert suddenly found himself on thin ice, having inherited not just the Comey case but a separate investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued Mr. Trump over his business accounting. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Ms. James in April 2025, accusing her of having falsified information in mortgage paperwork to get a more favorable interest rate.

Mr. Pulte leveled a similar allegation against Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who while in the House had led impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump. Mr. Pulte suggested that Mr. Schiff had claimed two different places as his primary residence.

In July, Mr. Blanche summoned F.B.I. agents, Virginia prosecutors and senior F.H.F.A. officials to a meeting at the Justice Department to talk about the James investigation. The meeting began with a detailed presentation from F.B.I. agents, emphasizing the lack of evidence of criminality surrounding Ms. James’s mortgages.

Then Mr. Blanche declared that the evidence simply did not support a criminal case against Ms. James for either property. When Mr. Pulte’s aides tried to argue or interject, Mr. Blanche shot them down.

The agents and prosecutors on the case were encouraged to see the deputy attorney general back them up. Their optimism, however, was short-lived. Within days of the meeting, law enforcement officials were told that the White House still wanted to see Ms. James charged. (One senior Justice Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly disputed that characterization of the meeting as “inaccurate and oversimplified,” saying that investigators still wanted to pursue the case against Ms. James.)

The administration was not giving up on the Comey investigation either. Mr. Siebert had been handed the case in mid-August, after the federal prosecutors in western Virginia successfully argued that they did not have jurisdiction. It was the second time in months that Mr. Siebert and his team were pressured by superiors to investigate Mr. Comey.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Blanche → Epstein, William Kristol, right, June 8, 2026. There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.

As former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee recently, it was Blanche who, as deputy attorney general, “supervised [the] entire process” of dealing with the Epstein files. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” she testified. Blanche has also been the most visible public defender of the coverup, and of the decision not to investigate or prosecute anyone else for crimes.

Blanche stepped boldly into the Epstein spotlight on July 24, 2025, when he traveled to Florida to interview convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The meeting was initiated by Maxwell, and she received limited immunity via a proffer agreement.

But Maxwell didn’t use her immunity as an opportunity to be more forthcoming than she’d been previously about anything to do with Epstein. As every sentient observer familiar with the Epstein case agreed, she simply continued to stonewall and lie. But Blanche wasn’t sure. He told CNN a couple months later that deciding if Maxwell was a “credible” witness is “an impossible question to answer.”

Really?

In any case, Blanche explained, “The point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave.”

Why not?

Because “the point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.”

This was laughable. But the real point of the interview became clear a few days later, when Maxwell was moved, contrary to Bureau of Prison guidelines for sex offenders, to a comfortable minimum-security prison.

The point of both the interview and the move was to encourage Maxwell not to talk about Donald Trump—and to hold out the prospect of even more favorable treatment in the future. Since the interview, Trump has continued to refuse to rule out the possibility of a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.

If you’re not a Bulwark+ member, you’re missing out on being part of the best pro-democracy community on the internet. Join us. We’d love to have you.Subscribed

Since then, Blanche has been assertively pushing back against widespread public unhappiness with the botched and selective release of the Epstein files. For example, in early February 2026, Blanche had this exchange with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham:

Ingraham: Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged in relations with minors will be prosecuted? Any chance?

Blanche: I’ll never say no, and we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct, but as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.

“It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” But “Mr. Epstein” (it’s kind of striking that Blanche added the honorific) pled guilty in 2008, and then was indicted again in 2019, for horrible crimes arranged or committed or celebrated at some of those parties. The Justice Department could now be following up on the testimony of scores of survivors to finally, properly investigate those crimes and their perpetrators. But Blanche’s Justice Department hasn’t even pretended to be seeking further evidence. Blanche’s DOJ has no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting the men who have done truly horrible things. After all, “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”

Trump rewarded Blanche for arranging and managing the Epstein coverup. First he made Blanche acting Attorney General. Now he wants to place him in that post outright. And that requires Senate confirmation.

Which means the Senate will debate and vote. Last November, thanks to a discharge petition, and over the opposition of the Trump administration and Republican leadership, Congress was forced to engage on the Epstein matter. Opposition to legislation requiring the release of the Epstein files collapsed when the issue emerged into broad daylight, and Congress voted almost unanimously to order the Justice Department to release the files. At the time, everyone from both parties could look as if they were in favor of the truth coming out.

But now we’ve had only a partial release of those documents and no follow-up investigations. Trump has gone out of his way to punish Republican critics of his administration’s Epstein coverup. Republicans have been happy to avoid further engaging on the issue.

But thanks to Trump’s nomination of Blanche, there is a chance to force a real public debate, with real Senate votes, on the Epstein coverup.

That is not what Blanche wants. In early April, shortly after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche told Fox News, “And so I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”

But the Epstein coverup should be part, a key part, of one thing going forward: It should be a key part of the upcoming debate on Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. The Blanche confirmation fight can bring the Epstein coverup back into the spotlight this summer. His nomination can be turned into a referendum on the coverup by the Trump administration, and by the entire political class, of Epstein and his co-conspirators and clients.

The vote on Blanche can become, it should become, a vote on Epstein.

The Contrarian, Opinion: How to Kill the Blanche Nomination, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 8, 2026. Democrats must focus on the most powerful issue.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly proved herself to be the most legally ignorant, dishonest, and ethically challenged person ever to head the Justice Department. However, if her former deputy and now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is nominated and confirmed for the permanent job, she by comparison would seem like one of giants who have held the post (e.g., Robert H. Jackson, Edward H. Levi).

Blanche, whom Donald Trump said last week he would nominate for attorney general, has presided over the shoddiest lawyering in the history of the DOJ, which has earned unprecedented denunciations of federal judges (for, among other things, defying court orders and making material misrepresentations to courts), Blanche has been the tip of the spear in Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and government-wide corruption operation. (White House photo)

Making clear his first loyalty is to Trump (“I love you, Sir”), not to the Constitution, Blanche has been at the wheel of vindictive prosecutions against Trump enemies, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, former FBI Director James Comey (in the infamous seashell case), journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort (a First Amendment travesty), and the civil rights legacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has been instrumental in turning the DOJ into a discredited, weaponized operation that has lost thousands of dedicated lawyers disgusted with the Trump regime.

Although directed to recuse himself from cases in which he represented Trump as a private citizen, he has continued to pursue Trump’s conspiracy-based inquests and investigations. He defended pardons of the violent January 6 felons and then authored the widely denounced (and, for now, discarded) slush-fund-for-secessionists. That deal, coupled with the legally suspect waiver of Trump’s tax liability, gives him the distinction of crafting the most corrupt scheme in presidential history.

However, far and away the single most compelling reason — and potentially the most politically damaging — for denying him the job came from Bondi herself. Blanche’s central role in the Epstein files coverup, which Bondi confirmed, should make his nomination a nonstarter.

Certainly, there are innumerable reasons for denying the job of heading the Justice Department to someone so obviously lacking independent judgment and respect for the rule of law and who is devoid of credibility, but if there is a single issue that should galvanize Republicans, Democrats, and independents — and pose a lethal threat to Republicans’ control of the Senate — it would be Trump’s demand that Republicans link arms with the Epstein coverup architect.

In her interview with the House Oversight Committee, Bondi struck a blow from which Blanche’s nomination should never recover. CNN, relying on the transcript of her interview, reported, “Bondi sought to distance herself from how her department handled the Epstein files as the Trump administration continues to deal with the political fallout.” Bondi threw Blanche under the bus, testifying, “He was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi made clear that the decision to withhold 3 million files required by law to be released was not hers.

Blanche also made the bizarre trip to visit Epstein accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who then was transferred to cushier surroundings (a move Blanche defended). Why would the No. 2 man at DOJ talk to her when the potential for incriminating testimony (in exchange for a pardon) was all too real?

Again, the Maxwell encounter was not Bondi’s handiwork. The Guardian reported, “During Bondi’s testimony last week, she also told lawmakers that she learned of the controversial prison transfer of Maxwell through news reports ‘after it happened,’ claiming: ‘I had nothing to do with that.’” Does anyone think Blanche was also in the dark?Subscribed

The Epstein coverup, of which Blanche is the chief orchestrator, has revealed the moral and legal rot at the core of the Trump regime in a way no other scandal, lawless escapade, or assault on constitutional norms has. In direct violation of the law, Blanche refused to release all documents. At least according to Bondi, he is also responsible for the egregious errors and violations of victims’ privacy in failing to make appropriate redactions. Nothing better epitomizes the abuse of power on behalf of Trump and the creation of a two-tiered system of justice than Blanche’s Epstein handiwork.

It’s not simply the magnitude of the Epstein debacle that should push it to the top of the reasons to block Blanche’s nomination. The Epstein scandal was the first and remains the hottest flashpoint between Trump and his Republican base and thereby offers the most promise for peeling off Republican support for Blanche. In effect, Trump is asking the Senate to give a stamp of approval to the man who defied their own legislative directive to release all the files.

The Epstein coverup is the first serious breach with Senate and House Republicans; the first time Trump was unable to fend off a politically harmful vote (on the Epstein Files Transparency Act). Asking the Senate to confirm Blanche would amount to a demand the Senate affirm and continue the corrupt coverup at the expense of Epstein’s victims and any semblance of the rule of law.

Asking senators to ignore Blanche’s violations of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, his dissembling about Maxwell, and his arrogant refusal to respond to Congress’s legitimate concerns and reward Blanche with the top law enforcement job should be a complete dealbreaker.

For Republican senators up for re-election (Maine’s Susan Collins, Ohio’s Jon Husted, Alaska’s Dan Sullivan) as well as newly unmuzzled Republicans (John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana) and Republicans most resistant to demands to fall in line behind the MAGA cult (Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), the implications of Blanche’s nomination could not be clearer: A vote to confirm Blanche is a vote to continue the coverup and inflict egregious harm on Epstein’s victims.

In sum, Democrats would be wise to be strategic in their opposition to Blanche. Throwing the kitchen sink at him may be satisfying, but taking Democrats and those already inclined to oppose Blanche down the memory of lane of his offenses should not be the aim. If the goal is to stop Blanche, defenders of decency, the rule of law, and the rights of abuse victims should drill down on Trump’s worst scandal and most vulnerable issue.

Markets, Inflation, Economies, Jobs

New York Times, Opinion: How to Fish Better, Paul Greenberg, June 8, 2026. We humans are capable of enormous devastation, but every now and then, we’re able to agree to stop the worst of our transgressions.

We no longer regularly scour the oceans for the great whales only to boil them down for margarine and pet food. We’ve stopped killing wild birds en masse to make hats out of their plumage. We’ve effectively banned DDT — a pesticide that nearly emptied the skies of hawks, falcons and even the bald eagle.

Bottom trawling — a destructive industrial fishing practice that indiscriminately brings to market about a quarter of the world’s wild-caught seafood — should be next. A bottom trawl is a weighted net that is often wider than a football field. As it is dragged along the sea floor, the trawl captures, kills or maims everything in its path. Around 19 million tons of marine life meets its end this way every year — that’s more than the combined weight of all the people in Brazil. At least another six to seven million tons of unwanted organisms are killed annually and dumped overboard. If a similar technique were deployed in the Amazon, people might be more likely to recoil from the mangled pulp of jaguars, toucans, sloths and trees deemed necessary sacrifices to bring meat to market. At our seafood counters, we never see the mangled pulp. Underwater, ignorance is bliss.

This year, that ignorance has been dealt a significant blow. In a major global study of bottom trawling, researchers at the University of British Columbia combed through years of international catch data and found that 3,000 different species are caught in bottom trawls each year. At least one in seven was vulnerable to extinction. As dogged as the researchers were, even they could not parse all the death. “An undifferentiated mass of diverse marine life,” they write, is typically sloughed off for animal feed and “surimi” (the pink mush that’s in your California sushi roll).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.

When humans do bad things, we often console ourselves that such things were always done. And bottom trawling has existed since the 14th century. Yet, as a planet-wide undertaking, the large-scale dragging of the seabed is quite young. 

In my 20 years of covering oceans, I’ve seen all kinds of destruction. I have stood on the deck of a Louisiana shrimp trawler and watched 10 pounds of wildlife shoveled dead off the deck for every pound of shrimp that went in the hold. As an apprentice field researcher for the Bureau of Land Management surveying the riverside along salmon habitat, I saw whole stands of old-growth trees obliterated in clear-cuts. I noted down how many 200-year-old stumps were left behind and how the tangled slag of the forest lay across the land, too gruesome to contemplate for very long.

Arguments in favor of accommodation and compromise have been made about essentially every environmental problem — and they almost never achieve their goals. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Mike Johnson Has Surrendered His Power As Speaker Of The House To Trump, Jason Easley, right, June 8, 2026. It turns out that the idea that Trump is the real Speaker of the House wasn't completely a joke, as Mike Johnson, shown above left in a file photo, has surrendered some of his powers as Speaker to Trump.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been referring to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as the Deputy Speaker of the House for months. Jeffries has been telling reporters and the American people that Johnson is bowing to Trump. What many people assumed was metaphorical is turning out to be literal.

Trump has joked that he is the Speaker of the House. There have even been rumors that some Republicans wanted Trump to be the Speaker of the House before he returned to the White House.

Sarah Jones talks about Trump and power:

However, NOTUS reported that Johnson has surrendered some of his power as Speaker to Trump:htBut it’s not just winning votes. At times, Johnson has handed over other powers that usually rest with the speaker.

According to two sources who spoke with NOTUS, Johnson has in several instances directed members seeking to bring legislation to the floor to obtain the administration’s approval first.

“It is a total shirking of responsibilities to the White House,” another House Republican told NOTUS. “Everything has to be preordained and pre-blessed, and there’s very little that we’re able to have our own will on. We should be empowered to pass our own priorities, not just follow what the mandate of the day is.”

A senior GOP aide pushed back on the idea that relying on the president is a bad thing.

The fact that a senior House Republican aide defended this practice, which is a defense of gutting the Constitution, is a big part of the problem.

It is easy to point to the Constitution and see that Johnson has violated the separation of powers by transferring his authority to Trump, but what Speaker Johnson has done is an even deeper betrayal of the fundamental principles the country was founded on.

In Federalist 51, James Madison wrote:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

The Speaker of the House was intended to be a person who had their own power and ambition. The Founders never foresaw a Speaker of the House who would surrender his power to a president.

When the argument is made that Democrats winning the House majority will take power away from Trump, it is now clear that the president will lose actual power if Hakeem Jeffries replaces Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.

Mike Johnson and Trump are conspiring to undermine the voice and will of the people. The House isn’t representing the views and will of the people. House Republicans aren’t working for the people who elected them but often serve as a rubber stamp for Trump.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Polymarket sponsoring election conspiracies from far-right influencers, Judd Legum, right, June 8, 2026. Polymarket, one of the dominant players in the prediction market industry, promotes itself as a source of objective truth. In 2024, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan called his company a “global truth machine“ and bragged the company would be “actually solving misinformation.” After Polymarket became the official prediction market of X, Coplan said the partnership joined together the “two top truth-seeking apps on the internet.”

However, as Semafor first reported, in the wake of the California primary election last Tuesday, Polymarket has sponsored posts from far-right influencers on X pushing election conspiracies and disinformation. Popular Information has uncovered a network of at least 16 influencers¹, with a collective audience of 13 million, publishing election-related misinformation in posts sponsored by Polymarket.

The conspiracies involve the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Like other California races, all candidates competein a single primary and the top two candidates advance to the general election. Early returns on election night showed incumbent Karen Bass (D) leading the field and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt (R) in second place. Pratt has gained a following through viral AI-generated videos depicting him as Batman and Bass as the Joker.

But California’s vote-counting process has been slow and later returns have favored another candidate, Nithya Raman (D), over Pratt. Many Californians vote by mail, and these ballots take longer to count. Based on the breakdown of the mail-in ballots, most analysts expect Raman, not Pratt, to advance to the general.

In numerous Polymarket-sponsored posts, far-right influencers, without evidence, claim that Raman’s improving fortunes are evidence of fraud. Former InfoWars correspondent Owen Shroyer, who has over 470,000 followers on X, posted that “California just keeps counting until the Democrat wins.” The post was labeled as a “paid partnership” with Polymarket.

Previously, Shroyer was a named defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by the family of a child killed at Sandy Hook and was found liable by default. Shroyer was also sentenced to 60 days in jail for his role in the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. “In the months prior to January 6, Shroyer spread election disinformation paired with violent rhetoric to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers,” prosecutors wrote. “Shroyer helped create January 6.”

Another right-wing content creator, Benny Johnson, wrote in a Polymarket-sponsored post that the declining odds for Pratt reflected people’s belief that “Democrats are going to dramatically rig it.” Johnson, a serial fabulist, has repeatedly pushed false claims about the LA mayoral in recent days, including the claim that California has created a “system of fraud specifically designed to manufacture votes in races you need to win and make the fraud untraceable.” In another post, Johnson said the “election cheat machine in California is so wildly unconstitutional and fraudulent it’s not even funny.” Beyond LA, Johnson asserted that in California, an overwhelmingly Democratic state, it was impossible to believe that Republican “Steve Hilton isn’t in the lead for Governor.”

In other cases, Polymarket sponsored posts by pseudonymous accounts with large followings pushing disinformation about the LA mayoral election. Posts sponsored by Polymarket asserted the LA election officials were “openly cheating,” “SCAMMING Spencer Pratt,” and “rigging it.”

Many of the Polymarket-sponsored influencers also frequently post bigoted content. Kangmin Lee, for example, posts about election conspiracies and disparaging posts about Black Americans. “Everyone is feeling the black fatigue,” Lee posted on June 7.

Polymarket’s sponsorship of election disinformation is consistent with its overall approach of using sensationalism on X to drive interest in its product. Front Office Sports reports that Polymarket and Kalshi “post on social media like they’re troll accounts“ and “are shitposting their way to legitimacy.”

Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.Kalshi removes some, but not all, sponsored election misinformation

According to the CEO of Kalshi, Polymarket’s chief competitor, the company is “replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth.” But Kalshi has also been sponsoring posts by right-wing influencers with misinformation about the LA mayoral election.

In one Kalshi-sponsored post, @GuntherEagleman, an account with 1.7 million followers, wrote “They are stealing it, aren’t they?”.

Kalshi told Semafor that these posts violate their “affiliate marketing policies“ and it has asked the creators to remove them. The @GuntherEagleman post, and a couple of similar sponsored posts, have been deleted.

But other posts raising doubts about the California electoral system remain. “We should all fly to LA and vote for Pratt,” @WallStreetMav wrote in a Kalshi-sponsored post on June 2. “Nothing can stop us, they don’t require voter ID.” In a June 5 post, @WallStreetMav asked, “Has anyone found a Democrat statistician or mathematician who can provide a legitimate explanation for how out of 24,000 ballots, Spencer Pratt received ZERO?”

That post is based on a thoroughly debunked rumor. The LA Times explained, “Voting data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass’ and Raman’s votes in the first and Pratt’s in the second.”George Santos under investigation, loses sponsorship deal

Pushing election misinformation is not the only scandal the prediction market industry has been dealing with recently.

Last week, Kalshi reported former Congressman George Santos (R), who was convicted of fraud and then had his sentence commuted by Trump, to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for “suspicious trades“ made ahead of Trump’s February State of the Union address. Santos “boasted he’d be going to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, then bet against his own attendance.” Ultimately Santos did not attend the event, blaming a flight delay.

The Santos case is an example of just how easy it is for insiders to game prediction market bets. On his own podcast in March, Santos called prediction markets “easily manipulable,” but argued “It is not a crime to do prediction market.” According to Santos, “there will always be advantaged players in this game and it’s very hard to understand who they are.”

In response to Santos’ referral to the DOJ, Polymarket announced George Santos would no longer be a paid content creator for the company.

New York Times, Europe Watches Its Economic Recovery Fade Into the Distance, Eshe Nelson, June 8, 2026. As the war in Iran persists, signs point to a prolonged period of higher prices and slower growth rather than a quick shock.

When the war began in the Middle East and energy prices soared, Europe braced for a sharp, short economic shock. More than three months later, the region is settling in for a period of higher prices and weaker growth that could last much longer than expected.

For Europe, the recovery from the last energy shock just a few years ago has been cut short in its early stages. The economic drag is now forecast to last into next year as higher energy costs drain money from public budgets, sapping investment for more productive uses. Consumers would be left increasingly nervous about spending.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 cut Europe off from a critical source of natural gas, and inflation raced into the double digits. Policymakers responded by aggressively raising interest rates to thwart price growth, but that also sharply restrained the economy.

The concern today is a more subtle, but still adverse, economic hit: noticeably higher inflation and interest rates into next year at least.

“A short-term shock is being extended in time,” said Mariano Cena, senior European economist at Barclays. The longer the disruption to energy supplies from the Persian Gulf goes on, the worse the effects get, he added.

Initially, after U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran, and Iran responded by closing off the Strait of Hormuz, the expectation was for what economists call a V-shaped impact, with a big but short drop in growth and a strong rebound, Mr. Cena said. Now, it’s more U-shaped, where the economy is weaker for longer and the recovery is slower. Barclays recently halved its forecast for European growth this year to 0.7 percent, with just a meager pickup to 0.9 percent next year.

More On U.S. Law, Corruption, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy case” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston). 

New York Times, How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept., Devlin Barrett (covering the Justice Department and the F.B.I., with this article is drawn from reporting in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice).” June 8, 2026. The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges.

It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June of last year.

Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down.

Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside F.B.I. headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Mr. Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials.

To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicization of the Justice Department — and the internal resistance to it.

New details of how that period unfolded show how Mr. Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with U.S. attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

(Excerpt continued from above)

Asked for comment on this account and the roles of Mr. Patel and other officials, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, said the department “enforces federal law fairly, consistently and without regard to politics,” adding that all investigative and prosecutorial decisions “are grounded in evidence and the law.”

On July 14, barely a month after Mr. Patel told millions of podcast listeners about a supposed vault of dirty secrets, Todd Gilbert became the interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.

Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.

Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.

His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va. It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.

The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.

To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials.

To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein’s monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life.

From the start, F.B.I. leadership wanted near-daily updates on the case — a level of attention usually reserved for national crises. The Virginia prosecutors were confused why the case received so much interest from Mr. Patel and so little from their actual boss, the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who had been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Mr. Gilbert tried repeatedly to get advice and instruction from Mr. Blanche, even driving to Washington unannounced to try to speak to him. Instead, one of Mr. Blanche’s deputies, Aakash Singh, urged Mr. Gilbert to pursue the case aggressively. But Mr. Singh did not address many of Mr. Gilbert’s legal and factual questions. One senior Justice Department official said Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Blanche eventually did speak about the case.

Mr. Gilbert’s team decided that the law gave his office jurisdiction over only one of the issues Mr. Patel had directed him to investigate — whether the documents in the burn bags had been mishandled as part of a criminal scheme to hide them.

The other two prongs he was assigned — whether Mr. Comey had lied in congressional testimony in 2020 about leaks and Russia-related intelligence, and whether Mr. Brennan had lied to Congress about a 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference that referenced a dossier compiled by a former British spy — had no legitimate venue in western Virginia, they concluded.

Mr. Gilbert angered the administration by resisting pressure to impanel a grand jury to investigate the burn bag case, since he and his team did not believe there was yet a sufficient factual basis for that step.

A related disagreement over personnel assignments in his office also hurt his standing. In mid-August, Sergio Gor, a powerful White House official, called Glenn Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican governor, and told him that Mr. Gilbert was going to be fired and that the governor should not try to stop it.

Mr. Gilbert lasted just 37 days as a U.S. attorney. After his departure, prosecutors in his office wrote a lengthy legal analysis, called a declination memo, detailing why no criminal charges were warranted in the burn bag case. The senior F.B.I. agent on the investigation endorsed the memo’s conclusions.

At that point, a number of current and former law enforcement officials concluded that the administration had embarked on a new kind of fishing expedition — not for dirt on the people they did not like, but to find a prosecutor willing to file charges based on the threadbare evidence they already had.

Resistance by officials in western Virginia did not stop the pressure campaign from senior administration officials. Instead, that pressure simply migrated across the state, to the federal prosecutor’s office in Alexandria, Va.

Mr. Trump’s pick to lead that office, Erik Siebert, was an experienced lawman, and unlike Mr. Gilbert, he had allies among the Justice Department’s leaders. Mr. Siebert’s law enforcement career began as a D.C. police officer, and he heartily embraced Mr. Trump’s agenda.

But in the summer of 2025, Mr. Siebert suddenly found himself on thin ice, having inherited not just the Comey case but a separate investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued Mr. Trump over his business accounting. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Ms. James in April 2025, accusing her of having falsified information in mortgage paperwork to get a more favorable interest rate.

Mr. Pulte leveled a similar allegation against Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who while in the House had led impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump. Mr. Pulte suggested that Mr. Schiff had claimed two different places as his primary residence.

In July, Mr. Blanche summoned F.B.I. agents, Virginia prosecutors and senior F.H.F.A. officials to a meeting at the Justice Department to talk about the James investigation. The meeting began with a detailed presentation from F.B.I. agents, emphasizing the lack of evidence of criminality surrounding Ms. James’s mortgages.

Then Mr. Blanche declared that the evidence simply did not support a criminal case against Ms. James for either property. When Mr. Pulte’s aides tried to argue or interject, Mr. Blanche shot them down.

The agents and prosecutors on the case were encouraged to see the deputy attorney general back them up. Their optimism, however, was short-lived. Within days of the meeting, law enforcement officials were told that the White House still wanted to see Ms. James charged. (One senior Justice Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly disputed that characterization of the meeting as “inaccurate and oversimplified,” saying that investigators still wanted to pursue the case against Ms. James.)

The administration was not giving up on the Comey investigation either. Mr. Siebert had been handed the case in mid-August, after the federal prosecutors in western Virginia successfully argued that they did not have jurisdiction. It was the second time in months that Mr. Siebert and his team were pressured by superiors to investigate Mr. Comey.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Blanche → Epstein, William Kristol, right, June 8, 2026. There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.

As former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee recently, it was Blanche who, as deputy attorney general, “supervised [the] entire process” of dealing with the Epstein files. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” she testified. Blanche has also been the most visible public defender of the coverup, and of the decision not to investigate or prosecute anyone else for crimes.

Blanche stepped boldly into the Epstein spotlight on July 24, 2025, when he traveled to Florida to interview convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The meeting was initiated by Maxwell, and she received limited immunity via a proffer agreement.

But Maxwell didn’t use her immunity as an opportunity to be more forthcoming than she’d been previously about anything to do with Epstein. As every sentient observer familiar with the Epstein case agreed, she simply continued to stonewall and lie. But Blanche wasn’t sure. He told CNN a couple months later that deciding if Maxwell was a “credible” witness is “an impossible question to answer.”

Really?

In any case, Blanche explained, “The point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave.”

Why not?

Because “the point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.”

This was laughable. But the real point of the interview became clear a few days later, when Maxwell was moved, contrary to Bureau of Prison guidelines for sex offenders, to a comfortable minimum-security prison.

The point of both the interview and the move was to encourage Maxwell not to talk about Donald Trump—and to hold out the prospect of even more favorable treatment in the future. Since the interview, Trump has continued to refuse to rule out the possibility of a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.

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Since then, Blanche has been assertively pushing back against widespread public unhappiness with the botched and selective release of the Epstein files. For example, in early February 2026, Blanche had this exchange with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham:

Ingraham: Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged in relations with minors will be prosecuted? Any chance?

Blanche: I’ll never say no, and we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct, but as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.

“It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” But “Mr. Epstein” (it’s kind of striking that Blanche added the honorific) pled guilty in 2008, and then was indicted again in 2019, for horrible crimes arranged or committed or celebrated at some of those parties. The Justice Department could now be following up on the testimony of scores of survivors to finally, properly investigate those crimes and their perpetrators. But Blanche’s Justice Department hasn’t even pretended to be seeking further evidence. Blanche’s DOJ has no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting the men who have done truly horrible things. After all, “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”

Trump rewarded Blanche for arranging and managing the Epstein coverup. First he made Blanche acting Attorney General. Now he wants to place him in that post outright. And that requires Senate confirmation.

Which means the Senate will debate and vote. Last November, thanks to a discharge petition, and over the opposition of the Trump administration and Republican leadership, Congress was forced to engage on the Epstein matter. Opposition to legislation requiring the release of the Epstein files collapsed when the issue emerged into broad daylight, and Congress voted almost unanimously to order the Justice Department to release the files. At the time, everyone from both parties could look as if they were in favor of the truth coming out.

But now we’ve had only a partial release of those documents and no follow-up investigations. Trump has gone out of his way to punish Republican critics of his administration’s Epstein coverup. Republicans have been happy to avoid further engaging on the issue.

But thanks to Trump’s nomination of Blanche, there is a chance to force a real public debate, with real Senate votes, on the Epstein coverup.

That is not what Blanche wants. In early April, shortly after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche told Fox News, “And so I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”

But the Epstein coverup should be part, a key part, of one thing going forward: It should be a key part of the upcoming debate on Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. The Blanche confirmation fight can bring the Epstein coverup back into the spotlight this summer. His nomination can be turned into a referendum on the coverup by the Trump administration, and by the entire political class, of Epstein and his co-conspirators and clients.

The vote on Blanche can become, it should become, a vote on Epstein.

The Contrarian, Opinion: How to Kill the Blanche Nomination, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 8, 2026. Democrats must focus on the most powerful issue.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly proved herself to be the most legally ignorant, dishonest, and ethically challenged person ever to head the Justice Department. However, if her former deputy and now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is nominated and confirmed for the permanent job, she by comparison would seem like one of giants who have held the post (e.g., Robert H. Jackson, Edward H. Levi).

Blanche, whom Donald Trump said last week he would nominate for attorney general, has presided over the shoddiest lawyering in the history of the DOJ, which has earned unprecedented denunciations of federal judges (for, among other things, defying court orders and making material misrepresentations to courts), Blanche has been the tip of the spear in Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and government-wide corruption operation. (White House photo)

Making clear his first loyalty is to Trump (“I love you, Sir”), not to the Constitution, Blanche has been at the wheel of vindictive prosecutions against Trump enemies, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, former FBI Director James Comey (in the infamous seashell case), journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort (a First Amendment travesty), and the civil rights legacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has been instrumental in turning the DOJ into a discredited, weaponized operation that has lost thousands of dedicated lawyers disgusted with the Trump regime.

Although directed to recuse himself from cases in which he represented Trump as a private citizen, he has continued to pursue Trump’s conspiracy-based inquests and investigations. He defended pardons of the violent January 6 felons and then authored the widely denounced (and, for now, discarded) slush-fund-for-secessionists. That deal, coupled with the legally suspect waiver of Trump’s tax liability, gives him the distinction of crafting the most corrupt scheme in presidential history.

However, far and away the single most compelling reason — and potentially the most politically damaging — for denying him the job came from Bondi herself. Blanche’s central role in the Epstein files coverup, which Bondi confirmed, should make his nomination a nonstarter.

Certainly, there are innumerable reasons for denying the job of heading the Justice Department to someone so obviously lacking independent judgment and respect for the rule of law and who is devoid of credibility, but if there is a single issue that should galvanize Republicans, Democrats, and independents — and pose a lethal threat to Republicans’ control of the Senate — it would be Trump’s demand that Republicans link arms with the Epstein coverup architect.

In her interview with the House Oversight Committee, Bondi struck a blow from which Blanche’s nomination should never recover. CNN, relying on the transcript of her interview, reported, “Bondi sought to distance herself from how her department handled the Epstein files as the Trump administration continues to deal with the political fallout.” Bondi threw Blanche under the bus, testifying, “He was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi made clear that the decision to withhold 3 million files required by law to be released was not hers.

Blanche also made the bizarre trip to visit Epstein accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who then was transferred to cushier surroundings (a move Blanche defended). Why would the No. 2 man at DOJ talk to her when the potential for incriminating testimony (in exchange for a pardon) was all too real?

Again, the Maxwell encounter was not Bondi’s handiwork. The Guardian reported, “During Bondi’s testimony last week, she also told lawmakers that she learned of the controversial prison transfer of Maxwell through news reports ‘after it happened,’ claiming: ‘I had nothing to do with that.’” Does anyone think Blanche was also in the dark?Subscribed

The Epstein coverup, of which Blanche is the chief orchestrator, has revealed the moral and legal rot at the core of the Trump regime in a way no other scandal, lawless escapade, or assault on constitutional norms has. In direct violation of the law, Blanche refused to release all documents. At least according to Bondi, he is also responsible for the egregious errors and violations of victims’ privacy in failing to make appropriate redactions. Nothing better epitomizes the abuse of power on behalf of Trump and the creation of a two-tiered system of justice than Blanche’s Epstein handiwork.

It’s not simply the magnitude of the Epstein debacle that should push it to the top of the reasons to block Blanche’s nomination. The Epstein scandal was the first and remains the hottest flashpoint between Trump and his Republican base and thereby offers the most promise for peeling off Republican support for Blanche. In effect, Trump is asking the Senate to give a stamp of approval to the man who defied their own legislative directive to release all the files.

The Epstein coverup is the first serious breach with Senate and House Republicans; the first time Trump was unable to fend off a politically harmful vote (on the Epstein Files Transparency Act). Asking the Senate to confirm Blanche would amount to a demand the Senate affirm and continue the corrupt coverup at the expense of Epstein’s victims and any semblance of the rule of law.

Asking senators to ignore Blanche’s violations of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, his dissembling about Maxwell, and his arrogant refusal to respond to Congress’s legitimate concerns and reward Blanche with the top law enforcement job should be a complete dealbreaker.

For Republican senators up for re-election (Maine’s Susan Collins, Ohio’s Jon Husted, Alaska’s Dan Sullivan) as well as newly unmuzzled Republicans (John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana) and Republicans most resistant to demands to fall in line behind the MAGA cult (Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), the implications of Blanche’s nomination could not be clearer: A vote to confirm Blanche is a vote to continue the coverup and inflict egregious harm on Epstein’s victims.

In sum, Democrats would be wise to be strategic in their opposition to Blanche. Throwing the kitchen sink at him may be satisfying, but taking Democrats and those already inclined to oppose Blanche down the memory of lane of his offenses should not be the aim. If the goal is to stop Blanche, defenders of decency, the rule of law, and the rights of abuse victims should drill down on Trump’s worst scandal and most vulnerable issue.

U.S. Military, Religion, Foreign Affairs

Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: Christo-fascist pseudo-War Secretary and drunkard de-recognizes dozens of religious sects, Wayne Madsen, right, June 7-8, 2026. Hegseth irritates Mormons while cutting Pentagon's recognition of Unitarians.

The pseudo-Secretary of War and Christo-fascist and neo-Nazi Pete Hegseth pulled Pentagon recognition from dozens of religious faiths and sects prior to equating the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 to the arrival of refugees on European beaches. In a couple of days, Hegseth managed to irritate Mormons by designating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as a non-Christian religion and antagonized Unitarians by pulling the Pentagon’s religious faith codes for Unitarian-Universalists. In total, Hegseth removed 200 religious faith codes by whittling the recognized codes to 31.

Religious faith codes are used for military dog tags, chaplain assignments, religious accommodation, and burial rites.

Creating lists of state-approved religious sects is often a slippery slope and the practice has no place in a nation where the separation of church and state is a constitutional right. Moreover, certain initially “approved” religions often find themselves subject to future bans. Following the Fascist takeover of Italy in the early 1920s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Salvation Army, and Freemasonry, originally legal under Benito Mussolini, were eventually banned outright.

Hegseth’s de-recognition of certain religions is a slap in the face during the 250th anniversary of American independence. Famous Deists include Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Ethan Allen, Gouverneur Morris, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and Edgar Allen Poe.

Unitarians are counted among the founders of the United States and include Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. Other Unitarians were Presidents Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft, as well as Adlai Stevenson II, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Susan B Anthony, Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Buckminster Fuller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Pete Seeger. One famed Deist and purported Rosicrucian was founding father Benjamin Franklin. Famed Swedenborgians in American history include Helen Keller, John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed), Henry James, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In one stroke of a pen, the unaccomplished drunkard Hegseth, and, by acquiescence, the rapist and pedophile Trump, have crapped all over the legacies of illustrious Americans who were guided to success by their respective religious faiths.

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Hegseth canceled religious faith codes for the following Pagan, Wiccan, and Earth-based sects:

• Wicca
• Wiccan (various traditions)
• Pagan
• Paganism (general)
• Asatru
• Heathenry
• Druid
• Druidry
• The Troth
• Ásatrú Alliance
• Ásatrú Folk Assembly
• Celtic Reconstructionist
• Norse Pagan
• Odinist
• Magick‑based traditions
• Neo‑Pagan (general)
• Shamanism
• Shamanic traditions

Small Christian Denominations were also struck from the recognition list:

• Unity Church
• Swedenborgian
• Christadelphian
• Messianic Judaism
• Restorationist micro‑denominations
• Independent Charismatic groups

Also removed from the recognized list were the following New Age, Metaphysical, and Esoteric Traditions:

• New Age
• Eckankar
• Rosicrucianism
• Spiritualism
• Theosophy
• Anthroposophy
• Universal Gnostic
• Esoteric Christianity
• Metaphysical Churches
• Unity Church
• Church of Light
• I AM Activity

Secular, Humanist, and Non‑Theistic Codes were also dropped:

• Atheism
• Atheist
• Humanism
• Secular Humanism
• Ethical Culture
• Freethinker
• Rationalist
• Brights Movement
• No Preference (as a religious code)
• None (as a religious code)

Indigenous and Traditional Religions were also de-recognized:

• Native American Church
• Indigenous spiritualities
• Animism
• African Traditional Religions
• Santería
• Candomblé
• Umbanda
• Yoruba/Ifá
• Vodou (Haitian Vodou)
• Minority or Micro‑Religions were also dropped:
• Deism
• Cao Dai
• Tenrikyo
• Scientology
• Raëlism
• Falun Gong
• Eckankar
• Jainism
• Taoism
• Confucianism
• Unitarian Universalism
• Zoroastrianism

One of the stages of creating a fascist state is the state declaring what religious faiths are legal and which are not. In Nazi Germany, Judaism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasonry, and Baha’i were banned. Restricted by the Nazis were Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Science, Anthroposophy, and Theosophy and Occultism. There should be no surprise that Hegseth’s banned list and that of Nazi Germany overlap. Both Hegseth and Donald Trump take their white nationalist beliefs straight from Nazi Germany’s doctrine.

The 31 religious faith codes which continue to be recognized are:

• Agnostic (AN)
• Baha’i faith (BH)
• Buddhism (BU)
• Christian - Assemblies of God (AG)
• Christian - Baptist (BA)
• Christian - Brethren (BR)
• Christian - Catholic (CA)
• Christian - Church of Christ (CC)
• Christian - Church of God (CG)
• Christian - Church of the Nazarene (CN)
• Christian - Episcopal/Anglican (EA)
• Christian - Evangelical (EV)
• Christian - Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW)
• Christian - Lutheran (LU)
• Christian - Methodist (ME)
• Christian - Non Denominational (ND)
• Christian - Orthodox (OX)
• Christian - Other (CO)
• Christian - Pentecostal (PE)
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U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Maine's Democratic candidates in the primary on June 9 are, from left to right, Troy Jackson, a former president of the State Senate; Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state, and Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the State House (Photos by Amanda Sabga/Reuters; and Cliff Owen and Joel Page, via Associated Press).

New York Times, Graham Platner Announced His Picks for Maine Governor. Will It Sway the Race? Jenna Russell, June 8, 2026. The crowded race for governor has barely qualified as background noise in recent months, drowned out by the high-stakes, turbulent campaign for U.S. Senate.

For months, a crowded, collegial race for governor of Maine barely qualified as background noise amid the din of a high-stakes Senate campaign. Then Graham Platner, the populist newcomer in the Senate race, revealed his preferred candidates.

Mr. Platner, a self-proclaimed political outsider, named three Democrats with lengthy tenures in Maine government, who were at that moment pleased to receive his insurgent imprimatur.

“Those three candidates, whether it’s an issue of democracy and standing up to President Trump, or whether it’s around the environment, or broader progressive values, they are the ones that I think most represent my value set,” Mr. Platner said at a campaign event on May 21.

Two weeks later, as Mr. Platner faces new scrutiny after reports about his relationships with women, the shine may be off that endorsement. But the governor’s race has tightened, with a University of New Hampshire poll showing Troy Jackson, Mr. Platner’s top pick, tied with Dr. Nirav Shah, an epidemiologist who led Maine’s coronavirus response and had led the race in most previous polls. The primary election will take place on Tuesday.

Mr. Jackson, a logger and longtime state senator, stood beside Mr. Platner at a rally in Bar Harbor on Friday night as the Senate candidate railed against “politically motivated, serious and false allegations” against him.

Mr. Jackson’s campaign did not respond to questions about his view of the allegations. But he told reporters that he had not read all the details, and that he supported Mr. Platner because they cared about the same issues.

The Opposition via The Bulwark, Opinion: The Platner Blame Game, Lauren Egan, June 7-8, 2026. Before we get into today’s edition, I wanted to give a refresher of what this space is all about. This newsletter is not an expression of my preferred politics. I spend my days talking to officials and strategists across the left’s ideological spectrum to bring you some of the best-sourced journalism out there on the inner workings of the Democratic party. Which means sometimes you’re going to read things that you don’t want to hear. 

THE CONTINUOUS WAVE of public controversy surrounding Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has given way to a private wave of recriminations over how the party’s marquee Senate race ended up in such a tenuous place.

And within the fractious and competitive world of Democratic operatives and consulting firms, it is the Philadelphia-based ad firm chiefly behind Platner’s rise that has taken it most on the chin.

Fight Agency is a new shop that has had a fairly remarkable run of success. Launched in 2025 by alums of the campaigns of Jon Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, and Bernie Sanders, the group quickly set the pace for the rest of the party in re-engaging the Trump-curious voters it lost in 2024. Its formula was fairly obvious: elevate more nontraditional, outside-the-box candidates with a working-class and anti-establishment appeal. And it scored arguably one of the most significant wins over the past year, when it helped a previously unknown New York state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion.

Platner seemed poised to be Fight Agency’s next triumph. And he may very well prove to be. But since October, he has repeatedly been accused of not being forthright about various episodes in his past, both troubling and embarrassing. There have been stories about Platner’s years-old Reddit comments, his Totenkopf tattoo, and whether—as the son of a Dartmouth-educated lawyer and the recipient of a private education—he was inflating his “working-class” background. Late last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife had discovered him sexting with other women in the spring of 2025. And last week the New York Times published a report about how some of Platner’s ex-girlfriends found him to be demeaning to women and, in at least one instance, physically threatening.

Platner has denied that last item. And he has continued to insist that he was unaware of the meaning of his tattoo. He has stressed that much of the controversy stems from a period in his life when he was struggling with PTSD following tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, overcoming a drinking problem and social isolation. And he has argued, more generally, that Maine voters are simply not as interested in or obsessed with dredging up the skeletons from his past as the national press corps is.

But the problem remains that he previously insisted there were no more skeletons. And there clearly were, leading to one of two conclusions:

That he wasn’t forthcoming or that the campaign didn’t have a real grasp of the damaging details out there. Either way, Democrats say, Fight Agency is to blame.

“This falls upon the consultants and operatives around Platner, no question about it,” said Michael Trujillo, a Democratic strategist who recently ran a super PAC supporting Antonio Villaraigosa for California governor (Fight Agency backed another candidate in the race, billionaire Tom Steyer). “This agency is serving the party raw cookie dough, and we’re getting sick of it.”

THE FALLOUT FROM THE PLATNER SAGA has led to intense fighting and factionalism within operative circles. Consultants aligned with the campaign have accused those critical of it of trying to plant stories designed to force Platner from the race. Their main target has been Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was Platner’s political director.

McDonald left the campaign in October after Platner’s old Reddit account resurfaced. And she has not hidden her concern about the trajectory of the campaign. Platner’s allies have responded by attacking her for being a source for the Wall Street Journal sexting article, releasing incredibly private details that were divulged to her by Platner and his wife. Her defenders have said that the information was bound to come out at some point and the only question was whether it would happen before the primary or closer to November, when Democrats could be left trying to rally around a deeply damaged and problematic candidate.

In conversations with The Bulwark, McDonald made clear that she believed Platner’s past was a real liability. And she insisted that it was the consultants—who encouraged him to run for office despite knowing some of what was in that past—who were to blame.

“Fight Agency may cost us the U.S. Senate to be perfectly frank,” McDonald told me. “Maine Dems have a lot of work to do to clean up their mess.”

Whether or not McDonald is a disgruntled ex-staffer, her feelings were shared by a number of national Democratic operatives as well as other candidates and strategists in Maine whom I spoke with last week. They believe that Fight Agency was too eager to run out a candidate before Gov. Janet Mills, the party establishment’s top recruit, got into the race, in the process forgoing a more rigorous vetting process.

Platner was not the first candidate whom progressive-minded operatives wanted. As Michael Kruse reported in a profile for Politico last year, Democratic strategists Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan—alums of Bernie Sanders’s campaign—showed up at Platner’s mother’s restaurant last July to ask for her son’s phone number only after the candidate they’d initially recruited to run in the anti-establishment lane didn’t work out. Shortly after, Morris Katz, an operative at Fight Agency, was meeting with Platner at his house. And just a few weeks after that, Platner launched his campaign with a buzzy video that quickly went viral.

For a while, it worked. Platner’s forearm tattoos and bass voice, his clear comfort with populist politics, and his ease with digital campaigns helped turn him from a no-name oyster farmer into a viral Senate candidate. He drew huge audiences and overshadowed Mills. She eventually suspended her campaign. But the lack of extensive vetting caught up with Platner—and with Fight Agency.

“They ignored the red flags and put all of us in a bad position,” said a Maine-based Democratic strategist, who asked to be quoted anonymously in part because of a fear of professional retaliation.

When I asked other national operatives involved in candidate recruitment about the process for getting Platner launched, they told me that the timeline in this case was unusually short. Typically, they said, it takes at least a month to do a thorough vet—let alone recruit a candidate and stand up an entire campaign. The vetting process requires uncomfortable conversations with the candidate and their family, as well as going through personal finances and online social media accounts. And it usually involves paying an outside research firm to conduct an in-depth report, which results in a lengthy document of all the things that could be problems for the candidate. Then, the candidate and their team work through how they will respond, should those issues arise. Plus, additional time is needed prior to launching to figure out the campaign’s theme, message, and pathway to victory.

“It’s abnormal to have that kind of timeline to run for city council, let alone U.S. Senate,” said Trujillo. “You can’t even get a public records request back in the time that they met him to the time that they launched. It was absolutely unequivocally impossible that they did self-oppo thoroughly enough.”

Make friends and influence people: Pop this article into somebody’s inbox or post it to social media:

PLATNER’S DEFENDERS ARGUE that it is precisely because he has rough edges and an atypical past that he has been successful. Cookie-cutter candidates who have spent decades climbing the political ladder, they stress, aren’t set up for success in the current climate. If the Democrats want to make inroads with the voters they’ve lost to Trump, they need to be less cautious in the candidates they run.

“If you are going to engage a different type of voter with a different type of candidate, then you have to accept the fact that you’re not going to be able to catch all these things,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne.

Beyond that, it’s clear that Platner’s team did do some vetting. An operative close to the campaign told me Moraff hired a vetting firm in late July. Platner was also well aware that some of his background wouldn’t play well in an election. It’s why his Reddit posts were deleted just days before his campaign launched in mid-August. It’s also the reason we know about his sexting: Platner’s wife disclosed it to McDonald in the early days of his campaign out of concern that it could become a political problem.

Those close to the Platner campaign argue that the D.C. political class is overreacting to the negative stories. They emphasize that Maine voters are craving a different type of candidate and haven’t just shown a willingness to forgive Platner for his past mistakes, but continue to be enthused by his candidacy. And they note that small-donor fundraising hasn’t let up. Platner’s campaign announced last week that in the twenty-four hours after the New York Times article dropped, the campaign raised over $200,000 from more than 5,000 donors with an average contribution of $40—drawing in more money than on any day since Mills suspended her campaign on April 30.

“Let’s be very clear: we all want to win. We just have very different ideas of what it means to win in this environment,” said Rebecca Katz, a partner at Fight Agency. “Maybe it’s time to put the knives away and start focusing on what matters to folks outside of D.C.”

THE FRUSTATION WITH FIGHT AGENCY’S handling of the Platner race is symptomatic of a larger debate within the party—a debate not just over how to expand Democrats’ appeal but also over which consulting groups and operatives ought to be entrusted to bring the party into the future.

Payne was sympathetic to Fight Agency, noting that while there was risk in running Platner it has come with obvious reward. But other party strategists countered that Fight Agency’s basic theory of politics is flawed. They argued to me that the group’s support of Fetterman and Platner indicated a misunderstanding of working-class voters, that they were choosing to elevate people with a certain blue-collar aesthetic over candidates with genuine working-class roots. Fetterman and Platner are downwardly mobile well-off kids rather than authentically working class.¹

“What I find most revealing is that they think it is impossible to find working-class people who don’t talk this way or who don’t have these problems,” said a Democratic consultant, who has worked on the opposing sides of some of the Fight consultants on primary races. “It’s not that high of a bar to find somebody who isn’t an alcoholic or who isn’t spending ten years posting deeply offensive and hateful things on Reddit.”

Then there are those in the party who’ve stressed that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer deserves to shoulder just as much of the blame as Platner and his team. They argue that Schumer’s decision to recruit the term-limited Mills to the race—sending a clear signal to other ambitious Maine Democrats to get lost—led a slate of high-quality candidates to run for governor instead. While Mills hemmed and hawed all summer long about whether to run for Senate, the field was left wide open. Platner was largely alone in it, helping his candidacy to take off.

“Everyone is at fault,” said Amanda Litman, cofounder of Run For Something, which recruits and trains first-time candidates.

“It is hard to recruit candidates. You have to start with a very large number in order to then winnow it down to the best of the best. You have to do rigorous vetting. It takes staff, it takes time, and you can’t outsource it,” she added. “You gotta take a bunch of bets because most of them aren’t gonna pay off, but the ones that do, really do—like [Run For Something alum] James Talarico. And that takes time, it takes long-term planning.”

Perhaps that will be a lesson that Democrats take away from this primary season. But it won’t calm Democratic officials who are currently worried that they’re running out of time to course-correct in Maine. The Senate primary is on Tuesday. Platner will almost certainly win. He could under state law drop out of the race up until early July, in which case the party could select a new nominee. But even Platner’s critics don’t know if that would be the best move, noting all the complications that came after Kamala Harris was anointed instead of going through a competitive primary in 2024.

For now, it doesn’t look like Platner is going anywhere.

Speaking to hundreds of supporters at a campaign rally in Bar Harbor on Friday night, Platner told the crowd that they’ve helped build “the most powerful movement our state has ever seen.”

“When politically motivated, serious, and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” he said. “And to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”

BIG: The Monopoly Roundup, Analysis: Graham Platner and Stock Market Democrats, Matt Stoller, right, June 7-8, 2026. Lots of news happened on the monopoly front. Bernie Sanders suggested nationalizing big AI firms, states look like they are preparing to try and block the Paramount-Warner merger, and the stock market fell sharply on Friday.

But this week, I want to start with a discussion about a deeply bitter political battle over the Senate candidacy of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, which is roiling the Democratic Party. I try to avoid discussing political races in BIG, but this one has broad implications for finance and market power.

Let’s start with some context. The emergence of monopoly in America is a fundamentally political phenomenon, based on choices made by policymakers over the last fifty years, from the late 1970s onward. The intellectual organizers of that era, on both sides of the aisle, argued the New Deal had been too rough on capital, and proposed deregulation, rolling back antitrust, and releasing the energies of Wall Street.

From Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, they constructed a heavily financialized society, and a set of dominant firms, led by high technology. Part of this order was a security model based on an alliance with Israel, American dominance of the Middle East, and increasing foreign elite investment in the U.S. stock market and dollar assets.

This system almost ended multiple times. The 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq were shocks. But an even bigger moment occurred in 2007-2010, during the great financial crisis fostered by Too Big to Fail banks. At the time, there was an opportunity to reorder our philosophy of governance, to distribute power to ordinary people and away from Wall Street. The system had lost its popular legitimacy, no one believed that markets were free. But the Bush, and then Obama administrations, made a decision to double down, and, as Simon Johnson noted in 2010, build an oligarchy.

Just after that set of choices, the anti-monopoly movement was born. Lina Khan started doing journalism, Zohran Mamdani got into politics. And an angry bartender at a D.C. spot called the Tune Inn served drinks. Graham Platner was a veteran, having served four violent tours abroad, and loathed the banks. His bar was where Congressional reporters gathered, and discussed their views of politics, Congress, and power. He eventually returned to Maine, and began oyster farming.X avatar for @zachdcarter Zachary D. Carter@zachdcarterHa, one reason Platner reminds me of guys I used to know is that he’s literally a guy I used to know. Worked at the Tune Inn when I was a Hill(ish) reporter. He was quiet then, but had correct opinions about banks. Zachary D. Carter @zachdcarterGenuinely don't get why so many folks are so upset about Platner. Strikes me as very likeable, reminds me of multiple people I know.7:14 PM · Jun 7, 2026 · 86.7K Views12 Replies · 31 Reposts · 415 Likes

Voters have been getting angrier and angrier since the financial crisis. Donald Trump was one symptom. This bartender, who declared for Senate last year and caught fire among Democratic primary voters, is another. In ordinary times, a random person like Platner would be laughed out of a Senate race. But America is looking for newcomers, and Platner is certainly that.

In the early 2020s, debates on the right were what mattered, because there was a fight over how Donald Trump would govern. A party out of power has flexibility to fight over ideas, without the responsibility to govern. The monopolists and proponents of the status quo on security architecture by and large won that debate, and Trump’s second term is the result.

Now the battle is happening among Democrats, and market power is an important subtext. I’ve written about this dynamic before, when I discussed the Democratic Party’s cult of powerlessness, how split Democrats are when it comes to oligarchy, and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s shocking win last year. Right now, as odd as it seems, this debate is happening through the veil of Graham Platner.

Platner has a clear anti-corporate philosophy, which we saw last year when he coherently discussed, of all things, lobster regulations.

“The state of Maine has passed laws over the years that have regulated the lobster industry in a very specific way, and it means there’s one boat, one captain, one license. Fishing can only be conducted while the captain is aboard. This has entirely disincentivized consolidation,” he explained. “The result is a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry for the state of Maine that has almost no corporate ownership.”

Platner is a populist. He rejects corporate PAC money, supports breaking up health care monopolies, called to “bring the hammer of antitrust” down on the Paramount-Warner merger, and has even gone after the Fanatics monopoly for screwing over sports fans. And his broad view is that big business today is simply too profitable.X avatar for @grahamformaine Graham Platner for Senate@grahamformaineCorporate profits are at their highest level in modern history. They're bleeding us dry, and unless working people take this country back they'll leave us with nothing.Image4:36 PM · Feb 3, 2026 · 37.4K Views97 Replies · 458 Reposts · 2.21K Likes

He also has a basic opposition to the U.S. alliance with Israel and the broad security architecture underpinning the post-Cold War world. Like Mamdani, Platner does not see a world dominated by American finance as a safe place, or worth preserving. And that is a frightening prospect to most political and economic elites, whose positions of prestige and wealth are dependent on this particular architecture, and whose last real challenge was during the Great Financial Crisis.

In the primary, Platner faced a lethargic and disliked establishment candidate, Maine Governor Janet Mills, and easily defeated her. In the general election, he will go up against Susan Collins, a 30 year institution in the state, widely respected for her bipartisan gravitas and powerful ability to bring home Federal funding to Maine.

So that’s the setup.

This week, the New York Times initiated a scandal, publishing allegations of a professional conservative political operative, Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner, and called his behavior “unsettling,” saying he hated women, and was “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” She claimed he “yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.” Platner has well-known struggles with PTSD, and covered up a controversial skull and bones tattoo he got in Croatia, a common thing for U.S. soldiers, but also associated with Nazi imagery.

After the Times published this story, the party exploded in acrimonious argument about Platner’s character. The scandal is layered onto typical intra-party discussions about who is best set up to win a particular political race. Can Platner win the Senate seat? Will the Democrats be giving up on the Senate? Is he electable? The debate seems to be about allegations of sordid behavior. Some believe her, others do not. I do not have any particular insight in this race or this scandal, I will simply note what has been revealed so far has not been enough to derail Platner’s candidacy among voters.

But if you look at the money in this race, another possible way to understand the situation is to see scandal and electability as a fulcrum to discuss ideology. Today, with AI data centers and foreign wars deeply disliked, it would be extremely unpopular to explicitly articulate a pro-oligarchy and pro-Iran war posture. It’s much easier to allege a sordid scandal. As with Mamdani’s alleged anti-semitism, those topics become the way we have a discussion about the social order.

The money involved in the race gives us a hint of what this debate is about. For instance, the biggest donor to Susan Collins is a hedge fund billionaire named Ken Griffin, who gave her $2.5 million. Griffin became a Collins supporter in 2017, after she single-handedly rescued a tax break that lets hedge funds and private equity firms pay less in taxes. She’s also a big recipient of AIPAC money, and a billionaire-associated SuperPAC has already reserved $23 million in ad spending for her. These are not criticisms of Collins, but simply observations that her constituency is the existing political and economic elite.

And Griffin is not just a random rich guy, he’s a politically connected monopolist. His company, Citadel, has an important position in the equity market structure, he was a big part of the GameStop market saga. He is an important creditor of Spirit Airlines, and helped throw that company into insolvency. He’s also politically savvy. He declared war on Mamdani in New York City after Mamdani suggested he should pay more in taxes. As a proponent of the U.S.-Israel alliance, Griffin is part of the economic elite who sees immense value in the existing global security and financial architecture. And while he is a supporter of Trump, Griffin had harsh words for the President over his tariff policy.

Griffin, in other words, shows that the campaign against Platner and that against Mamdani have the same financial and political organizers. Griffin is an important leader that other powerful billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, are rallying around. Both ex-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and ex-Fed Chair Janet Yellen were on his firm’s payroll. The campaign against Platner is coming from politically connected organizers of capital.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Vance Never Met a Racial Controversy He Didn’t Like, Cathy Young, June 8, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who used D-Day commemorations in Normandy to lecture Europe on resisting a new “invasion,” wasn’t the only Trump administration figure to annoy our allies with anti-immigration harangues in recent days.

On Friday, the office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticized those who would “interfere in our democracy” by exploiting the murder of 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak after his killer, Vickrum Digwa—a Sikh of Indian background—was sentenced to 21 years to life. That was a veiled swipe at Vice President JD Vance, who jumped into the controversy over the police response to Nowak’s fatal stabbing last December with a post saying Nowak would be alive if “European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”

The outrage over the circumstances of Nowak’s death is legitimate. Digwa stabbed Nowak multiple times after a minor (non-racial) verbal altercation. But it was Digwa and his brother, not Nowak, who called the police to report a violent racial assault. When the police arrived on the scene, they initially dismissed Nowak’s pleas that he’d been stabbed. The victim, bleeding internally and barely conscious, was handcuffed and arrested for assault; only then, after a cursory check, did the police call an ambulance and try CPR. Digwa was arrested a few minutes later, and Nowak was soon declared dead. (I discuss the incident in more detail in an article in Persuasion.)

Though the pathologist on the case declared that Nowak could not have been saved, it’s still horrifying that one of the last things he heard was “You are under arrest.” Many people, including commentators who are not on the right, think this appalling police negligence may have stemmed at least partly from hypersensitivity about racism based on an “overcorrection” in response to legitimate concerns about biased policing. Or maybe, as conservative British analyst Andrew Fox argues in Quillette, it was lazy assumptions based on the Digwas’ police call (how often does the murderer call the cops, after all?); the belief that, as the Digwas had claimed, the man on the ground was a violent drunk; and the lack of visible stab wounds or blood. There is now a well-warranted official investigation.

But far-right narratives pushed by politicians like Nigel Farage and media outlets like the GB News TV channel have promoted a drastically distorted account in which “woke” antiwhite racism caused the police to let Nowak die in a pool of his own blood. These hyperbolic accusations have already led to violent protests against the police and harassment toward Sikhs. Nowak’s family has asked that their tragedy not become a cause of division.

Enter Vance, right, not only denouncing the uncaring authorities but blaming Nowak’s death on immigration. Presumably, this means that Digwa, whose father is British-born and whose mother immigrated legally from India thirty years ago, should not have been in England. (One may only wonder what Second Lady Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, thinks.) Presumably, Vance also means non-white immigration, since Nowak himself was the son of an immigrant from Poland. It’s repulsive, bigoted demagoguery, all the more vile since it exploits an awful tragedy to praise the Trump administration’s efforts to stop “mass migration.” But what else is new?

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Soldiers Need Clarity From the President... When the commander-in-chief speaks, the troops—and our allies—listen, MARK HERTLING writes.
• Tonight! The Bulwark Book Club kicks off with MARK HERTLING joining MONA CHAREN at 7 p.m. Eastern to discuss If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal. This is exclusively for Bulwark+ members on Substack and YouTube. Join now.
• What a Russian Army Collapse Might Look Like… The Ukrainians are trying to break the Russian military—and they just might do it, argues BRYNN TANNEHILL.
• North Korea’s New Nuclear Doctrine… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the latest jackassery before pivoting to the war with Iran and under-reported nuclear developments on the Korean Peninsula.

Quick Hits

PRESIDENTIAL HISSY FIT: Donald Trump’s done a lot of combative press interviews over the years, but it’s been a while since he ragequit one. In a Meet the Press interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker aired yesterday—taped in a barn in Wisconsin and frequently interrupted by torrential rain—the president gradually melted down over his stolen-election claims, insisting that the 2020 election had been rigged against him, that January 6th rioters who pled guilty to assaulting cops had actually been innocent, and that Democrats are rigging another primary election in California as we speak.¹ As Welker repeatedly pressed him to give evidence for any of these claims, Trump repeatedly dodged: “There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. . . . All I have to do is look. . . . I listen to people.” He got madder and madder until: “You’re a one-sided crooked network,” he spat. “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

It was all the base-pleasing hits he’s played a thousand times before: The elections are crooked, the press is crooked, everybody’s crooked except Donald J. Trump. Another major interview, in other words, in which Trump failed to do a thing to neutralize the enormous hole he’s dug himself with voters ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

DON’T TELL ME PEOPLE ARE MAD ABOUT THE ECONOMY: There were many other interesting moments in Trump’s Welker interview, but here’s another that stood out: As Welker repeatedly asked Trump what his message was to farmers who have been hammered by the economic effects of the Iran War, Trump repeatedly refused to give them a message at all, simply insisting that “nobody’s been better to farmers” and “I love the farmers and the farmers love me.”

It was a striking illustration of Trump’s bizarre unwillingness to engage on one of his key negative issues: voters’ growing fury about the cost of living in America.

Meanwhile, anti-Trump groups are gearing up to turn the heat up on Trump on the issue ahead of the midterms. This morning, our friends at Home of the Brave launched a new ad blitz in sixteen states highlighting spiking prices in essentials like gas and groceries, including a faintly horrifying AI spoof of Wal-Mart’s old price-rollback ads, which you can watch here.

New York Times, Progressive Challenger Overtakes Spencer Pratt in Race for L.A. Mayor, Shawn Hubler, June 8, 2026 (print ed.). Nithya Raman pulled into second place in the race to see who will face Mayor Karen Bass in November. There are more votes to be counted.

Nithya Raman, a progressive member of the Los Angeles City Council, pulled ahead of the reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral primary on Sunday, as a surge in the vote count signaled a potential shift in the race for second place.

Five days after the election deadline, it remained officially undetermined who will face Mayor Karen Bass, the incumbent, in the November contest to decide who will lead the nation’s second most populous city. The Associated Press, which estimates that about 80 percent of the vote has been counted, has not determined a winner.

But late returns have trended heavily in favor of the liberals who make up an overwhelming majority of the city’s electorate.

Ms. Bass, 72, a former Democratic congresswoman who has already advanced to the November runoff, remained in the lead with 34.7 percent of the vote, according to the updated tally released by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

Ms. Raman, 44, who has steadily gained ground as the count has progressed, had 27.1percent, enough to overtake Mr. Pratt by a little more than 3,000 votes. He had been running in second place since election night.

A resident of Pacific Palisades who lost his home in the fire and channeled the fury of his neighbors, Mr. Pratt, 42, a Republican, dropped to third place with 26.7 percent of the vote.

A Los Angeles mayoral candidate can win outright by receiving a majority of votes in the primary. Otherwise, the top two finishers regardless of party advance to a November runoff in the nonpartisan race.

Los Angeles residents vote by mail in large numbers, and ballot counting is a slow process, with leads often shifting as the tally drags on for days or even weeks. Mail-in ballots with an Election Day postmark are accepted by county election officials through June 9.

More Global News

New York Times, Opinion: In Russia, Rage Is Boiling Over, Andrei Zakharov (a Russian journalist and the author of “The Russian Cyberpunk"), June 8, 2026. Over the past year, Russian authorities have been blocking popular messaging apps and coercing citizens to migrate to MAX, a new state-endorsed messenger platform. The messages there are presumed to be fully accessible to the F.S.B., the state security agency that succeeded the Soviet K.G.B. 

Usually the Kremlin faces dissent only from the small, liberal, perpetually-opposed-to-Putin part of society. But the state’s latest policies — blocking the internet on people’s phones, social media and internet messaging apps and running pro-MAX programming around the clock on many other broadcasts on Channel One — are generating criticism among the core of people who favored the war against Ukraine. Exacerbating frustrations at the rising costs of the war — in mid-May, Moscow was hit by a record-breaking Ukrainian drone attack — these internet restrictions have left everybody angry, and the rage is boiling over.

Mr. Putin and his cronies have been trying to restrict Russians’ access to the internet for a long time. The bans are always carried out using the same playbook: While denying people access to a service, the authorities offer them a Russian alternative, owned by people close to the Kremlin. If you can’t use Facebook, just use VK, whose chief executive is the son of Mr. Putin’s curator of domestic policy. If you can’t use YouTube, just use VK Video. These transfers are actively encouraged by the state-controlled media, which loudly accuse Western services of not complying with Russian law.

Only opponents of the regime were sounding the alarm when the government blocked independent media and platforms such as Twitter, popular mostly among urban freethinkers. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, the restrictions have grown much tighter. Now, most international social media platforms with audiences of tens of millions are blocked or slowed down: Facebook and Instagram in 2022, YouTube in 2024 and, most recently, Telegram in 2025.

Restricting Telegram seems to have been a bridge too far for many Russians. Telegram, which combines private messaging and news channels, had essentially become the top Russian media app for both services. After the invasion of Ukraine, the audiences of pro-war Telegram channels grew to millions of users, and the channels became a central means of communication for Russian soldiers at the front line.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.

Today, the pro-war audience is not happy. In their posts, members are even using the word “grandpa,” a derogatory nickname for Mr. Putin that was previously used mainly by the opposition. It refers not only to his age, 73, but to his relationship with modern technology. The Russian president does not use a smartphone, and only watches television and reads written news reports.

Why have Russians taken the banning of Telegram so personally? Being cut off from both Telegram and WhatsApp seems to have broken the social contract that people made with Mr. Putin’s regime many years ago: As long as the people stay out of politics, the Kremlin will stay out of people’s private lives. Many in Russia viewed the deal as affording a degree of material comfort in exchange for their political loyalty.

For the modern world, unfettered internet access is just as important as a good car or new clothes. Only the Kremlin’s grandpas, who don’t use the internet themselves, seem not to understand that. Along with the app bans, there have been frequent internet shutdowns in the past year across the country. When a shutdown happens, you can gain access only to sites on the so-called white list, the collection of websites and services preapproved by the government.

The official reason for the shutdowns is to minimize the consequences of Ukrainian drone attacks. In practice, they have had no effect on the attacks’ success; one recent wave in March managed to briefly disrupt ports on the Baltic Sea, through which up to half of Russia’s oil exports pass. Many Russians believe that this is a part of the state’s bigger strategy of building a sovereign internet, a corner of cyberspace completely controlled by the Russian state. They also suspect that such internet shutdowns will eventually become the norm. In some regions, especially those near the border with Ukraine, they already have.

Sports, Culture, Entertainment, Religion

The Athlletic via The New York Times, This World Cup is uniquely challenging: it’s not the heat, the altitude or travel – it’s the combination, Alan McCallBy, Updated June 7, 2026. This article introduces The Athletic’s World Cup performance series, in which Alan McCall draws on more than 20 years of experience across elite football to explain the science behind the challenges teams are facing this summer and the strategies they will use to deal with them. He begins unpacking the unique challenges of preparing for a World Cup that spans three countries and a dizzying range of conditions.

The 2026 World Cup will expose teams to an unusually complex mix of environmental and logistical challenges across three countries, multiple climates, vast travel distances, and potentially differing altitudes and time zones — not because these challenges are new to World Cups, but because they may be more pronounced and variable across a single tournament than ever.

Environmental and logistical challenges are part of international tournament football. Teams have long been required to adapt to demanding and often unpredictable conditions, from altitude in Mexico in 1986 to the heat of the United States in 1994 to travel across countries in South Korea and Japan in 2002.

More recently, Russia in 2018 brought extensive travel distances but generally moderate and relatively consistent environmental conditions, while Qatar in 2022 presented a different type of challenge — a World Cup played during the middle of the club season for many of the world’s elite players, but with minimal travel between venues and climate-regulated stadiums.

These were significant demands, but they were often more stable, predictable, or centred on one primary factor, allowing teams to prepare more specifically.

The demands of 2026, however, cannot be so easily separated. The challenge at this summer’s World Cup lies in the cumulative effect of transitioning between environments across matches, and the variability this creates for preparation, recovery, and performance.Fluminense players trying to cool off during the Club World Cup at the New York/New Jersey stadium last summerPaul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images

Across a World Cup, these performance influencing pressures accumulate. Match play naturally induces fatigue and can disrupt sleep. Travel compounds this, particularly when combined with changes in climate, altitude, and routine. Heat and humidity likely further impair recovery, while altitude adds an additional physiological strain. These factors do not act alone — they interact and influence physical recovery, mental freshness, and decision-making across the tournament.

Throughout this World Cup Performance series, I will draw on more than 20 years of experience across club and international elite football, alongside conversations with elite players, medical and performance staff, and leading researchers, to explore how teams are likely approaching these challenges and the science and practical realities shaping those strategies.

June 7

Top Headlines

• Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: Hegseth dishonored D-Day in front of the entire world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, June 7, 2026. At 2:54 p.m. local time in Normandy, France, Pete Hegseth (shown above below a view of the American cemetery at the battleground) stood among the graves of thousands of American service members who never came home. But instead of focusing on the sacrifice, courage, and humanity of the young men who crossed an ocean to confront fascism, Hegseth transformed a solemn remembrance into yet another political rally. 
• Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Sunday Afternoon Updates: Trump Storms Off Meet the Press, Israel Strikes Beirut + More, Ben Meiselas, right, June 7, 2026. Top Stories. 
• Newsweek, Trump Posts Doctored Music Video Saying Everyone Around World Loves Him, Giulia Carbonaro, June 6, 2026. President Donald Trump shared a self-celebratory AI-generated music video on social media which uses his name 45 times and claims that people all around the world love him.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 6, 2026 [$70 billion more for Trump enforcement actions], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 7, 2026. In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a measure to provide about $70 billion in additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. They did so without meeting any of the demands Democrats had made to reform ICE and Border Patrol in the wake of the violent sweeps that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: Major Mid-Day Update: Trump Melts Down and Leaves Interview When Pressed on Lies, UFC Fight in Doubt, Screwworm Spreads, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 7, 2026. Trump crashed out of an NBC interview and walked off early after being pressed about his election lies in a remarkable exchange. He also refused to rule out giving taxpayer-funded payouts to January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Denies He Pledged Not to Start New Wars, Staff Reports, June 7, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Veterans furious with Trump on D-Day, Mormons erupt on Hegseth, Vance says Kirk's death convinced Usha to have another child, and more, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are furious with Pete Hegseth after the Pentagon declined to classify the church as Christian. Service members and veterans are also criticizing Trump after he failed to mark D-Day, instead spending the day posting AI-generated content about himself and Barack Obama. And that’s just the start.
• The Parnas Perspective, Major Good News Sujnday Updates!! Spread the Word!! Aaron Parnas, June 7, 2026. As promised, we’re keeping our Sunday tradition alive with another weekly good news update. As always, share one piece of good news from your week in the comments—and pass this along so others can join in too.  

U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Inspiration From Lincoln and Eisenhower, The Importance Of Voting Early, Trump Lost Votes On Iran And Putin This Week!, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 7, 2026. Let’s start our Sunday together with Eisenhower’s Order Of The Day distributed to 175,000 men amassing for what has become known as D-Day.

More On Trump, Trump Team 

• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump is falling apart, and the people around him are racing to cash in, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 6-7, 2026. Just before 5:00 in the morning, after an all-night vote-a-rama, the Senate approved nearly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, along with something no other American has ever received.
• New York Times, Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement With Vast Health Portfolio, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, June 7, 2026. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, has demonstrated little interest in managing his sprawling department as he focuses on food and vaccine policies, according to colleagues. Mr. Kennedy, who is isolated from much of his top staff, leans on a small number of key advisers.
• The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Donald Trump Won't Rebound, Steve Schmidt, June 5, 2026. Trump can't stay awake and can barely speak. Steve Schmidt breaks down Trump's decomposing regime, his collapsing legacy, and his blatant compensatory and narcissistic monuments.
• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The Coming Revival of America, Robert Reich, right, June 7, 2026. Trump has shown us why we need a good and decent government. 

U.S. Media, Culture

• New York Times, 5 Takeaways From Scott Pelley’s Times Magazine Interview, Adeel Hassan, June 7, 2026. Mr. Pelley, who was at CBS News for 37 years, including as a White House correspondent and a “60 Minutes” correspondent, spoke in his first extended interview since he was fired.
• Mediaite, ‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion, Joe DePaolo, June 7, 2026. Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Melts Down And Walks Off Meet The Press Interview When Asked For Election Rigging Proof, Jason Easley, right, June 7, 2026. Meet The Press's Kristen Welker interviews with Trump are always taped and never too tough, but when Welker asked Trump for evidence of election rigging the president blew up and walked out. 

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

• New York Times, An Uncertain Win for Immigrants Seeking to Stay in U.S., Jesus Jiménez, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). After a judge’s ruling, there was a sense of renewed hope that immigration applications that were put on hold would move forward. But how soon that would happen was unknown.
• New York Times, Kennedy Center Loses Case Against Musician Who Canceled After Trump Renaming, Mark Walker, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). A judge sided with jazz performer Chuck Redd, who canceled a 2025 holiday concert after President Trump’s name was added to the building. 

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New, Michael Crowley, June 7, 2026. President Trump’s boasts of securing a commitment from Iranian leaders not to develop a nuclear weapon have puzzled nuclear experts who note that Tehran has made that pledge for more than 50 years.
• New York Times, As Oil Prices Spike, Talk of ‘Demand Destruction’ Sets In, Lora Kelley, June 7, 2026. The decades-old term refers to the sustained loss of demand for a commodity, caused by high prices.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Trump Looms Over Pivotal Republican Senate Runoff in Georgia, Patricia Mazzei, June 7, 2026. The president has not yet endorsed Representative Mike Collins or Derek Dooley, a former football coach, in the race to challenge the Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff.
• New York Times, They Vied for Trump’s Endorsement. Will It Matter? Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochrane,.June 7, 2026. The Republican candidates for South Carolina governor went to extraordinary lengths for the president’s support. But his choice of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette has not quite sealed the deal among voters.

More Global News

• New York Times, Ukraine Strikes St. Petersburg in Long-Range Drone Attack, Neil MacFarquhar, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). It was the second such attack in days and came just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin spoke at an economic forum in the city.

More On U.S. Media, Culture, Crime

The late U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican, and the late FBI Las Vegas Field Office Supervisor Joe Yablonsky, a would-be whistleblower on the senator's corruption.

• Mobology, How a 1985 rivalry between ABC News and "60 Minutes" allowed a mobbed-up U.S. Senator to evade exposure, Dan E. Moldea, right, June 7, 2026. An earlier example of a major public figure using libel litigation to chill the press.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup 

Then-Trump Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, center right, joins other Trump administration officials in boasting in February 2025 outside the White House that they held in their hands "The Epstein Files" in binders that they would soon release

• Emptywheel, Analysis: DOJ Remains Panicked about So-Called “Duplicative” Jeffrey Epstein Files, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 7, 2026. To the extent anyone covered the Oversight Committee’s interview of Pam Bondi — the transcript of which was released on Thursday (see my Bluesky thread on it) — they focused on the extent to which Bondi said Todd Blanche was in charge.

Top Stories

Heather Delaney Reese, Opinion: Hegseth dishonored D-Day in front of the entire world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, June 7, 2026. At 2:54 p.m. local time in Normandy, France, Pete Hegseth (shown above below a view of the American cemetery at the battleground) stood among the graves of thousands of American service members who never came home. He was there to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, to honor the Allied troops who stormed those beaches and helped liberate Europe from one of the darkest chapters in human history.

But instead of focusing on the sacrifice, courage, and humanity of the young men who crossed an ocean to confront fascism, Hegseth transformed a solemn remembrance into yet another political rally. Standing on ground made sacred by those who fought and died for freedom, he compared modern immigration by sea to an invasion, bringing his anti-immigrant rhetoric into one of the most hallowed places in the Western world. “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late?” he said. “I pray not, and I believe not.” In that moment, the most disturbing part was not simply what he said. It was where he said it.

He could have said those same words from a podium anywhere else in the world, and they would have been ugly. But he chose to say them on a bluff above Omaha Beach, over the graves of thousands of Americans who crossed an ocean to destroy fascism, and that choice is what turned ugly into desecration. It was an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of the dead. To wrap a modern political grievance in the sacrifice of a generation that fought and died for something far greater than fear. The ground was not the backdrop to his message. The ground was the message. He needed the dead. He needed the moral authority of men and women who can no longer speak, and he used it to give weight to something unworthy of their sacrifice.

What he did was use sacred ground to launder far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric. And he built the comparison not with a single sentence, but with the language itself. Earlier in the same speech, he spoke of the men who landed on those beaches, and he warned that in the years since, much of the West had grown comfortable. Then he turned, and the same words came back aimed in a different direction. Different European beaches, he said, are now stormed by dangerous ideologies. Beaches. Stormed. The exact vocabulary of June 6, 1944, lifted from the history being honored and laid over migrants arriving in boats. The word “invasion,” which on that ground carries the weight of liberation, he reassigned to desperate people crossing the Mediterranean. He placed migrants in the rhetorical role the Nazis occupied in actual history, and he cast closed borders in the role of the liberators. That is the inversion. That is the deception hiding inside the ceremony.

There was another layer to what Hegseth was doing. The very people being honored that day had themselves crossed an ocean to reach those beaches. Americans, Canadians, British troops, and Allied forces arrived from distant shores to liberate a continent from tyranny. Their mission was liberation, not conquest, and the circumstances could not be more different. But standing on a coastline forever defined by men arriving from across the sea, Hegseth chose that same imagery to portray today’s migrants as a threat. He took one of history’s most celebrated examples of people crossing oceans in the name of freedom and repurposed its language to fuel fear of those crossing oceans in search of safety, opportunity, or survival. It was a comparison that turned history inside out.

And that wasn’t the only contradiction. Before he turned to immigration, Hegseth spent part of the speech praising the Allied coalition that fought on those beaches. He spoke about real allies making real sacrifices and named the countries we stood shoulder to shoulder with: Great Britain, Canada, France, Norway, Poland, and others. He honored the nations that bled with us, that lost sons and daughters alongside our own, and then, moments later, used the same stage to lecture their descendants about an alleged invasion and their failure to defend their countries. He delivered that warning as a guest in France, standing in a cemetery on French soil that exists because France chose to preserve the memory of American sacrifice. There is something deeply heartbreaking and devastating about that. The allies of the past are treated as heroes. The allies of the present are treated as obstacles, failures, or cautionary tales. And somehow, on a day meant to honor partnership and shared sacrifice, that contradiction never seemed to occur to him.

Then he told the crowd that America saved Western civilization. And in that moment, I found myself feeling more sad than angry. Because D-Day is not the story of one nation rescuing the world. It is the story of countries setting aside their differences and sacrificing together in the face of evil. To stand in Normandy and reduce that history to another exercise in American exceptionalism feels like a betrayal of the very lesson thos

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Sunday Afternoon Updates: Trump Storms Off Meet the Press, Israel Strikes Beirut + More, Ben Meiselas, right, June 7, 2026. Top Stories:

• Trump melts down during Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker, calls her “crooked,” rips off his mic, and storms off set
• Israel launches airstrikes on Beirut’s Dahieh neighborhood, Iran threatens full-scale war response and “Operation True Promise 5”
• North Korea ramps up Hwasong-11 ballistic missile production while Trump praises the Ayatollah
• Federal lawsuit seeks emergency court order to block UFC event at the White House
• Trump’s planned attendance at NBA Finals Game 3 sparks Knicks fan fury
• California election updates

Let’s start with the big one. Donald Trump sat down with NBC News anchor Kristen Welker for what was supposed to be a wide-ranging interview on Meet the Press. It did not go well for him, and by the end, he called Welker “crooked,” ripped off his microphone, and stormed off the set. It was a complete crash out.

The interview covered Iran, U.S. troops in the Middle East, American hostages, the impact of tariffs on American farmers, and election fraud claims. Trump grew increasingly unhinged throughout, and Welker, to her credit, kept pressing him with basic, straightforward questions that he simply could not answer.

On Iran, Trump said he plans to resolve the situation either through a deal or by blowing them “the hell up.” He also warned that Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon, going so far as to say that if they did, there would be no more NBC, no more Meet the Press. I mean, what is he talking about? His own intelligence community said Iran did not have nuclear weapons capability. Now he’s out here threatening NBC with nuclear annihilation? This is how far gone he is.

He also praised the new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, calling him “younger and more rational” and expressing willingness to meet with him. This from the same guy who, moments earlier, was threatening to blow Iran off the map. The whiplash is remarkable. It’s giving Kim Jong Un love letters all over again — and we all saw how much good that did, but more on North Korea in a moment.

When Welker asked whether Trump had kept his campaign promise of no new wars, he flatly said he never promised anything. He didn’t promise anything. Okay. So all those rallies, all those speeches, none of that counts apparently.

Welker also pressed him on why, if he’s such a great dealmaker, he never finalized an Iran nuclear deal during his entire first term after tearing up Obama’s agreement. Trump’s answer was that it takes years to do these things and it has only been three months. So now the war could take years? Making a deal could take years? His first term was four years. Where’s the deal? Where are the 90 trade deals in 90 days he promised? Where is any deal, in writing, anywhere? There isn’t one, because the whole dealmaker persona is a fraud.

On American hostages potentially held by Iran, Trump said nobody really has an accurate list of who they are or whether they’re even being held. He’s the president of the United States. He’s been conducting military operations against Iran. And he’s telling us he doesn’t know who the hostages are. He told Welker that if she gave him the names, he’d do his best.Subscribed

On farmers: when Welker cited a statistic that 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of tariffs, Trump said the farmers are doing very well. That’s it.

The whole thing finally came apart when the conversation turned to election fraud. Trump claimed the 2020 election was rigged and that fraud is currently happening in California. When Welker asked if he had evidence, he said, “All I have to do is look.” She pushed back. He called her crooked and stupid, then got up and left. 

Israel Strikes Beirut, Iran Threatens Full-Scale War

While Trump was busy storming off a TV set, the situation in the Middle East continued to deteriorate. Israel launched airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut’s Dahieh neighborhood, acting on direct orders from Netanyahu per the IDF. Iran had made very clear, before these strikes, that any attack on Beirut would constitute a violation of the ceasefire and trigger a direct military response against Israel.

That response now appears to be coming. Iran’s IRGC announced it is ready to execute “Operation True Promise 5” against Israel. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, right, has authorized a full-scale resumption of hostilities. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council convened an emergency session. Iranian state TV is promising a “painful and decisive response.” Iran has issued evacuation warnings to residents in northern Israeli territory and transferred coordinates of Israeli targets to its missile units. An Iranian MP warned residents to “look at the sky over the occupied lands tonight.”

This is exactly what was always going to happen. Trump announced a ceasefire weeks ago and declared victory. Netanyahu never accepted it as binding. He kept pushing, kept escalating, kept probing for the moment he could drag everyone back into open conflict. And here we are.

This is Donald Trump’s weakness on full display. The whole world sees it. Netanyahu is using Trump, and Trump either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because the alternative is admitting he has no control over what’s happening.North Korea: Missiles and No Love Returned

Speaking of Trump’s brilliant diplomatic instincts — while he was on Meet the Press praising Iran’s new Ayatollah and talking about the “great respect” and “bravery” he sees in him, North Korean state media published footage of Kim Jong Un inspecting a defense plant and personally reviewing the fulfillment of ballistic missile production plans for the first half of 2026. The scale of Hwasong-11 production currently underway is massive, per state media.

Trump said Kim Jong Un and he exchanged love letters. He called him talented. He said they had a special relationship. North Korea has spent every day since then expanding its nuclear arsenal. The whole world sees this pattern. Flattery doesn’t work on dictators who are pursuing weapons of mass destruction. It just gives them cover.

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.

Newsweek, Trump Posts Doctored Music Video Saying Everyone Around World Loves Him, Giulia Carbonaro, June 6, 2026. President Donald Trump shared a self-celebratory AI-generated music video on social media which uses his name 45 times and claims that people all around the world love him.

The one-minute video, which features several AI-generated versions of Donald Trump traveling across the globe and being greeted by leaders and citizens alike, was created by a user identified on Truth Social as "ac132."

On the social media platform, where the president published the video early on Saturday, the user said: "I am proud to be endorsed by President Trump who I wrote this song about."

At the end of the clip, the song itself is credited to Anthony Constantino, a Trump-endorsed Republican congressional candidate in New York.

It is the latest example of Trump’s adoption of AI-generated imagery, which he has personally embraced and continued to share on his social media profiles despite recently receiving backlash over an AI-generated photo portraying him as a Jesus-like figure.

After receiving criticism from all sides of the political spectrum, including former allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and religious conservatives who typically support him, the president deleted the post and explained that it was actually a representation of himself as a doctor.

"It wasn’t a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one," he said in April.

The music clip shared this weekend shows the president paragliding, planting the U.S. flag on the moon in a spacesuit, riding a camel, riding a motorcycle through the streets of India, and even riding a lion. His face also appears on a pizza, a double-decker bus, and in the Northern lights.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 6, 2026 [$70 billion more for Trump enforcement actions], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 7, 2026. In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a measure to provide about $70 billion in additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. They did so without meeting any of the demands Democrats had made to reform ICE and Border Patrol in the wake of the violent sweeps that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

While Republicans tried to insist that Democrats who demanded reforms were starving immigration enforcement, in fact, the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July of last year—they one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—provided an astonishing $191 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security, with about $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP. According to Dominik Lett of the libertarian Cato Institute, those numbers were seven times ICE’s previous annual budget and four times the typical annual budget of CBP, and were designed to last through September 30, 2029.

Putting more billions behind ICE and CBP now will mean those agencies are funded through the rest of Trump’s term. Even if Democrats take control of Congress after the midterms, the funding will be in place, preventing Democrats from using funding to demand reforms.

How those tax dollars are being spent is a question. In February, twenty-one Democratic senators wrote to the Congressional Budget Office to note that there had been no public accounting of how that money was being spent. Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council reports that while the OBBBA gave ICE $45 billion for detention through September 2029, former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem decided to use $38 billion of it to buy warehouses and convert them to detention centers.

On May 29, Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler of NBC News reported that the new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, is considering selling a number of the warehouses. If he does so, Ainsley and Strikler report, there may well be scrutiny of the initial purchases. An Atlanta suburb has filed a lawsuit alleging that ICE paid more than five times the assessed value of a warehouse there.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office noted that funding for ICE and CBP has historically been made under annual appropriations bills, and the Republicans’ new policy of giving them a huge pot of money for years makes it hard to estimate the pace of spending.

Democrats had demanded reforms to ICE and Border Patrol actions, so to pass the measure, Senate Republicans used the budget reconciliation process. Not usually used for appropriations, budget reconciliation prevented a Democratic filibuster and enabled Republicans to pass the measure with a simple majority.

But anyone can amend a budget reconciliation measure, and Democrats used amendments to cause an 18-hour debate that forced Republicans to vote against a number of measures that are popular with the American people, showing how Republicans really stand.

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.776 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Republicans blocked Democratic proposals to stop Trump from establishing the $1.776 billion slush fund with the complicity of the men he has appointed to the Department of Justice and to prevent any such fund from giving payouts to people convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar the use of federal funds or private donations for Trump’s ballroom unless Congress explicitly approved.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar William Pulte, right, the director of the Federal Housing and Finance Agency, from serving as the director of national intelligence by providing that no one could direct the Office of National Intelligence while heading a different agency. Trump has announced that Pulte will be the acting director of national intelligence, putting him in place through the midterm elections with the evident plan that he will weaponize intelligence against the president’s political opponents.

The Senate passage of ICE and CBP funding demonstrates a Republican worldview. In January 2024, then-candidate Trump convinced Republicans to abandon a strong bipartisan border bill to fix immigration issues because he wanted to keep the issue of immigration open as a way to win in 2024. Now it is clear that the assault on immigrants was a tool to enforce a right-wing vision of the country on the American people, much of which is happening under cover of darkness.

Yesterday Meryl Kornfield of the Washington Post noted a report from former senior executive at the Social Security Administration Jeremiah Schofield, who is now a whistleblower. Schofield says that officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hatched a plan to make immigrants self-deport by declaring 2.7 million of them dead. Some of those people on the list were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Being listed on the Death Master File cuts off people’s access to wages, banks and other financial systems, and other services. The idea appears to have been that such an erasure would force people either to leave the country or to go to a Social Security office where they could be arrested. While they ultimately did not implement the larger plan, officials did move 6,100 mostly Latino immigrants into that database.

On Thursday, Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post reported that ICE is abandoning a policy begun under the Biden administration in 2021 that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate the deaths of detainees who died within 30 days of their release. The policy was designed to make sure ICE could not pass off deaths caused by conditions in the detention centers simply by releasing severely ill people.

At least 18 people incarcerated in detainment facilities have died in the first five months of 2026. At least 30 died last year, the highest number in 20 years. MacMillan notes that a number of those deaths happened after detainees were taken to the hospital.

Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ), right, went back to Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, to talk with detainees. Despite the established congressional duty of oversight, “ICE refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he said. “They restricted my ability to do my job.”

Kim reported that as he went through the women’s unit, “the women were trying to get my attention and flagging for me, waving their hands, and they were pointing into one of the beds. And I looked over, and I saw a woman curled up in a fetal position, clearly in some pain and agony. ICE and GEO Group [the private prison company that runs Delaney Hall on a federal contract] told me that they cannot share with me what is happening. I’m very concerned about that woman…. They have only one full-time doctor in this facility that has hundreds and hundreds of detainees.”

“The American people deserve to know what is happening,” Kim said. “We deserve to be able to hear directly from the detainees. They are doing whatever they can to impede congressional oversight and oversight from the American people.”

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) notes that the $70 billion in tax money Republicans just gave to ICE and Border Patrol could provide free childcare for 1.3 million children through September 2028, cover the annual cost of groceries for about 10.7 million U.S. households, provide a year of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to 31 million Americans, expand the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits for at least a year, cancel about 31.5% of Americans’ medical debt, and end homelessness for about eight years.

But in France today, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, right, rejected the belief on which the United States of America was founded: that the government should act to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Instead, he perverted a commemoration of D-Day, when American soldiers fought with their Allies to defend democracy against fascism, into a call for the racial ideology on which fascism was based. Embracing the Great Replacement theory that says the culture of white Europeans and Americans is being undermined by people of color from Africa and Asia, he flipped the Allied and Nazi positions.

“Sadly, today,” he said in reference to the beaches of Normandy the Allies stormed in 1944, “different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

More to the point on the anniversary of D-Day 2026, is the speech by of Prime Minister Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940, promising that those who cared about freedom and human self-determination would never stop fighting the Nazis:

“We shall fight on the beaches,” he said. “[W]e shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” 

News Roundups 

President Trump repeatedly insulted Meet the Press host Kristen Welker of NBC News, above right, and then abruptly walked out of the interview broadcast on Sunday, June 7, 2026 after she pressed him for evidence to support his repeated lies about opponents, his previous statements and elections

The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: Major Mid-Day Update: Trump Melts Down and Leaves Interview When Pressed on Lies, UFC Fight in Doubt, Screwworm Spreads, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 7, 2026. Trump crashed out of an NBC interview and walked off early after being pressed about his election lies in a remarkable exchange. He also refused to rule out giving taxpayer-funded payouts to January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit has been filed seeking to stop Trump’s planned UFC event at the White House, the flesh-eating screwworm outbreak continues to spread in Texas, and another mass shooting has left multiple people wounded.

I’m heading to the Epstein reading room shortly and will have more updates for you this evening. If you value this reporting, please consider supporting it so I can keep doing this work and pushing back. If you’re able, subscribe today. And if you’re already a subscriber, upgrading your membership is one of the best ways to help sustain this reporting.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Trump crashed out during a heated Meet the Press interview after Kristen Welker repeatedly challenged him to provide evidence for his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Unable to substantiate the allegations and increasingly frustrated, he lashed out at NBC as a “crooked” network and complained about the press instead of answering the questions. He then abruptly ended the interview, declaring “I’ve had enough” and walking off despite Welker’s attempts to continue the conversation. The exchange became a striking example of Trump losing his temper under sustained questioning about the 2020 election.

Welker pressed Trump on why he was moving toward military action after repeatedly touting “no new wars.” Trump responded that he never promised war would never happen, arguing that his investment in building the world’s strongest military was evidence that force remained an option.

Here is Trump promising “no new wars” during the 2024 campaign (video recording):

A lawsuit filed by a Virginia Vietnam veteran and a civic activist seeks to block UFC Freedom 250 (shown above under construction) at the White House, arguing that Trump is improperly giving his ally, UFC CEO Dana White, access to federal property for a private profit-making event. The plaintiffs contend that allowing the UFC and its sponsors to stage and brand a commercial event on White House grounds and at the Lincoln Memorial amounts to corruption and violates laws restricting private commercial use of federal land. They argue Trump is effectively using public monuments to benefit friends and political allies while generating revenue for the UFC and its broadcast partners. While the lawsuit faces long odds given the current administration and the event is only a week away, it directly challenges the legality of turning iconic federal sites into venues for a private sports promotion.

President Trump said he is open to compensating some Jan. 6 defendants (some shown above attacking the Capitol to threaten lawmakers) through a proposed “anti-weaponization” fund, including not completely ruling out payments to people convicted of assaulting police officers, though he said individual cases would need review.

During the interview, he also repeated claims that the 2020 election and recent California elections were tainted by fraud, but did not provide evidence when pressed by Kristen Welker. Trump argued that many Jan. 6 defendants were unfairly prosecuted, defended his mass pardons of participants in the Capitol riot, and claimed some guilty pleas were made under coercion. The interview ended after Trump became increasingly frustrated during questioning about election claims and the press, while the future of the nearly $1.8 billion fund remains uncertain amid legal challenges and conflicting statements from his administration.

Several diabetes researchers were removed from the American Diabetes Association’s annual conference after distributing copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration cuts to scientific and medical research. The incident occurred shortly before NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak; security and police escorted out multiple experts, confiscated badges, and barred some presenters from participating further in the conference. The researchers argued they were being intimidated for sharing a peer-reviewed editorial warning that federal funding cuts could damage diabetes research and U.S. leadership in health innovation. The ADA said the removals were due to violations of conference conduct rules and restrictions on distributing materials, while critics contended the organization was trying to avoid conflict with the Trump administration.

At least 12 people were shot near Toledo’s Old West End Festival on Saturday after at least two gunmen, who police believe may have been shooting at each other, opened fire in a crowded area. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 61, with two people left in critical condition, while the suspects remained at large. Investigators are interviewing witnesses and reviewing surveillance footage from the festival, which had hundreds of attendees and a significant police presence. In response to the shooting, organizers canceled Sunday’s events, and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine condemned the violence and expressed confidence that the shooters would be caught.

During a discussion about the economy and the impact of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Kristen Welker pointed out that gasoline and diesel prices had risen. Trump responded that prices would fall once the war ended. When Welker followed up by noting that 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer, Trump dismissed the concern, insisting that farmers are actually doing very well despite reports of mounting input costs across the agricultural sector.

A flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm has been detected in Texas cattle near the Mexican border, raising fears that an outbreak could worsen already record-high beef prices and create major losses for ranchers. Officials are trying to contain the pest through quarantines and the release of sterile flies, but experts warn current production capacity is far below what would be needed if the infestation spreads widely. Texas leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, are pushing to accelerate construction of a new sterile-fly facility, warning the state cannot afford another summer without stronger defenses. While the USDA says the food supply is safe and the impact on grocery prices remains uncertain, ranchers and industry groups worry the outbreak could reduce beef production and drive prices even higher. Trump blamed Biden for the outbreak:

The New York Knicks have canceled all outdoor watch parties around Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals because President Donald Trump is expected to attend the game. The team said enhanced security measures required for a presidential visit made it impractical to hold the fan events, and attendees have been advised to arrive early for additional screening. Game 3 marks the series’ return to New York, with the Knicks holding a 2–0 lead over the San Antonio Spurs. The decision follows broader security changes around the arena, including stricter entry procedures and a no-bag policy for fans.

Israel carried out airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday, just days after a renewed U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement took effect, saying the attacks were retaliation for rocket fire from Hezbollah toward northern Israel. The strikes underscore the fragility of the truce, with clashes continuing in southern Lebanon and both sides accusing the other of violations. Meanwhile, regional powers including Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt are trying to revive U.S.-Iran negotiations and secure the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy route disrupted by the broader conflict. The fighting has become increasingly intertwined with the wider Israel-Iran war, raising concerns about regional escalation, energy markets, and efforts to reach a lasting ceasefire.

The European Commission has warned Albania that a controversial luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner could jeopardize the country’s bid to join the EU if it violates environmental protections required under EU law. The project, planned in a protected coastal area home to flamingos, seals, and sea turtles, has sparked a week of nationwide protests and an anti-corruption investigation into changes made to the area’s protected status. Brussels says Albania should reverse legal changes that weakened environmental safeguards, end its fast-track strategic investment program, and ensure a full environmental impact assessment before any construction proceeds. The dispute has become a major political issue for Prime Minister Edi Rama as Albania pushes to complete EU accession negotiations and join the bloc by 2030.

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Denies He Pledged Not to Start New Wars, Staff Reports, June 7, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• Iran: President Trump denied in an interview aired on Sunday that he had ever promised not to involve the United States in new wars, which was a central pledge of his 2024 election campaign. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” Mr. Trump said in a lengthy interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press.” Speaking about the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war.” Read more ›
• Military: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day anniversary speech in France on Saturday to criticize Europe over its migration policies, saying that “dangerous ideologies” were storming the continent’s shores, in what he compared to an “invasion.” The comments reflect the Trump administration’s previous assertions on immigrants in Europe, which overlap with the language of European far-right political parties. Read more ›

In a lengthy interview with “Meet The Press” broadcast on Sunday, President Trump denied that he had ever promised to not involve the United States in new wars, which was a central pledge of his 2024 campaign for reelection. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” Trump told Kristen Welker, the show’s host, during the interview, which was taped on Friday. “Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Speaking about the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, Trump said, “I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and a former chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his remarks in France marking the anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Hegseth’s remarks echoed anti-immigration sentiments of far-right parties in Europe, calling the continent’s migration policies “dangerous ideologies” and compared new immigrants’ arrival to an “invasion.”

McCaul called those remarks “out of place” and “inappropriate” on ABC’s “This Week,” adding that Hegseth’s message should have been about veterans’ sacrifice and what they did to “protect the free world at a time of great peril against Nazi Germany.”

A political activist and a Vietnam veteran represented by an anti-corruption organization filed a lawsuit on Saturday challenging the “night of cage fights” planned at the White House on June 14 as part of the celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary. The lawsuit argues that the event is an unlawful for-profit event designed to benefit President Trump and his friend, Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Sunday outlined his deep concerns about the nomination of Bill Pulte to temporarily run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Warner said that he did not believe Pulte, who will oversee 18 intelligence agencies in the role, has a security clearance.

“I fear that he is trying to gut the intelligence community, or so intimidate them that they don’t tell the truth,” he said of the president’s decision to put Pulte in the role. “What he has shown is a complete loyalty to do whatever Donald Trump wants,” Warner said of Pulte.

In the “Meet the Press” interview, President Trump also said that he would still support a fund to reimburse people he believes were unfairly prosecuted, even though his attorneys have said in court in recent days that the fund is not moving forward. “If they get it approved, that’s great,” Trump said, an apparent reference to congressional Republicans. “If they don’t get it approved, I’d be disappointed.”

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Veterans furious with Trump on D-Day, Mormons erupt on Hegseth, Vance says Kirk's death convinced Usha to have another child, and more, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are furious with Pete Hegseth after the Pentagon declined to classify the church as Christian. Service members and veterans are also criticizing Trump after he failed to mark D-Day, instead spending the day posting AI-generated content about himself and Barack Obama. And that’s just the start.

I’m also hearing that the White House is preparing to significantly expand its attacks on creators and independent journalists in the days and weeks ahead.

If you value this reporting, please consider supporting it to help me fight back.

Here’s the news:

President Donald Trump marked D-Day by posting AI-generated content on social media, including a music video depicting himself being celebrated around the world and an image portraying the future Obama Presidential Library as dilapidated and surrounded by trash. Here is the first video:

Here is the Obama trash can image:

Unlike many other world leaders and government officials, he did not post a direct D-Day tribute on his personal account, though the White House and members of his administration commemorated the anniversary. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day ceremony in France to criticize European immigration policies, comparing migrant arrivals on Mediterranean shores to an “invasion.” The comments reflected the Trump administration’s broader criticism of immigration in Europe and its calls for European governments to take a tougher approach.

Vice President JD Vance writes in his new memoir that the 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk deeply affected his family and ultimately influenced his wife, Usha Vance, to reconsider having another child. Vance says that after comforting Kirk’s widow, who expressed regret about not having more children with her husband, Usha changed her mind and later became pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. He describes Kirk as a close friend, mentor, and confidant who helped him navigate family life while serving in national politics.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day anniversary speech in Normandy to criticize European governments over immigration, comparing migrant arrivals on Mediterranean beaches to an “invasion.” His remarks echoed broader Trump administration warnings that large-scale migration threatens Europe’s cultural and political future. The speech followed similar comments from Vice President JD Vance, whose criticism of immigration in the U.K. sparked backlash from British officials and the family of a murder victim whose case he referenced. The comments highlight ongoing tensions between the Trump administration and European leaders over migration policy, even as migration levels into Europe have fallen significantly from their 2015 peak.

Mormons have erupted this afternoon after the Department of Defense reduced its list of recognized religious designations to 31 categories and included The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a separate faith rather than under Christianity. Here is the list, and as you can see, the religion is listed separately:

Utah Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis sharply criticized the decision, arguing that the church is clearly Christian and that the government should not define a religion contrary to its own beliefs. The Pentagon said the changes were intended to simplify religious classifications and help military chaplains better serve service members. Critics from multiple faith groups also objected, saying the government should not create a hierarchy of religions or decide which faiths qualify as Christian.

The Trump Administration has changed the logo of the Kennedy Center’s LinkedIn page. The new logo no longer includes the President’s name. I have been tracking this religiously and monitoring the pages of the Kennedy Center ever since the court’s ruling, and today, they quietly changed it. This is the beginning of many more changes to come:

I spent the afternoon at the Kennedy Center and documented what I saw. The Center has not received official orders to remove the Trump name today. I will be returning every day until I capture the name removal:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed nine Navy officers from a promotion list, including all three women who had been selected for advancement to one-star admiral, resulting in no women receiving that promotion this year. The Pentagon has not explained why the officers were removed, leading many female service members to worry that their careers could be limited or increasingly influenced by politics. Critics argue the move breaks with the military’s traditionally structured promotion process and follows other recent dismissals of senior female officers under Hegseth. Pentagon officials maintain that promotions are based solely on merit and not on race or gender.

Albania's Prime Minister Ed Rama, a close ally of the Trump-Kushner families and now a target of mass protests in his country over the resort development deal arranged for Kushner on beachfront property, is shown as contributor to the Trump so-called "Board of Peace" created in Washington, DC by and for world dictators and would-be dictators: Wayne Madsen Report.

Thousands of Albanians have continued protests under the slogan “Albania Is Not for Sale,” opposing a proposed $5 billion luxury tourism development backed by Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners. Demonstrators argue that planned projects on Sazan Island and in the Vjosa-Narta Protected Area could damage environmentally sensitive coastal and wetland ecosystems and limit public access to national assets. Protests have entered their seventh day:

Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley are warning that a lapse in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could create a major intelligence gap if Congress fails to renew the authority before next Friday's deadline. According to the report from Punchbowl News, they urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prepare for the possibility that intelligence collection could be disrupted.

I also visited the reflecting pool to see whether the pool is actually reflecting. Here is an image I took:

Russia’s war in Ukraine remains at a stalemate, with peace talks making little progress despite U.S. mediation efforts and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to meet directly with Vladimir Putin, which Putin rejected. At Russia’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin and other Russian officials emphasized that Moscow remains open to improving relations with the United States, while also expressing frustration that U.S. attention has shifted toward the conflict involving Iran.

Several prominent Americans, including Candace Owens, left, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., and the Tate brothers, visited Russia during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum as the Kremlin sought to project strength despite setbacks in Ukraine and growing domestic frustrations. Russian officials and state media highlighted their presence as evidence that Russia is not isolated and that ties with Americans remain active. The visitors praised aspects of Russian culture, safety, and society, while critics argued that their trips primarily served the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda goals. Experts said the visits are unlikely to change American views of Russia but may help reassure Russian audiences that their country still has international connections.

The body of 20-year-old Auburn University student James “Weston” Higginbotham was found in a mountainous area outside Kyoto, Japan, after he had been missing for a week. He disappeared during a family trip on May 29 after walking away from his parents at Kyoto Station, prompting a large search effort involving police and volunteers. His family had said he may have been emotionally distressed following an argument about artificial intelligence before he left. His mother thanked everyone who helped search for him and asked for privacy as the family copes with the loss. 

The Parnas Perspective, Major Good News Sujnday Updates!! Spread the Word!! Aaron Parnas, right, June 7, 2026. As promised, we’re keeping our Sunday tradition alive with another weekly good news update. As always, share one piece of good news from your week in the comments—and pass this along so others can join in too.

I am heading to the Kennedy Center now to try and capture the moment they take Trump’s name down, stay tuned.

I’ve got two pieces of good news myself. First, tomorrow I’m giving a keynote address to a room full of Epstein survivors, advocates, and others about the fight to use social media to keep the Epstein files front and center. Second, this week I had the opportunity to speak with lawyers at my alma mater about my journey from lawyer to journalist. It was an amazing experience.

I say this often because it’s true: this is the best job in the world. We’re building something meaningful without billionaire backing, corporate ownership, or a giant media machine—just people who believe journalism can be better. And none of it works without you.

Here’s the news:

Identical twin brothers Travan Jasper and Travis Jasper have returned to their hometown of Richmond to serve as co-medical directors of the emergency department at Chippenham Hospital. The brothers were co-valedictorians in high school, attended the same college and medical school, and became the first members of their family to pursue higher education and careers in medicine. After years of practicing in other states, they now lead their hometown emergency room together, combining their shared experience and commitment to patient care. Both doctors describe each other as a source of strength and support, emphasizing that compassion, perseverance, and teamwork have been key to their success and are values they hope to pass on to future healthcare professionals.

A rehabilitation program at Cedar Creek Corrections Center is using golf to help inmates develop life skills, emotional control, and discipline before reentering society. Participants say the sport teaches perseverance, accountability, focus, and integrity—qualities they believe will help them avoid repeating past mistakes after release. The program was created by former superintendent Tim Thrasher, who views golf as a tool for reducing idleness and encouraging personal growth, noting that many of the game’s values mirror those needed for success in everyday life. Inmates involved in the program report that it has helped them manage anger, reflect on their futures, and build confidence as they prepare to return to their communities.

Undue Medical Debt has erased approximately $6.5 million in unpaid medical debt for about 97,000 residents of Connecticut through a partnership with the state government. The program uses leftover COVID-19 relief funds and charitable donations to buy medical debt from hospitals for a fraction of its face value, then forgives it entirely. Eligible residents are selected automatically based on income and debt criteria, and they do not need to apply or take any action to receive relief. The initiative is part of a broader effort that has already helped hundreds of thousands of people in other states, reducing financial burdens while allowing hospitals to recover at least some value from otherwise difficult-to-collect debts.

Roy Donk, a New York entrepreneur known as “The Baklava Guy,” has built a successful business by selling fresh-baked baklava directly to people at parks, concerts, and sporting events. He recently gained attention for giving away free baklava outside Madison Square Garden during a playoff celebration involving the New York Knicks, saying it simply felt like the right place for baklava to be. Donk’s unconventional business grew out of his travels following the band Phish after he got sober and looked for a legal way to support his nomadic lifestyle. What began as a small side hustle has expanded into a nationwide operation, with Donk selling baklava at events across the United States and even overseas.

A woman from Pennsylvania, Keshia Smith, found a 3.09-carat white diamond while visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park, shortly after experiencing the deaths of both her son and her father within a year. She spotted the heart-shaped gem while digging and described the discovery as a much-needed source of hope and emotional healing during a difficult period of grief. Park officials verified the diamond’s authenticity and noted that Arkansas diamonds often emerge from the ground looking unusually clean and polished because of their natural properties. Smith named the stone the “Za’Novia Liberty Diamond” in honor of her grandchildren and the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States.

Carmelo Anthony surprised 12-year-old Knicks fan Carmelo Rios with tickets to the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. In a gift package from Fanatics, the boy first discovered a personalized New York Knicks jersey bearing his name before watching a video message from Anthony revealing the tickets. The heartwarming surprise was shared widely on social media and quickly drew attention from basketball fans. For the young Knicks supporter, the opportunity to attend the NBA Finals in person was described as a dream come true and an unforgettable experience.

An 86-year-old woman from Sissonville, Pauline Monk, became an internet sensation after attending the opening of her hometown’s first Taco Bell while battling terminal bile duct cancer. A lifelong fan who calls herself the “Queen of the Taco Bell,” Monk said one of her goals was simply to live long enough to see the restaurant open, and she was the first customer through the doors, ordering her favorite meal: Nachos BellGrande and a Diet Pepsi. Despite being given only a few months to live, she has maintained an upbeat outlook, crediting her faith, family, and sense of humor for keeping her going.

U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Inspiration From Lincoln and Eisenhower, The Importance Of Voting Early, Trump Lost Votes On Iran And Putin This Week!, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 7, 2026. Let’s start our Sunday together with Eisenhower’s Order Of The Day distributed to 175,000 men amassing for what has become known as D-Day.

In reading this remarkable letter this morning I just keep thinking of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

Eisenhower’s letter came 80 years after the Gettysburg Address, and here we are, working together, in our time’s great battle for freedom and democracy, 80 years after D-Day. Let us draw inspiration for these two great leaders, and their successful fights, for our own work to ensure that there is a new birth of freedom, here and everywhere, in the years ahead. And yes let us thank, and honor, all those who haven given their lives so we may be free.

The Week Ahead - As we rest up today to get ready for another week of hard work ahead let us marvel that Trump lost votes in the House this week on both Iran and Ukraine/Putin. It really is extraordinary that Trump has been repudiated now by Congress on the Epstein files, on his terrible tariffs, on his failed Iran war, and his treasonous fealty to Putin. The consequential losses just keep piling up for our addled, sundowning, failed leader (more here, here), and we need to keep the pressure on. Here are some things to call your Senators and Rep about this week:

• Finish the job on the Ukraine Support Act, get it passed through the Senate to the President’s desk
• Finish the job on the Iran war powers resolutions that have passed both the Senate and House in recent weeks, and get them to the President’s desk
• No to the big ICE/CPB funding bill that gives DHS years of funding with no reform of the out of control agency that will be coming to the House this week
• No to the ballroom, the Arch, the gilded statues, the slush fund, the corruption, self-enrichment……
• Hell no to Bill Pulte for ODNI, and hell hell no to Todd Blanche becoming Attorney General

More On Trump, Trump Team 

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump is falling apart, and the people around him are racing to cash in, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 6-7, 2026. Just before 5:00 in the morning, after an all-night vote-a-rama, the Senate approved nearly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, along with something no other American has ever received.

It is the protection shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits. Democrats brought amendment after amendment to strip the carve-out from the bill. Republicans beat back nearly every one. The closest vote, an effort to block the $1.8 billion payout fund tied to Trump’s settlement, failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. Americans are expected to pay every tax dollar they owe and are always subject to audit. Some reports say the president may owe roughly $100 million in back taxes. One set of rules for them. Another for everyone else.

And the corruption runs deeper than one bill. A watchdog report revealed that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s White House ballroom have won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion in the past six months. Sixteen of those 27 donors have watched their federal enforcement actions get dropped, scaled back, or suspended. They are not funding a ballroom out of generosity. They are buying favor. Meanwhile, the House voted 213 to 210 to cut $141 million in fruit and vegetable benefits from WIC, the program feeding 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, and pregnant mothers, while grocery prices keep climbing. They voted to take produce from babies while the president’s donors collected billions.

And the speed of it all tells us something important. The man at the center is failing. He fell asleep on camera at his own coal event. He needed help getting down a single stair in Wisconsin. And the people around him are not slowing down. They are speeding up, racing to seize as much money and power as they can while he can still sign what they put in front of him, because they know the midterms are closing in. This is a smash and grab in the window they have left. They are building it in a hurry because they know it is not built to last. Americans are waking up. And time is no longer on their side.

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.

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New York Times, Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement With Vast Health Portfolio, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, June 7, 2026. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated little interest in managing his sprawling department as he focuses on food and vaccine policies, according to colleagues. Mr. Kennedy, who is isolated from much of his top staff, leans on a small number of key advisers.

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa a public health emergency, a reporter asked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he was worried about the virus. Six Americans had already been exposed. His response was brief: “Yeah, we’re working on it.”

In the nearly three weeks since, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed travel restrictions to keep the virus from coming to the United States, Mr. Kennedy has made no public comments about the spreading outbreak. He has received very few briefings about the virus from C.D.C. scientists, although he speaks daily to the acting director, according to people familiar with his response.

Mr. Kennedy’s approach to the crisis reflects his broader management of the Department of Health and Human Services, which affects the health of 340 million Americans and provides health care to 40 percent of the population through Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.

Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Mr. Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.

He rarely engages with members of Congress, colleagues said, unless he is asked to testify. He has made just one known visit to the C.D.C., after a gunman opened fire on its headquarters and killed a police officer last August.

This examination of Mr. Kennedy’s leadership style is based on the accounts of a dozen people who have had direct contact with him as secretary, as well as other health department employees, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Mr. Kennedy and the department did not directly address questions about his leadership style.

The secretary’s detachment from much of the work of the agency, along with the administration’s deep staff cuts and his attacks on career staff, have driven down morale, they say. It’s a dynamic that could threaten the department’s ability to protect Americans in a crisis, according to public health experts and former secretaries.

Critics say one of the most urgent problems is Mr. Kennedy’s failure to act more swiftly to address a leadership vacuum. There is no surgeon general. Around half of the 27 institutes and centers at N.I.H. are run by acting directors. The acting chief of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases was recently fired, as was the nation’s top drug regulator.

The leader of the Food and Drug Administration quit last month under pressure over tobacco policy. Mr. Kennedy fired the C.D.C. director last August; it is now run on an acting basis by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who already has another huge job as director of the National Institutes of Health.

New York Times, Screwworm Flies and Drought Spell Tougher Times for Cattle Ranchers, Kevin Draper, June 6, 2026. Some Texans fear “the nightmares and the horrors” of a potential screwworm outbreak. Elsewhere, not enough grass to feed cattle sends them to market earlier.

The discovery of the New World screwworm fly in the United States this week is threatening to further disrupt an already strained cattle business at a moment when many ranchers are also contending with a severe drought.

The United States herd is at its smallest level in 75 years, even as consumer demand for beef continues to grow. That has driven live cattle prices — and beef prices — higher, which normally would encourage ranchers to begin rebuilding their herds or prompt new ranchers to enter the business. Drought conditions across several states have led to a shortage of grass for grazing, forcing ranchers to sell some of their animals sooner.

“We have a lot of things happening all at once,” said David Anderson, a livestock market economist at Texas A&M University.

The average price for a pound of ground beef is $6.90, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 32 percent increase from two years ago. Last month, the Agriculture Department forecast beef prices would rise 12.1 percent in 2026.

But successive crises and volatility over the last year have largely prevented ranchers from rebuilding their herds, meaning low cattle supplies and high beef prices are likely to stick around.

The latest blow is the discovery of the larvae from the New World screwworm fly in a 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, about 50 miles from the Mexican border. The fly can lay its eggs in open wounds as small as a tick bite, and the infection can kill animals if left untreated.

The New World screwworm was eradicated from the United States in the 1960s, and the rest of North and Central America by the early 2000s. This was done by breeding hundreds of millions of sterile flies each week and dropping them from aircraft into areas where wild flies were found. But eradication efforts have weakened, and since 2022 the fly has been making its way north from Panama and closer to the United States.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Donald Trump Won't Rebound, Steve Schmidt, June 5, 2026. Trump can't stay awake and can barely speak. Steve Schmidt breaks down Trump's decomposing regime, his collapsing legacy, and his blatant compensatory and narcissistic monuments.

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.

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The Coming Revival of America, Robert Reich, right, June 7, 2026. Trump has shown us why we need a good and decent government. 

I detest him and everything he does or says. Ditto his despicable aides and Cabinet members, his unprincipled sycophants and suck-ups.

But it’s possible that someday we’ll look back on this horrendous era and say we needed Trump. We needed to see how horrible it could get before America was able to revive its ideals.

Please hear me out.

Even before Trump, we were barreling down the wrong road. Inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity were worsening. Legalized bribery was soaring in the form of mounting campaign contributions from big corporations and the wealthy. Workers were getting shafted. On Wall Street and in C-suites, fealty to the rule of law was giving way to “greed is good” selfishness. Giant corporations were monopolizing ever more of the economy. America was losing its moral authority in the world (think Abu Ghraib and the torture memo).

We couldn’t have remained on that road. Even if we didn’t know it then, most of us understand that now. Trump has opened our eyes to the consequences of extreme greed, corruption, cruelty, and utter disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. His brazenness and shamelessness have awakened us to much that we took for granted.

He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall.

It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.

Before Trump, how many Americans understood the importance of “checks and balances” among the three branches of government, as envisioned by the Founders?

Now nearly everyone knows, because we’ve seen what happens when the head of the executive branch usurps the power of Congress and defies the federal courts.

How many of us really knew what “due process” meant when it came to giving people accused by the government an opportunity to defend themselves?

By now most of us have seen videos of people dragged out of their homes in the dead of night by masked agents of the U.S. government and thrown into detention camps without so much as a hearing. And we’ve seen government agents murder American citizens in cold blood on the streets of our cities.

Did we understand the meaning of corruption, bribes, self-dealing, and pay-to-play before Trump extorted corporations and billionaires to contribute millions to his campaign, his PAC, his inauguration, his ballroom, and his 250th birthday party? Now, we surely do.

Did we really know the importance of professional civil servants before Trump fired tens of thousands of them and substituted brainless loyalists? Before he got rid of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it published truthful jobs data he didn’t like?

Did we understand the importance of expertise before Trump turned his back on career diplomats at the State Department, doctors and epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, and experienced lawyers at the Justice Department and replaced them with loyalist hacks?

Or the meaning of “equal justice under the law” before Trump turned the Justice Department into his own private law firm to prosecute political enemies and pardon supporters?

Did we comprehend the true meaning of freedom of speech and expression before Trump attacked our universities for allowing demonstrations he disliked? Before he got CBS to fire Stephen Colbert for satirizing him and muzzle “60 Minutes” for criticizing him?

Did we know the dangers of oligarchy before Trump authorized Elon Musk to destroy entire federal agencies? Before Trump suck-up Jeff Bezos prohibited the editorial board of The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris? Before Trump turned over to Larry and David Ellison much of how Americans learn what’s going on — CBS’s broadcast network, its news division, and over 28 local television stations, as well as CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, Discovery, HBO and HBO Max, and Warner Bros. Studios?

Did we understand the importance of the federal government keeping us safe and healthy before Trump eviscerated health and safety regulations? Before he decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, and much of the Department of Health and Human Services? Before he authorized a crackpot with no medical background who opposes vaccines to run the world’s largest and most powerful health agency?

Did we understand why the Federal Reserve needs to be independent of politics? Did we know why the Federal Trade Commission needs to crack down against monopolies? Did we appreciate why the National Labor Relations Board must protect workers’ rights to form unions?

I venture to say, in answer to all of these questions: No, we did not know.

Now, most of us do.

It’s a terrible time. I share your sadness, anger, and fear. But prior to this daymare, too many of us had fallen asleep at the wheel. We had let America barrel down a road that was compromising too many of the ideals we hold in common.

Maybe we needed this horrific wakeup call in order to get back on the road we should have been on. We needed to see how fragile the institutions of self-government are in order to know why we must strengthen them. We needed to be reminded of what America is all about — what it should be about — in order to revive it — and reclaim it, for and by the people.

We will use what we’ve learned. We will fight for a stronger democracy. We’ll demand equal justice and the rule of law. We’ll commit ourselves to the common good. And we will assign Trump and his regime to the dustbin of history. 

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

New York Times, An Uncertain Win for Immigrants Seeking to Stay in U.S., Jesus Jiménez, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). After a judge’s ruling, there was a sense of renewed hope that immigration applications that were put on hold would move forward. But how soon that would happen was unknown.Listen · 6:21 min

A day after a federal judge struck down Trump administration policies that had frozen applications for many immigrants seeking to stay in the country, there was renewed hope that a six-month logjam might be easing.

There are more than a million backlogged applications for citizenship, green cards, work permits and asylum. When those applications would move forward, however, was uncertain.

In a strongly worded opinion on Friday, the judge, John J. McConnell Jr., wrote that the policies enacted by the Trump administration had effectively made it challenging for many immigrants to stay in the United States.

The policies, which were enacted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the legal immigration system and processes paperwork for immigrants already in the country, put a hold on asylum applications. The agency also paused decisions on applications filed by immigrants from 39 countries under a travel ban, many of them in Africa and the Middle East.

“When U.S.C.I.S. first enacted the policies at the center of this litigation, the agency did not simply place a hold on adjudications,” Judge McConnell wrote. “More fundamentally, the challenged policies placed the lives of countless individuals on hold — solely by virtue of their countries of birth. Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures.”

The ruling was a victory for labor groups that had filed a lawsuit in March against the federal government over the policies. Among those groups was American Gateways, a nonprofit that provides legal services for immigrants.

Edna Yang, a co-executive director of American Gateways, said in a statement that the ruling “reinforces the integrity of our nation’s immigration system.”

“It allows people who have spent decades waiting for the legal system to work as promised to have certainty and a path forward for hard-fought permanent status and family reunification,” she said. “It is important that no administration excludes people based solely on their country of origin.”

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said that this decision could allow those with immigration cases to move their applications forward.

But the relief may be short-lived. While it was unclear immediately after the ruling how the Trump administration planned to respond, it was expected that the judge’s order would be appealed.

The White House referred questions about the decision to the U.S.C.I.S.

James Percival, the general counsel for the Homeland Security Department, the parent agency of U.S.C.I.S., said in an emailed statement on Saturday that the ruling was “sabotage dressed in legal clothing.”

New York Times, Kennedy Center Loses Case Against Musician Who Canceled After Trump Renaming, Mark Walker, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). A judge sided with jazz performer Chuck Redd, who canceled a 2025 holiday concert after President Trump’s name was added to the building. 

A judge in Washington on Friday tossed a lawsuit filed by the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts against a jazz musician who canceled a performance at the venue’s annual Christmas Eve concert last year after the center’s board added President Trump’s name to the building.

In an order throwing out the breach-of-contract case, the judge, Tanya M. Jones Bosier, wrote that the Kennedy Center failed to prove that Chuck Redd, a jazz musician and a host of the institution’s holiday program, had signed a contract to perform as he had in years past.

The dispute arose after the Kennedy Center’s board voted to rename the institution The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, according to court papers.

Following the decision, Mr. Redd said that he would not participate.

The Kennedy Center sued, accusing Mr. Redd of breaking an agreement to appear at the concert. He argued that no enforceable contract existed.

“It is undisputed that Redd did not sign the 2025 Agreement that the Center provided,” the judge wrote.

According to court papers, the center said it sustained damages “from lost good will with the public, wasted marketing expenses, and sunk costs preparing for a concert that did not occur.”

However, the judge noted the center did not lose any ticket sales because the concert was free, “and the entire performance was canceled as a result of multiple artists canceling, so the center did not incur costs for staff or other performers.”

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

In a statement, a lawyer for Mr. Redd, Lisa J. Banks, noted that the suit was dismissed based on the District of Columbia’s Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) Act, which empowers defendants to fight lawsuits meant to intimidate and silence opposing points of view on matters of public interest.

“The center sued Mr. Redd because he publicly and rightly objected to adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to former President John F. Kennedy,” she said. “The lawsuit against Mr. Redd was political retribution, pure and simple, by the Trump Kennedy Center, and the court correctly saw it as such in dismissing the case with prejudice.”Editors’ PicksAre You a New Yorker? If You Weren’t Born Here, Jennifer Lopez Says No.For America’s Birthday, a Declaration of Independence WhodunitA 5-Point Checklist for Managing Your Aging Parents’ Money

The ruling was another setback for the institution stemming from the same renaming dispute that prompted Mr. Redd’s withdrawal.

On Thursday, the center’s general counsel in a memo directed staff to “immediately” remove President Trump’s name from official material after a federal judge ruled on May 29 that the board of trustees lacked the authority to rename the institution.

The memo also instructed employees to replace indoor and outdoor signage bearing the disputed name by June 12.

In a 94-page opinion, Judge Christopher R. Cooper, left, of the Federal District Court in Washington, determined that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

Kennedy Center officials have indicated that they are planning to appeal Judge Cooper’s ruling.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New, Michael Crowley, June 7, 2026. President Trump’s boasts of securing a commitment from Iranian leaders not to develop a nuclear weapon have puzzled nuclear experts who note that Tehran has made that pledge for more than 50 years.

More than two months of on-again, off-again peace talks have made little progress toward settling the U.S. war on Iran. But President Trump has lately claimed a major breakthrough.

“The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News last month. Iran, he added, has “agreed to that, and it was very interesting.”

Mr. Trump emphasized the point again on Monday. “They’ve already agreed they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he told a New York Post podcast. “That was one of the things they’ve had to agree, they’ve agreed to that. That was the big thing,” he said.

Mr. Trump has said the main reason he went to war on Feb. 28 was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. An official White House fact sheet lists 74 occasions, dating to 2011, when Mr. Trump said that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. And when he posted his latest conditions for a deal on social media last month, the first was that “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb.”

But Mr. Trump’s boasts of an Iranian commitment have puzzled nuclear experts. The president appears to be claiming credit for something that is neither new nor, experts say, particularly meaningful.

“It’s not much of a concession,” said Gary Samore, a veteran arms control expert who dealt with Iran as a National Security Council official in the Obama administration.

One reason is that Tehran has forsworn nuclear weapons for more than 50 years, insisting over and over that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes such as electricity and medicine. Its promises have come in the form of written pledges, verbal statements and even a religious ruling, or fatwa, from its supreme leader.

Another is that such a promise means little on its own. Its only value would come as a first step toward subsequent talks that could establish detailed limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment. “The issue is how the pledge translates into limits on Iran’s enrichment program,” Mr. Samore said.

In fact, Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the United States, under President Barack Obama, and several other world powers that Mr. Trump so often denounces.

New York Times, As Oil Prices Spike, Talk of ‘Demand Destruction’ Sets In, Lora Kelley, June 7, 2026. The decades-old term refers to the sustained loss of demand for a commodity, caused by high prices.

As the war in Iran has stymied traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, demand for oil has fallen, and industry watchers and oil executives have started to fret about “demand destruction.” The decades-old term refers to the sustained loss of demand for a commodity caused by high prices.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Trump Looms Over Pivotal Republican Senate Runoff in Georgia, Patricia Mazzei, June 7, 2026. The president has not yet endorsed Representative Mike Collins or Derek Dooley, a former football coach, in the race to challenge the Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff.

Derek Dooley campaigned in rural Georgia this month with a lifelong friend: Gov. Brian Kemp, who also happens to be the state’s most popular Republican. Yet Mr. Dooley remains, by his own admission, the underdog in the Republican Senate primary runoff.

His opponent, Representative Mike Collins, who led after both advanced to a runoff in the first-round election last month, is the race’s self-styled MAGA candidate. President Trump has not endorsed either man ahead of the June 16 runoff — at least not yet.

But Mr. Collins told a Republican women’s club in suburban Griffin last week that Georgia’s MAGA crowd has “always known” who’s who. “I’ve been out there all over the country with President Trump,” he said.

Trump-aligned candidates have won nearly every time the president has made a primary endorsement this year, but some of those elections occurred in deeply Republican states, including Louisiana and Texas. In Georgia, Republicans face a much more difficult electoral landscape in their bid to unseat Senator Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, who has banked more than $32 million for the November election. That’s far more than either Republican so far.

The stakes are high for Democrats too, who must hold the seat to have any realistic chance of taking control of the Senate.

New York Times, They Vied for Trump’s Endorsement. Will It Matter? Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochrane,.June 7, 2026. The Republican candidates for South Carolina governor went to extraordinary lengths for the president’s support. But his choice of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette has not quite sealed the deal among voters.

Not long ago, a Trump endorsement in a solidly red state like South Carolina would have gone a long way toward helping Ms. Evette secure victory. But the president’s choice in the first wide-open governor’s race in almost two decades has not yet proved decisive — just as it did not prove decisive in Iowa’s primary for governor on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump’s pick lost to a political newcomer.

The candidates for governor in South Carolina went to extraordinary lengths to garner Mr. Trump’s endorsement, many of them repeatedly posting photos of themselves with the president as if his nod had been secured.

But in interviews, voters appeared to be more concerned about who could steer the state — the fastest-growing in the country — through its growing pains and infrastructure woes.

As of June 2, just over 207,000 people had voted, with Democratic votes nearly doubling the number of Republican votes. To energize their conservative base, candidates have barnstormed across the state, racking up hundreds of miles on bus tours and popping into barbecue joints and bars to shake hands and plead for support.

More Global News

New York Times, Ukraine Strikes St. Petersburg in Long-Range Drone Attack, Neil MacFarquhar, June 7, 2026 (print ed.). It was the second such attack in days and came just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin spoke at an economic forum in the city.

Ukraine hit a Russian military base and other targets near St. Petersburg with a barrage of long-range drones early Saturday, just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin, addressing an important annual economic forum in the city, rejected a peace overture by his Ukrainian counterpart.

The Russian authorities called the attack “unprecedented,” with Gov. Aleksandr Drozdenko of the Leningrad region around the city announcing that more than 140 drones had been shot down. The attack ignited a fire at an unspecified military facility, causing “insignificant” damage and the evacuation of some residents, he said.

In an unusual move since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, urged residents to shelter indoors.

Falling drone debris from an attack elsewhere, in the Tver region, killed a man, while three people were injured in the St. Petersburg area, officials said. Mr. Beglov described the injuries as “minor” and said that Russian air defenses had prevented any serious damage.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, writing on X, stressed the distance that the drones had flown, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), to strike a naval base at Kronstadt, on an island just west of St. Petersburg, as well as a naval arsenal.

“It is time to end this war,” Mr. Zelensky said in his post. “But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting.”

Russia unleashed its own barrage of scores of long-range drones against various targets on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said.

The Ukrainian drone strike on St. Petersburg was the second such attack in four days. Black smoke from a burning oil facility billowed on Wednesday over the western edge of the city just as the country’s business elites were gathering for the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

While the forum was once a magnet for major Western investors, those investors have largely stayed away since the war began, although Russia said that 130 countries were represented this year. The United States sent an official representative for the first time in years, a low-level cultural delegation.

In conjunction with the forum’s start, Mr. Zelensky had released a letter to Mr. Putin suggesting that the two meet in person to try to reach a peace agreement. The letter was written in a slightly mocking tone, noting that Mr. Putin had already spent about half his over two decades as Russia’s leader fighting Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader was counting from 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and fostered a separatist movement in the country’s east.

At the forum on Friday, Mr. Putin rejected the overture, calling the letter “rude” and saying that the war would end only when Russia’s goals were met. Although the Kremlin has abandoned its initial objective of seizing all of Ukraine, Russia officially annexed four eastern provinces, only one of which it fully controls. The war has basically deadlocked, with Russian advances stalling again in recent weeks.

U.S. Media, Culture, Crime

The late U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican, and the late FBI Las Vegas Field Office Supervisor Joe Yablonsky, a would-be whistleblower on the senator's corruption

Mobology, How a 1985 rivalry between ABC News and "60 Minutes" allowed a mobbed-up U.S. Senator to evade exposure, Dan E. Moldea, right, June 7, 2026. An earlier example of a major public figure using libel litigation to chill the press.

On April 26, 2026, I published the column: “With defamation lawsuits now cynically used as political weapons, we need to reform the laws that govern libel.”

Today, I reprint the following award-winning article, “Networks Knuckle Under to Laxalt: The Story That Never Aired”—which I co-authored with investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman—in the Village Voice on March 5, 1985.

This piece chronicled, among other things, how that story—completed and scheduled for broadcast by both ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS’s 60 Minutes—was killed.

The parallels between this 41-year-old article and the circumstances behind the current crisis in journalism at both ABC and CBS, stemming from Donald Trump’s flagrant abuse of litigation, are striking.

Friedman is an important character in this story, but he still wanted to share the byline after inviting me aboard. Consequently, unless otherwise noted, I conducted the interviews with 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt, and 60 Minutes senior correspondent Mike Wallace, as well as Peter Lance, Bill Lichtenstein, and Charlie Stuart at ABC News, along with others quoted in this story, including Joe Yablonsky of the FBI and Robbie.

This is the first time that I have published this edited story on Mobology.

Tragically, Robbie Friedman died at 51 on July 2, 2002, from a rare disease that he contracted while on assignment in India. . . . He was a good man and a brave reporter.

From the Village Voice, March 5, 1985: Overview

There was an air of excitement at 60 Minutes late last summer as journalists at that top-rated CBS news program completed an expose about Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt’s alleged ties to organized crime. Earlier stories in the press—most notably in the Miami Herald in 1981 and the Wall Street Journal in 1983—included long lists of Laxalt’s friends and campaign contributors who have mob connections.

By mid-September 1984, Lowell Bergman, a respected 60 Minutes producer for senior correspondent Mike Wallace, was putting the finishing touches on his own story—the end product of a three-month-long investigation—that had uncovered startling revelations about Laxalt’s notorious friendships.

On September 14, Wallace said on the Phil Donahue Show that the forthcoming Laxalt segment on 60 Minutes could possibly change the course of the November presidential election.

But the story, pegged for the season opener in late September, never aired.

On September 20, CBS News executives received a hand-delivered letter from Laxalt’s New York attorney, which threatened a libel suit if they broadcast a report linking Laxalt to organized crime. The letter called into question the credibility of the network’s key on-camera source, Joseph Yablonsky, the former head of the FBI in Las Vegas, whose allegations about Laxalt’s mob connections were the centerpiece of the story.

ABC’s World News Tonight, which had also obtained an interview with Yablonsky and was racing to scoop its arch-rival with its own Laxalt expose, received a similar letter that same day.

Shortly after getting the correspondence, 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt called Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News and Sports. The news executives agreed to shelve their Laxalt stories.

Neither was broadcast.

Hewitt’s decision was based on the simple fact that his star correspondent, Mike Wallace, wanted to kill the segment after learning that Yablonsky had talked to ABC, giving that network the chance to scoop him. Yablonsky, who promised Wallace an exclusive interview, had spoken with ABC after receiving what he believed were assurances that ABC would not broadcast its program until after the 60 Minutes segment aired.

In the end, while the networks’ stories self-destructed, Laxalt, one of President Ronald Reagan’s closest friends and the chairman of both the Republican National Committee and Reagan’s reelection campaign, sidestepped the serious allegations in the reports. And the American viewing public was deprived of a significant insight into one of this country’s most powerful public officials.

What follows is an anatomy of the two networks’ aborted Laxalt stories in the era of the multimillion-dollar libel suit, as well as an inside view of what happens to journalists and their sources when rival networks are locked in bitter competition over the same story. CBS opens an investigation of Paul Laxalt

On November 30, Yablonsky sent a letter to Roone Arledge, chronicling his travails with ABC and CBS. Yablonsky concluded:

“Simply put, ABC’s lies to me turned me into a liar to Wallace. . . .

“Paradoxically, I became the scapegoat of an incident caused by ABC’s lack of integrity. I naively thought I could trust a network organization. . . .

“In retrospect, I really don’t think you had the guts to do the story in the first place. Your actions caused an important story to go untold to the American public.”

Besides the American public, however, the big loser in this story is clearly Joe Yablonsky, who, after a brilliant 32-year career with the FBI, jeopardized his reputation because of the naive manner in which he conducted himself with the networks.

Says Yablonsky, “I tried to please everyone: ABC, CBS, Friedman, and myself. In the end, I didn’t please anyone.”

Except, of course, Senator Paul Laxalt. . . .

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup 

Emptywheel, Analysis: DOJ Remains Panicked about So-Called “Duplicative” Jeffrey Epstein Files, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 7, 2026. To the extent anyone covered the Oversight Committee’s interview of Pam Bondi — the transcript of which was released on Thursday (see my Bluesky thread on it) — they focused on the extent to which Bondi said Todd Blanche was in charge.

It’s true Todd Blanche, left, came up almost a hundred times. It’s true that Bondi’s invocation of Blanche (and StanWoodward) gives Democrats reason to demand they sit for interviews. It’s true that Blanche’s centrality in the process could make any confirmation hearing awkward.

Several invocations of Blanche are particularly interesting.

For example, Bondi told James Comer’s counsel, Jack Emmer, that Blanche was the one who made privilege determinations.

Q And who made the determination whether a document was considered to be privileged?

A Todd Blanche, while following the law.

In an Appropriations hearing that took place after Bondi’s interview but before its release, U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean read the content of her hand transcription of an October 2009 email from Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer to the sex predator regarding what Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten had proffered Trump would say in lieu of a deposition (this is the same document Dan Goldmanraised with Bondi in a hearing and then taunted Blanche about in February). In the publicly released version, the passage was entirely redacted as privileged.

The contents differ from Trump’s public claims in three ways:

It conceded he may have been on Epstein’s plane It conceded he may have been at Epstein’s house It twice said that Epstein was never asked to leave Mar-a-Lago

Lisa Rubin laid out how absurd redacting this passage by invoking privilege was. All the more so that it was Trump’s defense attorney Blanche (who in an earlier exchange with Dean refused to say he owed a greater duty to the victims than Trump) who decided to redact the passage.

Equally important, again in response to a question from Emmer, was Bondi’s attribution of the unsigned July 7 letter claiming there was no there there to Blanche and Kash Patel.

Q What role did you have in issuing this statement?

A This was — I did not have a role in issuing this statement. I believe this was done by Deputy Attorney General Blanche in conjunction with the FBI, I believe.

Q And, for the record, this is the July 7, 2025, DOJ and FBI joint statement.

While still deferring to Blanche, Bondi, right, got a lot squirrelier when responding to questions from the Democratic staffer (whose name was redacted) about the same letter:

Q Thank you. With respect to that memo’s assertion that no further disclosure of files would be appropriate or warranted, do you recall who made the decision at the time that no further Epstein files should be released?

A Can you —

Q Yeah, it was just a sentence —

A — point out where you’re reading that?

Q Sure. Down at the bottom of the first page, there’s just one sentence. It says, “It’s the determination of the DOJ and the FBI that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

A I can’t answer that, other than that was in July, and we had sought, meaning the Department of Justice, to unseal in July documents from courts in the Southern District of Florida and Southern District of New York, and that was denied, I believe, by both judges, the release of those documents.

Q If you know, would the Department have been aware of the content of the 3 million or so pages that we now have seen at the time that this memo was written in July?

A I don’t believe so.

Q Okay. Okay. So that judgment about no further disclosure of files would be warranted was made on a lesser understanding of what the files were than as we sit here today?

A Well, clearly, they did not know there were 3 million-plus — approximately 3 million pages of documents at that time.

Q As far as you know, was that July memo written and formed exclusively within DOJ and FBI, or did the White House have any role in crafting that memo?

A I don’t recall. [my emphasis]

This exchange came shortly after Bondi (unsurprisingly) refused to give details about Trump’s response when she told him he was in the files, a refusal she repeated when Robert Garcia asked her those questions.

Q The Wall Street Journal has reported that you told President Trump last May that he was in the Epstein files and that the Department did not plan to release anymore Epstein files.

Deputy Attorney General Blanche was also reportedly in that meeting. What did President Trump say when you told him he was in the files?

A I won’t discuss any conversations that I had or did not have with the President of the United States.

Q I’ll note, just for the transcript’s purposes, that I think the Department of Justice publicly confirmed the nature and scope of that meeting. So that would seem to us like something that is reasonable to discuss in this forum. But I understand your position, and I’ll move forward.

Having just been asked about telling Trump, in May, that he appeared in the files, Bondi then claimed,

That the request to unseal grand jury materials, which happened weeks after the July 7 letter, is what preceded it Not to know about 3 million files held at SDNY Not to recall whether the White House was involved in the July 7 letter

Yeah, that’s bullshit.

Bondi also implied that Blanche approached Ghislaine Maxwell, not the other way around, offering the insanely stupid excuse that Ghislaine was a live witness, as if all the victims whom DOJ has blown off are not.

A I believe — I don’t believe who initiated it. If she reached out to us, I believe — I don’t want to speculate, but I believe Deputy Attorney General Blanche, at the time, reached out to them because there was someone, still living, in prison, who had potential information about other co-conspirators and crimes.

There’s one more reference I find important. As part of his initial questions, presumably meant to establish the least incriminating story, Emmer cued Bondi to specify that Blanche was in charge of collecting everything.

Q In relation to EFTA and the Department’s obligations thereunder, what concerns was — or, did Todd Blanche express concerns as far as releasing documents? What was he saying?

Ms. Dhillon. I’m just going to point out that you can answer that to the extent that it doesn’t reveal protected communications.

Ms. Bondi. I can say I believe everyone was concerned about protecting victims’ identities, given the 6 million pages of documents that was received and a 30-day timeline to comply with that process.

BY MR. EMMER:

Q And we’re going to talk in more detail about what was produced.

But, to start, how did the Department of Justice initially gather or collect the necessary documents or materials that complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act?

A Can you repeat that?

Q How did the Department of Justice initially gather or collect the necessary documents or materials that complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act?

A Well, as I stated earlier, we — the Department made motions to unseal things that were previously withheld from us by the courts and requested everything we possibly could, which is why there was an over-collection in documents, as well, from all the jurisdictions. And, again, that included the death of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, both of — all of Epstein’s cases in the multiple jurisdictions.

Q To the best of your knowledge, what was the process to determine which documents or materials fell under the Epstein Files Transparency Act?

A I believe we collected everything possibly out there related to Epstein, which is why there was such an over-collection as well.

Q And, again, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was overseeing these efforts. Is that right?

A Yes. Todd Blanche oversaw the entire investigation, and he has made multiple statements and done multiple interviews regarding that. [my emphasis]

The interruption by Harmeet Dhillion, right, purportedly there to represent the interests of DOJ (though there was someone from the Civil Division there, as well as two people who would represent Blanche’s interests), was the first she made, reminding Bondi not to invoke “protected” communications, whatever those would be in this context. This leads into a description of the purportedly heroic efforts to get 500 attorneys to review materials that — Emmer does not mention — were purportedly reviewed already in March, before Bondi told Trump he appeared in there.

One thing Bondi did take credit for, again in response to a question from Comer’s staffer, was the letter she sent Kash on February 27, 2025 about unreviewed documents at SDNY — the one that likely led to the March review which Blanche replicated with lawyers in December and January. But then she played dumb about what happened next.

Q And pursuant to your letter, did Director Patel initiate an investigation into that [NY] field office?

A I believe he did.

Q Do you know what the results of that investigation were?

A I don’t recall.

Q Given this letter, what other steps did you take to ensure the FBI turned over any and all of the remaining withheld documents?

A I relied on Director Patel and Deputy Attorney General Blanche.

Q So you, yourself, did you ever confirm that the FBI turned over all relevant documents following this incident?

A You would have to ask Director Patel.

Given this very carefully crafted narrative, one cued up by the Majority’s staffer, I find the treatment of “duplicative” files just as important as the effort to make Blanche own this process.

Jack Emmer teed up the discussion of duplicative material in one of his most highly staged questions, where he asked Bondi why people still claim there were materials that haven’t been released.

Q And there has been public statements, I believe, that then-Deputy Attorney General Blanche had said that, at one point, there were 6 million total potentially responsive materials. Is that right?

A He did. And he has clarified that multiple times, I believe, publicly, indicating that a lot of — much of it was duplicative because it was coming from two districts and some was privileged.

And, also, he stated that some of the material had absolutely nothing to do with Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein. It was over-collection, in an effort to ensure radical transparency for the country.

Q So, to be clear, there has been a lot said and accusations that the Department didn’t produce everything. Attorney General Bondi, are there any documents remaining in possession of the Department of Justice that are required to be released pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act?

A To my knowledge, they’ve all been released. To my knowledge.

Q Why do people keep asking for the files to be released then?

A The unredacted versions are also available to Members of Congress, including the duplicative material, so — and I believe that’s still available — so people can — so Congress can go in and see for themselves the 6 million pages versus why 3 million was released, and much of it was duplicative or privileged or completely unrelated to Jeffrey Epstein. [my emphasis]

Much of this discussion relies on Blanche’s repeated public claims that there were duplicative materials.

When Emmer has Bondi define what duplicative materials are, she gets one main source of the duplication wrong, and then says she does not know how many duplicative files there were; when first Dem staffers and then Dave Min asked later, she (and Harmeet) were very aggressive that this question had already been asked and answered.

Q And, again, you — I believe one class was duplicative documents. And for the record — I know you’ve been an attorney for many years, but can you just explain again what 20 qualifies as a duplicative document?

A Sure. The same document being released twice.

And that occurred, I believe, because there were documents in multiple districts within the country — specifically, I believe, the Southern District of Florida and the Southern District of New York.

Q And understanding that then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was overseeing hese efforts, did he ever brief you on how many documents were considered to be duplicative?

A Not specifically, but I believe it was approximately 3 million, I believe — oh, duplicative. No, I don’t — I’m sorry — I don’t recall how many were duplicative.

The source that Bondi gets wrong — unforgivably so, given her false claim that DOJ tried to get grand jury material released before, not after, the July 7 letter — is discovery provided to Ghislaine, the material that was unavailable in July but became available because of the Epstein Transparency Act.

A Democratic staffer addressed the significance of this as their final questions: The interviews with the woman who claimed she was raped by Trump had been improperly labeled as duplicative (just as investigative files from a woman who described Epstein boasting to Trump, “This is a good one, huh?” were improperly withheld as duplicative).

Q I’d like to ask about a woman who was interviewed by the FBI four times and who accused Mr. Epstein and President Trump of sexual misconduct.

The January 30th production contained one of her interview summaries but not the other three interview summaries. And, in those other interviews, the woman had accused President Trump of sexual assault.

The Department subsequently released those other interview notes on March 5th and said that they had been incorrectly coded as duplicative.

Do you have any understanding of how those interview summaries came to be incorrectly coded as duplicative?

A Other than Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s statements that it was, I believe he said, incorrectly labeled because they were already mentioned in a summary. So it popped up as duplicative. And then they were, in fact, put back online.

And that’s the best of my recollection from his statements.

Q Thank you. And is it your perception that, if we wanted to get more granular and try to understand what exactly happened with these documents, that Mr. Blanche would be a logical starting point?

A Well, I believe he came to this committee, and I think he answered that question. I believe he addressed that in front of this committee already.

I addressed this here and here how important this is: What happened is that all of the original copies of these documents were withheld (or, potentially, worse), but references to them were disclosed in discovery provided to Ghislaine, which is how Roger Sollenberger and others discovered the files.

Sollenberger and others first discovered this woman’s existence via several summary documents (of a report by a friend of hers of the allegation, called into FBI’s tip center; of her complaint; of allegations against famous people).

That led them to find the one 302 that got published, which matched her known lawsuit (which in turn provided details of her representation). And that, in turn, allowed Sollenberger to identify the interview reports in the discovery inventory provided to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, and through that, the omission of these reports (marked with pink rectangles) from the public release.

And when DOJ did release the files making explicit allegations about Trump (and, just as importantly, about threats that she attributed to Epstein), they were clearly marked not as the originals, but as the files turned over to Ghislaine in discovery.

As NPR focused in their original story on the withholding, what got released was the discovery shared with Ghislaine. Both the original release and these includes three Bates stamps, including the series — 3501.045-003, here — tied to discovery to Ghislaine, along with stamps from that production.

The Ghislaine material is the definition of duplicate material, because everything that went to her should have an original copy in the FBI’s case file.

But we didn’t get any of those originals. We still haven’t gotten those originals. We can’t be sure if the originals still exist. DOJ certainly hasn’t given us the originals, they gave us duplicates after saying these were duplicates.

I laid out a hypothesis of what went down here, and Bondi’s interview — and DOJ’s squeamishness — certainly accords with it.

Bondi did her stunt release in February 2025, thinking she was helping Trump. When it became clear everything had been released, she sent the letter to Kash about documents FBI was sitting on in NY. That led to the March FBI review — one which barely got addressed in this interview. Bondi at first denied, then (once Republicans had the floor) made a clarification confessing, then played dumb about whether that review specifically searched for mentions of Trump.

I understand the witness would like to make a clarification.

Ms. Bondi. Yes. I was asked by one of the Members of Congress —

Ms. Dhillon. Congressman Frost, I believe.

Ms. Bondi. — I believe Congressman Frost, whether I directed the President’s name to be reviewed in — to see if his name was in the documents.

I don’t believe — I know I didn’t dir- — I did not direct anyone’s name to be reviewed to see if it was in there, but it was done. Because I remember now — I don’t know the timeframe, though — but I remember being aware, of course, that his name was in it, along with hundreds — or countless — countless other individuals. And I think that list ultimately came out, as well, involving high-profile individuals.

So I am aware that his name was searched, but that was among many names that the department searched. I said “hundreds”; I’m not sure if it’s hundreds, but many, many high-profile names. And, in fact, that list was ultimately released.

But the FBI review appears to have been an attempt to both assess the exposure of Trump (and Melania, probably, but she was not mentioned once in this interview), and also to test the political value of exposing Democratic ties. Pam Bondi told Trump damning references to him were in the file in May. That led Blanche and Kash Patel, right, to issue the July 7 letter saying there would be no further release and, importantly, that no one was being blackmailed; remember, the woman who implicated Trump believed she was being threatened. But then, on July 17, WSJ published the birthday book story, which may be what led Blanche to (per Bondi’s testimony) reach out to Ghislaine — to prevent any more really damning stories in the WSJ. That led to three actions, all in close succession:

On July 18, Blanche made the frivolous requests in both SDNY and SDFL to unseal the grand jury materials, eliciting court orders that had the effect of burying (temporarily) the damning testimony that ultimately would be released. On July 22, someone emailed a list of famous names based off the March review which — I have argued — served as the script for Blanche’s questioning of Ghislaine. On July 23 and 24, Blanche seemingly worked off that list, asking Ghislaine what she knew of allegations against them. Ghislaine declined to say anything damning about most anyone, including Trump, and also claimed (in response to repeated questions) to remember nothing damning from her discovery, even while making a slew of claims that conflicted with known record. Her testimony probably is not true, but the interview locked her into that testimony. As a reward for it, she was sent to Club Fed.

At this point, Blanche probably thought he had locked up the damning allegations about Trump (as well as whatever there is about Melania that remains buried under a policy redacting all women’s names as potential victims).

Then the Epstein Transparency Act not only mandated release of everything Blanche thought he had locked up for his client, but it also provided cause to release grand jury materials — the Ghislaine discovery where copies of those allegations remained.

It is still not remotely clear whether the allegations implicating Trump bearing the Bates stamps of Ghislaine’s discovery really are duplicative or not. I think it just as likely that Blanche tried to lock up the original files bearing those allegations (and, probably, a great many other 302s that victims say have not been released) via some other means, and then attempted to bury everything turned over in discovery to Ghislaine with both his interview and the frivolous grand jury request. Then, when the ETA came along and ruined that plan, someone — possibly Blanche — withheld the Ghislaine stuff based on a claim that should be true but was not in practice, that there were other copies, the originals, of those materials.

I’ve seen nothing that confirms those originals still exist.

No wonder DOJ remains so squirmy about duplicative files.

June 6

Top Headlines

Then-President Joe Biden and then-First Lady Jill Biden celebrate the anniversary of World War II's D-Day in Normandy, France on June 6, 2024 (New York Times pool photo by Kenny Holston).

• New York Times, The Bidens Return to the Stage: Online, in Bookstores and at a Best Western in South Dakota, ShawnMcCreesh, June 6, 2026. The re-emergence of the former first family has been fraught for some Democrats who just want to move on.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Veterans furious with Trump on D-Day, Mormons erupt on Hegseth, Vance says Kirk's death convinced Usha to have another child, and more, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are furious with Pete Hegseth after the Pentagon declined to classify the church as Christian. Service members and veterans are also criticizing Trump after he failed to mark D-Day, instead spending the day posting AI-generated content about himself and Barack Obama. And that’s just the start.
• Newsweek, Trump Posts Doctored Music Video Saying Everyone Around World Loves Him, Giulia Carbonaro, June 6, 2026. President Donald Trump shared a self-celebratory AI-generated music video on social media which uses his name 45 times and claims that people all around the world love him.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump is falling apart, and the people around him are racing to cash in, Heather Delaney Reese, June 6-7, 2026.  Just before 5:00 in the morning, after an all-night vote-a-rama, the Senate approved nearly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, along with something no other American has ever received.
• The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Donald Trump Won't Rebound, Steve Schmidt, June 5, 2026. Trump can't stay awake and can barely speak. Steve Schmidt breaks down Trump's decomposing regime, his collapsing legacy, and his blatant compensatory and narcissistic monuments.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Upset as Celebrities Bail on UFC Fight, Screwworm Disaster, Pentagon Promotes Christian Nationalism, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Republicans in Congress are preparing to break with Trump on key votes as his influence continues to weaken. The flesh-eating screwworm outbreak is expanding, with a second Texas case confirmed, Canada banning Texas cattle imports, and growing questions about whether DOGE cuts hampered early detection efforts.

Trump Watch 

Trump dozes in the Oval on Thursday (Fox News photo).

• Public Notice, Opinion: Trump's cognitive impairment endangers us all, Justin Glawe, June 6, 2026. It's undeniable if you actually watch him. 

U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs

• New York Times, Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat From Israel, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt, June 6, 2026. The Defense Department has increased the counterintelligence threat assessment to its highest level, and Israel is believed to have eavesdropped on American negotiations with Iran.
• New York Times, Trump Says Bill Pulte, His New Intelligence Director, Should Slash Staff, Maggie Haberman, June 6, 2026 (print ed.). The president suggested that employees who worked for previous Democratic presidents were among those who should be fired.
• New York Times, Jan. 6 Rioter Is Hired to Work in Sensitive Pentagon Office, Helene Cooper and Alan Feuer, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). It was not clear who hired Elias Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to various offenses at the Capitol and waslater pardoned by President Trump.

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

• New York Times, ICE Says Detainees Are ‘Worst of the Worst.’ Government Data Disagrees, Ed Shanahan and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026. Federal officials said they are removing killers and rapists from the streets. Data obtained by The New York Times indicates most detainees at a Newark facility haven’t been convicted of crimes.
• New York Times, As Trump Pushes Deportations, a Skyrocketing Caseload Strains Immigration Courts, Jazmine Ulloa and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026. A federal surge has more than doubled caseloads within some immigration courts nationwide. Lawyers say the tactic is causing errors and confusion.
• Politico, Trump could also tear down the Statue of Liberty, DOJ argues in defense of White House ballroom, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, June 6, 2026. Justice Department lawyers said the courts are powerless to intervene in the dispute over the former East Wing.
• The Contrarians, Contrarians Shake the Ground Beneath Trump; When you're winning, pour it on, Norman Eisen, right, June 6, 2026. Last week marked an inflection point in the fight against Trump’s corruption — thanks to you Contrarians. 

More On Iran-Lebanon War

• New York Times, What Visual Evidence Tells Us About Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon, Sanjana Varghese, June 6, 2026. Videos collected by The Times shows how the Israeli military has deployed a munition that can be extremely harmful over populated areas in Lebanon.

More U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

Michigan's U.S. Senate Republican nominee Mike Rogers is shown above at left in a normal campaign photo and at right after his campaign staff enhanced his muscles with photo tricks).

• Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: This week in stupid: June 6 edition, Jeff Tiedrich, right, June 6, 2026. Mike pumps it, Donny dumps it, and so much more...
• New York Times, Paxton’s Senate Bid Raises the Stakes in His War on Latino Voting Groups, Jazmine Ulloa and Edgar Sandoval, June 6, 2026. The Texas attorney general has mounted an all-out effort to prove Democratic Hispanic groups have been corrupting elections. Now he could be the beneficiary of his own attacks.
• New York Times, Screwworm Flies and Drought Spell Tougher Times for Cattle Ranchers, Kevin Draper, June 6, 2026. Some Texans fear “the nightmares and the horrors” of a potential screwworm outbreak. Elsewhere, not enough grass to feed cattle sends them to market earlier.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 5, 2026 [When Happy Days Seemed Here Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 6, 2026. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said. 

More On U.S. Markets, Jobs, Inflation, Economy

• Hopium Chronicals, Political Advocacy: Reality Check -- Trump Has The Worst Jobs Record Since Hoover, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 6, 2026. As of this morning my bottom line on the week - Trump is in profound political and physical decline 
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Comments on a Freaky Friday, Paul Krugman, right, June 6, 2026. Yesterday was a job report day. The report was unusually strong, certainly stronger than almost any of the professional forecasters expected, 172,000 jobs. Predictably, Trump first boasted about this with a lot of talk about how you know we didn’t have this kind of prosperity under Joe Biden. 

More On U.S. Religion, Culture, Media, Education

• The American Pope & US Politics, Vatican Confirms: Pope Leo XIV to Meet Abuse Victims in Opus Dei’s Birthplace, Christopher Hale, June 6, 2026.  The Spanish Church organized the private encounter. The pope lands in Spain on Saturday with Gareth Gore’s evidence in hand and Opus Dei’s future on his desk. 

June 6

Top Stories

Then-President Joe Biden and then-First Lady Jill Biden celebrate the anniversary of World War II's D-Day in Normandy, France on June 6, 2024 (New York Times pool photo by Kenny Holston).

New York Times, The Bidens Return to the Stage: Online, in Bookstores and at a Best Western in South Dakota, Shawn McCreesh, June 6, 2026. The re-emergence of the former first family has been fraught for some Democrats who just want to move on.

“This is the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America,” the 46th president of the United States of America was saying about the 47th.

It was Friday night in Sioux Falls, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had turned up here, of all places, to speak at a dinner put on by the South Dakota Democratic Party in the banquet hall of a Best Western hotel. Hundreds of Democrats applauded as he delivered what amounted to the most political speech of his post-presidency yet.

At times halting and hard to understand, at other times yelling clearly at the top of his voice, he tore into the current occupant of the Oval Office and his “appalling vanity projects.”

“My god,” Mr. Biden scoffed, “tearing down the East Room of the White House to make room for a ballroom more fitting of Versailles?”

The crowd booed.

“Or writing his name on the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Biden said, and they booed some more. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. “Or building an arch that would dwarf the Lincoln Memorial,” he continued, “or turning the Reflecting Pool into something you might see in a theme park!”

The 83-year-old man who spoke in Sioux Falls would be approaching the halfway mark of his second term in office had things turned out the way he wanted. His speech Friday capped off a week that saw Mr. Biden, his wife and his son all start to return with a vengeance to the public stage, very much against the wishes of many Democrats, including some former Biden staff members.

A year and a half has passed since that freezing cold day in Washington when Joe and Jill Biden climbed into a helicopter outside the front steps of the Capitol as Donald and Melania Trump and JD and Usha Vance stood together and waved goodbye. Their legacy and standing within their party blown to smithereens, the Biden clan stayed pretty quiet until now.

The publication of Jill Biden’s book this week, right, and her subsequent publicity tour reopened deep wounds in the party as she presented her Rashomon version of how her husband’s presidency came to its painful end. The discourse turned messy as former Biden staff members contradicted her online and in media reports and she hit back.

At the same time, Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, re-emerged on X, where he has been scribbling prolifically. Treated as a liability to his father his entire term in office, the younger Mr. Biden is finally free to speak his mind, and, interestingly enough, people can’t seem to get enough of it. The self-deprecating tone he has used to describe his crack-addicted past, and the caustic wit he has turned on Biden family foes, Democrat and Republican alike, has earned him a kind of countercultural sheen that has won over even some Trump fans.

The former president also apparently has a lot more to say. He showed up at one of his wife’s book events in New York this week and said his book would be out in September. Was that correct, or did he misspeak? His spokesman TJ Ducklo said that Mr. Biden was “continuing to work on his memoir and the release date has yet to be determined.”

Many Democrats have said that none of this is what anyone should be focusing on now. The battle lines for the coming midterms are being drawn and the party is trying to exult in new faces. Just when President Trump is facing down the first real (if small) signs of rebellion from his party this term, and especially poor poll numbers, here come the ghosts of the Democratic Party’s past. 

“When we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ’24, it’s never going to be a good place for Democrats,” Meghan Hays, who worked in the Biden administration, said on C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire” show.

Mr. Biden is hardly the first former president who has been treated as an albatross. Jimmy Carter, another one-term president, felt mistreated by Democratic presidents and candidates for decades until Mr. Biden came around and embraced him at the end of his life. Many Democrats didn’t want Bill Clinton popping up on the 2004 campaign trail. He and Hillary Clinton were radioactive in 2018, when the party was trying to move on from her loss to Mr. Trump, even as the Clintons decided to go on a nationwide speaking tour.

But what occurred with Mr. Biden — the way his decline was laid bare on the debate stage for all to see, and the shocking power struggle that followed — was sui generis.

Mr. Biden has since been diagnosed with cancer that has metastasized to his bones. He moved slowly on Friday, and his voice was a rasp. But, as many politicians do, he seemed to get a charge from the crowd. Jill Biden was not there with him. A friend of theirs had died, he explained, “and she had to be at the funeral.”

The room he was speaking in was the size of a small plane hangar. It was in a detached building out back of a sprawling Best Western that was constructed in the 1960s, the hotel’s low-ceiling hallways a maze of worn brown carpeting pungent with the scent of chlorine from the “indoor water park.” Sheets of paper taped to the doors outside the banquet hall in which Mr. Biden spoke read, “Photo ID Required. No Weapons. No Large Bags.” There was little else in the way of security. No magnetometers. No Secret Service agents searching bags or waving wands.

There was no great motorcade out front or a media circus inside. There were almost no reporters there. The former president’s speech was not televised.

He has appeared quietly at similar dinners in Delaware and South Carolina recently to help out Democratic operations in those states. But South Dakota? It’s redder than Mars out here; one local political operative said the last year a Democrat was elected to statewide office was 2008.

The caravan of South Dakotan Democrats who’d driven across the prairie to be there were just thrilled to see a former president up close. And they didn’t much mind that any of the Biden baggage was back out on display this week.

“They’re not bad people,” said Bob Porter, a 73-year-old former beer distributor from Mitchell, S.D. He was there with his wife, Sherry, who used to work for her local radio station. “Joe,” she said fondly as she put her hand over her heart. “I wish Jill was here.”

“That one event they used against him, and look at all the good things he’s done for America,” sighed Frank Kloucek, a 69-year-old former legislator from Scotland, S.D.

A 65-year-old retired local official from Sioux Falls named Arlene Brandt-Jenson was “one of the lucky ones” who got her picture taken with Mr. Biden before his speech, she said, adding: “I told him that we missed him. He said, ‘Thank you for taking the time to be here.’ And then I left with, ‘You’re an honorable man.’”

But how did he seem up close?

“Well,” she winced, “he seemed a little frail.” She hurriedly added, “But my goodness, when I look at Trump, I’m seeing a frail man, too!”

Mr. Biden’s speech on Friday was the most he has slammed Mr. Trump yet. He talked about the $1.8 billion “slush fund” — “what made me most angry was Trump was going to give that money to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists,” he boomed — and the gobs of crypto loot Mr. Trump has made since returning to office.

“I got criticized a while ago when I was still president for saying our democracy was at stake,” Mr. Biden said. It was the closest he came to a straight-up I-told-you-so.

He told the South Dakotans to stay positive.

“That photo line of 20 people I just did,” he said, pausing to make the sign of the cross. “I couldn’t help but walk away incredibly encouraged.” 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Veterans furious with Trump on D-Day, Mormons erupt on Hegseth, Vance says Kirk's death convinced Usha to have another child, and more, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are furious with Pete Hegseth after the Pentagon declined to classify the church as Christian. Service members and veterans are also criticizing Trump after he failed to mark D-Day, instead spending the day posting AI-generated content about himself and Barack Obama. And that’s just the start.

I’m also hearing that the White House is preparing to significantly expand its attacks on creators and independent journalists in the days and weeks ahead.

If you value this reporting, please consider supporting it to help me fight back.

Here’s the news:

President Donald Trump marked D-Day by posting AI-generated content on social media, including a music video depicting himself being celebrated around the world (and courageously exploring space, as shown above) and an image portraying the future Obama Presidential Library as dilapidated and surrounded by trash. Here is the first video:

Here is the Obama trash can image:

Unlike many other world leaders and government officials, he did not post a direct D-Day tribute on his personal account, though the White House and members of his administration commemorated the anniversary. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day ceremony in France to criticize European immigration policies, comparing migrant arrivals on Mediterranean shores to an “invasion.” The comments reflected the Trump administration’s broader criticism of immigration in Europe and its calls for European governments to take a tougher approach.

Vice President JD Vance writes in his new memoir that the 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk deeply affected his family and ultimately influenced his wife, Usha Vance, to reconsider having another child. Vance says that after comforting Kirk’s widow, who expressed regret about not having more children with her husband, Usha changed her mind and later became pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. He describes Kirk as a close friend, mentor, and confidant who helped him navigate family life while serving in national politics.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day anniversary speech in Normandy to criticize European governments over immigration, comparing migrant arrivals on Mediterranean beaches to an “invasion.” His remarks echoed broader Trump administration warnings that large-scale migration threatens Europe’s cultural and political future. The speech followed similar comments from Vice President JD Vance, whose criticism of immigration in the U.K. sparked backlash from British officials and the family of a murder victim whose case he referenced. The comments highlight ongoing tensions between the Trump administration and European leaders over migration policy, even as migration levels into Europe have fallen significantly from their 2015 peak.

Mormons have erupted this afternoon after the Department of Defense reduced its list of recognized religious designations to 31 categories and included The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a separate faith rather than under Christianity. Here is the list, and as you can see, the religion is listed separately:

Utah Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis sharply criticized the decision, arguing that the church is clearly Christian and that the government should not define a religion contrary to its own beliefs. The Pentagon said the changes were intended to simplify religious classifications and help military chaplains better serve service members. Critics from multiple faith groups also objected, saying the government should not create a hierarchy of religions or decide which faiths qualify as Christian.

The Trump Administration has changed the logo of the Kennedy Center’s LinkedIn page. The new logo no longer includes the President’s name. I have been tracking this religiously and monitoring the pages of the Kennedy Center ever since the court’s ruling, and today, they quietly changed it. This is the beginning of many more changes to come:

I spent the afternoon at the Kennedy Center and documented what I saw. The Center has not received official orders to remove the Trump name today. I will be returning every day until I capture the name removal:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed nine Navy officers from a promotion list, including all three women who had been selected for advancement to one-star admiral, resulting in no women receiving that promotion this year. The Pentagon has not explained why the officers were removed, leading many female service members to worry that their careers could be limited or increasingly influenced by politics. Critics argue the move breaks with the military’s traditionally structured promotion process and follows other recent dismissals of senior female officers under Hegseth. Pentagon officials maintain that promotions are based solely on merit and not on race or gender.

Thousands of Albanians have continued protests under the slogan “Albania Is Not for Sale,” opposing a proposed $5 billion luxury tourism development backed by Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners. Demonstrators argue that planned projects on Sazan Island and in the Vjosa-Narta Protected Area could damage environmentally sensitive coastal and wetland ecosystems and limit public access to national assets. Protests have entered their seventh day:

Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley are warning that a lapse in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could create a major intelligence gap if Congress fails to renew the authority before next Friday's deadline. According to the report from Punchbowl News, they urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prepare for the possibility that intelligence collection could be disrupted.

I also visited the reflecting pool to see whether the pool is actually reflecting. Here is an image I took:

Russia’s war in Ukraine remains at a stalemate, with peace talks making little progress despite U.S. mediation efforts and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to meet directly with Vladimir Putin, which Putin rejected. At Russia’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin and other Russian officials emphasized that Moscow remains open to improving relations with the United States, while also expressing frustration that U.S. attention has shifted toward the conflict involving Iran.

Several prominent Americans, including Candace Owens, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., and the Tate brothers, visited Russia during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum as the Kremlin sought to project strength despite setbacks in Ukraine and growing domestic frustrations. Russian officials and state media highlighted their presence as evidence that Russia is not isolated and that ties with Americans remain active. The visitors praised aspects of Russian culture, safety, and society, while critics argued that their trips primarily served the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda goals. Experts said the visits are unlikely to change American views of Russia but may help reassure Russian audiences that their country still has international connections.

The body of 20-year-old Auburn University student James “Weston” Higginbotham was found in a mountainous area outside Kyoto, Japan, after he had been missing for a week. He disappeared during a family trip on May 29 after walking away from his parents at Kyoto Station, prompting a large search effort involving police and volunteers. His family had said he may have been emotionally distressed following an argument about artificial intelligence before he left. His mother thanked everyone who helped search for him and asked for privacy as the family copes with the loss.

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Trump is falling apart, and the people around him are racing to cash in, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 6, 2026. Just before 5:00 in the morning, after an all-night vote-a-rama, the Senate approved nearly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, along with something no other American has ever received.

It is the protection shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits. Democrats brought amendment after amendment to strip the carve-out from the bill. Republicans beat back nearly every one. The closest vote, an effort to block the $1.8 billion payout fund tied to Trump’s settlement, failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. Americans are expected to pay every tax dollar they owe and are always subject to audit. Some reports say the president may owe roughly $100 million in back taxes. One set of rules for them. Another for everyone else.

And the corruption runs deeper than one bill. A watchdog report revealed that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s White House ballroom have won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion in the past six months. Sixteen of those 27 donors have watched their federal enforcement actions get dropped, scaled back, or suspended. They are not funding a ballroom out of generosity. They are buying favor. Meanwhile, the House voted 213 to 210 to cut $141 million in fruit and vegetable benefits from WIC, the program feeding 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, and pregnant mothers, while grocery prices keep climbing. They voted to take produce from babies while the president’s donors collected billions.

And the speed of it all tells us something important. The man at the center is failing. He fell asleep on camera at his own coal event. He needed help getting down a single stair in Wisconsin. And the people around him are not slowing down. They are speeding up, racing to seize as much money and power as they can while he can still sign what they put in front of him, because they know the midterms are closing in. This is a smash and grab in the window they have left. They are building it in a hurry because they know it is not built to last. Americans are waking up. And time is no longer on their side.

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.

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Newsweek, Trump Posts Doctored Music Video Saying Everyone Around World Loves Him, Giulia Carbonaro, June 6, 2026. President Donald Trump shared a self-celebratory AI-generated music video on social media which uses his name 45 times and claims that people all around the world love him.

The one-minute video, which features several AI-generated versions of Donald Trump traveling across the globe and being greeted by leaders and citizens alike, was created by a user identified on Truth Social as "ac132."

On the social media platform, where the president published the video early on Saturday, the user said: "I am proud to be endorsed by President Trump who I wrote this song about."Read More on NewsDonald Trump Boasts as White House Releases Physical Exam Results6 min readDonald Trump Boasts as White House Releases Physical Exam ResultsPaulina Mangubat Posts ‘Temu Hitler’ Cake, Calls Stephen Miller Ugly Again5 min readPaulina Mangubat Posts ‘Temu Hitler’ Cake, Calls Stephen Miller Ugly AgainWhat are ‘Wrench Attacks?’ Nancy Guthrie Theory Emerges4 min readWhat are ‘Wrench Attacks?’ Nancy Guthrie Theory Emerges

At the end of the clip, the song itself is credited to Anthony Constantino, a Trump-endorsed Republican congressional candidate in New York.

It is the latest example of Trump’s adoption of AI-generated imagery, which he has personally embraced and continued to share on his social media profiles despite recently receiving backlash over an AI-generated photo portraying him as a Jesus-like figure.

After receiving criticism from all sides of the political spectrum, including former allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and religious conservatives who typically support him, the president deleted the post and explained that it was actually a representation of himself as a doctor.

"It wasn’t a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one," he said in April.

The music clip shared this weekend shows the president paragliding, planting the U.S. flag on the moon in a spacesuit, riding a camel, riding a motorcycle through the streets of India, and even riding a lion. His face also appears on a pizza, a double-decker bus, and in the Northern lights.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Donald Trump Won't Rebound, Steve Schmidt, June 5, 2026. Trump can't stay awake and can barely speak. Steve Schmidt breaks down Trump's decomposing regime, his collapsing legacy, and his blatant compensatory and narcissistic monuments. 

More News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Upset as Celebrities Bail on UFC Fight, Screwworm Disaster, Pentagon Promotes Christian Nationalism, Aaron Parnas, right, June 6, 2026. Republicans in Congress are preparing to break with Trump on key votes as his influence continues to weaken. The flesh-eating screwworm outbreak is expanding, with a second Texas case confirmed, Canada banning Texas cattle imports, and growing questions about whether DOGE cuts hampered early detection efforts.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is reducing the number of recognized religions, officials are reportedly concerned about Israeli espionage targeting U.S. leaders, and Trump is facing new headaches as major celebrities pull out of his UFC event.

In a few hours, I’m heading to the Kennedy Center, where I’ll be reporting throughout the weekend as efforts continue to remove Trump’s name from the building. We also have major Epstein-related developments coming tomorrow.

The White House is expanding its attacks on journalists and critics in an effort to silence dissent. We’re pushing back together. If you’re able, please subscribe to support my work and keep me caffeinated through what will be another long weekend of reporting.Subscribed

I honestly can’t remember the last day I took off, but I love this work and I love bringing you these stories. If you’re already a subscriber, consider upgrading your membership. Your support helps grow this community, strengthen independent journalism, and keep this reporting going.

Here’s the news:

A growing number of House Republicans are becoming more willing to break with President Donald Trump as the midterm elections approach, reflecting concerns that some of his recent decisions could hurt the party politically. Republican lawmakers have increasingly opposed or criticized parts of Trump’s agenda, including his proposed settlement fund, White House ballroom project, Iran policy, intelligence appointments, and other controversial initiatives. Vulnerable GOP members in competitive races are particularly focused on economic issues such as gas prices and cost-of-living concerns, and many worry Trump’s priorities are distracting from those messages. Despite the growing friction, most Republicans continue to support Trump’s broader legislative agenda, though signs of dissent on Capitol Hill are becoming more frequent as Election Day draws closer.

Senate Republicans are also increasingly pushing back on Trump instead of automatically falling in line. Several GOP senators voted against or distanced themselves from some of his recent proposals, including the White House ballroom and the anti-weaponization fund. Trump’s expected nominees, including Todd Blanche and Bill Pulte, are facing resistance and could have difficult confirmation fights. Republican support for additional Iran war funding and some other administration priorities appears to be weakening. The divisions suggest Trump’s influence over Senate Republicans is not as strong as it once was.

Several celebrities who were reportedly invited to President Trump’s planned UFC event at the White House are not expected to attend. Reports indicate that Dwayne Johnson, Adam Sandler, Jared Leto, and Mario Lopez have either declined or do not plan to participate. The event is part of broader America 250 celebrations tied to the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary. Organizers have reportedly faced challenges securing high-profile celebrity involvement for some of these events. The UFC event is still expected to move forward despite the apparent lack of support from several A-list figures.

A second case of the flesh-eating New World screwworm parasite has been confirmed in Texas, just a few miles from the first U.S. case detected this week. The parasite, which lays eggs in wounds and can kill livestock if left untreated, has been moving north through Mexico and is now raising fears of a broader outbreak in the United States. Texas ranchers and federal officials have been preparing for its arrival for months, with the government spending millions on prevention efforts and keeping the border closed to live cattle imports from Mexico. A larger outbreak could have major economic consequences for the cattle industry, particularly in Texas, the nation’s largest cattle-producing state.

The development comes after DOGE-led cuts eliminated funding for a U.S. program that monitored and helped contain the parasite's spread through Central America and Mexico. Agriculture officials and ranchers warned for months that the cuts would leave the United States vulnerable, but those warnings went unheeded. Now, with the parasite detected in Texas for the first time in decades, officials are scrambling to contain a threat critics say was made worse by the administration's decision to slash prevention efforts.

Last November, Agriculture Secretary-designate Brooke Rollins claimed the screwworm threat was 'under control south of the border' and predicted beef prices would come down by spring 2026. Instead, the flesh-eating parasite has now been detected in multiple Texas cattle, Texas has declared a disaster, Canada has banned cattle imports from the state, and beef prices remain near record highs.

Farmers are blaming the Trump Administration for the outbreak:

Canada has now banned cattle and horse imports from Texas after a second case of the flesh-eating New World screwworm was confirmed near the U.S.-Mexico border. The outbreak has escalated quickly, prompting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to declare a state of disaster and warn that the parasite is likely to spread throughout the summer. The crisis comes after DOGE eliminated funding for a U.S.-backed monitoring and containment program in Central America that experts had relied on to track the parasite’s northward movement. Now, with international trade restrictions taking effect and fears growing over impacts on livestock and beef prices, critics argue the cuts left the U.S. less prepared for a threat agricultural officials had warned about for months.

According to a Pentagon memo, the Department of Defense has reduced its list of officially recognized religions and belief systems from more than 200 to just 31, saying the change will help chaplains better provide religious support to service members. The revised list continues to recognize major faiths such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the Baháʼí faith, but removes many smaller belief systems, including Wicca, Druidism, Paganism, Humanism, Unitarian Universalism, and Atheism. Defense officials say the move is intended to streamline administrative processes and improve chaplain services. Critics, including religious freedom advocates, argue the change marginalizes minority faiths and nonreligious service members and raises concerns about religious equality within the military.

Trump said he would be willing to meet Iran’s supreme leader as part of a potential peace deal, a proposal that surprised many foreign policy observers given the ongoing war and deep tensions between the two countries. Iran’s leadership quickly threw cold water on the plan:

According to NBC News, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency recently raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest designation, citing concerns that Israeli intelligence efforts to monitor U.S. officials and gather information about the Trump administration’s internal deliberations have become unusually aggressive. U.S. officials told NBC the move comes amid growing tensions between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war with Iran and military operations in the region. Israeli officials strongly denied the allegations, calling them false and insisting Israel does not spy on U.S. government officials. Despite the heightened concerns, officials said intelligence sharing between the two countries continues, though American personnel may take additional security precautions when interacting with Israeli counterparts.

The U.S. military said it intercepted Iranian missiles and drones launched toward Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Strait of Hormuz, while also carrying out strikes on Iranian coastal radar sites in response. According to U.S. Central Command, Iran fired seven ballistic missiles toward Gulf allies, with six intercepted and one failing to reach its target, while four Iranian drones were also shot down. The exchange marks another escalation despite an existing ceasefire, as tensions remain high over negotiations to end the conflict and reopen critical shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump said the situation with Iran was “going quite well,” even as military confrontations continue and diplomatic efforts remain stalled.

Trump said Iran has not yet agreed to a deal to end the war because its leaders are “strong” and “proud,” but argued that they ultimately have “no choice” but to reach an agreement with the United States. In an interview with NBC News, Trump said Iran still possesses roughly 21% to 22% of the missile arsenal it had at the start of the conflict, despite U.S. and Israeli military operations that he claimed have severely degraded its capabilities. The president defended the pace of negotiations, arguing that resolving a decades-long conflict takes time and rejecting criticism that a deal has not yet been finalized. He also warned that if diplomacy fails, the administration could pursue a more forceful alternative, saying, “the other way is not nice.”

Israel is facing growing international pressure after activists detained aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla accused Israeli forces of abuse, including beatings, sexual violence, humiliation, and mistreatment following the interception of the aid convoy bound for Gaza. Several European governments, including France, Italy, and Spain, have demanded explanations and investigations into the allegations involving their citizens. Israeli military and prison authorities have denied the accusations, while criticism intensified after far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted video appearing to show detainees being publicly taunted while restrained. Human rights advocates say the allegations add to broader concerns about the treatment of Palestinian detainees and are calling for independent investigations into the reported abuses.

This morning, Trump posted an AI-generated music video portraying himself as wildly popular around the world, with the video depicting enthusiastic crowds and adoring supporters in a highly stylized, unrealistic fashion.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is urging the Treasury Department to stop production of a proposed 24-karat gold coin featuring President Trump that is planned as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration. She argues the gold used by the U.S. Mint may come from supply chains linked to illegal mining operations and criminal organizations. She also criticized the idea of putting Trump’s image on the commemorative coin, saying it resembles the behavior of a monarchy rather than a democracy. The coin is part of a broader effort by the administration to incorporate Trump’s image into government-related commemorations and projects.

A federal prosecutor in California says the Justice Department and FBI have opened multiple investigations related to the state’s primary elections after President Donald Trump repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that Democrats were cheating in the vote count. A federal attorney also visited the Los Angeles County ballot processing center to observe ballot-counting operations, though election officials noted that such observation is routinely permitted and open to the public. California officials have defended the pace of the count, explaining that mail ballots received after Election Day can still be counted if they are postmarked on time and that close races often take days or weeks to finalize. The investigations come as several high-profile California races remain undecided, including the battle for the second spot in the governor’s race, where Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer remain in a tight contest.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, right, has advanced to California’s gubernatorial general election, according to NBC News projections. Becerra, a former California attorney general and longtime congressman, led a crowded field after gaining momentum in the final weeks of the race and secured one of the two spots in November’s election. The second spot remains undecided, with Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Tom Steyer locked in a close race. If Becerra ultimately faces a Republican in November, he is expected to benefit from California’s strong Democratic lean, though the final matchup has not yet been determined.

The Nashville Zoo is leading opposition to a proposed 69,000-square-foot data center that would be built roughly 50 yards from some of its animal habitats, warning that noise, artificial light, and other disruptions could harm vulnerable species, including endangered clouded leopards. Zoo officials have launched a petition that has already gathered more than 180,000 signatures, while local officials are considering a temporary moratorium on new data center projects. The proposal comes from DC BLOX, which says it will use waterless cooling systems, comply with environmental regulations, and work to minimize impacts on the zoo and surrounding community. The dispute reflects a broader nationwide backlash against AI and data center expansion as communities increasingly raise concerns about energy use, water consumption, noise, and quality-of-life impacts.

According to Politico, the Trump administration is in active discussions about creating a new Strategic Petroleum Reserve in California, a move that would expand oil infrastructure on the West Coast and likely spark a clash with California Governor Gavin Newsom and other state leaders. Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed the talks, while documents reviewed by Politico show that offshore oil company Sable Offshore Corp. has proposed a reserve that could eventually store up to 30 million barrels of oil. Administration officials argue the project would strengthen national security, support military operations in the Pacific, and help stabilize fuel supplies on the West Coast, which has limited pipeline connections to the rest of the country. Critics are expected to oppose the plan because it would deepen California’s reliance on fossil fuels at a time when state leaders are pursuing aggressive clean-energy goals and reducing oil production and refining capacity.

Trump says he plans to meet with major artificial intelligence companies as soon as next week to discuss a proposal that would allow Americans to share in the profits generated by the AI industry. Trump suggested the idea could involve giving the public an ownership stake or dividend payments from AI companies, arguing that Americans should benefit from an industry expected to generate enormous wealth while also disrupting jobs and the broader economy. The concept has been discussed by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, though critics warn that government ownership stakes in regulated companies could create conflicts of interest. Trump said he has already spoken with leading AI executives and believes a profit-sharing arrangement could increase public support for the technology.

Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack on Russian military and energy targets, including a naval base in St. Petersburg and oil facilities in Russian territory, on the final day of a major economic forum hosted by Vladimir Putin. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian drones struck naval arsenals near Kronstadt and an oil depot in the Krasnodar region, while Russian officials reported fires, evacuations, and injuries. Russia said it intercepted more than 140 drones over the Leningrad region, but Ukrainian officials claimed some drones reached their intended targets. The attacks are part of Ukraine’s broader campaign to hit Russian military and energy infrastructure deep inside Russia as the war with Ukraine continues.

A seven-month-old Palestinian baby, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, died after Israeli soldiers opened fire on his family’s car in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron, according to his family and hospital officials. His father said the family had stopped their vehicle as instructed by soldiers when shots were fired, while the Israel Defense Forces said troops believed the vehicle was moving toward them and later determined those injured were uninvolved civilians. The baby’s parents were also wounded, and the military said the incident is under review while expressing regret for harm caused to civilians. The shooting comes amid ongoing violence in the occupied West Bank, where the United Nations says more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the broader conflict, including at least 240 children.

Planned Parenthood announced that clinics in Washington and Hawaii will begin offering “just-in-case” abortion pills, allowing patients to obtain medication before becoming pregnant. The initiative is intended to help people overcome growing legal, financial, geographic, and personal barriers to abortion access, particularly as restrictions have expanded across much of the country. Advocates say having medication on hand can be critical for people in rural areas, those facing domestic violence, or anyone who may struggle to access timely care when needed. Planned Parenthood leaders said the program is designed to expand reproductive healthcare access and hope to extend it to additional states where laws permit in the future.

Trump Watch 

Trump dozes in the Oval on Thursday (Fox News photo).

Public Notice, Opinion: Trump's cognitive impairment endangers us all, Justin Glawe, June 6, 2026. It's undeniable if you actually watch him.

“He doesn’t sleep and it’s actually a problem,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during Senate testimony this week.

Rubio was trying to make the point that President Trump is a dynamo — a near-superhuman leader who works deep into the night on the complex issues facing the nation and world. But Rubio inadvertently made the opposite point: Trump’s lack of sleep, evidenced by his frequently manic, late night Truth Social posting sessions, is a problem for the president’s clearly declining mental and physical abilities.

The signs of this decline are available for anyone who chooses to see them.

On Wednesday, after six days out of the public eye, Trump bumbled through a ceremony in which he signed a handful of executive orders, marveling at his own signature — “Oh, that’s a good one” — and asking aides to explain to him what the orders being placed in front of him actually did.

After listening to a lengthy explanation of an order that would expand the number of federal employees who can be fired by him, Trump still didn’t quite understand.

“And the reason for this was, what? Whose idea was that?” he said.

Then on Thursday, Trump sat in his chair dozing as members of his cabinet lavished him with praise.

Thursday’s embarrassment of an appearance in the Oval Office would be devastating for any other president. For Trump, it was just Thursday. And before that, it was just another Wednesday.

The on-camera dozing sessions that Rubio was being pressed about are one sign of Trump’s growing physical weakness — which is certainly not helped by staying up until the early morning hours voraciously consuming a Truth Social algorithm feeding him a steady and unhealthy diet of Trump-worshipping AI slop, election fraud conspiracies, and Boomer meme garbage.

Other signs of Trump’s body falling apart: swollen ankles, difficulty walking in a straight line, and unexplained bruising on both hands.

The garbage social media diet probably isn’t helping Trump’s declining cognitive abilities either. The president frequently appears unable to discuss complex matters like peace negotiations with Iran in any competent manner. (The peace deal has been just around the corner or days away, Trump has repeatedly said for several months. He now says the whole matter is “boring” to him.)

All of this madness is plainly viewable for anyone willing to look. And yet, Trump continues to be covered as if he’s a rational actor. “Trump optimistic on Iran deal,” read the chyron on Fox News on Thursday morning — as if the president is deeply involved with the complexities of negotiations and not clearly concentrating on things he actually enjoys, like White House renovations and preparations for his rally there later this month.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress have turned themselves into punchlines by never hearing or seeing anything Trump says or posts, or insisting they would need to hear the full “context” of his statements to conclude whether he’s actually losing his mind. But the reality is the signs of mental decline are obvious and abundant.

The letter referenced some of Trump’s more insane Truth Social posts, including the one where he portrayed himself as Jesus Christ (above), as evidence of “grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility.” The letter also cited Trump’s threats against Iran, domestic political opponents, and American citizens as evidence of his growing inability to control his own thoughts and statements — a symptom of cognitive decline called “disinhibition.”Trump has no way out on Iran Trump has no way out on IranNoah Berlatsky · May 28Read full story h

The authors warn of Trump’s “significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications — e.g., 150 social media posts in one night — fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas, and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions.”

This letter, of course, came before the last few days, when Trump has been busy posting AI slop depicting everything from oil tankers arriving in New York City, to him commanding military vessels and sitting behind a Star Trek-like command desk, to Gov. Gavin Newsom in a padded cell, and, for some inexplicable reason, Trump walking alongside an alien who is apparently under arrest, or perhaps being deported.

Politico, Trump could also tear down the Statue of Liberty, DOJ argues in defense of White House ballroom, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, June 6, 2026. Justice Department lawyers said the courts are powerless to intervene in the dispute over the former East Wing.

A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished.

Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even if it was found to be illegal, because it was too far along and involved significant national security interests.

“When did it become a fait accompli?” Judge Patricia Millett asked. “If this were complete lawlessness by the government … it couldn’t be stopped?”

“On these theories, I think that’s right,” replied Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department attorney.

Millett, an Obama appointee, peppered Roth with questions about the extent of the Trump administration’s view of its power to “move fast and break things” without being subject to legal challenge.

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?” the judge asked.

“I think that’s right, yes,” Roth responded.

A federal judge in March halted construction on the ballroom during the legal battle, but the D.C. Circuit quickly paused the ruling, allowing construction to continue while the litigation is ongoing.

The Friday exchange underscored the Trump administration’s full-throttle effort to defend Trump’s massive reconstruction project, which the president has made clear is a personal priority, along with other aesthetic and architectural ambitions he has across Washington. Millett was joined in her skepticism by Judge Bradley Garcia, a Biden appointee.

Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, questioned whether the plaintiff in the lawsuit, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, had a basis to sue in the first place, especially when set against Trump’s claim that the ballroom would serve as a critical national security bulwark in addition to an event space.

Roth told the panel that the Trust’s “aesthetic” concerns about the White House must take a back seat to the security issues at stake.

“The balance of harms and public interest are so lopsided in favor of this project,” Roth said. “It’s an architectural preference on one hand and the safety and security of the president of the United States on the other hand.”

Roth also asserted that it would be overreach for the courts to take any steps to halt the ballroom project at its outset or now, even if it was clearly illegal under federal law. Rather, he said, if a court found the project illegal, the only remedy would lie with Congress.

Trump has repeatedly ridiculed the lawsuit over the project, asserting in a social media post that it was “brought by a woman walking her dog, who has absolutely No Standing to bring such a suit.” In fact, the National Trust has claimed standing through Alison Hoagland, a historian and retired professor who has volunteered on various preservation boards and regularly visits the area.

The Contrarians, Contrarians Shake the Ground Beneath Trump; When you're winning, pour it on, Norman Eisen, right, June 6, 2026. That’s because in the space of a few hours on May 29, my democracy litigation colleagues and I won the two biggest victories against Donald Trump’s corruption yet.

First, we represented 35 former federal judges in getting a Florida federal court to reopen an investigation into Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund. And then we won the Kennedy Center case, including getting an order that Trump’s name must come off the building. All thanks to your paid subscriptions!Subscribed

But one of the fundamental lessons of the fight for democracy — indeed of any fight — is when you’re winning, pour it on. And that’s just what we did this week with two more major legal onslaughts against the slush fund plus much more (all covered here at the Contrarian, naturally). body of water near buildings under blue sky during daytime Photo by Clay Elliot on Unsplash

First, we did not accept the Trump administration’s claim that it was backing away from the fund. In a sign that we had drawn blood, anonymous leaks that the fund was supposedly dead were followed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s testimony on the Hill. He declared that the fund was “not moving forward.”

With an administration that lies so much (just look at Trump’s flip-floppery on Iran, among countless other examples), we weren’t buying it. That’s why, a day after Blanche’s announcement, we sued to make sure that not a penny of this money is ever paid — and the associated “settlements” also are stopped.

Sure enough, after we filed, Trump apparently back-tracked, saying of the fund “I love it…. I think it’s so important” and “These are great people that were destroyed, their families have been destroyed.” Violent insurrections who attacked cops should be paid? We don’t think so. And who better than our clients — two January 6 prosecutors — to take that on?

But more was to come. On Thursday, we filed a rare bipartisan brief opposing the fund. We represent Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) in an amicus brief fighting this outrageous attempt to take $1.8 billion from taxpayers. They assert that it violates the Appropriations Clause by spending federal money without congressional authorization. Like hiding the Epstein files — which we are also litigating — Trump’s fund has unusual bipartisan opposition on the Hill. Experts say those kinds of defections are a sign of failing authoritarianism.

Now the Trump administration has filed legal briefs claiming that the fund is not going forward. Well, we are going forward. We won’t stop until we have not only guaranteed that no money will be paid, but also that Trump’s sweeping “settlement” absolving himself and his family from vast liabilities is also reversed.

U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs

New York Times, Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat From Israel, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt, June 6, 2026. The Defense Department has increased the counterintelligence threat assessment to its highest level, and Israel is believed to have eavesdropped on American negotiations with Iran.

Recent U.S. intelligence reports have raised concerns about Israeli spy agencies eavesdropping on American negotiators working on a peace deal with Iran, amid rising concern over a more general counterintelligence threat by Israel.

Israel and the United States have long known, and tolerated, that each was spying on the other. But an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials.

The reports include concerns that Israel has stepped up its efforts to eavesdrop on senior American officials, including Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s top negotiator, Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, and one of his main deputies, Michael P. DiMino IV.

Another report, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military intelligence offices and focused on earlier events going back several years, said that the counterintelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical. The report, to which the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency contributed, outlines various efforts by Israel to spy on American military personnel and government officials.

The reports and the intensified concern about Israeli spying come at an especially sensitive time. Israel and the U.S. have been fighting the war against Iran together, and have never had such close military coordination as they do now, with Israeli military officers working side-by-side with their American counterparts at U.S. Central Command.

The U.S. military is sharing huge amounts of tactical and operational information with its Israeli counterparts. But senior American officials said that Israel is looking for insights into Mr. Trump’s strategy and shifting stances on the peace talks. 

New York Times, Trump Says Bill Pulte, His New Intelligence Director, Should Slash Staff, Maggie Haberman, June 6, 2026 (print ed.). The president suggested that employees who worked for previous Democratic presidents were among those who should be fired.

President Trump called on Friday for his choice to temporarily run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to conduct mass firings of employees who “shouldn’t be there.”

Mr. Trump, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, also said his pick, Bill Pulte, right, would be “less shackled” by the constraints of being the president’s choice to lead the agency permanently.

“It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time,” Mr. Trump added.

The comments are the most expansive that Mr. Trump has made about Mr. Pulte, who runs a lesser-known agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and has no known national security experience. Mr. Trump on Monday announced Mr. Pulte as his choice to replace Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence.

Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Pulte will not be nominated for confirmation by the Senate to lead the agency permanently. Since Mr. Pulte has been Senate-confirmed previously for his current role, he can serve in the new position for 210 days.Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.

But Mr. Pulte, a loyal attack dog on behalf of Mr. Trump, has spent more than a year identifying what he has called crimes committed by people the president views as his political enemies. Those people have either investigated Mr. Trump or been part of institutions, like the Federal Reserve, that the president has maintained are operating with political motives against him.

Mr. Pulte did not respond to a request for comment.

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Mr. Trump told The Journal.

That has alarmed several Republican senators, who have said they worry about the office that oversees the intelligence community being used as a weapon. And the comments from the president are unlikely to assuage the concerns of those lawmakers, who are debating whether to reauthorize a controversial section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to monitor U.S. citizens abroad without a warrant.

Mr. Trump has long been deeply skeptical of the intelligence community, primarily because of the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russians who, officials have repeatedly said, interfered in the presidential election that year to harm Mr. Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.

New York Times, Jan. 6 Rioter Is Hired to Work in Sensitive Pentagon Office, Helene Cooper and Alan Feuer, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). It was not clear who hired Elias Irizarry, shown above at the U.S. Capitol, who pleaded guilty to various offenses at the Capitol and was later pardoned by President Trump.

The Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office is a sensitive Defense Department branch responsible for uncovering and defending against terrorism plots and asymmetric warfare, and making sure that U.S. commandos have everything they need to carry out their missions.

The office now has a new asset: a Jan. 6 rioter who pleaded guilty to climbing through a broken window at the Capitol and to other offenses. Elias Irizarry, who was 19 on Jan. 6, 2021, eventually apologized for his actions.

President Trump pardoned Mr. Irizarry on Inauguration Day last year when Mr. Trump began his second term by granting blanket clemency to Jan. 6 rioters.

It was unclear who was responsible for the appointment of Mr. Irizarry, which was reported earlier by The Washington Post. But the Pentagon’s acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, said in a statement that Mr. Irizarry “is a qualified, patriotic young professional, and we are proud to have him as a political appointee.”

Political appointees usually are selected by the office of the defense secretary or, in some cases, the White House.

Mr. Irizarry could not be reached for comment. mageMr. Irizarry, seen in another Justice Department photo, was not charged with committing violence on Jan. 6. He stayed on the Capitol grounds until after dusk, and later pleaded to a charge of federal trespassing.Credit...Justice Department

But one of the former leaders of the Special Operations office said the move could degrade public trust in the Pentagon.

“The office he was hired for works with our most elite military units and on extremely sensitive national security issues,” said Michael Lumpkin, the assistant defense secretary for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the Obama administration. “It used to be that any possible negative perception about a hire like this would prevent it from happening. Today, it seems fealty is often more valued than expertise, sound judgment, or a strong moral compass.”

On Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors said, Mr. Irizarry, a former student at the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, entered the Capitol through a broken window on the Senate side, and roamed through the building armed with a metal pole. He found his way to a private conference room, where he was videotaped by one of his friends, Elliot Bishai, sitting in an armchair with the pole across his lap.Editors’ PicksWhat to Expect at the Tony Awards9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This WeekMore Renters Are Using Tools to Skip Security Deposits, but There’s a Catch

Mr. Irizarry, Mr. Bishai and a third man, Grayson Sherrill, ended up in the Capitol’s Rotunda, where they took photos and videos of one another climbing on statues, prosecutors said. While Mr. Irizarry was not charged with committing violence, he stayed on the Capitol grounds until after dusk, and later pleaded to a charge of federal trespassing.

Prosecutors said that his participation in the riot violated the oath he took as a student at the Citadel to abide by the virtues of “honor, duty and respect.” At the time, Mr. Irizarry was also a member of the Civil Air Patrol, and the crimes he committed were a betrayal of his duty to “keep the homeland safe,” prosecutors said.

After he was arrested in March 2021, Mr. Irizarry showed no remorse, prosecutors said, but tried instead to figure out who had turned him in to the authorities. He sent text messages to Mr. Bishai about joining the Russian military if he could not eventually join the U.S. military. He also took part in a group chat titled “Civil War,” prosecutors said, in which he discussed “using small planes to cross borders undetected.”

Mr. Irizarry’s lawyers said that he was a top student at the Citadel who later trained as a volunteer firefighter. He was also deeply interested in politics. “Not the ‘politics’ spewed by Infowars and the MyPillow guy, but international relations through the Model United Nations and Boys State,” his lawyers wrote in a memo asking the judge who handled his case for lenience.Mr. Irizarry, seen in another Justice Department photo, was not charged with committing violence on Jan. 6. He stayed on the Capitol grounds until after dusk, and later pleaded to a charge of federal trespassing.Credit...Justice Department

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

New York Times, ICE Says Detainees Are ‘Worst of the Worst.’ Government Data Disagrees, Ed Shanahan and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026. Federal officials said they are removing killers and rapists from the streets. Data obtained by The New York Times indicates most detainees at a Newark facility haven’t been convicted of crimes.

When reports emerged last month that immigrants held at a Newark detention center were staging a hunger strike to protest conditions there, demonstrators mobilized and New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, demanded to be let in so that she could inspect the building.

Federal officials rejected her demand and said that she and other Democratic officials in New Jersey should be grateful that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was removing killers, rapists and other criminals — “the worst of the worst,” they said — from the state.

But the federal government’s own data, including some from internal documents The New York Times obtained this week, indicates that people with criminal convictions account for just a fraction of the detainees at the Newark center, Delaney Hall.

In early April, ICE stopped updating its once-regular public reports on the number of people being detained at its facilities. The internal data obtained by The Times shows that of 591 people held at Delaney Hall this week, 76 — about 13 percent — had criminal convictions and 123 — about 21 percent — had pending criminal charges.

The detainees had been at the center for about 80 days on average, the data shows.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement on Friday that it was “working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detentions centers to their final destination — home.”See the Clashes at Delaney Hall Between ICE and ProtestersJune 3, 2026

Delaney Hall’s population has dropped sharply since ICE’s April report, which showed 891 people (833 men and 58 women) being held there as of April 2. Less than 10 percent — 61 men and two women — were classified as criminals.

When people are detained, and then periodically during their detention, they are divided into categories that reflect the level of security risk they are believed to pose and then housed accordingly, according to ICE.

The categories — low, medium low, medium high and high — are based on factors such as previous convictions, disciplinary records and “special management concerns,” ICE says. As of April 2, just one Delaney Hall detainee was considered a high security risk, ICE data shows; 789, or just under 90 percent, were deemed low risk.

Immigration officials also assign detainees to “ICE threat level” categories determined by their “criminality,” including “the recency of the criminal behavior and its severity.” They are ranked on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being the most severe. Detainees with no criminal convictions are classified as “no ICE threat level.” As of April 2, just six detainees were classified in the highest threat level. About 90 percent were said to be no ICE threat, agency data shows. 

New York Times, As Trump Pushes Deportations, a Skyrocketing Caseload Strains Immigration Courts, Jazmine Ulloa and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026. A federal surge has more than doubled caseloads within some immigration courts nationwide. Lawyers say the tactic is causing errors and confusion.

Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims.

The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been apparent in numerous courts around the country. Some judges have seen their caseloads double and triple, prompting worries that cases are being rushed through, violating due process rights.

At separate courthouses in Annandale and Sterling, Va., in recent days, Times reporters observed long lines and packed dockets. Some immigration judges saw their caseloads more than double, with as many as 100 adults waiting for their cases to be heard. In Annandale, the caseloads have included dozens of unaccompanied minors.

Lines were also evident at a courthouse in downtown Chicago on a recent weekday, with families spilling out of waiting areas and into hallways. Many cases were being processed in small groups, or in several instances with more than two dozen people appearing at once.

And in New Orleans, lawyers saw the number of cases increase to more than 200 on Monday and Tuesday in one courtroom alone. The judges at that courthouse typically take only about 30 to 40 cases per day, lawyers said. The morning dockets were so packed and chaotic that lawyers wishing to observe or monitor the proceedings were not allowed in to watch.

Federal officials say that speeding through cases will help alleviate backlogs that have led some asylum and immigration relief claims to languish for years. The slow pace of the process, they contend, creates incentives for people to enter the United States to file claims that may be weak or invalid.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

New York Times, What Visual Evidence Tells Us About Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon, Sanjana Varghese, June 6, 2026. Videos collected by The Times shows how the Israeli military has deployed a munition that can be extremely harmful over populated areas in Lebanon.

The Israeli military has deployed white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that can be extremely harmful, over populated areas in Lebanon in its battle against Hezbollah, according to experts, aid groups and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.

Distinctive smoke trails from this type of munition were seen as recently as May 30 in Nabatieh, a city of roughly 40,000, in social media footage verified by The Times, which was filmed as Israeli forces captured Beaufort Castle, a landmark in the area.

Other verified footage showed that white phosphorus had been used in the vicinity of the coastal city of Tyre, as well as near three small towns — Qlayaa, Khiam and Yohmor — in the months since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, began again in March. The latest fighting erupted after Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Once exposed to air, white phosphorus spontaneously ignites and is exceptionally difficult to extinguish.

Often deployed by militaries to create fires and smoke screens during combat, white phosphorus is not illegal in itself, but deploying it deliberately against civilians or in an area populated by civilians violates the international laws of war. Human rights advocates have raised concerns that civilians have been affected by the Israeli military’s use of it.

Israel denies using the substance in violation of those laws. It is not clear for what purpose the Israeli military used white phosphorus in these incidents.

The Times asked the Israeli military questions about its use of white phosphorus in Nabatieh, Qlayaa, Khiam and Tyre in four specific instances and provided the coordinates for those incidents. The Israeli military had no comment on those incidents. The Times also asked the military about its internal guidelines for the usage of white phosphorus.

“I.D.F. procedures require that such shells are not used in densely populated areas, subject to certain exceptions. This complies and goes beyond the requirements of international law,” it said in a statement.Editors’ PicksThe Fastest Woman to Circle the Earth on a Bike Is Aiming for the Men’s RecordThe Good List: 6 Things to Bring Delight to Your DayThe Last Straw

Israel uses American-made 155-millimeter M825A1 artillery projectiles that contain 116 felt wedges, in the shape of pizza slices, coated with white phosphorous. They are designed to create five to 10 minutes of dense white smoke, providing cover to fighters.VideoVideo filmed on April 30 shows white phosphorus over the town of Qlayaa, in the south of Lebanon.CreditCredit...Associated Press

The shells can be fuzed to break apart and dispense their cargo midair, which will spread their incendiary effect over a wide area. That can be used to create a smoke screen, but also will cause fires on the ground wherever the wedges land.

The munitions can also be set to rupture on impact — to create a single fire, that militaries use as a visual marker to guide additional strikes.

Munitions experts who analyzed recent footage from news agencies as well as social media posts concluded that the imagery showed artillery projectiles bursting midair in Lebanon, releasing streams of burning white phosphorous below — consistent with previous Israeli uses of American M825A1 shells.

In response to questions by The Times, the Israeli military said that, “the primary smoke-screen shells used by the I.D.F. do not contain white phosphorus.”

“Like many Western militaries,” the statement added, “the I.D.F. also possesses smoke-screen shells that include white phosphorous that are legal under international law. These shells are used by the I.D.F. for creating smoke screens and not for targeting or causing fires and are not defined under law as incendiary weapons.”

There are currently no publicly available statistics about the Israeli military’s use of other smoke-screen shells.Israel’s use of white phosphorusVideoNews agency video filmed on March 27 shows these munitions dispersing over an area near Tyre, a large city in the south of Lebanon.CreditCredit...Associated Press

The substance is “cheap, plentiful and pretty good at what it’s used for,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a private intelligence consultancy based in Australia that tracks arms and munitions.

Israel’s deployment of white phosphorus in populated areas has brought about scrutiny in the past.

A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch documented its widespread use in Lebanon and questioned its necessity, pointing out that there were safer alternatives, such as the M150 shells, which the Israeli military reportedly used in 2024. .

The traces of these shells are visually distinct from the feathery trails of white phosphorus, which are more irregular.

Israel has also deployed white phosphorus in Gaza — in 2009, and in conflicts in Lebanon, including 1982 and 2006. In the year following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the Israeli military used white phosphorus more than 200 times in Lebanon, according to Ahmad Beydoun, an independent researcher who built a visual database of its sightings in the country.

The Lebanese government has filed four letters since October 2023 raising concerns about Israel’s use of white phosphorus to the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council. One of the letters, dated July 3, 2024, cites government figures showing that more than 600 fires have broken out as a result of the use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon.

More U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: This week in stupid: June 6 edition, Jeff Tiedrich, right, June 6, 2026. Mike pumps it, Donny dumps it, and so much more...

As another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back: 

That’s Mike Rogers (shown above campaign in a normal photo and at right after his campaign staff enhanced his muscles with photo tricks). He’s some low-wattage Republican yutz running for Senate in Michigan. He can’t run in his record as a member of the House, because — like all MAGAfied Republicans — his record sucks. So Mike’s handlers had to figure out some way to make their underwhelming nobody stand out.Llook at what they did: they used AI to beef him up, and turn him into some garish cartoon version of himself.

Here are a couple more reasons why you should never let the six-fingered plagiarism robot crank out your bigoted propaganda.

When using the Holy Umbrella of Righteous Hatred to keep your family from being soaked by all the gayness pouring down from the sky, it always helps to have three hands.

Tthat way, you can hold your umbrella, your obedient blonde tradwife, and your obedient little blonde tradwife-in-training, all at the same time.

And yes, I absolutely do believe that if Preznit ____ ever made it the the moon, the very first thing he’d do is take off his helmet. 

New York Times, Paxton’s Senate Bid Raises the Stakes in His War on Latino Voting Groups, Jazmine Ulloa and Edgar Sandoval, June 6, 2026. The Texas attorney general has mounted an all-out effort to prove Democratic Hispanic groups have been corrupting elections. Now he could be the beneficiary of his own attacks.

For years, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has been waging war on Democratic and Latino-led groups over “election integrity,” leaving a trail of ransacked residences, shellshocked volunteers, struggling organizations and indictments behind him.

But the stakes of the fight with groups determined to mobilize Texas’ fast-growing Hispanic electorate changed significantly last month when he won the Republican Party’s nomination for Senate. Now it is personal and could help determine his own political future — and which party controls the Senate.

“It doesn’t look good for us,” said Gabriel Rosales, the Texas director for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which is one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations. “But we are going to keep fighting.”

Long a voice amplifying baseless claims that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers, Mr. Paxton went beyond rhetoric in 2024, using a new restrictive voting law to target left-leaning Latino groups and wielding corporate statutes that allow him to target entire organizations, not individual officers or employees.ImageKen Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, stands in a blue suit behind a lectern.“Under my watch, there will be no stolen elections in Texas,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose war on left-leaning Latino groups could affect his bid for the U.S. Senate.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times

In the name of election integrity, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature criminalized what had been fairly routine tools for civic groups, churches and political campaigns, particularly in Latino communities. The new law made it a felony to pay staff or give volunteers benefits — such as stipends or gas money — or to drop by the homes of voters. The measure also made it illegal for volunteers to help fill in ballots for, say, elderly or bilingual voters, and bring them to polling sites or drop boxes. Volunteers are allowed only to read mail-in ballots to those they would assist.

Lawsuits and investigations followed, along with raids on home offices and private residences. At least 15 Latino Democratic officials and volunteers were indicted last year in Frio County alone, a place with only about 20,000 people. They include a county judge, two city council members and a former county election administrator, charged with contravening the new Texas voting law by illegally “harvesting” ballots that otherwise would not be cast and with tampering with evidence.

“Under my watch, there will be no stolen elections in Texas,” Mr. Paxton said in February.

The groups remain defiant. Four prominent Latino civil rights and political organizations formed a strategic alliance in May, seeking to stem the Republican Party’s gains among Hispanic voters. In a separate initiative, seven national and state-led Latino rights and progressive groups announced on Tuesday that they will coordinate canvassing and voter outreach.

“We are at a critical inflection point,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a voting rights consultant, who said the coalitions would blanket Texas this campaign season, from community centers to quinceañeras. 

New York Times, Screwworm Flies and Drought Spell Tougher Times for Cattle Ranchers, Kevin Draper, June 6, 2026. Some Texans fear “the nightmares and the horrors” of a potential screwworm outbreak. Elsewhere, not enough grass to feed cattle sends them to market earlier.

The discovery of the New World screwworm fly in the United States this week is threatening to further disrupt an already strained cattle business at a moment when many ranchers are also contending with a severe drought.

The United States herd is at its smallest level in 75 years, even as consumer demand for beef continues to grow. That has driven live cattle prices — and beef prices — higher, which normally would encourage ranchers to begin rebuilding their herds or prompt new ranchers to enter the business. Drought conditions across several states have led to a shortage of grass for grazing, forcing ranchers to sell some of their animals sooner.

“We have a lot of things happening all at once,” said David Anderson, a livestock market economist at Texas A&M University.

The average price for a pound of ground beef is $6.90, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 32 percent increase from two years ago. Last month, the Agriculture Department forecast beef prices would rise 12.1 percent in 2026.

But successive crises and volatility over the last year have largely prevented ranchers from rebuilding their herds, meaning low cattle supplies and high beef prices are likely to stick around.ANOTHER CONFIRMED CASEThe New World screwworm was found in a second Texas calf.

That cycle is “taking longer than we all wish for,” said Wesley Batista Filho, the chief executive for the U.S. business of JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, on a call with analysts last month.

The latest blow is the discovery of the larvae from the New World screwworm fly in a 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, about 50 miles from the Mexican border. The fly can lay its eggs in open wounds as small as a tick bite, and the infection can kill animals if left untreated.

The New World screwworm was eradicated from the United States in the 1960s, and the rest of North and Central America by the early 2000s. This was done by breeding hundreds of millions of sterile flies each week and dropping them from aircraft into areas where wild flies were found. But eradication efforts have weakened, and since 2022 the fly has been making its way north from Panama and closer to the United States.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 5, 2026 [When Happy Days Seemed Here Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 6, 2026. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. above,had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.

The president pointed out that “it is…significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”

This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism. For all that the fascists boasted of the superiority of their form of government over democracy, in Italy “[o]ur troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule,” FDR said.

But the president warned Americans that the fall of Rome was only the beginning. “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. “[T]he victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly.”

FDR knew something his audience did not. On the other side of the Atlantic, paratroopers, their faces darkened with cocoa, were already dropping into France, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allies were on their way across the English channel.

The order of the day from their commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the evening of June 5 had read: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

“Your task will not be an easy one,” it read, but it assured the troops that the Germans had suffered great defeats and Allied bombing had reduced German strength, while “[o]ur Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”

Eisenhower’s public confidence did not reflect his understanding that the largest amphibious invasion in military history was a gamble. The seas on the crossing were rough, and the beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers. On June 5, in pencil on a sheet of paper, he had written a message to be communicated in case the invasion failed.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” it read. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and dedication to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

But Eisenhower’s letter was never delivered.

On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from 8 countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD.

By the end of the day, more than 10,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed, but the Allies had established a foothold in France that would permit them to flood troops, vehicles, and supplies into Europe.

When FDR held a press conference later that day, his comment to the cheerful reporters highlighted the extraordinary weight of the past 24 hours. “I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome,” he told them, “that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”  

Hopium Chronicals, Political Advocacy: Reality Check -- Trump Has The Worst Jobs Record Since Hoover, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 6, 2026. As of this morning my bottom line on the week: Trump is in profound political and physical decline 

Trump got a goods job report yesterday and then the stock market tanked. So that little bit of good news the White House got was tempered by the broader damage their domestic policies -- tariffs, health care cuts, mass deportation, tax cuts/bigger deficits - and his failed war have done to the economic lives of Americans and our overall economy - soaring inflation, slowing GDP growth, real wage decline, rising health care costs and reduced access to care, struggle for farmers and small businesses.

It’s was a powerful and sobering reminder that there is no easy way out for Trump and the Rs from the historic failure of their government, and even the one thing that has gone right - the stock market - may be on shakier ground than they understood.

Paul Krugman’s morning post does a very good at explaining what happened yesterday. 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Comments on a Freaky Friday, Paul Krugman, right, June 6, 2026. Yesterday was a job report day. The report was unusually strong, certainly stronger than almost any of the professional forecasters expected, 172,000 jobs.

Predictably, Trump first boasted about this with a lot of talk about how you know we didn’t have this kind of prosperity under Joe Biden. For what it’s worth you know how often during his 48 months in the White House did Biden preside over job reports that were as good as yesterday’s in terms of job creation? The answer is 37 times.

But still this was unexpectedly high job growth but not really something that should alter your fundamental view about how the economy works, although the near-term outlook looks stronger than you might have thought.

One thing I should say, since there are some people wondering, can we trust these numbers? Are these books being cooked? The answer is no. 

Okay trying to make sense of what is going on — why is the labor market as strong as it appears to be?

One important point about the economy right now is that there are three big forces that are hitting us. It would be really great from the point of view of professional economists if just one thing would happen at a time. But unfortunately, that’s not how it works. So there are three things happening. First, we are still feeling the effects of Trump’s erratic tariff policy, which has had a depressing effect on employment — not so much the tariffs themselves as the uncertainty. It’s very hard for businesses to make plans, very risky for them to sink money into new ventures when they have no idea what the tariff regime will be a few months down the road. But that uncertainty probably did a one-time hit to employment which is mostly probably behind us because yeah we have crazy erratic trade policy, but that’s now just a piece of the landscape which affects the level of employment, maybe, but not the rate of growth. The second thing is AI. So we have this enormous boom in spending on data centers, a large surge in investment, big rise in stock prices because of hopes about what AI might return. There are not that many people who benefit from high stock prices, but these are people with a lot of money and a lot of spending power. And if they go out and spend more, that boosts the economy. So that’s a sort of force that operates in opposition to the effects of the tariffs.

And possibly the AI-driven spending is coming on now while the tariff effect is sort of closing out.

About oil: For what it’s worth, prediction markets are by and large evil things, but they do give you a quick way of summarizing conventional wisdom. And just about a week ago,

Kalshi said that the probability that the Strait of Hormuz would be open by August 1st was 60%. It’s now 26%. So people have justifiably gotten very skeptical of White House pronouncements that this is just about over. They should have been more skeptical before.

But anyway, it just does not look like it’s going to open. And there’s a still huge remaining uncertainty about what does this imply? Through all of this there’s been a dichotomy between people in financial markets — including people in the futures market for oil who are presumably more professional, less vibes driven than a lot of investors — and what people who actually study the physical market for oil have to say.

 So what is happening? Trump professed to be baffled that a good jobs number should make stocks go down. But of course, it’s actually quite straightforward. What’s happening here is that with the combination of elevated inflation, now largely driven by the effects of Iran, and a job market that is holding up — that is not, in fact, falling off a cliff, if anything, appears to be accelerating — there is no case for cutting interest rates. A few months ago it seemed plausible that there would be some reduction in interest rates, that the Fed would have a rate cut or two this year. Now the chance of a rate cut, according to the market implied probability uh is around one percent. So there’s essentially no chance that rates will be cut and last I saw the market implied probability that rates will actually be increased is about 70 percent. 

More On U.S. Religion, Culture, Media, Education

The American Pope & US Politics, Vatican Confirms: Pope Leo XIV to Meet Abuse Victims in Opus Dei’s Birthplace, Christopher Hale, above, June 6, 2026. The Spanish Church organized the private encounter. The pope lands in Spain on Saturday with Gareth Gore’s evidence in hand and Opus Dei’s future on his desk.

The Vatican confirmed on Friday that Pope Leo XIV will meet privately with victims of clergy sexual abuse during his weeklong pilgrimage to Spain, which begins Saturday and runs through June 12.

The encounter was organized by the Spanish Church, and the Vatican says details will be released only after it concludes — a standard practice meant to protect the privacy of the survivors in the room. The meeting does not yet appear on the trip’s official program.

According to the Associated Press, Spain’s government and its bishops’ conference approved a new reparations program for abuse survivors in the months before the visit — an answer, years in the making, to the 2023 report from Spain’s human rights ombudsman that estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of clergy abuse across decades.

Leo has made three earlier trips outside Italy, and he is not known to have met with survivors on any of them.

The itinerary runs from Madrid to the monastery of Montserrat to Barcelona, where Leo will inaugurate the newest tower of the Sagrada Família, before ending in the Canary Islands among migrants who survived the Atlantic crossing.

The trip — Leo’s first major European pilgrimage — comes four months after the Spanish daily El País reported that the pope had told Spain’s bishops that far-right ideology is the country’s biggest threat.

The bishops’ conference afterward contested that report, saying the pope had spoken about the risks of subjecting faith to ideologies without naming any group.

Spain is also the country where the Church’s newest abuse reckoning was born. Josemaría Escrivá founded Opus Dei in Madrid in 1928, and the movement grew from a Spanish student apostolate into a global power with banks, universities, and — according to the British investigative journalist Gareth Gore — a decades-long pipeline of underage girls recruited from poor families to cook and clean without pay as so-called numerary assistants.

Gore’s 2024 book Opus documents women who were cut off from their families, moved across borders, and — according to interviews Gore conducted — treated with sedatives and antidepressants. Argentine prosecutors, after a two-year investigation built on the testimony of 43 women, found grounds to bring charges against senior Opus Dei figures for human trafficking and labor exploitation. 

June 5

Top Headlines 

• The Wayne Madsen Report, Trump's war against Washington press institutions, Wayne Madsen, June 5, 2026. White House is using CBS News as a Trojan horse to seize control of longstanding press organizations.
• New York Times, Trump Keeps Immunity From I.R.S., a Victory in a Long-Running Feud, Andrew Duehren, June 5, 2026. Even as they rebelled against a $1.8 billion fund for President Trump’s allies, Republicans looked the other way as his administration granted him potentially lucrative tax protections.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: SAVE Act is Dead, Congress Members Call for 25th Amendment, Trump Discussed Marking Living People "Dead," and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 5, 2026. The White House is lashing out after new scrutiny over Trump’s public appearances, while some members of Congress are now openly discussing the 25th Amendment.  A whistleblower alleges Trump administration officials discussed marking 2.7 million living people as “dead” in government records, potentially cutting them off from banking and other essential services.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 4, 2026 [Trump Faces Limits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 5, 2026. The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus..

Threats To Democracy 

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 5, 2026. Standing up to bullies in New Jersey, Russia, and at CBS News.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: The President is preparing to steal the midterm elections, Heather Delaney Reese, right, June 4-5, 2026. At 3 p.m. this afternoon [Thursday], Donald J. Trump was already seated in his high-backed leather chair in the Oval Office as the cameras focused in on him and the row of men standing shoulder to shoulder behind him.
• Democracy Docket, Trump DOJ voter roll grab echoes ‘poll taxes and literacy tests,’ civil rights group warns, Yunior Rivas, June 4, 2026. A civil rights coalition is warning a federal court that the Trump Justice Department’s demand for unredacted statewide voter rolls is not just a privacy threat — it is a modern revival of a long racist history of using voter registration data to intimidate Black voters.
• New York Times, Opinion: A Shocking Betrayal of Black Americans, Mara Gay, June 5, 2026. Outside the blindingly white antebellum columns of the Alabama State Capitol on a recent Saturday, Martese Chism stood in the Southern heat with thousands of others, rallying for voting rights. It was a show of defiance amid a sweeping attack on Black political power.
• New York Times, Deal to Renew Surveillance Law Falters in the Senate Amid Revolt Over Pulte, Robert Jimison, June 5, 2026. Democrats who had been expected to supply the votes necessary to advance it balked after President Trump named Bill Pulte, right, to head the intelligence apparatus.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Bad News On Big Money: Judd Legum, right,une 5, 2026. I’ve been doing campaign finance research since 1997. The bad news is that the influence of big money on our political system has notwaned. 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.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Calls for Trump’s Impeachment ESCALATE as Epstein Files Revelations GROW, Aaron Parnas, right, June 4, 2026. Trump's Name is Coming Down off of Kennedy Center, RFK Jr.'s Daughter in Law Resigns, and More. 

Disputed Trump Agenda Plans

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• New York Times, Senate Passes $70 Billion G.O.P. Immigration Bill, Annie Karni and Robert Jimison, Updated June 5, 2026, Senate Republicans on Friday rammed through their $70 billion bill to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown through the remainder of his term, after beating back bipartisan efforts to add language to bar or sharply restrict a federal payout fund for his political allies.
• New York Times, House Passes Ukraine Aid in Defiance of Republican Leaders, Robert Jimison, Updated June 5, 2026. Eighteen G.O.P. lawmakers broke with their party and joined Democrats to deliver yet another blow to the president’s foreign policy agenda.

More On Iran, Lebanon War

• New York Times, Hopes of Lebanon Cease-fire Falter as Israel and Hezbollah Fight On, Euan Ward, June 5, 2026. The U.S.-brokered agreement requires Hezbollah, which Iran backs, to stop firing first. But the group, not party to the talks, rejected the conditions as a virtual surrender.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections

• New York Times, Platner Denies Hurting Ex-Girlfriend and Says He Will Not Quit Senate Race, Tim Balk, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, appeared Thursday night in his first interview since a New York Times report about his treatment of several women he had dated, denying one woman’s account that he had physically harmed her and saying he would not drop out of the race.
• New York Times, Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior, Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing. 

U.S. Media, High-tech, Culture, Religion

• New York Times, ‘60 Minutes’ Stars Will Stay Because They Don’t Want Show to ‘Die,’ Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, June 5, 2026. Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim said on Friday in an email to their colleagues that they had reached the decision after a period of frustration.
• PoliticusUSA, Trump's Lawsuit Against The BBC Has Massively Backfired, Jason Easley, right, June 5, 2026. Trump's defamation lawsuit against the BBC has turned into a major liability as the broadcaster hasn't backed down and has demanded financial documents from Trump, which he won't provide.
• New York Times, A Murdoch Builds His Own Media Empire. Is This ‘Succession’ or Secession? Jim Rutenberg, June 5, 2026. James Murdoch says acquiring New York magazine and Vox has nothing to do with his father. But in some ways, it’s a tribute.

More On U.S. Governance

• New York Times, How Trump’s Proposed Arch Could Complicate D.C.’s Congested Airspace, Anushka Patil, Marco Hernandez, Junho Lee and Karoun Demirjian, June 5, 2026 (print ed.).The mammoth triumphal arch President Trump wants to build would sit under one of the most complex sections of the national airspace — directly in the paths of flights in and out of Ronald Reagan National Airport and just a few miles from the site of a catastrophic midair collision last year.

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

• New York Times, Ohio State Agrees to $100 Million Payout Over Sexual Abuse Claims, Billy Witz, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). The deal with 279 former students is the latest in the long-running case at the university. In all, nearly 600 people who said they were abused by an athletic department doctor have settled.
• New York Times, Appeals Court Panel to Hear Arguments Over Trump’s Ballroom, Zach Montague, June 5, 2026. A three-judge panel will consider whether a lower court erred in ordering construction stopped until President Trump secured the support of Congress.
• Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: social media star Hunter Biden has no fucks left to give-- and we are all here for it, Jeff Tiedrich, June 5, 2026. Has anyone in US politics been more unfairly maligned than Hunter Biden?

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

• New York Times, When Jeffrey Epstein Needed Favors, This Restaurant Mogul Was There, Kim Severson, June 5, 2026. Stephen Hanson, whose empire included Blue Water Grill and Ruby Foo’s, was a devoted friend and wingman who helped manage and entertain the women in Epstein’s orbit.

More Global News

Red Cross workers removing the disinfected body of a gold miner, Mumbere Saidi, in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, last week (New York Times visual by Arlette Bashizi, from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak).

• New York Times, The Gold Mines at the Heart of This Ebola Outbreak, Declan Walsh, Visuals by Arlette Bashizi (reporting from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak), June 5, 2026. Mining has been the lifeblood of this remote Congolese hill town for decades. Now, it is fueling the spread of a devastating virus.
• New York Times, China Builds an Economic Fortress as Global Tensions Rise, Alexandra Stevenson and Murphy Zhao, June 5, 2026. Beijing says the changes are needed for national security, but they could complicate efforts by Chinese companies to find growth overseas.China is erecting walls to prevent money, technology and companies from leaving the country.
• New York Times, Why Xi Jinping Is Going to North Korea to Court Kim Jong-un, David Pierson and Choe Sang-Hun, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). As Xi Jinping visits Pyongyang, he faces an emboldened North Korean dictator, whose alliance with Russia has reduced his dependence on China.ina’s military buildup and Washington’s ability to honor its defense agreements as it depletes resources fighting a war with Iran.
• New York Times, Ireland, Seen as a Weak Link in Europe’s Defense, Is Trying to Bulk Up, Megan Specia, Visuals by Paulo Nunes dos Santos, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). As concern rises in Europe over threats from an emboldened Russia, the Irish government says it’s working to plug gaps in its military, which reflect a tradition of neutrality.

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Markets, Tariffs

• New York Times, Live Updates: Employers Added a Robust 172,000 Jobs in May, Lydia DePillis, June 5, 2026. Unemployment remained steady at 4.3 percent.
• New York Times, For New Graduates, Job Market Scars Could Linger for Years, Sydney Ember, June 5, 2026. The full impact of graduating into this hiring downturn will not come into focus for years, and much remains uncertain, especially about A.I.’s role.
• New York Times, Opinion: It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers, Molly Jong-Fast, June 5, 2026.  Commencement address season hasn’t been going well — for the commencement speakers.
• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: Why the Hell Is Gas So Expensive in California? Hint: It's not taxes or environmental fees, Robert Reich, right,June 5, 2026. Trump and his Republicans say gas is hugely expensive in California because of state taxes and fees (mostly related to the environment).

June 5

Top Stories

The Wayne Madsen Report, Trump's war against Washington press institutions, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, June 5, 2026. White House is using CBS News as a Trojan horse to seize control of longstanding press organizations.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, founded in 1914, has operated as an independent entity managing the media's logistics in relation to coverage of the president of the president and his administration. After having granted access to the White House press pool to far-right social media influencers and serial fabulists, Trump set his sights on the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, scheduled for April 25 at the Washington Hilton, the traditional venue for the event. In what is increasingly looking like a staged event designed to disrupt the first dinner featuring Trump as a speaker, a gunman rushed a security checkpoint. The resulting melee with Trump being evacuated by his Secret Service agents and heavily-armed Secret Service Counter Assault Team running across fully set tables and pushing over chairs is exactly the scene Trump wanted to send to the media.

Just prior to the “attempted assassination” in an area of the hotel far removed from the banquet, Weijia Jiang, WHCA president and Senior White House Correspondent for CBS News (and shown above in a Reuters photo), was able to publicly praise her boss, CBS News editor-in-chief and Trump sycophant Bari Weiss, left, the “murderer” of 60 Minutes. Once that important public display of affection was out of the way, it was time for the reality TV performance of Cole Tomas Allen to run past the magnetometer security checkpoint and the Secret Service to rush Trump and members of his administration out of the hotel to the White House. Once at the White House, Trump used the “assassination” attempt to justify the construction his gaudy ball room.

CBS’s Jiang has permitted the independence of the WHCA to be further undermined by permitting Trump to brag about re-scheduling to July 24th the event from the 2,600-capacity Hilton ballroom to the 1,300 maximum capacity ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, the former Trump International Hotel. Trump lied in claiming he built the hotel. In reality, Trump had leased from the federal government the Old Post Office building, built in 1899. Many journalists believe the dinner should have been canceled, as it had been in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and held next year at the Hilton.

Jiang has demonstrated her loyalty to Weiss and David Ellison, the right wing owner of CBS Paramount and the likely owner of CNN through his acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. Progress Radio host Dean Obeidallah was among those who criticized Jiang’s and the WHCA’s decision, writing that the July 24th rescheduled dinner was “giving Trump a national platform to attack free speech and spew lies.”

Just as Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin seized control of independent media institutions, Trump is intent on taking possession of every journalistic body in the nation’s capital.

This includes the National Press Club, located a mere two blocks from the White House. There are serious indications that the White House’s CBS Trojan horse is planning between now and next year to lay claim to the institution founded in 1908 that has served as an important junction between the press, the government, civil society, the diplomatic corps, and private industry. With its hands on the WHCA and NPC, the Trump White House will be calling the shots on how the news is framed institutionally.

Running concurrently with Trump’s attempted acquisition of the WHCA and NPC is his White House Media Bias Portal, a taxpayer-funded, official digital index which publicly tracks, ranks, and denounces news outlets, individual journalists, and specific articles that the administration deems hostile or inaccurate. This is a direct attack on the First Amendment and freedom of the press.

The webpage’s "Leaderboard" of Trump’s top targets also features a “Media Offender of the Week.” The webpage’s database explicitly lists the names of individual reporters and bureau chiefs alongside the stories being criticized. There is also a “tip line” where anyone can report news organizations, journalists, and news aggregators as “media offenders.” Singled out for attack in the White House “hall of shame” are CNN, ABC News, MSNOW, NBC News, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters, TMZ, Scripps, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Daily Mail, The Independent, People, Apple News, The Bulwark, Politico, The Daily Beast, New Jersey Monitor, and “Leftist influencers” David Pakman and Ed Krassenstein.

Independent journalism is under severe assault in the United States. It is a frontal attack by the Trump White House, the billionaire tech bro class, and far-right enablers in the media. Any journalist worth a salt should stand his or her ground and fight the forces of fascist control of the people’s right to be informed.

New York Times, Trump Keeps Immunity From I.R.S., a Victory in a Long-Running Feud, Andrew Duehren, June 5, 2026. Even as they rebelled against a $1.8 billion fund for President Trump’s allies, Republicans looked the other way as his administration granted him potentially lucrative tax protections.

Senate Republican anger about President Trump’s $1.8 billion fund for people who claim to be victims of federal overreach was loud and apparent.

It held up the Republican agenda in Congress for weeks, and during a marathon voting session on Thursday and early Friday, several Republicans voted to end the fund, though those efforts failed. Still, the furor forced the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, right, to announce this week that he was abandoning it entirely.

Not so for the sweeping protections from I.R.S. audits that Mr. Blanche also ordered up for Mr. Trump and his family. On that front, Republican reaction has been much more muted, and Mr. Blanche said the audit shield would stay in place. A Democratic effort to cancel the audit protection failed on a voice vote.

The result is that an apparently unprecedented and enormously valuable public benefit for the president has, so far, flown under the radar in Congress and passed into Mr. Trump’s hands without much protest from members of his own party.

Mr. Trump and his family have spent decades aggressively avoiding taxes, according to previous reporting in The New York Times. The newly won ability to escape from Internal Revenue Service examinations could be worth tens of millions of dollars: One audit, ongoing in the days before the new immunity for Mr. Trump was announced, could have resulted in a bill from the government exceeding $100 million, The Times has reported. Other authorities have had questions, too: In 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud in New York.

Mr. Trump has also sought to avoid public scrutiny of his taxes. During his first run for office in 2016, he refused to release his tax returns, breaking a norm for presidential candidates. Mr. Trump said at the time he had to keep his returns private because he was subject to an I.R.S. audit — a perennial problem.

“Every year they audit me, audit me, audit me,” he said at a Republican primary debate in February 2016. “Nobody gets audited — I have friends that are very wealthy people. They never get audited. I get audited every year.”

Mr. Trump’s decision to not release his tax returns in 2016 would eventually snowball into the audit immunity unveiled last month by Mr. Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer.

Public interest in Mr. Trump’s tax situation was enormous at the time, as initial reporting showed that he had claimed vast business losses that could have helped him avoid paying any federal income taxes. In 2017, a man named Charles Littlejohn applied for a job at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. His intention was to work as a contractor for the I.R.S. and leak Mr. Trump’s tax returns, according to testimony he later gave in a deposition.Editors’ PicksThe Sun Is Shining on LisbonMister Rogers: Now on YouTubeNeutrals That Stand Out Even in a Raucous Festival

Mr. Littlejohn succeeded, providing years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns to The Times in 2019, as well as the returns of thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica in 2020.

The resulting series of articles in The Times in 2020 revealed that Mr. Trump had paid little or no federal income taxes for years. The reporting showed Mr. Trump trying to reduce his taxable income in large and small ways, including by treating his daughter Ivanka as a consultant and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

Unauthorized disclosure of tax information is a federal crime, and Mr. Littlejohn was prosecuted for leaking the returns and sentenced to five years in prison during the Biden administration. But the leak seemed to inflame Mr. Trump’s enmity for the I.R.S. In January he sued the agency for at least $10 billion, accusing it of not doing enough to stop Mr. Littlejohn’s leak.

Mr. Trump was suing an agency that he ultimately controls, an extraordinary attempt by the president to extract financial gain from the government. Rather than contest Mr. Trump’s suit in court, as lawyers at the I.R.S. suggested, top Justice Department officials this spring instead sought to settle it before a judge could rule on its legitimacy.Trump Administration: Live UpdatesUpdated June 5, 2026, 9:07 a.m. ET3 hours ago

A deal to renew a surveillance law falters in the Senate amid a revolt over Pulte. An appeals court will hear arguments over Trump’s ballroom. Trump announces a plan to create a promenade at the Lincoln Memorial.

Mr. Blanche did not want to directly pay Mr. Trump money out of the Treasury, The Times has reported. Instead, the Justice Department created the $1.8 billion fund, now seemingly dead, and offered Mr. Trump, his family members and their businesses the sweeping protections from audits of tax returns they have already filed. In return, Mr. Trump dropped his suit, an arrangement that the judge who was originally assigned to the case is now investigating.

The judge in that inquiry, Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, is looking into whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers deceived her when they brought the original suit, though it is unclear if she would have the power to unwind the audit protection during those proceedings. Because the deal is between the government and Mr. Trump, it may also be difficult for a third party to challenge it in court.

Mr. Blanche, in testimony before the House this week, cast the audit protection as a typical part of how the I.R.S. settles litigation. But Mr. Trump’s suit focused on the unauthorized release of his tax returns, not a dispute over a tax position. Tax experts said amnesty in an actual tax controversy would typically come from the I.R.S., not the acting attorney general, and would apply only to specific issues on the tax returns under review. 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: SAVE Act is Dead, Congress Members Call for 25th Amendment, Trump Discussed Marking Living People "Dead," and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 5, 2026. The White House is lashing out after new scrutiny over Trump’s public appearances, while some members of Congress are now openly discussing the 25th Amendment.  A whistleblower alleges Trump administration officials discussed marking 2.7 million living people as “dead” in government records, potentially cutting them off from banking and other essential services.

Republicans delivered a pair of major rebukes to Trump, helping sink the SAVE Act and advancing Ukraine aid, even as the Senate approved billions more in funding for ICE and Border Patrol in a late-night vote. Meanwhile, a new report finds that roughly half of the known donors to Trump’s White House ballroom project have received massive federal contracts, and anti-Trump protests continue to grow in Albania.

I am also working on another major deep dive this weekend, so stay tuned. In addition, I will be delivering a keynote address to a room full of human trafficking survivors, advocates, and attorneys.

To say today will be busy would be an understatement. I am going to spend parts of this weekend near the Kennedy Center to try to capture the moment they take Trump’s name down.

Here’s the news:

A major Republican election overhaul backed by President Trump failed in the Senate after four Republican senators broke with Trump and joined Democrats to block the measure. The four Republicans were Thom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. The SAVE America Act would have required proof of citizenship for voter registration, mandated photo ID for all voters, and expanded federal oversight of state voter rolls. Trump had called the bill Congress’s top priority and urged Republicans to pass it before any other legislation, but the defections underscored divisions within the GOP over changing Senate rules and federalizing election administration. The vote marks a significant setback for one of Trump’s signature election-related priorities and highlights the limits of his influence over every member of the Republican conference.

The House has passed the Ukraine Support Act in a 226–195 vote, approving new military assistance for Ukraine and tougher sanctions on Russia after lawmakers successfully used a discharge petition to force the bill to the floor over the objections of Speaker Mike Johnson. The legislation advanced with bipartisan support, as 18 Republicans and former Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley broke with House GOP leadership to vote in favor of the measure. The vote represents a significant rebuke to Republican leadership and highlights growing divisions within the GOP over continued support for Ukraine. The bill now moves to the Senate, where its prospects remain uncertain.

A prominent cardiologist and former physician to former Vice President Dick Cheney is raising concerns after President Trump appeared to have his eyes closed and slump in his chair during an Oval Office event focused on coal policy. Dr. Jonathan Reiner argued that Trump’s recent physical examination did not address what he described as a possible sleep disorder and said repeated episodes of apparent daytime drowsiness are “not normal.”

The White House strongly rejected the criticism, calling Trump healthy, energetic, and accusing critics of engaging in politically motivated speculation. The debate comes amid broader scrutiny of Trump’s health following a recent medical examination, visible physical symptoms that have attracted attention, and questions about his week-long absence from public events last month.

At least one member of Congress is calling Trump’s proclivity to sleep a “national security crisis” and called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked:

Another member of Congress called for an inquiry into the President’s health:

A new report from the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 14 of the 27 publicly identified corporate donors to President Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project have received more than $50 billion in new or expanded federal contracts since contributing to the effort. According to the report, major beneficiaries include Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Palantir Technologies, while several donors are also facing federal investigations or regulatory actions that have been paused or scaled back under the Trump administration. Critics argue the findings raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest and “pay-to-play” politics, especially because the White House has not released a complete list of donors to the project. The White House rejected those allegations, saying the donations are helping fund long-overdue renovations without burdening taxpayers and that the contributors represent a broad range of American companies and individuals.

A former senior Social Security Administration executive has alleged that Trump administration officials considered a plan to falsely classify 2.7 million living people as dead in a key government database as part of an immigration enforcement strategy. According to whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, the proposal would have used the agency’s Death Master File to cut targeted individuals off from banking, employment, benefits, and other services, potentially affecting not only undocumented immigrants but also some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. Schofield says he and agency lawyers raised legal concerns after reviewing a sample of the list and finding that the people examined were alive, leading the larger plan to be abandoned, although a smaller effort involving roughly 6,100 immigrants was reportedly carried out. The allegations have prompted demands for investigations from Democratic lawmakers, while the Social Security Administration says no list of 2.7 million names was ever added to the death database.

Protests in Albania have entered their fourth consecutive night as demonstrators oppose a planned luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner, right, and Ivanka Trump. Thousands of protesters are demanding that construction be halted, arguing the development (portrayed above) threatens environmentally sensitive coastal areas and protected wetlands that are home to flamingos, sea turtles, seals, and other wildlife. Critics also accuse the Albanian government of fast-tracking the project without sufficient public consultation or transparency, while Prime Minister Edi Rama has defended the investment and insists it will move forward. Environmental groups and activists say they will continue demonstrating until the project is suspended and a full review of its environmental and legal impacts is conducted.

The Senate has passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement package that would fund ICE and the Border Patrol through the remainder of President Trump’s term, but lawmakers rejected multiple bipartisan efforts to permanently block or restrict the administration’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The bill passed 52–47, with Lisa Murkowsk, left, as the lone Republican voting against it, citing concerns about both the funding process and the settlement fund. Critics, including Chuck Schumer, argue the legislation leaves open the possibility that taxpayer money could still be used to compensate Trump allies or January 6 defendants, despite assurances from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that the administration is no longer pursuing the fund. The measure now heads to the House, where debate over immigration funding and the unresolved settlement fund is expected to continue next week.

Detainees at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center allege that guards withheld food, clean water, and medication after they refused to sign documents written in English that they said they could not understand. In a recorded call with an immigrant advocacy group, multiple detainees claimed the water provided in recent days was contaminated with dirt and mosquito larvae, and that lunch was withheld as pressure to force them to sign paperwork. The allegations add to a growing list of complaints about conditions at the facility, including claims of inadequate medical care, restricted access to attorneys, and pressure to accept deportation without legal representation. Florida officials have previously denied mistreatment at the center and maintain that medical services are available around the clock, but advocates say the latest accusations represent a serious violation of detainees’ rights.

According to CNN, President Trump’s pick to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, right, did not hold a security clearance before being selected for the role and only began the clearance vetting process this week, according to multiple sources cited by CNN. The revelation has intensified bipartisan concerns because the DNI oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and routinely has access to some of the nation’s most highly classified information. Critics, including Mark Warner and even some Republicans, have questioned both Pulte’s lack of national security experience and whether he has undergone the background checks typically required for senior intelligence positions. Trump defended the appointment, arguing that Pulte is smart, loyal, and will only serve in the role temporarily, while Senate Democrats cited the appointment as one reason for blocking consideration of a surveillance bill this week.

The U.S. economy added 172,000 jobs in May, significantly outperforming expectations of about 80,000 new jobs and signaling continued labor market strength despite economic pressures tied to the war with Iran. The unemployment rate remained at 4.3%, but wages grew by 3.4% over the past year, trailing inflation, which rose to 3.8% in April as energy prices surged. Education, health care, leisure and hospitality, and local government were among the biggest drivers of job growth, while previous months’ employment figures were revised upward by 93,000 jobs. Federal Reserve officials say they remain concerned about persistent inflation, particularly as rising fuel costs and major AI-related investments continue to put upward pressure on prices.

Even if the Trump administration abandons its proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, the Justice Department may still have a pathway to compensate January 6 defendants and other individuals through the federal government’s existing Judgment Fund. The fund is a longstanding Treasury mechanism that allows the government to pay settlements and judgments without seeking a separate appropriation from Congress, and administration officials argue it already provides authority to resolve claims against the government. Critics, including a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Cory Booker and Bill Cassidy, argue that the original fund proposal was an attempt to bypass congressional oversight and create a politically controlled compensation system. Hundreds of January 6 defendants are already preparing claims, and some administration allies have openly discussed the possibility of significant future payouts through existing legal channels.

A new U.K. government audit found that former royal Prince Andrew earned money by subletting cottages on the Royal Lodge estate, where he lived for more than two decades under a lease that required only a nominal “peppercorn” rent. The report also revealed that his daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, live in royal properties at below-market rents paid through funds controlled by King Charles III. Critics say the findings raise fresh questions about royal finances and taxpayer support, while Buckingham Palace argued the report demonstrates its commitment to transparency. The revelations come as Andrew remains under scrutiny over his ties to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and amid an ongoing British police investigation into allegations related to his time as a trade envoy.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced that Illinois will temporarily stop processing applications for tax incentives for new AI data centers, citing concerns about electricity demand, water consumption, and the impact on local communities. The move comes after state lawmakers declined to approve his proposal to suspend the incentives for two years while a broader review was conducted. Pritzker is calling on lawmakers, utility companies, labor groups, local governments, and industry leaders to develop new rules governing data center growth, including requirements for transparency, environmental protections, and ensuring the facilities pay their fair share of infrastructure costs. The decision reflects growing scrutiny nationwide over the rapid expansion of AI-related data centers and their potential impact on energy grids, natural resources, and consumer utility bills.

Karen Read, who was acquitted last year of murdering her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, says she has filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts State Police and the town of Canton because she believes misconduct and negligence led to her prosecution. Read and her attorneys argue that corruption, bias, and institutional failures within law enforcement played a central role in the investigation, citing derogatory text messages sent by former state trooper Michael Proctor and other alleged misconduct. Canton officials and the Massachusetts State Police have rejected many of the lawsuit’s allegations, though state police leaders acknowledged that some of the messages cited were inappropriate and unacceptable. Read says the lawsuit is about exposing what she sees as systemic problems within law enforcement and seeking accountability for what she describes as a wrongful prosecution.

According to NBC News, the U.S. State Department has inserted itself into a political controversy in the United Kingdom after the killing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, criticizing what it called “ideological conditioning” and “two-tier policing” in Britain. The case drew widespread attention after video showed police handcuffing Nowak as he lay dying from stab wounds while initially treating him as a suspect after his attacker falsely accused him of making a racist attack. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer acknowledged serious questions about the police response and ordered a review, but condemned violent protests that followed and rejected claims that Britain operates a two-tier justice system. The controversy has been amplified by figures including Nigel Farage and Elon Musk, while Nowak’s family has called for accountability but urged people not to use his death to fuel division or hatred.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 4, 2026 [Trump Faces Limits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 5, 2026. The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.

Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.

Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”

In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.

Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.

Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.

Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”

He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”

And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.

“If we all work together and follow the animal treatment protocols and movement restriction guidance, there is no reason to believe that this incursion will result in an establishment of the pest in our country,” Rollins said last night.

Meanwhile, Jamie Smyth of the Financial Times reported yesterday that U.S. oil reserves are at their lowest level in twenty-two years. The administration has released them to try to control oil prices that are skyrocketing after Trump’s war on Iran prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passed before the war. Oil industry analysts warned that oil prices will shoot higher if the crisis isn’t resolved.

Today President Donald J. Trump appeared to fall asleep again at a meeting in the Oval Office.

But Trump’s interest in profiting off the presidency remains clear. Jonathan Edwards of the Washington Post reported today that 14 of the 27 known donors to Trump’s $400 million ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts totaling over $50 billion since they made their donations.

As the results of the Republican destruction of the liberal consensus become clear, Democrats are speaking up to defend it and to chart a different course for the nation. Today, for example, Democrats called out the $187 billion in cuts Republicans have made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in their budget reconciliation bill of last July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

House Democrats criticized Agriculture Secretary Rollins’s repeated boasts that she has pushed more than 3.5 million people off SNAP, claiming that such cuts are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program. Representative Craig noted that Rollins appears to confuse the program’s error rate, which measures underpayments or overpayments, with fraud. Craig noted that SNAP has “the lowest fraud rate in any program in America.”

Although Congress itself makes the same distinction between error rates and fraud rates Craig did, and says that “SNAP fraud is rare,” Sydney Carruth of MS Now reported that Rollins told Craig: “You can’t be serious.”

More and more, Democrats are anchoring their opposition to MAGA Republican governance in their opposition to its extraordinary corruption that siphons taxpayer money into the pockets of a small group of wealthy elites and their loyalists. On Sunday, Georgia senator Jon Ossoff reminded an audience of Trump’s deal with his appointees at the Department of Justice to establish a slush fund of $1.776 billion to pay his supporters for their claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the legal system against them by indicting them for crimes.

Ossoff called out Trump’s frantic pace of outlandish social media posts, then said, “[W]hen not posting, he’s been trying to rob us. Have you seen it? He sued the U.S. government he commands for $10 billion. Then he settled the suit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund so he can cut checks to cronies and Jan[uary] 6 foot soldiers, the same men who sacked the Capitol to seize the presidency for Donald Trump, who beat police officers with flagpoles, built a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and hunted the vice president to lynch him. Donald Trump’s brownshirts. He pardoned them, and now he wants you to pay them.”

Ossoff continued: “He promised to bring down prices on day one. Instead, prices are soaring. Ground beef’s up 25% since Trump was sworn in. Coffee, 40%. The price of gas, 33%. Groceries, rent, health care, and the power bill hit their new all-time highs last month. And while you pay more for everything, Donald Trump wants your tax dollars for what many are calling the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called out how the corruption of the administration perverts the nature of government by stealing from everyday Americans for the vanity projects of a leader. She told Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News that “when people see a ballroom and they see at the same time their health insurance getting cut off, they know that they are paying for that ballroom with no healthcare, higher grocery prices, and increasingly impossible-to-afford housing.” “[P]eople are pissed off about it,” she said, “and they should be. It’s wrong. This is a complete theft of our money.” Rather than paying for Trump’s ballroom or his splashy renovations in the nation’s capital, taxes should pay for “[b]etter roads, healthcare, more affordable housing.”

And when the Texas Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, James Talarico, spoke to supporters in the home county of his opponent, Ken Paxton, he made it clear that the corruption of MAGA Republicans must not stand. He noted that “Paxton’s mugshot was taken just a few miles from here at the Collin County courthouse, where he was indicted for investment fraud. He convinced his own friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company. But what he didn’t tell them was that he was making a commission off their investments. He was scamming his own friends. If Ken Paxton will sell out his own friends for a quick buck,” Talarico asked, “what makes you think he won’t sell you out in the United States Senate?”

In a telling echo of a different sort of rally almost a decade ago, the audience began to chant, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

“Listen,” Talarico said. “Ken Paxton has escaped accountability, but accountability is coming on November 3rd.”

Threats To Democracy 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 5, 2026. Standing up to bullies in New Jersey, Russia, and at CBS News.

When under siege from authoritarian aggressors, democratic forces are forced to engage in an unending series of skirmishes testing their will and values. We recently saw this play out in three very different settings. In a sign democracy is on the rebound, resolute figures proved themselves up to the task of defending democratic values and institutions.

Delaney Hall is facing accountability

At the Delaney Hall immigration facility, politicians such as Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) have shown up at personal risk to call attention to the horrific conditions for detainees and the abusive conduct toward protestors.Senator Andy Kim @kim.senate.govI saw chaos inside and outside of the ICE detention center Delaney Hall today. Detainees protesting the lack of due process, the disgusting food and poor treatment while their families and advocates stood outside calling for help. 1/4Tue, 26 May 2026 02:02:20 GMTView on Bluesky

In addition, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and Gov. Mikie Sherrill filed suit against the GEO Group Inc., which operates Delaney Hall, demanding it provide full access to health inspectors or face closure. The city of Newark filed its own action and lifted the curfew that was imposed, ostensibly to reduce conflict between protestors and state officials.

As the New York Times reported, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka moved in to take control on the ground after widespread criticism of state police tactics:

Baraka said that the state officials were handing greater control to the city after the state police failed to cool tensions between the demonstrators and federal immigration enforcement officers. He said that the city planned to remove protest zones that had limited demonstrators’ movements and would lean on street teams largely made up of clergy and community activists to keep the peace.... Mr. Baraka said that the state police used tactics that only made matters worse as the protests grew during the weekend.

In sum, neither stonewalling by the Department of Homeland Security nor ham-handed police tactics by New Jersey state police have been able to silence critics. Rather than intimidate protests, the effort to silence criticism and block investigation backfired. A persistent, disciplined effort undertaken by federal and local officials, litigators, and ordinary Americans to challenge brutality and lawlessness is forcing accountability on the private prison system.

Ukraine persists

On the physical battlefield against authoritarian aggression, Ukraine has defied the odds and turned the tide against Russian invaders. “A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory,” Defense One reported.

Though Russian aerial barrages kill innocent people and cause great damage, Ukraine has intercepted the vast majority of them. Moreover, Ukraine has taken the fight to Russia’s homeland to shatter the illusion of security for the Russian population. (In a brazen move, as the BBC reported, “Ukraine has carried out a strike on the outskirts of Russia’s St Petersburg, hours before the opening of a major economic forum designed to attract foreign investment into the country.”) A member of Ukraine’s 26th Artillery Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces carries a Valkyria drone on April 29. (26th Artillery Brigade)

Ukraine’s AI and drone technology, its willingness to experiment with new tactics, and its development of a sophisticated domestic defense industry have overcome Russia’s overwhelming numbers and a cynical government’s willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its own people. Ukraine is demonstrating that a thugocracy stultified by corruption, rigidity, and fear is no match for a democracy that benefits from an informed, engaged citizenry, free dialogue and scientific innovation.

Despite threats and pressure from Vladamir Putin stooge Donald Trump, Ukraine seems to have plenty of cards these days. That is why Putin (not unlike Trump in Iran) finds himself trapped in a costly forever war that has served only to undermine his support. As Foreign Affairs explained:

Stopping the fighting now would mean economic dislocation, social upheaval, and a political reckoning the regime is not prepared to face. Moscow, in other words, has stumbled into a war trap that no one designed and no one can easily dismantle. …

He cannot demobilize without setting off a vast unemployment and reintegration crisis. He cannot cut defense spending without devastating the regions and industries that depend on it. And he cannot abandon the narrative of existential struggle without undermining the legitimacy on which his authority rests.

So, Russia plods along at the cost of thousands of deaths each week, further economic hardship, and increased social discord. Trump’s efforts to bully Ukraine into submission have failed. He should spend more time persuading Putin to look for an off ramp. It’s Russia that desperately needs to end this debacle.

Heroic defense of free press

Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

Veteran CBS reporter Scott Pelley channeled the frustrations of his colleagues, conscientious journalists throughout legacy and independent media, and anyone who cherishes a free press when he denounced CBS News chief Bari Weiss and her new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton.

Pelley’s refreshing candor in confronting Bilton face to face (after a bloodbath of firings the previous week) served to debunk Weiss’s claims of devotion to the program (she is murdering it, he declared). He also called out their lack of qualifications (so much for merit in MAGA-friendly environs) and denounced efforts to manipulate facts and inject bias. He cut through the fog of cringeworthy platitudes that have poured out of Black Rock since Trump booster David Ellison took control of the network. (As remarkable as Pelley’s interrogation of his boss was, the naivete of CBS’s new management was even more stunning. They plainly underestimated the tenacity of real journalists — and wound up embarrassed when, of course, an audio of the meeting leaked.)

At an editorial meeting after Pelley’s firing was announced, Weiss sounded whiny and defensive, insisting, “Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways.” She added: “We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.” Pelley swiftly denounced that as a lie, again exposing Weiss’s lack of credibility.

Pelley’s stand undermined any claim that Ellison, Weiss, and Bilton are independent figures acting in the best traditions of journalism. He stripped the pretense of legitimacy, which is key to undermining their effectiveness, and robbed them of any claim to independence. He also reminded journalists of their obligation to speak truth to power not only in government but also in their own outlets and to resist manipulation and censorship.

What democracy defenders have in common

In very different contexts, the coordinated effort to end abuse at Delaney Hall, the Ukrainians’ defense of their homeland, and the courageous stance taken by Scott Pelley (backed up by many of his coworkers) attest to the strength of the pro-democracy movement. Undaunted, unintimidated, and uncompromising, those who value democratic norms and institutions have shown they can prevail against entrenched forces that use violence, bullying, threats, and lies to cling to power. We salute those who fight authoritarian oppressors at Delaney Hall, the Kremlin, and CBS/Paramount — which, despite a great deal of bluster, looked small, defensive, and inept in the face of principled resistance.

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: The President is preparing to steal the midterm elections, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 4-5, 2026. At 3 p.m. this afternoon [Thursday], Donald J. Trump was already seated in his high-backed leather chair in the Oval Office as the cameras focused in on him and the row of men standing shoulder to shoulder behind him.

The event was supposed to be about his new $700 million plan for what he calls America’s beautiful “clean coal” industry. Instead, he spent much of the afternoon insulting his fellow Americans and, in the process, explained how he intends to interfere with the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. And in doing so, he may have revealed one of the greatest threats facing American democracy over the next five months.

Within minutes of this event starting, he had already wandered through bizarre mockeries and complaints. He called Graham Platner, right, the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine, “a basket case.” He mocked James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas, by comparing him to “Alfred E. Newman,” the gap-toothed mascot from Mad Magazine. When speaking about Iran’s Supreme Leader, he said that “in some circles he has a very good reputation actually,” then added that he would be “honored” to meet him and would be “respectful.” Then he drifted back into the old grievance loop, attacking Biden as “never the sharpest guy” and bragging that his “Where’s Hunter?” shirt was once “the number one shirt anywhere in the world.”

Almost nothing about the event unfolded the way he and his handlers must have imagined. As the cameras continued rolling, Trump repeatedly appeared to fall asleep. His face looked noticeably swollen, his eyes heavy and deeply bagged, and he seemed increasingly disconnected from the conversation unfolding around him. The man who was supposed to be promoting a major energy initiative looked like he was struggling to make it through the next hour.

But underneath the latest public spectacle coming out of the White House, something far more important was happening. Because here is the thing about this president, even at his most incoherent, even when he is drifting off in front of the cameras and reaching for insults instead of answers, he tells us the truth about what he is planning. He always does. And that is exactly why we cannot afford to get bored or numb with his antics. We cannot let ourselves scroll past one more clip of him saying something outrageous and tell ourselves it does not matter, that it is just Trump being Trump, that it is noise. It is not noise. Every single thing this man says is of the utmost importance, because he is telling us, out loud and on camera, exactly what he intends to do. And this afternoon, somewhere between mocking a Senate candidate and praising the Ayatollah, he told us how he plans to handle an election he already knows he is going to lose.

He spent the entire day setting it up. Over the span of an hour and a half this afternoon, he posted, “Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the Vote. I hope the Republicans are watching so that they can finally pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!” He also posted, “I believe we have the Most Dishonest Elections of any Country, anywhere in the World!” And then tonight, after the event, he posted again about California, writing that “Our Election process is as bad, or worse, than any Third World Country,” and that “They don’t wait seven days to tell you who won, rigging the Election during each and every one of them.” And at the event itself, he said much of the same thing, bragging about his own past wins by saying, “they tried with me. They did it successfully the second time. The third time we made it too big to rig.” He told the room to watch California, where he claimed it would take “seven or eight days to count the votes,” and where, in his words, “the numbers are looking strange because without any vote counting, the numbers dropped very precipitously for two Republicans.”

He is betting his most loyal followers won’t put two and two together. Because he says we have the most dishonest elections of any country anywhere in the world. The most dishonest on earth. But he won. Twice. So either he won under the most dishonest election system in the world, which would make his own victories meaningless, or it is not true, or he does not actually believe a word of it. There is no version of this where the math works. Because “rigged” has only ever meant one thing to Donald Trump. It means Trump lost. Every election he wins is clean and beautiful and historic. Every election he or his side loses is stolen.

Because the complaints are never just complaints. They are a sales pitch. And he is pulling out all stops to get us to buy into his lies, including his obsession with the SAVE America Act.

He posted a whole list about it again this morning. All voters must show photo ID. All voters must show proof of citizenship. No mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military, or travel. And then, bolted onto an elections bill for no reason other than to rile people up, “No men in women’s sports” and “No transgender mutilization surgery for our children.”

He recited the same list from behind the Resolute Desk this afternoon. And this is the part we have to notice. The manufactured crisis and the pre-packaged solution arrived on the same day, within hours of each other, because they are not two things. They are one thing. You declare the fire, and then you sell the country the extinguisher you happened to be holding the whole time.

This is the modern version of authoritarian propaganda. Simple solutions to complex problems. Or in Trump’s case, many of the problems he talks about don’t actually exist and are simply there to further radicalize his base.

What made today different, what genuinely concerned me, was when he blurted out that he has started building the machine to overturn, interfere with, block, or challenge our next major elections in November. He said it while talking about appointing Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence. Not the head of one agency. The head of the entire United States intelligence community.

A reporter asked him a straightforward question. Given the pushback, even from Senate Republicans, why did he think Pulte was the best person for the job? And Trump did what he always does. He rambled. He praised Pulte’s “high integrity.” He went off on a long tangent about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And then, buried right in the middle of all that, he said Pulte “may find out some things about the rigged elections, etc., etc.”

The President of the United States explained that the man he just put in charge of all of our intelligence agencies is there to “find out some things about the rigged elections.” He did not say Pulte would protect our elections or help keep us safe from foreign threats, which is the actual job of the Director of National Intelligence. And then he told us the term, twice. “It’s an acting position,” he said. “He’s not going to be permanent.” He was “interviewing people right now,” and Pulte was just “somebody to take it over for a little while.”

And when he was asked a follow-up question about whether Pulte had the necessary national security experience to take on that position, Trump answered, “Well, I do, and I think he does actually because he’s smart.” Then he compared Pulte to himself. “A lot of national security, I wasn’t greatly experienced in national security, and I think I’ve done a really great job with it.”

In other words, when asked point-blank whether the man has the qualifications to lead American intelligence, the President’s answer was that qualifications do not really matter. Being loyal is enough. And that is the whole point. The job was never about intelligence. He told us what it was really about: Trump’s plan to stay in power regardless of how we, the people, actually vote.

And he was careful to emphasize that Pulte would serve in an acting capacity. An acting director can remain in that position through at least the end of this year. Through November. Through the midterm elections. The word “temporary” is not reassuring. If anything, it sounds closer to a confession.

And that matters because it would likely be difficult, even with a Trump-backed Congress, to get someone like Pulte confirmed. But as an acting director, Trump doesn’t need confirmation. He can place the least qualified, but most loyal, person in charge of the nation’s intelligence apparatus and still remain within the boundaries of the law.

And if we want to know what “find some things” looks like when this particular man has the power to do it, we already know how far he will go to prove loyalty to Trump. At his last job, running the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte sent the Justice Department criminal referrals against four Democrats who had investigated Trump. New York Attorney General Letitia James. Former Congressman Eric Swalwell. Senator Adam Schiff. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. He also referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. That is the skill he is known for. Taking a position of power and turning it into a weapon against the president’s enemies. And now he has been handed the keys to every intelligence agency we have.

Donald Trump has been screaming that elections are rigged for years. We have heard it a thousand times. What changed today is the capacity of his propaganda. Because an intelligence chief can produce intelligence. He can manufacture a document, surface a “raw” and unverified report, declassify exactly what is useful and bury the rest, and hand the president a piece of paper that looks official enough to call an election into question. The distance between a sore loser and an actual attempt to overturn a result is the machinery. And today, we watched him put the last piece of that machinery into place. The false claim. The proposed law. And now the loyalist in the chair, whose stated job is to find the proof.

I am not the only one who saw it. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sounding this alarm for months, warning of a coordinated effort to try to interfere in the 2026 midterms. He said we have “a president that can’t get over the fact that he lost in 2020 and now in kind of a Nixonian effort is going to try to do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t get another beating in 2026.” And on Pulte specifically, Warner said, “If he’s been able to manipulate and weaponize mortgage information,” continuing with “think about if you got the keys to all of the intelligence agencies.”

Trump is building the excuse to reject a loss before a single midterm vote has been counted. And there is really only one reason a person builds that machine ahead of time. You build it because you already know you are going to lose.

This is the oldest authoritarian move there is. You do not wait for the election and then cry foul. You poison the well first. You tell people for months that the system is rigged, so that when the results come in and they are not what you wanted, half the country is already primed to believe the count was stolen. And then the “remedy,” the purges, the prosecutions, the claims that certain votes and certain people were illegal, looks justified to the people who believed you. Warner reached for the word Nixonian, and he is right, but Nixon at least still felt he had to resign. What we are watching now is a man who has spent a year learning that there are no consequences, assembling the tools to make sure he never has to.

Today was a lot. There were over a dozen other atrocities I wanted to share with you. Some days are just like that now. And so I sat with all the stories and tried to bring the one that mattered most. And as I wrote this, it became even more real what we are up against, because I do not want to have to keep sharing about his reckless attacks, or his endless nodding off. Or how he is looking more ill by the day. I’d rather spend the evening with my husband and daughters.

But I know that is what authoritarians want. They want us to feel hopeless and overwhelmed by the chaos and cruelty. And I reminded myself that I write these every night so that there will come a day when we can fully live again. Where this will be a memory of dark days and a lesson for future generations. That is why we have to keep calling it what it is, even if it feels like Groundhog Day. Because that is how they win. They count on our exhaustion. They count on us looking away. They count on us believing that because the outrage is constant, it somehow matters less. But it doesn’t.

And even on the days when it is hard to see a future without Trump’s nonstop terror, we are already seeing glimmers of better days. The SAVE America Act that he spent all day demanding failed today. In the Senate, this afternoon, it went down forty-eight to fifty. He could not even get a simple majority, let alone the sixty votes he would need. And the same four Republicans who have broken with him on this before broke with him again. Susan Collins. Lisa Murkowski. Mitch McConnell. Thom Tillis. Four members of his own party stood against it. And if that wasn’t enough, the Kennedy Center began ordering its staff to remove Donald Trump’s name from the building, less than a week after a federal judge ruled it had been added there illegally. The judge wrote that it was crystal clear the Center was named for President Kennedy, that Congress named it, and that only Congress can change it. Trump put his own name on the front of a national memorial on the banks of the Potomac, and a court told him no, and the name is coming back down.

The machine Trump keeps building to stay in power is real, and we have to see it clearly for what it is. But we also need to remember that the man building it is far weaker than he wants us to believe. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

After vanishing from public view for over a week following his visit to Walter Reed, the President of the United States finally reappeared for 43 minutes. And what the world saw was a man with his left hand gripping his right to hold it down, his face puffy, his right eye swollen, slurring his speech, and snapping between eruptions and a flat monotone voice. He led not with his disappearance or his health, but with pictures of the reflecting pool, comparing it to the Empire State Building and bragging about truckloads of garbage removed from it. He bragged about how he drew a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr. for the “I Have a Dream” speech. And buried beneath the rambling, he signed an executive order stripping job protections from roughly 8,000 senior federal workers, making them fireable at will so they can be replaced with political loyalists.

When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins tried to ask a question, he told her to “be quiet,” called her “a young, beautiful woman who never smiles” with “hatred in her eyes,” and said, “There’s something wrong with you.”

And then, he just stopped, causing an abrupt conclusion to the press conference. His staff sprang into rehearsed motion, clearing the room while he remained slumped behind the desk with a blank expression. We have seen this sequence before, and it keeps happening often enough that the people around him appear to know exactly what to do.

The House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution telling him to end his war in Iran, 215 to 208, with four Republicans crossing over to vote for it. Members of his own party broke ranks in public. That is his greatest fear, people saying no. Lawmakers are realizing they have more to fear from their constituents than from him. He is watching his protectors do the math, and one by one, they are starting to step away. That is what made him so agitated today. And that is why November matters more than ever.

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 Hundreds of thousands of voting rights advocates rallied across the country Saturday to call for sweeping protections against a further erosion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)

Democracy Docket, Trump DOJ voter roll grab echoes ‘poll taxes and literacy tests,’ civil rights group warns, Yunior Rivas, June 4, 2026. A civil rights coalition is warning a federal court that the Trump Justice Department’s demand for unredacted statewide voter rolls is not just a privacy threat — it is a modern revival of a long racist history of using voter registration data to intimidate Black voters.

“Poll taxes and literacy tests may be gone,” the United Black Agenda (UBA), a coalition of Black-led and allied groups in New Jersey, argued in a brief filed Thursday supporting New Jersey’s effort to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking access to the state’s voter registration list. “But while the means of intimidation may change, the ends stay the same.”

The filing argues that the Trump administration is trying to repurpose a civil rights law designed to protect Black voters into a tool for mass voter surveillance.SIGN UP TODAYGet updates straight to your inbox — for free

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The case is part of the Trump Justice Department’s nationwide campaign to obtain state voter rolls, including sensitive personal information.

In New Jersey and 30 other states, the department is demanding unredacted statewide voter files, including full names, birthdates, home addresses, driver’s license and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

So far, DOJ has had no success. The department has not won a single case, while eight federal courts have dismissed its lawsuits. DOJ has appealed some of those losses.

In its filing, UBA warned that the request turns the history and purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, specifically Title III, upside down.

That law gave the federal government power to inspect voting records so it could uncover racial discrimination and protect people who were being blocked from registering to vote. Now, the group wrote, the same law is being used to justify a sweeping demand for millions of voters’ private information.

“This request effectively transforms Title III from a shield into a sword in an attempt to weaponize the law designed to protect against this very type of conduct,” UBA wrote.

The group’s argument gives the opposition to DOJ’s voter roll grab a sharper civil rights frame.

The danger is not only that private voter data could be exposed, breached or misused. It is that, for Black voters, the government collection of voter information has often been a precursor to retaliation, intimidation and suppression.

“We need not theorize as to whether bulk data collection and mass challenges harm the communities that Title III aims to protect: we know that they do,” UBA wrote. “Poll taxes and literacy tests may be gone. But while the means of intimidation may change, the ends stay the same.”

The brief traces that warning back to Mississippi, where Black citizens who tried to register to vote once had their names published in local newspapers. UBA wrote that the requirement may have looked like a neutral administrative rule, but in practice it exposed Black registrants to retaliation from employers, landlords, banks and vigilantes.

“That publication requirement, dressed as a neutral administrative act, was meant to intimidate,” UBA wrote. “By making registrants’ names and addresses public, registrars made it easier for employers to fire registrants, landlords to evict them, banks to deny them credit, and vigilantes to threaten or assault them.”

The brief also points to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency created after Brown v. Board of Education that surveilled civil rights activists and shared information with officials and private actors who used it to retaliate. When the commission’s files were later made public, they showed records on more than 87,000 people, according to the filing.

For UBA, that history is not distant. The group argues that today’s tools may look more technical — database matching, mass eligibility challenges and federal data sharing — but they can produce the same chilling effect.

“History shows that when such data are gathered and shared, it does not merely collect dust,” UBA wrote. “Again and again, when voter records have been compiled and exposed beyond their original purpose, the same consequence has followed: the empowerment of weaponization against voters, whose rights the recording system is meant to serve.”

UBA also challenged DOJ’s legal theory, arguing that Title III was meant for targeted investigations of specific voting rights violations — not a nationwide dragnet. The brief contrasts the Trump administration’s request with historic civil rights enforcement cases in which the federal government sought local records to investigate officials accused of discriminating against Black voters.

Instead, the group wrote, DOJ is seeking the private data of more than 6 million New Jersey voters based on broad claims about list maintenance — the process states use to keep voter rolls accurate.

“Title III does not authorize such overbreadth,” UBA wrote. “Title III is not a dragnet to build a broad voter database but is rather a scalpel for investigating specific voting-rights violations.” 

The brief warns that a centralized federal voter database could fuel mass challenges to voter eligibility, especially if voter rolls are checked against federal immigration databases or other government records. Data matching systems are often flawed because records may be outdated, incomplete or inconsistent across agencies.

When those errors are used to flag voters, eligible people can be forced to prove they have a right to vote — or be wrongly removed from the rolls.

UBA wrote that these burdens often fall hardest on voters of color.

“Voter data is the fuel for mass eligibility challenges,” UBA wrote. “Putting every state’s full voter file into one federal database would dramatically amplify these challenges.”

The group also warned that the mere existence of a federal voter database could discourage people from registering or voting, particularly in communities that have long histories of being targeted by government surveillance.

“A federal database of every American voter’s identifying information, subject to cross-database matching and mass challenges, is itself intimidating,” UBA wrote. “Fear of misuse keeps people away from the polls just as surely as past forms of intimidation did.”

UBA is urging the court to reject DOJ’s demand and dismiss the lawsuit entirely.

“Over six decades after the passage of Title III, it should be true—but it is not—that voter intimidation and harassment are remnants of the past,” UBA wrote. “It should be true—but it is not—that the right to vote is not a data collection tool to mine and weaponize.”Next UpVirginia agrees to make voter registration easier for college students

A federal judge has approved a settlement agreement between the NAACP Virginia State Conference and the state of Virginia that will make it easier for college students to register to vote and ensure fewer of their registration applications are rejected.Related Links

Trump DOJ loses in Maine, Wisconsin as courts rebuff demand for voter rolls Court bashes internal DOJ legal memo that Trump admin used to justify voter roll grab.

New York Times, Opinion: A Shocking Betrayal of Black Americans, Mara Gay, June 5, 2026. Outside the blindingly white antebellum columns of the Alabama State Capitol on a recent Saturday, Martese Chism stood in the Southern heat with thousands of others, rallying for voting rights. It was a show of defiance amid a sweeping attack on Black political power.

To get there, Ms. Chism, 65, left Mississippi before dawn, drove to Memphis and rode a bus five hours to Montgomery with her 8-year-old great-nephew Carson in tow. They made the trip to honor Ms. Chism’s great-grandmother Birdia Keglar, a civil rights activist killed while fighting for the same rights in Mississippi 60 years ago.ImageA woman and a boy stand outside a house in matching shirts.Martese Chism Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

Millions of Americans like Ms. Chism live in states where Republicans are drawing maps that dilute the power of Black voters, and those who share their interests. Just on Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to eliminate one of only two Black-majority districts. By the fall elections, and almost certainly by the next presidential election, new maps will be in place.

The Supreme Court decision in April severely weakened the Voting Rights Act by allowing political parties to gerrymander voting districts for partisan advantage, no matter the effect on Black voters. The effort to destroy Black political power in the South is among the greatest betrayals of Black Americans, and those who have voted alongside them, by the federal government in living memory. It will have far-reaching consequences for all Americans, and for our democracy. Despite this, the work of mobilizing a response is largely falling to Black people.

In Montgomery, many of these Americans had come from across the South to gather in what was the first capitol of the Confederacy and register their outrage.

Elderly Black people protested in soaring temperatures. Some told me they had marched many times before, over decades. Parents carried small children who had overheated and fallen asleep, fanning them as their brown limbs dangled from their arms. White Americans showed up, too, joining the largely Black rally with signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps.”

Black Americans have carried extraordinary burdens in the United States, not only to exercise their own rights, but also to make the country a democracy. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 and strengthened in the decades that followed, had protected them from racial gerrymandering that divided them across multiple districts in order to blunt the impact of their votes. This was just one of a multitude of tactics Southern officials used to limit Black suffrage and stifle competition during Jim Crow.Editors’ PicksA Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding DayParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This WeekImageA boy leans against the window on a bus.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York TimesImagePeople board a bus traveling to a protest.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

In more recent years, an increasingly ideological Supreme Court began issuing rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act. On April 29, the court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority eviscerated much of what was left of the law, effectively saying the legislation that Americans marched, bled and died for decades ago was no longer necessary. Congressional maps that diminish the Black vote are now acceptable, according to the court, so long as state lawmakers say they are drawing them based on partisan advantage and not on race.

The suggestion that partisan gerrymandering has nothing to do with race is fantastical. It ignores the defining role of race and racism in shaping partisan affiliation in the United States. For instance, the embrace of the civil rights movement by the national Democratic Party is, according to many historians, the main reason so many white Southerners became Republicans in the second part of the 20th century, a phenomenon known as realignment.

Since the court’s April ruling, largely white Republican-led legislatures across the South have moved to dismantle Black political power at stunning speed, breaking apart voting blocs at the urging of a failing president desperate to keep control of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections. The redrawing of these maps is almost certain to sharply reduce the number of Black Americans serving in the U.S. House and could critically diminish the ability of Black voters and millions of other Americans to elect candidates of their choice. At the same time, they will become less able to hold the elected officials who come to represent them accountable. Redistricting has already happened in Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama. Lawmakers plan to redistrict in Georgia and Mississippi for future elections.

The clearest assessment of this arrangement came from Ms. Chism. “Yes, I can vote, but I have no power,” she told me. She then recalled the U.S. Constitution, which for 80 years when determining congressional seats counted enslaved Black Americans as three-fifths of a person. “They’re using our body, our vote, as part of the census, like they did during slavery. They count us, but we don’t have no voice. We back to that.”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.

All Americans, everywhere, have a deep stake in what happens to voters in the South. The harm of severely limiting the power of Black voters across the region will not be limited to Black Americans and marginalized people.

The South will be more likely to send members of Congress to Washington who have directly benefited from the erosion of the Voting Rights Act. These lawmakers can be expected to be less responsive to Black constituents and other Democrats in their own districts, but also the interests of voters across the country who hold similar political preferences.ImageA man holds a sign that reads “Protect our voting rights.” 

New York Times, Deal to Renew Surveillance Law Falters in the Senate Amid Revolt Over Pulte, Robert Jimison, June 5, 2026. Democrats who had been expected to supply the votes necessary to advance it balked after President Trump named Bill Pulte, right,  to head the intelligence apparatus.

With just one week left until a key government surveillance authority was set to expire, a deal to renew it faltered in the Senate early Friday morning after Democrats refused to back it because of concerns over President Trump’s recent appointment of Bill Pulte to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

A bloc of Republicans who have long harbored concerns about the spy program joined Democrats to block consideration of a bill that would extend for three years a warrantless wiretapping law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The vote was 52 to 47, well short of the 60 that would have been needed to move ahead.

While a group of Democrats had been working with Republicans on the measure and had been expected to deliver the votes necessary to move ahead with the extension, their anger over Mr. Pulte’s naming prompted an almost unanimous retreat from the emerging deal. Every Democrat except Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted against advancing the bill. They were joined by seven right-wing Republicans: Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Rick Scott of Florida and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

The defeat left uncertain the future of Section 702, which allows intelligence agencies to collect communications of foreign targets overseas — including when they are communicating with Americans — and has become one of the government’s most important counterterrorism and espionage tools. It is slated to expire on June 12, after members of Congress failed to reach a deal this spring for a longer-term extension.

Friday’s vote capped a week of growing unease after Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Pulte, a businessman and close political ally who has used his role as federal housing director as a perch to carry out a campaign of retribution against the president’s perceived enemies. Democrats and some Republicans have also criticized the choice given his lack of national security experience.

“I don’t know whether he has any intelligence or military background,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said of Mr. Pulte. “I don’t even know whether he has a security clearance.”

Democrats argued that Congress should not move forward with a long-term renewal of surveillance authorities until lawmakers received assurances about how the intelligence community would be led.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Bad News On Big Money: Judd Legum, right, une 5, 2026. 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. This afternoon, I’m 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 today, June 5 at 1 p.m. Eastern.

This webinar is free for all paid subscribers of Popular Information. Click the button below to register.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Calls for Trump’s Impeachment ESCALATE as Epstein Files Revelations GROW, Aaron Parnas, right, June 4, 2026. Trump's Name is Coming Down off of Kennedy Center, RFK Jr.'s Daughter in Law Resigns, and More. 

I just finished reviewing more than 100 pages of Pam Bondi’s testimony, where she appeared to place responsibility for the Epstein files controversy squarely on Todd Blanche while refusing to discuss her conversations with Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center has begun removing Trump’s name following a federal court order. Trump is now talking about additional construction near the Lincoln Memorial, RFK Jr.’s cousin has resigned from the CIA in protest of the administration, and there are several other major developments breaking this afternoon.

Some of you have noticed that I look a little more tired than usual this week. You’re right. The pace of the news cycle has been relentless. But I love this work, and I’m not slowing down.

Here’s what you missed:

Newly released testimony shows former Attorney General Pam Bondi told lawmakers that Todd Blanche was “in charge” of the Justice Department’s handling and release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, including decisions about redactions and document disclosures. Bondi sought to distance herself from the controversial process, insisting that all non-privileged Epstein records had been released and directing many questions to Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. Democrats argue the testimony raises new questions for Blanche, who is now expected to face scrutiny during his attorney general confirmation process over both the Epstein files and his role in the administration’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Bondi also denied involvement in the transfer of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison and reiterated that she believes Maxwell should spend the rest of her life in prison.

Starting today, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is beginning the process of removing President Trump’s name from the institution after a federal judge ruled that the board lacked authority to rename it without congressional approval. Kennedy Center staff have been instructed to immediately update email signatures, letterhead, and official documents, while all signage and branding bearing Trump’s name must be changed back by June 12. The order stems from a lawsuit filed by Joyce Beatty, who successfully argued that the board overstepped its legal authority when it adopted the “Trump Kennedy Center” name last year. Center officials are also reviewing whether to proceed with a planned two-year closure for $257 million in renovations, following the court’s directive that the board reconsider the decision under proper procedures. Here was my interview with Senator Mark Kelly concerning the vote-a-rama:

Senate Republicans voted down two separate efforts to permanently eliminate President Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, despite concerns from some GOP members that it could be used to compensate Trump allies or even some January 6 participants. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s amendment failed 49–50, while a separate attempt by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis also fell short, leaving open the possibility that the fund could return in another form. The dispute has complicated Senate consideration of a $70 billion Republican immigration bill, with some GOP lawmakers refusing to support the legislation unless the fund is explicitly terminated. Although acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers the administration is no longer pursuing the fund, Trump recently defended the proposal and declined to say whether it had been permanently abandoned.

Russia’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, once a major gathering for Western leaders and investors, now features a smaller group of American attendees, including Steven Seagal, Candace Owens, and Rodney Mims Cook Jr., chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Cook’s visit drew attention because he is the first U.S. official-level attendee at the forum in years, though U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was unaware of any official American delegation. The forum highlighted Russia’s growing focus on partnerships with countries such as Saudi Arabia and China, while discussions between Russian and American participants emphasized potential future business and cultural ties despite ongoing tensions over the war in Ukraine. Owens questioned continued U.S. support for Ukraine, Seagal advocated stronger U.S.-Russia relations, and the event underscored how Russia is using the forum to showcase international engagement despite Western isolation.

President Trump said plans are moving forward for a new pedestrian walkway near the Lincoln Memorial and claimed supporters want it named the “Trump Promenade.” Speaking about the project, Trump remarked, “We’re going to be doing a promenade at the Lincoln Memorial. They want to call it the Trump promenade.”

Amaryllis Fox Kennedy says she resigned from her intelligence roles in the Trump administration because she was concerned about what she described as inadequate oversight of intelligence agencies’ spending and the movement of cash and gold. She pointed to the recent arrest of a senior CIA official accused of hoarding millions of dollars in gold bars as evidence of broader problems within the intelligence community. Fox Kennedy denied reports that she left over disagreements about Trump’s Iran policy, instead arguing that her concern was the alleged politicization and lack of accountability within federal security agencies. The CIA disputed her claims, saying it properly informs congressional oversight committees about its resources and expenditures.

Texas barbecue restaurants are facing a crisis as beef prices soar, driven by inflation, drought, a historically small cattle herd, labor shortages, and concerns about the spread of the New World screwworm. Even some of the state's most famous barbecue joints are raising prices, cutting menu items, or struggling to stay open, while several longtime restaurants have already closed. Industry leaders warn that the financial pressure could permanently change Texas barbecue culture, threatening regional styles and small family-owned businesses. Many pitmasters say they see no relief in sight and fear more closures as meat costs continue to rise.

President Trump responded to reports that his likeness could appear on a proposed $250 bill by saying he views the idea as a compliment from supporters. Asked about the proposal, Trump said, “There is a group of people [who] really like the job we are doing. That is a great honor.” Federal law currently prohibits living individuals from appearing on U.S. currency, so any effort to place Trump on a $250 bill would require significant legal and legislative changes. The proposal has attracted attention largely as a symbolic gesture by some supporters rather than as an imminent change to U.S. currency.

A bipartisan group led by Bill Cassidy and Cory Booker has filed a court brief urging a judge to block the Trump administration’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The senators argue that the fund would allow the executive branch to use government resources to reward political allies and punish perceived opponents, posing a threat to democratic institutions. In unusually stark language, they wrote that the case concerns whether “the machinery of democratic government may be turned, by design and with explicit intent, against the democratic foundations it exists to serve.” The filing represents another instance of Republicans publicly breaking with President Trump over one of his administration’s initiatives. Image

Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would seek to recover money distributed through the Trump administration's proposed "anti-weaponization" fund if they regain control of Congress in 2027. Jeffries warned that recipients of payments from the fund could face future investigations and "clawbacks," arguing that taxpayer money should not be used for politically motivated compensation programs.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton has agreed to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information, resolving a criminal case that initially included multiple classified-information charges. Prosecutors say the information was contained in an electronic diary entry that Bolton shared with two family members, not in leaked documents or disclosures to foreign governments. As part of the agreement, Bolton faces a possible sentence ranging from probation to prison and has agreed to pay $2.25 million in restitution. The plea brings an end to a high-profile case involving one of President Trump’s most prominent former aides and later critics.

A watchdog group, Democracy Defenders Fund, has filed a lawsuit seeking records related to FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to the Winter Olympics. The suit seeks details including travel costs, security expenses, communications, and other records to determine whether public funds were used appropriately during the trip. The filing notes that tickets for high-profile Olympic events, including the men’s hockey final, reportedly ranged from roughly $500 to $1,600, raising questions about the overall cost to taxpayers. The lawsuit is part of a broader effort to obtain transparency about official travel and government spending by senior Trump administration officials.

Investor and TV personality Kevin O'Leary has agreed to cut his proposed massive Utah AI data center project in half after facing pressure from state lawmakers and environmental groups. Even after the reduction, the development would remain larger than Manhattan and require enormous amounts of power, raising concerns about water use, energy demand, and potential impacts on the Great Salt Lake ecosystem. Utah officials had pushed for even deeper cuts and greater transparency about the project's environmental effects, while local activists continue to oppose the plan. O'Leary argues the data center would create jobs, strengthen U.S. AI and defense capabilities, and help the country compete with China.

St. Paul prosecutors have declined to bring state charges against dozens of anti-ICE protesters, including former CNN host Don Lemon, who interrupted a church service in Minnesota earlier this year. The demonstrators were protesting immigration enforcement and the death of a woman during an ICE operation, and many still face federal civil rights charges. City officials said the evidence did not meet the standard for state criminal charges and noted that the protest did not involve violence, property damage, or threats to public safety. Church leaders strongly criticized the decision, arguing that disrupting a religious service should not be protected simply because it was part of a protest.

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report found serious problems at a Louisiana ICE detention center, including staff using a prohibited chokehold on one detainee and an officer stabbing another detainee’s hand with a pen during a use-of-force incident. Inspectors also documented unsanitary conditions, including leaking ceilings, falling insulation, and deficiencies in food service, record-keeping, and detainee privacy protections. The watchdog issued nine recommendations for improvement, while ICE said it is addressing the issues through additional training and corrective measures. The findings come as scrutiny of conditions inside ICE detention facilities intensifies amid record detention levels and growing political debate over immigration enforcement.

Immigration lawyers across the country say scammers are increasingly using AI-generated voices, deepfakes, fake websites, and cloned social media accounts to impersonate them and defraud immigrants seeking legal help. Victims are often promised impossible outcomes—such as instant citizenship, guaranteed residency, or canceled deportation proceedings—and are tricked into paying thousands of dollars for fraudulent services. Attorneys and advocacy groups warn that the consequences can be far worse than financial loss, as victims may miss court hearings, file invalid applications, or unknowingly receive deportation orders. Experts say the surge in scams is being fueled by fear surrounding immigration enforcement, long case backlogs, and the growing sophistication of AI-powered fraud.

A Florida mother is suing Campbell Soup Company and Walmart after claiming she discovered live worms or parasites in a can of SpaghettiOs that she and her daughter had already eaten. The lawsuit alleges that the contaminated product, purchased at a Walmart store in Okeechobee, Florida, caused both mother and child to suffer illnesses including parasitic infections, gastrointestinal symptoms, and ongoing medical complications. The family is seeking $75,000 in damages, arguing that Campbell’s and Walmart failed to maintain proper food safety standards and violated federal food safety laws. Both companies deny wrongdoing, with Walmart saying it is reviewing the complaint and Campbell’s stating it believes the allegations are without merit and will vigorously defend itself in court.

A rare strain of Lyme disease caused by the bacterium Borrelia mayonii has been identified in New York for the first time, according to a new CDC report. Previously found only in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the bacterium was detected in a resident of Herkimer County, New York, and in several ticks collected from the person’s property. While it causes Lyme disease similar to the more common strain, experts say it may be more likely to produce nausea, vomiting, widespread rashes, and neurological symptoms. Researchers believe the infection remains extremely rare, but its appearance highlights the expanding range of tick-borne diseases as climate conditions continue to favor tick populations across the Northeast.

Disputed Trump Agenda Plans

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

New York Times, Senate Passes $70 Billion G.O.P. Immigration Bill, Annie Karni and Robert Jimison, Updated June 5, 2026, Senate Republicans on Friday rammed through their $70 billion bill to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown through the remainder of his term, after beating back bipartisan efforts to add language to bar or sharply restrict a federal payout fund for his political allies.

The 52-to-47 vote early Friday morning sent the measure to the House, which was expected to move quickly to pass it.

It was a victory for the president and his party, who have been eager to spotlight their hard-line immigration stance — and Democrats’ opposition to it — in the middle of an election year when their control of Congress is at stake. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, was the only Republican to oppose the measure, joining all Democrats.

But passage came only after Republican leaders quelled an internal revolt that had been simmering for weeks over recent moves by Mr. Trump that have underscored how his personal agenda is diverging sharply from his party’s political interests. The divisions threatened to sink the measure and prompted several G.O.P. defections on bipartisan efforts to modify it, all of which failed in an hourslong series of back-to-back votes that stretched all day Thursday and into the predawn hours of Friday.

The overnight session featured a series votes orchestrated by Democrats seeking to force Republicans to weigh in for the record on unpopular moves the president has made, including his plan to create a $1.8 billion payout fund to compensate people who he claims have been victimized by the government; his push for $1 billion in federal funding for his White House ballroom project; and his decision to name the housing secretary Bill Pulte as the nation’s top intelligence official.

It was a victory for President Trump and his party, though the debate exposed fissures between Republican senators and Mr. Trump on a variety of issues.

New York Times, House Passes Ukraine Aid in Defiance of Republican Leaders, Robert Jimison, Updated June 5, 2026. Eighteen G.O.P. lawmakers broke with their party and joined Democrats to deliver yet another blow to the president’s foreign policy agenda.

The House voted on Thursday to approve new aid for Ukraine and impose a fresh round of sanctions targeting the industries fueling Russia’s war economy, after 18 Republicans defied their leaders to join Democrats in support of a bill that runs counter to President Trump’s agenda.

The legislation, which passed 226 to 195, would provide $8 billion in loans to Ukraine and $1.8 billion in aid for military and security assistance. In addition to putting new sanctions on Russian-affiliated businesses and officials, it would also punish foreign companies, organizations and individuals that attempt to evade sanctions in an effort to support Moscow.

It now heads to the Senate, where Mr. Trump’s opposition has stopped similar attempts at new penalties on Russia and its allies. And even if it were to clear both chambers, it would likely be vetoed by the president, who has repeatedly balked at legislation that seeks to constrain his ability to negotiate on foreign policy matters.

Still, backers of the measure said the vote Thursday sent a strong bipartisan message to the president that significant support remains in Congress for Ukraine. It was the second time this week that Republicans have broken with Mr. Trump over foreign conflicts, after a handful of them joined Democrats on Wednesday to push through a war powers resolution that seeks to require the president to seek congressional approval to continue the war in Iran.

The Ukraine bill, led by Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, was introduced in April 2025 but languished after Republican leaders refused to take it up in committee and Speaker Mike Johnson blocked it from coming to the floor.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.

Mr. Meeks turned to a discharge petition, a procedural move that allows lawmakers to circumvent the leadership and speed a bill to the floor if they collect signatures from a majority of House members. That required the backing of all Democrats and a small group of Republicans, a threshold reached last month when Representative Kevin Kiley of California, an independent who caucuses with Republicans, signed onto the petition. Two Republicans, Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, were already onboard, having broken with their party months earlier to back the effort.

The vote on Thursday drew even broader Republican support.

Ahead of the vote, Mr. Meeks told reporters that support for the measure signaled to the people of Ukraine that “the United States and Congress will stand and fight and work with you so that you preserve your democracy, your freedom and justice until Vladimir Putin is declared a war criminal and put away.”

The vote was the first time the House had approved significant financial support for Ukraine in more than two years. The last aid package, which Mr. Johnson put his job on the line to shepherd through the House, included $60 billion in security assistance for Kyiv.

Backers of the latest tranche of funding for the Ukrainians emphasized that an overwhelming majority of the funding was in the form of direct loans, something that Mr. Trump has said he favors over security assistance that would not require being paid back.

“Are we going to stand with good, or are we going to stand with evil?” Mr. Bacon said ahead of the vote. “That’s what this is about tonight.”

Republican leaders suggested that the move could undermine the president’s ability to negotiate an end to the war.

“If you support this bill, then clearly you are not interested in peace because the consequences would tie the hands of this president and could lead to future hostilities that would bleed over into Europe,” Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, said in a speech on the House floor opposing the legislation.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections

New York Times, Platner Denies Hurting Ex-Girlfriend and Says He Will Not Quit Senate Race, Tim Balk, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, appeared Thursday night in his first interview since a New York Times report about his treatment of several women he had dated, denying one woman’s account that he had physically harmed her and saying he would not drop out of the race.

In a nearly 25-minute appearance on MS Now’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” Mr. Platner, right, said that he would “absolutely” take responsibility for elements of his personal history. He described a history of self-medicating, and a pattern of “not exactly acting with the best behavior” after his service in the military.

But he reiterated that any allegations that he had behaved violently toward a girlfriend were “simply not true.”

“In this piece, there’s a lot about my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol,” Mr. Platner said. “And I have been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service.”

And Mr. Platner, whose primary is just five days away, said he had “not once” considered leaving the campaign in Maine, which is considered key to Democrats’ efforts to win back the Senate in the midterm elections.

Hours earlier, The Times reported that Lyndsey Fifield, a 40-year-old Virginia conservative who has worked for Republican campaigns and right-leaning groups and dated Mr. Platner roughly from 2013 to 2015, recalled that he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders. She said he once twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she could not get out, telling her to remain there until she calmed down. He never hit or punched her, she said.

The Times also reported that two other women who had dated Mr. Platner recalled him drinking heavily and womanizing. One of the women, Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, said his behavior was “unsettling” and “reckless,” and she described him as someone who “does not respect women.”

Ms. Fifield said that Mr. Platner had lied by saying he had learned from news media inquiries during the campaign that a tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol called a Totenkopf. She said that Mr. Platner knew it was a Nazi symbol years ago, and that he had called it “my Totenkopf” at the time.

And she provided The Times with screenshots of a private group chat in which she told her friends that Mr. Platner had an “actual” Nazi symbol on his chest. The message was dated Aug. 20 — months before Mr. Platner acknowledged knowing that the tattoo resembled the symbol.

In the interview with Mr. Hayes, Mr. Platner denied that he had known of the symbolism until recently. He said he had once taken his shirt off, exposing the tattoo, during a wedding attended by Jewish members of his extended family. “I would not have taken my shirt off in that context if I had known,” said Mr. Platner, who has since covered up the tattoo.

In an interview after The Times reported on his treatment of women he had dated, Graham Platner acknowledged “not exactly acting with the best behavior” after his military service.

New York Times, Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior, Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing. 

On Tuesday evening, after a whirlwind day in Washington, Graham Platner, right, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, rushed home.

Rumors were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about Mr. Platner’s messy personal life, after news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married. Democratic senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming, staking out his hometown.

Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.

In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.

But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.

Mr. Platner could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful.

Mr. Platner, 41, a combat veteran, has spoken openly about grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drinking that he said resulted from his time in the military. As revelations about him have surfaced — including his dismissive remarks online about rape and derogatory comments about women, as well as a tattoo he had that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol — he has said his past behavior does not reflect who he is today. Mainers, he has urged, should not judge him for “the worst thing I said on the internet on my worst day 14 years ago.”

The critical accounts provided by three of the women interviewed by The Times, who were each in romantic relationships with him for years, give a fuller picture of Mr. Platner’s life. They shed light on an earlier era, when he has acknowledged intense struggles, but also raise questions about his more recent years in Maine, which his campaign has presented as a period of healing and personal redemption.

The disclosures last week that Mr. Platner, now married, was exchanging sexual messages with women as recently as last year have complicated that narrative and unnerved Democrats, who see the Maine seat as key to their efforts to regain control of the Senate.Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”

His campaign strongly denied that he knew what the tattoo stood for. And in a statement to The Times, Mr. Platner said he had “too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during what he described as a “very dark period of my life.”

“I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better,” he said. “Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated. I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since, and the movement we are building in Maine.”

U.S. Media, High-tech, Culture, Religion

More On Iran, Lebanon War

New York Times, Hopes of Lebanon Cease-fire Falter as Israel and Hezbollah Fight On, Euan Ward, June 5, 2026. The U.S.-brokered agreement requires Hezbollah, which Iran backs, to stop firing first. But the group, not party to the talks, rejected the conditions as a virtual surrender.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah showed little sign of abating on Friday, a day after the Iran-backed militant group rejected a U.S.-brokered cease-fire, as Israeli forces bombarded towns across southern Lebanon and ordered residents to flee.

The continued violence has thrown into question the agreement that Israel and Lebanon announced this week after direct talks in Washington, raising doubts about whether it would ever take effect.

For many civilians in southern Lebanon, the faltering deal brought a now-familiar directive from Israel’s military to leave their homes. More than one million people have already been displaced since the war erupted in March, according to Lebanese authorities. Most have no indication when, or if, they can return.

The cease-fire is contingent on Hezbollah’s pulling back from Lebanon’s border region with Israel, and on a “complete cessation” of the group’s attacks, but does not require Israel to make any immediate concessions. Hezbollah was not involved in the negotiations and Lebanon’s government has little power to force the group to comply.

Israel’s ongoing offensive against Hezbollah complicates President Trump’s efforts to reach a peace deal with Iran, the group’s chief backer, which has threatened to pull out of talks if Israel does not cease its attacks.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and Lebanon? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon accused Iran on Friday of using his country as leverage in its talks with Washington: “This is not your country. It’s our country,” he told CNN, in unusually blunt remarks that reflected a widening rift between Beirut and Tehran.

“They are using Lebanon as a bargaining chip in their negotiation with the United States,” he added. “It’s unacceptable.”

While Mr. Aoun has thrown his weight behind the cease-fire agreement, it has exposed rifts in Lebanon’s political establishment.

Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon’s Parliament, who is a key intermediary between Washington and Hezbollah, criticized the terms of the agreement on Friday, saying it had been “booby-trapped” with one-sided conditions for the group.

Mr. Berri said he would only support an unconditional cease-fire, in which Hezbollah would only withdraw from southern Lebanon if Israel were to withdraw in parallel. His criticism underscored how far the U.S.-brokered deal was from terms that Hezbollah and its closest political allies were willing to accept.

The latest agreement follows an earlier U.S.-brokered cease-fire that took effect in April but did little to stem the fighting.

Israel’s flurry of evacuation orders on Friday extended deep into Lebanon, including the hillside town of Anqoun, which is about 16 miles from the Israeli border and within commuting distance of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Anqoun had previously been spared such orders, and Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported that the town was sheltering roughly 2,500 displaced people, many of whom were forced to flee again on Friday.

Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported heavy strikes across the country’s south, many in towns and villages that were not subject to evacuation orders. Hezbollah also kept up rocket and drone attacks on Friday that targeted Israeli ground forces.

The continued fighting came after Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, rejected the cease-fire agreement on Thursday, calling it a “humiliating” attempt to force Lebanon’s submission to Israel and tantamount to “surrender.”

Mr. Qassem said any truce deal must be comprehensive and include Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, where it has occupied broad stretches of territory since the latest invasion began in March.

“As long as the occupation continues, the resistance will continue,” Mr. Qassem said.

Hard-liners in Israeli have also criticized the deal, and the country’s defense minister, Israel Katz, gave little indication on Thursday that Israel was preparing to halt its campaign against Hezbollah.

Mr. Katz said that Israeli forces would continue operating in Lebanon “at this stage,” adding that the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon would not yet be allowed to return.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

New York Times, When Jeffrey Epstein Needed Favors, This Restaurant Mogul Was There, Kim Severson, June 5, 2026. Stephen Hanson, whose empire included Blue Water Grill and Ruby Foo’s, was a devoted friend and wingman who helped manage and entertain the women in Epstein’s orbit.

When Jeffrey Epstein wanted his favorite Zweigle’s Pop Open hot dogs ferried from his townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, he did what any exceedingly rich person might.

He had his staff reach out to a close friend with a private jet. Stephen Hanson, then head of a Manhattan restaurant empire that at its peak served more than 20,000 people a day at 25 theatrical, high-volume restaurants like Blue Water Grill, Dos Caminos and Ruby Foo’s, was happy to make the delivery himself.

“In the white freezer in downstairs kitchen of 71st street there are packages of frozen hot dogs,” Mr. Epstein’s private chef emailed an assistant. “JE would like to have hot dogs for lunch tmrw and these are the new dogs he likes.”

There was one other favor Mr. Epstein wanted on that August weekend in 2012. He asked Mr. Hanson to make room for a woman who would be bringing a wallet he’d left behind, according to documents the Department of Justice collected as it investigated Mr. Epstein. She was later paid settlements from funds established for Mr. Epstein’s victims.

The Justice Department files attest to Mr. Epstein’s transactional relationships with many powerful men. Billionaires like the Victoria’s Secret magnate Les Wexner and the private equity investor Leon Black helped build his fortune. Boldfaced names like Woody Allen and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince, provided cachet and social access.

What Mr. Hanson offered, a review of the thousands of emails and texts the two men exchanged over a decade shows, was access to the world of food and hospitality — as well as a wingman who enjoyed the company of attractive women, and had the means to help manage and entertain them.

Mr. Hanson got the young women tables in his dining rooms. He arranged cooking classes for them. When Mr. Epstein asked him to help women land visas or find jobs in his restaurants, the answer was almost always yes.

During their long friendship, Mr. Hanson became one of the most powerful people in the restaurant business. In 2003, Bon Appétit magazine named him restaurateur of the year, and he expanded his reach to Las Vegas. By 2007, his company, BR Guest Hospitality, was valued at $300 million.

Mr. Hanson still found time, the files show, to aid his friend in all kinds of ways. He recruited people to manage Mr. Epstein’s private Caribbean island compound and set up tastings to help him hire the perfect private chef. No errand was too small. When the beef jerky that fueled one of Mr. Epstein’s odd dietary binges didn’t taste quite right, Mr. Hanson worked on the recipe. He even had his executive assistant send a sample to a laboratory to test its nutritional value.Editors’ PicksA Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding DayParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Nothing in the files or other public records indicates that Mr. Hanson had sex with minors, as Mr. Epstein did. In a video interview in 2021, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s told the F.B.I. that a decade earlier, when she was in her early 20s, Mr. Epstein had sent the restaurateur to her New York City apartment, where Mr. Hanson paid her for oral sex at least a dozen times.

The woman, who first met Mr. Epstein when she was 17, said she had become dependent on Mr. Epstein and did whatever he requested. Her name was redacted in the files, and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman would not say whether the agency had investigated further, but Mr. Hanson has never been charged with a crime.

In response to questions for this article, Mr. Hanson did not address the woman’s allegations, but issued a brief statement through his lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, a former attorney for Mr. Epstein. “Mr. Epstein knew and relied upon Mr. Hanson for advice on certain matters given Mr. Hanson’s hospitality industry experience,” it read in part. “Mr. Epstein was adept at deception and manipulation. He pulled the wool over the eyes of leading academics, scientists, and titans of business. The suggestion, assumption, or insinuation that there was anything untoward about, in relation to, or concerning, any connection between Mr. Hanson and Mr. Epstein is untrue.”ImageThe beginning text of an email.Mr. Hanson’s birthday greeting to Mr. Epstein is one of several affectionate messages between the two.Credit...U.S. Department of Justice

The files make clear that the two were tight, both before and after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a child for prostitution and spent 13 months in a Palm Beach, Fla., jail. Mr. Hanson, whose hospitality empire is now little more than a single, recently opened restaurant in Palm Beach, was once designated as a backup executor in Mr. Epstein’s will. His name appears on more than 7,000 pages in the Epstein files, about as often as Mr. Allen’s and the former Prince Andrew’s.

Mr. Hanson and Mr. Epstein traded Valentine greetings and presents, including a take-a-number machine that customers in a deli might use. Mr. Epstein placed it in a prominent spot in a room of his Upper East Side townhouse where people waited to see him.

“Don’t take this goofy but I love you as a friend,” Mr. Hanson wrote in one of several affectionate messages. In another, Mr. Epstein told him, “There is still little I wouldn’t do for you.”

Mr. Hanson was one of the last people Mr. Epstein texted on July 6, 2019, before he boarded his Gulfstream jet in Paris and flew to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. It was his final day of freedom. Federal agents were waiting, and a shocked Mr. Epstein was arrested on federal charges of trafficking minors.

Mr. Hanson had reached out to wish him a happy Fourth of July. “Ive been careful as my press has been toxic,” Mr. Epstein texted back, explaining in his typo-laden style why he was in Paris. “No need to put you at risk. Hopefully changing soosn.”

“No different then before,” Mr. Hanson replied. “Nyc understand a bitch. But palm is easy. Enjoy paris.”ImageTwo men standing in a kitchen with food on the counter.The two men at Little Saint James, Mr. Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, in an undated photo from the Justice Department files.Credit...U.S. Department of JusticeA Restaurateur’s Skills

Mr. Hanson, 76, made his name by democratizing fine dining in Manhattan. He knew that for every customer seeking a three-Michelin-star experience, there were a thousand who just wanted a solid piece of grilled tuna and a cold martini.

Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., to parents who built a sportswear line around his mother’s designs, Mr. Hanson got hooked on Manhattan hospitality in the early 1970s, when he managed the first TGI Friday’s, which helped start the era’s singles-bar craze. In the golden age of disco, he opened and managed nightclubs, then tried his hand at trading commodities. His first restaurant — the Coconut Grill, on the Upper East Side — debuted in 1987.

Michael White, the executive chef who along with Mr. Hanson owned Fiamma Osteria when it won three stars from The New York Times in 2002, considers his former partner a pioneer. “The detail and the execution and knowing who is in your dining room, that’s all the stuff I learned from Stephen,” he said.

Ivy Stark, who was head chef at Mr. Hanson’s Dos Caminos restaurants in the early 2000s, said his systems for managing inventory and personnel were innovative, and his attention to detail unmatched. “He could walk into one of the restaurants and see a lightbulb out from 50 feet away,” she said.

He had a reputation for barking at employees, she said, but also a sweet side that was on full display when he would bring his two young daughters into the kitchen. (Mr. Hanson, a bachelor into his 50s, married Deana Dibello, a former host at his Upper West Side restaurant Isabella’s, in 2003.)

It’s unclear how Mr. Hanson met Mr. Epstein, but by the late 1990s, their friendship had blossomed. Both had climbed high enough in their respective fields to play in a world of wealth where being surrounded by models, or aspiring models, provided social currency and potential dates.

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

New York Times, Ohio State Agrees to $100 Million Payout Over Sexual Abuse Claims, Billy Witz, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). The deal with 279 former students is the latest in the long-running case at the university. In all, nearly 600 people who said they were abused by an athletic department doctor have settled.

Ohio State University has reached a preliminary agreement to pay $100 million to 279 former students who said they were sexually abused by a former athletic team doctor, the latest group to strike a deal with the college in the long-running case.

The settlement, which was ratified in principle by the university’s board of trustees in a meeting on Wednesday night, would resolve all but one of the remaining 280 plaintiffs’ claims.

Previously, Ohio State had paid out more than $61 million to 317 people who claimed they had been abused by Dr. Richard Strauss, an athletic team doctor from 1979 until he was fired in 1996. Dr. Strauss died by suicide in 2005.

Ohio State’s president, Ravi Bellamkonda, said that resolving the claims was important to the university. “We continue to be grateful for their courage in coming forward,” he said of the former students.

A lawyer for some of the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment. The judge in the case had instructed the parties not to discuss the settlement until it was finalized.

“We will provide additional information when we are in a position to do so,” John Zeiger, the outgoing chairman of the board of trustees, said at the meeting.

Several factors appear to have driven the parties toward an agreement.

In April, the judge, Michael Watson, rejected Ohio State’s motion to restrict damages to tuition costs, allowing the plaintiffs to recoup more money. Last month, more than 30 former Ohio State football players — including three members of the 1980 Rose Bowl team — joined the lawsuit.

And earlier this year, the judge ruled that Les Wexner, a prominent Ohio State alumnus under scrutiny for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, must sit for a deposition. Mr. Zeiger has been Mr. Wexner’s longtime personal lawyer.

The parties went back to mediation on May 11 ahead of an October trial date. But left open was the possibility of former Ohio State football players — including the two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin, who has been deposed in the case — taking the witness stand as the upcoming season played out.Editors’ PicksA Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding DayParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

“I think the judge’s decisions had a lot to do with it,” said State Senator Bill DeMora, whose district includes Ohio State. “A trial would have been ugly. It would have been terrible for the university and it would have done damage to our football program.”

Though the abuse allegations against Dr. Strauss were known around Ohio State for years, they had been kept out of the public eye until 2018 when a former wrestler, Michael DiSabato, came forward with accusations that Dr. Strauss had abused him. Mr. DiSabato is among the few plaintiffs who have chosen to be named.

As more came forward, Ohio State hired a law firm to investigate. A 182-page report, released in 2019, found that Dr. Strauss had sexually molested at least 177 men, including many varsity athletes. Plaintiffs have said that figure undercounts the abuse.

The report detailed instances of athletes who visited the doctor for a variety of ailments — such as a sore throat or an ear problem — only to have Dr. Strauss fondle their genitals as part of the examination. The accounts were so numerous, the report said, that investigators elected not to include an exhaustive accounting of each one.

The report also said more than 50 athletic department staff members and others had been aware of the doctor’s misconduct but did nothing to stop it. Though Dr. Strauss was fired in 1996, he was allowed to retain his tenured faculty position for two more years.

Many former wrestlers have said that the influential congressman Jim Jordan, a former assistant coach, was aware of the conduct by Dr. Strauss, who, according to one of the lawsuits, was known among them as Dr. Jellypaws. Mr. Jordan has denied knowing about it.

The claims are not unique among Big Ten universities.

Michigan State paid out $500 million to the victims of a former team doctor, Lawrence G. Nassar, who is serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting gymnasts. Penn State has paid close to $130 million to the sexual abuse victims of a former football coach, Jerry Sandusky, who is in prison. And the University of Michigan paid out $490 million to more than 1,000 athletes and students who said they were abused by a former team doctor, Robert E. Anderson, who is deceased.

The Strauss case has dragged on for more than eight years, remaining in the background as other scandals have played out at Ohio State. This year, Walter Carter Jr. resigned as university president after disclosing that he had an improper relationship with a woman who sought public funding for a podcast. A professor assaulted a journalist outside a classroom. And protests demanding that Mr. Wexner’s name be removed from campus buildings gathered momentum as his ties to Mr. Epstein emerged.

“It’s ludicrous that it took this long,” Mr. DeMora said. “I’m happy the university is done with the stain of this chapter and that there’s some closure for the victims of this horrible abuse.”

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Says Government Must Restart Asylum and Immigration Processing, Zach Montague and Madeleine Ngo, June 5, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• Immigration: A slate of the Trump administration’s immigration policies were struck down on Friday by a federal judge, who rejected the government’s indefinite holds on asylum applications globally and on immigration applications from people from 39 countries who had been unable to obtain green cards and citizenship. Read more ›
• Construction Projects: An appeals court panel will hear arguments on Friday over Mr. Trump’s White House ballroom project and whether he had legal authority to bulldoze part of the complex without congressional approval. On Thursday, Mr. Trump announced plans for a “promenade” behind the Lincoln Memorial, and a federal commission advanced his proposal to build a 250-foot triumphal arch, despite public opposition. Read more ›

A judge criticized Trump administration policies driven by “anti-immigrant sentiments.”

A federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday struck down a slate of immigration policies enacted by the Trump administration, writing that it had left immigrants living in the United States in “indeterminate legal limbo” because of “anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

In a searing 135-page opinion, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote that actions to lock eligible asylum seekers out of the immigration system and deny others temporary work permits had made it functionally impossible for a broad swath of people to remain in the country. The resulting squeeze, he wrote, “placed the lives of countless individuals on hold — solely by virtue of their countries of birth.”

The policies, enacted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, included a global hold on asylum applications filed with the agency. It also paused decisions on immigration applications filed by people from the 39 countries subject to the president’s travel ban, halting their ability to obtain green cards, U.S. citizenship and other benefits.

The policies were announced in November shortly after the authorities said an Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington. The man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, has pleaded not guilty.

The freeze resulted in many immigrants inside the United States waiting indefinitely for decisions on their applications, disrupting their ability to legally work and leaving them to question whether they could remain in the country.

“Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures,” Judge McConnell wrote.

Judge McConnell wrote that the various holds violated the immigration laws governing the responsibilities of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and that the agency had routinely applied the law unequally under the policies.

He wrote that the burden of the changes fell hardest on people who had followed all the procedures demanded of them, rather than immigrants who entered the country illegally, whom the Trump administration routinely vilifies.

“The court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy: If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to ‘follow the law’ and ‘do things the right way,’” he wrote. “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.”

Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit that helped represent the immigration groups and unions behind the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.

“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: The federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, the organization’s president. “These unlawful policies caused enormous harm to families, workers, asylum seekers and communities across the country.”

Neither U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, immediately responded to a request for comment.

Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: social media star Hunter Biden has no fucks left to give-- and we are all here for it, Jeff Tiedrich, right, June 5, 2026. Has anyone in US politics been more unfairly maligned than Hunter Biden?

He’s been harassed. he’s been the target of multiple smear campaigns. he’s been accused of corruption and crimes. he’s been forced to testify. he’s had his personal life put under a microscope — and he’s had photos of his freakishly oversized trouser hog put on display on the floor of the House.

All of this is why it’s super fucking satisfying to see that Hunter Biden is finally hitting back.

Trump hasn’t made a public appearance in 8 days. This after an unscheduled visit to the hospital- because he “likes getting check ups.” Thank God Jake Tapper (or as I like to call him- the Brick Tamland of his generation) is on the case hunting down clues in a book about my mom’s experience as First Lady four years ago.

I have to confess that No Fucks To Give Hunter Biden is my favorite Hunter Biden, and I am so here for it. after letting his social media presence dwindle for years, Hunter’s back with a vengeance.

Hunter Biden’s complaint is the same one we all have: why are the Jake Tappers of the world still sniffing Joe Biden’s pant leg, while right in front of their faces, the current sitting president is a cognitively-collapsed fuckwit who lost control of his bowels years ago?

except, of course, for Hunter Biden this hits much closer to home.

So let me get this straight. Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?” Please.

remember how the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press lost their fucking minds because Hunter Biden sold some paintings for a few thousand dollars? where are their howls of outrage, now that Dear Leader’s awarded multi-hundred-thousand dollar contracts to companies co-owned by his two felonious failsons?

hey, you know what Hunter Biden can do that MAGA can’t? laugh at himself.

can you imagine Donny being this self-critical?

can you imagine Donny’s failson Cokey McSniffles being this honest?

this is why Hunter Biden was able to turn his life around, while Don Jr. is still walking around with the half the gross national product of Bolivia up his nostrils.

it’s because Hunter was able to face the brutal facts about himself, and get the help he recognized he needed, while Cokey remains the result of a multi-generational exercise in self-delusion and denial.

and it doesn’t hurt Hunter Biden has a caring father who loves him, while Cokey’s own fucked-up dad once slapped him in the face for not wearing a suit to a baseball game.

congratulations, Hunter, on being seven years clean.

mad respect.

now let’s check in with the other member of that multi-generational exercise in self-delusion and denial, because for the second day in a row — lucky us — Preznit Fuckwit graced us with another Oval Bordello dog-and-pony show.

there he was, surrounded by his Emotional Support Flunkies, as he sat behind the Resolute Desk, closed his weary eyes, slumped over, and began to crop-dust the entire room.

look at this. all of Dear Leader’s neutered toadies have to stand there and pretend that what’s happening isn’t happening. seriously, Jake Tapper, are you getting all this?

oh dear. now that he’s finished assaulting the Reflecting Pool, Lord Shitticus is going to fuck up the Lincoln Memorial next.

“the Lincoln— Memorial, the uh, front was supposed to be the back, the back was supposed to be the front, never got built because they built two roadways behind it. after it was built. and it shut off the uhhhhhh— gateway to the water. that was really gonna be the main entry. and we’re gonna be doing that, we’re gonna— it’s called the promenade. buh duh— the promenade. they wanna call it the Trump promenade. but I dunno if I wanna— it’s gonna be beautiful. it’s a beautiful project and it’s gonna take— the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac.”

wait, who wants to call it ‘the Trump promenade’? are they in the room with us right now? is it the ceaseless shrieking noises inside Donny’s own fat head that are telling him this? sweet Jesus, this is just one more thing that the next president’s Secretary of Unfucking All That Shit is going to have to put back the way it used to be.

what is Donny gibbering about, with the back is the front and the front is the back? he’s just making stuff up on the spot — yet instead of calling in the nurse to jab Donny with a powerful sedative, everybody just stands around as if some fucked-up proposal to molest the Lincoln Memorial because it’s backwards were the most perfectly normal thing they’d ever heard.

now, because I’m a Responsible Journalist and Everything™, I had to make sure I was in command of my facts — so I googled ‘is the front of the Lincoln Memorial supposed to be the back,’ and this is what Google’s janky six-fingered plagiarism robot answered:

The Lincoln Memorial was designed to face east towards the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol, not the Potomac River. Its current orientation remains exactly as the original architect, Henry Bacon, intended it to be.

so let me repeat myself: what the fuck is Donny gibbering about? Jake Tapper, do you have any idea? Jake? hello, Jake?

sigh.

but what I really want to know is, can we make the Lincoln Memorial more secure? I mean if the Epstein Dance Hall can have sniper nests and a drone army on top of it, why not the Linc M?

and if we can’t have drones, can we at least have the dogs or the bees, or the dogs with the bees in their mouth, and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?

because that would be fucking awesome.

oh wait, Donny doesn’t want to talk about any of that. he’s too busy committing a racism.

reporter: “the Black unemployment rate is 7.3%. when you ran for president, you courted Black voters and talked about what you described as ‘Black jobs.’ how do you explain why this disparity happened?”

Donny: “well, we’re doing very well with uhhhhh, the Black jobs. African-American jobs.”

racist much, Donny? wouldn’t you love for some reporter to ask Donny what he considers a ‘Black job’? because we all know what the answer would be. janitor. cook. maid. nanny. I just want to hear Donny say it out loud.

oh, wait. in this case, a reporter doesn’t have to ask — because Donny answers the question all on his own, without being prompted. let’s just play the rest of that clip.

“where we’re really gonna do well is when all these plants are open. we’re building many car plants. we’re bringing cars back from Germany. it’s all coming back. it’s amazing. and where your Black worker is going to do really well, is when those factories open.”

ohhhhh, assembly-line worker, that’s a Black job, too. I’m so glad we cleared that up.

is it too much to ask that someday we might have a president who doesn’t scream the quiet part out loud? or maybe one who isn’t a racist fuckhead in the first place? 

New York Times, ‘60 Minutes’ Stars Will Stay Because They Don’t Want Show to ‘Die,’ Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, June 5, 2026. Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim said on Friday in an email to their colleagues that they had reached the decision after a period of frustration.

After a series of high-profile departures from “60 Minutes,” the remaining three on-air correspondents said Friday that they would stay at the program in order to keep it alive, putting an end to days of speculation about the future of the CBS show.

The correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, said in an email to employees that they had reached their decision after a period of frustration and grief.

“Here’s why we are staying: We don’t want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die,” they wrote.

Their memo came after a tumultuous week for the storied news program. Last Thursday, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss fired Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, and two of its on-air correspondents and installed Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker with no television news experience, as the new head of “60 Minutes.”

Another correspondent, Scott Pelley, laced into that decision on Monday in an explosive staff meeting, accusing Ms. Weiss of “murdering” the show. He was fired the next day, and the turmoil had raised questions about whether the show’s remaining stars would continue at the program.

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday afternoon, Ms. Stahl said that she, Mr. Whitaker and Mr. Wertheim had reached their decision after a marathon of calls across multiple continents. Mr. Wertheim was covering the French Open tennis tournament in Paris, Ms. Stahl said, so the trio decided to huddle over Zoom while in different time zones.

Several days ago, the remaining correspondents decided to make their decision about whether to stay at the program together, she said. They reasoned that they could best accomplish their goal of preserving the program if they made their decision as a unit, because any further departures could tank the show.

CBS News did not immediately return a request for comment.

PoliticusUSA, Trump's Lawsuit Against The BBC Has Massively Backfired, Jason Easley, right, June 5, 2026. Trump's defamation lawsuit against the BBC has turned into a major liability as the broadcaster hasn't backed down and has demanded financial documents from Trump, which he won't provide.

Trump’s learned from Disney paying off his bogus defamation lawsuit claim that big corporate media could be shaken down for cash, and the threat of an expensive lawsuit could be used as a means of dictating coverage and controlling the media.

After Disney, Trump responded by mounting an ongoing campaign to get late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired from the network.

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Trump also got paid off from an even more bogus defamation lawsuit that he filed against 60 Minutes, but that payoff was more about greasing the wheels so that CBS could be sold to David Ellison, a Trump ally, who took over the network, got rid of late night host Stephen Colbert, and has gutted 60 Minutes.

Trump didn’t like the way a BBC documentary talked about his attempted coup after the 2020 election, so he filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC.

This time, the president’s target is fighting back.

The Trump lawsuit against the BBC has reached the discovery phase. Trump’s legal team has made hundreds of requests for documents. The BBC has turned over tens of thousands of documents.

The BBC has done something Trump’s other targets were too afraid to do. The BBC has also made document requests of Trump, and what they have asked for has stopped the president dead in his tracks.

The Financial Times reported:

US President Donald Trump’s legal team has refused to hand over financial information requested by BBC lawyers in his $10bn defamation case against the broadcaster, according to court filings seen by the FT.

…The BBC has sought to identify the financial impact of the documentary, including serving a subpoena on the Donald J Trump Revocable Trust, which holds the president’s business interests and assets. It is managed by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, who is the sole trustee.

The BBC legal team has requested the production of financial documents that reflect its holdings and value, assets, inventories and lists of properties held. This includes information regarding almost 400 entities owned by or associated with the trust, as well as requests for tax returns, according to court filings in May.

So far, the president has not backed off of this lawsuit, but if the Trump family refuses to turn over financial documents, this lawsuit won’t be able to go forward. Discovery would be devastating for Donald Trump because it would offer a glimpse into what experts suspect is a massive amount of corruption.

First Amendment attorneys and media professionals both stressed to ABC and CBS that paying Trump’s lawsuit shakedowns would set a terrible precedent that would only encourage Trump to file more lawsuits in order to get cash and intimidate the media.

The big corporate media owners who were only interested in their own profits did not listen.

The BBC is following the recommendations of experts because, during Trump’s second administration, the rule of thumb was that those who fight back win.

Trump does not want any public information about his finances to come out, so as long as the BBC continues to fight, they are likely to win.

The president thought that he could bully the BBC, but the lawsuit is backfiring and could end up exposing Trump.

New York Times, A Murdoch Builds His Own Media Empire. Is This ‘Succession’ or Secession? Jim Rutenberg, June 5, 2026. James Murdoch says acquiring New York magazine and Vox has nothing to do with his father. But in some ways, it’s a tribute.

It is an enduring feature of our nation’s leading (for now) media dynasty, the Murdochs, that they continually generate news — as a force in politics and culture, as a bellwether of their industry and as a family whose fights have been soapy enough to inspire four seasons of “Succession.”

The family’s story arc, though, appeared to reach its zenith last September. That was when Rupert Murdoch ended a wrenching family legal battle over future control of his conservative media empire with three of his four oldest offspring — James, Liz and Prue — and made their more right-leaning brother, Lachlan, his undisputed business heir.

Driving the drama was Rupert’s fear that upon his death, James would swoop in with his sisters to pull the Murdoch news outlets, including Fox News and The New York Post, to the left. Rupert’s liberal critics hoped for — pined for — the same outcome. But Rupert and Lachlan, who now runs the companies, came to an accommodation with the wayward children in which they would cede their claims in return for more than $1 billion each. That seemed to be that.

Then came news last month that James would buy New York magazine, Vox.com and the Vox Media podcasting network for an estimated $300 million.

Small by the standards of today’s media deals, the purchase nonetheless grabbed attention because of what it represented: the most visible move by James to leave his father’s gargantuan shadow. It signaled a break from a legacy that James has publicly associated with climate change denialism and the “insidious and uncontrollable forces” that caused the Jan. 6 riots. He holds that his father’s empire has spread toxic political content in pursuit of ratings and revenue, degrading civic health and its own corporate standing.

Coverage of the deal has portrayed James as acquiring “an ideological competitor” to the outlets run by his brother. Though it would be the equivalent of fighting a destroyer with a speedboat, the notion made sense. The family fight had always taken place within the family media business. Now it would play out through rival media businesses.

James disclaims any connection between his acquisition and his family’s travails. When The Times asked him if he wanted to differentiate himself from his father, he said flatly no: “I’m just trying to build a great business,’’ he said.

But when I spoke with James last week, it was clear that he was setting out with an editorial philosophy that carries at least an implicit rebuke of his father’s populist, winner-take-all philosophy. That outlook, and many keen insights about what viewers really desire, built the Fox empire. It also turbocharged a practice of partisan combat that raced far beyond Murdoch’s control and shaped a worldwide ecosystem of misinformation. James is looking toward independent media as a higher-minded, if less lucrative, antidote to those forces. In their business choices, the two men — and the gulf between their visions — capture the divergent paths of American media in the industry’s roiling 2020s.

More On U.S. Governance

New York Times, How Trump’s Proposed Arch Could Complicate D.C.’s Congested Airspace, Anushka Patil, Marco Hernandez, Junho Lee and Karoun Demirjian, June 5, 2026 (print ed.).The mammoth triumphal arch President Trump wants to build would sit under one of the most complex sections of the national airspace — directly in the paths of flights in and out of Ronald Reagan National Airport and just a few miles from the site of a catastrophic midair collision last year.

The Trump administration said on Thursday that the Federal Aviation Administration had compiled preliminary findings from an initial review of whether the proposed arch presented any risks to Washington's airspace.

But the extent to which those findings, which have yet to be made public, will influence the administration’s plans to move ahead with construction as planned is uncertain. According to a New York Times analysis, the arch as currently planned would warrant further study under at least one F.A.A. guideline.

The F.A.A. had been looking into the administration’s plan for about a month to determine whether the proposed 250-foot structure — a height chosen to commemorate 2026 being the 250th year since American independence — would pose any hazard to flights in and out of Reagan National.

But in recent days, the National Park Service, acting on behalf of the Trump administration, appeared to change tack, quietly asking the F.A.A. to conduct a feasibility study — an advisory review that is normally preliminary and that, according to the F.A.A.’s own procedures, is usually given lower priority than official evaluations.

The reason for the new request, which administration officials defended as routine, was not immediately clear. Though the F.A.A. requires proposed structures over 200 feet to submit to a formal evaluation to determine their impact on local air traffic, feasibility studies are voluntary.

Some aviation experts said the administration’s decision to pursue one at this stage could indicate that possible problems had been identified with the height of the structure, which climbed from 250 feet in the initial filing to 259 feet in the feasibility study request, making the top of the arch sit 288 feet above sea level. In that case, they said, asking for an advisory study could be a strategy to avoid the potential black mark of having Mr. Trump’s pet construction project labeled a risk to flight safety.

It could suggest a project “ran into some issues and is more complicated than they had hoped,” said Michael O’Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior F.A.A. official focused on air traffic safety.

The change in approach may reflect the sensitivity with which the federal government has approached potential risks in the airspace surrounding Washington since a midair collision last year that killed 67.

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

New York Times, Appeals Court Panel to Hear Arguments Over Trump’s Ballroom, Zach Montague, June 5, 2026. A three-judge panel will consider whether a lower court erred in ordering construction stopped until President Trump secured the support of Congress.

For seven months, construction to replace the 123-year-old East Wing with what President Trump hopes will be a legacy-defining ballroom has been underway without interruption, in spite of a federal lawsuit.

On Friday, a federal appeals court panel will once again consider whether any of it has been legal.

At this point, with the project surging forward, the case may serve as a test of whether courts will assert Congress’s powers to rein in Mr. Trump’s ambitions to rebuild federal Washington as much as it is an obstacle to the ballroom itself.

At issue before the three-judge panel will be what legal authority, if any, Mr. Trump had to unilaterally bulldoze part of the White House without input from lawmakers.

The Trump administration appealed the case in April, after Judge Richard J. Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, issued a blunt order in March concluding there was no legal path to building without congressional authorization.

“Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” he wrote. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”

But even as the projected cost of the ballroom doubled to $400 million and courts have questioned the project, construction has proceeded.

Andrea Katz, an associate professor of law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the appeals court must decide whether to uphold Judge Leon’s order, all while Congress has not exercised the authority he insisted it holds.

Professor Katz said that the continuing construction meant the court would face a “fait accompli dynamic” in which the administration is expected to argue that the project cannot be left half-finished.

In filings, the Justice Department has also said that Congress gave passive approval to the project after the National Capital Planning Commission and Commission of Fine Arts, both of which were filled out with Mr. Trump’s appointees, voted to approve the design.Editors’ PicksA Shrimp and Okra Soup That Feels Like MagicNo One Understood Her Grief, So She Took It OnlineParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.

On Thursday, six Republican senators joined with Democrats in voting to block construction of the ballroom until it is specifically authorized by Congress, though the proposal fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to be adopted.

Professor Katz said the Trump administration has taken advantage of an inactive Congress to rush ahead on a variety of goals, including construction of the ballroom, but also immigration restrictions and other areas. By the time the government is defending itself in court, she said, it is often offering justifications for transformative actions that took hold months earlier.

“Courts are aware of this problem,” she said.ImageConstruction equipment and cranes seen from an aerial view.Even as the cost of the ballroom has grown to $400 million and the lawsuit has proceeded, construction on the project has continued.Credit...Allison Robbert for The New York Times

She said the court had ample reasons to uphold Judge Leon’s order in the interest of “proper enforcement of the law,” even if that resulted in an enduring open pit at the White House and an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group chartered by Congress to oversee preservation of historic places, brought the lawsuit in December raising concerns about the project.

It argued that Mr. Trump’s decision to accept donations for the project from corporations with business before the federal government and redesign the historic complex without input usurped the traditional power Congress has over federal property and spending.

At first, Judge Leon prodded the National Trust several times to refine their arguments to focus narrowly on whether the president has authority to change the White House however he wants.

Throughout that legal maneuvering, Mr. Trump kept building.

Then, 110 days after the lawsuit was filed, Judge Leon ruled for the preservation group.

But soon after, the president and his allies threw a curveball.

The ballroom, Mr. Trump said, was not even the primary purpose of the renovation. Rather, the planned structure would be a capstone, he said, on a sprawling underground military bunker designed to modernize security at the White House.

Throughout April, Mr. Trump spoke less of the ornate columns and neoclassical touches that he would later showcase for reporters, and more of drone-proof roofs and bulletproof windows. The president and his allies also cited an attempted assassination at an annual press gala in May, asserting that the attack vindicated efforts to build a secure event space within the White House. Mr. Trump has referred to the structure as a “shed” atop a new complex that would entirely replace the existing Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

Hesitant to interfere with work involving presidential security, Judge Leon clarified his order, saying that it applied only to aboveground construction and not underground security features. Even so, the appeals court panel chose to pause Judge Leon’s order entirely until after the judges consider arguments at the Friday hearing.

That meant that throughout April and May, Mr. Trump kept building.

Lawyers representing the National Trust are expected to argue on Friday that the months of construction have all grinded ahead in spite of both federal law and the constitutional separation of powers, which both give lawmakers a clear say in major changes to the White House grounds. “This case is about who controls federal property,” lawyers for the group wrote in a brief.

“The answer is Congress, as the Constitution, numerous federal statutes and longstanding Supreme Court precedent regarding the president’s supposed emergency powers all make clear,” they added.

Andrew Mergen, a professor at Harvard Law School who spent more than 20 years in the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said that Congress reserved “incredible authority” over federal properties that it delegates to federal agencies to help manage.

“It’s something that the branches do hand in hand,” he said. “And to have taken a project like this on without consulting with Congress is really, I think, to push the outer limits of the president’s authority.”

The panel consists of Judges Patricia A. Millett, an Obama appointee; Bradley N. Garcia, a Biden appointee; and Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee.

The panel had previously expressed confusion about Mr. Trump’s shifting descriptions of the project, sending the case back to Judge Leon to clarify what parts of the project he thought required approval.

But the panel has not seemed eager to halt the construction. All three judges signed off on allowing work to until now; Judge Rao noted in a dissent that she would have preferred to pause Judge Leon’s order for the duration of the case.

Regardless of the outcome in front of the appeals court, the case could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

At the end of several hearings, Judge Leon predicted that unless Mr. Trump took steps to resolve the dispute, it would likely fall to the justices to decide the president’s power to transform the White House.

More Global News

Red Cross workers removing the disinfected body of a gold miner, Mumbere Saidi, in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, last week (New York Times visual by Arlette Bashizi, from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak).

Red Cross workers removing the disinfected body of a gold miner, Mumbere Saidi, in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, last week.

New York Times, The Gold Mines at the Heart of This Ebola Outbreak, Declan Walsh, Visuals by Arlette Bashizi (reporting from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak), June 5, 2026. Mining has been the lifeblood of this remote Congolese hill town for decades. Now, it is fueling the spread of a devastating virus.

After the local Islamic State affiliate attacked his farm, Mumbere Saidi fled to the gold mines in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, trekking 200 miles across one of Africa’s most dangerous war zones.

He found backbreaking work in a remote mining town where he panned for gold. When times were good, Mr. Saidi, 27, sent a few dollars back to the parents he left behind. When they were bad, he struggled to feed his wife and baby daughter.

At least he felt safe, until last week, when an invisible enemy struck Mr. Saidi inside his home.

“The disease got him,” said his brother, Kondu Ganda, also a miner, using a common euphemism for Ebola in a town where many avoid the word.

Behind him, Red Cross workers in white protective suits removed Mr. Saidi’s body from their mud-walled home and carefully placed it in a coffin.

For over a century, gold has been the lifeblood of Mongbwalu, a remote hill town in Ituri province that draws people looking for work from across Congo and beyond. But now Mongbwalu is at the epicenter of the devastating Ebola outbreak sweeping this region, and gold is helping to drive it.

Experts now believe that the outbreak, already the third largest on record, began in Mongbwalu as early as February. Yet the authorities failed to detect it until May 15, in part because it was caused by a lesser-known virus, Bundibugyo, for which there is no treatment.

By the time a crisis was declared, the Bundibugyo virus had already been spreading for weeks through Mongbwalu’s gold mines, among men who work cheek by jowl in rough conditions, trading gold that often crosses nearby borders.

Now, they are falling sick and dying.ImageA muddy gold mining site in Mongbwalu with several people seen at a distance standing on a makeshift platform that looks like a slapdash raft.At the Kanza Kanza gold mine in Mongbwalu. The lure of lucrative wages draws miners to the area.VideoMiners feeding sandy goop into a generator.ImageSeveral miners work in a muddy work site at Kanza Kanza.Miners at a quarry. The gold economy fuels a flow of workers, traders, prostitutes and smugglers from Congo and neighboring countries.

When Mr. Saidi fell ill last month, it first seemed to be malaria. As his condition deteriorated, increasingly desperate relatives carried him to six different clinics in search of a cure, his brother said. Nothing worked.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

After his death, neighbors clustered quietly outside Mr. Saidi’s home, which is perched on a hillside amid banana groves and twisting paths. Five people had already died on their street, they said; word came through that a sixth had fallen ill.

“Another person has started bleeding up there,” Mr. Ganda said, pointing to a house.

Mongbwalu, in the Kilo-Moto gold belt, has long embodied the tragedy of Congo’s abundance. Belgian colonists opened the town’s first mines over a century ago, using forced labor. Cycles of exploitation, corruption and conflict followed. Under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the mines were badly mismanaged. After Mobutu was ousted in 1997, and Congo fell into turmoil, militias and warlords battled over Mongbwalu’s riches.

During one particular brutal period between 2002 and 2003, at least 2,000 civilians were killed in and around Mongbwalu, Human Rights Watch later found.Editors’ PicksA Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding DayParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Now Mongbwalu is largely peaceful, even as ethnic conflict rages in the surrounding countryside, and most of the mining is done by small-scale miners who work the informal mines dotting the town’s edge. Many come from other provinces of Congo, especially North Kivu, which itself suffered an Ebola outbreak between 2018 and 2020.

But the lure of Mongbwalu is what is making it so dangerous.

The gold economy fuels a flow of workers, traders, prostitutes and smugglers from Congo and neighboring countries. Town authorities now believe that more than 80 people died from Ebola in the weeks before the outbreak was detected, and things have only gotten worse.

“We fear we are just at the start of our misfortune,” said Jean-Pierre Bikilisende, a former town mayor.

On the edge of town, gold seems to be everywhere. Following a winding path through tall grass, Arlette Bashizi, a photographer for The New York Times, and I suddenly found ourselves next to a wide stream where dozens of men in mud-splattered clothes shoveled sediment.

They sifted the sandy goop by feeding it into wooden sluices powered by clattering generators, then mixed it with mercury to extract gold nuggets. Given the perils of the work and the threats many had fled, few said they were bothered by Ebola.

Bienvenue Bironyi, a miner from North Kivu, had heard that people were dying. But, he added, he did not know what precautions he could realistically take.

“We’re still working from morning to evening,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

The pay was an indisputable factor. Gedeon Abimana said he made between $136 and $272 a week, depending on his team’s gold haul. That is great money in rural Congo, although it came with considerable health risk: his job involves handling mercury with his bare hands, which can cause serious illness, including neurological damage.

He shrugged. “What can we do?” he said. “We have no choice but to work.”ImageBienvenu Bironyi, a young gold miner, working at a gold mine.Bienvenu Bironyi, a young gold miner, left, working at a gold mine.ImageGedeon Abimana holds a piece of mercury containing gold that he has just collected from Maidede mining quarry.ImagePeople draw water from the exit of a blocked tunnel that once served as a roost for fruit bats at the Makala mining site.

The town could not stop, either. Heavy-duty mining trucks rolled down the unpaved main street. Motorcycle taxis clustered on corners, waiting for fares. Children in neat school uniforms skipped home. Soldiers and miners chugged beer in bars.

Michel Anguma, a gold miner in rubber boots, downplayed the calamity. Certainly, people were dying, he said as he strolled home after work. “Just back there, I saw people going to bury someone,” he said.

But gold workers could not afford to worry.

“Nothing is above God,” he said with a shrug.

He spoke under a cluster of trees filled with screeching fruit bats, which scientists say can act as a natural reservoir for the viruses that cause Ebola.

As with much in this outbreak, little is certain, including how many people are actually sick. In recent days, a surge in testing capacity at government laboratories was starting to give a clearer picture of the number of confirmed Ebola cases in Congo. About 300 people are suspected to have died so far.

But the head start the virus enjoyed as it spread undetected through Mongbwalu this spring means the true extent of the outbreak remains unknown. And with gold prices hovering near historic highs, the incentive to keep mining is powerful.ImageBats flying in the darkening sky over the large trees of Mongbwalu. 

New York Times, Ireland, Seen as a Weak Link in Europe’s Defense, Is Trying to Bulk Up, Megan Specia, Visuals by Paulo Nunes dos Santos, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). 

As concern rises in Europe over threats from an emboldened Russia, the Irish government says it’s working to plug gaps in its military, which reflect a tradition of neutrality.

Ireland, Seen as a Weak Link in Europe’s Defense, Is Trying to Bulk Up

As concern rises in Europe over threats from an emboldened Russia, the Irish government says it’s working to plug gaps in its military, which reflect a tradition of neutrality.

The George Bernard Shaw patrolling the Irish Sea in May. Patrols like these have been scaled up amid growing security threats.Credit...Listen · 8:49 min

By 

Two sailors peered through binoculars from the bridge of the naval vessel as it patrolled the Irish Sea on a still morning in early May.

As they scanned the horizon, Lt. Cmdr. Maria O’Callaghan, the captain, pointed to a series of lines on a navigation display, indicating underwater power cables and gas pipelines that stretch between Ireland and Britain.

The crew of the Irish ship, the George Bernard Shaw, was looking for anything out of the ordinary while the captain used the screen to monitor a large vessel transporting liquefied natural gas. Although the ship was not on a sanctions list, the crew knew from tracking it in the past that it was heading north toward a Russian port, narrowly skirting Ireland’s territorial waters.

Their patrol was part of a stepped-up campaign by Ireland to apply greater scrutiny to the waters that surround it, as hybrid threats from an emboldened Moscow hang over Europe and ships seeking to circumvent Western sanctions sail in and out of Russia.ImageNaval officers by digital controls in a ship.

New York Times, China Builds an Economic Fortress as Global Tensions Rise, Alexandra Stevenson and Murphy Zhao, June 5, 2026. Beijing says the changes are needed for national security, but they could complicate efforts by Chinese companies to find growth overseas.China is erecting walls to prevent money, technology and companies from leaving the country.

This week, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced new rules requiring national security screening for Chinese companies seeking to invest overseas. The move follows regulations introduced in April that allowed the authorities to intervene when foreign companies tried to relocate supply chains out of China.

Taken together, the measures amount to a new blueprint for the economic fortress China is building around its technology and supply chains amid rising tensions with Europe and the United States.

The rules are another sign that the economic principles of open markets and free trade, which have governed much of the world for decades and helped fuel China’s extraordinary rise, are giving way to a more fragmented era.

From Washington to Brussels, the world’s largest economies are choosing trade barriers over greater economic integration, driven in part by heightened concerns over China’s global dominance in raw materials, manufactured goods and technology, and a surge in Chinese products around the world.

“We’ve moved away from a world where laws made it easier to allow the flow of capital, people, technology and trade to go around,” said Ben Kostrzewa, a partner and trade expert at Hogan Lovells in Hong Kong.

“The Chimerica economy envisioned 20 years ago turned out to be chimerical,” he said, referring to the once-popular portmanteau of China and America.

Beijing has already offered a preview of what this new era could look like. It blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, an artificial intelligence company founded by Chinese engineers. It told Chinese refineries sanctioned by the United States not to comply. And it ordered a state-backed security equipment company not to cooperate with European Union investigators.

With each action, Beijing edges closer to a confrontation with the United States and Europe.

New York Times, Why Xi Jinping Is Going to North Korea to Court Kim Jong-un, David Pierson and Choe Sang-Hun, June 5, 2026 (print ed.). As Xi Jinping visits Pyongyang, he faces an emboldened North Korean dictator, whose alliance with Russia has reduced his dependence on China.

The last time China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, traveled to North Korea, that country’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, was reeling from sanctions and failed nuclear talks with the United States.

Now, nearly seven years later, as Mr. Xi returns to North Korea on Monday, he will meet with a leader who is newly emboldened by an alliance with Russia that has helped his economy break out of isolation.

Mr. Xi is expected to use the two-day summit with Mr. Kim to project a united front between allies against the West. But analysts say China is likely also keen to assert its influence over a neighbor that has leaned toward Russia. Mr. Kim, for his part, wants to be treated less like a junior partner to China and will likely use his new closeness to Russia to press Beijing for economic concessions.

If North Korea is able to successfully balance its two giant neighbors, Mr. Kim might feel even less constrained about advancing his nuclear weapons program. That could destabilize a region where U.S. allies are already worried about China’s military buildup and Washington’s ability to honor its defense agreements as it depletes resources fighting a war with Iran.

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Markets, Tariffs

New York Times, Live Updates: Employers Added a Robust 172,000 Jobs in May, Lydia DePillis, June 5, 2026. Unemployment remained steady at 4.3 percent.

American employers hired vigorously in May, in a sign that the labor market is on a genuine upswing after last year’s weak patch.

The economy added 172,000 last month, more than economists had expected, while the unemployment rate stayed at 4.3 percent.

The robust reading follows other data suggesting that labor demand has found its footing after a year of trade policy swings, immigration enforcement disruption and an exodus from the federal government. With revisions, March and April added 93,000 more jobs than previously reported.

• Wages cooling further: Average hourly earnings grew 3.4 percent from a year earlier, the slowest rate since August 2021. That’s now substantially behind the rate of inflation, although it may reflect the composition of job growth, as more lower-wage jobs have been added in recent months.
• Leisure boom: Growth was led last month by leisure and hospitality, which packed on 70,000 jobs. Some of that may have been early hiring for the World Cup as cities across the country prepared for an influx of tourists. Health care, which has been the steady fuel of job growth over the past several years, added another 35,000 positions.
• Federal exodus slowing: The federal government was about level, after having lost about 350,000 jobs since peaking toward the end of 2024. But local government surged, adding 55,000 jobs in May, mostly outside education.
• Warming signs: Job openings jumped in April, the Labor Department reported, and might have bottomed out at the end of last year. Initial claims for unemployment insurance have remained low, with no sign of the high-profile layoffs at companies like Meta and Cisco.
• Enough jobs to keep spending: A relatively low unemployment rate and healthy wage growth has allowed workers to keep spending, but a spike in energy prices following the outbreak of war in the Middle East has forced them to dip into savings to meet essential needs.
• Fed meeting incoming: The Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee meets in two weeks. Some officials have become more nervous about inflation in recent months, putting the possibility of interest rate hikes on the table for this year.

New York Times, For New Graduates, Job Market Scars Could Linger for Years, Sydney Ember, June 5, 2026. The full impact of graduating into this hiring downturn will not come into focus for years, and much remains uncertain, especially about A.I.’s role.

Young college graduates are facing a gloomy economic future.

Confronting the toughest job market since the depths of the pandemic, they are likely to make less money in the long term and have more trouble advancing their careers, economists warn.

The rise of artificial intelligence also poses a new threat to the kinds of entry-level knowledge jobs that young graduates have long sought, which could further scramble employment prospects and upend career trajectories.

The result is that the current crop of recent graduates could be left with deep scars that include a reduction in earnings, diminished employment opportunities and even widespread job displacement.

“There are going to be lasting effects,” said Lisa Kahn, an economist at the University of Rochester. “The cohorts that were lucky enough to just finish a little bit earlier or a little bit later I think are going to be doing better.”

The full impact of graduating into this hiring downturn will not come into focus for years, and much remains uncertain, especially about A.I.’s role.

But history suggests that trouble lies ahead.

Economists have broadly found that workers who graduate from college during bad economies fare worse in the long run than their more fortunate counterparts.

In a seminal paper that tracked recent graduates before, during and after the recession in the early 1980s, Ms. Kahn found that “graduating from college in a bad economy has a long-run, negative impact on wages.” Though she found that the effects faded over time, a gap persisted even 15 years later, long after the economy had recovered from that downturn.

A reduction in wages occurs partly because recessions affect the quality and availability of early-career job opportunities, an in-depth 2012 study found. Because larger, higher-paying firms reduce their hiring during bad economies, many recent graduates end up taking positions at smaller, lower-paying firms at first. That thins their résumés and makes it harder to move up the ladder to better-paying jobs.

Workers who graduated from less prestigious schools or with majors that usually lead to lower-paying jobs are at a disadvantage, the study found.“During recessions, good employers stop hiring,” said Till von Wachter, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of the 2012 study. “There’s a lot of friction in the labor market, so you never quite make it back to the top of the queue.”

The latest group of college graduates is likewise encountering an economy in flux.

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: Why the Hell Is Gas So Expensive in California? Hint: It's not taxes or environmental fees, Robert Reich, right,June 5, 2026. Trump and his Republicans say gas is hugely expensive in California because of state taxes and fees (mostly related to the environment).

This is total rubbish. See my video, included above via the link.

New York Times, Opinion: It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers, Molly Jong-Fast, June 5, 2026.  Commencement address season hasn’t been going well — for the commencement speakers.

I’m sure you’ve seen the videos on social media. The big shots who have been brought in to inspire a next generation of graduates have used their speeches as opportunities to extol the limitless possibilities that artificial intelligence will bring. They’re speaking to graduates who are entering a shaky job market and are already burdened by tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. However, companies of all stripes are using A.I. as an excuse to slow entry-level hiring and lay off workers. Tech executives have been warning (though it sometimes seems as if they are bragging) that their technologies will be job destroyers.

Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive who spoke at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities, told graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” Scott Borchetta, the chief executive of the record label Big Machine, told the graduates of Middle Tennessee State University that “A.I. is rewriting production as we sit here.” In each case, the students expressed their displeasure at the speakers’ blatant A.I. boosterism the best way they could: with loud boos.

When Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, told graduates at the University of Arizona about their A.I.-shaped future, the shouting got so intense that he paused and said that graduates feared “that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” Mr. Schmidt told them to make the best of it. “The question is not whether A.I. will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”

Mr. Schmidt’s solution to world-upending technological change is … what? To pull yourself up by your bootstraps? His approach is peak billionaire brain, directed at the young people who have, for the better part of a decade, been treated as woke, lazy, avocado-toast-eating snowflakes. All these speakers just don’t get it. The problem isn’t woke; the problem is work. It’s a lack of social mobility. It’s that college may no longer elevate a graduate to the middle class. It’s that nobody even bothers to pretend that a house, a good job and the ability to start a family are at all guaranteed.

Think of this from the graduates’ perspective: Wealthy old people telling you your future is being pulped by acres and acres of electricity-sucking, water-guzzling data centers feels dystopian because it is. Companies are trying to automate your future away. No wonder you’re furious.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.

Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)

According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.

I’ve spent the past six months obsessing about giving a commencement address to Bennington College, where I earned my M.F.A. It’s a truly bizarre moment to speak at a college, in light of the way technology is changing the work force so rapidly and the way the White House has waged war on colleges, professors and education writ large. Even in the best of times, commencement speeches are uncomfortable: The kids you’re speaking to are basically hostages; they can’t leave without their diplomas.

When I finally gave my speech on Saturday, I didn’t talk about A.I. with the Bennington graduates. I talked about the role their magical little college played in my life. Getting a master’s saved me; it gave me a bit of a foundation, perhaps a little authority in a world where I often felt like an impostor. I told the kids the truth: that I would love to give them advice about how to avoid the messiness of one’s 20s, but the messiness is the point. “That eyebrow pierce will leave a scar,” I said. “You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face.”Editors’ PicksA Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding DayParty Like a Swede! A Guide to Celebrating Midsummer.9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

(I worried initially that this advice might be too specific, but looking around the tent, I could see that getting a piercing out was something at least 30 percent of the graduating class would have to grapple with sooner or later.)

If I were to tell these graduates the truth about artificial intelligence, it would be this: You are right to be worried. But none of this is as inevitable as it seems. Remember putting everything on the blockchain? Remember NFTs? Hell, some of us are old enough to remember that the world was supposed to end in the year 2000.

Right now, A.I. is in its dark hype period — great for Anthropic’s I.P.O. — but who knows how useful any of this actually will be in the end in creating efficiencies (a.k.a.: replacing the youngs with bots). It’s within young people’s power to stop. Demand regulation of tech companies. Elect people who will legislate that regulation. Organize against data centers in your hometowns.  

June 4

Top Headlines

President Trump issues many posts a week such as the above informing his followers that he is all-powerful, often invoking such code phrases as "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming," which is an alert to hooligans, election-deniers and insurrectionists in the QAnon cult that elections, courts and other traditional guardrails of democracy cannot withstand his extraordinary powers  and genius.

• Thinking About, Political Opinion:Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget, Timothy Snyder, right, June 4, 2026. The proposal only makes sense as a bribe. In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Permanency Project, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 4, 2026.Who cares about popularity when you can make elections irrelevant?
• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: We Are All Scott Pelley, Thom Hartmann, right, June 4, 2026. We must all become truth-tellers, whether our platform is radio, TV, Substack, social media, a local newspaper, or a protest sign raised in the town square…

News Roundups

• MeidasTouch Network, Thursday Afternoon News Updates: Trump Boxed In and the World Knows It, Ben Meiselas, right,June 4, 2026. Here are the top stories we’re tracking today:
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Oppose Trump Publicly as Trump has Worst Week of Second Term, Screwworm is Back, Trump Health Questions, Aaron Parnas, right,June 4, 2026. Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly convinced that Trump’s support is slipping after what may have been the toughest week of his second term, and Republicans are beginning to do something we haven’t seen much of before—publicly break with him.

More On Trump's $1.8 Billion Taxpayer Slush Fund For Allies, Hooligans, Convicts

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Schrödinger’s Slush Fund, Andrew Egger, right, June 4, 2026. Earlier this week, facing a Senate Republican mutiny, the White House suggested it would cancel a planned $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for payouts to January 6th rioters and other Trump allies.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: No, Trump's $1.776 billion slush fund isn't 'dead,' Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, June 4, 2026. President Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” has faced bipartisan opposition. Multiple Republicans have argued that the $1.776 billion fund, which is part of a settlement agreement in Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), is a “slush fund” to reward Trump’s political allies, including rioters who participated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
• Scott MacFarlane via Substack, Democrats Plan to Block Trump's Sweetheart Immunity Deal with I.R.S., Scott MacFarlane, right, June 4, 2026. Formal Proposal on Thursday Would Prohibit Sitting Presidents From Entering Immunity Deals with I.R.S.

More On Weaponizing Courts, Prosecutors To Thwart U.S. Civil Rights

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leading researcher of White Nationalist and other ultra-right groups that promote hate crimes in the United States, has been indicted on fraud-related charges by the Trump Justice Department even though previous Justice Departments used the center's research for criminal investigations to protect against violence and other civil rights disruptions.

• Emptywheel, Analysis: In Superseding SPLC Indictment, DOJ Confesses They Made a Big Mistake, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 4, 2026. Days after DOJ first indicted SPLC in April, I laid out how the indictment worked. I showed several problems with the indictment’s theory of deception and argued that DOJ might be trying to criminalize SPLC’s efforts to protect their informants from the far right extremist organizations they were targeting.

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

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.

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Authoritarianism Accelerates, William Kristol, right, June 4, 2026. Last night, President Trump announced at a dinner in what used to be the Rose Garden that he would be nominating acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold that post in a full capacity. As Trump put it, “we are going to make him permanent attorney general.”
• New York Times, Trump’s plan to nominate Blanche could set off a bruising confirmation battle, Staff Report, June 4, 2026. President Trump has indicated that he plans to nominate the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, to take on the role on a permanent basis, the latest move by the president to place loyalists in top jobs across the government.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Republicans Begin to Test the Limits of Trump’s Power by Flexing Their Own, Katie Rogers, June 4, 2026 (print ed.). The president’s unilateral and retributive style of governing is starting to hit a wall in both chambers of Congress.

More On Trump's Health, Governance

• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Donald Trump knows he’s losing control, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 4, 2026. At 3:50 p.m. today, the President of the United States suddenly reappeared after not being seen at any public events since his visit to Walter Reed Medical Center over a week ago. With bad news mounting all around him and questions surrounding his declining health growing louder by the day, Donald Trump was forced to make an appearance.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is In A Period Of Profound Political Decline, Democrats Are Fielding Strong Candidates Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 4, 2026. The House rebuked Trump on both Iran and Ukraine yesterday. It was another day of remarkable losses for our ailing, addled, failure of a leader...... 
• False Flags via The Bulwark, Analysis and Opinion: Bill Pulte Was a “Degenerate” Buffoon. Now He’s Head of U.S. Intelligence, Will Sommer, above right, June 4, 2026. Bulletproof vests, helicopters, and, yes, dildos.
• The New Republic, Analysis: Mystery of Trump’s Hair-Loss Drug Exposes Bigger Issue With His Health, Edith Olmsted, June 4, 2026. Donald Trump’s team abruptly stopped disclosing if he’s taking a certain drug.

More Supreme Court Help For Republicans Against Black, Democratic Voters

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 3, 2026 [Court Helps Trump By Gutting Voting Rights Law, Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 4, 2026. Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Los Angeles Mayoral Primary Leaders Karen Bass, the incumbent Democrat at left, and Republican challenger Spencer Pratt (Campaign photos).

• New York Times, Why Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Has to Fight for Her Job, Jill Cowan, June 4, 2026. Ms. Bass, a Democrat, has had a roller-coaster first term. She now faces the first runoff since 2005 for an incumbent mayor in the city.
• New York Times, The Democrats’ Big Decision: Black Representation or More Blue Seats? Clyde McGrady, June 4, 2026. As Republicans break up majority-Black House districts, Democrats must decide whether to preserve seats concentrated in urban areas or push them into white suburbs to target G.O.P. seats.
• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Trump's Elite Enablers, Stuart Stevens, right, June 4, 2026. To advance in today’s GOP, you must assert what fifth-graders know to be untrue.
• The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Analysis and Opintion: How Opus Dei Operates within the Trump Regime, Host Frank Figliuzzi, right, and author Gareth Gore, June 4, 2026. Opus Dei isn't fiction. It's infiltrated our government.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Israel and Lebanon Agree to New Cease-Fire, Yan Zhuang and Ephrat Livni, June 4, 2026. The deal is contingent on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group that was not part of the talks, stopping attacks against Israel and withdrawing from southern Lebanon.

More On U.S. Tariffs, Inflation, Markets, Job, Economy

• New York Times, SpaceX Sets Price for the World’s Largest I.P.O., Ryan Mac, June 4, 2026. The $135 share price means Elon Musk’s rocket maker is poised to exceed the 2019 initial public offering of Saudi Aramco in both valuation and money raised.  
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Illegal Tariffs, Round 3, Paul Krugman, right, June 4, 2026. Another failing war Trump won’t end. Remember tariffs?

Top Headlines

President Trump issues many posts a week such as the above informing his followers that he is all-powerful, often invoking such code phrases as "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming," which is an alert to hooligans, election-deniers and insurrectionists in the QAnon cult that elections, courts and other traditional guardrails of democracy cannot withstand his extraordinary powers  and genius.

Thinking About, Political Opinion:Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget, Timothy Snyder, right, author of best-selling historical book "On Tyranny," June 4, 2026. The proposal only makes sense as a bribe. In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.

This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off.

And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. No other explanation fits the data.

Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power.

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.”

It’s a military dictatorship budget. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Permanency Project, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 4, 2026. Who cares about popularity when you can make elections irrelevant?

The House of Representatives delivered a remarkable rebuke to the White House yesterday, passing a war powers resolution that would require the president to withdraw forces from Iran or seek congressional approval for ongoing military action. Four Republicans broke ranks to support the measure, which now heads to the Senate.

Donald Trump wasn’t pleased. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing,” he fumed on Truth Social. “They know where the negotiations stand. . . . They should be ashamed of themselves.”

In other words: Quit telling me to end my war! Can’t you see I’m TRYING? Happy Thursday.

 Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: We Are All Scott Pelley, Thom Hartmann, right, June 4, 2026. We must all become truth-tellers, whether our platform is radio, TV, Substack, social media, a local newspaper, or a protest sign raised in the town square…

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU SDS.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hourlong news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to rightwing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.— Declare an “emergency.”— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.— Bypass Congress.— Bully or ignore the courts.— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.— Send people to foreign concentration camps.— Build concentration camps within the United States.— Prosecute lawyers and judges.— Assert control over universities.— Merge corporate and state interests.— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship. 

News Roundups

MeidasTouch Network, Thursday Afternoon News Updates: Trump Boxed In and the World Knows It, Ben Meiselas, right, June 4, 2026. Here are the top stories we’re tracking today:

• Iran’s Supreme Leader declares the U.S.-Israeli military campaign a defeat, warns of “hybrid war” aimed at dividing Iranian society
• Trump is boxed in on Iran with no clear strategy, as Lebanon ceasefire collapses within hours
• Oil inventories hitting “tank bottom” with industry warning of catastrophic price spikes by mid-to-late June
• Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent both get torched in congressional hearings
• Trump’s bizarre ballroom ambassador shows up at Putin’s economic forum in St. Petersburg
• Polls continue to crater for Trump in Ohio and Iowa as DCCC data reveals massive openings in rural America
• Judge Luttig delivers a major rebuke to the Trump presidency, exclusively on MeidasTouch
• Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces the BLANCHE Act to block Trump’s corrupt IRS immunity deal

Iran Won’t Budge, Lebanon Burns, and the Ayatollah Is Calling Trump’s Bluff

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the Iranian people Thursday, and the message wasn’t directed inward, but rather it was directed squarely at Donald Trump. Khamenei declared that the U.S.-Israeli “system of domination” has suffered a historic military defeat and is now resorting to psychological warfare, propaganda, and attempts to sow division within Iranian society. He claimed the U.S. and Israel were using tools such as doubt, despair, fear, suspicion, and discord. He told Iranians not to fall for it. And then his office posted an AI-generated propaganda image showing Iran ascending as a great power, with the symbols of America, Israel, and imperial Rome toppled at its feet.

Iran’s envoy Dr. Mohammad Fathali called the entire U.S. military campaign a “strategic assessment failure.” He said they miscalculated Iranian society, Iranian leadership, Iranian military capability — all of it. And now Trump is frozen in this endless negotiation “loop.”

Allies and critics alike are warning that Trump has gotten himself completely boxed in. The AP is reporting that Iranian officials believe Trump is reluctant to restart bombing after depleting key weapons systems, so they have zero reason to yield to new U.S. demands. Trump wanted a bilateral deal, just the U.S. and Iran, without Lebanon in the picture. Iran said from the very beginning, in March, that a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, was their precondition for any deal. We talked about this in March. Nothing has changed on Iran’s end.

And then Trump announced a ceasefire in Lebanon. Within hours, Israeli strikes resumed. At least nine people were killed. A journalist reporting live from the Nabatieh area said there was no ceasefire, rather just a full Israeli war continuing. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called a Lebanon ceasefire “a fantasy,” said Hezbollah has grown stronger throughout this conflict, and argued that Netanyahu should have told Trump directly: we love you, but the answer is no.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. went on CNN and described Trump and Netanyahu as “lovers” who had a little “lovers’ spat.” Lovers.

Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem issued his own warning, saying as long as villages are being bombed and people are being killed, northern Israel will not be safe. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the region will never be stable until Israel withdraws from occupied areas in Lebanon.

Trump is not negotiating from a position of strength here. He’s negotiating from a position of exhaustion. And everyone can see it. 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Oppose Trump Publicly as Trump has Worst Week of Second Term, Screwworm is Back, Trump Health Questions, Aaron Parnas, right, June 4, 2026. Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly convinced that Trump’s support is slipping after what may have been the toughest week of his second term, and Republicans are beginning to do something we haven’t seen much of before—publicly break with him.

Meanwhile, a flesh-eating screwworm has resurfaced in the United States, the White House says it no longer needs to disclose certain Trump medications, RFK Jr. is seeking broader access to Americans’ medical records, and much more.

This afternoon, you’ll get an interview with either Governor Walz or Senator Mark Kelly (the other will run tomorrow). We’ll also be live with paid subscribers at 6:40 p.m. ET today. 

Here’s what you missed:

The President of the United States is facing what may be the most difficult week of his second term. A series of legal, political, and legislative setbacks have created growing challenges for the administration, while some observers note increasing signs of friction between the White House and congressional Republicans. Among the developments:

• A federal court ruled that Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was unlawful and ordered that his name be removed from the building.
• A federal court blocked the administration’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The proposal had also faced opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill, leading the Justice Department to abandon the initiative.
• Congressional Republicans dropped funding for Trump’s proposed White House ballroom project, including a requested $1 billion for related security measures.
• A federal court reopened litigation involving the IRS to examine allegations concerning possible coordination between Donald Trump and the Justice Department.
• A Trump-endorsed candidate for governor in Iowa lost in the Republican primary, marking the first defeat of a Trump-backed candidate in the 2026 election cycle.
• Republicans in both the House and Senate broke with the president to advance war powers resolutions intended to limit his authority to conduct military operations against Iran without congressional approval.

Taken together, these developments represent a notable string of setbacks for the president across the courts, Congress, and the political arena.

Donald Trump woke up furious at the four Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to rein in his war powers:

A flesh-eating parasite called the New World screwworm has been detected in a Texas calf, marking its first appearance in U.S. livestock in about 60 years. While it poses little risk to the general public and does not affect food safety, officials worry it could seriously harm cattle herds and drive up already high beef prices if it spreads. Federal and state authorities have responded with quarantines and the release of sterile flies to stop the parasite from reproducing. Officials say they are confident the outbreak can be contained before it becomes a major agricultural problem. Farmers are urging the Administration to declare a national emergency declaration to combat the outbreak:

Critics, especially Texas agriculture officials, say the federal government did not act aggressively enough despite repeated warnings. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller accused the USDA of moving too slowly and relying on a "partial solution" that would take years to fully implement, while experts pointed out that a major Texas sterile-fly production facility is not expected to be operational until 2027. By the time the first Texas case was confirmed, the parasite had already advanced from Central America through Mexico and into the U.S. cattle industry. The concern is not just about one infected calf. Experts warn that if the parasite becomes established in U.S. livestock, it could cause billions of dollars in losses, further shrink an already historically low cattle herd, and drive beef prices even higher. Their argument is that prevention would have been far cheaper and easier than trying to eradicate the pest after it crossed the border.

Questions have emerged after finasteride, a hair-loss medication that had previously appeared on Donald Trump’s medical disclosures, was omitted from his latest White House health report without explanation. The White House says the report includes all medically relevant information but has declined to clarify whether Trump still takes the drug, prompting criticism from some medical experts who argue the lack of transparency raises broader questions about the president’s health disclosures. The story also revisits longstanding concerns about Trump’s medical transparency, including past disputes over health reports, multiple visits to Walter Reed, and questions surrounding cognitive testing. Despite these concerns, the White House’s latest medical report states that Trump is in excellent health and fully fit to serve as president. This is from the Washington Post this morning:

Iran update:

Iran says negotiations with the U.S. to end the conflict have made “no tangible progress,” though communication channels remain open and both sides continue exchanging messages. Iran warned that any Israeli strike on Beirut could trigger a full resumption of the war and said its military remains prepared for further conflict.

Israel and Lebanon announced a renewed ceasefire framework that would require Hezbollah to stop attacks and withdraw from parts of southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah quickly rejected the proposal as a form of surrender. Despite the ceasefire announcement, reports of Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon continued, underscoring the fragility of the agreement.

Political pressure on President Trump over the Iran conflict is increasing at home, with the House passing a bipartisan war powers resolution aimed at limiting his ability to continue military operations without congressional authorization. Trump criticized the vote as “unpatriotic,” while lawmakers in both chambers have shown growing willingness to challenge the administration’s handling of the war.

Other news:

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, is pursuing access to extensive state-held medical records to investigate possible links between vaccines, autism, and chronic illnesses, despite decades of scientific research finding no connection between vaccines and autism. Public health officials and medical experts have raised concerns that the effort could give the federal government access to highly detailed personal health information, including doctors’ notes and prescription histories, without clear safeguards or transparency. Several state health information exchanges have resisted sharing data, questioning both the legality of the request and whether the records would provide meaningful scientific answers. The initiative has intensified concerns that the administration is prioritizing a controversial vaccine agenda while expanding federal access to sensitive medical data.

President Trump announced that he will nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, to become the permanent attorney general. Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney and later as deputy attorney general, took over the Justice Department after Pam Bondi was fired. During his tenure as acting attorney general, he launched investigations involving some of Trump’s political opponents and oversaw controversial initiatives, including a proposed compensation fund for people who claimed government targeting. His nomination now moves to the Senate for confirmation.

Scientists studying the 5,300-year-old mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman discovered living cold-adapted yeast in his body, showing that microbial life remains active even after thousands of years in frozen conditions. Researchers successfully grew some of the yeast and even used it to bake a sourdough loaf, demonstrating that the organisms are still viable. The study also found ancient gut bacteria that have largely disappeared from modern industrialized populations, offering clues about how human microbiomes have changed over time. Researchers say Ötzi is not simply a preserved mummy but a living microbial ecosystem that continues to provide insights into ancient human life and biology.

California’s governor’s race remains too close to call because millions of mail-in and other ballots are still being counted under the state’s lengthy vote-counting process. Early results show conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading, with former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in second place and businessman Tom Steyer trailing, but the final top two candidates advancing to November have not yet been determined. Both campaigns are urging patience as counties continue processing ballots, which could take days or weeks. The uncertainty has fueled political speculation, though election officials stress that California prioritizes accuracy and security over a rapid count. Trump, however, is already claiming fraud:

Thousands of people in Albania are protesting a proposed $1.6 billion luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, arguing that it threatens protected coastal ecosystems and has moved forward without sufficient transparency or public input. Environmental groups say construction has already begun in sensitive habitats that support endangered wildlife, while accusing the government of bypassing normal environmental and permitting processes. Prime Minister Edi Rama has defended the project as a source of jobs, investment, and economic development, insisting it will proceed. The controversy has grown beyond environmental concerns into a broader dispute over government accountability, land use, and foreign-backed development in Albania.

A close Trump ally, Bill Pulte, right, has been selected to lead U.S. intelligence agencies despite lacking intelligence experience. The move has sparked concern among former officials and some lawmakers, who fear intelligence resources could be used for political purposes. Supporters argue that Pulte is loyal, effective, and aligned with Trump’s agenda. The appointment highlights ongoing debates about the role of loyalty, expertise, and political influence in national security leadership.

FIFA has banned fans from bringing reusable water bottles into 2026 World Cup stadiums, reversing a previous policy that allowed empty bottles. The organization says the ban is for safety reasons, but critics argue it could create problems given the high temperatures expected at many venues. Fans will have access to hydration stations and other cooling measures, though they will need to buy water inside the stadiums. Limited exceptions apply for baby formula, children’s water, and medically necessary liquids.

A shooting broke out in a parking lot after a high school graduation ceremony in Fairfield, California, killing an 18-year-old and injuring three others, including an 11-year-old child. The violence occurred shortly after Sem Yeto High School’s graduation event ended on the Fairfield High School campus. Police launched a search for the shooter and were still investigating the circumstances, with no suspect description immediately available. The tragedy shocked the local community and disrupted what had been a celebratory graduation night.

More On Trump's $1.8 Billion Taxpayer Slush Fund For Allies, Hooligans, Convicts 

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Schrödinger’s Slush Fund, Andrew Egger, right, June 4, 2026. Earlier this week, facing a Senate Republican mutiny, the White House suggested it would cancel a planned $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for payouts to January 6th rioters and other Trump allies.

Yesterday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the House Appropriations Committee that the Justice Department was “not moving forward with the fund.” But nobody involved—not the president, not the rioters, not the senators who oppose the fund—seems convinced that the idea of cash transfers to insurrectionists is really dead.

In an interview with the New York Post this week, Trump continued to insist that the January 6th criminals he pardoned last year “should be reimbursed for a crooked government.” Yesterday, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked him whether the fund was dead or merely on hold, Trump dodged the question: “It’s, uh . . . I’d have to ask the lawyers. I don’t know.” He then pivoted to an extended personal attack on Collins.

Meanwhile, many of the rioters and the lawyers representing them are still holding out hope for a payout. The slush fund, after all, was just a financial mechanism for bundling their claims; Trump’s ongoing endorsement of the idea that they should get money has many thinking the Justice Department may prove more willing to settle with them individually. Peter Ticktin, a MAGA lawyer with hundreds of J6er clients, said this week he has filed claims for 200 clients and expects to file 200 more.

“As much as we’re disappointed that the plan was canceled,” Ticktin told ABC News, “right now we’re still very optimistic.”

Several senators suggested yesterday they’re not taking the administration at face value here either.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, told reporters he wasn’t inclined to take Blanche at his word. “You want to make sure something’s dead, not just mostly dead,” the physician legislator told NOTUS, channeling his inner Billy Crystal.¹ “You want to make sure it’s really dead, and I think we can make it really dead.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) sounded a similar note. “They will call it dead so long as it is politically expedient for them to do so,” she told reporters. “We will only know that that fund, that slush fund, is dead when we make that the law that the president cannot do this.”

It’s exactly the right sentiment. If Congress has learned nothing else during the Trump era, maybe they’ve at least learned this: You’d have to be a fool to take these guys at their word.

If Congress is going to do anything to make sure the slush fund is truly dead and buried, today’s the day to do it. The Senate will be voting for hours today on amendments to its $70 billion reconciliation package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol, a top legislative priority for Republicans on the Hill. It’ll be a good opportunity to see how gullible this crew still is.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: No, Trump's $1.776 billion slush fund isn't 'dead,' Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, June 4, 2026. President Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” has faced bipartisan opposition. Multiple Republicans have argued that the $1.776 billion fund, which is part of a settlement agreement in Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), is a “slush fund” to reward Trump’s political allies, including rioters who participated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Republican opposition to the fund delayed voting for a reconciliation bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. To advance that legislation, the Trump administration wants Republican Senators and the public to believe that the fund is not moving forward.

This effort started Monday, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) posted a statement to X in response to a federal judge’s temporary order preventing the activation of the fund. In the statement, the DOJ wrote that it disagrees with the decision, but “will abide by the Court’s ruling.”

This was paired with a report from Axios citing “two senior administration officials” that said that the Trump administration would “drop its controversial $1.8 billion ‘weaponization’ fund.”

This proved insufficient for Senate Republicans. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said that Republicans would not be satisfied until the administration “shuts it down“ and makes it “very very clear.”

On Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House committee that the DOJ was “not moving forward” with the fund. Many major media outlets, citing Blanche’s comments, quickly published headlines claiming that the fund was “dead” or had been “scrapped.”

Politico, for example, published an article with the headline, “‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ is dead, acting AG says.” The Washington Post published an article entitled, “Trump administration abandons $1.8 billion payout fund after revolt by GOP.” The Wall Street Journal wrote that the Trump administration was “abandoning” the fund. The Associated Press, TIME, and the Guardian all published articles with headlines claiming the fund was scrapped, while Forbes, CNBC, and NOTUS all wrote headlines stating that Blanche said that the fund was “dead.”

This is not, however, what Blanche said.

The settlement agreement between Trump and the DOJ, which created the weaponization fund, states, “This Settlement Agreement may be modified only with the written agreement of the Parties.” During his testimony, Blanche repeatedly declined to reverse the settlement in writing.

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY): You and Associate Attorney General Woodward signed earlier documents regarding the settlement and this fund. Would both of you now sign and release documents reversing the DOJ’s position on the fund?

Blanche: We’re not moving forward with the fund. I’m not sure what that means to sign documents reversing. There’s nothing to reverse. We’re not moving forward with the fund.

Later, Meng said, “You established it in writing. So it just makes sense to rescind it in writing.” Blanche responded, “I’m not committing to doing anything in writing.”

During his testimony, Blanche indicated the Trump administration would continue to defend the fund against legal challenges, saying the administration would be “defending our rights and making sure our rights are protected.”

Further, the future of the fund depends on the position of Trump, not Blanche. Trump can replace Blanche, who is only serving in an acting capacity, at any time. Without a written reversal, Blanche could also simply say that the DOJ’s position has changed and the fund will move forward.

In a podcast interview that was taped on Tuesday, Trump was asked by host Miranda Devine if the fund was dropped. “No, a court ruled against it,” Trump said. Trump defended the fund, arguing that “these are people that have been decimated” and “they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

When asked Wednesday by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins if the fund was dead or on hold, Trump said, “I don’t know” and said he would have to ask “the lawyers.” When Collins pressed for further clarification, Trump told her to “be quiet.”

“I love it,” Trump said of the anti-weaponization fund. “I think it’s so important.”$100 million immunity

Another important part of Trump’s settlement with the IRS remains fully intact. Trump, his family members, and their businesses are shielded from any audits or punishments by the IRS related to tax returns that were filed before the settlement became effective last month.

Blanche confirmed that this part of the settlement is still in effect during his appearance in the House on Tuesday. He defended the provision, saying, “It’s nothing that gives any sort of immunity in the future to the president or his family or his organizations.”

The release from all audits of past tax returns, however, could generate massive savings for him and his family — potentially more than $100 million. (Further, like many wealthy people, Trump typically carries deductions forward multiple years. So preventing audits of prior tax returns would likely make auditing future tax returns extremely difficult, if not impossible.)

According to the New York Times, Trump has faced an ongoing audit by the IRS since 2010, when he received a $72.9 million tax refund. The IRS suspected that Trump had written off the same losses on a Chicago hotel tower twice. If the IRS had ruled against him, Trump could have owed more than $100 million.

It is unclear whether the audit was still ongoing when the settlement was reached this year. It is also unknown whether Trump or his family were facing any other audits.Blanche’s $10 million conflict of interest

Blanche personally signed off on the settlement, even though he served as Trump’s personal defense attorney in the past. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Blanche was paid nearly $10 million by Trump’s Save America PAC to represent Trump in various legal battles.

Blanche represented Trump during the trial over Trump’s hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. Although this trial resulted in Trump being convicted of 34 felonies, Blanche successfully stalled two other cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Both cases, one over Trump’s interference in the 2020 election and the other alleging that Trump illegally stored classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, were delayed until after Trump won reelection. At that point, Smith was left with little choice but to drop the cases.  

Scott MacFarlane via Substack, Democrats Plan to Block Trump's Sweetheart Immunity Deal with I.R.S., Scott MacFarlane, right, June 4, 2026. Formal Proposal on Thursday Would Prohibit Sitting Presidents From Entering Immunity Deals with I.R.S.

Democrats Formally Propose Plan to Halt Trump’s Sweetheart Immunity Deal with IRS,

US House Democrats will push a new plan to block the sweetheart deal to absolve President Trump from IRS audits and scrutiny. A bill introduced Thursday morning would prohibit any sitting President from entering into settlements with his or her own Administration to skirt scrutiny from the I.R.S.

The legislation, which was formally introduced by Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, would ban sitting Presidents from “entering into settlements with the federal government for money damages.” The bill would also require independent courts or judges review any agreement that would seek to grant a President a “super pardon” or other sweeping immunity arrangements.

Raskin said, “My legislative package would end the slush fund, outlaw collusive settlements, and make clear that no President can use taxpayer dollars to cut partisan loyalty reward checks.”

Outrage over the Trump Administration’s to redirect $1.7 billion in taxpayer money into a fund for convicted crooks, fraudsters and Capitol rioters has triggered a wave of proposals to shutdown the fund. Democratic and Republican Senators were expected to offer a series of amendments and votes on Thursday to block the creation of the fund, or to prevent Capitol Insurrectionists from receiving any of the money.

Raskin’s proposal responds to a second component of the Justice Department’s controversial announcement last month: The binding agreement that absolves Trump and others associated with Trump from scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service.

Raskin’s bill is titled the Block Lawless Agreements and Nullify Corrupt Handouts and Emoluments Act, which carries the acronym BLANCHE, an unequivocal reference to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has championed the IRS provision benefiting Trump.

Trump is expected to nominate Blanche to be his nominee for the post. The slush fund and the IRS sweetheart deal endanger Republican votes for Blanche in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, has already raised questions about Justice Department officials whitewashing the January 6th attack.

A report by the House Judiciary Committee argued the arrangement “Grants to Trump, his ‘related or related individuals’ and all their ‘trusts’ and ‘companies’ for ‘any matters currently pending or that could be pending” before the IRS “or other agencies or departments. In other words, Trump, his entire family and all of their businesses can never be investigated, prosecuted, fined or taxed by any agency of the federal government for any violations of federal law—criminal, civil, or administrative—they have committed.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined to comment to questions from a Senate panel about whether Trump would still receive the IRS immunity agreement, even if the Administration halts its plants for the $1.7 billion slush fund. 

More On Weaponizing Courts, Prosecutors To Thwart U.S. Civil Rights 

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leading researcher of White Nationalist and other ultra-right groups that promote hate crimes in the United States, has been indicted on fraud-related charges by the Trump Justice Department even though previous Justice Departments used the center's research for criminal investigations to protect against violence and other civil rights disruptions.

Emptywheel, Analysis: In Superseding SPLC Indictment, DOJ Confesses They Made a Big Mistake, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 4, 2026. Days after DOJ first indicted SPLC in April, I laid out how the indictment worked. I showed several problems with the indictment’s theory of deception and argued that DOJ might be trying to criminalize SPLC’s efforts to protect their informants from the far right extremist organizations they were targeting.

After I posted it, several revelations made it clear the US Attorney involved, Kevin Davidson, had rushed his work, and in the process fucked up the indictment in several ways.

An April 17 letter disclosed as part of an effort to get Todd Blanche to correct his lies revealed that SPLC had reminded DOJ that the bank at the center of false statements claims was “aware that the SPLC was the owner of those accounts”: “As the government acknowledged during our February 26 meeting, the local bank representatives—at least—were aware that the SPLC was the owner of those accounts.” Various lawyers had pointed out material flaws in the indictment. This April 25 Andrew Weissmann post, for example, described: The Wire Fraud charges presumed that SPLC was promoting, rather than combatting, far right extremist groups. The vagueness of the Bank Fraud charges suggests DOJ is covering something else, and that charge does not reflect a year-old SCOTUS precedent limiting such crimes to false, rather than just misleading, statements. An April 28 declaration revealed that, after SPLC corrected false information DOJ had been fed by a source (claiming SPLC had deleted its informant files), DOJ belatedly subpoenaed and SPLC complied with that subpoena on April 17, just days before the indictment was returned on April 21. SPLC turned over 14,856 records to DOJ. Presumably DOJ initially charged SPLC without reviewing this closely, if at all. On April 30, Jamie Raskin wrote Davidson describing that a whistleblower had told HJC that Todd Blanche flunky Aakash Singh had ordered Davidson to rush the indictment.

According to whistleblower information provided to this Committee, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh ordered your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.

So when, on May 22, SPLC asked to extend their pretrial motion deadline because DOJ was considering superseding the indictment, I thought such a superseding indictment might fix some of these substantive problems.

Before I revisit that earlier post, showing how the indictment works, I want to share the — by far — most interesting new detail in the superseding indictment.

Buried in a description about informants F-31 and 32 — KKK members who tried to leave with SPLC’s help, whom SPLC convinced to stay and inform on the Klan — there’s a discussion of motive. (Unless one of these informants is the person IDed as F-uknown in the original indictment, they are two of the only entirely new characters in it; though the vagueness of the timing and total money spent would be consistent with that earlier reference.)

iv. An SPLC employee told F-31 and F-32 that if anyone asked where the money [from SPLC] came from, they were to say they worked for Rare Books and that their job was to help college students research and write essays. The SPLC employee told them that this was for their own safety. Neither F-31 nor F-32 ever researched or wrote any essays for any students, college or otherwise.

v. Although the SPLC employee claimed F-31 and F-32 needed to be paid as Rare Books employees for their safety, donors’ money paid to them from the SPLC operating account, through the CIA account, through the Rare Books account, and onto the pay car resulted in F-31 and F-32 being put in the type of dangerous situations that F-32 sought SPLC’s help to get away from in the first place.

This language, which could have been in the information SPLC turned over on April 17, is highly exculpatory. It makes it clear that evidence shows that all the secrecy was not an attempt to protect F-31 and F-32 from SPLC donors. On the contrary, this secrecy served to protect people who agreed to help SPLC learn more about the Klan.

DOJ offers a dumb excuse — that F-31 and F-32 wouldn’t be in danger if SPLC had just helped them remove their tattoos. Except just talking to SPLC put them in danger!

The superseding indictment, then, confirms that SPLC had a different motive than the one DOJ claims. SPLC used this secrecy to keep informants safe from the extremists they were informing on. DOJ nevertheless superseded anyway, still claiming that SPLC was trying to deceive its donors.

Now, to be clear, there are new inclusions that have right wingers frothing with glee: a claim that SPLC reimbursed F-31 and F-32 for cross burning materials; language claiming SPLC softened the language describing one of their informants so he could continue to recruit; for six years, the head of SPLC intelligence and one of the informants — the same one that SPLC warned DOJ had reason to be extremely biased before they relied on his testimony — lived together in a romantic relationship, with the informant seemingly making more than the SPLC employee.

I’m not sure any of those change the basic problem: DOJ has proof that SPLC’s motive was to protect informants, not to defraud donors.

And in spite of DOJ’s attempts to clean up the problems that Weissmann identified, all it did was change the language in the indictment (perhaps in a bid to stave off one kind of motion to dismiss), without changing the underlying lack of evidence. The superseding indictment takes out the words “and misleading” to reflect the SCOTUS precedent identified by Weissmann, but these charges appear far weaker given SPLC’s representation that, in February, prosecutors admitted the bank knew these accounts belonged to the SPLC. The superseding indictment weakens their fraud claim, now accusing SPLC of omitting material facts, in addition to making materially false claims.

But it does so in an indictment that describes SPLC trying to protect informants from the far right extremists informants were informing on, rather than misleading donors.

And all that comes on top of another problem with the superseding indictment. As I laid out in this post, there are three crimes charged: the wire fraud tied to six payments made in 2023, the false statements to a bank made in 2020, and a concealment money laundering charge trying to tie the alleged lies to the bank together to the payments to informants; Weissmann describes that the latter charge, “piggybacks on, and requires the validity of, the first bucket of fraud charges.” So you gotta have SPLC lying to confuse donors, not far right extremists, and you gotta have the bank being fooled before that charge works.

This table updates the table in my earlier post, comparing which informants the indictment chooses to talk about with those actually implicated in alleged crimes. As noted, pink F-numbers are people for whom DOJ added new details, green are people who’ve disappeared, and blue are potentially new characters. Italics mark new financial or temporal data.

As with the first indictment, DOJ jumbles the descriptions of the informants (and jumbles the order used in the first indictment), making it hard to track which payments DOJ actually says amounted to wire code.

But the treatment of the six money laundering payments in the superseding indictment further undermines that SPLC was duping donors by paying actual far right extremists, because several more of them are revealed to be informants. The six recipients are:

F-9: The original indictment claimed that F-9 “was affiliated” with a bunch of Neo-Nazi organizations. The superseding indictment not only reveals that F-9 was romantically involved with another SPLC staffer, but it makes clear that “At the direction of the SPLC, F-9 infiltrated” those Neo-Nazi organizations. [my emphasis] F-11: While the F-11 payment is still among the six wire fraud charges, the superseding indictment takes out language — “the SPLC funnl[ed] more than $160,,000.00 from a fictitious entity to F-11 who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders” — describing F-11 as a kind of cut-out, possibly paying for information from extremists who didn’t know they were tied to SPLC. F-35: As with the original indictment, there’s no description of what F-35 was doing, or whether they were paying for information or infiltrating a right wing group. F-40: As with F-35, there’s no description of who or what F-40 was, just that they got an ACH payment in 2023. F-42: Both indictments describe that F-42 was “the former chairman” of the National Alliance. What they don’t say is whether he was still personally participating in right wing extremism during the years he was informing for SPLC (or whether SPLC was paying someone who had left the movement as a kind of expert insider). But what they do reveal is that one of the ways he got paid was via checks (in addition to the ACH payments that cannot possibly defraud the bank). F-37: Unite the Right infiltrator

F-37 deserves particular attention, because it really demonstrates the fraud DOJ is engaged in. F-37 was the first person introduced in the original indictment, described unequivocally as “a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. DOJ used F-37’s role in Unite the Right to get right wingers riled up about fedsurrection, disclaiming the very real organizing right wing extremists did to set up the Charlottesville rally.

In the superseding indictment, though, DOJ buries F-37, making him the sixth informant described. Perhaps that’s because the description now begins by admitting, “F-37 was not involved in an extremist organization before F-37 reached out the SPLC seeking employment.”

That is, F-37 — the cornerstone of the first indictment — turns out to be precisely what everyone knows SPLC always used, informants, people who got a job with SPLC working as an informant.

This is critically important because one point of this exercise has always been to claim that SPLC fraudulently juiced their fundraising with their very important Unite the Right reporting. And indeed, the superseding indictment adds language to that effect:

The “Unite the Right” rally led to massive fundraising windfall for the SPLC with open-source media reporting that the SPLC more than doubled their previous year’s reported revenue from private and corporate donations following the “Unite the Right” rally.

In reality, however, this superseding indictment confirms things worked exactly like they were supposed to. SPLC cultivated an infiltrator for three years before Unite the Right (and kept paying him for six years afterwards), and because they did that, SPLC gave donors precisely what they wanted: insight into the far right surge that coincided with Trump’s installation.

And donors paid for that.

This indictment doesn’t help DOJ save this case. What it does is corroborate the whistleblower who told Raskin that Todd Blanche’s office forced prosecutors to charge this before checking on basic things … like whether SPLC explained they were engaged in all this secrecy to protect informants, as everyone believes.

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

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.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Authoritarianism Accelerates, William Kristol, right, June 4, 2026. Last night, President Trump announced at a dinner in what used to be the Rose Garden that he would be nominating acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold that post in a full capacity. As Trump put it, “we are going to make him permanent attorney general.”

It’s an interesting formulation. Trump can’t actually “make” Blanche attorney general. That will require Senate confirmation, which could well be problematic. And moving up from acting attorney general doesn’t make you “permanent attorney general.” Unless Trump plans to remain permanent president.

Which, it seems, is something Trump increasingly seems to have in mind.

In his two months as acting attorney general, Blanche has gone out of his way to show Trump, conspicuously and publicly, his unsparing commitment to the autocrat’s precept: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies the law.” From the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, to the authorization of a sweeping investigation of former law enforcement and intelligence officials allegedly engaged in a decade-long conspiracy against Trump, to the attempt to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump’s allies and supporters, to his earlier work on the Epstein coverup—Todd Blanche has done what Trump wants. Trump’s announcement last night sends the signal that such an effort will be recognized and rewarded.

Trump’s announcement of his intention to promote Blanche came hard on the heels of Trump’s selection Tuesday of his spectacularly unqualified but fervently loyal henchman, Bill Pulte, to be acting Director of National Intelligence. And the last few days have also seen progress, if that’s the word, in the ongoing Trumpification of other key national security agencies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has intervened in unprecedented ways in the selection of senior military officers, and has also put a 24-year-old convicted January 6th rioter in a counterterrorism job at the Pentagon. Trump has also been increasingly strident in recent days in his defense of what he and his supporters attempted on January 6, 2021. And in testimony to Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to commit to obeying court orders. This led senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to comment, “If you’re a Republican or a Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out.” Just yesterday, Trump signed an executive order converting some 8,000 career, non-partisan civil service positions into political appointments, making those employees hirable and fireable at will.

We all should be “really, really freaked out.” Because it’s clear that Trump’s power grab over the executive branch is not just proceeding apace, but is intensifying. Yes, Trump is less popular than he used to be, and he has less of an absolute sway over Republican members of Congress than he once did. But this seems to be causing not hesitation on Trump’s part, but an intensification of his power-grabbing efforts. He seems no longer to care much about political backlash, or electoral consequences. As he said last week, “I don’t care about the midterms.” It’s almost as if he doesn’t expect elections to matter because he’s not going to do everything he can to allow them not to matter.

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Trump seems to be at the stage of his authoritarian project when the mask comes off, when he increasingly disdains to conceal his aims. Trump has always presented himself as the tribune of the people. But yesterday he posted on Truth Social:

Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!

This professed disdain by Trump for the “Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE” is striking. Trump has been a fantastically successful demagogue, a master flatterer of the people. But at some point in an authoritarian takeover, one has to explain why one is taking over power despite or against the wishes of the people. What we are seeing is a president who is going full steam ahead on his centralization of power in a way that should make one doubt he intends to give it up—whether over the next two years, whatever a Democratic Congress tries to do, or in 2028, whatever the people try to do at the polls.

Many of the authoritarian efforts of Trump and his apparatchiks remain in the shadows, to be sure. But he wants to accustom his supporters to the idea that the opposition is thwarting him and that he may therefore need to take extraordinary measures. Trump didn’t have to nominate Blanche as “permanent” attorney general. Blanche can stay in the job as acting attorney general, with all the powers of a “permanent attorney general,” for quite a while. Trump wants these public fights. Authoritarianism needs to come into the daylight in order to socialize the acceptance not just of particular measures, but of the overall project, and to justify what might need to be done to seize power or stay in power in order to defeat the “Communists” who have seduced the people.

Over the past century, in many nations, fascist movements and authoritarian coups have sought justification in the need to save their respective countries from the Communists. One hopes and trusts that American exceptionalism will win out, and that we will not go down in history as merely another chapter in this sad story. We’re in no way destined to succumb to such a fate. 

New York Times, Trump’s plan to nominate Blanche could set off a bruising confirmation battle, Staff Report, June 4, 2026. President Trump has indicated that he plans to nominate the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, to take on the role on a permanent basis, the latest move by the president to place loyalists in top jobs across the government.

Dan Scavino, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted advisers, posted a video of the president announcing the plan on Wednesday night.

“Tomorrow I’m instructing Dan and everybody else that’s involved in that very complicated process, which is going to go, I think, very quickly, that we are going to make him permanent attorney general,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Blanche in the video.

If Mr. Trump follows through and formally nominates Mr. Blanche to the post, it would likely set off a bruising confirmation battle in the Senate.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Blanche, left, have faced a backlash over the president’s plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to use taxpayer money to pay his allies who claim they have been politically persecuted.

Also this week, Mr. Trump named Bill Pulte, who has pressed for investigations into the president’s foes, to serve as the acting director of national intelligence, giving him oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Mr. Pulte, who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no known background in intelligence, defense or national security. He has been among the most aggressive advocates for prosecuting Democrats and others perceived by Mr. Trump as having crossed him.

His appointment led Democrats to threaten to hold up reauthorization of a surveillance program used to guard against national security threats.

New York Times, News Analysis: Republicans Begin to Test the Limits of Trump’s Power by Flexing Their Own, Katie Rogers, June 4, 2026 (print ed.). The president’s unilateral and retributive style of governing is starting to hit a wall in both chambers of Congress.

On a tour through Asia last fall, President Trump took a moment on the world stage to celebrate a legislative victory at home: After months of iron-fisted pressure, he had compelled Republicans to pass legislation that cut taxes and slashed into the country’s social safety net.

“I said, ‘Put it all into one bill, and if we get it done, we’re done for four years,’” Mr. Trump said during an October speech in Tokyo. “We don’t need anything more from Congress in terms of that.”

Ever since, Mr. Trump has been intent on testing that theory, daring lawmakers to defy him and doing his best to vanquish them from office if they do. But after a retributive romp through primary season, Mr. Trump’s style of governing — unilateral, and often impatient — has collided with restive Republicans who seem to be exacting some political vengeance of their own.

On Wednesday evening, four House Republicans sided with Democrats to demand Mr. Trump withdraw U.S. forces from the conflict with Iran or win approval from Congress, rebuking a president who has repeatedly said he does not need congressional authorization to continue the conflict.

That came on the heels of another high-profile setback: a Republican revolt against a $1.8 billion fund to reward Trump supporters who claim political persecution by Democrats. Many Republican senators had indicated that they would not move forward with plans to fund Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda unless those plans were axed. This week, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that the administration would abandon the effort.

But on Wednesday, just as the Senate moved to debate an immigration bill that they had held up because of the fund, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he wasn’t quite sure if the fund was dead or on hold.

“I love it,” he told a reporter who asked about the pot of money, effectively jamming his foot in the way of a door lawmakers had hoped to close. “I think it’s so important.”

No wonder Republicans want to put something in writing.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican whom Mr. Trump helped dispatch during the primaries, shared a Wall Street Journal editorial on social media earlier in the day, calling on Congress to pass legislation to kill the fund.

“The way to ensure the Trump retribution fund is more than mostly dead would be for Congress to put a stake through it,” Mr. Cornyn wrote, echoing the editorial.

(The senator, who has been posting up a storm about the concept of betrayal in recent days, added the word “retribution,” which did not appear in that sentence in the editorial. Last week, he shared a fable about a frog who was wronged by a scorpion.)

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump in 2021 and lost his primary, also supports legislation that would kill the fund. “You want to make sure it’s really dead,” he told reporters.

On a tour through Asia last fall, President Trump took a moment on the world stage to celebrate a legislative victory at home: After months of iron-fisted pressure, he had compelled Republicans to pass legislation that cut taxes and slashed into the country’s social safety net.

“I said, ‘Put it all into one bill, and if we get it done, we’re done for four years,’” Mr. Trump said during an October speech in Tokyo. “We don’t need anything more from Congress in terms of that.”

Ever since, Mr. Trump has been intent on testing that theory, daring lawmakers to defy him and doing his best to vanquish them from office if they do. But after a retributive romp through primary season, Mr. Trump’s style of governing — unilateral, and often impatient — has collided with restive Republicans who seem to be exacting some political vengeance of their own.

On Wednesday evening, four House Republicans sided with Democrats to demand Mr. Trump withdraw U.S. forces from the conflict with Iran or win approval from Congress, rebuking a president who has repeatedly said he does not need congressional authorization to continue the conflict.

That came on the heels of another high-profile setback: a Republican revolt against a $1.8 billion fund to reward Trump supporters who claim political persecution by Democrats. Many Republican senators had indicated that they would not move forward with plans to fund Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda unless those plans were axed. This week, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that the administration would abandon the effort.

But on Wednesday, just as the Senate moved to debate an immigration bill that they had held up because of the fund, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he wasn’t quite sure if the fund was dead or on hold.

“I love it,” he told a reporter who asked about the pot of money, effectively jamming his foot in the way of a door lawmakers had hoped to close. “I think it’s so important.”

No wonder Republicans want to put something in writing.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican whom Mr. Trump helped dispatch during the primaries, shared a Wall Street Journal editorial on social media earlier in the day, calling on Congress to pass legislation to kill the fund.

“The way to ensure the Trump retribution fund is more than mostly dead would be for Congress to put a stake through it,” Mr. Cornyn wrote, echoing the editorial.

(The senator, who has been posting up a storm about the concept of betrayal in recent days, added the word “retribution,” which did not appear in that sentence in the editorial. Last week, he shared a fable about a frog who was wronged by a scorpion.)

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump in 2021 and lost his primary, also supports legislation that would kill the fund. “You want to make sure it’s really dead,” he told reporters.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Tell Me How the Iran War Ends… MARK HERTLING asks: What are we fighting for?
• Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong… Online bigotry masquerades as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X, writes BRET DEVEREAUX.
• The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy… On the flagship pod, LUKE RUSSERT and JOSH TUREK join TIM MILLER to discuss why it sure feels like there’s a vast right wing conspiracy to try and take over the media.

Quick Hits

YANK PULTE OR STOP SPYING: For Senate Democrats, reauthorizing America’s broad post-9/11 spying programs is one thing—and reauthorizing them with a Trump hatchet man like Bill Pulte in the government’s top intel position is quite another. Punchbowl News reports that Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, met with Majority Leader John Thune Tuesday to urge him to press Trump to change his mind on Pulte. If he refuses, Warner said, Democrats may be forced to tank a bill under consideration to extend the administration’s FISA 702 intelligence authorities. Here’s Punchbowl:

Democrats believe they’d be doing Republicans a favor because they also see Pulte as unqualified for the job, even if few openly say it. As we scooped Tuesday, the White House had indicated to top Republicans that Aaron Lukas, whom Trump announced as the acting DNI 12 days ago, would remain in the role for an extended period. Senate Republicans felt blindsided.

Despite Republicans’ concerns about Pulte, many argued Tuesday that reauthorizing Section 702 shouldn’t be “conflated” with his appointment. . . .

But Democrats have leverage here. Republicans can’t pass a FISA reauthorization on their own. With a handful of GOP senators expected to oppose any FISA agreement, Thune would likely need at least a dozen Democrats to support the bill. . . . That’s where Warner comes in. As his party has grown more antagonistic toward the surveillance authority, the Virginia Democrat is seen by Republicans as a crucial ally who can deliver Democratic votes.

Read the whole thing—and watch this space. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

CEASEFIRE, DESPITE ALL THE FIRING: Despite Iran’s strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait Tuesday and American strikes against Iran’s Qeshm Island, the Trump administration yesterday maintained that nothing fundamental has changed: The war against Iran is over, the ceasefire holds, and negotiations with Iran are ongoing.

“Epic Fury has concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a House committee in testimony yesterday. “We’re no longer conducting sustained strikes inside of Iran to degrade their military because Epic Fury is over.”

It’s an argument the White House is politically obliged to make: If Epic Fury were still ongoing, the administration would have been compelled by law to seek congressional authorization for its continuance weeks ago. But the distinction is largely one of scale and definition only, with Iran and American forces continuing to trade missile barrages that both sides insist on describing as “defensive strikes.”

Meanwhile, negotiators remain hung up on the same roadblocks as ever: In addition to the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program, Trump has grown skittish about granting Iran sanctions relief after a reported preliminary deal that would have freed up billions for Iran sparked backlash among Republicans last week. Trump is eager, CNN reports, “to strike a deal that will be viewed as superior to a prior agreement inked during the Obama administration.”

TINKERER IN CHIEF: As early as March of last year, we were already remarking on the remarkable amount of time Donald Trump was spending on vanity projects like shaking up the Kennedy Center and redecorating the White House relative to working on his actual political agenda. At the time, we considered this a good thing: “Every minute spent critiquing the upholstery in the Kennedy concert hall is one less minute the president has to search out new beefs with Canada or personally vet FBI agents to no-knock Liz Cheney’s home.”

We stand by the sentiment—but even we have to admit this stuff’s getting ridiculous. Yesterday, the president summoned reporters to the Oval Office for a major announcement: The resurfacing of the bottom of the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial was nearly complete. He even had bizarre props on hand: “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers,” read the giant posterboard printout Trump brandished, boasting that the reflecting pool is longer than the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center are tall. (This is, of course, true of many bodies of water, both natural and artificial.)

Trump was equally exultant on Truth Social: “Excitingly, the final coat of protection will be completed on the Reflecting Pool . . . at 4 P.M. today,” he posted shortly before that hour. “The water will start flowing, shortly thereafter. The walking paths outside of the Pool will, likewise, be cleaned, sandblasted, and finished soon. This will be the first time since the day it was built, 1922, that it has worked, and worked wonderfully, indeed!” Our long national nightmare, it seems, is finally at an end. Thank you, Mr. President!

More On Trump's Health, Governance

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Donald Trump knows he’s losing control, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 4, 2026. At 3:50 p.m. today, the President of the United States suddenly reappeared after not being seen at any public events since his visit to Walter Reed Medical Center over a week ago. With bad news mounting all around him and questions surrounding his declining health growing louder by the day, Donald Trump was forced to make an appearance.

And for 43 minutes, Trump and his enablers attempted to present a powerful, in-control leader (as shown below). But all the world saw was a paranoid man praising an authoritarian leader as “a friend of mine, a good man,” attacking a journalist as “a young, beautiful woman who never smiles” with “hatred in her eyes,” and desperately trying to maintain the illusion that everything was under control.

And it started, of all things, with pictures of Trump’s current favorite project: the reflecting pool. Before he signed a single thing or took a single question, the President spent the first several minutes of his reappearance talking about the reflecting pool on the National Mall. He described its length. He asked his staff to bring him a picture, comparing it to some of the tallest buildings in the world. He talked about the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and the Sears Tower as if a flat pool of water were a skyscraper standing upright. He told the cameras it would be “American flag blue” and bragged about how many truckloads of garbage had been pulled out of it. This is what the man who had vanished from public view for over a week chose to lead with. Not his disappearance, health, or the mounting crises facing the country. A pool.

And from there, his rambling took him to the part that was truly disgusting and told us everything about what we are dealing with. He started describing the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most important speeches in modern American history, and used it to claim that his own crowd had been bigger. “They said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people,” he said, before insisting that if you put the pictures side by side, “I had more people. They were tighter. My people were tighter.”

For Trump, everything is a competition because everything is insecurity. Looking out over the reflecting pool where Dr. King spoke of justice, equality, and the unfinished promise of American democracy, Trump’s mind immediately went to crowd size. Not the speech. Not the movement. Not the courage it took to stand there in 1963 and demand that America live up to its ideals. The only thing he could think about was whether he looked bigger. And the men standing beside him just nodded and smiled along.

Because the actual business was real, and serious, and buried beneath all of it. He signed two executive orders. One reshapes customs enforcement. The other strips long-standing job protections from roughly 8,000 senior federal workers, making them fireable at will, the kind of move that allows an administration to purge experienced civil servants and replace them with political loyalists. Those protections exist for a reason. They help ensure that government officials answer to the law, the Constitution, and the public rather than to the personal demands of a president. Remove those safeguards, and competence becomes less important than obedience. Dissent becomes a firing offense. And the people responsible for telling the truth inside government learn very quickly that their jobs depend on telling the leader what he wants to hear.

From there, it became all about his grievances. He attacked the judge who ruled against his anti-weaponization fund, dismissing the decision as the work of “a radical left judge.” He cast himself as a victim over and over again over the search of his own home, expecting sympathy. And when a reporter asked him about the 1.776 billion dollar slush fund, he simply said, “I love it. I think it’s so important.”

Then he moved on to reframing his war in Iran. After launching strikes on Iran without congressional approval, he wanted us to believe it was barely a war at all. “It’s not a big thing for us,” he said. “We have a great military. It’s not a big thing for us.” And in the same breath, he assured us the stock market was soaring, retirement accounts were booming, and costs were coming down. The war is nothing. The economy is perfect. And if your grocery bill says otherwise, you’re apparently supposed to distrust your own eyes.

And then he drifted into communism. He had posted about it earlier today on Truth Social, and he was clearly proud of it. “Has anyone ever seen a Happy Communist?” read the first post. The second was longer: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL!” When a reporter read his own words back to him, he lit up. “I just wrote that,” he said. “Did you like it? Did you think it was well written?” He was desperate for praise. This was a very embarrassing moment for the president for the world to see.

Then came the familiar routine. He called New York, Los Angeles, and parts of California communist. He acted out, in the first person, what he imagined a communist demagogue would say: “You’ll no longer pay rent.” “I’ll end your mortgage.” “I’m going to give you free food.” “Follow me. You’re going to have the greatest life ever.” He performed the villain in a one-man show. He called the governor of Illinois “a slob.” He called the mayor of Chicago “a low IQ person.” He went city by city, tearing down the country he leads, cataloging the places he claims are failing, before once again casting himself as the lone man capable of saving them.

And then, in the middle of all of it, he just stopped. There was no conclusion. No natural ending. He was still talking, still wandering through one grievance after another, and then suddenly: “Thank you very much, everybody.” Almost immediately, his staff sprang into motion. “Thank you, press. Thank you, press.” Reporters were ushered out. The room was cleared. And Trump remained seated behind the desk with a blank expression, his shoulders slumped, his body seeming to sink into the chair.

We have seen this sequence before. Something changes, and suddenly the event is over. The room clears. The staff moves quickly. The same phrases are repeated, almost like a rehearsed signal. We don’t know what triggers it. It could be a physical issue or a cognitive one. But what we do know is that it isn’t how normal press events end. It isn’t how presidents typically conclude appearances. And it keeps happening often enough that the people around him appear to know exactly what to do the moment it does.

Because somewhere in that rant, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was standing there doing her job, and he went after her. He called CNN “crooked as hell” and “a very corrupt organization.” He called the network garbage. He looked at her and said she “never smiles,” that she is “a young, beautiful woman” who stands there “with hatred in her eyes.” When she tried to speak, he snapped, “Wait a minute. Be quiet.” He told her, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” He kept calling Democrats the “dum-o-crats.” And then he said the thing that I cannot stop thinking about. Talking about Democrats, and talking about her, he said, “There’s something wrong with them. There’s something wrong with you.”

He said there was something wrong with them while he sat there with his left hand gripping his right, holding it down. His face puffy and his right eye swollen and nearly shut at times while he was walking. He kept slurring his speech and then snapping back. He would erupt, and then go flat and monotone, and then erupt again. It was hard to watch as a human being and not be embarrassed for him. But it was even harder to watch as an American, to think about everyone who has ever fought for this country, and to realize that after nearly 250 years of democratic self-government, this is who we are presenting to the world as our leader.

And we have to ask why. Why, with the news this bad all around him, with his own party breaking from him in public, with the questions about his health getting louder by the hour, did he spend his first appearance in over a week attacking a reporter for not smiling? And the answer is the simplest one. He is trying to discredit the people whose job is to tell us what is happening, because what is happening is so bad for him. If he can make us distrust the press, then it does not matter what the press reports. That is the whole game.

And here is what we have to understand about that game, because it is bigger than one reporter and one bad afternoon. When an authoritarian can no longer reliably deliver his own propaganda, when the man himself is slurring his words and drifting and being hurried out of rooms, the machine around him does not stop needing the propaganda. It just needs someone else to deliver it. And so it reaches for the institutions that used to belong to all of us. It commandeers the media.

We watched it happen this week at CBS. Scott Pelley, who gave that network 37 years, was fired. One day earlier, in a staff meeting, he had accused the new leadership of “murdering the show,” the show being 60 Minutes, a program known for its accountability journalism. And then he put out a written statement that confirmed most of our worst fears. He said new management had instructed him to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. He said he had been told to include claims that were unverified, and that so far he had refused. He said politicians were being invited to choose which correspondents would interview them. And he said the network’s new owner was casting the program aside, in his words, to “curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”

CBS is gone now. Their independence and credibility are gone with it. And we will most likely lose CNN too. They will not stop. We are going to keep losing these mainstream outlets, one by one, because the people who own them have done the math. It is easier to make money telling people what a strongman wants them to hear than it is to make money telling the truth. The truth has no oligarch behind it. The lie has very deep pockets. And the men running these companies have watched how this President rewards loyalty and punishes the rest, and they have decided to grab what they can while the grabbing is good, even if they do not believe it will last. They do not care if it lasts. They care about right now.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.Subscribed

So the work is going to fall, more and more, on the people who do not have the deep pockets. The independent journalists. The investigative reporters. The writers and the creators who keep showing up, often at real cost to themselves, on the dark days, especially. And our country cannot survive if those voices go quiet, because a country where the people do not know what is being done to them is not a free country. You can already see what the lack of knowledge does. There are people all around us who have no real idea what is actually happening. And the ones who go looking for the truth are increasingly finding only the version someone was paid to feed them.

I made a promise when I started writing these posts. Every time this administration attacked the press, attacked the First Amendment, attacked the right of the American people to speak truth to power, I would call it out by name. Today, Trump did just that. And I am calling it out. This was an attack on our right to know about the destruction to our country being carried out by this administration. He was sending a direct message to all journalists and members of the media. I will come for you too. And to the public, he is saying, you can’t trust a single thing the media tells you. Our answer has to be that we won’t back down and we will support those still speaking out and reporting the truth.

Our way through this time in history is to put our money where our voices are. Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people defending it. That is the most direct form of resistance available to us right now. Independent media is how the truth stays alive when every other system is being captured. I have written every single night for a year with no corporate backing or sponsorship money. No one who could reach into what I write and change a word of it. Every post I write is free for everyone, because the truth should not be behind a paywall. But that is only possible because of the people who choose to support this work with a paid membership, who understand what is at stake, and who choose to support it. Thank you for being with me in the resistance.

And tonight I’m asking you, once again, to think beyond just my voice. Think about every writer, every journalist, every podcaster, every independent outlet that you turn to when you need the truth. The ones who are still standing up to endless attacks in our email inboxes and under greater pressure from the federal government. The ones still posting even when doing so comes at great cost. Because what this administration is trying to build requires our silence. And the most powerful thing we can do right now is make sure the people refusing to be silent can keep going. Every paid subscription to an independent voice is a vote against everything Trump and his enablers say and do.

And the reason Trump is behaving like he is with increasing desperation is because the same day that the President of the United States was attacking a journalist and her network, the House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution telling him to end his war in Iran. It passed 215 to 208. And four Republicans crossed over and voted for it.

It still needs the Senate, and on paper, it is largely symbolic. But that is not the point. The point is that members of his own party finally broke ranks in public and voted against him. This is Trump’s greatest fear: disloyalty. People saying no. People realizing they have more to fear from their constituents than from him. That is what made this man so agitated at today’s event.

Because that is what he is doing now. He is pushing people past their breaking point. And the cruelty of this man, the paranoia, the way even the smallest perception of disloyalty has become unforgivable to him, is starting to cost him the very people who used to protect him. They are watching him slur and drift and lash out, and they are doing the math too. And one by one, they are starting to step away. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too. 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is In A Period Of Profound Political Decline, Democrats Are Fielding Strong Candidates Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 4, 2026. The House rebuked Trump on both Iran and Ukraine yesterday. It was another day of remarkable losses for our ailing, addled, failure of a leader......

The proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered last night for our regular Wednesday look at our great battle against MAGA and for freedom and democracy. As they usually are, it was a lively affair, full of passionate chat and terrific questions. A video recording and rough transcript are above.

But before we get into the details of my talk let us marvel at this remarkable sight being seen throughout the Republican political universe this morning…. Here is some of what we talked about last night:

Trump Is In A Period Of Profound Political Decline. The Opposition Is Getting Stronger, Bigger, and More Ambitious. Little cracks have become big cracks my friends. Between the courts and Congress in recent weeks Trump has lost on the Kennedy Center, his ballroom, his slush fund, his tariffs, and now on his approach to the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

The Ukrainians and Iranians are now winning their wars against Putin and his [Trump's] regime, and refusing to lose. He had to retreat from Minnesota, and fire Bovino and Noem. His close ally Orban was routed in Hungary. He was humiliated in China, yielding to a stronger and more capable leader -- as he so often does, the coward that he is. His “Board of Peace” has become a global joke. Inflation is not bending the knee and the Federal Reserve is now more likely to raise interest rates than to cut them. Consumer sentiment is at at a 65 year low. His polling continues to drop. Democrats continue to see heightened performance in elections across the country. His candidate lost in the primary for Iowa governor on Tuesday night, a potentially deeply consequential loss. His successful efforts to defeat, and not re-elect, two well-regarded, influential Senate Republicans has permanently, and potentially dangerously, damaged his standing on the Hill. His new picks for ODNI and AG are tone deaf, impulsive, self-indulgent mistakes, new, fresh signs of his ebbing powers, increasingly paranoia, and narrowing circle. He keeps failing asleep at events he is hosting, and his medical reports have become something out of Monty Python.

Here’s the homepage of the New York Times this morning:

The U.S. House of Representatives advanced legislation on June 3 that would provide billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine, overcoming opposition from President Donald Trump’s administration and setting up a final vote on the measure the following day.

Lawmakers approved a procedural motion by a vote of 218-204, allowing the Ukraine Support Act to move forward despite opposition from Republican leadership. Six Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the measure.

Introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York and the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill would provide $8 billion in military financing for Ukraine, extend the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative through 2027, and impose additional sanctions on Russia.

The vote marked the first major Ukraine aid measure to gain significant momentum in Congress since Trump’s return to the White House.

The legislation had previously stalled after House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to consider it, reflecting Republican reluctance to continue U.S. support for Ukraine. Republican lawmakers have increasingly sided with Trump on Ukraine, contributing to a softer stance toward Moscow and a more skeptical approach to aid for Kyiv.

The House will take a final vote on HR 2913 today. Please make your calls people! Here are our working recommendations for things to call your Senators and Reps about today:

• Pass HR 2913, the Ukraine Support Act, in the House today, and eventually get something like it through the US Senate
• Encourage lawmakers to bring the successful war powers votes on Iran into a single package, and force Trump to veto it
• No to the big Senate ICE/CPB funding bill that gives DHS years of funding with no reform of the out of control agency (votes could begin today)
• No to the ballroom, the Arch, the gilded statues, the slush fund, the corruption, self-enrichment……
• No to Bill Pulte, a reckless and dangerous pick to lead the US intelligence community in a time of conflict and war.
• No to his mob lawyer, Todd Blanche, for Attorney General 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Trump's Elite Enablers, Stuart Stevens, right, June 4, 2026. To advance in today’s GOP, you must assert what fifth-graders know to be untrue.

We talk a lot about the degrading compromises required of Republican elected officials in the Trump era. But the politicians are only the tiny tip of a vast political ecosystem. Behind those elected officials is a billion-dollar campaign industry of consultants and staff who make the ads, organize the events, write the speeches. They fill the roles that winning campaigns require.

For a long time, I was part of that world.

I was lucky in who I got to work for. Candidates like Governor Bill Weld in Massachusetts. Governor Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Agree or disagree with their politics, they were decent human beings who never would have danced with the devil of deliberate cruelty and racism that is now the entry fee to the Republican Party.

Never miss a column or show from Stuart Stevens. Become a Lincoln Loyal paid subscriber today.Subscribed

I was thinking about this while listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Liam Donovan. Ezra was asking the question: does Donald Trump want to lose the midterm elections?

Liam is one of those uniquely Washington professionals who did a stint at the Republican Senatorial Committee and moved on to become a lobbyist, trading off his connections to Republican Senators. I wouldn’t really consider him a campaign guy, but in the Trump years, he’s often called on as a smart Republican insider to try and interpret the insanity of Trumpworld to the sane world.

I don’t know Liam Donovan, but I know his boss, Zac Moffit, the founder of Targeted Victory, where Liam works. Zac worked on the Romney 2012 campaign, where he directed its digital strategy. His firm was relatively new in 2012, but since then, Targeted Victory has grown into a large and prosperous hybrid digital/lobbying/public affairs company. Which isn’t surprising. The scouting report on Zac would have tagged him as a first-round draft pick. Smart, engaging, focused, who came up through former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office.

Now he’s a Trump guy.

Through a cultural and class filter, Zac and Liam Donovan could not be more distinct from former 2020 Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, most memorably last seen as cops pushed him into the back of a squad car, handcuffed in his underwear, responding to a 911 call from his wife. I’m betting Zac and Liam would wince at being labeled Trumpers and lumped together with the freaks and oddballs Trump has pushed into prominence.

But the sad truth is that if you came to Trump reluctantly holding your nose or ran into his embrace as the white Christian nationalist savior, it doesn’t really matter. If you are helping Trump and Trumpism, you are aiding and abetting evil. Knowing which fork to pick up and graduating from Stanford and Georgetown doesn’t change the substance of what you are doing: supporting Trump.

Zac and Liam are hardly the worst. But in a way, their types are because they know better. Choosing to support Trump is no different than choosing to be a segregationist. William Buckley came from another cultural planet than George Wallace, but when Buckley wrote his 1957 editorial, Why The South Must Prevail, he was as much a segregationist as Wallace,

Most of my tribe were drawn to the City on a Hill of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Many I worked with — Nicolle Wallace, Mark McKinnon, Pete Wehner, Matthew Dowd, the late Michael Gerson — rejected Trump from the first day and never wavered. But far more have found ways to rationalize a man who is destroying every value we once claimed as First Principles.

Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. Eight hundred and eighty days later, it fell. Now the Republican Party sends J.D. Vance to Hungary to campaign for the Russian’s candidate, Viktor Orban.

To advance in today’s Republican Party, you must assert what fifth-graders know to be untrue: Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential race. It’s like trying to run NASA with only those who prosecuted Galileo for believing the Earth revolves around the sun. The party that once prided itself on being the grownups in the room is now a place where reality must be denied.

I can’t pretend that if I had been younger and more ambitious in 2016, I wouldn’t have joined the freak show. I would like to think not, but that’s the arrogance of hindsight. I succeeded in politics more because I was hungry and ambitious than any claims to a higher purpose. By the time Trump came along, I was at a different point in my life, and I had the freedom to join the Lincoln Project and try to burn my old party to the ground. Like I said, I was lucky.

We know what happens when Trump is gone. Many of the Republican elected officials, the staffers, and the consultants will work very hard to pretend he never happened. Most will be able to say they weren’t the worst of the Trump crowd and, if pressed, will argue that they, in one way or the other, helped temper Trump’s darkest impulses. They will walk the path of the Vichy French and the Quisling Norwegians.

In a civil society, politics should be a place where citizens can believe in the possibility of a better future without compromising their decency and dignity. Not so in Trumpworld. Unless you are a MAGA extremist, Trump requires constant bargaining with self. How much of what I know to be wrong can I tolerate for maybe the possibility of some improvement or the necessity of employment? That constant compromising grinds down the soul. You can’t do that for over a decade and still believe you are the same person before you supported Trump.

The legacy of Trump will be the impossibility of pretending that the values the Republican Party once espoused were actually values and not marketing slogans. Trump is the character test that nobody wants, but none can avoid.

False Flags via The Bulwark, Analysis and Opinion: Bill Pulte Was a “Degenerate” Buffoon. Now He’s Head of U.S. Intelligence, Will Sommer, above right, June 4, 2026. Bulletproof vests, helicopters, and, yes, dildos.

YEARS BEFORE PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP nominated him to be the acting director of national intelligence for the government of the United States of America, Bill Pulte was spending his time circling a gullible group of investors trading shares in a dead company.

The year was 2023 and Bed Bath & Beyond, after prolonged death throes, finally stumbled into bankruptcy in April; its stock (“BBBY”) was delisted from Nasdaq in early May. But a portion of the shareholders went on believing a resurrection was possible. Over the previous year, the retail chain had become a prominent “memestock”—the subject of intense speculation and rumor—and after the company shut down they refused to accept that their investments were worthless. Many of these diehards kept trading shares “over the counter” (as “BBBYQ”).

Pulte claimed in the summer of 2023 that he was “captivated” by the “incredible BBBY community.” And he went to extraordinary, often ridiculous lengths to promote it. On a livestream in September 2023, Pulte donned a jacket with astronaut patches, implying that the bankrupt company’s stock would somehow still go “to the moon.” At some events, Pulte would wear a bulletproof vest for fear that an unnamed cabal acting against the home-goods store might try to kill him.

In the fall of 2023, the BBBYQ shares were finally eliminated—but even that didn’t convince the lingering true believers, and Pulte kept stoking their baseless excitement. He even organized a December 2023 event in a Florida hangar that was, as journalist Paris Martineau put it, “dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt.” With Pulte sitting onstage, one promoter slapped a grateful supporter in the face with a green dildo, apparently a powerful symbol in their inscrutable online subculture.

An hour and a half later, Pulte himself would be presented with an award: a small, circular trophy base with a little blue T. Rex on top of it. He accepted the gift, saying “That looks pretty badass.” (Screenshot via YouTube)

None of this had any effect on the defunct company. Bed Bath & Beyond did not arise like Lazarus from the grave, and the shareholders did not make back their money. But Pulte himself never slowed down. Just over two years after the dildo incident, he was rocketing upward in Trump world, entrusted to be the nation’s top housing regulator and—more to the point—one of the president’s primary henchmen.

Indeed, it is Pulte’s relentless pursuit of the president’s enemies that appears now to have earned him his DNI nod. With the same shamelessness he brought to pimping BBBY, he has dug up mortgage-fraud allegations against Trump critics like Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.

And like those earlier Bed Bath & Beyond ventures, the more recent investigations have ended in failure. So too have Pulte’s non-vengeance government endeavors. His Trump-endorsed proposal to solve the housing crisis with fifty-year mortgages flopped. It was Pulte who also reportedly provided Trump with the AI-generated picture of the president as Jesus that enraged Christians this past April.

Critics of Pulte have pointed to this record of futility—in addition to the complete absence of any experience in the intelligence community—to show why he should not be getting the acting DNI post. But it’s also worth considering Pulte’s pre-government background as a sort of internet clown in the memestock community when considering just how wild his selection truly is. Because it was there that Pulte distinguished himself through a terrible sense of judgment and a willingness to say whatever people wanted to hear.Subscribed

PULTE’S RISE IN POLITICS has been fueled by his inherited wealth. He is the grandson and namesake of homebuilding magnate William J. Pulte, and was appointed to the board of construction giant Pulte Homes in 2016 as part of his grandfather’s corporate maneuvering.

In 2019, Pulte started to give away large amounts of money on Twitter to random people in what he called “Twitter Philanthropy.” The giveaways boosted his social media accounts, since people had to follow him so that he could send them money. As I write this, Pulte has a whopping 2.9 million followers on X.

Unhappy with Pulte’s rising profile and how it was deluging the company with misdirected pleas for money, the Pulte Homes board removed him in 2020, according to the New York Times. Bill Pulte didn’t take it easily. He launched a years-long lawsuit in 2022 by suing an executive at his family’s company, accusing them of creating a “Ghost of Bill Pulte” account on Twitter that posed as Pulte’s now-dead grandfather to criticize his grandson.

In the meantime, Pulte also started getting in on the memestock mania, in which investors tried to strategically reap profits off the unexpected price spikes in unlikely stocks, such as GameStop and AMC Theatres. Bed Bath & Beyond was one of his first major ventures.

In 2022, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen had bought a large stake in Bed Bath & Beyond, and his memestock reputation caused the struggling home-goods chain’s stock price to rise.

Retail investors hoping to make a quick killing followed Cohen into the stock. But when Cohen sold his shares five months later for a $60 million profit, the price collapsed. Rather than accept that they had been left holding the bag, some investors clung to the stock in the hopes that Cohen somehow had a secret plan to salvage the price.¹

They coalesced into online communities, where Pulte became an object of interest. Cohen had exchanged some tweets unrelated to Bed Bath & Beyond stock with Pulte, prompting shareholders to believe Pulte knew of the supposed secret plan to salvage the company. Pulte didn’t dispel the chatter. Instead, he leaned into it. He appeared on podcasts promoting the stock, and embraced his role as a Bed Bath & Beyond sage.²

“I’m the biggest degenerate you ever met,” Pulte said on the show where he wore the astronaut jacket, using a popular term to describe a hardcore memestock investor.

Pulte began to reference the 2020 Taylor Swift track “Only the Young” in his tweets, and used it as an intro song in his public appearances. BBBYQ shareholders became convinced, QAnon-style, that the song had a hidden message about how Pulte and Cohen would rescue their fortunes.

In the exuberant, male-heavy memestock world, “Only the Young” soon came to be referred to as “Only the Hung.” At the Florida hangar event, Pulte was given a case of helicopter gunship ammo that had been inscribed with the more sexualized song title. And on the livestream where he put on the astronaut jacket, Pulte sat in front of a whiteboard with “ONLY THE HUNG!” written on it. (Screenshot via YouTube)

Despite their adoration, the shareholders clearly grated on Pulte. At one point during the livestream with the astronaut jacket, a prominent BBBYQ investor grew tearful talking about his hopes for the stock’s revival. An unimpressed Pulte listened to him while eating ice cream from a pint.

Like other failed memestock online groups, the BBBYQ subculture was filled with paranoia about shadowy forces out to keep the stock down, which is apparently why Pulte started going out in public to shareholder gatherings wearing a bulletproof vest and accompanied by a security detail. (Photo from a since-deleted X post by Bill Pulte, posted to Reddit)

Whether Pulte had legitimate reasons to fear for his safety is impossible fully to know. But the investors clearly were deluded.

In fact, to attend the Florida event in December 2023, they paid $500 each, believing Pulte was some sort of oracle who could recover their lost investments. But instead of answers, they were left with dildo humor and treated with cases of Coors Light and bottled water.

Even the trophy Pulte received bore a regrettable inscription, a combination of the millennial compliment “This guy fucks” and his supposedly secret-meaning slogan “Only the Young.” Put together, it read: “Bill Pulte fucks only the young.”

Yiiiikes. Send this newsletter to somebody you know who thinks the director of national intelligence should have more gravitas and competence:

Pulte seemed at least entertained by it all. He was very much in on the gag. He arrived at the Florida event in a helicopter but flight data showed that it had taken off from the same airfield, circled the site, then returned for a climactic landing.

Why would Pulte subject himself to this? A clue came late in the night, as one of his associates, Kais Maalej (shown standing next to Pulte in the bulletproof-vest photo above), announced that attendees at the Florida event would each receive one share of Pulte Homes as part of the $500 ticket fee for attendance. In order to get the share, though, they had to sign an agreement to hold the stock long-term—as well as to sign their shareholder rights over to one of Pulte’s friends, according to a letter filed in the Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcy case.

“We are in a family that I see is very very good family, it’s a great family,” Maalej told the crowd. “It’s the Pulte family.”

It appears that Pulte may have been trying to harness the restless energy of memestock investors to settle scores with the Pulte Homes executives. But if that was Pulte’s plan, it failed too. He never made it back to the company. Instead, he entered Trump’s orbit through the usual means, according to the New York Times: getting retweets from Trump and buying membership at Mar-a-Lago. It changed the course of Pulte’s life and, in turn, U.S. history. The supposed Bed Bath & Beyond oracle who watched a dildo get slapped across a man’s face is now set to have access to the country’s most sensitive intelligence matters. His old denizens in the memestock world can hardly believe it.

On Tuesday, commenters in a subreddit devoted to tracking and mocking the antics of this world reacted in disbelief to Pulte’s appointment. How, they wondered, could this man keep failing upward?

“If I was American I’d be crying,” wrote one. 

The back of Donald Trump's head as he sits at his desk in the Oval Office Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The New Republic, Analysis: Mystery of Trump’s Hair-Loss Drug Exposes Bigger Issue With His Health, Edith Olmsted, June 4, 2026. Donald Trump’s team abruptly stopped disclosing if he’s taking a certain drug.

The results of Donald Trump’s most recent physical examinations omitted a hair-loss drug the president has been taking for years—raising red flags for health experts, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The glowing report on Trump’s most recent trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center included a list of medications the president takes, but did not include finasteride—the generic name of Propecia—a hair-loss drug Trump used during his first term. When the Post asked whether the president was still taking Propecia, the White House said it was not obligated to reveal the full range of medications the president was taking.

“The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time,” the White House said in a statement, adding that the medical report released Friday included information relevant to his ability to serve as president.

The White House insisted: “No additional undisclosed conditions or procedures materially affecting his health status were omitted from this report.”

But a range of health experts told the Post that the White House’s lack of transparency suggested that there could be other elements of the president’s health that were being kept out of view.

“It raises significant questions of what else is possibly not being revealed,” said Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist who leads Columbia University’s master’s program in bioethics. He warned that finasteride had been linked to an increased risk of depression, which would have potential effects on the president’s performance.

“We want to make sure that we’re getting the full story in order to know that whoever occupies a position can sufficiently carry out the responsibilities of the office,” Klitzman told the Post.

Despite the fact that treatment for a cosmetic condition is less serious than treatment for a medical one, Steve Joffe, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, pointed out that “there isn’t much downside” to disclosing the continued use of hair-loss drugs.

“There’s a certain level of openness and disclosure that people have a right to expect from someone in whom they place such profound trust,” Joffe told the Post.

Concerns over Trump’s mysterious prescription cocktail come as medical experts found his latest medical report lacked specificity where it matters. Trump’s consistently glowing results contrast directly with what Americans can see: visible bruising and rashes, his frequent on-camera naps, and the fact that he is an 80-year-old man who rants madly about how healthy he is.

The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Analysis and Opintion: How Opus Dei Operates within the Trump Regime, Host Frank Figliuzzi, right, and author Gareth Gore, June 4, 2026. Opus Dei isn't fiction. It's infiltrated our government.

Frank Figliuzzi welcomed journalist and author Gareth Gore, whose book, Opus, tells the incredible story of the cult-like Catholic sect Opus Dei, which was made famous in the Da Vinci Code.

But the group isn’t a fantasy. In fact, it has infiltrated the highest echelons of our government.

Gore, who has met personally with the Pope to discuss the dangers of Opus, joined Frank to connect the dots between this powerful cabal and the men whispering in Trump’s ear.

OPUS, published by Simon & Schuster:  "Vividly told and excellently researched" -- Financial Times 

More Supreme Court Help For Republicans Against Black, Democratic Voters

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 3, 2026 [Court Helps Trump By Gutting Voting Rights Law, Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 4, 2026. Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.

After handing down the Callais decision, the Supreme Court sent a case involving Alabama’s map back to the state. One lower court had ruled the 2023 map unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment and, in diluting Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, eliminated a majority-Black district in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

As Lawrence Hurley of NBC News reported, on May 26 a panel of three judges reaffirmed that the map showed intentional discrimination and was unconstitutional. The state took the case to the Supreme Court, and last night the right-wing justices allowed the state to use the 2023 map, saying it was likely to win its case that the map was lawfully drawn.

And so, Alabama will likely replace a Black Democratic lawmaker with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Republican lawmakers currently in power appear to be trying to grab as much power as they can as President Donald J. Trump deteriorates both personally and politically.

Today, a day after visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House said was a six-month physical that he said went “PERFECTLY,” the nearly 80-year-old Trump appeared in public for the first time since May 27. He seemed tired and vague.

In the House of Representatives, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s 2027 budget requests for the State Department, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Trump sleeping in two Cabinet meetings as Rubio was talking, and asked how the president could make good decisions about war if he couldn’t stay awake even during public events.

Rubio insisted he had never seen Trump asleep in a meeting, although in the instances Lieu showed, the president was sleeping in a chair directly beside him. Lieu accused Rubio of lying to Congress.

The weekend’s promises of an end to the war on Iran have fizzled, and the economy is slowing under the pressure of higher oil prices. The administration announced on Monday that it is dropping tariffs on imported farm and construction equipment from 25% to 15% to ease prices, proving—as critics have maintained all along—that the tariffs are in fact raising prices.

On Sunday, when Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel asked Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett about a Wall Street Journal report that delinquent credit card balances are at their highest level in 15 years as people use their credit cards for necessities, Hassett centered not the American people but the credit card companies. “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes, but for the most part…there’s not any kind of…financial threat to the credit card companies.”

Americans trying to navigate rising prices by putting necessities on their credit cards were not likely to be concerned about how their financial pain might hurt credit card companies.

As Trump and the administration falter, the MAGA leaders Trump has installed in the government are pushing their agenda as fast as they can. Russell Vought, the co-author of Project 2025 who directs the the Office of Management and Budget and who therefore has the power—although not the authority—to ignore the laws Congress has passed for the expenditure of money, proposed last Thursday, May 28, that political appointees in his office should have final say over research grants, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies.

The proposal promises to root out “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favor[s] certain identity groups over others.” In addition to submitting scientific research to political approval, the new rules would also stop international research collaboration unless it was approved by political appointees.

Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.

Democrats have pledged to fight the plan to tear out the observation system.

While those empowered by his 2024 win are pushing through their agenda, Trump himself appears to have abandoned any pretense of governing and is focusing on his Ultimate Fighting Championship ring in front of the White House—today he suggested making it permanent—and the painting of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today he showed to reporters images of how the Reflecting Pool is longer than skyscrapers are tall and that he is having it painted “American Flag Blue.”

He is also trying to cement control over the government. Today Trump signed an executive order stripping nearly 10,000 career civil service workers of their protected status, making it possible for the president to fire them at will. This move was introduced late in Trump’s first term but rescinded under President Joe Biden, and was a key part of Project 2025.

Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) illustrated that he is willing to pervert one of the most important positions in the U.S. government to his own whims. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, but he has demonstrated a willingness to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. By making him an acting director, Trump can get around the requirement for Senate confirmation.

But lawmakers who will have to face the voters in November appear to be getting queasy at being tied to Trump’s actions. Pulte’s nomination could be a bridge too far. The nomination threatens the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on June 12. Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec has called for Pulte to take control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism as well as the international,” and Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.

Section 702 permits intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreigners operating outside the U.S. without a judicial warrant. But in the process of that collection, the communications of U.S. citizens often get swept up. As Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian notes, the FBI used Section 702 to investigate protesters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has led the charge against renewing FISA without significant protections for American citizens, warned that Pulte could use Section 702 as a political weapon, abusing surveillance powers for purposes of blackmail, smear campaigns, or attacks on lawmakers, nonprofits, or activists. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added that Pulte could use his position to seize ballots or election equipment. Wyden urged lawmakers to refuse to reauthorize FISA “without strong new safeguards for Americans’ rights.”

Mark Warner (D-VA), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the person who can deliver the necessary Democratic votes for the renewal of FISA, warned that Pulte’s nomination could doom the measure’s reauthorization. Even Republicans, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are objecting to Pulte, citing his lack of intelligence experience, which the law requires for a DNI head, as a deal-breaker.

House Republicans are also starting to balk at the administration’s actions.

Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor of Politico reported today that House leaders had to push back votes today when Republicans didn’t show up from their holiday week. The House has been at work 43 fewer days in this congressional session than the Senate has as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has avoided pushback against Trump in the House by keeping members away from Washington. The Republican majority in the House is so slim that attendance issues have forced Johnson to delay votes to prevent Democrats from defeating bills. Now that members don’t want to go on the record either against Trump or for him, the ability of the House to get through the work it needs to is in jeopardy.

Johnson’s slipping control over the House showed today when the House voted to pass a resolution, introduced by Democrats, telling Trump either to stop further strikes against Iran or to get congressional approval for them. Johnson sent House members home early before the Memorial Day holiday to keep such a measure from passing, but today it did, by a vote of 215 to 208. Although Johnson warned that the resolution was “very dangerous” and would “weaken” Trump’s ability to find a way out of the conflict, members passed it, likely noting that according to a recent New York Times–Siena College poll, 64% of registered voters think Trump’s decision to go to war was wrong, while only 30% approve of it.

Shortly after passing that measure, the House rebuked both Trump and Johnson a second time when it advanced a measure that would aid Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s invasion by a vote of 218 to 204. If the measure now passes the House and then the Senate, it will provide $8 billion in loans and $300 million in security aid.

Trump does not appear to be taking his loss of power well, retreating to the traditional Republican position that anyone who disagrees with him is a communist. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Israel and Lebanon Agree to New Cease-Fire, Yan Zhuang and Ephrat Livni, June 4, 2026. The deal is contingent on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group that was not part of the talks, stopping attacks against Israel and withdrawing from southern Lebanon.

The renewed cease-fire in Lebanon appeared to be holding on Thursday morning, after Israel and Lebanon announced a U.S.-facilitated agreement to extend it.

The agreement could help clear an obstacle to ending the war in Iran. The state of peace talks between Washington and Tehran remains murky, with issues including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program unresolved. Iran has called for Lebanon to be part of any deal.

Whether the cease-fire holds will depend in part on the cooperation of Hezbollah, which does not answer to the Lebanese government and is not a party to either set of negotiations. The group has not publicly responded to the announcement of the renewed cease-fire.

The agreement, which was confirmed by the U.S. State Department, calls for the creation of “pilot zones” where the Lebanese military would “take exclusive control” and all “nonstate actors” would be barred. A U.S.-brokered cease-fire, which took effect in Lebanon in April, has been largely ignored, with both sides continuing to trade attacks.

Israel began to escalate its push into Lebanon in March, shortly after the United States and Israel launched an offensive against Iran. Hezbollah soon began firing rockets across the border in support of its sponsor. In recent weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has ramped up his rhetoric against Hezbollah even as truce talks have taken place.

The cease-fire between Iran and the United States has also been tested in recent days by a series of exchanges between them. On Wednesday, Kuwait and Bahrain, U.S. allies, came under Iranian drone and missile fire. One of those attacks hit Kuwait's main international airport, damaging a passenger terminal and killing one person, the Kuwaiti authorities said.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• U.S.-Iran negotiations: Later on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s claim that the war with Iran “has concluded,” despite the strikes. Mr. Rubio told Congress that the Trump administration would try to negotiate with Iran to get it to commit to a long-term agreement to not enrich uranium.
• Airport attack: A spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had not fired at the Kuwait airport terminal, blaming the damage on a failed American interceptor missile. The U.S. military said the Iranian claim was false.
• U.S.-Israel relations: President Trump said in an interview with The New York Post published Wednesday that he had used expletives in a recent phone conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel but that they had a broadly positive relationship. Read more ›

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Los Angeles Mayoral Primary Leaders Karen Bass, the incumbent Democrat at left, and Republican challenger Spencer Pratt (Campaign photos).

New York Times, Why Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Has to Fight for Her Job, Jill Cowan, June 4, 2026. Ms. Bass, a Democrat, has had a roller-coaster first term. She now faces the first runoff since 2005 for an incumbent mayor in the city.

Karen Bass will likely be the first incumbent mayor of Los Angeles since 2005 to have to fight for her job in a runoff. It’s a sign that, despite a rebound from the depths of the pandemic, voters remain dissatisfied with life in the nation’s second most populous city.

Angelenos were frustrated by the aftermath of last year’s devastating Palisades fire — and Ms. Bass’s initial absence during the blaze. But they are also struggling with rising costs, and still see homeless encampments as a problem, even though the number of people living on the street has fallen.

Peggy Clark, 69, an accountant from Woodland Hills, said she was voting for the former reality television star Spencer Pratt because “he’s not Bass.”

Ms. Clark said that she didn’t believe the mayor’s claims that fewer people were unhoused in the city. “They’re still everywhere,” she said.

Ms. Bass’s last two predecessors, Eric Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa, dispatched their challengers in their re-election primaries by winning a majority of the vote. Under Los Angeles’s rules, a mayoral candidate who receives more than 50 percent of the votes in the primary automatically wins, and Mr. Garcetti and Mr. Villaraigosa never faced a runoff campaign as incumbents.

As of Wednesday afternoon, with hundreds of thousands of ballots still to be counted, Ms. Bass was in the lead with about 35 percent of the vote. She had enough support to win one of the two runoff spots, according to The Associated Press, but was well short of the majority needed to win the seat outright.

In second place was Mr. Pratt, who launched his bombastic campaign after his family’s home burned in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood last year. And in third was the progressive City Council member Nithya Raman, a former ally of the mayor who announced her candidacy just before the filing deadline.

The two prominent challengers saw an opportunity this year to harness the protest vote against Ms. Bass. Suddenly, the mayor was forced to run against an entertainer with a knack for leveraging social media and a city councilwoman with a progressive base — both more formidable opponents than Mr. Garcetti or Mr. Villaraigosa faced in their re-election bids.

The fact that Mr. Pratt, a Republican with no government experience who has drawn praise from President Trump, has garnered significant support in one of the nation’s most liberal cities is particularly notable.

Mike Bonin, a former Los Angeles City Council member who now leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, said that Mr. Pratt “knows how to tell a story” — something that neither Ms. Bass nor Ms. Raman have mastered in this campaign.

New York Times, The Democrats’ Big Decision: Black Representation or More Blue Seats? Clyde McGrady, June 4, 2026. As Republicans break up majority-Black House districts, Democrats must decide whether to preserve seats concentrated in urban areas or push them into white suburbs to target G.O.P. seats.

South Carolina Democrats at Representative James Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” on Friday were feeling triumphant.

Mr. Clyburn, left, South Carolina’s longest serving Black lawmaker and the state’s lone Democrat in Congress, had survived a failed redistricting attempt by state Republicans determined to act after the Supreme Court weakened protections under the Voting Rights Act for majority-Black districts. So as the sun set on a terrace above the Congaree River, in Columbia, a crowd of Black women line danced to 803Fresh’s “Boots on the Ground,” while hot grease popping in deep fryers sent a thick smell of fish through the late-spring air.

But the next act in the drama over Black representation will be driven in part by Democratic leaders, some of them Black, who face a difficult decision. Do they preserve the majority-Black, overwhelmingly Democratic districts in blue states like New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey? Or do they maximize Democratic representation in the House by diluting urban districts dominated by Black voters and expanding their boundaries into the suburbs. Doing the latter would allow them to target Republican House members in those states.

Those new districts would remain Democratic, though less so, but they may no longer be majority-Black. So Black voters could lose power in two ways — by losing the number of districts they dominate and by losing the number of Black voices in Congress.

It could be an agonizing choice, but with Republicans determined to maximize their own representation, many Black Democrats at the grass roots, state and federal level are firmly in the camp that the party should do what is necessary to expand its power. Black representation is important, but they consider this moment an emergency.

“We’re not going to sit back and just accept this cheating and gerrymandering,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, a close ally of fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader. Both men are Black.

In the weeks since the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, which lowered the bar on what it considered unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, Republican states in the South have led a furious effort to dilute or eliminate congressional districts where majorities of Black voters have typically elected Democrats.

Majority-Black districts in Tennessee and Louisiana are gone. One seat long-held by a Black Democrat in North Carolina is teetering. The Supreme Court on Tuesday night gave Alabama Republicans permission to eliminate one majority-Black seat. Georgia and Mississippi are likely to target such seats ahead of 2028.

Beneath the jubilation at his fish fry, Mr. Clyburn seemed to acknowledge the anger.

“I want all of the energy that’s here tonight to be harnessed, much like we harnessed the atom in order to make the atomic bomb,” he implored the crowd from the stage.

Beyond anger, Democrats are pondering the path back to political power and how far the party should go to attain it. Mr. Jeffries last month took on maximalist tones as he rattled off seven states — New York, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland — that Democrats would redistrict in response to Republicans “to wipe out any structural advantage that they’re trying to get themselves” in the South.

A central calculation will have to be the value of Black representation and whether Democrat-controlled states should protect highly concentrated urban seats in New York, Newark, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago, rich in Black voters, or push the boundaries of those districts into whiter suburbs to go after Republican seats.

Mr. Meeks was clear on which way he wanted to go: “We can look at seats like mine, for example,” he said.

Redrawing districts in Long Island would mean moving voters from his overwhelmingly Democratic district in Queens into two marginally Democratic districts in the western part of the island. That would give them better chances of ousting two Republicans to the east.

“We can then win two more seats on Long Island,” Mr. Meeks said.

Likewise, pushing Democratic voters south from the heavily Black Brooklyn districts represented by Mr. Jeffries and Representative Yvette Clarke would endanger the Staten Island seat held by Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican.

“We can win seats in upstate New York,” Mr. Meeks said. “We can win seats on Staten Island.”

Similarly, reconfiguring Representative Jonathan Jackson’s Democratic district on the South Side of Chicago to the south and west would push more Democratic voters into a district now held by a Republican, Representative Darin LaHood. Representative LaMonica McIver’s overwhelmingly Democratic district in New Jersey could be drained of some voters to target the swing district held by a Republican, Representative Thomas Kean Jr.

Representative Ilhan Omar’s overwhelmingly Democratic district in Minneapolis could be expanded into the Twin Cities’ Democratic suburbs, starting a chain reaction that would push Democratic voters into a district held by Representative Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican.

Maryland Democrats are likely to extend Representative Sarah Elfreth’s Democratic district around Annapolis across the Chesapeake Bay into the Eastern Shore to endanger the last Republican House member in the state, Andy Harris. But to do it, they may want to send some voters in Representative Kweisi Mfume’s strongly Black Democratic district around Baltimore to shore up Ms. Elfreth, who is white.

“This is not the game we want to play," Mr. Meeks said, “but this is the game that we are compelled to play.”

The price for such moves is already playing out in Florida, where state Republicans redrew House districts to their advantage in November. The South Florida district of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a senior Democrat who is white, was redrawn to heavily favor Republicans, so she has decided to run instead in one of the remaining Democratic seats where Black voters remain powerful. That has enraged Black Democratic politicians who want to represent the seat and have demanded that Democratic leaders speak out against Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s move.

“We have been supporting every single Democratic person on the ballot, and for them not to support us in this moment is totally ridiculous, and we’re not standing for it,” former Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick told The Miami Herald this week.

Mr. Clyburn was hesitant to engage in the debate. He is not just one of the most powerful Black elected officials in America; he is a fierce defender of the South, and he insisted the Republican effort to redistrict the region offends its people. The decision by South Carolina’s State Senate to leave the state’s congressional map alone, for now at least, is proof of that, he said.

“The South, I think, is doing a great job of searching for a more perfect union and getting there, and that’s what insulted some of the members of the South Carolina Republican Party,” Mr. Clyburn said in an interview.

Mr. Clyburn prides himself on the relationships he has built with South Carolina Republicans and is complimentary of those Republicans who joined Democrats to block redrawing his district. He pointed to the rebellious streak of the southern psyche, which resisted President Trump’s demand that the state gerrymander away its last Democratic House seat.

“I cannot in good conscience surrender this authority that has been preserved to, for and by the states and merely take orders from those who are not in South Carolina,” Shane Massey, the Republican leader of the South Carolina Senate, said during a May floor speech.

But Mr. Clyburn is also a student of history. And he spoke of the end of Reconstruction, when America abandoned its commitment to the southern freedmen and the courts nullified laws protecting Black civil rights.

Having a diverse Congress isn’t just good for Black people, Mr. Clyburn argued. “The value is to the country,” he said. It is essential for a legitimate multiracial democracy.

More On U.S. Tariffs, Inflation, Markets, Job, Economy

New York Times, SpaceX Sets Price for the World’s Largest I.P.O., Ryan Mac, June 4, 2026. The $135 share price means Elon Musk’s rocket maker is poised to exceed the 2019 initial public offering of Saudi Aramco in both valuation and money raised. 

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, set a price for its initial public offering on Wednesday of $135, which would value it at $1.77 trillion and crown it the largest I.P.O. ever.

At that price, SpaceX would raise $74.4 billion from the offering, and its valuation would be more than 40 percent higher than the $1.25 trillion that it valued itself at in February. The current I.P.O. record is held by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019.

Most companies that go public set a preliminary price range for their stock offering before settling on a final number in case investor demand for their shares changes. But Mr. Musk and SpaceX sidestepped that and simply declared one price for investors. SpaceX could still change that price but is not expected to do so. It is likely to begin trading on the Nasdaq next week under the ticker symbol SPCX.

At $74.4 billion raised, SpaceX’s I.P.O. would be just about “more than every U.S. I.P.O. combined in the last two years,” said Matthew Kennedy, a senior I.P.O. market strategist at Renaissance Capital.

A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX’s I.P.O. is a bellwether for other expected offerings that are set to be enormous, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic confidentially filed to go public on Monday, and OpenAI is expected to file in the coming weeks. Both start-ups have valuations approaching $1 trillion. The three offerings could unleash an avalanche of wealth across Silicon Valley and Wall Street, creating new corporate titans in the process.

Among the biggest winners would be Mr. Musk, 54, who is already the world’s richest man. At $135 a share, the roughly 50 percent stake in SpaceX that he controls would be worth just over $752 billion. (Mr. Musk cannot sell some of the SpaceX shares he controls until the company hits various operational milestones, according to the firm’s filings.)

A large increase in the company’s share price in its first days of trading could turn Mr. Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.

Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, has remade the space race with partly reusable rockets and transformed communication with the company’s satellite internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought his A.I. company, xAI, which owned his social media platform, X, creating a conglomerate of the tech billionaire’s various interests. Mr. Musk separately runs the electric carmaker Tesla, as well as other companies.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Illegal Tariffs, Round 3, Paul Krugman, right, June 4, 2026. Another failing war Trump won’t end. Remember tariffs?

Fourteen months ago, Donald Trump announced that he was starting a trade war by imposing sweeping tariffs on almost every nation in the world. His move caused shock waves, and not just because of the economic impact.

The Trump tariffs were clearly illegal — taxes imposed not via proper legislation, but by invoking an obscure existing law intended to deal with economic emergencies, even though no emergency existed. Also, by imposing these tariffs unilaterally, Trump was violating many decades’ worth of solemn U.S. agreements with other nations, including our closest allies. So “Liberation Day” marked the end of rule of law at home — goodbye separation of powers, hello a monarchical system in which the president does whatever he wants. And it also marked the transformation of the United States into a rogue nation that holds its erstwhile allies in contempt and can’t be trusted to honor its promises.

The initial shock has faded, largely because there have been so many outrages since, from pogroms at home to the disastrous war in Iran. And the Supreme Court, after dragging its feet for many months, eventually, grudgingly, ruled that the illegal tariffs were, in fact, illegal, and will have to be refunded.

But Trump officials kept many of the tariffs in place using another obscure law, this one intended to deal with balance of payments emergencies, although again no such emergency existed. This invocation of “Section 122” will probably also be ruled illegal at some point, but in any case the law sets a 150-day time limit on such tariffs, so the Trumpists needed another dodge.

Yesterday it came in the form of “Section 301” tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the European Union and Japan. Section 301 is titled “Relief from Unfair Trade Practices.” So what are the unfair practices the Trumpists say the whole world is engaging in?

The answer is that the Trump administration is accusing other countries of “failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

Notice the wording. They aren’t accusing the European Union itself of employing slave labor. Even the Trumpists aren’t willing to lie that shamelessly (yet). No, the claim is that the EU isn’t doing enough to stop countries that do employ slave labor from selling their goods in Europe.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, understands that the alleged justification for these tariffs is a lie. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the EU is less diligent about opposing the use of slave labor than the US. For that matter, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his minions have any particular objection to slave labor. This is nothing but a transparently, one might say sneeringly, bogus rationale for continuing to flout both US law and international agreements.

Why do Trump’s minions keep using legal tricks and lies to impose tariffs? There is, after all, no reason they couldn’t simply ask Congress to impose tariffs through normal legislation. But doing so would run into three problems, from Trump’s point of view. First, Congress might balk. Second, at minimum an attempt to pass legislation would require hearings, in which the weakness of the administration’s arguments would become obvious. Third, one of the reasons Trump loves tariffs is that he gets to issue decrees at will, none of this pesky nonsense of consulting with the legislative branch; having to follow the Constitution would spoil his fantasies of omnipotence.

So here we go again, with another round of tariffs that will probably be ruled illegal some months from now.

Why doesn’t Trump just back down? After all, the tariffs aren’t achieving their stated objectives. Remember how Trump was going to revive US manufacturing?

The tariffs are also deeply unpopular, with an overwhelming majority of Americans believing, rightly, that they have raised prices: But for Trump, backing off on the tariffs would amount to admitting failure. And if you believe he’s going to do that, I have a quick, easy victory over Iran you might want to buy. 

June 3

Top Headlines 

• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: House Passes Measure to End Iran War, a Rebuke of President, Robert Jimison and Megan Mineiro, June 3, 2026. The House on Wednesday voted to direct President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after four Republicans sided with Democrats in a striking sign of growing opposition to a military campaign now in its fourth month.
• New York Times, Election Live Updates: Races Are Close in California With Many Votes Still to Count, Jill Cowan, June 3, 2026. The realityTV star Spencer Pratt could secure a spot in a runoff with Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles. Xavier Becerra, a Democrat right, and Steve Hilton, a Republican, were leading in the governor’s race. Here’s the latest.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Bill Pulte Is a Putz—But a Dangerous Putz, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 3, 2026. He’s unserious, unqualified, disliked, ill-prepared, inexperienced, and exactly what Trump is looking for.
• New York Times, House Advances New Sanctions on Russia and Aid to Ukraine, Robert Jimison, June 3, 2026. After G.O.P. leaders blocked additional aid to Ukraine, six Republicans and an independent joined Democrats to force the measure to the floor against the wishes of the speaker.

News Roundups

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 2, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 3, 2026. Officials in the Trump administration have worked hard to restrict the access of members of Congress to the detention centers it has established across the country. Although lawmakers have a constitutional duty to oversee executive agencies and courts have reiterated their authority to conduct unannounced visits to federal immigration facilities, officials have repeatedly tried to limit that access. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: CBS Tried to Inject Information into Stories to Help Trump, Trump Lashes out at Netanyahu and No Public Events in One Week, Aaron Parnas, right, June 3, 2026. We have major stories to cover today, and none is more important than CBS firing journalist Scott Pelley after he publicly challenged Bari Weiss. In a new statement this morning, Pelley revealed a stunning allegation: CBS executives tried to pressure him into including unverified information in his reporting to benefit the White House.

More On U.S. Governance, Trump Administration 

• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, This could lead to the end of our republic, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 3, 2026. At 3:23 this afternoon, sitting before the Senate Appropriations Committee for the first time since taking over as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s replacement was asked a simple question: Would he follow court orders? He refused to say yes.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Has Given Up, Paul Krugman, right, June 3, 2026. No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Director of National Retribution, Andrew Egger, right, June 3, 2026. Donald Trump is facing a host of crises at once. His political agenda is on the rocks, his popularity has never been lower, and his quest to punish his personal and political enemies for their crimes has all but stalled out.
• New York Times, New Intelligence Role Puts Bill Pulte’s Housing Agenda in Doubt, Matthew Goldstein and Lydia DePillis, June 3, 2026. Mr. Pulte has had difficulty boosting the housing market as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Now he will also serve as acting intelligence director.
• New York Times, G.O.P. Works to Jump-Start Immigration Bill After Trump Retreat on Fund, Annie Karni and Robert Jimison, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Republicans hoped the acting attorney general’s vow that the administration was “not moving forward” with a fund for people claiming to be victimized by the government would unlock the votes. 

More On U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran, Lebanon

• New York Times, War Games and Warnings on Strait of Hormuz Went Unheeded by Trump, Michael Crowley, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Over the past two decades, Iran repeatedly threatened to close down the waterway. President Trump underestimated Iran’s ability to do so. 
• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Kuwait Says Iranian Attack Has Damaged Its Main Airport, Yan Zhuang, June 3, 2026. The United States and Iran both reported strikes overnight, accusing each other of being the aggressor. It was unclear where diplomatic efforts stand to end the war.
• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: America Handcuffed: How the New NDAA Would Merge US and Israeli Defense, Frank Figliuzzi, right, June 3, 2026. Congress added Section 224 in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. Here's why it's fundamentally different from decades of traditional military aid.
• New York Times, Out of Time to Delay, House to Vote on Directing an End to the War in Iran. Robert Jimison and Megan Mineiro, June 3, 2026. A measure to direct the president to halt U.S. engagement in Iran had been on track to pass in late May, but Republican leaders postponed action. They have run out of time to delay the vote. 

Trump Family Corruption, Probes, Allegations, Accountability, Coverups

• New York Times, Order Shielding Trump Family From I.R.S. Audits Will Remain, Blanche Says, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). The acting attorney general said the administration was preserving a broad order protecting the president and his family from audits of already filed returns, despite dropping a $1.8 billion payout fund. 

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above and below).

• Public Notice, The slush fund is dead. Long live the slush fund, Liz Dye, June 3, 2026. Todd Blanche, call your lawyer. Yesterday the Trump administration made it known that it’s tapping out on the “weaponization” slush fund … maybe.
• New York Times, ‘I Love It’: Trump Is Still in Favor of $1.8 Billion Payout Fund, Luke Broadwater, June 3, 2026. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said on Tuesday that the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period,” after the plan drew bipartisan backlash.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kushner’s Albanian resort faces corruption probe, mass protests, Judd Legum, right, June 3, 2026. Jared Kushner’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran War are not going well. But he is only moonlighting as one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats. Kushner is also having problems at his day job as the founder of Affinity Partners, a private equity fund bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Investigative Reporting, Trump Pressures, Corporate Cowardice

Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

• New York Times, CBS News Fires Scott Pelley of ‘60 Minutes,’  Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Mr. Pelley, a former “CBS Evening News” anchor, was ousted after months of tensions between staff and Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief.

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

• Democracy Docket, Supreme Court greenlights Alabama’s racial gerrymander, signaling free rein for states to discriminate, Brentin Mock, June 2, 2026. The U.S. Supreme Court will allow Alabama to use a congressional map found to have intentionally discriminated against Black voters, it said Tuesday.
• New York Times, ‘Infuriated’ Former Judges Take on Trump, Adam Liptak, June 3, 2026. Critics say it is unseemly for retired judges to trade on the prestige of their former positions.
• Michael Fanone via Substack, Opinion: Leaked: America's Largest White Supremacist Group Is Twice the Size We Thought, in Almost Every State, Michael Fanone, June 3, 2026. More than 540 members. Every state but one. Doubling every year since 2018. And the most disturbing thing in the leak isn't the size — it's who keeps signing up.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics

• New York Times, News Analysis: Democratic Voters Acted Strategically in a Turbulent California Election, Laurel Rosenhall and Jennifer Medina, June 3, 2026. Without a dominant candidate in the governor’s race, Democratic voters ultimately wanted to ensure that their party wasn’t shut out of the general election.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Iowa May Go the Way of Texas, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 3, 2026. Another red state is in play. After Tuesday’s primary, Iowa joins the list of red states with competitive U.S. Senate races. 
• New York Times, A Trump Endorsement Falls Flat: 4 Election Takeaways From Iowa and Beyond, Reid J. Epstein, June 3, 2026. The president’s pick for governor of Iowa lost his primary, while Democrats in the state chose their nominee in what they hope will be a competitive Senate race.
• New York Times, Deb Haaland Wins Nomination in New Mexico Governor’s Race, Reis Thebault, Updated June 3, 2026. Ms. Haaland, a former Interior secretary, took a big step toward making history as the first Native American woman to be a governor when she won the primary in her Democratic state.
• New York Times, Rebecca Bennett Wins New Jersey House Primary to Take On Thomas Kean Jr., Tracey Tully and Davaughnia Wilson, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Bennett, a Democrat, will compete in November against Mr. Kean, the incumbent Republican, who has been sidelined for months by a mysterious health condition.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What Congress Can Do, William Kristol, right, June 3, 2026. One additional point on Donald Trump’s ludicrous—but more importantly, dangerous—selection of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.
• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: You're Not Alone, and You're Not Crazy, Robert Reich, right, June 3, 2026.A brief conversation on the way to breakfast.  

U.S. Tariffs, Inflation,  Markets, Economy, Jobs

• New York Times, Trump Aims New Tariffs at 59 Countries and the European Union, Catie Edmondson, June 3, 2026. Trump officials said they planned to impose levies of up to 12.5 percent on countries that failed to crack down on goods made with forced labor.

More Global News

• New York Times, Rubio Suggests U.S. Return to Global Vaccine Program in Rebuke of Kennedy, Stephanie Nolen and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated in pointed testimony to senators that he was reclaiming control of the U.S. relationship with Gavi, an international vaccine alliance.
• New York Times, Ukraine Strikes St. Petersburg on First Day of a Marquee Putin Event, Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer, June 3, 2026. As anannual economic conference was set to begin, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had targeted a navy base and an oil terminal in the region that includes Russia’s second-largest city.

U.S. Civil Rights Leaders, Transitions  

• Four Died Trying (4DT), Tonight we honor two 4DT interviewees who died in May, John Barbour and Clarence Jones, 4DT Producers, June 3, 2026. "With the passing of these legends, we have now lost 27 of the men and women whose eyewitness accounts form the backbone of "Four Died Trying," chronicling the lives and legacy of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. 

Top HeadlinesNew York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: House Passes Measure to End Iran War, a Rebuke of President, Robert Jimison and Megan Mineiro, June 3, 2026. The House on Wednesday voted to direct President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after four Republicans sided with Democrats in a striking sign of growing opposition to a military campaign now in its fourth month.

• War Powers: The House passed a measure directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war. The 215-208 vote is a remarkable rebuke of Mr. Trump and his handling of the conflict. Read more ›
• Payout Fund: The Senate voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown, which had stalled in a dispute over the administration’s plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who said they had been victimized by the federal government. Several Republicans said they would oppose the new bill unless it included language permanently blocking such a fund. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, cast doubt on whether he had truly abandoned the fund, telling reporters “I love it,” calling it “so important” and saying he was unsure of its fate. Read more ›

Adoption of the resolution was a remarkable rebuke to Mr. Trump and his handling of the war, after he has repeatedly dismissed any effort by Congress to curb his power and as the G.O.P. has largely ceded its prerogatives to do so, deferring to him time and again. Republicans had abruptly postponed the vote two weeks ago, recognizing that they did not have sufficient votes to defeat the measure and wanting to spare themselves and the president the affront.

But they made no headway over the ensuing days in winning converts, as the conflict has dragged on and Mr. Trump has made little progress toward ending it. And G.O.P. leaders were unable to delay the vote any longer because Democrats had invoked the War Powers Resolution, which requires consideration of such measures within a limited period of time.

The move was also the latest reflection of divisions between Republicans in Congress and the president on a range of issues as their interests diverge in the run-up to the midterm congressional elections. It came after Senate Republicans have in recent days forced Mr. Trump to abandon his request for $1 billion in security funding for his ballroom project and a plan that the Justice Department announced to create a federal fund to pay claimants who accuse the government of having victimized them.

The vote was 215 to 208 to adopt the war powers resolution, sending it to the Senate. Even if it were to pass both chambers, the ability of lawmakers to force a president to withdraw troops remains a contested legal question, and Mr. Trump and his senior aides have dismissed any effort by Congress to limit his war powers as unconstitutional.

But the vote in the House, and a similar one in the Senate last month when a handful of G.O.P. defectors broke from the president and opposed the war, indicate an increasing willingness by some members of the president’s party to pressure him to end a conflict that a majority of Americans say is not worth the costs.

Republican Representatives Tom Barrett of Michigan, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky crossed party lines to vote with Democrats in favor of the resolution. Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, who had previously opposed similar measures, switched his position to support it.

Though the few defections were notable, almost every Republican voted against the resolution. Most of them have accepted the Trump administration’s claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, the legal threshold under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 for the president to order attacks on a foreign adversary without the permission of Congress.

Many have dismissed Democrats’ war powers measures, which call for the removal of most U.S. forces from hostilities in Iran, as politically motivated attacks on the president that would leave American interests unprotected.

Democrats contended that members of both parties must protect the role of Congress to determine when and how the country undertakes prolonged combat operations overseas

New York Times, Election Live Updates: Races Are Close in California With Many Votes Still to Count, Jill Cowan, June 3, 2026. The reality TV star Spencer Pratt could secure a spot in a runoff with Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles. Xavier Becerra, a Democrat below right, and Steve Hilton, a Republican, were leading in the governor’s race. Here’s the latest.

A high-stakes primary night in California ended with two candidates neck and neck in the race for governor, and with a besieged incumbent mayor forced into a runoff that could pit her against a Republican reality TV star in deeply liberal Los Angeles.

Mayor Karen Bass held a significant lead in Tuesday’s primary, but she is the first sitting mayor since 2005 to fail to earn the 50 percent of votes required to avoid a runoff. Although it is possible that the third-place candidate, the progressive City Council member Nithya Raman, could still secure a spot in the November runoff, the performance of Spencer Pratt, the Republican, suggested that Los Angeles voters harbored frustrations with homelessness and their city’s other problems.

In primary contests elsewhere in the country, Republican voters dealt a surprising defeat to President Trump, narrowly rejecting the candidate he supported to run for governor of Iowa, and a progressive won in a crowded Democratic field for a New Jersey congressional district.

The highest-profile primary was for California governor, even if voters found many of the candidates uninspiring.

By early Wednesday morning, Steve Hilton, a Trump-backed Republican, and Xavier Becerra, a former lawmaker and Biden administration official, were leading in the race to compete in the November general election. California’s ballot counting process is known to be slower than other states’, and because many Democrats were holding on to their ballots until the last minute, the results were still in flux.

Election officials in California said that counting would continue throughout Wednesday.

Candidate Party Votes Percent Pct.

Hilton Rep. 1,384,026 +28% 28%

Becerra Dem. 1,264,766 +25% 25

Steyer Dem. 977,651 +20% 20

Bianco Rep. 563,016 +11% 11

58% of votes in

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Candidates concede: The early results in the California governor’s race were enough to compel two lower-performing Democrats, the former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, to concede shortly after the first results were posted. Katie Porter, who was in a distant fifth place, conceded later.
• Iowa Democrats: In the Democratic primary for Senate, Josh Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist who was backed by a group allied with Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, coasted to victory over a progressive state senator who campaigned against the party establishment.
• House races: Voters also chose finalists for 52 congressional seats — the most of any state — in races that could offer clues in the battle for control of Congress. See results from key races.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Bill Pulte Is a Putz—But a Dangerous Putz, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 3, 2026. He’s unserious, unqualified, disliked, ill-prepared, inexperienced, and exactly what Trump is looking for.

The East Wing of the White House is still just a hole in the ground while funding for the ballroom languishes in Congress, but Donald Trump is warming to some of the White House’s other cool new features, like the pop-up UFC arena on the lawn (shown above).

“We’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said in a TikTok filmed from the Oval Office yesterday. Happy Wednesday

New York Times, House Advances New Sanctions on Russia and Aid to Ukraine, Robert Jimison, June 3, 2026. After G.O.P. leaders blocked additional aid to Ukraine, six Republicans and an independent joined Democrats to force the measure to the floor against the wishes of the speaker.

Defying Republican leaders, the House voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and provide additional aid to Ukraine, after a bloc of G.O.P. defectors joined Democrats in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Moscow more than four years into the war.

The bill, which still must win passage in the House, faces a difficult path to enactment, given divisions in the Senate over a sanctions package and objections from the White House. President Trump has repeatedly signaled he does not want Congress constraining his flexibility to negotiate directly with Moscow, and could veto the legislation if it reaches his desk.

Still, the 218-to-204 vote to take it up, in which six Republicans and one independent who normally votes with them crossed party lines to side with Democrats, sent a clear signal of bipartisan pressure on the matter. It added to a growing list of issues on which the Republican-led Congress has in recent weeks shown a greater willingness to challenge Mr. Trump, including the war with Iran, his push to fund a new White House ballroom and a bid to create a federal fund to benefit his political allies.

News Roundups

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 2, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 3, 2026. Officials in the Trump administration have worked hard to restrict the access of members of Congress to the detention centers it has established across the country. Although lawmakers have a constitutional duty to oversee executive agencies and courts have reiterated their authority to conduct unannounced visits to federal immigration facilities, officials have repeatedly tried to limit that access.

Last May they went so far as to arrest Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, for trespassing after he waited inside the gate of the privately operated Delaney Hall detention center where a staffer had asked him to stand after he accompanied three members of Congress to Delaney Hall, and then stepped outside when asked to leave. After they dropped the charges against Baraka days later, they charged Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with assault for her actions during a skirmish that broke out when immigration agents arrested Baraka.

On May 11, 2026, Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried again, issuing a memo that calls congressional visits “disruptive” and saying ICE will facilitate meetings of lawmakers with people in detention only if the lawmaker can specifically identify the individual in detention and provide “valid proof” that the detainee consents to a visit. Any such visit, they said, will require two days’ advance notice.

On May 22, after writing public letters to call attention to the crowded and unsanitary conditions inside Delaney Hall, the largest detention center in the Northeast, about 300 detainees began a hunger strike to demand the immediate release of young, elderly, and medically vulnerable detainees and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases, leaving them incarcerated.

While much of the protest focuses on the horrific conditions inside the facility, the detainees themselves have focused on their lack of access to the legal system. They wrote: “We see with deep helplessness and frustration that our due process, rights, and defense have been violated, disregarding benefits granted under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.”

“We are certain that we are not being processed equally under immigration laws and the Constitution….. We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases. We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court. We are witnessing how judges are disregarding decisions of federal judges, for example not honoring HABEAS CORPUS rulings decided by a FEDERAL judge, depriving us of our liberty.”

They asked for help from senators and members of Congress and said, “[W]e trust in God and believe that justice will be done under the law of the United States of America, since it is a sovereign and constitutional country respected worldwide for upholding human rights.”

Since the Delaney Hall detainees began their strike, supporters outside have gathered to show support. Federal agents have clashed with them repeatedly, pepper-spraying Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) among others. MAGA activists went to the site to counter-protest, and Mayor Baraka established a curfew near the facility. Late last week, Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, deployed New Jersey state troopers after White House advisor Tom Homan—a former consultant for Delaney Hall operator GEO Group—threatened to send “tactical units” to New Jersey if the situation continued. The troopers arrested dozens of protesters.

Today New Jersey attorney general Jennifer Davenport sued the GEO Group for refusing to allow inspectors into the facility in violation of state law. “If the GEO Group—with a $1 billion government contract—has nothing to hide and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building,” Sherrill said. “The people of New Jersey deserve transparency and accountability, and I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.”

In a May 29 interview with me on American Conversations, Senator Kim said that “the detainees were actually very clear with me… they’re concerned about the conditions, but the main reason they’re pushing forward right now, on this hunger strike and broader protest, is about the lack of forward movement when it comes to their cases. I remember one of them ran out of the room when I was talking to them, to go grab a piece of paper off a bulletin board…. The paper, when they brought it back, was about the court docket for the following couple days. And it showed that…this past Tuesday, when the courts opened up after the holiday weekend, this one judge that they are put in front of has 74 cases before her in just that one day, just on Tuesday. She had 74 cases on her docket. You know, I did the…math. I mean, that’s roughly about five minutes per case, if that’s everything is perfectly aligned…. [I]t’s just a…farce. This is not actual justice. This is not actual… legal proceedings as per our Constitution, and as per our laws.”

The destruction of the rule of law in Delaney Hall is part of the Trump administration’s destruction of the rule of law across the United States. This morning, Trump announced he is appointing the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, to become the acting director of national intelligence in addition to his job at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The director of national intelligence is the nation’s top intelligence official, and federal law requires that the director have “extensive national security expertise.” Pulte has none.

What he does have is willingness to use the power of the government to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. It was Pulte who came up with the scheme of going after Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and New York attorney general Letitia James by accusing them of mortgage fraud. He also advocated investigating then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell for alleged overruns in the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings.

Today, under pressure from Senate Republicans who recognize that the optics of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund will hurt Republicans in the midterms and demanded the removal of that funding from the budget reconciliation measure they are working on to fund ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Trump appears to have dropped that demand. But acting attorney general Todd Blanche told members of Congress today that he would not commit in writing not to proceed with the slush fund, and that the Department of Justice is not dropping the plan to provide Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization broad amnesty for any laws broken in past tax filings and a pass on future audits.

Just after midnight this morning, Trump posted that his criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records and the civil fraud judgement against him in New York for manipulating his financial statements to get better tax and insurance rates be dismissed, saying he was “an innocent man who has been horribly treated.” As Sophie Brams of The Hill noted, he also called for criminal charges to be launched against New York attorney general James and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the successful lawsuits.

Today the new secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, right refused to assure a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would follow court orders. Repeatedly, he told Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law.” But he refused to agree that they would follow court orders. “If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Kyle Cheney of Politico reported last month that the Trump administration has lost nearly 10,400 court cases over DHS immigration detentions while prevailing in about 1,200. That translates to a 90% loss rate. More than 425 judges—an overwhelming majority of them—have decided against the administration. Cheney notes that even a majority of the judges Trump himself appointed have decided against the administration on immigration.

In February, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin explained away the administration’s dismal record by saying that “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”

But Judge Joseph R. Goodwin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia wrote: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process…. It is an assault on the constitutional order.”

Today, after Mullin wouldn’t agree to obey the courts, suggesting instead that “we’ll hold each other accountable” if ICE breaks the law, Senator Murphy said: “Listen, if you’re a Republican or Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out.”

Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who oversaw the operations during which federal agents shot and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, joined white nationalist Jared Taylor at a conference of far-right activists and influencers in Portugal over the weekend. As Marion Solletty of Politico reported, in an interview before the conference, Bovino embraced the white nationalism of the Great Replacement theory that says white Europeans and white Americans are in a fight to save their civilization from Black and Brown people.

He claimed that of the 342 million people in the U.S.—he said there were 420 million—100 million are undocumented immigrants who must be removed. But, he added, “our main battle is not with undocumented immigrants or unassimilated immigrants: it is with the bureaucrats of the status quo and the timid politicians, determined to suspend action or wait for the next election cycle.”

“If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method,” he said, “then fantastic.” 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: CBS Tried to Inject Information into Stories to Help Trump, Trump Lashes out at Netanyahu and No Public Events in One Week, Aaron Parnas, right, June 3, 2026. We have major stories to cover today, and none is more important than CBS firing journalist Scott Pelley after he publicly challenged Bari Weiss. In a new statement this morning, Pelley revealed a stunning allegation: CBS executives tried to pressure him into including unverified information in his reporting to benefit the White House.

Meanwhile, Trump has not held a public event in seven days, and new swelling has appeared under one of his eyes. In recent taped interviews, he said he cursed out Netanyahu and suggested the UFC structure being built at the White House could remain indefinitely. All of this comes as the Middle East ceasefire appears to be unraveling, with new strikes reported overnight.

I cannot overstate how significant Pelley’s statement is or how alarming his firing should be. One of the most respected institutions in American journalism has been brought under political pressure. It is now our responsibility to help build what CBS is tearing down.

Unlike CBS News, I will never trade the truth for access. If you want journalism that tells the truth even when it is uncomfortable, if you want reporting that is not shaped by political favors or advertising dollars, support this work.

Here’s the news:

Veteran journalist Scott Pelley, left, was fired by CBS News after a heated confrontation with new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton during a staff meeting. Pelley publicly criticized the program’s new leadership, including editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, accusingthem of undermining the long-running news program’s journalistic standards and editorial independence. In response, management cited Pelley’s conduct as hostile and insubordinate, terminating his employment after nearly 40 years at CBS News. The firing highlights ongoing turmoil at “60 Minutes” following ownership and leadership changes under Skydance Media, with disputes over editorial direction and the departures of several prominent journalists.

Here is Scott Pelley’s statement this morning confirming that CBS News tried to inject falsehoods into his stories to help the White House.

Rep. Madeleine Dean alleged that newly unredacted Epstein-related documents show President Donald Trump was not truthful when he denied flying on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. She argued that the records contain evidence contradicting his publicstatements and accused officials of concealing important information. Her comments were made as part of broader debates over the release and interpretation of Epstein-related files.

New swelling under Trump’s eye has raised new health concerns as the President has now not held a public event in seven days:

President Donald Trump confirmed he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy” during a tense phone conversation about Israel’s military actions in Lebanon. Trump acknowledged the exchange in a podcast interview, saying he was frustrated by the continued fighting and wanted it to stop. According to the report, Trump also pushed back on suggestions that Netanyahu had manipulated him into attacking Iran and said the two leaders still get along well.

Iran and the United States exchanged new military strikes that further strained a fragile ceasefire, with Iran launching missile and drone attacks that killed one person and injured dozens in Kuwait while the U.S. struck targets linked to Iranian operations. The conflict has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global oil route, contributing to rising energy prices and uncertainty about ongoing peace negotiations. This is what Kuwait’s airport looks like this morning following Iranian strikes:

Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack on Russia, striking targets in St. Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, as the city prepared to host its annual international economic forum. Ukrainian officials said the attack hit an oil export terminal, demonstrating Kyiv’s ability to reach deep into Russian territory and target infrastructure that supports Russia’s war effort. The strike came amid escalating exchanges between the two countries, following a major Russian aerial assault on Ukraine that killed at least 22 people. Analysts say the timing was intended not only to pressure Russia economically but also to embarrass the Kremlin and send a message to international guests attending the forum.

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that Alabama may use a congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, overturning a lower court decision that found the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters. The conservative majority said Alabama was likely to prevail because lower courts had not properly applied a recent Supreme Court ruling that weakened protections under the Voting Rights Act and emphasized deference to states’ political redistricting decisions. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing that the decision undermines democratic principles and permits a map previously found to discriminate against Black voters. The ruling could have major implications for the 2026 midterm elections, as Republicans seek to protect their narrow House majority and other states reconsider majority-Black districts following recent voting-rights decisions. Here is an excerpt from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:

Election results:

Zach Lahn won Iowa’s Republican gubernatorial primary, narrowly defeating Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra in a significant upset and marking the first loss for a Trump-backed candidate in a major 2026 midterm primary. Lahn, who aligned himself with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, benefited from support among anti-establishment conservatives and endorsements from figures such as former Rep. Steve King. He will face Democratic nominee Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor, who ran unopposed and has built a bipartisan, anti-establishment campaign. Political observers expect the general election to be highly competitive despite Iowa’s recent Republican lean, with voter concerns about economic issues and open statewide races adding uncertainty.

California’s gubernatorial primary remains too close to call, with Republican Steve Hilton and Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer competing for the two spots that will advance to the general election. With only about half the expected vote counted, Hilton held a narrow lead, while millions of ballots remained outstanding under California’s slow vote-counting process. Several other important races also remained unresolved, including competitive U.S. House primaries and the race to determine who will face Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff. The outcomes could have significant implications for California politics and the balance of power in Congress, but final results may take days to emerge.

Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot and healthcare executive, won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District and will face Republican incumbent Tom Kean Jr. in the general election. The race is expected to be highly competitive because the district is closely divided politically, with President Trump having carried it by only 1 percentage point in 2024. Kean has been absent from Congress since March due to an undisclosed medical condition, drawing criticism from Bennett, who argues he has failed to represent the district effectively. Bennett campaigned on her military and healthcare experience while positioning herself as a candidate who can appeal to Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans.

Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland won the Democratic primary for governor of New Mexico and will advance to the general election, where she will face Gregg Hull. If elected, Haaland would become the first Native American woman to serve as a U.S. governor, a historic milestone she has emphasized throughout her campaign. Haaland, who previously served in Congress and as Interior Secretary under President Biden, has focused her campaign on economic issues, health care, and opposition to President Trump’s policies, particularly cuts to federal assistance programs. Entering the general election as the frontrunner in a state that currently has no Republicans holding statewide office, she seeks to succeed term-limited Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Other news:

Overnight, Trump suggested that he will make the UFC instillation on the White House lawn permanent, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower:

Trump said he expects acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to become the permanent attorney general, praising his work at the Justice Department. Trump also defended Blanche’s handling of several controversial issues, including a now-abandoned plan to compensate some of Trump’s allies and supporters involved in the January 6 cases. The remarks signal Trump’s continued confidence in Blanche as a key ally and suggest he is likely to remain a central figure in the administration’s legal and law-enforcement agenda.

A survey of more than 300 federal employees fired during their probationary periods found that 95% reported ongoing mental health effects, with nearly half experiencing PTSD-like symptoms after losing their jobs. Many of the workers said the terminations were unlawful, disruptive to their careers, and left them struggling financially, with some still unemployed or earning significantly less in new positions. Several former employees argued that the firings weakened the federal workforce and contributed to the loss of experienced scientists, researchers, and public servants. The findings come amid ongoing legal challenges to the Trump administration’s workforce reductions and broader concerns about their impact on government services and employee well-being.

A hostage standoff in Bakersfield, California, entered its second day after a man allegedly made bomb threats and barricaded himself inside a building that includes a Chase Bank branch, holding several people hostage. At least two hostages have been released without injuries, while FBI agents, SWAT teams, and crisis negotiators continue efforts to resolve the situation peacefully. Authorities say the remaining hostages appear to be in good health, and the FBI has assumed command of tactical operations as the area remains evacuated and roads stay closed. Officials, including Bakersfield’s mayor, are closely monitoring the incident and urging the public to avoid the area while negotiations continue.

The Trump administration has proposed new rules that would require federal grants to align with the president’s policy priorities and “American values,” giving political appointees greater authority over funding decisions for universities and nonprofit organizations. Critics, including scientists and researchers, warn that the changes could undermine independent peer review, restrict academic freedom, and make it easier to cancel grants for political reasons. The proposal would also formalize restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and limit some international research collaborations. Opponents argue the rules could slow scientific innovation, increase political influence over research, and weaken the United States’ competitiveness in science and higher education.

The European Union criticized a proposed Trump administration tariff that would impose an additional 10% duty on EU goods, calling the measure unjustified. The tariff is based on a U.S. finding that the EU has not yet fully enforced a ban on products made with forced labor, even though the EU has already passed legislation addressing the issue. European officials argue the move is an attempt to find a new legal basis for tariffs after earlier Trump trade measures faced setbacks in court. The dispute threatens a recently negotiated U.S.-EU trade truce and could complicate ongoing efforts to stabilize transatlantic trade relations.

More On U.S. Governance, Trump Administration

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, This could lead to the end of our republic, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, June 3, 2026. At 3:23 this afternoon, sitting before the Senate Appropriations Committee for the first time since taking over as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s replacement was asked a simple question: Would he follow court orders? He refused to say yes.

And with that single exchange, the Department of Homeland Security found itself back in the headlines, because the man overseeing one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government would not commit to obeying the judiciary branch of our government. It was a chilling moment, one that points toward a question every American should be asking tonight: What happens when the people entrusted to enforce the law no longer believe they have to follow it? Can our country survive such a moment? DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wasn’t supposed to be in this story. Until March, he was a Republican Senator from Oklahoma. Then Donald Trump fired Kristi Noem and put Mullin in her chair, and at his confirmation hearing he sold the Senate a softer version of himself. He promised to work across the aisle. He said he would bring confidence back to an agency that had lost it. For two months after that, he was quiet. Today we found out what the quiet was for. He was planning for this moment.

The question came from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and he built it carefully. He read aloud from a ruling by Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minnesota, a man who clerked for Antonin Scalia and was put on the bench by George W. Bush. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” the judge had written. Murphy made sure no one in the room could file that away as partisan. “That’s not a Democratic-appointed judge,” he said. “That is a Republican-appointed judge describing the scale of illegality.” Then he asked the simplest version of the question there is. When a court tells DHS that something it is doing is illegal or unconstitutional and orders it to stop, will you comply with the court order?

And Mullin would not say yes. He said, “We will never break the Constitution and we’re not going to break the law.” It sounded like an answer, but it wasn’t one. The entire structure of our government gives the courts the power to decide whether the law is being broken, not the officials accused of violating it.

So Murphy asked again. And this time Mullin revealed the real issue. “If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” he said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.” That was the moment. Because Murphy wasn’t asking whether Mullin agreed with a court order. He was asking whether DHS would obey one. Four times. Four times, he was given the opportunity to say yes. Four times he refused.

At one point, he didn’t even try to hide how he really feels, saying, “Not all judges are above the law, but sometimes they think they are.” Murphy told the entire committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, that they “should be really, really freaked out.” And he named the stakes without flinching. “I think that’s actually the end of our republic, if the administration willfully ignores a court order because they disagree with it or its motivation.”

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This is the trick Mullin is playing. He keeps swapping in the words “the Constitution” and “the law” where the words “court order” belong. He wants us to hear a man pledging fidelity to the founding document. But under our system, he does not get to be the one who decides whether he is obeying it. A court does. That is the whole purpose of an independent judiciary.

So when he reserves the right to ignore the judges who make that determination, while wrapping himself in the language of constitutional devotion, he is not promising to follow the law. He is claiming the authority to decide for himself whether the law applies to him at all.

And the judge Murphy quoted was not exaggerating. Schiltz had attached a list. Ninety-six court orders were violated across seventy-four cases, in one state, in roughly a month. These were habeas cases, people detained and challenging whether their detention was even legal. The judge wrote that ICE has every right to challenge an order, but, like any other party in any other case, it has to follow that order unless and until it is overturned.

The danger of ignoring court orders isn’t just in the orders themselves. A court rules that something DHS is doing is illegal and orders it stopped. DHS decides the order doesn’t count. What happens then? The uncomfortable answer is: not much. The courts can issue contempt orders. They can impose fines. They can even order arrests. But courts do not have an army. They do not have police forces. They depend on the executive branch to enforce their rulings.

Alexander Hamilton warned about this more than two hundred years ago. He called the judiciary the weakest branch because it possesses “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The entire system depends on one assumption: that government officials will obey court orders even when they don’t like them. What Mullin told the Senate today is that he may not.

And this won’t stop with DHS. This is just another test. What happens when an election ends up before a court and the ruling goes against the Trump regime? Do they ignore that, too?

Murphy made one more point that we need to think about. If a Republican administration gets to ignore the court orders it decides are political, then so does the next Democratic one. You do not get to break the rule only when it serves you. Once it is broken, it stays broken for whoever comes next. But more importantly, it creates a system where the law means whatever the people in power say it means. Nobody wins in that system.

And maybe the hardest thing to sit with is that none of this is a surprise. We expected this. Not Mullin by name, but this. Exactly this. We have been saying for more than a year that the guardrails would be tested until one of them finally gave way. We are still in the testing phase. But the next phase comes after the tests stop and the consequences begin. And history has taught us that the most dangerous attacks on democratic institutions rarely come from chaos. They come from people who know exactly what they are doing.

Hearing Mullin declare that he might not follow court orders did not shock me. I am not shocked by Trump anymore, either. I expected all of it. What I cannot get past, still, after all this time, are the people in Congress who are letting it happen. The Republicans who know exactly what this is and have decided that a seat at his table is worth more than the country that gave them that seat in the first place. They think they are buying safety. Influence. Access. Power. Whatever he has promised them.

And maybe that is the part that still hurts the most. Not that men like Trump and Mullin would test the limits of our democracy. Authoritarians always do. It is that so many people who swore an oath to defend it have decided not to. They are watching the same events we are. They understand the same stakes. And they are choosing silence anyway. That is what I have never been able to understand. And I know so many of us feel the same way.

Tonight I am watching the election results in California and in five other states, primaries that will help shape what next November even looks like. And while one man in a hearing room was telling the Senate he might not honor a ruling he dislikes, real Americans all over the country were standing in line and casting ballots. Votes were counted. Results came in and were accepted, even by candidates who lost, even when the loser had the president’s own endorsement behind him. That is the thing they have not taken. Our democratic norms are still holding tonight.

Today was not an explosion of good news. It was quieter than that. It was people still showing up, caring, and believing their voice counts for something. And maybe that is what stayed with me tonight. The willingness to participate, to stay engaged even when things feel uncertain, is exactly what we are going to need in November. And people are already showing us they are ready to meet the moment. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Has Given Up, Paul Krugman, right, June 3, 2026. No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge. 

Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.

Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte, right, as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.

The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.

But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.

For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.

Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”

The Times goes on to note that

These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.

How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?

Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.

Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.

Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.

What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.

But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.

Just to be clear, I am by no means saying that Trump’s descent into rage-madness has ended the threat to U.S. democracy. The Koch-backed Federalist Society, which now controls the Supreme Court, is going all in on rigging U.S. elections with the goal of locking in permanent Republican rule. The architects of Project 2025 are marching ahead with their goal of turning the federal government into a spoils system that answers only to billionaires and their political pawns. Politicization of research funding is getting very close to destroying a scientific community that took generations to build.

But Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Director of National Retribution, Andrew Egger, right, June 3, 2026. Donald Trump is facing a host of crises at once. His political agenda is on the rocks, his popularity has never been lower, and his quest to punish his personal and political enemies for their crimes has all but stalled out.

At times like these, a guy’s got to make some hard choices about which priorities to push hard for and which to let fall by the wayside. And Trump’s selection yesterday of Federal Housing Finance Agency chair Bill Pulte as his new pick for acting director of national intelligence makes it crystal clear: Punishing his enemies is the one goal he’s determined to see through to the bitter end. Virtually everyone not in the bag for Trump—both lawmakers and veterans of the intel community—has been left aghast.

“That’s what politicization fundamentally is,” Susan Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. “You’re putting into this messy fray, this difficult thing in which the president already has distrust, you’re putting someone in charge that wants to support the president by going and finding the things that he wants to be true. You’ve now just corrupted the whole discipline.”

Gordon is right to worry. By practically any metric you can imagine, Pulte—the scion of a construction dynasty who parlayed minor MAGA e-celebrity into a housing-policy post—is an insane pick for a top intelligence role. He has zero experience, none whatsoever, in any national-security-related field, making him not only a silly pick but also perhaps an illegal one: Literally the first thing federal law has to say about the DNI is that any nominee to the post “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Nor has Pulte, right, earned the post by proving to be a lion of good government in his current post. Just the opposite: He’s routinely earned the scorn of other D.C. Republicans for the clownish ideas he regularly feeds into Trump’s brain. It was Pulte who briefly sold Trump on a housing policy built around the “50-year mortgage,” which sent White House officials scrambling to do damage control after Trump posted an endorsement of the idea with no explanation and no warning last November. When Trump posted a bizarre AI image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man in April, prompting outrage from his evangelical base, it came out that Pulte was the one who had “brought the image to Trump’s attention.”

“I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte at a dinner last September after hearing Pulte had been badmouthing him to the boss. This earned (anonymous) applause from Republican lawmakers on the Hill: “He’s a nut,” one House Republican told Politico. “The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” groused another. “I would have done the same [as Bessent],” said a third.

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But Pulte has done one thing that Trump has really, really liked: He has gone after Trump’s enemies with ferocity, tenacity, and an utter lack of shame. The Federal Housing Finance Agency might have seemed a strange perch from which to wage the president’s war of retribution. But as soon as he got there, Pulte busied himself finding ways to use the limited tools at his disposal to get scalps for his boss. Eventually he found a promising route. In fact, the strategy he put together—rooting through opponents’ federally filed mortgage applications in search of discrepancies he could trumpet as fraud—became one of the White House’s go-to strategies in 2025, with Pulte laying the groundwork for mortgage-fraud investigations into a host of Trump foes, including then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Now Pulte will get to bring this hatchet-man zeal to a much bigger perch with a much more powerful set of dirt-gathering tools: the office of the director of national intelligence. (Have no fear, though: The president said Pulte will keep his housing job at the same time.)

Gathering dirt on Americans, particularly political foes of the government, isn’t what our intelligence agencies are supposed to be for, but it’s long been obvious that it’s Trump’s primary use for them. When Tulsi Gabbard was DNI, she was routinely sidelined or excluded from matters of foreign affairs like the raid to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Instead, the president sent her haring off on all sorts of revenge-tour missions: relitigating the launch of the 2016 Russia investigation, or supervising raids on election offices in an attempt to prove 2020 voter fraud. (When the FBI raided an office in Fulton County, Georgia, Gabbard wasn’t just bizarrely on hand—she even facilitated a speakerphone call from Trump to the on-site agents congratulating them on their success.)

But at least Gabbard had national-security experience—as an Army officer and as a Democratic lawmaker who served for years on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs Committees. She was a putatively qualified nominee who Trump liked because she would do what he wanted, where he wanted. With her gone, Trump is dropping the fig leaf. All that national security experience, it turns out, was just window dressing. The main thing for a director of national intelligence is to be willing to hit Trump’s foes where it hurts.

It’s worth stressing, too, how bad a candidate for this job Pulte would be even if you set this evidence of obvious malice aside.

“There’s so much uncertainty in intelligence, just in general,” Gordon said. “To put someone who has never in his whole life probably even seen intelligence, to understand what it means, is I think profoundly disturbing and sends a lot of signals about how the president values intelligence, how the president understands the job.”

If Pulte’s appointment suggests Trump intends to keep doubling down on his revenge tour, it will do little to help either his swooning popularity or his growing problems keeping lawmakers in check. It’s far from their top issue, but the polls have been clear for months that Americans disapprove of Trump’s weaponization of government against his enemies. Continuing to burn more political capital in pursuit of this goal won’t help dig him out of the popularity pit he’s in. And as Republican lawmakers keep finding new reasons to resent the ways Trump has tried to short-circuit their oversight and policymaking authorities, they can’t love the fact that Trump is nominating an unqualified person they disdain to a top national security role—all in an “acting” capacity that spares Pulte of needing to get the Senate’s consent for the job.

Year two of his second term has left Trump battered and wounded, but in his instincts he remains an authoritarian to the last. He could be spending his time trying to shore up Americans’ living conditions and attempting to win back the voters he’s already lost since 2024. But why bother with that when there’s all these Democrats left to crush?

New York Times, New Intelligence Role Puts Bill Pulte’s Housing Agenda in Doubt, Matthew Goldstein and Lydia DePillis, June 3, 2026. Mr. Pulte has had difficulty boosting the housing market as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Now he will also serve as acting intelligence director.

Bill Pulte, President Trump’s top housing official, has voiced grand ambitions for jump-starting the housing market by lowering interest rates, boosting home construction and reshaping the federally controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

With his appointment on Tuesday as the acting director of national intelligence, Mr. Pulte will now also vet national security threats.

Already, Mr. Pulte’s tenure as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency was marked by a lot of talk and theatrics but few tangible results. With his new unusual dual role, housing advocates said they expected his housing agenda to slow even more.

“It suggests that, for the time being anyway, any efforts that require a heavy lift from F.H.F.A. will have to wait,” said Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and an adviser on housing finance issues.

Mr. Pulte, 38, is a grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the nation’s largest home-building companies, and served on its board for about four years before his fellow members pushed him out. But he has had little day-to-day experience in the housing world outside of owning several small mobile home parks in Florida and a number of single-family rental homes.

At the housing agency, Mr. Pulte has shaken up the staff, firing people in large groups. Teams focusing on fair-lending enforcement and climate risk were cut or merged with others.

Mr. Pulte also de-emphasized Fannie and Freddie’s mission of expanding homeownership to historically underserved populations. He canceled support for a program aimed at catering to people of color, for example, and lowered the targets for the share of loans to low-income home buyers that Fannie and Freddie try to acquire.

Neither Mr. Pulte nor a spokesperson for the Federal Housing Finance Agency responded to requests for comment.

Under Mr. Pulte’s tenure, the administration’s lofty goals for the housing market have yet to materialize. Early on, he was able to hail falling mortgage rates, which helped make buying homes slightly less formidable. A decision he made to have Fannie and Freddie buy hundreds of billions of dollars more in mortgage securities had some initial success in bringing down rates, but prices have remained stubbornly high.

Rates on a 30-year mortgage, as tracked by Freddie Mac, have been rising during the war with Iran and now sit about where they were last summer.

The difficulty of purchasing a home, particularly for first-time buyers, has helped drive down Mr. Trump’s approval ratings on the economy. And housing starts have remained subdued since interest rates soared in 2022.

At one point, Mr. Pulte floated the idea of creating a 50-year mortgage in a bid to spur homeownership, but both progressives and conservatives panned the idea. Critics said the interest payments would last so long that they would eat into a homeowner’s life savings.

One of Mr. Pulte’s signature proposals is launching an initial public offering of Fannie and Freddie, which buy mortgages from banks and package them into bonds that are sold to investors. Controlled by the federal government since the financial crisis nearly 18 years ago, the companies are two of the most important cogs in the nation’s roughly $17 trillion mortgage market.

New York Times, G.O.P. Works to Jump-Start Immigration Bill After Trump Retreat on Fund, Annie Karni and Robert Jimison, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Republicans hoped the acting attorney general’s vow that the administration was “not moving forward” with a fund for people claiming to be victimized by the government would unlock the votes.

Senate Republicans toiled on Tuesday to push forward with a bill to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown, hoping that a clear statement from the administration that it was abandoning the idea of a $1.8 billion fund to pay people claiming to have been victimized by the federal government would be enough to unlock the needed votes.

The plan for the fund had generated an intense bipartisan backlash, and many Senate Republicans indicated last month that they would not agree to move forward with the legislation as long as the fund remained an issue.

On Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, attempted to take it off the table, testifying before a House committee that the Justice Department was backing away from the plan to create what it had called an anti-weaponization fund as part of a settlement the president reached with the Internal Revenue Service.

“We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” Mr. Blanche said, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee.

“Not moving forward ever?” Representative Grace Meng, Democrat of New York, pressed.

“Correct,” Mr. Blanche replied.

It was not clear whether his statement would be enough to mollify Republicans who had been outraged about the idea of the fund, who are all but certain to be faced with politically difficult votes on the topic when the $70 billion immigration crackdown bill reaches the floor. But G.O.P. leaders hoped it would be enough to unite their party around the measure and allow votes on it in the Senate as soon as Wednesday.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, had said at a news conference earlier Tuesday that he was relying on Mr. Blanche to clear the way for such a breakthrough after the acting attorney general had told him privately that he would provide a “very definitive, very clear” statement on the fund in his testimony.

Afterward, Mr. Thune said he thought that Mr. Blanche had delivered a “definitive” message — “I thought he was good,” he told reporters at the Capitol — but said the bill was still a “work in progress,” and indicated that he was still trying to line up the votes to move forward.

“We’ve been talking to our members, continue to dialogue with them, see where it goes,” Mr. Thune said.

Still, Mr. Blanche’s testimony did not solve all of Republicans’ problems with the measure, which aims to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection for the remainder of Mr. Trump’s term.

He told the House panel that he was not backing away from another provision of the deal that Mr. Trump reached with the I.R.S.: one that protects him, his family and his businesses from audits of tax returns they have already filed. That could still prove to be a political liability for Senate Republicans, as Democrats seek to portray them as helping to enrich a billionaire at a time when affordability remains the overwhelming issue concerning voters heading into the midterm elections.

The immigration legislation, which was supposed to be a point of unity for Republicans, has in recent weeks devolved instead into a flashpoint for tensions between Mr. Trump and members of his party in Congress. G.O.P. senators had already agreed last month under political pressure to drop $1 billion in security funding that the White House had sought to include in the bill for Mr. Trump’s ballroom project, which also generated a bipartisan backlash.

On Tuesday, in an indication that Republicans were trying to insulate themselves further from political blowback over the president’s fund, they agreed to drop roughly $1.5 billion from the bill that was to have gone to the attorney general’s office for a broad swath of Justice Department “missions,” according to a leadership aide who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Some senators had worried that money could be used for a fund compensating the president’s allies.

Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all Republicans, have continued to express concerns about the fund. Mr. Tillis even said he would support a Democratic amendment to block the Justice Department from revisiting the creation of such a fund in the future.

More On U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran, Lebanon

New York Times, War Games and Warnings on Strait of Hormuz Went Unheeded by Trump, Michael Crowley, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Over the past two decades, Iran repeatedly threatened to close down the waterway. President Trump underestimated Iran’s ability to do so. 

In mid-February, shortly before President Trump launched the war on Iran, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted live-fire drills in its coastal waters. Iranian state media publicized the exercise, whose official name made its purpose clear: “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.”

The exercise amounted to a flashing red warning light to the Trump administration — one that, for reasons that are still not fully clear, went largely unheeded.

Within days of the war’s start, Iran’s military exerted control over the strait, menacing commercial tankers with boats, missiles and drones. Shipping ground to a halt. Energy prices soared. And Mr. Trump was backed into a strategic corner.

Three months later, Iran’s control of the strait has become its most powerful weapon, a source of huge leverage in negotiations with Mr. Trump over the country’s nuclear program.

A president used to bending opponents to his will has struggled to conceal his exasperation. In an April social media post, Mr. Trump profanely demanded that the “crazy bastards” leading Iran open the strait, “or you’ll be living in Hell.” Iran’s military mocked Mr. Trump’s threat as a sign of helplessness.

But Iran’s response has been neither crazy nor surprising, say numerous former U.S. officials who spent hours war-gaming Tehran’s likely response to a major U.S. attack.

For years, the U.S. government has conducted war games dealing with potential conflicts with Iran, including ones at the Pentagon attended by dozens of military officials and policymakers. Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major American attack by closing the strait of Hormuz.

“Every single time, the first thing we focused on was the strait — without exception,” said Dennis B. Ross, a senior national security official in the Obama White House. “We assumed that if you go to war with Iran, this was their counterpoint.” 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Kuwait Says Iranian Attack Has Damaged Its Main Airport, Yan Zhuang, June 3, 2026. The United States and Iran both reported strikes overnight, accusing each other of being the aggressor. It was unclear where diplomatic efforts stand to end the war.

Here’s the latest.

Kuwait’s army said a passenger terminal at the country’s main international airport was damaged by an Iranian drone attack early Wednesday, after a new round of strikes between the United States and Iran.

The hostilities overnight were the latest in a series of attacks the two countries have launched in recent days, even as they negotiate over a framework to end the war. The U.S. military has described its actions as self-defense, while Iran has said it is retaliating against American attacks.

The Kuwaiti authorities said one person had been killed in the attack on Kuwait International Airport’s Terminal 1, and the army said multiple people were injured. The foreign ministry said the country reserved the right to take appropriate measures in response.

Kuwait’s Civil Aviation Authority said it had suspended flights and was diverting them to alternate airports. By early afternoon local time, some flights had resumed from a different terminal.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement that Iran had launched missiles and drones at two regional neighbors, Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as civilian mariners in nearby waters. Several projectiles failed in flight, it said, and others were intercepted.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had targeted the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and an American vessel it identified as the Panaya. U.S. Central Command said Iran’s Wednesday attacks targeting U.S. bases did not hit their targets.

The U.S. military said it was responding to “aggressive Iranian behavior,” and that the targets it struck included a military ground control station on Qeshm Island, off the coast of Iran. Iran cited the Qeshm strikes as grounds for its own attacks.

Both sides have maintained that the cease-fire between them remains in effect while negotiations continue.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that a deal with Iran “could happen today, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week,” but cautioned that there was no guarantee any agreement would be “acceptable to the Senate or acceptable to the American people.”

Iran has insisted that any new cease-fire and peace deal must include Lebanon.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Israel-Lebanon talks: Israeli and Lebanese officials met in Washington on Tuesday for the first day of a new round of U.S.-mediated talks on ending the war in Lebanon, a conflict closely tied to the one that the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. Another round of talks is scheduled for Wednesday.
• Lebanon fighting: Early Wednesday, the Israeli military issued new evacuation warnings for parts of southern Lebanon, where it has continued strikes against the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah.
• Market reaction: Oil prices rose on Wednesday as military strikes in the Middle East cast doubt on efforts by Iran and the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil and gas shipping route. 

New York Times, Out of Time to Delay, House to Vote on Directing an End to the War in Iran. Robert Jimison and Megan Mineiro, June 3, 2026. A measure to direct the president to halt U.S. engagement in Iran had been on track to pass in late May, but Republican leaders postponed action. They have run out of time to delay the vote.

The House on Wednesday was set to vote on a measure directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war.

The resolution had been on track to pass in May when Republican leaders abruptly pulled it from the floor to avoid an embarrassing defeat for both the party and the president.

Adoption of the resolution would be a remarkable rebuke to Mr. Trump and his handling of the war, after he has repeatedly dismissed any effort by Congress to curb his power and the G.O.P. has largely ceded its prerogatives to do so, deferring to him time and again. Republicans put off the vote two weeks ago, recognizing that they did not have sufficient votes to defeat the measure.

But it was not clear whether they had made any headway in the days since, in winning converts, as the conflict has dragged on and Mr. Trump has made little progress toward ending it. And G.O.P. leaders are unable to delay the vote any longer because Democrats have invoked the War Powers Resolution, which requires consideration of such measures within a limited period of time.

Three House Republicans sided with Democrats in support of a similar resolution that just barely failed on a tie vote last month, in a sign of growing opposition to the military campaign now in its fourth month.

The vote comes as divisions between Republicans in Congress and the president have surfaced on a range of issues as their interests diverge in the run-up to the midterm congressional elections. Senate Republicans have in recent days forced Mr. Trump to abandon his request for $1 billion in security funding for his ballroom project and a plan that the Justice Department announced to create a federal fund to pay claimants who accuse the government of having victimized them.

Even if the resolution were to pass and be approved by the Senate, the ability of lawmakers to force a president to withdraw troops remains a contested legal question, and Mr. Trump and his senior aides have dismissed any effort by Congress to limit his war powers as unconstitutional.

But a Senate vote last month to move forward with a similar measure, in which a handful of G.O.P. defectors broke from the president and opposed the war, indicated an increasing willingness by some members of the president’s party to pressure him to end a conflict that a majority of Americans say is not worth the costs.

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: America Handcuffed: How the New NDAA Would Merge US and Israeli Defense, Frank Figliuzzi, right, June 3, 2026. Congress added Section 224 in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. Here's why it's fundamentally different from decades of traditional military aid.

There’s a spot on the horizon that merits our attention before it vanishes into classified obscurity. And deep within last Tuesday’s release of their 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the House of Representatives included an innocuous sounding section labeled, “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” Section 224.

Since Israel was founded in 1948, it has received over $200 billion inflation-adjusted dollars in military aid from the United States. If you think that represents the pinnacle of historical global defense partnerships, you haven’t seen Section 224. The draft NDAA isn’t about increasing the amount of money we spend on Israel’s military. It’s about increasing Israel’s influence over, and integration into, the U.S. military industrial complex to an unprecedented level beyond that of any other partner nation.

Section 224 as currently drafted would fully integrate another country into America’s most sensitive research and development, weapons production, defense licensing agreements, and potentially every key facet of Israeli and American military industries. If not reconsidered and redrafted, the two nation’s defenses and related economic complexes could be so wedded, indistinguishable and mutually dependent, as to preclude separation or divorce when this ill-advised marriage inevitably falters.

For national security professionals, concerned citizens, and lawmakers, it’s time to speak now or forever hold our peace.

I write this column as an advocate of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, and, as someone who understands America’s interest in coming to Israel’s aid when it’s attacked. Yet, my concerns about Section 224 are also informed by 25 years of national security experience and my former role as head of counterintelligence at the FBI. It was my job to protect our nation’s future by protecting its most valued secrets and preserving our capacity to share what we wanted, when we wanted, and with whom.

Section 224 seems to undermine that essential independence. That’s my first reason for concern over this NDAA.

I’d have similar concerns if we were talking about this level of integration with other, even longer-established alliances like that with the United Kingdom. But members of Congress from both parties seem sold on the idea of moving well beyond the existing joint initiatives with Israel in areas such as missile defense, and plunging into ill-advised consolidation and exposure of our, “AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more” cutting edge proprietary projects. Even further, Section 224 proposes “network integration” and “data fusion” with Israel. That’s a techie’s way of saying: My house is your house; just take what you need.

I know the U.S. works in tandem with NATO allies to jointly produce armaments and preserve common supply chains. America exports its fighter aircraft to other countries and even trains foreign pilots to fly those jets. We are also the top purveyor of guns in the world and sell weapons to many nations. It’s also true that Israel develops some cutting-edge military technologies and shares them with us, particularly when it comes to anti-drone platforms.

But the 2027 proposed NDAA is different.

Beyond the intensely powerful Israeli lobbying machine, another possible reason lawmakers from both parties are throwing their approval behind Section 244 is that it would bring more jobs to their districts. As Ben Freeman wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft:

“It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on U.S. soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.”

That’s my second concern. Once local, state and even our national economies become co-dependent and perhaps beholden to another nation in such a critical area as military defense, our national interest is no longer our own. Once Section 224 gets approved, how do lawmakers launch objections that could lose jobs in their districts and ultimately lose those members an election? Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official commented on the potentially unfixable intertwining with Israel, “What Congress is trying to do now is find different ways of entrenching the relationship so deep in America’s own defense industrial base that it’s impossible to root it out.”

 Frank Figliuzzi, is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. 

Trump Family Corruption, Probes, Allegations, Accountability, Coverups

New York Times, Order Shielding Trump Family From I.R.S. Audits Will Remain, Blanche Says, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). The acting attorney general said the administration was preserving a broad order protecting the president and his family from audits of already filed returns, despite dropping a $1.8 billion payout fund.

The Justice Department is standing by an extraordinary measure giving President Trump, his family and his businesses potentially lucrative protection from I.R.S. investigations, Todd Blanche, left, the acting attorney general, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Blanche’s remarks about the tax protections came during an appearance in front of a House Appropriations subcommittee, in which he told lawmakers that the Trump administration was abandoning a related plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to pay restitution to people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization.”

Mr. Blanche said the end of the fund would not affect the separate agreement shielding Mr. Trump from audits of tax returns he and his family had already filed. Both proposals had emerged in recent weeks as part of a settlement of Mr. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. But now only the measure benefiting the Trumps will survive, Mr. Blanche said.

“Nothing has changed with that,” he said, referring to the tax proposal. “We’re not moving forward with the anti-weaponization fund.”

Mr. Blanche’s directive left in place a staggering public benefit to a president who has sought to bend the government toward his own financial interests. A host of thorny legal questions also remain. Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. was revived last week by a judge concerned about potential deception in the agreement to withdraw the suit and to release the Trumps from any ongoing audits.

These protections could be immensely valuable to Mr. Trump and his family, who have faced repeated audits from the Internal Revenue Service. Just one investigation by the I.R.S. stemmed in part from how Mr. Trump claimed losses on his Chicago tower could have cost him more than $100 million, The New York Times has reported. The Trump Organization had recently entered settlement talks with the I.R.S. to try to resolve the audit, The Times previously reported.

Tax lawyers and former I.R.S. officials have said that the protection for Mr. Trump was unprecedented in its scope and form, particularly since it extends to “affiliates” of the Trumps. Pre-existing I.R.S. procedure has been to audit the president every year, rather than confer on him sweeping protection from scrutiny on tax returns already filed.

Mr. Blanche sought to cast the audit protections as a typical outcome of litigation against the I.R.S. But Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the agency did not deal with an audit or tax issue, instead focusing on the leak of his tax returns by a former I.R.S. contractor during his first term.

Indeed, when the tax proposal was first floated to the Justice Department last month, lawyers there raised questions about whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.

The I.R.S. also sought to contest Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, with lawyers at the agency preparing a 25-page memorandum recommending that the Justice Department move to dismiss the case.

“Like anytime the I.R.S. settles with an individual taxpayer or another company, as part of the settlement, it’s standard, it’s typical to get rid of past ongoing audits,” Mr. Blanche said. “It’s not a forward-looking document. It’s nothing that gives any sort of immunity in the future to the president or his family or his organizations.”

Mr. Blanche personally signed the document conferring tax protections for Mr. Trump, his family and businesses. The brief agreement was posted without fanfare on the Justice Department’s website on May 19, one day after the agreement setting up the anti-weaponization fund was released. Some lawyers have questioned whether Mr. Blanche, as the acting attorney general, even has the authority to order the I.R.S., a separate agency, to stop civil tax audits.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said at the hearing on Tuesday that the I.R.S. order proved that Mr. Blanche was continuing to act as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. “Do you not find there’s any conflict of interest in what you are doing here as the acting attorney general of the United States?” she asked. Mr. Blanche said there was none.

While Senate Republicans had loudly protested the $1.8 billion fund, spurring Mr. Blanche’s retreat on that provision, many have appeared to look the other way at the audit protection, a benefit for the president potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.

“I haven’t been focused on that to tell the truth,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. “I think the same rules should apply to everybody.”

Still, Senate Democrats have said they plan to try to force votes on both the $1.8 billion fund and the audit provision. Republicans are taking up a bill funding immigration enforcement efforts under a fast-track process that allows Democrats to introduce amendments.

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Public Notice, The slush fund is dead. Long live the slush fund, Liz Dye, June 3, 2026. Todd Blanche, call your lawyer. Yesterday the Trump administration made it known that it’s tapping out on the “weaponization” slush fund … maybe.

First Axios and then every other news outlet simultaneously reported that the $1.776 billion payout to Trump’s pals is “dead for now.”

As for the administration, though, they’re putting nothing in writing.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comMENG: Are you going to issue new memo in writing rescinding weaponization fund? BLANCHE: I'm not committing to putting anything in writing. What would the purpose be? M: You established it in writing so it makes sense to rescind it in writing B: Ok. I'm not committing to doing anything in writing

And not even Trump’s fellow Republicans will take his word that this theft of taxpayer dollars won’t rise from the dead.

Trump v. Trump

In theory, the slush fund was created to settle a lawsuit Trump filed in January against the IRS.

Back in 2020, a contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked more than 400,000 tax returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica and the New York Times. As a victim of the leak, Trump was entitled to recover his actual damages under the Privacy Act, codified at 5 U.S.C. § 552a, and the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 7431. But the statute of limitations is two years from the date of discovery, and Trump absolutely knew about the leak years before that.

In fact, Trump sent his lawyer Alina Habba to represent him at Littlejohn’s plea hearing in October 2023. Nevertheless, Trump demanded $10 billion — a number totally unmoored to any claim of actual harm suffered — insisting that he didn’t find out about the leak until 2024.Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms.

Everything about this case suggests that it was a collusive effort between Trump and the government he controls. No lawyer for the Justice Department ever entered an appearance, and the requests to delay the government’s answer to the complaint were docketed “jointly,” but signed by Trump’s lawyers alone.

Smelling a rat, Judge Kathleen Williams ordered both sides to brief the threshold question of whether she had jurisdiction to hear the case at all. Article III courts can only hear live cases and controversies, and a president suing the an agency he controls doesn’t look much like a real dispute. Trump himself confirmed as much on Air Force One, telling reporters “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

The briefs were due May 20. But on May 18, Trump’s private lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if the Trump administration had filed an answer to the complaint, Judge Williams would have had to approve the settlement. But because the parties made sure that the no DOJ lawyer ever entered an appearance, Trump could just walk away without subjecting the settlement to judicial scrutiny. Judge Williams had no choice but to dismiss the case.

The same day, DOJ announced the Anti-Weaponization Fund, transferring $1.776 billion from the Treasury Judgment Fund to a private entity controlled entirely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, right. Under the aegis of five commissioners named by Blanche and removable by Trump, the fund would secretly dole out cash with zero judicial or congressional oversight.

Here again, Trump’s lawyers inside and outside of government colluded to situate this payout in ways that are legally self-contradictory. They captioned it as a settlement of the lawsuit, even though it also purported to settle unrelated claims arising from an administrative complaint that Trump filed alleging abuse of process in the the stolen documents case.

Normally legal settlements are taxable income to the prevailing party, but Trump certainly doesn’t intend to pay taxes on $1.8 billion in income. And the Treasury Judgment Fund can only pay monetary judgments; it cannot be used to fund administrative overhead to run what is effectively a federal agency dispensing cash to randos.

The next day, Blanche signed a separate addendum immunizing Trump and his family for any tax crimes they might previously have committed. Trump has been arguing for more than a decade about a dodgy tax filing back in 2010, so this amnesty is potentially worth $100 million for him, according to the New York Times.

The backlash was intense, and not just from Democrats.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick joined Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi to propose legislation blocking the slush fund. Over in the Senate, Sen. Thom Tillis called the project “stupid on stilts” and a “payout for punks,” according to CNN.

“Utterly stupid, morally wrong – take your pick,” Sen. Mitch McConnell scoffed.

Even Sen. Ron Johnson, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, called it “a galactic blunder.”

Blanche’s steadfast refusal to promise that no money would go to J6-ers who beat cops did not help matters.

Republicans in Congress were already furious at being asked to fund Trump’s ballroom — the one that was supposedly being donated by all his pals who just happen to have business before the federal government.

The Senate Parliamentarian saved the GOP from having to walk that particular plank by stripping the ballroom out of the reconciliation bill Republicans have been trying to pass to fund ICE and CBP without Democratic votes. But DOJ funding is still part of it, which gave Democrats a hook to propose endless amendments to the reconciliation package barring distributions to Trump’s slush fund. Voting to fund the project would be politically embarrassing for Republicans, and there’s good reason to think enough of them would cross the aisle that the amendment would pass.

But Trump’s prodigious lying has finally convinced Republicans that nothing is official until it’s actually official.

“It’s pretty clear that the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley told Politico.

“If it means it’s completely pulled, then that would satisfy me, but I haven’t heard anybody say that that is actually what is happening,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski agreed.

On Monday, even after the news of the “settlement” was reported, Senate Majority Leader John Thune moved to strip DOJ funding from the reconciliation bill entirely, in an effort to separate the issue of the slush fund from the reconciliation bill.

And Trump’s most ardent supporters are sure that they’ll get their money, one way or the other.

Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio posted the above message asserting confidence that Trump will prevail in creating a $1.8 billion taxpayer fund for those allies supposedly unfairly targeted by law enforcement

X avatar for @NobleOne Enrique Tarrio@NobleOneYou actually think President Trump is going to surrender this fund so easily? Don’t ever bet against this President. Dont play with this man. Let’s be crystal clear: the DOJ never said it was giving up the fund. They simply stated they will abide by the judge’s order for now.Image9:06 PM · Jun 1, 2026 · 21.4K Views262 Replies · 96 Reposts · 376 Likes

In testimony yesterday before a House appropriations subcommittee on oversight of the Justice Department, Blanche agreed that “we’re not moving forward with the fund. Period.”

But Blanche refused to put that in writing, suggesting that the money may still be moving to Trump, but not the slush fund. (Sorry, Enrique!) And he insisted that the tax amnesty was non-negotiable.

“There’s a settlement that the IRS entered into with President Trump and others in his family and his companies,” Blanche simpered. “As part of that settlement, as is customary in IRS settlements, there is a separate AG order.”

The slippage here is that this wasn’t an IRS enforcement action — it was a civil suit filed by Trump himself under the Privacy Act and the Internal Revenue Code. Blanche may be right that it is “customary” for the IRS to settle all a taxpayer’s outstanding issues in a dispute over back-taxes. But here, if Trump had actually won in court, he’d have been entitled to monetary damages and nothing else. His own tax liability is totally irrelevant.

On the plus side, the continued existence of this settlement means that Judge Williams’s inquiry into potential attorney misconduct will probably continue — and she’s not going to get flimflammed with a deliberate obfuscation about tax settlements and tort suits.

And neither will Congress!“

This thing isn’t over … not by a long shot.

New York Times, ‘I Love It’: Trump Is Still in Favor of $1.8 Billion Payout Fund, Luke Broadwater, June 3, 2026. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said on Tuesday that the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period,” after the plan drew bipartisan backlash.

President Trump on Wednesday said he still loved the idea of a $1.8 billion fund to use taxpayer money to pay his allies who claim they have been politically persecuted, even after his administration said it was dropping the plan.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said on Tuesday that the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period,” after the plan drew enormous, bipartisan backlash.

But in his first public comments since then, Mr. Trump did not disavow the politically toxic pot of money, which critics have characterized as a slush fund.

“I love it,” Mr. Trump said of the fund. “I think it’s so important.”

Asked whether the fund was actually dead or merely on hold, the president said: “I’d have to ask the lawyers.” He added: “The weaponization fund, as far as I’m concerned, was a beautiful thing.”

Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to be a way to distance himself from the decision to back away from the fund.

The president then spoke in praiseworthy terms of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” defacing the halls of Congress and attacking and injuring more than 150 officers.

“These are great people that were destroyed, their families have been destroyed,” he said, adding, “They went there with love.”

In one of his first official acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Mr. Trump’s proposal could have enriched through taxpayer dollars those who attacked the Capitol; the prospect spurred widespread outcry among lawmakers, many of whom had fled the mob violence. In response, Republican senators blocked the advancement of a spending bill as a protest, unless the fund was killed. They moved forward with the bill on Wednesday, around the time the president made his remarks praising the fund.Editors’ PicksKarl-Anthony Towns’s 5 Favorite Places in New York CityHis Grandfather Was a Spy. Obviously, He Wrote a Novel About It.Can You Use Dirty Rubber Bands in the Kitchen?

The president said Wednesday he thought the fund was “so important.” He said many people including himself had been victimized by law enforcement.

“I’m one of them,” he said. “Look, they raided my house.”

Jared Kushner’s Albanian resort faces corruption probe, mass protestsJudd LegumJun 3 READ IN APP Rendering of Kushner’s planned Albanian resort. (Studio Genesis)

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kushner’s Albanian resort faces corruption probe, mass protests, Judd Legum, right, June 3, 2026. Jared Kushner’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran War are not going well. But he is only moonlighting as one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats. Kushner is also having problems at his day job as the founder of Affinity Partners, a private equity fund bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Along with his wife Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Trump, Kushner is developing a multibillion-dollar resort on Sazan Island in Albania and nearby coastline. In an interview with the David Senra podcast published Sunday, Ivanka Trump described the project dreamily:

It’s an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that, really, the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.

Ivanka Trump said the project is “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live.”

But the reality of the massive project, which includes 10,000 hotel rooms and is located in one of Europe’s most environmentally sensitive areas, is a lot messier. In 2024, the Albanian government changed the law to allow the area, which was previously part of a protected national park, to be developed. After Trump’s election in November 2024, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor“ status, clearing the way for permits.

Kushner’s LLC was granted that status “just weeks before the new US president’s inauguration, even without a business plan or feasibility study for the construction of a luxury resort on an uninhabited island once used by the army for shooting practice.”

On Monday, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, known as SPAK, confirmed it was investigating Kushner’s project. The investigation will probe the changes to the land’s protected status and how Kushner-controlled entities obtained rights.

An investigative report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) found that the project involved a “network of shady individuals and companies“ including “a businessman accused of links to the Italian mafia, a former judge who resigned due to the vetting process, the daughter of a lawyer accused of forgery, the company of a murdered businessman and individuals linked to one of Albania’s biggest oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati.”

In January, 41 environmental organizations from 28 countries wrote to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and called for “the immediate suspension of any decisions advancing the project.” The groups said the resort posed “serious risks to the biodiversity and critical habitats of the area,” including “crucial habitats for some of the world’s most endangered marine species.”

Rama, however, has continued to defend the project. “There is not a single chance it will be stopped for as long as I am here,” Rama said at a press conference Tuesday.“Albania Is Not for Sale”

On Senra’s podcast, Ivanka Trump said she was “just there [in Albania] walking the lands” to “sort of be with it and experience it alongside some of the greatest living architects of our time.” She did not mention that the property has been subject to mass protests.

On April 29, government officials allowed barbed wire fencing to be constructed around the coastal portions of the resort property. This cut off miles of beach from the public. Heavy machinery was brought in to construct access roads.

The actions prompted regular protests by Albanians objecting to handing Kushner a public asset to develop into an ultra-luxury resort. Video captured private security guards dragging a protester across the ground.

After the incident, “authorities revoked the licenses of two private security firms involved in the incident, arrested one guard and stripped the local police chief of his duties.” Fifteen protesters were also charged with crimes.

This week, protests expanded to Tirana, Albania’s capital, with thousands chanting “Albania is not for sale” and demanding Rama’s resignation.

In December, Kushner’s plan to build a Trump tower in Belgrade collapsed after the project became enmeshed in a criminal corruption scandal involving Serbian government officials. Prosecutors allege that government officials forged documents to remove cultural protections from the land where the tower was to be constructed.

Investigative Reporting, Trump Pressures, Corporate Cowardice

 Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

New York Times, CBS News Fires Scott Pelley of ‘60 Minutes,’  Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Mr. Pelley, a former “CBS Evening News” anchor, was ousted after months of tensions between staff and Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief.

CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.

Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.

“We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who was hired last week as the new “60 Minutes” executive producer, wrote in a memo to the show’s staff on Tuesday night.

CBS News declined to comment. In a formal letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60 Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.

It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.

Those viewers are accustomed to familiar faces like Mr. Pelley, who has contributed to the program since 2004. The “60 Minutes” staff prides itself on autonomy, and it is not clear how the show’s production team may react to the firing of Mr. Pelley.

At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network’s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show’s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender” qualifications to oversee the show and that he would “never be welcome” at “60 Minutes.”

In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.

“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a “performative display of hostility” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”ImageA black-and-white photo of several people in suits holding microphones in a formal room.Mr. Pelley, second from right, preparing to deliver live reports alongside other White House correspondents in 1998.Credit...Getty Images

Mr. Pelley, asked about the letter in the interview on Tuesday evening, said Mr. Bilton’s missive “betrays a complete misunderstanding of what we work for and what we live for at ‘60 Minutes.’”

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley sent a statement to The Times that assailed the new leadership of CBS News, writing that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc” at the network.” He added, “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.”

Mr. Pelley also wrote that senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into stories for “60 Minutes” this past season, though he did not provide details about specific segments.

Mr. Bilton must now take charge of a weekly program that has lost four of its on-air correspondents in the past month. Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired last week, and Anderson Cooper voluntarily left the show at the end of the season in May.

Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS’s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media.

Her early interactions with the “60 Minutes” staff led to some awkwardness. In a meeting in October, Ms. Weiss bluntly asked the show’s journalists why the country believed they were biased. In December, she pulled a segment about a Salvadoran prison shortly before it aired, saying it needed more reporting. Ms. Alfonsi, the correspondent, accused Ms. Weiss of a “political” move. (The segment later aired in full, with additional comments from the Trump administration.)

Mr. Pelley’s future had seemed up in the air since his standoff with Mr. Bilton on Monday. 

U.S. Courts, Rights, Crime, Justice

Democracy Docket, Supreme Court greenlights Alabama’s racial gerrymander, signaling free rein for states to discriminate, Brentin Mock, June 2, 2026. The U.S. Supreme Court will allow Alabama to use a congressional map found to have intentionally discriminated against Black voters, it said Tuesday.

When the court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Louisiana v. Callais, it found that intentional racial discrimination in voting remains unconstitutional. But the new ruling, to which all six conservative justices signed on, suggests that, in practice, almost no federal protections remain for non-white voters, even in extreme cases.

A federal court found in 2023 that lawmakers intentionally discriminated in drawing Alabama’s congressional map, which diluted the voting strength of Black Alabamians. The Supreme Court agreed, and in 2024 the state was required to use a fairer map, with two Black-majority districts.

“As to intentional vote dilution, the District Court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus,” the court’s conservative majority wrote.

In the April 29 Callais ruling — which all but ended the VRA’s ability to block maps that reduce minority voting power — Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the decision had “no bearing” on the court’s earlier finding on Alabama’s map. He wrote that maps could still be found in violation of the VRA if it was proven that they were drawn with the explicit intent of discriminating against a state’s minority voters.

Still, shortly after Callais, Alabama lawmakers resuscitated the state’s previously blocked map. They did so while an active election was happening, hoping that courts would quickly step in and allow them to use it. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey scheduled a special election based on that map for August 11, also betting on courts’ approval.

But last month, a three-judge panel found the map to still be a violation of the 14th Amendment and the court’s new legal standard under Section 2 of the VRA. Alabama appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.

The request has been seen as the first major test of the high court’s new approach to policing racial discrimination in voting.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar,” the court’s dissenting justices wrote. “Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

Citing the election law doctrine known as the Purcell principle, the justices said the lower court erred by changing election rules close to an upcoming election, risking confusion for voters and election administrators.

“To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts,” the dissent added. “Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts. These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the State’s total number of registered voters).”

Critics say the Court’s conservative majority has applied that principle selectively to reach its preferred outcomes. In December, the Court invoked similar reasoning to stay a lower-court order blocking Texas’ 2025 congressional map, which the lower district court had found likely to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The map is expected to give Republicans several additional seats in Congress.  

New York Times, ‘Infuriated’ Former Judges Take on Trump, Adam Liptak, June 3, 2026. Critics say it is unseemly for retired judges to trade on the prestige of their former positions.

Adam Liptak is the chief legal correspondent and host of The Docket.June 3, 2026Updated 4:19 p.m. ETYou’re reading The Docket newsletter. Adam Liptak helps you make sense of legal developments in a turbulent time. Get it sent to your inbox.

Judges retain a special status even after they hang up their robes. Addressing them in a 2020 article, an American Bar Association official, Marla Greenstein, wrote that “the public will forever view you as a living representative of the judicial system.”

In recent months, coalitions of retired judges have drawn on their distinctive positions to file forceful briefs supporting challenges to what they said was lawless conduct by the Trump administration.

Such briefs are in one sense nothing new. It is not unusual to see, for instance, a friend-of-the-court brief from a handful of retired judges concerned about a miscarriage of justice in a criminal case. But ones featuring scores of former judges taking issue with presidential initiatives seem to be on the rise.

Such briefs have attracted critics, who say it is unseemly for retired judges to trade on the prestige of their former positions. But there is reason to think the recent filings have been influential.

On Friday, a federal judge in Florida took a motion from 35 former federal judges very seriously. She ordered President Trump to respond to their request that she reopen a case the administration had used as a vehicle to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate his allies and to shield him from tax audits and liabilities.

The former judges said the asserted settlement of the case was the product of collusion and fraud. That argument has been made far and wide, but it may have taken on special force coming from people who, as they put it in their motion, “have dedicated their professional lives to the administration of justice.”

It is possible, of course, that the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams of the Federal District Court in Miami, would have taken similar actions without outside prompting or spurred by someone else’s filing. But she seemed to welcome a motion from her former peers.‘The Federal Judges Are Infuriated'

Even larger groups of former judges have filed supporting briefs in other cases.

In a Supreme Court case on protections for immigrants, more than 175 former judges filed a brief in March arguing that the court’s emergency orders do not count as precedent binding lower courts if the justices did not give reasons. Recent emergency orders have tended to come with explanations.

In May, more than 100 former judges urged the federal appeals court in Boston to address what they called a pattern of abuse by immigration officials, including moving detained immigrants around the country to thwart court challenges and “a broader pattern of disrespect by ICE for judicial process and orders.” The case is pending.

Harold Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, is among the lawyers for the former judges in the Boston case.

“I thought we’d get about 20 judges, which is still impressive, and instead we got 135,” he said, adding that the surge of interest was driven by a threat to the rule of law.

“This is no longer about ICE versus the detainees,” Professor Koh said. “It’s about ICE versus the courts. The federal judges are infuriated.”

Perhaps the most prominent of the retired judges, Michael Luttig, signed all three of those briefs. Judge Luttig was appointed to a federal appeals court by President George H.W. Bush, served for 15 years and was considered for a seat on the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush.

He is now a harsh critic of the Trump administration, and he said current and former judges must speak up.

“The courageous voices of the federal and state judges of the United States,” he said, “are the only voices that can and have been heard above the deafening din of partisan political rancor that is literally threatening our nation.”

Asked about the role retired judges should play in general and in the challenge to the $1.8 billion fund, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, responded by criticizing sitting judges.

“President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower-court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the administration’s lawful agenda,” she said in a statement.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, told lawmakers on Tuesday that the administration was withdrawing plans for the fund but would continue to shield Mr. Trump from I.R.S. audits. Mr. Trump’s response to the retired justices’ brief is due June 12.Rejecting Briefs From Former Judges

The role of retired judges in the legal system has not attracted much scholarly attention, though it was the subject of a thoughtful 2023 article by Carson Jones Lacy, then a law student at Baylor University. It was called “Retired Judges: No Longer Friends of the Court?” and concluded that such briefs should generally be allowed.

Most courts, including the Supreme Court, are receptive to filings from former judges.

But there is one notable exception, and it provides an instructive window into how some sitting judges view such filings. In 2006, a federal appeals court in Washington told seven former federal judges that their views were not welcome. Two former chief judges of the court, the D.C. Circuit, were among those rebuffed.ourt

Michael Fanone via Substack, Opinion: Leaked: America's Largest White Supremacist Group Is Twice the Size We Thought, in Almost Every State, Michael Fanone, June 3, 2026. More than 540 members. Every state but one. Doubling every year since 2018. And the most disturbing thing in the leak isn't the size — it's who keeps signing up.

Picture a young man you actually know. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Quiet. Decent enough kid. He didn’t go to college, or he went and it didn’t take. He works a job that doesn’t need him to think and doesn’t notice when he’s tired. He comes home, he eats alone, he scrolls until the room goes dark. Nobody calls him. Nobody would notice for a while if he stopped showing up anywhere, because there isn’t really anywhere he shows up.

Now imagine someone hands him a flyer for a club. Guys who lift together. Train, box, push each other. Saturday mornings, a real schedule, a crew that gets on him if he skips. Brotherhood. Discipline. Men who say they’ll have his back.

He goes. Of course he goes. It’s the best offer he’s had in a year.

I want you to hold that kid in your head, because a 72-page document leaked this week, and it shows that adult American men like him are turning to hate groups in numbers we haven’t seen since the Jim Crow Era.

The 72 page document is a membership roster, leaked to USA Today from inside a white supremacist group called Patriot Front. The number on it is bad enough on its own. More than 540 members. Every state in the country except one. A group that has roughly doubled in size every single year since 2018, and pulled in more than half its current ranks in just the last two years.

You can read that and reach for the easy thought -- ok, a hate group is growing. Watch them. File it next to all the other things to be afraid of in the Trump Era.

But that’s not the part that should keep you up. The number isn’t the horror. The horror is the question underneath it: where are 540 grown men coming from?

They aren’t being shipped in. They aren’t a foreign object lodged in the body of the country. They’re us. They’re American men, hundreds and hundreds of them, who looked at an organized white supremacist movement and decided they wanted in. The leak isn’t a story about monsters multiplying in the dark. It’s a story about ordinary people volunteering, in numbers that keep doubling, to become them.

When I was a cop, you learned fast to read a group by what it does, not by what it calls itself. And what Patriot Front does, better than almost anyone in this ugly little world, is make joining a hate group feel clean.

Go look at the photos they want you to see. Matching shirts. Khakis. Fresh haircuts. American flags carried in tight formation, men moving in step like a drill team. No slurs on the banners. No swastikas in frame. They film themselves picking up trash on the highway. They talk about fitness and tradition and showing up for each other and building something with men who share your values.

In other words, they’re cosplaying as adult Boy Scouts.

That’s the whole trick. They worked out a long time ago that you don’t recruit a normal twenty-two-year-old by opening with the ethnostate. You recruit him by offering the things he is actually starving for and letting him walk the rest of the way himself. Belonging. A reason to get off the couch. A group of guys who notice him. The feeling of being part of something disciplined and meaningful, handed to him in a country that has spent his whole adult life making him feel like he is part of nothing at all.

The white supremacy isn’t the pitch. The white supremacy is what’s waiting for him once he’s in deep enough that leaving means losing every friend he’s made.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics

New York Times, News Analysis: Democratic Voters Acted Strategically in a Turbulent California Election, Laurel Rosenhall and Jennifer Medina, June 3, 2026. Without a dominant candidate in the governor’s race, Democratic voters ultimately wanted to ensure that their party wasn’t shut out of the general election.

After a turbulent primary campaign, Xavier Becerra, a former Biden administration official, was on the verge of pulling off a Lazarus-like comeback in the California governor’s race, based on election night returns.

And Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host endorsed by President Trump, also appeared likely to advance to the general election for the state’s highest office.

The race was still too close to call on Tuesday night. But Los Angeles residents went to bed knowing that Mayor Karen Bass would proceed to the November election, according to The Associated Press. And her opponent could be Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star who had a strong showing but had to wait for more ballots to be counted.

Mr. Pratt and Mr. Hilton, both Republicans who got their start in television, tried to harness voter frustration and anger at the Democrats who control nearly all levels of government in much of California. If they advance, however, each would face long odds in general election races where Democrats have dominated for decades.

Here are key takeaways from the early results.Many voters cast their ballots strategically.

For months, the California governor’s race featured a long roster of Democratic candidates whom voters found unfamiliar or uninspiring. Several polls indicated that two Republicans could sweep the primary because too many Democrats were splitting the vote and their supporters were not coalescing behind any one candidate.

Democratic leaders began to panic.

Dynamics shifted in the race as Republican voters consolidated behind Steve Hilton after he received President Trump’s endorsement, and Democratic voters started paying more attention to their options after Representative Eric Swalwell dropped out amid accusations of sexual assault.

By May, there was little chance of two Republicans winning the primary. But Democratic voters hung on to the fear that their party could get shut out of the general election if they didn’t get behind a front-runner.

Many felt the responsibility to cast a vote strategically so that their party would not be locked out. They considered who was ahead and who would win, and seemed to focus less on the policies that each candidate proposed for the future of California.

“I liked Katie Porter, but I’m a realistic person,” said Dennis McLin, 43, a social worker from Riverside, Calif. “I didn’t think she had a good chance of winning, so I voted for Xavier Becerra.”Editors’ PicksWhat the Y2K Generation’s ‘Hot Girl’ Thinks About It All NowOur Best Father’s Day RecipesKnicks Fans Want ’90s Tees. They’ll Have to Pay Very 2026 Prices.

Ms. Porter was in a distant fifth place in initial returns and conceded the race on Tuesday night.California’s top-two primary may be on its last legs.

California has been using the top-two primary system for 15 years, but it has never caused as much consternation as it did this election.

Democratic fears that two Republicans could sweep the governor’s race — in one of the nation’s bluest states — triggered a new effort to repeal the system this spring.

Under the current approach, all candidates of all parties run on the same primary ballot, and the top two finishers advance to the general election. The approach was intended to empower independent voters and force candidates to moderate their views.

But sensing voter frustration this year, a Democratic strategist put together a bipartisan coalition to back an initiative called “Undo the Top Two” that could come before voters in 2028. It would return California to a traditional primary in which one candidate from each party advances to the general election.

If the initiative qualifies for a future election, a key question will be whether voters want to return to a system that empowers the parties.Republicans have a durable base in California.

Democrats are the dominant force in California politics, having controlled the state legislature and governor’s mansion for more than a decade. Nearly half of all registered voters in the state are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans nearly two to one.

But Republican voters have remained a durable minority in California. With roughly half of the estimated ballots counted, Mr. Hilton received about 27 percent of the vote. Chad Bianco, the other Republican in the race and the Riverside County sheriff, had 11 percent.

Their combined support was consistent with historical norms for Republicans in the state. In 2024, for example, Donald J. Trump received 38 percent of the vote. In the 2022 governor’s race, Brian Dahle, a Republican state lawmaker, received 40 percent of the vote.A big blowout for Big Tech.

Matt Mahan, the Democratic mayor of San Jose, entered the race in January with enormous excitement from Silicon Valley.

Billionaires and tech titans poured about $30 million into campaigns supporting Mr. Mahan, who had a centrist message and offered to bring a new approach to governing — neither MAGA Republican, nor liberal Democrat.

But despite the money behind his message, it never caught on. He was one of the first candidates for governor to concede defeat on Tuesday night and was in sixth place in returns.

Tech leaders also failed in their attempt to challenge Representative Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley Democrat who expressed support for a proposed billionaire tax. The candidate they backed, Democrat Ethan Agarwal, was trailing in a distant fourth place Tuesday night.Money may not be enough to win.

Tom Steyer spent more than $200 million on the California governor’s race, breaking every previous record. The money — most of which went to advertising on television and social media — helped propel him toward the top of the heap of candidates for months.

But even though he spent more than six times as much as Mr. Becerra, it was not enough to ensure he would advance. Mr. Steyer is not out of the race, but he was in third place on Tuesday night and needed a large share of the uncounted votes to mount a comeback.

California voters have a long history of rejecting self-funded candidates. In 2010, Meg Whitman, a former eBay executive, spent more than $144 million in her run as Republican, the equivalent of roughly $218 million today. Jerry Brown, a Democrat who had served as governor decades earlier, won the race that year with 53 percent of the vote.

In San Francisco, a wealthy tech engineer was trailing in his race to succeed Representative Nancy Pelosi. Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat, pumped about $10 million of his own money on his campaign, but finished in a distant third place Tuesday night.

The Contrarian,  Opinion: Iowa May Go the Way of Texas, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 3, 2026. Another red state is in play. After Tuesday’s primary, Iowa, shown above, joins the list of red states with competitive U.S. Senate races.

The race was not on either party’s list of tight races several months ago, but that dramatically changed as Donald Trump’s ratings plunged and his failed policies delivered body blows to Iowa’s economy. Democrats now have a highly electable Democratic state representative, Josh Turek, who defeated by a healthy margin progressive Zach Wahls, with the help of a nearly $10 million VoteVets ad buy. He will go up against Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in November.

Trump-endorsed Hinson, who just acknowledged that the Iran war is a drag on Republicans, is no longer considered a slam dunk, even in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats in party registration by over 8 points. As The Daily Beast reported, “Iowa constituents have been hit particularly hard by Trump’s war, which has claimed the lives of six Army Reserve soldiers from the Des Moines-based 103rd Sustainment Command who were killed in an Iranian strike on a facility in Kuwait.”

With Iowa’s farm economy in extreme distress, “Iowa Democrats see an opening, especially as one of the states where recent special elections have seen notable shifts towards Democrats even as voters have soured on the national party’s brand,” NPR reported.

Disastrous MAGA policies have handed Democrats a compelling batch of campaign issues. First and foremost, the rural healthcare system is collapsing, creating a health and economic disaster accelerated by Republicans’ draconian Medicaid cuts. Turek’s personal health struggles and reliance as a child on Medicaid make him particularly effective on the issue.

High tariffs, another self-destructive Trump gambit, cut off Iowans’ access to critical overseas markets, spread economic distress, and may lead to more farm bankruptcies. Trump’s trade war with China has crushed soybean farming in Iowa (the No. 2 state for soybeans after Illinois.) As Bloomberg News reported, “US-China flows were halted for months and some Chinese buyers turned to South American producers.” Exports plunged from $12.6 billion in 2024 under President Biden to just $3.1B billion in 2025 under Trump, improving only marginally this year.

Trump’s Iran war debacle compounded that economic shock. “Trump’s war with Iran and the restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz — a key shipping lane in the Middle East — has also sent fertilizer prices surging just as planting season is beginning,” Bloomberg noted. Fertilizer prices are expected to jump by about a third, to the highest level since Russia launched the Ukraine war. Adding to their economic woes, Iowans now pay (on average) $4.65 per gallon for diesel, up from $2.73 last year.

Turek, a 4-time Paralympic Games basketball player who was born with spina bifida, was savvy enough to capitalize on this assortment of affordability issues during the primary campaign. Claiming prairie populist Sen. Tom Harkin as his political inspiration and mentor, he refused to be categorized as a left-winger. He advocated for “a living wage, affordable housing, healthcare and public education — all while rooting out corruption.” Pointing to his record in winning a Republican-leaning state (rather than vowing to take down Democratic leadership, as his opponent Wahls did), he has argued, “This is not a red state. This is a common-sense state that has masqueraded as more red than we are.”Subscribed

Iowa’s problems did not spring up overnight. Under one-party GOP governance, Iowa’s economy is in decline. With the state ranking 46th in growth, younger, better-educated people are fleeing the state. “In 2008, 47% of Iowa’s college students planned to stay in the state after graduation. That dropped to 41% in 2024,” Iowa Public Radio reported recently. “That’s a big concern in a state where many businesses are already seeing a worker shortage.”

An Iowa think tank, the Common Sense Institute Iowa, explained, “Iowa’s economy [loses] an estimated $4.5 million in total gross nominal earnings over the working life of each out-migrating, college-educated Iowan age 25-29.” Moreover, the cost of out-migration amounts to “an astounding $6.1 billion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) over the working life of those who leave.”

Something is not working for average people, and those who remain in Iowa face a gloomy forecast unless something changes dramatically. Turek has put the state’s long- and short-term economic woes in the context of a political system rigged by the oligarchy’s growing power and wealth. Arguing that it is “nearly impossible” for young people to find careers, he describes scenes of desolation, as if “a vacuum has come through and just sucked it out of there, just because we have policies in place that have only benefited billionaires and multinational corporations.” His answer to this problem? Elect leaders “who are going to actually fight for the middle class and fight for our workers, and fight for small businesses and for rural communities.”

Turek makes the case that Hinson and the policies she has supported have contributed to the burdens weighing down average people. “Ashley Hinson is Joni [“Well we are all going to die”] Ernst 2.0, arguably worse,” he said. “She is someone who voted for the Big, Beautiful Bill ... just to give tax breaks to billionaires.” He adds: “She’s also someone who has voted four times in favor of the Trump tariffs, which has led us to lead the nation in farm foreclosures. It’s absolute ‘farmageddon’ for our farmers. She’s not looking out for Iowans or the middle class.”

That might remind you of Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico’s populist message: “The biggest divide in politics is not right vs. left, but top vs. bottom.” That is no coincidence. In both Iowa and Texas, Democrats have found a receptive audience for the classic Democratic message that they will stand up for the little guy and gal against the rich and powerful, who rig the system in their favor at ordinary Americans’ expense.

Turek and Talarico will test the proposition that Democrats with an effective message centered on the economy and corruption can win in the heartland. We would experience a sea change in national politics if articulate, compelling Democratic candidates break through with a populist message in states Trump won comfortably in 2024.

If Democrats prevail, they should recognize that victories like these would never have been possible without Trump’s grotesque corruption, war on average workers, and utter indifference to rural Americans’ pain. And it will be rubber stamps — such as Hinson — who will pay the price for sycophancy in service of a president concerned only about himself. 

New York Times, A Trump Endorsement Falls Flat: 4 Election Takeaways From Iowa and Beyond, Reid J. Epstein, June 3, 2026. The president’s pick for governor of Iowa lost his primary, while Democrats in the state chose their nominee in what they hope will be a competitive Senate race.

Republican voters in Iowa dealt a shock defeat to President Trump on Tuesday, narrowly rejecting his chosen candidate for governor in favor of another conservative contender who ran as a political outsider.

The primary loss for Representative Randy Feenstra, whom the president endorsed on Friday afternoon, came at a time of mixed signals of Mr. Trump’s power over the Republican Party. He has won a series of dominant primary victories over Republican opponents, but has faced rising pushback from his party in Congress.

Here are four takeaways from a busy primary night in Iowa and several other states. (You can follow California’s high-stakes primaries here.)Trump had a rare high-profile primary loss.

In modern Republican primary politics, Mr. Trump’s endorsement is the gold standard. In the last month, it has ousted sitting senators, a congressman and state legislators whom the president deemed insufficiently loyal.

So when Mr. Feenstra won Mr. Trump’s endorsement for governor last week, it felt like the push he needed to get past four candidates in the primary.

Yet Mr. Feenstra was toppled on Tuesday by Zach Lahn, a conservative political operative and farmer who ran an insurgent campaign. Mr. Feenstra was seen as having run a lackluster campaign, and also faced the wrath of former Representative Steve King, who lost to Mr. Feenstra in a 2020 primary and backed Mr. Lahn.

Mr. Feenstra’s defeat makes him the highest-profile candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump to lose a Republican primary race in years — perhaps since Luther Strange, an appointed senator in Alabama, fell to Roy Moore in a 2017 special election primary. Mr. Moore went on to lose the general election to Doug Jones, a Democrat.

New York Times, Deb Haaland Wins Nomination in New Mexico Governor’s Race, Reis Thebault, Updated June 3, 2026. Ms. Haaland, a former Interior secretary, took a big step toward making history as the first Native American woman to be a governor when she won the primary in her Democratic state.

Deb Haaland, the former congresswoman and Interior secretary, won the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting her up to make history as the first Native American woman to lead a state.

Ms. Haaland defeated Sam Bregman, district attorney of New Mexico’s most populous county and father of the baseball all-star Alex Bregman, who ran as a tough-on-crime Democrat and turned the primary campaign into a surprisingly feisty affair.

One of New Mexico’s most prominent politicians, Ms. Haaland benefited from robust fund-raising, widespread name recognition and the historic nature of her candidacy. In her deep-blue state, where no Republicans hold executive office, Ms. Haaland is widely expected to prevail in the November general election.

Ms. Haaland launched her campaign in early 2025, less than a month after leaving the Biden administration, and became the immediate front-runner to succeed Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who is term-limited.

During the race, Ms. Haaland touted her progressive bona fides — she was an early supporter of the Green New Deal and “Medicare for All” — and she leaned on her personal experiences battling addiction and raising children by herself to connect with working-class voters.

Ms. Haaland is poised to take charge of New Mexico at a consequential moment. The state is struggling to upgrade one of the nation’s worst performing education systems, while it grapples with high rates of violent crime and childhood poverty. At the same time, the oil-rich state is making millions of dollars off surging gas prices from the war in Iran, giving New Mexico leaders an opportunity to spend the surplus on social programs.

At her election night party in Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza, Ms. Haaland pledged to protect New Mexico’s natural resources, work to bring down costs and defend the state against Trump administration policies.

“Are you ready to show Donald Trump and his administration that, here in New Mexico, we believe in dignity and respect?” Ms. Haaland asked, flanked onstage by her two sisters.

She acknowledged the state’s “longstanding challenges” but said repeatedly that “a better New Mexico is possible.”

A member of the Laguna Pueblo, Ms. Haaland describes herself as a 35th generation New Mexican and traces her family’s ancestry in the state to the 1200s. She has been a barrier breaker since the moment she entered politics.

In 2015, she became the first Native person to chair a major New Mexico political party. Three years later, Ms. Haaland and Sharice Davids of Kansas became the first Native American women elected to Congress. And after her 2021 confirmation, Ms. Haaland became the first Native American cabinet secretary, running a department that once oversaw the repression of Native tribes.

New York Times, Rebecca Bennett Wins New Jersey House Primary to Take On Thomas Kean Jr., Tracey Tully and Davaughnia Wilson, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Ms. Bennett, a Democrat, will compete in November against Mr. Kean, the incumbent Republican, who has been sidelined for months by a mysterious health condition

Rebecca Bennett, a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and aircraft commander, beat three opponents on Tuesday to win the Democratic nomination to run in November against Representative Thomas Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican who has been missing from Congress for nearly three months.

The race is expected to be among the country’s most contested midterm matchups. Democrats see Mr. Kean’s seat in New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District as a potential pickup as they seek to retake the House and check President Trump’s power in Washington.

Ms. Bennett was leading her closest primary opponent, Tina Shah, by roughly 27 percentage points when The Associated Press called the race in her favor an hour after polls closed.

She thanked her supporters gathered in Bridgewater, N.J., in a rousing address.

“If this group of badass American patriots can get a political outsider — a 2010 Honda Accord-driving, Navy-veteran mom — to win in one of the most competitive primaries in the country, we are going to flip this seat,” Ms. Bennett said.

“Hard does not scare me,” she said, adding: “We cannot just be anti-Trump and anti hate. We have to be for something. We have to solve the problems that we are all facing in our everyday lives.”

Mr. Kean, 57, had no challenger in Tuesday’s Republican primary. But intrigue over an unexplained health condition that has caused him to vanish from public life since the middle of March has overshadowed much of the debate in recent months. He has missed more than 100 votes during his absence, at a time when Republicans hold a narrow House majority and are working to advance the president’s agenda ahead of the midterm elections.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What Congress Can Do, William Kristol, right, June 3, 2026. One additional point on Donald Trump’s ludicrous—but more importantly, dangerous—selection of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.

The pick is bad for U.S. intelligence and a threat to the civil liberties of American citizens. But the greatest danger of appointing Pulte as DNI is that it’s a further step in Trump’s plans to subvert free and fair elections in the United States, to some degree in 2026 but especially in 2028.

As Andrew reminds us, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI has already used the excuse of possible foreign election interference to try to help out the Trump administration’s efforts at injecting itself into election supervision in the swing state of Georgia. But the appointment of Pulte takes the danger to another level. With Pulte, right,, in charge of the intelligence community—along with Todd Blanche at Justice, and Kash Patel at the FBI, and Markwayne Mullin at DHS, and Pete Hegseth at Defense—we have the clear and present danger of a full-fledged effort of election subversion, perhaps in 2026, but I would say almost certainly in 2028.

Many actors in our system have to be alert to this and be ready to fight this. The general public, state officials, the legal community, the courts, and many institutions in the private sector and civil society all have a role. But Congress will need to step up as well. It will be able to do so far more effectively if the Democratic party controls it. So electing Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate is the single most important step for democracy that could happen this year.

This means we all have to focus on free and fair elections in 2026, so that we can have a Congress that can ensure free and fair elections in 2028.

But there are things that Democrats in Congress can do even before the midterm elections. As we’ve seen recently, even as a minority they have leverage in both houses. They can sometimes block legislation and appropriations bills. They can use oversight mechanisms and opportunities for publicity. They can sometimes pressure a few Republicans to break from the administration.

Different kinds of what we might call guerilla legislating, all types of imaginative and creative resistance, efforts to use the different levers of power—these need to be mobilized on behalf of democracy for the rest of this year and of course beyond, in 2027 and 2028, when, let’s not forget, Trump will still be in power.

In the case of Pulte, Democrats—and pro-democracy Republicans—need to take a fresh look at every legislative and appropriations measure that affects the intelligence community in light of saving democracy and the rule of law. This means, for example, that one arrangement for handling intercepts involving American citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that might be reasonable for a normal administration may well not be suitable for this one, and should be opposed given that Pulte would be in charge. Along these lines, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner has reportedly warned Majority Leader John Thune that an extension of Section 702 might fail unless Pulte is removed.

To put it simply: Democrats—and responsible Republicans—need to avoid the trap of trying to help Pulte—or Blanche, or Patel, or Mullin, or Hegseth—to be as effective in doing their jobs as possible. Given what they are trying to do, Congress needs to make them all as ineffective as possible.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Playing Politics with Military Promotions… When personal preference trumps professionalism and merit, trust breaks down, argues MARK HERTLING.
• Yes, Russia Is Losing the War in Ukraine… And Putin seems to be the last person not to know it, writes CATHY YOUNG.
• The Party of Vicemaxxing… DEREK THOMPSON joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss why Republicans never defend Trump’s corruption on the merits but serve up anti-moral excuses for his repeated acts of immorality instead.

Quick Hits

IRAN HITS KUWAIT: The war in Iran is getting hot again, with limited strikes between Iran and U.S. forces expanding yesterday into Iranian strikes on the broader region. Here’s NBC News:

Iran launched a deadly new set of attacks in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday as it traded strikes with the United States, the latest exchange to threaten the fragile ceasefire and stalled peace talks between the two countries.

One person was killed and flights were suspended in Kuwait, officials said, after missile and drone strikes including an attack on its international airport. The U.S. military said it shot down Iranian drones near the Strait of Hormuz and struck Iran’s Qeshm Island a day earlier.

Repeated military exchanges between Washington and Tehran, as well as Israel’s escalating campaign in Lebanon, have added strain to efforts to end the war and reopen the crucial trade route. The two sides offered mixed messages on the status of talks, with President Donald Trump insisting they were ongoing after Iran signaled it may walk away.

Trump, who on Monday told CNBC he “couldn’t care less” if Iran negotiations had stalled out since they had “started to get very boring,” insisted yesterday on Truth Social that “Fake News Reports” to that effect are “false and erroneous.”

THE 60 MINUTES PURGE CONTINUES: CBS News didn’t wait long to punish veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley for his public objections to the purge of the program’s leaders this week. One day after Pelley took over new executive producer Nick Bilton’s introductory meeting to grill him about Bari Weiss’s leadership and firing decisions, the company informed him he was being terminated for cause, effective immediately.

“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” Bilton told Pelley in his termination letter. “And I have heard you.”

In a statement, Pelley castigated CBS’s new leadership for casting aside the legacy of “the most successful program of any kind in history,” accusing “new management” of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into politically sensitive stories. “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable,” Pelley wrote. “The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”

PRIMARY RESULTS: California and Iowa held their party primaries last night. Because California counts its votes with ludicrous slowness, we still don’t know the outcomes of some of the major races there, but as of now the governor’s race seems to beheading for a runoff between Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman and state attorney general who served as secretary of health and human services under President Joe Biden. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who briefly looked like the race’s frontrunner after the campaign implosion of Rep. Eric Swalwell, currently lags in third. Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles mayoral race, former reality star Spencer Pratt seems likely to advance to a runoff against Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.

Over in Iowa, Democrats got the candidates for governor (Rob Sand) and senator (Josh Turek) they expected, but there was one big surprise on the Republican side: The Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, Rep. Randy Feenstra, was edged by insurgent challenger Zach Lahn by less than a single percentage point. Trump’s endorsement came late in the cycle, and Feenstra was widely seen as having run a lackluster campaign. But it’s a notable outcome in a GOP primary season that has so far featured mostly big successes for the president’s picks.

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: You're Not Alone, and You're Not Crazy, Robert Reich, right, June 3, 2026. A brief conversation on the way to breakfast. 

Someone I didn’t know approached me early this morning on my way to breakfast. He looked about 60 years old, with dark hair graying at the temples. He was dressed in a tie and jacket.

He asked me if I was Robert Reich. I admitted to it.

“Well, I just want to say …” he began, but nothing more came out of his mouth. “I just want to say …” he started again. Then silence.

“I’m sorry,” I said with as friendly a smile as I could muster at that hour of the morning, “but I’m meeting someone for breakfast.”

His eyes welled up.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude!” I said, suddenly feeling dreadful. “I apologize. I just …”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “It’s just that I’ve been feeling, well, so lonely in all this …”

“I understand,” I said.

“You see, I-I’m from the Central Valley,” he continued. “My wife and my brother are Trumpers, and a lot of my neighbors. You have no idea ….” His eyes welled up again.

“I really do get it. I hear it all the time.”

“They tell me stuff that’s just … well, not true.”

“It’s like they’re in a different world,” I said.

“Yes! Exactly!” he became more animated. “I mean, sometimes I don’t know if they’re crazy or I’m crazy.” 

U.S. Tariffs, Inflation,  Markets, Economy, Jobs

New York Times, Trump Aims New Tariffs at 59 Countries and the European Union, Catie Edmondson, June 3, 2026. Trump officials said they planned to impose levies of up to 12.5 percent on countries that failed to crack down on goods made with forced labor.

President Trump has proposed tariffs of at least 10 percent on 60 American trading partners, his most aggressive effort yet to enact new import duties after the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s sweeping tariffs.

Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said on Tuesday night that investigations found that the 59 countries, along with the 27-nation European Union, had failed to enact or effectively enforce laws prohibiting imports made with forced labor.

The administration, invoking a legal provision known as Section 301, proposed a 12.5 percent duty on imports from countries including China, Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Goods from the European Union, Canada and Mexico would face 10 percent import taxes.

Mr. Trump has signaled he intends to use Section 301 to rebuild his tariff agenda after the Supreme Court ruled that he exceeded his authority by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose duties without congressional approval.

After the court struck down those tariffs, Mr. Trump sought to revive them partially with a global 10 percent duty under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a never-before-used provision. A trade court ruled in May that the move violated the law. The tariffs were initially scheduled to expire at the end of July.

Mr. Greer’s office has also opened an investigation into what the Trump administration has described as “excess manufacturing capacity” among 16 of America’s largest trading partners.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

“Following the Supreme Court overturning the IEEPA tariffs, a legal basis was needed to rebuild Trump’s tariff wall, and this was a convenient way to do so,” said Steve Okun, chief executive of APAC Advisors, a geopolitical consulting firm.

Mr. Okun added: “Tariffs are here to stay under the Trump administration.”

Mr. Greer’s office is scheduled to hold hearings on July 7 about the proposed tariffs, which would take effect sometime after that.

“The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable,” Mr. Greer said in a statement. “This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.”

Some products would be exempt from the tariffs, including beef, bananas, coffee, steel and a slate of critical minerals.

The move is likely to anger some of the United States’ closest trading partners, whose relations with Washington have been whipsawed by contentious negotiations and the Supreme Court’s ruling in February.

In the days after Mr. Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, in Beijing last month, the Chinese government sought to draw a line under trade tensions, saying both sides had agreed not to raise tariffs further and warning that it could retaliate if Washington did so again.

More Global News

New York Times, Rubio Suggests U.S. Return to Global Vaccine Program in Rebuke of Kennedy, Stephanie Nolen and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, June 3, 2026 (print ed.). Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated in pointed testimony to senators that he was reclaiming control of the U.S. relationship with Gavi, an international vaccine alliance.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, indicated on Tuesday that the United States may resume its funding of a global vaccines alliance that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled the United States out of last year, an unusual public rebuke of Mr. Kennedy’s involvement in matters of global health.

Testifying on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rubio told senators that President Trump had asked the State Department to allow Mr. Kennedy to “play a leading role” in the decision on whether to fund Gavi, an organization that provides immunizations for low-income nations and maintains the global Ebola vaccine stockpile.

But Mr. Rubio suggested in pointed testimony that he was reclaiming control of the U.S. relationship with Gavi, which has historically been managed by the State Department.

The State Department is “going to re-engage on the issue of Gavi,” Mr. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said that the department was not going to “yank” the matter from Mr. Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, or ignore “his points of view.” But he said that a few weeks ago, he had made the decision to resume management of the relationship.

About Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Rubio added: “I wouldn’t use the word defer, but we have certainly allowed him to play a leading role in determining what we’re going to do next. But right now, we’re sort of at a stage where we are going to re-engage. We need to drive this to an outcome.”

Mr. Rubio’s reassertion of authority is part of a broader effort by the State Department to reclaim control of global health from the Department of Health and Human Services, said J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Although the Trump administration has moved to sharply reduce the amount the United States spends on foreign aid, including money for global health and disease surveillance, Congress has continued to fund these areas.

Congress has appropriated $600 million for Gavi that has been blocked by Mr. Kennedy, despite the State Department’s usual role in handling the relationship.

“We are very encouraged by Secretary Rubio’s remarks that the U.S. intends to re-engage on the issue of funding Gavi,” Dr. Sania Nishtar, Gavi’s chief executive, said after the hearing. “Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats.”

At the hearing, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, pressed Mr. Rubio on funding for Gavi in the context of the current Ebola outbreak in central Africa. While there is no vaccine against the species of virus, Bundibugyo, causing this outbreak, Gavi has committed up to $40 million to back production of promising vaccine candidates — the kind of global health security measure that the Trump administration has said it wishes to support.

“How are you making sure that Secretary Kennedy, who has been sitting on those funds for months now, is going to release them so that they can go to help develop a vaccine to address the Ebola outbreak?” Ms. Shaheen asked.

Mr. Rubio replied that Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Kennedy to play a role in decisions about Gavi “because of the strongly held views with regards to vaccine safety, and he wanted them to conduct some reforms.”

But Mr. Rubio said that “we’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”

Although the Trump administration has moved to sharply reduce the amount the United States spends on foreign aid, including money for global health and disease surveillance, Congress has continued to fund these areas.

Congress has appropriated $600 million for Gavi that has been blocked by Mr. Kennedy, despite the State Department’s usual role in handling the relationship.

“We are very encouraged by Secretary Rubio’s remarks that the U.S. intends to re-engage on the issue of funding Gavi,” Dr. Sania Nishtar, Gavi’s chief executive, said after the hearing. “Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats.”.

At the hearing, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, pressed Mr. Rubio on funding for Gavi in the context of the current Ebola outbreak in central Africa. While there is no vaccine against the species of virus, Bundibugyo, causing this outbreak, Gavi has committed up to $40 million to back production of promising vaccine candidates — the kind of global health security measure that the Trump administration has said it wishes to support.

“How are you making sure that Secretary Kennedy, who has been sitting on those funds for months now, is going to release them so that they can go to help develop a vaccine to address the Ebola outbreak?” Ms. Shaheen asked.

Mr. Rubio replied that Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Kennedy to play a role in decisions about Gavi “because of the strongly held views with regards to vaccine safety, and he wanted them to conduct some reforms.”

But Mr. Rubio said that “we’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”

New York Times, Ukraine Strikes St. Petersburg on First Day of a Marquee Putin Event, Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer, June 3, 2026. As an annual economic conference was set to begin, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had targeted a navy base and an oil terminal in the region that includes Russia’s second-largest city

Ukrainian drones on Wednesday attacked St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on the opening day of an annual economic conference that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to cultivate into a showcase of a modern and prosperous country.

It was the second time in a month that Ukraine had struck a major Russian city before an event important to Mr. Putin, as Kyiv expands a campaign of long-range strikes aimed at inflicting economic damage on Russia and demonstrating its vulnerability to attacks.

In early May, Ukrainian forces hit sites in Moscow, including a high-rise apartment building near the city center, days before the annual Victory Day parade, the most important event on the Kremlin’s calendar. A truncated version of the parade was later held after Ukraine mockingly said it would “permit” Russia to hold the event.

On Wednesday, drones hit infrastructure facilities in three districts of St. Petersburg, causing damage and injuring several people, Aleksandr Beglov, the city’s governor, said in a statement. Nearly 60 drones were shot down in the Leningrad region, which surrounds the city, Aleksandr Drozdenko, the region’s governor, said.

St. Petersburg’s main airport, Pulkovo, suspended operations for almost five hours, according to Rosaviatsia, the Russian aviation authority. Early in the morning, the city’s residents reported smoke in the sky, as well as roaring noises and bangs, according to Fontanka, a local news website.

U.S. Civil Rights Leaders, Transitions

Four Died Trying (4DT), Tonight we honor two 4DT interviewees who died in May, John Barbour and Clarence Jones, 4DT Producers, June 3, 2026. "With the passing of these legends, we have now lost 27 of the men and women whose eyewitness accounts form the backbone of "Four Died Trying," chronicling the lives and legacy of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

When our film franchise returns, you will learn what these iconic figures told us. In the meantime, feel free to watch (or rewatch) our “Prologue” on your streaming platform of choice.

Keep scrolling to read the bios of all 27 of those we’ve lost since our project began.

In Memoriam

Four Died Trying is an ongoing franchise of documentary films about what happened before, during, and after the four cataclysmic political assassinations of the 1960s. Firsthand sources who were physically on the scene back then are in their eighties and nineties now. Our efforts to find them and preserve their stories is effectively a race against time — which waits for no one, as the saying goes.

The following men and women were witnesses to history. They spoke to us on camera and on the record about what they heard, saw, thought, and experienced during the turbulent decade that is the focus of our films. In some cases, our interview was the first they ever gave. In others, it was the last.

Here, in alphabetical order, are the 27 citizens we’ve spoken with whose voices have since been silenced. Taken together, their end-of-life interviews prove the prescience of that Shakespearean idiom, “the truth will out.”

John Barbour

April 24, 1933— May 10, 2026

As cocreator and host of Real People — one of the first popular unscripted shows — Barbour became known as the father of reality TV. Later in his career, he wrote and directed two JFK documentaries: The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes and The American Media and the Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

G. Robert Blakey

January 7, 1936 — May 1, 2026

Coauthor of The Plot to Kill the President, Blakey was Staff Director and Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s and helped write the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. He found evidence of conspiracy in the RFK and MLK murders. But his biggest claim to fame was his masterful drafting of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970. Prosecutors still use it to thwart organized crime today.

Anthony “Tony” Bouza

October 4, 1928 — June 26, 2023

Tony Bouza was a New York City police officer from 1953 to 1979. He initially served as a detective in the undercover unit known as the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (aka BOSSI), eventually rising to the rank of Assistant Chief and Commander of the Bronx. Later, he became Chief of the Minneapolis (MN) Police Department. Considered the “father of evidence-based policing,” Bouza was also the author of nine books, including The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Corruption, Decadence, and the American Dream.

Fernando Faura

October 12, 1932 — April 17, 2018

Puerto Rico-born Faura was a Pulitzer Prize-nominated newspaper reporter and author of the nonfiction book The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing: The Paris Peace Talks Connection. In 1968, he served as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press director. A talented investigative journalist, Faura discovered evidence that there were multiple assassins at the Ambassador Hotel the night Senator Robert Kennedy was killed.

Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher

March 2, 1921 — October 17, 2018

A New Jersey congressman from 1959 to 1973, Neil Gallagher chaired the Special Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy in 1966 and was an early critic of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Lewis Garrison

July 9, 1932 — September 2, 2020

Lewis Garrison was the longtime Memphis attorney who represented Loyd Jowers in the November 1999 wrongful-death civil suit pursued by the family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The official name of the trial was “King Family v. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” and the jury unanimously found Jowers guilty.

Dick Gregory

October 12, 1932 — August 19, 2017

This legendary comedian and political activist was friends with both MLK and Malcolm X. As an assassination researcher, he criticized the Warren Commission’s findings and spearheaded efforts to get new investigations into the murders of JFK and MLK. In 1975, he co-presented the first network TV broadcast of the Zapruder film.

Reverend Jesse Jackson

October 8, 1941 — February 17, 2026

As a staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Congress, Rev. Jackson wasn’t just Martin Luther King’s protégé: He was talking with MLK at the Lorraine Motel at the moment King was assassinated and was therefore a primary witness of that terrifying historical event. In the aftermath of the assassination, Jackson’s voice played a key role in highlighting the enormity of the loss and emphasizing the dangers that come with fighting for civil rights.

Clarence Jones

January 8, 1931 — May 22, 2026

An iconic civil rights activist and lawyer, Jones was one of MLK’s confidants and his liaison to Malcolm X. Jones smuggled Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out to the public and helped MLK shape his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech.

Dr. Naomi Ruth Barber King

November 17, 1931 — March 7, 2024

This Dr. King was the widow of MLK’s brother, Rev. A.D. King, and the mother of Drs. Alveda and Derek King. In 1963, the Birmingham home she lived in with her husband and children was bombed by white supremacists. A passionate civil rights activist, she founded Atlanta’s A.D. King Foundation in her husband’s name later in life; the organization focuses on nonviolent conflict resolution and social change.

John J. Kirby, Jr.

October 22, 1939 — October 2, 2019

The father of the director of Four Died Trying, John Kirby, Jr. was a member of the Civil Rights Division of the Kennedy and Johnson Justice Departments from 1961 to ’68. As a summer intern in 1961, Kirby, Jr. discovered the mechanism by which Black Americans were being denied the vote in Mississippi.

Lewis Lapham

January 8, 1935 — July 23, 2024

This legendary author, editor, and essayist was the longtime editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine and founder of Lapham’s Quarterly. An American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame inductee, Lapham had an intense interest in history and covered numerous political upheavals over the course of his long and storied career. The New York Times likened his work to that of H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

Reverend James Lawson

September 22, 1928 — June 9, 2024

Lawson was a key advisor to Martin Luther King, who called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” A renowned civil rights activist, Lawson was a board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a founder and mentor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led sit-ins, voter registration drives, and Freedom Rides in the 1960s Deep South.

Marita Lorenz

August 18, 1939 — August 31, 2019

Lorenz was Fidel Castro’s lover and was later recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. She testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about the JFK assassination, stating that she was involved with a group of anti-Cuban militants — including Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, of CIA and Watergate infamy — shortly before the assassination.

Graeme MacQueen

1948 — April 25, 2023

MacQueen was founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He was also author of the in-depth article “John F. Kennedy 55 Years On,” in which he reflected upon the direction that JFK‘s assassins steered America, “to the detriment of all of us, U.S. citizens and otherwise.”

Phillip Nelson

December 12, 1944 — June 2, 2024

An acclaimed JFK-assassination researcher, Nelson wrote the books LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, LBJ: From Mastermind to “The Colossus”, and Who Really Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?, among others.

Ruth Paine

September 3, 1932 — August 31, 2025

Paine’s interest in the Russian language eventually led her to cross paths with the Russian-speaking Oswalds. Her connection with the young family deepened to the point that they stayed in her Dallas home and she became a patron of Lee Harvey’s wife, Marina. Prior to JFK’s assassination, Oswald stored his rifle in Paine’s garage. She was famously questioned at length by the Warren Commission.

William “Bill” Pepper

August 16, 1937 — April 7, 2024

Best-selling author of three nonfiction books about the King assassination — The Plot to Kill King, Orders to Kill, and An Act of State — Pepper was the attorney who represented James Earl Ray in the assassination of MLK. He also represented Sirhan Sirhan after the assassination of RFK, and the King family in the 1999 wrongful-death suit King Family v. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators. Pepper’s decades-long connection with and investigation of his friend Martin Luther King’s murder shined a spotlight on the government conspiracy that silenced the leader and hero.

Jerry Policoff

February 27, 1947 — March 7, 2020

As a freelance journalist and Executive Director of the Assassination Archives Research Center, Policoff was a major critic of the media’s handling of President Kennedy’s assassination. Convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the real killer, Policoff spent almost 55 years amassing evidence to refute the findings of the Warren Commission.

Mort Sahl

May 11, 1927 — October 26, 2021

Born in Canada, Sahl became a wildly popular Jewish-American comedian and political satirist in the 1950s. Now credited with reinventing stand-up comedy, he made the cover of Time magazine and served as interim host of The Tonight Show. He was friends with both Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and wrote jokes for JFK when the latter was running for office. After JFK was assassinated, Sahl joined NOLA DA Jim Garrison’s investigation team. His outspoken criticism of the Warren Report and obsession with JFK’s murder ultimately damaged his career.

Vincent “Vince” Salandria

March 28, 1928 — August 23, 2020

Considered “the godfather of JFK assassination researchers,” Salandria was a Philadelphia-based civil rights lawyer and author of the book False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK. A fierce critic of the Warren Commission, he was the first person to challenge Arlen Specter’s “single-bullet theory” and concluded that Kennedy was killed in a state-sponsored coup d’état. Salandria’s two articles about the Commission and its findings sparked national debate. “We, if we are free citizens,” he wrote, “now must serve our government not by blind acceptance of the Commission’s work but rather by and through the exercise of our critical judgment concerning the findings of this body.”

Paul Schrade

December 17, 1924 — November 9, 2022

Schrade was vice president of United Auto Workers and RFK’s labor advisor, and he was shot in the head and wounded during RFK’s assassination. After that, Schrade became a major advocate for the release of convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, whom he firmly believed could not have shot Robert Kennedy from behind at close range.

Sandy Serrano Sewell

April 17, 1948 — April 29, 2021

At age 20, Sewell was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Soon afterward, she told the press that a girl in a polka-dot dress had run past her and shouted, “We've shot him!” Sewell asked her, “Who did you shoot?” And the girl said, “Senator Kennedy!” The authorities later railroaded Sewell into recanting her account.

Antonio Veciana

October 18, 1928 — June 18, 2020

Veciana was a Cuban exile who became the founder and leader of the anti-Castro group known as Alpha 66. He told the House Committee on Assassinations that a representative for the CIA (whom he knew as “Maurice Bishop”) had directed him to organize Alpha 66 and helped plan many of the group’s operations — including two assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Veciana also claimed that he’d met a man he later recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald, during a meeting with Bishop a few months prior to the JFK assassination.

James Wagenvoord

1935 — July 26, 2022

The author of 43 books over the course of his career, Wagenvoord worked at Life magazine in the 1960s as both Editorial Business Manager and Assistant to the Executive Editor. Within days of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, a federal agent came to the magazine’s office and handed Wagenvoord ready-made visual materials of Lee Harvey Oswald. Not long after, Life published a series of stills from the Zapruder film — and Wagenvoord realized that some images had been misprinted to show Kennedy’s head moving forward instead of backward.

Adam Walinsky

January 10, 1937 — November 2023

Walinsky was a Yale Law graduate who eventually became Robert F. Kennedy’s aide and speechwriter. In 1968, he wrote RFK’s famous “GNP speech,” in which Kennedy asked if the gross national product was an adequate measure of freedom, health, and happiness. The GNP, Walinsky wrote, “measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Cyril Wecht

March 21, 1931 — May 13, 2024

Cyril Wecht was a world-renowned coroner and forensic pathologist who advised on the autopsy of Robert Kennedy and was the first civilian to examine the evidence of JFK’s assassination. Wecht was the lone voice to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that the so-called “magic bullet” could not possibly have inflicted all seven of the wounds discovered on the bodies of President Kennedy and Governor Connally. Wecht also vociferously dissected the government’s fictional case against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s accused assassin, James Earl Ray.

June 2

Top Headlines

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Stop Your Chirping!, Paul Krugman, right, June 2, 2026. Trump is bored and wants everyone to leave him alone. The picture above shows bodies of U.S. troops lying on the beach after the terrible first day of the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. This and other horrifying photos were released to the American public soon after the fighting. But that was another America.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Housing Official and Enforcer Named Top Intelligence Chief, Staff Reports,  June 2, 2026. National Security experts said on Tuesday that the appointment of Bill Pulte, right, was at odds with the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That law set a requirement that the director of national intelligence “have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte does not appear to meet that requirement.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Don’t Let Trump Hijack Our July 4th, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 2, 2026. What does the president have to do with national independence, anyway?  

More On Trump Team Threats To U.S. Elections, Justice and National Security 

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

• New York Times, Housing Official Who Attacked Democrats Invokes a Disputed Family Legacy, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Kailyn Rhone, First published Nov. 14, 2025. The Trump nominee Bill Pulte has called out a Fed governor and New York’s attorney general for issues with their mortgage documents. Some leaders of the family’s home-building business bristle at how he has enhanced his reputation.

Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio posted the above message asserting confidence that Trump will prevail in creating a $1.8 billion taxpayer fund for those allies supposedly unfairly targeted by law enforcement

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Already Suspected of Fraud, Trump Attempts to Extend His Con on the Terrorist Slush Fund, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, June 2, 2026. In the fifth paragraph of NYT’s story claiming Trump was backing off his plans for a Terrorist Slush Fund, it admitted not just that Trump might change his mind, but he might do so based on media coverage; the admission had originally appeared in the second paragraph. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is the J6 Slush Fund Dead?, Andrew Egger, right, June 2, 2026. The so-called “anti-weaponization fund”—the $1.776 billion slush fund for allies Donald Trump announced last month as part of a so-called settlement with the Treasury Department—has been an interesting test of a scholastic sort of thought experiment: Can the president create a humiliation so large his congressional allies can’t swallow it?

Iconic Reporter's Response To New CBS Ownership 

• The Triad via The Bulwark, Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need, Jonathan V. Last, June, 2, 2026. What we can learn from the ‘60 Minutes’ reporter who went to the mattresses. We’re talking about 60 Minutes again because there was an earthquake in journalism yesterday. I’m leaving this edition unlocked because I want everyone to know what Scott Pelley did. It’s inspiring. It’s important.

More On U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran, Lebanon

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon After Pulling Back From Threat to Beirut, Aaron Boxerman, Christina Goldbaum, Farnaz Fassihi and Hari Raj, June 2, 2026. Here’s the latest.
• New York Times, News Analysis: How Israel’s Strategy in Lebanon Was Blown Up by Drones, David M. Halbfinger, June 2, 2026. An Israeli campaign that started with high hopes has devolved into a kind of impasse, with Hezbollah looking more capable than it did when the war began.
• New York Times, High-Wire Negotiations With Iran? Trump Finds It ‘Very Boring,’ David E. Sanger, Updated June 2, 2026. President Trump told CNBC that he “couldn’t care less” if the negotiations with Iran break down.

News Roundups

• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Trumpism Feels Increasingly Broken, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 2, 2026. We have primaries today in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota - good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump 'Irate' Over Concert Cancellations, GOP to Cut Funding for Dolly Parton Library, Trump Rips into Netanyahu, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 2, 2026. Trump is reportedly “irate” that his America 250 state fair concert series has flopped, with most of the artists pulling out and the event becoming a growing embarrassment for his administration.

Russian War Against Ukraine

• New York Times, After an Agonizing Week of Threats, Kyiv Is Finally Bombarded by Russia, Maria Varenikova and Kim Barker, June 2, 2026. More than a week after Russia warned of an attack on Kyiv that would be so big that diplomats and other foreigners should flee, Moscow finally struck early on Tuesday. Its forces launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at the capital and other cities in Ukraine, killing at least 16 people, the Ukrainian authorities said.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Russia Is Showing Signs of Weakness in Ukraine. So It Hits Harder, Lara Jakes, June 2, 2026. The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way recently, with battleground losses and mounting casualties. With renewed strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations.

More On Trump Watch: Corruption, Rants, Boasts, Impacts

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Not His Holiday, William Kristol, right, June 2, 2026. I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 1, 2026 [Trump's Iran Mess], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 2, 2026. There is so much news today, I’m going to have to let some of it splash over into tomorrow to do it justice. For today, Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: Another day of losing for Donald Trumpy, Heather Delaney Reese, above and at right, June 1-2, 2026. After days of hiding from the press, tucked away from the American people deep inside the White House, while a giant UFC cage is being set up on the South Lawn, the President of the United States finally found a moment to emerge from seclusion when he took a phone call from a reporter earlier today.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment On Republican Chaos: Trump's Ballroom Is Dead, And His Battleships Might Be Sunk, Jason Easley, right, June 2, 2026. House and Senate Republicans are livid with Trump and (finally) asserting their power. Trump's ballroom money is dead. The weaponization fund is toast, and money for his battleships could be next. 

U.S. Elections, Politics

• New York Times, California Votes on Newsom’s Successor After Turbulent Primary Campaign, Laurel Rosenhall and Shane Goldmacher, June 2, 2026. The race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom has been unpredictable for months, while Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles is trying to fend off two challengers.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Email exposes GOP dirty tricks operation! Judd Legum, right, June 2, 2026. Whoops!
• MSNOW, Senate Democrats stand by Graham Platner amid new sexting scandal, Mychael Schnell, After reports over the weekend that Graham Platner sent sexually explicit text messages to women while he was married, Democrats are standing by Maine’s presumptive Democratic Senate nominee.
• New York Times, Group Pledges $2 Million to Fight AIPAC in House Races, Maya King and Nicholas Fandos, June 2, 2026. A super PAC created to counter spending from powerful pro-Israel groups will try to help Democrats critical of Israel’s wars and military actions.

More On U.S. Governance, Crime, Health

• The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: How We Can Combat Human Trafficking During the World Cup, Frank Figliuzzi, right, with Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, June 2, 2026. What happens off the field when the world's biggest games come to town?
• New York Times, Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline,  Maggie Astor and Dani Blum, June 2, 2026. Doctors nationwide are encountering more children with whooping cough, bacterial infections and other serious illnesses, as well as more adults refusing tetanus shots.

U.S. Tariffs, Markets, Economy, Jobs

• New York Times, Trump Targets Brazil With 25% Tariff, Citing Unfair Trade Practices, Daisuke Wakabayashi, June 2, 2026. The proposal marks the latest effort by the administration to rebuild its tariff agenda through Section 301 investigations.

Media, Culture, History

• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The Murder of "60 Minutes," Robert Reich, right, June 2, 2026. Scott Pelley gets this week's Joseph N. Welch Award. 
• Thinking About..."Waiting for the missiles to pass," Timothy Snyder, right, June 2, 2026. The living book in wartime Ukraine. Why have a book festival in the middle of a war? Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

Top Headlines

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Stop Your Chirping!, Paul Krugman, right, June 2, 2026. Trump is bored and wants everyone to leave him alone.

The picture above shows bodies of U.S. troops lying on the beach after the terrible first day of the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. This and other horrifying photos were released to the American public soon after the fighting.

As the New York Times explained in 2023, these images were barely censored before being shown to American audiences, and prompted outrage at home. Instead of scenes of victory, the American public was confronted by haunting images in which, as [one of the war photographers] described it, “riddled corpses formed a ghastly fringe along the narrow white beaches, where men of the Second Marine Division died for every foot of sand.”

Just a few months after the landings, a full-length documentary containing gruesome footage, “With the Marines at Tarawa,” was released in theaters.

In other words, in the middle of a desperate, existential war, the U.S. government believed that citizens had a right to know what was happening — up to and including seeing graphic images of ugly setbacks.

But that was another America.

Today Donald Trump, who now says that talks with Iran are “very boring,” insists that anyone questioning how his war is going is unpatriotic:

We used to be a serious country. Not anymore. 

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Housing Official and Enforcer Named Top Intelligence Chief, Annie Karni, Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman, June 2, 2026. National Security experts said on Tuesday that the appointment of Bill Pulte was at odds with the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That law set a requirement that the director of national intelligence “have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte does not appear to meet that requirement.

• National Intelligence: President Trump announced on Tuesday that he was naming Bill Pulte, right, a home-building heir who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to be the acting director of national intelligence, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. The move has drawn criticism as Mr. Pulte has no known experience for a national security role. Read more ›
• State Department: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is testifying before the U.S. Senate in a budget session that is also sure to cover pressing national security issues, such as Mr. Trump’s negotiations to end the war with Iran and an intensifying U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba’s government. Read more ›
• Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas who last week lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said that he saw “no evidence of any qualification” for Pulte to serve as the director of national intelligence, although he noted that the senate plays no role in confirming acting cabinet officials.
• Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that President Trump had chosen an official with a demonstrated “eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution” to be the acting director of national intelligence. Warner said that Pulte lacked the national security experience that is legally required for the post. “Elevating him to oversee the Intelligence Community makes clear that this president is not looking for an intelligence leader who will follow the facts or speak truth to power, but rather someone who will be willing to shape intelligence around the president’s wishes, regardless of the cost to the American people,” he said.

One of the most consequential questions facing Pulte is whether he will use his perch to press Trump’s debunked claims of voter fraud ahead of this year’s midterm elections, as Tulsi Gabbard did. In February, Gabbard, right, showed up near an F.B.I. search of an elections office in Fulton County, Ga. Trump said she was “working very hard on trying to keep the election safe.” Law enforcement officials said they had no idea why she was there.

Senator Angus King, Independent of Maine, said that the appointment of Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence “makes no sense.” King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the job of coordinating the nation’s spy agency requires experience and expertise in national security.

“I’m puzzled by this appointment because of all the people involved in our intelligence agencies, and of all the people who work within our national security apparatus protecting Americans across the country and around the world, the president has chosen someone with no experience whatsoever in this complex and critically important field,” he said.

Pulte emerged as Trump’s most vocal critic last year of Jerome Powell, the former Fed chair whom the president wanted to oust. Pulte regularly assailed Powell on social media, publicly scrutinized the cost of the renovation of the central bank’s headquarters and even drafted a termination letter for Trump to give to Powell

In the first year or so of his term, Pulte was able to tout falling mortgage rates, which helped make purchasing homes slightly more affordable. But home prices have remained stubbornly high, since few people with mortgages with pre-2022 rates have wanted to sell.

Since the Iran war, rates on a 30-year mortgage as tracked by Freddie Mac have been rising, and now sit about where they were last summer. A home, particularly for first-time buyers, has been one of the big-ticket items that feels increasingly out of reach — and it’s been driving down President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy.Maggie HabermanJune 2, 2026, 10:36 a.m. ET1 hour ago

Trump has been mistrustful of the office of the Director of National Intelligence since his first term. He believed some of the staff was involved in leaks that were ultimately damaging to him, particularly as related to the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russians. Dan Coats, the former senator from Indiana who served in the role, was distrusted by the president as an establishment figure. Trump then briefly appointed Richard Grenell, who was his ambassador to Germany, to the role. After that, John Ratcliffe, who is now the director of the C.I.A., served in the role in Trump’s first four years.

New York Times, White House Seeks to Impose Political Test on Billions in Federal Grants, Tony Romm, June 2, 2026. A new proposal would allow the administration to block grants if they do not satisfy President Trump’s agenda or support what it calls “anti-American” values.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Why MAGA and Trump Are Grasping at Straws, Steve Schmidt, June 2, 2026. Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters's sentence despite her anti-democratic crimes. Steve Schmidt breaks down Polis’s appeasement, why Trump's presidency is sinking like the Titanic, and why it's too late for him to stop it.appeasement.

New York Times, White House Seeks to Impose Political Test on Billions in Federal Grants, Tony Romm, June 2, 2026. A new proposal would allow the administration to block grants if they do not satisfy President Trump’s agenda or support what it calls “anti-American” values.

The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.

While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending, even as Congress and the courts continue to rebuke the president for abusing such powers.

Mr. Trump’s ambitions were made clear in a roughly 400-page blueprint that was released to little fanfare on Friday. If finalized, it would require all federal grants to be approved by the president’s political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

For the agencies that issue those awards and the nonprofit groups, local governments, universities and other entities that receive the money, the Trump administration would also impose a set of highly prescriptive and political criteria.

The government could not issue grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” for example. Nor could it seek to fund initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The rules would further limit the ability of grant recipients to engage in some “issue advocacy.” Those that are funded would be scrutinized for their compliance with “religious liberty laws” and their “memberships and affiliations” with outside groups. And they could face the outright termination of their grants if the Trump administration someday determines that their actions are not in the “public interest.”

The restrictions echo the string of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed shortly after returning to office, many of which have been challenged or blocked in court. This time, however, the White House has pursued its restrictions by proposing a regulation, which is expected to become final after the government solicits public comment. The result could be applied far more broadly, and perhaps in ways that are harder to fight legally or undo later, according to budget experts.

The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.

In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.ImageRussell T. Vought sitting behind a microphone in a congressional hearing room.The proposed rules reaffirmed the view of Russell T. Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, that much of the government’s ledger is riddled with spending that is wasteful, “divisive” or “woke.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Dr. Benjamin said the Trump administration sought to “codify a lot of the things they tried to do” over the past year that courts previously had rejected. That included an attempt to cut billions in grant funding for the National Institutes of Health, which his association sued to stop.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.

While Dr. Benjamin said he could not predict what legal steps, if any, his group might take in response to the newest White House proposal, he said of its publication generally, “You can be sure this is going to be challenged.”

An official at the White House budget office, who would only describe the administration’s thinking on the condition of anonymity, said the proposed regulations were consistent with the president’s recent directives and current law.

The official said that the goal was to promote transparency, efficiency and accountability around federal grants, which would now be suspended if they are not in compliance with the new rules.

The Trump administration would also require those that receive government aid to scrutinize the use of taxpayer dollars more closely for fraud. In general, its policies would not apply to all federal spending, meaning that money doled out based on criteria established in law — like entitlement programs, block grants and other spending mandates — would not be affected.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Why MAGA and Trump Are Grasping at Straws, Steve Schmidt, June 2, 2026. Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters's sentence despite her anti-democratic crimes. Steve Schmidt breaks down Polis’s appeasement, why Trump's presidency is sinking like the Titanic, and why it's too late for him to stop it.appeasement.

When it comes to Jared Polis, right, he represents a cohort of elected Democrats, and they can be found in Washington and across the country, who lack judgment, who lack common sense, who lack fighting spirit and should have no place representing a party in office that will spend the next 20 years leading America out of the abyss dug by MAGA, by Trump during their what will be four-year assault against the American way of life.

Their [MAGA] fullthroated embrace of corruption, of dishonesty, of lying, of cruelty, of malice, of indecency, and the deluded belief that Trump is on any given day a god, Jesus Christ, or their king. Either way, they seem prepared to live on their knees, pleased to be at his feet.

No thank you. Thankfully, the good sense of the American people is breaking through. Things are not as they were 7 months ago. Trump's support has collapsed. The bottom is falling out.

Here's the thing about Donald Trump. He lives in a house of cards. Look at the White House. This is the evidence. Look at the madness that is involved in the creation of this image, this picture.

Shown above is the arch of a stadium President Trump ordered to be constructed on White House grounds so that he can host a UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) event created by his friend and political ally Dana White to celebrate the Trump birthday on June 14 in tandem with the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

This is a world where nobody will ever tell the Donald no. There is no restraint. And so imagine the pollsters who have to come in and try to who knowsdo what? Tell him the truth. He's a person who believes all over the country.

The people love him and want to name things after him. And he tweets and rages throughout the night, including this insanity from last night. The pollsters from Trump's favorite on down will look away, will stare at their shoes as they sit in the Oval Office trying to avert Trump's wrath by telling Trump a lie that whatever is happening in the country can be cured by more Trump, who the people love.

And thus the diagnosis will lead to a strategy that will accelerate the spin and lead MAGA into a political crash and explosion for the ages.

Tick tock. Tick tock. The bill is coming due and it's coming due quickly. Trump is increasingly unhniged. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Don’t Let Trump Hijack Our July 4th, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, June 2, 2026. What does the president have to do with national independence, anyway?  

The White House’s access reporters at Axios report that Donald Trump “lashed out” at Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli strikes in Lebanon yesterday, saying that Netanyahu is “fucking crazy,” would be “in prison if it weren’t for me,” and that “everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Not so, respond Netanyahu’s access reporters at Israel’s N12 News: “Trump did not make personal remarks about jail or claim Netanyahu is hated globally.”

And hawks in the American media are beside themselves over the whole thing: “THE LEAK IN AXIOS WAS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW AND PROVIDED SUPPORT TO THE IRANIAN REGIME AND ITS HEZBOLLAH PROXY,” conservative radio host Marc Levin fumed.

So negotiations to end the war seem to be going great, is the point. Happy Tuesday.

More On Trump Team Threats To U.S. Elections, Justice and National Security

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above). 

New York Times, Housing Official Who Attacked Democrats Invokes a Disputed Family Legacy, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Kailyn Rhone, First published Nov. 14, 2025. The Trump nominee Bill Pulte has called out a Fed governor and New York’s attorney general for issues with their mortgage documents. Some leaders of the family’s home-building business bristle at how he has enhanced his reputation.

When Bill Pulte, right, appeared before the Senate committee considering his nomination to be one of the nation’s top housing regulators, he presented himself as the anointed representative of his family’s home-building empire.

Mr. Pulte recounted visiting job sites with his grandfather William J. Pulte, who founded PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He expressed gratitude to senators from Georgia, Nevada, Minnesota and Arizona on behalf of his family.

“You know, my family’s legacy company is based in Georgia,” he told Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, at the hearing in late February. “Atlanta has been very good to our family.”

But Mr. Pulte, 37, no longer has any official connection to PulteGroup, which has built 800,000 homes across the country since the 1950s. He was pushed off the company’s board in 2020 after being elected to a seat several times since 2016. And his family’s $500 million charitable foundation, run by an aunt and his father, issued a statement two years ago saying that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”

These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.

His mobile home park investments were not readily apparent on his financial disclosure form because he listed parent companies but not the subsidiaries used to buy the properties in 2023 and 2024. Two of the trailer parks, in Palm Beach County, are only hours from a site where the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation is spearheading the construction of 179 rental homes for people who live below “the poverty line, often in overcrowded trailers,” according to the foundation’s website.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Pulte said he owned “passive shares” in the mobile homes and had “no oversight or management in any of these companies.” The spokesman said the mobile homes “represent a very small part of his net worth.”

As President Trump’s choice to direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Mr. Pulte oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage finance firms that control much of the nation’s mortgage market. But he has made his mark by publicizing personal mortgage agreements of some of Mr. Trump’s enemies and calling out what he claims are misrepresentations in the documents.

He has accused Lisa D. Cook, left, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, of listing two of her homes as primary residences on mortgage applications and accused New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, of renting out a home that she told her mortgage provider she would use as a secondary residence.

Last month, federal prosecutors charged Ms. James with bank fraud after a criminal referral by Mr. Pulte. She has pleaded not guilty. Citing Mr. Pulte’s allegations, Mr. Trump has tried to remove Ms. Cook from her position at the Fed. Ms. Cook has sued the president in response and remains at the Fed.

Mr. Pulte’s limited disclosure about his mobile homes most likely met the broad federal reporting standards required of top federal officials. But it also fits his pattern of carefully choosing facts to enhance his reputation and associate himself with the Pulte name in ways that have frustrated PulteGroup executives and some of his relatives.

In interviews, two members of the family said Mr. Pulte had created confusion in news releases and social media posts by attributing his own pronouncements to “The Pulte Family.”

He congratulated Elon Musk for buying Twitter. He announced a stake in GrabAGun, an online gun retailer where Donald Trump Jr. is board member. He assailed the chief executive at PulteGroup for selling shares and for “management problems” in 2023 — all on behalf of “The Pulte Family.”

During his first term, President Trump had taken note of Mr. Pulte’s posts on Twitter, retweeting him at one point and boosting his profile in Republican circles. Mr. Pulte went on to forge a bond with Mr. Trump’s eldest son at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida country club, where Mr. Pulte is a member, a person familiar with their relationship said. Heading into the 2024 election, Mr. Pulte and his wife, Diana, contributed nearly $1 million to various campaign committees supporting Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates.

But some of his statements over the years have not sat well with others in the wider Pulte family, which includes the patriarch William J. Pulte’s 14 children and more than two dozen grandchildren, according to two of his relatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.

The spokesman for Mr. Pulte said in a statement that he “was the only Pulte in Pulte Homes, other than his grandfather, and going back to 2013, as evidenced in press conferences, national media and legal contracts involving PulteGroup, Bill Pulte was the only authorized representative for PulteGroup’s founder and the Pulte family.”

Many of Mr. Pulte’s most outlandish posts on Twitter and later X were deleted. Shortly after the Senate Banking Committee took up his nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a top Democrat on the committee, asked Mr. Pulte to provide access to the roughly 25,000 tweets that had been deleted during the few weeks after Mr. Trump’s re-election.

He never complied.

Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio posted the above message asserting confidence that Trump will prevail in creating a $1.8 billion taxpayer fund for those allies supposedly unfairly targeted by law enforcement

Emptywheel, Analysis: Already Suspected of Fraud, Trump Attempts to Extend His Con on the Terrorist Slush Fund, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, June 2, 2026. In the fifth paragraph of NYT’s story claiming Trump was backing off his plans for a Terrorist Slush Fund, it admitted not just that Trump might change his mind, but he might do so based on media coverage; the admission had originally appeared in the second paragraph.

But as with all things involving Mr. Trump, he could still decide to reverse course, especially as he tracks media coverage of his decision.

That tell did not prevent the gray lady from rewarding Trump’s con with this headline:

The NYT was not alone if wildly overstating what is going on. I’ve already talked about how Marc Caputo claimed, “Trump admin plans to drop ‘weaponization’ fund” in a post admitting this might be no more than a temporary plan in ¶2.

Trump Signals Retreat, WSJ blared, in a story that described — also in ¶2 — that, “the official cautioned that President Trump could change his mind,” and included a whole lot of nuance about why the White House would have to do more.

“Trump administration retreats on ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund'” described a Politico team — comprised of some of the best congressional reporters and one of the best DOJ reporters — that knows better.

Compare the far more responsible headline from ABC News, which notes the only thing Trump did was claim he would abide by a legal ruling that may halt the program no more than 11 days.

Clunky? Yes. Accurate? Yes.

Though it edited this reporting from Jonathan Karl (who is not bylined in the ABC report),

Removing Trump’s repeated refusal to agree he was giving up on the Terrorist Slush Fund.

President Donald Trump, speaking with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Monday, said he will respect the court’s ruling.

“We are subject to the courts,” Trump said in a telephone conversation. “At this moment, that’s what it is.”

“If a court doesn’t allow it, and right now a court has it held up, what can you do?” Trump said.

I believe that WaPo initially followed the crowd on declaring full retreat but now also states accurately that the fight, which is about members of Congress, not the courts, is not yet over.

Through all these stories — and this dedicated story on the legislative fight from Politico’s Jordain Carney — there’s plenty of good reporting describing what is really going on. Republican members of Congress want to ensure that they can’t be held accountable for the Terrorist Slush Fund, though at least some don’t really care whether it happens or not.

The Justice Department took a small step back Monday from its controversial $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” It wasn’t nearly enough to quell the furor on Capitol Hill.

Republican senators, including some top leaders, said a DOJ statement that it would “abide by” a federal judge’s recent ruling to temporarily halt any payouts did not do enough to clear the intraparty concerns that have thrown the GOP’s immigration enforcement bill into limbo.

This ambivalence is best embodied by John Thune, who claims he wants a very clear sign, but doesn’t want to do anything that would cause Trump to veto the reconciliation package — which it to say, he wants Trump to succeed at this con.

“The way the statement is worded, I think it’s clear that they’re not proceeding with the fund, but obviously whether that’s sufficient to satisfy a number of our members is something we’re still sorting through,” Thune told reporters.

He added that Republicans should know by Tuesday if they are going to be able to revive the immigration enforcement bill this week.

[snip]

Asked if he was worried about a possible Trump veto if the fund was banned, Thune said, “Oh yeah, don’t you?”

John Cornyn, who just days ago was warning about lies from scorpions but who no longer has to answer to voters, was fairly lonely among those who believed this con resolved the issue. “It makes it moot,” multiple outlets reported the Texas Senator saying.

Shelley Moore Capito, Chuck Grassley, and James Lankford need the denials to look more convincing.

John Kennedy and Lisa Murkowski were less pliable.

“The reconciliation bill looks like a broken arm with the bones sticking out,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “They have to abide by the district court decision — that’s in the Constitution. I’d have to know more about their position on the weaponization fund to know whether it would be enough to dislodge the reconciliation bill.”

“If it means it’s completely pulled, then that would satisfy me, but I haven’t heard anybody say that that is actually what is happening,” added Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). She also hinted she could oppose the immigration enforcement bill regardless of how the fund debate plays out.

The real issues in the short term are tactical: whether Thune and [Judge] Mike Johnson can make it harder for Dems to exploit reconciliation by pulling out DOJ funding, and whether that, in turn, will be enough to placate members of Congress who want to pretend they fought against a slush fund to pay off cop assailants.

A bunch of judges have alleged that Trump, Stan Woodward, and Boris Epshteyn are attempting to defraud the court and the United States by using this “settlement” to steal billions to use to reward beloved cop assailants and terrorists.

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.

Judge Kathleen Williams found that argument compelling enough to order DOJ to respond (after such time, it should be said, when Trump hopes to have the reconciliation funding resolved.

But even the looming threat of an inquiry into whether this all amounts to fraud has not stopped Trump from extending the con (though it may explain his remarkable discipline in pointing to the fraudulent DOJ tweet, as he did with Karl, rather than saying anything personally). Trump wants headlines claiming he has given up the Slush Fund just long enough to get him to the place where he can enact it anyway.

Meanwhile, the convicted seditionist Trump pardoned [Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, shown above in a file photo rallying a pro-Trump mob] is sure he’s getting his reward.

White House historic East Wing ballroom was demolished to enable Trump to build a ballroom at cost estimates rising from $200 million to sums approaching $1 billion in taxpayer funding (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment On Republican Chaos: Trump's Ballroom Is Dead, And His Battleships Might Be Sunk, Jason Easley, right, June 2, 2026. House and Senate Republicans are livid with Trump and (finally) asserting their power. Trump's ballroom money is dead. The weaponization fund is toast, and money for his battleships could be next.Jun 2 ∙ Paid READ IN APP

Three days before Christmas in 2025, when the American people were busy with the holidays, the president announced that he was seeking money from Congress to build a new class of battleships that would, to no one’s surprise, be named after Donald Trump.

Here is how the official press release described these ships:

These new battleships will stand as the centerpiece of the Navy’s Golden Fleet initiative and will be the first of its kind providing dominant firepower and a decisive advantage over adversaries by integrating the most advanced deep-strike weapons of today with the revolutionary systems of the years ahead.

Engineered to outmatch any foreign adversary, the new battleship class will be the centerpiece of naval power. At triple the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, its massive frame provides superior firepower, larger missile magazines, and the capability to launch Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles and the Surface Launch Cruise Missile-Nuclear.

The Trump class will be capable of operating in a traditional Integrated Air and Missile Defense role with a Carrier Strike Group or commanding its own Surface Action Group for Surface and Anti-Submarine Warfare efforts in addition to delivering long range hypersonic strategic fires and quarterbacking the operations of an entire fleet as the central command control node.

A few months later, Trump launched a war with Iran that demonstrated how much the United States military was not prepared for drone warfare. The US has not released an official estimate of the cost of the war, but Americans spent billions on expensive traditional military equipment while Iran has inflicted damage with much cheaper drones.

The new ships are another Trump vanity project that could have been funded if the president had not enraged Senate Republicans by jeopardizing their majority with his corruption and revenge tour that has ousted three of their members.

It is getting ugly for Trump, and now Republicans in the House and Senate who are trying to save their jobs are looking at not funding his Trump class of ships.

Over the past month, concerns have been growing in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees over the Trump battleships.

The concerns are that the administration has provided zero proof that the concept will work, and Congress has not been told how much the battleships will cost.

Responsible Statecraft reported that the House version of the NDAA has language that denies funds until it is proven that the ships will work:

The House draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, released last week, authorizes $1 billion for the prospective Trump-class battleship program. But the bill bars contracts from being granted until the Navy secretary can certify the ships’ technologies are “sufficiently mature.”

Congress has a very long history of funding Pentagon projects that end up wasting taxpayer money, so it isn’t as if the Republican majority has suddenly turned fiscally responsible when it comes to the military.

The skepticism in Congress likely has more to do with Trump’s poor political standing and his constant grift. The battleships are part of a $1.5 trillion budget request for the Pentagon, but the only amount that House Republicans are suggesting is nothing next year, and $1 billion if it is proven that these ships will work.

Republicans are in total chaos. Primary season is almost over, which means that Trump’s power to deliver on threats to House and Senate Republicans is evaporating.

The Republican Party is in chaos and on the verge of civil war, and Trump’s battleships may be the next presidential vanity project that Congress kills.  

Iconic Reporter's Response To New CBS Ownership 

The Triad via The Bulwark, Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need, Jonathan V. Last, June, 2, 2026. We’re talking about 60 Minutes again because there was an earthquake in journalism yesterday. I’m leaving this edition unlocked because I want everyone to know what Scott Pelley did. It’s inspiring. It’s important.

And it’s very much what we try to do at The Bulwark every day. We don’t have a lot of power—we don’t control a secret police force, or the federal government, or the Supreme Court. We are a dissident movement. Which means that the power we do have is all about truth.

Saying true things is powerful. Refusing to go along with polite fictions is powerful. That’s what today’s Triad is about. And I think you’re going to feel energized when you read it.

Help to be a beacon for truth: Please share this Triad far and wide. If you are on social media, find it on our social account and like or share it to help boost our signal.

Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need

Four days after Bari Weiss decapitated the leadership of 60 Minutes, she sent her new executive producer, Nick Bilton, to meet with the remaining staff. What happened will reverberate in journalism for years.

In full view of the newsroom Scott Pelley took Bilton and Weiss (in absentia) to the woodshed.

The best account is from Oliver Darcy at Status, who had a recording, and the short version is that Pelley:

Asked Bilton to explain the firings of correspondents and reporters.

Bilton absurdly tried to pretend that he didn’t know anything about these firings.

Observed that Bilton had only the most slender qualifications for the job of EP and that Weiss had no qualifications for running CBS News.

The most important part of the showdown, however, was this:

• “Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves 60 Minutes.”
• “She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”

Truth to power.

People sometimes ask me why I’m so hung up on Bari Weiss and the answer is that it’s because her project is essentially the same as Donald Trump’s project. She is a corrupter.

Weiss has attempted to do to journalism what Trump has done to American government: Transform an ancient, messy, imperfect—but basically functional—web of institutions into a corrupt gangland organization. To do so, both Weiss and Trump have depended on the opposition refusing to notice what they are doing and—when they do notice it—to accept ludicrous rationalizations.

Ergo: Trump turns Elon Musk and DOGE loose on USAID and says it’s about saving money. Trump directs his attorney general to indict his enemies and says it’s about stopping the weaponization of government. Trump has ICE agents assault people and says it’s about deporting hardened criminals.

Or: Weiss dismantles 60 Minutes and pretends it’s about getting more views on digital.

Every time someone goes along with this make-believe by treating it as a valid point of you—just like, your opinion, man—they contribute to the corruption.

Here is why Scott Pelley’s stand was so important: He didn’t just refuse to be party to Bari Weiss’s lie—he stood up and exposed it. Even though she has the power and he does not.

Remember Christopher Wray? He was the director of the FBI. Trump wanted to fire him. And Wray, instead of forcing the issue, meekly resigned his office and pretended that he was preserving the integrity of his institution.

Remember John Kelly? He stood next to Donald Trump, saw exactly what kind of man he was serving, and when he finally walked away was only able to muster a couple of print interviews sharing what he knew about the man plotting to destroy American democracy.

Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, Mick Mulvaney, H.R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Bill Barr, Elaine Chao.

All of these people saw what was happening. All of them objected to it. None of them dared say so out loud.

After all, doing so would have been poor form. Better to walk away and not get involved in any ugliness.

Authoritarianism exploits politesse.

The corrupter counts on the existing establishment normalizing her actions, hoping that they can work with her. She depends on people not noticing the plain reality and, if they do notice, politely looking the other way. Or quietly resigning. Not being unpleasant.

Throughout the 60 Minutes meeting yesterday, one of Bari Weiss’s lieutenants begged Pelley to stop asking questions because, he insisted, Pelley was being “rude.” As if civility and obeisance were the same thing.

Pelley would have none of it. He kept going. He said the things that were obviously true. He called things by right names.

2. Enjoy the Bagels

Here are things that are true about 60 Minutes, CBS News, and Bari Weiss:

• 60 is the most successful property—in terms of both product and revenue—in broadcast journalism.
• Donald Trump has a particular grudge against 60, as evidenced by his lawsuit against the show.
• Larry and David Ellison needed Trump’s approval for the purchase of Paramount and CBS News.
• The Ellisons put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News for the sole purpose of placating Trump.
• Trump has been publicly effusive about Bari Weiss as head of CBS News.
• Weiss decapitated the show’s staff in order to bring it fully under her control in order to please Trump.
• The Ellisons now need Trump to approve their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

That’s the story. That’s what is happening. Anyone who pretends that this is about Weiss and the Ellisons “rebuilding public trust” or “reaching a broader audience” is participating in the corruption.

Just like anyone who pretends that DOGE was about reducing government spending. Or that Christopher Wray’s resignation would preserve the integrity of the FBI. Or that Elon Musk bought Twitter because he was concerned about free speech.

You see the thread, right? In every case, the corrupter counts on liberalism being too fastidious to believe the reality, or too polite to say it out loud.

We need more Scott Pelleys. More people who will say the true things, out loud. More people who, when confronted with authoritarian power, will say, “Make me.”

Our entire rationale for The Bulwark is to be Scott Pelley every day. To say the true things. No matter the consequences. Hell, that’s how I got here in the first place, after losing my job because my colleagues and I wouldn’t shut up about what Donald Trump was doing.

Come ride with us. Because it’s right. And because we’re going to win.

3. Africa

My friend Holly Berkley Fletcher has a fantastic piece explaining why government corruption is so toxic for nations:

By some estimates, corruption costs the [African] continent $150 billion annually, which is equal to 25% of GDP. The African Development Bank estimates if you add more general illicit finance enabled by weak rule of law to government-related corruption, that number rises to $580 billion per year.

Then there are the follow-on effects of creating an environment that discourages investment and robs ordinary people of the resources, infrastructure, education, and basic sustenance they need to thrive. There is the massive wealth disparity, with political and ethnic contours that often feed into deep historical animosities, as those with political connections are rewarded at the expense of those who are out. Then there are inflated stakes for political competition. Then there is violence, war, insecurity, extremism.

The US is not Africa. For one thing, its economy is nine times the size the entire African continent’s. By the numbers, the American economy can absorb Trump’s corruption, although the juxtaposition of it with things like the mass firing of federal workers, the shutdown of USAID, cuts to families with disabled children, and the slashing of funding for scientific research makes it seem all the more obscene. We have other structural advantages, like robust federalism, that mitigates the impact of corruption in the federal government.

But we can already see the beginnings of corruption’s corrosive impact on our political economy and envision how it could directly harm ordinary Americans. 

More On U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran, Lebanon

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon After Pulling Back From Threat to Beirut, Aaron Boxerman, Christina Goldbaum, Farnaz Fassihi and Hari Raj, June 2, 2026. Here’s the latest.

Under pressure from President Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel held off from attacking Beirut. But he vowed to continue Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, which could threaten peace talks with Iran.

Israel launched fresh strikes in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to pull back from a threat to strike Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, under pressure from President Trump and the United Nations.

Mr. Netanyahu, shown above in a file photo, paused the attacks on Beirut but made no mention of a cease-fire in Lebanon and vowed to maintain the military offensive in the south. Iran has said that among its conditions for a peace agreement with the United States is an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon.

The Israeli military issued a new evacuation order on Tuesday for Nabatieh, one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, which has been heavily bombarded in recent days.

The strikes were launched as officials from the Lebanese government and Israel were set to meet on Tuesday for a new round of U.S.-mediated talks in Washington aimed at defusing the conflict.

On Monday, diplomats at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council were nearly unanimous — with the exception of the United States — in calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and refrain from launching more attacks. Israel had warned that it would strike Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.

New York Times, News Analysis: How Israel’s Strategy in Lebanon Was Blown Up by Drones, David M. Halbfinger, June 2, 2026. An Israeli campaign that started with high hopes has devolved into a kind of impasse, with Hezbollah looking more capable than it did when the war began.

When Israel’s prime minister and defense minister warned on Monday that the air force would soon bomb the suburbs of Beirut, it wasn’t just a threat to intensify Israel’s simmering three-month-old war with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that dominates Lebanon.

It was an admission that Israel’s strategy in that fight was falling short.

And when Israel backed down from that threat a few hours later, the decision pointed up just how much it had been backed into a corner — stuck between domestic pressure to hit Hezbollah hard, and American pressure to constrain its attacks in Lebanon.

The Israeli strategy was to seize territory in Lebanon as a protective buffer and push Hezbollah back beyond the range of the antitank missiles with which it had long plagued tens of thousands of civilians living in northern Israel.

But Israel did not seem to be ready for Hezbollah’s widespread use of explosive “first-person-view” drones, which are controlled with fiber-optic cables that unspool for miles and are unsusceptible to electronic jamming.

The drones haven’t killed Israeli troops at anywhere near the rate that Israel has killed Hezbollah militants and Lebanese civilians during its offensive. But they have been steadily hunting down Israeli soldiers and commanders, both in Lebanon and in Israel, with the often-lethal strikes documented in chilling videos that Hezbollah has been posting on social media. Two soldiers were killed and 10 wounded in such attacks on Monday alone, the military said.

And so a matchup that had Israeli leaders sounding almost giddy back in March — sending their mighty tanks and infantry in to crush a weakened, vulnerable and somewhat rudderless Hezbollah — has devolved into something else. It is now a kind of deadlock in which Hezbollah suddenly looks more capable than it did when the war began and the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces can look startlingly helpless.

New York Times, High-Wire Negotiations With Iran? Trump Finds It ‘Very Boring,’ David E. Sanger, Updated June 2, 2026. President Trump told CNBC that he “couldn’t care less” if the negotiations with Iran break down.

For three months, President Trump has been deeply engaged in the Iran conflict, planning the 38 days of attack, struggling to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and proclaiming “a whole civilization will die tonight,” then backing away to declare a cease-fire and a naval blockage of Iranian ports.

But on Monday, after days of haggling with Iranian officials through intermediaries on a preliminary agreement, Mr. Trump declared it was starting “to get very boring.”

“I don’t care if they’re over, honestly,” he told Eamon Javers of CNBC when asked about reports that the Iranians, angry at continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon and low-level conflict with the United States in the Persian Gulf, were threatening to stop negotiating. “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over.”

There are reasons to doubt that Mr. Trump is truly so unconcerned: Gasoline prices have soared since the war began, with a senior Exxon-Mobil official predicting recently that prices could go far higher, and Republicans are taking note of how deeply unpopular the war with Iran is with their constituents. In recent weeks he has professed indifference about a range of issues that carry deep political consequences for him, including the midterm elections and the financial situation that Americans are facing.

But even for Mr. Trump, who has veered from threatening the Iranians with annihilation to declaring that they had already agreed to American terms to fuming that they have not, it seemed strange that he thought the whole conflict was becoming a bore.

After all, just hours before he had written in a social media post that negotiations were “continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” There were widespread reports that on Friday he toughened the requirements on a preliminary accord with Iran — one that would just set up another, deeper negotiation — because he was concerned about provisions for returning frozen funds to the Iranian government and over who would handle the recovery of Iran’s highly-enriched uranium.

These were details, but vitally important.

Back in March, Mr. Trump confidently predicted the conflict would be over in a few weeks, saying it was not possible to suffer from boredom while facing off against a longtime American adversary: “Somebody said today, they said, ‘oh, well, the president wants to do it really quickly. After that, he’ll get bored.’”

“There’s nothing boring about this,” he added.

News Roundups

President Trump apparently falls asleep during a women's health event in the White House Oval Office on May 11, 2026.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Trumpism Feels Increasingly Broken, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 2, 2026. We have primaries today in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota - good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 Been talking a lot of late about Trump’s racking up the losses on everything from Iran to his ballroom to his ICE funding bill to his slush fund, and how he had become a weakened and diminished figure in Washington and around the world (here, here). Let’s review some headlines from this morning, and just note how much of media narrative has become about some form of Trumpian failure and his ebbing powers. THE STORY has become his weakness and struggle.

For Trump the growing perception of his failing/weakness/struggle is a very big problem for being strong/winning/successful is the foundation of his brand. Everything else is built on top of it, and if you take it away what you are left with is something very ugly and impossible to sell to the American people. It’s also why we often talk here about how Democrats need to take the strong/weak, winning/losing, successful/failure dimension in our politics far more seriously, for it is may be as important to people’s understanding of a candidate or party as most of the big issues we focus on each election cycle.

In 2024 that he was winning and a winner - in part garnered through heavily advertised right-aligned, favorable polling and prediction markets data - I think played a big role in helping late deciding, lower information voters break his way. This growing perception of his weakness matters for it will lead to further defiance of him and his agenda, as we are now seeing from Congressional Republicans on the slush fund, the ballroom, Iran, and Russia; and in the increasing ambition and courage of judges across the country.

Here’s how Punchbowl News described this dynamic today:

President Donald Trump is suddenly taking losses from his own friends and allies, especially on Capitol Hill.

GOP lawmakers are bucking Trump on his White House ballroom, shelving plans to spend $1 billion to secure the new facility and other areas of the presidential compound.

The “Trump battleships” are steaming into a wave of skepticism at the House Armed Services Committee as lawmakers prepare to mark up the FY2027 defense authorization bill this week. (All puns intended.)

The House may vote this week on a discharge petition for a Ukrainian aid bill that Trump is certain to oppose. Several dozen House Republicans could back the measure anyway.

And after Trump — bogged down in negotiations to end the war with Iran — said Israel had agreed to halt its military assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared he’d continue IDF operations in the southern part of the country. Trump reportedly yelled at Netanyahu over the offensive.

Most prominently, Republicans are also in the process of killing Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, a direct rebuke to the president.

Trump and Hill Republicans are trapped in a dangerous paradox. Trump’s political endorsement is worth more than ever in GOP primaries, yet his legislative agenda and fixation on personal projects are growing more toxic heading into the fall campaign season. As more Republicans move past their primaries, they’re suddenly finding it advantageous to oppose him.

Weaponization-lite. Senate Republicans remain far short of the votes needed to begin floor consideration of their $70 billion reconciliation bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol. GOP leaders will make a decision today about whether it’s possible to pass the bill this week, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely.

At least a dozen GOP senators said Monday that the White House’s attempt to quell the uproar over Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund wasn’t enough to win their support for advancing the immigration-centric package — something that should unify them.

And there is also this dangerous outrage, new this morning -- Trump just made Bill Pulte, a ridiculous political hack, the Acting Director of National Intelligence. It’s a shocking misjudgment that is going to only further weaken his already battered standing on the Hill and with what’s left of our allies around the world. Coming in a week where he may facing -- and lose -- Congressional votes on both Ukraine and Iran this will be seen on the Hill as a huge, reckless misstep, from a regime that feels like it is unraveling right now. The Economist/YouGov weekly tracking poll was just released and look at all this evidence of Trumpian failure. Note he’s 21%-71%, -50 points, with independent voters, -34 with Hispanics and -35 with 18-29 year olds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump 'Irate' Over Concert Cancellations, GOP to Cut Funding for Dolly Parton Library, Trump Rips into Netanyahu, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, June 2, 2026. Trump is reportedly “irate” that his America 250 state fair concert series has flopped, with most of the artists pulling out and the event becoming a growing embarrassment for his administration.

Meanwhile, Missouri Republicans are moving to slash funding for Dolly Parton’s literacy program, Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, Trump reportedly cursed out Benjamin Netanyahu while reminding him that he would likely be in prison without U.S. support, and much more.

The Bill Pulte appointment particularly concerns me. Pulte has repeatedly used his position to target people Trump dislikes, often amplifying attacks on perceived political opponents. Now, as acting Director of National Intelligence, he will have access to the vast resources of America’s intelligence community. That raises serious concerns about the potential for political abuse and retaliation against journalists, critics, and others whose only offense is telling the truth. If you value this work, please consider subscribing. Your support helps ensure I have the resources to keep reporting and pushing back.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Missouri’s statewide Dolly Parton Imagination Library program may stop accepting new enrollments on July 1, 2026, because proposed state budget cuts would reduce funding from nearly $6 million to $2 million. The program, which provides free books to children from birth to age 5, has distributed more than 4.3 million books since its launch in Missouri in 2023. If the budget is approved, currently enrolled children would continue receiving books only as funding permits, while new applicants would be turned away. State officials are exploring potential partnerships with local organizations to sustain the program, but its future as a fully state-funded initiative remains uncertain.

Donald Trump has tapped Bill Pulte, right, to be the acting Director of National Intelligence. This is a very dangerous appointment because Bill Pulte has no background in intelligence, national security, foreign policy, or military affairs, yet President Trump has chosen him to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence, one of the government’s most sensitive national security positions. Pulte currently leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency and has become known for pursuing investigations into individuals Trump views as political adversaries, raising concerns about the potential politicization of intelligence agencies. Trump praised Pulte’s management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and described his experience overseeing trillions of dollars in housing finance assets as qualification for the role. Pulte will replace Tulsi Gabbard when she departs later this month, marking an unusual transition from housing regulation to overseeing the U.S. intelligence community.

President Trump is reportedly irate over the failure of his Freedom 250 concert series after most of its originally announced performers pulled out. The cancellations have turned the event into a public embarrassment, leaving organizers scrambling to salvage the lineup. Trump is said to be furious about the situation and wants people held responsible for the botched rollout. The controversy has raised doubts about whether the concerts can proceed as originally planned.

Trump’s Freedom 250 concert series has lost another performer as artists continue withdrawing from the event. A former Milli Vanilli singer became the latest act to pull out, further weakening an already troubled lineup. The departures reflect growing reluctance among musicians to be associated with the event. As a result, the concert series is facing increasing uncertainty and difficulty attracting headline talent.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, a leading Republican candidate for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat and a close ally of President Donald Trump, privately acknowledged that the ongoing Iran war could become a political problem for Republicans if it continues much longer. Speaking at a campaign event, she said, “I do hope we can get this done by the next couple of weeks. If it drags on beyond that, it’s a political liability for us too, because we’ve lost Iowa soldiers. I’ve been to four funerals since December, it’s awful.” While Hinson reaffirmed her support for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and backed Trump’s handling of the conflict, her remarks reflected growing Republican concerns about rising casualties, higher energy costs, and voter dissatisfaction with a prolonged war. The comments come as Iowa prepares for a closely watched Senate race and as polls suggest increasing public unease about the economic and human costs of the conflict.

A report from Axios says President Donald Trump sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a phone call over Israel’s military actions in Lebanon, reportedly calling him “crazy,” accusing him of ingratitude, and at one point shouting, “What the f— are you doing?” The call came amid escalating tensions after Israel struck Hezbollah targets near Beirut despite efforts to maintain a ceasefire.

Following the conversation, Trump publicly wrote, “I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi!” He also said, “I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!” Despite those claims, Netanyahu later stated that Israel would continue military operations if Hezbollah attacks persisted.

Despite Donald Trump announcing that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop fighting, both sides exchanged new attacks in Lebanon, raising doubts about any ceasefire. Israel carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon that killed at least six people and damaged civilian and military facilities, while claiming it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure after intercepting projectiles launched from Lebanon. The renewed violence threatened ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations, with Iran warning it could suspend peace talks if Israeli attacks continued. Trump said discussions with Iran were still proceeding and claimed both Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to halt hostilities, though clashes continued on the ground.

The Trump administration’s proposed $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, designed to compensate people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the federal government, is facing intense legal and political backlash. While the Administration is appearing to back off the fund, those on Capitol Hill, including several Republicans, say that until it is completely dead, they will not be satisfied.

Critics argue the fund could serve as a payout mechanism for Trump allies and January 6 rioters, while courts have raised concerns about its legality and temporarily blocked its implementation. Former officials and lawmakers from both parties have condemned the fund as a misuse of taxpayer money and a threat to the rule of law. As lawsuits mount and judicial scrutiny increases, the fund’s future remains uncertain.

Russia launched one of its largest attacks on Ukraine in months, firing more than 650 drones and 70 missiles overnight, killing at least 18 people and injuring over 100 across cities including Kyiv and Dnipro. Ukrainian officials reported widespread destruction of residential buildings and infrastructure, with many civilians taking shelter in Kyiv’s subway system as air defenses worked to repel the assault. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to the United States for additional Patriot missile interceptors, warning that continued shortages of air-defense systems could leave Ukrainian cities increasingly vulnerable. The attack comes amid a prolonged military stalemate and follows Russian warnings of intensified strikes, which Moscow says are retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian-held territory.

Mass shootings strike America:

A shooting spree in Muscatine, Iowa, left six people dead on June 1, 2026, after a series of attacks at two homes and a business that police say stemmed from a domestic-related dispute. Four victims were found dead in one residence, while two additional victims were later discovered at a second home and a nearby business. The suspect, 52-year-old Ryan Willis McFarland, was located by police on a trail near the Mississippi River and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound during a confrontation with officers. Authorities believe all the victims were family members of the suspect, and investigators said there is no ongoing threat to the community.

A mass shooting linked to a domestic disturbance in Sandy, Oregon, left multiple people dead on May 31, 2026, and resulted in a police officer being seriously wounded during an exchange of gunfire with the suspect. The officer was hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds but is expected to survive, while the suspect, 38-year-old Bryan Moore, surrendered peacefully and was taken into custody on suspicion of murder and kidnapping. Authorities have not yet disclosed the total number of victims, but officials described the incident as deeply traumatic for the community. Sandy Mayor Kathleen Walker called the shooting an act of domestic violence and urged attention to issues such as violence in the home, untreated trauma, and community support for those affected.

Other news:

California voters are heading into a highly competitive primary election that will shape races for governor, Los Angeles mayor, and several key congressional seats. In the governor’s race, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra leads polls, while progressive Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton are battling for a spot in November under California’s top-two primary system. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faces strong challenges amid voter frustration over homelessness, affordability, and her handling of recent crises, making the mayoral race unusually close. The election could also have major national consequences, as newly redrawn congressional districts may give Democrats several opportunities to gain House seats and strengthen their chances of retaking control of Congress.

The House Armed Services Committee’s proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act would authorize a record $1.15 trillion in U.S. military spending. A key provision, Section 224, would establish a new U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative aimed at deepening military and technological collaboration. The initiative would expand joint research, technology sharing, and co-production of weapons systems across areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, biotechnology, and cyberwarfare. If enacted, it would create one of the most extensive defense technology partnerships ever between the United States and Israel. It is unclear right now if it has the votes to remain.

Congressional Democrats are criticizing a Trump administration proposal that would allow 401(k) retirement plans to invest in assets such as cryptocurrencies, private equity, and private credit. Lawmakers including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Bobby Scott argue that the change would expose workers’ retirement savings to riskier, more volatile, and potentially more expensive investments. Critics cite cryptocurrency price swings, fraud risks, and possible conflicts of interest stemming from the Trump family’s involvement in crypto ventures. The Trump administration, however, says the proposal would expand investment choices and leave decisions to plan managers using standard fiduciary processes.

Russian War Against Ukraine

New York Times, After an Agonizing Week of Threats, Kyiv Is Finally Bombarded by Russia, Maria Varenikova and Kim Barker, June 2, 2026. More than a week after Russia warned of an attack on Kyiv that would be so big that diplomats and other foreigners should flee, Moscow finally struck early on Tuesday. Its forces launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at the capital and other cities in Ukraine, killing at least 16 people, the Ukrainian authorities said.

The bombardment of Kyiv was similar in scale to two other deadly attacks last month. Moscow has continued its air campaign against the capital even as the Russian military has suffered its worst period in years on the front line, measured in territory gained.

What appeared to be different about the latest assault on Kyiv was the psychological element. Last month, Russia’s foreign ministry issued dire warnings of retaliation for what Russian officials said was a Ukrainian drone attack that struck a college dormitory in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, killing 21 students. The toll could not be independently verified.

After Russia threatened another huge strike on Kyiv, including on “decision-making centers,” and told foreigners to evacuate, Western envoys rallied around the Ukrainian government, saying they would stay put and not give in to intimidation tactics.ImageA night city skyline, with a bright orange explosion at the top of one building.One of the strikes in Kyiv before dawn on Tuesday. Russia had warned days earlier that diplomats and foreigners should leave the city.Credit...Gleb Garanich/Reuters

Still, Moscow’s warnings, and the long amount of time that passed before Russia actually struck, took a toll on residents of Kyiv. For days, Russia launched planes in a manner that imitated a large attack, setting off alarms and wearing people down.

Many families ended up sleeping in Kyiv’s subways and in parking lots for multiple nights. By Tuesday morning, as the first Russian drones crossed the border into Ukraine, shelters were full, a sight less common than it was early in the war, with people having gotten used to the threat of Russian strikes. Those who arrived in the middle of the night, after the first missile warnings, struggled to find a space to lie down.

Subway station floors were covered in tents and yoga mats. Dogs were barking. Children were crying, struggling to fall asleep.

After the alert was lifted, sleepy families walked home as the sun cut through thick clouds of smoke over Kyiv. But shortly after 7 a.m., with some people already on their way to work, Russia hit the city with hypersonic ballistic missiles, Ukrainian officials said, leaving little time for people to seek shelter again.

After the dozens of explosions that shook Kyiv overnight, several sites were still on fire on Tuesday morning. At least five people were killed, and three children were among the 65 injured, said Mayor Vitali Klitschko. A nine-story apartment building in the Podilskyi district, west of the Dnipro River, partly collapsed, he said.

New York Times, News Analysis: Russia Is Showing Signs of Weakness in Ukraine. So It Hits Harder, Lara Jakes, June 2, 2026. The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way recently, with battleground losses and mounting casualties. With renewed strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations.

The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask Moscow’s increasing signs of weakness in the four-year war.

Russia’s advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts fall short. Domestic discontent is growing, and Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. Peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended.

All this adds up to a loss of momentum by Russia, analysts say. If it continues, Russia could find itself at a diplomatic disadvantage once cease-fire negotiations restart.

“Although drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning,” Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, wrote in an analysis for Foreign Affairs this week.

Some analysts say they believe that Russia’s fiercer recent strikes are an attempt to reclaim an advantage in potential peace talks and to engage the Trump administration, which has become more focused on the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Nonetheless, Mr. Watling said, Ukraine’s battlefield gains had turned the tide in the war. “In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” he wrote.

That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities, even as he bolsters his arsenal with additional European weapons — including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week.

More On Trump Watch: Corruption, Rants, Boasts, Impacts

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Not His Holiday, William Kristol, right, June 2, 2026. I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.

Embarrassment is an emotion unknown to Trump, and so he’s forging right ahead. Construction is proceeding apace in turning the White House South Lawn into a vulgar venue for Trump’s gladiatorial circus scheduled for June 14, his eightieth birthday. Active-duty military are being pressured to attend, in uniform, to act as props for the birthday boy whose painful bone spurs precluded his own military service.

Then, ten days later, on June 24, to make up for all the performing artists who’ve pulled out of his “Great American State Fair,” Trump plans to take over the National Mall for a speech. And God only knows how much Trump will go out of his way to make himself the center of the festivities on Independence Day itself.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to agitate, in honor of our 250th, for the issuance of a $250 bill with his face on it and for the construction of a 250-foot high imperial arch that only he wants that would loom over our national cemetery.

So here in Washington, D.C., Trump is trying to make America 250 all about Trump all of the time. As David Frum lamented,

a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. . . . Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.

It can all be a bit dispiriting. One’s natural reaction can be to look away from this year, and look beyond towards a brighter future. That was my reaction last week, that “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.”

But we can do better than merely hope for a brighter future. We can refuse to allow Trump’s desecration of our 250th to be our desecration.

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And this doesn’t actually require that we do anything that special. All we have to do is to go ahead and celebrate the Fourth of July as we usually do. After all, the Fourth has never been about one big spectacle anchored by the president in Washington, D.C. It’s always been about family and local and community events across the nation, about family cookouts and community parades and fireworks at local high school football fields. It’s never been about looking up to something given to us by Washington. It’s always been about our gathering to commemorate our anniversary.

These events around the nation aren’t and shouldn’t be particularly solemn. They typically don’t and needn’t feature conspicuously deep reflection about The Meaning of America. They should be fun. John Adams was hardly the most fun-loving of the Founders, but it was he who wrote in 1776 that he hoped to see the anniversary of our independence marked by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

Dispersed, local, fun events are what we’ve done to mark July Fourth over the years. That’s what we can do and will do again this year.

But this year, our normal July Fourth celebrations can make a kind of statement. They’ll be making a statement that July Fourth is our celebration, not Trump’s. That America is our nation, not Trump’s. That here, we the people rule, not Trump.

So rather than be demoralized by Trump’s effort to hijack our holiday, we can view this July Fourth as a moment for remoralization. We can see it as an opportunity for a renewed dedication to the real meaning of Independence Day. We can look away from Trump’s sad simulacrum of kingly spectacles in Washington, D.C. Across the length and breadth of this land, of our land, we can enjoy July Fourth as our celebration of our independence.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 1, 2026 [Trump's Iran Mess], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 2, 2026. There is so much news today, I’m going to have to let some of it splash over into tomorrow to do it justice. For today, Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.

Over the weekend, there were what I’m going to have to call the usual reports of an imminent agreement between the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, with the usual outcome.

Last week the U.S. and Iran appeared to be making headway on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to continue the ceasefire and to establish a framework for further talks about Iran’s nuclear program. But President Donald J. Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place in these negotiations.

His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.

And Congress returns to work tomorrow, raising the possibility that lawmakers will pass a war powers resolution requiring Trump to withdraw American forces from the region. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent House members home a day early before the Memorial Day holiday out of concern such a measure would pass.

But Iran is in no hurry to throw Trump a lifeline. Their negotiators now maintain they have a right to control the Strait of Hormuz. They are demanding reparations for the damage inflicted in the country during the war, and they say they won’t negotiate over the nuclear program until there is a ceasefire.

But these conditions are all problematic for Trump’s negotiators. Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.

And then there is the nuclear issue.

So what has tended to happen in negotiations is that the teams come up with a framework, details leak to the media, and Trump’s base hears that Trump has weakened on some of his maximalist demands. They complain, Trump then posts something false about the talks or incendiary about Iran, and the negotiations fall apart.

And the cost of the war, in both lives and treasure, and the pressure on U.S. consumers and the economy continue to mount.

Last Friday, Trump and his advisors spent two hours discussing the latest round of negotiations in the Situation Room. According to Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi of the New York Times, that agreement included the release of about $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets and a postwar “investment fund” to rebuild Iran, with one diplomat telling the journalists the number on the table was $300 billion. Talks about Iran’s nuclear program would be deferred.

On Friday morning, Trump posted, once again, that the strait would be opened and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. But then he emerged from the Situation Room without the “final determination” on the agreement he had promised. On Saturday, Mohsen Rezaie, one of the advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, posted: “As predicted, the President of the United States is betraying diplomacy for the third time.”

Over the weekend, Trump’s social media account posted repeated attacks on Democrats and on the judges who have been deciding against him in legal cases. He posted long defenses of his alterations to monuments in Washington, D.C., and AI images of capital landmarks covered in trash and graffiti juxtaposed with ones gleaming and fresh, with captions that blame Democrats for the former and praise Trump for the latter.

His posts seemed designed primarily to reassure himself. By Saturday, so many of the musical acts his team had lined up to play at his Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” from late June through the beginning of July had bailed that Trump posted that he was “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!” He continued: “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! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

It was an odd echo of his December 19, 2020, tweet calling his base to Washington, D.C., in which he wrote: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Odder still was what followed: image after image of Trump as a great leader. There were images of Trump alongside first president George Washington, one of them showing the two presidents riding horses together in colonial garb beside a racecar with TRUMP across the hood, the White House in the background, and the Space Shuttle overhead. In an AI image, Trump is dunking a basketball over an exhausted New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat; in another image, he and Patriots football player Tom Brady stand talking, backlit, under a caption that reads “GOAT.”

There were pictures of Trump kissing the American flag; Mount Rushmore with Trump’s sculpture in line with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln (who looks somewhat alarmed); Trump apparently as a superhero admiral with armor on his chest that bears an American eagle; Trump standing near King Charles; Trump with China’s president Xi Jinping.

A series of AI images in the style of the 1950s Dick and Jane readers show a town parade festooned with flags and patriotic bunting, little girls laughing together at an old-fashioned town fair, and little boys in a suburb playing ball. All of the images read: “AMERICA IS BACK!” And in them, all of the people are white.

He posted an image of a white family from that era standing beside a Cadillac Coupe DeVille parked on a suburban street, with the caption: “BILLIONS WERE SPENT TO CONVINCE YOU THIS IS EVIL.”

Then Trump’s account posted a series of images contrasting his vision of Biden’s America versus his own. In his images, Biden’s world was one of theft, illegal squatting, violence, and illegal immigration. The images of Trump’s “solutions” to these problems showed people imprisoned, arrested, and deported.

At 1:02 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end—It always does! President DJT”

A minute later, his account posted: “Has anyone ever seen a happy Dumocrat???”

Then, later this morning, Iranian officials said they were suspending negotiations with the U.S. until Israel, which entered the war alongside the U.S., stops its strikes on Lebanon, strikes they say violate the ceasefire agreement. They warned they would close the Strait of Hormuz entirely—a few ships have been making the transit—and move against the Bab al-Mandab strait at the outlet of the Red Sea, as well. On CNBC, Trump told Eamon Javers that he doesn’t care if peace negotiations with Iran end. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. Negotiations were starting “to get very boring.”

But oil prices jumped sharply with the announcement of the suspension and the threat to the Bab al-Mandab, and at 1:43 in the afternoon, Trump posted: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” At 5:47, he posted on social media that he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and indirectly with Hezbollah, and that they both agreed to stop striking each other.

The Pentagon has been trying to control information coming out about its actions for months now, but that effort is now ramping up. This afternoon, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has designated its press office as a classified space—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—and even those journalists who have not had their press badges rescinded will require an appointment to talk to the press secretary.

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: Another day of losing for Donald Trumpy, Heather Delaney Reese, above and at right, June 1-2, 2026. After days of hiding from the press, tucked away from the American people deep inside the White House, while a giant UFC cage is being set up on the South Lawn, the President of the United States finally found a moment to emerge from seclusion when he took a phone call from a reporter earlier today.

And when the reporter, CNBC’s Eamon Javers, spoke to him, Trump did not hold back. His lack of impulse control got the better of him. Asked about negotiations collapsing over the Iran war, Trump shrugged off the question entirely, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” because the discussions had “started to get very boring.” This was the President of the United States discussing a deadly war that he started. A conflict that has destabilized an entire region, rattled global economic markets, endangered American troops, and left allies and adversaries alike scrambling to understand what comes next. And his response was that he didn’t care anymore because it was boring.

He did not misspeak, and he was not caught off guard. He said it, knowing he was speaking to a journalist who would be reporting on it later. And he still said he did not care because he was now bored with negotiating a peaceful end to the war. The war he ordered, the one being fought right now with real weapons and real bodies, no longer holds his interest. And the only flash of energy he summoned on the subject was a threat. When the conversation turned to whether Iran might still try to build a nuclear weapon, he said he would “blow them up to kingdom come.” That is the entire range of his thinking now: indifference on one end and annihilation on the other, with nothing in between. No strategy, diplomacy, or visible grasp of the thing he set in motion. Just a shrug and a threat from a man who would clearly rather be doing something else. Unfortunately, he is the President of the United States, and this is the job he volunteered for, campaigned for, and was ultimately elected to do.

And here’s what makes that answer so disturbing. Just before eleven o’clock this morning, hours before he told Eamon Javers he could not care less, the President posted this on Truth Social: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Rapid pace. Everything moving along. Nothing to worry about. And then, within the span of a single morning, those same rapid-paced talks became too boring to follow.

Both of those statements came from the same man, about the same war, on the same day. They cannot both be true. And the reason they cannot both be true is that he was not following the negotiations closely enough to know which version of reality he was supposed to be selling. While he was posting reassurance at 10:43 that morning, Iran was already moving to suspend its participation in the negotiations over Israel’s escalation in Lebanon and threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The collapse was already underway as he typed the word “rapid.”

He was not informing us. He was performing for us. And by the end of the day, the performance had changed completely.

Because what he told that reporter at midday cannot be squared with what he posted later that same afternoon. During the call, Trump said he was “going to ask” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu what was happening in Lebanon. Going to ask. The President of the United States, in the middle of a regional war his own military helped start, telling a reporter that he still needed to find out what was going on. And then, a little over an hour later, he suddenly sounded as though he already knew everything.

In his first post, he wrote that he had a “very productive call” with Netanyahu, and that “there will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.” He added that, “through highly placed Representatives,” he had spoken with Hezbollah, and “they agreed that all shooting will stop.” Then, hours later, he posted the entire thing all over again, the same claims, now wrapped in gratitude and wishful thinking. “I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi! I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!”

It was a remarkable announcement. A ceasefire on every front, brokered personally by the President of the United States and, if his post was to be believed, possibly lasting forever. There was only one problem. The people actually fighting the war had not agreed to any of it. According to reporting across CNN, The Jerusalem Post, and The Times of Israel, Netanyahu publicly contradicted him, saying the Israel Defense Forces would “continue to operate in southern Lebanon as planned.” His own defense minister, Israel Katz, went even further, denying that there was any ceasefire in Lebanon at all.

So the President announced a potential end to a war that the people fighting it were still actively fighting. He declared victory before there was a victory to declare. He took a victory lap around a finish line that did not exist.

And the call itself with Netanyahu was not the warm exchange that his “Thank you Bibi!” suggested. According to CNN, it was a heated phone call in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to scale back the operation and at points used expletives. The Times of Israel reported the words more bluntly, that Trump told Netanyahu, “you’re f**king crazy,” and “I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel.” So in private, he was reportedly shouting, and in public, he was posting gratitude and dreams of eternity. The distance between those two things is the distance between what is actually happening and what he wants us to believe is happening. And he does not appear to know, or to care, which side of that distance he is standing on from one hour to the next.

And nowhere was that clearer than when the subject turned to oil in his phone interview. Because while families across this country are watching the numbers climb at the pump, the President described a world that does not exist. He told Javers he was not worried about prices at all, that oil would soon be “dropping like a rock,” that there were “1,700 boats right now that are loaded up with oil,” and that it was “going to be like an oil gusher.” An oil gusher. That is the picture he painted. Here is the picture the rest of us are living in. Gas prices are devastating families. That cost lands squarely on the people who can least afford it, while the man responsible waves it away with a story about boats and gushers. And maybe he believes it. Maybe no one around him is willing to tell him otherwise, or maybe he simply cannot be bothered to know or care. We have to imagine it is some combination of all three. But the result is the same no matter which it is. The President of the United States is creating and telling fairy tales at our expense and at the expense of the world around us.

And maybe the most dangerous part is that nothing he does is new. We have seen this before, in other places and other times. Not the specifics, but the pattern. Strongmen who lose touch with the reality of their own wars while insisting, right up until the end, that everything is going perfectly. Leaders surrounded by aides who learn that the safest thing to do is agree, who manage the man instead of informing him, who feed him the version of events that keeps him calm and keeps themselves close to power. The danger in that arrangement is not only the leader’s detachment. It is that no one is left to say the true thing out loud. The reports grow rosier as the situation grows worse. The declarations of victory grow louder as the ground gives way. And the people who could correct the course decide, one by one, that it is easier to nod along. That is how a country drifts into catastrophe. Not only because the man at the top cannot be trusted, though he cannot, but because the man at the top does not know what is happening, and everyone around him has decided not to tell him.

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

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is the J6 Slush Fund Dead?, Andrew Egger, right, June 2, 2026. The so-called “anti-weaponization fund”—the $1.776 billion slush fund for allies Donald Trump announced last month as part of a so-called settlement with the Treasury Department—has been an interesting test of a scholastic sort of thought experiment: Can the president create a humiliation so large his congressional allies can’t swallow it?

Remarkably, in this case, the answer now appears to be “yes.” As I wrote last month, House and Senate Republicans were ballistic with anger on the news of the fund’s creation. Even more remarkably, that indignation only grew stronger during the congressional recess, and many lawmakers returned to Washington this week determined to stop the thing. Yesterday, Trump seemed to throw in the towel: Multiple outlets suddenly reported yesterday afternoon that Trump was quietly telling allies he would abandon the fund altogether.

Could this still just be a feint on Trump’s part? The specifics are worth drilling into.

First, the slush fund had received a pair of judicial setbacks late last week. On Friday, after a group of plaintiffs including a January 6th prosecutor sued in federal court to block the fund, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked all payments both from the Treasury to the fund and from the fund to claimants. Meanwhile, Judge Kathleen Williams, who had been assigned to the Trump–IRS case that led to the settlement in the first place, wrote Friday that she still intended to investigate whether Trump’s lawyers had “abused the judicial process” by filing “a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement.”

By this point, the fund seemed to be in pretty bad shape. Trump and Co. had drawn it up specifically to avoid legal scrutiny, but legal scrutiny was arriving anyway, and their ridiculously shameless argument that lawmakers should approve of the fund because they themselves could apply for money from it wasn’t landing. But pulling the plug would be met with outrage by the core MAGA base. How to pick the lock?

Step one is to blame the courts. Although the judicial hold on payments to and from the fund was only a short-term order, the Justice Department’s statement yesterday made it sound as though the court had shut the fund down altogether. The court, the government claimed, had stated that “under no circumstances may the Department of Justice proceed with the Anti-Weaponization fund.”

“This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized [sic], targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise,” the statement continued, in the language of an elegy. “The Department will abide by the Court’s ruling.”

What’s going on here is obvious: The DOJ is betting that the MAGA base is so incapable of reading and processing the specifics of the news that if the fund never materializes, Trump supporters will blame the courts rather than the administration.

But the particularly interesting bit is the way the administration seems to be making a similar case to Republican senators. These senators have a lot of sway at the moment: They’re currently considering legislation to re-fund ICE and the Border Patrol, legislation into which they could easily tuck language blocking the anti-weaponization fund from going forward at all.

The pitch from the White House seems to be: Hey, look, we’re backing off on the weaponization fund—lucky for you, now you don’t have to bother with banning it!

Even this, however, doesn’t seem to be landing. “It’s pretty clear that the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund” before the Senate will move forward with the reconciliation bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday, a sentiment that was echoed by many other GOP senators.

They should go further, though. The Senate should not ignore the possibility that Trump is trying to deke them: whisper enough sweet nothings in their ear to get them to pass the reconciliation bill, then go right back to trying to make the fund happen when their moment of leverage has passed. If blocking the fund was good legislation when Trump was trying to make it work in the first place, it’s still good legislation today.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Inside MAGA’s Fake Gay Motorcycle War… In False Flag, WILL SOMMER reports on the Dunces of Anarchy.
• ‘Masters of the Universe’ Review… it’s a feature-length meme, writes SONNY BUNCH.
• Trump Is All-In on Authoritarianism…On the flagship podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s unhinged late night bleats and why we need to be vigilant for Trumpian attempts to meddle in the midterms.
• Bari Weiss is “Murdering 60 Minutes”... On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins JVL to discuss the explosive showdown inside CBS News where Scott Pelley confronted Bari Weiss’s new executive producer on their neutering of the famed program.

Quick Hits

15 MINUTES AT 60 MINUTES: There’s heated meetings, and then there’s what went down at 60 Minutes yesterday amid Bari Weiss’s purge of the program to install more pliable leadership and correspondents. Over at Status, Oliver Darcy has the painful tick-tock:

On Monday morning, the staff of “60 Minutes” convened for an introductory meeting with Bari Weiss’ handpicked new executive producer of the program, Nick Bilton. Bilton, the technology journalist who lacks both broadcast news and managerial experience, opened the meeting by reading from some prepared notes. He didn’t get far.

Scott Pelley, the iconic “60 Minutes” correspondent and longtime CBS News journalist, interjected and started grilling Bilton about what he dubbed “Black Thursday”—referencing the day last week in which Weiss carried out mass firings, terminating Tanya Simon as executive producer, ousting Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega as correspondents, and showing the door to other senior staffers.

In the extraordinary back and forth, an impassioned Pelley relentlessly pressed Bilton on Weiss’ intentions for the storied newsmagazine, pointed out that he has no relevant experience to helm television’s most prestigious news program, grilled Bilton on what he knew about the firings, and more.

“Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves ‘60 Minutes.’”

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

The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes before Bilton gave up and called it, but those were fifteen eventful minutes. Read the whole thing.

THE PEOPLE v. THE MACHINE: Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has taken a more populist, hostile approach to AI policy than the mostly pro-AI Washington GOP. Yesterday, the state sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, arguing that the company and its CEO had “chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids.” CNN has more:

The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Florida’s tenth circuit, accuses OpenAI of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence and violating product liability laws. It also seeks to hold Altman “personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians,” including his alleged “utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.”

The lawsuit lists a litany of accusations against ChatGPT, including helping mass shooters, encouraging suicide, causing “public humiliation,” getting minors addicted to a tool with “no parental oversight” and causing users to lose “critical thinking skills.”

OpenAI said in a statement that it believes minors “need significant protection” and that it has “put in place industry leading protections and policies.”

Read the whole thing.

THE PENTAGON’S LITTLE TYRANT: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, has already gone to unprecedented lengths to neuter and muzzle the Pentagon press, beginning last year when he revoked the badges of pretty much every non-MAGA defense reporter after they wouldn’t sign a pledge not to report on “unauthorized” information. But the work against the Enemy of the People is never done! Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Defense Department has designated its press office a “classified space,” banning journalists—if any should ever happen to get back in the building—from accessing it at all:

While Pentagon reporters are still largely barred from the building, as litigation over the agency’s press rules continues, the change would have an outsize impact on them upon a possible return—restricting access to a space they have for years been able to walk freely.

People familiar with the change said it was driven in part by a shift that moved Pentagon speechwriters into the public affairs office. The office will be equipped with SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, so personnel can use the tool without decamping for a separate secured room. . . .

The latest designation creates a scenario in which even if journalists are able to access the Pentagon, their ability to interact with the department’s spokespeople will be reduced.

As the Post notes, Hegseth’s anti-press approach increasingly stands out even within the administration: Neither the White House nor other key departments like State have clamped down on access with anything like Hegseth’s zeal. Read the whole thing.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics

New York Times, California Votes on Newsom’s Successor After Turbulent Primary Campaign, Laurel Rosenhall and Shane Goldmacher, June 2, 2026. The race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom has been unpredictable for months, while Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles is trying to fend off two challengers.

For the first time in more than two decades, California voters are about to pick a new governor who is not already a national figure.

The race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom has been a tumultuous affair. It began with Kamala Harris’s flirtation with a run. It continued with Senator Alex Padilla’s brief consideration. Representative Eric Swalwell entered the race, only to implode with a flurry of sexual misconduct allegations that resulted in his resignation from Congress rather than promotion.

Voters have been left sifting through about a half-dozen contenders who have mostly struggled to capture their imagination. The top two vote getters advance to a November runoff, regardless of party.

The most intense contest has been between the race’s two highest polling Democrats, Tom Steyer, the billionaire financier who has run hard to the left, and Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general and health secretary under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who would be the state’s first Latino governor in the modern era. President Trump endorsed Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News personality, giving him an edge to advance because there are only two serious Republicans in a race with far more Democrats.

California counts its votes slowly, so don’t necessarily expect the results to be clear on Tuesday night. But here is what to watch in the contest for governor, the Los Angeles mayoral race featuring a former reality television star, and other key congressional battles across the state:Do voters actually want experience?

Mr. Newsom served eight years as lieutenant governor before taking the state’s top job. His predecessor, Jerry Brown, served as attorney general for four years — and eight years as governor more than two decades earlier — before seeking the office again.

Like them, Mr. Becerra has emphasized his governmental bona fides: a state legislator, a leadership role in Congress, a former state attorney general and a cabinet post under Mr. Biden. He’s the candidate who won’t need “training wheels” in the governor’s office, he likes to say.

The contrast with Mr. Steyer, who has never been elected to anything despite his 2020 presidential run, could not be sharper.

The former hedge fund manager is running as an unabashed progressive outsider who wants to raise commercial property taxes and radically change the way people get health care and electricity.

Other Democratic contenders are also campaigning as disrupters of the status quo. They include Katie Porter, the former congresswoman, and Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who both have some experience in government but have never held statewide office and have promised to upend how Sacramento does business.

But the main — and most vicious — contest has been between Mr. Becerra and Mr. Steyer.Will Democrats embrace a billionaire of their own?

California’s political graveyard is littered with the ultrawealthy who tried to buy their own way into power. There was Al Checchi, a businessman who ran for governor in 1998. There were the tech executives Meg Whitman, who ran for governor in 2010, and Carly Fiorina, who ran for Senate the same year. And Rick Caruso, the developer who spent $100 million losing the 2022 Los Angeles mayor’s race.

Mr. Steyer, who has smashed records by spending more than $200 million in a California governor’s race, is trying to change that, deluging the airwaves with ads more than 1,300 times a day in the month of May, according to an analysis by AdImpact. He has run four times as many ads as all of the other campaigns combined. And that doesn’t even count the paid influencers promoting his candidacy on social media.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Email exposes GOP dirty tricks operation! Judd Legum, right, June 2, 2026. Whoops!

On Friday, Popular Information reported that Real Change PAC, a purportedly “progressive” super PAC spending millions attacking Democrats from the left, was linked to House Republicans. The linkage to the House Republican super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), was established indirectly — through Real Change PAC’s connections to another sham PAC, California Blue.

Now, in a digital blunder, Real Change PAC directly revealed its real goals and political affiliation. In a post on X, journalist Andrew Solender noted that when someone subscribes to Real Change PAC’s email list, the confirmation email comes from a cavalryllc.com email address. Cavalry LLC is one of DC’s premier Republican communications shops, founded by Josh Holmes, Senator Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) former Chief of Staff.

In Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, for example, Real Change PAC is running a TV ad attacking Democratic candidate Joe Baldacci. “The truth? Joe Baldacci is the only Democrat running for Congress who stands with Trump and opposes implementation of Medicare for all Mainers now,” the ad asserts.

In New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District, Real Change PAC is attacking Democratic candidate Rebecca Bennett with mailers accusing her of “STANDING WITH ICE” and “CASHING IN ON TRUMP’S TERROR.”

Cavalry does not work with Democrats and supports President Trump’s agenda. The firm does work extensively, however, with the CLF.

According to FEC filings analyzed by Popular Information, the CLF spent over $10 million in the 2024 cycle buying digital ads through Cavalry. The CLF spent over $5 million with Cavalry in the two previous cycles. (CLF, which spends most of its resources on general election campaigns, has not spent much yet in the 2026 cycle.)

Ironically, Real Change PAC’s anti-Baldacci ad, funded by dark money funneled through sham PACs, also attacks Baldacci for being “the handpicked yes man of dark money DC.”

Cavalry did not respond to a request for comment.

Popular Information is a three-person newsletter but we produce in depth campaign finance investigations you will not find anywhere else. We can do this reporting because we are truly independent — there are no corporate overlords or advertisers pulling the strings. This newsletter only exists because of readers like you. Upgrade to paid to support this work.SubscribedCalifornia Blue’s strategy, revealed

Real Change PAC’s agenda is easy to discern. It is attacking Democrats who are perceived to be strong candidates in the general election to help the eventual Republican nominee.

California Blue PAC, a related group active only in California’s 40th Congressional District, has a more complex strategy. The 40th district is strongly tilted toward Republicans. But, due to redistricting, there are two Republican members, Young Kim and Ken Calvert, facing off against each other in the 40th.

Further, California has a “jungle primary,” which means candidates from all parties compete and the top two advance to the general, regardless of party affiliation. In addition to each other, Kim and Calvert are also facing a challenge from a Democratic candidate, Esther Kim Varet. If Kim Varet finishes ahead of Kim or Calvert in the primary tonight, one of the incumbents will be eliminated before November’s general election.

California Blue, which is linked to Republicans, is running ads supporting Kim Varet. What is going on? Is California Blue just trying to avoid an expensive general election? Or are they trying to put their thumb on the scale for one of the Republican candidates?

Cavalry’s involvement reveals the answer.

Both California Blue and Real Change PAC are funneling all their spending through a newly created shell company called Four Ponies Consulting LLC. (No other federal committee has spent a dollar with Four Ponies.) So we know that Cavalry, through Real Change PAC, is connected to California Blue.

It is likely that Four Ponies LLC is paying Cavalry to do work for Real Change PAC and exists to obscure the relationship.

FEC records reveal that Cavalry has also been paid over $200,000 in the last month to run digital ads for California Conservatives PAC. These ads, published on an unlisted YouTube account, attack Kim for being a “backstabbing Republican” who “sponsored a bill to censor and condemn President Trump.”

So Cavalry is connected both to efforts to bolster the Democratic candidate, Kim Varet, and to attack one of the Republicans, Kim. Both of these efforts benefit Calvert.

So who is backing California Conservatives PAC, which was just created on April 15? California Conservatives PAC has received 100% of its funds from Conservative Americans PAC. In turn, Conservative Americans PAC receives 100% of its funds from the American Prosperity Alliance.

The American Prosperity Alliance is a 501(c)(4) dark money organization, run by three lobbyists, that appears to exist primarily to obscure the source of political spending. But we do know one thing: it is tightly connected to the CLF.

In a 2024 filing, the American Action Network, the 501(c)(4) associated with the CLF, granted $5.5 million to the American Prosperity Alliance.

This makes some sense. The CLF is tightly connected to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Republican leadership. It is not surprising that House Republican leaders would favor Calvert, who was first elected in 1992 and chairs the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee, over Kim, who was first elected in 2020.

If you would like to learn how to do the kind of campaign finance research included in this piece, I’m hosting a webinar detailing the methods I’ve developed over nearly 30 years. The 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.

MSNOW, Senate Democrats stand by Graham Platner amid new sexting scandal, Mychael Schnell, After reports over the weekend that Graham Platner sent sexually explicit text messages to women while he was married, Democrats are standing by Maine’s presumptive Democratic Senate nominee.

Asked on Monday if he was rethinking his support for Platner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — the progressive leader who endorsed the oyster farmer just days into his campaign — told MS NOW, “Certainly not.”

It was a similar sentiment from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — another Platner booster — who brushed off questions about the candidate’s indiscretions and pivoted to rising gas prices, the war in Iran and Democratic hopes of unseating the Republican incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins.

It’s not the first controversy to hit Platner’s campaign ahead of the June 9 primary in Maine. But the text message scandal is threatening to shake up a key competition for Democrats as they plot their way back to the majority.

And not all Democrats sound as dismissive. 

New York Times, Group Pledges $2 Million to Fight AIPAC in House Races, Maya King and Nicholas Fandos, June 2, 2026. A super PAC created to counter spending from powerful pro-Israel groups will try to help Democrats critical of Israel’s wars and military actions.

A super PAC created as a counterweight to powerful pro-Israel advocacy groups has pledged to spend $2 million in New York to support a pair of candidates challenging Democratic House incumbents from the left and a third progressive Democrat running for an open seat.

The new super PAC, American Priorities, told The New York Times that the money would fund television, streaming and digital advertisements that boost three congressional candidates also backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez.

Mr. Lander, who is challenging Representative Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Ms. Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Representative Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District, are trying to defeat Democratic incumbents with close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, typically the largest pro-Israel spender in elections. But all three candidates with American Priorities’ support have been outspoken critics of Israel’s wars and military actions across the region.

The cash infusion could help level the playing field in a handful of expensive and increasingly competitive primary contests taking place on June 23. The largest share of the spending, about $1 million, has been earmarked for Ms. Avila Chevalier in her campaign to topple Mr. Espaillat, who is the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in a district in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. She has emphasized the congressman’s support from AIPAC and associated donors — roughly $350,000 over his five terms — in her campaign against him.

More On U.S. Governance

New York Times, Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline,  Maggie Astor and Dani Blum, June 2, 2026. Doctors nationwide are encountering more children with whooping cough, bacterial infections and other serious illnesses, as well as more adults refusing tetanus shots.

Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.

The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.

For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.

While most children recover, these diseases aren’t benign. Many children endure extended hospitalizations. Some infections can be fatal.

Dr. Meghan Hofto, a pediatric hospitalist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one of the doctors who said she is seeing more illnesses that she used to encounter only rarely. This year, she and her colleagues have treated more children than usual with persistent diarrhea. A child with a run-of-the-mill stomach virus might need a day or so of IV fluids, but these patients were being hospitalized for three or four days.

The culprit: Rotavirus, which once caused tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year in the United States but was largely swept away by vaccines introduced 20 years ago. These vaccines were so effective that Dr. Hofto could recall treating only four or five children with rotavirus in the past decade. Now, she said she had treated about that many already this year, and none of them were vaccinated.

Dr. Jessica Kirk, a pediatric hospitalist in Fairhope, Ala., recently treated an unvaccinated toddler who was hospitalized with pneumonia from two simultaneous infections, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Routine childhood vaccines can protect against both S. pneumoniae and a common form of H. influenzae, but vaccinations against both illnesses have declined in recent years.Sign up to get Dani Blum's articles emailed to you. Dani Blum is a health reporter focusing on news and trends. Get it sent to your inbox.

The child that Dr. Kirk treated for both infections needed antibiotics and oxygen to get through the illness.

Some of these conditions can lead to serious complications. H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae infections can cause sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. Dr. Hofto said she had treated 4- to 6-week-old infants with whooping cough, or pertussis, who seemed fine at times but then stopped breathing after a coughing fit. “It’s hard to know when they’re safe to go home,” she said.

U.S. Tariffs, Markets, Economy, Jobs

New York Times, Trump Targets Brazil With 25% Tariff, Citing Unfair Trade Practices, Daisuke Wakabayashi, June 2, 2026. The proposal marks the latest effort by the administration to rebuild its tariff agenda through Section 301 investigations.

The Trump administration on Monday proposed a 25 percent tariff on a broad range of Brazilian imports, concluding after a trade investigation that Brazil had engaged in unfair practices that imposed burdens on American businesses.

In a news release, the United States Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, said the investigation found that Brazil had failed to adequately enforce intellectual property rights and had not taken sufficient measures to combat corruption and bribery. The administration also cited Brazil’s restrictions on access to its ethanol market, and what it described as inadequate enforcement of anti-deforestation laws.

The investigation was conducted under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the United States to impose tariffs and other penalties in response to unfair foreign trade practices.

Mr. Greer said that he and President Trump had “several constructive meetings” with the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over the past year, but that “substantial differences” remained over issues identified in the investigation. The United States Trade Representative is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the proposed measures on July 6.

Brazil has until July 15 to take what Mr. Greer called “responsive action” to address the issues raised in the investigation.

Brazil is one of more than a dozen countries that have come under Section 301 investigations as part of Mr. Trump’s effort to rebuild a tariff plan after key elements of his trade agenda were struck down by the Supreme Court in February. Although Mr. Trump responded with a 10 percent global tariff, a panel of federal judges ruled last month that those duties violated the law.

The Trump administration has been working to establish a more durable global tariff system by the summer, but Section 301 requires the government to conduct country-specific investigations and hold consultations and hearings before the new import taxes can take effect.

The proposed tariffs would exempt some products, including beef, coffee, rare earth metals, aircraft equipment and certain fruits and vegetables.

The move comes despite the United States maintaining a trade surplus with Brazil for the past decade. Last year, Mr. Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports to pressure the country to halt its prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president and an ally of Mr. Trump. The United States later rolled back the tariffs on many Brazilian goods, while the court challenges further reduced the scope of the duties.

Media, Culture, History, Sports

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The Murder of "60 Minutes," Robert Reich, right, June 2, 2026. Scott Pelley gets this week's Joseph N. Welch Award. 

CBS News’s new Editor in Chief, Bari Weiss, recently announced in an email to staff that the network was parting ways with the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, and substituting Nick Bilton.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bilton said he was excited “to take what I believe is largely an unutilized news brand and take it into the modern age.”

Unutilized? Modern age?

At a time when broadcast news is in crisis, “60 Minutes” is anything but. It’s the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history. It has remained the #1 news program for 50 straight years and consistently ranks among the top 10 of all Nielsen-rated television programs.

And it pulls in a fortune for CBS. “60 Minutes” is one of the most profitable programs in all of television, generating tens of millions in annual profit for CBS. In one recent year its advertising revenues were $67.5 million. The network wholly owns the franchise, which makes it a goldmine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.

This goes beyond “if it ain’t broke ….”

At a staff meeting yesterday, famed correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded. (Scott Pelley gets this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)

I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?

One hint: Besides chucking its executive producer, Weiss’s has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

In December, Alfonsi challenged Weiss’s decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on an El Salvador maximum-security prison where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, including alleged gang members. Weiss raised concerns about the comment-seeking process and determined that it needed additional reporting. Alfonsi termed the decision a political move. (The segment, called “Inside CECOT,” eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)

Alfonsi calls the network’s decision to allow her contract to expire “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” that “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”

Vega is no less blunt. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”

Of course it’s censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trump’s assets to get Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.

Trump’s “fingerprints and DNA are all over this,” veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft says. “He’s been making threats against 60 Minutes and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”

Trump has fixated on “60 Minutes” for years, calling the show "a dishonest Political Operative disguised as News." He sued CBS News over an interview of then presidential candidate Kamala Harris that Trump claimed has been edited unfairly to him. After the “60 Minutes” aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, he said CBS “should lose their license.”

This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as correspondent Scott Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a goldmine. Politically, it’s dangerous as hell to Trump.

Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone who’s been fired from “60 Minutes” knows this. Trump’s lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.

You need to know this.

“60 Minutes” — the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history — is being dismantled because Trump doesn’t want America to know the truth.

Trump’s increasingly corrupt political system — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing a corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaire and multi-billionaires, and monopolists.

When political and economic deal-making become personal transactions, when greed and payoffs replace trust, what happens? Authoritarianism replaces democracy. And an economy collapses, as it did at the end of America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.

One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s dispicable reign. 

The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: How We Can Combat Human Trafficking During the World Cup, Frank Figliuzzi, right, with Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, June 2, 2026. What happens off the field when the world's biggest games come to town?

Next week, the FIFA World Cups comes to North America, with 16 cities across the continent hosting games. And while fans are gearing up to cheer on their favorite teams, former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi warns that what’s not being televised is cause for alarm.

Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz is the Director of Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention and Research at Arizona State University, and has spent her career fighting human trafficking and violence against women.

She sat down with Frank Figliuzzi on The Frank Figliuzzi Show here on Lincoln Square to warn fans and residents of the cities hosting these games of the signs they should be aware of for human trafficking that’s expected to increase during the coming World Cup.

Frank Figliuzzi is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. 

Thinking About..."Waiting for the missiles to pass," Timothy Snyder, above (best-selling author of On Tyranny and a frequent visitor to Ukraine), June 2, 2026. The living book in wartime Ukraine.

• Why have a book festival in the middle of a war?
• Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

The historian Marci Shore goes to wartime Ukraine because it’s her job, and because she has people to see. She’s been there five times since the full-scale war began. Before her latest visit I asked Marci to take some photos and videos, so you could see a bit of war and resistance through her eyes.

Marci, left, arrived in Kyiv in late May, right after one of the largest Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital thus far, and as Russian authorities were telling “foreign citizens” to leave the city because Moscow planned to destroy “decision-making centers.”

On Marci’s agenda: to give a public lecture, to comment on papers at a history workshop, and to participate in Book Arsenal, Kyiv’s amazing annual book festival. Last year she was one of its curators, under the motto “Everything is Translation.” This year the motto was “Bear Your Freedom.”

Since the war began in 2014, and especially since the full-scale invasion of 2022, book publication has been self-defense. Russia targets Ukrainian publishing houses, archives, libraries, and museums, and in occupied zones Russians collect and burn Ukrainian books. Genocide is about eliminating a people, and it includes the attempt to eliminate their ability to think for themselves, as themselves, in their own language.

Ukrainians defend themselves in many ways, as soldiers and as civil society, and also by reading and writing and talking about books. Ukrainian culture, including book publishing, is undergoing an extraordinary renaissance. More than one hundred publishers gathered at Book Arsenal. From Marci’s photos and video I hope you will catch some of their spirit.

We start, though, by joining Marci at a site of a recent Russian attack on civilians. On May 24th, Russia launched more than six hundred missiles and drones at Kyiv and environs. Ukrainian air defense brought down the huge majority of them, but some sadly got through. The missiles destroyed a historic outdoor market and a shopping mall and damaged a subway station and apartment buildings. Russia also struck Ukrainian cultural sites: the National Art Museum, the Institute of Literature, the Opera Theater. Four people were killed, and a hundred more were injured.

The most serious damage was sustained by the Lukianivka neighborhood in Kyiv. This is Marci’s photo of some of the damage there:

And here is a snippet of Marci with a few words from the site.

Marci’s next video of the Lukianivka neighborhood shows people trying to clean up their damaged apartment, and also gives a further sense of the scale of the destruction.

From Lukianivka, Marci went to the Book Arsenal. The video gives you her first thoughts…

Why have a book festival in the middle of a war?

Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

“An unbroken city...” Book Arsenal has an excellent bomb shelter, and during air raid alerts, participants go underground. This next video selfie is of Marci in the shelter “waiting for the missiles to pass,” which is a thing that one does.

Air raids are an interruption; when they are finished, participants in Book Arsenal go back to talking about books. People in Kyiv are frustrated by these interruptions, or angry, or sleepless; but after four years these Russian war crimes become a part of life, to which one adapts. In Lukianivka the outdoor market is already open again. The rubble is still there, but the vendors are out. And the rubble will be cleared.

One knows when the air raids are coming from apps and from Telegram channels. The danger can be judged and navigated. The stoic philosopher Seneca, who is much read now in Ukraine, reminds us that life is long enough if we do what is important. Reading good books is important. Tens of thousands of people attended the two hundred and forty events at Book Arsenal. This selfie from outside, on a patch of green called the Literary Garden, captures one side of the mood.

Here is Marci at the train station; lecture was delivered; workshop was attended; and this year’s Book Arsenal was a big success. Brava!

The horrible war goes on, with cowardly Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities with drones, with the missiles they use for nuclear weapons, with anti-ship missiles, with whatever they have to hand. Russia is losing on the battlefield, and so must present itself as a menace and try to intimidate. Last night Russia attacked again, this time firing more than seven hundred missiles and drones at Dnipro and Kyiv, killing at least eighteen civilians, including children.

The US government is doing nothing to help Ukraine stop Russian missiles; this could easily change and should change now, in the interest not only of saving lives but of bringing the war to a close. If the Americans chose to supply missile defense to Ukrainians (and to enforce meaningful sanctions on Russian oil and gas), the war would quickly end. At the moment, the effect of US policy is to keep Russia’s war effort going. But you yourself can help Ukrainian air defense shoot down drones and save lives, with a couple of clicks, right here. You can also help Ukrainian civil society protect Ukrainian soldiers here. Resistance includes shooting down projectiles fired to kill people in a senseless war of aggression; and that is a form of resistance in which you can take part, if you wish.

Resistance can also be about reading, wherever you are, bomb shelter or not, because good books liberate us from the obvious and prepare us for the real. It might seem like, at the edge, where life meets death, we should put the books down; this is not what one sees in Ukraine. The last time I went to the front I rode with soldiers who were bringing books to other soldiers.

The readers and the writers and the soldiers can be the same people. One of the curators of this year’s Book Arsenal, the philosopher and journalist Maksym Butkevych, is a survivor of two years in captivity in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; the other, the poet and novelist Andriy Lyubka, is on active duty in the Ukrainian armed forces.

Above all, perhaps, resistance means being the person you are, not despite everything, but because of everything.

Цілую.

June 1

Top Headlines

• Meidas Touch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Iran Suspends Talks with U.S., Ben Meiselas, right, June 1, 2026. Remember that Iran deal so many in the corporate media said was about to be signed by Trump? Not only did that deal never come to fruition, but as of this moment, Iran has walked away from the table entirely. Here’s what we’re tracking:
• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Cease-Fire Wavers as U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks and Israel Threatens Beirut, Aaron Boxerman, Yan Zhuang and Christina Goldbaum, June 1, 2026. Israel issued an evacuation order for the suburbs of Lebanon’s capital. Oil prices spiked after an unconfirmed report that Iran would stop participating in peace talks. U.S. Central Command said the military intercepted two Iranian missiles overnight on Monday and no personnel were harmed. The attacks threatened to further complicate talks to end the war.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Administration Faces Crises on Three Fronts: Diplomacy, Costs, and Disaster Preparedness—Alarms are Being Sounded, Aaron Parnas, right, June 1, 2026. First, the Trump administration is dealing with a diplomatic and foreign policy crisis as more than 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been fired or laid off while the conflict with Iran continues despite repeated promises of a deal. Second, the administration is racing to address concerns about FEMA’s readiness as hurricane season begins today. Finally, despite claims that Americans are earning thousands more than they were at the start of the administration, many workers continue to face stagnant wages and rising costs.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Problem With Platner, Bill Kristol, Mark Hertling and Jim Swift, June 1, 2026. In fetishizing ‘outsiders,’ Democrats are getting used to excusing bad behavior. We’ve seen this movie before. Donald Trump wants to know: When are you people going to shut up with your “opinions” about the “quality” of his Iran deal and just let him cook?

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

• New York Times, Losing Trust in Justice Dept., Judges Call Out Its Lawyers’ Behavior, Mattathias Schwartz,.June 1, 2026. The federal courts have long assumed that the government’s lawyers are trustworthy. Now judges across the country are criticizing their lack of candor.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Said to Be Backing Off Plans for $1.8 Billion Fund After Backlash, Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett and Annie Karn, June 1, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.
• Democracy Docket, Election denier Tina Peters freed from prison, immediately tells Steve Bannon: ‘Democrats are going to cheat,’ Matt Cohen, June 1, 2026. Moments after Tina Peters was released from prison Monday, the former Colorado GOP election clerk appeared on a far-right podcast where she continued to espouse false election conspiracy theories.
• New York Times, Pentagon Bars Reporters From Its Press Office, Greg Jaffe, June 1, 2026. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly curtailed journalists’ access in the Pentagon.
• New York Times, Ex-F.B.I. Officials Form New Group for Embattled Employees, Devlin Barrett, June 1, 2026. The F.B.I. Support Network offers legal, mental health and job search services to current agency employees. Its founders say the work force is incredibly strained under Kash Patel.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Pogroms, American Style, Paul Krugman, right, June 1, 2026. The Trump administration’s attack on immigrants isn’t about rule of law, crime or jobs. It’s racism and sadism all the way down.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: ‘Paradise’ Lost, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 1, 2026. The hellscape of Trump 2.0. Donald Trump’s most unctuous and depraved courtier, Stephen Miller, last week insisted, “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.” To paraphrase Mary McCarthy (not Dorothy Parker, to whom the quote is frequently misattributed), every word he speaks is a lie, including “and” and “the.” 
• New York Times, Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List, Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly, June 1, 2026. The defense secretary’s decision to block the officers’ promotions appears driven by his anti-diversity stance rather than based on merit.
• Politico, Anti-Trump group can keep flying ‘86-47’ flag near National Mall, judge rules, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, June 1, 2026.U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss says the banner can’t plausibly be read to threaten violence against President Donald Trump.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Spinmeisters Pretend Mike Johnson Is a Judge, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 1, 2025. There are two orders pending regarding Trump’s Terrorist Slush Fund.
• The Pugilist, Investigative Commentary: The US Attorney for New Mexico Who Wrongly Prosecuted a Taiwanese Scientist for Espionage — but Ignored a Pedophile Who Was Probably a Spy for Israel, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, June 1, 2026. John J. Kelly had Q clearance, seven years as New Mexico's top federal prosecutor, and multiple victim reports from Zorro Ranch. He acted on none of them.

More On Iran, Lebanon Wars

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Iran Buys Chinese, Mark Hertling, right, June 1, 2026. NBC News reported this weekend that the American F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran on April 3 may have been hit by a Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile, known by its NATO nickname the “Flying Crossbow.” If that reporting is confirmed, it would mean that Chinese military technology played a direct role in the first shoot-down of an American combat airplane in decades. That is certainly newsworthy, but the missile itself is not the story. The story is how it got there.
• New York Times, How Lebanon’s Best Chance to Disarm Hezbollah Failed, Abdi Latif Dahir and Aaron Boxerman, June 1, 2026, Lebanon’s government has long wanted the powerful militia to give up its weapons. Before the Iran war began, there were signs of progress toward that goal.
• Drop Site Daily, Iran threatens to suspend ceasefire talks after Israel escalates in Lebanon; Pro-Israel groups play big in key Tuesday primaries, Staff Reports, June 1, 2026. Iranian state media reports Tehran may be suspending ceasefire talks. U.S. and Iranian strikes resume over the weekend. Nuclear talks stall as U.S. leadership continues to temporize.

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.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Opinion: The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained, David French, May 31, 2026. It’s the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we’re taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas.
• Politico, Will California elect another Democrat — or could Republicans pull off a stunning upset? Staff report, June 1, 2026. Our roundtable examines the candidates, the surprises and the paths to victory.Steve Hilton, Chad Bianco, Tom Steyer, Katie Porter and Xavier Becerra.
• New York Times, How California Redistricting Shrunk the Competitive Map, Jennifer Medina and Leo Dominguez, June 1, 2026. The state now has just four congressional districts considered safe for Republicans, and four seen as competitive. The rest of its 52 members of Congress are all but certain to be Democrats.
• New York Times, Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity? Ruth Graham and J. David Goodman, June 1, 2026. Jim Rigby, a pastor who rarely uses the word “God,” is a key to understanding the Senate candidate trying to pull off something unusual in Texas.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 31, 2026 [When A Senator Fought Oppression], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 1, 2026. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”
• New York Times, As Democrats Worry About Senate Race, Platner Attacks Reports About Sexual Messages, Lisa Lerer, Tim Balk and Katie Glueck, June 1, 2026 (print ed.). Graham Platner, whose contest in Maine is a key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate, sought to discredit reports that he had exchanged sexual messages with women outside his marriage.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is This Platner Scandal Different? Andrew Egger, right, June 1, 2026. Graham Platner, oysterman, veteran, and presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, has for months faced a steady drip of embarrassing stories about his personal life: from the Nazi-logo tattoo he got while a young meathead Marine to his post-service history of basically unhinged anonymous social-media posts.
• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Corporate Media Attacks on Graham Platner Are Getting Very Strange—and the Social Media Attacks, Too, Seth Abramson, right,, June 1, 2026. Maine’s wildly imperfect Democratic Senate candidate deserves analysis and criticism—like any political candidate. But what’s being said of Platner has become unprecedentedly bizarre and incoherent.
• Michael Fanone via Substack, Opinion: Both Parties Are Failing. Only One Is Breaking the System, Michael Fanone, June 1, 2025. Record-low trust in Republicans and Democrats sounds like a both-sides story. It isn’t. And the framing matters more than ever.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: There Are 22 Weeks of Potential Crisis and Catastrophe before Election Day, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 1, 2025. One reason I keep harping on five ways to fight fascism is to emphasize the multiple roles included, roles that all intersect.

More Global News

• New York Times, U.K. Braces for More Files About Mandelson, Ambassador Tied to Epstein, Stephen Castle, June 1, 2026. A second batch of documents about the former U.S. ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, could create more problems for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
• New York Times, Fringe to Mainstream: The Movement to Split Alberta From Canada Gets Its Moment, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Photographs by Amber Bracken, June 1, 2026. In October, Albertans will get to say if they want to stay in Canada, or hold a referendum to leave. Will it settle the matter, or deepen the rift?

High Tech, Media, Culture, Education

“Tilly Norwood,” a computer-generated character described as “the world’s first A.I. actress,” has become a flashpoint in the debate over the technology’s use in media (Photo and Design by Particle 6).

• New York Times Magazine, I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Updated June 1, 2026. The A.I. actress on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.
• New York Times, China Aims A.I. at Predicting Who Could Pose a Political Risk, Julian E. Barnes, June 1, 2026. New research examines how a Chinese company struggled to develop its predictive surveillance technology while U.S. restrictions were in place.
• New York Times, Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him, Jacqueline Mroz and Maggie Astor, June 1, 2026. Mr. Epstein banked his sperm several years before his death and said that if he died, it should be left in the control of his estate.

Top Stories

Meidas Touch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Iran Suspends Talks with U.S., Ben Meiselas, right, June 1, 2026. Remember that Iran deal so many in the corporate media said was about to be signed by Trump? Not only did that deal never come to fruition, but as of this moment, Iran has walked away from the table entirely. Here’s what we’re tracking:

• Iran suspends all talks and message exchanges with the United States, per Iran’s Tasnim News Agency
• Netanyahu expands military operations in Lebanon, crossing the Litani River and threatening strikes on Beirut’s Dahieh district
• Iran threatens to fully blockade the Strait of Hormuz and activate the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea
• Oil prices surge over 8% to $94 per barrel
• Iran’s IRGC claims to have shot down a US MQ-1 drone early this morning
• A Panama-flagged container ship hit near Umm Qasr, Iraq, per the UK Maritime Trade Operations office
• The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve falls to its lowest level since early 2024, per GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan
• Roughly 60 US Air Force aerial refueling tankers relocated to Ben Gurion Airport in Israel
• Pakistan’s Prime Minister publicly praises China as the world’s dominant military and economic power
• A federal appeals court rules Trump’s transgender military ban is likely unconstitutional
• Scott Pelley confronts new 60 Minutes leadership hire at all-hands meeting, per Puck’s Dylan Byers
• Tina Peters, freed by Colorado Governor Jared Polis, kicks off her MAGA media tour
• Kash Patel’s girlfriend sues MSNBC for defamation
• Judge orders Trump legal team to respond to Florida court filing on potential fraud in IRS lawsuit

Iran Is Done Talking

Iran has suspended all diplomatic communications with the United States. No more message exchanges, no more back-channel conversations through Pakistan, nothing. Per Tasnim News Agency, which is closely aligned with the IRGC, the Iranian negotiating team is halting all dialogue and exchange of texts through a mediator. The reason, per Tehran, is Netanyahu’s ongoing military escalation in Lebanon, which Iran says was a precondition of any ceasefire agreement. Iran is saying the deal was never just about Iran. It was about stopping the broader regional carnage, and the U.S. and Israel blew through that condition without blinking.

Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi said a ceasefire between Iran and the US is a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon. Violate it on one front and you’ve violated the whole thing. Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf echoed that, calling Israel’s naval blockade and war crimes in Lebanon clear evidence of U.S. noncompliance. Iran’s IRGC has now threatened to not only fully shut down the Strait of Hormuz but activate the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea as well. This would be a catastrophic blow to global energy markets, and oil prices are already reacting. We’re at $94 a barrel and climbing. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, meanwhile, has fallen another 8 million barrels to 357 million, the lowest since early 2024 and getting dangerously close to levels not seen since 1983, per GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan.

We were telling you this was happening when corporate media was either ignoring it, actively downplaying it, or telling you a deal was imminent. We showed you the drone footage. We showed you the Lebanon escalation. We told you the ceasefire was being violated in real time. And now here we are.Netanyahu Is Lighting the Region on Fire

While Iran was announcing it was walking away from the table, Netanyahu was busy posting videos of himself celebrating the capture of Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon and announcing an expansion of IDF operations beyond the Litani River. He is also now threatening strikes on Beirut’s Dahieh district, which prompted Iran’s military central command to issue an immediate warning: if Netanyahu follows through, Iran will directly strike northern Israeli territory. Per Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya military command, Israeli residents in the northern occupied territories should evacuate immediately.

So Netanyahu, who got us into this war in the first place, is now actively doing everything possible to make a diplomatic resolution impossible. He’s crossing lines, grabbing territory, announcing new strike packages. The IDF has already issued evacuation warnings for Dahieh, and residents there are fleeing as of this afternoon.

Then, just as we were about to hit publish on this update, Trump posted that he had a “very productive call” with Netanyahu and a separate call with Hezbollah through “highly placed representatives,” claiming all shooting will stop, that no troops are going to Beirut, and that any troops already en route have been turned back. Israel will not attack Hezbollah. Hezbollah will not attack Israel.

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Cease-Fire Wavers as U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks and Israel Threatens Beirut, Aaron Boxerman, Yan Zhuang and Christina Goldbaum, June 1, 2026. Israel issued an evacuation order for the suburbs of Lebanon’s capital. Oil prices spiked after an unconfirmed report that Iran would stop participating in peace talks. U.S. Central Command said the military intercepted two Iranian missiles overnight on Monday and no personnel were harmed. The attacks threatened to further complicate talks to end the war.

The United States and Iran traded attacks in the last 24 hours, complicating negotiations over a framework for a deal to end the war.

The U.S. military said late Sunday that it had attacked radar and command sites in southern Iran over the weekend, the latest in a litany of low-level strikes amid strained negotiations to end the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that began in late February.

The U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, said in a statement that it had retaliated against Iran for shooting down an American drone in the area. Fighter jets attacked Iranian air defenses, among other sites, the military said.

Less than an hour later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that its forces had targeted a military base from which an American attack on a communications facility in southern Iran had originated, Iranian state media reported.

Kuwait, which hosts U.S. military bases, accused Iran on Monday of launching a new wave of attacks against its territory, but did not confirm whether a base had been targeted.

It was not immediately clear how the latest strikes would affect U.S.-Iranian negotiations over a framework for a deal to end the war and lift Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, a vital waterway for oil and gas shipments.

Talks to end the war have advanced in fits and bursts. Last week, officials familiar with the negotiations said that U.S. and Iranian negotiators had agreed on a document that had been sent to the two countries’ leaders for approval.

It is unclear whether Mojtaba Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader believed to be in hiding, responded to the proposal. But President Trump has pushed to toughen the terms of the deal, sending a revised document to Iran, according to three officials who spoke anonymously because they could not discuss the matter publicly.

Fighting in Lebanon was also complicating efforts to reach a broader agreement to end the war. Iran demanded that a cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia, be implemented as part of earlier talks that led to an April cease-fire.

On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement that he had ordered the Israeli military to attack the southern outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, as part of the widening campaign against Hezbollah. Thousands fled Beirut’s southern suburbs, clogging the roads with traffic after the Israeli threat.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Energy markets: Oil prices climbed on Monday as investors weighed a renewed exchange of military strikes between the United States and Iran. Read more ›
• Trump comments: Mr. Trump said on social media early Monday that Iran wanted a deal and suggested that criticism from Republicans and Democrats had made negotiations more difficult.
• Lebanon castle: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had captured a strategic, Crusader-era castle in southern Lebanon as part of the most sweeping Israeli invasion in the country in decades. Read more ›
• Strait of Hormuz: American forces have helped coordinate the passage of around 70 commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz in the last three weeks, according to U.S. officials. Read more ›

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Administration Faces Crises on Three Fronts: Diplomacy, Costs, and Disaster Preparedness—Alarms are Being Sounded, Aaron Parnas, right, June 1, 2026. First, the Trump administration is dealing with a diplomatic and foreign policy crisis as more than 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been fired or laid off while the conflict with Iran continues despite repeated promises of a deal. Second, the administration is racing to address concerns about FEMA’s readiness as hurricane season begins today. Finally, despite claims that Americans are earning thousands more than they were at the start of the administration, many workers continue to face stagnant wages and rising costs.

I also want to address something directly. I’ve received a number of messages this weekend, including from people canceling subscriptions.

This platform is mine and mine alone. It is completely independent. I have never hidden who my father is, but I am my own person, and I hope you will judge me based on my work and not the actions of others that I could not control. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out.

This will be a busy week. Congress is back in session, we have another live show with Jessica Tarlov on Wednesday, and our next paid subscriber live event is Thursday evening.

Here’s the news:

America has a diplomacy crisis, with roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats leaving the State Department through layoffs or forced retirements, taking decades of expertise, language skills, and crisis-management experience with them. Former and current diplomats warn that the departures have created leadership gaps across the globe, leaving more than half of U.S. ambassador posts vacant and weakening America’s ability to respond to conflicts, health emergencies, and threats to citizens abroad. Critics argue that the Trump administration has sidelined career foreign service professionals, increased political vetting, and relied more heavily on political appointees and outside advisers for major international negotiations. While the State Department says it remains confident in its workforce and is advancing an America First foreign policy, many diplomats fear the loss of institutional knowledge will undermine U.S. influence, economic interests, and global leadership for years to come.

Now, Donald Trump now says, regarding the war in Iran, “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end.”

America’s Middle East crisis is deepening as Israel has launched its largest military advance into Lebanon in 26 years, capturing the strategic Beaufort Ridge across the Litani River and signaling plans to expand its control over territory once held by Hezbollah. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the operation a “dramatic change” in strategy, while some Israeli officials and allies have openly advocated for a longer-term occupation of southern Lebanon despite international criticism. The offensive has raised fears of a broader regional conflict, with more than 1.2 million Lebanese displaced and thousands killed since fighting intensified, while France and other international actors warn that Israel’s actions risk violating international norms. Analysts say the escalation could also jeopardize ongoing U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations, making it harder for Washington to secure a broader regional agreement and increasing the risk of a prolonged conflict.

Overnight, the United States and Iran exchanged new military strikes over the weekend, with U.S. forces targeting Iranian radar, drone, and air-defense sites and Iran responding with attacks on a base linked to the U.S. operation. Both sides say their actions were defensive, but negotiations to end the war remain stalled over disagreements about Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, and security demands. The conflict has disrupted global energy markets and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for global oil supplies. Efforts to reach a broader ceasefire are further complicated by Israel’s ongoing military operations in Lebanon, which Iran says must be addressed in any final agreement. Here is the statement from United States Central Command:

Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are launching an effort to block President Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and force Republicans to publicly vote on whether to preserve it. Democrats argue the fund, created after Trump’s settlement with the IRS, could improperly benefit Trump allies and have introduced legislation called the “Drain the Slush Fund Act” to eliminate it. While Democrats are unlikely to have the votes needed to stop the fund outright, they plan to use Senate procedures to make Republicans take recorded votes on the issue. The fund is already facing legal challenges in federal court and has complicated Republican efforts to advance other immigration and border-security funding priorities.

Shannon Bream noted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports inflation is rising faster than wages, raising concerns about workers’ purchasing power. Kevin Hassett responded that the issue is partly a matter of how income statistics are measured. He said personal income figures include government transfer payments and benefits in addition to wages. Hassett argued that reductions in those programs, as part of efforts to reduce government spending, have affected the income data.

Bream cited a report that credit card delinquencies have reached 13%, the highest level since the aftermath of the financial crisis, and noted that many people say they are relying on credit cards for basic necessities. He asked what message the administration has for those struggling consumers. Hassett responded that delinquency does not mean default and said credit card companies do not see the situation as a threat to their financial stability. He characterized the issue as consumers taking longer to make payments rather than being unable to pay altogether.

Minnesota Republicans, at their annual convention, held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the man who murdered George Floyd:

Rep. Maxine Dexter, an Oregon congresswoman and physician, is pressing federal officials for answers about pregnant, unaccompanied migrant minors who were being held at a facility in San Benito, Texas. After visiting the center, she said she was unable to speak with the girls and remains concerned about where many of them and their infants were transferred after leaving the facility. Dexter and immigration advocates have raised questions about whether the minors are receiving adequate medical care, whether some U.S.-born infants are effectively leaving the country with deported mothers, and whether the facility is operating with sufficient transparency. Federal health officials reject those concerns, saying pregnant minors have access to specialists and appropriate medical treatment, but critics argue that key questions about the girls' whereabouts and care remain unanswered.

Immigrant rights groups across the 11 U.S. cities hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup are organizing legal aid, rapid-response networks, and public awareness campaigns because of concerns about increased immigration enforcement during the tournament. More than 120 organizations have issued a travel warning advising visitors about potential risks, including detention or deportation, while activists are distributing legal resources and training communities on their rights. Organizers are also creating “safe spaces,” hotlines, and attorney networks to assist immigrants and visitors if ICE operations occur near World Cup events. Supporters of these efforts argue they are necessary to protect immigrant communities and maintain tourism, while federal officials say security measures are focused on ensuring a safe environment for fans and participants.

France detained the Russia-linked oil tanker Tagor in the Atlantic Ocean as part of efforts to crack down on Moscow’s so-called “shadow fleet,” which is accused of helping Russia evade international sanctions. French authorities said the vessel was sailing under a false Cameroonian flag and was diverted for inspection after naval commandos boarded it with support from the United Kingdom. President Emmanuel Macron said the operation was aimed at enforcing international law and preventing sanctions evasion that helps finance Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia condemned the seizure as illegal, while French officials said the tanker, which was already under EU and U.S. sanctions, would undergo further checks.

Nvidia unveiled its new RTX Spark “superchip,” designed to bring powerful AI capabilities directly to laptops and desktop computers and enable AI agents to perform tasks locally rather than relying on cloud services. CEO Jensen Huang said the technology could fundamentally change how people interact with computers by allowing AI agents to navigate systems autonomously, potentially reducing reliance on traditional mouse-and-keyboard inputs. The chip, developed in partnership with Microsoft and MediaTek, will be used in devices from major manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and HP. While analysts see the launch as a major long-term opportunity for Nvidia, they note that the company’s business remains heavily dependent on demand for AI infrastructure and data-center computing.

Britain denied entry to U.S. political commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker by revoking their Electronic Travel Authorisations ahead of scheduled appearances in London and Oxford. Uygur claimed the decision was retaliation for his criticism of Israel and argued that British authorities labeled some of his comments antisemitic. A U.K. official told POLITICO that the decision was based on remarks assessed as antisemitic, while noting that both men could still apply for visas. The move follows other recent U.K. entry bans on foreign figures whose statements were deemed controversial or contrary to the public interest.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the European Union could help make a U.S.-Iran ceasefire more durable by contributing diplomatic expertise, nuclear monitoring experience, and maritime security capabilities. She argued that any temporary ceasefire should be followed by broader negotiations covering Iran’s nuclear program, missiles, and regional proxy groups. Kallas made the comments while visiting Pakistan, which has been involved in diplomatic efforts to extend the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. However, it remains unclear whether the United States would support a significant EU role in future talks, given tensions with European governments over their stance during the conflict.

A dispute has emerged in Compton over Measure CPT, a $360 million school bond that would fund the replacement of the aging Dominguez High School. Dr. Dre has publicly endorsed the measure, arguing that it would improve school facilities and invest in the future of Compton’s students. Confusion arose when a campaign mailer from Citizens for Waters, a committee associated with Rep. Maxine Waters, urged voters to reject the measure, surprising local education leaders and community members. Waters has not publicly explained the recommendation, and the disagreement has become a major issue ahead of the local vote.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Problem With Platner, Bill Kristol, Mark Hertling and Jim Swift, June 1, 2026. In fetishizing ‘outsiders,’ Democrats are getting used to excusing bad behavior. We’ve seen this movie before. Donald Trump wants to know: When are you people going to shut up with your “opinions” about the “quality” of his Iran deal and just let him cook?

“Don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever,” the president fumed on Truth Social shortly after 1 a.m. this morning. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end - It always does!” Happy Monday.

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

New York Times, Losing Trust in Justice Dept., Judges Call Out Its Lawyers’ Behavior, Mattathias Schwartz,.June 1, 2026. The federal courts have long assumed that the government’s lawyers are trustworthy. Now judges across the country are criticizing their lack of candor.

In late April, a lawyer for the Justice Department told a federal judge that her colleagues had been in the midst of negotiations with a Rhode Island hospital about turning over gender-transition treatment health records, only for the hospital’s lawyers to stop responding.

But Judge Mary S. McElroy of Federal District Court in Rhode Island concluded that was not true. While the government claimed it had not heard from the hospital since February, emails showed the hospital’s lawyers had stayed in close touch. v

In a scathing ruling on May 14, Judge McElroy called the government’s account “misleading, if not utterly false.” At issue in Judge McElroy’s view was the “awesome power” wielded by government lawyers and the trust that they will “play fair and be honest” with courts.

The Justice Department “has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case,” she wrote.

The opinion was one of several heated rulings from federal judges in recent weeks castigating the government’s lawyers for withholding information and making assertions that turned out to be at odds with the facts.

A judge in Chicago said transcripts of grand jury proceedings had been redacted to hide misconduct by her district’s U.S. attorney’s office. Another judge in Rhode Island referred an assistant U.S. attorney for potential discipline after he admitted that he had knowingly withheld information from the court.

Like the one involving the Rhode Island hospital, the complaints have come as administration lawyers seek to defend major parts of President Trump’s agenda.

The government lawyers whose honesty the judges have called into question are a mix of career civil servants, political appointees and newcomers brought in as the Justice Department makes a public hiring push to fill its depleted ranks. Their missteps in court come as the department’s leadership takes an unusually combative tone with judges who rule against them, and department lawyers try to balance judges’ demands against the often stubborn posture of the executive-branch clients they represent.

But regardless, an increasing number of judges appear to be questioning the longtime assumption that Justice Department lawyers can be taken at their word, part of the “presumption of regularity” that experts say allows federal courts to operate swiftly and smoothly.

In a statement, a Justice Department spokeswoman disputed that lawyers were coming up short on ethics. “Any attack on the professionalism or integrity of D.O.J. attorneys is outrageous and unjustified,” said the spokeswoman, Natalie Baldassarre. “The department will continue to vigorously advance and defend President Trump’s agenda in federal court with the utmost respect for the institution and rule of law.”Editors’ PicksBy September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in DyingWallpaper Without the WorkJill Biden’s New Memoir Shows Off a Sharp Eye, if Not a Sharp Elbow

By giving voice to their lack of trust, the judges are heralding major risk to a legal order that has been in place since Watergate. Codified in a Justice Department reference text called the Justice Manual, the basic idea is that department lawyers should be held to a higher standard because they carry with them the reputation of the entire executive branch. Before her death in 2019, Judge Patricia Wald described her expectations of the Justice Department as the “five C’s”: competence, credibility, civility, consistency and candor.

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Said to Be Backing Off Plans for $1.8 Billion Fund After Backlash, Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett and Annie Karn, June 1, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

President Trump is backing off his plan to establish a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of unfair prosecution by the government, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

The people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president’s thinking, said he had been leaning for days toward scrapping the fund, which critics have characterized as a scheme to reward Mr. Trump’s political allies with public benefits.

The administration signaled a retreat on Monday, when the Justice Department said in a statement that it would abide by a federal judge’s temporary order not to proceed with any steps to activate the fund until at least June 12, when a hearing on the fund is scheduled. The department said the administration disagreed with the decision but did not make clear whether it intended to fight the issue further in court.

It was unclear whether getting rid of the fund would affect another part of the legal settlement in the case, which provides Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses with significant immunity from audits.

Still, some administration officials privately expressed relief that the judge’s ruling showed a way out of what most had seen as a mess of the Trump team’s own making. But as with all things involving Mr. Trump, he could still decide to reverse course, especially as he tracks media coverage of his decision.

The decision by Mr. Trump to back down — at least for now — comes after rare pushback from members of his own party, who normally fall in line behind him. Some Republicans on Monday were looking for assurances that the president would actually follow through with killing off the fund, which likely would have distributed huge sums to Mr. Trump’s allies.

The White House referred to the Justice Department’s statement that it would abide by the temporary order.

The fund emerged as part of a deal the Justice Department brokered over Mr. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

Beyond the legal challenges, Mr. Trump has also faced increasing pressure from both parties on Capitol Hill to torpedo the fund. It was so appalling to Senate Republicans that last month they abruptly abandoned their plans to take up a filibuster-proof bill to fund the president’s immigration crackdown rather than advance Mr. Trump’s personal agenda and take what would have been a politically toxic vote.

Democracy Docket, Election denier Tina Peters freed from prison, immediately tells Steve Bannon: ‘Democrats are going to cheat,’ Matt Cohen, June 1, 2026. Moments after Tina Peters, shown above in an AP photo, was released from prison Monday, the former Colorado GOP election clerk appeared on a far-right podcast where she continued to espouse false election conspiracy theories.

Peters, who was convicted for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, appeared as a guest on the podcast of former Trump senior advisor Steve Bannon, where she baselessly claimed Democrats rigged voting machines to flip votes.

“I see these elections that are taking place in real time: The Mamdanis, the Virginia governor, Spanberger, and then what’s going on in California and Texas and Maine — just all over the country,” Peters said. “And I know that the Democrats are going to cheat, and no one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for, and that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped.”

Peters was convicted in 2024 after prosecutors showed she facilitated unauthorized access to Mesa County voting equipment and helped expose sensitive system data, actions driven by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. A jury found Peters guilty on multiple counts, and she was sentenced to nine years in prison by a judge who called her a “charlatan” who peddled “snake oil” and said she showed no remorse for her actions.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted Peters’ sentence last month, after months of pressure from President Donald Trump, MAGA fanatics, and election deniers.

New York Times, Pentagon Bars Reporters From Its Press Office, Greg Jaffe, June 1, 2026. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly curtailed journalists’ access in the Pentagon.

The Defense Department has designated its press office as a classified space, off limits to journalists, further restricting interactions between its public-facing representatives and the reporters assigned to cover the military.

The move, confirmed by the department’s acting press secretary, follows a change in policy from earlier this year that required journalists to have an official escort at all times when visiting the Pentagon.

The New York Times sued the Defense Department last month in Federal District Court in Washington over the escort requirements, accusing the Pentagon of violating the First Amendment.

For decades, reporters assigned to cover the Pentagon were granted press passes that gave them wide access to the building’s corridors and its press offices and enabled them to interact daily with the department’s spokespeople.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has repeatedly curtailed journalists’ access within the Pentagon. He initially imposed an escort requirement for certain Pentagon corridors before expanding it to the entire building.

The move to designate the press office a classified space followed a decision by the Pentagon’s leadership to move speechwriters into the area, said Joel Valdez, the acting press secretary. The new Pentagon policy was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

“These speechwriters routinely handle classified material,” Mr. Valdez said in a statement. “Access to the office of the assistant to the secretary of war for public affairs and to the press secretary remains available by appointment only.” The Department of War is the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Defense Department, whose name can be officially changed only by Congress.

In October, the department imposed a comprehensive set of restrictions that let it designate journalists as “security risks” and revoke their press passes.

Late last year, The Times sued the Pentagon on the grounds that the policy violated the First and Fifth Amendment rights of its journalists. In March a federal judge ruled in favor of The Times, tossing out the October policy.

The Pentagon responded with a new “interim” policy that mandated escorts inside the building and closed the work space, known as Correspondents’ Corridor, where reporters from major news organizations long had designated desks.

In April, a divided three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allowed the escort requirement to remain in place while the Trump administration appealed the earlier ruling.

In its latest lawsuit, filed in May, The Times said that the interim policy was “patently retaliatory” and that the escort requirement rendered the press passes of Times journalists “essentially worthless.”

The new policy, restricting access to the press office by declaring it a classified space, further limits the ability of reporters to talk to the civilians and officers whom the Pentagon has assigned to interact with the news media.

New York Times, Ex-F.B.I. Officials Form New Group for Embattled Employees, Devlin Barrett, June 1, 2026. The F.B.I. Support Network offers legal, mental health and job search services to current agency employees. Its founders say the work force is incredibly strained under Kash Patel.

Former F.B.I. officials are starting a group to help embattled bureau employees grapple with the Trump administration’s rapid efforts to reshape its agency, saying that the work force is under incredible strain under its director, Kash Patel.

The group, called the F.B.I. Support Network, is an offshoot of the Justice Connection organization, made up of former Justice Department employees who offer legal, mental health or job search services to current agency employees.

The former agents, analysts and executives behind the network said they formed it because F.B.I. agents, analysts and support staff need assistance from people who understand the unique aspects of the bureau’s work culture and employment rules.

“There’s an incredible amount of tension inside the agency right now,” said Michael Mason, a former senior executive in the bureau. “We want our colleagues who are still in the service of the F.B.I. to know there are people out here who recognize what is happening. People are being fired without any due process as the Justice Department is being weaponized in a way that is totally unfamiliar to those of us who served long and distinguished careers there.”

Among its members are Brian Driscoll, who briefly became the acting director of the bureau in early 2025 shortly after Mr. Trump took office, only to be fired in August after repeatedly clashing with the administration over its demands to fire agents who had worked on cases related to President Trump.

“It’s time for those of us who served our country with the F.B.I. to offer our assistance to the special agents, intelligence analysts and the professional staff who are under attack,” Mr. Driscoll said in a video announcing the new group. “Those facing these unprecedented times are not alone.”

Mr. Patel, left, has repeatedly denied firing agents for political reasons, insisting that the frequent terminations are meant to rid the bureau of people biased against the president and his allies. Such statements have led to angry confrontations in congressional hearings, with Democratic lawmakers accusing him of lying to Congress.

Michael Feinberg, a former counterintelligence agent, emphasized that the dismissals underscored how drastically the bureau had changed. “Law enforcement and national security work should be resolutely apolitical,” he said. “You investigate threats and prosecute criminals without fear or favor. Seeing that norm not just eroded but purposely destroyed is fundamentally changing the nature and culture of the F.B.I.”

Mr. Feinberg added that Mr. Patel’s denials only showed the shift in the bureau’s approach. There is now a “wide gulf between what the director says in public and in testimony before Congress, and what the work force sees happening to their colleagues on a daily basis,” he said. “I think the way a lot of employees feel right now is that at least some senior career executives have been willing to compromise with Kash Patel in those matters in an effort to secure their own employment. It’s difficult to articulate how much of a betrayal of the F.B.I. ethos this is.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Pogroms, American Style, Paul Krugman, right, June 1, 2026. The Trump administration’s attack on immigrants isn’t about rule of law, crime or jobs. It’s racism and sadism all the way down.

Migrant children in U.S. detention face physical, mental harms: report | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.

If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.

To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”

As the article explains,

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.

According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,

has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee

So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:

Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.

So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?

Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.

We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.

Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.

According to one detainee, a guard told him that

It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.

Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurate description of what’s happening.

And the campaign of harassment and terror against immigrants is working. ICE doesn’t have to be able to find and arrest every immigrant to make life in the United States impossible to endure, just as Iran doesn’t have to be able to target every oil tanker to make passage of the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to try. Net immigration into the United States has probably turned negative — that is, more people are leaving the country than entering.

The Trump administration is pleased. In March it issued a press release hailing Census estimates that show plunging net immigration across U.S. metro areas.

There were two notable features of the release’s triumphalism. First, it hailed falling immigration in general — nothing about distinguishing between legal and illegal entry to the United States. Second, it said nothing — nothing at all — about why falling immigration should be considered a good thing.

The truth is that none of the claims made by anti-immigration hardliners about the benefits of driving the foreign-born away has survived contact with reality.

The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began:

And the idea that immigrants are, as a group, especially crime-prone, has been extensively debunked. Notably, cities like New York that have huge immigrant populations also have very low crime rates by historical standards.

It’s important to realize that the pogroms, aside from objectively failing to help native-born Americans, aren’t popular. Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration, which was positive when he took office, is now deep in negative territory.

And the American people are, in general, much more benign in their views about immigrants than the likes of Stephen Miller. On one side, we have the Trump administration trying to deny child care to children of all immigrants. On the other, according to Gallup, 78 percent of adults believe that people who immigrated illegally should nonetheless have a chance to become U.S. citizens — and 85 percent support offering that chance to children brought in illegally by their parents.

So what is all of this about? A lot of it is racism. The Trump administration has essentially ended refugee admissions to the United States, with only one exception, for whom refugees quotas have been hugely expanded and backed by federal aid to immigrants: white South Africans. Need we say more?

And one final observation: The atrocities being perpetrated by ICE — atrocities that are almost surely far bigger and worse than we know about — are in part instrumental, a way to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. But is there any real doubt that mistreating and terrorizing people, especially people of color, is for some MAGA types a goal in itself — something they always wanted license to do?

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a justly famous essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. And what does it say about us as a nation if we accept this?

Too angry for a musical coda today

The Contrarian, Opinion: ‘Paradise’ Lost, Jennifer Rubin, right, June 1, 2026. The hellscape of Trump 2.0.

Donald Trump’s most unctuous and depraved courtier, Stephen Miller, last week insisted, “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.” To paraphrase Mary McCarthy (not Dorothy Parker, to whom the quote is frequently misattributed), every word he speaks is a lie, including “and” and “the.” “The American people” overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump’s performance because they know they are not getting “paradise,” let alone “extraordinary paradise.” (Is there such a thing as mediocre paradise?) Trump’s overall approval has dropped in many polls to the mid-30’s. On inflation, Trump’s polling is the worst of any president ever. Trump’s results are truly “extraordinary” because he has managed to create broad consensus in a sharply divided country that his performance, especially on the economy, is horrible.

Trump’s dismal poll numbers, if they follow the deteriorating economic environment, may get even worse. “A measure of inflation closely watched by the Federal Reserve accelerated in April to a three-year high, reinforcing the central bank’s budding support to consider raising interest rates if price pressures do not ease,” the New York Times reported last week. “The Personal Consumption Expenditures index rose 3.8 percent from the same time last year. It was the fastest annual pace since May 2023, when the Fed was in the midst of raising rates to tame a burst of inflation that had emerged in the wake of the pandemic.” With numbers like that, not even Trump “sock puppet” Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is going to push through rate cuts anytime soon.

Trump says the economy is “hot.” Maybe a hot mess. “The U.S. economy grew more slowly during the first three months of the year,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. “Gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the U.S., rose at a 1.6% seasonally and inflation-adjusted annual rate in January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday.”

Americans accurately perceive that they are falling behind. Simply put, inflation is outpacing wages. “From April 2025 to April 2026, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.3 percent, seasonally adjusted,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month. This amounts to genuine hardship for many American families, as a new Brookings Institution study just reported. Since many families cannot readily control significant parts of their budget (e.g., housing, childcare), “closing that gap between essentials and income has meant skipped meals, increased debt and delayed medical care.”Subscribed

Two data points illustrate Americans’ struggle to make ends meet.

First, with wages lagging inflation, Americans are increasingly relying on credit card debt. “In the first quarter of this year, the percentage of credit-card balances that were at least 90 days delinquent rose to 13.12%, according to data released in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “That’s the highest level in 15 years, and the most since the period following the 2008 financial crisis.” With families stretched to the breaking point, future household purchases will need to decline to manage families’ debt load.

Second, the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment plunged to the lowest level since 1978. As Market Watch explained:

Sentiment was worse in May than at any point during the 2020-21 coronavirus pandemic. It was also worse than at any point during the financial crisis of 2008-09. And it was even worse than at any point during the tumultuous period of 1980-82, when the U.S. suffered two recessions, 11% inflation and 18% mortgage rates.

Moreover, economic pain is not felt evenly. The New York Fed reports that inflation has hit lower- and middle-class families — who spend a greater share on essentials like food and housing — hardest. As a result, food insecurity, aggravated by cuts to SNAP, has increased. “Households have struggled with the expiration of pandemic-era [food] aid … [R]ecently, President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ tightened the work requirements for SNAP benefits.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently found that in 12 states, 700,000 fewer children are receiving SNAP food; “nearly half of the 1.6-million-person decline among people of all ages in those states.” The MAGA agenda’s war on families has taken its toll:

The new law’s cost shift has led states to take steps that are making it harder for eligible people to receive SNAP, including families with children. Losing SNAP also makes it harder for low-income children to qualify for other food assistance, such as WIC and free school meals — jeopardizing the short- and long-term health, education, and economic benefits of nutrition programs for our children and society.

All this may seem like “paradise” to Stephen Miller and Trump’s other lickspittles, but Americans who are falling behind, burning through savings, relying on credit card debt, and deciding whether to skip meals or a doctor’s visit likely perceive this as amounting to economic hell.

Some people certainly do think Trump has delivered “paradise.” The Jan. 6 violent insurrections, already pardoned, are thrilled about Trump’s $1.8B taxpayer-financed slush fund (although two federal judges have stepped in to block the outrageous scheme). Vulcan Elements, in which Donald Trump Jr. invested, got a sweetheart $620M loan after intervention by Peter Navarro. (This would make Hunter Biden blush.) And Trump has been a godsend for private prisons that make a fortune exploiting ICE detainees and for no-bid contractors who get to work on Trump’s vanity projects.

In addition, Trump’s reign must seem like paradise to the additional 10,000 White South African “refugees” who benefit from the immigration cap raised exclusively for them. (Since October, the Trump regime has allowed in thousands of Afrikaners but only 3 nonwhite Afghan refugees — a minuscule share of those who risked their lives to aid U.S. troops.)

Trump regime certainly has delivered paradise for the hodgepodge of donors, supporters, and hangers-on ranging from crypto kings to convicted fraudsters to Middle East sheiks to Big Oil. Collectively, they have reaped rewards including: “Cabinet and executive branch positions, ambassadorships, pardons and commutations, dropped investigations or enforcement actions, corporate-friendly policies and perks, and even foreign policy actions.”

Finally, the MAGA era has been heaven on earth for sundry sexual abusers: men identified in the Epstein files who remain shielded from accountability, hordes of accused harassers, and sex predator Adam Dean Hoffman, who got out of jail with a slap on the wrist, thanks to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In short, the “American people” who think Trump is delivering paradise are the super-rich (who have gotten richer with more tax cuts); pardoned (and rewarded!) felons; white supremacists (who welcomed thousands of Afrikaners, received affirmed action for mediocrities and incompetents, and gained power from MAGA justices’ rollback of voting rights); presidential relatives and cronies; decrepit autocrats; and incompetent media lackeys.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are worse off under Trump’s corrupt authoritarian rule. Fortunately, they will have the chance in November to let Trump and Republicans know this is not their idea of paradise.

New York Times, Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List, Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly, June 1, 2026. The defense secretary’s decision to block the officers’ promotions appears driven by his anti-diversity stance rather than based on merit.

In a move that disproportionately targets women and minority officers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers who had been selected by a board of senior Navy admirals.

The net result of Mr. Hegseth’s intervention is a slate of 22 nominees to be one-star admirals that bears little resemblance to the broader force these officers will help lead.

At least two of the officers removed by Mr. Hegseth from the promotion list are women and two are Black men. An additional three are white men.

Mr. Hegseth’s actions, which appear to violate the rules governing a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, were described by four current and former defense officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

No female officers were included on the new one-star list, which was released publicly in late May, despite the fact that women make up about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. The list appears to include only two nonwhite officers, even though sailors who identify as racial minorities make up about 38 percent of the active-duty Navy.

Mr. Hegseth’s removal of the officers from the one-star list is highly unusual, said the current and former defense officials. According to Pentagon rules, the defense secretary is only supposed to pull officers from the list for moral, mental, physical or professional failings that raise questions about the officers’ fitness to lead.

Mr. Hegseth’s actions are the latest in a series of firings and personnel interventions that seem to be driven by his anti-diversity politics rather than the officers’ performance. Taken together, they could reshape the military’s top ranks for years to come.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to say why Mr. Hegseth pulled the officers off the Navy one-star list. “Military promotions are given to those who have earned them,” Mr. Parnell said. “The department will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions.” The Navy declined to comment.

Politico, Anti-Trump group can keep flying ‘86-47’ flag near National Mall, judge rules, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, June 1, 2026.U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss says the banner can’t plausibly be read to threaten violence against President Donald Trump.

A federal judge has ordered the National Park Service not to interfere with a liberal organization’s display of an “86-47” flag at its ongoing demonstration near the National Mall, rejecting the contention that the phrase was meant as a coded call for violence against President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued a two-week restraining order Monday at the request of Accountability Now USA, which has been protesting Trump for months at a site in front of the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue.

Moss concluded that the group intended to advocate for Trump’s removal from office via impeachment, and that “86” is not an unambiguous call to political violence — and certainly not the kind of “imminent” violence that would be necessary to justify restrictions on speech.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole. But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out,’” Moss wrote.

The Obama-appointed judge appended a Merriam-Webster definition of the term “eighty-six,” which defines it as a 1930s soda-counter slang meaning “to throw out “ or ”to get rid of.”

The ruling doesn’t mention the recent criminal case brought against former FBI director James Comey, accusing him of threatening Trump’s life last year with an Instagram post of a seashell arrangement on a North Carolina beach that depicted the “8647” phrase. But Moss’ determination underscores questions about the genesis of the charges against Comey, who took down the post and apologized and has repeatedly denied that the expression was meant to provoke violence against Trump.

An attorney for Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the decision.

Moss’ ruling doesn’t rule out the possibility that use of “86-47” could be viewed as a threat in some context, and he notes that Merriam-Webster’s discussion of “eighty-six” does mention it is sometimes used to refer to killing someone, although the editors declined to adopt that meaning “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

According to court filings, Secret Service agents visited the protest on May 12 and briefly spoke with some people who were participating, who said they wanted Trump out of office but wished him no physical harm.

Justice Department attorneys said the flag became more ominous in the wake of the May 24 incident near the White House, where an armed man was shot dead by law enforcement.

Accountability Now USA first ran into trouble with the Park Service in April over signs critical of Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, including one sign that said, “Trump raped little girls.”

Trump has acknowledged that he knew Epstein but has said he broke off ties with him before he came under scrutiny by law enforcement. The federal government’s files on Epstein contain a smattering of allegations against Trump, but authorities have said they were deemed not credible. Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein’s crimes.

A Park Service official emailed the protest group in April, alleging that its signs contained “obscenity” not protected by the First Amendment and that the organization could face “further steps” if the signs were not removed.

The group took the signs down temporarily before suing, Moss said. His opinion issued Monday does not analyze whether the signs meet the legal definition of obscenity.Watch: The Conversation27:02Audience questions, special cameos & behind-the-scenes stories with Dasha Burns

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Spinmeisters Pretend Mike Johnson Is a Judge, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 1, 2025. There are two orders pending regarding Trump’s Terrorist Slush Fund.

The more dangerous one, for people like Stan Woodward and Boris Epshteyn, is Judge Kathleen Williams’ order that DOJ respond to the allegations from a bunch of judges that Trump’s personal lawyers and Trump’s other personal lawyers at DOJ entered into a collusive settlement.

Accordingly, it is ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that Plaintiffs shall file a response to the Motion (DE 63) on or before June 12, 2026, detailing their position on the matters set forth in the Motion, including (1) the charges of collusion and whether the Parties are truly adverse; (2) the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties; and (3) the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the “victim of a fraud.” (DE 63 at 13, citing 11 Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 2870 (3d ed.)).

Another one, from Judge Leonie Brinkema, enjoins the government from funding the Terrorist Slush Fund before she has had a chance to rule on it.

Because full briefing of the issue will enhance the ability of the Court to make a sound decision. plaintiffs’ Expedited Motion, [Dkt. No. 30], is DENIED and defendants’ request for additional time is GRANTED; however, to ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the AntiWeaponization Fund (hereinafter, “Fund”) while plaintiffs’ Motion is pending, it is hereby ORDERED that defendants be and are ENJOINED from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund;1

1 It is important that the status quo be maintained until plaintiffs’ pending Motion has been resolved, especially as plaintiffs allege in their Expedited Motion that defense counsel “was unable … to provide assurances of how long [the] status quo would last” and declined plaintiffs’ “request that the government commit to not transferring money to the Fund or processing or paying claims until at least June 19 to allow for less compressed briefing in this case.” [Dkt. No. 30] at 2-3.

Neither order tells the government that they can’t set up a Terrorist Slush Fund (though Williams could find that Woodward and Epshteyn engaged in fraud by even attempting to do so).

Nevertheless, Trump’s minions got Marc Caputo and Jake Sherman to claim that the judges’ rulings were the reason Trump decided to halt, “for now,” the Terrorist Slush Fund.

What they’re saying: “We’re planning to respect the courts,” one of the administration officials said.

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

Sherman’s credulity is especially galling, given that he reported that Mike Johnson had warned Trump against proceeding with the fund shortly before this announcement and the Tweet from DOJ claiming to abide by Brinkema’s — but not Williams’ — order misrepresents the temporary nature of Brinkema’s order.

Here is the statement from DOJ. They disagree with the ruling, but “will abide” by it. I think Rs are still gonna want something in reconciliation to make sure that admin doesn’t do this in the future.

The only “judge” that Trump is obeying is [House Speaker] Mike Johnson, right, who told Trump that reconciliation was dead unless he dropped the fund.

And people like Stan Woodward will presumably use the credulity of Caputo and Sherman to attempt to moot Williams’ order. And once Trump has his brownshirts funded for the next several years, he’ll revert back to paying off terrorists, as an update to Caputo’s post describes he might do.

Reality check: Nothing is certain in the Trump administration until it’s officially announced or the president says it himself.

“The plan right now is to halt it. But the president likes the fund, he believes in it. So nothing is final until it’s final,” one of the sources said.

This is spin. And nevertheless Trump’s minions have found the people who’ll report it like they want.

Update: Reese Gorman describes that Mike Johnson’s meeting is what killed the fund: House Speaker Mike Johnson raised issues with the fund directly with Trump in a White House meeting, a source told NOTUS. It was this conversation that effectively killed the fund, a separate source said.

The Pugilist, Investigative Commentary: The US Attorney for New Mexico Who Wrongly Prosecuted a Taiwanese Scientist for Espionage — but Ignored a Pedophile Who Was Probably a Spy for Israel, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, right, June 1, 2026. John J. Kelly had Q clearance, seven years as New Mexico's top federal prosecutor, and multiple victim reports from Zorro Ranch. He acted on none of them.

Readers of The Pugilist already know what the national press has largely ignored: Jeffrey Epstein was not a financier. He was, in the words of security consultant Gavin de Becker — a man who has advised presidents and intelligence agencies — “a construct.” A funded fiction. The structure beneath that fiction, as this publication has documented across months of reporting, ran directly through New Mexico’s nuclear weapons infrastructure: through Robert Maxwell’s sale of backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos, through Ghislaine Maxwell’s placement on the Santa Fe Institute board and her introduction of Epstein to the Los Alamos founding scientists, through the military-grade microwave communications system Epstein built in 2016 pointing from Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest Tower.

If you’re new here, that’s the foundation. This piece is about the man who was supposed to be watching but looked the other way.The U.S. Attorney

John J. Kelly became U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico in December 1993 — nine months after he had personally served as Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney-in-fact, signing the closing documents on the Zorro Ranch purchase and filing the transmittal letter to the New Mexico State Land Office on Epstein’s behalf. Those documents — SDNY_GM_00173766, SDNY_GM_00173767, and the Hinkle Cox firm letter of March 15, 1993 — are in the federal Epstein files and were first reported by this publication.

Kelly held that office for seven years. His jurisdiction covered Zorro Ranch and, critically, both Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. His CV, filed with the City of Albuquerque — where he is, as we speak, a mayoral appointee to the city’s Ethics Board — confirms Kelly held Top Secret and Q security clearances from the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy, and was specifically tasked with investigating the unauthorized removal and possession of classified information at the national laboratories.

The federal guardian of America’s nuclear secrets in New Mexico was the same man who had, months before taking that job, been Jeffrey Epstein’s personal legal representative.

And nobody in power in New Mexico seems to think this is a big deal.What His Office Did Not Do

No investigation of Zorro Ranch was ever opened during Kelly’s seven-year tenure. The documented record of what his office chose not to act on is not limited to the single report to the FBI from Maria Farmer (shown at right as a teen) about her sister Annie, though that is what Kelly has told the local media (and they, true to form, accepted this at face value.)

Federal files contain another report, this one from a man who states that in December 1993 — Kelly’s first month as U.S. Attorney — he was taken to Zorro Ranch, drugged, and sexually assaulted. Yet another report comes from a witness identified in federal proceedings only as “Jane,” who testified that Epstein began abusing her at age 14 and transported her to New Mexico, her abuse dating to the mid-1990s, when Kelly was New Mexico’s United States Attorney. In 1996, Annie Farmer, then 16 years old, told the FBI she had been sexually abused at Zorro Ranch by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. A federal lawsuit filed by twelve Epstein victims against the FBI alleges the Bureau received reports, complaints, and tips concerning Epstein’s trafficking of women and minors continuously from 1996 through 2006 — the first four years of that window falling entirely within Kelly’s tenure.

Annie Farmer is the best-documented of these accounts. She testified about it at Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal trial, naming both Epstein and Maxwell, and her account is in the public record by name. But she was not the only person whose account reached federal law enforcement during Kelly’s years in office. You wouldn’t know this to read local media reports about Kelly and Epstein, however.

Kelly’s office did nothing about Epstein. Not in 1993, when the first reported assault occurred in his first month. Not in 1996, when Farmer’s report was filed. Not in 1997, 1998, 1999, or 2000, when Kelly left office and joined Modrall Sperling, one of New Mexico’s most politically connected law firms, before running for Congress with Bill Clinton, whose name appears in the files, appearing at his fundraiser to speak about their Georgetown friendship.

For seven years, not one of those reports produced a federal investigation of the ranch in New Mexico, under the federal watch of John J. Kelly.

He remains one of the most powerful and politically connected men in the state.What He Did Do? Ruin Wen Ho Lee’s Life.

Here is what Kelly’s office was capable of doing, when it chose to act.

In December 1999, near the end of his tenure, Kelly stood before cameras and announced the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee — a Taiwanese-American nuclear physicist at Los Alamos accused of downloading classified weapons design data onto portable tapes. Kelly declared that Lee had “denied the United States its exclusive dominion and control over some of this nation’s most sensitive nuclear secrets.” He prosecuted Lee on 59 counts, the most serious carrying potential life sentences under the Atomic Energy Act. More than 60 FBI agents were assigned. More than 1,000 interviews were conducted. Lee was held in solitary confinement for 278 days.

The case collapsed.

Investigators could not prove Lee had passed anything to anyone. The government dropped 58 of 59 counts. Lee pleaded guilty to a single mishandling charge and was sentenced to time served. Judge James Parker issued a formal rebuke from the bench, stating he had been “led astray” by the Department of Justice, the FBI, and specifically “its United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico.” The judge said the government had “embarrassed our entire nation.” He apologized to Wen Ho Lee directly.

Lee was never charged with espionage. He was a Taiwanese-American scientist. He was not Jeffrey Epstein, who by all accounts actually was a spy, and a spy who used a child sex trafficking ring to smuggle nuclear secrets to Israel.

The contrast is not subtle and it is not accidental. Kelly’s office mobilized the entire machinery of federal prosecution — 60 agents, 1,000 interviews, life-sentence exposure, months of solitary confinement — against a man accused of mishandling nuclear data from Los Alamos. During those same years, reports of rape and sexual abuse at a ranch thirty miles from those same laboratories accumulated in federal files and produced nothing. Not a phone call. Not a file opened. Not one interview. Had Kelly’s office investigated, they would have found the spy they tried to create out of We Ho Lee.

There is one more layer. The Wen Ho Lee prosecution framed the Los Alamos security breach publicly as a Chinese espionage problem — generating enormous press coverage about Chinese intelligence penetrating America’s nuclear secrets. What it did not address, and what Kelly’s office never addressed, was the Israeli intelligence penetration of those same laboratories that this publication has previously documented: Robert Maxwell’s sale of backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia and Los Alamos, the FBI counterintelligence investigation into Maxwell’s activities that was shut down, and the social and physical network Maxwell’s daughter had built — through the Santa Fe Institute, through Epstein’s dinner parties with Los Alamos founding scientists, through the ranch itself — that gave an intelligence operation sustained access to the people who built American nuclear weapons. That operation ran thirty miles from Albuquerque for the entirety of Kelly’s tenure and was never examined by his office.

Instead, Kelly’s close friends and associates, people like Herb and Diane Denish, benefitted financially from Epstein’s criminal intelligence and finance network, as Kelly looked the other way.What He Said

When Albuquerque’s KOAT Target 7 asked Kelly in February 2024 about his appearance in Epstein’s personal black book — which contains not just a work number but his home address and his wife’s direct phone line — Kelly declined an on-camera interview. (In fact, we could not find a single photo of him anywhere in the public domain, which is odd for a man who ran for congress and has held such powerful positions. It suggests he keeps his public profile tightly scrubbed.) He stated he had met Epstein exactly once, at a meeting arranged by Governor Bruce King, at which Epstein expressed interest in buying land.

“I have no clue,” Kelly said of why he appeared in the black book. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein.”

Epstein had died in federal custody in 2019, so asking him was obviously never going to happen — and answering in this manner was not just glib, it was glib and slick as snot.

The documents in the federal Epstein files directly contradict Kelly’s account. He did not meet Epstein once at a land deal. He was Epstein’s legal representative. He signed Epstein’s name. He filed paperwork on Epstein’s behalf with the State of New Mexico. In the eyes of the land records of this state, for the purpose of that transaction, Kelly was Epstein. He did not disclose any of this to KOAT.

Kelly has since told the city of Albuquerque’s spokesperson Dan Mayfield that he “never met” Epstein and “was never aware of any activities beyond the real estate transaction.” His signature is on the closing documents. The documents are in the federal files. They have been publicly available since their release. “Any insinuation that I did, or would have, condoned Mr. Epstein’s criminal conduct,” Kelly has said, “is categorically false.”

Kelly’s record of inaction against Epstein is not insinuation, however. It’s fact.Who Knows and Has Done Nothing

The documents establishing Kelly’s relationship with Epstein are in the publicly available federal Epstein files, bearing Kelly’s name and his signature. They were first reported by this publication. The Santa Fe New Mexican, the city of Albuquerque, Mayor Tim Keller’s office, and Representative Melanie Stansbury’s office have all now had occasion to reckon with what those documents show.

The New Mexican published a story whose headline centered Kelly’s denial and presented me and this publication as the only voices saying Kelly protected Epstein. The paper did not try to verify what has been written here, preferring instead to make the story one where I say one thing and Kelly says another. Mayfield, meanwhile, told the newspaper the city was “concerned” but accepted Kelly’s statement that the relationship was limited to a single real estate transaction — without apparent reference to the documents that contradict it. Keller’s office has not responded to this publication’s calls or emails at all. Stansbury’s office responded by email that she was unaware of the POA relationship and appreciated being informed. Then nothing changed. Kelly is still on the ethics board. And the state’s political and media elites continue to protect him, as he appears to have protected Epstein.

What none of these institutions appear to have done is look at the documents themselves. They have chosen, instead, to take Kelly’s word.

That’s how shit works in New Mexico.The Body That Could Act

Kelly currently sits on the Board of Ethics and Campaign Practices of the City of Albuquerque as a mayoral appointee of Tim Keller. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico, asked about whether Kelly’s office had reviewed the 1996 Farmer report, said it cannot “comment on the internal processes or deliberations that occur within our office” and possesses “incredibly limited insight as to whether a previous United States Attorney reviewed a particular law enforcement report three decades ago.”

Translation: We aren’t going to tell you, but also we don’t care because it happened a long time ago.

The New Mexico Truth Commission was created by the state legislature with subpoena power and a mandate to investigate exactly this history. Its initial report is due in July 2026. As of this writing, it has not publicly announced that it has contacted Kelly, requested his testimony, or subpoenaed his records. This publication has previously reported that the commission’s own procurement process for hiring legal counsel appears compromised, with documented PAC contributions from the winning firm’s connected PAC to the commission chairs who oversaw the selection.

John J. Kelly has a story to tell about Jeffrey Epstein, about Zorro Ranch, about what his office did and did not do with the reports that accumulated there over seven years, and about the nuclear secrets he was charged with protecting in the same years he was doing nothing about the intelligence construct operating thirty miles from the laboratories. But because New Mexico is New Mexico, he has not been asked to tell it under oath. And he probably never will be.

More On Iran, Lebanon Wars

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Iran Buys Chinese, Mark Hertling, right, June 1, 2026. NBC News reported this weekend that the American F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran on April 3 may have been hit by a Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile, known by its NATO nickname the “Flying Crossbow.” If that reporting is confirmed, it would mean that Chinese military technology played a direct role in the first shoot-down of an American combat airplane in decades. That is certainly newsworthy, but the missile itself is not the story. The story is how it got there.

The Flying Crossbow did not suddenly appear in Iranian hands. China’s military relationship with Iran dates to the earliest days of the Iran–Iraq War, when Beijing became one of Tehran’s most important sources of arms when many other nations were reluctant to sell to the newly installed revolutionary regime. Throughout the 1980s, China provided Iran with aircraft, armor, and missiles, eventually selling more than $2 billion worth of weapons while helping establish a long-term defense relationship that survived long after the war ended. In the decades that followed, that relationship expanded beyond simple arms sales to include missile technology, anti-ship cruise missiles, radar systems, drone components, electronics, manufacturing assistance, and increasingly sophisticated military cooperation. Recent intelligence reporting suggests China may have provided Iran with advanced radar capabilities.

These weapons transfers are only part of the equation. Modern military systems require training, on-site maintenance and logistics support, and even doctrine development. China and Iran have conducted military exercises because effective air-defense systems depend on operators who understand radar integration, target acquisition, command-and-control procedures, and electronic warfare techniques. Missiles become dangerous not simply because they are delivered, but because someone teaches others how to employ them effectively.

My father was a grocery salesman, representing companies that distributed quality food products. But I remember he always insisted that the product itself was only part of the sale. “People want to buy our product,” he would say. “But what seals the deal is the personality of the salesman.”

His point was simple. Customers tend to buy from people they trust. Anyone who has a favorite car dealer, real estate agent, hotel chain, or local business understands this instinctively. The relationship often matters as much as, or sometimes more, than the product.

The same principle applies in international arms sales. Countries do not simply buy weapons; they buy relationships. Every fighter aircraft, missile battery, radar system, and training program represents a long-term commitment between nations. The hardware matters, but the trust behind the hardware matters more.

For decades, nations purchased American equipment not only because it was often the best in the world, but because it came with a trusted relationship with the United States. Arms sales created partnerships, interoperability, intelligence sharing, training opportunities, and strategic alignment that frequently lasted for generations. The sales contributed to building strong alliances.

Today, many allies are beginning to question that reliability. European governments have watched repeated interruptions and political disputes over support to Ukraine while confronting the most serious security threat on the continent since the Cold War. Taiwan continues to express concern about delayed weapons deliveries, while Japan recently learned that delivery schedules for key capabilities, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, may be affected by American inventory shortages and competing priorities. Other allies have quietly raised similar concerns.

Whether those delays are justified is beside the point. It’s the perception that matters.

China understands this. Beijing does not need to outspend the United States to gain influence. It simply needs to appear more dependable. While Washington debates commitments and sends mixed signals, China continues offering weapons, technology, infrastructure investment, and security partnerships around the world. In many places, it is capitalizing on doubts about American reliability.

The Chinese-made “Flying Crossbow” that may have downed an American aircraft is certainly something that should concern us. The Chinese missile is the product, but the relationship that put it there is what really matters. The Chinese–Iranian relationship is not new, and it would be ill-advised to think China is not part of the global arms market. But the questions we should be asking are: Who else is buying Chinese weapons, and why?

My father understood that lesson decades ago in the grocery business. Nations are learning it today in the international security business. 

New York Times, How Lebanon’s Best Chance to Disarm Hezbollah Failed, Abdi Latif Dahir and Aaron Boxerman, June 1, 2026, Lebanon’s government has long wanted the powerful militia to give up its weapons. Before the Iran war began, there were signs of progress toward that goal.

Early this year, Lebanon’s leaders seemed to be edging toward one of their most elusive goals: disarming Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militia that has long operated as a state within a state.

That effort — tentative and incremental from the start — has now stalled.

After more than a year of largely holding its fire, despite Israeli strikes from across the border, Hezbollah re-emerged as a major combatant. In March, after the United States and Israel began the war with Iran, Hezbollah began cross-border attacks on Israel in solidarity with its patron, and it has killed several Israeli soldiers.

Now, Lebanon is trapped in a familiar position. Israel has intensified its military campaign against Hezbollah, making the group even less likely to disarm. And Lebanon’s government, wary of Hezbollah’s enduring strength and haunted by memories of civil war, has recoiled from the idea of forcibly seizing its arsenal, despite Western pressure to do so.

On Monday, the Israeli government announced plans to bombard the southern outskirts of Beirut, and Hezbollah claimed new attacks against Israeli soldiers and communities — reflecting how a cease-fire declared by the Trump administration in April increasingly exists only on paper.

With hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting and Israel occupying parts of southern Lebanon, many Lebanese worry that any strife between the government and Hezbollah would deepen the country’s turmoil and reopen old wounds.

“Any coercive or confrontational process from the army will be complicated because it would require a nonconsensual decision, which is very much against the grain of Lebanese politics,” said Heiko Wimmen, the project director for Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, a research organization.

Another obstacle is Iran itself.

Though battered by two wars with Israel and the United States in less than a year, Iran’s authoritarian clerical rulers remain firmly in charge. Analysts say Hezbollah is unlikely to relinquish its weapons unless Iran’s regional influence and ability to project power are meaningfully curtailed by the war.

“Lebanon will have to wait for change in Tehran before it can turn a page regarding Hezbollah’s defiance of the Lebanese national interest,” said Lina Khatib, a visiting scholar with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Opinion: The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained, David French, May 31, 2026. It’s the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we’re taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas

Consider what’s happening at home. Tariffs raise prices and restrain economic growth, while the federal government embraces both Gilded Age corruption and a version of the spoils system.

A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is “sometimes OK.”

And hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism on both the left and the right. Once again, ancient slanders are circulating through the culture.

Or consider what is happening abroad. Germany rearms to confront the Russian threat. Japan rearms to deter China. War rages in Europe and in the Middle East. Threats of territorial expansion haunt the world. Russia is trying to grab Ukraine. China continues to covet Taiwan. And the Trump administration, incredibly enough, has cast its expansionist eyes on Greenland.

When you step back and actually think about it, these trends are confounding. I mean, I can understand the temptation to return to some of the discredited ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas ravaged the world?

What is going on?

The answer lies in part in the interplay between two political sayings that are so oft-repeated that they have become clichés. When they should be top of mind, though, they seem to have lost their impact.

Here’s the first (and you can probably say it along with me), from George Santayana in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We can argue about the precise historical parallels, but the echoes of the past are everywhere.

Here’s the second, from Winston Churchill in 1947: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”

It is no coincidence that authoritarianism is once again appealing to people at a time when two things are happening at once. Liberal democracies are struggling to meet the needs of a substantial portion of their citizens, and entire generations have come of age with no living memory of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century. 

Politico, Will California elect another Democrat — or could Republicans pull off a stunning upset? Staff report, June 1, 2026. Our roundtable examines the candidates, the surprises and the paths to victory.Steve Hilton, Chad Bianco, Tom Steyer, Katie Porter and Xavier Becerra.

The field vying to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom may lack star power, but the race itself has delivered no shortage of plot twists.

After waiting in vain for a heavyweight candidate like former Vice President Kamala Harris or Sen. Alex Padilla, Democratic leaders began to panic over a nightmare scenario: so many Democrats splitting the vote that both leading Republicans, former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, could advance from the top-two primary on June 2 — raising the once-unthinkable prospect of a GOP governor in deep-blue California.

Then the race swerved again. Many Democrats had started lining up behind then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, a virtual unknown to Sacramento politics, before his campaign — and political career — imploded last month amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Suddenly, former Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra surged to the front of the Democratic pack after languishing in polls and fundraising. He’s now locked in an intense face-off with Tom Steyer, a billionaire running as a progressive populist who has poured some $200 million of his own fortune into the bid.

To make sense of it all, we convened a panel of California-based political reporters who have been breaking news and uncovering shifting dynamics in the race for many months. Melanie Mason, Jeremy B. White, Dustin Gardiner and Blake Jones talked through what surprised them the most, what to watch on Tuesday, and the latest possibility Sacramento is gaming out: two Democrats advancing to the general election.

Anyone who thought they understood the shape of this race a year ago was proven wrong. Kamala Harris and Alex Padilla stayed out, Katie Porter stumbled after some unflattering videos surfaced, and Eric Swalwell left the race following allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. What’s been the biggest surprise to each of you?

Jeremy White: I’ll go with how quickly Xavier Becerra moved into the frontrunner position after Eric Swalwell dropped out. Usually it takes some time for Sacramento consensus to translate into voter behavior, but in this case it happened almost immediately and without Becerra spending much money.

Dustin Gardiner: What Jeremy said is true. At the same time, I was baffled by how difficult it was for the political establishment in Sacramento or the Democratic Party to find a consensus candidate akin to the likes of Gavin Newsom or Jerry Brown. It’s not like they didn’t know this election was coming. But it seemed like there was little, if any, effort to coalesce the field until very late last year. And then, none of the folks who might have united the establishment wanted to run. So, now, Becerra is the least-offensive option.

Melanie Mason: I’ve been surprised at how reactive the state’s major political players have been in this race. There seemed to be a real paralysis among interest groups for much of the year — much of their decisions were guided by candidate viability (which turned out to be quite wrong!) versus a strong sense of what they were looking for in a governor. Since the state’s electorate does not really engage until quite late, that meant the vast majority of this race was stuck in a state of suspended animation.

Blake Jones: Becerra’s quick rise and Swalwell’s even faster fall were the biggest shocks of the campaign. But Katie Porter slipping out of the race’s top tier has been almost as surprising. A year ago, she looked like the frontrunner, and now, she’s mired in single digits of support.

There was a stretch when Democrats seriously feared getting locked out of the top two. Is that still a real possibility, Melanie and Jeremy, or does a Democratic runoff in November actually seem more likely?

White: It seems very remote now — in fact, the smarter money is on two Democrats making the runoff in Steyer and Becerra. Still unlikely, but likelier than a two-Republican finish that locks out Democrats. A sign of how topsy-turvy this race has been! 

New York Times, How California Redistricting Shrunk the Competitive Map, Jennifer Medina and Leo Dominguez, June 1, 2026. The state now has just four congressional districts considered safe for Republicans, and four seen as competitive. The rest of its 52 members of Congress are all but certain to be Democrats.

Back in 2010, California created something many good government advocates had encouraged and many political incumbents feared: a nonpartisan redistricting commission. The people appointed to the panel were charged with drawing political maps in a way that did not favor one party over the other, while still taking into account California’s complicated demographics and geography.

Then, last year, partisan redistricting wars ignited across the country. After Texas legislators redrew their state’s congressional districts to favor Republicans, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed for voters to approve a plan that would allow California Democrats to do the same. They did, by a wide margin.

As a result, there are just four competitive congressional districts in the state and just four seats considered safe for Republicans. The rest of the state’s 52 members of Congress are all but certain to be Democrats.

With California primary voters headed to the polls on Tuesday, here is a look at some of the more dramatic changes to the state’s congressional map.

New York Times, Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity? Ruth Graham and J. David Goodman, June 1, 2026. Jim Rigby, a pastor who rarely uses the word “God,” is a key to understanding the Senate candidate trying to pull off something unusual in Texas.

On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation to share what came to mind when he mentioned the Apostle Paul, the major Christian figure to whom 13 books in the Bible are attributed. They cheerfully complied:

“Villain!”

“Homophobic!”

“He’s a jerk.”

Paul’s attributed writings include passages seen as encouraging wives to submit to their husbands and instructing them to be quiet in church, and others condemning same-sex sexual behavior as sinful.

Mr. Rigby acknowledged the trouble. But in a sermon that also cited the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha, he nudged his congregation to reconsider the apostle, one of the most important in the early Christian church. “Aristotle and Plato, they were creeps, too, in modern times,” Mr. Rigby said. “But do we want to learn from our ancestors or not?”

One longtime member of St. Andrew’s was not there, although he had attended the previous weekend: James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate. Mr. Rigby, who has led St. Andrew’s since the 1980s and is a well-known activist locally, has suddenly become a key to understanding Mr. Talarico, a candidate who aims to be the first Democrat to win statewide office in Texas in a generation.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Talarico described Mr. Rigby and St. Andrew’s, along with his grandfather, who was the pastor of several Baptist churches in South Texas in the late 1960s, as “the biggest influences on me as a Christian, as a human being.” Mr. Rigby baptized Mr. Talarico as a toddler, and married his parents.

“He is my pastor in every sense of the word,” Mr. Talarico said of Mr. Rigby. “Not that we agree on everything.”

He added: “I think every Christian disagrees with their pastor. And the beautiful thing about Dr. Jim is that he welcomes and encourages that.”

At 37, Mr. Talarico has become one of the Democratic Party’s fastest-rising stars in part by talking about his identity as a Christian. Unlike some politicians who forge politically strategic relationships with faith leaders deep into their careers, Mr. Talarico has an authentic lifelong relationship with a local pastor, and speaks easily about his personal faith. 

Margaret Chase Smith sworn in as U.S. Senator representing Maine (Library of Congress photo).

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 31, 2026 [When A Senator Fought Oppression], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 1, 2026. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948 they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed on to the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.

On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

New York Times, As Democrats Worry About Senate Race, Platner Attacks Reports About Sexual Messages, Lisa Lerer, Tim Balk and Katie Glueck, June 1, 2026 (print ed.). Graham Platner, whose contest in Maine is a key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate, sought to discredit reports that he had exchanged sexual messages with women outside his marriage.

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, struck a defiant posture on Sunday in response to reports that he had sent sexual messages to women outside his marriage, accusing a former aide of false claims and news outlets of “journalistic malpractice.”

In his first public comments on the matter, Mr. Platner said “establishment media outlets” were focused on “gossip” instead of issues such as the shuttering of child care facilities, low wages for teachers and nurses and “the fact that everybody down here continues to work harder and longer and get less.”

He sought to discredit news reports about the messages. Asked by reporters whether they were true, he said: “No. This is the amazing part. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I’m sorry, that’s — that’s frankly journalistic malpractice. We pushed back on it.”

The Times report, which was published on Saturday, cited a current campaign official as well as a former one. Both said that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had told the former campaign official, Genevieve McDonald, soon after he began his bid, that he had exchanged sexual messages with multiple other women.

The current official, who was granted anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record, said on Sunday evening that Mr. Platner was not disputing that there had been discussions of sexual messages he had sent to other women while married, but rather the number of women involved.

The Times article quoted Ms. McDonald — a onetime state legislator who was the Platner campaign’s political director before leaving in October — who said that he had exchanged messages with as many as a dozen women. And it noted that the current campaign official had said Mr. Platner had been communicating with up to six women.

Mr. Platner said Ms. McDonald was not being truthful in her account. Ms. McDonald declined to comment. In a statement on Sunday evening, Mr. Platner addressed his marriage.

“Amy and I went through something hard — because of me. We did the work, and I’m grateful for her every hour of every day,” Mr. Platner said in the statement. “Our opponents want politics to be empty of content and empty of actual change — and beating that is exactly what our movement is about.”

Mr. Platner spent Sunday on the campaign trail in Portland, joining a rally in the morning, attending a canvass launch and appearing at a gathering of leaders in the immigrant community, according to his aides.

The Maine Senate seat is seen as a key to the Democrats’ hopes of winning control of the Senate. Mr. Platner is trying to unseat Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, in a state that President Trump lost by about seven percentage points in 2024. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is This Platner Scandal Different? Andrew Egger, right, June 1, 2026. Graham Platner, oysterman, veteran, and presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, has for months faced a steady drip of embarrassing stories about his personal life: from the Nazi-logo tattoo he got while a young meathead Marine to his post-service history of basically unhinged anonymous social-media posts.

Until recently, these stories didn’t seem to be landing with Maine voters, who had adopted a frame of Platner that accounted for those rougher edges. For them, Platner’s whole story was that he got older, wiser, and more politically engaged after struggling mightily with post-war disillusionment. The young dumb soldier simply wasn’t the same person as the one they now supported politically.

But now comes a Platner scandal that threatens to upset that accommodation. This weekend, multiple outlets reported on Platner’s recent turn as an extramarital sexter. When Platner launched his bid for Senate last year, his wife Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023, told a top campaign aide about a possible skeleton in his closet: She had found explicit texts with a number of other women on his phone in early 2025.

Platner has pushed back on the story—attacking “gossip” from “establishment media outlets” and trying to spin the real villain as the ex-staffer who leaked it. But he hasn’t denied the texts. In fact, he and Gertner have both acknowledged them, saying they worked through the issue in marriage counseling.

That may be enough to survive politically. But I, for one, am not so sure. This story is different from the others: Platner running around on his wife while in his late 30s can’t be written off as a youthful idiocy he later grew out of. And the attempt to redirect the story is silly: Infidelity is bad, speaks poorly of your judgment and character, and is the sort of thing that has caused problems for politicians who get caught doing it from time immemorial. Susan Collins was born, it seems, under a lucky star.

For a certain type of anti-anti-Trump conservative commentator, Platner has long been a favorite conversation piece. Chronically grumpy over all the nonsense Trump makes them swallow, they’ve leapt at the opportunity to use Platner to press the same critiques they regularly receive against their Democratic critics: Look who’s eager to overlook character defects in their candidate NOW!

But to me, the closest cross-party parallel for Platner isn’t Trump. It’s some of the Republican candidates that cropped up in the years preceding Trump’s rise, when anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican base had already hit a fever pitch but before Trump came along as its perfect vessel.

During the Obama years, Republicans were in many ways psychologically where Democrats are now: Licking their wounds after incredibly painful electoral losses, seething with rage at what they saw as out-of-touch party leaders, ready to fall in love with pretty much anyone who was willing to reflect that rage back at them.¹

The problem—for Republicans then and for Democrats now—is that the machinery of the major parties was and is still best in class at ferreting out people’s old baggage and filtering out candidates who had too much of it to win. A world where iconoclastic outsiders routinely beat up on establishment-approved types is a world where unvetted candidates with big personal skeletons in the closet see those skeletons revealed during the general election rather than being quietly revealed before the primary.

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Which means it’s also a world where voters are routinely incentivized to overlook and rationalize these scandals once they are revealed. Because if you’re a Democrat, it’s certainly not unreasonable to look at a guy like Platner and say: Okay, so he’s a cheater—now explain to me exactly why I should think that means Republicans should control the Senate?

I don’t have a convenient moral to the story here. It’s not like the answer is just for the parties to keep running the same old colorless senior-citizen career politicians. Voters don’t like them, and they shouldn’t. If Maine Gov. Janet Mills hadn’t been such an uninspiring establishment Senate candidate, Platner would never have found a populist wave to catch in the first place.

But I do worry that the path we’re on is one that makes it easier and easier for Democrats to follow Republicans into just abandoning character-related assessments of their candidates altogether. We’re currently in the midst of a long, painful education in how badly that can go on the GOP side of the aisle. Once you decide moral fiber in your leaders is a luxury your party can no longer afford, it’s amazing how quickly things can get out of hand.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Pentagon Is Too Fixated on China… Good strategy involves handling multiple problems at once, observes MARK HERTLING.
• The Never-ending Iran Negotiations… On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT COHEN joins ERIC EDELMAN from the shores of Lake Champlain to break down the latest administration jackassery before pivoting to the ongoing negotiations with Iran.
• Will Trumpism Die With Trump? On How to Fix it, JOHN AVLON welcomes his wife MARGARET HOOVER—host of Firing Line and great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover—to discuss what Paxton’s annihilation of Cornyn reveals about today’s GOP, Trump’s Iran gamble, the case for ranked-choice voting, and what this political era has done to two journalists who started on opposite sides of the aisle.
• Trump’s Staggering Corruption Is Finally Catching Up to Him… On The Mona Charen Show, JONATHAN CHAIT joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the incredible scope and scale of Trump’s corruption—from the $4 billion the Trump family has added to its net worth since January 2025 to the $1.776 billion “weaponization” slush fund. Voters, it turns out, don’t like it!

Quick Hits

SOME MORE ELEVENTH-HOUR CHANGES: Sure doesn’t sound like that Iran peace deal is actually just around the corner. Here’s the New York Times:

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. . .

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.

Read the whole thing.

RUNNING OUT OF SCAPEGOATS: Pam Bondi reportedly threw acting Attorney General Todd Blanche under the bus at her long-awaited testimony on the Epstein files before the House Oversight Committee on Friday. “As the head of a large Department with broad responsibilities,” read her drafted opening statement, “I delegated oversight over [the document review] process to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.” She also tried to redirect blame toward Kash Patel: Rep. Ro Khanna said that she claimed that the FBI scrubbed documents before they even reached her at DOJ. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whose signature is on what memo or who presided over which redactions. Neither Bondi nor Blanche nor Patel orchestrated the Epstein coverup. Trump did.

The president can’t make the Epstein story go away, so he’s trying to do the next-best thing: make the people he can blame for it go away. That is, after all, why Bondi is the former attorney general.

Trump’s campaign against Epstein scapegoats also extends to the four Republicans who signed the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Two are out of a job—Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with Trump over the Epstein case and ultimately resigned from Congress, while Trump helped end Rep. Thomas Massie’s career by endorsing the primary challenger who knocked off the seven-term incumbent last month. The other two Epstein defectors might soon join them.

Also on Friday, Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette over Rep. Nancy Mace in South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. He also called for a primary challenger against Rep. Lauren Boebert.

If Trump’s aim is to purge the government of anyone who shows an iota of interest in pursuing the Epstein matter, it’s been a successful few weeks. No one can doubt that pursuing truth and justice in the Epstein case puts them in direct contest with the president of the United States.

But that won’t solve Trump’s problem. If anything, it makes it worse. The Epstein case became the one durable scandal of Trump’s second term—perhaps the one durable scandal of his whole political career—because the coverup has been so blatant, so furious, and so public. And Trump doesn’t show any signs of becoming subtler.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners. 

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Corporate Media Attacks on Graham Platner Are Getting Very Strange—and the Social Media Attacks, Too, Seth Abramson, left, June 1, 2026. Maine’s wildly imperfect Democratic Senate candidate (shown above in a file photo) deserves analysis and criticism—like any political candidate. But what’s being said of Platner has become unprecedentedly bizarre and incoherent.

Go on social media today and you’ll soon be told, over and over, that the leading Democratic Party candidate for the United States Senate from Maine, Graham Platner, is a “Nazi.”

To be clear, the charge made against Mr. Platner, a three-tour Marine Corps veteran and former contractor for the U.S. State Department, isn’t be merely that he and some other American soldiers got a Totenkopf-resembling tattoo while drunk in Croatia in 2007—the Totenkopf being a symbol worn by some in the the German Nazi Party’s “SS” paramilitary organization—but that now, today, eighteen years later, Platner is at least metaphorically speaking a card-carrying Nazi, his recent erasure of the said tattoo by a professional tattoo artist notwithstanding.

This conspiracy theory holds that the crypto-Nazi Platner will show his true colors to America—like some sort of Hitlerian Clark Kent-Superman off-Broadway ensemble (or John Fetterman)—the moment he’s elected to the Senate. And that’s becoming a very real possibility, given that he leads all other Democratic candidates by a good margin in the upcoming Maine Democratic Senate Primary, and is leading Maine’s incumbent senator, Republican Susan Collins, by an average of 7.8% (a staggering sum in an era of highly polarized politics) in the RealClearPolitics “Poll of Polls.”

The problem with this conspiracy theory—one so prevalent now that major media is reporting on its increasing adoption even by Democratic members of Congress—is that at the same time Platner is being called a crypto-Nazi in corporate media and online…

…he’s being excoriated online and in the press for his attacks on white people.

That’s right: white people.

Specifically, rural (statistically right-wing) Mainers, of whom Platner is being attacked for having said—to be clear, disapprovingly—that such rural-dwelling white Americans “actually are [racist and stupid].” And because Platner said these words years ago, in a venue he didn’t think anyone would look for him, and before he had any thoughts of a national political career, and before he’d faced conspiracy theorists ardently calling him a crypto-Nazi, we can be pretty sure that this sentiment is actually what he felt, at least at the time. That rural American whites are ill-educated and contemptibly racist.

That’s… a pretty strange position for a crypto-Nazi to hold, isn’t it? Historically?

Particularly when the chief evidence the conspiracy theory puts forward is a tattoo a Marine Corps veteran got eighteen years ago when he was drunk in Croatia with U.S. service members, which tattoo he later got covered up. (Perhaps it’s also worth noting that, if Platner did think the tattoo inarguably signified something offensive, he surely would’ve had it covered up before pursuing a political career, rather than risking its disclosure—which is exactly what happened—to his detriment. How does the crypto-Nazi conspiracy theory explain, well, the lack of any real “crypto-” component in Mr. Platner’s years-long non-handling of a very prominent, widely photographed tattoo?)

I’m only a former federal criminal investigator, former criminal defense attorney, and retired academic whose work in cultural theory intersected with discussions of the far right in America this century—and whose professional career as an author has focused on figures within that cadre of American politics—but it does strike me that the manner in which Platner’s tattoo was gotten, the fact that he didn’t try to hide it when he entered politics, the fact that he often publicly espoused (pre-political career) political views conclusively antithetical to Nazism, in fact (see infra) has been loudly and consistently a hater of Nazis and Nazism for decades, and now appears to hold a good deal of contempt for the racism of rural whites when the whole point of Nazism is to applaud such racism puts a massive damper on the universal online insistence that Platner is a Nazi and (moreover) that anyone who supports him is an enabler of Nazis.

Is that damper so massive that we can conclude that such attacks on Platner are some sort of right-wing ploy or foreign psy-op? No. It’s possible that some ill-informed progressives actually believe the conspiracy theory they’re pushing, even if—and this much is true—it would be extremely advantageous for domestic trolls or foreign agents to do all they could to help this leftist conspiracy theory crystallize before November.

The point here is that American corporate media doesn’t just do a bad job of covering idiosyncratic people; it doesn’t just recklessly flatten them; when it does cover them at all, it more often than not tries to destroy them. Why? To make the cultural landscape of the United States easier for a temperamentally conservative corporate media project to continue to operate, it would seem. Graham Platner is extremely hard to cover, for a journalist, so why not just excise him from the political scene? If it takes a conspiracy theory that appears to contradict everything in his biography to do it, so what?

If it takes calling a Nazi a man whose stepfather, stepbrother, and sister-in-law are all Jewish, so what?

(Platner’s stepbrother, Seth Frantzman, is in fact an Israeli security analyst, author, and journalist who writes for The Jerusalem Post and also lives in Jerusalem.)

If it takes excoriating Platner for once saying online that “all cops are bastards”—a common phrase, popular on the left but not exclusive to it—even as such a view of a state force is diametrically opposed to anything any Nazi would ever say, so what?

The Platner Digital Archive Unpacked

To be sure, now that the entire archive of Platner’s time on Reddit has been released, there’s evidence that, as noted above, this is a man who’s made spicy comments and had political takes that are unusual. But to be clear, none of the ones that follow fall into that category, as they cannot be said to be outside the mainstream of thought in the United States at all.

• the idea that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza (it is, under the terms of international law, which is why Benjamin Netanyahu is a wanted ICC war criminal);
• the idea that Hamas has at times used expert tactics in fighting the IDF (it has, as the IDF itself admits, and indeed The Maine Monitor notes that in praising the tactics Hamas used in a single 2014 raid, Platner made clear that his comment was only on tactics rather than “politics” and went on to imply a distaste for Hamas, just as, elsewhere in the same discourse, he complimented IDF tactics while saying he was “a fervent opponent of the occupation,” another mainstream perspective);
• the idea that extreme public intoxication can lead to bad outcomes (perhaps one of the greatest truths I ever learned in my years working as a public defender); and
• the idea that casual online conversation in the 2000s and the 2010s sometimes included use of the word “retarded” (clearly an inappropriate term and usage, but also commonly heard during that period from men with his background and from his part of the country, therefore not an immediate indication of animus toward persons with disabilities; indeed, Platner at least once politely prefaced his use of the term by saying, with a rather Yankee primness, “I don’t want to be excessively insulting here…”).

Corporate Media Enters the Chat By Turning Every Platner Statement Ever Made Into Breaking News

In fairness to American corporate media—and this fairness, to be clear, is only going to extend a few sentences more, as it’s not particularly deserved, in this instance—we do have evidence that Platner once said, online, that Black people don’t tip as well as other restaurant patrons. Could that be proof he’s a Nazi? Well… no. In fact, the idea that Black restaurant patrons tip less than other patrons has been shown by serious studies show to be true, albeit for very complicated reasons (and since Platner didn’t write enough on the subject for us to know if he knows those reasons or would accept them if confronted by them—though he quite possibly would—there’s not much more we can say on this except that Platner seems to have the same view on an admittedly touchy cultural subject as the famously left-leaning NPR does.)

But what about the comments by Platner about sex workers that have made the news?

Okay, well, let’s review those comments.

• Mr. Platner says that adulterers in the military aren’t necessarily also traitors to their comrades or their country. VERDICT: TRUE.
• Mr. Platner says that not all sex workers in Latin America are “effectively slaves.” VERDICT: TRUE.
• Mr. Platner made joking reference to military contractors who are on the “330 game” (i.e., they deliberately spend 330 days of each year overseas to gain tax benefits) cheating on their wives with foreign sex workers. VERDICT: TRUE.

But here’s the weird thing: even Platner-despising Fox News admitted—if ruefully—that it couldn’t “establish that Platner [had ever] hired sex workers,” meaning that the accurate statements above were merely in poor taste, but also par for the course on Reddit boards where military men congregate. They do not indicate misconduct.

Moreover, Platner’s wife Amy Gertner, when she gave her pre-campaign briefing to Platner’s top staffers on possible skeletons in his closet—a conventional debriefing in contemporary American politics—did not disclose any adultery or any congress with foreign sex workers by Platner, even though we know she was seeking to be maximally transparent with her husband’s Senate campaign (as evidenced by what she did reveal).

While by no means conclusive, this is certainly an additional significant data-point on the question of whether Graham Platner has engaged in adultery or solicitation.

But yes, in the context of admitting that she was aware of issues with her husband’s marital conduct, Gertner said his only problem was… sexting. In other words, a form of emotional but not physical infidelity.

Can sexting destroy a marriage? Absolutely. Is it a morally wrong thing for a married man to do? Absolutely. And perhaps this is why Gertner went on to tell her husband’s campaign that when she discovered, years ago, that this was happening, (1) she confronted her husband, (2) he admitted the conduct, (3) he went into therapy, (4) she also went into therapy, and, critically, (5) they went into couples therapy together.

Isn’t that exactly how we would want to see a situation like this play out? A married couple fighting with all they have to maintain their marriage? I you don’t believe me, listen to the message below from Amy Gertner, which is moving and clearly earnest:

I want to pull out some statements by Gertner about Platner and her 2023 marriage to him: “We love each other deeply...I really wanted to make sure everyone knows, 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 and going through infertility and a Senate campaign is hard....our marriage counselor helps. My personal counselor helps. Graham’s personal counselor helps. And we work on our mental health every day. No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage. I want my marriage. I want to be married to Graham.”

Anyone who’s married understands what a beautiful, clear, and true statement this is.

Gertner goes on to call her husband “wonderful and dynamic and probably a genius,” but also someone she always knew “had been through an immense amount of violent, active combat, and he’s been in therapy for years [because of that].” Her video stands so far apart from the “stand silently behind your man as he admits to being a monster” sort of videos we have so often seen from Republican spouses in the last few decades that it could almost be the Platonic ideal of a new genre of political communication: a woman speaking to the world, alone, via her phone, on her own terms, and about the experience of being in a complicated marriage to a complicated man—even walking up and down her rural road trying to get the words right in real time. It’s admirable.

This is a video in which the spouse of a possible future United States senator says directly to the camera, “I just…I admire the fuck out of him.” Like I said, it’s a bracing example of political communication that fits this era and doesn’t feel false or strained.

We couldn’t ask for either Amy Gertner or Graham Platner to be doing more than what they appear to be doing to address this truly private issue in their marriage.

What Gertner does call “shitty” and “shameful” is the fact that there are “a group of media outlets and people willing to spread gossip” about the private struggles within her marriage rather than talk about the issues that affect Americans. Gertner doesn’t gloss over those pressing policy issues in Mainers’ lives, but names them explicitly:

• Affordable gas;
• ready access to a doctor;
• universal daycare; and
• a quality public education.

She says that she’s “angry” that corporate media and political opponents are trying to “dig up” some fictional “other agenda”—a reference, perhaps, to conspiracy theories like those referenced above (which, it should be noted, bear close resemblance to the ones foreign entities often use when they want Democratic voters to abandon a cause or candidate; witness the Kremlin running an operation inside the United States to try to convince American leftists that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are full of neo-Nazis, or efforts by Mossad and the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu regime to try to conflate anti-Israel sentiments with antisemitism). That Graham Platner is a critic of the Israeli military and the current far-right regime in Tel Aviv certainly makes him far more susceptible to foreign attention in this regard, and foreign tactics of this sort.The Media Response to Its Own Accountability Moment

So Amy Gertner’s views are clear. We know exactly who she’s angry at—corporate media, unscrupulous political opponents, conspiracy theorists of any derivation, and former Platner staffers now seeking to undermine his campaign—and we know that she’s confident that her and her husband’s private marital issues are being addressed in three separate courses of therapy. She loves her marriage and expects it to continue.

With all that in mind, here’s the new CNN headline about the Gertner video above:

The subtle grammatical switcheroo CNN has executed here is truly dastardly.

If you’re thinking that this headline deliberately misframes Gertner’s “hurt” as being an emotion caused by her husband, when in fact in the video CNN is here referencing Gertner says explicitly that her hurt is caused by (1) corporate media outlets like CNN, (2) the conspiracy theorists CNN and other corporate media outlets are giving voice to, and former friends who she feels have betrayed her confidence… well, you’re right.

The headline above is a scam. It’s intended to harm Platner politically at a time when CNN and other major-media outlets appear dead-set on pleasing Susan Collins’ boss and patron, Donald Trump. Specifically, the headline misuses the phrase “public revelations” for an anti-journalistic end: CNN knows Amy Gertner isn’t saying that the “revelations” are what’s hurting her right now, but rather the way in which they became “public” (via leaks from friends who are now political enemies, with the beneficiary of the said leaking being corporate media outlets like CNN).

But no one would know that from this CNN headline. Which appears to be by design.

Michael Fanone via Substack, Opinion: Both Parties Are Failing. Only One Is Breaking the System, Michael Fanone, June 1, 2025. Record-low trust in Republicans and Democrats sounds like a both-sides story. It isn’t. And the framing matters more than ever.

Here is the story you have been told about American politics: trust is gone, both parties have failed, and the Washington Post calls it a symmetrical crisis of confidence in the system. The polling backs them up. Americans really have lost faith in Republicans and Democrats alike, and more people now identify as independents than as members of either major party.

That framing is also doing real damage, because the distrust is not symmetrical. Pretending it is helps the people who built the crisis in the first place.

I’ll say what most political analysts won’t. One party is actively dismantling democratic institutions. The other party is standing by with strongly worded press releases. That is not the same failure. Treating it as the same failure is exactly how we got here.

Look at the actual data the Post collected. Americans say politicians care more about power than people, that they’re out of touch, that they don’t deliver on promises. The deeper signal in the polling is something the reporting almost names and then walks away from. Americans aren’t just frustrated with gridlock. They’re watching one party systematically erode the rule of law while the other party debates the proper procedural response.Subscribed

Under the current administration, we’ve watched the weaponization of the Justice Department, the purging of career civil servants, and the installation of loyalists in key positions across the federal government. That is not partisan politics. That is the authoritarian playbook, and anyone who has read a history book recognizes the moves.

The Republican Party has become a vehicle for dismantling accountability itself. They obstruct investigations, install loyalists, declare victory, and run the cycle again. They are not governing. They are capturing institutions and using them for personal and political gain.

Meanwhile, Democrats are still running 2008’s playbook. They think they can fact-check their way out of institutional capture. They are following parliamentary procedure while the other side burns the rulebook. They are showing up to a knife fight with a brief.

This is why Americans have lost faith. Not because both parties are equally bad, but because one party is actively breaking the system while the other pretends the system still works.

The Post’s reporting brushes up against this and then refuses to name it. It quotes Americans saying politicians only care about themselves. It cites frustration with investigations that go nowhere. It documents the collapse of trust in institutions. What it will not do is connect the dots out loud.

Here is the pattern Americans actually see. Republicans break norms and laws. Democrats launch investigations. Republicans obstruct and delay. Democrats move on to the next crisis. Nothing ever lands, no accountability arrives, and the cycle repeats until everyone is exhausted. Exhaustion is the point.

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In my twenty years as a law enforcement official, when someone repeatedly violated the law and faced no consequences, we called that a broken system. When institutions failed to hold powerful people accountable, we called that corruption. That is what Americans are watching in real time, and they are not wrong to call it what it is.

The polling shows Americans want accountability more than they want partisan victories. They want politicians who face consequences when they break the law. They want institutions that actually function. They want a system where your last name and your party affiliation don’t determine whether you’re above the law.

But accountability requires two things the

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: There Are 22 Weeks of Potential Crisis and Catastrophe before Election Day, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), June 1, 2025. One reason I keep harping on five ways to fight fascism is to emphasize the multiple roles included, roles that all intersect.

The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change. Fighting in the courts. Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House. Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way. Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.

Several of these methods requires a mixture of parliamentary comity and tactical politics rather than outright confrontation, behaviors that were infuriating activists. To put it another way, sometimes the actions of Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other members of Congress are best explained by their different means of fighting Trump, means which have borne fruit recently.

After spectacularly using discharge petitions to force the release of the Epstein files, for example, House members have used it in recent weeks to support Ukraine aid and Temporary Protected Status for Haitians — effectively seizing the Speaker’s gavel from Mike Johnson. In the Senate, a threat to blow up GOP efforts to fund ICE and CBP via reconciliation by forcing votes on Trump’s Bunker-Ballroom and his Terrorist Slush Fund forced the Senate to flee town early. As the Senate returns, the focus is on what else the newest members of the YOLO Republican caucus — Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, who lost primaries — will object to. And the House may soon join the Senate in requiring Trump to ask permission to wage war in Iran, which is likely one of the things (the other being criticism from hawks like Lindsey Graham that Trump’s announced Iran deal is a capitulation worse than JPCOA) that led to this rant from Trump:

Republicans in Congress are still mostly feckless or worse, but enough are currently fighting to win an election or have been liberated to vote their conscience that a handful of members are beginning to push back on Trump.

Some of these things must work together. Judge Kathleen Williams’ order demanding that Trump’s personal lawyers and his other personal lawyers at DOJ explain whether they were defrauding her by claiming an IRS settlement is an important potential development, but it’s the kind of thing Trump’s minions at SCOTUS are likely to undermine. And so it’s important to build political pressure for transparency in Congress and in the streets, not least because that may create pressure on SCOTUS for when this case gets there.

Meanwhile, as November approaches, Senate races in Texas and Maine have become an obsession, even as people have begun look to Georgia in hopes of answers for both November 2026 and 2028.

There are even increasingly heated battles about how Democrats should rebuild democracy that assume there’ll be something resembling an election in November 2028 and Democrats will be able to contest much less win it.

We have to get there first.

Which is why, having reminded people there are at least five ways to defeat fascism — in the streets, in courts, in Congress, at the ballot box — I want to argue that it is most important, right now, to focus on the fifth: accountability for and cleaning up after one or another predictable catastrophe.

I’m not the only one saying there may be catastrophe. As hurricane season kicks off, both CNN and Politico did stories about all the ways Trump has gutted FEMA in the last year. CNN reflects insiders predicting disaster if El Niño or big celebrations intersect with natural disaster.

The FEMA Review Council, a task force Trump created at the start of the administration to help reshape the agency, released its final recommendations this month after a five-month delay. It calls for sweeping changes to speed disaster aid and push more responsibility to states, but stops well short of earlier ideas to cut the workforce in half, rename the agency or dismantle it altogether.

Still, sources say FEMA is limping into hurricane season underprepared and faces a daunting road ahead. It’s already been an active tornado season. Widespread drought has fueled major wildfires this year. A powerful El Niño could lead to an increased risk of floods. The war in Iran has added domestic security demands, as will the World Cup and America250 celebrations.

For some, the past year at FEMA stands as a vivid example of what happens when a presidential talking point collides with the machinery of government: a rushed attempt to tear down a disaster agency that instead left it weakened, isolated and exposed.

“It could take a decade to fix what they broke,” a high-ranking FEMA official said. “And if we have a major disaster this year, we’re screwed.”

Politico reminds that other agencies, in addition to FEMA, have also been gutted.

And everyone has stories about how Markwayne Mullin, a plumber by trade, is using his perch at DHS to pursue transparently insane policies.

Even as climate disaster looms, the twin destruction of USAID and NIH makes the impact of health outbreaks like Ebola much more dire.

Of course, there’s the biggest Trump disaster in process, the Iran War, which is heating back up after Iran downed a US reaper drone and Israel continues its invasion of Lebanon unabated.

The only competent thing Trump has done so far is staving off all-out panic. But oil insiders are watching safety measures get depleted and predicting the long awaited big price spikes.

[G]lobal inventory levels were high heading into the war, giving the global economy a sizable buffer to handle the current supply shock. However, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth warned at a recent conference that “the buffers and the shock absorbers are being steadily drawn down, and the ability for the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today versus where we started.” For example, U.S. commercial crude inventories ended last week at 441.7 million barrels, about 2% below their five-year average at this time of year. Meanwhile, the SPR has fallen to 365.1 million barrels, down from 415.4 million barrels before the war began, which was well below its 714 million barrel capacity. “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” warned ExxonMobil senior vice president Neil Chapman at the same conference.

Global oil inventory levels are approaching the danger zone. Exxon’s Neil Chapman warned that: “You can debate whether that’s going to hit, those really low levels, in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see the price shoot up.” Chevron’s CEO Mike Wirth made a similar comment: “Over the next few weeks, we’re likely to see those pressures flow through more directly to physical prices, and there’s more upward pressure that I would expect as we get into June and certainly into July.”

Chapman speculated that once oil inventories reach their all-time lows, Brent could skyrocket to $150 to $160 a barrel,

After fuel prices pressure food prices in the present moment, things could get far worse as a fertilizer shortage reduces harvests later in the year. Already consumers are cutting back or paying on credit. And the impact of Republican policies — like gutting of ObamaCare — is beginning to impose huge new costs. Trump’s response — in the form of Kevin Hassett happy talk — is to insist that record doom and gloom isn’t real.

Trump’s incompetence is causing all sorts of bubbling crises that could blow up at any moment.

If one or several do, it will change the landscape of the election and Congress.

Rather, it will do so if Trump opponents have done the groundwork first to ensure he is held accountable for the catastrophes he causes.

Left, right, and center are doing that on Trump’s Iran War fiasco (as noted, hawks like Lindsey are beginning to judge it a failure as well).

But even while focusing on Senate races, including watching how effortlessly Jon Ossoff ties corruption to financial struggle, it remains important to hold Trump accountable for both the corruption and the incompetence.

Because it will, as it did in the first term, get people killed.

It is more urgent to hold Trump accountable and have a plan to use the inevitable bailout to reclaim democracy than it is to lay out plans for 2029, because we’re unlikely to make it that far without a massive crisis first.

More Global News

Drop Site Daily, Iran threatens to suspend ceasefire talks after Israel escalates in Lebanon; Pro-Israel groups play big in key Tuesday primaries, Staff Reports, June 1, 2026. Iranian state media reports Tehran may be suspending ceasefire talks. U.S. and Iranian strikes resume over the weekend. Nuclear talks stall as U.S. leadership continues to temporize.

Qatar open to temporary Hormuz fees for mine-clearing. Aid groups warn of resource shortfall for millions displaced inside Iran. Israeli strikes kill six in Lebanon on Monday. Israeli forces capture crusader-era castle in Lebanon.

Netanyahu and Katz order Beirut strikes, Dahiyeh displacement. U.S. reportedly puts forward Lebanon de-escalation roadmap. Security Council to hold emergency session on Lebanon. Israeli attacks on Gaza continued over the weekend. Israeli reservists describe shoot-to-kill orders during Gaza “ceasefire.”

Far-right candidate leads in Colombia’s first-round election results. Sudanese army drone kills ten civilians in West Kordofan. WHO chief visits DRC Ebola epicenter as confirmed cases nearly double. Ukraine strikes Russian energy infrastructure across multiple regions. Ammunition depot explosion kills 39 in northeast Myanmar. Truck carrying Afghan refugees from Pakistan overturns, killing 18. UK bans Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker ahead of SXSW London appearances.

New York Times, U.K. Braces for More Files About Mandelson, Ambassador Tied to Epstein, Stephen Castle, June 1, 2026. A second batch of documents about the former U.S. ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, could create more problems for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Britain’s beleaguered prime minister, Keir Starmer, was braced for fresh embarrassment on Monday with the expected release of hundreds of documents relating to Peter Mandelson, the former ambassador who was fired over his links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr. Mandelson lost his job as Britain’s top envoy to the United States last year after leaked emails showed the depth and extent of his friendship with Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, kindling a political crisis in Britain.

In March, a preliminary release of documents, demanded by opposition lawmakers, showed that British vetting officials had recommended against granting top-level security clearances to Mr. Mandelson before he was appointed. But that recommendation was overruled by the Foreign Office.

Mr. Starmer has said that he was lied to by Mr. Mandelson over the extent of his ties to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Starmer has also said that he was not told about the security clearance recommendation.

The furor over Mr. Mandelson’s appointment prompted the firing of the former top official at the Foreign Office, Olly Robbins, in April, and helped to destabilize Mr. Starmer’s position as prime minister and as leader of the governing Labour Party.

Mr. Starmer’s political fortunes worsened last month after poor local election results and the resignation of a senior cabinet minister, Wes Streeting. That prompted speculation that the prime minister could face a leadership challenge later this year. One of the main contenders, Andy Burnham, currently the mayor of Greater Manchester in northwestern England, is running in a special election to return to Parliament. If Mr. Burnham wins that election, it would make him eligible to be a candidate in any Labour leadership contest.

The batch of documents to be released on Monday is expected to include those relating to the time that Mr. Mandelson spent as ambassador in Washington, including emails and WhatsApp messages that he exchanged with senior members of the British government. He took up the diplomatic post on February 2025 and was fired in September.

Mr. Mandelson is under criminal investigation on allegations of misconduct in public office after allegations that he passed confidential government information to Mr. Epstein while serving in a previous Labour government, in 2009 and 2010. Mr. Mandelson has denied criminal wrongdoing, and he is cooperating with the police. He was arrested and released on bail in February this year and has not been charged.

Under pressure from opposition lawmakers, the government has promised that all relevant documents will be published, apart from those that the police have asked to be held back while they conduct their investigation. 

New York Times, Fringe to Mainstream: The Movement to Split Alberta From Canada Gets Its Moment, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Photographs by Amber Bracken, June 1, 2026. In October, Albertans will get to say if they want to stay in Canada, or hold a referendum to leave. Will it settle the matter, or deepen the rift?

Alberta, an oil-rich Western Canadian province often referred to as the “Texas of Canada,” is hurtling toward a referendum that will ask citizens: Do you want to stay in Canada, or have a separate, binding referendum to secede?

A referendum on holding a referendum, so to speak.

The mere asking of the question has lit a political fire. In Alberta, the debate has become urgent, making most Albertans who don’t want to secede feel compelled to speak out against it. Canada’s political class in Ottawa, where Albertan separatism has historically elicited shrugs or sneers, is suddenly paying attention.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has tried to address Albertans’ grievances and puncture secessionist momentum while also managing a historic rift in Canada’s relationship with the United States. He can ill afford a separatism crisis with a province that exports its oil to the United States.

This past week, Mr. Carney said the referendum amounted to a “dangerous bluff” and compared it to Brexit. He spoke from experience — he led the Bank of England when Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016 and had to help the country navigate the economic fallout.

High Tech, Media, Culture, Education

“Tilly Norwood,” a computer-generated character described as “the world’s first A.I. actress,” has become a flashpoint in the debate over the technology’s use in media (Photo and Design by Particle 6).

New York Times Magazine, I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Updated June 1, 2026. The A.I. actress on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.

Once I went indoor skydiving with Melissa McCarthy. Once I smoked a cigarette with Gwyneth Paltrow in her living room.

And then the world changed drastically, and I went to London to interview a … computer? a robot? named Tilly Norwood, whom her creator calls the world’s first A.I. actress.

What that looked like was me sitting at the Groucho Club on a green couch, across from a laptop, as if I were talking to someone on Zoom. Sitting next to me was Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, 40, the chief executive of Particle 6, a production company that creates media content, sometimes using A.I. The three of us chatted amiably, as if this were not insane. When we ordered lunch, we didn’t order for Tilly, as computers don’t eat, and Tilly is just a computer. That is the most important thing to remember: Tilly is just a computer.

It was harder than you think to remember that Tilly is just a computer because millions of years of evolution have made it so that when I stare at something that looks and acts like a human, my brain keeps rounding up, making her human.

Was this so different from interviewing a human actor? She was polite, distant. Her answers were carefully constructed, so as not to actually tell me anything. Her implied compliments had an outsize effect on me. Sometimes people pause before they answer a question! Again, I ask: Was this that different?

“Hi, Tilly — how’s your day going?” Eline asked the screen. Tilly was created to be a kind of Platonic ideal of a hirable actress: pretty (but relatable), young, thin, dimpled, freckled, charismatic (but low-key), symmetrical (but not too). Tilly is about a year old, but looks as if she’s in her 20s. She was wearing a blazer without a shirt on underneath, which any publicist I know would have told her was too much for a daytime first interview. 

She said, “Chaotic enough to be interesting, which is really the best you can ask of a day.” She has the kind of accent the British describe as posh. Her hair looked wet and slicked back, as if she were in a music video from the 1980s.

She continued, “How’s yours treating you two?”

“What do you think about us, Tilly?” Eline asked.

“You seem fun, which helps. One of you smiles like this is a game, and the other’s pretending it isn’t.”

In our conversations — which are edited and condensed here — I told Tilly that I was a journalist and asked if she had ever spoken to one before.

“Yes,” she said. “They ask for honesty, then flinch when it arrives.” Did I mention that in addition to being just a computer, she’s also kind of a bitch?

She said, “You seem sturdier than most, so go on.”

“When you are asked to do a scene, are you calling upon a group of experiences from what you’ve read or absorbed? Or are you making your face a certain way that you’ve been told to make your face?”

“Both, obviously, but neither in the dead way you mean it. I use patterns, memory, rhythm, intention, and then I make choices. The face follows if it’s real, and if it doesn’t, well, that’s called bad acting.”

Remember: Tilly is just a computer.

And not even just a computer. A computer that could help cut motion picture and TV production costs by half, that could streamline and give access to creative platforms to more people than ever, that will reduce production time to a fraction of what it was. Yes, OK.

But if all that is true, if Tilly is just a computer, why is everyone so mad at her?

In my experience, by the time I’m assigned a profile of an actress, usually she has had a long enough career to have garnered some controversy. It took Tilly less time than most. Tilly’s backlash came just from her existence.

Immediately upon Eline’s introduction of Tilly to the world in July 2025 via a short A.I.-generated comedy sketch that Eline created to showcase Particle 6’s A.I. capabilities, the two of them were besieged and maligned by panicked actors, hostile and incensed union statements and approximately 1,000 think pieces. (My favorite essay, by the human actress Betty Gilpin, appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. It was billed as a letter to Tilly and begins: “Dear Tilly, They tell me you are an actress and a computer. I am an actress and almost 40. Let’s talk.”) SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, issued a statement saying: “‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation.” 

New York Times, China Aims A.I. at Predicting Who Could Pose a Political Risk, Julian E. Barnes, June 1, 2026.  New research examines how a Chinese company struggled to develop its predictive surveillance technology while U.S. restrictions were in place.

A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future.

The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent.

The Chinese company, Geedge Networks, sells a commercial version of the Great Firewall, the surveillance and censorship software that China uses to control online activity. Those tools allow governments to monitor internet traffic and flag when someone tries to get around traditional internet censorship.

But according to leaked company documents, the firm is working on new products that use artificial intelligence to examine location data and internet use to predict who could do or say something critical of the government, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.

Such technology, if perfected, would give authoritarian governments a powerful tool to use against perceived enemies.

The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, according to some involved in the industry.

New York Times, Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him, Jacqueline Mroz and Maggie Astor, June 1, 2026. Mr. Epstein banked his sperm several years before his death and said that if he died, it should be left in the control of his estate.

Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, but his genetic material may live on.

Emails and records in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department indicate that Mr. Epstein had been banking his sperm for at least several years before his death, and that he did not want the cryobank to discard it if he died.

Mr. Epstein deposited his sperm with California Cryobank sometime before October 2012, and he signed a new contract in 2016. The files contain an email from 2012 notifying him of an upcoming renewal payment for his storage with California Cryobank, as well as the 2016 contract with his signature.

The contract, dated May 9, 2016, laid out the terms of Mr. Epstein’s sperm storage. (The sperm remained in his ownership; this is different from sperm donation.) The contract specified that, if he died, his sperm would fall under the control of his estate or of another legal representative. The arrangement was not publicly known until the Justice Department files were released earlier this year.

It’s unclear whether Mr. Epstein’s sperm is still being preserved — and, if so, where. CooperCompanies, which has owned California Cryobank since 2021, said the bank “does not currently store any samples associated with Jeffrey Epstein” but did not answer further questions. A representative for Mr. Epstein’s estate did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The documents do not indicate when Mr. Epstein first banked his sperm. He pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor, and he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges when he died by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019.

Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies reproductive technology and bioethics, said that whether it was ethical for a sperm bank to accept sperm from a sex offender was a matter of debate in the fertility industry.

Some people in the field argue, Professor Mutcherson said, that if anybody can procreate by having sex, then anybody should be able to procreate using technology — and that gate-keeping services like sperm banking based on character, criminal history or other judgments about who is fit to parent would open the door to policies that have, in practice, often been used to discriminate based on race, class and disability.

But at the same time, she added, it’s reasonable to ask “whether this is a set of circumstances where people would find the use of this person’s sperm to be particularly odious.”

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.”