Kai Trump, the granddaughter of President Donald Trump, revealed that half the world dislikes her because of her last name.

In a recently resurfaced interview with conservative influencer Jake Paul, Kai Trump admitted that "some people don't like me."

"I mean, 50% in the world doesn't like me," she remarked, "because my last name, but like they don't actually know me. So like, I'm hoping if people actually give me a shot and, like, not look at like the last name, then I won't have any [opposition], but we'll see."

"Does that happen often?" Paul wondered. "Are people screaming s--- at you?"

"I've had one time I was out in public, and someone literally walked up to me to tell me that my grandpa sucks," Kai Trump recalled. "I'm like, well, thank you so much for taking the time of your day to say that. Like, great. What do you want me to say to that? Like I was like, okay."

The president's granddaughter explained her strategy for dealing with haters.

"I think for me, social media was kind of easy," she observed. "So I felt like whenever — if I get, you know, s--- online and all that stuff by people, since I've always had the mentality when I was even little."

"It just doesn't, doesn't like affect me," Kai Trump added. "And that's going back to the family and everything like that. We all have that mentality. It's just like ingrained into us."

President Donald Trump signaled his impatience with ABC over his long-simmering feud with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

The 79-year-old president demanded the network remove Kimmel from the airwaves over a joke he made last week in which he described first lady Melania Trump as having "the glow of an expectant widow," and his Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr has directed Walt Disney Co. to file early license renewal applications for its local affiliate stations.

"When is ABC Fake News Network firing seriously unfunny Jimmy Kimmel, who incompetently presides over one of the Lowest Rated shows on Television?" Trump posted Thursday morning on Truth Social. "People are angry. It better be soon!!! President DJT."

Both the president and his wife have publicly called on ABC to fire Kimmel over his April 23 joke, which they have blamed for an alleged assassination attempt two days later at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

ABC briefly suspended Kimmel in September following backlash over his comments about the suspect accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah.

The Michigan Supreme Court adopted a rule on Wednesday to prohibit civil arrests, including the civil immigration warrants commonly used by ICE, which are administrative warrants, not judicial warrants.

Specifically, the new rule, which will go into effect on May 1, states that “Parties, attorneys, and subpoenaed witnesses are not subject to civil arrest while going to, attending, and returning from the places they are required to attend.”

That is defined in the rule as applying in any location that a person is legally obligated to appear at for judicial proceedings or related functions, as well as “the reasonable and direct travel necessary” to arrive and return from those proceedings.

The rule, first proposed in late November, garnered significant public attention, with over 2,500 comments posted to the court’s website over the course of just over a month. Those comments included support from Attorney General Dana Nessel, as well as a number of state legislators and organizations like the State Bar of Michigan Executive Committee.

“The existence of, and ICE’s compliance with, its own prior policies shows that ICE can carry out its operations without making civil arrests in a courthouse. And there is nothing in the proposed amendment to suggest otherwise,” Nessel wrote. “All told, the impact of the proposed amendment on ICE’s operations will be minimal, and any impact is far outweighed by the need to protect and preserve the people’s fundamental right to participation and accountability in the fair administration of justice.”

This rule now largely aligns Michigan with a number of other states that have enacted policies to limit ICE actions at courthouses, including New York, Connecticut and Illinois.

Judge Noah Hood added a concurring opinion in the order issuing the rule, which he said was to “emphasize that this amendment falls squarely within this Court’s rulemaking function and does not exceed it.”

He noted that the rule “functions to maintain order in courthouses and courtrooms so that litigants, witnesses, and members of the public may conduct their business without unnecessary interference, including when they are en route to and from the same,” and that it does not impair federal or state executives, nor the state Legislature, from executing or making laws related to civil arrests or immigration enforcement.

Justice Brian K. Zahra, the sole Republican on the court, wrote a dissenting opinion in opposition to the new rule, calling it “at best a political statement framed as a solution in search of a problem.” Zahra, who also stated when the rule was first proposed that he would have declined to publish the proposal for comment, wrote that the question of immigration detention at courthouses was not a problem in Michigan.

He also raised concerns about the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which is often cited as a reason why state and local jurisdictions have limited ability to limit ICE actions, including the development of detention centers.

“State courts have no authority to void a federal arrest,” Zahra wrote. “The proposed amendment offers only false assurance that parties, attorneys, subpoenaed witnesses, and officers while going to, attending, and returning from court may not be arrested by the federal government. Moreover, as a practical matter, the prospect of having an arrest ‘voided’ by a state court offers false comfort to someone being held in federal custody.”

The rule’s adoption comes as a set of bills to limit ICE actions in multiple jurisdictions — including courts — has advanced to the full Senate. The bills would also limit the use of masks by federal law enforcement officers. While likely to pass the Democratic-controlled upper chamber, Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has refused to take up similar legislation in the GOP-led House.

Donald Trump received more bad news on Thursday morning with MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire reporting that voters are fed up with inflation during his watch, with the president reaching record low approval numbers.

According to Lemire, Trump is in “real trouble.”

“Only 21 percent of people surveyed approve of Trump's job handling over inflation and rising prices, while 70% disapprove,” the Morning Joe co-host began. “That puts Trump a whopping 49 points underwater, the lowest rating Trump has ever had on inflation. In fact, that's even lower than former Presidents Biden and Carter, when inflation was at its worst during their presidencies; when inflation reached just over 9 percent in June 2022 under Biden and nearly 13 percent in October 1980 under Carter.”

“For perspective, the current inflation rate is 3.2 percent, so a smaller number, but yet unhappiness [is] really high towards Trump,” he elaborated. “So when it comes to the cost of living, the poll found that 75 percent of independents and 45 percent of Republicans surveyed say the country is on the wrong track.”

“This is why so many in the GOP are deathly afraid of November’s midterms," he added.

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Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) announced on Thursday she is suspending her campaign for U.S. Senate.

In a statement posted to her campaign site, Mills said, “When I decided to run for the United States Senate last year, it was because I believed Maine people were getting a bad deal from Washington and because the President of the United States was threatening our democracy and pushing our nation to the brink of disaster. I continue to believe that today. While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else – the fight – to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources."

“I step back from campaigning with unending love, admiration, and hope for Maine people – a people whose hearts are filled with love and whose integrity and humility is surpassed only by their kindness, generosity, and compassion," Mills concluded. “To the people of Maine: I love you, and I will continue to fight relentlessly for you as your Governor. For the next eight months, I will continue working hard for you, standing up for what is right, defending the Constitution and doing what I can to preserve our democracy."

Mills, age 78, entered the race partly at the urging of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), but has frequently faced questions about how long she would be able to serve if elected.

With Mills no longer in the running, the main Democratic candidate to take on longtime Sen. Susan Collins is Graham Platner, a harbormaster and oyster farmer running as a progressive outsider. Polls prior to Mills' exit already showed him with a comfortable lead in the primary.

Owner of President Donald Trump's former aides looked askance at a new report that Amazon is considering a reboot of the popular reality TV show that propelled him to ubiquitous fame.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, co-host of "The View" and former White House director of strategic communications, told "CNN News Central" that Amazon's potential reboot – possibly starring Donald Trump Jr. – is clearly aimed at flattering the 79-year-old president.

"I'm just shocked they haven't thought of this sooner, to be honest," Griffin said. "So honestly, people think of Donald Trump and they think of his real estate empire. But the thing he was actually most successful at before becoming a two-term president was television, 'The Apprentice.' The spinoffs were hugely successful. You've got about 80 million people who voted for Donald Trump, even if a fraction of those are loyal to any project he's involved in, they're going to tune in to this."

"Will I watch it? Probably not," she added, "but there are a lot of folks who are going to tune in because it's the Trump legacy, and it's a show that was widely popular from a business standpoint, it makes total sense."

Amazon previously paid $40 million to distribute “Melania,” a documentary that followed the first lady during the first weeks of her husband's second term, and it released episodes of the original “The Apprentice” series on Prime Video in March 2025, and Griffin agreed the company was trying to curry favor with Trump.

"That's very clearly what is happening here, but there is a market for it," she said. "That's just there's no question that at this point, Donald Trump won the popular vote. I think a lot of executives are looking around and saying, 'Okay, so what do we do with, how do we bring in some of those voters as potential viewers?' That said, I think a less polarizing person would maybe be Ivanka Trump as the potential host of this. Put somebody in who might have a little bit of appeal to people who didn't vote for him, but it's not the worst idea I've ever heard."

"Television is a great way to curry favor with this president," Griffin added. "Being supportive of him on television, putting his allies on television, that's that's the quickest way to get through to him."

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Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV), one of the only Republican governors in charge of a swing state, hitched his fortunes to President Donald Trump — and now, with the tide of voters aggressively shifting against the president, he seems to be regretting it.

According to Politico, "The Republican governor started the year with a sevenfold fundraising advantage, double-digit net favorability ratings and the tailwinds of a swing state the GOP presidential candidate carried for the first time in two decades. Five months later, he finds himself in a neck-and-neck race with Democrat Aaron Ford, the state’s attorney general, yoked to a highly unpopular president, a wobbling economy and a Middle Eastern war that has sent gas prices in the state soaring from $3.50 to $5 a gallon, among the highest in the nation."

Speaking to Politico, Lombardo said, “Yes, I am concerned. Not only because of my re-elect but because of Nevada, right? What’s the proverbial line — all politics are local? It’s no longer that way. What’s happening worldwide, nationally, either we embrace it or we don’t.”

Lombardo, while not known as a firebrand among Republican governors, has run into his share of controversies. He tried to preserve gun rights for people convicted of hate crimes, and claimed people protesting the mass firing of government workers last year were just too lazy to get a real job.

His big issue, though, has been tying himself to Trump. The Democratic Governors Association has slammed him for claiming in an interview with The Nevada Independent's Jon Ralston that the president is "doing a fantastic job," and advocating voters take "a little pain" for the sake of Trump's tariffs.

Donald Trump's attempt to exploit Saturday's assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to build support for his controversial and unpopular $400 million ballroom addition has failed to move the needle, with the Washington Post reporting that voters remain "unmoved."

Despite a full court press by the president and his allies to use the dinner chaos to change voters' minds, new polling cited by the Post revealed that 56 percent of Americans still oppose Trump's plan to replace the torn-down East Wing for his privately-funded ballroom, while just 28 percent support it.

The opposition runs deep. Nearly three times as many Americans "strongly" oppose the project as strongly support it — revealing a stark enthusiasm gap that no amount of crisis exploitation can overcome, reports the Post.

Trump and his GOP allies attempted to capitalize on the shooting incident, circulating legislation this week to either authorize the project or funnel taxpayer money into construction, arguing that a secure ballroom is essential for protecting the president, but the strategy went nowhere. While Republican support did tick upward slightly — from 62 percent to 72 percent among GOP voters — there was no meaningful shift in overall public support for the project.

Case in point: Tamara Snyder, a Florida independent who leans Republican, was blunt in her assessment: "The ballroom is frivolous, in my opinion." She also praised the historic preservationists fighting to stop construction. "I'm 100 percent backing them and what they're doing," she said.

The ballroom has consumed Trump's second term in alarming ways. He mentions the project more frequently than policy priorities his advisers have urged him to champion ahead of the midterms — including his TrumpRx drug-pricing website. Administration officials have confirmed that Trump "has micromanaged every detail of the renovation," the Post report notes.

FBI Director Kash Patel's lawsuit against The Atlantic is not going to get very far, attorneys Shant Karnikian and Brian Kabateck agreed on the latest episode of their "Civil Action" show on Meidas Touch's Legal AF Network.

The reason is simple, they observed: Patel would have to prove something that will be almost impossible to prove.

"I'll see you in court," said Karnikian. "Those are the famous last words of many people in the Trump administration right before they lose the lawsuit that they bring. Joining those ranks is going to be Kash Patel. He has now filed what he calls a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic for reporting on some problems he's been allegedly having lately. And this isn't just media drama. Kash Patel is going to have to deal with a major constitutional law problem."

The Atlantic's reporting alleged a lot of damaging info about the FBI director, including excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and a constant state of paranoia and meltdowns over the prospect he could be fired from the administration. Patel denies all of these allegations — but that won't be enough, Karnikian and Kabateck said.

"If you've watched this before, you know that the case that governs here is New York Times v. Sullivan," said Karnikian. "Kash Patel is a public official. He's a public figure because he's the FBI director. And that's determined objectively, by the way. It's not up to Kash Patel to say he's a private citizen or not. So, since he's a public figure, the standard that applies is that the Atlantic acted with actual malice. They need to prove that. Kash Patel needs to prove that they acted with actual malice."

"Now, what does that mean?" said Karnikian. "It doesn't mean that the things that The Atlantic published were just false. You know, that they happened to turn out to be false. Kash Patel needs to prove that The Atlantic knew it was false, but still published it nonetheless, or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Not just got it wrong, that they knew it was false or acted so recklessly, published something that could not possibly be true."

"That's a very, very, very high standard," Karnikian added. "Doesn't matter how much it damaged you. Doesn't matter how false it turned out to be. They need to show that the Atlantic knew it was false. I think that's an uphill battle."

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In 2019, Kathy Zhu had her title of Miss Michigan beauty queen taken from her due to offensive tweets deemed by many to be racist and Islamophobic. Almost seven years later, she’s handling digital media for the Michigan House Republicans.

Zhu has been employed as digital strategist director for the Republican Central Staff at the Michigan House of Representatives under Speaker Matt Hall since August 2025. The fact that Zhu has held the job without any public outcry might be an indicator of how thoroughly the far right has infiltrated the Michigan GOP.

“It’s very feasible that she might not feel pressure to disavow the views that she had,” Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, told Raw Story. “It might help her brand to be able to say to the Michigan GOP that she’s able to tap into edgy, young, right-wing culture.”

Zhu’s rehabilitation from disgraced beauty queen to Republican state legislative aide offers an example of a Generation Z conservative who responded to public censure by doubling down on extremism, while finding acceptance from the GOP establishment.

Then the president of the College Republicans at the University of Michigan, where she was studying political science, and an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, Zhu was forced to relinquish the title of Miss Michigan after the Miss World America organization deemed her anti-Black and anti-Muslim tweets to violate its rules on “good character.”

The tweets that Miss World America flagged as “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate” included one calling on Black Lives Matter activists to address crime within the Black community before protesting police violence, and another accusing Muslim students celebrating World Hijab Day of “trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam.”

Other tweets from Zhu’s now-suspended account, which have been archived, are even more provocative.

Zhu described Adolf Hitler as “very smart and a good public speaker” in a 2017 tweet that appears to be framed as a rhetorical parry against criticism leveled at Trump for praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as a “tough cookie” and a “smart guy.”

In another tweet that appears to argue against equating white supremacist violence with Islamic extremism, Zhu posted: “KKK DOESN’T BLOW UP ARENAS AND SHOUT IN THE NAME OF JESUS.” The Ku Klux Klan’s history since its founding is replete with acts of terrorism, intimidation and murder, including the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, resulting in the deaths of four Black girls. Klan members have historically cloaked their violence in Christian rhetoric.

Rather than apologize in the aftermath of the Miss Michigan controversy, Zhu went on a media tour, telling CNN in one interview, “I stand behind every tweet that I post.”

Zhu’s appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” got the attention of Trump, who singled her out at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit in Washington, DC.

“What they did to this young lady was terrible,” Trump said, adding that it “was pretty cool” that she had worn a “Make America Great Again” hat on “Fox and Friends.”

With her newfound notoriety following the controversy, Zhu networked with an array of influencers to the right of the mainstream MAGA movement and Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump group led by the late Charlie Kirk.

Zhu reportedly attended a dinner in September 2019 with Nick Fuentes and other far-right luminaries described by People for the American Way as “white nationalist and anti-Semitic content creators.” Turning Point USA severed ties with one of its brand ambassadors who attended the dinner, while denouncing white nationalism as “abhorrent and un-American.”

At the time, Fuentes, a rising influencer with a history of questioning the Holocaust and praising Hitler, was dispatching his followers to Turning Point USA events to heckle speakers and pose questions intended to embarrass them over their support for Israel in a campaign known as the “Groyper wars.”

At the time of the September 2019 dinner with Zhu, Fuentes had recently attacked a conservative commentator for condemning a mass murder carried out by a white supremacist targeting Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Fuentes, during a livestream that was apparently cut from his podcast, reportedly called Matt Walsh a “shabbos goy race traitor” who worked for Jews. Walsh was employed by the Daily Caller, owned by Ben Shapiro.

Fuentes has said that he and Zhu were in contact during the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and that he later saw her in Orlando, Florida. Fuentes' comments don’t explain the circumstances of the meeting, but his group, America First Political Action Committee, hosted conferences in Orlando in February 2021 and February 2022.

It’s unclear whether Zhu and Fuentes have remained in contact.

While working as a scheduler and director of operations for Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) from 2022 to 2025, Zhu maintained a relatively low profile and stayed out of the headlines. In a 2025 LinkedIn post, Zhu said she had earned a master of arts in global security studies from Johns Hopkins University and was undergoing “spiritual transformation” as a convert to Catholicism.

Zhu could not be reached for this story. While she has not publicly renounced any of the views expressed in her past social media posts, it’s unclear whether she still holds them. It’s also unclear whether she views herself as being aligned with Fuentes and his Groyper movement.

Regardless, the views of someone like Fuentes, who dined with Trump in 2022, are no longer out of line in the Republican Party. By early 2024, Kirk, formerly the standard-bearer of youth conservatism in the Trump era and the one-time target of Fuentes’ attacks, had voiced white nationalist talking points. Conservative writer Rod Dreher reported last November that a D.C. insider estimated that "between 30 and 40 percent of of the Zoomers who work in official Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes."

“I can say since 2019 the spectrum of respectable, young, conservative opinion has gotten closer to Nick Fuentes,” Lorber said. “For someone like [Zhu], a past association with Nick Fuentes is really not much of a deal-breaker in the way it might have once been.”

The office of Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall did not respond to messages from Raw Story inquiring whether he was aware of Zhu’s history of losing her Miss Michigan title for her controversial social media posts at the time she was hired for the job of digital strategist director.

Hall, whose party took control of the Michigan House in January 2025, has not shied from controversy. In Trumpy fashion, he reportedly attacked a Democratic colleague by calling her “a very low IQ representative” and “probably one of the dumbest ones in the legislature” during a weekly press conference last year.

Hall held on to his leadership position over the objections of at least one of his Republican colleagues after the Daily Beast reported that he was accused of domestic violence against his girlfriend and interfering with a 911 call in 2019, but was never charged.

Hall has also acknowledged sending an email threatening to kill a college student in 2001, although he told the police he did not actually have any intent to harm the recipient. Hall reportedly wrote in the email, “We are going to impose our Southern ways on you! I’ve got a shotgun rifle and I just put a bullet in it with your name on it!”

Since 2019, views once considered taboo, such as the idea that America should be a Christian nation and that white people are being replaced, have become widely accepted in the Republican Party.

“She may very well be encouraging Michigan politicians to adopt some of that edgy, right-wing culture to connect with young conservatives,” Lorber said. “It might even be a benefit for her to say that she’s been an influencer. It really doesn’t matter if she’s secretly a Groyper, or has no connection to those views. There’s such a wide acceptance of the views that used to be considered beyond the pale that she can fit comfortably in the young GOP.”

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr's decision to initiate an early renewal review of Disney's broadcast licenses is creating divisions within the Republican Party, with some lawmakers expressing concern about potential government censorship while others defend his authority to investigate diversity practices.

Carr cited Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices as the reason for the accelerated license review. However, critics argue the timing suggests retaliation for a joke Jimmy Kimmel made about First Lady Melania Trump during a White House Correspondents' Dinner preview, reported Politico.

Kimmel quipped that Melania had a "glow like an expectant widow," referencing the 24-year age difference between the Trumps, but President Donald Trump denounced the comment as a "despicable call to violence" in light of a shooting that occurred at the dinner Saturday night.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) whose Commerce Committee oversees the FCC, left open the possibility of questioning Carr, reiterating his longstanding opposition to government involvement in regulating speech. "The federal government should not engage in censorship, that it is not the FCC's role to be the speech police," Cruz said Wednesday.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) similarly expressed skepticism, stating the FCC "probably shouldn't be involved with regulating humor."

However, most Republicans either downplayed Carr's action or defended it as routine regulatory authority. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) characterized the licensing review as a standard exercise of FCC power, while Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) affirmed Carr's authority to conduct such reviews.

The National Association of Broadcasters strongly criticized the move, with CEO Curtis LeGeyt calling it "nearly unprecedented" and warning it "creates significant uncertainty for all broadcasters."

An FCC spokesperson responded that the action addressed alleged discriminatory DEI conduct, including claims Disney created racially segregated spaces and established racial preferences or quotas.

Far-right supporters including MAGA influencer Benny Johnson backed Carr's efforts, arguing taxpayers shouldn't fund programming they object to. Meanwhile, at least one liberal advocacy group called for Carr's impeachment.

Harvard University reportedly concealed the true source of a $25,000 donation to its women's rugby team, allowing athletes to believe the money came from university leadership when it actually originated from convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein.

According to an investigation by podcaster Pablo Torre and Harvard Crimson staffers Dhruv Patel, Hugo C. Chiasson and Elise A. Spenner, the university deliberately obscured Epstein's connection to the gift — a deception that didn't unravel until 2019, years after the money had been spent.

The athletes had no idea who was funding them. Former team president Emily Riehl learned the truth only when a journalist investigating Epstein's criminal history contacted her in 2019.

"I've seen online that you were the president of the women's rugby club that year," attorney Martin F. Murphy wrote, before revealing the donor's identity: "The donor was convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein."

That was the first time Riehl had heard Epstein's name connected to the gift, the report states.

Harvard's internal records tell a different story. Documents obtained by The Crimson and Torre show that in June 2004, Harvard explicitly established the "Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics," noting a specific preference for women's rugby. One month later, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers personally thanked Epstein for the contribution in a direct letter.

But the team was deliberately kept in the dark. Players believed the money had come through Massachusetts Hall, routed personally by Summers after they confronted him about funding disparities between men's and women's rugby programs.

"There's absolutely no way we would have touched a dime from him had we known the source of this funding," Riehl said. "But that information was never provided to us."

The team was struggling financially. The women's rugby players operated on roughly $6,000 annually, cleaning dormitory bathrooms through work-study, volunteering for psychology studies, and soliciting donations from parents to keep the program alive, the Harvard Crimson reporters wrote.

The $25,000 infusion was transformative — but only because its source remained hidden from those it was supposedly meant to help.

Harvard's 2020 report buried the truth, the report notes. When the university released its official investigation into Epstein's donations, the women's rugby gift was folded into a generic tally without addressing the core deception: Harvard's internal records had always identified Epstein as the donor, while the "cash-strapped athletes" were left believing Summers had answered their financial pleas.

Documents released by the House Oversight Committee and Department of Justice since November reveal that Summers maintained a longstanding relationship with Epstein, exchanging emails from the 1990s until the day before Epstein's 2019 arrest.

"I'm glad that it is coming out now, and I'm glad that there is finally some reckoning," Riehl said. "Maybe not to the degree that is warranted, given everything that he did — but it's better to talk about it late than never at all."

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A former Trump administration official downplayed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on voting rights but met pushback from his fellow panelists on CNN.

The conservative majority essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act's requirement that congressional districts be designed to give minority voters an opportunity to elect their own representatives, and former Donald Trump aide Mike Dubke told "CNN This Morning" that he agreed with the court's ruling.

"Let's be clear about what we're talking about: This is just another form of gerrymandering," Dubke said. "I mean, we've been talking about Texas and Virginia and California and that midterm gerrymandering, the Voting Rights Act, making race a primary issue of how you draw these districts, is just another form of gerrymandering. So to Justice [John] Roberts' point, a law that was written over 60 years ago, is it still necessary? We can have that argument, we should have that argument. But we've also got a broken system in which we are trying to gerrymander ourselves into majorities in the House of Representatives. It is the fox designing the henhouse."

Host Audie Cornish pushed back.

"But one of the things that's interesting about this ruling is they specifically say partisan reasons are okay, partisan reasons to protect incumbency, to protect parties is perfectly legal and fine," Cornish said. "So in a way, it doesn't alleviate what you say. It actually elevates the partisan reasoning."

Journalist Sara Fischer agreed.

"When I look at certain laws in the way that the Supreme Court has set precedents, for example, the standard of actual malice when it comes to defamation – that's something that I cover a lot – the wording here matters so much," Fischer said. "So the thought here that you need to prove intent is so, so, so hard for anybody to legally overcome, so just want to put that out there. In terms of the political and partisan thing, I think what they're trying to get at there is that is not going to violate the way that this law is being interpreted. What will violate the way that this law is being interpreted is if you are to make these decisions that are, you know, end up being discriminatory against race, and so essentially what they're saying is we're not ruling on whether or not this is a partisan problem. We're only ruling on this narrow thing. Yeah, now that the outcome means it's more partisan, that's a debate that we all are going to have to have as a society."

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House Republicans are so disgusted with their leadership that some of them are now privately wishing they would lose the majority.

According to NOTUS, "The majority of the House Republican Conference, GOP senators, the White House and even members of his own leadership team are fighting with the embattled House speaker and believe Johnson has lost control of his members. They are also confused by his strategy, as he has repeatedly fumbled attempts to get must-pass legislation through the chamber."

Johnson finally managed to get an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on a bipartisan basis, following days of wrangling and negotiations, noted the report. "But his conference walked away from the process scarred. Some Republicans told NOTUS it was unwise for Johnson to have clumped multiple controversial bills into one rule — including one for Republicans’ budget blueprint for reconciliation. That decision deterred Democrats, who went out of their way to support the failed rule on FISA earlier this month."

One higher-ranking Republican member of Congress told NOTUS, “This is what happens when you have leadership who can’t organize a one-car parade.”

Another said there's essentially no point to having a House majority, and they almost wish the rush of Republicans resigning from Congress would give Democrats the reins: “If we were to lose the majority now, it’d be a blessing in disguise. Because maybe then Democrats would go off the rails and do something stupid, and maybe voters would actually give us another chance in November.”

Wednesday saw yet another round of drama, with the farm bill repeatedly being delayed, undelayed, and delayed again as various members raised objections.

Fresh off forcing the Trump administration to drop its politically motivated prosecution of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is now deploying his Senate Judiciary Committee leverage to block acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's permanent nomination unless the administration abandons any tolerance for Jan. 6 apologism.

According to Politico's Jordain Carney, Tillis holds extraordinary power over the confirmation process. Republicans have a one-vote advantage on the Judiciary Committee, giving Tillis an effective veto over any nominee he opposes.

Tillis issued his ultimatum directly. "Hopefully they'll take me at my word when I say anybody who equivocated on the Jan. 6 rioters, I just can't support," the North Carolina Republican said about potential Justice Department nominees.

The warning extends to anyone Trump nominates as attorney general to replace Pam Bondi. "Every single member of the conference has the same option," Tillis said, urging his GOP colleagues to adopt similar standards.

Tillis has already demonstrated he's willing to execute this strategy. He previously blocked Ed Martin's U.S. attorney nomination because of Martin's comments defending Jan. 6 rioters and his legal work on their behalf, the report notes.

"I'll scrub it when a nominee comes forward, and I'll apply the Martin standard," Tillis said of any pick to succeed Bondi. "By the way, I don't think Martin is employed by the DOJ anymore, either, is he?" — a pointed reference suggesting the administration may have quietly pushed Martin out to avoid further Tillis obstruction.

Tillis dismissed other GOP senators' approach to obstruction as ineffective. "I've seen people do silly things like blanket holds and stuff like that that are not sustainable," he said, contrasting his principled stand with performative opposition.

Disgraced South Carolina politician Mark Sanford is ending his comeback bid — before it even had a chance to properly begin.

According to The Post and Courier, Sanford will suspend his campaign to reclaim his old congressional seat, just 30 days after he first announced: "The former South Carolina governor and congressman confirmed his plans to The Post and Courier April 29, a day before he intends to make his exit official. 'What has hit me over the last month is how the debt and deficit spending issue that I care dearly about will be a change that comes to Washington, rather than from Washington,' Sanford told the newspaper."

Sanford previously represented the state's 1st Congressional District between 1995 and 2001, then again from 2013 to 2019. Between his two stints, he served as governor.

In his second term as governor, he became nationally famous for an infidelity scandal, in which he vanished for days, allegedly to hike the Appalachian Trail, when in reality he was visiting his mistress in Argentina.

He left Congress in 2019, after he lost his primary battle to Katie Arrington. Democrats briefly captured the district as part of the 2018 blue wave, before losing it again to Rep. Nancy Mace in the next cycle.

Mace is now running for governor herself, and with Sanford ending his campaign, the election for the 1st District is now wide open.

President Donald Trump has intensified pressure on Iran by predicting that the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will soon cause catastrophic damage to Tehran's oil infrastructure, but energy experts and analysts widely dispute these claims as unrealistic.

Trump told reporters at the White House last Thursday: "If they don't get their oil moving, their whole oil infrastructure is going to explode." During a Fox News appearance Sunday, he escalated the rhetoric, stating that Iranian oil pipelines "both mechanically and in the earth" would "explode from within" if exports don't resume soon. "They say they only have about three days left before that happens. And when it explodes, you can never rebuild it the way it was," Trump said.

However, energy scholars and industry analysts strongly challenge these predictions, reported the Washington Post. Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at the Defense Priorities think tank, stated flatly: "That is not how it works. Nothing is going to self destruct." Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University's Baker Institute, countered that "Iran has proven it knows how to keep its system operating," noting that abundant empty tankers and domestic refining networks provide viable alternatives to strait exports.

Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy concluded in a Tuesday analysis that even if Iran exhausts storage capacity, it "will not cause catastrophic, or even very serious, damage" to its oil industry. While shut-in operations — where water and gas contaminate reservoirs — can cause long-term damage, explosions are not a known consequence.

Shipping data from TankerTrackers.com shows approximately 45 million barrels of storage capacity exists in empty tankers within the blockade perimeter, equivalent to six weeks of Iran's usual export production. Iran also maintains millions of barrels in inland storage capacity, according to analytics firm Kpler.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed Monday that Iranian production was already slowing, writing on X: "Iran's creaking oil industry is starting to shut in production thanks to the U.S. BLOCKADE." A Treasury Department spokesperson stated that Kharg Island, Iran's primary export hub, was approaching storage capacity at a cost of roughly $170 million daily in lost revenue.

Despite expert skepticism, Trump's predictions represent the latest in a series of shifting administration claims about ending the conflict. As gas prices have surged to $4.23 per gallon from under $3 before the February war's onset, Americans face mounting economic pressures from the ongoing Strait of Hormuz closure.

Multiple MAGA bombshells dropped on Wednesday, from the SCOTUS decision to let Republicans keep cheating to steal elections to Punch-Drunk Pete Hegseth’s sloppy House hearing on the Pentagon going off the rails so badly that he had to be shut down by the Republican Committee Chair.

Meanwhile, MAGA is still weakly trying to scapegoat Jimmy Kimmel for making roughly the same “expectant widow” joke Donald Trump did about Melania. Except that Trump did it in front of the king of England instead of on his own TV show.

And there’s still the fallout from whatever happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The biggest part of that story should be how we can’t trust anything coming from this White House or anyone supporting its current occupant.

I don’t know why we’re being forced to live in the stupidest timeline ever, but I do know sometimes we still get to enjoy it when the smart kids prevail. One of them got Trump’s biggest confession on camera thus far.

Kudos to Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, who apparently shreds all of the memos from Bari Weiss and instead sticks to her job of asking questions to get real answers.

Her sharp reply of “Oh, you think he was talking about you?” is the stuff of legend. The Smartest Girl in School just shut down the biggest, dumbest bully in eight words.

Trump claimed to have read the White House Congressional Dinner shooter’s manifesto, but of course, he didn’t, because he doesn’t read anything. If he had, he’d know it never specifically names him. His fixation on that part of it, and his reaction to O’Donnell reading it, are also part of the tell.

Trump hates women who tell the truth about him so much because he knows we’re right about him.

Yeah, I include myself in that group, because I got under his thin skin in August 2015, and I remain blocked by Trump on both Twitter and Instagram to this day.

O’Donnell pushed back a bit when Trump went after her for *checks notes* reading the words another person wrote. But he kept verbally abusing her, and while she didn’t push back against all of it, she gave a textbook example on how to hold your ground when you also have to deal with whatever’s going on under his suit.

Just as the women of the Supreme Court all stood against Trump in the Voting Rights Act decision, another smart woman returned on Wednesday to ruin it for him.

Our Shero, E. Jean Carroll, was once again vindicated in her defamation case. A federal appeals court in New York rejected Trump's request (number eleventy billion, is it?) to rehear his challenges.

You might recall that a jury awarded E. Jean $83 million in damages in 2024 after her lawyers successfully proved that Trump defamed her with comments he made disputing her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.

MAGA loves to blame the judge and the jury for Trump sexually abusing E. Jean, which is weird when you learn exactly who was on that jury. As she writes in her excellent book Not My Type, one of the jurors who slipped through the voir dire process turned out to only get his news from right-wing podcaster Tim Pool. And he still voted to award her the $83 million in damages.

Seems like maybe both MAGA and Trump need to learn how to take NO for an answer already.

Let’s also pour another one out for Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas, who withstood horrifically racist and misogynistic bullying from MAGA online while preventing Republicans from gerrymandering their way into stealing House seats.

And then there’s the fruitless pursuit of trying to get MAGA to hold Trump accountable for the Epstein Files. His latest manufactured distraction from the files, along with the stupid ballroom, is indicting James Comey again over an AI screenshot of rocks spelling out “86 47” on a beach.

Seriously, this is what passes as a “threat” to the same guy who gleefully celebrated the death of Bob Mueller.

Not only does MAGA still refuse to believe he’s in the Files, but the way they defend him is the same way he defends himself: by bullying the messengers to make us their scapegoats. They also like to try to move the goalposts back to the Biden administration, but that doesn’t really work when Joe Biden’s name isn’t anywhere in the Epstein Files, but Trump’s is in there tens of thousands of times.

Whenever I tweet something about the Epstein Files, MAGA likes to troll me with “Trump should sue you!”

Trump has never sued anyone for saying he’s in the Epstein Files. The most lawsuit-happy loser in this country’s history will gladly keep people tied up in court for years with his appeals, but not when it comes to Epstein.

Weird, huh?

I realize it’s wrong of me to hope that MAGA will follow our example with Eric Swalwell and hold Trump accountable, but I can’t help but believe that they know what Trump did. They don’t want to have to admit they were wrong.

One more story that broke on Wednesday: it turns out that former AG Pam Bondi would rather not go to jail, so she’ll show up for her Congressional subpoena after all. It’s more likely she’ll perjure herself rather than tell the truth about the Epstein Files, so who knows what consequences she might face.

Any would be good at this point, please.

President Donald Trump's latest court loss could bring his scandalous relationship with disgraced financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein back to life, according to one expert.

Michael Popok, a lawyer and host of the podcast "The Intersection with Michael Popok," argued during a new episode on Wednesday that the Trump Department of Justice's unsuccessful bid to remove former DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey's lawsuit from federal court is bad news for the administration.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York ruled that Comey can keep her lawsuit in federal court and said that Trump's DOJ had effectively sealed its own fate when it admitted that her termination relied solely on the Constitution, not the civil service statutes.

"They fired her under the presidential authority under Article II, hoping that this would never see the light of day," Popok said. "I think this new ruling by Judge Jesse Furman in the Southern District of New York may unlock Epstein's scandal as well as help get her job back because Judge Furman has just ruled that she gets to keep her case in federal court."

Comey, the daughter of twice-indicted former FBI Director James Comey, was fired by the DOJ last year for reasons that remain unclear. She then sued the DOJ, arguing that her termination was political retribution for her father's investigation into Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Popok also noted that the ruling would affect the Epstein investigation. Comey was responsible for convicting Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a 20-year sentence on sex trafficking charges. Now that Maxwell is angling for a pardon, Popok argued that Trump doesn't want someone like Comey in his ear, reminding him of how untrustworthy she is.

"So, on the surface, it's Maurene Comey allowed to stay in federal court rather than be shuffled off into an administrative law procedure, never to be heard from again," Popok said. "That's the top line. But right below the surface is the connection between her and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein, Trump, and Todd Blanche, now the acting U.S. attorney. And I think this gets blown sky-high as this particular case continues."

The panel on CNN's "NewsNight" got heated on Wednesday as the price of President Donald Trump's "unpopular" war in Iran was brought up.

Since late February, Trump's war with Iran has raged with almost no end in sight. The Iranian regime has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, which has sent global energy prices skyrocketing, even though the U.S. and Israel have killed multiple of the country's top military and political leaders.

Meanwhile, the goals of the conflict remain unclear. Trump has said the goal was to create the conditions for the Iranian people to rise up and take control of their government, and also to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. Neither outcome has materialized yet.

John Avlon, a former Democratic congressional candidate from New York, argued that Trump's attempts to effect regime change through airstrikes alone won't solve the issue. That's when the panel started to get heated.

"Oh yeah? What about when you throw in their navy? Does that help?" Scott Jennings, a GOP consultant, said snidely.

" Scott. Scott, just for one second! Stop the talking points," Avalon said.

"A blockade is a talking point?" Jennings shot back.

"It is easy to blunder into war, but it is very hard to get out of it," Avlon said. "And that's why our allies are saying, 'We're not with the U.S. on this,' because no case was made. That's why the war is unpopular at home, because no case has been made."

A former federal prosecutor who prosecuted mafia crime families obliterated President Donald Trump's defense for his latest legal battle.

On Tuesday, the Trump Department of Justice returned a two-count indictment against former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening Trump's life and for felony interstate communication violations. The charges stem from a picture Comey posted on his Instagram account that featured seashells arranged to read "86 47," which has been interpreted by the Trump administration to mean Trump should be killed.

The indictment was returned just days after an alleged shooter fired several rounds inside the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents' Dinner was being held. Trump and several members of his cabinet were in attendance and were safely evacuated from the event.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked the president on Wednesday whether he believed the threat was legitimate. Trump responded by arguing that "86" is a common term in the mafia world that means someone ought to be killed.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, argued on CNN's "The Source" with Collins that Trump's explanation carries no weight.

"There was a point in my life where I spent the better part of my waking hours either talking face to face with real-world mobsters, or listening to them talk to each other over wiretaps, body wires, or bugs," Honig said. "I dealt with all five families: Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, and Colombo. I dealt with bosses, underbosses, consigliere, capos, soldiers, associates, all the way down the line. Never, ever. Not once did I hear any real-world gangster use the term 86 to refer to a murder or anything, and god knows these guys had colorful lingo, but never that phrase."

"I don't know where the president's getting this from," he continued. "He said from some movie. They don't use that term in The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Goodfellas. Maybe some old-timey movie, but that's not reality."

The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful and destructive industry in the history of the world. Right now the fate of our planet hangs on our ability to defeat the political power of that industry. It is ready to do anything, including making alliances with pro-fascist forces to maintain its ability to make profits. Understanding the insidious ways it has worked to undermine democracy will be helpful for protecting democracy and challenging the destructive actions of this industry.

Capitalism is the practice of putting profits at the center of how decisions are made about how to produce and distribute resources. Those with capital are able to shift social institutions to enable them to gain even more capital. Entities, such as corporations, come to be self-perpetuating agents whose only goal is profit making.

Capitalism existed long before fossil fuels. But for over a century, fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-based corporations, have been at the heart of capitalism. Fossil fuels have made energy plentiful, which has led to the development of forms of industry and approaches to agriculture that use a lot of it. As we are seeing with the war on Iran, fossil fuels have become the life blood that keeps the global capitalist economy running. Fossil fuel-centered corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world.

Over time, and in many places, capitalism extracts profits, exploits labor, and despoils nature with very little force. It becomes a matter of course how the systems function. But the original forms of accumulation that allowed some companies to be enormously powerful, and to shape the regulatory world in which they operated, came from brutal expropriation. Capitalism began with slavery and colonialism and a willingness to do anything to make profits.

As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks.

The fossil fuel industry has, from its beginning, supported violent overthrows and encouraged states to install authoritarian governments to ensure its ability to engage in extraction. Many of the places where fossil fuels are extracted have been controlled politically by brutal forces kept in power by so-called liberal democratic forces. We see this story in Mexico in 1911, in Iran in 1954, in Shell Oil’s despoliation of Ogoniland in Nigeria in the 1980s.

Outside of those extraction zones, for many years, and in many places, the fossil fuel industry was compatible with liberal democracy. The US was able to have a liberal democratic government, and most countries in the world could as well, as long as those governments supported political and economic practices that allowed for the profitability of powerful industries. The markets constructed to facilitate capitalist processes can generally function fine in collaboration with governments that allow for high standards of living, social safety nets, and civil liberties, as long as those governments have kept processes in place that allow for the extraction of profits. As soon as any government gets in the way of that ability, the so-called liberal democratic order that dominates the global economic system has been prepared to overthrow those governments to put new ones in place that are willing to act in its interests.

Retired General Wesley Clark has argued that US foreign policy has focused on keeping regimes in power that would support the continued use of the dollar as the currency used for trading oil—the petrodollar. By ensuring that regimes are in power that support the continued use of the petrodollar, the US is able to ensure that it has some control over the continued flow of the lifeblood of the global economic system.

Capitalism is compatible with democracy as long as that form of democracy allows the economic world to be dominated and controlled by markets, which are constructed in ways that make them immune from accountability. The fossil fuel industry has functioned in alliance with a nominally democratic US, as long as the US government has also engaged in military action when it was needed to keep the oil, and profits, flowing. It is new that the fossil fuel industry has been aligned with fascism in the US and other Western countries.

Fascism is a particular form of authoritarianism that grows when a capitalist elite worries that its power is going to be threatened by democratic forces. An authoritarian government is one that tries to control all aspects of society and close down dissent. It holds power closely in a small group and is not accountable to its people. Fascism is authoritarianism that runs on popular support. It emerges in contexts that require elections to hold governmental power, where the people are in danger of not acting in elite interests.

A fascist government generally creates in-groups and out-groups in order to get people to bond emotionally with its movement. It uses the power of the government, violence, and threats of violence to intimidate people into compliance. It acts in the interests of an economic elite while pretending to be anti-elitist. And it uses anti-intellectualism and attacks on media and other cultural systems to pull people into its way of thinking and feeling. It often harks back to a mythical past where the in-group had more power and prestige, and society was stable.

In the middle of the 20th century, Germany, Italy, and Spain had nominally democratic governments that were in crisis. The governments were not able to keep the economy functioning in the interests of elites. In the political chaos that comes from an economy that is not functioning well, parties emerge that use extreme racist nationalism to consolidate popular support for authoritarian regimes. It is that move, of using hatred to consolidate popular support, that distinguishes fascism from other forms of right-wing or authoritarian politics.

As the climate crisis has developed, people all around the world are working to shift how we meet our needs in society away from a dependence on fossil fuels. With clean forms of energy fully developed and ready to take over as the energy sources running our economies, the fossil fuel industry is in a fight for its survival. It is aligning itself with fascist forces to remain profitable. To survive, it is prepared to take the whole planet, as well as liberal democracy, down with it.

In the past, the industry has impacted US politics by donating to and leaning on both Democratic and Republican politicians. For example, the industry remains the largest donor to California’s politics, even as that state has a two-thirds Democratic majority. But as renewables become more economically competitive, and many forces are challenging their ability to profit, the industry is seeing a bleak future. And so, for many years, it has been participating in a broad set of challenges to democracy as a strategy to maintain the conditions needed to maintain its profitability.

The move toward fascism in the US has come as a result of the success of the Reagan Revolution’s attack on the New Deal and anything that remotely resembles socialism. The fossil fuel industry has been a part of that revolution every step of the way. There is a line of thinking that was crystallized in the 1971 memo “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo outlines a blueprint for how to fight back against emerging challenges to corporate power. Oil barons and political activists the Koch brothers were influenced by the memo and went on to found the think tank the Cato Institute to promote a free-market ideology that argues against regulations on industry in general, and especially against environmental regulations that might impact the fossil fuel industry. It also argued against social safety net programs, such as the programs put in place under the New Deal. Other powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have worked assiduously to promote that set of ideals. That organization was founded by Richard Melon Scaife, heir to a Gulf Oil fortune.

The work of these forces paid off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of the Reagan Revolution. That revolution challenged the power of unions, destroyed the social safety net systems developed under the New Deal, and rolled back environmental regulations and other limits on corporate power. It allowed inequality to flourish.

Part of what fueled popular support for the Reagan Revolution was the mobilization of racial resentments, used to encourage white voters to blame their precarious situation on people of color, especially on Black people. The Democratic Party decided to ride that wave, and Bill Clinton ran for the presidency on the idea that he would get rid of social safety net programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and get tough on crime, coded in the public imagination as Black. The Reagan Revolution led to extreme pro-business decisions by the Supreme Court, such as Citizens United, which have further eroded our democracy. Many other court decisions over the past decades have allowed monopoly power to go unchecked.

The extreme free market form of capitalism engendered by the Powell Memo and the Reagan Revolution have led to a crisis in capitalist democracy in the US. As people’s lives have been made increasingly precarious by the lack of a safety net and by extreme inequality, they have been ripe for a revolt against the dominant system. In the 2016 election many voters favored populist Bernie Sanders and others favored right-wing pseudo-populist Donald Trump.

The democratic party decided to make its peace with the populists and began working for a return to support for some New Deal social programs as well as strong action to address the climate crisis. The Republican Party went all in on a pro-corporate fossil fuel dominated pseudo-populism, and won in 2016. That coalition won again in 2024. It did this by leaning hard on people’s resentments against the system and elites, and by mobilizing people’s passions against imagined enemies, such as immigrants and trans people.

As the US has traveled this destructive path, the fossil fuel industry has walked right along with the Republican Party. The fossil fuel industry contributed heavily to the climate denial movement and the right-wing think tanks that linked climate action with the bogeyman of socialism. It has funded extreme right-wing politicians, including President Trump. It wrote the chapter on energy in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 policy manifesto. It is pushing for legislation to make itself immune from lawsuits to hold it accountable for the destruction it causes. Many of its former industry executives are in Trump’s cabinet. The only way for this dying industry to maintain its hegemony is to hide behind the mask of nationalism, a way to get people to vote for politicians who clearly act against their interests.

As we fight to protect democracy, we need to challenge any attempts to distract our attention from the forces causing our precarity. We need to engage in deep forms of solidarity, where we encourage others to not fall for political rhetoric that blames the wrong people for why we are experiencing extreme inequality, ecological devastation, war, and the unraveling of the systems that support stable lives.

As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks: the fossil fuel industry. The future of democracy requires an end to the political power of the fossil fuel industry.

At this crucial moment in world history, it is incumbent on all of us to fight for accountable democratic politics, and to challenge the political imperatives being driven by an industry that is flailing and causing unprecedented devastation to our planet and our politics. It is up to us to consign it to the dustbin of history before more damage is done.

The New York Times editorial board tore into the Supreme Court's decision limiting the use of the Voting Rights Act to challenge racial gerrymanders on Wednesday, calling it "a mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach."

"Six conservative justices voted to weaken the act, in that way substituting their own judgment for that of Congress, which reauthorized the law 20 years ago with overwhelming bipartisan support, including a unanimous vote in the Senate," wrote the board. "With this ruling, the court has acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges."

The justices stopped short of outright overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — but laid out new, stricter, and contradictory requirements for applying it that could give right-wing legislators greater power to carve up Black communities and deny them representation.

"The ruling, in Louisiana v. Callais, makes it easier for states to draw districts for Congress, state legislatures and local councils that elect the candidates favored by white voting blocs. The officials who make the maps no longer need to worry much about whether they are sprinkling Black voters across many districts and eliminating majority Black districts," wrote the board. "The reality is that in the name of disentangling race from politics, the Supreme Court has given white voters more power at the expense of racial minorities."

Moreover, wrote the board, "It is impossible not to notice the partisan nature of the ruling. The six justices in the majority are the six nominated by Republican presidents, and they have likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress. Wednesday’s decision may shift nine seats in Southern states from Democratic to Republican hands, some in the 2026 cycle and more in years to come. State legislatures and local bodies will surely tilt in the same direction."

Ultimately, the board concluded, "The Supreme Court has used dubious reasoning to issue a ruling that will likely help the Republican Party and increase the number of white members of Congress and state legislatures. That ruling will lead to even more suspicion that the court prioritizes partisanship over principle."

Amazon is preparing a potential reboot of President Donald Trump's signature former show, "The Apprentice," hosted by his son, Donald Trump Jr., according to a new report.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing "people familiar with the matter," that Amazon is in "early stage" discussions with the Trump family about relaunching the show. It comes after the corporate behemoth bought Melania Trump's eponymous documentary for roughly $40 million.

If launched, the Amazon version of "The Apprentice" would appear on its Amazon Prime platform.

"Amazon’s deliberations about rebooting the TV show—and potentially casting Trump’s son in the starring role—is the latest example of how it has sought programming that would appeal to the president and his base of conservative supporters," the report reads in part. "In some instances, the first family has profited from the push."

"Amazon MGM Studios head Mike Hopkins and other Amazon executives began talking about the reboot idea internally early last year, around the time Trump was being sworn in for his second term, according to some of the people familiar with the talks," it added.

A New York Times columnist hit back at President Donald Trump's assertions that violent rhetoric from left-wing political groups contributed to the attempt on his life during the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday in a fiery piece.

Jamelle Bouie argued in a new opinion piece on Wednesday that Trump is nowhere near as concerned about the impact of his own language as he claims to be about the language others use about him. He cited Trump's recent comments about a social media video created by six Democrats that Trump described as "seditious," and called the lawmakers "traitors."

Bouie argued that this showed Trump lives in his own "bubble," where he can isolate himself from the world and not worry about the consequences of his actions.

"This is a president who rarely travels beyond the confines of the White House compound or Mar-a-Lago," Bouie wrote. "He rarely meets people where they are. Trump holds the occasional rally, but he does not move through the world the way most presidents have. More so than most who have held the office, he lives inside a bubble."

"Some of this is vanity. Some of it is laziness. But some of it, I think, is fear," he continued. "Trump is afraid of the world. Which in a way might mean he is afraid of the world he has helped to build."

A top Trump aide will have to give up working with top advisors dealing with the wars in Ukraine and Iran, according to a new report.

Josh Gruenbaum was a former advisor for Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. A report by Politico on Wednesday quoted anonymous sources who said that "he fell out of favor" and had a "penchant for self-promotion and an abrasive work style" that "rankled some of Trump's other senior advisers."

Gruenbaum, 40, was exiled to Trump's Board of Peace, where he'll be focused on Gaza. He first worked alongside Kushner and Witkoff on the Gaza ceasefire deal.

According to Politico, "he flooded various administration officials with phone calls and was seen as very focused on how his name appeared in stories and official communications."

One anonymous source said that, "While Kushner and Witkoff remain Gruenbaum’s allies, the pair didn’t stand in the way of paring back his duties."

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly confirmed that Gruenbaum "will continue to advance the President's agenda" on the Board of Peace, Politico reported.

Meanwhile, "Gruenbaum referred questions to the White House."

MAGA hats are disappearing in one deep red county, a telling sign of how President Donald Trump's support is waning in communities that once supported him, according to a new CNN report.

"For eight years, there were Trump signs on every corner, there were flags. You couldn't go to a grocery store without seeing a red MAGA hat," Chris Anderson, the chair of the Mahoning County Democrats in Ohio, told CNN's John King. "I challenge you to find one."

King confirmed, "It's true."

"It's hard to find one," he said, based on his visit to the blue-collar Ohio county, where he set out to "answer the 'is MAGA cracking' question" with his report.

"I've talked to a lot of people whose views are changing," Ohio voter Mark Skonieczny told King. "Even in my own family, so I am hopeful that that is starting to fracture."

"As we head into the midterms, the jobs he promised are not here," King observed. "The revival and American manufacturing he promised is not here."

Legal analyst Elie Mystal took a dim view on Wednesday following the Supreme Court's move to weaken the Voting Rights Act's ability to police racial gerrymandering — and, writing for The Nation, gave Democrats a window of just four years to prevent the ruling from causing an absolute crisis.

"The VRA was the first piece of legislation that seriously tried to change this, to ensure every citizen the ability to participate in democratic self-government," wrote Mystal. "It did this by enforcing the 15th and 9th Amendments and their prohibitions on denying the vote on account of race or gender."

"Remember, constitutional amendments mean nothing if there is no legislation to support them," he continued. "Nobody, for instance, went to jail for having a beer in violation of the18th Amendment’s prohibition on alcohol; instead, people went to jail for violating the Volstead Act (which attempted to enforce the 18th Amendment in the most draconian and stupid way possible). Similarly, every Black person alive in the South between 1865 and 1965 could tell you that nobody got to vote because of the 15th Amendment. Black people got to vote because of the Voting Rights Act."

Under the new ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, the right-wing justices technically left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act functional, but added harsh and often conflicting new requirements to legal tests for racial gerrymanders, which some experts fear could effectively make it defunct.

Democrats are now on the clock, he warned — they have four years to win back power and fix this, before the next Census gives Republicans power to nuke far more majority-minority districts.

"If Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights," he wrote. "Those new justices could overrule not just Callais, but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions. A new court could reject the white supremacy the Roberts court embraces."

"The Voting Rights Act is dead. We need a new one, or the racists win. It’s as simple and as depressing as that," he concluded.

Legal experts blasted Chief Justice John Roberts for his part in weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its ability to block discrimination when district maps are drawn.

"For Chief Justice John Roberts, this is a huge asterisk on his legacy in such a bad way," journalist and lawyer Katie Phang said during an interview for the Contrarian with lawyer and professor Leah Litman. "He has had a series of really not good asterisks next to his name, but this, I think, is one of the biggest ones."

The 6-3 decision on Louisiana v. Callais came down on Wednesday. Phang described the decision as "clearing the way for the GOP to racially gerrymander us back to the days of Jim Crow voter suppression."

Litman noted that Roberts "began his career as a lawyer in the Reagan Department of Justice, pushing to limit the Voting Rights Act, pushing against the amendments to the Voting Rights Act that sought to expand its protections to encompass unintentional discrimination."

Roberts "dismantled the other key leg of the Voting Rights Act," as the author of the opinion in the case Shelby County v. Holder, Litman added. "So, yes, he has been able to cultivate this appearance and reputation as an institutionalist. He is a hard-line ideologue on the Voting Rights Act, and always has been."

Litman warned that people should "never, never buy into this narrative that the Republican appointees are just respecting the democratic processes."

She also pointed out that while Justice Samuel Alito penned the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, "Roberts, he is the senior-most justice in this opinion. That meant he had the option of who to assign the opinion to."

The US Senate on Tuesday defeated a Democrat-led bid to stop President Donald Trump from following through on his threat to wage war on Cuba, whose long-suffering people are reeling from the American administration’s tightened economic stranglehold.

Upper chamber lawmakers voted 51-47 on a procedural motion to block further debate Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-Va.) SJ Res. 124, “a joint resolution to direct the removal of United States armed forces from hostilities within or against the republic of Cuba that have not been authorized by Congress.”

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky voted to advance the resolution, while John Fetterman of Pennsylvania joined his GOP colleagues in voting to sink the measure.

The vote effectively sidelines the measure, one of many failed attempts to curb Trump’s ability to wage war on countries including Iran and Venezuela, as well as rein in his high seas boat bombing spree.

“The American people are not asking for another war,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.)—one of SJ Res. 124’s dozen co-sponsors—said following Tuesday’s vote. “They want us focused on building housing in Arizona, not bombing housing in Havana. They want us to lower the cost of healthcare not condemn a generation of veterans to a lifetime of hospital visits. They want us to make their lives more affordable, not spend their tax dollars on unnecessary wars.”

Kaine called the GOP move “purely a regime change effort.”

“Why do they want it? You’ll have to ask them,” he added. “What we’re doing with respect to Cuba, if somebody was doing it to us, we would consider it an act of war. But because they don’t pose a security threat to the United States, it’s clearly an effort to change the regime.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who also co-sponsored the resolution, said, “The last thing working Americans need right now is another war—let alone one that’s 90 miles south of the US.”

Resolution co-sponsor Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said on Bluesky after the vote, “A conflict with Cuba would cost hardworking Americans billions of dollars, deepen the humanitarian crisis in Cuba, and put American service members in harm’s way.”

“The Constitution is clear: Only Congress has the authority to declare war,” Alsobrooks added.

Trump has attacked seven countries since returning to office and 10 since the start of his first term—more than any other president.

The situation in Cuba is dire, as a result of both the 65-year US economic chokehold on the island and mismanaged central planning by its socialist rulers.

Trump has been ramping up military threats and economic pressure on Cuba, whose people were already suffering from generations of US sanctions. His administration’s tightened embargo has severely restricted fuel imports, worsening an energy emergency in which blackouts have become the norm, threatening the lives of vulnerable Cubans—especially sick people and children.

The US president said that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished” with the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran that’s killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children. Trump has also said that he believes he’ll “be having the honor of taking Cuba.”

The United States already took Cuba once, during an 1898 war waged against Spain under highly dubious pretenses that ended with the US also acquiring Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam—with Hawaii also annexed that year under the guise of security.

American presidents have been trying to force out Cuba’s socialist government since shortly after the revolution that overthrew a US-backed dictatorship in 1959. US efforts have included carrying out or backing an armed invasion, terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, and other acts of aggression.

Cuba commits no such acts against the United States or anyone else, yet Trump added the country to the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

Following Tuesday’s vote, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said that “Trump should learn the law of holes: If you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

“Instead of threatening that ‘Cuba is next,’ President Trump should remove his blockade against Cuba, which has devastated Havana’s economy and healthcare system, and has created a deepening humanitarian crisis,” Markey added.

The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the blockade 33 times since 1992.

“With its catastrophic Iran war of choice, the Trump administration has lost all credibility on issues of war and peace,” Markey asserted. “The American people do not want yet another endless war that will only costs more lives and more taxpayer dollars, and undermine US security.”

Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler warned Tuesday that “Trump is preparing military action against Cuba,” calling the Senate vote possibly “the last chance for US Congress to stop it.”