Sen. Ron Wyden, longtime Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Commitee, has never been a fan of President Donald Trump. But I’ve never seen him quite this worked up.

The administration, Wyden declared in a statement on Friday, “is dripping with corruption from top to bottom” and is now plotting “among the most corrupt acts in American political history.”

What we are witnessing, he said, is nothing less “than a shakedown of the American people by a crook president and his crook lawyers…no more valid than if he had sued the White House kitchen for serving him an undercooked steak. Between this and the ballroom and a thousand other acts of corruption, Trump is a parasite on the American republic.”

In case you haven’t been glued to the news, the saga that has Wyden so enraged kicked off in late January, just over a year into Trump’s second term, when the president, along with his company and sons Eric and Don Jr., filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking “at least $10,000,000,000” in damages.

Ten billion dollars!

Basically, in 2019 and 2020, an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax returns and related filings to the New York Times, ProPublica, “and other leftist media outlets,” as the lawsuit put it. Admittedly, this was illegal, even though Trump had repeatedly (and falsely) promised to make his tax returns public. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for his leaks, which included a trove of documents that revealed how little US billionaires pay in tax.

The Trump lawsuit claims that the leaks caused the Trumps and their company “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

The reputational claims are notable, coming from a man found guilty or liable in several civil and criminal fraud cases and liable for defamation and sexual abuse. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. And of course there’s Trump’s incitement of the violent attempt by his followers on January 6, 2021, to thwart the peaceful transfer of government, for which Trump was impeached though not convicted.

Early in his second term, Trump then pardoned all of the J6ers, dozens of whom, according to the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for unrelated crimes in the wake of January 6, including rape, domestic violence, weapons charges, and possession of child pornography. (Has America forgotten Willie Horton?)

Some even reoffended after Trump pardoned them, including a man who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in January 6, and this past February pleaded guilty to threatening the life of the US House Minority Leader: “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” he’d written, according to court filings. “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future.”

All that aside, the primary legal question in Trump v. IRS is whether a president’s government lawyers can mount a meaningful defense against a president’s personal lawyers—in this case pertaining to the transgressions of that president’s own administration during his first term. The correct answer is: no, of course not.

CREW, along with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, filed a friend of the court brief in the Trump lawsuit, which notes, “The President’s two hats in this litigation—his personal capacity as plaintiff and his role as chief Executive—make it impossible for attorneys in the Department of Justice (DOJ) to fulfill their ethical duties to zealously represent the interests of the defendant agencies against President Trump’s claims.”

The brief urges Kathleen Williams, the federal judge in Florida overseeing the case, to hit pause on the proceedings and “enjoin the parties from terminating the lawsuit through an unconstitutional monetary settlement while the President remains in office.”

Now, as the New York Times first reported last Tuesday, there is talk of just such a settlement. Judge Williams had set a May 20 deadline for the two sides to submit briefs explaining why they should even be considered two sides—a prerequisite for any lawsuit, since one cannot sue oneself. Williams also, the Times noted, appointed six reputable outside lawyers to weigh in on “whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.”

With seemingly little chance of convincing the skeptical judge, the two sides—which are actually one side—have scrambled to concoct a settlement prior to her deadline. Among the terms initially discussed, the Times noted, was that the IRS might be precluded from auditing the Trumps and their companies in the future.

That would be “unheard of,” says John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner under President Barack Obama. “I don’t recall the IRS ever promising a taxpayer that there would be no audits,” he told me. “Audits get settled all the time, but promising no audits simply raises the question of what someone is worried about or trying to hide. This is especially troubling when, as the president acknowledges, the Department of Justice, representing the IRS in the case, works for the president.”  

When I spoke with CREW’s president, Donald Sherman, on Friday, he called the lawsuit “a stunningly corrupt attempt for the president to take taxpayer money and put it in his pocket.”

While Trump has done many corrupt things during his second term, Sherman told me, those have mostly involved outsiders buying access and influence—via foreign investments in Trump crypocurrency enterprises, for example, or billionaires shelling out for Trump’s monster ballroom. “He’s sought to get foreign countries to put money in his business. He sought to get American corporations to pay for his pet projects. He sought trademarks and things like that. Not the best—pretty corrupt,” Sherman said.

But this proposal, he added, “is of a different scale and a different order in terms of the corruption involved, because the president is suing the government that he runs, and negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The story took another turn later on Friday, when ABC Newscame out with new details: Trump would consider dropping the IRS lawsuit and other audacious claims he’d made against the DOJ in 2023 and 2024, seeking $230 million in restitution for what he claimed was malicious prosecution related to Russia’s 2016 influence campaign and the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents. “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity,” he told the New York Times. (In 2019, a court forced Trump to pay $2 million and admit to having misused his family’s own charitable funds for political purposes.)

The settlement now under discussion, ABC reported, would entail the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to be overseen by a commission ultimately under Trump’s control. The money wouldn’t go directly to Trump, but rather would be used to compensate people purportedly victimized by the “weaponization” of the DOJ under President Joe Biden.

On Saturday, ABC’s Katherine Faulders wrote on X that she’d been told the commission would be “likely be called ‘The President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission,’ and the total amount available in the fund will be… $1.776 billion.”

Cute.

There are “major problems with the settlement idea,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. First, it provides “financial reward for those who attacked American democracy. The consequence of not punishing Trump for January 6th is that now he rewards his supporters.”

“It is also,” Moynihan told me, “part of a pattern where Trump is violating the basic separation of powers—[$1.8] billion is a lot of money. There is no way that Congress would approve it. And yet, Trump will simply take these taxpayer resources.”

Can this be stopped? “It’s really up to the court to stop because obviously the majority in Congress has abdicated any responsibility,” CREW’s Sherman said. But if the parties act before the judge rules, things could get tricky. “There’s probably some narrow mechanisms where the court could overturn a settlement,” he added. Barring that, enough Republican lawmakers would have to draw the line—which they have done only very rarely with this president.

And that’s a big problem. We already have seen a great deal of corrupt intent from Trump’s DOJ, both in its actual weaponization against officials Trump despises—like former FBI director James Comey and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ended on Friday—and in its monetary settlements with Trump’s allies.

In April, for example, Trump’s DOJ agreed to pay $1.25 million to Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI amid the investigation of Russian election interference. (He was pardoned by Trump in November 2020.) His subsequent lawsuit against the DOJ accused federal prosecutors of “improperly and politically targeting General Flynn because of his lawful association” with the Trump campaign. (Flynn may stand to collect even more restitution in a separate case, according to Lawfare.)

Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion fund would lead to more of the same, and could potentially be used to pay off insurrectionists who engaged in violence in support of Trump on January 6—some of whom sued for restitution after he granted them clemency. This “slush fund,” as Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, put it to The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent, would be “a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution” and “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse.”

What’s more, he pointed out, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

Even by the standards of the Trump administration, a federal agency funneling cash into the president’s pocket indeed seems stunningly corrupt. Yet using public money to reward the perpetrators of right-wing violence seems potentially far worse—a clear and present danger to the republic.

As Raskin told Sargent, ominously, Trump and his lawyers “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

On Friday afternoon, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued 35 pardons. He also commuted the sentences of nine prisoners, allowing them to be released years before they otherwise would be.

Some of these acts of clemency were deeply controversial. Polis, a Democrat, shortened the sentences of multiple convicted murderers. He is also setting free Brandin Kreuzer, who shot Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Tucker in 2008 and has served 15 years of a 50-year sentence. “I had numerous surgeries to basically put my arm back together,” Tucker told Denver’s 9News. “I still have lasting nerve damage to this day. My arm is not 100 percent, does not function as it should.” The current county sheriff said in a statement that he was “furious” about Kreuzer’s commutation: “The audacity of Governor Polis to grant clemency to a would-be cop killer on National Peace Officer Memorial Day shows a complete lack of respect for the brave men and women who wear the badge.”

But it’s a different commutation that has sparked furious bipartisan backlash across Colorado. In 2024, Tina Peters—the former Mesa County clerk—was convicted of various crimes for her role in a scheme to illegally breach that county’s election system and in an effort to prove the 2020 race had been stolen from Donald Trump. Peters was originally sentenced to nearly nine years behind bars. On Friday, Polis commuted her sentence to about four-and-a-half years and ordered her paroled next month.

Trump—who for months has been demanding Peters’ release and attempting to punish Colorado for this and other perceived transgressions—immediately celebrated Polis’ decision. But beyond the MAGA faithful, the move is drawing broad outrage. Matt Crane, a Republican who directs the Colorado County Clerks Association, blasted Polis in a press conference, as Colorado Public Radio reported: “When given the opportunity to stand firmly for the rule of law, for the integrity of Colorado elections and for the public servants who defend them, [Polis] chose a different path.” The watchdog group Common Cause Colorado added that “Governor Polis’ decision undermines election security, weakens accountability, and permanently stains his legacy.”

These are reasonable arguments, but personally, I don’t find them compelling. There’s no doubt that Peters is a raging conspiracy theorist who abused her public office and broke the law. But nine years is an awfully long time. She is 70 and has already been in prison for more than a year and a half. A defendant who pleaded guilty to similar charges in the doomed Trump RICO prosecution in Georgia received probation. “The crimes you were convicted of are very serious and you deserve to spend time in prison,” Polis wrote in his commutation letter to Peters. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.”

Why was Peters’ prison sentence so severe? Partly because it was based on unconstitutional factors. At sentencing, Judge Matthew Barrett indicated that he was taking into account not just her actions, but her noxious conspiracy theories. Among other things, Barrett accused Peters of peddling “a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

“So the damage that is caused and continue[s] to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis,” Barrett declared. “And it’s particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you.”

The key word there is “words.”

Last month, three Colorado appellate judges—all of whom were appointed by Polis’ Democratic predecessor—unanimously threw out Peters’ prison sentence, declaring it a clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights. They ordered Peters to be resentenced, but Polis intervened before that could happen.

“It is apparent that the [trial] court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes,” the appeals court concluded. “The tenor of the [trial] court’s comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed ‘damaging.’”

In other words, Peters should have been sentenced for what she actually did, not the bizarre conspiracy theories she espoused. She can be punished for the crimes she committed in her illegal quest to expose non-existent election fraud. But she can’t be punished for loudly voicing her beliefs.

Publicly, Peters herself now claims to recognize this distinction. In a statement she released after the commutation was announced, she acknowledged that her actions were wrong but said that once released, she planned to “support election integrity” through “legal means.”

I have no doubt that Peters will continue spreading damaging election conspiracy theories in the years to come. But prison is not the solution to that.

Polis addressed that point in an interview Friday with 9News’ Kyle Clark. “I vehemently disagree with much of what she has to say, certainly her conspiratorial beliefs,” the governor said. But, he added, the proper way to oppose such rhetoric is through public refutation—not to “lock somebody up because they believe something that is…conspiratorial and potentially dangerous.”

“That’s not the country we live in,” Polis said. “I believe in free speech.”

As voters in Louisiana head to the polls for Saturday’s primary elections, President Donald Trump is doing all he can to ensure that incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy gets the boot. 

Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial after the January 6 insurrection, and the president hasn’t forgotten. Cassidy is facing two primary challengers: State Treasurer John Fleming and Congresswoman Julia Letlow, whom Trump has endorsed. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote Saturday, Louisiana Republicans will head back to the polls on June 27 for a runoff. 

“Senator Bill Cassidy is a Disloyal Disaster,” Trump posted on Truth Social Saturday morning. “Now he’s going to get CLOBBERED, hopefully, in today’s BIG election, by two great people!!!”

Beyond voting to convict Trump, Cassidy has clashed with the president over HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccination stance—though he also cast the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy to his position. Cassidy’s capitulation in the confirmation battle doesn’t seem to have helped him much with Trump’s and Kennedy’s loyalists. MAHA PAC, a group associated with Kennedy’s agenda, has spent six figures opposing Cassidy and supporting Letlow. Still, Cassidy outraised both of his challengers by millions of dollars. 

Letlow has spent her time in Congress focused on the culture war in education, sponsoring a “Parents Bill Of Rights Act” that would require educators to notify parents if a child requests to use a different name or pronouns in school. It would also allow parents to review all educational materials, such as library books. Despite this, Cassidy’s campaign has spent heavily on ads calling her “Liberal Letlow.” 

Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him, only four have subsequently managed to win reelection. Most retired, lost primaries, or were redistricted out of their seats.

If Trump gets his way, Cassidy will become the next apostate to be ousted. And three days from now, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie—a Republican who didn’t vote to impeach Trump but has opposed him on numerous other issues—will attempt to defend his seat against a Trump-backed challenger, too.

It’s hard to make a story about data centers interesting. I know this because that was the goal I gave myself recently: Report a data center story that wasn’t totally soporific. And honestly, it was a challenge. Whether I succeeded remains to be seen—breaking news, I did!—but what I learned during my reporting has been the subject of every dinner party discussion I’ve had for months. 

You’ve probably heard that data centers are sprouting all over America like weeds in an empty field. You may also have heard that they are huge water hogs, sucking up more H₂O than the Kardashians of Kalabasas. What you might not know is that their electricity guzzling has caused energy bills to spike through the ceiling all around the country. And their need for vast swaths of land has resulted in the bulldozing of natural habitats from Oregon to Florida. Basically, if you want to be dramatic about it—and I do—data center proliferation is a harbinger of humanity’s demise at the hands of our AI overlords.

But this digital gold rush isn’t just threatening open tracts of land or pristine rural watersheds. It’s infringing on residential neighborhoods right outside major US cities. In fact, developers are trying to buy whole suburban communities as sites for these moaning monoliths, these temples of technology. In exchange for thousands of acres of residential property, data center developers promise they will bring jobs, infrastructure, and much-needed municipal revenue to places like the Northern Virginia suburbs, right outside Washington, DC, where I live. 

Here’s the gag, though: The jobs are temporary, the infrastructure is useless, and the revenue is diminishing and offset by monster tax breaks. The developers are counting on public ignorance about what the Brookings Institution calls the “little durable local economic upside” of data centers. They are swanning into communities like Prince William County, Virginia, where I did most of my reporting, with sackfuls of cash, offering folks a Faustian deal of sorts: We’ll give you gobs of money to scram from your property, or you can stay on your little patch of earth and we’ll build colossal data centers all around you. Not a great bargain.

For the past few years, developers in Northern Virginia have been trying to push through the world’s largest data center project to date. If built, the Prince William Digital Gateway would be roughly the size of 61 Pentagons spread over 2,100 acres. And a good chunk of that acreage abuts the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Now, if you’re not a Civil War buff and you didn’t know that this battlefield is one of the most important in the US, you’re forgiven. But it’s so important that when the legendary documentarian Ken Burns—he of the epic 11-hour Civil War miniseries—found out that some developers were trying to turn a buck by building a bajillion new data centers right outside the battlefield’s gate, he was like, Oh, hell no. And he wrote a very sternly worded letter to the county’s Board of Supervisors expressing his distress and admonition.

It wasn’t just the inimitable Kenneth Lauren (real middle name) Burns who protested the arrival of the gargantuan tech project. Neighbors also took up the mantle. When the development came up for a final vote, all kinds of folks came out to speak their minds: a man whose family had farmed the land for generations, a Civil War reenactor in a sack coat and forage cap, and a lady who sang an anti-data center ditty to the tune of Joni Mitchell’s ubiquitous “Big Yellow Taxi.” They paved paradise and put up data centers, indeed.

I won’t tell you the outcome of this David vs. Goliath cage match royale. You’ll just have to learn the fate of our collective digital future by listening to the story on Reveal.

Editor’s note: This post was not written by AI, despite how perfect and clever and 100 percent factually accurate it is. It was written by a human with seasonal allergies, an extreme aversion to stone fruits, and two breathtakingly naughty dogs. 

Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park. 

“The amount of surface land that is being displaced by data centers and everything that goes with that, I don’t think people understand what’s really happening,” says Elena Schlossberg, a leading activist against data center development in Northern Virginia. “There’s NIMBY and there’s NOTE, and NOTE is ‘not over there, either.’”

This week on Reveal, we look into our AI future and the local machinations that are pitting neighbor against neighbor. And we listen in as our “tech lords” talk about the future they are planning for us, whether we want it or not.

Wheelchair user Julia Feinberg, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is very aware that she will need more assistance as she ages in Oakland. She lives independently thanks to the 600 hours of help she gets each month to have someone assist with daily tasks, like getting out of bed, grocery shopping, and preparing meals.

If Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) gets his way, Feinberg risks losing the care that allows her to live an independent life. In-home support services, known in California as IHSS, is a program that pays home aides or loved ones to help people with disabilities with daily tasks. Active since 1983, the program is funded by federal and state Medicaid funds. In practice, it’s a win-win for consumers and governments: disabled people get to live in their communities at a fraction of the price it would cost for the state to house them in nursing homes or hospitals. As of March 2026, there were over 900,000 disabled people and aging adults who are authorized to receive home care through the program in California.

California’s disabled people are now caught in the middle of what is essentially a schoolyard fight between Newsom and Donald Trump. As Newsom continues to cast himself as Trump’s most formidable Democratic opponent, as of Wednesday, Trump’s federal government is threatening to withhold over a billion dollars worth of Medicaid reimbursements amid baseless claims of fraud. Newsom’s proposed solution puts hundreds of thousands of disabled people at risk of losing access to the country’s largest and most accessible in-home support program.

Newsom wants to change how the program is funded. Under his proposed plan, first introduced in January, if someone like Feinberg needs an increase in hours for the support they need, the county would have to cover more of the cost. Many counties can’t afford the cost. Newsom also proposes cutting a backup provider program, which could leave disabled people in peril if their home aid gets sick.

Every state in America is scrambling to figure out how they are going to address draconian Medicaid cuts passed by Republicans at the federal level last year. It doesn’t help that home and community-based services are optional across the country under Medicaid, leaving the over 8 million disabled people and older adults currently benefiting from the program across the United States in a dangerous bind (all states offer some form of Medicaid home care).

Newsom has tried to cast himself as one of Trump’s biggest foils. “People are rolling over,” Newsom said at the World Economic Forum in January about leaders acquiescing to Trump. “I should have brought a bunch of kneepads for all the world leaders.”

But advocates say that far from being a hero, Newsom is still part of the problem.

“There is a difference between what [Newsom] is trying to project as the resistance or the antidote to Trump and the modern agenda, versus what’s in his [proposed] state budget,” Feinberg, who volunteers with LTSS4ALL Coalition, told me. “It’s really scary to know that as I age…and my needs increase, my hours will not with it.”

Trump himself, surprisingly, has not spent time much publicly complaining about home and community-based services. That would be up to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS head Dr. Mehmet Oz, who claim, without evidence, that the program is rife with fraud.

“This rhetoric is not just harmful and problematic, it’s also dangerous and could lead to impacts for programs that absolutely need public funding,” Lindsay Imai Hong, the California director of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network, told me. “We’ve seen in Minneapolis with raids on Somali-run child care centers, and also was used back in the 90s to dismantle our public welfare program.” 

Time is running out. Democrats in California’s State Senate and Assembly are in budget negotiations with Newsom. State Senate Democrats unveiled a plan strongly opposing cuts to IHSS in mid-April. In a revised budget in mid-May, Newsom did not budge on IHSS changes. They have until the end of June to reach an agreement.

In a statement to me, California Senate President Monique Límon said that “limiting IHSS would likely force low-income seniors into more expensive housing situations” and overall, the IHSS program is “ethical, dignified, and more cost-effective option for seniors, people with disabilities, and caregivers.”

California’s program is in Trump’s crosshairs because it’s one of the most accessible in the country. Over half a million people are on home and community-based services waiting lists across the United States, according to research from KFF, though there is no wait list in California.

Sabrina Epstein, a policy analyst at Disability Rights California, pointed to the absence of a waiting list for people who qualify. “[IHSS] offers a lot of flexibility regarding who you can hire to be your caregiver, including family caregivers or caregivers from an agency,” said Epstein, “and it serves people of all ages in California, which is a really incredible benefit.” 

The program in itself is not perfect—consumers often do not get the number of hours they actually need, and workers, who are directly paid by the government, are underpaid. Patrice Strahan is paid around 31 hours a week to help clients, including an aging Black woman with cerebral palsy. In Alameda County where Strahan works, IHSS workers make $21.60 an hour. Strahan finds joy in this care work and feels grateful for her job and the connections she has with the people she assists. If her clients have to go to the emergency room, Strahan will work overtime–and without pay. 

“It’s four in the morning. I’m not on the clock anymore,” Strahan told me. “[Emergencies] happen frequently enough that it’s a regular expectation of the job.” 

Strahan also told me that it frustrates her how much disabled people, especially low-income disabled people, are expected to settle. “They are kind of conditioned to accept crumbs,” Strahan told me. 

Even though Newsom himself was vocally against federal Medicaid cuts last year, calling them “cruel, costly, and a significant encroachment on states’ rights”, his proposed changes threaten to become a political liability, according to Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, who told me that Newsom “would have to defend his record” on this topic if he runs for President.

Newsom, however, has not been scot-free when it comes to attacking IHSS. Last year, he proposed devastating cuts to the program, such as limiting the hours IHSS providers could work, which was halted. California, under a Newsom proposal, restricted certain immigrants from being able to get Medicaid, which means that they cannot qualify for IHSS. 

Several sources I spoke with find it absurd that California has not already created a source of more revenue for Medicaid. Californians are currently debating a wealth tax, known as the Billionaire’s Tax, which could be one potential solution, to the Medicaid funding crisis, but Newsom has notably spoken against it, labeling it a fear of his and saying he has “warned against it.” Meanwhile, Newsom’s potential successor, billionaire Tom Steyer, has spoken in favor of a wealth tax). 

Other blue states are exploring different solutions. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed raising taxes for digital ads, nicotine products, and gambling to raise more funds for Medicaid.

“We hear that California has one of the five largest economies in the whole world,” Strahan told me. “There’s just no way that this state truly lacks the revenue to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable Californians are met.” 

Now, California disability and care advocates are fighting in Sacramento and across the state. Feinberg would truly wish to be doing something else with her time. “I’m just exhausted having to fight every year,” Feinberg said.

Have you been struggling to get your hands on affordable World Cup tickets? Well, Donald Trump’s business partners have an “extraordinary” offer for you!

The president’s $TRUMP meme coin has been floundering for months, tumbling from a stratospherically absurd price of $74 per coin shortly before Inauguration Day to around $2.25 on Friday. To drum up interest in this crypto asset, Trump last month attended an exclusive gala at Mar-a-Lago for the top coin holders. But that didn’t seem to help much.

Now, Trump’s meme coin business partners are back with what appears to a new plan to lure investors: a chance to win box seats at the World Cup final in July. Or, as the meme coin’s official website eloquently puts it: “This Summer, Top Members Earn an Extraordinary 3-Day VIP Experience with a Private Luxury Suite at the World Football 2026 Final Game.”

Earlier this month, the coin’s website, which is run by Trump associate Bill Zanker, announced the creation of a special club for coin holders that would offer perks, including exclusive access to then-unnamed sporting events. Now the first details have been posted—the 19 highest ranking club members will be invited to attend a three-day party for the World Cup final. The precise rules for determining rankings are unclear but seem to include some combination of the number of coins investors own and the amount of time over which they’ve owned them.

Perks will include access to a swanky stadium suite, three nights at the St. Regis hotel, chauffeured rides to the stadium, an invitation to a gala, an “elite” afterparty, and “exclusive World Cup nightclub access.” The apparently AI-generated illustration on the website shows a generic stadium, with guests dining and facing away from the game. One figure is wearing a red hat that says “$TRUMP” instead of “MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN”—a not especially subtle clue about where the Trump presidency is heading.

Neither FIFA nor the club’s organizers responded to a request for comment on what exactly the “World Cup nightclub” is, or if the gala and afterparty are FIFA events. The site’s fine print does make clear that the World Cup and FIFA are not affiliated or connected in any way to the $TRUMP coin promotion. But on some levels, it’s a perfect match. The World Cup has already been harshly criticized for focusing its ticket sales on lavish hospitality packages. Trump has developed a close relationship with FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who created a “peace prize” to award to Trump.

On Stubhub, the cheapest nosebleed seats for the final are currently going for around $8,700. So, as swanky and elite as the Trump Coin Club’s offerings aim to be, the plunging price of $TRUMP could perhaps turn it into an unexpectedly affordable way to get into the big game.

It’s planting season, and 70 percent of American farmers can’t afford enough fertilizer to plant all their crops. About a third of the planet’s nitrogen fertilizer, the most widely used in global agriculture, must pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, that waterway is essentially still closed to most ships. 

It’s been described as a “slow-moving food crisis”: when farmers can’t buy fertilizer, they don’t plant as much, and months on, that shows up in scarcer, pricier food. United Nations estimates that 45 million people worldwide could go hungry thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Though the situation is not quite as dire in the US, American farmers are feeling the squeeze, too: fertilizer prices are changing by the minute, soybean farmers are still facing export tariffs, and diesel costs are up, too. 

In an Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Sen. John Boozman proclaimed that “food security is national security.” But the hearing offered few governmental solutions to the fertilizer shortage—particularly not ending the war. 

Trent Kubik, president of the South Dakota Corn Grower’s Association, told the committee he’s had a hard season on his farm. “We expected our costs were going to be higher than normal, as we’d be purchasing [fertilizer] closer to peak demand season,” he said, but with the war on Iran, they’re “nearly doubling.” 

He’s not the only one. In the first quarter of 2026, 86 American farms have already filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. And while farmers suffer under the Hormuz blockade, fertilizer producers’ revenues continue to increase. 

“The fertilizer industry is one of the most heavily consolidated industries,” Omanjana Goswami of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who studies agricultural policy, told Mother Jones. “At the same time that these companies are making billions of dollars in profits over the years, farmers have seen profit margins go down drastically because of the higher cost of fertilizer.”

Four major manufacturers control nearly the entire US fertilizer market—and they’ve increased nitrogen fertilizer prices 28 percent since the war on Iran began in February, according to recent University of Illinois data.

Meanwhile, farmers are scrambling, planting less food, and switching to less fertilizer-thirsty crops. “About 4 million acres of corn [in the US] have been switched over to soybean, just to make up for the fact that fertilizer availability was much less this spring,” Goswami said. 

“That’s the thing that we feel the worst about,” Kubik, the corn farmer, said. “During the last 75 days, a lot of money was being made–but it wasn’t by farmers.” 

“Farmers get thrown head first into a crisis every time global supply chains are hit,” Goswami said. That reoccurring crisis—which also happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—is the product of an unsustainable agricultural model that requires massive amounts of fertilizer to be shipped from overseas. Some experts suggest that even if the war on Iran ends tomorrow, high fertilizer prices will persist through at least 2027.

The Iran war fertilizer shock, Goswami added, will likely impact wheat in particular. 

Combined with some bad weather earlier this spring and an unrelenting drought in the plains states, the war is making this the worst year for wheat yields in decades. Most wheat grown in the US (unlike, say, corn or soy) is destined for consumption by humans, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see that price shock in the bread aisle later this year.

Meanwhile, beyond some efforts at mandating greater price transparency from fertilizer manufacturers, farmers haven’t been offered any real relief.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), at Tuesday’s hearing, was indignant. “Between the war in Iran, spiking fuel and fertilizer prices, and illegal trade wars, increasing the cost of equipment, and limiting market access, it’s no wonder that farmers in Georgia I talked to say that they can’t take much more,” he said at this week’s hearing. “Fertilizer prices are increasing. Diesel costs have increased by over $2 a gallon compared to this time last year and there’s no end in sight. At this point, the best-case scenario for farmers is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

It was open, he pointed out, before the war started.

A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where the theory ends and dark suggestion takes over. One is meant to conclude that the supposed Hebrew origins of the word mean that the hantavirus—a well-documented illness with outbreaks that go back several decades—is somehow a scam, perpetrated by either the Israeli government or some other undefined group of Jewish people. 

None of this is true. Even the root linguistic claim is completely wrong: the word “hantavirus” comes from the Hantaan River in Korea, where the prototype virus was first identified. Nor is hantavirus, which is typically spread by close contact with infected rodents or their urine, saliva, or feces, a new illness: the virus was isolated in 1978 and cultivated in labs as far back as 1981. In New Mexico, hantavirus cases virtually occur annually; last year, Santa Fe resident Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman, died from the illness. 

Yet in the past two weeks, the “Hebrew” claim has spread wildly across Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X, and YouTube, through a fusillade of virtually identical posts, mostly shared by people who are neither public figures nor widely followed. The way the false notion has spread is an excellent demonstration not only of how a conspiracy theory is created and reinforced in real time, but of the ways tech platforms are either unable or unwilling to take action against coded hateful claims. 

Almost all of the social media posts making these claims follow the same format, whether presented in screenshots or a video: the words “I wonder what Hanta means in Hebrew” appear, followed by an image of a Google search for the term, with the company’s AI Overview summary at the top, which claims: “In Hebrew slang, hanta (חַנְטָה) means nonsense, a lie, a scam, or something completely fake. It is often used colloquially as the equivalent of “that’s bullshit” or “a load of garbage.” As citations, Google’s AI overview links to an answer from Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot, and to a Reddit thread that’s since been deleted. A virtually identical AI summary also currently appears on Instagram when a user searches for the phrase “What does Hanta mean in Hebrew.” 

The rumors spread so widely on X that they, as Snopes pointed out, became a trending topic on the platform. Many of the posts had impressive reach, considering the posters’ stature. One of the most successful versions on Instagram, from a New Age influencer calling herself Divinely Sierra, has garnered over two million views. (In a comment added a day after she made the video, Sierra added, “I can’t stress enough about how this post is not a dig at Jews… This post is specifically talking about how this reality and everything we see come from the world stage is scripted.”) Another version on Instagram is approaching 200,000 views, posted by a small-scale hunting and masculinity influencer whose previous videos often didn’t crack 500 views. To drive the point home, his video includes audio from the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila.”

Interestingly, the claims have spread widely even as very few recognizable public figures have engaged. Shock jocks Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew discussed the claim in a video that’s still up on YouTube but was removed by TikTok the day I contacted the company for comment. JP Sears, a far-right comedian, has posted versions of the claim on both X and Facebook—but at just over 200,000 views apiece, he’s done scarcely better than that hunting influencer.  

Like false claims about the Talmud that circulated among some of the internet’s most unpleasant masculinity influencers in the summer of 2024, the hantavirus claims also rely on flatly wrong facts about Hebrew. Dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, a linguist and language revivalist, suggested to me that the claim is “based on confusing the Korean potamonym (river name) ‘hanta’ with khárta (חרטא), a common Israeli slangism meaning ‘bullshit, nonsense.’” (The Hebrew letters that make the N and R sounds, he points out, are “similar graphically.”) 

Zuckermann says that another Israeli slang term, khantarísh (חנטריש) means “nonsense, worthless person, bullshitter.” “Theoretically, this term could be clipped (shortened) to khánta,” he says. 

But, he adds, “I personally know hundreds of thousands speakers of the Israeli language and have never heard any of them saying khánta, whereas khárta is common.”

A TikTok spokesperson told me the company’s “Community Guidelines” disallow “misinformation that could cause significant harm to individuals or society,” including “harmful conspiracy theories, and other false information related to public safety or crises—when such content may lead to violence or cause public panic.” The spokesperson also told me that when users search for the word “hantavirus” on TikTok, they’ll now first see a link to a Mayo Clinic page.

While the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, under Elon Musk, X maintains nominal policies against “hateful conduct.” Experts have found what one study called a “consistent spike” in hate speech after Musk bought the company in 2022. In an agreement with British regulators announced Friday, the company pledged to take stronger action against both hateful content and accounts linked to terrorist groups.

YouTube—where the claims are present, but not as prevalent—has policies that forbid “certain types of misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm,” which the hantavirus claims don’t clearly fall into. A Meta spokesperson, meanwhile, told me that the company is “reviewing the content in question and will take action against anything that violates our policies.” 

But like the videos spreading false claims themselves, the spokesperson added, the responses are also expected to come from users.

“As we announced in March 2025, Meta has rolled out a Community Notes feature that lets people add more context to Facebook, Instagram and Threads posts that are potentially misleading or confusing,” they told me. “Meta has always been clear that we don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth, and our approach has long been to surface information that people find helpful in deciding what to read, trust or share.”

On March 21, 2025, Allison Posner received a “Reduction in Force” notice informing her that her position as chief of external relations at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was being abolished. Her termination was the result of the “dissolution” of the watchdog office, which handled complaints about conditions and treatment in detention facilities. She was among some 110 full-time OIDO staff who were put on a 60-day administrative leave. “You will be separated from DHS at the close of business on May 23, 2025,” the letter stated.

Posner, a one-time immigration attorney, had joined DHS during the Obama years to work in the ombudsman’s office for US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency in charge of visas, work authorizations, and other immigration benefits. Then, in 2019, Congress established another office to carry out independent and neutral oversight of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities and investigate potential misconduct and detainees’ rights violations. Posner was tasked with helping set up this new detention watchdog.

OIDO was supposed to be separate from ICE and CBP while still answering directly to the Homeland Security secretary. It was also designed to complement the oversight work of other department bodies, such as the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and the Office of Inspector General. Crucially, the office placed on-site inspectors and case managers inside detention centers where they could hear complaints directly from detainees and more immediately address their grievances.

“We went into facilities, talked to people, and solved their individual problems,” Posner said. “For the first time, it wasn’t that people in detention would file a complaint by mailing off a form to Washington. They would simply look for someone from our team who was visiting their facility every week or every other week and just talk to a person in real life.”

But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Posner witnessed his administration gut the detention ombudsman’s office she had played a role in getting off the ground. It all culminated in this month’s announcement, first reported by the HuffPost, that OIDO was being shut down. The dismantling of the watchdog office creates a void in independent detention oversight at a moment when it’s needed the most, former employees and advocates say. “We were getting to a place where we were doing it well,” Posner said, “but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking.”

The stated mission of the ombudsman office was to ensure that the conditions for detained immigrants were humane. To that end, case managers stationed across the country conducted announced and unannounced visits to more than 100 detention centers, including those run by private companies and owned by state and local governments. The office also published inspection reports with recommendations to improve detention conditions in specific facilities and flagged broader systemic trends like medical understaffing at the border.

Lately, Posner said, DHS hadn’t allowed them to publish their most recent annual report on the website. “We didn’t publish anything else,” she said. “I think we had a couple of other inspection reports that we ended up just sitting on.” The last available report posted on the website is from 2024, and OIDO’s webpage advising relatives of detainees and advocates on how to request assistance has been archived.

The detention ombudsman wasn’t the only DHS oversight office affected by the March 2025 reduction in force. Most of the 150 full-time employees with CRCL and the 44 who worked at the USCIS ombudsman’s arm were also put on administrative leave, according to an April 2025 complaint filed by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and other advocacy groups challenging the closure of the oversight offices as “arbitrary and capricious.” The complaint claims their elimination violated the statutes mandating their existence and funding. (CRCL and the USCIS ombudsman were established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.)

The number of complaints the detention ombudsman office received plummeted in the months after March 2025, which a government official attributed to the absence of case managers in the detention centers, according to a Washington Office on Latin America report about the dismantling of DHS’s internal oversight. Detainees also reported that information on how to file complaints with the watchdog offices had been removed from their facilities.

Tricia McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, said at the time that the watchdog offices “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles” and “often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” OIDO, she added, “misused taxpayer funds by facilitating complaints that encourage illegal immigration.” In an April 2025 letter to ex-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, dozens of members of Congress expressed outrage at the closure of the watchdog offices, saying it placed “vulnerable populations at even greater risk of abuse.”

In May 2025, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the government to post public notices stating that the offices remained operational. But by early 2026, OIDO had been stripped down to just a handful of employees, according to a court declaration by the acting deputy immigration detention ombudsman, who framed the downsizing not as a fatal blow to the office but as a “realignment.” In 2025, OIDO had a $28-million budget—a small fraction of DHS’s ballooning resources boosted by an injection of $170 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill. The department’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year accounted for no additional funding for the watchdog office, stating that “OIDO has been eliminated in its entirety.”

“The office of the ombudsman was already decimated in early 2025 when the Trump administration fired almost all of the staff,” Michelle Brané, who served as the ombudsman in 2024, said. “But it is particularly concerning that there is now no pretense at all, and there is no mechanism for people to have very serious concerns about conditions of custody addressed.”

It wasn’t easy for people who had been detained by the federal government, and their families and supporters, to trust that an office within that same government would address their problems. But over time, the complaints coming in started to mount. Some were about relatively small problems, like a broken soda vending machine. Others had to do with medical neglect or abuse. In the fiscal year 2024, OIDO received 11,384 complaints, according to an unpublished annual report to Congress. The number of complaints that reached the office over five years added up to 26,846. The most common issues were related to inadequate medical care, contact and communication, and facility environment.

News of OIDO’s shutdown broke on the same day as the Washington Post published an investigation based on internal ICE records that revealed 780 use-of-force incidents in detention facilities during the first year of the second Trump term. It also comes at a time when immigrant deaths in ICE custody have reached a record high; 49 people have died in detention since January 2025. As many as 29 just in this fiscal year. In January, the detained population peaked at 73,000, but it has since diminished to about 60,000, according to the most recent data from ICE.

Former employees I talked to wondered if some of these deaths could have been prevented if the office hadn’t been decimated. “Any death in immigration detention custody is a death too many,” Brané said. “I would like to believe that our attention to a lot of these medical issues kept that number lower than it might have been otherwise.” OIDO’s system wasn’t perfect, she noted, and could have used more independence and enforcement authority. Nonetheless, the now-defunct office played a critical role in providing immediate responses to complaints ranging from insufficient food to a detainee’s inability to secure a medical appointment.

David Gersten, who worked at DHS for almost 20 years and recently served as acting immigration detention ombudsman, praised on LinkedIn the watchdog’s case management embedded model as a “new approach” to federal oversight. “I visited around a hundred ICE and CBP facilities over four years and know OIDO helped ICE and CBP reduce costs and improve efficiency while ensuring safe and secure conditions for detainees,” he wrote in a post. In 2023, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recognized the office with an innovation award.

Last week, DHS blamed the end of the detention watchdog on Congress, saying in a statement to NPR that it had shut down because of a funding lapse. But the legislation to fund the department and end the government shutdown didn’t mandate the closure of the office. “There’s plenty of money lying around for DHS to accomplish its statutory functions,” said Anthony Enriquez, an attorney with the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center leading the case against the government. “They’re using the fact that Congress didn’t give even more money as a pretext to accomplish the goal they always had from the beginning, shut these offices down without congressional approval.”

Posner agreed. “It feels like it’s all very intentional to make people absolutely miserable while they’re detained,” she said, calling it “an utter disregard for safety and just humane treatment.”