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Editor's Choice: Scroll below for Part 2 of our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative April 2026 news and views, with clips beginning at April 10 and extending to the present in reverse chronological order. See Part 1 in our News Reports section for clips April 1 to 15 during this unusually heavy news period.

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

  

April 27

Top Headlines

 

Trump, Violence, Democracy

 

jan 6 insurrection

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.

News Roundup

More On Attack At DC Press Gala Featuring Trump

 

djt norah odonnell cbs 4 26 2026

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

  • Lawfare, The Grand Conspiracy’s New Prosecutor May Be the Case’s Biggest Liability, Anna Bower and Molly Roberts, April 27, 2026. Former Trump lawyer Joseph diGenova is one of the most vocal proponents of a conspiracy theory that he is now in charge of investigating.Statue depicting the blind scales of justice.
  • New York Times, Guest Essay: Why Trump Wants Unqualified U.S. Attorneys, Jeffrey Toobin, former federal prosecutor and the author of “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy”), April 27, 2026. When President Trump began his second term, he stacked the top ranks of the Justice Department — the country’s chief federal law enforcement officers — with his former private attorneys, no doubt to make sure that they would protect his own personal and political interests rather than the nation’s.
  • New York Times, Supreme Court to Hear Arguments in Landmark Roundup Weedkiller Case, Hiroko Tabuchi, Updated April 27, 2026. A victory for the manufacturer, Bayer, could end thousands of lawsuits against the company claiming that the herbicide causes cancer.
  • New York Times, Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find Criminals, Ann E. Marimow, April 27, 2026. Geofence searches allow law enforcement to find suspects and witnesses by sweeping up location data from cellphone users near crime scenes.
  • Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 26, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 27, 2026. Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.
  • Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: Kash Will Soon Be Out on His Ass, Robert Reich, right, robert reich color headshotApril 27, 2026. Another radically underqualified Trump appointee is about to bite the dust.
  • Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Polymarket celebrates insider trading scandal, Judd Legum, right, April 27, 2026. judd legumLast week, the Justice Department indicted Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke for misappropriating classified information to profit on the prediction market Polymarket.

More On Iran War

More On U.S. Foreign Relations 

 

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

  • New York Times, Can King Charles Help Heal the U.S.-British Rupture? Michael D. Shear, April 27, 2026. Not since his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, traveled to Washington after the Suez Crisis has a visit by the British monarch come at such a fraught time in Anglo-American relations.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

sergey brin geralyn gilbert soto

Top Headlines

ny times logoNew York Times, The U.S. Started the War. The Rest of the World Is Feeling the Effects, Patricia Cohen and Ben Casselman, April 27, 2026. In just eight weeks, much of the global economy has been knocked sideways. America has mostly been spared from the tumult.

The fallout from two months of war in Iran is shuttering textile mills in India and Bangladesh, grounding airplanes in Ireland, Poland and Germany, and prompting energy rationing in Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand. The only country, it seems, that has been relatively spared from the economic chaos is the one that started the war: the United States.

While warning signs of a recession are flashing across countries in Asia and Europe, the United States is likely to outperform most of the world’s advanced economies. Growth is steady and unemployment low. “It’s still hard to bet against the U.S. economy,” the Royal Bank of Canada said last week.

The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s richest countries, with sovereign wealth funds that total more than $2 trillion, has asked the United States for a financial lifeline in the wake of missile-damaged gas fields and a halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

In just eight weeks — less time than it takes to age a traditional English fruitcake — the global economic outlook has been knocked sideways.

The worst economic pain will be felt in poor countries, where consumers cannot afford higher energy prices, and governments cannot afford to provide aid to offset the costs. And as financing tightens, the cost of desperately needed borrowing for these countries increases. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Live Updates: Defendant in Press Gala Attack Charged With Attempting to Assassinate Trump, Zach Montague, Devlin Barrett, Maggie Haberman, Amy Qin and Katie Rogers, April 27, 2026. The defendant, Cole Tomas Allen, faces two counts of federal gun crimes and one of attempting to assassinate President Trump during the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Here’s the latest.

The Justice Department formally charged a California man with attempting to assassinate President Trump on Monday, two days after investigators said he broke past a security perimeter and fired a gun during the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington.

The defendant, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., wore a neon blue jumpsuit for his brief appearance before a federal magistrate in Washington. He appeared calm and quietly answered prompts from the judge, who told him he faced up to life in prison if convicted.

Mr. Allen, who did not enter a plea, came to Washington with a pump-action shotgun, a handgun and three knives with the intent to carry out a political assassination, a federal prosecutor told the judge. Mr. Allen also faces two weapons charges, including discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.

Federal authorities in Los Angeles said that a search warrant was served late Saturday night at Mr. Allen’s home. A note that the authorities said had been written by the defendant appears to express deep anger at the administration and the president. Administration figures were the defendant’s “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” according to a copy of the roughly 1,000-word document, part of which was included in an affidavit unsealed after Mr. Allen’s court appearance.

According to the affidavit, Mr. Allen rushed through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night “holding a long gun,” and agents “heard a loud gunshot.” The document says a Secret Service officer, identified by the initials V.G., was shot once in the chest but protected by his bulletproof vest. It does not specify that Mr. Allen fired that shot.

The Secret Service officer who was struck in the chest fired multiple rounds at Mr. Allen, who “fell to the ground and suffered minor injuries but was not shot.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, blamed Democrats and some members of the news media for the violence. She attributed it to a “left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

  • The defendant: Mr. Allen worked as a tutor and graduated from the California Institute of Technology. Those who know him are struggling to reconcile the man they knew with the political violence that he is accused of.
  • Shooting scene: Investigators have said that Mr. Allen took a train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Washington, before checking into the Washington Hilton, where the shooting occurred. President Reagan was shot outside the same hotel in 1981.
  • Presidential security: Officials insisted that the security measures at the dinner worked as intended, noting that the assailant never made it into the ballroom. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, will hold a meeting this week with the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security and other officials to review security practices, including for major events in the coming months, according to a White House official.

The affidavit states that Secret Service officers “heard a loud gunshot.” The affidavit also says that a Secret Service officer, identified only by the initials V.G., was shot once in the chest. The affidavit does not appear to specify that it was Allen who shot the officer.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, watched the proceedings from inside the courtroom. Cole Tomas Allen appeared calm, nodding to acknowledge instructions and quietly answering prompts from the judge.

Cole Tomas Allen, the man officials say was arrested in connection with the attack on the White House correspondents’ dinner, has been escorted out and will return in three days to discuss the possibility of release. Tezira Abe, one of Allen’s lawyers, noted he had no prior convictions.

Jocelyn Ballantine, a federal prosecutor, told Magistrate Judge Sharbaugh that Cole Tomas Allen came to Washington with a pump-action shotgun, a pistol and three knives, all with the intent of carrying out a political assassination. The court has set a hearing for Thursday morning to determine whether Allen will be kept in detention. Allen did not enter a plea through his lawyer Tezira Abe.

Trump, Violence, Democracy

 

 

jan 6 insurrection

Shown above, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, convicted at trial of Jan. 6, Trump-inspired Capitol insurrection-related charges, with the Trump-run Justice Department moving this month to dismiss all charges against him and fellow-insurrectists, some of whom are portrayed above in film used as evidence to obtain their convictions before Trump's team freed them all.

French Revolution leader Maximilien de Robespierre is guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, July 28, 1794 (Pictorial Press Image / Alamy). .Joseph-Ignace Guillotin is widely credited with the introduction in 1792 of a clean-death machine, although similar devices had been used previously..+
French Revolution leader Maximilien de Robespierre is guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, July 28, 1794 (Pictorial Press Image / Alamy). .Joseph-Ignace Guillotin is widely credited with the introduction in 1792 of a clean-death machine, although similar devices had been used previously.

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.

-- Charles Dickens

jonathan v last jvl triad logoThe Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Political Violence Breaks Containment, Jonathan V. Last, above, April 27, 2026. This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

We have to talk about political violence, again.

Quotation above in bold: That is Dickens describing the origins of the French Revolution. He regards the guillotine as a horror—an abomination—but believed that French society had become so dysfunctional, so disordered, that the abomination became inevitable.

Not justified, but inevitable.

I think about that passage often.

he SPLC shrank away from its aggressive reporting on the right.

 

Charlottesville

Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Torchlight Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.

bulwark logo big shipThe heart of the Trump project has been mainstreaming political violence. It began in 2016 with Trump imploring his supporters to punch people they disliked. It continued with excusing the “very fine people” who rioted in Charlottesville. Itmorphed into explicit calls for a mob, above, he called into assembly—and which he knew was armed—to march on the Capitol and “take back our country back” and “show strength” and “be strong.”

He later pardoned the members of this mob who had been convicted of violent crimes and even appointed one of them to a position in his administration. He ordered extralegal killings off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has referred to American citizens murdered by his regime as “domestic terrorists.” ICE logoHe has called his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies of the people” and said they are guilty of “treason.” He celebrates physical assaults on—and the deaths of—people he does not like. He has publicly said he might attempt to strip certain Americans of their citizenship so as to render them stateless.

He threatened genocide against a foreign population.

And then, when the culture of political violence he has willed into being comes for him, Trump is incredulous and aggrieved. As if people were not supposed to notice what he has been doing for a decade. As if violence is supposed to be a one-way street.

It reminds me a bit of the sputtering anger Trump and his supporters voiced after the pope condemned the war in Iran.

Trump and his administration had made a great show of not caring about woke rules of engagement and being alpha lethal warriors who killed without remorse. They published snuff films celebrating death and promised to commit war crimes. Again: The president himself threatened the Iranian people with genocide.

pope leo xiv vatican mediaAnd then, when the Holy Father, shown above in a Vatican photo, noticed these words and deeds and said, No bueno, Trump and his supporters were outraged.

How dare the pope notice all of the bad things he had said and done!

cole allen mugIt is bad that Cole Tomas Allen, shown in a mug shot at right, attempted to harm people at the WHCD. It is bad that Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Trump. It is bad that Ryan Wesley Routh planned to assault Trump.

What happened on Saturday wasn’t random or wanton or unexpected. It’s what follows from a world in which political violence is condoned and even encouraged. It will, eventually, break containment.

djt maga hatThis is precisely why liberals warned about the dangers of Trumpism from the very start. Because we understood that saying what Trump has said and doing what Trump has done would have terrible, unpredictable consequences.

Not a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn.

Why do we abjure political violence? It is a conditional rejection, not an absolute. The American Revolution was an exercise in political violence; so was the Civil War.

A liberal society rejects political violence because it views violence as an admission of the failure of liberalism.

Which is exactly why the forces of illiberalism revel in it. They understand that the spread of violence is an assault on the liberal order.

Liberalism has not failed completely in America. Not yet. The authoritarian attempt is still in the attempt phase; it has not overthrown the liberal order completely.

We are in a phase of asymmetric struggle in which Trump and his confederates will dole out—or celebrate—political violence, while the forces of liberalism must reject it not only because doing so is morally correct, but because that is the best path to political power.

To give in to political violence is to stipulate that we are in a place like the Revolution or the Civil War. That is not, as of this moment, correct. Pray we never arrive in such a place.  

 

Shown above is on of the Artificial Intelligence-generated fake images created by the Trump Administration to portray President Trump as a brave wartime commander leading troops against domestic and foreign enemies.

no kings trump screenshot

President Trump's published self-portraits asserting dominance include those above, with the lower one showing him (when portrayed fully) as dumping excrement on New Yorkers from his warplane perch the cockpit.

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: No Violence. No Demagoguery. No Kings, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift. We condemn Saturday’s violence. And we condemn attempts to exploit it.

bulwark logo big shipTrump hasn’t given the order to resume bombing yet, but the ceasefire with Iran seems to be dying a death of a thousand cuts. Hezbollah announced today, per the New York Times, that it will not “relinquish its weapons,” and Israel and the group continue to trade attacks despite the reported terms of the U.S.–Iran ceasefire.

Some quick bookkeeping: Sam and Will Sommer will be going live on YouTube and Substack at 10 a.m. EDT for MAGA Mondays—albeit a bleaker one than usual in the wake of Saturday’s attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Happy Monday.

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: How the Hate-Industrial Complex Keeps Marching On, Thom Hartmann, right, commentator and author (as shown below right), April 27, 2026. Unpacking the system that turns outrage into profit and democracy into collateral damage…thom hartmann new

The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their“realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.

Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric hartmann report newwhile Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.

The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)

Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.

thom hartmann last american presidentSome even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.

Billionaire Peter Theil famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”

There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.

Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.

The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.

While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.

I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.

That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.

Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.

Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.

And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.

You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.

None of this deals with the problem of rightwing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.

But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.

Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting rightwing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.

News Roundup

The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: White House Calls Moment “NATIONAL EMERGENCY” and BLASTS Americans Who Call Trump FASCIST, Major Epstein Lawsuit, Aaron Parnas, right, April 27, 2026. The White House is calling this weekend’s shooting, along with the lack of DHS funding, a “national emergency.” At the same time, Karoline Leavitt is blaming people who called Trump a “fascist” or a “threat to democracy” for the violence, and Todd Blanche is pointing the finger at the media, even as Trump and Melania are demanding that Jimmy Kimmel be fired.

This is exactly why I keep saying we should never normalize the president’s rhetoric. Just days after a shooting, we are right back to divisive attacks on Americans and on the press. That is why I boycotted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and why I will boycott the next one as well. I will continue to support and celebrate independent media instead.

I also want to update you from this morning. I am in contact with several social media platforms and working on a legal strategy following the spread of AI-generated images this morning that falsely tied me to the suspect. It has been a scary time truthfully, as just one person could believe it and immediately be a threat to me and my family. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, reached out, and shown support. There are people who want me to stop this work. I will not. Subscribe if you can, and let’s continue fighting back in the face of these threats.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

The White House is urging Congress to quickly fund the Department of Homeland Security, calling the situation a “national emergency” after the recent attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. President Trump is pushing Republicans to unite and pass a budget plan to fund immigration enforcement agencies by June 1, while warning of growing security risks as DHS faces a prolonged funding shortfall. Officials say the agency could soon run out of money to pay employees, adding urgency to the standoff with Democrats over immigration policy conditions. The incident has intensified concerns about security preparedness for upcoming major events and increased pressure on lawmakers to act.

Karoline Leavitt blamed critics of Trump for contributing to the shooting, arguing that rhetoric labeling him a fascist or threat to democracy fuels political violence. She said such comparisons, including to Hitler, encourage hostility and claimed a broader “left-wing” climate of hatred has led to people being harmed.

Todd Blanche criticized media coverage of the president, arguing that harsh and unsubstantiated criticism contributes to a climate of hostile rhetoric. He said journalists who frequently use negative labels are “just as guilty” as online commentators, adding, “Many people in this room have done it as well. They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X. When you have reporters, when you have media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, it shouldn’t surprise us that this type of rhetoric takes place.”

Meanwhile, this is what the President of the United States said following the death of Robert Mueller:

A lawsuit has been filed against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, accusing the Justice Department of failing to fully release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The plaintiff argues that missing documents and unexplained redactions violate the law and hinder journalists’ ability to report accurately. Although the DOJ claims it has released all appropriate materials, millions of documents may still be withheld, raising concerns about transparency. The lawsuit seeks full disclosure, clearer explanations for redactions, and oversight to ensure compliance. I interviewed Katie Phang, who filed the lawsuit, here:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation said it will continue its lawsuit to block construction of a proposed White House ballroom, despite pressure from the Justice Department to drop the case. The DOJ argues the lawsuit poses security risks, while the White House says the ballroom is critical for safely hosting large gatherings of top government officials.

A report based on leaked lectures claims tech billionaire Peter Thiel described Pope Leo XIV as a potential “Antichrist” figure and urged JD Vance to ignore the pope’s moral guidance. The remarks reflect a broader worldview in which Thiel emphasizes technology and innovation over traditional religious authority. The article highlights concerns about Thiel’s influence on Vance, given his role as a major political backer. It also suggests these ideas signal a growing intersection of Silicon Valley ideology, politics, and unconventional religious beliefs.

jimmy kimmel melania trumpDonald Trump demanded the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, shown above, today. Melania Trump did too.

Cole Tomas Allen appeared in court after allegedly opening fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and was charged with attempting to assassinate the president, along with two additional firearm-related offenses. Prosecutors say he brought multiple weapons and sent a note beforehand claiming it was his duty to target Trump administration officials. Law enforcement exchanged gunfire with him before subduing and arresting him, while a Secret Service officer was injured but later released.

A newly revealed note shows the suspect apologized to his family before the attack and said he was motivated by strong opposition to the Trump administration. He indicated he planned the shooting in advance and chose to use buckshot in an effort to reduce civilian casualties.

Officials said key details about the shooting are still under investigation, including whether the gunman fired shots, how many were fired, and whose bullet struck the agent. When asked, Blanche responded, “We’re still looking at that.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed a new congressional map that could create four additional Republican-leaning seats, potentially shifting the state’s delegation from 20-8 to 24-4 in favor of the GOP. The plan is controversial, with critics arguing it may violate the state’s anti-gerrymandering rules and show clear partisan intent. Even some Republicans worry the changes could backfire by making districts more competitive and putting incumbents at risk in upcoming elections. The proposal is expected to face legal challenges and could ultimately be decided by the state Supreme Court. This is the new map:

Between the AI this morning and a recent threat to myself and my family, a lot has been going on. It was real, it was scary, but thankfully, I was able to make sure I protected myself. With a newborn in tow, making sure that my family is protected is top of mind. And reporting on the topics that I do often lend credence to threats, like the one I received recently to my inbox. It’s why I am continuing my partnership with DeleteMe. For many months DeleteMe has helped protect my personal information and remove it from data broker websites. Now with threats even greater, I know DeleteMe has my back and I want you to protect yourself too. You can use my code AARON at this link to protect yourself and your loved ones this year.

Kid Rock reportedly flew to Fort Belvoir and took a ride in two Apache helicopters with War Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to Army sources and flight data. The helicopters were flown with only one pilot each so both men could ride in the front seats. Apaches are not normally stationed at Fort Belvoir, raising questions about their origin. Base officials declined to comment and referred inquiries to the secretary’s office.

After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was disrupted, the Washington Hilton donated about 2,600 unused meals to shelters for abused women and children. The food—steak and lobster—was freeze-dried to extend its shelf life before distribution. The gesture also highlighted appreciation for staff who worked overnight under difficult circumstances.

Mark Carney said that Canada’s historically close relationship with the U.S. has shifted from a strength to a vulnerability as American policies change. He emphasized that while the U.S. has the right to change course, Canada is adapting by strengthening ties with other allies. As he put it, “Many of our former strengths, built on our close ties to the US, have become weaknesses. The US has changed. That’s their right. And we’re responding ... we’re deepening our partnerships with our closest allies, including the EU, the Nordic countries, and Australia.”

Contractors working to repave the 17th Street entrance to the White House and Blair House ran out of asphalt just before the expected arrival of King Charles. The rushed construction is part of the longer-term Pennsylvania Avenue West Project. With the visit imminent, the incomplete work highlights last-minute preparations for the high-profile guest.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the Senate-passed Homeland Security funding bill contains “problematic” provisions and will need changes before it can pass the House, particularly over how immigration enforcement agencies are funded. The disagreement highlights divisions among Republicans and could delay funding further, even as officials warn about security risks following the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. Johnson also called for stronger Secret Service protocols, saying security at the event appeared insufficient and needs to be “tightened up.” Meanwhile, some lawmakers are pushing for immediate action on DHS funding and broader reviews of security measures for high-profile events.

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: White House Blame Game Escalates With Top Officials at Risk, Epstein Survivors Call Trump's Bluff, and I Need Your Help, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 27, 2026. We are tracking major developments on multiple fronts, from critical Epstein-related news tied to King Charles’ visit to Washington, D.C., to a serious and escalating blame game inside the White House, where Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is facing intense pressure over her oversight of the Secret Service. At the same time, new details are emerging about Iran, with negotiations stalled and no clear path forward.

I also need to address something deeply concerning that unfolded overnight. I woke up to a flood of messages and videos asking about a claim that the suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting was a former employee of mine. That is completely untrue. These claims appear to be driven by AI-generated content that originated on Facebook and is now spreading across platforms by bad actors. This is not just misinformation. It is dangerous, and if the wrong person believes it, it could lead to serious threats to me and my family.

Some people say this kind of attack means the work is having an impact. That may be true, but the narratives being pushed right now put me and my family at risk. I am actively exploring legal options. Many of you have asked how you can support my work and help ensure I have the resources to respond. The most effective way is to subscribe, gift a subscription, or upgrade your current plan.

Here’s the news:

King Charles III is set to receive a formal welcome in Washington, D.C., but has declined to meet with survivors who had requested an audience. At the same time, survivors connected to the Jeffrey Epstein case gathered for a vigil honoring Virginia Giuffre, marking one year since her death, while expressing frustration with the United States Department of Justice for urging them to speak again with the Federal Bureau of Investigation instead of releasing existing files they’ve long sought.

After the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Republicans quickly blamed Democrats’ rhetoric for contributing to political violence, echoing arguments previously made after past threats against Donald Trump. There is no truth to this, however. Democrats condemned the attack and rejected the violence, calling for unity and emphasizing that violence is unacceptable regardless of political affiliation. The incident has intensified partisan tensions, with Republicans using it to push policy goals like increased Department of Homeland Security funding, while Democrats accuse them of politicizing the event.

Susie Wiles is under intense scrutiny inside the White House following the security breach at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with a widening internal blame game raising questions about her future. Although she has convened urgent meetings and ordered a full review of security failures, sources say some officials are quietly discussing whether she could be fired as pressure mounts to hold someone accountable.

The tension is fueled by disputes over leadership decisions, including her oversight of the Secret Service and the controversial appointment of its current director, with some insiders arguing she should bear responsibility while others deflect blame elsewhere. Reports also suggest attempts to shift responsibility onto other figures, including members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, underscoring deep infighting and uncertainty within the administration as officials scramble to contain fallout from the incident.

Kash Patel praised Donald Trump on Fox & Friends, highlighting his “courage under fire” and calling his law enforcement team the best he has seen. The remarks come as pressure mounts inside the administration following recent security failures. His strong endorsement appears aimed at reinforcing loyalty to Trump amid internal tensions. It also suggests he may be trying to protect his position as scrutiny and potential shakeups grow.

Donald Trump has promoted a proposal to rebrand Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “NICE,” amplifying a supporter’s suggestion aimed at softening the agency’s public image. The idea comes amid backlash over aggressive immigration enforcement and controversial incidents, including fatal shootings during protests, which have damaged ICE’s reputation. Critics have mocked the rebranding effort as superficial and out of touch.

Donald Trump shares a MAGA supporter's post.

Epstein survivors called the DOJ’s bluff:

Donald Trump said, “The internet, I think maybe more than anything else, it’s radicalized some people. It’s made people mentally sick,” blaming online platforms for contributing to extremism and mental health issues.

A Florida resident described the harsh reality of rising costs and limited access to care, saying, “I struggle everyday and now I’m taking care of my mom who’s older and denied [insurance] simple simple things like breathing meds…so I don’t eat this week because I have to take mom to the doctors tomorrow…so you decide what’s more important…you’ve got to make tough choices and tough choices today is tough for anybody, whether you’re from this country or not.” The statement highlights the difficult trade-offs many families face between basic needs and medical care.

According to Politico, Todd Blanche could remain in charge of the United States Department of Justice for months without Senate confirmation due to legal loopholes that allow extended acting appointments. While Donald Trump has not yet decided whether to formally nominate him, Blanche is seen as a leading contender and could continue in the role even if a nomination stalls. The situation has raised legal and political concerns, with experts divided on whether such an extended tenure without confirmation would be lawful.

Mike Johnson is facing an extraordinarily difficult week in Congress, juggling multiple high-stakes battles including surveillance law renewal, immigration funding, and a contentious farm bill, all amid deep divisions within his own party. The recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting has added urgency to security and DHS funding debates, while also complicating negotiations. With internal GOP rebellions, tight deadlines, and even scheduling disruptions from King Charles III’s visit, Johnson’s ability to pass key legislation remains uncertain.

New reporting from the Guardian suggests that Iran has proposed ending its control over the Strait of Hormuz but is not offering concessions on its nuclear program, according to regional officials. In return, it wants the United States to lift its blockade, with the proposal reportedly Iran Flagpassed through Pakistan. The move comes as Iran’s foreign minister consults with Russia amid ongoing conflict involving Israel and the U.S. However, President Donald Trump is unlikely to accept the deal, as he insists any agreement must also address Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Donald Trump is expected to meet with his top national security advisors to discuss next steps in the Iran conflict as negotiations have stalled, with Iran blaming the U.S. for the failure of recent talks in Pakistan. The meeting will address how to proceed after diplomacy reached an impasse, while U.S. officials say Iran’s latest proposal falls short of Washington’s core demands, leaving the situation unresolved.

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with Vladimir Putin to discuss strengthening coordination between Iran and Russia. The talks come as both countries deepen military cooperation, including supplying drones and sharing intelligence. This collaboration has supported their respective conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. The meeting signals a growing strategic alignment between the two nations.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticized the United States’ approach to the Iran conflict, saying he sees no clear exit strategy and warning that Iran’s leadership, particularly the Revolutionary Guards, is humiliating opponents. He said Iran appears to be negotiating skillfully and is stronger than previously believed, raising concerns about how the conflict is unfolding. Merz also emphasized the urgency of ending the war, citing its direct negative impact on Germany’s economy.

The Trump administration abruptly fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, without providing a reason. The move is unprecedented, as board members typically serve staggered six-year terms, and critics warn it could undermine independent scientific guidance in the U.S. It follows a broader pattern of dismissing scientific advisory groups and proposed cuts to science funding under Donald Trump’s administration. Scientists and lawmakers have raised concerns about increased political interference and the future direction of U.S. science policy.

The Supreme Court of the United States is set to consider whether police can use broad “geofence warrants” to access cellphone location data from companies like Google during investigations, a case that could reshape digital privacy rights. The issue stems from a bank robbery case where such data helped identify a suspect, raising questions about whether this practice violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches. Supporters argue the data is voluntarily shared with tech companies, while critics say the sweeping nature of these warrants amounts to unconstitutional mass surveillance. The court’s decision could have far-reaching implications for law enforcement access to personal digital information.

The Supreme Court of the United States is also set to hear a major case that could eliminate thousands of lawsuits against Bayer over claims that its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. The company argues that federal regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency have already deemed the product safe, which should override state-level claims. The Donald Trump administration has backed Bayer in the case, a move that could significantly limit corporate liability if the court rules in its favor.

United CEO Scott Kirby confirmed he approached American Airlines about a merger aimed at expanding routes, boosting jobs, and adding perks like Starlink Wi-Fi. However, American’s CEO Robert Isom rejected the proposal as harmful to competition and consumers. The plan ultimately collapsed without a deal, reportedly amid White House discussions and opposition from Donald Trump. The failed effort leaves the two airlines continuing as major rivals.

More On Attack At DC Press Gala Featuring Trump

 

djt norah odonnell cbs 4 26 2026

Politico, Trump lashes out at ‘60 Minutes’ anchor for reading alleged gunman’s manifesto, Eli Stokols, April 27, 2026 (print ed.). Any detente between the president and the press after the shared horror of Saturday’s dinner appears to be short-lived.

politico CustomPresident Donald Trump lashed out at CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell in an interview Sunday (shown above) for quoting from the manifesto of the suspected gunman who tried to storm the White House Correspondents Dinner less than 24 hours earlier.

Trump had initially expressed a sense of camaraderie with members of the press corps who hosted him at their annual dinner and experienced the same initial panic when armed law enforcement agents stormed into the ballroom.

But when O’Donnell, during an interview recorded at the White House on Sunday, quoted from the accused gunman Cole Allen’s apparent manifesto — “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” she read — Trump, who’d been relatively subdued in his responses, flashed a familiar anger.

“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”

O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”

But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.”

Trump bristled at what he seemed to deem an insinuation about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was not mentioned by name in the manifesto or by O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person,” the president said. “I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”

O’Donnell had just asked Trump if he thought the experience at the dinner would change his experience with the press. He answered obliquely, asserting that the press corps was largely left-leaning and opposed to his policies on immigration and crime.

But his scathing response to her moments later offered a much clearer answer.

“You should be ashamed of yourself for reading that, because I’m not any of those things,” Trump said. “You shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes.’ You’re a disgrace.”

 

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel.

ny times logoNew York Times, Live Updates: Suspect in Press Gala Shooting to Be Arraigned in Federal Court, Luke Broadwater, Michael M. Grynbaum, Shawn McCreesh, Tyler Pager, Devlin Barrett, Maggie Haberman and Amy Qin, April 27, 2026. Two law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, Calif. Authorities said the suspect appeared to express anger at administration officials and President Trump, who was rushed from the dinner unharmed.

Here’s the latest.

A suspect detained in connection with gunfire at the hotel where President Trump was attending the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington over the weekend was expected to be arraigned in federal court on Monday.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said that the suspect would face two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. Additional charges are expected, she said.

Two law enforcement officials familiar with an investigation into the shooting identified the suspect as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif. They asked to remain anonymous because they had not been authorized to disclose the information. Federal authorities in Los Angeles said that a search warrant was served late Saturday night at Mr. Allen’s home.

The suspect was taken into custody on Saturday night after running through a security checkpoint inside the Washington Hilton and exchanging fire with law enforcement officials. Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet, who were attending the dinner in the hotel’s ballroom with hundreds of journalists, were rushed out of the room and were unharmed.

A note that the authorities say was written by the suspect appears to express deep anger at the administration and the president. Administration figures were the suspect’s “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” according to a copy of the roughly 1,000-word document shared by two law enforcement officials who were not authorized to disclose the information.

The suspect expressed surprise at having been able to check into the hotel a day before the event with a shotgun, a handgun and a knife, according to the document.

The attack has raised fresh questions about whether the Secret Service is adequately prepared to protect the president in an age of rising threats and political violence. Officials insisted that the security measures at the dinner worked as intended, noting that the suspect never made it into the ballroom.

On Sunday night, President Trump told 60 Minutes that he told agents to “wait a minute” as they urged him to get down, saying he was curious to see what was happening. He said he finally dropped to the floor with the first lady. “My thought was, ‘I’ve been through this a couple of times before,’” but his wife had not, he said.

Still, he said, she was good under pressure in the moment.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

  • Royal guest: The state visit by King Charles III of Britain will proceed as planned, according to a statement released by Buckingham Palace. Charles was expected to arrive in Washington on Monday.
  • Suspect: Mr. Allen worked as a tutor and graduated from the California Institute of Technology. Those who knew him are struggling to reconcile the man they knew with the shocking act of political violence that he is accused of.
  • California resident: Investigators determined that the suspect took a train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Washington, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said.
  • Rumors and speculation: Influencers jumped to fill the information void with conspiracy theories about the attack.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How Trump Intends to Exploit the Moment, William Kristol, right,william bill kristol imdb April 27, 2026. I should begin with the obvious: I condemn Saturday night’s act of violence at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and I am grateful that no one, including President Trump, was killed.

Last Wednesday, after the vote here in Virginia on redistricting, I wrote that I was proud to be part of “a movement that does what it has to do—peacefully and legally and democratically—in defense of fair elections and liberal democracy.” I repeat: “peacefully and legally and democratically.”

bulwark logo big shipWe should be proud to be part of a civic and political movement that unequivocally rejects violence. Which this pro-democracy movement does. To take one example, the No Kings homepage states that “A core principle behind all No Kings events is commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”

So when MAGA propagandists try tar eight million Americans who peacefully and lawfully exercised their right of assembly last month at No Kings protests, using a report that shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen may have attended one of those protests, we should dismiss the smear with scorn.

We will never apologize for being pro-democracy. In fact it’s kinda our whole thing. Join us.

We should also be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t make light of violent attacks on political opponents, as President Trump and his supporters did after the 2022 assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. We should be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t celebrate the death of public servants, as President Trump did a month ago: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

And we should be proud to be part of a movement that will not be cowed by attempts at intimidation. The pro-democracy movement will resist efforts by this administration and its MAGA minions to use Saturday night as an excuse to criminalize political dissent, silence legitimate criticism, and curtail our civil liberties.

Such efforts got underway within hours of the shooting at the Washington Hilton.

On Sunday morning, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “I don’t think this should be lost on anyone . . . that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump—in that same week we learn that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate.”

I’d say in response that I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that this is mere demagoguery in defense of the baseless indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in defense of using Congress’s investigative powers, as Jordan intends to do, to abet DOJ. Of course Jordan doesn’t quite say that there is any connection between the shooter and the SPLC. But he implies one that should not “be lost on anyone.” This is pretty classic McCarthyism—or, for that matter, Trumpism.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) tried to use Saturday night’s incident as an excuse not just to get new funding for the Department of Homeland Security but to increase the power of the Senate Republican majority: “At a moment of national danger, if Democrats refuse to fund DHS, I would say this would be the time to nuke the filibuster for good.”

In fact, Democrats are refusing to provide new funds not for the whole of DHS but merely for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, neither of which has anything to do with Saturday’s shooting, but which have a lot to do with the administration intimidating opponents. But Trump wants more money for those agencies, and he wants to get rid of the filibuster. This fake “moment of national emergency” is the excuse.

And Speaker Mike Johnson intends to try once again this week to move legislation in the House reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any real civil liberties safeguards.1 Expect to see him and his lieutenants use this “moment of national danger” to try to overcome opposition to the bill, even though there’s no connection between Section 702 and the events of Saturday night.

More broadly, we should expect a sustained effort in the days and weeks to come to intimidate and silence critics of the Trump administration in the same vein as the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be attempts to justify further investigation, chilling, and criminalizing of speech as part of a crackdown on “domestic terrorism.” According to NSPM-7, one of the “common threads animating this violent conduct” is “anti-Christianity.” So President Trump has already called Cole Tomas Allen “anti-Christian”—though as it happens he was active in a Christian group at college, and spends considerable time in his manifesto trying to justify his actions by appealing to scripture.

But the Trump administration will use any excuse to further batter American democracy, and so there will be plenty of demagoguery directed at us this week.

The pro-democracy movement shouldn’t, and won’t, yield to any of this. The Trump administration’s agenda is as noxious as ever, and it remains right for us to oppose it as vigorously as ever. The defense of civil liberties and the rule of law is as important today as it was before Saturday night. The true moment of national danger we face is Trumpism, and there is no reason to hesitate or waver in opposition to it.

 

jimmy kimmel melania trumpPoliticusUSA, Political Opinion: Melania Trump Slithers To The Bottom And Tries To Get Jimmy Kimmel, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 27, 2026. First Lady Melania Trump showed where her priorities are as she tried to use a gunman's attempted entry into the White House Correspondents Dinner to call for ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, above left.

It didn’t take long for the White House and its MAGA allies to try to use the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner to push all sorts of items on their agenda.

politicus usa logoThe one that has gotten the most attention is the call for the White House ballroom to be built, even though the project is illegal and has nothing to do with the incident at a private event on private property.

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) demanded that the DHS be funded in a post on X, even though the Secret Service was funded last year as a part of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich that Comer voted for.

PoliticusUSA is direct and straightforward news and opinion delivered to you every day. Support us by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

However, the award for the most shameless and petty attempt to manipulate the situation out of a petty personal grudge goes to First Lady Melania Trump, who used the standard MAGA tactic of taking attempted or actual political violence and weaponizing it against the First Amendment.

Trump posted on the official account for the First Lady on X, and an unfathomable call for ABC to “do something” about late-night comedian and Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel.

Just a reminder, Melania Trump has been a fountain of divisiveness and political division. Before she was ever first lady, Trump was spreading birther lies about Barack Obama.

Melania Trump posted:

Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country.

His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.

A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.

Jimmy Kimmel had nothing to do with the White House Correspondents Dinner incident. Kimmel did not inspire the events, nor has he had a chance yet to use his show to comment on them.

Melania Trump’s comments were an example of the Trumps trying to exploit a situation to silence critics.

Anyone who tries to paint Melania Trump as a victim of her husband needs to read that post again.

Melania Trump and her husband have the same beliefs. They are two peas in a pod. Melania Trump is not a victim of her husband. She is a partner and co-conspirator.

The reason why the Trumps consistently fail is because of these heavy-handed and obvious efforts to suppress dissent and manipulate the American people.

Melania Trump is one of the last people in the United States who should be lecturing anyone about spreading corosive political sickness.

She is married to the toxic fountain that is the root of the nation’s illness, and she has helped spread the toxicity at every opportunity.

Melania Trump is part of the problem.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Jeanine Pirro Did the Same Thing Norah O’Donnell Did, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, marcy wheelerApril 27, 2026. After Trump pretended to be outraged that O’Donnell repeated language that NY Post had already published, Pirro effectively implied he is obviously the person Allen meant when referring to the pedophile, rapist, traitor.

In her interview with Donald Trump last night, Norah O’Donnell asked Trump to comment on what she claimed was accused gunman Cole Allen’s motive (she also accused Allen of writing anti-Christian things, even though his manifesto is steeped in religion, however corruptly applied).

Amid an interview in which Trump repeatedly stoked polarization, he attacked O’Donnell for reading words that were first published by the New York Post.

O’Donnell coyly took Trump’s aggressive denial — he’s not a pedophile, he’s not a rapist, Trump claimed, but did not specifically address whether he’s a traitor — as an admission that Allen was talking about him.

NORAH O’DONNELL: The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, “Administration officials, they are targets.” And he also wrote this, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” What’s your reaction to that?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re– you’re he– you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m– I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Oh you think– do you think he was referring to you?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all– stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, little’s say, Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, “You know, I’ll do this interview and they’ll probably”– I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Mr. President these are the gunman’s words –

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I was never– excuse me. Excuse me. You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview.

As I expected, when Jeanine Pirro, right,Jeanine Pirro o charged Allen today, she included 18 USC 1751, attempt to assassinate the President.

Remarkably, however, she included nothing other than Trump’s public announcement that he would be attending and the passage of the manifesto that includes those descriptions (she excluded most of Allen’s references to his Christianity, as well as his view that Secret Service security was inadequate).

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated nonlethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

There is no other language in the complaint — not even a mention that Allen said he’d start from highest-ranking to lowest — substantiating that Allen’s target was Trump.

To be sure, I have no doubt it was. I believe the attempted assassination charge is totally appropriate.

I just think it funny that, after Trump pretended to be outraged that O’Donnell repeated language that NY Post had already published, Pirro effectively implied he is obviously the person Allen meant when referring to the pedophile, rapist, traitor.

More On Iran War

ny times logoNew York Times, Guest Essay: By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal, Erwin Chemerinsky (dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley), April 27, 2026. President Trump’s war with Iran is almost certainly illegal.

Congress hasn’t declared war or authorized it by statute, and it wasn’t precipitated by an imminent attack or a national emergency. If the war continues through Friday without congressional approval, it will clearly be illegal, having passed the 60-day threshold and the 48-hour notice period that the president is given, under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, to conduct this kind of military operation.

Whether you support or oppose this war — or, as Mr. Trump has called it, this “excursion” — time will be up. And it is the obligation of the federal courts to say so.

The resolution, often called the War Powers Act, was adopted during the Vietnam War. It applies when American troops are engaged in hostilities or in situations in which hostilities are impending — such as during this war with Iran.

Iran FlagDespite Mr. Trump’s saying, on Thursday, “Don’t rush me” regarding the war’s timeline, the act requires that the president withdraw our military from participation in hostilities after 60 days unless Congress has declared war, has authorized a 60-day extension or is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack against the United States. The president can extend this by 30 days if he certifies to Congress in writing that an “unavoidable military necessity” regarding the safety of our armed forces requires it.

The Iran war began on Feb. 28. For these purposes, the clock started running on March 2, when the president formally notified Congress of his military action against Iran. Congress has not declared war or done anything to authorize the war, and its refusal to do so in no way constitutes the requisite approval to continue the conflict — the War Powers Resolution doesn’t come with a check box for opting out.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

If the president and Iran’s leaders don’t reach an agreement to end the war before the deadline, every indication is that Mr. Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will ignore the act. To try to justify continuing the war, there’s a good chance they’ll come up with some new form of legal-sounding double talk. If that’s the case, it will be left to the courts to uphold the law. Suits should be brought, including by service members and by members of Congress, to enforce it.

Unfortunately, recent efforts to enforce the act have been dismissed by the courts as involving political questions that they cannot decide. For example, in Crockett v. Reagan, in 1982, a Federal District Court dismissed a lawsuit by members of Congress that challenged U.S. military assistance to El Salvador. In Doe v. Bush, in 2002, a Federal District Court dismissed a suit to enjoin President George W. Bush from invading Iraq. The court said that the issues raised were political questions “beyond the authority of a federal court to resolve.” Kucinich v. Obama, in 2011, challenged America’s military actions in Libya as violating the act and the Constitution. A Federal District Court dismissed the case.

These decisions make meaningless Congress’s war powers. In the face of congressional inaction, and without judicial enforcement, there are realistically no checks on the president’s ability to unilaterally wage war. If the federal judiciary, up to and including the Supreme Court, won’t uphold its responsibility here, it will nullify our Constitution’s design that two branches of government should be involved when our country goes to war.

The courts haven’t always been so reluctant. The Supreme Court decided several cases arising from the Quasi War, an undeclared naval war with France between 1798 and 1800: In Talbot v. Seeman (1801), the court emphasized the importance of Congress’s involvement in any type of war. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the “whole powers of war” were vested in Congress. In Little v. Barreme (1804), the court held that even during wartime the president cannot authorize actions that violate acts of Congress.

In the Prize Cases, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Abraham Lincoln’s blockading Southern ports in 1861. In a narrow 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled that although the president cannot initiate war, as the commander in chief he could meet an armed rebellion with force. It did not, however, question its own authority to rule on a president’s war powers.

The notion that courts cannot enforce constitutional and statutory provisions concerning war powers has no historical foundation. Nor is there any basis for arguing that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional as an infringement of the president’s powers as the commander in chief. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” That last phrase has immediate and obvious relevance when it comes to our military blockading or boarding ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Constitution’s framers unquestionably intended that the power to use military force lay with Congress. During his presidency, George Washington wrote: “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress, therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.”

Yes, presidents control the execution of wars, but they don’t decide whether to take the country to war. While in Congress, James Madison wrote: “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.”

The courts should simply hold that the War Powers Resolution requires the president to end our involvement in the war with Iran unless and until Congress authorizes it. This shouldn’t be — and isn’t — different than any other injunction on any administration to comply with the law. Mr. Trump might disregard such an order. But that isn’t a reason for the federal judiciary to abandon its duty to enforce the law.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school and a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran Offers Plan to Focus on Strait of Hormuz and Delay Nuclear Talks, Farnaz Fassihi, April 27, 2026. In its latest offer delivered on Sunday, Iran proposed opening the key waterway to shipping traffic and lifting the U.S. blockade, while postponing the thornier nuclear issue until later.

Iran has offered the United States a new proposal for negotiations that focuses on opening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the U.S. sea blockade on Iran as a way of ending the war and then tackling nuclear negotiations later, according to three Iranian officials.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, delivered this latest plan to Pakistan on Sunday, after an initial proposal from Iran a day earlier had been rejected by President Trump, according to the Iranian officials familiar with the details of negotiations who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive diplomacy.

Mr. Trump is holding a meeting this afternoon to review Iran’s latest proposal.

“They have achieved none of their goals, and this is why they are asking for negotiations; we are now considering it,” Mr. Araghchi said to a Russian reporter on Monday, according to a video of the interview. Mr. Araghchi was in Russia on Monday and met with President Vladimir V. Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The White House was mum on its response. “These are sensitive diplomatic discussions, and the U.S. will not negotiate through the press,” said Olivia Wales, a White House spokeswoman. “As the President has said, the United States holds the cards and will only make a deal that puts the American people first, never allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”ImageA dozen vessels in a waterway, with a sere mountain in the distance.Vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday as seen from Musandam, Oman.Credit...Reuters

Iran’s new proposal was delivered after weeks in which Tehran and Washington exchanged draft proposals but made no headway on the thorny issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. The United States has demanded that Iran suspend its nuclear program for 20 years and hand over its 972-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which could quickly be turned into several bombs if Iran chose to militarize its program.

Iran has refused, calling the U.S. demands overreaching. In the proposal Iran delivered to Pakistan on Saturday, Iran had offered a five-year suspension of its uranium enrichment, followed by five years of very low grade civilian enrichment in labs. It would have diluted its stockpile and kept half of it at home under international inspectors while giving the other half to Russia, an ally.

But the United States rejected the offer. Mr. Trump on Saturday said Iranians had given him a response that was “not good enough.”

So Iran came up with another idea: Leave the harder issues for later.

“This is a face-saving change in sequencing: put Hormuz first as part of war-ending arrangements, not formal negotiations, lift the blockade, and defer the harder issues so they don’t sink the process at the outset,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention research organization.

Since the war started, a cohort of senior generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have been running the war and making key decisions about strategy, cease-fire and talks with the United States, according to Iranian officials. The new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, gravely injured and isolated in hiding, has deferred authority to the generals.

On Monday, 261 Iranian lawmakers from various political factions signed a statement in support of the negotiating team, led by Parliament Speaker Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, to signal unity. But five lawmakers from the ultra hard-line faction, opposed to any concessions with Washington, refused to sign. 

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

 

djt chart digenova toensing blt teamLawfare, The Grand Conspiracy’s New Prosecutor May Be the Case’s Biggest Liability, Anna Bower and Molly Roberts, right, molly robertsApril 27, 2026. Former Trump lawyer Joseph diGenova is one of the most vocal proponents of a conspiracy theory that he is now in charge of investigating.Statue depicting the blind scales of justice.

lawfare logoWho better to lead the Grand Conspiracy investigation than one of the country’s grandest conspiracy theorists—or, really, who worse?

The 81-year-old lawyer who represented President Trump’s campaign in challenging the results of the 2020 election was recently dispatched to Southern Florida as counselor to the attorney general. He is entrusted with helming an inquiry into a supposed deep-state plot that encompasses many of his onetime client’s longtime woes: from impeachments to prosecutions to the lost 2020 election, all purportedly a unified effort on the part of Trump’s enemies to violate his constitutional rights and the rights of legions of voters to elect him.

The Grand Conspiracy probe has ramped up in recent days, following the departure of Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Medetis Long, a respected career prosecutor who, CNN reports, “resisted pressure to quickly bring charges against” former CIA Director John Brennan for lying to Congress. This perjury probe—initially regarded as part of the broader Grand Conspiracy investigation—now appears to have moved to Washington, D.C., presumably because of the lack of jurisdictional hook in Southern Florida. Meanwhile, the rest of the case continues to develop down the coast, including in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where a special grand jury has been empaneled and where the eminently administration-friendly Judge Aileen Cannon presides.

Joseph DiGenova will work on all of the above. The Reagan-era U.S. attorney has become a MAGA media fixture in this century. As part of the gig, he has trumpeted the very narrative he is tasked with turning into a criminal case—and demonized the very people at the center of the investigation in the process.

DiGenova has also been willing to pull back the curtain on the palace intrigue surrounding his recent hiring: Just this month, in an interview with Rudy Giuliani, diGenova claimed that former Attorney General Pam Bondi was “singularly responsible for the delay and investigations into the lawfare against Donald Trump that’s being run out of the…U.S. attorney’s office in Miami and Ft. Pierce.” Saying she had previously nixed his appointment to run the probe, diGenova insisted, “If she had not done that, we would have had indictments brought in the last two months.”

DiGenova further suggested that Bondi had been fired over the president’s frustration with the slow pace of the Miami probe. ”The president’s conversation with her yesterday coming back from the Supreme Court was not pleasant,” he said, referring to the conversation in which Trump reportedly fired Bondi. “The president was ripping mad about the fact that there was no progress on the lawfare investigation in Miami.”

On April 20, the same day he was sworn in, diGenova appeared on WBAL Radio and said the president “personally asked” him to accept the role running what he called “the Russia hoax investigation.” Later—sketching out the Grand Conspiracy in full—he noted “the historical significance of what happened in 2016, 2020 and 2024, where it’s very evident…that there was a very brazen plot against a private citizen, and then a president, and then a post-president, and then a sitting president again, Donald Trump, to deny him his civil rights.”

These statements are only the latest in a litany of accusations diGenova has lodged against the president’s perceived enemies over the years. The volume and, indeed, the vitriol of his grievances cast real doubt on his ability to act as an independent or impartial prosecutor in the Grand Conspiracy case or any related matter.

The Grand Conspiracy Gospel According to Joseph diGenova

For the better part of a decade, diGenova has been among the most vocal proponents of the conspiracy theory that he is now in charge of investigating. A review of dozens of hours of audio and video footage of his media appearances reveals how he has spent years constructing a detailed narrative of criminality around a specific group of individuals—repeatedly accusing them of crimes, attacking their character and even demanding their imprisonment.

The precise contours of the Grand Conspiracy can be difficult to distinguish, as one of us recently explained. Exactly who conducted what malign activity and which law it ostensibly violated depends on whom you ask. If you ask diGenova, however, the theory goes something like this: Senior Obama-era officials, led by then-FBI Director James Comey, deliberately bungled the Clinton email investigation out of a desire to clear her path to the presidency. As an “insurance policy” in the event that plan failed, the officials also concocted the tale of Trump-Russia collusion—laundering the salacious Steele Dossier through the U.S. intelligence community to give their story credibility, then using it as a predicate to spy on the Trump campaign and later launch a special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller “unfettered by rules or law.”

DiGenova laid out this view in a 2018 speech at Hillsdale College that reads as a veritable Sermon on the Mount for the MAGA faithful. Over the following years, he has added new chapters to his gospel: insisting, for instance, that the Ukraine impeachment was the real “Big Lie” designed to “nullify” the 2016 election; that the 2020 election was stolen and former cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” (these words, diGenova later insisted, were “in jest”); that Jack Smith’s indictment over the Mar-a-Lago search was a sham representing “unleashed retributive justice by a Democratic administration that is…on fentanyl with power.”

These allegations line up almost perfectly with the Grand Conspiracy that prosecutors are now understood to be pursuing in Southern Florida as a criminal case. Indeed, diGenova explicitly called for the empanelment of a grand jury in that division last summer on Real America’s Voice, saying, “John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, everybody. Lisa Monaco. They'll all be going to Florida. That's where this grand jury is going to be…This conspiracy against President Trump deserves punishment, not just a lecture. People need to go to prison.” On the WBAL Radio episode on which he appeared on the day of his swearing-in, he even cited the Substack of a retired DEA agent that lays out the fantasy in footnoted detail—supplemented by the specific statutes under which the purported perpetrators of the plan could be prosecuted.

Lawyers frequently express opinions and legal analysis in public forums, and doing so is not, in itself, disqualifying from later representing the government in related matters. What sets diGenova apart is not that he commented publicly—it is the nature, specificity, and sustained period of time during which he made those comments. Rather than the careful, conditional language of a legal analyst who understands that facts remain uncertain and that investigation might reveal something other than criminal conduct, diGenova's statements consistently treat the guilt of his now-subjects as already established.

That pattern is troubling enough. But diGenova’s comments have also frequently crossed the line from legal argument into personal attacks on the people he is now tasked with investigating. He has, for example, called former FBI Director James Comey a “dirty cop” who is “committed to himself above all else,” mockingly dubbing him “James ‘Cardinal’ Comey.” Brennan has fared no better, cast variously as an “evil man,” a “very troubled man,” a “traitor,” or simply “nuts.” In one memorable clip, diGenova attributed Brennan's composure in a 2018 media appearance to his having been put “on meds”—his baseline, diGenova explained, being that of a man "flailing away, looking like a madman."

DiGenova’s history of public statements have already raised questions about his ability to seek justice in a fair and disinterested manner. Asked about diGenova’s past comments at a recent press conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pushed back. “I’m not sure what the conflict of interest would be,” he said. “Because somebody has said something in the past about a particular matter, that doesn’t create a conflict, necessarily.”

To some extent, Blanche may be right, given that a disqualifying conflict of interest typically involves conflicting loyalties between clients or financial conflicts of interest. But if the grand conspiracy case ultimately results in criminal charges, diGenova’s appointment is bound to be a boon for the defense. That’s because diGenova’s statements are useful evidence of unconstitutional prosecutorial animus in the context of a motion to dismiss for selective or vindictive prosecution. Rooted in the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause, both claims require some showing that the prosecution was motivated by an impermissible purpose—and both are notoriously difficult to prove, given that courts tend to afford a presumption of regularity to prosecutorial decision-making.

DiGenova’s public record goes a long way to helping the defense meet that burden. Not only has he spent years calling for the now-subjects of his investigation to be jailed, but he has suggested that his animus is rooted in those individuals' exercise of First Amendment-protected conduct—namely, their public criticism of Trump, their participation in investigations and impeachment proceedings, and their performance of official duties diGenova that has characterized as “partisan.” That is precisely the kind of impermissible purpose that the selective or vindictive prosecution doctrines are designed to prevent. That his appointment came at Trump's personal request—from a president who has spent years publicly demanding retribution against the very individuals now under investigation—and that diGenova himself complained that the previous attorney general had wrongly delayed indictments he was champing to bring, strips away any pretense that the relevant question was ever whether the evidence supported charges.

DiGenova's public statements may also create problems well before any charges are ever filed. Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a court may quash or modify a subpoena “if compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive.” Courts have shown willingness to exercise that power when a subpoena appears to serve an improper purpose, such as harassment or retribution, rather than legitimate investigative ends. Judge James Boasberg made exactly that point in quashing a recent subpoena to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, writing that it would not be “kosher” for a prosecutor to “single[] out an opponent of the President ‘out of malice’ or ‘to harass’ him, including by fishing around for some crime to pin on him.” Any target who receives a subpoena need only point to the record diGenova spent years building—in which he calls for the investigation and imprisonment of specific individuals as vindication for a president who then personally handed him the job following the departure of a career prosecutor and the attorney general—to make exactly that argument.

The Ukrainian Connection

There’s another reason diGenova is uniquely ill-suited to lead this case—or, perhaps in the president’s eyes, uniquely well-suited. The snarled web of the Grand Conspiracy includes the impeachment inquiry over Trump’s incriminating phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

On this call, remember, Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” and commit to investigating Hunter and Joe Biden in a possible quid pro quo for military aid from the United States. The conversation was the culmination of a monthslong endeavor engineered by Rudy Giuliani to precipitate the Biden-Bursima investigation that Trump ultimately took it upon himself to request directly from Zelensky (as well as to discredit the Mueller probe as a “Witch Hunt”).

DiGenova was part of that operation. Indeed, at one point, amid the Southern District of New York’s investigation of Giuliani for ties to Ukraine, the FBI seized some of diGenova’s wife Victoria Toensing’s data and devices—a move for which diGenova, perhaps providing more fodder for a vindictiveness motion, insisted Christopher Wray would “find himself in front of a federal grand jury.”

The details of these events boggle the brain similarly to how the Grand Conspiracy itself does—except this time, the events actually took place: A company co-founded by Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas hired Giuliani Partners for $500,000 “to consult on…technologies and provide legal advice on regulatory issues.” (The name of the firm, by the way? “Fraud Guarantee.”) This brief, in practice, meant pushing for the ouster of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich—whom Parnas and his partner, the Belarusian-American Igor Fruman, painted as “unfriendly to the president and his interests.”

Eventually, in spring 2019, these efforts came to encompass regular meetings at the BLT Prime restaurant at the Trump International Hotel, attended by Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman, the conservative reporter John Solomon, and—crucially—diGenova and Toensing. Discussions revolved around how to advance the dirt-digging operation in Ukraine. DiGenova and Toensing were already regulars on the MAGA media circuit at the time; concurrent with these conversations, diGenova made appearances on Fox News smearing Yovanovich.

“This woman needs to be called home to the United States for consultation to answer a slew of questions about her conduct and her assault on the president of the United States,” he said to Sean Hannity on March 20. Two days later, on March 22, he told Laura Ingraham that “the president of the United States deserves an ambassador in Kiev who supports his policies, not someone who bad-mouths him.”

“This has all the markings of bribery and extortion,” he continued, launching into the fabricated narrative in full. “It’s something that deserves a full-blown investigation into the conduct of the Biden family in Ukraine.” DiGenova also mentioned the generation of “false information about [Paul] Manafort, other information that went into the so-called black, black binders.” (The reference to Manafort ties into an involved attempt by Giuliani and his allies to suggest the Mueller report was a frame-up.)

Precisely what diGenova was getting out of this arrangement is unclear. But, as Marcy Wheeler has reported, Toensing was at least discussing the possibility of related payment with Parnas. “I love you and your husband you are the best,” warrants from an eventual Southern District of New York investigation indicate that Parnas texted Toensing after the interview. “We can be really great if we have a retainer signed,” she replied, apparently referencing her attempts to convince Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko—whom Giulini et al were diligently working—to agree to compensate the husband and wife duo for advancing his interests with the administration. Such a document appears to have been drafted, but never signed.

What is certain is that diGenova and Toensing did represent the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, after Parnas and Fruman suggested that they could aid him in the case brought against him by the Justice Department. Firtash told the New York Times he paid diGenova and Toensing $1.2 million for their services, with a finders fee also awarded to Parnas.

Somewhere along the way, another Ukrainian prosecutor for whom diGenova and Toensing also prepared a draft retainer—this time, Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin——produced at the duo’s request an affidavit in support for Firtash for an Austrian court in which he swore he was “forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors.” This document mysteriously made it, as so much other privileged information from diGenova and Toensing had a tendency to do, into a column by John Solomon for “The Hill.”

DiGenova and Toensing delivered for Firtash in another essential way: Parnas testified to Congress in 2024 that the two met with then-Attorney General Bill Barr urging him to drop the charges “because Dmitry Firtash was going to help us getting dirt on the Bidens.”

“Someone from the Trump campaign is talking to the Attorney General to drop the charges because this foreign national is helping get dirt on a political candidate?” asked Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “Absolutely,” Parnas replied.

Weeks later, when the existence of the whistleblower complaint about the Trump-Zelensky phone call became public, diGenova and Toensing appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show touting the Shokin affidavit without any mention that it was she and her husband who had obtained it. DiGenova also spoke of the whistleblower: “This whistleblower needs to go to prison. He doesn’t need to be feted, he needs to go to prison.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just this month issued a criminal referral—apparently unaccompanied by evidence of any crime—for that very whistleblower that, along with the rest of drama surrounding Russia, Ukraine and the president, may well make its way down to Southern Florida as part of the Grand Conspiracy investigation.

All of which is to say: DiGenova has been appointed to investigate a made-up deep-state plot that supposedly involves the wrongful impeachment of President Trump over a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump demanded an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma. This was the very investigation that diGenova not only repeatedly clamored for on conservative television programs—but was paid to help bring about. Now, charged with prosecuting the case, the Grand Conspiracy’s most enthusiastic promoter may turn out to be its most consequential liability.

ny times logoNew York Times, Guest Essay: Why Trump Wants Unqualified U.S. Attorneys, Jeffrey Toobin, right, jeffrey toobinformer federal prosecutor and the author of “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy”), April 27, 2026. When President Trump began his second term, he stacked the top ranks of the Justice Department — the country’s chief federal law enforcement officers — with his former private attorneys, no doubt to make sure that they would protect his own personal and political interests rather than the nation’s.

Lately, though, in a less conspicuous way, he’s playing offense as well as defense, naming United States attorneys who will pursue, and even prosecute, his enemies. The Senate will shortly decide whether to confirm three of Mr. Trump’s most astonishing — and chillingly unqualified — selections for these crucial local positions.

Justice Department log circularThe president has long expressed bitterness that his first attorney general, Jefferson Sessions III, recused himself from the investigation of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election, after which Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, named Robert S. Mueller III to lead the probe. Determined in his second term to avoid any such displays of independence and integrity by his subordinates, Mr. Trump stocked the Justice Department with former courtiers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi (since fired), Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (since named acting A.G.) and Solicitor General D. John Sauer (unchanged).

Still, Mr. Trump has been frustrated that revenge-based criminal cases against his enemies — which apparently range from one against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for supposed perjury to another against former President Barack Obama for alleged treason — have not come successfully to fruition. That’s where the U.S. attorneys come in.

Because the Senate is still honoring the blue-slip process for U.S. attorneys, giving Democratic senators the ability to block Mr. Trump from installing his choices in their states, the president has been stymied. (For a time, he contrived ways to bypass the Senate to appoint U.S. attorneys in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, but the courts ultimately rejected those gambits.) Nevertheless, Mr. Trump has a free hand in red states, and he’s counting on an ever-compliant Republican majority in the Senate to rubber-stamp his selections.

The senators will shortly decide, for example, whether to confirm Darin Smith as the chief federal prosecutor in Wyoming. Mr. Smith, who is already the acting U.S. attorney, has acknowledged participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, though he asserted that he never entered the building. He is a failed candidate for Congress and in a brief tenure as a state senator, he co-sponsored bills to eliminate gun-free zones in buildings and ban state employees from assisting in enforcement of federal firearms laws. Primarily an estate planning specialist, he has practiced law for 25 years without trying a single case in federal or state courts.

When President Trump nominated Phillip Williams, Jr. to be U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, Mr. Williams was the president of “Rightside Media,” a podcast and radio network where he hosted a daily, multi-hour talk show with the tagline, “Solid Conservative and Just Plain Right.” On his program, Mr. Williams argued that the Jan. 6 rioters were “hunted down” by federal law enforcement, whom he accused of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He compared these prosecutions to “the Salem witch trials on a national scale.” As a lawyer, Mr. Williams has never tried a criminal case.

The Senate will also soon consider the nomination of Dan Bishop to be the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. Mr. Bishop, who is already acting leader of the office, served in Congress from 2019 to 2025 and voted in 2021 not to certify the presidential election results in two states won by Mr. Biden. As part of Mr. Bishop’s current confirmation process, he answered a question from a Democratic senator about whether “the left” orchestrated the riots on Jan. 6, by saying, in writing, “I have heard credible accounts that black-bloc/Antifa agitators were in the crowd and among the first to vandalize the Capitol building, so I think that leftists participated in and perhaps instigated the mayhem in part.” In his career in private practice, Mr. Bishop estimated that the cases he handled were 97 percent civil and 3 percent criminal.

“Trump’s nominees as U.S. attorneys have been dramatically different in his second term,” Senator Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told me. “In the first term, the nominees were conservative Republicans. Now they are MAGA loyalists.”

By custom, nominees for U.S. attorney posts do not testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in confirmation hearings, and following perfunctory debates, these three candidates were approved by the Committee on party-line votes. Under new procedural rules promulgated by the Republican majority in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, will be able to call for a single vote to approve all three nominees. There is no announced Republican opposition to these U.S. attorney candidates, and none seems likely to materialize.

It’s possible to see U.S. attorneys as just another set of midlevel political appointees with a timer on their jobs, but that understates their importance. Whereas this administration figures whoever wins confirmation in most cabinet departments must first learn to navigate the vast federal bureaucracy in order to turn their policy preferences into concrete action, U.S. attorneys have almost unlimited discretion to launch criminal investigations. At minimum, these prosecutors can upend the lives of individuals and often lead to formal charges.

The consequences of the misuse of this extraordinary power are well illustrated by what’s been happening in South Florida. There, Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney nominated by Mr. Trump last year, has been working feverishly to build some kind of criminal case against John Brennan, the Obama-era head of the C.I.A., whom President Trump has long despised for his role in raising early suspicions about the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump.

I know of no legitimate case against Mr. Brennan — as Mr. Trump’s first Justice Department already demonstrated. At that time, the president ordered up a nearly identical investigation of Mr. Brennan and the origins of the Russia probe, that one led by John Durham, and it came up empty. It appears that the current Florida investigation has also found nothing, since Maria Medetis Long, a career prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office, recently left the investigation, reportedly over her belief there was not enough to make a case.

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department responded by doubling down on the pursuit of Mr. Brennan. The president’s enablers summoned Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old Reagan-era U.S. attorney in Washington, to replace Ms. Medetis Long and take over the investigation. It’s not clear precisely how Mr. diGenova will direct the probe, but there’s no doubt that his assignment is to produce Mr. Brennan’s scalp. Even if the investigation of Mr. Brennan ends without criminal charges, as it would in a just world, or in an acquittal, which would be a second-best result, the cost to him and his family — in legal fees, harm to his good name and stress — will be enormous.

The power to inflict this kind of hardship gave rise to the most famous description of the power of federal prosecutors, which was made in 1940 by Robert H. Jackson, who was then the attorney general and would go on to be a Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg war-crimes prosecutor.

Addressing the annual conference of U.S. attorneys in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Jackson said, “It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.” In an especially resonant passage, Mr. Jackson called out “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”

True then, true now.

 

supreme court 2023 nyt

ny times logoNew York Times, Supreme Court to Hear Arguments in Landmark Roundup Weedkiller Case, Hiroko Tabuchi, Updated April 27, 2026. A victory for the manufacturer, Bayer, could end thousands of lawsuits against the company claiming that the herbicide causes cancer.

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Monday in a case that could lead to the dismissal of tens of thousands of lawsuits against Bayer, the pharmaceutical and biotech giant, that claim the weedkiller Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, Roundup is one of the best-selling weedkillers in the world, but it has been dogged by controversy over its effects on human health. The company, which was acquired by the German conglomerate Bayer in 2018, has faced thousands of lawsuits, amounting to one of the largest waves of such litigation in U.S. history.

Evidence in lab animals, and more limited evidence in humans, has indicated a link between Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, and cancer. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

The Environmental Protection Agency considers the herbicide to be safe. The E.P.A. is responsible for pesticide labeling nationwide, and Bayer argues that the federal agency’s decision overrides state-level legal claims, effectively insulating it from lawsuits. The federal government faces an Oct. 1 deadline to re-examine the effects of glyphosate.

Monsanto, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018, had petitioned the court to review a lawsuit brought by John Durnell of St. Louis, Mo., a gardener who used Roundup for decades. Mr. Durnell received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and sued the company in 2019, alleging that his illness was a result of exposure to the pesticide and that Monsanto had failed to warn of the cancer risks.

The Trump administration has formally backed Bayer in the case, reversing a position taken by the Biden administration. In February President Trump also issued an unusual executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee production of glyphosate-based herbicides, essentially elevating Roundup to a national security priority.That came soon after Bayer made a move to end the bulk of its current litigation over Roundup, proposing a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. With a Supreme Court win, much of Bayer’s litigation woes over the weedkiller could be behind it.

The Justice Department agrees with Bayer’s argument that federal law expressly and implicitly pre-empts any failure-to-warn claims under state law, because the E.P.A. has already evaluated the pesticide and determined that a cancer warning is not required. That means manufacturers cannot unilaterally alter federally approved labels without violating federal law, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said in his brief.

Environmental groups argue the E.P.A.’s review process is deficient and routinely fails to require cancer warnings to protect the public. They note that a federal court vacated a health-risk assessment and pesticide-registration review conducted by the E.P.A. in 2020, calling the agency’s evaluation of glyphosate’s cancer risk flawed.

“E.P.A.’s overall review is limited, leaving an important and robust role for states,” George A. Kimbrell, lead counsel for the Center for Food Safety, wrote in his brief.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States, sprayed on “Roundup Ready” genetically modified crops including corn, soybeans, and cotton to control weeds. In the United States, about 280 million pounds of glyphosate are applied annually across nearly 300 million acres of farmland.

Farmers also often spray glyphosate on non-GMO crops such as oats, wheat, and lentils shortly before harvest, drying out the plants and making them easier to harvest. This leads to higher residues in finished products like oatmeal, bread and cereal.Editors’ PicksRejected by a Co-op Board: Do They Have to Tell You Why?You Don’t Have to Be Filthy Rich to Enjoy an Airport Shower36 Hours in Richmond, Va.

Over the past year, Bill Anderson, the Bayer chief executive, has said the company could stop selling its Roundup weedkiller altogether because of the billions of dollars that it has paid out toward its Roundup litigation. The situation had become an “existential” threat to the company and farmers, he said in May.

ny times logoNew York Times, Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find Criminals, Ann E. Marimow, April 27, 2026. Geofence searches allow law enforcement to find suspects and witnesses by sweeping up location data from cellphone users near crime scenes.

When the Call Federal Credit Union outside Richmond, Va., was robbed at gunpoint in 2019, the suspect took $195,000 from the bank’s vault and fled before the police arrived.

A detective interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank’s security footage. But with no leads, the officer relied on a so-called geofence warrant to sweep up location data from all the cellphones in the vicinity of the bank for the 30 minutes before and after the robbery.

Justice Department log circularThe data he gathered eventually led to the identification and conviction of Okello T. Chatrie, now 31, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 2017.

Geofence searches have become increasingly popular as a tool for law enforcement, but critics say they put at risk the personal data of everyday Americans and violate the Constitution. Mr. Chatrie challenged the use of a geofence warrant in his conviction, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday.

The justices will examine how the Constitution’s traditional protections apply to rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person’s movements and activities.

It has been eight years since the court last took up a major Fourth Amendment case involving the expectations of privacy for the millions of people carrying cellphones in the digital age. In that 2018 case, the court ruled that the government generally needs a warrant to collect location data drawn from cell towers about the customers of cellphone companies.

The court has also limited the government’s ability to use GPS devices to track suspects’ movements, and it has required that law enforcement get a warrant to search individual cellphones.

In Mr. Chatrie’s case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Millions of Americans use a Google service known as “location history,” which gathers data about every two minutes about where its users travel and when. Unlike traditional warrants, which target an identified suspect based on probable cause that they have committed a crime, geofence warrants operate in reverse. Law enforcement draws a virtual “fence” or boundary around a geographic area where a crime has been committed and asks Google for data on every user whose device happens to be in the area during a particular time.

Mr. Chatrie’s lawyer Adam G. Unikowsky compared geofence warrants to fishing expeditions, saying they allow the government to “search first and develop suspicions later,” in violation of the Constitution and the longstanding prohibition against warrants that are too broad or general.

“The technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not,” Mr. Unikowsky wrote in a court filing. “The potential for abuse is breathtaking: The government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.”

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 26, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 27, 2026. Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.

The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.

Justice Department log circularShumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”

“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”

This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.

Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.

Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.

While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.

The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.

Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.

But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.

But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.

Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”

If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”

The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.

Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.

“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.

You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.

You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.

But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.

A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.

Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent.

He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.

I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.

Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported. Kash Patel celebrating with the US men's hockey team at the Winter Olympics

Soon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.

It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice. Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump. Kash Patel and Alexis Wilkins at a Professional Bull Riders event. Patel with girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins

The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”

More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.

Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).

It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.

Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.

But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.

Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.

A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.

I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: Kash Will Soon Be Out on His Ass, Robert Reich, April 27, 2026. Another radically underqualified Trump appointee is about to bite the dust.

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.

You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.

You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.

But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.

A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.

Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent.

He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.

I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.

Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported. Kash Patel celebrating with the US men's hockey team at the Winter Olympics

alexis wilkins kash patel instagramSoon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins (shown at right with Patel), when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.

It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice. Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.

The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”

More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.

Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).

It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.

Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.

But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.

Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.

A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.

I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.

 

noel sims

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Polymarket celebrates insider trading scandal, Judd Legum, right, judd legumApril 27, 2026. Last week, the Justice Department indicted Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke for misappropriating classified information to profit on the prediction market Polymarket.

Van Dyke was a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces unit that captured former President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. Over the span of eight days just before the operation, Van Dyke allegedly leveraged his access to classified information to make more than $400,000 on Polymarket.

According to the prediction market industry and its advocates in the Trump administration, Van Dyke’s arrest is proof that the “system works.” In reality, Van Dyke’s experience is highly unusual. Van Dyke was not caught because of a robust system that protects prediction markets against insider trading. Rather, it was a combination of the specific kind of information that Van Dyke exploited and his own hamhandedness.

Van Dyke allegedly became aware of Maduro’s impending capture around December 8, 2025, when he was assigned to the team planning the operation. According to the indictment, on December 26, 2025, Van Dyke personally created an account on Polymarket, funded it with about $35,000, and began placing bets on Maduro-related markets under the username “Burdensome-Mix.” For example, Van Dyke allegedly placed large “YES” bets on “Maduro out by… January 31, 2026” and “Will the U.S. invade Venezuela by… January 31,” among others.

Van Dyke made these bets, according to the indictment, after he signed non-disclosure agreements in which he promised “to never divulge, publish, or reveal by writing, words, conduct, or otherwise . . . any classified or sensitive information.”

Polymarket claimed this was a validation of the integrity of its platform. Neal Kumar, Polymarket’s Chief Legal Officer, posted on X that Van Dyke’s arrest “proved just how easy it is to find & charge criminal insider trading when markets are onchain.” A separate X post by the official Polymarket account says it was the company that “identified a user trading on classified information.”

Kumar said that others who tried to trade on insider information “will be found just like this guy.”

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan posted: “We flagged this, referred it, and cooperated throughout the process.”

Polymarket’s story does not add up. The indictment credits “reports of unusual trading in Maduro-related contracts on Polymarket [that] appeared in the press and on social media” with bringing scrutiny to Van Dyke’s conduct. Polymarket’s internal systems are not mentioned.

The issue was that, according to the indictment, Van Dyke did not take basic steps to conceal his activity. He opened brand-new accounts to place trades and immediately placed large bets on a narrow range of contracts, all related to Maduro. Had Van Dyke spread smaller bets across several accounts with established betting histories, his conduct would have been difficult or impossible to detect. An even more effective tactic would have been to pass the information to a third party who would execute that strategy. Van Dyke allegedly took none of these precautions.

Further, all the charges in the indictment rest on the fact that the information used by Van Dyke was classified and that he had a duty not to disclose or misuse it. Many of the markets offered by Polymarket do not involve this kind of information.

For example, Polymarket is currently taking bets on whether Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” online influencer, “announces that he and a partner are expecting a baby through pregnancy between market creation and December 31, 2026.”

Clavicular has no obligation to keep the timing of any potential pregnancy announcement secret. Similarly, if Clavicular informed a friend in advance of an announcement, the friend would have no “duty” not to share or act on that information. In other words, the roadmap for prosecuting Van Dyke would not apply to insiders gaming the Clavicular market — or the vast majority of markets offered on Polymarket and Kalshi.

Notably, Coplan told 60 Minutes in November 2025 that trading on insider information was beneficial. “I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing,” Coplan said. “Obviously… you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn… But it’s sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there’s a lot of benefits from it.”The truth about Kalshi

Kalshi, Polymarket’s chief rival, attempted to use the indictment to portray itself as the prediction market with real protections against insider trading. CNBC reported that Kalshi “blocked Van Dyke from opening a Kalshi account.” Notably, a Kalshi spokesperson “could not give details of when the 38-year-old Van Dyke tried to open an account or why he was prevented from doing so.”

While creating an account on Kalshi is marginally more difficult, there is no indication that Kalshi blocked the account because it knew Van Dyke was a member of the Special Forces. If that were the case, Kalshi would almost certainly say so publicly. More likely, Van Dyke’s own reckless conduct thwarted his efforts to create a Kalshi account.

For example, according to the indictment, Van Dyke attempted to create the accounts while on a military base in Fort Bragg and then tried to use a VPN to conceal his location. This is the kind of behavior that can thwart account creation. Had Van Dyke established the account outside a military base, he may not have run into this issue.

More fundamentally, Van Dyke could have had someone else place bets on Kalshi on his behalf, eliminating the need to create a new account entirely. It was his inability or unwillingness to do so, not the rigor of the Kalshi system, that prevented him from trading on inside information on Kalshi.Did Trump defend insider trading?

Prosecutors emphasized the seriousness of Van Dyke’s alleged crimes. “Prediction markets are not a haven for using misappropriated confidential or classified information for personal gain,” Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said. “The defendant allegedly violated the trust placed in him by the United States Government by using classified information about a sensitive military operation to place bets on the timing and outcome of that very operation, all to turn a profit.”

Trump, however, appeared to defend Van Dyke, suggesting that his behavior was less problematic because he bet that the Venezuela mission would succeed. “That’s like Pete Rose betting on his own team… Pete Rose, it kept him out of the Hall of Fame because he bet on his own team. Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team,” Trump said. Trump later lamented that “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino” and said he would “look into it.”

Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi.

More On U.S. Foreign Relations 

 

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

ny times logoNew York Times, Can King Charles Help Heal the U.S.-British Rupture? Michael D. Shear, April 27, 2026. Not since his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, traveled to Washington after the Suez Crisis has a visit by the British monarch come at such a fraught time in Anglo-American relations.

Nearly seven decades have passed since a British monarch traveled to the United States in the hope of repairing a relationship damaged by a disastrous military adventure in the Middle East.

In 1957, Queen Elizabeth II charmed President Dwight D. Eisenhower after Britain joined France and Israel in trying to seize back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt. Widely condemned, Britain’s actions caused a domestic political crisis and underscored the country’s status as a second-tier power.

Now, it is her son’s turn at royal diplomacy, this time with the tables turned.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla will arrive in Washington on Monday afternoon during Week 8 of President Trump’s war with Iran. This time, Britain’s refusal to take part in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer has characterized as the United States’ latest war of choice has infuriated Mr. Trump, and deeply strained relations between the two governments.

Officially, the king’s four-day visit has nothing to do with that dispute. Government officials say the monarch is above day-to-day politics and does not have a role in policy or commenting on affairs of the state.

Yet there is hope among people inside and outside No. 10 Downing Street that the pomp and pageantry, and some meetings with regular people, might remind Mr. Trump and his advisers how much the two countries have in common as the United States celebrates its 250th birthday this summer.

Even Mr. Trump, who has spent the past several months calling Mr. Starmer a coward and belittling the power of Britain’s naval forces, seems ready to dial down the temperature, at least while playing host to the royals. Asked by the BBC whether the king’s visit would help do that, the president said: “Absolutely. He’s fantastic. He’s a fantastic man. Absolutely the answer is yes.”

The ceremonial part of the trip will begin as soon as the king and queen touch down amid heightened security after the shooting Saturday night at the White House correspondents’ dinner, where Mr. Trump was set to deliver remarks before being rushed offstage.

The royal couple will be greeted with a red-carpet ceremony and a garden party — with tea, of course — held by the British Embassy. On Tuesday, the king will meet one-on-one with the president in the Oval Office.

That could be the part of the trip with the biggest political risk. Photographers are set to capture the two men, seated side by side, but British officials in charge of logistics said there were no plans for a questions-in-the-Oval moment — the kind that are common when prime ministers and other heads of government visit the White House.

Yet those are just the kinds of political performances that Mr. Trump craves. Could the president decide to complain about Mr. Starmer with the king sitting next to him? And what, if anything, might Charles say in response?

Those may not be idle concerns. This month, Mr. Trump told The Telegraph newspaper in Britain that he believed the king “would have taken a very different stand” on the war in Iran than Mr. Starmer, adding: “But he doesn’t do that. I mean, he’s a great gentleman.” Might the president try to draw the king out on those purported differences?

The king could also feel some pressure to respond to the Trump administration’s threats to withdraw American support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Argentina that is also claimed by the South American country. A Pentagon report raised the possibility of withdrawing U.S. backing for Britain as punishment for failing to participate in the attacks on Iran.

Argentina views Britain’s rule of the islands as an act of colonial force. Downing Street noted last week that people living in the Falkland Islands had previously voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining a British overseas territory.

Britain’s news media is bracing for big news. A Daily Mail headline on Saturday said: “King Flies Into a U.S. Storm Over Falklands.” The Independent wrote: “The King and Queen Go to America … What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” And the BBC added: “King’s ‘High Stakes’ Visit With Trump Will Be Toughest Test Yet of His Reign.”

Ed Davey, the leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats party, was so concerned about the potential for diplomatic disaster that he repeatedly urged Mr. Starmer to cancel the visit.

“I really fear for what Trump might say or do while our king is forced to stand by his side,” Mr. Davey told Mr. Starmer during a recent session in Parliament. “We cannot put His Majesty in that position.”

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

 

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Geralyn Gilbert-Soto at an April 2026 gala this month in Santa Monica, California (Photo by Dave Starbuck dpa via Associated Press).

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Geralyn Gilbert-Soto at an April 2026 gala this month in Santa Monica, California (Photo by Dave Starbuck dpa via Associated Press)

ny times logoNew York Times, Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side, Theodore Schleifer and Kate Conger, April 27, 2026. After once backing liberal causes, the Google co-founder has praised President Trump, donated to Republicans and spent $57 million to try to block a California billionaire tax.

It was a holiday party at a crypto titan’s estate in Marin County, and Sergey Brin had a bone to pick with Gavin Newsom.

Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk.

Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax. They were soon joined by Mr. Brin’s girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a Trump-loving gut-health influencer. Even as she tried to defuse the tension — joking that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would wreck California’s economy.

Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.

The December confrontation, which took place at a party thrown by the billionaire Chris Larsen and was recounted by three people briefed on it, reflected Mr. Brin’s new war footing. He is growing more politically agitated, more willing to spend his estimated $273 billion fortune on elections and evidently more receptive to Republican points of view.

Mr. Brin, 52, long showed little interest in politics. When he did, he embraced liberal causes: He donated to a campaign to defend same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and backed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He called President Trump’s election in 2016 “deeply offensive” in leaked comments to Google employees and then joined a protest against Mr. Trump’s ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries. In 2021, he quietly started a nonprofit group that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy.

But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right.

With his outspokenly conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr. Trump in his second term. Last May, he attended a fund-raiser featuring Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

Mr. Brin is particularly rattled by the proposal for a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, and has emerged as Silicon Valley’s leading combatant of the measure. To escape the tax, he moved before a Dec. 31 deadline to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he has spent $57 million to try to undercut the measure, including $9 million more disclosed on Friday.

Asked for comment on this article, Mr. Brin said in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

The New York Times spoke with more than a dozen people close to Mr. Brin for this article, many of whom were granted anonymity to tom steyer twitterdescribe private conversations.ImageSupporters of California’s proposed billionaire tax holding up signs at the state’s Democratic convention in February.

Mr. Brin’s spending, along with smaller donations in the California governor’s race, have made him the state’s second-largest individual donor this election cycle — behind only the billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for governor himself.

Mr. Brin’s political engagement has roughly coincided with his relationship with Ms. Gilbert-Soto, which began in 2023. Mr. Brin began dating her after divorcing from Nicole Shanahan, who served in 2024 as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.

Ms. Gilbert-Soto, 32, who goes by GG, describes herself on Instagram as a “holistic health coach” and a “clean meat enthusiast.” She, like Mr. Brin, regularly attends the Burning Man festival, and she appeared on a season of the reality television series “Vanderpump Rules.

But she also styles herself as a firebrand in Trumpworld, and even some of the president’s own aides are struck by her loyalty. She has called Mr. Trump her “bestie,” owns a clutch bedazzled with “MAGA,” and has shown off a photo of Mr. Brin in a red MAGA hat, two people who saw it said. After the comedian Seth Rogen made anti-Trump jokes at an event last year, Ms. Gilbert-Soto was incensed and complained to other guests, one attendee said. 

 

Shown above is the proposed new U.S. House map for Florida, whose Republican proponents estimate will bring a net gain of four new Republican seats to their total by packing Democrats into fewer districts (New York Times chart). The map belows shows the current map..This is the proposed new U.S. House map for Florida, whose Republican proponents estimate will bring a net gain of four new Republican seats to their total by packing Democrats into fewer districts (New York Times chart). The map belows shows the current map.

 

This is the current U.S. House map for Florida, whose Republican opponents want replaced with a map estimated to bring a net gain of four new Republican seats to their total by packing Democrats into fewer districts (New York Times charts). The map above shows the proposed map.
ny times logoNew York Times, DeSantis Proposes Florida House Map That Could Add Four Republican Seats, Patricia Mazzei and Nick Corasaniti, April 27, 2026. The Republican-controlled Legislature is meeting in Tallahassee this week to vote on the map, which would apply for the 2026 midterms if passed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida proposed a redraw of the state’s congressional districts on Monday that could give Republicans as many as four new seats, an aggressive gambit that could also endanger some of the party’s incumbents should a blue wave emerge in the November midterms.

The map, which is likely to face legal hurdles, appears to eliminate two Democratic-held districts in South Florida, a third in the Tampa area and a fourth in the Orlando area. That would leave Democrats with perhaps only four of the state’s 28 congressional seats. There are currently seven Florida Democrats in Congress; an eighth, former Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, resigned last week after being charged with embezzlement.

Florida, which does not hold primary elections until August, is the last state aiming to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms. A Supreme Court decision expected soon on a key provision of the Voting Rights Act could provide opportunities for other states to do so, but with many holding primaries in the next month or two, time is running out.

Mr. DeSantis’s map was first reported by Fox News, which received it before the State Legislature did on Monday morning. Lawmakers are scheduled to meet in a special redistricting session starting Tuesday.

The short turnaround is likely to upset some state lawmakers, few of whom have expressed much interest in redistricting, as well as some members of the Florida congressional delegation, who will have to introduce themselves to new voters between now and the midterms. State lawmakers are not expected to propose any maps of their own, but rather to vote on Mr. DeSantis’s redraw as early as Wednesday. It is almost certain to pass, given Republican supermajorities in the State House and Senate.

Mr. DeSantis’s map appears to eliminate the lone Democratic district near Tampa, currently held by Representative Kathy Castor, a House member for almost two decades.

It packs Democratic voters in Orlando into a single district, appearing to eliminate the seat currently held by Representative Darren Soto, who took office in 2017. The Orlando district that would remain intact under the proposal is held by Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost.

The proposal also appears to eliminate the South Florida districts held by Representatives Jared Moskowitz, who is in his second term, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is in her 11th.Editors’ PicksWhy Elie Saab Will Never Leave Lebanon, Despite the WarDo You Have to Make Pour-Over Coffee for Your Spouse?‘Michael’ Fans Danced in the Aisles, Critics Be Damned

“This clear effort to steal more seats for Republicans shows his total contempt for Florida voters, who voted two-to-one in favor of a ban on partisan gerrymandering in our Constitution,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said in a statement, referring to Mr. DeSantis. “This nakedly partisan scheme breaks state law.”

Should the map pass, it could give Republicans nationwide a handful of new seats heading into the midterms. That would hardly be the multiseat advantage that President Trump and national Republicans envisioned when they kicked off the national redistricting battle in Texas last summer.

But should the fight for the U.S. House come down to a few districts, any seat that flips from Democrat to Republican could prove critical. Republicans currently control the chamber by just a handful of seats.

In 2010, voters in Florida passed the Fair Districts amendments, which effectively ban partisan gerrymandering in the state. Mr. DeSantis told Fox News that his proposed map — colored red and blue to indicate the expected political leanings of new districts — “more fairly represents the makeup of Florida today.”

In a letter to legislative leaders on Monday, David Axelman, the governor’s general counsel, reiterated Mr. DeSantis’s position that Florida should have received at least one additional congressional seat after the 2020 census.

Mr. Axelman also said that the state’s existing map had been “distorted by considerations of race.” In the Voting Rights Act case before the Supreme Court, the court’s conservative majority has signaled that it might prohibit using race as a factor in drawing election districts. Mr. Axelman suggested that the voter-imposed ban on partisan gerrymandering would not survive the Supreme Court’s expected decision.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said last week that if Florida Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map, it would “only create more prime pickup opportunities for Democrats.”

“We will aggressively target for defeat Mario Diaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills and Brian Mast,” he said, referring to Republican House members throughout Florida.

In a new statement on Monday, Mr. Jeffries said, “See you in court.”

Though the new maps can would not go before voters, recent polling in Florida showed a majority of likely voters in the state were opposed to drawing new maps before the midterms. A poll from Emerson College this month found that Florida voters, by a slim margin, said it was a “bad idea” to redraw maps in the middle of the decade.

Some Republicans in the state have expressed reluctance to draw new maps this year. Such worries grew after special elections this year in which Democrats flipped a State House district that includes Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, and a State Senate district near Tampa.

April 26

Top Headlines

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.djt kash patel press conference 4 25 2026

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel.President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel. Shown below:  Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo). Additional details in the news excerpts below. 

News Roundups

djt at podium with full cabinet 4 25 2026

More Opinions On Shooting, U.S. Media, Politics

garrett graff doomsbury1

  • Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: A quick analysis of last night's shooting, Garrett M. Graff, April 26, 2026. A quick analysis of last night's shooting. So far, it appears the system worked as intended. 
  • Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion and Analysis: Not buying Trump's reality TV act at the "Hinckley Hilton," Wayne Madsen, left, Trump's corruption has seeped deeply into the US Secret Service. So let the show go on as Trump texted following the "security event."
  • PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Many Americans Don't Care About 3rd Assassination Attempt On Trump, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 26, 2026. The media elites are expressing shock that the entire nation isn't riveted by the fact that a third assassination attempt against the most unpopular president in American history.
  • Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 25, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 26, 2026. Tonight the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) held its annual black-tie dinner, which is designed both to raise money for the institution and to provide a glitzy night out for journalists. In recent years the event has drawn criticism for the chumminess it reveals between White House journalists and the lawmakers they cover. This year, that concern was heightened dramatically when the WHCA invited President Donald J. Trump to attend the dinner and to give a speech.

Since he entered the political arena, Trump has denigrated the press and even urged supporters to attack journalists, but in his second term his administration has gone further, trying to silence the press with lawsuits or threats of them against media outlets and individuals, blocking access to the White House and the Pentagon for journalists Trump dislikes, personally attacking female journalists, arresting independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and raiding the home of Washington Post political correspondent Hannah Natanson. Inviting him to address the press at a fancy dinner seemed to normalize his attacks on the First Amendment.

More On Trump Team, Corruption, Media Coverage 

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

More On Gunman's Attack In DC

Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo).mike johnson reuters 4 25 2026

War On Iran, Lebanon

  • New York Times, Islamabad Reopens After U.S.-Iran Talks Fail to Materialize, Elian Peltier, April 26, 2026. Officials had locked the city down, anticipating talks between U.S. and Iranian delegations. But they didn’t happen. “What did I close my business for?” one business owner asked.

More Global News

Israel's once-caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid (right), talks with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022 (Pool photo by Ronaldo Schemid). The two served as prime ministers in a rotation agreement under a prior coalition government, and now plan to merge into a single faction.

Israel's once-caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid (right), talks with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022 (Pool photo by Ronaldo Schemid). The two served as prime ministers in a rotation agreement under a prior coalition government, and now plan to merge into a single faction.

U.S Governance, Politics, Elections

More U.S. Media Dinner Follow ups

Top Stories

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

New York Times, Live Updates: Attacker Wrote ‘Manifesto’ Before Charging Press Gala, Trump Says, Luke Broadwater, Michael M. Grynbaum, Shawn McCreesh, Tyler Pager, Shawn Hubler, Devlin Barrett and Maggie Haberma, April 26, 2026. President Trump was unharmed after being rushed from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Investigators have gathered messages and written material from the suspect denouncing the Trump administration and laying out a plan to take violent action, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Here’s the latest.

President Trump said on Sunday that the gunman who stormed a security perimeter at the White House correspondents’ dinner had written a “manifesto,” as investigators continued to examine his writings and other evidence to piece together the motive for an attack that appeared to be aimed at the president and his top aides.

Shortly before the attack, the suspect sent messages to his relatives denouncing Trump administration policies and suggesting he intended to take violent action, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Other written material found in his hotel room contained similar statements, the person said.

Mr. Trump did not offer any details about the document he described as a manifesto in an interview with Fox News, but the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told NBC that investigators gathering evidence about the suspect “know there were some writings.” He said a preliminary review of the evidence indicated that members of the administration, “likely including the president,” had been targets.

The suspect, identified by law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after the police said he ran through a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.

Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.

The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. Mr. Blanche said the man had purchased the two firearms he was carrying “within the last couple of years,” and had been staying at the Hilton, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.

Washington Hilton Hotel security layout during attack (New York Times graphic).

Washington Hilton Hotel security layout during attack (New York Times graphic).

There were no metal detectors set up at the hotel’s entrances, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom. But Mr. Blanche defended the security at the event, and noted that the suspect did not enter the ballroom.

“The system worked,” said Mr. Blanche, who was also at the dinner. “We were safe. President Trump was safe.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

  • The suspect: Investigators have determined that the suspect took a train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Washington, Mr. Blanche said, and checked into the Washington Hilton a day or two before the dinner. If you have information about the suspect, you can share it confidentially with The New York Times.
  • Charges: Officials said the suspect will be charged with using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, with more charges possible. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said the suspect was expected to be arraigned in federal court on Monday.
  • Political violence: The attack revived questions about political violence in the United States and about security around Mr. Trump, one of the most targeted presidents in history. In 2024, he was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, and rushed to safety months later when a federal agent fired on an armed man at his Florida golf club.
  • Ballroom scene: There were no announcements or cries of “get down” in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Saturday. Security officials with weapons drawn emerged on the dais as the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, were quickly escorted out.
  • Royal visit: Buckingham Palace said in a statement that King Charles III, who is set to begin a state visit to the United States on Monday, had been “kept fully informed of developments.” The king’s visit is expected to take place as scheduled this week, according to officials familiar with the planning. He plans to arrive on Monday.

At a separate news conference after the attack, Mr. Trump compared his line of work to being a racecar driver or a bull rider, and said that presidents were more likely to be shot at or killed.

“It’s a dangerous profession,” he said.

The president said a Secret Service officer had been shot but was saved by his bulletproof vest.

The attack revived questions about political violence in the United States and about security around Mr. Trump, one of the most targeted presidents in history. In 2024, he was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, and rushed to safety months later when a federal agent fired on an armed man at his Florida golf club.

There were no metal detectors set up at the hotel’s entrances on Saturday, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom. Mr. Trump said the incident underscored why he wanted to build a $400 million ballroom on White House grounds that he said would be equipped with the latest security features. That project is currently subject to litigation.

Todd Blanche OInvestigators have been able to gather some information from the suspect’s electronic devices and have interviewed some people who know him, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, right, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. The gunman “set out to target folks that work in the administration, likely including the president,” Mr. Blanche said, though he said the understanding of his motivation could change as evidence is reviewed.

 

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel.President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel. Shown below:  Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo). Additional details in the news excerpts below. 

 News Roundups

 

President Trump, right, prompts smiles among his cabinet leadership team array to his left along with Vice President Vance and First Lady Melania Trump at a White House press conference following capture of an attacker one floor above the site of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo by Kylie Cooper April 25, 2026).

President Trump, right, prompts smiles among his cabinet leadership team array to his left along with Vice President Vance and First Lady Melania Trump at a White House press conference following capture of an attacker one floor above the site of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo by Kylie Cooper April 25, 2026).

MeidasTouch Network, Sunday Afternoon Updates: Trump Turns a Shooting Into a Propaganda Parade, Ben Meiselas, right, ben meiselas daily beastApril 26, 2026. Let me walk you through everything we’re tracking today following last nights shooting near the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The throughline connecting a lot of it is this regime’s shameless instinct to exploit anything and everything for political gain.

Here’s what we’re following:

  • The WHCD shooting incident and what we actually know
  • The coordinated MAGA ballroom propaganda blitz
  • Trump’s morning post demanding his golden ballroom
  • mtn meidas touch networkCole Allen: who is the suspect?
  • Footage shows the Secret Service protected Vance before Trump, and all the nation’s top officials were in the room at the same time
  • Todd Blanche and the media’s usual attempts to silence criticism of Trump
  • Trump’s fake Iran meeting and continued market manipulation
  • Farm bankruptcies, starving troops, Epstein, and more

Before I go any further, I want to thank all our paid subscribers. At MeidasTouch, we don’t chase access and we don’t cozy up to power. While others are dressing up and pretending everything is normal at ritzy parties in DC with the Trump administration this weekend, we’re focused on telling the truth—plain and simple. We’re not here to protect Trump or play along with his allies. We’re here to hold them accountable.

Let’s dive in. What actually happened at the WHCD

Let’s start with the facts, because the facts matter and they are not what the Trump regime has been selling you all morning.

Cole Allen, a 31-year-old from Torrance, California, allegedly approached a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton Hotel during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. He was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. He did not get through. He was stopped at the perimeter.

Here is the critical detail that is getting lost in all the noise: the incident happened on a floor above where the dinner was actually taking place. Not in the room. Not near the room. Up a flight of stairs, past multiple security layers, in a part of the hotel that was open to the general public because the Secret Service only secured the specific areas of the WHCA event — not the entire building. Law enforcement officials confirmed this. The suspect never breached the secured zone. The president, vice president, cabinet officials, and guests were nowhere close to this.

That is not a minor footnote. That is a major part of this story.

And yet, within thirty minutes of the incident, Donald Trump was at a podium holding a press conference, not to reassure the public, not to thank law enforcement, but to demand his golden ballroom. He and his officials were all smiles. Karoline Leavitt had a grin on her face. Pete Hegseth was photographed beaming. alina habba whcd 4 25 2026 gettyAlina Habba, right, posted on Instagram that she “slayed on the look” with a photo of herself from the event, captioned “10/10.” These are the people who want you to believe this was a harrowing, historic moment of danger. 

And then there was Dan Scavino. As guests were still processing what had just happened, Scavino decided the moment called for a rousing “USA! USA!” chant. It did not land. The response from the room was total silence. Not even Trump’s own allies joined in. The only thing audible, per footage reviewed from inside the room, was a wave of “shhhhs” from the audience and people telling him to shut up. This is the man as close to Trump as anyone in the regime, and his read on the room in that moment was to try to start a rally chant. It was perhaps the most accidentally revealing and cringeworthy moment of the entire night.The Ballroom blitz that ensued…

What happened next was one of the more transparent influence operations we’ve seen from this reigme, and they do this constantly. Within hours of the incident, dozens, probably closer to a hundred, MAGA influencers and regime-adjacent accounts were all posting virtually the same message. Libs of TikTok: “This is why we need Trump’s ballroom.” Jack Posobiec: “Thank God President Trump is building a ballroom.” Wall Street Mav: “We need the White House ballroom.”

 

Pro-Trump propaganda campaign lauched promptly after attack (April 26, 2026).This is not organic. This appears to be a coordinated message campaign. And the people typing these posts (exemplified above) are in many cases the same people who were waving fake Epstein files binders around the White House during that other debacle back in the day.

Then Trump himself posted bright and early. He wrote that the shooting “would never have happened” with his “Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction.” He called the lawsuit filed against its construction “ridiculous,” complained it was brought by “a woman walking her dog,” and demanded it be dropped immediately. He assured everyone the project is “on budget and substantially ahead of schedule.”

For those keeping score: a man was stopped at a security checkpoint in a publicly accessible hotel corridor, one floor above and several security layers away from where the dinner was happening, and Donald Trump’s response at dawn was to demand a ballroom.

Tommy Vietor put it simply: groups wouldn’t want to host every event at the White House anyway, especially the press corps, and the same kind of incident could happen at a White House venue. Our own Scott MacFarlane made the obvious point that the White House is likely not going to let journalists and their families into the complex for a private banquet. Sam Stein noted the WHCA dinner is not a White House event — it’s a press association event — and Trump had never even attended before.

The ballroom argument makes no sense. It was never meant to make sense. It was meant to be repeated.They want you to pay for it…

Congressman Chip Roy then took the operation to its logical conclusion and proposed that taxpayer funding for Trump’s ballroom be included in the DHS reconciliation bill — alongside anti-transgender provisions, ICE and CBP funding, and the so-called SAVE America Act. MAGA influencer Scott Presler went further, posting that because “Democrats are literally trying to assassinate President Trump,” the Senate should rush back to Washington and pass the SAVE America Act immediately.

That’s the game. An alleged shooter who never reached the room becomes justification for a golden ballroom, which becomes justification for attacking trans people, which becomes justification for restricting voting, which becomes another opportunity to consolidate power.

So who is Cole Allen?

cole allen family facebook graduationCole Allen, shown above at center right in a Facebook photo with family, is a 31-year-old mechanical engineer who graduated from Caltech in 2017. He did research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He built robotics systems, developed physics-based simulations, created a space combat video game called “First Law,” and later released another game on Steam called “Bohrdom.” He earned a master’s in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills in 2025 and was recognized as Teacher of the Month in late 2024. By external measures, his trajectory appeared stable and even successful. This isn’t the typical profile of shooters in these situations.

Investigators are reviewing writing found in his hotel room that they believe indicates he was targeting Trump administration officials. Law enforcement says a manifesto attributed to him contains the line: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” MeidasTouch’s sources tell us he is being held in a local police lockup about a half-mile from the Hilton (where the event took place) and is expected to appear in federal court Monday, likely around 1 p.m. Prosecutors are expected to charge him by complaint rather than waiting on a grand jury. This case will run through the same courthouse where Trump was prosecuted for election subversion and where hundreds of January 6 cases were heard.

The corporate media’s predictable failure


jamie raskin dana bash 4 26 2026On CNN, Dana Bash asked Jamie Raskin, shown above, whether Democrats need to tone down their rhetoric in the wake of the incident. Raskin, correctly, asked what rhetoric she was referring to. The answer, as it always is when anchors ask this question, is: accurately describing what the Trump regime is doing. Calling out corruption is not incitement. Describing harm to working people is not incitement. Our editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski made this important point: the idea that we should stop pointing out factual ways the president is wrecking this country because of something an unhinged individual does is a profoundly un-American concept.

Another corporate news correspondent praised Trump for calling for “unity” at the press conference, even as Trump and his allies were simultaneously blaming the media and using the incident to push their full legislative agenda. The corporate media spent the morning debating whether Trump was being sufficiently praised for his grace under pressure. Again, he showed no grace. And he was never in harm’s way.

Todd Blanche, on Meet the Press, confirmed the suspect never got close.

abc news logo colorOn ABC's Face the Nation, he said they won’t stop holding events like this. On another show, when asked about having no designated survivor in the room, he essentially brushed it off. The regime violated longstanding protocol by having the president and vice president, along with the defense secretary, treasurysecretary, and much of the cabinet, in the same room with no designated survivor.

Also worth noting: the Secret Service evacuated J.D. Vance before Donald Trump, per video. It was certainly an odd moment.

Meanwhile, There remains a whole lot else going on in the world.

As we’ve reported extensively, the day before the dinner, Trump and his allies told the media there would be a major meeting in Islamabad between the American delegation and Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi. The Iranian side had been clear all along that they were not meeting with Trump representatives. There was no meeting. When it didn’t happen, the Trump regime claimed they had reviewed a document from Iran, found it unacceptable, and canceled the meeting themselves. Trump told reporters: “Nothing changed. They gave us a paper that should have been better. Immediately when I canceled it, within 10 minutes we got a new paper that was better.” This is false. You cannot cancel a meeting that was never scheduled. There was no “new paper.” This was market manipulation, again, using the American press as a delivery mechanism.

Farm bankruptcies are up 46% from 2025, with Midwest cases surging 70%. Trump’s approval rating sits at 33%. Approval on the economy is at 30%, which is worse than Nixon at the moment of his resignation. His disapproval among Gen Z sits at 76%, which even Marjorie Taylor Greene acknowledged this weekend, warning Republicans to distance themselves from Trump if they want any future with young voters.

iran us military rations newsweekOn the USS Abraham Lincoln, new photos reviewed by Newsweek, above, show service members receiving what can only be described as inadequate food portions. Reports indicate some troops have lost significant weight. The Pentagon denies shortages.

Republicans are reportedly open to pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell to secure her cooperation in the Epstein investigation, per Reuters. Epstein survivors were in Washington this weekend demanding accountability. The regime is focused on the ballroom.

And in Asia, Japanese television is covering the arrival of a single American oil tanker as a major news story because the energy crisis on that side of the world is that serious. We saw what happened when a crisis starts in Asia and goes unreported in the West. It spreads. Pay attention.

The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: Big Firings Set to Occur After Security Breakdown, I Expose Lax Conditions at the Scene, MAGA Pushes Ballroom Narrative and Attacks Democrats, Aaron Parnas, right, April 26, 2026. aaron parnas new headshotThis morning I went to the Hilton hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held and documented just how lax the security was and how easy it was to access the venue.

I also spoke with a guest who confirmed there were serious elevator security issues. At the same time, Republicans are already blaming Democrats for the alleged shooting, while influencers are pushing in lockstep for a White House ballroom, even though the security failures show that would not have meaningfully changed what happened. Accountability is coming, with Kash Patel’s ouster expected and major scrutiny on the Secret Service.

I am also making it a priority to center Epstein survivors and Virginia Giuffre right now, and I will not let last night’s events overshadow her legacy. Meanwhile, parts of the media are normalizing Donald Trump by framing his comments as a meaningful call for unity. I am not going to do that. This kind of normalization is a serious problem, and I will not be part of it.

Here’s the news:

I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner location this morning, the day after the incident, and walked through the lax security. In particular, elevator access seemed less restricted than usual, making it easier to move between floors.

A source staying at the Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner told me that elevator security was unusually lax, with no key card required to access different floors. This differed from the hotel’s typical policy, which restricts movement via key card access. The lapse may have made it easier for individuals to move through the building during the event. Here is an image I received confirming that typically you need a badge or key card:

The House Oversight Committee has requested a briefing from the United States Secret Service regarding the incident, though no date has been set. Mike Lawler, who attended the event, called it a “security failure,” citing a lack of ID checks, guest verification, and screening measures like magnetometers. He also noted that hotel guests had broad access to the building, raising concerns about how the suspect brought weapons near the ballroom. Lawler emphasized that while no one was killed, the breach was deeply troubling given prior threats against Donald Trump.

Heads are set to roll because of the lax in security:

The media has begun to normalize Trump:

Brian Stelter @brianstelter X.com Trump very easily could have blamed the media last night, but instead, he basically said "we're all in this together." 

Dana Bash [was] doing something similar.

Donald Trump described the suspect in a recent attack as a “sick” and hateful individual, claiming the man harbored strong anti-Christian sentiment. He referenced an alleged manifesto found in the suspect’s hotel room, though this has not been independently verified. During a Fox News interview, Trump did not dispute the reported name of the suspect, Cole Allen. He also said the suspect’s family had previously raised concerns with law enforcement, suggesting earlier notification might have helped. This morning he demanded the building of the ballroom at the White House:

Pro-Trump “MAGA” social media accounts posted coordinated messages after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner incident, emphasizing the need for a dedicated White House ballroom.

Trump said he wants the postponed dinner event to be rescheduled soon, suggesting a timeframe of around 30 days, give or take. He emphasized that the event was important and should not be derailed by criminal acts. Trump argued that such incidents should not change the country’s course or disrupt planned gatherings. Notably, he had initially said the event should continue as scheduled the night before.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the suspect who rushed security at the WHCA dinner in Washington, D.C., intended to assassinate Donald Trump and kill multiple top administration officials. She described being escorted to safety with Trump and the First Lady by the Secret Service during the incident. Leavitt characterized Trump as “fearless” in the moment. She also echoed his statement that political violence must come to an end.

Margaret Brennan questioned how the suspect was able to transport multiple firearms across state lines into Washington, D.C., where open carry is illegal. Todd Blanche did not directly address the logistics, instead saying the focus should not be on changing or tightening gun laws. Brennan pressed the issue of interstate transport, but Blanche dismissed it as not the main concern. The exchange highlighted tension over whether to focus on enforcement details or broader policy debates.

The latest gun violence statistics:

Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee, blamed a “radicalized left” for the incident at the White House rnc logoCorrespondents’ Dinner. He called it an attempted assassination of Donald Trump and his administration officials, arguing it stemmed from normalized political violence. Gruters criticized Democrats, saying their calls for unity were hollow and accusing them of blocking funding for security agencies like DHS. He concluded that Democrats’ actions undermine public safety and contradict their stated support for peace.

Scott Jennings blamed Hakeem Jeffries for contributing to heated rhetoric, arguing there is a “violent streak” on the political left. During the discussion, he pushed back on another guest who mentioned the death of Melissa Hortman, accusing them of downplaying political violence. Jennings also criticized Democratic candidates for associating with Hasan Piker.

Epstein survivors are calling for a meeting with King Charles III during his upcoming U.S. state visit. The timing coincides with the anniversary of Virginia Giuffre’s death, adding significance to their request. Giuffre had accused Prince Andrew of sexual abuse when she was a minor, allegations he denied but later settled in civil court. Survivors say they want acknowledgment and engagement from the King during his visit.

Donald Trump claimed that there was significant cheating in Virginia during the recent election, asserting that Republicans had been leading before a sudden “ballot drop” changed the outcome. He suggested the shift raised concerns about the integrity of the vote-counting process. No evidence was provided in the statement to support the claim.

pete hegseth facebookPete Hegseth, right, has drawn scrutiny for rhetoric on the Iran war that appears to echo sermons from his Christian nationalist church. The article highlights the influence of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), whose leaders promote theocratic ideas, including restricting rights and enforcing biblical law. Sermons linked to Hegseth’s church emphasize themes like “biblically informed hatred,” which critics say align with some of his public statements. Experts warn that this blending of religious ideology with government and military messaging raises concerns about extremism and the separation of church and state.

A 17-year-old suspect, Markel Lee, was arrested in connection with a mass shooting at a Louisiana mall that killed one high school senior and injured five others. Authorities say he fled the scene with help from his grandmother, who later cooperated with police after being shown surveillance images. Investigators used video footage and license plate readers to track him down, and he now faces multiple serious charges, including first-degree murder. Officials say the shooting may be linked to social media disputes or possible gang activity, and the investigation is ongoing.

Liz Conmy, a North Dakota legislator, was killed in a small plane crash shortly after takeoff from Crystal Airport near Minneapolis, along with the pilot. The aircraft went down and caught fire in a park in Brooklyn Park, according to local authorities. The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed two people were on board, and the National Transportation Safety Board has launched an investigation. Colleagues and her party described Conmy’s death as a profound loss, highlighting her work on education, the environment, and government transparency.

More On Gunman's Attack In DC

 

Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo).mike johnson reuters 4 25 2026

ny times logoNew York Times, World leaders condemn violence after gunfire at the White House correspondents’ dinner, Amelia Nierenberg, April 26, 2026. World leaders condemned political violence after the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, the third in three years to unfold close to President Trump.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said he was “relieved” to know that Mr. Trump and other attendees were safe.

“My thoughts and prayers are with him, and I wish him continued safety and well-being,” Mr. Sharif wrote on X.

Mr. Sharif has been trying to broker talks between the United States and Iran, which appear to be on pause again after Mr. Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a trip to Pakistan by two of his top negotiators.

Many European leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, strongly condemned the violence.

Mr. Macron called the attack “unacceptable” and said Mr. Trump had his “full support.”

“Violence has no place in a democracy,” he wrote on X.

The leaders of Canada and Mexico, who have often clashed politically with Mr. Trump, posted messages of support.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said she had sent Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “our respect.”

“Violence should never be the way,” Ms. Sheinbaum said on X.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada, who is embroiled in a trade battle with Mr. Trump, said he was “relieved that the President, the First Lady, and all guests are safe.”

ny times logoNew York Times, ‘I’m Not a Basket Case’: Trump Describes His Mind-Set After an Evening of Chaos, Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager, April 26, 2026. Very little was clear about what had happened at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. But the president wanted to talk about it.

It was 10:31 p.m. on Saturday when President Trump walked into the White House briefing room, still dressed in his tuxedo and bow tie, to talk about what may have been yet another attempt on his life.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said. “That was very unexpected!”

Moments before he walked out, the president posted surveillance footage of a suspect making a mad dash through the cavernous halls of the Washington Hilton. That’s where Mr. Trump was attending the White House correspondents’ dinner when gunfire broke out at the hotel. Very little was clear about whatever had happened there, a mile and a half up the hill.

But the president wanted to talk about it.

“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he said, standing with the first lady, the vice president, the defense secretary, the secretary of state, the acting attorney general, the F.B.I. director and the press secretary — all still in their evening wear from the dinner.

But, really, he argued, the whole thing was just the latest example of why he needs to build his maximum-security, legally challenged ballroom at the White House.

“I didn’t want to say this,” he said, “but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got — it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

cbs news logoAnd then he gave the first question of the night to Weijia Jiang, the CBS News correspondent and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who had been seated next to him at the dinner before pandemonium broke out.

“Madam chairman,” he said, “I just want to say you did a fantastic job. What a beautiful evening.” (Mr. Trump does not usually speak this way to the reporters who cover him.)

She asked him what was going through his mind when he realized his life may have been in danger again. He told the tale: He was sitting with the first lady on his other side when he heard a noise he thought sounded familiar and nonthreatening. “I thought it was a tray going down,” he said. “I’ve heard that many times, and it was a pretty loud noise, and it was from quite far away.”

His wife was not so sure, he said.

“Melania was very cognizant, I think, of what happened,” he explained. “I think she knew immediately what happened. She was saying, ‘That’s a bad noise.’” She looked quite stoic behind him in the briefing room. The only word she spoke during the news conference was “No,” after being asked if she would like to say anything at all. The president said that it was “a rather traumatic experience for her.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Confusion and Fright Inside the Washington Hilton Ballroom, Michael M. Grynbaum, April 26, 2026. A sense of danger spread like a wave among high-profile politicians and journalists as an emergency unfolded at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The spring pea and burrata appetizer course had been distributed and the schmoozing hour of Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner had begun when a small commotion occurred toward the back of the Washington Hilton ballroom shortly past 8:30 p.m.

It might have been an upturned catering cart, or perhaps a scuffle with protesters. Then security officers began sprinting down the aisles toward the elevated dais, where President Trump, along with Vice President JD Vance and the first lady, Melania Trump, had taken their seats just a few minutes earlier.

There were no announcements or cries of “get down.” Instead, a sense of danger spread across the room like a wave. Hundreds of the country’s top media executives, editors in chief and prominent television anchors, clad in tuxedos and evening gowns, instinctively dropped to the floor, crouching besides chairs and ducking under tables. 

More Opinions On Shooting, U.S. Media, Politics

garrett graff doomsbury1

Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: A quick analysis of last night's shooting, Garrett M. Graff, above, April 26, 2026. A quick analysis of last night's shooting. So far, it appears the system worked as intended.

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and — unfortunately — the fight for democracy in the Trump era.

I had intended to write today about what a travesty the White House Correspondents Association dinner was — and how embarrassed every single journalist who attended should be — but for obvious reasons, after the events of last night, I wanted to share instead some quick thoughts on presidential security that might be useful to understanding what happened.

First, a couple of points on my particularly relevant background to this subject: During a different era, when the event was merely laughable, I attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner itself multiple times and covered the event and the parties around it for more than a decade. Plus, during my Washington career, I’ve been to probably just shy of a hundred dinners and galas inside that same ballroom at the Washington Hilton, which is known universally in Washington as the “Hinckley Hilton,” in reference to the 1981 shooting of President Reagan there. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on presidential security over the years, including writing a book on “continuity of government” and presidential evacuation protocols.

Two very-much-related factoids: Anne Schroeder, then at the Washington Post, and I, then the blogger at FishbowlDC, were largely responsible for the nicknaming the correspondents’ dinner “prom” in 2005, which later evolved into “nerd prom.” Anne coined it in her gossip column that year, and I picked it up to use in my blog coverage of that year’s event. Later, when I was editor at Washingtonian, I as a history buff repeatedly badgered the Hilton team into finally putting up a historic plaque marking the entrance where Reagan was shot.

Which brings us to last night’s startling events at an event that already felt particularly high-stakes as the famously anti-press president attended for the first time the main dinner meant to honor the working relationship of the president and White House press corps.

What we know so far is that gunfire could be heard inside the dinner around 8:30 p.m., and that Secret Service and protective details swarmed the stage and room about 15-20 seconds later. Vice President JD Vance and President Trump were rushed from the stage and in the audience Cabinet members and congressional leadership similarly evacuated. Outside the ballroom, a 31-year-old named Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California, had tried to rush the ballroom armed with both guns — perhaps a shotgun and handguns — as well as knives. Trump finally headed back to the White House around 9:30 and, alongside other officials, addressed the events from the White House briefing room. Across Washington, the after-parties mostly continued as planned, albeit depleted by the reporters and anchors who rushed to cover the unfolding events.

We normally don’t get to see the massive hidden security footprint that surrounds the president like we did last night, when members of the Secret Service Counter-Assault Team (CAT) actually stormed the stage and we saw countless security details rush their protectees from the room:

In the hours since, I’ve seen a lot of arm-chair-quarterbacking about how the whole hotel should have been behind the security cordon or how shocked shocked shocked guests were that security seemed so lax at the entrances, etc., etc., but most of those critiques misunderstand two major things:

(1) You always have to have an outer security perimeter; and

(2) The goal of the Secret Service isn’t to prevent any incident at a high-profile event — it’s to prevent an incident that could harm the president.

Yes, you can always push the security checkpoints out further, but there will always have to be a first moment where the unvetted and unsecured public approaches a security check. You’ll hear similar complaints/quarterbacking when there are shootings at airports: “How did someone get inside the airport with a gun?” Because anyone can walk through the first door. Security in a free society is always a trade-off. Push the security checkpoints back to the curb, and the attack will just happen at the curb instead.

As far as I can tell — I didn’t attend last night’s dinner and maintain every single journalist or editor who made the decision to do so made a bad professional and life choice — security at the Hilton was basically the same as it has been in past years.

washington hilton hotel mapSome background: The Washington Hilton (shown above, with a graphic showing also the layers that include a ballroom on a lower level, has some 1,100 guest rooms spread across ten floors and several main public levels — including the main lobby level and then, an escalator flight down, the level of the ballroom, which is accessible too from a lower street entrance on the side of the building, which is where the red carpet for the correspondents dinner is located. Its giant “pillar-less” ballroom is the main venue for large events in Washington — including not just the correspondents dinner but other large conventions and gatherings like the National Prayer Breakfast — because it can seat around 2,600 people at banquet tables.

The size and scale of the hotel — or any major hotel in Washington, really, where presidential events occur — is such that there are hundreds of people in the hotel who have no connection to the dinner and are going about entirely unrelated activities.

Moreover, the “Hinckley Hilton” is, tragically, now uniquely situated for handling a presidential visit — following the shooting of President Reagan, the hotel installed a secure entrance facility for VIPs and there’s a special secure green room and secure path to and from the stage for a president. Securing a presidential speech at the Washington Hilton is like table-stakes for the Secret Service — about as easy as a presidential movement can be.

The evening events at the Hilton involve both the dinner itself but also a whole host of cocktail receptions and parties, big and small, at the hotel by various news organizations, and there are many hundreds of people who attend only those parties and then go elsewhere for the dinner itself and then rejoin the glitzy after-parties, and thus never come anywhere close to being in the presence of the president. (That’s actually what I usually preferred to do when I lived in DC.)

There’s usually — as there apparently was last night — a very rough outer security check at the edge of the property to try to determine whether someone has business in the Hilton that night. You have to be a registered guest in the hotel, or have an invitation to the party inside, or some such, but the goal with that security check is less about weapons and more about crowd control — trying to minimize the number of people who crowd into the hotel’s public spaces to gawk. It’s not the goal of this checkpoint to definitively ID and cross-check every person attending — it’s to manage the crowd flow inside.

secret service gold logoThe Secret Service at some fundamental level doesn’t really care who is merely inside the hotel. Instead, the Secret Service only cares about securing the area where the president will be and where people will be able to see the president. Similarly, it’s not the job of the Secret Service to protect all the partygoers or even all the non-presidential VIPs at the event.

It would be an impossible, disruptive, costly, and unnecessary project to secure the entire hotel and property — particularly for an event where the president is only on-site for 2-3 hours maximum. (I’ve seen, for instance, some “criticism” of how when Barack Obama was staying at the Hay-Adams as president-elect, everyone entering the hotel was subject to security screening, but securing a place where a president is staying is a very different protocol than just where a president is visiting, and the Hay-Adams is a much smaller hotel than the Hilton.)

Thus, the Secret Service sets up magnetometers — usually staffed by some combination of uniformed Secret Service officers and TSA officers — that screen guests before they file into the ballroom itself. At that point, there’s (usually) a much tighter circle of security — double-checking names and invite lists as well as screening for weapons.

 

Washington Hilton Hotel security layout during attack (New York Times graphic).

Washington Hilton Hotel security layout during attack (New York Times graphic).

According to video and photos that Trump posted on Truth Social afterward, this is evidently the security checkpoint that the suspect charged and where he was stopped — and, because of the geography of the hotel, he was stopped before he even made it to the floor where the ballroom was:

(One question I do have: The TV audio of the incident appears to show far more gunshots than have been explained so far — we know one Secret Service agent or officer was hit in his bulletproof vest, but it’s unclear who fired what shots at whom.)

The shooting at Butler was clearly a major security failure and exposed all sorts of problems with the Secret Service’s protocols and planning — and emphasized how overlooked and exhausted the long-underfunded and under-staffed agency has become, particularly in the complex years of providing security to the ever-growing list of the sprawling Trump family and ever-more administration officials.

It’s not clear — so far — that this event should be viewed the same. (Another question I have: I was surprised that apparently Trump remained in his motorcade on-site for the better part of an hour before organizers and the Secret Service finally decided to cancel the remainder of the evening and he departed for the White House. I would have imagined that the goal of the Secret Service would have been to get him out of the site as fast as possible once the shooting occurred, particularly since it wasn’t or wouldn’t have been initially clear whether the attacker was acting alone.)

Overall, knowing only the scattered reports we still know about 12 hours later, this mostly appears like presidential security working as it is intended. It’s not — and shouldn’t be — the job of the Secret Service to secure the whole building. There was a threat to the president and it was stopped well before it could pose a threat to the president. Screening everyone who enters the outer perimeter of even a high-profile event like the correspondents dinner for weapons and then re-screening everyone who attends the actual dinner would be a massive operation and require more than a multiple of the security resources already committed to an event like this.

We’ll surely learn more in the coming days and months — and I would bet the dinner security will change in future years and that security at the Hilton will change, as it did after 1981 and as it is now the first place in the US to have the dubious distinction of being the site of not one but two presidential assassination attempts — but so far as we know right now, this seems like the system basically working as designed amid the always necessary trade-offs of security in a free society.

I’m glad everyone is okay. Political violence is never the answer. 

 

wayne madesen report logoWayne Madsen Report, Opinion and Analysis: Not buying Trump's reality TV act at the "Hinckley Hilton," Wayne Madsen, left, April 26, 2026. Trump's corruption wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Smallhas seeped deeply into the US Secret Service. So let the show go on as Trump texted following the "security event."

Having been present at the Washington Hilton for Barack Obama’s first White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner in 2009, significant security questions about the alleged well-armed gunman who raced past the Secret Service magnetometer security check abound. Trump almost immediately took advantage of the incident to push for his White House ballroom.

We’re told the Secret Service, seen on hotel security camera footage firing at a blurry running figure, stopped the alleged assailant before he could enter the ballroom filled with 2600 dinner guests just beginning to dig into their first salad course. One agent is said to have been hospitalized with injuries suffered when the armed man shot him.

For us old timer reporters, the Hilton became colloquially known as the “Hinckley Hilton,” as it was the site of the attempted daytime assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by Bush family friend John Hinckley. But that is another story.

Jeffery Carroll, Interim Chief of Police for the DC Metropolitan Police Department, said the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, was armed with a “shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives.” He was reportedly a schoolteacher and what was described as an “independent game developer.”

The alleged assailant reportedly booked a room at the Hilton in early April. This appears odd considering the fact that most, if not all, of the rooms are booked for the dinner months in advance. I recall being told when I worked a block south of the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue in 2003 and 2004 that the hotel, aware that suspected anti-Iraq war protesters wanting to book rooms there during the correspondents’ dinner were offered stays at other Hilton hotels in downtown DC. The Washington Hilton also invoked the “no room at the inn” protocol during an AIPAC policy conference I reported on in 2002.

Speaking of AIPAC, there was a photo of alleged assailant Allen wearing an Israel Defense Forces sweatshirt that was posted on Instagram prior to its being down by the Meta censors on April 25.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, Todd Blanche Oa Trump flunky, admitted to ABC News that Allen checked into the Hilton on April 24, the day before the dinner. That would represent a significant change in the Hilton’s policy during the annual VIP dinner.

White House all-around Trump shill Dan Scavino tried and failed to get the stunned crowd of guests to begin shouting “USA! USA!” after Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Cabinet secretaries, and even the Small Business Administration chief were led out of the ballroom by armed security agents at a very casual pace.

Reappearing at the podium of the head table, White House Correspondents Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS News informed the remaining dinner guests that Trump would be holding a press conference on the incident at the White House in 30 minutes. Loud laughter could be heard from the audience. In other words, many of the remaining press and other attendees weren’t “buying the act,” to use a quote once used against me on air by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, who was present during the banquet-turned-melee at the Hinckley Hilton during the Trump’s “I need my White House ballroom” performance act.

After being whisked away back to the White House, Trump made plain the ulterior motive behind his Butler 2.0 performance.

On Sunday morning, he texted: “What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE.” Trump added, “This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House . . . “It cannot be built fast enough! While beautiful, it has every highest level security feature there is plus, there are no rooms sitting on top for unsecured people to pour in, and is inside the gates of the most secure building in the World, The White House.”

There were more than an ample number of suspicious anomalies present at the banquet before the incident. Fox News White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie was sitting next to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s husband, Nicholas Riccio. Hasnie said before the dinner and after the national anthem he leaned over and told her, “you need to be very safe . . . and he was very serious when he said that to me . . . and he kind of looked around the room and said there are some . . . “

At that point Hasnie’s cell phone connection went dead. The Fox news anchor went on to explain how cell phone connections are often lost when so many people are seeking cell service at the same time. That might have been quite a legitimate explanation had it not been for Karoline Leavitt earlier saying to a Fox News correspondent during the red-carpet promenade of second-rate and third-rate celebrities, “I will tell you, this speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump . . . [The speech] will be funny. It will be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.”

Just as Trump and other head table guests were being rushed from the ballroom, Secret Service agents shouts of “shots fired!” echoed throughout the hall as attendees crouched beside their chairs and under their tables.

At least two protesters were suspiciously allowed into the venue prior to the dinner and during the red-carpet “penguin walk.” They got close enough to Hegseth for him to hear them yell, “Arrest Hegseth!”

Then there was the bug-eyed FBI director Kash Patel sitting aimlessly at the Daily Mail table after the head table was rushed out, looking like he was anticipating a waiter to come and refill his wine glass.

Unlike most of the U.S. corporate media, overseas media were not buying Trump’s act. Editorials published the day after the incident pointed to “false flags” and the Reichstag fire template. In an editorial France’s Le Monde wrote that the security incident was “meticulously staged” with the White House’s immediate reliance on “enemies within” rhetoric being used to enable further crackdowns of political dissent.

In Germany’s Der Spiegel suggested that what was at foot at the Washington Hilton was a Washingtoner Reichstagsbrand or “Washington Reichstag Fire. Tgerman flaghe reference was to the Nazis using the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 to justify stamp out the German Weimar Constitution.

El Pais of Spain suggested the Hilton incident was to be used as a “transactional use of tragedy” as a distraction from the war in the Middle East and the U.S. dire economic situation.

guardian logoThe Guardian in the UK suggested the Hilton incident would bolster Trump’s “security-industrial complex” to permanently “fortify” the executive branch against judicial and legislative oversight.

taiwan flagUnited Daily News of Taiwan wrote that the Trump administration could use the incident to renege on international security commitments to focus on domestic “purification.”

The world isn’t buying Trump’s dinner act, one that pre-empted a mentalist magician named Oz Pearlman, who was to wow the audience with Atlantic City boardwalk-style conman tricks.

With all deference to Mr. Pearlman, it appears that the real trick of the evening was played by the Trump regime with the media, Trump loyalists, and the American public being the easy marks.

 

politicus usa logoPoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Many Americans Don't Care About 3rd Assassination Attempt On Trump, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 26, 2026. The media elites are expressing shock that the entire nation isn't riveted by the fact that a third assassination attempt against the most unpopular president in American history.

The media elites are traumatized by the events at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and they will not stop talking about it. The problem is that they were never in any real danger, unlike people in the United States who experience real gun violence in cities, towns, schools, churches, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, concerts, dance clubs, neighborhoods, and their own homes every single day all across the country.

secret service logoIt has been less than a day since a gunman tried to enter the White House Correspondents Dinner, and even though, according to administration officials, the gunman’s manifesto said that he wanted to kill administration officials, the American people aren’t interested in the story.

If you spend five minutes on any form of social media, you’ll soon learn that the consensus reaction is people claiming the gunman was staged, MAGAs who think a White House ballroom will solve everything, and some version of the sentiment that the American people have already seen this movie twice before, and they are bored. The disinterest in the story has shocked some media elites.

Dylan Byers of Puck News posted a long story on X about how a bar in Washington, DC wouldn’t turn on Trump’s press conference last night:

We asked a bartender to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president’s briefing with captions, which they did. But then, a few minutes later, the bartender said he’d been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he’d have to go back to sports.I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel. I imagine every television would have been on CNN or the wall-to-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passers by would have come in to watch, as well.

The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves.

But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we just picked the wrong bar. But I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that attention to news in the U.S. has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults (ages 18 to 29) have consistently had the lowest levels. Even as the news itself intensifies—in politics, geopolitics, technology, etc—more and more people seem to be tuning it out. And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation’s capital, an hour after crouching behind a chair as secret service members evacuate the President of the United States from the room, being told that you’ll have to watch Penguins vs. Flyers.

People care deeply about the crisis of mass shootings and gun violence in the country. They don’t care about a president who treats them badly, shows contempt for most Americans, and makes their lives worse.

The American people don’t care because media elites who earn six, seven, or eight figures a year put themselves in this situation by choosing to hang out with Donald Trump for an evening, and they were never in any danger.

Big media is siding with Trump. They are not on the side of the people, and that is why most Americans don’t care about their trauma or a potential third attempt on Trump.

It is all just an endless loop of drama that doesn’t lower prices, reduce costs, or keep our families safe.Do you care about this latest gunman coming after Trump? 

Meidas Touch Podcast, Commentary: MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on his opinion that Donald Trump’s health is rapidly declining as evidenced by Trump’s response to the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Ben Meiselas, right, ben meiselas daily beastApril 26, 2026. And the Secret Service had to like pick him up and they had to basically drag him out of there.

And I think they were just like, "Wow, this is now being caught on film finally." And you know, we've been talking about this and we've seen uh this before as well, though. But let me just remind you what went down as Donald Trump literally just falls down.


mtn meidas touch networkWhether it's out of fear, whether it's that hecan't walk straight. I want to show you this. Then I want to talk about seeing this. I want to talk about Butler, Pennsylvania. And I want to talk about how those medical records have never been released. And while we're at it, really no credible medical records from Donald Trump have ever been released at all.

And this incident last night at the White House correspondents dinner, I think raises serious questions about all of this. And I'm not afraid to ask thosequestions here on the Meidas Touch Network. And I know you're smart enough to look into it. So let's just watch Donald Trump fall down flat on his face as he's being escorted out by the Secret Service. Here, play this clip.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 25, 2026 [Background on the attack and event], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 26, 2026. Tonight the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) held its annual black-tie dinner, which is designed both to raise money for the institution and to provide a glitzy night out for journalists. In recent years the event has drawn criticism for the chumminess it reveals between White House journalists and the lawmakers they cover. This year, that concern was heightened dramatically when the WHCA invited President Donald J. Trump to attend the dinner and to give a speech.

Since he entered the political arena, Trump has denigrated the press and even urged supporters to attack journalists, but in his second term his administration has gone further, trying to silence the press with lawsuits or threats of them against media outlets and individuals, blocking access to the White House and the Pentagon for journalists Trump dislikes, personally attacking female journalists, arresting independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and raiding the home of Washington Post political correspondent Hannah Natanson. Inviting him to address the press at a fancy dinner seemed to normalize his attacks on the First Amendment.

While it is customary for a president to attend at least one WHCA dinner, where traditionally a comedian roasts him, Trump has always refused to attend. This year, though, he agreed (although a mentalist was engaged to perform instead of the usual comedian). With his job approval numbers plummeting and the administration mired in a war in Iran that Trump appears to have started on a whim, along with the economy stumbling, there was plenty of speculation about what he would say at the event and how journalists should react if he used the opportunity to insult them.

We will probably never know. Something happened at the event that made Secret Service agents evacuate Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. Exactly what happened is not yet clear: it appears law enforcement stopped an armed man outside the event, and a subsequent noise alarmed dinner attendees and Secret Service agents, who rushed the president, the first lady, and other government officials to a secure location.

During the confusion, as Trump was being held near the ballroom, he posted: “Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again.”

Then, at 8:36, he posted that law enforcement “has requested that we leave the premises, consistent with protocol, which we will do, immediately. I will be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House Press Briefing Room. The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition. We will be speaking to you in a half an hour. I have spoken with the representatives in charge of the event, and we will be rescheduling within 30 days.”

Trump took to the podium a little after 10:30. Referring to the threat of a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner—which has never happened before—he said: “I will say, you know, it’s not a particularly secure building, and, uh, I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure. It’s got— It’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it. They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today’s, uh, a little bit different, because today, we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”

Trump said that there was a record crowd at tonight’s event and that he felt everyone coming together, but he urged people to do so even more fully in light of what he said was another attempt on his life. In response to a question about why Trump thought attempts on his life happened so frequently—a reminder: there is as yet no information about what the man’s plan or motives were—he responded that assassins come for “impactful people” and boasted of how much he has done for the country.

The Framers of our government enshrined the right to freedom of the press in our Constitution along with the right to gather together, to practice any religion we want (including none at all), the right to say what we want, and the right to ask our government to do (or not to do) things. After writing a new constitution that created a far stronger national government than existed under the Articles of Confederation, which had underpinned the government since 1777 (although the Articles were not ratified until 1781), the Framers designed the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights to hold back government power.

The power to control what citizens can publish about the government would give leaders the power to destroy democracy. A free press is imperative to keep people informed about what leaders are doing. Lose it, and those in power can do whatever they wish without accountability.

From the beginning of the American republic, though, the press was openly partisan. This meant the president worked quite closely with newspaper reporters from his own party while ignoring, or sometimes even trying to silence, his opponents. By the 1880s the country had begun to turn against the partisan press and to “independent” newspapers, and the number of papers took off.

No longer advocates for a party position and eager to attract readers, reporters began to look for new, exciting stories. And not much was more exciting in 1886 than a marriage in the White House. On June 2 of that year, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, who had been his unofficial ward, in the Blue Room.

Reporters had dogged their courtship (many thought he was interested in her more age-appropriate mother), and they flocked after the newlyweds, finally prompting the irritated president to ask his personal secretary to keep them away. But while the president was angry at the scrutiny, editors recognized a good story, and by the end of Cleveland’s first term, a reporter had figured out he could just stay at the White House and write columns based on interviews with people coming from meetings with the president. Other papers immediately stationed their own people at the White House.

In Cleveland’s second term, which started in 1893, his private secretary worked directly with the press. Through the next few presidencies, the role of press secretary began to take shape. Theodore Roosevelt relished attention from reporters. When his shy successor William Howard Taft shunned them, they complained he was hiding things.

So, shortly after he took office in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson held the nation’s first press conference, only to complain both that reporters were quoting statements he considered off the record and that the conferences were a free-for-all in which anyone could shout out questions, often ones Wilson found irritating (like his opinion about Groundhog Day).

In 1914, rumors circulated that Congress might begin to choose which reporters would be allowed at Wilson’s press conferences. In alarm, eleven White House reporters organized the White House Correspondents’ Association. In 1921, as part of their annual election of officers, fifty members of the growing WHCA held a dinner. With former newspaperman Warren G. Harding in the White House, they were in a celebratory mood despite Prohibition (which they ignored). Taking their cue from the famous Gridiron Club, which held dinners where they roasted politicians, WHCA members poked fun at the administration and Congress.

While at first the reporters simply wanted access to the president, as the WHCA became an established force it came to work for transparency more generally, recognizing that journalists are the main eyes and voice of the people. It protected press passes for journalists who regularly covered the White House, and assigned seats in the briefing room.

But all that changed in February 2025, after Trump took office for the second time. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the administration would no longer recognize the role of the WHCA in managing the White House press pool. Instead, she said the “White House press team” would control access to the White House. At the time, then–WHCA president Eugene Daniels said the change “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States” and “suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president.”

“In a free country,” Daniels said, “leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

Trump repeated tonight that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be rescheduled.

More On Trump Team, Corruption, Media Coverage

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

People Magazine, Karoline Leavitt Attends White House Correspondents' Dinner 9 Months Pregnant, Just 1 Day After Announcing Maternity Leave, Lindsay Kimble, April 25, 2026. Leavitt sat onstage at the head table during the dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C.  

One day after announcing her maternity leave, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was onstage at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday, April 25.

Leavitt, 28, posed for photos with her husband Nicholas Riccio, 60, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., ahead of the dinner and speeches (as shown above). Then, once inside the ballroom, Leavitt was seated onstage at the head table with President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance, among others.

The baby, a girl, will be Leavitt's second with Riccio, who she married in 2025. She first announced her pregnancy last December. They welcomed their first child — a son, Nicholas "Niko" Robert Riccio — in July 2024.

Leavitt is the youngest press secretary in U.S. history and also the first pregnant press secretary.

Just yesterday, Leavitt told reporters that she'd be stepping away from the podium while awaiting the birth of her child.

"This will likely be my last gaggle for some time. As you can see," Leavitt said on April 24 as she looked down at her 9-month-pregnant belly, per USA Today, AFP and UPI. "I'm about ready to have a baby any minute, so I will see you guys very soon."

“I know you'll be in very good hands with my team here at the White House. And I know all of you have the president's phone number personally, so I have no doubt that you will have a shortage of statements and news from this building while I'm gone,” Leavitt then joked, referencing a March Atlantic article about Trump's personal phone number being leaked.

Democratic Underground,aishah hasnie Commentary: Fox Reporter Was Warned, Noah Prince, April 26, 2026. Fox News might have cooked their entire narrative.

One of their reporters [Aishah Hasnie, right] was cut off mid-sentence while saying someone (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's husband Nicholas Riccio) warned her before the shooting. 

 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

 

warner brothers discovery logo

ny times logoNew York Times, Hollywood Heavyweights Sign Letter Opposing Paramount’s Deal for Warner Bros., Benjamin Mullin, April 13, 2026. The letter warns that the deal will result in fewer jobs for creatives, along with higher costs and less choice for audiences.

More than 1,000 writers, actors and directors released a letter on Monday opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the deal would harm Hollywood’s already distressed entertainment industry.

The letter, which was signed by well-known performers and directors including Bryan Cranston, Joaquin Phoenix, Tiffany Haddish, Lily Gladstone and Yorgos Lanthimos, warns that merging two of Hollywood’s major studios will result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”

“We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed,” the letter said. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made — and on what terms — leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.”

The letter comes months after Paramount and its chief executive, David Ellison, prevailed against Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion. Mr. Ellison has said that the deal will be good for the creative community, pledging to release at least 30 movies in theaters annually and invest in both studios. He has also argued that a deal with Netflix would have created a subscription streaming behemoth twice the size of its nearest competitor.

 "Poetic justice, put it in a song, alright."

— Kendrick Lamar wrote that as a love song in 2012. He had no idea he was also writing the caption for a night in Washington when a press secretary predicted shots would be fired and the universe decided to take her literally.

Lincoln Square Media, Corporate Media Chaos: Trump, the WHCD Shooting, and the Future of the Free Press, Kristoffer Ealy, right, kristoffer ealyApril 26, 2026. “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology.”

I was mid-sentence.

Sitting here building what was supposed to be a straightforward analytical follow-up to my March piece about the most lincoln square media logodangerous media consolidation in a generation — the $111 billion Paramount purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery — when Ben Meiselas broke the news on MeidasTouch and my iPad started doing exactly what the evening was about to do — interrupt everything with something nobody saw coming.

Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump evacuated. A Secret Service agent down. The suspect in custody at the Washington Hilton — the same hotel where John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Hinckley Hilton. Because Washington, D.C. has a sense of humor that nobody asked for.

My first thought wasn’t shock.

It was recognition.

Because I had spent the better part of this Saturday documenting exactly how we arrived at a place where something like this could feel — in the most sick and twisted way imaginable — not just possible but almost inevitable. So I didn’t put the merger story down. I folded the two together. Because they belong together. Because on Saturday, April 25th, American democracy didn’t just hand me a metaphor. It handed me the whole damn thesis gift-wrapped in chaos and burrata salad.

Karoline Leavitt (shown at right in a file photo) — nine months pregnant, apparently planning to have a lovely evening watching her boss roast his political enemies like it Karoline Leavitt at her first Press Conferencewas open mic night at the authoritarian comedy club — told reporters before the dinner began that Trump’s speech would be “classic Donald J. Trump” and that there would be “some shots fired tonight.” She was talking about jokes. Tasteless, mean-spirited, grievance-soaked jokes about whoever had the misfortune of being on Trump’s enemy list this particular Saturday. She had no idea how literal she was about to be. Famous last words, Karoline. Famous. Last. Words.

This is what poetic justice looks like in 2026. Not clean. Not satisfying. Just this — a press secretary waddling into the Hinckley Hilton expecting a comedy show and ending up in a security evacuation while 2,600 journalists abandoned their burrata and dove under tables at a dinner ostensibly celebrating the First Amendment. The same First Amendment that the guy they were celebrating has spent his entire second non-consecutive term treating like a suggestion.

Kendrick asked us to make it make sense. I’m going to try.

 

david ellison cbs lincoln square graphicLet me start with David Ellison (shown above), because nothing that happened on Saturday night makes sense without him.

Six weeks before the dinner, Ellison — son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, new owner of Paramount, aspiring architect of American state paramount logomedia, and apparently a man who has never once asked himself whether something is too on the nose — threw a private gathering at the United States Institute of Peace. Except it isn’t called that anymore. It’s the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace now, which is the kind of sentence that should make your eye twitch regardless of your political affiliation. The invitation described the evening as “an intimate gathering in celebration of the First Amendment honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.”

Norm Eisen responded that this resembles the First Amendment “in the same way that a book burning is a celebration of the written word.” Which is correct. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was in that room. The same Todd Blanche — who stepped in after Trump fired Pam Bondi — whose Justice Department has to approve Ellison’s $111 billion merger. Trump spoke for an hour. Weijia cbs news logoJiang — CBS News anchor, White House Correspondents’ Association president, employee of the man throwing the dinner — was also there, presumably calculating exactly how grateful she was supposed to look.

Two nights later she stood on the WHCD stage and told Trump “it is meaningful that you are here.”

No. What’s meaningful is what was in that room on Thursday. What’s meaningful is that the woman running the organization that exists to protect press freedom from government interference was breaking bread with the government official whose signature her boss needs on a $111 billion check. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s a conflict of interest wearing a tuxedo, sipping champagne, and calling itself a First Amendment celebration. That’s a conflict of interest so naked it needs a bathrobe.

But nobody in that ballroom was going to say that into a microphone. They had already made their calculation. They replaced the comedian with a mentalist — Oz Pearlman, a man whose entire profession is making you believe something that isn’t real, which, now that I think about it, is an oddly honest metaphor for the evening — specifically to avoid generating the kind of jokes that might upset the White House.

Don don lemon wLemon, right, the man Ellison’s network pushed out the door with a cardboard box and a severance check, had the good sense to stay home. The people who showed up practiced their resting faces and prepared to laugh at whatever the president decided to say. That was the plan. That was the evening.

Then a 31-year-old man from Torrance, California — my backyard — allegedly walked into the Washington Hilton with guns and knives and blew the whole performance up. Literally.

Now. About that merger.

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: Corporate Media Is about to Get So Much Worse, Kristoffer Ealy, March 15, 2026. 

I wrote about this in March and I will not insult your intelligence by repeating myself at length. What I will do is note that everything I predicted has happened faster and more brazenly than even I anticipated, which is saying something because I anticipated a lot. The debt load made a merger inevitable — I said that. The only question was who would hold the leash and who would get walked. Paramount and Skydance won that race. Shareholders approved the deal. They also, in the same vote, rejected David Zaslav’s $887 million golden parachute — lincoln square media logobecause even the people cashing out apparently have a threshold for what’s too naked to defend in public, and “pay me $887 million for destroying the company I was hired to run” apparently clears that bar.

Zaslav spent years “maximizing value for shareholders” by crushing Warner Bros. Discovery under so much debt it had to sell itself. For this service he requested $887 million on his way out the door. The shareholders said yes to the merger and no to the parachute in the same breath — 82% of them voted it down. That’s not accountability, by the way, because the vote is non-binding. The WBD board can pay him every penny anyway. So the shareholders staged a symbolic rebellion and Zaslav will likely still collect. That’s not accountability. That’s aesthetic objection with a side of impotent fury. But I’ll take it.

The opposition to this merger has been loud, credentialed, and almost completely ignored by the people with the actual power to stop it — which, coincidentally, is also the story of American democracy in 2026. Mark Ruffalo testified before the Senate — sat in the chair, looked senators in the eye, and said, “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology.” He called Zaslav’s exit package “obscene” for a man who spent years crushing the company he was now being paid hundreds of millions to abandon. Worth noting: David Ellison was invited to that same hearing and skipped it, claiming a family funeral — then showed up in DC two days later to throw Trump a dinner party. The audacity on this man is genuinely impressive in the way that a house fire is impressive.

And in the most literary moment of a congressional hearing in recent memory, Ruffalo invoked both Citizen Kane and 1984 in the same sentence, because when you’re describing a billionaire buying the news infrastructure of a democracy to stay friendly with the president who controls his merger approval, sometimes the classics are the only frame that fits. Some things are just that on the nose.

Damon Lindelof — who knows David Ellison personally and signed the petition anyway, because that’s what integrity looks like when it actually costs something — put it in the language that doesn’t require a political science degree: “It’s thousands and thousands of Grips and Gaffers. Drivers and Decorators. Builders and Boom operators. Camera teams and Caterers. And they’re all about to get fucked.” Lindelof isn’t describing an abstract antitrust concern. He’s describing human beings whose livelihoods are about to be restructured into nonexistence so that two legacy corporations can tell Wall Street they’re “maximizing synergies” — which is corporate-speak for “we are about to fire a lot of people and we hired a consultant to make it sound inevitable.”

cnn logoAnd then there’s Jane Fonda. Who was married to Ted Turner — the man who built CNN — from 1991 to 2001. She watched him create the network from inside the marriage. They share an adopted daughter. She knows what CNN was built to be better than virtually anyone alive who isn’t Ted Turner himself. Jane Fonda produced a satirical sketch imagining what CNN looks like under Paramount’s ownership and called it “Pete Hegseth’s dream.” That is not a celebrity with an opinion. That is a woman with a front row seat to exactly what is being dismantled, and she is not being subtle about what she sees. When the woman who shared a bed with the man who built CNN tells you it’s about to become Pete Hegseth’s dream, you should probably listen.

The petition hit 4,000 signatures. More than 75 Oscar winners and nominees. Robert De Niro signed and said nothing further — which, if you know De Niro, is its own statement. This is a man who called Trump a wannabe dictator from a podium in Cannes, who showed up outside the hush money trial just to talk to reporters, who has never in his life been accused of keeping his opinions to himself. He signed the letter and went quiet. When Bobby De Niro decides silence is the move, pay attention to what he’s not saying.

netflix logoAnd the Star Trek universe — the franchise that Gene Roddenberry built explicitly around anti-authoritarianism, collective ownership, and the dangers of concentrated power — is owned by the company throwing Trump merger-approval dinners. Let that land for a second. The people who play characters dedicated to resisting exactly this kind of consolidated authoritarian control are petitioning against the company that cuts their checks. Wilson Cruz, Wil Wheaton, Jeri Ryan, Jonathan Frakes all signed. J.J. Abrams — who made the last three Star Trek films for Paramount with Skydance as partners — signed against his own business partners. Gene Roddenberry didn’t accidentally build a show where the Federation has no billionaires and everyone shares resources. The franchise’s DNA is a direct rebuke of everything this merger represents, and the people who embody that franchise know it. The universe is not being subtle.

Here is something worth saying plainly that most coverage of this story glosses over completely: legacy media has already gone to shit. We are not riding to the rescue of something healthy. We are watching the dignified disposal of something that was already on life support, hooked up to a machine that mostly just played Nielsen ratings and called it journalism.

CNN has spent years hosting what amounts to a nightly panel discussion moderated by human resources — one person with sources and facts, one person with vibes and a Twitter following, both treated as equally valid inputs into democratic discourse, as if democracy is a debate club where points go to whoever sounds most confident. Scott Jennings has somehow turned the ability to say factually incorrect things with enormous confidence into a lucrative television career. That’s not a critique. That’s a business model, and CNN paid for it. Jake Tapper wrote a book about Biden’s cognitive decline while employed as a CNN anchor, promoted it on Megyn Kelly’s show — Megyn “Santa Is Definitively White” Kelly — and announced on that same appearance that he had personally apologized to Lara Trump. Jake Tapper apologized to Lara Trump. Read that sentence again. Take as long as you need. I’ll wait.

cbs news logoCBS News didn’t wake up one morning and decide to drift toward conservative appeasement. Institutional decline rarely works that way — it almost never announces itself because the people doing it have convinced themselves they’re being reasonable. It happens gradually, through executive hires framed as balance, through editorial recalibrations justified as audience outreach, through legal departments quietly reminding producers which fights might complicate the next merger approval. Nobody sends a memo. Nobody has to. The memo is the silence. And now Bari Weiss — the patron saint of corporate media’s desperate attempt to appear intellectually rebellious while remaining structurally safe, a woman who has built an entire career around convincing powerful institutions that the best way to handle criticism from the right is to hire someone who agrees with it — is running editorial operations at a network whose owner was just in D.C. throwing the president a party with the AG in the room. This is not a coincidence. This is a org chart.

The institutional anxiety has already reshaped the newsroom. Producers are recalibrating which pitches are worth making. Reporters are calculating how far to push on stories that might generate the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people. That is not editorial independence. That is institutional fear wearing a press badge and calling itself journalism.

Meanwhile, at the same hotel where all of this was unfolding, 2,600 people gathered to celebrate press freedom by replacing their comedian with a mentalist and praying the president didn’t get offended. That’s the state of the First Amendment in 2026. We swapped the jokes for a magic show and hoped for the best.

jim acosta gage skidmore croppedThink about what the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has become. Joy Reid, Katie Phang, Jim Acosta (shown at right in a Gage Skidmore photo), and Waj Ali — people who were pushed out of or escaped from the corporate media structure that runs that dinner — spent Saturday night doing their own roundtable roast without asking a single corporate boss for permission. They called themselves the Resistance Brady Bunch, which is both funny and accurate, and they used the phrase “truthful not neutral” because they have the luxury of meaning it. They did not have to calculate whether their takes would upset an advertiser, complicate a merger, or generate a phone call from a congressman who controls a broadcast license. That freedom is not a consolation prize. That is the whole point.

That is what journalism looks like when it isn’t performing deference to power. That is also why Ellison buying everything he can get his hands on ultimately won’t work — because the audience isn’t sitting in that ballroom eating burrata and practicing their resting faces. The audience already left. Don Lemon didn’t disappear when CNN showed him the door; he rebuilt and his audience followed him there. Jim Acosta moved to Substack, where he isn’t required to share a panel with anyone whose job description is “say the opposite of the truth with confidence.” Roland Martin built Black Star Network years before most legacy executives were willing to acknowledge that Black audiences deserved serious coverage, let alone serve it. Joy Reid. Katie Phang. The migration is real, it is accelerating, and no amount of merger paperwork changes it.

Viewers recognize institutional fear faster than executives realize. And when they recognize it, credibility goes with it — and it doesn’t come back just because you hired a new anchor.

Let’s talk about the strongman problem, because it goes directly to why this merger is happening and why it cannot be allowed to become the template.

Donald Trump has spent his entire political career performing toughness while being catastrophically, legendarily, almost impressively thin-skinned about the most basic forms of accountability. The 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner — where Barack Obama roasted him mercilessly while he sat in that same ballroom, stone-faced, unable to laugh, unable to leave, and apparently unable to let it go for the next fifteen years — is arguably the origin story of his political radicalization. A man who can dish out cruelty without limit but cannot absorb a joke from a comedian is not strong. He is performing strength for an audience that has agreed, collectively, to confuse aggression with courage and grievance with conviction. Obama did what comedians do — told the truth without asking permission — and Trump spent the next decade and a half making the entire country pay for the humiliation he felt in that room.

This is not unique to Trump, by the way. Putin has people jailed for memes. Orbán criminalizes satire. Every authoritarian who has ever styled himself as the toughest man in any room has turned out to be, without exception, the most fragile person in it the moment someone makes a joke at his expense. Because comedy tells the truth without asking permission, and that is the one thing a manufactured strongman cannot survive. You can suppress a journalist. You can regulate a network. You can threaten advertisers and harass reporters and call everything you don’t like fake news. But you cannot make a punchline illegal without everyone instantly understanding exactly what you’re afraid of. The joke always wins. It just sometimes takes a while.

So what does a man like that do when he can’t make the jokes stop? He buys the room where the jokes are told. He puts his people in the anchor chairs. He installs Bari Weiss at CBS and calls it editorial independence. He throws a “First Amendment” dinner with the AG whose signature he needs and calls it a celebration. And then he shows up to the actual Correspondents’ Dinner — the first time in his presidency, because he was too fragile to attend during his first term — expecting to spike the football in a room he believes he has already won.

Instead, Cole Tomas Allen walked in with guns and knives, and Trump’s press conference from the White House briefing room was the third time in less than two years that someone has tried to shoot at or near this man. Butler, Pennsylvania. West Palm Beach. Now the Hinckley Hilton. His response each time has been a variation of the same performance: toughness, a shrug, a victory lap, a Truth Social post about how brave law enforcement is. Because showing genuine concern would be weakness, and weakness is the one thing the MAGA definition of masculinity cannot accommodate — even when the alternative is pretending that three assassination attempts in two years is just the cost of doing business.

For the next week, every legacy media outlet that has been slowly surrendering its editorial independence to avoid political pressure will spend wall-to-wall airtime being grateful Trump is okay. He should be okay. I want to be clear about this: I don’t want to see any president get shot, including this one. But that coverage will completely crowd out the question that actually matters — how did we get to a place where a gunman walks into the most symbolically important press freedom dinner in American democracy, and the story we’re all supposed to tell is about the president’s bravery? The press corps that just spent the evening auditioning for Ellison’s good graces will spend next week performing concern for the man they were performing deference to twelve hours earlier. It is performances all the way down.

Here is where I land, and I want to be precise about it.

This merger is not permanent. Nothing Ellison builds is permanent. The AT&T breakup didn’t happen because AT&T grew a conscience — it happened because an administration decided to enforce antitrust law against a consolidation that had been allowed to calcify for decades. The government can revisit mergers. It can order divestiture. It is harder the longer you wait, and the window to cleanly block this one is closing fast. But the 2028 election matters enormously. Agency leadership shifts with elections. What Brendan Carr builds, a different FCC chair can dismantle. What Ellison assembles under this administration, a different DOJ can be ordered to take apart. The architecture of American regulatory governance exists precisely because the founders understood that concentrations of power — in industry, in government, in media — eventually produce enough dysfunction to trigger correction. We are in the dysfunction phase. The correction phase is an election away.

The goal is not just to stop this merger. The goal is to make the next one not worth trying.

If the pattern becomes — you spend $111 billion, you throw a dinner with the AG in the room, you get regulatory approval, you spend years integrating two massive companies, and then a new administration orders divestiture and you spend five more years and billions more dollars unwinding the whole thing — the math stops working. Billionaires are not ideologues. They are accountants with better PR. Make the expected return on regulatory capture include a realistic probability of forced divestiture, and the calculus changes. The next David Ellison looks at the spreadsheet, looks at what happened to the last guy, and decides a $111 billion bet on a single administration’s goodwill isn’t the genius play it looked like on paper.kristoffer ealy

Kristoffer Ealy, right,is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization.  

 

helen delaney reese djt

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Donald Trump works for the highest bidder, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, April 26, 2026. At 2:31 in the afternoon, Donald J. Trump exited Air Force One onto the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Florida, and slowly made his way toward the press pool waiting nearby to ask him questions. As the president began to speak, the camera caught the growing exhaustion and confusion we have been seeing more frequently in recent months.

As he hurried through questions after attending a crypto event at Mar-a-Lago for those who invested in his $TRUMP meme coin, which he has personally made millions of dollars from, he continued to struggle to justify not sending negotiators to Iran talks because it’s “too expensive,” adding that he’s “a very cost-conscious person.”

The man who is too cost-conscious to send negotiators to Iran to end the war that he started, that has destabilized the entire region, and impacted the world’s fuel supply, just walked out of a party his family has made over $336 million from in a single year. Money he made from a meme coin, a personal cryptocurrency he launched three days before taking office, one that has since collapsed 96% from its peak, while he collected a transaction fee on every single trade, all the way down. The people who paid to be in that room today lost most of what they put in. And he just keeps making money from them and all the fees.

That is where we are. The president of the United States, standing on a tarmac, too cost-conscious for diplomacy, on his way back from selling access to himself by the token.

I was in Washington in the morning, walking before an event I was attending later in the day. It was one of those mornings where the city feels like two places at once. On the surface, everything looks like it always has. The buildings are still standing. The streets are still full. People are moving through their days with purpose. But underneath it, you can feel the weight of what is happening inside those buildings, and what is being done to them from the top down.

I stopped to talk with a security guard outside one of the federal buildings. He was not a federal employee. He worked for an outside company. And he started talking, the way people do when they have been holding something in and finally find someone to say it to. He told me about the federal workers he sees every day. People who have given decades to this government. Who were there long before Trump arrived and who intend to be there long after he is gone. He said they keep showing up by telling themselves, and each other, that he is a temporary “bad manager.” That the work still matters and that the mission does not belong to him. He told me that the banners they have hung everywhere draw a reaction from at least half the people who walk past them. Not salutes or approval, but a different kind of gesture entirely, involving one finger raised in the middle of their hands.

I found more comfort in that conversation than I have found in a lot of headlines lately. Because what he was describing is not a coup, nor is it dramatic. It is just people, without power like those at the top, without titles, and without aspirations of wealth accumulation from proximity to the current administration, showing up every day and refusing to let the institution be hollowed out on their watch. These are the real Americans. The true patriots. Doing the work under harsh conditions and not losing hope for better days and better leaders.

And then I came back to my hotel room and opened my laptop. While those federal workers were walking into their offices this week, doing the unglamorous, unnoticed work of keeping this government functional, the people at the very top of it were doing something else entirely. The New York Times published an investigation that we should all be talking about. At the center of it is a Syrian billionaire named Mohamad Al-Khayyat, whose family business is tied to more than $12 billion in Syrian reconstruction contracts. Contracts that were worthless as long as American sanctions blocked the international financing needed to build anything. Meaning the only thing standing between him and that money was the United States government.

The barrier was sanctions. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, in place since 2020, was specifically designed to block international financing from flowing into Syria’s reconstruction until there was accountability for war crimes committed by the Assad regime. For the Al-Khayyat family, those sanctions stood between them and billions of dollars. So they went to work on getting them lifted. And they did not do it through normal channels.

They proposed a Trump-branded golf course on the Syrian coast, part of a larger development vision that also included a cruise port, a polo club, and a Bugatti showroom. According to the Times investigation, they cut Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar resort project in Albania, a deal that began as a contractor arrangement and grew into a full joint venture. Ivanka flew to Albania to meet with the family and review design plans with architects and local officials. They cultivated at least a dozen members of Congress. And then there was the stone. Someone physically delivered a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican congressman, with instructions to carry it to the White House to get the president’s attention.

And then in December of 2025, Trump signed the repeal of the Caesar Act into law, buried deep inside the National Defense Authorization Act. The sanctions were gone, and the contracts started moving. The Damascus Airport redevelopment. Power plants. Natural gas projects. Historic properties in the capital being converted into luxury hotels. The resort deals with Kushner’s firm kept expanding. And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.

The same family that needed the policy changed to access their billions of dollars was building resorts with the president’s son-in-law and daughter. The policy was changed. And the reporting suggests all it took was that, plus a stone, with a congressman willing to carry it.

And then there is the meme coin gala that happened earlier today. One that tells much of the same story told in a different way. Old money uses engraved stones and Albanian resort deals and defense bills with buried provisions. New money uses a leaderboard and a smartphone and a champagne toast.

Here is what today’s event at Mar-a-Lago actually was. Not a crypto industry conference or a policy summit. A contest. The 297 people who held the most $TRUMP tokens during a qualification window won invitations. The top 29 got a VIP champagne reception with the president of the United States. Winners received Trump-branded watches, trading cards, sneakers, and fragrances. The coin is trading around $2.98 today, down 96% from its $75 all-time high in January 2025. The minimum holding needed to qualify dropped 85% from last year, because fewer people were willing to play. The people in that room lost most of what they put in. But the Trump family has pulled in more than $1 billion from crypto ventures overall, at least $336 million tied to meme coin sales alone in the first half of 2025, all while Trump is simultaneously shaping U.S. crypto policy. He earns a transaction fee on every single buy and every single sell. He profits when people buy in. He profits when people panic and sell. He profited from the entire collapse. The White House says there is no conflict of interest. Ethics experts say the opposite, and the numbers say everything.

And those losing money weren’t just the people in that room. It was all of us. We are the ones paying with our tax dollars, the money we pay into the government pool for roads and schools and veterans’ care and the basic infrastructure that holds a country together. Instead, untold millions are flowing toward Trump’s constant travel to events like this one in Florida. The nonstop fundraising. The donor parties. The meme coin galas. Local security alone costs $240,000 a day every time he lands in Palm Beach. Individual trips run three to four million dollars when you add Air Force One and the Secret Service. He has visited his own properties 129 times since taking office. And every dollar spent protecting him at a club he owns and profits from is a dollar he is effectively collecting twice. We are the losers here, too.

And then there is Justin Sun. A Chinese-born crypto billionaire. The single biggest $TRUMP holder. This year’s top contest winner for the second year in a row. He was in that room today raising a glass with the president. He also filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump family’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which Eric Trump co-founded, accusing it of freezing his token holdings worth hundreds of millions of dollars and using the Trump brand as a vehicle to profit through fraud. He is suing them and celebrating with them on the same weekend. That one detail captures the whole arrangement. Even the people who got burned keep showing up, because the access is that lucrative.

We talk a lot about Trump’s authoritarian takeover. But the thing about Trump is that he has taken the worst parts of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and fascism and combined them with something that gets less attention but may be doing just as much damage. Kleptocracy. Government by theft. Because what he is doing is what kleptocracy looks like. Not a dramatic seizure of power. But often, a transaction fee collected on a collapsing coin. An Albanian resort deal. A defense bill with a sanctions repeal buried on page 400. Small corruptions, stacked and compounded until the entire structure of government bends toward one family’s financial interests. In Putin’s Russia, the oligarchs did not bribe the government from the outside. They became the government. The line between the state and the family vanished. In Erdogan’s Turkey, the president’s son-in-law ran the energy ministry while the family’s firms won government contracts worth billions. Trump’s version is distinctly American, louder, brasher, sold with merchandise and a leaderboard and a branded fragrance. But it follows the same blueprint. When the people at the top are extracting wealth from the power, the people at the bottom are paying for it twice. Once in taxes. Once in the cost of a government that no longer works for them.

And it’s not just what he is doing through his personal businesses. It’s also what he is doing to the federal government itself, trying to use the machinery of our own institutions to funnel money directly to himself and his family.

Take the IRS lawsuit. In January, Trump, along with his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization, filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. The claim: that the government failed to protect his tax returns when a contractor leaked them to the press. The lawsuit followed a New York Times report that found Trump had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. The contractor, a man named Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.

But on Friday, a federal judge named Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee sitting in Miami, looked at the case and asked a question that cut through what this lawsuit really was about: money. She pointed out that Trump is the sitting president who directly oversees both the IRS and the Treasury Department. His named adversaries in this lawsuit are agencies whose decisions are subject to his direction. She questioned whether the parties are even “sufficiently adverse to each other” for the lawsuit to be constitutional under Article III, which requires an actual controversy between genuinely opposing parties. She ordered both sides to explain by late May why the case should not be thrown out entirely.

Here is why that matters beyond the legal technicality. Trump and his lawyers are currently in settlement talks with the Department of Justice over this lawsuit. The same DOJ that he controls. If those talks result in a payout, it would be Trump’s own administration writing Trump and his family a check from the United States Treasury. That would be taxpayer money being spent. A group of former government officials filed a brief calling the situation “extraordinary” because “the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics.” And Trump himself, on Air Force One back in January, acknowledged the strangeness of it. He told reporters it is “very interesting” to be on both sides of a lawsuit, adding, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

And if he does donate the winnings to charity, as he suggested on Air Force One, do not hold your breath waiting to find out which one. This is a family with a history of creating entities that look like charities on paper. The Trump Foundation was shut down under court supervision after the New York Attorney General found that Trump had repeatedly used its funds for his own personal, business, and political interests. He was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. He made 19 admissions of illegal activity. His three adult children were required to undergo mandatory charity law training as part of the settlement. So when he says the money could go to charity, it might not mean what we imagine that to mean.

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

There is a lot of corruption in Washington, D.C., especially in the Trump regime, but that is a small part of American society. We are seeing more and more people stepping up outside of the machine of profit and self-dealing in our government. And we just saw another example of this with Bette Midler and friends who created a new rendition of Woody Guthrie’s, “All You Fascists” that he originally wrote in 1940. As he was watching the rise of fascism in Europe and recognizing the strains of it at home, in the poll tax, in Jim Crow, in the systems designed to keep people powerless and afraid, he used the tool he had at hand, his words, to not just draw attention to what was happening but as a form of resistance. He did not have a Senate seat. He did not have a law firm, a news network, or a lobbying budget. He believed that the people without official power were the ones who would ultimately decide how the story ended. He wrote a song for them and handed it forward.

Eighty-six years later, Bette Midler, now 80 years old, sat down and rewrote it for this moment. She talked to her friend Jane Fonda, who told her the resistance needed an anthem. So she went back to Guthrie’s words and updated them for 2026. She brought in her Beaches co-star Barbara Hershey, actor David Hyde Pierce, singer and actress Jenifer Lewis, Broadway star Shoshana Bean, and she released her powerful version just yesterday with a music video, and she said at the start of it: “I hope you’ll sing it when you’re marching.”

Nobody in that video has the power to lift sanctions. Nobody can issue a pardon or dismiss a lawsuit, or override a president. They are singers. An actress. A woman who has been making people laugh and cry for fifty years and who looked at this moment and decided that was exactly the right set of tools to bring to it.

Verse by verse, she moves through everything we have lived through this year. She warns the fascists directly that when they come for the rest of us, we will fight them at the gate. She names the ICE raids. She names Minneapolis. She calls out the cowards hiding behind their masks and says plainly that we are coming for them at the ballot box. She names the Epstein files and the violence of the raids in the same breath. And then she lands on the close, the clearest statement of purpose in the whole song: “America, get ready, midterms are at hand. We got to stick together folks and vote to save this land.” It is not subtle. It is not meant to be. Woody Guthrie was not subtle either. That was never the point. The point was to give people something to sing when the moment called for it. Bette Midler looked at this moment and decided it called for it.

Guthrie wrote that song for working people, and Midler updated it for the same people. The federal workers who walk past those banners every morning and keep going. The judge who opened a copy of the Constitution and applied it to a $10 billion self-dealing lawsuit. The security guard I talked to in Washington this morning, who is not a federal employee and has no official power, but who told me what was happening inside those buildings with the quiet certainty of someone who has watched it long enough to know. Who told me that the people who built their careers around this government, who were there before Trump and will be there after, are getting through it the same way people always get through a bad manager. By holding onto each other, by showing up and doing the work that keeps this country running, while the man at the top charges people by the token for the privilege of standing near him.

The celebrities, the writers, the judges, the federal workers, the security guards, the people marching, the people reading this right now. None of us has official power. Yet all of us are the resistance. And all of us, together, are the reason this does not end the way he wants it to. The presidency is for sale, but the resistance has no price tag. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Sunday Message from MeidasTouch Co-Founder, Ben Meiselas, right, ben meiselas daily beastApril 26, 2026. I really look forward to this time with you, just slowing things down a bit, talking directly, and cutting through all the noise together.

The news today is focused on the incident last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The facts are still developing, but what we saw almost immediately afterward tells you a lot. Within minutes, Trump and his team rushed out to politicize it, pushing narratives, talking about the need for his “golden ballroom,” and trying to turn the situation into a talking point about the unlawful war in Iran.

Let’s just call that what it is. It certainly seems like Trump and MAGA are going to try to use this incident to boost their poll numbers and repeat this narrative over and over again. But the American people aren’t buying it. They already aren’t buying it. People see this for what it is. And more broadly, people see what’s happening right now.

They see weakness. They see desperation. They see a war spiraling with no clear end. They see the Strait of Hormuz still controlled by Iran. They see gas prices up, oil at record highs, groceries unaffordable, housing and rent out of reach, and healthcare being ripped away. Americans are sick and tired of a regime of lies, chaos, and constant manipulation.

All of that connects. I’ve been reporting on YouTube, breaking this down, comparing it to Butler, talking about the lack of transparency, the missing medical records, and how these patterns keep repeating. Everything becomes spin. Everything becomes propaganda. And we’re not going to let that slide.

While all of this was happening, I wasn’t at the Correspondents’ Dinner. I wasn’t even in D.C. I stayed right here in California. I took my baby girl to see Disney on Ice yesterday, came home, grabbed a cup of coffee, and got right back to reporting for all of you.

War On Iran, Lebanon

 

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Sanctions Zigzag in New World of Economic Warfare, Alan Rappeport and Ephrat Livni, April 26, 2026. With oil prices in mind, the Trump administration has deployed a haphazard approach to sanctions on Russia and Iran.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared in mid-April that the United States would not extend a waiver allowing the sale of Russian oil. Two days later, on a Friday evening, the Treasury Department quietly issued another 30-day reprieve.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, condemned the waiver, saying, ”Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war.” Senate Democrats called the 180-degree reversal a “shameful” decision.

Then, on Friday, Mr. Bessent told The Associated Press that the United States did not plan to renew the waiver for sales of Russian oil another time. The current waiver ends on May 16.

The about-face on Russian oil sanctions underscored the haphazard state of U.S. statecraft as the Trump administration confronts the fallout from the war it and Israel started with Iran. While the United States could once use its financial might to cripple the economies of adversaries, countries such as Russia and Iran have been using their leverage in energy markets to fight back. That has forced the Treasury Department, which oversees the U.S. sanctions program, to improvise.

The Trump administration rolled out a blitz of sanctions on Friday, targeting 40 shipping firms and vessels that it identified as part of Iran’s so-called shadow fleet of oil tankers as it broadened its efforts to cripple the Iranian economy. The administration also imposed sanctions on an independent Chinese refinery, Hengli Petrochemical Refinery, which is one of Iran’s largest customers for crude oil and other petroleum products.

At a Senate hearing last week, Mr. Bessent said that the decision to extend the Russia license came after developing countries lobbied him to keep more Russian oil on the market while they were in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

“It was my belief we would not do it,” Mr. Bessent said, but added that poor countries have been struggling with the global shortfall of oil.

The White House and Treasury Department had no comment on whether the decision to continue easing the Russia sanctions came directly from President Trump.

The sanctions relief has been filling Russia’s coffers with, by some estimates, as much as $200 million per day, undermining years of work by the U.S. and Western allies that aimed to make it harder for Moscow to pay for its war in Ukraine.

“You don’t have to read ‘The Art of War’ to know that helping your adversaries gain money while you’re at war is a terrible idea,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said while questioning Mr. Bessent at the hearing on Wednesday. “No country has profited more from this war than Russia,” Mr. Coons added, noting that the country’s revenues also help support Iran militarily.

The strategy toward Iran has been equally muddled. The United States last month granted a 30-day exemption allowing the sale of Iranian oil, arguing that it would help curb global oil prices while preventing the Iranians from profiting by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. But this month, the Trump administration changed course, letting the sanctions exemption expire and embarking on “Operation Economic Fury,” with new sanctions on Iran. The U.S. military also extended its blockade on vessels coming in and out of Iranian ports to the waters of the wider world.

ny times logoNew York Times, Islamabad Reopens After U.S.-Iran Talks Fail to Materialize, Elian Peltier, April 26, 2026. Officials had locked the city down, anticipating talks between U.S. and Iranian delegations. But they didn’t happen. “What did I close my business for?” one business owner asked.

Residents of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, lived in a state of quasi lockdown for nearly a week as they awaited Iranian and U.S. negotiators who were expected to gather for high-level talks in their usually quiet city.

But the negotiators did not show up — at least not together.

As the city reopened on Sunday after President Trump canceled the American delegation’s trip to Islamabad, residents and business owners emerged from their barricaded neighborhoods and shuttered shops with a shared grievance: “We all had to close down — we all suffered for one thing that didn’t happen,” said Abdul Haq, a tea shop manager who said he had lost the equivalent of $1,800 in revenue. “What did I close my business for?”

Pakistan has positioned itself at the center of the mediation efforts between the United States and Iran, and its leaders have bent over backward to make Islamabad a convenient venue for talks.

They welcomed Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s Parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, for negotiations in early April, and have since been pushing for a second round.

Last week, there was a possibility that Mr. Vance would make a return trip. This weekend, Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, were scheduled to represent the United States in Islamabad. And on Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, traveled to Pakistan to hold talks with the country’s leaders.

In preparation for it all, Pakistani officials emptied the luxury Serena Hotel, which had hosted the first round of talks. They again sealed off a two-mile perimeter around it, forcing thousands of private clinics, restaurants, offices and banks to close, with no compensation.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Vance canceled his trip after Iranian officials said they would not participate in negotiations unless the United States lifted its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Then on Saturday, Mr. Araghchi left Islamabad before any U.S. officials arrived. Shortly after, Mr. Trump canceled Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner’s trip.

It was the second no-show in less than a week for Pakistan.

More Global News

Israel's once-caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid (right), talks with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022 (Pool photo by Ronaldo Schemid). The two served as prime ministers in a rotation agreement under a prior coalition government, and now plan to merge into a single faction.

Israel's once-caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid (right), talks with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022 (Pool photo by Ronaldo Schemid). The two served as prime ministers in a rotation agreement under a prior coalition government, and now plan to merge into a single faction.

Associated Press via Politico, 2 former Israeli prime ministers agree to merge parties against Netanyahu, Staff Report, April 26, 2026. Two Israeli political heavyweights on Sunday said they would join forces in upcoming elections in a shared effort to unseat longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid served as prime ministers in a rotation agreement as part of a coalition government they formed in 2021. They now plan to merge their parties into a single faction headed by Bennett.

“The move is intended to unite the bloc, put an end to internal divisions and focus all efforts on winning the critical upcoming elections,” Lapid’s Yesh Atid party said in a statement.

Bennett and Lapid scheduled a joint news conference later Sunday.

The 2021 coalition agreement ended 12 years of Netanyahu rule. Bennett served as prime minister for the first year until their coalition fractured. Lapid then held the top job as caretaker prime minister for the final six months until new elections brought Netanyahu back to power.

Lapid has served as Israel’s opposition leader since that time, while Bennett took a break from politics.

The two men have ideological differences. Bennett is an Orthodox Jew with hard-line views toward the Palestinians, while Lapid is secular and seen as more moderate. But they enjoyed a close working relationship during their short-lived coalition.

Their alliance is aimed at uniting a fragmented opposition that appears to have little in common beyond their shared hostility toward Netanyahu.

ny times logoNew York Times, Israel’s President, Putting Off Decision on Pardon for Netanyahu, Will Push for Plea Deal, Isabel Kershner, April 26, 2026. President Isaac Herzog has decided not to issue a pardon to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption case at this time, and instead will seek mediation, officials say.

Israel FlagFor months, President Isaac Herzog of Israel has deliberated over the politically fraught question of whether to grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his long-running corruption trial. It’s a highly contentious issue that has divided Israelis and drawn pressure from President Trump, who has aggressively intervened on Mr. Netanyahu’s behalf.

But Mr. Herzog does not plan to give Mr. Netanyahu a pardon anytime soon. Instead he will first try to initiate a mediation process to reach a plea deal, according to two senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of Mr. Herzog’s thinking.

Mr. Herzog, the officials said, believes that there are many options beyond the binary pardon-or-no-pardon choice, and that the main role of Israel’s president is to foster unity. So he does not plan to say yes or no to Mr. Netanyahu’s request for a pardon at this stage, the officials said, preferring to try to resolve the issue through negotiations.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue is so politically sensitive.

In response to a request for comment, Mr. Herzog’s office said in a statement: “President Isaac Herzog has stated on several occasions that he regards reaching an amicable solution between the parties as an important public interest. As for the decision on the pardon request, the president will act solely in accordance with Israeli law, guided by his conscience, and in the best interests of the state of Israel.”

The prime minister’s office and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Netanyahu, 76, a conservative, has been on trial for almost six years. Charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, he is battling three separate but interlocking cases centered on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage of him and his family.

He denies all wrongdoing and says he is the victim of a political witch hunt by a liberal “deep state,” finding a kindred spirit in Mr. Trump in that regard. The American president has pressed Mr. Herzog hard for a pardon and called him “disgraceful” and a “weak and pathetic guy” for not already granting one.

Israel is deeply divided over the issue. Polls indicate that about half of all Israelis oppose a pardon. Opinions are split roughly along political lines, with conservatives more sympathetic to the prime minister.

Mr. Herzog is acutely aware that the atmosphere in the country is tense, the officials said, because of the wars in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, and with national elections slated to take place within six months.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Though the president’s role in Israel is largely ceremonial, one of the few powers Mr. Herzog has is granting pardons. A decision either way would be momentous and defining for both his and Mr. Netanyahu’s legacies and for the country’s future trajectory.

The officials who spoke of Mr. Herzog’s plans declined to elaborate on the potential outlines of a deal at this point, before the sides were even on board with mediation.

A plea agreement usually involves an admission of wrongdoing by the defendant and some kind of sanction. Israeli legal experts have said that any plea deal should be conditioned on Mr. Netanyahu agreeing to resign from public office.

U.S Governance, Politics, Elections

MeidasTouch Network, This Weekend in Politics, Bulletin 357, Ron Filipkowski, ron filipowskiright, April 26, 2026. Trump and Republicans have predictably seized upon the shooting incident at last night’s WHCA dinner to push for suppression of free speech and dismissal of the court case that is temporarily halting some of his beloved ballroom construction.AP: “Video showed the suspect running past security barricades as Secret Service agents ran toward him. One officer was shot in a bullet-resistant vest but was recovering. The gunman was tackled to the ground and was not injured, but was being evaluated at a hospital.”

… CBS reporter Jennifer Jacobs: “The shooting happened on the level above the ballroom where the dinner was. I don’t think people hearing about this - or even those of us in the room - realized how far from the president, VP and other guests this incident was. It was on another floor, up some stairs and several sets of security away.”

… Reese Gorman with NOTUS: “I was talking with a GOP lawmaker at the WHCD last night right after the shooting who was appalled at the lack of security entering the Washington Hilton. There were 0 magnetometer or security checkpoints prior to entering the Washington Hilton. All you needed to do to get in was flash a ticket or a screenshot of an email, there was no actual inspection of what you showed anyone.”

… “In my case they didn’t even check my phone or ticket they let me through because I was with someone who had already flashed their ticket. You didn’t reach your first and only security checkpoint until you went down the escalator and were right outside the ballroom. No ID’s were checked. There’s significantly more security at some Trump rallies I’ve been to. And this dinner had the President, VP and Speaker in attendance.”

… Karoline Leavitt on Fox right before the event started: “This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room, so everyone should tune in.”

… Minutes after the shooting, Dep. WH Chief of Staff and former Trump golf caddie Dan Scavino got up and tried to lead attendees in a “USA! USA!” chant by screaming it out several times. Not one person joined him and he walked out.

… Trump then held a press conference at the event:

“When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone.”

“This is not a particularly secure building. And I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all the attributes of what we have planned at the WH. It’s a much larger room and much more secure, it’s got bulletproof glass. That’s why we need the ballroom.

“I lead a pretty normal life, considering, you know, it’s a dangerous life. I think I’m, I think I handle it as well - as well as it can be handled. To be honest with you, I’m not a basket case.”

“We’re not going to cancel things because we can’t do that. We wanted to stay tonight, I will tell you, I, I fought like hell to stay, but it was protocol—they said, please, sir.”

He said he wants the event to be rescheduled because he has a great speech ready: “I was all set to really rip it. I’ll have to save it. I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight. I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”

… Kash Patel then praised Trump: “Mr. President, you inspire them 24/7, 365 You give them the resources that they need and you know, they know that you have their back, and that is a changing dynamic in this country and that’s why you saw a brave Secret Service agents respond immediately, swiftly, subdue and take down the suspect and safeguard the lives of thousands of individuals at that hotel.”

… Monica Crowley, Chief of Protocol at the WH: “Once again, you witnessed the Hand of God tonight.”

… Franklin Graham posted: “After three assassination attempts, some people say that President Trump is one lucky man. I don’t think luck has anything to do with it - I believe it is the hand of God. What do you think?”

… I think Franklin Graham is a nepo-baby charlatan who weaponizes the Bible to advance his political agenda.

… Immediately after the incident, MAGA supporters received their marching orders and blasted out coordinated propaganda posts on X trying to use it as justification for Trump’s ballroom monstrosity.

… Which also includes Sen. John Fetterman these days: “We were there front and center. That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the US govt. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the WH ballroom for events exactly like these.”

… Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) took it a step further and said taxpayers should pay for it: “Any consideration of DHS reconciliation instructions this week and beyond should provide for construction of a secure ballroom on WH grounds.”

… Dep. AG Todd Blanche then sent a letter to the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding they dismiss their lawsuit against the ballroom: “You lawsuit puts the lives of the president, his family, and his staff at grave risk. I hope yesterday’s narrow miss will help you finally realize the folly of your lawsuit.”

… Former MAGA influencer and Elon Musk baby-mama Ashley St. Claire: “All of MAGA is paid and they coordinate their messaging in lockstep via groupchats. All of these people came to the conclusion that after what they saw at the WHCD, their first thought was ‘Trump needs his ballroom’? One of the main groupchats in which they coordinate this messaging is literally called ‘Fight, Fight, Fight!’ after the ‘attempt’ on Trump’s life in Butler”

… Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) received quite a bit of ridicule after she suggested that actor Ben Stiller may be involved or complicit when he made this 3-word post: “Got it done.” Mace responded: Got what done?” Her reply was hit with this Community Note: “He was rooting for the Knicks to win their game against the Atlanta Hawks. And they did.”

… Journalist David Shuster: “Last night, CNN, TMZ, CBS and others reported the dinner gunman was ‘confirmed dead.’ In fact, he was alive and had not been shot. (Just shot at). At a dinner honoring WH reporting, the rush to be first instead of being accurate was on full display. Speaks volumes.”

… Daily Mail on the shooter: “On LinkedIn, he describes himself as: ‘A mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth.’ Allen earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the CA Institute of Tech and later a M.S. in Computer Science from a CA State Univ. During his time at Caltech, Allen listed his involvement in the Caltech Christian Fellowship.”

… CA-based elections analyst Rob Pyers on shooter: “Registered as a No Party Preference voter in LA County. FEC records show a single $25 contribution via ActBlue to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.”

… From the shooter’s manifesto, which he sent to his family minutes before the incident:

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. (Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)”

“Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest. In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)”

“I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this admin. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

… Seems a bit odd that he would exclude Patel from his hit list. Wonder what the reason is for that?

… CBS: “Allen’s brother had notified New London PD (CT) of the alleged manifesto he had sent to his family members prior to the incident. Family members told investigators Allen would regularly go to the shooting range to train with his firearms. The official said Allen was part of a group called ‘The Wide Awakes’ and attended a ‘No Kings’ protest in CA.”

… Trump then posted Sunday morning: “What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the WH!”

… Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) was on CNN. Dana Bash: “You and your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. Do you think twice about that when something like that happens? Raskin: What rhetoric do you have in mind? Bash: That he’s terrible for this country and so on and so forth.”

… Todd Blanche on CBS: Q - “The alleged shooter had multiple weapons. In DC, open carry is not permitted. You just said he traveled from CA across the country by train. How did he do that? Blanche: This isn’t about in my mind changing the law, or making the laws more restrictive around firearms. Host: I’m asking about crossing state lines with firearms. Blanche: I don’t think that’s something we should be focused on.”

… Mehdi Hasan: “They want to use the alleged assassination attempt to build a ballroom (!) and crack down on the left but not touch gun laws, oh no, never that.”

… Peter Doocy on Fox: “We should expect in the coming days to hear about major security improvements - that could include Trump having to wear a bullet-proof vest when he is out in public.”

… When the announcement was made that the dinner was canceled, that started a run on people grabbling bottles of wine and champagne off the tables. Some for takeout later, others decided not to wait.

… While multiple corporate media outlets reported that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were heading to Pakistan to meet with the Iranian delegation led by their foreign minister, readers of this Bulletin on Friday knew that the whole thing was another typical Trump admin Friday afternoon charade to manipulate the markets.

… I documented in the Friday Bulletin how multiple Iranian officials repeatedly denied that they would attend any meeting with the US and were calling BS on US media reporting this - specifically singling out Axios and CNN for laundering Trump admin propaganda on phantom peace talks. I also documented how the price of oil dropped right after those false reports on Friday.

… But Trump continued to lie about it: “You probably heard that we canceled the trip. We have all the cards. We’re not going to spend 15 hours in airplanes all the time, going back and forth, to be given a document that was not good enough. So, we’ll deal by telephone, and they can call us any time they want. If they want, they can call me. We have all the cards. We won everything.”

… Trump then said he was not going to try to send Vance, Witkoff and Kushner to Pakistan again since Iran keeps rejecting him: “We’re not going to be traveling 15, 16 hours to have a meeting with people that nobody ever heard of. Too much travel. Takes too long. Too expensive. I’m a very cost-conscious person.”

… He said this on the tarmac in Palm Beach as he flew on AF1 there for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for his crypto investors before flying back to the WHCA dinner in DC the next day.

… Middle East analysts Danny Citrinowitz: “The assumption that a naval blockade will compel Iran’s current leadership to abandon its nuclear program, missile arsenal, and regional proxy network is as flawed as the belief that the Iranian regime can be toppled from the air, or that eliminating Khamenei would lead to meaningful regime change.”

… NBC: nbc news logo“US military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair. The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump admin attacked, hitting dozens of targets across US military bases in 7 Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite comms infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft.”

… “In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the US base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years. The US bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families.”

… NYT: “All 4 Black Republicans in the House are leaving Congress next year: 3 are seeking statewide office, and one is retiring because redistricting in his state effectively boxed him out of his seat. The exodus is a reflection of the striking and persistent lack of diversity in the GOP ranks of Congress.”

… There is no Black Republican House candidate favored to win a House seat anywhere in the US during the midterms, which would leave the House with no Black Republican representatives in 2027.

… DCCC spokesperson Nebeyatt Betre: “Republicans won’t have any Black members in the next Congress because Republicans have no interest in actually representing Black voters.”

… NYT: “During President Trump’s first month in office, his admin upended much of the flagship global HIV program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. The Zambian govt went into emergency mode, desperate to ensure that people with the virus could continue to receive lifesaving medications. Crucial aspects of the program had to be scrapped - interventions that had helped stop the spread of the virus and protected the most vulnerable people.”

… “Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced US support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump admin has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian govt to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the US expanded access to the country’s mineral resources. If Zambia doesn’t sign, officials warn that Washington could cut off all of its HIV aid, a situation health officials here say would be disastrous.”

… Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC): “I have been clear from the start: the US Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Jerome Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence, and it needed to end before I could support Kevin Warsh’s confirmation. I take DOJ at its word: the investigation is closed, and any appeal of Judge Boasberg’s ruling will be with respect to legal principles and not for the purpose of reissuing subpoenas.”

… Only a criminal referral from the IG would cause a reopening of the investigation.With these assurances, I look forward to supporting Kevin Warsh’s confirmation. He is an outstanding nominee, and it is time for the Fed Reserve to move beyond this distraction and return its full attention to its mission.”

… Trump continued to claim on Fox today that Democrats cheated in the VA redistricting referendum: "I happen to think there was a lot of cheating going on in Virginia. We were leading all day long - the Republicans. All of the sudden there was a ballot drop."

… The Salt Lake Tribune: “Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary plans to build a massive hyperscale data center project in Box Elder County. The board that oversees the state’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, approved a series of resolutions to move the multibillion-dollar project forward, agreeing to move fast and charge far lower taxes than usual to help O’Leary ‘lure the hyperscalers’ to UT.”

… O’Leary posted on Facebook: “Luckily, in Utah, I found 3 senators and Gov. Cox, pro-business, pro-data centers, but the ball’s back in their court now. We’ve announced that we need every incentive we can get out of that state because we have to raise billions to build this power, and then the data centers that come afterwards.”

… “MIDA usually imposes a 6% energy use tax on its developments. But to stay competitive with others trying to land deals with the same companies, board members were asked to approve a sharply reduced rate for the project’s data centers. The board agreed to set it at 0.5%.”

… “Its first phase is expected to require about 3 gigawatts of power - nearly matching UT’s average statewide electricity use of roughly 4 gigawatts. At full buildout the campus would reach 9 gigawatts, more than double the state’s current total energy consumption.”

… WaPo: “The top holders of Trump’s meme coin were rewarded Sat with a lavish conference at Mar-a-Lago, where they received Trump-branded swag, listened to industry evangelists and scored facetime with the president. Trump’s crypto has flagged in popularity, and its top buyer has sued the Trump family’s other crypto business.”

… “The top 297 investors joined 18 ‘global superstars,’ including boxer Mike Tyson, motivational speaker Tony Robbins and prominent crypto executives and investors. Guests received a Trump-branded fragrance, a commemorative poster and a ‘Fight Fight Fight Red Beauty Watch,’ which typically retails for $499, promoters say. The top 29 VIPs received a ‘very, very special’ talk about the history of Mar-a-Lago.”

… Trump drained the Reflecting Pool and had workers painting the ground underneath it blue so it would look more like a swimming pool.

… Trump made a post where he claimed it was a mess when Obama was president. It received the following fact-check Community Note: “These images are identical, note the clouds and floating birds are the exact same, except the left image has been altered to make the water appear dirtier than in the original image. The original image was also taken in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.”

djt handwave file
ny times logoNew York Times, The Trump Administration Has Changed Almost Every Aspect of Food Stamps, Linda Qiu, April 26, 2026. Legislation and regulatory tweaks enacted over the past year have altered who is eligible, what recipients can buy and how much some receive in benefits, among other changes.

President Trump and his top officials have cast a sharp decrease in the number of food stamp recipients over the past year as evidence of economic progress and increasing self-sufficiency.

But the decline of more than three million participants since Mr. Trump took office to December 2025 is the result of some of the most consequential changes and the largest funding cut to the program since its inception.

Through legislation and regulatory tweaks over the past year, the administration and its allies in Congress have achieved a long-held conservative goal of shrinking the safety net, reshaping how the federal government defines need for low-income beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Among the alterations: who is eligible, who must work to receive benefits, how much beneficiaries will receive, what can be purchased, what grocery stores that accept SNAP must stock on shelves, how states and counties administer the program and how much localities are paid by the federal government.

Combined, the moves signal a shift in the program’s goals and how it has historically operated, said Tracy Roof, a professor at the University of Richmond, in Virginia, who is writing a book on the political history of food stamps.

“This is major,” she said. “The program is really, really changing.”

Supporters argue that the revisions will rein in a bloated program by encouraging able-bodied participants to work and to eat healthy food, and by incentivizing states to reduce paperwork errors, while keeping SNAP benefits generous.

In an opinion essay in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote that SNAP had “turned into a handout that threatens to trap Americans in a vicious cycle of government dependence.”

“From Day 1, the Trump administration has been tirelessly fighting to reform this broke program so that it serves families who need it most,” she wrote.Editors’ PicksThe Japanese Designers Changing Men’s WearTwo Sisters, Two Husbands, a Toddler and a House in the Bay AreaA New Manifesto for Children’s LiteratureImagePeople lining up to enter the Salem Pantry. The Agriculture Department last fall canceled the government’s annual report measuring food insecurity, an assessment it had conducted since the 1990s.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration tried to cap the program by tightening eligibility and reducing benefits. But whereas those efforts were more explicit about their end goals, the Trump administration has added bureaucratic hurdles, shifted costs to states and made other changes that are “really, probably, long-term, a way to cut the program” as well, Ms. Roof said.

Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, signed into law last July, made some of the farthest-reaching moves. It enacted stricter work requirements for a broader swath of people, eliminated eligibility for certain lawful immigrants like refugees, capped future increases to benefit amounts, altered how deductions for utilities and internet bills are calculated and phased out funding for a nutrition education program. Altogether, the changes amounted to the largest cut in federal funding for SNAP, $186 billion, or 20 percent over a decade.

The Agriculture Department, seeking to carry out the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, has also modified how benefits are administered. It began last May to approve waivers allowing states to prohibit purchases of sugary drinks and proposed a regulation in September requiring retailers that accept food stamps to stock more varieties of staple foods.

Even more changes may be on the horizon. The Agriculture Department has drafted, but not yet issued, a regulation narrowing a policy that allows states to automatically enroll participants who already qualify for other types of government assistance. By one estimate, that would remove six million more people, including 1.8 million children, from SNAP.

The administration has taken a fundamentally different approach to SNAP than many of its predecessors, not hesitating to cut off the program or use it as a political cudgel. The agency declined to fund full SNAP benefits during a federal government shutdown last fall, disrupting the program for the first time. It has also repeatedly asked states to turn over sensitive personal data on SNAP participants and threatened to withhold benefits if they do not comply.

Proponents of smaller government often argue that SNAP has expanded in recent years at an unjustifiable rate, possibly outpacing need. The changes enacted by the administration are sorely needed to tame a ballooning program, they say.ImageAn explainer of SNAP rules in a snack aisle at a grocery store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Credit...Thalassa Raasch for The New York Times

Over the past 20 years, as more and more eligible people have begun to participate, annual enrollment has increased from 25 million people in 2005 to over 40 million in the years since the Great Recession, while annual expenditures have tripled to over $100 billion. And in the past decade, the participation rate in the program has surpassed the poverty rate.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the president was “strengthening SNAP for the Americans who need it by ensuring these programs are sustainable for future generations.”

Since January 2025 to December, the month with the latest available data, SNAP participation has declined from nearly 43 million to under 40 million. That number is likely to tumble further as the data accounts for the new restrictions taking effect and as states absorb more of the cost. Millions of households will also receive smaller benefit amounts, have more limited purchasing options or face additional barriers to obtaining their benefits.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the domestic policy law’s stricter work requirements would reduce monthly participation by about 2.4 million people. (Under the law, adults under 65 without children under 14 can receive benefits for only three months every three years unless they work, volunteer or participate in work training for at least 80 hours a month.)

In South Carolina, Mandee Wyrick, a single mother to two teenagers, said her household’s monthly benefits had decreased by a third, or around $250. She became ineligible for SNAP last month because she no longer meets those work requirements. Ms. Myrick, who used to do contract work for homeless advocacy organizations in Oregon before she moved, has tried in vain to find a new job, applying to anything that would allow her to continue to home-school her 14-year-old son. (“He just missed the cutoff,” Ms. Wyrick said.)

kevin warsh hearing

ny times logoNew York Times, Key G.O.P. Senator Says He Is Prepared to Advance Nominee for Fed Chair, Tony Romm and Colby Smith, April 26, 2026. Senator Thom Tillis said he had received assurances from federal prosecutors that eased his concerns, setting the stage for a key committee vote on Kevin Warsh, shown above. 

The Senate is set to proceed with Kevin Warsh’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve, after a pivotal Republican lawmaker, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said on Sunday that he was prepared to lift his blockade and lend his support toward confirmation.

For weeks, Mr. Tillis refused to advance Mr. Warsh or any other Fed nominee while the Trump administration investigated the current chair, Jerome H. Powell, in an inquiry that many have described as politically motivated.

But Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said on Friday that the Justice Department would drop the matter, which focused on cost overruns in a renovation of the Fed’s headquarters. Even though Ms. Pirro said that she would “not hesitate” to reopen the criminal investigation, her move to stand aside still proved sufficient for Mr. Tillis, who said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was ready to move forward with a key, first committee vote on Mr. Warsh.

“They have made it very clear that the current investigation is completely and fully ended,” Mr. Tillis said of his conversations with the Justice Department.

The senator said those discussions gave him the assurances he needed “to feel like they were not using the D.O.J. as a weapon to threaten the independence of the Fed.”

Mr. Tillis’s vote is pivotal in determining whether Mr. Warsh, who served as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, will be confirmed by the time Mr. Powell’s term officially ends on May 15. While Mr. Warsh enjoys broad Republican support, Senate Democrats have called him a “sock puppet,” given President Trump’s insistence that he would pick only someone who supported lower rates to replace Mr. Powell.

Republicans hold a slim 13-to-11 majority on the Banking Committee, which oversees the Fed, meaning Mr. Tillis’s opposition had created an insurmountable deadlock there. Lawmakers are set to hold a vote on Wednesday to advance Mr. Warsh’s nomination to the full Senate.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Safety From Gun Violence Is A Privilege Most Americans Don't Have, Sarah Jones, right, sarah reese jonesApril 26, 2026. Blaming security for the events at the WHCD ignores the fact that most Americans don't have security at all in a culture of easy gun access and escalating violence at groups Trump targets.

politicus usa logoLast night’s still unclear events during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have brought into focus the constant threat of gun violence in the United States.

Thank goodness everyone is okay, but it does beg the question if, after journalists’ horrifying experience of a suspected gunman being taken down outside of their glittering dining room full of elites with the best security in the world, it will change the culture of easy access to guns?

  • Because most Americans don’t have security at all.
  • Security is a privilege for the elite.
  • So it’s not a surprise that the focus by many in the media is blaming “security failings” for the threat.

But it is not just the president and his administration who face threats.

In fact, during Trump’s ten plus years in the political spotlight, violence has increased dramatically against people he targets with his hateful rhetoric:

“… political discourse in the United States became more hateful and divisive. Threats and actual violence against groups and individuals singled out and demonized by Trump increased. The targets of his verbal attacks were most of all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the news media collectively and individual journalists, and well-known politicians, mostly Democrats. There was a rise in bullying incidents in schools against minority students…Trump’s aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language was seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.”

In 2021, Journal of Democracy noted, “What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past. Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts.”

Their graph of terrorism in the United States by ideology shows how far-right violence escalated sharply after Trump entered the arena.

In a country where the Trump administration and some House Republicans have pursued initiatives that could restore gun rights to individuals with criminal records, including potential exceptions for some domestic violence offenses — even with an average of 3 women a day being killed by an intimate partner — it could be argued that everyone needs security.

House Republicans have pushed for a federal law that could allow individuals, including those with convictions for stalking or certain abuse charges, to carry hidden, loaded guns across state lines, overriding stricter state laws.

It’s most likely that the victims of those convicted abusers do not have security.

The average American kid going to school doesn’t have it.

Most Americans do not have security or security checkpoints. They don’t have Secret Service or private security. They can’t blame their personal security when their kids hide under a desk at school during a mass shooting event.Trauma and Guns Go Together

Journalists have been sharing how traumatized they feel after last night’s events at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton.

The event was interrupted by an alleged shooting incident outside the dining room near the magnetometer screening area in the hotel lobby near a security checkpoint. The exchange of gunfire reportedly by the suspect and Secret Service led to the emergency evacuation of Donald Trump, his wife Melania, and other high-ranking officials. A Secret Service agent was reportedly hit but was wearing a bullet proof vest and is expected to recover.

The suspect has been identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, California. The acting US AG Todd Blanche said Trump was “likely” the target of the shooter, and also said “preliminary” findings suggest the suspected gunman was targeting members of the Trump administration. This is still unclear, and unfortunately given the Trump administration’s penchant for lying even in courts of law about evidence, it will be up to the media to vet the facts once/if they are established.

Trump’s own supporters have been raising concerns that they feel he did not investigate the Butler assassination attempt properly, or is unwilling to share the results, as Trump’s support within his own movement has crumbled under the weight of his refusal to go after Epstein predators, the cost of gas after the war he started in Iran, and what they see as Trump being led around by the nose by Netanyahu.Partisan Blame Game

Although MAGA supporters were quick to blame the “left” for the shooting last night, even before any evidence of his identity was put forth, it’s also true that the Trump administration took the deliberate action of deleting a DOJ study from its website which showed that far more domestic terrorism is committed by far-right extremists.

Trump has made it a habit in the past to quickly label shooters far-left, and the media has accommodated this “both sides” narrative without the context that there is one side that experts determined posed the biggest threat, and it was not the left.

Facts are not partisan.

This isn’t about the blame game, but rather the critical point that is MIA in the media, which is that many of the people and groups Trump has targeted so hatefully do not have security and cannot afford it. They are just regular Americans.

The partisan blame game after a shooting has become a part of our culture, which is convenient because it ignores the easy access to guns, the lawmakers who give gun manufacturers cover, and the fact that the president’s divisive, dehumanizing rhetoric has increased violence in our country.

Because facts matter, BBC Verify dug into Allen and found that “Los Angeles County’s voter registration records appear to show he had registered no party preference. According to a Federal Election Commission record, seen by BBC Verify, in October 2024 Allen donated $25 (£18.5) to the fundraising platform ActBlue with the money earmarked for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.” They also report that Allen also took part in Christian fellowship.

Even if politics turn out to be his motive, that is not an excuse to put a target on half of the country. Again, most private citizens do not have private security.Conclusion: Regular Americans Don’t Get Safety And Security

Most citizens from all sides share one thing in common: They are not elites.

Thus, they do not have security checkpoints when they’re attending awards ceremonies to celebrate themselves. They don’t even have their own private security. They send their children to schools where they need to worry about a mass shooter event.

Other cultures have the same mental health issues America does, but they don’t have the same easy access to guns and or high rate of gun ownership.

The broader problem is not the lack of security; it is the guns. It’s the largely unregulated access to guns, the culture of rhetorical violence that has been normalized by the media, and the elite lawmakers who have allowed America’s gun fetish culture to metastasize into being the leading cause of death among children and teens.

It’s not partisan to make this argument “so soon”; rather, it’s moral to make this argument as soon as possible, because it prioritizes the protection of the lives of regular, vulnerable Americans, including children — as all journalists should.

 ny times logoNew York Times, Investigation: U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold and Sells It as ‘American,’ Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios, Visuals by Federico Rios, April 26, 2026. As prices for the precious metal soar, the industry’s guardrails have broken down.

Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.

“To hold a coin or medal produced by the Mint is to connect to the founding principles of our nation,” the Mint declares.

But a New York Times investigation has found that the government’s program of gold sales is based on a lie. The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined, for an insatiable market.

The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.VideoFCongress in 1985 prohibited the Mint from making bullion out of foreign gold because it wanted to insulate the process from human rights abuses, primarily in apartheid South Africa. The Mint has flouted that law, across Democratic and Republican administrations, despite internal warnings.

Now, even President Trump’s 24-karat gold coin, commemorating the United States’ 250th birthday, could come from a swirl of non-American gold from any number of sources.

The Mint, the biggest name in the global market for investment gold coins, is an example of how the industry’s guardrails have collapsed. Gold prices hover around $5,000 an ounce, about four times the price of a decade ago. That gives criminal organizations and fly-by-night operators a huge incentive to mine in wasteful, destructive and risky ways.

Investors buy gold as a hedge against instability. Nearly every terrorist attack, war and financial meltdown in the past quarter-century has fueled a gold-buying frenzy.

But as prices climb ever higher, wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.

Gold mining funds Sudan’s brutal civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Surging gold prices have helped Venezuela and Iran temper the effects of financial sanctions. Colombia’s biggest cartel, the Clan del Golfo, traffics in gold alongside cocaine — and uses the proceeds to maintain control through murder and bombings. Illegal miners deforest and pollute the Amazon, poisoning people there with mercury. Terrorist groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda, are getting into the gold business, too.

ny times logoNew York Times, Measles Surge in South Carolina Ends After Sickening Nearly 1,000, Teddy Rosenbluth, April 26, 2026. It was the largest outbreak in recent U.S. history.

A large measles outbreak in South Carolina that sickened nearly 1,000 people, a vast majority of whom were unvaccinated children, was declared over on Sunday.

The outbreak, which began in October and became the largest since measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000, led to 21 hospitalizations. Some of those patients developed severe complications such as pneumonia and brain swelling.

State public health officials declared the measles outbreak over after reporting no new cases in the region in 42 days, the standard measure for determining an outbreak’s end.

Most of the cases were in Spartanburg County, where a close-knit, evangelical Slavic community bore the brunt of the cases and where childhood vaccination rates have been falling in recent years. Just 89 percent of school-age children were up to date on their required immunizations, including the measles, mumps and rubella shots, this academic year. That was down from 94 percent in the 2021-22 school year. About 95 percent of a community needs to have the measles vaccine to stem the spread of the virus.

The outbreak was contained, in part, because of a vaccination effort led by local clinics, pharmacies and doctors who together administered nearly 4,000 additional doses of the measles, mumps and rubella shot in the county compared to the year before.

But state health officials also noted that the virus, which is highly contagious, sickened so many unvaccinated people in the area that there were no more vulnerable people to infect.

Even those who avoided infection experienced significant disruptions during the outbreak. More than 870 students had to quarantine, which kept them home from school for weeks at a time. Some unvaccinated students were exposed to the virus on two separate occasions, leading them to quarantine twice, for 21 days each.

Local health officials said they were relieved to put the outbreak behind them but acknowledged that the community would likely have to grapple with the consequences of the outbreak for years to come. Measles can cause “immune amnesia,” when the virus wipes out protection children have acquired from other infections. This can leave them more susceptible to these illnesses, like skin infections and the flu, for months or years.

And in very rare cases, the virus can also cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis , a degenerative condition that causes brain swelling and can occur up to a decade after the illness. It is almost always deadly.

“Will we let out a big sigh of relief? Yes,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, chief medical officer at the state’s department of public health. “But we will not just throw a big party and never think about measles again.”

There are still several ongoing measles outbreaks in the United States, including in Florida and Utah. The number of measles cases in the United States hit a 34-year high in 2025, and the country is on track to surpass that record this year.

The federal health department has drawn scrutiny for its handling of the outbreaks under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At a hearing this week, Mr. Kennedy — who has long cast doubt on vaccines — repeatedly defended his track record and offered one of his strongest endorsements of the shot yet: “We have advised every child to get the M.M.R. That’s what we do,” he said.

The spread of measles internationally or in any part of the United States heightens the risk that a new case will be introduced into another community with low vaccination rates, like the one in Spartanburg County. Last week, South Carolina health officials reported a new case in a different part of the state, unrelated to the recent outbreak. They said that 34 people may have been exposed to the virus. 

Post-Attack Follow Ups

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump pushes for approval of his White House ballroom after the shooting, Luke Broadwater, Ali Watkins and Zach Montague, April 26, 2026. President Trump on Sunday said that the attempted security breach by an armed man at the White House correspondents’ dinner underscored why he should be allowed to build a $400 million ballroom equipped with the latest security features on the White House grounds.

“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media on Sunday morning. “It cannot be built fast enough!” He raised the issue again in an interview with “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News late Sunday morning, talking about the security challenges of the hotel where the shooting occurred.

The proposed ballroom is subject to litigation that has repeatedly slowed the project’s progress — and frustrated the president.

Just over a week ago, a federal judge escalated the legal standoff by ordering a halt to aboveground construction, saying the president appeared intent on skirting a previous order by redefining the ballroom project as a critical national security upgrade.

Judge Richard J. Leon said that adding features like bulletproof windows and other standard security features that exist throughout the White House did not exempt the ballroom project from his directives. “National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Judge Leon wrote.

The president’s ballroom plans call for a 90,000 square-foot structure on the former site of the East Wing. He has said it will be paid for by $400 million in private donations, and has declined to list the donors. The Times has identified some of them.

A former real estate developer, Mr. Trump has rushed the construction with little time for public review, and in his post on Sunday he again decried a lawsuit seeking to block it a “ridiculous campaign by “a woman walking her dog, who has absolutely No Standing to bring such a suit.”

The lawsuit, he wrote, “must be dropped, immediately,” and “nothing should be allowed to interfere” with further construction.

He made similar comments about the need for a White House ballroom at a news conference on Saturday night, only hours after he was rushed from the stage at the Washington Hilton by his Secret Service protection team.

There were no metal detectors set up at the entrances to the Hilton on Saturday night, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom deeper inside the hotel. A security video posted by Mr. Trump showed the gunman sprinting past the security checkpoint before being captured before he could enter the ballroom.

“It’s not a particularly secure building,” he said of the Hilton, before launching into a familiar pitch for the necessity of his ballroom. “It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom.” 

Irish Star, Donald Trump ally condemned for saying she ‘slayed’ at WHCD after shooting, Kathleen O'Boyle, April 26, 2026. Trump supporter Alina Habba is facing backlash from social media users after posting about her '10/10' outfit as chaos unfolded at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. 

alina habba whcd 4 25 2026 gettyDonald Trump ally Alina Habba is facing backlash after posting a photo (at right) showing off her outfit for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner despite an active shooter being on the premises.

irish star logoFollowing the event, Habba, 42, shared photos of herself from the red carpet on X and wrote, “10/10 slayed on the look #WCHD2026.” The post quickly drew criticism online, with many pointing to the wording and timing given the violence that had just taken place at the Washington D.C. event.

One person wrote, “Perhaps not the best verb to use at the scene of a fake assassination attempt.” Another added, “Umm. I don’t think that is the verbiage she should be using after an supposed “assassination attempt” These people are toned deaf af!!” This comes after Karoline Leavitt and Melania Trump were all smiles moments after surviving the shooting.

A third said, “Oh thank god. WHCD was a smashing success then.”

The backlash came as more details emerged about the shooting that disrupted the annual dinner Saturday night, April 25, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. The event, which typically hosts around 2,600 journalists, politicians, and public figures, was underway when gunfire broke out near a secured entrance.

Witnesses described hearing multiple gunshots and immediately taking cover, with some guests diving under tables as confusion spread throughout the venue. Secret Service agents quickly responded, confronting the suspect and taking him to the ground before he could enter the ballroom itself.

Habba is a lawyer and longtime legal spokesperson for Trump.

Editor's Note: Federal judges in New Jersey recently ordered her removal as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, the top federal legal figure for the state, because she had failed to secure confirmation by the U.S. Senate. She had been an attorney for a parking lot company before taking on legal work for Trump and his related causes but has received many legal reverses and expensive sanctions.

In other news from the dinner, top White House aide Stephen Miller, shown below, received extensive mockery on social media sites for seeming to use his pregnant wife as a human shield as they fled the ballroom for safety as the dinner broke up.

 

stephen miller uses pregnant wife as human shield

 

April 25

Top Headline

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.djt kash patel press conference 4 25 2026

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

Other Top Headlines

News Roundups

djt truth social iran 4 25 2026 message

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

More On Iran-Lebanon Wars

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump-allied New York real estate financier Steve Witkoff in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12, 2026 (Pool photo by Agence France-Pr

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump-allied New York real estate financier Steve Witkoff in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12, 2026 (Pool photo by Agence France-Presse). 

Media, High-Tech, Propaganda

  • New York Times, Iran’s Meme War Against Trump Ushers In a Future of ‘Slopaganda,’ Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, April 24, 2026. When the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran started two months ago, online accounts linked to Tehran tried building sympathy with defiant and emotional appeals. They had little impact. Then, as the war dragged on, Iran shifted tactics. It began circulating short animated videos that scorched President Trump and others with biting satire. 

Trump Family Businesses, Insider Deals

  • New York Times, Trump Says He Dislikes Prediction Markets. His Family Invests in Them, Ben Protess, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The White House has warned staff not to wager on government decisions, but his family’s involvement with these firms undermines the president’s message.
  • New York Times, Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater and Andrea Fuller, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The National Park Service increased the value of the contract several times over and then awarded it to Maryland-based Clark Construction, in a process that experts said was highly unusual.
  • Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Spirit Airlines is the Canary in Trump’s Fossil Fuel Mine, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right) April 24, spirit airliines2026. When I first started this post, yesterday morning, WSJ was presenting the question of whether to bail out Sprit Airlines as a debate between two of Trump’s top advisors. Howard Lutnick told Trump he could be a hero by saving jobs, whereas Sean Duffy argued taxpayers would be buying a dud. One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. 

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, supported by Russia and the conservative U.S. group CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee, is shown above at the White House President Trump, another committed supporter. Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, supported by Russia and the conservative U.S. group CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee, is shown above at the White House President Trump, another committed supporter. 

More Global News

zambia flag

April 25

Top Story

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.djt kash patel press conference 4 25 2026

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

ny times logoNew York Times, Live Updates: Suspect Detained After Gunfire Near Dinner Attended by Trump, Luke Broadwater, Michael M. Grynbaum, Shawn McCreesh, Campbell Robertson and Tyler Pager, April 25, 2026. Secret Service officers at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner rushed the president out of the Washington Hilton. The president was unharmed. The F.B.I. said a suspect was in custody.

Here’s the latest.

President Trump was rushed from the stage after gunfire broke out in the hotel where the White House correspondents’ dinner was being held on Saturday night. At a news conference a few hours later, Mr. Trump said a man carrying multiple weapons had charged a security checkpoint before being taken into custody.

The president said a Secret Service officer had been shot, but was saved by his bulletproof vest. A suspect was in custody, and the president said his motive was not immediately clear.

Two law enforcement officials who were not authorized to discuss the matter information identified the man in custody as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif. 

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel.President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued. 

Mr. Trump posted two images on Truth Social showing a man he said was the attacker being detained, as well as a brief surveillance video of a man running past the security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton. In the video, agents drew their guns and appeared to start firing.

The F.B.I. said a suspect was in custody after what the Secret Service called “a shooting incident” near a security screening area at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was being held.

According to the White House press pool, a group of reporters who travel with the president, a member of the Secret Service shouted, “Shots fired,” and agents with guns drawn sprinted through the aisles to reach the president.

Guests were about five minutes into the dinner hour when a commotion occurred toward the back of the ballroom. Gasps were heard and then hundreds of attendees dropped under their seats at their tables. Security officials with weapons drawn emerged on the dais as the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, were quickly escorted out.

Mr. Trump, who was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt during a July 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pa., and rushed to safety a few months later when a federal agent fired on an armed man at his Florida golf club, departed the hotel around 9:45 p.m.

Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo).mike johnson reuters 4 25 2026Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo)

The gunman did not make it inside the large hotel ballroom where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered for dinner around 8 p.m., officials said. A Secret Service agent was shot in his protective vest and in good condition, Mr. Trump told reporters at a White House news conference later in the evening.

Jeanine Pirro oJeanine Pirro, right, the D.C. U.S. attorney, said the suspect was being charged with two counts: using a firearm during a crime of violence, and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. Pirro said that the defendant would be arraigned on Monday in federal court and that she expected more charges to follow.

In a news briefing, the D.C. police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, said that “an individual charged a Secret Service checkpoint” armed with a shotgun, handgun and multiple knives. Carroll said that the suspect had not been struck by gunfire but was transported to a local hospital to be evaluated. A Secret Service agent was shot and was taken to a hospital, where he was “in good spirits,” Carroll said. Carroll said that the security plan for the dinner was established by the Secret Service and that it worked.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

  • Administration attendees: Vice President JD Vance and many members of the president’s cabinet and senior staff were in attendance at the dinner. Among the attendees were Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary; Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary; Robert Kennedy Jr., the health secretary; Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I. Mr. Trump later wrote on social media, “The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition.”
  • Hotel’s history: The Washington Hilton is the same hotel outside of which John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Brags About The Crowd Size After Someone Tried To Shoot Up WHCD, Jason Easley, jason easleyright, April 25, 2026. Donald Trump spoke at the White House after someone tried to enter the White House Correspondents Dinner with a gun, and Trump bragged to the nation about the dinner's crowd size.

The shooter was not able to gain entry into the ballroom area, and it is unclear how far the person got.

politicus usa logoOnce the situation was under control and Trump returned to the White House, the press waited for the president to address the nation.

"So as you know, this is not the first time in the past couple of years that our republic has been attacked by a would be assassin who sought to kill. And Butler, Pennsylvania, less than two years ago, you know, all know that story. And in Palm Beach, Florida, a few months after that we came close. We really had, again, we had some great work done by law enforcement, but in light of this evening's events, I asked that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our difference peacefully."

The same president who started a war with Iran for no reason and sent ICE into the streets of America to kill citizens says we should solve our differences peacefully.

However, even the arrival of a gunman is an opportunity for Trump to brag about crowd size.

Trump said:

"We have to, we have to resolve our differences. I will say. You had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. Those words are interchangeable perhaps, but maybe they're not. But yet, everybody in that room, big crowd, record setting crowd, there was a record setting group of people and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that."

Other Top Stories

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, April 25, 2026. President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.

As nuclear talks restart in Pakistan this weekend, President Trump will confront the complicated legacy of his own decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”

That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.

Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time.

Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.

Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.

Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.

Now, matching or exceeding that diplomatic accomplishment is one of the most complex challenges facing Mr. Trump and his two lead negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who are expected to leave for Pakistan on Saturday.

Mr. Trump is acutely aware that whatever he can negotiate with the Iranians will be compared with what Mr. Obama achieved more a decade ago. While the two countries are still exchanging proposals, and could well come up empty-handed, Mr. Trump is already judging his own, yet-to-be-negotiated agreement as superior.

“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Monday. The Obama-era deal “was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”Editors’ PicksThe Japanese Designers Changing Men’s WearThese Literary Thrillers Explore Hollywood’s Dark SideTwo Sisters, Two Husbands, a Toddler and a House in the Bay Area

Based on Mr. Trump’s often-shifting objectives for the conflict with Iran, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff face a daunting list of negotiation topics, many of which the Obama team failed to address. They have to find a way to limit Iran’s ability to rebuild its arsenal of missiles. (The 2015 deal never addressed Iran’s missile capability, and Tehran ignored a United Nations resolution imposing limits.)

They need to find a way to fulfill Mr. Trump’s mandate to protect anti-regime protesters, whom Mr. Trump promised to help in January when they took to the streets. In fact, those protests were among the triggers for the American military buildup that ultimately led to the Feb. 28 attack.

News Roundups

djt truth social iran 4 25 2026 messageMeidas Touch Network, Saturday Afternoon News and Commentary, Trump 'Cancels' Meeting Iran Never Agreed To, Ben Meiselas,ben meiselas daily beast right, April 25, 2026. Here are the stories we’re tracking today:

  • Trump cancels (as announced above) a trip to Islamabad for talks with Iran that Iran already said were never happening
  • Trump sparks a new international crisis involving the Falklands
  • New photos from USS Abraham Lincoln contradict Pentagon denials regarding troubling food shortages for troops
  • Dozens of U.S. planes are dumping equipment across the Middle East nonstop
  • D.C. hangs Australian flags to welcome King Charles. Only the best people…
  • Trump greeted by video of his Epstein ties on the side of a building near the correspondents’ dinner
  • Trump is focused on renovating pools now
  • A leaked Pentagon email floats suspending Spain from NATO, along with other disturbing plans
  • MeidasTouch’s Adam Mockler’s take on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner absolutely nails it

Let’s get into it.

Trump’s Iran lie collapses as we told you it would

Let me take you back to Friday, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News and told the world, without mtn meidas touch networkhedging, that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were headed to Islamabad, Pakistan to engage in direct talks with representatives from the Iranian delegation. She said Iran had reached out and asked for this in-person conversation. She said the president was “dispatching” them to go hear what Iran had to say.

We said immediately: don’t believe it. It’s not happening.

And here’s why we knew. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi had traveled to Islamabad for pre-scheduled meetings with Pakistani officials as part of Pakistan’s ongoing mediation efforts. Iranian officials were explicit that no meeting was planned with the United States. Iran’s Foreign Ministry made clear that any observations would be conveyed to Pakistan, not delivered directly to Witkoff or Kushner. Iranian adviser Seyed Mohammad Marandi went further, questioning why Iran should extend any trust at all to a process being conducted by two individuals he described as having demonstrated their appetite for war.

Araghchi completed his meetings with Pakistani leadership, thanked them for their mediation efforts, and left today. No Witkoff. No Kushner. No talks.

So what does Trump do? He calls the media and tells them he cancelled the trip. He says he told his people “nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight” to sit around talking about nothing. He posts on Truth Social that there’s “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iranian leadership. He says “we have all the cards.” He says engaging in diplomacy is “too much work.” His words.Image

Think about what just happened. The White House announced negotiations. Iran said there were no negotiations. We said there were no negotiations. Iran left. And now Trump is out here pretending he’s the one who pulled the plug, on a trip that was never happening, to conduct talks that Iran never agreed to.

This is not a negotiating strategy. This is a cover story. And a sloppy one. It’s as if nobody asked Trump to the school dance and now he’s pretending he’d rather just stay home. Poor Donald.

The Wall Street Journal’s editor at large made a comment recently that really cuts to the heart of it, noting that in this conflict, the Iranians have been providing more accurate information than the Trump administration. That’s not a commentary on Iran’s moral standing. It’s a damning indictment of an administration that lies so reflexively, so constantly, that a foreign adversary in the middle of a standoff has managed to be more credible than our own government.

Iran is preparing for war. Their military says so openly. Dozens of U.S. Air Force planes have been moving equipment into the Middle East nonstop. And in the middle of all this, the Trump administration is running market-moving disinformation about negotiations that don’t exist.The Falklands, NATO, and Trump’s war on allies

The humiliation isn’t contained to the Iran situation. Trump has decided this is also the week to go after our actual allies. Again.

The Falkland Islands government is now telling Trump directly to back off, calling him a “bully.” This comes after reports that the Trump administration is entertaining the idea of backing Argentina’s territorial claim over the islands, a betrayal of the United Kingdom that would have been unthinkable under any previous American president. The British response has been swift and pointed, with sentiment in the UK shifting toward the position that if Trump wants to start redistributing sovereign territory, maybe it’s time to revisit a few things about America.

For context: the Falklands held a referendum in 2013. The result was not close. The islanders chose to remain British. That’s the democratic will of the people who actually live there. Trump and his Argentine ally Javier Milei, who functions essentially as a puppet in this arrangement, have decided that doesn’t matter. The UK and the Falklands have a different view.

Then there’s Spain. A Pentagon email has surfaced floating the idea of suspending Spain from NATO over the Iran situation.

Tammy Bruce, who serves as Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN, went on television and delivered a line about a leader whose approval numbers are in the gutter and whose people have lost faith in him. Out of context, you would assume she must be talking about Donald Trump. But no, she was talking about UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The self-awareness is very much lacking with these people.Our troops deserve better

New photos from the USS Abraham Lincoln published by Newsweek this morning show service members receiving food portions that are, to put it plainly, inadequate. This follows previous reporting about sailors across multiple ships — the Gerald Ford, the Abraham Lincoln, the USS Tripoli — receiving minimal nutrition while deployed in the Persian Gulf during an active military buildup.

The Pentagon denies any shortages.

The photos tell a different story. And these new photos come after the Pentagon’s previous denials of any issues the last time similar images surfaces.

Israel FlagTrump has called veterans and service members “suckers and losers.” His contempt for the military as an institution has been on display for years. Now, while he moves dozens of Air Force planes into position across the Middle East and rattles sabers at Iran, the men and women on those ships are losing weight and not receiving their care packages. This should be a five-alarm scandal. In a functioning media environment, it would be.A Saturday morning at Mar-a-Lago

While all of this is happening, Donald Trump is in Florida, having fled Washington, seething, and posting on social media about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is going to look nicer thanks to his renovations than it did under Barack Obama. I don’t know what else to say other than this is truly pathetic stuff.

Trump posted side-by-side images of the pool. One labeled “Hussein Obama.” One labeled “Trump.” Trump is currently having workers paint the pool a brighter shade of blue. That’s what’s occupying his mind this morning.

He’s supposed to return to Washington for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner tonight, an event he has already kneecapped by banning any comedian from hosting, presumably to insulate himself from the mockery he has so thoroughly earned. Whether he actually shows up remains to be seen.

What will greet him if he does: projections of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein displayed on buildings near the venue. Video documentation of his close friendship with Epstein. His administration’s ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files. The cover-up of a child sex trafficking investigation, playing on a loop for everyone arriving at the dinner.

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Morning News and Commentary: Important Epstein News, Food Supply for Troops Becomes Dire,  Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 24, 2026. Why I am boycotting the White House Correspondents Dinner: We should not make today business as usual.

Today is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But instead of attending, I’ll be in Washington, D.C. standing alongside more than a dozen Epstein survivors as they demand justice and accountability from the President and his administration. Overnight, I received exclusive video of a new projection displayed on the building hosting the dinner—calling out the administration’s failures toward these survivors.

While the political and media elite gather to celebrate, there are also serious stories unfolding—from concerns about food rationing for troops to broader questions of leadership and responsibility.

I’ve been clear: I will not be attending tonight’s dinner, despite having the opportunity. CBS is inviting Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Paramount is inviting Brendan Carr. Donald Trump is attending for the first time. That’s their choice. This is mine.

To me, honoring the First Amendment isn’t about black-tie events—it’s about standing with people who are willing to speak out, no matter the cost. The Epstein survivors embody that courage. That’s why I’ll be with them today, and I’ll be sharing what I witness. We should not pretend that today is just business as usual.

If there were ever a moment to support independent journalism, it’s now. We cannot keep pretending everything is normal—because it isn’t. Let’s build something better.

Here’s the news:

More than 480 journalists have signed an open letter urging the White House Correspondents’ Association to confront Donald Trump at its annual dinner over concerns about press freedom. The group argues the event should not proceed as usual given what they describe as ongoing efforts by Trump and his administration to undermine the media. Some have called for a strong public defense of the First Amendment during the dinner, while others are choosing to boycott the event entirely. The controversy highlights growing tensions between the press and the administration ahead of Trump’s rare appearance at the gathering.

New photos shared with Newsweek from aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln appear to show small food portions and limited side items, raising concerns among military families and advocates about troop nutrition and morale. A retired Air Force member said the images were “below standard” and warned that failures in food service and mail delivery could signal broader logistical problems during an extended deployment. Reports also indicate that one service member lost significant weight, and that care packages sent by families have been delayed for months due to suspended mail service to certain military ZIP codes.

Department of Defense SealA particularly alarming detail from the reports is that one service member aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is said to have lost 17 pounds during deployment, according to a family member. That level of weight loss in a relatively short period has raised concerns about whether troops are receiving adequate nutrition while deployed in a high-stress environment. Advocates note that proper food intake is critical not just for physical health but also for maintaining morale and operational readiness, especially during extended missions.

The situation comes as tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain deployed in the Middle East, with additional forces being sent to the region. Critics argue that both food quality and mail delivery are essential to maintaining morale, especially during prolonged operations, and say the reported issues raise questions about overall support systems for deployed personnel.

The Pentagon and U.S. Navy have strongly denied claims of shortages, stating that ships have more than 30 days of food supplies and that meals are nutritionally adequate. Officials also said the mail disruptions were temporary and tied to combat-related logistics, emphasizing that systems are in place to support troops and maintain operations despite the challenges.

Epstein survivors are in Washington, D.C. today, advocating for the Trump administration to fully release related case files. They are gathering on the National Mall to bring attention to their demands and push for transparency. The demonstration coincides with a formal black-tie dinner, White House Correspondents Dinner, attended by Donald Trump and members of the media.

I’ve learned exclusively that in honor of White House Correspondents’ Weekend, a video message highlighting Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is being projected onto the side of a building near the venue where the president is expected to attend the dinner. The display is intended to draw attention to the Epstein files at a moment when political and media figures are gathered for the high-profile event.

Trump spent the evening posting a racist image of Candace Owens on his Truth Social platform:

Donald Trump referred to Greece as “he” and called it “a terrific guy,” a confusing remark that appeared to mix up the country with an individual.

12 March 2025 - Washington, DC - US Secretary of Labor Lori M. Chavez-DeRemer Official Portrait***Official Department of Labor Photograph***Photographs taken by the federal government are generally part of the public domain and may be used, copied and distributed without permission. Unless otherwise noted, photos posted here may be used without the prior permission of the U.S. Department of Labor. Such materials, however, may not be used in a manner that imply any official affiliation with or endorsement of your company, website or publication. Photo Credit: Department of LaborShawn T MooreLabor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, left, resigned after multiple controversies, including alleged misconduct and misuse of funds, which she denied while blaming “deep state” actors. Her departure follows a period of instability in the Department of Labor, marked by staff cuts, low morale, and criticism of her leadership. Union leaders and lawmakers said her tenure weakened worker protections and created ongoing challenges for the agency. Despite her exit, officials warn the department continues to face uncertainty without us labor department logostable leadership.

Iran has warned it will retaliate if the US continues its naval blockade of Iranian ports, with its military calling the action “aggressive” and vowing a strong response. The blockade was ordered by Donald Trump following the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Despite the pressure, Iranian officials say they will not enter negotiations until the blockade is lifted. The standoff highlights escalating tensions and a lack of progress toward a diplomatic resolution.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi shared Tehran’s negotiating demands and concerns about US positions during a visit to Islamabad, according to a Pakistani source. Meanwhile, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are traveling to the Pakistani capital. Iranian state media, however, has denied that any direct talks between the US and Iran will take place.

Six months after a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian conditions remain dire, with widespread hunger, disease, and ongoing Israeli strikes affecting civilians. Most of the population is displaced, living in damaged buildings or tents, while aid delivery remains limited and inconsistent. Negotiations over Gaza’s future have stalled, largely over disagreements about Hamas disarmament and broaderpolitical issues. Aid groups warn that conditions could worsen, especially with rising temperatures and a weakened healthcare system.

amal khalil apThe UK and Finland have jointly condemned attacks on journalists in Lebanon following the death of journalist Amal Khalil, above, in an Israeli strike. In a statement, the UK Foreign Office emphasized the vital role of journalists in covering war and called such violence “unacceptable.” As co-chairs of the Media Freedom Coalition, the two countries urged all parties, including Israeli authorities, to ensure the safety and freedom of media workers. The statement underscores growing international concern over risks faced by journalists in conflict zones.

Israel has carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon, targeting what the Israel Defense Forces said were Hezbollah rocket launch sites. The attacks hit areas including Deir al-Zahrani, Kfar Reman, and al-Sama’iya, north of current Israeli troop positions. The strikes come just days after Donald Trump announced a three-week extension of a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. Despite the extension, the truce has been only loosely observed, with sporadic clashes continuing since it began.

Iran has resumed some commercial flights from Tehran’s main international airport for the first time since the conflict began. Departures from Imam Khomeini International Airport are heading to cities including Istanbul, Muscat, and Medina. The move follows a partial reopening of Iranian airspace earlier this month after a ceasefire with the United States. It signals a cautious step toward restoring normal travel and easing disruptions caused by the conflict.

Ben Cohen was arrested after interrupting a Capitol Hill hearing to confront Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over Gaza. During the disruption, Cohen accused Congress of funding violence in Gaza while cutting domestic programs like Medicaid. Authorities removed him after he shouted his protest during the proceedings.

Palestinians in the West Bank and parts of Gaza are voting in local elections, marking the first such vote since the Gaza war began in 2023. More than 1 million people are eligible, though early turnout has been low at around 15%. Most candidates are affiliated with the Fatah movement led by Mahmoud Abbas or are independents, while Hamas is not participating. The elections take place amid ongoing conflict, political tensions, and continued violence affecting communities in the region.

Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have created the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new data centers through 2027. While she expressed general support for limiting their environmental and energy impacts, she opposed the bill because it did not exempt a major $550 million project expected to bring jobs to the town of Jay. Instead, Mills plans to study the issue further through a new council and has signed separate legislation restricting tax incentives for such projects. The debate reflects growing political tensions nationwide over the economic benefits and environmental costs of expanding data centers.

A 75-year-old American big-game hunter, Ernie Dosio, was killed after being trampled by a group of elephants during a hunting trip in Gabon. He and his guide accidentally encountered five female elephants with a calf, which led to a sudden defensive attack. Dosio, a wealthy vineyard owner and experienced hunter, had a long history of hunting and was also involved in conservation and charity work. His death underscores the risks involved in big-game hunting, even for highly experienced individuals.

sam altmanSam Altman, left, apologized after OpenAI failed to alert authorities about a user later responsible for a deadly mass shooting in British Columbia. The company had flagged and banned the individual’s account for potential violent activity months earlier but decided it did not meet the threshold for reporting to law enforcement. The February attack killed eight people, including family members and school victims, and injured many others. Altman expressed regret and pledged to improve cooperation with authorities to help prevent similar tragedies in the future.

The Parnas Perspective, Friday Evening News and Commentary: White House Braces for 'Political Collapse,' DOJ Brings Back Modern-Day Gas Chamber, Patel Previously Arrested for Intoxication, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 24, 2026. The White House is bracing for what insiders are describing as a political collapse, with even the president’s own advisors acknowledging that his poll numbers are among the worst on record.

As a result, he and his family are expected to face intense scrutiny and what some are calling “political hell” through a wave of investigations. At the same time, the administration is moving to expand the death penalty with new execution methods, including one that critics have compared to a modern-day gas chamber and described as torture. And there is more.

But I want to begin tonight with something more personal. This weekend is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Instead of attending, I will be spending time with Epstein survivors to honor the life of Virginia Giuffre. I believe this moment calls for moral clarity.

Many of you have asked how you can support my work and the work of other journalists choosing to boycott an event that elevates those who attack the press. If you are able, I ask you to subscribe. Your support is helping build independent media, something stronger and more honest than what we are seeing right now.Subscribed

Today is also my daughter’s one-month birthday. Time really does fly. I was sitting with her earlier, and something hit me in a powerful way. The work we are doing here, the work you are helping me build, is about ensuring that she and her generation grow up in a world where trust in media is restored and where a sense of normalcy returns. I will not stop working toward that goal. I know many of you feel exhausted and overwhelmed. I want you to hear this clearly tonight: it will be okay. I am here with you every step of the way.

Now, to the news:

Jim VandeHei, the founder of Axios, described the Trump White House as heading toward a political collapse, citing internal Republican polling that is deteriorating rapidly. He indicated the downturn could cost Republicans control of both the House and Senate, signaling a breakdown in political support. According to his assessment, such losses would almost certainly trigger impeachment efforts against Donald Trump as soon as power shifts.

Justice Department log circularThe U.S. Department of Justice announced plans to expand federal execution methods to include firing squads, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation, citing difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the changes aim to ensure executions can proceed even when certain methods are unavailable. The move follows Donald Trump’s push to resume and strengthen capital punishment policies during his second term. Officials also said the department is streamlining procedures to speed up death penalty cases while continuing to seek new death sentences.

An American Civil Liberties Union report details the controversial use of nitrogen gas in executions, highlighting Alabama’s 2024 execution of Kenneth Smith despite a jury previously recommending a life sentence. Witnesses described the execution as prolonged and distressing, while U.N. experts warned the method could amount to torture and violate international law. The report also raises safety concerns about nitrogen exposure for prison staff and others, citing past fatal industrial accidents. It argues that such methods underscore broader problems with capital punishment, including wrongful convictions and systemic inequities, and calls for the death penalty to be abolished. 

 

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown guzzling champagn while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties..

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown gussling champagne while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties.

Kash Patel was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents, including public intoxication and public urination, according FBI logoto a 2005 letter he wrote as part of a professional disclosure. He described the behavior as an anomaly and not representative of his usual conduct. The incidents have resurfaced amid recent scrutiny and allegations about his drinking, which he denies. A spokesperson said his background was thoroughly vetted and characterized the renewed focus as an attempt to undermine his leadership.

pete hegseth facebookPete Hegseth, right, said the rebranding of the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” reflects a more proactive approach to maintaining peace through strength. Responding to a question about renaming it the “Department of Peace,” he argued that the U.S. military effectively acts as a global guarantor of safety and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize each year. He framed the name change as emphasizing deterrence and assertive action to preserve stability.

Donald Tusk questioned whether the United States would remain “loyal” to its NATO commitments and called on the European Union to become a stronger, more unified alliance. He warned that Russia could potentially attack a member state within months, underscoring growing security concerns in Europe.

The U.S. Justice Department has dropped its criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome Powell, over costly renovations at its Washington headquarters. However, the inquiry is effectively continuing under the Federal Reserve’s inspector general, who is reviewing the project’s multibillion-dollar cost overruns. The move may help advance the nomination of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair, which had been stalled in the Senate.

Karoline Leavitt at her first Press ConferenceKaroline Leavitt, right, said the investigation into Jerome Powell is not over, despite the Justice Department ending its criminal probe. She explained that the case has been shifted to the Federal Reserve’s inspector general and remains a priority for Donald Trump. According to Leavitt, the investigation is continuing under a different authority rather than being fully closed.

Donald Trump criticized a Supreme Court decision on tariffs, claiming it could force the U.S. to repay $159 billion to companies and countries that previously paid those fees. He argued the ruling failed to include a simple clarification that would have prevented the repayments. Trump framed the situation as a major financial loss for the country, suggesting it could have been avoided with minor changes to the decision.

A federal appeals court has rejected Donald Trump’s effort to bar migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border from seeking asylum, ruling the policy conflicts with existing law. The decision marks a significant setback for a key part of his immigration agenda and affirms that only Congress can change asylum rules. The 2–1 ruling sets up a likely Supreme Court battle, as the administration weighs next steps. Advocates say the decision could protect thousands of migrants by preserving their right to apply for asylum.

An Iranian delegation led by Abbas Araghchi has arrived in Islamabad, according to Pakistan’s foreign ministry, to meet with senior Pakistani leaders. The talks will focus on recent regional developments and efforts to promote peace and stability. Araghchi has not indicated any plans to resume negotiations with the U.S., and reports say he will not engage with American officials during the visit. Meanwhile, a U.S. delegation led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner is expected to arrive in Islamabad shortly.

A former staffer who accused Eric Swalwell of rape is now cooperating with an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. The woman alleges assaults in both New York in 2024 and California in 2019, and has retained new legal counsel. The probe was launched shortly after her claims became public, leading Swalwell to withdraw from the California governor’s race and resign from Congress. Swalwell has denied the allegations and said he intends to defend himself. Anwar Ibrahim said Malaysia is negotiating with Iran to allow two Malaysian-owned fuel tankers to pass after facing restrictions, despite earlier clearance. The vessels have already exited the Strait of Hormuz, though details on the limitations were not provided. One tanker has returned to Malaysia, while another is expected to arrive soon. A third vessel remains stuck at port due to technical issues.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continues despite a three-week extension of the ceasefire, with both sides accusing each other of violations. Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli soldiers and vehicles in southern Lebanon and claimed it shot down an Israeli drone. The Israel Defense Forces said it struck Hezbollah sites after rocket fire into northern Israel and reported killing several fighters. Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue acting against threats, accusing Hezbollah of undermining the ceasefire.

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

The New Republic, Trump Suffers Staggering Legal Loss in Quest to Ban Asylum, Hafiz Rashid, April 24, 2026. The president cannot enforce his executive order preventing immigrants from claiming asylum. President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban immigrants from claiming asylum at the southern border was blocked in a federal court Friday.

new republic dailyThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2–1 that Trump could not deport immigrants “under summary removal procedures of his own making” or suspend their rights to apply for asylum, even if they cross the border illegally.

Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, and J. Michelle Childs, appointed by Biden, ruled against Trump, while Trump appointee Justin Walker ruled in the administration’s favor. The three-judge panel upheld a ruling from U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in July, who said that Trump’s January 2025 executive order ending asylum claims for those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border went against federal law.

“Barring foreign individuals who are physically present in the United States from applying for asylum and, if they make the statutory showing that they are eligible, from being considered to receive it cannot be squared with the statute,” Childs wrote in her ruling.

Last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller railed against the lower court’s similar conclusion, calling Moss a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court,” which is where the case is likely headed next. Asylum claims have plummeted under Trump, who has fired immigration judges and pushed mass deportations despite multiple defeats in court.

 

 

southern poverty law center

 

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

The Contrarian, Political Opinion: The Trump Regime’s Heinous Attack on a Legendary Civil Rights Organization, Norman Eisen, right, norman eisen Smalland Tom Joscelyn, April 25, 2026. The Trump administration’s move to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) stands as the latest in a string of preposterous abuses of power and the continued weaponization of our justice system.

I know many of us were alarmed into action by prior controversial investigations involving high-profile figures (e.g., Leticia James, James Comey). This week’s indictment is perhaps an even more brazen smear — one that raises the stakes for the deployment of government authority against civil society organizations.

I spent time this week on other injustices that you, Contrarians, are enabling me to contest — including David Ellison’s Paramount-Warner merger and my forthcoming court appearance arguing for summary judgment on the renaming of the Kennedy Center. But this publisher’s note spotlights the SPLC battle. It’s a stark example of the erosion of contrarian logoinstitutional norms and the chilling effect such actions could have on free press and expression. These concerns underpin a Contrarian special report I co-wrote with my colleague Tom Joscelyn, a senior adviser for Democracy Defenders. We’ll be posting that at noon ET here at The Contrarian. In it, we scrutinize the details of the indictment to share a definitive takedown. You won’t want to miss it! Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (left) and FBI Director Kash Patel announce the SPLC indictment. (Department of Justice)

Here’s a sneak peek, followed by our usual weekly roundup:

During a press conference on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the SPLC had been criminally indicted by a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. “There is nothing political about this indictment,” Blanche insisted. Anyone paying attention knows that is a lie. This DOJ attack on the esteemed SPLC is a travesty.

This sham regime has unethically abused its power in this ridiculous attack on a legendary civil rights organization. As my fellow former presidential ethics counselors Richard Painter (George W. Bush), Virginia Canter (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton), and I (Barack Obama) wrote in a statement issued shortly after the indictment, we will not stay silent while the administration weaponizes the tools of law enforcement to attack groups it disagrees with.

This grievance is not a new one. MAGA Republicans have been gunning for the SPLC for years. During a congressional hearing late last year, for instance, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) portrayed the legendary civil rights organization as a bogeyman out to get conservatives and demanded a full investigation into how the DOJ, FBI, and other federal agencies had long relied on the center’s work. Other leading MAGA Republicans have loudly complained when the organization called out their hate.

Donald Trump’s corrupted DOJ and FBI have found a way to use the court system to act out MAGA’s revenge fantasy. Absurdly, the Trump regime alleges that instead of seeking to “dismantle” white supremacist groups — the center’s mission for the past 55 years, during which time it helped take down the Ku Klux Klan — it was surreptitiously paying extremists as part of some convoluted conspiracy. Blanche accuses the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Patel claims the SPLC “allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.”

These allegations are a smear. None of them withstands scrutiny.

The indictment centers on the SPLC’s use of paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups. That is not unusual. It is often difficult to get inside groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government or impose their racist vision on the country. The FBI itself regularly uses informants, and the “courts have recognized” that it “is lawful and often essential to the effectiveness of properly authorized law enforcement investigations.”

Indeed, the SPLC provided intelligence from its informant network to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI — a fact not included in the indictment. The exclusion of any mention of the longstanding working relationship between the SPLC and the FBI is outrageous and undermines the entire premise of the case. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI,” Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president, said in a video defending his organization.

Patel knows Fair’s statement is true. Patel severed “all ties” between the FBI and SPLC in October 2025, as he wrote on X. Patel’s statement is an admission that the SPLC had those ties and was providing intelligence to the bureau. In fact, before Patel ended the relationship, Republican congressmen and conservative activists frequently complained that the FBI was cooperating too closely with the SPLC.

Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC’s use of informants was part of a “scheme and artifice” to deceive donors. Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson alleges in the indictment that though SPLC’s “stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country” it was “unbeknownst to donors,” secretly using “donated money … to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”

However, the indictment utterly fails to explain how these payments to extremist leaders undercut the SPLC’s stated mission. Nor does it say how anyone working for the center intentionally deceived donors. Nor could it; if you surveyed donors to the organization, they have already stated or would almost undoubtedly say that investigating hate is exactly what they wanted to support and that these claims are reprehensible.

The DOJ’s entire case centers on the SPLC’s alleged payments to ten informants inside extremist groups. Our special report, which will be posted here at The Contrarian at noon today, details the facts regarding these informants. The report makes evident that not a one justifies the criminal charges brought against the SPLC.

Please check it out! As you’ll read, this is hardly a conspiracy to secretly fund extremism or defraud donors. It is simply intelligence work. In fact, it is the type of information-gathering on white supremacist groups the FBI routinely engages in — or at least used to.

The hollow, desperate accusations underscore the extent to which the Trump regime wants Americans to believe that the SPLC, which has fought white supremacy since its founding in 1971, was secretly sponsoring white supremacy. That is utter nonsense.Subscribed

We stand with SPLC and will support the organization however we can.

ny times logoNew York Times, The ‘Lasting Damage’ of Pirro’s Abandoned Fed Investigation, Colby Smith and Tony Romm, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The Trump administration’s attacks on the Federal Reserve have rattled confidence in the central bank’s ability to operate independently before a leadership transition.

The Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, appears to be over. But the ramifications for the central bank are likely to prove much longer lasting.

Justice Department log circularNine months after President Trump made a hasty visit to the Fed’s Washington headquarters and promised to “take a look” at a costly renovation, the administration has concluded its inquiry with seemingly nothing to show. Far from the criminal charges that they once pursued, prosecutors left in their wake a dark cloud over the institution and the person Mr. Trump has chosen to next lead the central bank.

The about-face has removed, for now, the immediate threat of a further escalation against the Fed. It has also potentially cleared a path for Mr. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin M. Warsh, to succeed Mr. Powell, whose term ends on May 15.

What will be far harder to recoup is confidence in the Fed’s ability to operate independently from a White House that has shown little restraint in its efforts to bully the central bank into slashing interest rates.

Even as Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced that the investigation was shutting down, she warned that she would “not hesitate” to reopen the inquiry if warranted. Ms. Pirro added that she had asked the Fed’s inspector general to take over the investigation, even though the internal watchdog had been looking into the matter since July.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Friday that the investigation “still continues” and was simply being taken up “under a different authority.”

Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said she feared “lasting damage” from the investigation into Mr. Powell — not only for the Fed but for policymakers across government.

Until now, she said, officials did not have to worry about repercussions from “taking a strong stance on policy issues in ways that are inconsistent with the president’s agenda.” But that was the sort of pressure that Mr. Powell faced as Mr. Trump sought to force rates down.

Although the Fed cut rates last year, it did not deliver the kind of relief that Mr. Trump wanted. Since January, it has also turned cautious on subsequent reductions, a sentiment that has only grown amid the war in Iran, which has caused an acute energy shock.

“The Fed, so far, has proved resilient in ways that have proved quite helpful for the broader economy,” Ms. Judge said. She added that the country “cannot take for granted” that the Fed “will continue to prove resilient as it takes hit after hit from this administration.”

Since returning to the White House for a second term, Mr. Trump has been consistent in his desire to have more sway over the Fed, which has long set rates free from political meddling. That ability is critical, given the powerful role the central bank plays guiding the economy and ensuring low, stable inflation and a healthy labor market.

For a time, the president’s attacks had largely played out in news conferences and on social media. At one point, he flirted with firing Mr. Powell, but never took that step.

Yet Mr. Trump’s decision in August to try to oust Lisa D. Cook from the Fed’s Board of Governors over unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud was a serious escalation, one now in the hands of the Supreme Court. The investigation by the Justice Department, which specifically targeted Mr. Powell and became public in January, crossed yet another threshold, quickly touching off widespread outrage.

In a rare video, Mr. Powell called out the administration for trying to leverage legal threats to coerce the Fed into lowering rates and warned about the institution’s ability to carry out its duties independently. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed those concerns, with many demanding that Mr. Trump back off.

Mr. Trump’s actions proved especially unpalatable to Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Tillis coupled his criticism with a threat to block any future nominee to the Fed until the investigation into Mr. Powell was resolved. Republicans have a slim 13-to-11 majority on the Banking Committee, giving Mr. Tillis the ability to throw a wrench into confirming Mr. Trump’s pick.

The New Republic, Trump DOJ Announces It Will Start Executing People by Firing Squad, Edith Olmsted, April 24, 2026. Apparently death penalty by lethal injection wasn’t enough for Donald Trump.

The Department of Justice announced Friday that it will resurrect federal firing squads as part of an effort to implement Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to revamp capital punishment.

new republic dailyTrump’s order, signed in January 2025, demanded the attorney general pursue the death penalty on “all crimes of a severity demanding its use,” including murder of a law enforcement officer or any capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.

Under former President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland had paused federal executions. Trump became furious when, before leaving the White House, Biden pardoned 37 prisoners on death row. The Republican kicked off his second term in office with a bloodthirsty decree for more death.

Justice Department log circularThe January order made no mention of firing squads. Still, the DOJ said in its Friday announcement it had directed the Bureau of Prisons to “expand the execution protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad.”

Some view firing squads as more humane than lethal injection, which do not have a 100 percent success rate and sometimes require multiple doses. However, execution by firing squad can also result in prisoners slowly bleeding to death if they are not immediately killed by the bullet.

In March 2025, the Supreme Court allowed South Carolina to carry out the country’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years. Since 1608, at least 144 prisoners have been executed by firing squads in America, most of them in Utah, according to the Associated Press. Firing squads have not gained much traction outside of Utah because they are considered to be barbaric. Currently only five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—allow the use of firing squads in certain circumstances.

ny times logoNew York Times, Man Is Charged With Murder of 2 Missing Florida Doctoral Students, Hannah Ziegler and Isabella Kwai, Updated April 25, 2026. The University of South Florida students were reported missing last week. On Saturday, prosecutors charged a roommate of one student in both their deaths.

A former student at the University of South Florida has been charged with the murder of two doctoral students at the school, one of whom was his roommate, the authorities said on Saturday.

The doctoral students, Zamil Limon and Nahida Bristy, both 27, were reported missing shortly after they were last seen in the Tampa area on April 16.

Mr. Limon’s body was found on Friday morning on the Howard Frankland Bridge in Tampa, about 20 miles southwest of his home near the university’s campus, said Joseph Maurer, a chief deputy of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office on Friday.

The sheriff’s office on Saturday said that it had charged Mr. Limon’s roommate, Hisham Abugharbieh, 26, with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Mr. Limon and Ms. Bristy.

More On Iran-Lebanon Wars

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12, 2026 (Pool photo by Agence France-Presse).

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump-allied New York real estate financier Steve Witkoff in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12, 2026 (Pool photo by Agence France-Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Trump Calls Off Witkoff and Kushner’s Travel to Pakistan for Peace Talks, Luke Broadwater and Pranav Baskar, April 25, 2026. What We’re Covering Today

  • Negotiations: President Trump on Saturday canceled plans for two of his top advisers to go to Pakistan. Earlier, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, left Pakistan after holding discussions with the country’s leaders. Read more ›
  • Lebanon: The fragile truce in Lebanon was extended after talks in Washington this week but has since come under threat as both Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks. Read more ›
  • Strait of Hormuz: Both the United States and Iran are blocking the transit of ships through the waterway, which remains a critical issue in peace talks. Read more ›

President Trump on Saturday called off a trip by two of his top negotiators to Islamabad, Pakistan, just before they were set to leave for talks about a potential deal to end the war in Iran.

“I’ve told my people a little while ago, they were getting ready to leave, and I said, ‘Nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight to go there. We have all the cards,’” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing.”

Steve Witkoff, the special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had been scheduled to travel to Pakistan on Saturday, along with top aides to Vice President JD Vance. Officials in Pakistan have been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end more than a month of war in the Middle East.

The cancellation of the trip is the latest sign that Iran and the United States are far from reaching a deal to end the war. A previous trip to Islamabad by Mr. Vance proved unsuccessful, and the Americans appear no closer to achieving the administration’s political goals, including convincing Iran to turn over its nuclear stockpile and curtail its future program. The two sides are also locked in a stalemate over control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.

Mr. Trump’s decision came after Iranian officials who had been in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials trying to broker a peace agreement left the country.

Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Iranian negotiators held a round of talks with Pakistani leaders but left without reaching an apparent breakthrough. On Friday, Iran’s foreign ministry had said no meeting had been planned in Pakistan between Iran and the United States.

Mr. Trump this week unilaterally extended a cease-fire between the United States and Iran that had been set to expire, saying he wanted to give Tehran a chance to come up with a new proposal to end the war.

The United States recently transmitted a written proposal to the Iranians intended to establish points of agreement that could frame more detailed negotiations. The document covers a broad range of issues, but the core sticking points are the same ones that have bedeviled Western negotiators for more than a decade: the scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the fate of its stockpile of enriched uranium.

The American military has displayed its overwhelming might during the war, successfully striking thousands of targets. But Iran’s theocratic regime, even after its top leaders were killed, has remained in power and has asserted tight control over the Strait of Hormuz, limiting shipping, driving up the price of oil and shaking the world economy.

After leaving Islamabad, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said in a social media post that he had shared Iran’s position on a “workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran” with Pakistani leaders. “Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy,” he wrote, in a post that came after Trump on Saturday canceled plans for two of his top negotiators to go to Pakistan. He did not give details of the proposal., 12:07 p.m. ET

The cancellation of the trip is the latest sign that the two sides are far from reaching any deal to end the war. A previous trip to Islamabad by Vice President JD Vance proved unsuccessful, and the Americans appear no closer to achieving the administration’s political goals, including convincing Iran to turn over its nuclear stockpile or curtail its program. 

 

President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025.President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself "Secretary of War" instead of the congressionally mandated term "Secretary of Defense." 

 

pete hesgeth military collage

Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia. 

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Not Ignorant of Iran Risks; He Is Attempting a Con to Cope with His Failure, Emptywheel, (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 25, 2026. He is not ignorant, and asserting he is lets Trump off the hook for even greater failures than stupidity.

Please read this story, published February 23, describing how, on or about February 17, Dan Caine gave Trump several warnings about an attack on Iran: it would deplete an already depleted munitions stockpile, risk US casualties, and be complicated because the US had no allied support.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.

Separately, in Pentagon meetings this month, Caine also has raised concerns about the scale of any Iran campaign, its inherent complexity and the possibility of U.S. casualties, one person said. The general has said that any operation would be made all the more difficult by a lack of allied support, this person said, speaking like others on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

[snip]

The White House meeting on Tuesday included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller, one person told The Washington Post.

[snip]

Some U.S. officials oppose a limited strike because it could trigger an unpredictable cycle of tit-for-tat violence, including Iranian attacks on U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in the region, said a person familiar with the deliberations.

And now, read this tweet Trump posted in response to the WaPo and an earlier Axios story describing Caine’s briefing.

First two Trump (and Jared and Witkoff) whisperers, then incredibly reliable State and DOD reporters, described Caine warning Trump, and then Trump responded by stating that:

I am the one that makes the decision [I]f [Caine] is told to do so [H]e only knows […] how to WIN

Trump attributed his certainty on this point because Caine “was in charge of Midnight Hammer” in which operation “the Iranian Nuclear Development […] was blown to smithereens by our Great B-2 Bombers.” It had nothing to do with warnings Caine gave. It had to do with the necessity of his own power bolstered by the snuff films Trump saw last summer that made him feel invincible.

If you haven’t gotten the point, read how (as Maggie H and J Swan reported) Trump told Tucker Carlson, within days of this briefing from Dan Caine, that everything was “going to be OK … Because it always is.”

A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump replied.

There is an instinct from people who loathe Trump to attribute to ignorance his serial disclaimers — collected by Aaron Blake — of advance warning of the catastrophe that could result from this war.

Also on Monday, Trump again expressed surprise at Iran’s retaliation against its neighbors. He claimed that “nobody” anticipated that Iran would respond to the US-Israeli strikes by attacking its Gulf neighbors.

“So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,” Trump said. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

The comment was puzzling enough that Fox News’ Peter Doocy pressed Trump on it at a later White House event. He asked whether Trump was surprised that nobody had briefed him on this possibility.

The president doubled and then tripled down.

“Nobody. Nobody. No, no, no, no,” Trump said. “The greatest experts — nobody thought they were going to hit — they were, I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral.”

He then added: “There was no expert that would say that was going to happen. It’s not a question of like, gee, should you have known?”

Trump said something similar to CNN’s Jake Tapper shortly after the war began, calling Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbors “the biggest surprise.”

Treating this as ignorance is a category error, an assumption that Trump treats information like rational beings do. It treats knowledge as a binary: Trump either learns something and synthesizes it into his own rational thought process, or never had the opportunity to learn something. That’s not how Trump’s brain works, in significant part because his brain can only process ways to appear powerful.

He was warned directly of the risks of attacking Iran. He responded to those warnings by insisting that he controlled everything, that he would not face consequences because he never has.

Among the public warnings Blake catalogs to show Trump should have known is this column from Nate Swanson, who worked at NSC on Iran issues before he was ousted in a Laura Loomer purge last year. The column was published the day after Trump’s tweet.

It is easy to see why Trump would believe that the warnings about another attack on Iran are overwrought and that he can repeat his formula of decisive action and a clean exit. But this time is different. I spent 18 years working on Iran in various U.S. government capacities, including as President Joe Biden’s Iran director and on Trump’s negotiating team in the spring and summer of 2025. From that experience, I can see that Trump fundamentally fails to grasp that Iranian weakness will not lead the country to capitulate at the negotiating table. On the contrary, Iran’s present fragility only narrows the space for meaningful compromises. Nor does Trump understand that Iran faces entirely different conditions than it did in June 2025, when it chose to de-escalate. The Islamic Republic now believes that Israel and the United States intend to repeatedly strike its ballistic missile program—the foundation of Iranian self-defense—and that it must be more aggressive to forestall the kind of perpetual assault that could topple it altogether.

Trump’s own behavior also increases the risk of escalation. The president’s ever-intensifying wish to be seen as a historic peacemaker has led him to an unnecessarily binary choice—strong-arm Tehran into a major new deal or use substantial force. And the nebulousness of his motives makes this flash point much more dangerous. Trump seems interested, in no particular order, in demonstrating the prowess of the U.S. military, strengthening his negotiating position, showing he was serious when he vowed in a January Truth Social post to protect Iranian protesters, and differentiating his approach from President Barack Obama’s. This mishmash of objectives contrasts with the focus he brought to his previous successful operations and will make him less prepared if a strike does not yield the expected, swift capitulation. All told, today’s conditions mean that an attack by the United States on Iran could result in unexpectedly deadly retaliation—and a much longer and potentially damaging conflict for Washington.

First Swanson, whom Loomer found either insufficiently loyal or too cognizant of the complexity of Iranians, laid out why Iran would escalate. Then he described in detail how Trump always believed he would get away with ignoring expert advice. Then Swanson explained why Trump was particularly vulnerable to getting things wrong this time.

Swanson included the factor I noted here: on Iran, Trump is motivated by the Narcissistic injury of comparing himself to Barrack Obama.

Trump is facing the Narcissistic injury that has animated his entire political career: Barack Obama’s superiority to him. Trump’s advisors, some of his Gulf allies, most of the world, recognize that negotiating out of this deal is the only way to avoid a counterproductive escalation. But any deal will be worse than JPCOA, which Trump tore up in an attempt to void the history of the first Black president eight years ago. Any current deal will involve more financial benefit for Iran, with no additional limits on uranium enforcement, after such time as Iran has proven its ability to hold the world hostage by shutting Hormuz, after such time as Trump has installed more radical Iranian leaders.

That Narcissistic injury must be tearing Trump apart. He has spent years boasting he would show Obama he could do better on Iran, he tore up an agreement that included most everything Trump could get here (without the Hormuz crisis and a more radical regime), and in hopes to finally prove his superiority, he ignored explicit warnings provided and documented in advance.

I’m not sure what term to use to describe Trump’s bullshit claims (though the term would apply to virtually everything that comes out of his mouth these days). I don’t know whether he knows he is lying or has to believe he didn’t fail this spectacularly and so believes what he says to be true. Perhaps he is wittingly attempting to dodge blame for predictable catastrophe. Perhaps the utterances that come out of his mouth amount to his brain’s attempt to forestall a psychological collapse.

But he is not ignorant, and asserting he is lets Trump off the hook for even greater failures than stupidity.

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Witkoff and Kushner to Travel to Pakistan for Talks on Iran, April 25, 2026. Iran’s military threatened on Saturday to retaliate over the U.S. military’s blockade of Iranian ports.

“If the aggressive U.S. military continues its blockade, banditry, and piracy in the region, it should be certain that it will face a response from Iran’s powerful armed forces,” the military said in a statement carried by Iranian state media. President Trump ordered the blockade in response to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for global energy supplies.

The measure appears to have had little effect in forcing Iran to accept American conditions for a diplomatic agreement to end the war. U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to gather in Pakistan on Saturday for further talks, although it was unclear whether they would meet directly or exchange messages through Pakistani mediators.What We’re Covering Today

  • Negotiations: Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of President Trump’s, and Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, are traveling to Pakistan on Saturday for discussions on the war in Iran. Read more ›
  • Lebanon: The fragile truce in Lebanon was extended after talks in Washington this week but has since come under threat as both Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks. Read more ›
  • Strait of Hormuz: Both the United States and Iran are blocking the transit of ships through the waterway, which remains a critical issue in peace talks. Read more ›

Media, High-Tech, Propaganda

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran’s Meme War Against Trump Ushers In a Future of ‘Slopaganda,’ Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, April 24, 2026. When the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran started two months ago, online accounts linked to Tehran tried building sympathy with defiant and emotional appeals. They had little impact. Then, as the war dragged on, Iran shifted tactics. It began circulating short animated videos that scorched President Trump and others with biting satire.

Iran’s success in spreading these memes has surprised experts who study foreign influence operations. They say the tactics and technology on display during the war will almost certainly be replicated in other international crises, as well as major political events, including the looming elections in the United States.

“It’s spoken to the sort of Gen Z language of the internet in ways certainly diplomats don’t normally do,” said Bret Schafer, a senior director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that has tracked Iran’s activity.

“They have taken a regime that is, I mean, brutal and pretty awful and didn’t have exactly a great global reputation and turned them into kind of a plucky, fun underdog.”

Dozens of accounts belonging to Iranian government officials and diplomats have peppered their social feeds with a previously uncharacteristic edge, reposting biting videos that mock the United States and Israel.

They portray Mr. Trump as an imperialist out for blood or as an incompetent lackey of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, often stoking antisemitic tropes. They regularly suggest the war was launched to distract from the disclosures in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Collectively, the posts by roughly 150 official Iranian accounts gained about 900 million views over the first 50 days of the war, a thirtyfold increase from the same period before, according to an analysis published on Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“They’re talking in a way that’s fundamentally changed,” said Moustafa Ayad, another researcher at the institute. “If you go back two months and look at what they were putting out, it’s nothing like this.”

Propaganda is always adapting, reflecting the era in which it is made. Iran’s deft use of technology, experts say, has highlighted a new era of meme warfare that expands the information battlefield by using the algorithmic engines of social media to undermine an adversary’s political support. The new tactic has been called “slopaganda.”

Iran’s effort, the institute’s analysis concluded, “offers a blueprint that authoritarian actors can replicate in the future.”

Trump Family Businesses, Insider Deals

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Says He Dislikes Prediction Markets. His Family Invests in Them, Ben Protess, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The White House has warned staff not to wager on government decisions, but his family’s involvement with these firms undermines the president’s message.

When a U.S. soldier was indicted on Thursday on charges of using classified information to place prediction market bets, it seemed to confirm President Trump’s lament just hours before that “the whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino.”

“I was never much in favor of it,” Mr. Trump said from the Oval Office, when asked about concerns that federal employees might be leveraging insider information on the prediction markets. “I don’t like it conceptually. It is what it is. I’m not happy with any of that stuff.”

Yet Mr. Trump and his family stand to profit from the very same industry.

The president’s publicly traded media company unveiled its own prediction market product last year. And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has ties to two of the industry’s top firms, including Polymarket, the platform that prosecutors say was used by the soldier for well-timed bets.

The result, ethics experts say, is a jarring juxtaposition between Mr. Trump’s public comments and his family’s private business.

While the president’s criticism of the prediction markets raised the prospect of new regulation, the reality is that little is likely to change. Last year, Mr. Trump’s administration backed away from enforcement efforts against Polymarket, and it is unclear whether regulators will adopt any new oversight measures.

“Presidential statements used to be the gold standard, but this is not true for President Trump,” Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said.

“What he does is more important than what he says,” Mr. Engel said, adding, “I don’t think his comments will bother the prediction markets in the least.

Prediction markets, a fast-growing industry, allow consumers to place wagers on the likelihood of a future event, from cricket match scores to the release date of an album by the Canadian rap star Drake. But bettors can also weigh in on military and national security matters around the world. Some of those outcomes could be known or affected by a small group of decision makers, including those in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

Mr. Trump made his remarks on Thursday, just hours before federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an Army Special Forces soldier who had helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Sgt. Van Dyke, prosecutors said, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation.

He is not the only government employee suspected of placing well-timed bets on Venezuela and the war in Iran. There was a surge of suspicious trading related to the war last month. In response, Congress is considering legislation to limit government officials’ use of prediction markets, while officials in some states are also considering new regulations.

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, the lead Democratic sponsor of legislation that would bar any public official from placing prediction-market bets using nonpublic information they learn in the course of their jobs, has warned about “operational risk” and threats to national security.

It remains unclear whether the Republican-led Congress will advance the bipartisan bill. Asked about the president’s son’s ties to Polymarket and Kalshi, Ms. Slotkin said in an interview last month that she feared the White House could throw up barriers to passing the bill by pressuring Republicans not to support it.

ny times logoNew York Times, Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater and Andrea Fuller, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The National Park Service increased the value of the contract several times over and then awarded it to Maryland-based Clark Construction, in a process that experts said was highly unusual.

To build his mammoth White House ballroom, President Trump last summer chose Maryland-based Clark Construction. Since then, Mr. Trump has repeatedly sung the company’s praises, even saying he wanted it to refurbish projects all over Washington.

In January, government documents show, the Trump administration secretly gave the company a no-bid contract to do another job at a sharply inflated price.

The National Park Service wanted to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The Biden administration in 2022 had estimated the work would cost $3.3 million. But Mr. Trump’s government agreed to pay Clark $11.9 million to do it, and later added tasks that increased the contract to $17.4 million, the documents show.

The agency did so without considering offers from other firms, citing a rarely used “urgency” exception to normal open-bidding procedures usually meant for emergencies like war or natural disasters. By law, federal agencies are generally supposed to seek competing bids to find the vendor that provides the best deal.

Unlike the ballroom project, which Mr. Trump says will be funded by private donations, the bill for the fountain repairs is being paid by the government.

On Friday, Mr. Trump took credit for the repairs. “The first time Lafayette Park Fountains, opposite the White House, have worked in decades,” he wrote on social media. “My Great Honor to have funded this project (and many others!), and helped.”

This contract has not been previously reported. The Trump administration did not post it in public databases of federal spending, although agencies are typically supposed to report new contracts within three business days.

The New York Times obtained internal Park Service documents showing how the contract was awarded. Contracting experts said those documents revealed that the government had repeatedly used unusual procedures to bypass competition for the project and increase the price it expected to pay.

The Park Service, for instance, added more than $1 million to the contract’s cost estimate by accounting for inflation. Twice.

“They just took the cover page of my estimate and just added a bunch of money onto it,” said Stephen J. Kirk, an independent consultant who had estimated the cost of the fountain repairs for the National Park Service in 2022. “I didn’t add those extra millions on there."

The Interior Department, which includes the Park Service, defended the contract but declined to answer specific questions about it.

 

spirit airliinesEmptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Spirit Airlines is the Canary in Trump’s Fossil Fuel Mine, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right) April 24, 2026. When I first started this post, yesterday morning, WSJ was presenting the question of whether to bail out Sprit Airlines as a debate between two of Trump’s top advisors. Howard Lutnick told Trump he could be a hero by saving jobs, whereas Sean Duffy argued taxpayers would be buying a dud. One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. 

howard lutnick wLutnick, left, argued to Trump that the president would see a political win by coming to Spirit’s rescue months before the midterm elections and that the deal could save thousands of jobs, according to a senior administration official and other people familiar with the matter.

Lutnick is the architect of the proposal under consideration by Trump and the company, in which the government would loan the company up to $500 million and receive in return warrants to take a potential significant stake in Spirit, some of the people said. The Wall Street Journal first reported Wednesday morning on the plan, which hasn’t been finalized.

[snip]

Duffy, on the other hand, told Trump that, in his view, making such an agreement with Spirit could have negative political consequences. He told the president he agreed it might save jobs, but he voiced skepticism about what the government is going to get out of possibly having a stake in the business.

Duffy also said that a deal with Spirit could leave voters with a negative impression about the Trump administration trying to bail out a failing company, a move that in the past hasn’t always been popular, the people said.

One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. Scott Perry used pretty plane AI slop to argue that if you shield businesses from consequences of their decisions, “there’s no incentive to act responsibly.”

Teddy Cancun noted that “the government,” not Trump, “doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline,” before blaming Biden just like Perry did.

The persistence with which right wingers blamed the decision by Joe Biden’s DOJ — importantly, as a bid to sustain competition and so cheap flights (as well as jobs) — was a tell of how seriously Trump was considering this plan, because Trump always blames one of his predecessors when he does something unpopular.

The logic here was that Biden destroyed Spirit by challenging the merger in order to sustain competition between airlines, plus jobs, so now Trump has to intervene to save cheap flights and jobs.

Two days ago, Trump was considering floating the airline for a 90% stake in the company. By the end of the day yesterday, Trump declared he wanted to buy it.

President Trump said that the U.S. government could take over Spirit Airlines, the ailing budget carrier that has been negotiating this week for a federal bailout.

“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it. I think we’d just buy it,” Trump said, speaking from the Oval Office Thursday. He said that Spirit’s aircraft and assets were good and that the government could sell the company for a profit when the price of oil fell.

“I’d love to be able to save those jobs,” Trump said. “I’d love to be able to save an airline.”

Donald J. Trump, the serially failed businessman whose addiction to being rescued means he has little incentive to act responsibly, has opined once before that an airline’s aircraft and assets are good. That’s what he said about Eastern’s Shuttle business.

There are a slew of stories about this chapter of Trump’s life, which makes it really weird that Republicans addressed whether the government can run an airline, not whether Trump, personally, has proven he cannot.

This Matt Viser story from 2016 described how the prospect of owning an airline was, first, an ego boost — “like a presidential press conference” — and then a crash, both literally, and figuratively, with Trump getting bailed out as he always does.

“This is something from day one I have said I want to have my name on,” he said at a press conference just as he was about to take over the Shuttle. “I hope my name does a lot for the shuttle, and I hope the shuttle does something for my name.”

Stumbling over his enthusiasm at one point, he called the shuttle a “truly great transportation whatever.”

“Let’s be honest. If anyone else had started an airline, you never would have gotten that many reporters,” he said later. “That was like a presidential press conference.”

He was also asked about what it was like to fly on his own airline, looking down at his properties below.

“Truthfully? Truthfully it was great for the Trump ego,” he said. “I’m not supposed to say that.”

[snip]

The Eastern Airlines Shuttle flight had been a reliable source of revenue for decades. Since the 1960s, the number of shuttle flight passengers had grown every month, without exception, until November 1989, Nobles said.

It dropped. Then it dropped again in December. A recession was coming. As a result of the Gulf War, the price of oil — and, therefore, jet fuel — had jumped.

The Trump Shuttle was successful enough to cover operating costs but not enough to pay down the debt.

It fit a pattern for Trump: making a bet that his product would be so successful that he could pay down massive debt and earn a hefty profit along the way.

This time around, taxpayers, not Citibank, would be on the hook for Trump’s judgment about airplane stock after a crash.

But it’s not just about this airline. After all, the guy who crashed his Shuttle also serially bankrupted his companies, and several of his current companies are running on fumes. Trump’s invasion of Iran is beginning to do the same to parts of the US economy, to say nothing of the global economy.

Joe Biden didn’t create the precipitating need to bail out Sprit. Trump’s own invasion of Iran, and more importantly the unfathomable incompetence not to stave off a Hormuz closure, did. Trump has created a jet fuel crisis far bigger than the one that destroyed his plans for Trump Shuttle.

Spirit’s tailspin, of course, is partly of Trump’s making. The Middle East conflict has ignited an explosion in jet fuel prices, a line item that in average times amounts to 20% to 30% of airlines’ pretax, noninterest costs. Spirit has been operating under bankruptcy protection since August, and just two weeks after the war began, presented an already-fragile reorganization plan in the Southern District of New York. The blueprint projected jet fuel in the $2.20 a gallon range for this year and 2027, and even at those historically low prices, foresaw super-thin operating margins of 0.5%. Now, airlines are paying around $4.20, almost double the prewar sticker and Spirit’s forecast. A study by J.P. Morgan posits that owing to the fuel hit, Spirit is set to lose 20 cents for each dollar of revenue, and add $360 million in operating costs, an amount equal to its cash cushion.

It’s clear that Spirit can’t keep flying—unless Trump indeed orders a huge cash refill from the government. Clearly, keeping America’s leisure and business flyers as happy as possible under the circumstances is the best possible outcome for Trump.

Trump’s claim this is about jobs when he destroyed far more than 14,000 jobs with DOGE is rank bullshit. This is about hiding the damage Trump’s stupid invasion has done to America’s normal way of life. Trump wants to use taxpayer dollars to hide from taxpayers what a catastrophic economic disaster Trump caused with his incompetence.

And if Trump does this, the need will just snowball, at least to JetBlue and Frontier.

“Should the administration afford any sort of cash infusion, we believe JetBlue and Frontier (ULCC.O), opens new tab would be inclined to quickly follow,” they said, adding that ​such a move could eventually draw in larger ​carriers and distort competition across the industry.

One ⁠industry source said other airlines that compete with Spirit have privately voiced opposition to a bailout of just one carrier, even as they face similar cost pressures.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby also struck a skeptical tone this week, calling Spirit’s business model fundamentally flawed and questioning whether it could ​cover its operating costs.

And all that’s the damage Trump has done to the US economy, a petrostate with its own jet fuel capacity. Analysts are only beginning to think through what it will do to other economies, especially less wealthy Asian ones, but even Europe, if this continues to June.

If Europe keeps subsidising consumption, markets will get more out of whack. For one thing, prices for products will keep rising. America, where demand tends to jump in a period of summer road trips, will push them further. Competition for LNG, shortage of which was mostly absorbed by Asian consumers’ self-deprivation and a switch to coal, will also increase when Europe starts restocking gas for the winter.

Fast-depleting stocks make matters worse. Europe’s reserves of jet fuel cover some 50 days of consumption, their typical level. But modelling by Michelle Brouhard of Kpler, a data firm, for The Economist shows that European stocks will fall precipitously if Hormuz flows do not normalise by June. Those in other importing regions may disappear even faster (see chart 2, bottom panel). The outlook could worsen if America, seeking to tame domestic prices, emulates China and bans exports of refined products, which have risen by nearly half since the start of the war.

Trump take capitalism. Because of Trump’s stupidity, countries around the world are being forced to eschew capitalism to keep a quasi-normal way of life afloat.

The billionaire conman who started a war with the belief that it would all work out because it always does is now facing down the certainty that the defining moment of his legacy will not, this time, be OK.

A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump replied.

And his response to that is to get taxpayers to subsidize the illusion of normalcy.

Update: Mike Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom Foundation, comes out against the bailout, though again ignoring that Trump exacerbated Spirit’s woes. Curiously, when it invokes TARP, it doesn’t note whose ineptitude caused that crisis.

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

 

Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, supported by Russia and the conservative U.S. group CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee, is shown above at the White House President Trump, another committed supporter. Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, supported by Russia and the conservative U.S. group CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee, is shown above at the White House President Trump, another committed supporter. 

Public Notice, Analysis: What America can learn from Viktor Orbán’s defeat, Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson, April 24, 2026. "The key was linking Orbán’s corruption to Hungarians’ daily lives."

Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was finally defeated in an election that took place on April 12.

Orbán led Hungary for 16 years, during which time citizens endured a crackdown on free speech, the free press, LGBTQ rights, and immigration. He cozied up with Putin and moved Hungary away from Europe. The MAGA movement saw Orbán as a model — the infamous Project 2025 was heavily influenced by his governance style — so his loss is not just important for Hungary or the European Union, but also in terms of the global fight against right-wing authoritarianism.

Orbán’s defeat offers some lessons for how democracy defenders could potentially win the fight against Trumpism here in the United States. One of the key takeaways is that the opposition, led by victorious Tisza Party candidate Péter Magyar, focused on Orbán’s corruption and what it meant for everyday Hungarians. And as we were reminded yesterday, there’s no leader in the world more nakedly corrupt than Trump.

Kim Lane ScheppeleTo get some expert insight on the fall of Orbán and the reasons Magyar was able to beat him so resoundingly, we connected with Kim Lane Scheppele, right, a professor of sociology and international relations at Princeton University, who has worked in Hungary and actually met Orbán.

“It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on,” Scheppele told us, alluding to all of Orbán dirty campaign tricks and the structural reforms he enacted to entrench himself in power. “By the end, [Magyar] was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.”

“In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them,” she added. “People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there’s too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.”

A full transcript of the conversation between Scheppele and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Thor Benson

A lot of American commentators are attributing Magyar’s success to the fact his campaign focused on an anti-corruption message, and are drawing conclusions from that for US politics. Is that your analysis too, or is what happened more nuanced?

Kim Lane Scheppele

It’s a little more complicated than that, because “anti-corruption” is still pretty abstract to most people. But what Magyar was able to do was link Orbán’s corruption to people’s lives.

There was amazing investigative reporting exposing visible aspects of Orbán’s corruption. You probably heard the stuff about zebras — a drone discovered that there was this little gathering of them near Orbán’s property. It was this visible sign of how ridiculous and expansive the corruption had become.

Corruption became meme-able, and there were other scandals that were happening. These investigative reporters kept turning up one thing after another. The crucial thing that Magyar did was to say, “Orbán’s government is corrupt. Look at the zebras. That is why the hospitals don’t work. Because they’re underfunded. The transportation system is underfunded. The educational system is underfunded. They’re stealing the money.”The Orbanization of the American pressThe Orbanization of the American pressAaron Rupar·November 22, 2025Read full story

The key was linking Orbán’s corruption to Hungarians’ daily lives. “The National Health Service promised you healthcare, but it couldn’t deliver. It promised you an education, and it couldn’t deliver. All of the trains are falling apart, and they’re always late. How come if you travel in the rest of Europe, the trains are air conditioned, but not here?” The visible signs of a corroding social state were blamed on the corruption.

The next through line was that democracy has broken down. “They’ve created an autocracy in which they don’t have to listen to you anymore.” It was a package of things.

It wasn’t just democracy as an abstract issue or corruption or affordability. The Democratic Party in this country tends to run on checklists. “Here’s corruption, here’s another issue, here’s that issue.” They’re all important, but they’re not linked to an ideological framework. Magyar linked the issues to an ideology. “We need democracy back again.”

Thor Benson

In America, everyone understands that Trump is corrupt, but the challenge is linking it to problems people face. AOC strikes me as somebody who is good at that. She says, “You know why they’re taking away your health insurance? Because they’re using the money for Trump’s war.”

Kim Lane Scheppele

Exactly. That’s what Péter Magyar did. He stayed away from the hot-button issues of both the left and right. He said almost nothing about immigration. He said almost nothing about gay rights. He just stayed away from all those issues on which left and right are polarized, and which the Orbán government had used to divide people.

He said, “Look, we’re all in this together, and here’s what we share.” He said the reason we need democracy is because it prevents corruption and ensures that when the government provides things, it does so effectively and for everyone.

Thor Benson

How was Magyar able to deal with the fact that Orbán had totally captured the media?

Kim Lane Scheppele

Yeah, media rigging is a part of this story too. Orbán controls literally all the television stations and radio stations and newspapers of any serious circulation size. That whole block of Orbán media gave virtually no attention to the opposition candidate, unless it was negative. Magyar had no way to get his message out. He was not interviewed once by the public broadcasters.

In Europe, most countries have a public broadcaster, like the BBC or Deutsche Welle. And there was such a thing in Hungary, but it got taken over by Orbán, so they never gave Magyar a minute of time to explain himself.

How do you overcome that? That’s where the opposition basically turned to social media, a couple of independent journalism platforms funded by readers and viewers, and a YouTube channel. That was it."Competitive authoritarianism" and America's slide toward it"Competitive authoritarianism" and America's slide toward itNoah Berlatsky·August 14, 2025Read full story

One great thing about the zebras is that it worked really well on social media. Post a little zebra icon and then everybody knows what you mean. A YouTube channel actually started running news broadcasts, and because it’s YouTube, it was hard for the Hungarian government to take it down. Ditto with social media. We all think social media is the thing that destroyed democracy, but it could end up saving it.

Maybe social media platforms are all that’s left. That’s what the Hungarian opposition moved on to — YouTube and Facebook. The young people got mobilized in this campaign, and they were really good at memes. The Orbán government tried everything. They had a negative press campaign, but they also bugged Magyar’s phone and released snippets of conversations where he was saying negative things about people in his own party.

They sent a girlfriend to him. He had a divorce. He was looking for girlfriends. They sent this woman to him, and then she taped his phone conversations to create scandals around him. There was one point when the Orbán-dominated media got this photograph taken from above of a bed that was all messed up. And then it was like, “coming soon.” Everybody assumed there was going to be a Magyar sex tape. He said, “Look, I’m a healthy 45-year-old man. I have a sex life with consenting women.” He addressed it, then dropped it. The young followers of Magyar started creating these fake AI videos of stuff happening in that room.

The opposition spread pictures of Orbán in bed with Putin and Trump. By the time the Magyar sex tape was expected to drop, there were so many ridiculous things out there taking place in that room that it would have just joined them as yet another fake video. It was pretty brilliant.“Neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party”“Neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party”Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson·June 21, 2025Read full story

There was this other problem, which was that the election system was rigged. Magyar faced the difficulty that votes from the countryside are worth up to three times as much as a vote in the cities. He knew he had the cities in his corner because they would vote for anybody who would take down Orbán, frankly.

But Magyar had to persuade Orbán’s voters. In the absence of the kind of media that they watch, namely television and radio, he would go around to all these villages. He spent two years doing six, seven, sometimes eight villages a day and meeting people and talking to them and asking about their problems and connecting it back to the state stealing their money.

Thor Benson

Wow. There were more dirty tricks in the campaign than I realized.

Kim Lane Scheppele

There were tons. Magyar, at the beginning of his campaign and before he developed extraordinarily steely discipline, got into a bar brawl with somebody. He could have been provoked by Orbán’s people. That’s kind of what I think, but we never could prove it. Somebody punched him, and then he got into this fight and threw somebody’s phone into the Danube River. The public prosecutor, who’s in Orbán’s pocket, came after him with criminal charges.

By this time, Magyar had been elected to the European Parliament, and no state can put a member of the European Parliament under criminal charges unless the European Parliament waives his immunity. The European Parliament refused to do so.

It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on. Orbán had intimidated everybody. You knew that if you stood up to Orbán, he would be able to come after you with whatever it was you needed from the government. Maybe your kid needs to get into college, and almost all the colleges are public colleges. Maybe your spouse is on the chopping block at their job. Orbán had such a reach that they could ensure that you lost your job, couldn’t get your social benefits paid, and couldn’t get unemployment insurance. They were using the power of the state to deny people every material thing that the state can provide.

People kept their heads down. They just said it’s not worth it. Magyar’s campaign was a campaign against fear. He said, “Look, of course they’re after me, but here I am. If I can do it, you can do it.” He brought out lots of people who would then realize, “Oh, my neighbor’s here. I’m not alone. Other people are standing up.” By the end, he was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.

In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them. People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there are too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.

The New Republic, Trump Has Lost Almost All Gen Z Support, Brutal Poll Shows, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, April 24, 2026. Donald Trump has lost all the gains he made with younger voters—and then some.

Young voters across the country overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But less than two years into his term, the MAGA leader has completely lost them.

new republic dailyAn NBC News Decision Desk poll published Friday reveals a stark reversal in Gen Z’s opinion of the president, indicating that just 24 percent approve of Trump’s performance, while 76 percent disapprove.

The nosedive is in no small part due to the war with Iran, and the subsequent cost of living crisis caused by sky-high fuel and oil costs. A collective 81 percent of Gen Z respondents said that they either somewhat or strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran war, and 72 percent said that the U.S. should stop military operations in Iran altogether.

Some 48 percent of polled young Americans said that inflation and the rising cost of living were the most important economic matters to themselves and their families at the moment, an 8 percent increase compared to August 2025.

Meanwhile, roughly 80 percent of Gen Z respondents said that the U.S. is on the wrong track, the highest percentage of any age group polled, and nearly half (47 percent) of polled young adults said that they would choose to live in the past if they could. A minority of respondents appeared optimistic about the future: Just 10 percent said they’d choose to go less than 50 years into the future if the option was hypothetically available to them, and 5 percent said they would time-skip by more than 50 years.

Those polled said that their feelings about the future were informed by their relationship with technology and a “growing discomfort with being connected to the internet at all times,” reported NBC News. The current technological and geopolitical uncertainty has inspired a nostalgia for a less chaotic, less technologically dependent world.

The poll found that 62 percent of Gen Z respondents believed that life will be worse for them than for previous generations. Just 25 percent said that they thought that the quality of life would improve compared to the past, and 13 percent said it would remain the same.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Says Venezuelan Government Can Pay for Nicolás Maduro’s Defense, Jonah E. Bromwich, April 25, 2026 (print ed.). The issue had been hanging over the former Venezuelan leader’s federal criminal case for weeks. Last month, a judge indicated that he was skeptical of the U.S. government’s rationale for blocking the funds.

The U.S. government on Friday evening conceded that the Venezuelan government could pay for Nicolás Maduro’s defense lawyers, an issue that had been hanging over the case for weeks.

In a letter filed in Manhattan federal court, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, said that the Treasury Department had issued amended licenses that would allow defense lawyers for Mr. Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, and his wife, Cilia Flores, to receive payments from their country’s government.

The department had previously blocked those payments, setting off furious protests from defense lawyers.

The development comes a month after a hearing in which the judge presiding over the case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, sharply questioned the government as to why the funds were being blocked. The judge even suggested that if the United States did not change course, he might consider dismissing the case, a suggestion that had been made by a lawyer for Mr. Maduro, Barry J. Pollack.

In the letter, Mr. Clayton said that Mr. Maduro’s lawyers had agreed that the Treasury Department’s concession had rendered the defense’s efforts to dismiss the indictment moot and were withdrawing that request for the time being.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Venezuela? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

American forces seized Mr. Maduro from a compound in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, in January and transported him to the United States. He was charged in Manhattan with conspiracies to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine, along with other counts. Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores, who was charged in the same indictment, have pleaded not guilty. Both are being held in a Brooklyn detention facility while they await trial.

A trial is still months if not years away. But the concession by the administration on Friday evening clears the first major hurdle in the case. The issue first became public in February when Mr. Pollack alerted Judge Hellerstein that the U.S. government was blocking the Venezuelan government from paying him through the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The office, known as OFAC, grants licenses that allow individuals and companies to enter arrangements with countries subject to U.S. sanctions that would normally be barred. Mr. Pollack said that after initially granting a license that would have allowed him to accept payment from Venezuela, OFAC amended that license to bar those payments.

Mr. Pollack argued that the restriction rendered Mr. Maduro unable to afford his services. He said that the decision interfered with Mr. Maduro’s Sixth Amendment right to the counsel of his choice.

At the hearing in Manhattan federal court last month, Judge Hellerstein appeared inclined to agree. He said several times that Mr. Maduro’s right to defense was “paramount” and suggested that the relevant sanctions might be outdated given the renewed relations between the United States and Venezuela.

When the judge indicated he might rule against the government, the lead prosecutor on the case, Kyle Wirshba, suggested that the Trump administration might revisit the issue.

In his Friday letter, Mr. Clayton said that the amended licenses subjected the Venezuelan funds to certain conditions, including that the payments are made with funds available to the country’s government after March 5, 2026, the day that Venezuela and the United States formally reestablished diplomatic relations.

The letter was filed before Judge Hellerstein ruled on the issue. Mr. Clayton said that the prosecution and defense were requesting a status hearing in 60 days, at which the next steps in the lengthy march to trial are likely to come into focus.

More Global News

 us aid logo

ny times logoNew York Times, AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance, Stephanie Nolen, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, April 25, 2026. A once-robust H.I.V. treatment and prevention system, credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, has begun to crumble.

Saulo Kasekela died of AIDS on March 7, in a small town called Mpongwe in the copper belt of northern Zambia. He was a 37-year-old security guard, admitted to the mission hospital two days earlier. After his body was wheeled out of the men’s ward, a nurse set aside his chest X-ray, a clouded smear of lungs devoured by tuberculosis, a hallmark of advanced, untreated H.I.V. infection. A scrawled doctor’s note indicated the X-ray should be saved for medical students.

Of the eight patients in the ward at day, four had AIDS. Lewis Chifuta, 33, was bone thin, feverish and barely able to recognize his siblings when they reached his bedside.

A year ago, in Mpongwe, there was one case like this each month, or maybe two. In January this year, there were 28 new cases; in February, 28 more; in March, seven more.

During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. The Zambian government went into emergency mode, desperate to ensure that people with the virus could continue to receive lifesaving medications.

But other crucial aspects of the program had to be scrapped — interventions that had helped stop the spread of the virus and protected the most vulnerable people, those like Mr. Kasekela.

Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.

The administration says the deal would offer Zambia five years of funding and help to build a stronger system that gives the country more control. But if Zambia doesn’t sign, officials warn that Washington could cut off all of its H.I.V. aid, a situation health officials here say would be disastrous.

What is happening in Mpongwe now is a grim echo of a time that most of the nurses and clinicians here are not old enough to remember. Three decades ago, hospitals in Zambia were packed with young men and women dying agonizing deaths, and the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic had overwhelmed the health system. Life expectancy had dropped to 37.

In 2003, President George W. Bush’s administration launched a historic humanitarian response to the pandemic — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — and Zambia was a focus country. By then, a lifesaving cocktail of antiretroviral medications had beaten back AIDS in the United States and other high-income countries, but the drugs cost tens of thousands of dollars, and almost no one in Africa could get them.

 

zambia flag

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 24, 2026 [Remembering the United Nations -- and its importance], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 25, 2026. On April 25, 1945, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to establish a permanent forum for international cooperation: the United Nations.

Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations, a treaty formalizing the alliance that stood against the fascist Axis powers. The treaty declared that signatories would not sign separate peace agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan and would work together to create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter.

In October 1943 the governments of the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China declared that they would continue to cooperate with each other after the war ended, and that they recognized the need to establish an international organization, “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

To create that organization, representatives from those four nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., in late summer and fall 1944. They hammered out the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals for an international organization called the United Nations. Its purpose would be to maintain international peace and security by acting collectively to stop aggression and settle international disputes, to strengthen ties between nations, and to work together to solve problems.

The organization was based on “the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states,” and membership in it would be open to all such states.

In February 1945, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar world. The Allies had liberated France and Belgium, and the Germans had lost the Battle of the Bulge in late January, while Soviet forces were within 50 miles of Berlin. It was clear that the end of the war in Europe was coming.

At Yalta the three leaders hashed out the last pieces of the proposed United Nations and agreed that “a United Nations conference on the proposed world organization should be summoned for Wednesday, 25 April, 1945, and should be held in the United States of America.” Those invited to the conference would be “the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb[ruary], 1945” and any associated nation that had “declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945.”

On March 1 a visibly exhausted Roosevelt addressed the nation. “A conference of all the United Nations of the world will meet in San Francisco on April 25, 1945,” he said. “There, we all hope, and confidently expect, to execute a definite charter of organization under which the peace of the world will be preserved and the forces of aggression permanently outlawed.”

“This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time,” he said, in reference to the failed League of Nations after World War I, “as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.”

Roosevelt explained: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations—or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.

“It cannot be a structure of complete perfection at first. But it can be a peace—and it will be a peace—based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter—on the concept of the dignity of the human being—and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.”

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and less than two weeks later, on April 25, 3,500 people arrived at the San Francisco conference: 850 delegates and their staff and advisors, along with the staff of the conference. To follow developments, more than 2,500 reporters and observers were also there.

The conference organizers divided the delegates into committees to figure out how, exactly, to make the United Nations work. Together they wrote, and then adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter.

“We the peoples of the United Nations,” the preamble to that document began, are determined “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The document declares the signers “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” It calls for the maintenance of international treaties and international law.

The preamble also called for countries to live in peace with each other, uniting their strength to maintain international peace and security and making sure that “armed force shall not be used” unless it is in the common interest. As Roosevelt and Churchill had called for in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, it called for nations to work together “for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

“To accomplish these aims,” the signatories announced, “[we] have resolved to combine our efforts.” 

Cosmopolitics World Review, Analysis: Ukraine’s New Vibe, Elise Labott, April 25, 2026. I joined @ivodaalder for this week's World Review with Semafor's @PreshantRao and Middle East Broadcasting's @MatthewKaminski.

ukraine flagUkraine: Four years into the war, the assumptions underpinning the Ukraine conflict have quietly but fundamentally shifted. Russia is losing an estimated 30,000 soldiers a month, its economy is showing deep signs of strain, and its spring offensive has yielded virtually no territorial gains.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has transformed itself into what Matt called the Silicon Valley of Europe in defense innovation, pioneering drone warfare and cultivating technology partnerships that major European powers now see as essential to their own rearmament.

Zelensky’s outreach to the Gulf — offering Ukraine’s four years of experience fighting Iranian drones as a calling card — is emblematic of a broader strategic pivot: Kyiv is diversifying its alliances and no longer assuming American support will anchor its war effort. And as Prashant observed, the United States remains necessary for any diplomatic resolution — but it is far from clear where the bandwidth for that comes from, “given that at the moment all eyes in Washington are on the Middle East.” 

April 24

Top Headlines

News Roundups

Trump Watch, Democracy Threats

 

President Trump presides at Oval Office meeting where he fell asleep at his desk in front of cameras one quarter of the way through the meeting before reviving himself and falling asleep again, with additional revival (April 23, 2026).President Trump presides at Oval Office meeting where he fell asleep at his desk in front of cameras one quarter of the way through the meeting before reviving himself and falling asleep again, with additional revival (April 23, 2026)

  • Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: The President is deeply unwell, Heather Delaney Reese, April 24, 2026. At 3:13 pm this afternoon, ten men and women stood behind the President of the United States as he sat slumped in his tall leather chair in the Oval Office. With his face sagging on one side, a lost look in his eyes, and fresh makeup covering the bruises on his hands, it was clear he did not want to be in that room, complaining he has to do this “every single day.”
  • Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Open the Strait. Shut Down Trump, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 20, 2026. On March 21, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours. The strait did not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours, or for that matter, within the next two weeks.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

U.S. Congressional, Defense, Immigration Budget, Civil Rights Updates 

  • Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 23, 2026 [Massive Battleship SNAFU Ahead?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 24, 2026. Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
  • Roll Call, Senate all-nighter puts ICE in Johnson’s court, Savannah Behrmann and Valerie Yurk, April 24, 2026 (print ed.). Behind the scenes, lawmakers also struggled over a FISA deal ahead of an ambitious agenda next week.

U.S. House Redistricting For Virginia Hearing Set

U.S. Inflation, Tariffs, Consumers, Markets, Economy

U.S. Corruption, Crime, Price-Gouging, Justice

  • Popular Information, Info Weekly: Kushner, Kash, and lots of cash, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, April 24, 2026. The UAE has partnered extensively with the Trump Organization and has multiple business ties to the Trump family.Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy.
  • Robert Reich, Opinion: The Worst Neo Robber Baron of Them All, Robert Reich, April 24, 2026. Hint: He's even worse than Musk.
  • Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Spirit Airlines is the Canary in Trump’s Fossil Fuel Mine, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right) April 24, 2026. When I first started this post, yesterday morning, WSJ was presenting the question of whether to bail out Sprit Airlines as a debate between two of Trump’s top advisors. Howard Lutnick told Trump he could be a hero by saving jobs, whereas Sean Duffy argued taxpayers would be buying a dud. One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. 

Global News and Commentary

 

Top Stories

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons, Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan, April 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Pentagon’s rush to rearm its Mideast forces makes it less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China, administration and congressional officials say.

Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.

The Iran war has significantly drained much of the U.S. military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.

The conflict has also underscored the Pentagon’s overreliance on excessively expensive missiles and munitions, especially air-defense interceptors, as well as concerns about whether the defense industry can develop cheaper arms, especially attack drones, far more quickly.

The Defense Department has not disclosed how many munitions it used in 38 days of war before a cease-fire took effect two weeks ago. The Pentagon says it hit more than 13,000 targets, but officials say that figure masks the vast number of bombs and missiles it used because warplanes, attack planes and artillery typically strike large targets multiple times.

White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the conflict so far, but two independent groups say the expense is staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.

In the first two days alone, defense officials have told lawmakers, the military used $5.6 billion of munitions.

To restore the U.S. global stockpile to its previous size, the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. “At current production rates, reconstituting what we have expended could take years,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said this week.

“The United States has many munitions with adequate inventories, but some critical ground-attack and missile-defense munitions were short before the war and are even shorter now,” said Mark F. Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which recently published a study estimating the status of key munitions.

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Isn’t Thinking Strait, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 20, 2026. The president is disengaged from his disastrous war.

bulwark logo big shipAnother day, another Pentagon press conference in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fruitlessly demands Europe get more involved with reopening the Strait of Hormuz: “This should not be America’s fight alone,” Hegseth seethed. “We barely use the Strait of Hormuz. . . . [The Europeans] need the Strait of Hormuz much more than we do, and might want to start doing less talking and having fancy conferences in Europe and getting on a boat.”

Sure, he’s said some variation of this fifty times over the last month—but maybe he just wasn’t petulant enough before. Happy Friday.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Calls for Arrest of Obama and Clinton in Unhinged Posts, Measles Cases Surge, Netanyahu Cancer Diagnosis, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 24, 2026. Trump spent the evening posting dozens of messages on Truth Social, calling for the arrest of Obama and Hillary Clinton for treason, the permanent erasure of the 2020 election, and more. I want to be clear about why I cover these posts: it is important not to normalize this kind of behavior from elected leaders, no matter who they are.

New video footage from inside Iran shows nurses rushing to save babies during US and Israeli bombings on hospitals. Netanyahu has announced a cancer diagnosis. Trump is also facing protests at a dinner hosted by the Ellisons in his honor and in the name of the First Amendment.

This weekend will be busy with White House Correspondents’ Dinner events. I will not be attending. I do not believe in celebrating figures like Brendan Carr, who actively undermine the First Amendment. I will, however, be reporting around the clock to bring you real-time updates.

If you want to support my work, consider subscribing, gifting a subscription, or upgrading your current plan. Let’s keep building independent media at a time when legacy institutions are willing to celebrate figures like Carr.Subscribed

Here’s what you missed:

President Donald Trump posted dozens of overnight messages on Truth Social, targeting political opponents like Chuck Schumer and reviving claims against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He amplified accusations of conspiracies and called for investigations or arrests, while also criticizing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The posts echoed broader administration claims, including a controversial legal case against the SPLC that some former prosecutors say lacks merit. Trump continued by promoting allies’ social media content and reiterating policy positions like ending birthright citizenship, capping off hours of late-night activity.

Trump called for the arrest of Obama for treason.

And of Hillary Clinton:

Trump reiterated false claims about the 2020 election, stating: “The 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.” The remark reflects his continued effort to challenge the legitimacy of the election despite its certification and widespread rejection of fraud claims.

Trump faced protests upon arriving at a high-profile Washington, D.C. dinner hosted by David Ellison, amid controversy over a major media merger and concerns about monopoly power. Demonstrators, joined by lawmakers like Jamie Raskin, criticized the event as emblematic of political favoritism and corporate influence.

The dinner also highlighted turmoil within CBS News following Ellison’s takeover and the appointment of Bari Weiss as a controversial leader, which has led to layoffs, editorial disputes, and accusations of a pro-White House bias. Additionally, CBS’s decision to invite Trump allies to media events has sparked internal backlash, raising concerns about press independence and access-driven journalism.

Harry Enten reported that President Donald Trump currently has the worst net approval rating on the economy at this point in a presidency, ranking below Joe Biden, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter.

A recent Fox News poll shows Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy (D+4) for the first time since 2010.

New research suggests measles is spreading silently in the U.S., with far more cases than officially reported due to underdiagnosis and low testing. Genetic sequencing indicates some outbreaks may have begun months earlier than detected and could be significantly larger—potentially over six times the reported size. Wastewater surveillance and other data also show the virus is more widespread than case counts suggest, especially in undervaccinated communities. This hidden transmission threatens the U.S.’s measles elimination status, as sustained spread may have already exceeded the one-year threshold.

A reporter from O’Keefe Media Group asked whether an Army nuclear chief—accused of sharing classified national security information with someone he met on a dating app—would face termination and prosecution. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded that the official “won’t work here anymore,” making clear the Army nuclear chief has been fired. The brief exchange underscores swift action following the alleged breach, though no details were given about possible prosecution.

At a Pentagon news conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the war in Iran as a “gift to the world,” echoing messaging aligned with President Trump’s framing of the conflict.

Benjamin Netanyahu smile TwitterBenjamin Netanyahu, right, was reportedly diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer without metastasis and underwent targeted radiation treatment following surgery, which successfully eliminated the tumor. Doctors have confirmed there is no evidence of recurrence or spread, and he is now said to be in excellent health. The disclosure of his condition was delayed by about two months to avoid giving Iran potential propaganda leverage during the war.

When asked about concerns over insider trading tied to prediction markets and the Iran war, President Donald Trump responded bluntly: “The world is a casino. It is what it is,” appearing to dismiss the issue rather than directly address the ethics or potential implications.

JD Vance made a cryptic and somewhat flippant remark to a journalist amid speculation about insider trading within the White House, suggesting, “Let Marco Rubio make his Polymarket bet on that first.”

Pope Leo XIV expressed a personal and emotional opposition to war, saying, “I carry in my pocket the image of a Muslim child killed in Lebanon… I cannot be in favor of war,” using the example to underscore the human cost of conflict and his broader anti-war stance.

Poland’s leader trolled Hungary’s Viktor Orban following his election loss.

According to The Guardian, an internal Pentagon email reportedly outlines potential U.S. responses to NATO allies that did not fully support operations in the Iran war. Proposed measures include suspending countries like Spain from key NATO roles and reconsidering U.S. positions on issues such as Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands. The discussion reflects frustration over some allies’ refusal to grant access, basing, and overflight rights, which officials say are a minimum expectation within NATO. The options are said to be circulating among senior Pentagon leadership.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez downplayed a leaked Pentagon email suggesting the U.S. could punish Spain for opposing the Iran war—including a highly unlikely proposal to suspend it from NATO—stressing that Spain remains committed to the alliance while acting within international law. The report reflects growing tensions between European allies and President Donald Trump, whose administration is considering retaliatory measures against countries seen as insufficiently supportive of the conflict, though experts say many such actions would be difficult to implement.

Trump announced plans to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool by adding a new “American flag blue” pool-like surface, aiming to improve its appearance and address maintenance issues. He estimated the project would take about a week and cost around $1.5 million, framing it as a beautification effort inspired by his background in real estate development. However, the proposal is part of a broader push to reshape major Washington landmarks, which has drawn criticism from preservationists and lawmakers concerned about changes being made without sufficient public or congressional input.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds most Americans blame Donald Trump for rising gas prices linked to the Iran war, creating political pressure ahead of the midterm elections. About 77% of voters say he bears at least some responsibility, including majorities across Republicans, independents, and Democrats. The issue appears to be affecting voter sentiment, with 58% saying they are less likely to support candidates who back his approach to the conflict. The findings suggest the surge in fuel costs could hurt Republican prospects in November.

Crude oil prices surged above $105 a barrel amid ongoing uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz and stalled peace efforts involving Iran. Both major benchmarks—Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate—rose sharply, gaining about 17% and 16% respectively over the week. The spike has pushed U.S. gas prices to over $4 per gallon, about 36% higher than before the conflict. Officials warn that consumers may continue to face elevated fuel costs in the near term.

A convoy of six trucks carrying medical supplies has departed eastern Turkey for Iran, according to Turkish officials. The aid shipment left from Van and is crossing through the Gurbulak border. It includes medicines and other essential medical materials. With this delivery, Turkey will have sent a total of nine trucks to support healthcare needs in Iran.

Former U.S. NATO envoy Kurt Volker warned European leaders not to openly criticize President Donald Trump over the Iran war, arguing that doing so could damage transatlantic relations. He suggested leaders instead take a more diplomatic approach to avoid provoking Trump, even as many in Europe strongly oppose the conflict and have called it illegal or misguided. Volker defended Trump’s actions as aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and emphasized the importance of maintaining cooperation between the U.S. and its allies.

A tornado struck the city of Enid, Oklahoma during a severe weather outbreak, causing significant damage but no reported fatalities and only minor injuries as emergency crews continued search and response efforts. Officials, including Kevin Stitt, said the community was “severely impacted,” with damage also being assessed at Vance Air Force Base. Residents were urged to avoid affected areas while first responders and aid organizations worked to assist those impacted by the storm.

Trump Watch, Democracy Threats

President Trump presides at Oval Office meeting where he fell asleep at his desk in front of cameras one quarter of the way through the meeting before reviving himself and falling asleep again, with additional revival (April 23, 2026).President Trump presides at Oval Office meeting where he fell asleep at his desk in front of cameras one quarter of the way through the meeting before reviving himself and falling asleep again, with additional revival (April 23, 2026)

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, The President is deeply unwell, Heather Delaney Reese, below right, April 24, 2026. At 3:13 pm this afternoon, ten men and women stood behind the President of the United States as he sat slumped in his tall leather chair in the Oval Office. With his face sagging on one side, a lost look in his eyes, and fresh makeup covering the bruises on his hands, it was clear he did not want to be in that room, complaining he has to do this “every single day.”

helen delaney reese djtAnd it wasn’t just his words that showed it. He fell asleep only a quarter of the way through.

The nearly hour-long event was supposed to be about health care affordability, but instead, Trump hijacked the discussion in multiple directions that had nothing to do with health care, let alone affordability. He moved from attacking reporters, telling one, “You’re such a disgrace,” to cutting off another and calling him a “wise guy,” to practically admitting he believes Republicans will lose the midterms. And without skipping a beat, he also exposed what “America First” really means to him, bragging about using “Italian granite” in the White House remodel, which was really sourced from Africa and carved in Italy.

And it wasn’t just what the President said that showed us this was another staged event that wasn’t actually about what we were led to believe. Even the placement of people was telling. Trump seated at the desk. Eight men and two women, all in dark suits, strategically packed in behind him. There to laugh at his jokes and to praise him as needed. A visual show of his power, with enablers and pawns used as props. It looked like something we’ve seen before, not in American politics, but in the staging of authoritarian power. Putin uses this arrangement. Mussolini used it. The don at the head of the table, the capos behind him, present not to contribute in overly meaningful ways, but to project loyalty and muscle. It’s a very specific visual language, and someone in that White House chose it deliberately. What it says is simple: these people serve him. He does not serve them. And by extension, none of them serve us.

Behind that performance, and in between the parts he actually cares about, namely his construction projects, he was completely checked out. He lasted just about 19 minutes. Nearly a quarter of the way into an Oval Office event being broadcast live, he fell asleep multiple times while pharmaceutical executives and Cabinet members stood at attention behind him, playing their part in the performance. This is the same man who has spent years calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.” And yet he is the one who keeps falling asleep on camera.

It is worth saying clearly what this is and what it is not. Nobody should mock a nearly 80-year-old man for needing rest. People of his age, people managing whatever he is managing mentally and/or physically, deserve exactly that. That is not the conversation. The conversation is that this man holds the fate of the world in his hands. His decisions affect every person on this planet, whether we like it or not. He holds millions of people mentally hostage through instability and manufactured chaos. He doesn’t govern from a plan. He rules on impulse. And he is asleep at his own desk. That is what we are talking about.

And once again, you could see the bruises on his hand that they attempted to cover with makeup, if you looked closely. And again, this could be a non-issue if there were actually transparency in the White House. We are at war. We are struggling with inflation and affordability. The president keeps attacking foreign countries and threatening to attack more. The entire world has been destabilized.

Yet what we see with our own eyes is a nearly 80-year-old man who has gloated that his favorite meal is fast food burgers, who says he takes more aspirin than his doctor recommends, who has recurring bruises on his hands, and who can’t stay awake during events he knows will be captured on camera.

And none of those things are even the biggest issue. The real issue is the cover-up. We can see it with our own eyes, right in front of us, what is happening, and we are told there is nothing there. In fact, we’ve been told the opposite. That he is in excellent health, both physically and mentally. That he is “one of the healthiest presidents ever.”

That is the architecture of every authoritarian regime: manufacture the lie, repeat it with confidence, and dare the public to trust what they can plainly see.

And that was just the start of this “health care affordability” event. Trump also announced a new pricing deal with Regeneron as part of his Most Favored Nation initiative and TrumpRx, the 17th such agreement his administration has struck with major drug companies.

And then there was the math fiasco, where RFK Jr. tried to use fake arithmetic to argue that you could cut drug prices by 600% and still have to pay. Those of us who are not trying to mislead people know that you can’t actually cut anything by 600%. Trump has repeatedly claimed drug prices have been cut by over 100%, which is mathematically impossible. If prices dropped more than 100%, companies would be paying you to take the drugs. RFK Jr. had already been called out on this exact point by Senator Elizabeth Warren the day before, and he showed up to the Oval Office event and repeated the claim anyway. When Trump was asked about it, he defended it. There are, he explained, “two ways of calculating.” Which we all know there is not.

Then he went further off script. He pulled out photographs of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and announced he was having it resurfaced. The granite surface, he said, was leaking and he claimed, would cost $301 million and three years to properly replace. So instead he called some pool contractors he knows personally and is having it coated with an industrial pool surface for $1.5 million. He initially wanted turquoise, “like in the Bahamas,” but a contractor talked him into “American flag blue.” The pool was last comprehensively renovated in 2012, paid for by $34 million in Obama-era stimulus funding. Now it is getting a swimming pool paint job, rushed to finish before July 4th, the nation’s 250th birthday. A permanent piece of American history, coated like a backyard pool, to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of a man who wanted it to look like the Bahamas.

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

Then came the embarrassing and deeply offensive crowd size claim, where Trump said of the spot where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963: “He had a million people, and I had the same exact crowd. Maybe a little bit more. I actually had more people, but that’s okay.” Reporters were unable to confirm which event of his he was referring to, but his representation is far from reality, and it is profoundly disgusting that he sees MLK as a threat to his own popularity. A man who was not perfect in many ways, but who was pivotal in the civil rights movement and who paid the ultimate price for standing on the right side of history.

And then he directed those reporters to look at the construction outside the Oval Office. Black charcoal granite, he said, going in along the West Wing Colonnade. Beautiful. Magnificent. A million-year life. He was proud of it. As the press was being ushered out at the end of the event, CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe stopped at the president’s desk. “Where did the granite come from?” Trump said it came from Italy. O’Keefe pressed: “So it’s Italian granite?” Trump clarified. “Well, it came from Italy, it was carved in Italy, it came from another location. You know where the location is? Africa.” O’Keefe: “So you have African and Italian granite outside the Oval Office?” Trump: “Correct, is that okay?” And that is what Trump really means by “America First.”

The reporters in that room today tried to hold him to account and paid for it. Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason asked how long Trump was willing to wait for an Iran deal. “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me, Jeff. Guys like you...” Trump named Vietnam, Korea, World War II. Six weeks of war in Iran is nothing, he said, compared to 18 years in Vietnam. A second reporter fact-checked him on his own timeline, noting the war is now in its eighth week. Trump backpedaled; he “hoped” it would be four to six weeks, but he gave Iran “a break.” Then a female reporter asked the plainest possible question: what do you say to Americans who are worried about how long this will take, given that gas prices keep rising? Trump pointed at her. “You’re such a disgrace. Did you hear what I just said? Vietnam. How many years was Vietnam?” She did not flinch. “I understand, sir, but you are past your six-week deadline.” He talked over her. Then O’Keefe asked about gas prices and Trump cut him off mid-sentence. “Can I finish my question, wise guy?” The same O’Keefe who, minutes later, asked where the granite came from.

And it wasn’t just the reporters in that room pushing back against Trump’s authoritarian behavior and lies. The polls tell us the majority of the country is seeing it too. Trump’s overall approval is at 37%, the lowest of his second term. His approval on the economy among registered voters sits at 34% today, according to Fox News, compared to 49% right before Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms, in the same poll, from the same network. These numbers aren’t just bad. They’re historically bad. And he knows it. Which is why he is pushing “creative math” and staging all of these carefully scripted events.

We also saw today that Trump’s reach continues to creep into our ability to have free and fair press. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve Paramount’s takeover of the entire company in a deal valued at $110 billion. Paramount is led by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s closest billionaire allies, a lead investor in TikTok’s U.S. operations, and a man who sat next to Rupert Murdoch in the Oval Office just weeks into Trump’s second term. Tonight, the same night his shareholders voted to approve this deal, he hosted an invitation-only dinner in Washington honoring Trump. Trump attended. The dinner was held at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, the federally funded building the State Department renamed after him last year.

Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller will be his guests at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, attending alongside CBS News, which Paramount already owns. Ellison has reportedly promised Trump sweeping changes at CNN if the deal closes. He says editorial independence will be maintained. The Freedom of the Press Foundation says he has “zero credibility on the issue.” That means CNN, HBO Max, TNT, the Warner Bros. film studio, and the full Paramount catalog, CBS, BET, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, all moving under one roof, owned by a family that is openly, actively, and financially aligned with this administration. Several state attorneys general and European regulators have signaled they may challenge it, and the deal is not expected to close until late this year. But the direction is clear. The consolidation of American media is accelerating in the same environment where the president of the United States is calling reporters disgraces and wise guys in the Oval Office and posting about fake news on Truth Social. This is not a business story. This is a democracy story.

When two of the largest media companies in the world merge, the number of people deciding what gets covered, how it gets framed, and what gets buried shrinks dramatically. Executives who want access to the White House start making editorial calculations that have nothing to do with journalism. We have already seen this happen in this country. We watched Jeff Bezos kill a Washington Post endorsement. We watched the LA Times owner do the same. We watched ABC settle a defamation suit with Trump for $15 million rather than fight it. We are watching corporate media capitulate to authoritarian power and profit from it.

This is how it works in authoritarian regimes. Not always with government censorship or journalists thrown in jail, though that happens too. Sometimes it happens with less noise, through consolidation, ownership, and the slow replacement of editorial courage with business calculation. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán didn’t need to ban the press. He just made sure his allies bought it. In Turkey, Erdogan didn’t outlaw journalism. He restructured ownership until the journalists who remained understood the rules. Trump has studied these men. He has called them winners. He has praised their methods. And now, the media landscape that is supposed to hold him accountable just got one step closer to being significantly smaller.

There are still people doing courageous work inside corporate and legacy media. The reporters didn’t flinch today. Ed O’Keefe didn’t stop. There are journalists at the remaining independent outlets, at regional papers, at nonprofit newsrooms, risking their careers and sometimes their safety to tell the truth. We need to name them. Support them. Refuse to let them disappear quietly. And for the voices that exist entirely outside the corporate structure, the ones who answer to readers and no one else, this moment is exactly why we exist and exactly why it matters that we keep going.

I was on a five-hour flight to DC today, and nearly the entire time I thought about how far we are from where we should be. We have the least qualified and most morally corrupt people in the most important positions, with an Epstein-connected elite enabling all of it. And driving into the city, I was reminded of how beautiful it is. The buildings are steeped in history, in both the good and the terrible. Enslaved people helped build the house Trump now lives in. He is constructing what amounts to an Arc de Triomphe for himself, determined to leave monuments that outlast him. He is fixated on strongmen. On authoritarian leaders. He sees himself as equal parts king and mob boss. Influence, wealth, loyalty, intimidation, secrecy, power, and control are the principles he rules under. Not civility, respect, compassion, care, and duty to the office that so many others have governed under in the past.

And as I drove past so many historic buildings as I entered the city, I felt a heaviness in my heart. I was really looking forward to my time here, but also troubled in a way I couldn’t quite place. And as the sun went down tonight, I finally started to understand it. It’s the proximity to power being abused. To destruction. To a man who has no care for the nearly 250 years of sacrifice that have carried this country. And now we are in a moment where one election could determine what, if anything, our children and grandchildren are left to inherit. It’s another day of living in the in-between. The beauty of what this country is in so many ways, what it could be for everyone, and the reality of what it is today after all that he has done.

But I’m also reminded that none of this is permanent. We still have a country, and there is still time to save it from complete authoritarian collapse. We have to stay focused right now on the elections and, as I say every single time he attacks the press, supporting reporters, both independent media and those still with corporate protections that haven’t completely given in to Trump. We must stand with the reporters who ask the hard questions and make it clear that their work matters. The Warner-Paramount merger is a warning about what happens when those voices get swallowed whole. We need to pay attention.

And for those of us who can, we need to support independent media, because if this merger goes through, independent media will be responsible for an even larger share of holding the line between truth and propaganda. That is why every time he attacks the press, I will say so, to remind us all what is at stake and how we make sure the truth can still be shared. Every time we lose another free and fair news source, I will name it, because that is the last line between truth and propaganda and, by extension, free and fair elections. If you are in a position to support independent voices with a paid subscription, without hardship, please do. Not just mine. As many as you can. That is how economic resistance works. That is how we show up in the numbers that actually matter to them.

The polls show he knows what is coming. His numbers are lower right now than they were before his party lost the House in 2018. He fell asleep at his own press conference today. He got caught putting African and Italian stone on the America First White House. This is not a man in control. This is a man performing control for an audience that is shrinking. We are making our way back to a better future; all the signs are there. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

ny times logoNew York Times, How the War in Iran Is Shifting From Bombardment to a Test of Wills, Anton Troianovski, April 24, 2026 (print ed.). The conflict has morphed into a volatile standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, as the economic costs mount and President Trump faces a political backlash at home.

On Thursday morning, Washington time, a senior Iranian official wrote on X that the country’s fighters were hiding in sea caves near the Strait of Hormuz, preparing to “devastate the aggressors.”

Eighteen minutes later, President Trump posted on Truth Social: “I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat” that is “putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Mr. Trump’s war on Iran, interrupted by a cease-fire that he extended indefinitely this week, has morphed from all-out bombardment to a volatile, costly standoff at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.ImagePresident Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday. Earlier, he posted on social media, “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” in the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

Neither side appears eager to return to the violence that ensnared much of the Middle East before the April 7 cease-fire, though both insist they are ready for it. And neither side is showing signs of capitulating to the other’s demands. The result is round after round of taunts, threats and maritime incidents, with many of the tensions playing out on social media even as the economic costs mount and Mr. Trump faces a political backlash at home.

Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said she had assumed that a diplomatic deal would resolve the standoff quickly, given the economic and strategic costs to the United States of the Strait of Hormuz’s staying closed. But Ms. Maloney said she was now adjusting her expectations amid Iran’s determination to maintain control of the strait as leverage and the strategic quandary that Mr. Trump has found himself in. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Blockade Will Last ‘As Long as It Takes,’ Hegseth Says, Abdi Latif Dahir and Euan Ward, April 24, 2026. Iran has made lifting the blockade of its ports a condition of resuming talks to end the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that U.S. forces had stopped 34 vessels since President Trump imposed the order.

The U.S. Navy blockade of Iranian ships and ports will continue for “as long as it takes,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday. Iran has made lifting the blockade a condition of resuming peace talks with Washington.

Hostilities between Iran and the United States have shifted to the waters in and around the Strait of Hormuz, a key conduit for oil and gas, since a cease-fire paused the war. Both sides in recent days have seized vessels they said were violating their respective restrictions on shipping.

“We have all the time in the world,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon, even as he insisted that the war would not be “endless” and that the United States was not “anxious for a deal.”

But the conflict has significantly drained the American military’s global supply of munitions, and rising energy prices caused by the conflict have put President Trump under domestic pressure to end it.

Mr. Hegseth said that some ships could make it through the Strait of Hormuz. But he also acknowledged that commercial shipping through the waterway was “much more limited than anybody would like to see” in part because of Iran laying mines in the strategic waterway. U.S. military and intelligence agencies are divided on how many mines have been put in the waters.

Separately, the Israeli military said on Friday that it carried out strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, a day after Mr. Trump announced a three-week extension of the cease-fire there, though there were no immediate reports of significant fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.

Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel nor President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon commented on the announcement. Hezbollah did not have representatives at the talks, but a senior lawmaker with the group, Ali Fayyad, said in a statement on Friday that the truce extension did not hold “any meaning in light of Israel’s continued escalation of hostile acts.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

  • Lebanon: Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire overnight in several towns and villages in southern Lebanon, and the Israeli military said early Friday that it had struck two rocket launchers in the region. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel can act in self-defense but not carry out offensive operations against Lebanese targets.
  • High price tag: White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the war so far, but two independent groups say it has been staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.
  • World Cup: Iran’s soccer team will be allowed into the United States to play in the tournament this summer, but not Iranians with ties to the country’s military, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Open the Strait. Shut Down Trump, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 20, 2026. On March 21, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours. The strait did not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours, or for that matter, within the next two weeks.

By April 5, Easter Sunday, the “very stable genius” who is our president had lost patience. He proclaimed that two days later, April 7, “would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

bulwark logo big shipWell, Iran did not open the strait on April 7. And more than two weeks since, after a few days in which a few ships were able to pass through the strait, it is once again closed.

But that’s okay with Donald Trump! Because he’s now apparently in favor of keeping the strait closed. Yesterday morning, Trump adjusted his persona from that of a deranged, genocidal maniac to that of an interested if somewhat befuddled commentator. “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” he informed us. “They just don’t know! The infighting between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!”

But not to worry. Trump reassured us that “We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

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So the Trump administration supposedly has total control and is using that control to seal the strait up tight. The president had been demanding, rather stridently, that it be opened pronto. But “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in 1841. Trump is no little statesman or philosopher or divine. He is, per his defenders, playing nineteen-dimensional international chess. He’s apparently closing the strait in order to pressure Iran—at an indeterminate point in the future—to open it.¹ In any case, before Trump began his war the Strait of Hormuz was open. As of this morning, April 24, eight weeks into the war, it is closed.

Which is bad! It’s contrary to our national interest in many different ways. It’s doing a lot of damage to the global economy. And it’s reinforcing the lesson that Iran’s key chess move in this war, a pretty simple and two-dimensional one that was entirely foreseeable, has succeeded. And when this is all over, the world will remember that Iran’s gambit worked, and that Iran can make this move again in the future.

This is a very bad outcome. Even if we get lucky and end up stumbling into a not-too-terrible short-term accommodation when the strait reopens thanks to various fuzzy agreements and murky accommodations, no one is going to forget that the Iranian regime has established the principle that it can close the strait. Nor will the world fail to notice that Trump launched a war that has failed to achieve its goals (whatever they actually were), undercut our standing in the Middle East, further damaged our alliances in Europe, drawn down our military stocks in Asia, and above all exposed our commander-in-chief as an increasingly unstable, foolish, and reckless old man flailing about on the world stage.

For his part, Trump seems to have decided just to pretend that real damage isn’t being done to the global economy, and to ours, and he’s just going to move on to other matters.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Trump is still plenty active on Truth Social. But his posts and reposts late last night and early this morning are attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center, on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for allegedly organizing the investigation of his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, and on “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” for criticizing the Border Patrol and ICE. At 6:23 p.m. yesterday, Trump shared the important news, “I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL!”

Earlier in the day, at the White House, Trump spent time claiming that the crowd he convened on the Mall on January 6th was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s in 1963. Today he’ll presumably be focused on sharpening the attacks on the media that he’s planning to deliver at Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The fact that Trump is bored by his war is good, insofar as it means he’s somewhat less likely to try truly reckless and irresponsible things that would unleash a chain of events that would be even more damaging to our nation and the world. A demoralized Trump is safer than a megalomaniacal one.

But the mania is still there. And as it becomes increasingly clear that his excursion into the Middle East has been disastrous in so many ways, as voters from Hungary to Virginia weigh in against him, as a midterm debacle for him looms, Trump’s desperation will merge with his megalomania to produce threats to our democracy more dangerous than ever.

It would be good if the seaways for global shipping were reopened as soon as possible. But it’s up to us to continue to work as urgently and effectively as possible to choke off the all-too-many political pathways to Trumpist authoritarianism.

AROUND THE BULWARK

  • Hungary Proved That Liberalism Can Win… Péter Magyar ran against authoritarianism, not the price of eggs, reports MATT JOHNSON.
  • bulwark logo big shipHegseth’s War on the Press Is a War on the Pentagon’s Credibility… All the news that fits the narrative, observes PATRICK GRANFIELD.
  • The Anti-Prestige Prestige Show: Why The Pitt Is the Cure for What Ails TV. It’s good art and healthy business, writes ZANDY HARTIG.
  • FRIDAY REVIEWS: SONNY BUNCH offers both a review of Michael and an interview with Lou Diamond Phillips about his riveting new film, Keep Quiet.

Quick Hits

THE CARD NOT TAKEN: Remember the Trump “gold card”? When the president announced his buy-your-residency program for foreigners last year, he bragged that he was expecting heavy demand for the applications priced at $1 million a pop: “We anticipate the TRUMP GOLD CARD will generate well over $100 Billion Dollars very quickly,” Trump wrote in September. “This money will be used for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt.”

So far he’s only a little bit off—about five orders of magnitude. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday that exactly one person has so far been approved for a “gold card” visa to date, per Bloomberg News. Hundreds more, he claimed, are still in the pipeline undergoing what he described as “an extraordinary vet.” (Coming soon, perhaps: Gold Card Premium Plus Accelerated™—all the benefits, half the fuss!)

Many observers have long doubted whether Trump’s gold-card program would attract takers, especially given that other immigration pathways, like an EB-5 investor visa, already exist for foreigners willing to splash down some cash to establish residency in the United States. These doubts seem to be proving true—and it’s looking like the money for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt will need to come from someplace else.

WHERE DO THEY FIND THESE GUYS?: Hung Cao, the new acting Navy secretary following the ouster of John Phelan, doesn’t have much (any?) experience running large organizations, handling budgets, working with defense contractors, or dealing with D.C. politics and bureaucracy. But he does have something far more coveted in today’s MAGA politics: a long history of saying truly insane things on right-wing podcasts.

“There’s a place in Monterey, California called Lover’s Point,” Cao told pastor/podcaster Sean Feucht in 2023, while running for Senate in Virginia. “The original name was Lovers of Christ Point. Now it’s become, they took out the Christ. It’s Lover’s Point. And it’s really—Monterrey is a dark place now, a lot of witchcraft, and the Wiccan community has really taken over there. . . . We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

Cao also seems to share Pete Hegseth’s obsession with anti-woke military recruitment. “When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said during a 2024 debate. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds.” No word yet on the state of alpha-male and alpha-female retention in the Navy during Cao’s brief tenure.

TROUBLE IN CRYPTO-PARADISE: The president’s crypto ventures have long been among his most hilariously and openly corrupt—a giant “BRIBE ME” sign hung out over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. These days, even some of his biggest investors are starting to agree. Here’s Reuters:

Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Tuesday sued World Liberty Financial, the digital currency venture co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his sons, ​alleging that World Liberty illegally froze his holdings of tokens issued by the company.

Sun alleged in the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, that World Liberty secretly installed tools to ‌prevent the sale of his tokens after they became tradeable in September 2025. The lawsuit also alleges that World Liberty threatened to “burn”—or permanently delete—his holdings, even while they were in Sun’s digital wallet.

Sun, the Hong Kong-based founder of the Tron cryptocurrency, bought $45 million of WLFI tokens—some 3 billion—and was later awarded a further 1 billion tokens after being named as an advisor to World Liberty, the lawsuit said.

One imagines it’s a hard lesson for Sun, who seems to have fallen prey to the same misimpression as so many of Trump’s business partners—the best marks are the people who think they’re in on the scam. 

U.S. Congressional, Defense, Immigration Budget, Civil Rights Updates 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 23, 2026 [Massive Battleship SNAFU Ahead?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 24, 2026. Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.

As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.

Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.

According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”

Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.

On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice,in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.

Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”

stars strips logo CustomToday the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.

Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “[n]o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”

While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.

As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.

Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.

But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.

Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.

But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.

On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “[a] strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”

“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”

Roll Call, Senate all-nighter puts ICE in Johnson’s court, Savannah Behrmann and Valerie Yurk, April 24, 2026 (print ed.). Behind the scenes, lawmakers also struggled over a FISA deal ahead of an ambitious agenda next week.

roll call logoCongress got one step closer this week to funding immigration enforcement for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term, while House lawmakers dealt with more ethics fallout and wrangled behind closed doors over a key surveillance authority.

But the path forward once again depends on whether Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., can whip votes within his own party.Skinny reconciliation

The Senate in the wee hours Thursday morning narrowly adopted a GOP-written budget resolution, 50-48, marking the first move toward providing roughly $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.

“Republicans are going to deliver for you,” said Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., as the GOP looks to sidestep a funding standoff with Democrats over guardrails at the agencies by relying on the reconciliation process.

Once the budget resolution is adopted in both chambers, more detailed work can begin. While Johnson is readying it for the floor next week, some House Republicans are trying to tap the brakes. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, for one, said he wants to see a resolution with a broader scope.

mike johnson oThose holdouts could be a headache for Johnson, left, who won’t be able to rely on any Democratic votes and is working with a slim GOP majority. FISA feud

Behind the scenes, Johnson also tried to straighten out support for extending section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The controversial spy authority is facing an April 30 deadline, as some Republicans demand privacy safeguards.

While new bill text released by GOP leaders Thursday seems to fall short of some of the privacy hawks’ demands, the Rules Committee is scheduled Monday to prep it for floor consideration.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Wednesday that the House had until the end of this work week to “come together behind something” and if not, the Senate is ready to lead and “prepared to move here.”

As a back-up plan, Thune on Thursday filed cloture on a three-year clean extension.House drama

House Republicans’ razor-thin margin did get a little more wiggle room this week.

sheila cherfilus mcCormickRep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., right, resigned Tuesday before the House Ethics Committee was set to consider what punishment she should face for numerous ethics violations related to campaign funds.

Her announcement capped a wave of recent departures, after Reps. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, resigned over unrelated allegations.

The ethics uproar may not be over, as Reps. Cory Mills, R-Fla., left, and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., continue an online feud over cory mills oalleged misdeeds. Mace has said she intends to call up a resolution soon aimed at expelling Mills.

On Wednesday, House leadership announced Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., had died. The 12-term congressman was 80.

House Democrats now have 212 members, giving Republicans a bit more leeway on party-line bills.Betting on Banking

Thune rubber-stamped a plan to try to help get Kevin Warsh confirmed as Federal Reserve chairman, promising “accountability.”

Thune said Wednesday the Senate Banking Committee will probe a Federal Reserve headquarters construction project that has run over budget, while the Department of Justice conducts its own investigation. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., has described the DOJ actions as a pressure campaign on the Fed’s current chairman, Jerome Powell.

During a Tuesday hearing, Tillis reiterated that he would not vote to advance Warsh’s nomination as long as the DOJ probe continues, even though he sees Warsh as qualified.

Tillis, who’s retiring, told CBS News on Wednesday, “I have a little over 260 days left in the U.S. Senate. And if that investigation is still going on, in the 260th day, then I’m pretty certain Kevin Warsh has not been confirmed.”

U.S. House Redistricting For Virginia Hearing Set

 

virginia maps 2026

Roll Call, Virginia Supreme Court sets oral arguments on redistricting, Michael Macagnone, April 24, 2026 (print ed.). Attorneys likely will spar over a swath of issues on the validity of the referendum process.

The Virginia Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for Monday over a challenge to the validity of the redistricting referendum, the latest step in a fast-moving court battle over the commonwealth’s congressional map (shown above).

roll call logoMonday’s oral arguments, stemming from a challenge brought by Republican Virginia Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle and other Republican officials, could determine the fate of a voter-approved map that could lead to Democrats in as many as 10 of the 11 congressional seats.

The scheduling announcement came the day after Judge Jack Hurley Jr. of the state Circuit Court of Tazewell County blocked the certification of the referendum following a hearing Wednesday in one of the lawsuits challenging the map.

Multiple groups of Republicans have challenged the referendum process in Hurley’s court since the start of the year, and the oral arguments Monday are officially based on a suit filed by McDougle. Hurley’s Wednesday ruling was in a case brought by the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee and Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va.

Hurley has ruled against the referendum three times, finding legislators flouted the rules to place the measure on the ballot, and the commonwealth’s high court allowed the referendum to proceed rather than intervene before voters cast their ballots.

The oral arguments Monday will likely cover a swath of issues, ranging from the timing of the legislature’s process to start the ballot measure last year to the wording of the referendum itself.

Virginia’s legal battle comes amid the broader mid-decade redistricting arms race that Texas started last year at the behest of President Donald Trump. There, legislators redrew the state’s congressional map to target several seats held by Democrats.

California, Missouri and other states followed, each targeting seats held by the other party. Last fall California voters approved a referendum map targeting five of the state’s Republican House members.

The map approved by voters on Tuesday would favor Democrats in 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. Republicans currently hold five of Virginia’s House seats.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted in Virginia, Jennifer Rubin, right, jennifer rubin new headshotApril 24, 2026. No one calls Louise Lucas ‘weak.’

On Tuesday, Virginia voters ignored Republicans’ shameless disinformation campaign to pass a redistricting referendum creating four more Democratic-leaning congressional districts. As predicted, the race was close (3 points), but Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans made clear that they would not tolerate Donald Trump’s re-redistricting gambit, which he began last summer in Texas. (On Wednesday, a right-wing judge enjoined implementation of the map. Virginia’s attorney general immediately appealed. This judge had previously issued similar orders blocking redistricting; all were overturned.)

contrarian logoDemocrats certainly have come a long way in the re-redistricting wars. Last August, when Texas Democratic state lawmakers returned home from their out-of-state venture to deny a quorum for the re-redistricting plan Trump had foisted on Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Republicans seemed to have the upper hand in re-redistricting. With Trump driving the effort to rig the midterms, many political watchers expected Republicans to pick up batches of seats — not only in Texas, but in other red states.

Things did not turn out that way. And with the heavy shift in Hispanics’ voting preferences, Republicans may well come up short in the re-redistricted seats in Texas. Democrats believe that incumbent Dems will manage to save at least 2 of the 5 seats that Republicans intended to snatch.

Moreover, with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries raising tens of millions of dollars, rallying Democrats, and doing gobs of free media appearances, Democrats nationalized the fight. They struck back resoundingly with Prop. 50 in California, potentially adding another 5 seats to their tally. And with Virginians voting on Tuesday to redistrict their state, as many as four more districts may fall into Democrats’ laps.

Previously, Republicans picked up one seat in Missouri (still subject to a referendum and legal challenge) and two in Ohio (although Democrats may well defend all their seats). Utah (+1D) and North Carolina (+1 R) cancelled each other out. Indiana rebuffed Trump’s redistricting demand. Florida may try a belated re-redistricting. However, many Republicans are nervous that the scheme will backfire if Hispanics, as has been the case in primary voting, turn out heavily for Democrats, especially in the Miami area. In short, Republicans may well wind up losing ground (hence the recriminations).Subscribed

In addition to Jeffries, credit in Virginia goes to firebrand Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas, who pushed for a redo of the map that would aim for 4 more Democratic seats. NPR reported:

About redistricting, she wrote to Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, “You all started it, and we f***ing finished it.”

“Donald Trump knows he’s going to lose the midterms. He knows it. That’s why he started this mess in the first place,” Lucas said in announcing the new map. “Today, we are leveling the playing field. These are not ordinary times, and Virginia will not sit on the sidelines while it happens.”

After the win, she took a victory lap: “I watched what was happening in Texas — Republican legislators backed by Donald Trump and MAGA extremists — try to rig the system before voters ever had a chance to speak,” said Lucas. “If they start this fight, Virginia is going to finish it … and in a special election — one question, no candidate, millions of dollars spent trying to confuse voters, Virginians still showed up.”

At a Wednesday press conference, Jeffries gleefully touted the multi-state strategy he spearheaded. “Donald Trump and Republicans launched this gerrymandering war,” Jeffries told reporters. “And we’ve made clear as Democrats that we’re going to finish it.” He brandished a slogan lifted from a MAGA operative: “Maximum warfare. Everywhere. All the time.” He may have finally shed his reputation for excessive caution.

The redistricting fight has accomplished more than simply adding seats to Democrats’ column. At the start of the battle last summer, Trump’s gambit woke up Democrats in Texas. After a dismal 2024 election, the redistricting fight energized local party officials and encouraged national Democrats to focus on and invest in the Lone Star State. Democrats found an opening to present themselves as the champions of Hispanic and Black voters who were losing voting power.

And perhaps most significantly, the Texas fight boosted the visibility of state senator James Talarico. He swiftly became a prominent figure in the Democratic resistance to Trump’s 2026 midterm-rigging. “My Democratic colleagues and I just left the state of Texas to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab. Trump is trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes. But first he’ll have to come through us,” Talarico said at the time on Twitter. “It’s time to fight back.” It is questionable whether Talarico would have gone on to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate had it not been for his role in fighting the Republican re-redistricting scheme. Talarico has put a critical Senate seat in play for Democrats and become an exemplar of a new generation of young, adept progressives with broad appeal.

Beyond Texas, the fight over Trump’s re-redistricting plot helped Democratic leaders address a key problem with their own voters, as well as independents: Voters think Democratic politicians are weak.

As pollster and analyst G. Elliott Morris has discussed, “Democrats’ weakness problem stands out as a particularly strong signal of intra-party dissatisfaction. . . Just 53% of Democrats call their party tough, compared to 80% of Republicans.” The same deficit has affected Democrats’ appeal to independents. “What is a Democratic problem is that 45% of independents say Democrats are weak,” Morris explained. That perception of weakness is a critical liability since “perceiving a party as strong is a stronger predictor of voting for that party than perceiving the other party as extreme.”

Arguably, the re-redistricting fight has helped change the image of Democrats nationally from a party playing by Marquess de Queensbury rules against street thugs to a party that recognizes it must brawl in defense of democracy. It also seemed to supercharge Democrats to take other bold moves, including holding firm on ICE funding, virulently opposing Trump’s war against Iran, demanding Cabinet members quit, pressing to release the Epstein-Trump pedophile files, and challenging Trump’s mental competency.

In that regard, the re-redistricting fight may turn out to be a crucial inflection point for the party, for 2028 aspirants who helped champion the effort (e.g., Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, louise lucasCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom), and for the man likely to be the next speaker, Hakeem Jeffries.

This week, credit goes to the voters of Virginia, and especially to Louise Lucas, right, who kept the momentum going throughout the re-redistricting fight. As Lucas put it in January, “I said in August of 2025 that the maps will be 10-1 and I’m sticking with that today.” She certainly did. She pulled Virginia Democrats, not known for partisan skirmishing, into the fray and scored another win against MAGA Republicans. She was an undaunted, unwavering, and unapologetic advocate of blocking Republicans’ power grab. Thanks to her and to Virginia voters, Democrats maintained their re-redistricting edge and, in the process, rediscovered their fighting spirit. We salute Lucas and her fellow Virginians for putting an exclamation point on a national fight to thwart Trump and his schemes.

U.S. Inflation, Tariffs, Consumers, Markets, Economy

ny times logoNew York Times, Companies, Not Consumers, to Cash In Big From Tariff Refunds, Tony Romm, April 24, 2026. Many families felt the sting of the president’s now-illegal tariffs, but companies have said little about whether they will share the $166 billion coming back to them.

You probably won’t receive a huge tariff refund.

The largest businesses stand to reap the biggest bucks as the Trump administration begins to return more than $166 billion in duties deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. Even though President Trump’s trade policies have led to higher prices for companies and consumers, many families aren’t in line to benefit directly from the coming refund checks.

The discrepancy is a reflection of the nation’s complicated import laws — and the ever-fluid nature of Mr. Trump’s trade war.

When the government applies taxes to foreign goods, it charges the firms and brokers that bring those items into the country. Those costs proved substantial during the president’s first year back in office, after he imposed a set of so-called reciprocal tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner.

But a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court struck down those duties in February, forcing the administration to pay back much of its coveted tariff revenue. As a result, the government owes refunds to the importers on its record books — meaning companies, in many cases — even if those businesses ultimately shifted the costs of Mr. Trump’s taxes on to their customers.

The beneficiaries may include retail giants, such as Costco, Gap, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Target and Walmart. For some, analysts estimate that the refunds may total into the billions of dollars apiece, leaving them with a choice of whether to keep the money or share it with consumers, even if indirectly in the form of future discounts.

But almost none of those U.S. retailers commented by Thursday on their exact plans. Only Costco promised previously to pass savings on to customers, without explaining how, as the buy-in-bulk company faces one of a series of class-action lawsuits from furious Americans who believe they are owed refunds.

Heather Boushey, who served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., described the refund process as a “windfall for businesses,” some of which foisted the tariffs on consumers.“American families,” she added, “are certainly the losers.”

That could turn the tariff refunds into a divisive political issue, at a moment when a majority of voters have already expressed dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the economy. Democrats have demanded that the administration return the money to families, but Mr. Trump has opposed returning the money at all — and he suggested this week that it would be “brilliant” if companies chose to forgo repayment. 

U.S. Corruption, Crime, Price-Gouging, Justice

Popular Information, Info Weekly: Kushner, Kash, and lots of cash, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, April 24, 2026. The UAE has partnered extensively with the Trump Organization and has multiple business ties to the Trump family.Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy.

On Tuesday, Trump indicated that he was open to offering the United Arab Emirates (UAE) a financial bailout to offset the economic fallout caused by the war in Iran.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has represented the U.S. in negotiations with Iran while engaged in a multi-billion-dollar business relationship with the Saudi government. Despite the brazen corruption, Kushner’s connection to the Saudis has received very little media attention. A Popular Information analysis of media coverage of Kushner’s diplomatic role from February 28 to April 19 found that 97% of the coverage from a variety of major media outlets did not mention Kushner’s financial conflict of interest.The media blackout of Jared Kushner’s historic, ongoing corruption scandal The media blackout of Jared Kushner’s historic, ongoing corruption scandalJudd Legum · Apr 20Read full story

Last week, The Atlantic published an article alleging that FBI Director Kash Patel has “alarmed colleagues” with a pattern of excessive drinking. Patel filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, calling the article “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” The complaint actually confirms several key aspects of The Atlantic’s reporting.Kash wants cash: Inside the FBI Director’s $250 million defamation lawsuit Kash wants cash: Inside the FBI Director’s $250 million defamation lawsuitJudd Legum · Apr 21Read full storyThe best of the rest

An analysis of satellite data shows the scale of damage done by strikes on Iran. Major damage has been done to Tehran after over a month of military conflict. An analysis by Bloomberg of radar imagery of “land use within damage clusters in Tehran” found that at least 2,816 buildings have been hit since the start of the conflict on February 28. Of the 2,816 buildings, “around 32%... were linked to the military, 25% to industry, 21% to civilians, while 19% were commercial and 2% governmental.” (Bloomberg)

The CDC blocked publication of a report showing the efficacy of the covid vaccine. The Washington Post reported this week that a report showing “the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine” was blocked from publication in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s scientific journal. The blocked report found that the covid-19 vaccine reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits among healthy adults last winter. (Washington Post)

NYT uncovers the origins of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” The Supreme Court’s shadow docket has been used to rapidly deliver major policy wins to the Trump administration with little explanation. This week, the New York Times published an investigation, including memos between the justices, that sheds light on how this practice originated in 2016. (The New York Times)

Sexual misconduct by state and federal lawmakers is widespread, according to a new report. The National Women’s Defense League found that 162 state-level officials have been accused of sexual misconduct since 2013, and 30 members of Congress have been accused since 2006. Authors of the report say this is likely a significant undercount. While two members of Congress resigned last week over sexual misconduct allegations, the report found that there is generally little accountability for lawmakers. Forty-five officials identified in the report are running for election in 2026. (The 19th)Numerical Information

$1 billion+

The amount that Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social, has lost since the company went public two years ago, according to the company’s most recent annual report. Trump is TMTG’s largest shareholder. This week, TMTG announced it was replacing its CEO, former congressman Devin Nunes, with interim CEO Kevin McGurn.

Over 5,600

The number of people who have been killed throughout the Middle East since the beginning of the war in Iran, according to NBC News.

$24 million

The value of a Pentagon contract awarded to Foundation Futures Industries earlier this month. Eric Trump, who became the company’s “chief strategy officer” in March, appeared on Fox News this week to brag about the deal.Quotes of the week: “Different” math

“President Trump has a different way of calculating… If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.” — RFK Jr.

“I’d say 500%, 600%, but we also say sometimes 50%, 60%, different kind of calculation… and people understand that better, but there are two ways of calculating it, but either way it doesn’t make any difference.” — TrumpVisual InformationX avatar for @MargoMartin47 Margo Martin@MargoMartin47Congratulations, Georgia Women’s Tennis! 🇺🇸Image9:54 PM · Apr 21, 2026 · 18.7M Views2.02K Replies · 477 Reposts · 4.11K Likes

​​President Trump poses with the University of Georgia women’s tennis team to celebrate their recent NCAA championship. Trump and a group of Georgia staffers and coaches stand in front of the women. The photo was posted to X by Margo Martin, a White House aide.POLLIs PopInfo Weekly something you would like to recieve each Friday?YesNo

Global News and Commentary

Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: Israel has forfeited its right to exist as an internationally recognized state, Wayne Madsen, left, April 24, wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small2026. A legal, ethical, and historical analysis of state legitimacy.

State sovereignty is a foundational principle of international relations, granting nations the authority to govern themselves without external interference. The right to exist as an independent state is traditionally protected by international law, recognizing territorial integrity and political independence. However, persistent violations of human rights and acts of genocide challenge the legitimacy of sovereign states and raise questions about the conditions under which a state’s right to exist can be forfeited.

The State of Israel, by its repeated actions of genocide, has forfeited its right to exist as an internationally-recognized state in the community of nations.

Destruction in northern Gaza. Israeli decimation of Gaza

Israel’s persistent abuses of basic human rights—through systematic oppression, discrimination, and violence—has undermined its own legitimacy, which was born from the horrors of the Holocaust of World War II. The very nations that championed Israel’s independence as a state in 1948 are now among its greatest critics. The international community is now looking for a resolution for future governance of the territory lying between the Jordan River and the southern Levantine coast. A post-Israel solution, whether it is a secular confederation, a Jewish-Palestinian federation, or a Swiss-style republic of Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli Arab, Druze, and Circassian cantons, is increasingly being seen as the only viable future to prevent the continuing genocide.

Legally and morally speaking, the commission of genocide delegitimizes the state. The state officially known as the German Reich (Deutsches Reich) from 1933 to 1943 and the Greater German Reich (Großdeutsches Reich) from 1943 to 1945 was consigned to the ash heap of history following the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. In April 1945, the only nations that continued to recognize the German Reich with embassies still in Berlin (no state ever recognized the Greater German Reich) were Japan and the Nazi puppet states of the First Slovak Republic and the Independent State of Croatia.

The German Reich’s unthinkable atrocities ensured its complete erasure as an internationally recognized state under international law. In a situation resembling the current internationally-recognized states of Israel and Palestine, the territory of the former German Reich became the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) until their unification in 1990.

palestinian flagRegardless of the fabulist claims made by the Netanyahu regime and its massive propaganda operations, Palestine and its people have been subjected to many of the same atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany. Gaza now resembles what was left of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942 and the French village of Oradour‑sur‑Glane in 1944 after the Nazis completely destroyed the towns and executed most of their inhabitants. Burned remains of Lidice. The Nazi destruction of Lidice

History offers several examples where states have faced significant consequences due to persistent human rights violations and genocide. The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, following ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities, led to international intervention and the creation of new states. The Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot ruled the state of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. During the Khmer Rouge reign, some 3 million Cambodians were executed, many in what became infamously known as the “killing fields.” The state banned ethnic Chinese, Khmer Krom, Thai, Lao, Burmese, Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brao, Muslim Cham, and Christians. They were systematically murdered by the regime during its rule. 

Mirroring the support for Israel’s genocide by successive U.S. administrations, the United States supported Democratic Kampuchea by diplomatically backing the murderous regime throughout the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations. Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski infamously said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” Brzezinski was continuing the policy initiated by Ford Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

Democratic Kampuchea retained control over Cambodia’s United Nations seat until 1993. It is noteworthy that Israel voted with the United States, China, and such human rights abusers as Saudi Arabia and Zaire to allow Pol Pot to retain his seat at the UN. South African Prime Minister Vorster meets with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Knesset members Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan, during a reception at Jerusalem's Hilton. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan, and apartheid South Africa Prime Minister B J Vorster.

The South African apartheid regime’s constructs of “Bantustans,” nominally “independent” black-ruled republics, which were abolished after the dissolution of the apartheid regime in 1994, served as a template for Israel. Although no nation, other than apartheid South Africa recognized the republics of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Venda, the only nation that came close was Israel. In what continues to sour relations between South Africa and Israel, Tel Aviv provided Bophuthatswana and Ciskei with assistance to build internal security forces. Israel welcomed Bantustan leaders and established “representative offices” or “liaison” entities in the Bantustan capitals of Mmabatho, Umtata, Thohoyandou, and Bisho. It is no coincidence that Israel has applied the Bantustan model to the West Bank, where areas over which the Palestine Authority maintains nominal authority resemble the ink blot like maps of the Bantustans.

Simply stated, repeated human rights abuses, including the crimes of genocide and unlawful warfare, have placed continued statehood for Israel in question. Considering the fact that Yugoslavia and apartheid South Africa, not to mention the German Reich, no longer exist, there is no ironclad right of Israel to continue to exist in its present form.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of states rests not only on their legal status but on their capacity to uphold the rights and dignity of their citizens and those subjected to their warfare. Israel has failed that test on all counts.

 

Billionaire High-Tech 'Bros' from left: Jeff Bezo of Amazon.com, the Washington Post and Blue Origin, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Tesla and other companies, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of META and Facebook.Billionaire High-Tech 'Bros' from left: Jeff Bezo of Amazon.com, the Washington Post and Blue Origin, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Tesla and other companies, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of META and Facebook.

Robert Reich, Opinion: The Worst Neo Robber Baron of Them All, Robert Reich, robert reichApril 24, 2026. Hint: He's even worse than Musk.

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk that title. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk.

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon.

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans.

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

amazon logo smallThe New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products.

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now.

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws.

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks.

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America.

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that on April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.

But what puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump's second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era.

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Spirit Airlines is the Canary in Trump’s Fossil Fuel Mine, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right) April 24, 2026. When I first started this post, yesterday morning, WSJ was presenting the question of whether to bail out Sprit Airlines as a debate between two of Trump’s top advisors. Howard Lutnick told Trump he could be a hero by saving jobs, whereas Sean Duffy argued taxpayers would be buying a dud. One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. 

Lutnick argued to Trump that the president would see a political win by coming to Spirit’s rescue months before the midterm elections and that the deal could save thousands of jobs, according to a senior administration official and other people familiar with the matter.

Lutnick is the architect of the proposal under consideration by Trump and the company, in which the government would loan the company up to $500 million and receive in return warrants to take a potential significant stake in Spirit, some of the people said. The Wall Street Journal first reported Wednesday morning on the plan, which hasn’t been finalized.

[snip]

Duffy, on the other hand, told Trump that, in his view, making such an agreement with Spirit could have negative political consequences. He told the president he agreed it might save jobs, but he voiced skepticism about what the government is going to get out of possibly having a stake in the business.

Duffy also said that a deal with Spirit could leave voters with a negative impression about the Trump administration trying to bail out a failing company, a move that in the past hasn’t always been popular, the people said.

One after another right wing member of Congress mocked the idea. Scott Perry used pretty plane AI slop to argue that if you shield businesses from consequences of their decisions, “there’s no incentive to act responsibly.”

Teddy Cancun noted that “the government,” not Trump, “doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline,” before blaming Biden just like Perry did.

The persistence with which right wingers blamed the decision by Joe Biden’s DOJ — importantly, as a bid to sustain competition and so cheap flights (as well as jobs) — was a tell of how seriously Trump was considering this plan, because Trump always blames one of his predecessors when he does something unpopular.

The logic here was that Biden destroyed Spirit by challenging the merger in order to sustain competition between airlines, plus jobs, so now Trump has to intervene to save cheap flights and jobs.

Two days ago, Trump was considering floating the airline for a 90% stake in the company. By the end of the day yesterday, Trump declared he wanted to buy it.

President Trump said that the U.S. government could take over Spirit Airlines, the ailing budget carrier that has been negotiating this week for a federal bailout.

“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it. I think we’d just buy it,” Trump said, speaking from the Oval Office Thursday. He said that Spirit’s aircraft and assets were good and that the government could sell the company for a profit when the price of oil fell.

“I’d love to be able to save those jobs,” Trump said. “I’d love to be able to save an airline.”

Donald J. Trump, the serially failed businessman whose addiction to being rescued means he has little incentive to act responsibly, has opined once before that an airline’s aircraft and assets are good. That’s what he said about Eastern’s Shuttle business.

There are a slew of stories about this chapter of Trump’s life, which makes it really weird that Republicans addressed whether the government can run an airline, not whether Trump, personally, has proven he cannot.

This Matt Viser story from 2016 described how the prospect of owning an airline was, first, an ego boost — “like a presidential press conference” — and then a crash, both literally, and figuratively, with Trump getting bailed out as he always does.

“This is something from day one I have said I want to have my name on,” he said at a press conference just as he was about to take over the Shuttle. “I hope my name does a lot for the shuttle, and I hope the shuttle does something for my name.”

Stumbling over his enthusiasm at one point, he called the shuttle a “truly great transportation whatever.”

“Let’s be honest. If anyone else had started an airline, you never would have gotten that many reporters,” he said later. “That was like a presidential press conference.”

He was also asked about what it was like to fly on his own airline, looking down at his properties below.

“Truthfully? Truthfully it was great for the Trump ego,” he said. “I’m not supposed to say that.”

[snip]

The Eastern Airlines Shuttle flight had been a reliable source of revenue for decades. Since the 1960s, the number of shuttle flight passengers had grown every month, without exception, until November 1989, Nobles said.

It dropped. Then it dropped again in December. A recession was coming. As a result of the Gulf War, the price of oil — and, therefore, jet fuel — had jumped.

The Trump Shuttle was successful enough to cover operating costs but not enough to pay down the debt.

It fit a pattern for Trump: making a bet that his product would be so successful that he could pay down massive debt and earn a hefty profit along the way.

This time around, taxpayers, not Citibank, would be on the hook for Trump’s judgment about airplane stock after a crash.

But it’s not just about this airline. After all, the guy who crashed his Shuttle also serially bankrupted his companies, and several of his current companies are running on fumes. Trump’s invasion of Iran is beginning to do the same to parts of the US economy, to say nothing of the global economy.

Joe Biden didn’t create the precipitating need to bail out Sprit. Trump’s own invasion of Iran, and more importantly the unfathomable incompetence not to stave off a Hormuz closure, did. Trump has created a jet fuel crisis far bigger than the one that destroyed his plans for Trump Shuttle.

Spirit’s tailspin, of course, is partly of Trump’s making. The Middle East conflict has ignited an explosion in jet fuel prices, a line item that in average times amounts to 20% to 30% of airlines’ pretax, noninterest costs. Spirit has been operating under bankruptcy protection since August, and just two weeks after the war began, presented an already-fragile reorganization plan in the Southern District of New York. The blueprint projected jet fuel in the $2.20 a gallon range for this year and 2027, and even at those historically low prices, foresaw super-thin operating margins of 0.5%. Now, airlines are paying around $4.20, almost double the prewar sticker and Spirit’s forecast. A study by J.P. Morgan posits that owing to the fuel hit, Spirit is set to lose 20 cents for each dollar of revenue, and add $360 million in operating costs, an amount equal to its cash cushion.

It’s clear that Spirit can’t keep flying—unless Trump indeed orders a huge cash refill from the government. Clearly, keeping America’s leisure and business flyers as happy as possible under the circumstances is the best possible outcome for Trump.

Trump’s claim this is about jobs when he destroyed far more than 14,000 jobs with DOGE is rank bullshit. This is about hiding the damage Trump’s stupid invasion has done to America’s normal way of life. Trump wants to use taxpayer dollars to hide from taxpayers what a catastrophic economic disaster Trump caused with his incompetence.

And if Trump does this, the need will just snowball, at least to JetBlue and Frontier.

“Should the administration afford any sort of cash infusion, we believe JetBlue and Frontier (ULCC.O), opens new tab would be inclined to quickly follow,” they said, adding that ​such a move could eventually draw in larger ​carriers and distort competition across the industry.

One ⁠industry source said other airlines that compete with Spirit have privately voiced opposition to a bailout of just one carrier, even as they face similar cost pressures.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby also struck a skeptical tone this week, calling Spirit’s business model fundamentally flawed and questioning whether it could ​cover its operating costs.

And all that’s the damage Trump has done to the US economy, a petrostate with its own jet fuel capacity. Analysts are only beginning to think through what it will do to other economies, especially less wealthy Asian ones, but even Europe, if this continues to June.

If Europe keeps subsidising consumption, markets will get more out of whack. For one thing, prices for products will keep rising. America, where demand tends to jump in a period of summer road trips, will push them further. Competition for LNG, shortage of which was mostly absorbed by Asian consumers’ self-deprivation and a switch to coal, will also increase when Europe starts restocking gas for the winter.

Fast-depleting stocks make matters worse. Europe’s reserves of jet fuel cover some 50 days of consumption, their typical level. But modelling by Michelle Brouhard of Kpler, a data firm, for The Economist shows that European stocks will fall precipitously if Hormuz flows do not normalise by June. Those in other importing regions may disappear even faster (see chart 2, bottom panel). The outlook could worsen if America, seeking to tame domestic prices, emulates China and bans exports of refined products, which have risen by nearly half since the start of the war.

Trump take capitalism. Because of Trump’s stupidity, countries around the world are being forced to eschew capitalism to keep a quasi-normal way of life afloat.

The billionaire conman who started a war with the belief that it would all work out because it always does is now facing down the certainty that the defining moment of his legacy will not, this time, be OK.

A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump replied.

And his response to that is to get taxpayers to subsidize the illusion of normalcy.

Update: Mike Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom Foundation, comes out against the bailout, though again ignoring that Trump exacerbated Spirit’s woes. Curiously, when it invokes TARP, it doesn’t note whose ineptitude caused that crisis.

April 23

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More On Iran, Lebanon Wars

Amal Khalil, who was a reporter for Al-Akhbarl, wearing a helmet and a vest with the word “PRESS” written on them, was killed on Wednesday (Photob by Mohammed Zaatari via Associated Press). New York Times, Israeli strikes kill a journalist and injure another in Lebanon, Ashley Ahn, April 23, 2026 (print ed.). Israeli strikes killed one journalist and wounded another in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, rattling a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon.Amal Khalil, who was a reporter for Al-Akhbarl, wearing a helmet and a vest with the word “PRESS” written on them, was killed on Wednesday (Photob by Mohammed Zaatari via Associated Press).

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

 southern poverty law center

 Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities. 

Charlottesville Ttorchlight Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.

Charlottesville Torchlight "United the Right" Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017 investigated by SPLC.

U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

Six leading candidates for governor of CaliforniaSix leading candidates for governor of California (from left): Matt Mahan, Xavier Becerra, Chad Bianco, Steve Hilton, Tom Steyer and Katie Porter (Pool photo by Jason Henry). (from left): Matt Mahan, Xavier Becerra, Chad Bianco, Steve Hilton, Tom Steyer and Katie Porter (Pool photo by Jason Henry). 

More On U.S. Fair Elections, Election-Rigging Claims 

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ny times logoNew York Times, A New Era and New Leadership: The Generals Who Are Running Iran, Farnaz Fassihi, April 23, 2026. Farnaz Fassihi has covered Iran for three decades. For this article, she interviewed 23 people in Iran, including senior officials, members of the Revolutionary Guards and individuals with ties to Ali and Mojtaba Khamenei.The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ushered in a new form of collective leadership in the country, with more power for the Revolutionary Guards.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as the supreme leader, he exerted absolute power over all decisions about war, peace and negotiations with the United States. His son and successor does not play the same role.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei,mojtaba khamenei the son, right, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.

“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.

“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.”

This account of Iran’s new power structure is based on interviews with six senior Iranian officials, two former officials, two members of the Revolutionary Guards, a senior cleric familiar with the inner workings of the system and three individuals who know Mr. Khamenei well. Nine other individuals with ties to the Guards and the government also described the command structure. They all spoke on the condition they not be identified because they were discussing sensitive matters of state.

Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Reported Ship Seizures Add to Anxiety in Oil Markets, Dan Watson and Aurelien Breeden, April 23, 2026. Oil was hovering above $100 a barrel and there were no public signs of a breakthrough in peace efforts. The White House said President Trump does not view Iran’s reported seizures as a cease-fire violation.

Oil was trading above $100 a barrel again on Thursday after Iranian forces claimed to have seized two cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz, injecting fresh fear into energy markets with no public indications of a breakthrough in efforts to restart U.S.-Iran peace talks.

President Trump told Fox News on Wednesday that there was “no time pressure” on holding a new round of talks or on the cease-fire, and “no timeline” for ending the war. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox separately that Mr. Trump did not view Iran’s reported ship seizures as a violation of the cease-fire.

The reported seizures happened after the U.S. Navy prevented dozens of ships from leaving or accessing Iranian ports as part of a blockade ordered by Mr. Trump.

Iran has in effect blocked shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — normally a vital conduit for global oil and gas supplies. Energy prices have risen sharply since the United States and Israel began the war on Iran in late February.

A summit aimed at reopening the strait was scheduled to reconvene in London on Thursday, with military planners from over 30 countries. Shipping companies are mostly keeping vessels away from the strait because of the risk of attacks.

On Wednesday, Iranian state media reported that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps had targeted two cargo vessels — the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, a Greek-owned ship — because they were not following Iran’s rules for passing through the strait. Iranian news outlets reported that the Guards had fired on a third cargo ship.

Here’s what else we are covering:

  • Israel-Lebanon cease-fire: A second round of ambassador-level talks between the two countries was scheduled for Thursday in Washington. A 10-day truce between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia, is set to expire on Sunday.
  • Journalists in Lebanon: Israeli strikes killed one journalist and wounded another in the country’s south on Wednesday, the Lebanese authorities said.
  • War powers vote: For a fifth time since the war began, Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a resolution to enforce Congress’s war powers.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What We Found When We Investigated Trump’s Latest Election Theft Claim, Andrew Egger, Jordan Ferdman and Jim Swift, April 23, 2026. You’re never gonna believe it. . .

bulwark logo big shipThe Cook Political Report is out this morning with a midterms vibe check, and Democrats have to like what they see: Across the 36 competitive districts most likely to decide control of the House of Representatives, “Democrats hold a six-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, 50 percent to 44 percent,” the authors write. “Voters here are deeply frustrated with Trump and are willing to overlook their antipathy to Democrats in order to put a check on the president.”

Maybe the resistance party should give up on restoring their battered reputation and just lean in. “Vote Blue: Odds Are You Hate Us Less.” Happy Thursday.

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Financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is shown above with his longtime friend Donald Trump, Below that photo is one of the U.S. Justice Department's headquarters in Washington, DC approximately halfway between the White House and Congress.

The Parnas Perspective, Afternoon News and Commentary: DOJ Inspector General Launches Major Investigation Into Handling of Epstein Files as Maxwell Pardon Talk Escalates, Aaron Parnas, right, April 23, 2026. aaron parnas new headshotThe Department of Justice Inspector General has launched a sweeping investigation into how the Epstein files were handled and whether the DOJ failed to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This is one of the biggest stories I’ve been working on, and there is more reporting to come.

At the same time, Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly warming to the idea of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, a move that is already drawing intense backlash. I also sat down with Xavier Becerra, a leading candidate for governor of California, and will be interviewing more candidates in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, shareholders have approved a major media merger involving Warner Bros. Discovery, raising serious concerns about consolidation and the potential influence of the Ellison family over outlets like CNN. Independent media has never been more important. Subscribe to support my work, and let’s keep fighting as the media faces growing pressure.Subscribed

Here’s what you missed:

The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is launching an audit into whether the DOJ followed the law requiring public release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. This review was initiated amid bipartisan criticism that the department has not fully disclosed the materials. Lawmakers and others have raised concerns that some information may have been improperly withheld. The audit aims to assess overall compliance with transparency requirements.

The investigation will examine how the DOJ handled identifying, redacting, and releasing millions of records tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically, it will review internal guidelines used to sift through roughly 6 million documents. It will also evaluate what instructions staff received about what information could be withheld or edited. This includes scrutiny of decisions around protecting sensitive details.

Another focus of the audit is how the DOJ managed issues after releasing the files, particularly concerns about privacy and disclosure. Officials will look into whether the department adequately protected survivors’ identities, which were supposed to be redacted under the law. There are questions about whether some names were improperly concealed or, conversely, at risk of being revealed. These post-release challenges are part of the broader accountability review.

The Inspector General’s office indicated the audit could expand if additional problems are uncovered during the process. Its findings may address not only compliance with the transparency law but also any broader procedural or oversight failures. The review signals heightened scrutiny of the DOJ’s handling of a high-profile and sensitive case. Further issues could be investigated depending on what auditors discover.

Some Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are reportedly open to the idea of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in investigations tied to Jeffrey Epstein, though the panel is divided. Chairman James Comer said he personally opposes a pardon but acknowledged others support the idea, while Democrats have strongly condemned it. Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence, has invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and her legal team has sought clemency. Donald Trump has not ruled out a pardon, adding to the controversy surrounding the proposal.

Thomas Massie says its time to look into Todd Blanche, the Attorney General:

Shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery have approved a massive takeover bid by Paramount Global, advancing a deal valued at over $100 billion that could significantly reshape the entertainment industry. The merger would combine major assets—including HBO Max, Paramount+, CNN, and CBS—under one umbrella, though it still faces regulatory scrutiny and political pushback. Supporters argue it could create a stronger, next-generation media company, while critics warn of job cuts, reduced competition, and greater consolidation of power in Hollywood. The deal also raises concerns about political influence and editorial direction, especially given ties between investors and Donald Trump. California’s Attorney General says it will be scrutinized:

The White House claims that Donald Trump helped prevent the execution of eight Iranian women by directly urging Iranian leaders not to carry out the sentences. According to officials, Trump was told the women would instead face reduced penalties, with some reportedly released and others given short prison terms. However, Iranian authorities have strongly disputed this account, with a judiciary-linked outlet stating that none of the women had been sentenced to execution in the first place. The conflicting narratives highlight ongoing tensions and uncertainty around the situation involving Iran and the treatment of protestors.

House Republicans are pushing to quickly pass a Senate-approved budget resolution as the first step toward funding immigration enforcement and advancing Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, but internal divisions are complicating the effort. GOP leaders, including Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise, are trying to win over conservatives by promising a follow-up “Reconciliation 3.0” bill that could include defense spending, Iran war funding, tax changes, and cuts to social programs. Some lawmakers remain skeptical about passing multiple party-line bills before the midterms and are threatening to oppose the current plan without broader policy concessions.

Donald Trump reposted a podcast by commentator Michael Savage that included derogatory remarks describing countries like India and China as “hell-holes,” sparking backlash. The comments were tied to criticism of U.S. birthright citizenship, with claims—widely disputed—that immigrants exploit the system through “birth tourism.” Trump has continued pushing to end automatic citizenship, despite legal consensus that the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees it. The controversy has drawn criticism internationally, while India’s government responded cautiously to the remarks.

Donald Trump claimed that Iran is struggling with internal leadership divisions, describing conflict between “hardliners” and “moderates” amid ongoing tensions. He also asserted that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz, stating that ships cannot pass without approval from the U.S. Navy. According to Trump, the key shipping route is effectively “sealed” until Iran agrees to a deal. His remarks highlight escalating geopolitical strain and competing narratives over control of the critical waterway.

Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot and kill” any vessels placing mines in the Strait of Hormuz, signaling a highly escalatory military posture.

In February 2025, Howard Lutnick projected that Donald Trump’s “Gold Card” visa program could sell as many as 200,000 residency slots to wealthy foreigners. By April 2026, however, Lutnick acknowledged to Bloomberg that only one person has actually been approved, highlighting a stark gap between early expectations and real-world uptake. The contrast underscores questions about demand, feasibility, and execution of the $1 million residency initiative.

Fatih Birol, the IAE Chief, warned that the world is facing what could be its most severe energy security threat ever, citing the loss of roughly 13 million barrels of oil per day and widespread disruptions to key commodities (as reported by CNBC). He linked the crisis to escalating conflict involving Iran and the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping route. The blockade—first imposed by Iran and followed by U.S. restrictions on ships accessing Iranian ports—has intensified fears of a historic energy crisis. Birol has cautioned that these developments could trigger the largest global energy disruption on record.

Two Israeli Air Force technicians have been arrested on suspicion of spying for Iranian intelligence, with authorities alleging they maintained contact with foreign agents in exchange for money. According to investigators, the soldiers initially claimed they cut ties after refusing to carry out weapons-related tasks, but later attempted to reestablish contact for financial gain. Prosecutors say one soldier faces more serious charges, including aiding the enemy during wartime and sharing sensitive military information, while the other is accused of contact with a foreign agent and transmitting intelligence. The indictment also alleges that classified materials—including fighter jet system details and base documentation—were passed to operatives linked to Iran over several months.

The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, lowering its perceived abuse risk and enabling more medical research and potential healthcare use. However, this change does not legalize marijuana, affect existing prison sentences, or remove key restrictions like interstate transport and banking limitations. Public support for legalization remains mixed, with a slim majority of Americans in favor despite some decline as legalization has expanded in many states.

 

mtn meidas touch networkMeidas Touch Network, Today in Politics, Ron Filipkowski, right, ron filipowskiApril 23, 2026. Sleepy Don fell asleep again during a press event today about prescription drug prices, dozing off multiple times as his sycophants RFK Jr, Dr. Oz, Lutnick, Vance and others droned on and on about how wonderful he is.

… RFK Jr was bragging about his testimony before Congress “One of the Democrats was ridiculing President Trump for his math, and she was saying it's in mathematically impossible to have any drug drop by 600% cost. And I said, well, if the drug was $100 and it raised the price of $600. That would be a 600% rise. If it drops from 600 to 100, that's a 600% savings. Trump: That’s right.”

… Trump was asked about the war dragging on: “We’ve been doing it for 5 and a half weeks. Reporter: But sir, it’s been 8 weeks, you said it would be over in 4-6 weeks. Trump: I took a break and I gave them a break.”

… Q - “How long are you willing to wait for a response from Iran? Trump: Don’t rush me. We were in Vietnam for 18 years.”

… Trump then griped about Iranian speedboats attacking shipping in the Strait: “Their military is totally defeated - outside of the little wise guy ships. I call them the wise guy ships.”

… He then starting rambling about his WH remodel: “I think it’s very interesting. We had flooring outside—it was coming to pieces. It's been there since the early 1940s. and it's a path to the Oval Office. It was broken, bad shape. We're putting magnificent new granite. It's called charcoal. We've stripped all of the paints off. We had 200 years of paint.”

… Q - “Why was your Navy Secretary fired? Trump: I really liked him, but he had some conflict with not necessarily with Pete but some other people. I didn't really deal with him too much.”

… He then talked about his plans to remodeled the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool: “I have probably built more than 100 swimming pools in different buildings I built, I said, think of it as a swimming pool—2200 ft by 167 ft wide. It's a reflecting pool and very famous, very famous. I said, Doug, I have a guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road. We have a club, we have an Olympic-sized swimming pool.”

… He then claimed that he had a bigger crowd for his July 4 speech at Reflecting Pool than MLK Jr had for his I Have a Dream Speech: “That's where MLK gave his great speech, and he had a million people and I had the same exact crowd, maybe a little bit more. I have pictures of MLK’s crowd, the exact same, everything, but it was 70 years difference. The exact same crowd, but I actually had more people.”

… Don Snoreleone then fell asleep.

… NYT: “The FBI began investigating a NYT reporter last month after she wrote about Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with govt security and transportation. Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for info on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Williamson broke federal stalking laws.

… “Those actions prompted concerns among some DOJ officials who saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, did not like, and who determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation.”

… In response to an inquiry for NYT, the FBI issued a statement that “investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking.”

… Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of NYT: “The FBI’s attempt to criminalize routine reporting is a blatant violation of Elizabeth’s First Amendment rights and another attempt by this admin to prevent journalists from scrutinizing its actions. It’s alarming. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.”

… Patel on Sean Hannity’s Fox show: Q - “I’m reading that you used the FBI because you didn’t like a story about your girlfriend. Is there any truth to that? It just doesn’t sound like you. Patel: Absolutely not. The reality is that this same reporter delivered a baseless story which delivered a direct threat of life to my girlfriend. But here’s the thing: me and mine are like you and President Trump. We’re as tough as we come.”

… Axios: “Buyer’s remorse is hitting House Republicans over their mid-cycle redistricting war - a strategy meant to protect their majority that’s now deeply in danger of backfiring. Republicans privately have expressed skepticism about the aggressive redistricting strategy for months amid increasing pressure from Trump, who’s said he fears a Democrat-led House would hand him his third impeachment:

… NRCC chair Richard Hudson (R-NC): “It’s not for me to say ... because really, it wasn’t my decision.”

… Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA): “I wish none of this had happened.”

… Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE): “I think it is a mistake in hindsight. They thought they could just do Texas and nobody else is gonna respond? We started a war, and you’ve got to play chess, think three or four moves ahead.”

… Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA): “I don’t think it’s favorable for anybody in America, redistricting. It’s a race to the bottom.”

… AOC was asked about Republicans complaining about VA redistricting. Q - “What do you make of Republicans saying that Virginia … AOC: Wah wah wah. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the US. And these are the rules that they have set.”

… In addition to redistricting woes, Republicans also have Trump’s dismal approval rating dragging them down like an anchor. This was on Fox last night:

… Politico: “Trump’s recent admin shakeup - the sacking of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi as well as this week’s departure of Lori Chavez-DeRemer - has created openings for a slew of potential confirmations, and GOP senators are contemplating who might be next and how quickly Trump should make any further changes.”

… “No Republicans are publicly urging any particular oustings. But privately GOP senators believe Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, DNI Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel could be at risk of leaving - voluntarily or not.

… One Republican senator: “He’s in a bad mood. He’s preparing to really let a lot of them go.”

… AOC to Meidas reporter Pablo Manriquez: Q - “Who do you think Trump should fire next? AOC: Is he out of women? Trump only seems to have the capability to fire female secretaries. If you’re a man in the Trump admin, it seems that they reward misconduct.”

… My prediction is that Gabbard will be fired next. Very soon.

… Meanwhile, Lutnick had a tough time today in his testimony before the House, where he repeatedly refused to answer questions about his ties to Epstein on the grounds that he made a “deal” with James Comer that he only had to talk about it with House Oversight:

Rep. Rosa DeLauro: Do you know how many manufacturing jobs the US lost per day during the first year of Trump’s second term? Lutnick: I don’t know. DeLauro: More than 100 per day. This isn’t a trade policy that delivers for working people.”

Lutnick: “The manufacturing is going to start in two or three years when these factories come online. DeLauro: You can’t even tell us about how many manufacturing jobs we’ve lost, so I don’t know about what we’re seeing in the future.”

Rep. Madeline Dean: Q - “Is the president concerned about your continued relationship with Epstein? Lutnick: I am not going to discuss conversations I had with the president. Dean: Trump just fired 3 cabinet secretaries - 3 women. If he has even a shred of concern about accountability for Epstein’s enablers, he would fire you too.”

Dean: “Why did you lie to the NY Post about your relationship with Epstein? Lutnick: The House Oversight Committee and I agreed-- Dean: I do not accept that answer. We are our own committee. You’re dodging the question. The coverup continues.”

… Bloomberg: “Only one person has been approved so far for Trump’s ‘Gold Card’ Visa program granting foreigners US residency for a $1 million fee, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday.”

… At the press conference announcing these in Feb 2025, Lutnick said they were going to sell 200,000 gold cards. Trump said they were going to balance the budget selling them.

… Hung Cao, Trump’s new nominee for Secretary of the Navy, said in 2023 during his campaign for US senate that he was worried about witches taking over VA: “We can’t let it turn like this. There’s a place in Monterey, CA called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but they took out the Christ. And Monterey is a very dark place now - a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to VA.”

… Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins on Fox: Q - “Do you have a plan to mitigate this fertilizer problem? Rollins: Yes. We have been every day now for almost 50 days having daily meetings in the WH. During the Biden years ... Host: But what is the plan? You’ve had lots of meetings, but what is the plan?”

… Alex Jacquez, who served on Biden’s National Economic Council: “‘During the Biden years...’ Yeah Brooke, I talked to fertilizer companies every day post-Ukraine invasion too. Then we put $900 million into fertilizer capacity expansion, which you put on ice and are now trying to revive.”

… CNBC: “The Trump admin is in advanced talks for a financing package for Spirit Airlines as the carrier is facing the risk of a liquidation. The deal could include $500 million in financing from the govt, which could provide a path to give the govt an equity stake in the carrier.”

… Sen. Ted Cruz: “This is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea. The government doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline.”

… Sen. Tom Cotton: “If Spirit’s creditors or other potential investors don’t think they can run it profitably coming out of its second bankruptcy in under two years, I doubt the US Government can either. Not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”

… WSJ’s Brian Schwartz: “The deliberation from within Trump’s own team about what to do with Spirit Airlines spilled out into a meeting at the WH with Trump. Howard Lutnick, the architect of the govt backed deal with Spirit, told Trump that the deal could save jobs and be a boost to GOP in midterms.”

… “Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made counterpoints to Trump: Yes, the deal could save jobs but... A bailout could be a political nightmare for the admin and questioned what the govt gets out of such a deal with Spirit. These are the key views heading into a decision by Trump to finalize and announce a deal.”

… Eric Trump was on Fox bragging about his new $24 million Pentagon contract for robots: "It's gonna change industry, military application, hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it's a very beautiful thing, but we must win that race."

… Eric’s business partner was on the show with him: "There are situations where you would need almost no human loop, where we would have to be able to rapidly deploy these technologies and we cannot always be calling a CEO to ask for permission before we do it."

… Eric was never involved in this kind of business before he father became president. He ran golf courses and hotels.

… Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA): “Eric Trump went on Fox to brag about winning ANOTHER multimillion-dollar contract from the Trump admin. I’ve been sounding the alarm and pushing for answers. Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.”

… Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch: “Think about how much time Fox spent on Hunter Biden. That was a real story, worth covering. But here they’re not reporting on the potential corruption, they’re celebrating it. Gross.”

… Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH): “The Trump Family gets rich off of Trump’s war. Working people get higher prices.”

There was a new report about how many members of Congress use AI now in their work. I just wanted to say that I will never use AI to put this together. I do not trust the accuracy of a lot of AI news and there is no AI tool that can do this because it is much more art than science.

These Bulletins are put together the old-school way with no shortcuts. I consume a massive amount of news each day by reading articles, social media posts, watching hearings, shows, podcasts, speeches, press conferences. It is 12 hours of non-stop work because I am bringing you news that just happened in real time while trying not to miss anything important.

The biggest problem for any AI tool would be how to identify what is important or interesting or how different concepts and events fit together in a not so obvious way. Which sentences from an article really tell the story? Which quotes from a press conference or interview are most compelling? Also, how to inject irony, sarcasm, humor, context, flow - a computer cannot do these things.

So while many in business, media, govt and politics increasing turn to AI to assist them in their work (or do their work for them), I never will because I am confident if I do this right AI will never be able to do it better.

Reminder that tomorrow is also Ask the Editor where I answer 5 of your questions in a podcast, so please submit any question you might have for that in the comments below. If you missed my weekly podcast Uncovered yesterday, you can find it here.

Meidas+ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

… Sen. Jon Ossoff was asked on MS NOW if he will run for president in 2028: “I have zero interest in running for president in 2028. I love serving the state of Georgia. I’ve got two young daughters. And to be honest with you, I think that the 2028 fantasy risks distracting us from the urgent task at hand.”

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary:Trump in 'Bad Mood' and Read to Fire Cabinet Members, Congress Braces for Major Shakeup, Republican Support for Maxwell Pardon Grows, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 23, 2026. Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly warming to the idea of Donald Trump issuing a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, with multiple members now openly supportive.

This comes as the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein-related efforts appear to be losing momentum. At the same time, Congress is bracing for a potential shakeup inside Trump’s Cabinet, and sources tell me another major firing could be imminent (stay tuned). All of this is happening while Trump’s approval ratings sink below where Joe Biden ever was, and after the abrupt firing of the Navy Secretary in the middle of an active naval blockade.

Separately, many of you have flagged something disturbing. Fake accounts impersonating me are reaching out. This is real, and it’s escalating, with attempts to hack me, spoof my voice, and replicate my identity. If my content does not come directly from me, then don’t believe it. I will never message you on Telegram, Signal, or WhatsApp. I will never ask for your personal information. I started working with SurfShark, who worked with me for this post, to help (more below), but this is a reminder of how volatile and manipulated the online space has become.

All of this tells me one thing. The reporting is landing. And I’m not slowing down. If you value this work, now is the moment to support it. Subscribe. 

Here’s the news:

Rep. James Comer said some Republican lawmakers are open to Donald Trump pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell. The goal would be to encourage her to provide information to Congress about Jeffrey Epstein. The idea is tied to the committee’s ongoing investigation into Epstein’s network. This idea has already been rebuked by survivors and every Democrat on the Committee.

Republican senators are growing concerned about the timing and impact of potential Cabinet shakeups under Donald Trump, warning that replacing officials could strain the Senate’s already tight schedule before the midterms. Some lawmakers are urging Trump to make any personnel changes sooner rather than later to allow time for confirmations, with one senator noting, “Just do the math,” given the limited legislative days. There is uncertainty about possible departures, with officials like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard facing scrutiny. The concerns reflect broader anxiety among Republicans about maintaining their Senate majority and managing a packed legislative agenda.

A Republican operative told Puck News that Donald Trump’s approval ratings have dropped to levels comparable to Jimmy Carter. They argued this puts Trump in a weaker political position than Joe Biden was during his presidency: “Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at Carter-esque levels, and Republicans are now confronted with the fact that he’s in worse shape than Joe Biden ever was during his presidency.”

Donald Trump posted a series of late-night messages on Truth Social promoting conspiracy claims about John Roberts. In multiple posts, he amplified allegations from a self-described conspiracy theorist and criticized figures including Norm Eisen. The posts were part of a rapid burst of activity within about an hour late at night. The episode reflects Trump’s continued use of social media to air grievances and promote controversial claims.

According to The Daily Beast, Susie Wiles has tightened control over Cabinet members by restricting international travel amid rising political pressure ahead of the midterms. At a February meeting, she instructed senior officials that overseas trips should only occur when absolutely necessary, reflecting concerns that frequent foreign travel is distracting from domestic issues. Wiles is viewed by some as a stabilizing figure within Donald Trump’s administration, aiming to impose more discipline compared to earlier internal chaos. The move comes as public frustration grows over the administration’s focus on foreign affairs, prompting efforts to refocus attention at home.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is conducting an external review of its past interactions with Jeffrey Epstein following new scrutiny from Justice Department documents. The review will examine how the foundation engaged with Epstein and evaluate its policies for vetting partnerships. While Bill Gates has denied wrongdoing and said their interactions were limited to philanthropy, the disclosures have raised concerns among donors and partners. The foundation acknowledged some staff had contact with Epstein but said no funds were exchanged and expressed regret over the association.

The Trump administration has reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, marking a major shift in federal drug policy. The change eases research restrictions, provides tax benefits for licensed cannabis businesses, and acknowledges accepted medical use, though it does not legalize marijuana federally. Officials said the move aims to expand access to medical treatments and improve scientific understanding of cannabis. The decision aligns federal policy more closely with the dozens of states that already permit medical marijuana.

Eric Trump appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s show and touted that one of his companies secured a $24 million Pentagon contract. He highlighted the deal as a business success while discussing it on air.

Navy Secretary John Phelan, right, was abruptly fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid internal disputes over shipbuilding strategy, naval john phelan odeployments, and the administration’s “Golden Fleet” initiative. The decision reportedly followed mounting tensions with senior Pentagon leadership, who disagreed with Phelan’s pace and approach on key naval priorities. Notably, his dismissal came in the middle of a high-stakes U.S. naval blockade of Iran, surprising lawmakers and defense officials given the sensitive timing. Some reports indicate Phelan may not have known he was being fired until the announcement was made public.

Here is the statement from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Following Iranian attacks on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz, maritime traffic through the critical waterway has nearly halted, with tracking data showing almost no vessels attempting transit. Only one ship, the LB Energy, successfully passed through using an Iranian-approved route, while another tanker turned back before entering the strait. Two seized cargo ships, Epaminondas and Francesca, were moved within the area and later stopped transmitting tracking data. The disruption highlights how the attacks effectively froze shipping activity in one of the world’s most vital transit chokepoints. Trump this morning ordered the Navy to shoot to kill:

A senior Iranian official told NBC News that Tehran has begun receiving revenue from tolls imposed on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz during its conflict with the U.S. and Israel. Deputy parliament speaker Hamidreza Hajibabaei confirmed that the first payments have already been deposited into the central bank. The tolls, which reportedly charge ships millions per transit, affect a critical global trade route that carries about 20% of the world’s oil and gas. The move signals Iran’s effort to leverage control over the strategic waterway for economic gain during the conflict.

A Pentagon assessment reported by The Washington Post suggests it could take up to six months to fully clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz after the conflict with Iran. Lawmakers were told Iran may have deployed 20 or more mines, some using GPS technology that makes them harder to detect and remove. The timeline has frustrated both Democratic and Republican officials, especially given the strait’s importance as a route for roughly a fifth of global oil and gas supplies. However, a Pentagon spokesperson later disputed the report, calling the assessment “inaccurate.”

The head of the University of Georgia chapter of Turning Point USA has resigned following a poorly attended rally, accusing the group of “blatant dishonesty.” The departing leader said the organization has strayed from the principles of its founder, Charlie Kirk. The resignation highlights internal tensions within the student chapter and criticism of the group’s direction.

A warning from Malaysian manufacturer Karex about potential 20–30% condom price increases—linked to supply chain disruptions from the Iran conflict—has gone viral in China, sparking widespread discussion. The topic gained over 60 million views on social media, with many users joking about or seriously considering stockpiling. While some expressed concern about rising costs, others emphasized that condoms remain far cheaper than the cost of raising a child.

I wanted to pause to tell you about a company I have recently used to mask my identity online—Surfshark. I have used Surfshark before and they reached out wanting to make sure that you can use them too! Now many of you may ask, what’s a VPN? Well it keeps my online identity safe by encrypting all of the information sent between my device and the internet. It keeps my data safe from big companies and cyber criminals. In recent months, many people have tried to hack me by logging into my accounts, spoofing my information, and more. Not only does Surfshark secure my online data, but it also allows me to change my virtual location and protect an unlimited number of devices when using it. It’s pretty easy to use—it lets you stay safe on public wifi, receive files securely, and ensure that you protect your data at a time when everyone wants access to it. You can start today too. Go to surfshark.com/aparnas or use code APARNAS at checkout at the link below to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

Tim Walz said authorities will pursue accountability for DHS officers involved in the shooting of Minnesotans, vowing: “We’re gonna bring them back and hold them accountable for what they did.”

A federal judge dismissed Laura Loomer’s $150 million defamation lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher over a joke suggesting she had a relationship with Donald Trump. The judge ruled that “no reasonable person” would interpret the comment as a factual claim, emphasizing it was clearly part of a comedic late-night show. Loomer argued the joke harmed her reputation and career, but the court found the context made it obvious satire. She criticized the ruling and said she plans to appeal.

Senior Republicans are pressuring Ron DeSantis to redraw Florida’s congressional map after Democrats gained ground in Virginia, hoping to pick up additional GOP seats before the midterms. Party leaders, including Mike Johnson, support the move, though some Republicans worry it could backfire or disrupt incumbents. The push highlights internal divisions, with some lawmakers warning against overly aggressive gerrymandering. The effort is part of a broader national redistricting battle as both parties compete for advantage ahead of the 2026 elections.

During an interview with Sean Hannity, Kash Patel denied claims that he used the FBI to respond to a negative news story about his girlfriend. He said the report was baseless and instead created a direct threat to her safety. “Absolutely not. The reality is that this same reporter delivered a baseless story which delivered a direct threat of life to my girlfriend. But here’s the thing: me and mine are like you and President Trump. We’re as tough as we come.”

According to NBC News, a suggestion by U.S. envoy Paolo Zampolli to replace Iran with Italy in the World Cup was met with skepticism and criticism in Italy. Zampolli said he raised the idea with Donald Trump and FIFA leadership, but officials and analysts noted it was neither feasible nor appropriate. Italian leaders and sports figures dismissed the proposal, emphasizing that teams must qualify through competition. FIFA also signaled that Iran is expected to participate as planned.

Megyn Kelly sharply criticized Donald Trump, saying: “He’s not a moral man. He’s obviously not the greatest husband in the world. And he’s extremely petty and thin-skinned…There’s no loyalty in return from Trump. Ever.”

U.S. Central Command said it has turned back 31 ships—mostly oil tankers—as part of its naval blockade of Iranian ports. The blockade is aimed at pressuring Tehran by preventing vessels from entering or leaving Iran. U.S. officials say the effort is ongoing and strictly enforced, while Iran has condemned it as a violation of the ceasefire. Tensions escalated further after Iran responded by attacking three ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Senate Republicans narrowly passed a 50–48 budget measure to advance funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol without Democratic support. The plan uses the budget reconciliation process to bypass a filibuster and directs committees to draft a $70 billion funding bill for the agencies. The move comes after bipartisan negotiations over a broader Homeland Security funding deal collapsed amid disagreements on limits to immigration enforcement. Democrats criticized the effort as protecting unchecked agencies, while Republicans argued it strengthens border security.

The Trump administration has agreed to a $1.25 million settlement with former campaign adviser Carter Page over claims tied to FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation. The settlement addresses allegations that warrants used to monitor Page were based on flawed and uncorroborated information, though it does not cover claims against individual FBI officials. The FBI had previously acknowledged errors in its warrant applications, including reliance on the Steele dossier. The case stems from Page’s lawsuit alleging unlawful surveillance tied to the 2016 election probe.

According to NBC News, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly rolling back some of its most controversial immigration enforcement tactics under the Trump administration. New internal guidance instructs ICE officers to limit arrests at courthouses and to avoid entering homes without judicial warrants, reversing earlier aggressive practices. The shift comes after mounting legal challenges and criticism over warrantless arrests and home entries, which raised constitutional concerns about Fourth Amendment protections. Officials and immigration attorneys say the changes are already being implemented, signaling a partial retreat from hardline enforcement policies.

Senator Jon Ossoff said he has no plans to run for president in 2028, emphasizing his focus on his current role and upcoming elections. “I have zero interest in running for president in 2028. I love serving the state of Georgia. Let’s keep our eyes on the ball, folks. We need to win decisively in Georgia and every battleground state and every competitive US House district this fall.”

A Colorado immigration officer, Nicholas Rice, has been charged with third-degree assault and criminal mischief after an incident involving a protester outside an ICE facility in Durango. Videos show the officer allegedly placing Franci Stagi in a chokehold and dragging her across the street during a protest over the detention of asylum-seekers. Stagi said the altercation escalated after she tried to get the agent’s attention while filming him, leading to him grabbing her and throwing her down an embankment. The case is under investigation, with state authorities stepping in following concerns about potential legal violations.

Lebanese state media report that Israeli troops have been burning homes and destroying infrastructure in southern Lebanon despite an existing truce. Incidents include house burnings in Mais Al-Jabal and widespread demolition of neighborhoods and roads in towns like Khiam, a key battleground with Hezbollah. Additional bombing operations were reported in areas such as Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold.

More On Iran, Lebanon Wars

Amal Khalil, who was a reporter for Al-Akhbarl, wearing a helmet and a vest with the word “PRESS” written on them, was killed on Wednesday (Photob by Mohammed Zaatari via Associated Press). New York Times, Israeli strikes kill a journalist and injure another in Lebanon, Ashley Ahn, April 23, 2026 (print ed.). Israeli strikes killed one journalist and wounded another in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, rattling a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon.Amal Khalil, who was a reporter for Al-Akhbarl, wearing a helmet and a vest with the word “PRESS” written on them, was killed on Wednesday (Photob by Mohammed Zaatari via Associated Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, Israeli strikes kill a journalist and injure another in Lebanon, Ashley Ahn, April 23, 2026 (print ed.). Israeli strikes killed one journalist and wounded another in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, rattling a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon.

The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said the Israeli military had targeted the journalists in the town of Tayri, where they took shelter in a nearby house after an airstrike struck a vehicle in front of the car they were traveling in. About an hour and a half later, a second strike hit the house they were hiding in, according to a statement by a Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, which employed the journalist who was killed.

The Lebanese Red Cross said its teams came under fire while trying to evacuate the journalists from the house, forcing them to withdraw. The rescue crews were targeted by a warning strike and machine-gun fire, the Lebanese health ministry said.

Zeinab Faraj, a photojournalist, was rescued from the house. The other journalist, Amal Khalil, who was a reporter for Al-Akhbar, remained trapped under rubble for hours before emergency medics recovered her body, according to the Lebanese Civil Defense.

In addition to Ms. Khalil, the two people in the car in front of her were killed in the strikes, Al-Akhbar reported.

Amid the 10-day truce between Israel and Lebanon, Israel has continued strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, citing its right to self-defense. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group, said that it had fired rockets and drones into Israel on Tuesday in response to what it said were violations of the cease-fire. Earlier on Wednesday, the Lebanese News Agency reported that an Israeli drone strike killed one person and wounded two others in another part of the country.

The Lebanese health ministry called the strikes in Tayri a “blatant double breach, involving both the obstruction of rescue efforts for a civilian known for her media and humanitarian work, and the direct targeting of an ambulance clearly marked with the Red Cross.”

The Israeli military denied in a statement that it had prevented rescuers from reaching the injured journalists, and said the incident was under investigation.

MS Now, How Trump set the stage for a long, drawn-out negotiation with Iran, Zeeshan Aleem, April 23, 2026. Iran War talks are proceeding neither quickly nor smoothly this week, in part because Iran’s government “has not yet decided” if it will participate in a second round of peace negotiations on how to end the war.

One factor that explains the sluggishness is that Iran’s government is reportedly unable to settle on a clear counteroffer to the U.S.’ latest position on ending the war.

That may sound like a problem of Iranian dysfunction, but it’s also one for which President Donald Trump bears enormous responsibility — since he has killed so many of Iran’s leaders. Trump has sown the seeds for a drawn-out conclusion to a war he desperately wants to end.

One cannot pursue “regime change” and lighter-touch coercive diplomacy at the same time.

Iran’s power structure has become more decentralized, more factionalized and more reactionary in the wake of many of Iran’s political and military leaders being assassinated in U.S. and Israeli bombings.

Axios, citing three U.S. officials, reported that Iran’s government is riven by “warring factions” that cannot settle on a “coherent” position for the next round of talks with the U.S. “Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is barely communicating. The [Iran Revolutionary Guard] generals now in control of the country, and Iran’s civilian negotiators are openly at odds over strategy,” Axios reported.

With different centers of power that don’t appear to be communicating well, Iran’s ability to negotiate and hew to clear policy positions is compromised. We saw this play out last week. Hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz was fully open following a ceasefire in Lebanon, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made a conflicting announcement, saying, “Passage is only possible with the permission of the IRGC Navy.” The IRGC-affiliated news agency Tasnim then blasted Araghchi for “a complete lack of tact in information dissemination.”

Axios attributed the fracture within Iran’s government to Israel’s assassination of Ali Larijani, the previous secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who “had the authority and political weight to hold Iran’s decision-making together.”

 

djt speech 12 17 2025 uncredited

jonathan v last jvl triad logoThe Triad via the Bulwark, Opinion: America Is Losing the Iran War, Jonathan V. Last, April 23, 2026. And that might be good for American democracy. 

  • Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, right, was fired.john phelan o
  • Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired.
  • Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation.

These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war.

Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.

bulwark logo big shipPhelan and George occupied different roles in the Pentagon. Neither was in charge of day-to-day management of the war—their jobs were focused on things like recruitment, retention, and training, of personnel and acquisition of technology and supplies. We can leave aside questions about their competence. Maybe they were excellent at their jobs; maybe they were not. Maybe they were pushed out for purely political or personality-related reasons that had nothing to do with performance.

But this war is a gigantic, sprawling exercise. It involves two dozen warships and roughly 50,000 troops. We are spending somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion per day and expending munitions at a fantastic rate.

When an organization enters a period of high-tempo operations like this, it places strain on the entire system. There are warfighters on the front line. Behind them are people in charge of logistics for the tip of the spear. Behind them is a universe of people who then have to compensate force dispositions across the rest of the world to rebalance America’s military presence. And behind them are the organizations Phelan and George led: people who suddenly have to start the process of rebuilding stockpiles and working double-time on procurement; who have to deal with what the war will mean for force retention and human resources.

There is no corner of the Pentagon that doesn’t get touched when America gets into a real war, as we are in Iran.

And when organizational structures are strained, the thing they need most is stability. If you are winning the war, then you don’t fire senior leaders, even if their performance is subpar—because the result speaks for itself. You are winning. Any change you make to leadership risks upending that balance.

If you are winning the war and you think the secretary of the Navy is not performing well, you write that down on a piece of paper and then replace him after the war is over, when you don’t have to worry about unintended consequences.

When the president starts firing senior military leaders while combat operations are ongoing, it’s an admission that the war is going badly. It’s an admission that the status quo is not tenable and must be altered, even if doing so creates instability and organizational risk.

So, you know, that’s not great news.¹

2. Losing the Pentagon

On the other hand, perhaps the net effect of the Iran war will be to turn the senior leadership of the military against Trump and reduce his confidence that, in a constitutional crisis, he could call on them to help him domestically?

It’s hard to imagine that senior military leaders have looked at the last 54 days and been inspired by the president’s competence.

We—and they—know that Trump:

  • Was talked into launching the war by the Israeli prime minister using a comically fanciful it-will-all-be-fine war plan.
  • Rejected cautionary warnings from his own intelligence and military that Israel’s projections were bullshit.
  • Shifted rationales for the war on an almost daily basis.
  • Was caught completely by surprise when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.
  • Has publicly been proven wrong about both what is happening and what is about to happen in the war.

Further, military leaders know that:

  • Trump continues to insist that the United States is blockading the strait, even after the military has clarified that it is not blockading the strait, because that would be a serious violation of international law.²
  • During the rescue operation of the two downed airmen, the president had to be kept out of the room in order to prevent him from interfering and screwing up the mission.
  • Trump says that American “mine ‘sweepers’” are currently operating in the strait, despite the fact that we no longer have any dedicated minesweepers.

This is not the portrait of a strong leader who has the best interests of military institutions at heart.

One of my maxims is that in the real world, the Joint Chiefs are the final arbiters of American democracy. No one gets sworn in on Inauguration Day without the implicit consent of the military.

I realize that this is not a very nice thing to say. But there it is.

The nightmare scenario was always that, following a disputed election, President Trump would call on the U.S. military to intervene on his behalf. This gambit would not have worked in 2020 or 2024. And that is why Pete Hegseth has moved with such alacrity to replace flag officers. He and Trump are probing to see if it might be possible to win the loyalty of the armed forces. Just in case.

Political leaders who lose wars—especially through their own strategic incompetence—do not usually engender loyalty from the officer corps.

It might have been possible to see Trump creating a cadre of loyalist flag officers at the Pentagon before the Iran war. It is very hard to see that happening now.

I don’t like to talk about walls closing in on Trump, but the Iran war has created a real strategic consequence for him. It has made one of his long-shot endgame scenarios even more unlikely to work.

If, having touched the stove of Trump’s incompetence in Iran, our senior officers become even more committed to staying out of domestic politics? Well, that’s not a terrible consolation prize.

Note: The other possibility here (in the firing of Phelan) is that Trump wasn’t directly involved in the firings at the Pentagon at all, and it’s all about Pete Hegseth and his paranoia/mismanagement/petty squabbles/demands for absolute loyalty and/or his inability to play nice with others, etc. Maybe that’s a more comforting explanation because it means that maybe Trump isn’t flailing and trying to find scapegoats for his losing war. But I think it’s actually worse.

First, we know Trump is flailing and trying to find scapegoats for his losing war. Right now those scapegoats are our NATO allies and the Iranian “hardliners,” but there are probably people in the administration he blames, too.

Second, if Trump isn’t involved in these firings, and it’s all Hegseth, then that means the secretary of defense is making major personnel moves without even considering the consequences they might have for his losing war. Which is worse. You don’t want the secretary of defense to be so focused on his internal political squabbles that he’s agnostic about whether the country wins or loses a war.

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

southern poverty law center

 

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Public Notice, Trump DOJ will avenge the KKK by taking out SPLC, Liz Dye, April 23, 2026. The racism is not subtle.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday.

Flanked by embattled FBI Director Kash Patel, Blanche announced an 11-count federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil rights organization which effectively brought down the Ku Klux Klan. Aaron Rupar 8hREPORTER: I just want to make sure I understand. You're alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups? BLANCHE: I'm not alleging it. The grand jury returned an indictment that says that

Justice Department log circularThe indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.

The SPLC spent five decades tracking white supremacists, infiltrating violent extremist groups, and dragging them into court. These are methods the FBI itself routinely employs — or did before it decided that racist militias were good, actually. In fact, the FBI coordinated with SPLC for years, relying on intelligence received from the organization to combat domestic extremists.

But now, as part of the project to undo Reconstruction, the Justice Department hopes to take out the SPLC using the very tools that group used to defeat the KKK. And along the way, they can exculpate every violent bigot who ever swung a tiki torch with murder in his eyes. Those boys weren’t bad, they were just stirred up by outside agitators from the SPLC! The organization that bankrupted the Klan.

 

will sommer false flagFalse Flag via The Bulwark, Investigative Commentary: DOJ’s Anti-Anti-Racism Indictment Has Major Holes, Will Sommer, April 23, 2026. I spent a lot of long hours this week sorting through the new indictment filed by the Department of Justice against the Southern Poverty Law Center, the anti-extremist group that has enraged Republicans for years. The indictment is notable not just for what’s in it but for what was left out. Plenty more to discuss on that below.

bulwark logo big shipTO MUCH FANFARE, the Department of Justice this week announced a new indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group known for monitoring and calling out the rise and prevalence of right-wing extremism and hate groups.

In the indictment, the DOJ accused the group of bank and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering, arguing that SPLC’s use of paid informants to monitor extremist groups was, in actuality, a funding mechanism for those groups.

Reading through the eleven counts, however, I noticed a telling omission.

In order to make the argument that “the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” the government listed several informants in white supremacist groups who received payoffs from the SPLC. One of them was described as an “Imperial Wizard” in a Ku Klux Klan group called the United Klans of America.

The indictment cites an SPLC article describing the United Klans of America as a “millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat.”

Yet the DOJ left out one key word from that SPLC article: “pathetic.” In the actual 2013 story, the SPLC described United Klans of America as a “pathetic millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat” (emphasis added).

That doesn’t sound like “manufacturing racism” so much as mocking it. If the SPLC were really trying to whip their donors into a frenzy over groups like United Klans of America, why would it describe the organization as “pathetic”?

And why would the DOJ leave that one word out of the indictment?

Those questions will almost assuredly be adjudicated in the courts, as the SPLC has pledged to fight the indictment. But, for now at least, they don’t seem to be causing much pause or hesitation on the right, which has seized on the indictment not just as a chance to crush a hated liberal institution, but as proof that essentially every politically unpalatable extremist on the right has been secretly funded by the SPLC.

“The supply of right-wing ‘hate’ was so low that a left-wing ‘anti-hate’ group had to subsidize it, so it could then raise money to fight it,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo tweeted.

“These extreme right-wing things that are supposedly everywhere, I swear to you, it is probably nothing but paid-off people from the SPLC and FBI informants,” Glenn Beck said Wednesday on his show.

THE DOJ’S INDICTMENT OF THE SPLC comes, ironically, when the group is far removed from the powerful perch it occupied during its civil rights heyday, or even what it was a decade ago. The SPLC was founded in the early 1970s as a legal clinic focusing on a racial discrimination. But it gained a name for itself later in the decade by filing lawsuits against the Klan. Over the subsequent years it expanded its remit to include other hate groups.

The SPLC has long faced allegations that it has amassed far more money than it needs to fund its activities, with more than $800 million in assets as of 2024. Working at the SPLC in the early 2000s, writer Bob Moser suspected he was working at what he would later describe as a “highly profitable scam.”

But conservatives despised it not just because it was flush with cash but because they believed the group spuriously ruined the reputation of people and institutions that were not hate groups and that it chilled speech.

In his new book, Strange People on the Hill, former SPLC investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden wrote about how, in the face of this conservative pressure—which became amplified in the MAGA era—the SPLC shrank away from its aggressive reporting on the right.

 

Charlottesville

Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Torchlight Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.

Much of the DOJ’s indictment against SPLC focuses on the group’s use of paid informants to gain information on politically marginal neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan groups. But for many on the right, the real intrigue in the indictment has been the government’s allegation that the SPLC had an informant involved in helping organize the fatal “Unite the Right” Charlottesville march in the spring of 2017.

Jack Posobiec called the revelation proof the march was “a complete hoax from top to bottom.” And conservative personality Priya Patel tweeted that the march was a “Leftist psyop.”

But here too, it’s what is not in the indictment that stands out. The mention of the informant is brief. All the government says is that the individual received $270,000 from the SPLC between 2015 and 2023 and that they participated in the march and played some ill-defined organizing role.

“[Informant] was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” the indictment reads. “[Informant] made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

What does that really mean? Who knows?

A couple hundred hard-right demonstrators marched in Charlottesville, and this informant arranged transportation for “several attendees.” That might mean a single rental car. As for the informant’s presence in an organizing chatroom, the best-known Charlottesville organizing chat, whose Discord logs were later leaked to the antifascist group Unicorn Riot, featured more than thirty people. 

southern poverty law centerTHE DOJ’S INDICTMENT MAY CENTER on the legal definition of what constitutes bank and wire fraud. But the larger question it raises is whether it is useful or even smart for a group devoted to disrupting violent racist groups to have people giving them information from the inside?

While certainly grimy, it’s not always illegal to pay someone for information. Private investigators do this. And while the practice is widely frowned upon in American journalism, it’s not forbidden. TMZ pays its sources. The National Enquirer buys stories—and buys them to kill them, too.

For their part, the SPLC leaders have tried to justify the program on the grounds that it was investigating potentially violent groups, and shared that information with law enforcement.

“This use of informants was necessary, because we are no strangers to threats of violence,” interim president and CEO Bryan Fair says in a video posted on the group’s website.

Even getting the money to the sources in a way that would protect their identities appears to have exposed the SPLC to prosecution. The indictment charges the group with making false statements to banks, over the SPLC’s use of bank accounts for fictitious front businesses to handle the payments.

But much of the government’s case rests on the idea that the SPLC committed wire fraud by not telling its own donors it was paying white supremacists for information.

Here again, more information would be helpful, specifically the reaction from the donors. Are they disappointed by the use of paid informants? Given that prosecutors admit in the indictment that the information provided by paid tipsters was used to write articles critical of the groups, why would donors feel defrauded?

WHILE THERE ARE ULTIMATELY some missing elements in the DOJ’s indictment that caught my attention, in one major respect it is the oversharing of information that stands out.

Reading the document, I was struck by how much detail the prosecutors provided about the identity of the SPLC’s alleged informants, considering that these are people who exist in a world where white supremacists are murdered with regularity.

I was able to confidently identify five of the ten informants described in the filing based only on their descriptions in the filings and some articles on the SPLC’s website. The government provided specific titles for several informants and at least one relative, and there are only so many “exalted cyclops” involved in adopt-a-highway lawsuits out there. Someone more familiar with the violent racist demimonde—like a vengeful Klansman or neo-Nazi biker—could likely figure out more.

Who would want to risk their lives to reveal the inner workings of right-wing extremist groups if they know the FBI is comfortable revealing their identities? Then again, perhaps that’s a fringe benefit of this whole case for the Trump administration. 


southern poverty law center

 

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Who’s Fooling Whom? How the SPLC Indictment Works, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 23, 2026. I want to return to the SPLC Indictment, to explain a bit more about how DOJ appears to have charged this, in part to show that the indictment doesn’t always clarify who was allegedly fooling whom.

The indictment charges:

Six counts of wire fraud (18 USC 1343) tied to payments made on April 25, 2023 Four counts of false statements (18 USC 1014) allegedly made to an FDIC-insured bank, tied to statements made by Employee-1 on December 20, 2016 One count of conspiracy to commit concealment (18 USC 1956) tied to two different ways in which SPLC obscured the way it paid informants

False Statements

Start with the false statements, which claims that Employee-1 (who would later become SPLC’s CFO) made four false statements to a bank about four accounts (all using the same Tax ID number) opened as a sole proprietorship, about which Employee-1 certified that they were the “sole owner” of the proprietorship. Presumably, DOJ treats this as false because Employee-1 said they were the only one involved, hiding SPLC’s role in it.

The bank opened an investigation into this scheme in 2020, and SPLC closed all of the accounts on August 5, 2020. A year later, on September 9, 2021, SPLC clarified its ownership interest in those four accounts, three earlier ones (closed in 2013), and one still earlier one (closed in 2011).

My guess is the FBI investigation started off a Suspicious Activity Report from the bank. I also suspect the timeline here — the bank’s discovery of it, SPLC’s closure of the accounts, and its clean-up of the claims to the bank — explain why DOJ didn’t pursue this under Biden: because SPLC cleaned it up.

Notably, SPLC closed the bank accounts more than five years ago, but SPLC cleaned up the statements less than five years ago. This may be how DOJ intends to get around statutes of limitation on statements made in 2016.Conspiracy

But that may also be the purpose of the conspiracy charge — to extend the statutes of limitation on false statements made over five years Justice Department log circularago. The conspiracy charge claims that, even though SPLC paid its informants via ACH accounts clearly tied to SPLC, because it replaced the bank accounts under false entity names with “monikers” like Rarebooks050, those monikers entailed an ongoing attempt to hide the source of the funds.

It’s unclear whom DOJ thinks SPLC was hiding the source of the funds though. The bank would have known the source.

Most commentators on the indictment assume that any deception was designed to hide the source of the funds from those who might rat out the informants, and that may be. But I wonder whether DOJ is charging SPLC for hiding the source of payment from the informants themselves?

Wire fraud

Which brings us to the wire fraud charges — the weakest part of a weak indictment.

 

Charlottesville Ttorchlight Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.

Charlottesville Torchlight "United the Right" Parade in Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.

The indictment starts by listing eight informants allegedly paid by SPLC, starting with a person who was in a chat room associated with Unite the Right (which was designed to, and did, get the far right trolls worked up), but including some senior officials in the leading organizations of the far right.

But only three of those informants are implicated in the April 2023 payments on which six counts of wire fraud are tied (marked with pink rectangles; DOJ mixes up the order of these for dramatic effect).

The wire fraud constituted payments made through ACH payment, not the bank accounts set up using false statements. And only one of those payments is to someone in a senior role in an organization (F-42, the former National Alliance Chair, which I’ll return to, though the National Alliance member who made copies of their documents, F-9, is also tied to a wire fraud charge). In other words, most of the people the indictment describes in the introductory part of the indictment are not tied to a charged crime.

In fact, one of those payments is explicitly tied to a cut out, F-11, someone who was paid via fictitious entity, who then paid others (including the Klan people). And the institutional affiliations, if any, of two of those recipients (F-35 and F-40), are not given.

The narrative of the indictment is that the fraud was targeted at donors. Poor SPLC donors had no idea they were paying Nazis. The best substantiation of that are the two people — F-30 and F-42, highlighted above — whom SPLC was paying at the same time as they profiled them in Hatewatch on the website.

e. F-42 was the former chairman of the National Alliance. The SPLC website contained an “Extremist File” webpage about F-42 from which the SPLC solicited donations. Between 2016 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-42 more than $140,000.00. This overlapped the time period in which F-42 was featured on the SPLC’s “Extremist File” webpage.

f. F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC website contained an “Extremist File” for F-30 from which the SPLC solicited donations. Between 2014 and 2016, the SPLC secretly paid F-30 more than $70,000.00. This overlapped the time period in which F-30 was featured on the SPLC’s “Extremist File” webpage.

This is the only real evidence DOJ makes that SPLC hid from donors that the people they were using as informants were themselves the people SPLC said were most extreme. I can imagine defenses to this, not least that it provides an informant operational security if SPLC implies they’re the target.

Importantly, however, just one of these two people was part of the alleged wire fraud. The other person was paid years ago, possibly relevant only to an alleged ongoing conspiracy (depending on how they were paid).

But here’s the thing: It’s not clear how the money laundering conspiracy, which seems to rely on ACH payments that allegedly obscure payment source with use of monikers, can possibly tie to the wire fraud, which alleges donors were duped. The bank knew the real source of the funds, the donors would never see the payments.

So who is DOJ alleging that SPLC was fooling in that money laundering charge? After all, SPLC might have been using the monikers for kash patel o croppedtheir own internal account, to keep track of which person they were paying how.

And I want to present the possibility that, even while Kash Patel, left, and Todd Blanche, right, wail about those poor SPLC donors, this indictment may be built off the possibility that at least some of the informants were duped. Todd Blanche OAfter all, that’s the only way that F-11, the handler, could be tied to wire fraud, because they almost certainly knew what was going on.

At least part of this indictment attempts to criminalize the handler, F-11, using money to get top Ku Klux Klan members to provide them information, via whatever ruse. There’s no allegation the poor dragons knew about it. And frankly, the only way the Rarebooks050 ACH could be deceptive is if that recipient didn’t know either.

U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

Six leading candidates for governor of CaliforniaSix leading candidates for governor of California (from left): Matt Mahan, Xavier Becerra, Chad Bianco, Steve Hilton, Tom Steyer and Katie Porter (Pool photo by Jason Henry). (from left): Matt Mahan, Xavier Becerra, Chad Bianco, Steve Hilton, Tom Steyer and Katie Porter (Pool photo by Jason Henry). 

ny times logoNew York Times, Candidates for California Governor Debate: 5 Takeaways, Jennifer Medina, April 23, 2026. The nonpartisan primary remains volatile after the departure of Eric Swalwell. A televised debate featured six leading candidates, but produced few fireworks.

Just weeks before voters receive their ballots, the California race for governor remains unpredictable and chaotic; but in a debate Wednesday night, there were relatively few fireworks among the six candidates onstage.

For voters still deciding whom to support in the nonpartisan June primary, the debate shed light on the candidates’ positions on taxes and homelessness, but did not provide a breakout moment for any of them.

The leading candidates include four Democrats and two Republicans, and polls have consistently shown that there is no clear front-runner in the race.

The televised debate, held in the San Francisco television studio of KRON4, was the first since Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman, dropped out of the race last week amid accusations of sexual assault. While questions about the collapse of Mr. Swalwell’s campaign came up briefly during the 90-minute debate, the moderators largely focused on some of the state’s most persistent problems, including housing costs, gas prices and inequality.

Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager, and Katie Porter, a former congresswoman, have polled near the top of the Democratic field for several weeks. But both Republicans — Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host who has been endorsed by President Trump, and Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County — have consistently polled well enough to worry Democratic leaders. The top two candidates in the primary, regardless of party, will advance to the general election.

Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general, and Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, did not meet the original threshold of voter support to participate in the debate. But after Ms. Swalwell dropped out, the debate organizers commissioned a follow-up poll that showed a spike in support for both candidates.

County officials in California will begin sending ballots on May 4.

Here are five takeaways from the debate.

Everyone wants to talk about Tom Steyer’s money. Mr. Steyer was arguably the best known of all the candidates onstage — and he is known for being a billionaire. He has spent roughly $120 million in the race so far, a fraction of his net worth, an estimated $2.4 billion according to Forbes.

And he has used that money to try to convince voters that he is a staunch progressive. “Tax me more,” he’s fond of saying. On Wednesday, that tax may have come in the form of repeated questions about his money. “I’m the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires,” he said. 

When the debate moderators asked him why doesn’t he choose to contribute more in taxes, Mr. Steyer said that he and his wife plan to give away the majority of their money while they are alive.

Ms. Porter was not impressed. “Mr. Steyer likes to talk about his ‘giving pledge,’ but what he’s done with his own money is more give himself an opportunity to be the governor,” she said.

Mr. Steyer retorted that “billionaires and corporations are spending big in this race to oppose me.”

“I am the change agent here, and they don’t want change,” he said.And everyone wants to be working class.

“The biggest problem in California is Californians can’t afford to live here,” Mr. Steyer said, in what may have been the least contentious line of the night. The rising cost of living has been one of the most persistent issues in California in the past decade. The candidates each tried to convince voters that they feel their pain.  

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 22, 2026 [Virginia's Vote To Gerrymander U.S. House Seats In Reaction To GOP Efforts], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 23, 2026. Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.

As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.

State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.

Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”

The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.

But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.

In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.

But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.

Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.

This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.

In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”

But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.

Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….

“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.

“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

More On U.S. Fair Elections, Election-Rigging Claims 

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Old Man Yells ‘Rigged Election’, Andrew Egger, right, andrew eggerApril 23, 2026. It’s remarkable that it’s become so unremarkable to say: Yesterday, the president of the United States claimed that an election outcome he disliked had been the result of election fraud.

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump fumed . “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before—and the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”

bulwark logo big shipEven in the crowded catalog of Trump’s bogus fraud claims, this one stands out as laughable. The entire substance of the claim is that the election was fraudulent because Virginia’s biggest counties, with the most votes to count, took the longest to count them. “Longest” being a relative term: the race had been called within two hours of polls closing.

Yet even within that two-hour window, some Trump allies were already laying the predicate for Trump’s argument: “New Virginia election results show opposition to the Democrats’ redistricting plan now leading 53% to 46%,” Laura Loomer’s show account Loomer Unleashed tweeted at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday. “However, Democrat controlled Fairfax County, one of Virginia’s most populated counties, still refuses to release its election results. Sadly, a swing could be coming soon.”

But at no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans. No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka—wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka—decried the Democrats’ “hollow, shameful victory,” but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply. I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that “we haven’t really heard anything about that.” (Then again, Bob added, “they never tell us anything.”)

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Nor were the White House or the Republican National Committee eager even to attempt to substantiate Trump’s claims. When I asked where specifically the president was claiming fraudulent votes had been counted, a White House press aide simply referred me back to his post. RNC spokeswoman Kiersten Pels, by contrast, pivoted to attacking the fairness of the gerrymander—again without touching the substance of Trump’s claim.

“46 percent of Virginians voted Republican in the last federal election, yet Democrats are rigging the system to cling to power and silence voters they can’t win over,” Pels said. “This map is an unconstitutional partisan power grab designed to disenfranchise millions of voters and tilt the playing field.”

Hey guys! Your boss doesn’t just think the measure was unfair! He thinks Democrats literally dropped in fraudulent votes and stole the election! Isn’t anyone going to look into this?

Figuring out what to make of all this requires us to hold two ideas in friction at once. On the one hand, this is all faintly silly old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff. Trump’s brain is so cooked that he immediately believes that literally any election result that fails to go his way must have been the result of fraud—to the point where even his own aides seem faintly embarrassed at having to cover for him.

And yet we can’t ignore the fact that he’s managed to pull a large chunk of the country and all the dizzying powers of the federal government down into his own mania as well. It’s difficult to overstate just how widespread truly kooky election-integrity beliefs have become within Trump’s GOP: Just this week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of voters, including 82 percent of Republicans, and 38 percent of independents, think there are “large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections.”

What Trump and his allies have created over the years is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing base of electoral nihilists. In past cycles, convincing such people that the fix was in usually required the mass propagation of specific lies: rigged voting machines from Venezuela, 2,000 Mules-style ballot-stuffing operations, batches of phony ballots snuck into the count by dastardly poll workers. But now this crowd’s cynicism has achieved orbital velocity; it no longer requires additional thrust. When Trump points at any given election and shouts “rigged!”, he no longer needs anything resembling a smoking gun: A giant chunk of the electorate is ready to go along.

Six years ago, Donald Trump attempted the most brazen theft of a presidential election in our lifetimes—a full-court legal and extralegal press to deny his defeat and stay in the White House that culminated in a deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol. And he keeps taking actions to remind us explicitly of his total lack of remorse: Pardoning every January 6th criminal, pursuing criminal charges against those who stood in the way of his theft attempt, enforcing a government-wide soft ban on anybody acknowledging that he actually lost.

We’re not going to see a “Stop the Steal” effort in Virginia, where the president and his allies actually have a decent chance of defeating the new gerrymander in court. (Yesterday, a circuit court judge gave them an early victory in a decision blocking the map from going into effect; Democrats, of course, are appealing.) But every stupid, baseless allegation of fraud the president makes should be another flashing warning sign. He’s tried it before. He’d do it again.

Civil Discourse, Legal Commentary: Voting rights. Southern resistance. National stakes, Joyce Vance, right, April 23, 2026. From the front lines at Fair Fight, we deliver sharp insights on the fight to protect democracy.joyce vance

My friends at Fair Fight, the Georgia-based pro-voting and pro-democracy organization, reviewed the results of a ProPublica investigation into how Trump is systematically removing election protections, and produced this summary, that brings you up to date and also provides an important suggestion for what you can do.

We're all responsible for protection the right to vote. So this is important information to take in.Trump Has Eliminated Election Safeguards and Installed Loyalist Election Deniers in Key Roles“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government.”Rights & Insights and Joyce VanceApr 15 READ IN APP

On Monday, ProPublica released a massive new investigation breaking down how Donald Trump has dismantled federal guardrails that stopped him from overturning his 2020 election loss.

The 4,700+ word investigation, based on interviews with about 30 current and former executive branch officials, provides an unprecedented and detailed account of how thoroughly critical election security guardrails have been gutted within the federal government ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.Key Findings from ProPublica’s Investigation:

 

pro publica logoProPublica, Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, April 13, 2026. Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.

Changing of Guard: At least 75 career staff are gone. Two dozen appointees, including many from the election denial movement, have been hired. Ten helped try to overturn the 2020 vote. Political Interference: Once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers, which they’ve already used to push forward unprecedented actions that critics say amount to partisan interference.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

We read the entire piece (twice) to make sure you’re aware of the findings: 

Career officials who protected elections are gone – election deniers have taken over. ProPublica found that at least 75 career officials across several agencies who played key roles in safeguarding the 2020 election have been fired, resigned, or reassigned. They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Many are election deniers, and ten actively worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss.

Federal programs designed to safeguard elections have been dismantled. Since Trump took office, nearly all federal election protection programs have been eliminated, severely defunded, or had nearly all their staff removed or reassigned:

  • CISA election team
  • NSC election security group
  • ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center
  • DOJ Public Integrity Section
  • DOJ Civil Rights Division’s voting section
  • FBI Public Corruption Team
  • FBI Foreign Influence Task Force
  • FBI and DOJ Election Day command posts

False claims and politicization now drive federal election policy. ProPublica reports that White House election lawyer Kurt Olsen – sanctioned by judges for false 2020 claims – pressured the FBI’s Atlanta chief to seize Fulton County’s 2020 ballots using a discredited report. When the FBI chief examined the evidence and found it didn’t hold up, and was already dismissed by Georgia Republican officials, he was forced out. The raid happened anyway – using a version of the same rejected evidence. Former DOJ Public Integrity lawyers said they likely would have tried to block the investigation.

Trump is “flooding the zone” to distract us. Billionaires are trying to control what you see, buying up media and controlling algorithms. 

 

dnc horizontal logo

The New Republic, Democrats Are Pissed Another One of Their Own Has Died in Congress, Malcolm Ferguson, April 23, 2026. Democratic members of Congress know they have an age problem—and it’s hurting them. Democrats are once again having hard conversations about their party’s gerontocracy, in the wake of Representative David Scott’s death on Wednesday.

new republic dailyScott, right, was up for reelection, seeking his thirteenth term in Congress at 80 years old. His health issues on the job were first reported in 2022. He is now the eleventh Democratic member of Congress to die in office since 2020, and his death comes just a day after another House Democrat, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, resigned over corruption allegations. One david scott oanonymous House member sounded off to Axios, calling the issue of age “a liability problem.”

“I will not be here at the age of 80 and I’m not quite sure why people feel that they should, but ... normal people are going to keep asking the question.... [It is] a liability problem.... We need every fucking vote we can get to stop this war in Iran, to ... protect the right for people to vote or to hold DHS accountable,” they said. “When we’re losing a vote because someone has to resign out of corruption or someone else has died ... people should really ask themselves: Are you absolutely sure you are the only person in your entire district who can represent your district right now to the best of your ability?

“Today is going to put a lot more pressure on my colleagues who are older, because the question is going to come back, ‘why are you running again?’” they continued.

“Chairman Scott’s death is incredibly sad for his family, loved ones, staff, and everyone he inspired,” former DNC vice chair and party youth leader David Hogg said. “But … it’s also terrible for his constituents, who could go months without representation, and the Democratic caucus, which is down another vote in Congress.”

U.S. House logoAnother House Democrat stated that Scott’s passing “reinforces the need for every member to really evaluate whether they have a full, hardy two years in them with the margins as close as they are”—referring to the slim 218–212 current GOP House majority.

Yet the party’s congressional senior citizens remain bullish, and perhaps foolishly so.

“If you want to volunteer to debate Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, all past the age of 85, I welcome you to do so and suffer the consequences,” a confident Representative Emmanuel Cleaver, 81 and up for reelection, told Axios.

Cleaver is a former Congressional Black Caucus chair and current member, as Scott was. The CBC is one of the oldest, most ideologically moderate bodies in the party, and Scott’s death is again calling attention to that reality.

“It’s a bit uncouth to say, but of the 16 members of Congress who have died in office since 2020, half of them have been members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which makes up 11% of Congress,” Washington, D.C.-based X user Andrew Damitio posted. “There needs to be conversations there about handing power to the next generation.”

Trump Team Watch

 

helen delaney reese djt

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: Trump is losing more power by the day, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, April 23, 2026. At 10:34 this morning, Donald Trump was inside the Oval Office of the White House in a meeting with one of his Commissioners, a meeting that directly affects the survival and well-being of millions of senior citizens, children, and disabled Americans.

But instead of focusing on that responsibility, his anger over losing yet another vote put before the American people got the best of him, and he lost control. Because after a night where millions of Virginians showed up and made their voices heard, Donald Trump did what he always does when the outcome slips beyond his control. He went to the one place where he can distort reality, control what’s said, and protect himself. Truth Social. And without evidence and without hesitation, he wrote, A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!

And the lie was just the beginning. Because that was not the first thing he posted this morning. At 8:34, while Americans were still processing the Virginia results, he shared a Fox News opinion piece with a headline that read: “Will President Trump go full Sherman in the war on Iran?” Sherman, as in General William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a path of total destruction across the American South during the Civil War and left nothing standing behind him. Trump didn’t add commentary. He didn’t need to. Just sharing it said everything.

And then, at 8:39, came the screenshot of a New York Times article from 2004, with his own caption above it: “Last Season of my Apprentice Juggernaut!” Rating numbers. Viewership figures. A reminder that he was once on a well-watched reality TV show 22 years ago.

Those three posts show us exactly how his brain operates. This is a picture of a man who, in one morning, laid out his entire playbook in three posts. The Virginia post is the domestic threat. The Sherman/Iran post is the foreign threat. And the Apprentice is the ego underneath it all.

His brain was saying, The elections are rigged when I lose. I’m planting the seed now ahead of the midterms. And then it moved to protection mode by sending a warning to those inside the country and out. I control the military. I will use it. Don’t test me. And then when he started to worry that that wouldn’t be enough, his ego made him start to overcompensate. The insecurity broke through, and so he displayed a desperate show of relevance and importance: I am a winner. I am beloved. I am untouchable.

This is not a president governing a country. This is a man performing dominance because he feels it leaving him. And the Virginia post is the most dangerous of the three, not because of what it says about last night, but because of what it is rehearsing for November.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: A tiny California tribe just donated $2 million to MAGA Inc. Here’s why, Judd Legum, right, judd legumApril 23, 2026. On March 5, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a small Native American tribe based out of the Rumsey Indian Rancheria in California, donated $2 million to MAGA Inc., President Trump’s Super PAC.

It was one of the largest donations MAGA Inc. has received this year and particularly remarkable, given that there are only 41 people on the Rumsey Indian Rancheria, according to the latest Census survey.

noel simsThe story behind the Yocha Dehe’s extraordinary political contribution illustrates exactly how business is done in Trump’s Washington.

The Yocha Dehe operates the Cache Creek Casino Resort on the 185-acre Rumsey Rancheria in Brooks, California. For nearly a decade, the Yocha Dehe has been engaged in a legal dispute with the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians, which is trying to build a casino on a 160-acre parcel in Vallejo, California, about 60 miles away.

Whether Scotts Valley can build its casino hinges on a technical determination by the Department of the Interior (DOI) about whether the site qualifies as “restored lands” — property with both a historical and modern connection to the tribe. On January 10, 2025, in the waning days of the Biden administration, Scotts Valley received some good news from the DOI. After many years of consideration, the DOI issued a detailed 30-page memorandum declaring the parcel qualified as restored land eligible for gaming.

But the Yocha Dehe was not ready to give up. Since 2019, the Yocha Dehe has been represented by Miller Strategies, a lobbying firm.

Jeff Miller, the founder of Miller Strategies, is one of the most powerful men in Trump’s Washington. In 2020, Miller bundled $11.2 million for Trump’s reelection campaign and raised another $100 million combined for Trump’s nominating convention and super PAC. In 2024, Miller co-hosted a fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. that raised over $2 million for Trump. Miller also served as the finance chair of Trump’s 2025 inauguration, which raised nearly $250 million. Since Trump took office, Miller has been helping Trump raise hundreds of millions from corporations to construct a giant ballroom.

Miller himself says he works “the phones every single week to raise money, whether it’s for the House, the Senate, or for President Trump.” Politico suggested Miller was “the most powerful unelected man in DC.”

Before Trump’s 2024 election, the Yocha Dehe typically paid Miller Strategies about $50,000 per quarter. According to government filings, the Yocha Dehe was paying Miller Strategies exclusively for issues related to “COVID-19 financial relief legislation.” But after Trump won in November 2024, the Yocha Dehe began paying Miller Strategies $150,000 per quarter. The lobbying also concerned a new topic: The DOI’s “reconsideration” of its decision on Scotts Valley.

On January 7, 2025, the Yocha Dehe donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

As soon as the new administration took office in January 2025, the Miller Strategies team sprang into action. Emails and other documents obtained by Popular Information provide a rare glimpse into the Washington, D.C., influence industry under Trump. These documents were disclosed as part of the ongoing litigation between Scotts Valley and the DOI.

On January 31, 2025 — just 10 days after Trump took office — Ashley Gunn, a Miller Strategies lobbyist, emailed Alexander Meyer, the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Gunn was well-positioned to navigate the Trump White House because she was Senior Director of Cabinet Affairs in the first Trump administration. She attached a white paper advocating for a reversal of the DOI’s January 10 decision. Gunn asked Meyer if he could help set up a meeting between the White House point person for Native American issues and Yocha Dehe leadership.

The Yocha Dehe donated $2 million to MAGA Inc. on March 5, 2026 — while the DOI was in the middle of its reconsideration process.

In many respects, Scotts Valley and the Yocha Dehe are very similar. Both are small California tribes seeking to preserve or expand their gambling revenue. Both employ high-powered lobbyists and make donations to politicians to advance their interests. But only the Yocha Dehe is aggressively greasing the wheels of the Trump machine — donating millions to Trump’s political operation and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist who doubles as a top fundraiser for Trump. That approach has given the Yocha Dehe a decisive upper hand. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump’s Dreams for a Battleship Led to His Navy Secretary’s Ouster, Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper, April 23, 2026. The Navy secretary, John Phelan, was supposed to deliver the first of the president’s ships by 2028. The timeline was nearly impossible.

President Trump wanted one thing, more than anything else, from his secretary of the Navy, John Phelan: a new class of battleships.

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Mr. Trump boasted at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort in Florida a few days before Christmas. Mr. Phelan, a billionaire investor who has a home near the club, stood next to the president as he made the announcement.

Mr. Phelan’s job was to deliver the first of Mr. Trump’s battleships by 2028.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Phelan, who had struggled to come up with a plan to deliver the ships on the nearly impossible timeline that Mr. Trump has demanded, senior defense and administration officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to be forced from the Defense Department during this administration, though he is far from the only senior Pentagon official to be dismissed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals over the past year, including the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month. Mr. Hegseth has also butted heads with the secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, over promotions and a host of other issues.

The churn of senior Pentagon officials at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in war with Iran has alarmed top Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

The breaking point for Mr. Phelan, who often said that he and Mr. Trump texted and talked on the phone regularly, came in the last two weeks as the president’s frustration over Mr. Phelan’s management of his prized battleship program grew and Mr. Phelan’s enemies in the Pentagon, including Mr. Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen A. Feinberg, mounted a campaign to force him out.

Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg told Mr. Trump that the Navy secretary was not a team player and needed to go, military officials said. Mr. Trump called Mr. Phelan to talk about his poor relationship with other leaders in the Pentagon.

Mr. Feinberg and Mr. Hegseth had recently seized some decision-making authority from Mr. Phelan, tapping a three-star admiral to oversee the Navy’s submarine portfolio and having him report directly to Mr. Feinberg.

That left Mr. Phelan with oversight of a major investment in new ships that Mr. Trump has called a “golden fleet,” built around the president’s beloved battleship program.

Presidents rarely pay close attention to military procurement, but Mr. Trump has spoken repeatedly about his plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship. In a February speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Mr. Trump insisted that he had helped design the new class of ships that bear his name.

“I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Mr. Trump told the troops. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.”

For Mr. Trump, the ships recalled “Victory at Sea,” a documentary television series that ran in the 1950s and touted the role that battleships and other Navy vessels played in World War II.

“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he mused to reporters in January when talking about the new battleships. “What a great thing that is to watch!”

Mr. Phelan played a prominent role in selling Mr. Trump on the new ships and his ambitious plans for revitalizing the U.S. Navy’s fleet and the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

In his confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Phelan said that the president often texted him late at night to ask him about “rusty ships or ships in a yard” and what Mr. Phelan was going to do about them. Before the Navy settled on its plans for the Trump-class battleship, Mr. Phelan wooed the president to the idea by showing oil paintings of some of the service’s great battleships from earlier eras, defense officials said.

In its $1.5 trillion defense budget, released earlier this week, the Trump administration is asking for $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, the second-largest shipbuilding budget proposal since 1955, according to Congressional Budget Office data.

The Navy is also projecting that it will be asking for $17 billion in fiscal year 2028 to start construction on the first of the Trump class, Navy officials said.

But senior defense officials said the program, along with Mr. Trump’s ambitious plans for his golden fleet, was marred by problems. The U.S. shipbuilding industry has nowhere near the capacity to build a technologically advanced battleship of the sort Mr. Trump is envisioning in the next few years, senior military officials said.

The Trump administration has failed over the last 16 months to nominate anyone to serve as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition — who is supposed to oversee the Navy’s weapons programs. And the Navy’s civilian work force, which plays a critical role in developing and testing new warships, has been devastated by cuts and early retirements, military officials said.

“The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion,” wrote Mark F. Cancian, an expert on military budgeting with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail.”

The ship would take “years to design,” Mr. Cancian noted. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

In Mr. Trump’s imagination the new warship would be massive, weighing as much as 40,000 tons, and would be packed with new high-tech weapons, like lasers, hypersonic missiles and electric rail guns, most of which are still in development and years from being deployed.

In recent weeks, it had become clear to Mr. Phelan that the Navy and the U.S. shipbuilding industry did not have the ability to deliver on Mr. Trump’s vision. Mr. Phelan recently suggested to Mr. Trump that the Navy might have to rely on European shipyards to deliver the battleships on the ambitious timeline Mr. Trump was demanding, senior military and administration officials said.

U.S. Economy, Jobs, Inflation, Markets, Media

ny times logoNew York Times, Meta to Cut 10% of Work Force in A.I. Push, Mike Isaac and Eli Tan, April 23, 2026. The layoffs affect about 8,000 employees, with Meta also planning to close 6,000 open roles, as the company focuses on artificial intelligence.

meta logoMeta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by A.I.-powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Microsoft Targets About 7% of Its U.S. Workers With Buyout Offer, Karen Weise, April 23, 2026. The tech giant is offering long-serving employees early retirements as it continues to invest aggressively in artificial intelligence.

Microsoft offered early retirement to thousands of long-serving employees on Thursday as it looks to thin its ranks amid major investments in artificial intelligence, according to an internal email from Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer.

microsoft logo CustomEligible employees amounted to roughly 7 percent of the company’s U.S. work force, a person familiar with the program said. Microsoft employed about 125,000 workers in the United States at the end of its fiscal year in June.

“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” Ms. Coleman wrote in the email to staff.

The early retirement is being offered to U.S. workers who meet certain criteria: Their age plus their number of years at the company must total 70 or more. They also have to be at the senior director level or below and cannot be paid by sales incentive programs.

Microsoft and its big tech peers have been closely managing or culling the size of their work forces amid a spending spree to build the infrastructure for A.I. The companies are plowing cash into building data centers and filling them with the chips and other technologies needed to power advanced systems. As more data centers are built and used, the technology inside them begins to depreciate, putting pressure on profit margins. Cutting employees is one way companies can offset those costs.

Epstein Files, Coverup

vicky ward investigatesVicky Ward Investigates, Norway's Journalists Say The Investigations Into The Epstein Files Will Take Too Long To Matter, Vicky Ward, April 23, 2026. What I learned At SKUP's Annual Conference.

I am back from an invigorating and inspiring time in Norway as a guest of SKUP, the Norwegian Foundation for Investigative Journalism, which was holding its annual conference in Tønsberg, outside Oslo.

The weekend and its concluding awards dinner was the journalistic equivalent of the US’s Oscars weekend. I had not anticipated how enormous (there were 600 attendees) and high-profile this conference is internationally. I am not sure I have ever learned so much useful stuff on a wide variety of important, pressing topics in such a short amount of time. (There was always one English-speaking session throughout the weekend.) I kept wondering how it is that here in the US, we haven’t thought to do the same. We have a lot of catching up to do. SKUP board member Kristoffer Rønneberg told me SKUP has been at this for 30 years.

So, what happened? Yours truly kicked it off. I was interviewed on stage by Gry Veiby of NRK (the Norwegian equivalent of NPR) about my experience reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The subject has particular significance in Norway. As I mentioned last week, you could easily make the case that of all countries, Norway’s upper echelons have been hit hardest by the revelations in Epstein’s emails.

mette marit norway crown princessNorway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit, left, has apologized for continuing a close friendship with Epstein for years after his conviction as a sex offender. Norway’s former Prime Minister, Thorbjørn Jagland, below right, is under investigation “on suspicion of aggravated corruption” because the files revealed Jagland planned a visit to Epstein’s island in 2014. The trip was canceled, but the back-and-forth over the arrangements raised questions about conflicts of interest, given that Jagland was Secretary-General of the Council of Europe and chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the time.

Thorbjorn Jagland 2007And two married Norwegian senior diplomats, Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, have had to step down from their respective posts because it emerged that 1. Terje Rød-Larsen had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Epstein’s foundations on behalf of his think tank, the International Peace Institute [IPI], and 2. Rød-Larsen had ccepted a $130,000 loan from Epstein in 2013 that was not disclosed to IPI's board.

Investigative journalist Gard Oterholm of Dagens Næringsliv, Norway’s leading financial publication, joined us on stage after 30 minutes. It was Oterholm who broke the story that Rød-Larsen had accepted the money from Epstein, leading to Rød-Larsen’s resignation from IPI in 2020. Gard Oterholm Joins Us On Stage To Discuss His Reporting

There was hilarious video and audio played on the screen behind us showing Oterholm catching up to Rød-Larsen in the street and asking about his ties to Epstein. “Can you please respect I don’t speak to Dagens Næringsliv. Is that understood?” Rød-Larsen says. (Which is like saying: “I don’t speak to the Financial Times.”) Rød-Larsen Blowing Off Gard Oterholm About Epstein

Separately, there was audio of Oterholm cornering Jagland at a drinks reception. When asked to explain his relationship with Epstein, Jagland starts speaking abstrusely about a Chinese proverb advising one not to speak about things one doesn’t know. (Many of the journalists I spoke to concurred with Epstein’sview of Jagland, which was that he was “not bright” but “offered a unique perspective. “He failed up professionally,” one of them said. ) Thorbjørn Jagland Blowing Off Gard Oterholm About Epstein

Some Norwegian journalists at SKUP told me they don't expect significant results from the government investigations because they say they will take a very long time and events will likely overtake them. Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit wearing a nasal cannula

Jagland is reportedly ill, in hospital. Crown Princess Mette-Marit suffers from chronic pulmonary fibrosis and has said she is considering not becoming Queen on the grounds of her ill health. She recently showed up to an event wearing a nasal cannula. (Although there was a rumor going around the conference that she had taken up smoking again, due to the stress of all this.) Rød-Larsen is 78 and not in the best of health. Juul is now retired. Still, though there remain unanswered questions. Who introduced them all to Epstein in the first place? They met in Strasbourg in 2011, it is believed. Oterholm, for one, would like clarity and specifics and is continuing to report.

There was also a tremendous amount of talk about the Crown Princess’s 29-year-old son from a previous marriage, Marius Borg Høiby, who is awaiting the verdict of a trial in which he was charged with 39 offenses, including four rapes. The four alleged victims have not been publicly identified, but sensationally, one of them appeared at the conference, unannounced, in an off-the-record interview after dinner on Friday night.

I have been wondering why we have heard so little about the Høiby trial over here, given his mother’s friendship with Epstein, and the made-for-TV storyline about a young man who grew up as the troubled Black sheep and only non-Royal in his extended family. Turns out that’s because in Norway, the courts decide which foreign journalists get access to the hearings - and, beyond that, which tiny minority of those journalists get even deeper access to the in-camera testimony of the victims.

I was astonished to learn during a session featuring three European journalists who covered the case, that the victims’ testimony is not public record. In Norway, it's entirely left to the discretion of the journalists who hear it as to what to report. (Which, I would argue, puts too much responsibility on the shoulders of the press and paves the way for allegations of corruption and cronyism by the courts.) European Journalists Discuss Covering Marius Borg Hoiby’s trial

Most stunningly of all, however, I learned that the maximum sentence Høiby can get, if he is convicted, is seven years in prison. That is: Four years for one rape, and then only one year on top of that for each of the other rapes.

Wow! Can you imagine if a man in the US were convicted of four separate rapes? In the US, the average sentence for one rape is sixteen years. If someone committed four, they’d almost certainly go to jail for life.

But in Norway, the penal system is heavily weighted towards rehabilitation. The maximum sentence, except in cases of extreme mental illness, is 21 years. And, I was told that in this small country of 5 million, this system works. Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, often cited at approximately 20% within two years of release and 25% after five years.

That was just one of the many fascinating things I learned this past weekend. I also learned what Masaana Egede, the CEO and editor-in-chief at Mediehuset Sermitsiaq, Greenland’s only newspaper, felt when Donald Trump Jr, and co, landed on his shores.

I also sat through a riveting, emotional seminar from a team of British Guardian journalists who investigated the new, troubling “Free Birth” movement in the US. Why, I wondered, is this important topic under-reported here? (As if on cue, the New York Times reported on it yesterday.)

Most of all, I learned that the Norwegian press is vibrant, energetic, and engaged.

 

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony in London, Saturday, May 6, 2023 (Associated Press photo by Frank Augstein).

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The King, the Tyrant, and Jeffrey Epstein, Jordan Ferdman, April 23, 2026. On Monday, the king and queen consort of England will visit the United States to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence.

If Trump and King Charles III want to talk politics, they can discuss the Anglo-American special relationship and the important role each country plays in the policies of the other. If they wanted to keep it light, they could talk about Scotland, where Trump owns golf clubs and Charles III is, well, the king. One topic they likely won’t broach, though, is the one that offers the starkest juxtaposition of the United States and the former mother country: our leaders implicated in the Epstein files.

bulwark logo big shipPowerful and influential men of many lands found their names in the Epstein files, but the United States has been singularly lenient in its handling of those implicated. The embarrassing contrast between the United States and the United Kingdom is worth pausing on.

In short: King Charles threw his younger brother to the wolves. Trump can’t even bring himself to fire Howard Lutnick.

Former Prince Andrew’s arrest in February marked the most significant development in the Epstein case since the conviction and imprisonment of Epstein’s longtime accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. It was the first time since 1647—more than a hundred years before American independence—that a senior British royal had been arrested. And just in case there was any ambiguity about how Charles felt about his brother’s alleged crimes, he unceremoniously stripped Andrew of his titles and honors.¹

In Virginia Giuffre’s memoir recounting her experience as a survivor of Epstein’s trafficking, she wrote that Andrew behaved “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.” It’s likely Andrew did believe it, and maybe even likelier that he believed that his birthright was both to commit the crime and to evade punishment for it. Charles III, an hereditary monarch whose coronation included his anointment with holy oil symbolizing his divine right to rule, made clear to Andrew that abusing people is not, in fact, Andrew’s birthright. Andrew thought—perhaps with good reason—that the law was something that applied only to other people. For nearly 400 years, that might not have been a bad bet.

At its core, the American experiment rejected the premise of unchecked, absolute power. “Governments,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”—not from birthright.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” accused the Founders in reference to King George III, Charles III’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. But today it’s the American president who has “in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”—including by extending more sympathy and dignity to the men implicated in the files than to the girls they abused.

The contrast between Trump and Charles III inverts American exceptionalism in the ugliest way. We should not be exceptionally indifferent to our leaders’ transgressions and crimes. We should not be exceptionally tolerant of sex trafficking and child rape.

As we prepare to celebrate our milestone birthday, we ought to—maybe with gritted teeth—embrace the irony of this discrepancy in accountability. Across the pond, a prince, stripped of his titles and banished from the palace, was arrested for his affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein. At home, our aspiring king directs the most shameful coverup in American history from the Resolute Desk.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners.

AROUND THE BULWARK

  • Putin’s Propagandists Scramble to Respond to Celeb Critic… ‘The common people are afraid of you’—and they’re angry, too, reports CATHY YOUNG.
  • Who Sees Vivek at Ohio State? Standard MAGAs, America First groypers, internet trolls, and a mime duo—that’s who, as JIM SWIFT reports from Columbus.
  • Can Trump Avoid Humiliation in Iran? On the flagship pod, SAM STEIN joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s humiliation, share their new cabinet rankings, and wonder: Is there a way to stop Kushner from making deals with Sharia law countries?
  • Trump’s AWFUL Polls, GOP’s Gerrymander Faceplant, WHCD Drama… KATIE COURIC joins JVL and BILL KRISTOL to talk about Trump’s dismal approval polling, the GOP’s failed attempt to gain an edge in the House via gerrymandering, and the upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner.

Quick Hits

NEVER SAY NEVER: Even in our deeply stupid era, the idea that Donald Trump might pardon Jeffrey Epstein associate and convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell seems almost too preposterous even to contemplate. And yet, well, here’s the GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee frankly admitting many of his own members are in favor of such a thing, per Politico:

Members on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are divided over whether President Donald Trump should pardon Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in the panel’s Epstein investigation, Chair James Comer said in an interview Wednesday. . . . When asked whether he believed it was a favorable deal to issue a pardon in return for Maxwell’s testimony, Comer said, “A lot of people do.”

“My committee’s split on that,” he added, declining to name who on the panel supported granting a pardon. “I don’t speak for my committee.”

Comer himself, for the record, disapproves. Read the whole thing.

STRAITJACKETED: And now for your regular vibe check, courtesy of the New York Times, on the Strait of Hormuz:

The number of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz has become a barometer of how the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is affecting the global economy. On Tuesday, after nearly eight weeks of war, that number was one, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Then Wednesday, more ships tried and Iran attacked two cargo vessels in the strait.

“They are reminding us that their threats to attack ships are genuine, and that’s enough to suppress traffic through the strait,” said Rosemary Kelanic, a director at Defense Priorities, a research organization focused on foreign affairs. Ships linked to Iran have passed through the strait, ship tracking data shows.

The problem for the United States and the world is the same as ever: Iran doesn’t actually need to be able to exercise control over every ship passing through the strait to keep it in a state of near-permanent stasis. All they have to do is stroll out every few days or so and shoot at some craft that’s trying to transit without their permission—which is enough to raise the risk of transiting above what shipping companies find acceptable. 

More Global News

european union logo rectangle

ny times logoNew York Times, $106 Billion Loan Reflects E.U.’s View That Peace in Ukraine Is Far Away, Constant Méheut, April 23, 2026. Unlike previous European assistance packages, this one is heavily weighted toward military spending, meant to put Ukraine on solid footing for a long fight.

For weeks, Ukraine had been caught in a bind. A path to ending the war seemed increasingly illusory, as peace talks with Russia went from yielding no results to being put on hold. That meant Kyiv needed to prepare to fight indefinitely, even as vital financial support from the European Union remained frozen.

On Thursday, a breakthrough finally arrived.

After Hungary dropped its opposition to a $106 billion E.U. loan to Ukraine the day before, European leaders unblocked the funds. The money, which had been held up since December, will cover a large share of Ukraine’s financial needs over the next two years. Once those funds are exhausted, an additional $117 billion from the bloc’s long-term budget is expected to be allocated to Ukraine.

ukraine flagTaken together, the pledges appear to put Ukraine on firmer financial footing at least through 2029, said Hlib Vyshlinsky, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Economic Strategy. The pressure, he added, now shifts to Moscow, which is facing growing economic challenges in sustaining its own war effort.

In addition to the loan, the European Union adopted its 20th package of economic sanctions against Russia on Thursday.

“Deadlock over,” Kaja Kallas, the E.U. foreign policy chief, wrote on social media. “Russia’s war economy is under growing strain, while Ukraine is getting a major boost.”

The European Union’s extended commitment to Ukraine has largely filled a void left by the Trump administration. Last year, European countries provided nearly all of Kyiv’s military, financial and humanitarian support, while U.S. aid fell by 99 percent, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research center.

Unlike previous E.U. assistance packages, the latest one is heavily weighted toward defense spending. Some $70 billion of the loan will go to the military, giving Kyiv a substantial pool of money to buy costly air defense systems and expand production of drones, its most effective tools for blunting Russian ground assaults.

ny times logoNew York Times, Will Bulgaria’s New Leader Cast His Lot With Europe or Russia? Carlotta Gall, April 23, 2026. With a record of pro-Russia statements, Rumen Radev handily won elections this week. Now Bulgarians and his E.U. partners wait to see which way he will turn.

Even after nine years as president of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, whose coalition won a landslide in parliamentary elections on Sunday, remains something of an enigma.

His resounding win, which will place him at the helm of Bulgaria’s next government, likely as prime minister, has brought a flurry of questions as to what he stands for and where he will take the country.

russian flag wavingHis critics describe him as pro-Russia, in the pocket of President Vladimir V. Putin. Some have raised the specter that he will be a Trojan horse inside NATO and the European Union, or a disrupter in the style of the outgoing Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, who used his veto to block policy decisions within the European Union.

Mr. Radev’s supporters dismiss such reports as scaremongering.

“We really take pride in being Europeans. We are Europeans by right,” said Alexander Pulev, a technocrat, former minister and member of Mr. Radev’s economic team. Mr. Radev’s press office referred a request for an interview to Mr. Pulev.

In a country that is both in league with the West yet shares a deep historical affinity toward Russia, Mr. Radev’s biography, appropriately, straddles both realms.

european union logo rectangleA 62-year-old fighter pilot who left his military career to enter politics in 2016, Mr. Radev’s education and early training was in Bulgaria when it was a loyal Communist satellite of the Soviet Union. But he has served in senior positions since the country became a member of NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007.

He trained at the Bulgarian Air Force University in the 1980s and at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in 2003. He served as Commander of Bulgaria’s Air Force in 2014- 2016.

Elected to the largely ceremonial presidency in 2016, he served nearly two terms before resigning last January to lead a new coalition, Progressive Bulgaria, to victory in last weekend’s parliamentary elections, running mainly on promises to clean up corruption. 

April 22

Top Headlines

News Roundups

More On Iran, U.S. Military

iran view 4 22 2026.graphic

  • Drop Site News, Trump Blinks First, Extending Ceasefire with Iran as Hormuz Deadlock Continues, Jeremy Scahill, April 22, 2026.  Iran is continuing to demand the U.S. lift the naval blockade as a condition for new talks. Trump says resuming war remains an option as Iran prepares retaliation. 
  • Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, April 22, 2026. On Tuesday, President Trump said he is considering a financial bailout for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an autocratic state experiencing an economic downturn due to the war in Iran.
  • Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Undue Command Influenza, Mark Hertling, right, mark hertling civilian military instituteApril 22, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that he is discarding mandatory flu vaccinations for U.S. service members. It may appeal to an anti-vax political base, and it may sound minor in the abstract—part of what Secretary Hegseth described as “restoring freedom to the joint force.”

More On U.S. Governance, Elections, Politics

U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Reform

 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., left, and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sit for a group photo at the Supreme Court in 2022 (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., left, and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sit for a group photo at the Supreme Court in 2022 (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford).

Trump Team Watch

U.S. Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

southern poverty law center

  • The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: The Trump Regime's Criminal Enterprise, Steve Schmidt, April 22, 2026. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are running the Justice Department solely to prosecute Donald Trump's enemies. Steve Schmidt breaks down why Trump can't keep America safe with this court of fools.
  • Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Todd Blanche’s Weird Double Standard Protects Sex Traffickers and Racists, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), marcy wheelerApril 22, 2026. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel just indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. The headline claim, that the SPLC misrepresented what they were doing to donors, is batshit insane. With one exception (in which a well-paid informant took a bunch of documents), there’s no misconduct even hinted. SPLC just paid informants doing incredibly dangerous work for that work. Blanche is claiming that this was a misrepresentation to donors — who supported SPLC precisely because their work was so well sourced.
  • PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary: Investigation Launched Into Kash Patel's Alleged Drinking, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 22, 2026. The pressure is growing on FBI Director Kash Patel as House investigation has been launched into Patel's alleged alcohol abuse.
  • New York Times, The Capitol Police Officer Swept Up in a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory, Corina Knoll, April 22, 2026. Shauni Kerkhoff was wrongfully implicated in the notorious Capitol Hill pipe-bomb case. Can she ever fully move on?
  • alexis wilkins kash patel instagramNew York Times, F.B.I. Said to Have Investigated Times Reporter After Article on Patel’s Girlfriend, Michael S. Schmidt, April 22, 2026. The bureau said it is not pursuing a case, but the scrutiny is an example of the Trump administration weighing whether to criminalize routine news gathering. The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend, a country and western  singer Alexis Wilkins, shown together at right in an Instagram photo, with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter. Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws, the person said.

More Global News

U.S. Inflation, Markets, Economy, Jobs

Kevin M. Warsh, at his confirmation hearing to lead the Federal Reserve, sought to dispel doubts that he would yield to President Trump’s demand for lower rates.Kevin M. Warsh, at his confirmation hearing to lead the Federal Reserve, sought to dispel doubts that he would yield to President Trump’s demand for lower rates.

April 22

Top Stories

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Iranian Forces Claim Seizure of 2 Ships After Trump Extends Truce, Adam Rasgon, Luke Broadwater, Jonathan Swan and Francesca Regalado, April 22, 2026. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had attacked and seized two cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz, state media reported. Both sides were seeking to exert control in the waterway even as President Trump renewed a cease-fire.

The attacks showed how both Iran and the United States were seeking to exert control over shipping in the area. Even as Mr. Trump announced the cease-fire extension late on Tuesday, before it was set to expire, he said the United States would continue to block ships heading to and from Iranian ports — a move that Iran’s foreign minister called “an act of war.”

Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks was put on hold Tuesday because Tehran had not responded to American demands in the negotiations, a U.S. official said.

In some of Iran’s first public comments in response to the extension of the cease-fire, the foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said Wednesday that Iran stood ready to defend itself militarily while remaining open to the prospect of further talks.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump said he had renewed the truce on a request from Pakistan, which is trying to mediate an end to the war. He said the cease-fire would remain in place until Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”

Here’s what else we are covering:

  • Strait of Hormuz: In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France were set to host military planners from more than 30 countries to “advance military plans to reopen the strait, as soon as conditions permit, following a sustainable cease-fire agreement,” according to a statement from Britain’s defense minister.
  • Fuel prices: Germany’s Lufthansa Group said Tuesday that it would cut 20,000 short-haul flights through October, citing the doubling of jet fuel prices since the start of the Iran war.
  • Lebanon: While a separate 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon has mostly held since it went into effect last week, Israel on Tuesday accused Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, of firing rockets toward Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah later confirmed firing on Israel, saying it had done so in response to cease-fire violations.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Wednesday that Iran stood ready to defend itself militarily while remaining open to the prospect of a further talks. He said Iran will negotiate “whenever we conclude that the necessary and rational conditions exist to use this tool to achieve national interests,” according to the official IRNA news agency.

Britain and France will convene military planners from more than 30 countries in London on Wednesday at a conference aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

“The sessions will advance military plans to reopen the Strait, as soon as conditions permit, following a sustainable ceasefire agreement,” the ministry said in a statement. At a previous summit of 51 countries, hosted by the French and British leaders in Paris last week, they called for the strait’s “unconditional, unrestricted and immediate” reopening and agreed to establish a multinational defensive mission to escort commercial vessels. 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Dems Remember They Can Play Hardball, Too, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 22, 2026. Virginia voters decide turnabout is fair play—at least for four years.

bulwark logo big shipYesterday morning, with White House officials set to depart for Pakistan for further peace talks with Iran and a two-week ceasefire on the verge of expiring, Donald Trump issued one of his now-standard threats: “I expect to be bombing” Iran within a few days, he told CNBC’s Squawk Box, “because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with.”

Iran, however, seems to be putting less and less stock in such threats — and it’s hard to argue they’re wrong to do so. Yesterday afternoon, Trump suddenly announced he was unilaterally extending the ceasefire despite a lack of diplomatic engagement from Iran “until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

Iran’s response, per an adviser to Iranian Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf: “The extension of the cease-fire by Donald Trump has no meaning.” Overnight, Iran said it seized two ships that were attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Who’s in charge around here again? Happy Wednesday.

News Roundups

 

Before map in Virginia: Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 10 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 10 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create nine Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 current U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts that voters approved in unusual mid-decade reapportionment referendum Tuesday to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature and then voters approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

After map in Virginia: Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 10 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 10 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create nine Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment, Virginia Republican Judge Strikes Down Election Results, FBI Investigates Reporter Who Looked Into Patel's Girlfriend, Trump Calls Results Rigged, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 22, 2026. A Republican judge in Virginia has thrown out last night’s election results, putting them on hold while an appeal moves forward.

I still believe Democrats will ultimately prevail, but at this moment the results are frozen. At the same time, Trump is calling the election rigged, and the FBI went as far as investigating a reporter who was looking into whether Kash Patel’s girlfriend improperly received security and other government resources.

I also want to address something else. I came across a Washington Post example that honestly made me sick. The double standard and hypocrisy in how these stories are framed is impossible to ignore.

This is exactly why independent journalism matters more than ever. I will not compromise my values for access the way Jeff Bezos and the Post have. If you believe in that, support independent reporting. During White House Correspondents’ Week, your support sends a message that independent voices are rising and people are paying attention. Subscribe today, gift a subscription, or upgrade if you can:

Here’s the news:

Like clockwork, Donald Trump called last night’s election results “rigged” despite having no evidence to support the claim:

May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says 'ten RIGGED ELECTION PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA! All day long Republicans were winning, Spirit unbelievable, until the very end when, course, there was massive Ballot Drop!" Where have heard that the Democrats out another Crooked Victory! Six five goes one, and yet the Presidential Election November was very close to addition everything else, the language the Referendum was unintelligible and deceptive. everyone knows, extraordinarily brilliant person, and idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let's the Courts will this travesty "Justice." President DONALD had 50-50 93 ReTruths'

A Republican-appointed Virginia judge has struck down a Democratic-backed redistricting amendment, ruling it unconstitutional and “void from the start.” The decision invalidates all votes from the April 21 special election and blocks the state from implementing the new maps. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said he will immediately appeal the ruling, setting up a legal battle over the state’s redistricting process.

Virginia State Sen. Louise Lucas defended the proposed 10–1 electoral map, arguing it is meant to counter perceived efforts to “tilt the system.” She framed the move as part of a broader national response, saying actions that began in Texas have spread beyond one state. Lucas emphasized that Virginia is sending a message that attempts to “rig the system” will be met with pushback.

She said that Republicans started it and Democrats will finish it:

Senate Republicans, including Majority Whip John Barrasso, pressed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his vaccine policies, raising concerns that his actions have created confusion about public health guidance. Kennedy acknowledged the need for clear, evidence-based recommendations and affirmed support for the measles vaccine, noting its high effectiveness. Lawmakers also challenged his criticism of a key federal health task force, warning that his moves could undermine preventive care efforts. The exchange highlights bipartisan unease with Kennedy’s approach to vaccines and public health policy.

The FBI is under fire for scrutinizing a New York Times reporter after she exposed FBI Director Kash Patel’s use of government resources to provide security for his girlfriend, raising alarm about a potential abuse of power. Agents reportedly interviewed sources and explored whether routine reporting could be treated as criminal stalking, before the Justice Department shut it down for lacking any legal basis. Critics say the episode reflects a dangerous attempt to intimidate journalists and criminalize standard newsgathering practices. The Times and press advocates warn it represents a serious threat to First Amendment protections and a chilling escalation against the media.

RFK Jr. says that Donald Trump has alternative math when calculating percentages for the reduction in drug costs.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick criticized Canada for not stocking U.S. spirits, calling the move “outrageous” and disrespectful. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen responded that Canada’s decision is a reaction to repeated insults from President Trump and similar rhetoric. The exchange highlights rising tensions and a tit-for-tat dynamic in U.S.-Canada trade relations.

House Democrats are accusing Oversight Committee Republicans of undermining the Epstein investigation by shifting from formal hearings to informal “roundtables.” They argue this tactic blocks lawmakers from forcing subpoena votes and limits efforts to obtain documents and testimony. Republicans say roundtables allow more focused discussions without partisan disruptions, but critics see the move as an attempt to avoid accountability. The dispute reflects growing tension over how aggressively Congress should pursue the Epstein probe.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt downplayed Iran’s seizure of three ships, arguing it did not violate the ceasefire because the vessels were neither American nor Israeli. She accused the media of exaggerating the incident to undermine President Trump’s claims about weakening Iran’s navy. Leavitt characterized the episode as “piracy” and insisted Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz.

The Trump administration is nearing a tentative $500 million rescue deal for Spirit Airlines to help the struggling carrier emerge from bankruptcy and manage rising fuel costs linked to the Iran war. The plan could give the U.S. government up to a 90% ownership stake, though details are still being negotiated. While the move aims to preserve jobs and stabilize the airline, critics question whether it would waste taxpayer money and set a risky precedent for other airlines seeking bailouts. Spirit has filed for bankruptcy twice recently and continues to face financial challenges despite plans to exit bankruptcy soon.

hakeem jeffriesHouse Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, right, sharply criticized Donald Trump, saying, “Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

A federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by FBI Director Kash Patel against former MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi, ruling that Figliuzzi’s remark about Patel frequenting nightclubs was “rhetorical hyperbole,” not a statement of fact. The court determined that a reasonable person would not interpret the comment literally, so it is protected under the First Amendment. Figliuzzi’s legal team celebrated the decision as a win for press freedom, though the judge declined to award attorney fees. Meanwhile, Patel has filed a separate $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic over allegations about his conduct.

Iranian official Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that reopening the Strait of Hormuz would be “impossible” if ceasefire violations continue. He argued that a ceasefire is only meaningful if there is no maritime blockade, economic disruption, or ongoing military escalation. Ghalibaf also stated that pressure and aggression would not succeed, insisting that recognizing Iran’s rights is the only viable path forward.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr is pushing a proposal that critics view as an attack on TV content, suggesting new warning labels for programs that include gender identity themes. The plan would expand the ratings system to flag transgender-related content in children’s shows, which opponents argue could stigmatize certain topics and pressure networks to limit what they air. Carr says the move is about giving parents more transparency, but detractors see it as government overreach into media and a step toward politicizing what appears on television. The FCC has opened the proposal for public comment as debate intensifies.

Councilmember Chi Ossé was arrested while attending a protest against an eviction in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Video circulating online appears to show NYPD officers tackling him to the ground during the incident. The arrest has drawn attention to tensions between law enforcement and housing activists at eviction protests.

david scott oRep. David Scott, shown at left, a Georgia Democrat and the first Black chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, has died at age 80. First elected in 2002, he served for over two decades and was known for advocating for farmers, veterans, and his constituents. Colleagues remembered him as a trailblazer with a long record of public service, though he had faced recent health concerns and a competitive primary challenge. His death will trigger a special election in Georgia and slightly shifts the balance in the House.

Kalshi announced enforcement actions against three political candidates accused of trading on the outcomes of their own elections, violating exchange rules against insider trading. The cases involved candidates in Minnesota, Texas, and Virginia, with penalties including fines and five-year suspensions from the platform. Two candidates cooperated and reached settlements with smaller penalties, while a third faced a larger fine after refusing to engage with investigators. Kalshi emphasized that even small trades can breach rules and said the cases highlight its efforts to prevent manipulation in political prediction markets.

Two people, including a 14-year-old student, were killed when Israeli settlers attacked a school in the occupied West Bank village of Al-Mughayyir, according to AFP. The victims were identified as Aws Hamdi al-Naasan and Jihad Marzouq Abu Naim. The school’s principal said the attack occurred while students were taking exams, describing how settlers advanced on and assaulted the school. The incident underscores ongoing violence and tensions in the region.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has urged international pressure on the Israeli military to allow the rescue of journalist Amal Khalil, who is reportedly trapped after an airstrike near southern Lebanon. RSF warned that ongoing Israeli strikes are preventing rescuers from reaching her and that her life is in immediate danger. Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, has called on the Red Cross to assist in rescuing Khalil and another journalist, Zeinab Faraj, who was with her. The situation highlights the risks journalists face in active conflict zones.

Wildfires across Georgia and Florida have intensified, destroying at least 50 homes and forcing widespread evacuations, school closures, and emergency responses. Officials say drought, low humidity, and strong winds have fueled the fire spread, with some fires growing rapidly and threatening hundreds more homes. Smoke has spread to major cities like Atlanta and Savannah, worsening air quality to unhealthy levels. Authorities have issued burn bans and mobilized large-scale firefighting efforts as the region faces one of its worst fire seasons in decades.

A man who stole former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s purse at a Washington, D.C. restaurant in 2025 was sentenced to three years in prison. The thief, Mario Bustamante Leiva, did not realize who Noem was and took her handbag containing cash and credit cards while she dined with her family. He pleaded guilty to multiple theft and fraud charges tied to a broader pattern of crimes in the area. After serving his sentence, he is expected to face deportation.

Democracy Docket, Virginia court blocks voter-approved redistricting, appeal coming, Yunior Rivas, April 22, 2026. A Virginia judge temporarily halted the state’s newly approved congressional map — but state officials are already moving to try to overturn the ruling, setting up a rapid legal fight in the state’s Supreme Court.

democracy docket logoIn a decision issued Wednesday on a Republican lawsuit, a judge in Tazewell County ruled that the legislature’s constitutional amendment and the referendum voters just approved were invalid — a move that immediately blocks the state from implementing the new districts.SIGN UP TODAYGet updates straight to your inbox — for free

The court declared the amendment invalid from the start, and ordered that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective.”

The judge also went further, issuing a permanent injunction — a legal order that blocks action going forward — preventing state officials from “certifying the results” and from taking “any actions to give effect to the proposed constitutional amendment.”

But despite the sweeping language, this ruling is far from the final word.

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones (D) moved immediately to challenge the decision, signaling a fast-track appeal that could quickly shift the case to higher courts.

“My office will immediately file an appeal in the Court of Appeals,” Jones said. “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

That appeal is expected to move swiftly — and could ultimately land before the Supreme Court of Virginia, which will have the final say on whether the voter-approved map can take effect.

For now, the ruling creates a pause — not a defeat.

The court’s decision hinges on procedural and constitutional arguments about how the amendment was passed, including timing requirements and legislative steps, the kinds of disputes appellate courts often revisit, especially when they collide with a direct vote of the people.

The referendum, approved by voters just a day earlier, allows Virginia to redraw its congressional map ahead of the 2026 elections — part of a broader national mid-decade redistricting battle, initiated by President Donald Trump, that could shape control of the U.S. House.

Opponents of the measure had hoped the court challenge would stop the effort outright. Instead, higher courts will weigh not just procedural questions, but the fundamental issue of whether a voter-approved amendment can be blocked after the fact.Those officials could ask the Supreme Court to turn down Page’s attempt to reinstate his claims against them or may ask the justices for more time to assess the situation in light of the government’s settlement with Page, which Sauer said was finalized Tuesday.

More On Iran, U.S. Military

 

iran view 4 22 2026.graphicdjt 4 21 2026 iran statementDrop Site News, Trump Blinks First, Extending Ceasefire with Iran as Hormuz Deadlock Continues, Jeremy Scahill, left, April 22, 2026. Iran is continuing to demand the U.S. lift the naval blockade as a condition for new talks. Trump says resuming war remains an option as Iran prepares retaliation. 

jeremy scahillThe future of U.S.-Iran negotiations remains in doubt after President Donald Trump and Tehran’s leaders staked out opposing positions on the Strait of Hormuz. “Diplomacy is a tool to secure national interests and security,” said Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, in a briefing in Tehran on Wednesday. “Whenever we conclude that the necessary and logical grounds for using this tool to realize national interests and consolidate the achievements of the Iranian nation in thwarting the enemies from reaching their evil goals are prepared, we will act.”

Iran FlagOn Tuesday night, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran would move forward with a second round of talks in Islamabad only if Trump extended the ceasefire and ended the U.S. naval blockade. “The Pakistani side indicated that they expect Trump to lift the naval blockade of Iran,” the official said. “If that happens, and the ceasefire is extended, a new round of talks will be held on Thursday.”

Soon after, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was indefinitely extending the ceasefire but added that the blockade will remain in place. “Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” Trump wrote. “I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

The Iranian official dismissed Trump’s claims that Iran’s leadership was in disarray, characterizing it as a desperate attempt by Trump to save face after his recent false claims, including that Iran had offered him sweeping concessions, and “agreed to everything,” including handing over its enriched uranium and allowing the U.S. military to enter Iran to seize it. “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States,” Trump said April 17. Iran swiftly rejected these claims.

Trump also publicly announced on Monday that JD Vance, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, were on their way to Islamabad and suggested that a deal was almost finalized. “They’re heading over now. They’ll be there tonight,” he told PBS. He added that he was considering personally attending the talks. When Iran ultimately decided not to send a delegation, Trump scrambled to reconcile his messaging and reverted to threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure. On Tuesday morning, he told CNBC he would not extend the ceasefire only to flip flop hours later in the face of Iranian intransigence. 

 President Trump responds on a Truth Social screed April 21 to a Wall Streeet Journal op-ed that described him as a President Trump responds on a Truth Social screed April 21 to a Wall Streeet Journal op-ed that described him as a "sucker" in Iran negotations.

noel simsPopular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump floats taxpayer bailout for Middle Eastern autocracy, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, below left, April 22, 2026. On Tuesday, President Trump said he is considering a financial bailout for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an autocratic state experiencing an economic downturn due to the war in Iran.

If the Trump administration does use public resources to rescue the UAE, it will be assisting a country that has partnered extensively with the Trump Organization and the Trump family.

noel simsOn Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that UAE Central Bank Governor Khaled Mohamed Balama “raised the idea of a currency-swap line” during meetings in Washington, D.C., last week with Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Officials from the UAE said that they “had so far avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but might still need a financial lifeline.” According to the Journal, a formal request has not yet been made.

UAE officials argued that the war between the U.S. and Iran could damage the country’s economy and harm its global financial standing. The war has already damaged the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off oil shipments that are a key source of dollar revenue.

If the U.S. agreed to the UAE’s proposal for a currency-swap line, the UAE central bank would get “inexpensive access to dollars to support its currency or shore up its foreign reserves in case of a liquidity crisis.” While swap lines are usually offered by the Federal Reserve, officials told the Journal that it is unlikely that one would be approved for the UAE. But the Trump administration has also provided financial bailouts through the Treasury Department.

uae embassy sealIn September, for example, Bessent announced a $20 billion swap line to bail out Argentina. That bailout benefited billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, a former colleague and close friend of Bessent.

Bailouts are typically reserved for countries with deep economic ties to the U.S. to avoid adverse consequences for the American economy. But the UAE is not a major trading partner of the U.S. In 2024, the goods and services trade between the U.S. and the UAE “totaled an estimated $47.9 billion.” In comparison, trade between the U.S. and Canada totaled $909 billion, and trade with the U.K. was $340.1 billion.

Nevertheless, Trump administration officials appear to be open to the idea. On Monday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, one of Trump’s top economic advisors, was asked about the potential bailout during an interview with CNBC. “The UAE has been an incredibly valuable ally throughout this effort, and I’m sure the Treasury Secretary will make every effort to help them out should that be necessary,” Hassett said, noting that he had not talked to Bessent directly.

The UAE has not been that helpful. For example, in January 2026, the UAE announced that it will not allow “its airspace, territory or territorial waters be used for any hostile military actions against Iran.”

On Tuesday, Trump also indicated that he was open to the proposal during an interview with CNBC. Trump was asked if a currency swap with the UAE was under consideration. “It is,” Trump responded. “It’s been a good country, it’s been a good ally of ours. And you know these are unusual times,” Trump said, noting that the UAE has been targeted particularly hard by Iranian missiles. “They’re very good for this country, so yeah, if I could help them I would.”The UAE’s business ties with Trump

Since retaking office, Trump and his family have benefited greatly from deals with UAE officials and businessmen.

Just days before Trump was inaugurated in 2025, for example, Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan secretly purchased a 49% stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial. Half of the sale was paid up front, resulting in a windfall of $187 million for entities tied to the Trump family. An additional $31 million went to the family of Steve Witkoff, who is a World Liberty Financial co-founder and Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff has been involved in negotiations with Iran throughout the war. It is unclear how much the two families will make from the second half of the payment.

Five months after Tahnoon bought into the company, MGX — a state-backed UAE investment fund chaired by Tahnoon — used $2 billion worth of USD1, a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, to finance an investment in the crypto exchange Binance. The deal will generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Trump and his family members.

Two weeks after the USD1 purchase, the Trump administration made a deal to give the UAE hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips that the country had been seeking for years. According to the New York Times, Tahnoon secured this agreement, and many of the chips went to G42, a tech firm under his control.

The Trump family has brought in additional millions by licensing the Trump name to a golf course and a real estate development in the UAE. The golf course, which opened shortly after Trump was inaugurated for the first time in 2017, was built outside Dubai by developer DAMAC, which reportedly pays the Trump Organization $6 million per year to use the Trump name. The Trump Organization signed a similar licensing agreement with developer Dar Global in April 2025 to construct a Trump-branded hotel and residential building in Dubai.

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who Trump has placed in a top diplomatic role, has also profited from investments from the UAE. In 2021, Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners received a $200 million investment from the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund and another $1.5 billion from entities controlled by the Qatari and Emirati governments in late 2024. Exactly how much of the $1.5 billion came from the UAE is undisclosed.

 

bulwark morning shots logo
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Undue Command Influenza, Mark Hertling, right, mark hertling civilian military instituteApril 22, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that he is discarding mandatory flu vaccinations for U.S. service members. It may appeal to an anti-vax political base, and it may sound minor in the abstract—part of what Secretary Hegseth described as “restoring freedom to the joint force.”

But “freedom” also comes with civic and community obligation, especially in a profession built on individual and group responsibility. In military units and on military bases, individual choices have immediate and cascading consequences for the health and readiness of others.

bulwark logo big shipConsider how other high-performance organizations or facilities with throngs of people in close contact handle contagious illnesses. If a professional sports team has a player with the flu, that athlete often isn’t welcomed into the locker room or told to push through practice. He’s isolated to prevent the spread of the virus.

Consider a daycare center or an elementary school where a policy like Hegseth’s became commonplace. Parents would have justifiable questions. Classrooms are enclosed. Kids share space, air, and germs. One case becomes five, then fifteen. Teachers get sick, as do parents. Learning suffers, and families, especially those with vulnerable members, feel the ripple effects.

No serious organization would accept that risk. The military is a serious organization that does all it can to prevent such outbreaks because they know the repercussions—especially when sending people home or spacing them out aren’t options. Many soldiers live in barracks, train in formation (or share tight crew quarters in a tank, submarine, or aircraft), eat in shared dining facilities, and operate in close quarters every day. Additionally, troops who are married have families who live in base housing, send their kids to base schools and child care, attend religious services, and interact in a closed environment where exposure compounds quickly. What spreads in one unit rarely stays there.

I’m not a doctor, but as a former commander, I know that medical protection and ensuring the care of troops are critical tasks—and they’re unlike those in a normal private-sector company. In the military, health is not just an individual matter. It’s a readiness issue. That distinction is important.

In civilian life, getting the flu is usually an individual inconvenience—missed work, a few days of recovery, perhaps a ripple effect within a household or office. In the military, illness spreads rapidly across formations. One soldier shows up sick to morning physical training, and within days, an entire unvaccinated platoon would likely be degraded. Maintenance slows. Training schedules slip. Leaders spend time managing symptoms and manning rosters instead of preparing for missions. Scale that to a battalion or brigade, and the impact becomes operational. For units in training, missed days due to illness mean less preparation for the next fight, which could lead to higher casualties or mission failure. For units in combat, the consequences can be even more severe.

Commanders have long understood the implications of keeping their units healthy. That’s why routine vaccinations have never been about bureaucracy—they’ve been about illness prevention and military readiness. Not every flu case is severe, but the cumulative effect of many cases, spreading quickly through formations, creates a predictable and avoidable degradation of capability.

Good leaders don’t ignore predictable risks; they mitigate them.

There’s also a deeper issue at play: trust. Service members accept that their profession carries hardship, threats, and danger. They also trust that their leaders will reduce unnecessary risk wherever possible—especially in areas that are well understood and historically managed. Force health protection is one of those areas.

When leaders step away from established preventive measures, it raises questions not just about policy, but about priorities. Are they accepting risk because it is unavoidable, or because it’s politically popular? If the latter, that isn’t leadership.

In the Army, we emphasize that leaders are responsible for everything their people and their unit do—or fail to do. That includes anticipating second- and third-order effects. Illness in close quarters is not a new problem. Armies throughout history have been weakened not just by enemy fire, but by disease spreading through their ranks. That lesson hasn’t changed.

What has changed is that for a long time we have had the means to reduce the risk of infectious disease and have institutionalized prevention measures because they work.

A professional sports team can bench a player, isolate him, and move on with the season. The military doesn’t operate that way. Units are not interchangeable rosters. Cohesion, timing, and collective performance matter in ways that don’t allow for easy substitution or separation. You can’t “bench” a platoon. You can only prepare it—or degrade it.

Eliminating mandatory flu vaccinations may appear to be a small policy change by a naïve civilian leader appealing to his boss’s base. But he’s removing a layer of protection from a force that needs collective health to function effectively. And unlike a sports team or a school, the consequences aren’t just missed games or sick days. The results affect readiness, mission execution, and ultimately, the well-being of the force.

That’s not a medical judgment. It’s a command responsibility.

Quick Hits

SCHRÖDINGER’S URANIUM HUNT: In yesterday’s Morning Shots LIVE video, your correspondents spent plenty of time breaking down Donald Trump’s long, rambling, newsy call into CNBC’s Squawk Box—from his insistence he would have won the Vietnam War very quickly had he been president, to his continued stubborn refusal to drop his pretextual criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, to his applauding companies like Apple for not (yet) seeking reimbursement of the revenues they paid under his illegal “Liberation Day” tariffs last year.

Still, there’s always lots more to chew on.¹ Let’s just pluck out one more moment, shall we? Here was Trump discussing the problem of the uranium buried at the nuclear sites America bombed last year:

They can’t get the nuclear dust, because it was obliterated by the B-2 bombers that went in. . . . They’ve tried to get down there. You know, we have cameras from Space Force on it all the time. They’ve tried to get down. They can’t get down. That place was obliterated. . . . The left tries to demean all the time, like, ‘Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated.’ It was. And they can’t get it, or they would have tried to get it.

For the record, the question Trump was answering was about interest rates. As he often does, Trump spent much of this interview ignoring his interviewers’ questions to instead answer other critiques that have plainly been irritating him lately—in this case, the critique that it’s ludicrous for him to claim the United States has achieved a total military victory over Iran if its cache of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for.

Trump insists this is silly: that we don’t need to retrieve or account for the uranium, because it’s buried so deep that Iran can never get at it. But observe the two explanations Trump gives—back to back, one following immediately on the other—for how we know this is so. Iran has “tried to get down there,” he says, without success. (We know this, apparently, because of the “cameras from Space Force.”) But we also know “they can’t get at it” because otherwise “they would have tried to get it.”

So there you have it. Iran can’t get its uranium back, which we know for two reasons: because they have tried to get it back, and because they haven’t tried to get it back. Careful, kids: This is what becomes of a mind that has spent its entire career operating in the realm of spin rather than of fact.

BAD NATO! VERY BAD NATO!: The sanctimony of these people! The pure hectoring poutiness! Politico reports on the White House’s latest effort to break the bonds between ourselves and our NATO allies: the development of a “naughty and nice” list distributing head pats and finger wags based on how obediently other countries drop everything to throw themselves into American boondoggles like the Iran war:

The effort, which officials worked on ahead of NATO head Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington this month, includes an overview of members’ contributions to the alliance and places them into tiers, according to three European diplomats and a U.S. defense official familiar with the plan.

It’s the latest sign that President Donald Trump plans to make good on his threats against allies who don’t adhere to his wishes. And it’s another pressure point on the increasingly frayed alliance, which has been battered by Trump’s attacks—from his push to annex Greenland to his warning of a complete withdrawal from the pact.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated the broad idea in December. “Model allies that step up, like Israel, South Korea, Poland, increasingly Germany, the Baltics and others, will receive our special favor,” he said. “Allies that still fail to do their part for collective defense will face consequences.”

The funniest/bleakest quote in the piece comes from an anonymous European official: “They don’t seem to have very concrete ideas. . . when it comes to punishing bad allies. Moving troops is one option, but it mainly punishes the U.S. doesn’t it?” Sure, but that’s never stopped them before. Read the whole thing.

More On U.S. Governance, Elections, Politics

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democratic Advocacy: Trump's Terrible Polling Gets Worse, National Battleground Deteriorates Further For GOP - 2026 Has Become A Year Of Opportunity For Democrats, Simon Rosenberg, right, simon rosenberg twitterApril 22, 2026. I cannot express to you how much it feels like Trump and his Congressional allies are melting down right now. 

Just look at the news coverage: The disgraced FBI Director yelling at reporters, Tucker Carlson apologizing for supporting Trump, the Labor Secretary resigning due to a really nasty scandal, Nancy Mace attempting to oust her colleague Cory Mills from the House, utter legislative chaos and infighting in both chambers, Trump’s unending whining about his gilded ballroom, and then there is the failed war -- gargantuan, historic, shocking levels of buffoonery, idiocy, incompetence and now desperation too.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been making two related arguments: 1) that Trump no longer had a face-saving way out of his failed war, and that he, America and the world were about to enter a dark and dangerous period 2) as bad as things were for the Republicans politically and electorally, they were going to get worse.

Well, things have gotten worse for the Rs these last few weeks, a whole lot worse. We’ve gotten a rash of really bad economic data showing inflation spiking, the economy slowing, and consumer sentiment plummeting. Here’s the latest GDP nowcast from the Atlanta Fed. Q1 GDP growth was running over 3% before the war began. Now it is hovering around 1%.

In the last two days Trump has seen the worst polling of his second term. Look at this data!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • 36%-62% (-26) Ipsos-Reuters
  • 35%-61% (-25) Strength in Numbers
  • 33%-67% (-34) AP-NORC
  • 32%-65% (-33) ARG

Look at this data from the AP-NORC poll. Staggering levels of rejection and repudiation on things that really matter:

In his tracking poll this month G. Elliott Morris tested impeachment. Yes, we are already at Nixon-level numbers:

A fifth of Republican voters want Trump impeached:

In recent weeks we’ve seen polls putting Democrats ahead in Senate races in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio, enough to give the Democrats the Senate. We had not seen us ahead in Iowa. Until yesterday that is, and this data from Echelon, a Republican pollster:

Echelon also released this encouraging data from Georgia:

And Maine:

I cannot stress to you enough how extraordinary it is that we are now seeing strong leads for our Senate candidates in Georgia and North Carolina, and that we will be in competitive seven-month long campaigns in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and potentially Florida and Texas too. These are places the national Democratic Party just have not been competitive in for some time.  

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Democrats Pledge 'Maximum Warfare' and Win Redistricting Battle Nationwide, Trump Fears Impeachment and Investigations, Iran Seizes Ships and Mocks Trump, Aaron Parnas, right,aaron parnas new headshot April 22, 2026. Democrats are pledging “maximum warfare” after their victory in Virginia in the redistricting fight, signaling an aggressive push heading into the midterms.

Inside the Trump orbit, there is growing concern about the real possibility of impeachment and relentless investigations next year, along with potential major shakeups in the administration before November. At the same time, Iran is escalating tensions by seizing ships in the Strait of Hormuz in direct response to Trump’s blockade, openly challenging the President.

Meanwhile, White House Correspondents Dinner Executive Director Steve Thomma previously claimed independent journalists are “not news,” would “never be news,” and would “never be invited.” That claim is wrong. We are news. We will continue to be news. And this year, many of us are refusing to attend in protest of invitations extended to Donald Trump, Brendan Carr, and others who undermine the First Amendment.

Here’s the news:

Donald Trump’s inaccurate or exaggerated claims to reporters about progress in Iran negotiations—such as describing concessions that hadn’t actually been agreed—undermined diplomatic efforts. According to accounts cited by media outlets, even some officials privately acknowledged that these statements damaged trust and complicated talks. This aligns with broader reporting that Trump’s public comments have at times contradicted reality or private negotiations, creating confusion for both allies and Iranian counterparts. This is how Iran is responding today:

Hakeem Jeffries warned that a proposed redistricting effort by Florida Republicans could backfire politically, calling it an “illegal scheme.” He said Democrats would aggressively target several GOP incumbents—including Mario Díaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills, and Brian Mast. Jeffries argued that similar efforts elsewhere created opportunities for Democrats and said his party is prepared to compete broadly. He concluded with a stark warning: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

Democrats appear to have gained the upper hand in the current mid-decade redistricting battle, with projections suggesting they could net around 8–10 seats. Republicans are still expected to gain seats as well, but at a smaller range of roughly 4–8. Analysts note that shifting results in recent special elections add uncertainty to the landscape. This makes further redistricting efforts in states like Florida a potentially risky move for Republicans.

A closely watched vote in Virginia approved a new congressional district map, with about 51% in favor, potentially flipping up to four Republican-held seats and putting pressure on the GOP’s narrow House majority. The outcome has sparked internal Republican tensions, with some blaming missed opportunities to counter Democratic momentum. Analysts note that if Democrats regain control of the House, it could open the door to a potential third impeachment of Donald Trump, though party leaders say that is not currently their focus. The result is part of broader “redistricting wars,” where competing map changes across multiple states could ultimately benefit Democrats in the 2026 midterms.

House Democrats have launched a probe into Kash Patel, raising concerns about his relationship with alcohol. In a pointed statement, they said, “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking.” Lawmakers have asked Patel to complete a 10-question Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test as part of the inquiry.

The U.S. Justice Department has received a USB drive containing new legal filings from Ghislaine Maxwell, including an amended motion seeking to overturn her conviction and prison sentence. A prosecutor from the Trump administration reportedly dismissed the arguments as “duplicative” and “meritless.” The filing represents another attempt by Maxwell to challenge her conviction in court. Full filing here.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it seized two ships—the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas—in the Strait of Hormuz, claiming they violated maritime rules and were escorted to Iran’s coast. Ship-tracking data appears to support their proximity to Iranian waters, while a third vessel, the Greek-owned Euphoria, was reportedly fired on and left stranded. Iranian state-affiliated outlets say all three ships were targeted, though details differ across sources. The incidents further escalate tensions in the strait, especially as the U.S. maintains its naval blockade and recent confrontations at sea continue.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has reportedly targeted three ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to a semi-official news agency. A Greek-owned vessel, the Euphoria, was said to be fired on and left stranded near Iran’s shores. Two other ships, MSC Francesca and Epaminondas, were described as “violating vessels,” immobilized, and later seized by Iranian forces. The incident adds to rising tensions in the strategic waterway, with earlier reports also confirming that ships had come under fire.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned it would deliver “crushing and unimaginable” strikes if fighting with the U.S. and Israel resumes. The group said it remains fully prepared to respond to any renewed aggression. The statement came after Donald Trump announced an indefinite extension of the ceasefire to allow time for negotiations. Iran also claimed it views itself as emerging from the conflict with stronger global standing. Meanwhile, Trump claims Iran is crumbling financially right now:

Iran’s attacks in the Strait of Hormuz appear to be a direct signal to Donald Trump, demonstrating Tehran’s willingness to escalate while its hardline military exerts control. At the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador indicated negotiations could resume in Islamabad if the U.S. lifts its naval blockade. However, Trump reportedly sees the blockade as essential leverage in talks. This creates a deadlock, with both sides unwilling to back down.

Seven tankers or cargo ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the last 12 hours despite ongoing attacks, according to tracking data. Some vessels showed irregular behavior, including turning off or intermittently transmitting their required tracking signals. Two ships later seized by Iran—the MSC Francesca and Epaminondas—had both stopped transmitting before reappearing near Iranian waters. A third ship, the Euphoria, continued transmitting but moved erratically and slowed significantly while transiting the strait.

An Iranian-linked news outlet warned that undersea data cables in the Strait of Hormuz are vulnerable to damage, whether accidental or intentional. Disruptions to these cables could trigger major internet and communications outages across Gulf countries. The report underscores rising risks to critical infrastructure amid regional tensions. It also points to similar incidents in the Red Sea as evidence of the potential impact.

uae embassy sealThe United Arab Emirates thanked Donald Trump for mentioning a possible currency swap with the country amid ongoing regional tensions. However, the UAE stressed that it does not need external financial support, highlighting its strong economic position. Officials pointed to over $2 trillion in sovereign investments, $300 billion in reserves, and a large banking sector as evidence of resilience. The statement appears aimed at reinforcing confidence despite uncertainty tied to the conflict involving Iran.

Rising tensions and uncertainty in the Strait of Hormuz have pushed global oil prices higher, with Brent crude nearing $100 per barrel. Renewed reports of attacks on vessels in the strait—through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes—have unsettled energy markets. As a result, Brent prices are now about 50% higher than a year ago. Meanwhile, U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate also increased slightly, reaching around $91 per barrel.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Tehran’s Enghelab and Vanak squares for anti-U.S. and anti-Israel demonstrations. Participants waved Iranian flags, chanted slogans, and showed strong support for the country’s leadership. The Iranian Armed Forces also displayed ballistic missiles at the protest sites. The demonstrations highlighted heightened tensions and public mobilization amid the broader geopolitical situation. From Getty Images:

Thousands in Tehran protest US - Israel alongside Ballistic Missiles

Iran has executed a man, identified as Mehdi Farid, who was convicted of spying for Israel’s Mossad and sharing sensitive information. Authorities said he used his position in a civil defense unit to pass intelligence to Israel. The execution follows similar cases days earlier, where two others were put to death over alleged Mossad ties. Human rights groups continue to criticize Iran for conducting closed-door trials that limit defendants’ ability to defend themselves.

The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges, alleging it secretly funded individuals tied to extremist groups while publicly opposing them. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the organization paid at least $3 million to sources, some linked to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, accusing it of “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.” The indictment includes multiple counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. The SPLC has denied the allegations, calling them false and saying its use of informants was intended to gather intelligence and prevent violence.

James Comer suggested that scientists working in classified fields may have reason for concern, citing potential threats from foreign adversaries. He said countries like China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia—as well as others—could be involved, though he also acknowledged it could be coincidental. His comments come amid broader concerns about the safety of researchers tied to sensitive national security programs.

An Israeli drone strike in Lebanon’s Western Bekaa region reportedly killed one person and injured two others, according to state media. The incident occurred despite a ceasefire that took effect the previous week. However, Israel’s military denied carrying out the strike. The conflicting accounts add further tension to an already fragile truce.

A new report highlights a sharp rise in stillbirths and birth defects in Gaza, which health officials link to the ongoing war and deteriorating living conditions. Cases of congenital anomalies have surged, with stillbirths increasing by about 140% and neonatal deaths also rising significantly. Doctors attribute the trend to factors such as malnutrition, contaminated water, overcrowding, and the collapse of healthcare services. Even with a ceasefire, many newborns continue to face severe, life-threatening conditions tied to the long-term impacts of the conflict.

Israeli forces have gradually expanded a “yellow line” in Gaza, increasing the area under military control despite a ceasefire. Residents say the boundary often shifts overnight, placing more areas into dangerous “free-fire” zones where civilians risk being targeted. The expansion has been accompanied by new fortifications, demolitions, and ongoing gunfire, creating constant fear among Palestinians. Critics, including UN officials, warn that civilians have been killed near the line and argue such actions could violate international law.

A new law in Israel mandating the death penalty for some Palestinians convicted in military courts has raised international concern. Officials at the Council of Europe warned the move could lead to the suspension of Israel’s observer status, as opposition to capital punishment is a key requirement. Critics argue the law may be discriminatory and violate human rights standards, and legal challenges have already been filed in Israel’s Supreme Court. The controversy adds to broader tensions over Israel’s policies in the region.

European Union ambassadors have approved a €90 billion loan package for Ukraine after Hungary lifted its veto. The decision is moving through a formal written procedure, with final approval expected soon. In addition, the EU agreed on its 20th round of sanctions against Russia. The measures signal continued financial and political support for Ukraine.

A new report from the American Lung Association finds that nearly half of children in the United States—about 33.5 million—are exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution. The study highlights risks such as asthma, respiratory illness, and long-term lung damage, with communities of color disproportionately affected. Experts also warn that climate factors like heat, drought, and wildfires are worsening pollution levels. The report raises concerns that environmental rollbacks under Donald Trump could further harm air quality and public health.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 21, 2026 [Wheels Off?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, April 22, 2026. heather cox richardson cnnThere is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.

Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had djt maga hatagreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate [Trump] negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.

Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.

After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.

For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”

As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”

Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported today that Trump is considering using money from the U.S. Treasury to shore up the finances of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, which have been hurt by the Iran war. After the story appeared, Zach Everson of Public Citizen pointed out that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, has directed hundreds of millions to Trump personally, buying 49% of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and investing $2 billion of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.

Tonight, Trump announced he is extending the ceasefire with Iran until Iran comes up with a proposal to end the fighting permanently. Iran has responded by saying Trump’s extension “means nothing” and suggested it was a “ploy to buy time for a surprise strike.”

According to a new poll out today from Strength in Numbers/ Verasight, conducted between April 10 and April 14, just 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-one percent disapprove, a new low. Seventy-two percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling rising prices. In a generic ballot for Congress, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by 50% to 43%, a margin of seven points.

Administration officials’ approach to the midterm elections seems to be to continue to sow distrust of elections. Following Patel’s claim, on Sunday, that there would soon be arrests stemming from the 2020 presidential election, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a letter from April 14 demanding that a Wayne County, Michigan, elections official give it records from Wayne County and Detroit from 2024 and alleging that there was fraud in 2020. Although Trump won Michigan, he lost Wayne County by almost 250,000 votes.

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson wrote in the Detroit Free Press that “this demand isn’t about election integrity—it’s about a weaponized DOJ trying to please a president who doesn’t want to be held accountable at the ballot box by voters tired of the chaos of his administration. It’s also about the upcoming elections in November and in 2028, which he is working to discredit by sowing doubt as to the security and fairness of the process. It’s not going to work with us, and it’s not going to hold up in court,” they wrote. “Michigan’s elections are safe and secure.”

Trump seems, though, to be courting the base that in 2021 attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in power. After offending his base first by posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ and then by insulting Pope Leo XIV, Trump is participating this week in an event called “America Reads the Bible.” Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz of CNN report that Trump is expected to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office. The same verse was read by Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and is associated with white evangelicals’ belief God sent Trump to heal America.

Trump’s vulnerability is showing on Capitol Hill. In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky examined House speaker Mike Johnson’s no good, very bad day last Thursday. With a Republican majority in the House of only three seats and a dramatically weakened president, Republican House members handed Johnson two embarrassing losses on Thursday.

First, Republicans joined with Democrats first to pass a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to protect the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and then they passed the measure itself.

Trump’s administration has left his claims to want to deport undocumented criminals far in the dust, working hard to get rid of legal immigrants as well. When she was homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem ignored the requirements for evaluating TPS and simply refused to agree to routine extensions of TPS for people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.

Haitian TPS holders sued, noting Noem’s apparent racial animus as a driving factor in her decision and that Haiti remains dangerous in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that destabilized the country. In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes paused the loss of Haitian immigrants’ TPS until the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Last month, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) brought a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to restore TPS to Haitian immigrants.

Johnson has tried to do Trump’s bidding even though it means ignoring what members of Congress actually want. It is possible for members to force a measure to the floor even after the speaker bottles it up through something called a “discharge petition,” by getting a majority of members of Congress to agree to override the speaker, but such an action is exceedingly rare because it requires members of the majority to side with the minority against their own speaker. Or it was exceedingly rare before this Congress. Herb Scribner of Axios noted last year that there were seven successful discharge petitions in the 30 years between 1985 and 2015; there were the same number from 2023 to 2025.

Four Republicans, all of them from purple districts, joined all the Democrats to sign Pressley’s discharge petition. Then when the measure came up for a vote, six more Republicans voted in favor of it. As Berlatsky notes, the bill probably won’t pass the Senate, but not only did it demonstrate Johnson’s weakness, it also, as Jamie Dupree of Regular Order noted, was a real rebuke to Trump on immigration. And it was bipartisan.

That was not the end of Johnson’s bad day. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was scheduled to expire on April 20, and Trump and Republican loyalists wanted simply to renew it. But members of both parties have issues with Section 702 of that act, which allows the government to collect information about the communications of foreigners without getting a warrant from a judge. But there are increasing signs the government is also collecting data from Americans without a warrant, and members of both parties concerned about government overreach have refused to extend the law without reforms to 702.

Republican leaders tried to force through a five-year extension just after midnight on Friday, but while four Democrats voted in favor of the measure, twelve Republicans voted against it, sending the measure down to a loss by 20 votes. Then Johnson tried to push through an 18-month extension. Twenty Republicans voted against even considering it. Finally, the House agreed to extend the law for just ten days.

Today, Virginians passed a redistricting referendum that will boost the Democrats’ chances of winning four more seats in the U.S. House. Redistricting in the middle of a decade is rare, but after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats, California retaliated with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas seats. Other states followed suit. As David A. Lieb of the Associated Press explained today, Republicans currently believe that their redistricting of Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that redistricting Virginia temporarily will make up the difference.

Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.” 

ny times logoNew York Times, In Virginia Redistricting Win, Democrats Play Hardball to Thwart Trump, Kellen Browning, April 22, 2026. “We cannot bring a stick to a knife fight”: Democrats are increasingly open to extreme measures, including gerrymandering, when the stakes are high.

Democrats’ success in pushing through one of the country’s most aggressively gerrymandered congressional maps on Tuesday in Virginia represented the latest example of the party’s willingness to take the gloves off as it seeks to win back control of Congress and thwart President Trump’s agenda.

It was a stark reversal for a party that has decried partisan gerrymandering for years. But Democrats said that the new map, which could flip as many as four Republican-held seats blue, was necessary to counter similar G.O.P. efforts in Texas and other states.

Their new mantra: It’s time to play hardball.

“While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader from New York, said in a statement after The Associated Press called the race. “Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.”

The party’s newly combative approach extends beyond redistricting as it has felt a new urgency to regain power in Washington. Despite their qualms over dark money, Democrats are nowadays more reliant on it than Republicans. And on Capitol Hill, they have adopted an uncompromising approach to spending negotiations, forcing a partial government shutdown earlier this year after they refused to fund immigration enforcement operations without new restrictions on federal agents’ tactics.

All of it amounts to a new openness among Democrats — spurred on by angry constituents demanding more forceful opposition to Mr. Trump — to reverse their opposition to political tactics they once considered bad governance. And none has been more head-spinning than the Virginia gerrymander, which transforms a nearly evenly divided 11-member congressional delegation into one with only one surefire Republican seat.

Proponents framed the initiative as a less than ideal but very necessary rebuttal to a gerrymandering war kicked off by Republicans. The measure allows for the temporary adoption of a new map, returning control of the process to an independent commission in 2031.

“We cannot bring a stick to a knife fight,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which spent more than $12 million backing the redistricting referendum.

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Two Cheers for Gerrymandering (For Now), William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 22, 2026. The Muse of History can be capricious.

We don’t remember Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1744–1814) of Massachusetts as an important early supporter of the American Revolution. We don’t recall that he served in the Second Continental Congress, where he was not only a signer of the Declaration of Independence but a leading advocate of it. We don’t know that a decade later Gerry was elected to the first House of Representatives, where he was involved in the passage of the Bill of Rights.

bulwark logo big shipWe remember his name—alas!—only because later on, as governor of Massachusetts, he presided over a highly partisan redistricting by the state legislature. A local newspaper compared the shape of one of the new state senate districts to a salamander, coining the term “Gerry-mander.” And so we have memorialized this impressive Founder with the term “gerrymandering.”

When the history of the democratic resistance to Trumpism of 2026 is written, yesterday’s vote in Virginia will be called a ratification of gerrymandering. And not unfairly. The new maps approved by the voters have some salamander-like qualities in pursuit of a likely gain of four Democratic seats and a 10–1 Democratic congressional delegation for the state.

But just as Gerry’s redistricting deserves to be remembered as only one act in an impressive political career, so yesterday’s vote was merely one act in a broader patriotic effort. The Trump administration started the mid-cycle redistricting wars in the summer of 2025. Over the next several months Republican legislatures in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Missouri (themselves gerrymandered to ensure lopsided Republican majorities) passed new maps to produce increased Republican representation from their states in Congress.

Would Democrats and anti-Trumpists respond only by hand-wringing and eloquent op-eds decrying the unfairness? No. California acted first, with a voter-approved congressional redistricting in November 2025. And last night, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the state legislature to temporarily reshape the commonwealth’s congressional districts, which had been drawn by a non-partisan redistricting process in 2021. Maps drawn by a bi-partisan commission will return after 2030.

Last night’s vote was close, with about a 3-point margin in favor of the referendum. It wasn’t an easy sell. Virginia voters had approved the nonpartisan redistricting process in 2020 by a two-to-one vote, and there was unhappiness among even Democrats and anti-Trumpists at having to resort to this unattractive counter-measure here to what Republicans had done elsewhere. There were also voters in central Virginia unhappy at being stuffed into districts that would be dominated by Northern Virginians, and likely represented by someone from Northern Virginia. And the anti-referendum campaign was sophisticated, making what appeared to be a case for good government, not for Donald Trump.

Still, the referendum passed. And so the bottom line is this: Democrats and liberals have likely wrestled Republicans and Trumpists to a draw—possibly even to slightly better than a draw—in the great redistricting war.

When things look dark, it’s important to have a community from which to draw strength. And when things look hopeful, it’s good to have a community to hope with. That’s why the Bulwark community exists. Join us.Subscribed

It’s an impressive achievement. Democrats are often thought to be hapless competitors in rough-and-tumble politics. Liberals are often thought to be unwilling or unable, in Robert Frost’s memorable formulation, to take their own side in a fight. But Democrats held their own in this contest of political hardball, liberals stepped up and fought back in this bare-knuckle political struggle.

I’d add that the fact that many Democrats and liberals were unhappy about having to resort to temporary gerrymandering is to their credit. It’s good to be part of a movement that is reluctant rather than exultant when it has to embrace a somewhat unsavory expedient. But it’s also good to be part of a movement that does what it has to do—peacefully and legally and democratically—in defense of fair elections and liberal democracy.

If I can close by returning to our friend Gerry, I’ll point out that no less of a figure than John Adams said of him in 1776 that “If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.” Virginia’s exercise in counter-gerrymandering was a contribution to making the liberties of America safer against the gates of a Trumpist Republican party. The Founders, including Gerry, would be pleased and proud. We should be too. 

AROUND THE BULWARK

  • Trump Has Revealed MAGA’s Anti-Christian Nature… It’s time for sincere believers to pull the wool from their eyes and see the truth about the president and his followers, argues MONA CHAREN.
  • bulwark logo big shipGeorge Washington’s Woke Vaccines… What the Founders would have thought about Pete Hegseth lifting the requirement that service members get the flu vaccine, writes THOMAS LECAQUE.
  • Lawsuit: Blaze’s Crackpot Reporting Prompted a Wild, Unnecessary FBI Raid: Quickly debunked reporting based on “gait analysis” was enough to get the feds to descend with a helicopter on a falsely accused J6 pipe-bomber’s home, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag. 

ny times logoNew York Times, News Analysis: With Midterms Coming Up, G.O.P. Is Bogged Down in Congress,  Carl Hulse, April 22, 2026. Republican majorities are at odds on big issues as the Senate resorts to extraordinary measures to pass homeland security funding over a Democratic blockade.

With midterm elections looming, embattled Congressional Republicans would like to be spending their scarce floor time showing voters they are tackling the high cost of living.

Instead, they are spinning their wheels on a series of bills with limited political payoff, if any, lacking the votes — or the consensus in their own ranks — to move ahead with much else.

djt maga hatSix months from voting that will decide control of Congress, Republicans in the House and Senate are bogged down on an intraparty fight over surveillance powers. The Senate spent a month debating a voter identification bill that has little chance of passing and may never even get a final vote. A major housing bill is caught in yet another House-Senate G.O.P. dispute. Much of the Homeland Security Department remains shut down after nearly 70 days. The war in Iran is driving up gas prices.

Now Republicans are embarking on a politically treacherous push to fund immigration enforcement agencies through the rest of President Trump’s tenure outside the traditional appropriations process, using a filibuster-proof budget maneuver that is typically reserved for big-ticket, party-line items, not routine spending bills.

Republican leaders are determined to keep the $70-billion budget legislation as narrow as possible to meet a June 1 deadline to send it to Mr. Trump. But that approach has frustrated some in the party who fear it may be a missed opportunity to put down a marker before the midterms. They would prefer to load up the measure with tangible benefits for voters as their fears of losing control of Congress intensify. 

 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with President Trump and Mehmet Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare services administrator, in the White House in September (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with President Trump and Mehmet Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare services administrator, in the White House in September (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross)

ny times logoNew York Times, Centers for Disease Control, Apoorva Mandavilli, April 22, 2026. The C.D.C. canceled the publication of a study showing the benefits of Covid vaccines.

The acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter, a Health Department spokesman said.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in the absence of a director, objected to the study’s design, saying it painted an inaccurate picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness.

The study, conducted by C.D.C. scientists, calculated the effectiveness of Covid shots by looking at the vaccination status of people who had sought care at hospitals and emergency rooms. It found that vaccination cut the likelihood of emergency visits due to Covid by 50 percent and of hospitalizations by 55 percent, according to a summary of the study viewed by The New York Times.

It was scheduled to be published on March 19 in The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the C.D.C.’s flagship journal. News of its cancellation was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Some former C.D.C. officials said it was unusual for the head of the agency to cancel a scientific publication that had already been cleared by the agency’s staff scientists and had been scheduled for publication.

“I’ve never seen a case where an article in the M.M.W.R. that got to that stage was not published,” said Dr. Michael Iademarco, who led the center that included the publication’s operations from 2014 to 2022.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that “scientific reports are routinely reviewed at multiple levels to ensure they meet the highest standards before publication.”

He said that assessment “identified concerns regarding the methodological approach to estimating vaccine effectiveness, and the manuscript was not accepted for publication.”

U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Reform

 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., left, and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sit for a group photo at the Supreme Court in 2022 (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., left, and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sit for a group photo at the Supreme Court in 2022 (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford). 

jonathan v last jvl triad logo

The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: It Is Time for Ruthless Aggression, Jonathan V. Last, above, April 22, 2026. The national battle over gerrymandering should be just the first step. Next up: expanding SCOTUS.

Abigail Spanberger did not campaign on saving democracy at the federal level. But that might turn out to be the most important thing she does as governor.

As Bill discussed this morning, Republicans in Texas—at the behest of the president—violated a bunch of norms when they embarked on a quest to gerrymander more seats for their party in the middle of an election cycle.

This action was illiberal and anti-democratic but—and this is the key—it was also legal.

Democrats, to their credit, responded not by rending their garments but with ruthless proportionality: Led by Gavin Newsom and Spanberger, they counter-gerrymandered.

This is the way.

The road to preserving liberal democracy does not involve unilateral disarmament or faking normality in the hopes of making the world normal again. It involves meeting force with force while crafting a national remedy for nonpartisan redistricting, which would force everyone to behave according to standards of good government.

It’s classical deterrence theory. As some Roman general once said, “If you seek peace, prepare for war.”

This should be the model for the biggest piece of ruthless aggression of them all: expanding the Supreme Court.

Let’s get ruthless.

We start from first principles:

supreme court 2023 nytThe current Supreme Court, above, is the most corrupt in living memory.

Republicans abused the confirmation process to deny an appointment to a Democratic president and rush through an appointment for aRepublican president, resulting in an imbalance on the Court that will persist for a generation.

One justice on the Court is personally corrupt in ways that are almost comical.

Two of the justices are so partisan that they are more Fox News hosts than legal scholars.

The Court as a whole has expanded executive power—and thwarted accountability for the executive—in ways that not only imbalance our constitutional system but are perilous for the liberal order.

The current Court is so corrupt that it seems unlikely to permit meaningful small-d democratic reforms enacted through normal legislation if the legislature and executive are controlled by the large-D Democratic party.

The Supreme Court cries out for reform. Because without reforming the court first, you cannot reform the rest of the system.

You and I could come up with perfect ideas for how to reform the Court. Possibilities include:

Defined terms for justices.

Age limits for mandatory retirement.

dnc square logoA regularized retirement schedule in which a seat is routinely vacated—every two years, say—which would lower the stakes of any one presidential election and eliminate the random, disproportionate impact of health events.

But all of these reforms require constitutional amendments and the amendment process for the Constitution is currently broken with no prospect of being fixed in any of our lifetimes.

Which is to say: They are nonstarters.

The only practical path to reforming the Supreme Court is expanding the number of justices.

First: It is legal to expand the number of justices on the court. Joe Biden appointed a bipartisan commission to study the SCOTUS and its report is conclusive about the legality of expansion.

Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the judiciary, requires that there be “one supreme Court” but does not specify the number of Justices that shall serve on that Court. Article I authorizes Congress to make all laws that are “necessary and proper” to carry out the powers conferred on various institutions of government, which include the Supreme Court.

Determining the size of the Court that might be “necessary and proper” to its functioning seems well within Congress’s formal discretion. The historical practice we recount above also supports the conclusion that Congress has broad authority to establish and change the Court’s size . . .

It is perfectly legal for Congress to expand the number of seats on the Court to mirror, say, the number of federal circuit courts. Period. The end.

The question of whether or not to expand the Court, then, is merely prudential.

2. Prudence

Biden’s commission on the Supreme Court did not make any recommendations, instead offering arguments on both sides of the question of whether the Court should be expanded—so you could come away from the commission’s report concluding that the prudent constitutional action to take is no action at all, just leaving the Court as it is. And at the time, that was more or less where I landed.

But that report was written in 2021, before:

The Supreme Court effectively invalidated the Insurrection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court invented a writ of presidential immunity—out of whole cloth—for the sole purpose of enabling a presidential run by a felon.

A federal judge braved rebuke from her superiors in order to help Trump avoid prosecution for serious crimes in the hopes that he would be elected president and could fire the prosecutor and dismiss the charges against himself.

A president handed the keys to the federal government to a private-sector drug addict who maimed the government without accountability.

A president began issuing direct instructions to his attorney general about enemies he wanted prosecuted.

The Supreme Court essentially enabled the president to continue his attacks on the independence of the central bank.

A president waged war—and imposing a blockade is the literal, legal definition of an “act of war”—in violation of constitutional requirements.

In 2021 it was possible to look at the wreckage of America’s first authoritarian attempt, believe that the system would rebalance itself, and hope for the best.

From the vantage point of 2026 such a hope is no longer reasonable to hold. You either accept that this is the new world, or you commit to active reform.

Expanding the Supreme Court is no different that redistricting in California and Virginia. It is a proportionate response to Republican attempts to degrade liberal democracy and move America toward a post-liberal order.

It would make legislative reforms more achievable—which would therefore encourage compromise.

It would create a deterrent effect, demonstrating to the forces of illiberalism that liberalism can be ruthless in its own defense.

And maybe it could even lead—in the very long term—to one of those more perfect solutions that is beyond the reach of mere legislation, in the way that Democrats offer a national law on nonpartisan redistricting while simultaneously using partisan redistricting at the state level as a way to counter and deter Republican norm-breaking.

Two caveats:

(1) Should Democrats campaign on Court expansion? No. You or I might care about it. But barely a third of the country even knows how many justices are on the Supreme Court right now. No one would care.

This isn’t to say that Democrats should cloak their thoughts on the issue. Again: Use Spanberger and redistricting as your model.

(2) Is there downside risk to expanding the Court? Yes. But there’s at least as much downside risk to doing nothing. And the status quo has almost no upside.

People thought there was downside risk in California and Virginia doing their own redistricting in response to Texas. But those risks were outbalanced by the gains. Democrats have blunted the Republicans’ advantage and taught the other side that they do not get free shots.

The success of redistricting should teach Democrats how to fight the next phase of the war for liberalism. Hoping for the best isn’t enough.

Trump Team Watch

The Contrarian, Opinion: Women Are the First To Go, Jennifer Rubin, right, jennifer rubin new headshotApril 22, 2026.  Trump’s venom toward women isn’t anything new.

lori chavez deremerLike eccentric guests in an Agatha Christie novel, members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet are disappearing in fast succession. The latest to be forced out: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, left.

The New York Times reported, “The Labor Department’s inspector general’s office is nearing the end of a monthslong investigation into a whistle-blower’s allegations of professional misconduct by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her closest aides, including claims that she was having an affair with a member of her security team and that she used department resources for personal trips.” (Several other aides have been forced out based on the same complaint.) The report added that Chavez-DeRemer’s departure came just days before shewas scheduled to sit for an interview. Her husband has also been ensnared in sexual harassment allegations.

Following Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, she is the third Cabinet secretary — and third woman — to get dumped. The question is not whether these officials should have been fired; all had serious, multiple allegations pending. (And Democrats certainly pushed for Noem and Bondi to go.) The more interesting issue is why the women are the only ones to get booted from a merit-free administration filled with unfit, unqualified, dishonest, and scandal-plagued characters.

contrarian logoIf removing embarrassing and disreputable characters were the object, there is no reason Pete Hegseth (mired in Signalgate, accused of denying women and minorities promotions, engaged in extrajudicial killings and arguably other war crimes, Christianizing the Pentagon, etc.) should still be there.

Kash Patel, below, who recently sued The Atlantic over a deeply sourced report alleging that he is a drunk, has been plagued by a slew of scandals (e.g., using funds to fly his girlfriend around, misleading Congress about firing FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6, speaking out of turn/spreading inaccurate information in the aftermath of shootings) and widespread complaints of utter incompetence (including gutting the FBI’s counterintelligence staff).Then there is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a crank who has systematically kash patel o croppedundermined our public health system; spread disinformation about vaccines, vitamin A, and autism; fired qualified scientists who refused to adopt his anti-science policies; and slashed grants and critical research.

Run through the list: from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (a buffoon who misrepresented his contact with Jeffrey Epstein) to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (who spreads chaos, appears oblivious to conflicts of interest, and presides over a meltdown in our airline system) to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (the most gaffe-ridden and least credible Treasury secretary in memory, who spends time acting as Trump’s attack dog). None of these people would have been nominated or confirmed for their positions in any other administration. A stable, competent president would have fired them multiple times over.

And yet, the men plod along, shuffling in oversized shoes and groveling in front of their boss. (One benefit the male Cabinet members have: Social and sporting event opportunities to suck up to him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio knew enough to hang out with Trump at a UFC event rather than negotiate with Iran.)

Plainly, a double standard is at work, heavily influenced by the toxic misogyny coursing through the veins of the MAGA movement and deeply embedded in Trump’s psyche. There is less tolerance for Chavez-DeRemer’s petty scandals than for Hegseth’s blunders that endanger our national security. Mike Walz got a different job after Signalgate; Bondi got shown the door. As Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) observed after Bondi was canned, “Well … first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi … it would be too much like right that Pete be next. I see a theme. He will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”Subscribed

Now, before we shed a tear for these women, remember that “Bondi, Noem, and the other women in Trumpworld knew exactly what they were getting themselves into,” as Jill Filipovic wrote. “It is not a secret that this president has asked his attorneys general and other high-ranking officials to break the law and defy the Constitution; it is not a secret that he is quick to anger, and who he fires and retains is often scattershot.” One is hard pressed to disagree with Filipovic’s conclusion that they are “villains of their own making,” unworthy of our sympathy.

That said, it is not as if his venom toward women is a new phenomenon. Trump gets especially enraged with women (reporters, members of Congress, presidential opponents) who displease him. Invectives against women fly from his lips, especially when he is facing criticism. The man credibly accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll infamously stated, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Women are objects whose disobedience and independence are an affront to him.

When women commit the cardinal sin of performing poorly on TV (as Bondi and Noem did), they put a target on their backs. (Hegseth might have been onto something in refusing to testify about the war.) Trump, who is fixated with women’s appearance and considers TV the true training ground for high office, expects these women to get rid of his messes. When they don’t, they are useless to him.

In short, none of these women “deserve” the jobs they held. Once there, they did not serve the American people. However, we would be blind not to recognize that Trump’s tolerance for women who mess up is much lower than for men. (Note that he is also allegedly contemplating canning Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.) “Under Trump, women will always have a ceiling they will hit before being discarded; the only power they have presumably acquired has been conditionally given and therefore can be taken away,” wrote Andrea González-Ramírez. “But that is the deal you make when you are willing to be a public shield for a man who rarely, if ever, sees women as fully human.”

We have always known that. Apparently, it is only now dawning on the Cabinet women who thought they were different. 

 

politicus usa logoPoliticusUSA, The Daily News and Commentary: Devin Nunes is Out at Trump Media, Whose Stock Price Has Fallen by More than 80%, Sarah Jones, right, sarah reese jonesApril 22, 2026. Trump uses his failing platform to attack critics and parade his increasingly tenuous hold on reality.

It’s as if Truth Social got a look at Trump’s alarmingly low job approval rating as it fell to just 33%, and his approval on handling the economy plunged 9 points since February to a sad, piddling 30%, and said ‘We give up.’

Devin Nunes, below, is out as CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group (Truth Social), whose stock has fallen by more than 80%.

devin nunes grimacing“The Truth Social parent company's shake-up comes after years of losses and a struggling stock price,” Politico noted, adding “His exit is the third among Trump Media’s senior ranks in recent weeks.”

Trump uses his failing social media platform to attack critics and generally parade his increasingly tenuous hold on reality, while oversharing his own grandiose belief in himself, including posting an AI image of himself as Jesus.

It’s almost as if it might not be a great idea for a President to own a social media company and post there whenever he feels like it, especially if that person is erratic, unstable and can’t moderate their emotions with anything approaching adult-like capabilities.

Nunes, a former Republican Representative best known for suing a parody cow on Twitter, is being replaced as its chief executive officer. Yes, Nunes lost that defamation lawsuit, but the good news is his lawsuit brought massive publicity to the account, which boasts over 760,000 followers.

He brought that same magic to Truth Social, where the stock price closed on TACO Tuesday at $9.82, according to the New York Times, down from $58 a share on its first day of trading.

“Last year, Trump Media took in $3.7 million in revenue and recorded a $712 million net loss,” the Times noted dryly. 

To the Contrary, Political Opinion: The Art of the Botched Deal, Charlie Sykes, April 22, 2026. Plus: Dems win big in Virginia. Sort of.

As we ponder this latest TACO du jour, it’s worth revisiting this CNN report from a few days ago. “A deal to end the Iran war seemed close. Then Trump started posting on social media.” Last weekend, negotiators thought they were making progress to end the seven-week war.

Then Trump began bleating.

To the surprise of precisely no one who has been watching Trump over the years, the president “did exactly what his staffers have repeatedly said they wouldn’t do: He seemed to try negotiating via the press, posting about ongoing talks on social media and speaking to several reporters by phone Friday morning as Pakistani intermediaries updated him on ongoing talks with Iranian officials in Tehran.”

And much of what he said bore no relation to reality.

He claimed Iran had agreed to a host of provisions that sources familiar with the talks said have not yet been finalized. He also asserted that Tehran had agreed to many of the most contentious US demands — including handing over the enriched uranium — and declared an imminent end to the war.

You all know the result: Iranian officials refuted Trump’s assertions “and denied they were preparing for another round of talks, rapidly tanking the rising optimism for a deal.”

So today, JD Vance is grounded and the peace talks have been shelved. But — after once again promising to bomb power plants and bridges — Trump blinked again and extended the ceasefire.

Which is a good thing, even though the whole incident exposed in the most garish manner possible the fact that the man in the White House is undisciplined, erratic, confused, and utterly not to be trusted.

Meanwhile: “Iranian Forces Claim Seizure of 2 Ships Near Strait of Hormuz After Trump Extends Cease-Fire.” So, I think it is safe to say that Trump’s War is not, in fact, “going swimmingly.”

Politico, New Jersey’s most vulnerable GOP incumbent is MIA, Daniel Han and Mia McCarthy, April 22, 2026. Rep. Tom Kean Jr.'s team said the absence is due to unspecified health issues.

politico CustomRep. Tom Kean Jr. represents New Jersey’s most competitive district this November — but nobody, even his GOP colleagues, can say where he’s been for the past month.

A scion of one of the state’s most storied political dynasties, Kean’s team says the two-term congressmember is facing unspecified health issues. The New Jersey Republican hasn’t voted since March 5 and has missed almost 50 roll call votes.

The other two Republicans in the New Jersey delegation, Reps. Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, said they have called and texted Kean out of concern for his health. But so far, neither said they have heard from him. Van Drew said it’s been “radio silence.”

Several New York Republicans who have worked with Kean on key issues said similarly. Kean’s absence has largely fallen under the radar and GOP leaders haven’t addressed the issue to the conference, according to several Republicans.

One Republican, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), said he didn’t even realize Kean had been missing until he tried to find him on the House floor Tuesday.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said in an interview Wednesday. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

Politico, Trump admin agrees to pay $1.25M to 2016 Trump adviser over surveillance, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, April 22, 2026. The settlement does not resolve Carter Page’s effort to revive his claims against a slew of former government officials he named as defendants.

politico CustomThe Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle claims from 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that the FBI and Justice Department illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance, according to a court filing and a person familiar with the deal.

Page sued the federal government — along with top FBI and Justice Department officials — in 2020, saying they abused their foreign intelligence surveillance authorities after his travel to Russia drew the eye of the FBI and fueled investigations of then-candidate Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. The allegations also provoked Trump’s attacks on the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies, saying they cut corners and broke rules in a single-minded effort to tie him to Russia and damage his presidency.

Solicitor General John Sauer revealed the settlement Wednesday in a filing with the Supreme Court, where Page had pressed his case after losing fights in federal district and appeals courts.

A Justice Department spokesperson said: “No American should ever face covert and unlawful surveillance based on their political views. The investigation into Carter Page — a man never charged with a single crime — relied on inherently flawed and uncorroborated information, proving it was a political sham from the get-go. The targeting of American citizens for political purposes constitutes a severe violation of civil liberties. This Department of Justice is committed to dismantling the weaponization of government, and today’s settlement represents one of many initiatives to provide justice to those abused by rogue actors.”

Page and one of his attorneys did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The settlement does not resolve Page’s effort to revive his claims against a slew of former government officials he named as defendants, including: former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe and Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI attorney who pleaded guilty to altering an email used in an application for permission to surveil Page.

john phelan oJohn Phelan, right, who served just over a year in his post, had helped conceive of the new battleships to curry favor with President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Politico, Navy secretary is out amid Pentagon infighting, Jack Detsch, Paul McLeary, Daniel Lippman and Connor O'Brien, April 22, 2026. John Phelan sparked tensions within the department over his support for a new battleship.John Phelan speaks into a microphone during a hearing.

politico CustomNavy Secretary John Phelan abruptly left his job on Wednesday in part because a hugely expensive new battleship he championed sparked friction with his superiors — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Phelan, who served just over a year in his post, had helped conceive of the new battleships to curry favor with President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The “Trump Class” battleships were a major source of frustration for Hegseth and Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg because they did not align with the Pentagon’s broader strategy to pivot toward smaller, cheaper uncrewed ships, according to the two people, who, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The massive ships will cost the Pentagon billions to even begin developing, and are “not at all aligned with where Hegseth and Feinberg want to go,” the first person said.

Phelan had also recently seen some of his key responsibilities pulled away, according to a third and fourth person. They said Feinberg had taken over management of submarine programs and the Office of Management and Budget was already running the shipbuilding effort.

Phelan was in the lobby of the White House on Wednesday after the announcement was made, according to a person familiar with the matter. He was also seen on Capitol Hill that day. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Pentagon declined to comment on specifics about the battleship. Phelan could not be reached for comment.

The ouster of Phelan comes a week before Hegseth is set to testify on the Pentagon’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget, which would involve significant boosts to key Navy programs. This includes Trump’s proposed “Golden Fleet.”

Phelan, a wealthy financier, was one of several businessmen tapped for top Pentagon posts by Trump, alongside Feinberg. He came aboard a service plagued by problems in shipbuilding with promises to shake up the process. He oversaw the cancellation of the troubled Constellation-class frigate, along with the announcement of Trump’s battleship and efforts to consolidate the Navy’s ranks of admirals.

But he struggled to get the Navy to increase shipbuilding numbers, one of Trump’s top priorities. Phelan had also lost key staff in recent months. Hegseth in October fired Jon Harrison, Phelan’s unusually powerful chief of staff who had sought sweeping changes to the Navy’s policy and budgeting offices and attempted to curb the role of the undersecretary before undersecretary Hung Cao was confirmed to the post.

Cao, the service’s second ranking civilian, will take over Phelan’s role on an acting basis.

Phelan’s management of the Navy was “out of touch” with the service, which frustrated both Feinberg and Hegseth, according to the second person, who added that Phelan had been left with “low-level people” as advisers.

Editor's Note: Passenger manifests released as part of the Epstein files indicate that Phelan flew twice on the plane of Jeffrey Epstein several months before Epstein's first arrest on sex charges. The first flight took place on February 27, 2006, from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Luton Airport. The manifest for the second flight, from London to New York on March 3, 2006, indicates that Phelan flew with 12 other passengers, including Epstein, modeling agent and Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel, and six people whose names are redacted on the version of the manifest released in October 2025 by the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.]

U.S. Law, Crime, Rights, Justice  

 

southern poverty law center

  • The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: The Trump Regime's Criminal Enterprise, Steve Schmidt, April 22, 2026. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are running the Justice Department solely to prosecute Donald Trump's enemies. Steve Schmidt breaks down why Trump can't keep America safe with this court of fools.

 

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Acting Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel presided at a raucous press conference at the Justice Department April 21 where their announcement of dubious federal charges against the Southern Poverty Legal Center, a civil rights organization, was superceded during question period by reporters' questions about news reports that Patel's job has been jeapardized by drinking and other unprofessional activities.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Todd Blanche’s Weird Double Standard Protects Sex Traffickers and Racists, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), April 22, 2026.marcy wheeler Todd Blanche and Kash Patel just indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. The indictment charges three kinds of crimes:

Paying informants for infiltrating far right groups, which DOJ charged as wire fraud for six payments made in 2023. Making four false representations on December 20, 2016 to set up four bank accounts to make payments that obscured SPLC as the source; on September 2021, those accounts were shut down in 2020 and senior SPLC management corrected the misrepresentations on September 9, 2021. Conspiracy to money launder.

In an absolutely hilarious press conference, Blanche, right, stated that the investigation had been shut down during the Biden Administration, but then claimed to be ignorant of why (or when) that happened. His comment will surely be a focus of SPLC’s response.

Todd Blanche OThe headline claim, that the SPLC misrepresented what they were doing to donors, is batshit insane. With one exception (in which a well-paid informant took a bunch of documents), there’s no misconduct even hinted. SPLC just paid informants doing incredibly dangerous work for that work. Blanche is claiming that this was a misrepresentation to donors — who supported SPLC precisely because their work was so well sourced.

The claims about the bank accounts might have merit, though given that SPLC cleaned them up (which may be why DOJ dropped this in the past), the statute of limitations may otherwise have tolled, but for the conspiracy charge.

So we shall see what happens with the legal case. There are several other takeaways, however.Kash Patel refused to answer questions about his drinking.

One reason the press conference was hilarious was that it devolved into a press conference about last week’s Atlantic article reporting that Kash often drinks too much.

Justice Department log circularBlanche told two lies in addressing a question about whether he had concerns about allegations about Kash’s drinking. He claimed that the article claimed senior DOJ officials had been informed of something, and since he had not been, the article must be false.

The article makes two references to DOJ officials, neither of which describes those people as senior.

His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

[snip]

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials.

The only reference to “senior” officials was a citation to a former senior spook and senior Administration officials, but the description implicitly places them at the White House.

Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

Blanche also claimed that Kash’s drinking at the Olympics had nothing to do with the article. I mean, granted, he said he had not read the article, but one allegation in the article that did not make the lawsuit pertains to Trump’s response.

While on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call.

Twelve minutes into the 27-minute press conference, Blanche ended these responses by saying he had already said too much about it. Several more questions addressed by Kash followed.

In response to a question whether he could “say definitively that you have not been absent or intoxicated during your tenure as FBI Director,” Kash started by not answering: “I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake news mafia.” Then he tried innumeracy, claiming he had been on the job “twice as many days as any FBI Director before me,” which impossibility he then explained by saying both that he had taken “half as many days off as those before” him and “a third less vacation.” After 79 seconds of filibustering, he finally said something about drinking, but not in a way that addressed the allegations in the story.

I’m like an everyday American who loves his country, loves the sport of hockey, and champions my friends when they win a gold medal and invite me in to celebrate. I have never been intoxicated on the job, and that is why we filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit.

Things got worse when a journalist noted, “your lawsuit contends that you were not able to log into the system,” then asked, “what did you think after you were unable to log into the system.” Kash’s first response was to ask, “let’s have a survey, how many of you people believe that’s true,” about a claim in his lawsuit (effectively accusing his lawyers of lying).

When the reporter restated the question about Kash’s thoughts about being locked out, Kash raised his voice and attacked the reporter. “The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie. It was never said, it never happened … every time you guys report false lies, every time you you raise baseless questions.” The journalist tried again; Kash said, “you are lying, I was never locked out of the system.” When the journalist noted that Kash’s own lawsuit differs, Blanche butted in and accused the journalist of being extraordinarily rude.

Here’s what the lawsuit says:

23. The Article’s assertions that on April 10, 2026, Director Patel “panicked, frantically” announcing he had been fired, engaged in a “freak-out,” and “is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy,” are false. On April 10, 2026, Director Patel had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed. Director Patel’s sole focus is on carrying out the administration’s law enforcement priorities. Prior to publication, the FBI expressly informed Defendants that the firing rumor was a “made-up rumor,” and that the “freak-out” and job-jeopardy claims were fabricated.

Kash Patel literally accused his own lawyers of lying.

This was a gift to Stephen Miller:

In part of Kash’s non-response, he said he would serve as long as the President and the Attorney General want him to. That may be true, but this indictment, and the press conference in DC, with just Blanche and Kash looking like bozos, was about Stephen Miller.

Miller has two gripes with SPLC. In 2019, it exposed Miller’s fond ties with white supremacists, based on emails linked from a former Breitbart editor, Katie McHugh.

Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

Miller has gained a reputation for attempting to keep his communications secret: The Washington Post reported in August that Miller “rarely puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls.” The Daily Beast noted in July that Miller has recently “cut off regular contact with most of his allies” outside the Trump administration to limit leaks.

[snip]

White nationalist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston,South Carolina,in June 2015. Roof’s attack triggered a national conversation about racial hatred in the United States. In response, Amazon.com and other retailers made efforts to pull the Confederate flag from their websites and stores.

Miller sought to create a counternarrative to this news through Breitbart, the emails show. He emailed McHugh with the subject line “defies modern comprehension” on June 23, 2015, following the news about the retailers, and highlighted a statistic about the deaths of Confederate soldiers with a link to history.com:

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET: “‘22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war.’” [history.com link]

McHugh told Hatewatch that she and Miller spoke on the phone about the subject of Amazon yanking Confederate flag merchandise after the email. Miller appears to refer to that call in his next email and suggests that McHugh write about how Amazon was selling “commie flags.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:31 p.m.ET: “That’s a really, really, really good point.

Have you thought about going to Amazon and finding the commie flags and then doing a story on that? I think you’ve hit on something potentially profound.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 3:32 p.m. ET: “Yes, definitely. There’s all kinds of hammer and sickle merchandise, Che shirts, Stalin shirts… the list goes on and on.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:36 p.m. ET: “I think that would be a very big story. Reveals just the stunning corporate hypocrisy that defines our modern culture.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 3:42 p.m. ET: “Yes, and extra lulz: [Former Obama White House press secretary] Jay Carney, who’s a senior advisor or something for Amazon, displayed Commie propaganda IN HIS HOUSE.” [Daily Caller link]

Miller, June 23, 2015, 4:33 p.m. ET: “This would be the perfect time to resurrect that fact. Brilliant.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 5:07 p.m. ET: “I’m going to go full Info Wars here: It’s not a coincidence that in the midst of pushing the US-ending trade deal, we’re seeing a historic artifact of real America be demonized and destroyed.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 5:11 p.m. ET: “I betcha they also sell lots of che gueverra garb too.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 5:13 p.m. ET: “Oh they do. It took a long time to write a very short piece because I feel gripped with anger and despair. But if there was ever a time to stay cheerful, this is it!!”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 5:14 p.m. ET: “shoot me link when you have.”

McHugh and Miller continued to trade emails about the subject later that night. McHugh mentioned that “Confederate monuments [are being] vandalized in the US.” She sent Miller a link to the story she wrote based on their conversation, “Amazon takes down Confederate flag, continues to sell communist merchandise,” noting it was “leading Breitbart.”

Miller replied:

Miller, June 23, 2015, 10:34 p.m. ET: “what do the [Confederate monument] vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?”

The emails show that Miller returned to the subject in subsequent days, tying the debate to immigrants and leftists. He sent an email June 24, 2015, with the subject line “story idea”:

Miller, June 24, 2015, 2:07 p.m. ET: “1. Should people of Spanish descent, especially those living in immigrant communities, be banned from displaying the Spanish flag given Spanish conduct in Latin America? 2. Should [Univision anchor] Jorge Ramos apologize for Spanish conduct in Latin America, and redress it by ensuring more people of indigenous backgrounds have hosting duties on his network? 3. Should the cross be removed from immigrant communities, in light of the history of Spanish conquest?”

Miller brought up the issue again one day later:

Miller, June 25, 2015, 10:38 a.m. ET: “When will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since stalin?”

And it reported on TPUSA’s embrace of white nationalism.

Several weeks after the 2024 presidential election, Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), proudly embraced a white nationalist conspiracy theory while celebrating then-President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation.

Kirk accused Democrats of embracing immigration as part of their plot to secure voters, permit crime and enact the “great replacement.” He warned his hundreds of thousands of listeners, “We native born Americans are being replaced by foreigners.” He then promised Trump will “liberate” the country from “the enemy occupation of the foreigner hordes.”

Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists and a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics. While the group was previously dismissed by key figures within the Republican National Committee (RNC), Trump attended several TPUSA events across the country throughout 2024, and several of his nominees have ties to the organization. Turning Point Action, the group’s sister 501(c)(4) organization, led Trump’s 2024 campaign efforts in key battleground states and played a vital role in the election of far-right candidates in Arizona, while TPUSA participated on the advisory board of Project 2025, a blueprint to radically reshape the federal government.

Over the last several years, the political right has increasingly shifted toward an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions. The political right in the U.S., whose party infrastructure is dominated by the Republican Party but includes the current Libertarian Party and is flanked to the right by the Constitution Party, has embraced aggressive state and federal power to enforce a social order rooted in white supremacy. Turning Point USA and its growing influence on conservative politics is emblematic of this current state.

After Kirk’s murder last year, FBI cut SPLC off from working with the FBI, without, then, mentioning any allegation of impropriety.

Charging SPLC is designed to do precisely what Miller loves to do: to discount his own bigotry by claiming everything has been invented.

In reality, the indictment instead shows that SPLC really worked hard to know what it was writing about. But right wing influencers are using the indictment to claim everything SPLC infiltrated, including the Unite the Right rally, was in fact set up by SPLC. (SPLC actually warned about Unite the Right in advance.)

Blanche adopts a double standard on funding

Setting aside the false claims to the bank, the headline claims here — that SPLC’s payment to informants equates to support for the hate groups it infiltrates — adopts a radically different approach to funding than Blanche has with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.

Adopting the logic used here, Blanche should be prosecuting Leon Black and Les Wexner because their funds supported sex trafficking.

Of course, he’s not. Where it serves him to use expansive claims of funding to protect racists, he does so. Where it serves him to read financial support narrowly to protect Trump’s sex trafficker network, he does so.

With Blanche, it’s all about using “law enforcement” to serve Trump’s political goals.

Update: Here’s the video SPLC released addressing the indictment. 

 

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown guzzling champagn while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties..

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown gussling champagne while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties.

PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary: Investigation Launched Into Kash Patel's Alleged Drinking, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 22, 2026. The pressure is growing on FBI Director Kash Patel as House investigation has been launched into Patel's alleged alcohol abuse.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) announced on Wednesday that an investigation has been launched into reports of FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking.

The Judiciary Committee Democrats’ announcement comes on the heels of the Senate taking steps to begin an investigation into Patel.

politicus usa logoUnlike in the Senate, the minority party in the House has investigative powers.

PoliticusUSA provides analysis that is 100% independent. No party spin or billionaire bias. Support us by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

The Democrats on the committee announced that they will be investigating Patel’s alleged drinking and demanded that the FBI Director pass a screening test for alcohol use disorders.

Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote to Patel:

A damning and explosive report recently revealed that the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are privately—and at times publicly—alarmed by your “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”1 There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you.

After repeatedly and inexplicably disappearing for long stretches of time only to reappear conspicuously inebriated, it is no surprise that your purported drinking habits and erratic schedule have had demonstrably disastrous effects on your performance of duties as FBI Director.

Your staff’s inability to reach you has reportedly led to delays in time-sensitive decisions to advance investigations of terror cases, including apparently the issuance of FISA warrants.

On the flip side, your inability to control your impulses has reportedly undermined high-stakes criminal investigations, including the manhunt for the mass shooter at Brown University and the search for the assassin of Charlie Kirk last year. During the course of both investigations, you shared and broadcast inaccurate information.

These claims corroborate what the American people have seen for ourselves: you have shuttled boxes of alcohol onboard the FBI jet, downed “aperitivo” with foreign dignitaries, and chugged beers in the Team USA locker room at the Olympics in Italy in a now notorious viral video. These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.

As you may be aware, federal law prevents employees in competitive civil service jobs from “habitually us[ing] intoxicating beverages to excess.” The Department of Justice Ethics Handbook for On- and Off-Duty Conduct applies that rule to all Department employees, including the FBI Director.

It is astounding that the FBI Director potentially being drunk on the job and jeopardizing national security is not a bigger story.

As you will see, the investigation seeks to get to the bottom of reports of Patel’s alcohol abuse.

The Democrats are demanding that Patel pass an alcohol disorders audit:

We understand that you have sued the journalists who have reported on the widespread concerns about your job performance and alcohol abuse, demanding a whopping $250 million in damages, plus disgorgement of income.

However, the American people deserve to hear the facts directly from you now—not your lawyers weeks or months from now—to determine for ourselves whether your continued leadership of the FBI in fact constitutes a severe “national security vulnerability.”

For the sake of our own security, we need to know, for example, “how many drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when you are drinking,” “how often during the last year have you failed to do what was normally expected from you because of drinking,” “how often during the last year have you needed a first drink in the morning to get yourself going after a heavy drinking session,” and “how often during the last year have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you had been drinking?”

Given the urgency and gravity of the risks to our nation and our people, we request that you fill out and submit to Congress the results of the attached Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)—a 10-question screening tool considered the “gold standard” in the U.S. and around the world for assessing harmful patterns of alcohol consumption and routinely used by individuals to help identify hazardous drinking behaviors—along with a sworn statement attesting that your answers are true under the penalty of perjury.11 Please provide the following to the Committee no later than 5:00 p.m. on April 28, 2026.

The penalty of perjury is the other shoe about to drop.

After the results of the amendment vote in Virginia on Tuesday night, Democrats are looking more likely than ever to take back the House majority.

The investigation by House Judiciary Democrats is not an empty threat. If Patel doesn’t comply with their request, when the Democrats control the committee, they will be able to schedule and hold public hearings and could find Patel in contempt of Congress, or if he files false documents, charge him with perjury. 

alexis wilkins kash patel instagram

ny times logoNew York Times, F.B.I. Said to Have Investigated Times Reporter After Article on Patel’s Girlfriend, Michael S. Schmidt, April 22, 2026. The bureau said it is not pursuing a case, but the scrutiny is an example of the Trump administration weighing whether to criminalize routine news gathering.

The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend,shown above in an Instagram photo, with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws, the person said.

Those actions prompted concerns among some Justice Department officials who saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, did not like, and who determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation, according to the person briefed on the matter.

In response to questions from The Times this week, the F.B.I. said that “while investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking,” the F.B.I. is not pursuing a case.

The scrutiny of Ms. Williamson is an example of the Trump administration examining whether to criminalize routine news gathering practices that are widely considered protected by the First Amendment.

Journalists are more often caught up in criminal investigations as potential witnesses when the authorities are trying to determine who leaked them classified information.

In preparing the article about Mr. Patel and Ms. Wilkins, Ms. Williamson followed normal procedures for a journalist working on a story, which typically involve reaching out to the subject and seeking a variety of perspectives. In this case, Ms. Williamson contacted numerous people who had worked with or knew Ms. Wilkins.

Ms. Williamson had one phone call at the beginning of her reporting process with Ms. Wilkins — Ms. Wilkins insisted that it be off the record — and exchanged emails with her before publication of the article. At that early stage in her reporting, Ms. Williamson asked Ms. Wilkins to provide a list of people she might speak to for the article, but Ms. Wilkins did not respond.

Ms. Williamson was never in Ms. Wilkins’s presence.

Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, criticized the bureau for investigating a reporter for doing her job.

“The F.B.I.’s attempt to criminalize routine reporting is a blatant violation of Elizabeth’s First Amendment rights and another attempt by this administration to prevent journalists from scrutinizing its actions,” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s alarming. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.”

The Times article, published Feb. 28, described how Ms. Wilkins has a full-time protective detail of Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country to accompany her to engagements including singing appearances and a hair appointment.

The disclosure intensified questions over Mr. Patel’s use of taxpayer-funded resources for personal use, not long after he drew headlines for celebrating in Milan with the U.S. men’s hockey team after its gold medal victory in the Olympics.

In a statement provided for the Feb. 28 article, a spokesman for the F.B.I. said that active death threats against Ms. Wilkins warranted the level of protection she was receiving, but he did not question the accuracy of Ms. Williamson’s reporting.

The inquiry into Ms. Williamson played out in the days and weeks following the publication of the article.

On the day of the article’s publication, Ms. Wilkins received a threatening email from an anonymous sender. Ms. Wilkins forwarded the email the same day to the F.B.I., according to an affidavit later filed in a criminal prosecution of the alleged sender of the email, who was in Boston. According to the affidavit, the sender acknowledged emailing the threat after reading the article by Ms. Williamson.

Several days later, the F.B.I. interviewed Ms. Wilkins, who told them how the reporting Ms. Williamson had done for the article had left her unnerved and feeling harassed, according to the person familiar with the matter. Ms. Wilkins had raised similar concerns with the F.B.I. as early as January, when Ms. Williamson first contacted her, the person said.

ny times logoNew York Times, The Capitol Police OfficerSwept Up in a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory, Corina Knoll, April 22, 2026. Shauni Kerkhoff was wrongfullyimplicated in the notorious Capitol Hill pipe-bomb case. Can she ever fully move on?

The Jan. 6 attack inspired conspiracy theories almost from the moment President Trump’s supporters overcame the police and charged into the Capitol. The one that gained the most traction held that the riot was a “fedsurrection,” an inside job orchestrated by a network of law enforcement officers intending to sabotage Mr. Trump.

More Global News

The Sun, Battle Plans Exposed Analysis: Putin's Losses Surge to 300+ Per Square Kilometre as Ukraine's Tactics Bite, April 21, 2026 (22:36 mins.). Russia is losing 316 soldiers per square kilometre, and at the current rate of attrition, it would take Vladimir Putin’s forces 103 years to seize the whole of Ukraine.

Former intelligence planner Philip Ingram reveals how the battlefield has reached a "lethal critical mass."

Following the democratic ousting of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Putin has lost his primary political shield in the EU, leaving the Kremlin more isolated than ever.

We go inside the "Deep Battle" doctrine as Ukraine bypasses the meat-grinder trenches to strike Russia’s energy crown jewels 1,000km away in the Caspian Sea. Philip breaks down the terrifying rise of terminal autonomy in drone warfare—where AI-guided ‘Hornet’ drones now remove human error and electronic warfare from the equation entirely.

Plus, we examine the "shocking" breakdown of Russian command and control during the so-called Easter ceasefire, where Russian troops were caught on camera killing their own men in "red on red" strikes.

U.S. Inflation, Markets, Economy, Jobs

 

Kevin M. Warsh, at his confirmation hearing to lead the Federal Reserve, sought to dispel doubts that he would yield to President Trump’s demand for lower rates.Kevin M. Warsh, at his confirmation hearing to lead the Federal Reserve, sought to dispel doubts that he would yield to President Trump’s demand for lower rates.

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump’s Fed Pick Faces Tough Task Shedding ‘Sock Puppet’ Label, Colby Smith, April 22, 2026. “Are you going to be the president's human sock puppet?" 

That question from Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, came early during Kevin M. Warsh’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve.

It was not the first time that the label had been invoked by lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee that morning, nor would it be the last.

At every opportunity during the hearing, his first public remarks since President Trump tapped him for the job, Mr. Warsh sought to disabuse lawmakers of the notion that he would do the administration’s bidding when it came to interest rates if confirmed to replace Jerome H. Powell as chair.

He repeatedly denied that Mr. Trump had made him promise anything regarding the Fed’s future decisions on borrowing costs. He pledged to defend the central bank’s autonomy to set policy based strictly on “analytic rigor, meaningful deliberation and unclouded decision-making.” And he made clear that stamping out inflation would be a top priority during his tenure, saying that stable prices must be pursued “without excuse or equivocation.”

But shaking off the perception that he will be pliable to the president’s pressure campaign will not be easy for Mr. Warsh, especially given his ambitions to overhaul the institution he soon hopes to lead. Nor will it be easy for him to actually deliver what Mr. Trump wants if he tries to do so, setting up a potential clash that risks keeping tensions elevated between the White House and the Fed.

 

catherine rampell receiptsReceipts via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:,Trump’s Fed Chair Nominee Fails the Big Test, Catherine Rampell, right, catherine rampellApril 22, 2026. None of the senators asked the question: How would Warsh react to the same kinds of pressures from Donald Trump that current Fed Chair Jerome Powell has endured?

Trump has been furious with Powell for the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates quite as quickly as Trump wants. So he has been visiting various kinds of pain upon Powell: smears, threats, even a bogus criminal investigation. Admirably, Powell has stood up for the centralbank’s independence.

Would Warsh do the same? We don’t know! But some curiously timed about-faces in his policy views, along with some snarky comments he’s made about Trump attacks on other Fed officials, call Warsh’s fortitude into question.

bulwark logo big shipKEVIN WARSH, DONALD TRUMP’S pick for Federal Reserve chair, had his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. The hearing was held under the shadow of Trump’s ongoing efforts to persecute (and prosecute) the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell—a vendetta that simultaneously undermines both the rule of law and the nation’s long-term economic prospects.

It was Warsh’s chance to prove his commitment to independence, and he failed.

He gave plenty of lip service to Fed independence, but he actually needed to answer two specific questions:

1) Is Trump’s criminal investigation into Powell appropriate?

2) What would Warsh do if Trump threatened retribution against him for monetary policy decisions the president disliked?

Both questions are critical, given that Trump’s demands for interest rate cuts—and Warsh’s promise to deliver them—will almost inevitably come into conflict with the inflation stoked by Trump’s war in Iran. But Warsh answered neither. In fact, no one even bothered to ask him the second question.

Unlike some of the other candidates Trump has considered for Fed jobs, Warsh is not obviously insane or incompetent. He’s not a clown, or a hack, or someone who makes easily falsifiable claims on TV. On paper, he looks like a terrific candidate. He is polished and fast on his feet, has market experience, and has even served on the Fed Board before (from 2006 to 2011, as an appointee of President George W. Bush). Plenty of people I respect have said he more than clears the bar.

But the question has never been whether Warsh has the brains for the job. It’s whether he has the spine for it. Which he will very much need, given who is in the White House.

As I’ve noted before, Warsh spent nearly his entire career advocating for policy positions the exact opposite of those that Trump demands today. Trump wants looser monetary policy, regardless of economic conditions. Trump even has affirmed that a commitment to cut interest rates immediately was a “litmus test” for anyone wanting his nomination to lead the Fed. But Warsh has generally been considered an inflation hawk, favoring tighter monetary policy with higher interest rates and a smaller Fed balance sheet.

Even in the deepest, darkest depths of the financial crisis—as in, literally one day after Lehman Brothers failed—Warsh said he was worried about inflation. Instead, we immediately experienced deflation.

Warsh has been fairly consistent about this positioning with two major exceptions: Each time Trump happened to be entering the White House. Less than two months before Trump was re-elected, Warsh chided the Fed for cutting interest rates. Warsh then reversed himself a few months later, when Trump just happened to be scouting out a new Fed chair.

The timing certainly smelled funny. Particularly given the fact that Warsh had been passed over for the Fed job before, in Trump’s first term, and had attributed his rejection then to the fact that he hadn’t said what Trump wanted to hear.

“My meeting with the president went on for a bit more than an hour, and he was transparent in his views,” Warsh told Simon Bowmaker in a 2023 interview for a forthcoming book (Fed Reckoning: Conversations on America’s Central Bank, due out in January 2027). “It was a very rigorous interview. He asked some very relevant questions, and I offered my best judgments. I left the interview, however, not overly enthused about my prospects for selection. I did not put my ambitions ahead of my principles.”

We don’t know if Warsh’s subsequent transformation from inflation hawk to dove was actually politically motivated. As Warsh said in Tuesday’s hearing, “My opinions change when the facts change.” That is certainly a reasonable approach, and words I hope to live by too.

What makes this latest conversion concerning, however, is how it overlays Trump’s efforts to politicize the Fed, and how Warsh has responded to those efforts.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bad Vibes and Broken Promises, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 22, 2026. More thoughts on the roots of Americans’ anger about the economy.

Cut in half, you say?

Americans hate, I mean really hate, the Trump II economy. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll puts Donald Trump’s net approval on the economy at -33 points, significantly worse than Joe Biden’s nadir in the aftermath of the 2021-22 supply-chain-driven inflation spike. A Verasight poll reported by G. Elliott Morris puts Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation at -46 points, which is just astonishingly bad. The venerable University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment has hit a record low. And the widely cited Conference Board index is well below its 2022-23 levels.

Yet standard measures of the economic situation don’t look that bad. Inflation is running at around 3 percent – above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, but relatively low by historical standards. Unemployment is a bit above 4 percent, also relatively low. These are, if anything, good numbers in historical perspective. So why are Americans so angry?

In a post last week, I began a discussion of this phenomenon and pointed to new analyses by Jared Bernstein, a serious macroeconomics guru, and G. Elliott Morris, who is my go-to guy on polling. Both argue, with extensive statistical backing, that Americans are upset about the level of prices. That is, they’re not satisfied with inflation that’s down to 2 or 3 percent. Having been accustomed over the past several decades to low inflation, Americans want to see prices fall to the levels they were at before the supply chain shock. And because that isn’t happening (and basically can’t happen, but the public doesn’t know that), Americans are angry.

I have considerable sympathy for Berstein and Morris’s view and great respect for their economic and statistical work. And I believe they offer a plausible explanation for why Americans were angry with the Biden administration. Yet I believe that the price-level story is inadequate to explain the much higher levels of anger and pessimism that are present now under Trump II. To make sense of where we are, I’d argue, we need to take account of people’s anger over not just the price level but also what they perceive as Trump’s broken promises.

Let me explain why.

There are, as I noted last week, two big empirical problems with the story that Americans just want their old prices back.

First is the sharp decline in consumer sentiment under Trump II, and his catastrophic polling on economic issues. This decline is hard to understand as a reaction to the fact that consumer prices haven’t fallen back to where they were in 2020. Indeed, if nostalgia for past prices was the whole story, we would expect consumer sentiment to gradually improve as the “good old days” of low prices recede further into memory. But we don’t see that happening. In fact, Americans are getting angrier and more depressed about the economy over time.

So what explains the public’s anger? My hypothesis is that it has a lot to do with the fabulist promises Trump made during the 2024 campaign, when he asserted that grocery prices would come down “on Day One” and that he would cut energy prices in half.

Did people actually believe those promises? Yes, many did – Trump voters in particular. Expected inflation among self-identified Republicans dropped sharply to zero after Trump won the election:

Notably, expected inflation among self-identified Democrats went up substantially after Trump’s victory, which was closer to accurate.

It wasn’t just partisan affiliation. Expectations of inflation plunged after the election among voters without higher education, which suggests that many low-education voters believed Trump’s promise to reduce prices. These voters’ expectations of inflation soared a few months into Trump’s term.

Morris has shown that low-information voters — defined as voters who don’t know which party controls Congress, but that is surely closely correlated with low education levels — pushed Trump over the top in 2024, but have turned hard against him since then. This is consistent with the view that a significant number of Americans believed Trump’s impossible promises about the economic miracles he would conjure into being, but now realize that they were lied to. And, in my view, this explains why Americans are so intensely angry and pessimistic about the economy now — significantly more so than under Biden.

It also doesn’t help that Trump can’t bring himself to admit that inflation was fairly low before he took office — he’s claiming that it was running at 5 percent and he brought it way down.

True, under Biden sentiment was also remarkably bad, although not as bad as it is now. Many economists, myself included, have argued, like Bernstein and Morris, that Americans were angry about the higher level of prices even after the rate of inflation came down. But as I noted last week, prices rose by almost exactly the same amount under Biden and during Ronald Reagan’s first term: 

Why, then, was Reagan able to triumphantly proclaim Morning in America while Biden was vilified? A large part of the answer, surely, is that Reagan took office after years of high inflation — inflation that the public expected to continue, while Biden took office after years of low inflation:

So higher prices under Reagan didn’t come as a surprise. In fact, prices rose less than most Americans expected before he took office. The rise in prices on Biden’s watch, by contrast, came as a shock after decades of low inflation. Thus I think that, adjusting for expectations, Bernstein and Morris’s arguments are a good fit for explaining the Biden years.

Let me hasten to say that there isn’t any moral equivalence between Biden and Trump. Biden and his team did not deliberately mislead American voters. They genuinely didn’t expect the 2021-2022 bout of high inflation, caused by snarled supply chains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When Biden promised a “summer of joy” thanks to the new Covid vaccines, he and his staff truly believed that would happen. Contrast this with Trump’s promises of lower prices, which were cynical, dishonest bombast when he was down in the polls against Harris. He never had any plan, or even a concept of a plan, to bring prices down.

Many Americans were angered by what they perceived to be economic incompetence on the part of Biden. That is, they believed that he should have found a way to stop inflation from rising.

But Trump actively misled Americans in order to win the 2024 election. And to add insult to injury, a majority of Americans now believe that the economy under Biden was better than the current economy.

Thus I believe that what we are witnessing now is heightened rage about a president who lied to win office, and who, once in office, made the economy worse than it was.

And it’s reasonable to believe that Americans will only become angrier as Trump’s lies on other fronts, and the damage that they have done, become more and more apparent.

U.S. Education, Free Speech, Culture Wars, Media

 

charlie kirk on biden

ny times logoNew York Times, College Where Charlie Kirk Was Killed Revokes Graduation Speaker’s Invite, Jeremy W. Peters, April 22, 2026. Utah Valley University was thrilled that Sharon McMahon, a best-selling author, would speak at its graduation. And then her old posts resurfaced.

A controversy over free speech was not how Utah Valley University had hoped to end an academic year that traumatized the campus, and shocked the nation, when the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated there in September.

But that is exactly what happened when it invited Sharon McMahon, a best-selling author of inspirational nonfiction, to be its keynote commencement speaker. After Mr. Kirk’s assassination, she had lamented his death, but also said some of his rhetoric was bigoted.

Many of Mr. Kirk’s legions of fans, their grief and anger all too raw, accused the university of callous indifference.

Mr. Kirk was killed while making the kind of appearance for which he had become famous — a lively, often tense debate over politics, religion, gender and other touchy topics. He and his followers saw these events as defiant celebrations of free expression in the very place they said they had felt silenced.

Ms. McMahon was no stranger to Utah Valley herself, having spoken there before. She had a fan in Astrid Tuminez, the university’s president, who thought Ms. McMahon’s message about unsung heroes in American history would be healing.

“She is a force of nature and a force for good,” Ms. Tuminez said in a news release in late March. “Our graduates are very lucky to have her as commencement speaker!”

Social media lit up over comments that Ms. McMahon had posted two days after the assassination and then deleted, in which she said she understood the reasons some people found it distasteful to exalt Mr. Kirk. She cited and repeated several derogatory statements he had made about Black people, Muslims and gay people.

“The murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done,” Ms. McMahon said. “But if you were a Charlie Kirk fan, you might not realize why there is so much backlash to posts eulogizing his death.”

The resurfaced posts angered conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers, who rushed to defend Mr. Kirk and urged others to tell the university they felt the same.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah led a campaign over several days on X to pressure the university to revoke the invitation.

April 21

Top Headlines

More On Iran War   

 

djt capitol war hartmann

 

no kings trump screenshot

  • Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 20, 2026 ['Stable Genius?'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 21, 2026. Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.
  • The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, April 21, 2026.We can agree Iran has not agreed to anything
  • The damaged destroyer Cole being taken out of the Port of Aden by tugboats after it was attacked in October 2000 (Hasan Jamali photo by the Associated Press).New York Times, How the Cole Disaster Drove the U.S. to Develop New Warship Defenses, Nicholas Kulish, John Ismay andConstant Méheut, April 21, 2026. The Navy destroyers enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports carry weapons fielded after an American warship was attacked and nearly sunk more than 25 years ago.
  • New York Times, Israeli Soldiers Sentenced to Jail for Damaging Jesus Statue in Lebanon, David M. Halbfinger, April 21, 2026. A statue of the crucifixion of Christ has been replaced after one soldier photographed another swinging what looked like a sledgehammer at its head.

News Roundups

U.S. Courts, Law, Regulation, Rights

 

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown guzzling champagn while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties..

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown gussling champagne while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties.

U.S. Politics, Elections 

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

  • New York Times, Fight Over Maps Escalates in Race for Control of Congress, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti, April 21, 2026. In the latest gerrymandering clash before the midterm elections, voters in Virginia will decide on Tuesday whether to approve a map that would give Democrats more House seats.
  • New York Times, Election Day Turnout in Virginia Is Down Significantly From 2025, After Strong Early Voting, Luke Vrotsos and Alex Lemonides, April 21, 2026. In-person turnout on Tuesday is trailing far behind that of last year’s governor’s race, which set a state record in a nonpresidential election.
  • Wall Street Journal, MAGA attorney general admitted under oath to ethics violation as Senate race heats up, Matthew Chapman, April 21, 2026 (print ed.). Newly unsealed deposition transcripts obtained by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton admitted under oath to violating attorney-client privilege by handing over data from a former client to a plaintiff suing them.
  • abigail spanberger twitterNew York Times, A Governor Who Stressed Pragmatism Is Hounded by Politics, Campbell Robertson, April 21, 2026.  Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, right, has emphasized practical governance as her brand, but the political fight over redistricting has dominated her term so far.
  • Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Decision Day, Andrew Egger, right, April 21, 2026. It’s decision day in your Morning Shots correspondents’ home state of Virginia, where Democrats have used their shiny new governing trifecta to go all-in on a controversial measure: a proposed constitutional amendment that would—let’s not get cute about it—temporarily gerrymander the hell out of the state.
  • New York Times, How the California Governor’s Race Is Changing Post-Swalwell, Laurel Rosenhall, April 21, 2026 (print ed.). Xavier Becerra, who once struggled to gain traction, has found growing support after Eric Swalwell left the race amid sexual harassment allegations.
  • The Long View, Political Opinion: A Strong Party Leader Who Doesn’t Care About The Party, Julian Zelizer, April 21, 2026.The Republican Dilemma.
  • Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Scandal Is the Men Trump Hasn’t Fired, William Kristol, right, April 21, 2026. It wasn’t the biggest story of the news cycle, but you might have noticed that another cabinet secretary put in her notice yesterday. “Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung posted on social media, not even allowing Chavez-DeRemer the dignity of announcing her own departure.

U.S. Inflation, Jobs, Economy, Jobs

Top Stories

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Trump Extends Cease-Fire With Iran, Luke Broadwater, Jonathan Swan, Farnaz Fassihi and Somini Sengupta, Here’s the latest.

The pause in hostilities had been set to expire within hours. The president said Pakistan, which is trying to mediate an end to the war, requested he hold off any attacks.

President Trump said he was extending a cease-fire with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire. The announcement came after Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Pakistan for a second round of peace negotiations was put on hold because, according to a U.S. official, Tehran had failed to respond to American positions.

Mr. Trump, posting on social media, said he had acted after receiving a request from Pakistan, which is trying to mediate an end to the war, to hold off any attacks. He also pointed to what he said were serious fractures in the Iranian government.

The extended cease-fire, he said, will stay in effect until Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”

The first response from Iran came from an adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the influential speaker of the Iranian Parliament — and it was dismissive. “The extension of the cease-fire by Donald Trump has no meaning,” the adviser, Mahdi Mohammadi, wrote on social media.

Mr. Trump’s announcement was a marked departure from his comments earlier in the day, when he told CNBC that if Iran did not agree to U.S. demands, “I expect to be bombing.”

But even as he extended the cease-fire, the president said the U.S. blockade on ships heading to and from Iranian ports would continue. Iran has demanded that U.S. forces allow its vessels free passage, and on Tuesday Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called it “an act of war.”

Even if the two sides return to the negotiating table, many sticking points remain, chiefly on Iran’s nuclear program and on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic conduit for oil and gas. The threat of Iranian attacks has throttled shipping traffic through the strait, and the U.S. Navy says it has forced 28 ships to turn around.

ny times logoNew York Times, Election Live Updates: Virginia Passes New Map, Lifting Democrats’ Midterm Chances, Nick Corasaniti, April 21, 2026. The state’s voters approved a map that could give Democrats four more House seats, putting the party on more even footing in the nation’s gerrymandering war.

Here’s the latest.

Virginia voters approved a plan on Tuesday to gerrymander the state’s congressional map to significantly favor Democrats, according to The Associated Press. The new map could eliminate four of the state’s five Republican-held seats for the 2026 midterm elections, giving Democrats a significant boost in their quest to regain control of the House.

The victory by Democrats in Virginia brings the national redistricting war roughly to a draw, effectively blunting the advantage Republicans built last year when they redrew maps for a partisan edge in Texas and other states. Beyond the red-versus-blue calculations, the vote is likely to further buoy Democrats as they seek to capitalize on President Trump’s low approval ratings and the unpopular war with Iran.

The rare spring election drew tens of millions of dollars in ad spending and unexpectedly high turnout during the early and absentee voting period, when nearly 1.4 million people cast ballots. But turnout on Election Day appeared to be considerably lower than it was during the 2025 governor’s race.

House maps are usually drawn only once a decade, after the census, to adjust for population changes. But last year, at President Trump’s request, Texas Republicans redrew their districts to create five more seats for their party. That kicked off an unusual mid-decade redistricting arms race as both parties vied for an advantage.

Virginia’s referendum is likely to be the last redistricting attempt by Democrats before the midterms, but it is not the final front.

Republicans in Florida, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, have signaled that they will redraw the state’s lines. And if the Supreme Court strikes down a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act that effectively bans racial gerrymandering, a number of Republican-led states, largely in the South, could try to push through new maps before November.

Here’s what else to read while you wait for results:

Dark money: Of the $98 million raised by the groups that bought the most advertising in the race, at least 96 percent came from nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors, according to a New York Times analysis of state campaign finance disclosures.

Voter voices: In parts of the state that have historically favored Republicans, voter anger was clear on Tuesday. But in the state’s more blue areas, some voters saw the referendum as necessary to help even the balance of power in Washington.

A Virginia scramble: The new districts do not exist yet, but that hasn’t stopped Democratic candidates — including some big names — from beginning to campaign for the seats.

The stakes for Spanberger: Gov. Abigail Spanberger has emphasized practical governance since easily winning the Virginia governor’s race last fall, but the fight over redistricting has dominated her term so far.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Should Fire More of His Cabinet, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 21, 2026. And not just the women.

Defending his war of choice in Iran, President Trump told CNBC this morning: “They want it to be over immediately, and I just looked at a little chart: WWI, four years, three months. WWII, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, nineteen years. Iraq, eight years. I’m five months. Five months. I would have won Vietnam very quickly.” W

We have a lot of questions, but paramount among them: Where did he get “five months” from? Happy Tuesday.

More On Iran War  

 

Shown above is on of the Artificial Intelligence-generated fake images created by the Trump Administration to portray President Trump as a brave wartime commander leading troops against domestic and foreign enemies.

no kings trump screenshot

President Trump's published self-portraits asserting dominance include those above, with the lower one showing him (when portrayed fully) as dumping excrement on New Yorkers from his warplane perch the cockpit.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 20, 2026 ['Stable Genius?'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 21, 2026. Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.

The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.

But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”

Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.

Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.

On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.

On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.

A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”

Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.

“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.

“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.

“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”

But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.

After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.

Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.

This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”

The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”

And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.

When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.” 

 

The damaged destroyer Cole being taken out of the Port of Aden by tugboats after it was attacked in October 2000 (Hasan Jamali photo by the Associated Press).

The damaged destroyer Cole being taken out of the Port of Aden by tugboats after it was attacked in October 2000 (Hasan Jamali photo by the Associated Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, How the Cole Disaster Drove the U.S. to Develop New Warship Defenses, Nicholas Kulish, John Ismay and Constant Méheut, April 21, 2026. The Navy destroyers enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports carry weapons fielded after an American warship was attacked and nearly sunk more than 25 years ago.

The American destroyer off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula was taken unawares by a small fiberglass skiff with two men on board. Before the crew knew what had happened, an explosion tore a hole 40 feet wide in the hull, killing 17 crew members and wounding 39 others.

That was in 2000 and the ship was the U.S.S. Cole, which narrowly avoided sinking after the devastating attack by suicide bombers from a group most Americans had never heard of at the time — Al Qaeda — using a small boat laden with explosives at the Port of Aden in Yemen.

It was a pivotal attack on the United States by members of Al Qaeda before its 9/11 assault a year later, at a time when most Americans were not focused on terrorism. The lessons the U.S. Navy learned from that episode — in which an inexpensive boat nearly sank a $789 million destroyer — could help determine how its ships fare a quarter century later near the Strait of Hormuz in the war with Iran.

Iran FlagIran has established a chokehold on transit through the critical waterway, threatening destruction to any ship that tries to pass through it without permission. In response, the U.S. has moved in a flotilla of ships, including about a dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, patrolling the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea south of the strait. The aim is to further pressure the Iranian economy by blocking oil exports from Iranian ports.

Tehran has issued a series of bellicose warnings since the war started, laying naval mines in the strait, and on Saturday two Indian-flagged ships reported coming under fire. The U.S. added to the hostilities on Sunday when a Navy destroyer attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship that U.S. officials said had defied their blockade.

One major question facing the American military is this: If the standoff on the seas turns into a military clash, will the changes made in response to the Cole disaster enable the U.S. military to repel any new attacks from the Iranians?

The U.S. Navy now has multiple options for defending its ships, analysts say. Following the Cole attack, Navy leadership created a task force called Hip Pocket to develop a range of new defensive weapons. They quickly added more automatic weapons to warships, as well as grenade launchers. And the current generation of Seahawk helicopters carried by Navy destroyers have advanced sensors and weapons that are far superior to those when the Cole was attacked.

Still, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in the narrow confines in and around the Strait of Hormuz, a swarm attack by unmanned maritime drones could be hard to defend against. “The problem is, you may have more than you can handle, 30, 40 drone boats; you’re not going to get them all with guns,” Mr. Clark said. “Some may leak through.”

The evolution of naval warfare has been on daily display in Ukraine, where the Russian fleet lost numerous ships to a mix of anti-ship missiles and unmanned sea drones. In April 2022, Ukrainian forces sank the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, starting fires and flooding that quickly put the vessel on the seafloor. Over time, Russian ships were forced to retreat to safer ports as Ukraine drove Moscow’s once-feared navy mostly out of the fight.

Iran has been paying close attention, experts said, and also learning from its proxies in Yemen, the Houthis, a militant group that used a remote-controlled boat packed with explosives to attack a Saudi frigate in 2017, killing two.

“The U.S. Navy took note of that as an important technological development with regard to the ability of weaker adversaries to attack stronger ones at sea,” Michael B. Petersen, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the Houthi attack. Iran does not have the resources to develop an advanced navy to take the U.S. head on, but “they do have the resources to build large swarms of small boats,” Mr. Petersen said.

Experts said the American decision to situate destroyers in the Gulf of Oman points to a degree of caution among senior military leaders — keeping their warships far enough away from the strait to give them the best odds of countering potential Iranian attacks, while at the same time staying close enough to screen ships trying to enter or leaving Iranian ports. If U.S. vessels tried to venture through the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran could quickly launch attacks, it would swiftly become a riskier proposition. 

 

djt vance rubio uncrediteddjt strait opened 4 17 2026The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, April 21, 2026. jennifer rubin new headshotWe can agree Iran has not agreed to anything

“Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Donald Trump declared on Friday [in one of multiple messages]. The same day, he announced Iran had “agreed to everything” — even the removal of its enriched uranium. But, to the surprise of no one who appreciates that Iran does not abruptly forfeit its considerable leverage, Iran agreed to no such thing. On Saturday, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and fired on two ships. Chances are increasing that Iran won’t agree to much of anything.

contrarian logoTrump lacks skills essential in high-stakes negotiation (grasp of details, understanding of what his opponent needs, appreciation of his opponent’s leverage, awareness of his limited military options, and patience). His equally ill-equipped negotiators — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (shown below right in a file photo) — seem hopelessly outmatched by the savvy, experienced Iranian negotiators. The Americans show no appreciation for the time, attention to arcane technical detail, tenacity, and hard work it takes to craft even a temporary arrangement.

jared kushner steve witkoffMoreover, with the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian control, Iran maintains the ultimate bargaining chip (which it played on Saturday) — the ability to open and close the Strait at will and extract tolls from ships seeking passage. (Neither side bothers to mention Iran’s missile program or support for regional terrorist groups, items that Trump once demanded must be part of any deal.) (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Public domain)

Trump’s habitual lying about the status of negotiations might be pure market manipulation. (Indeed, the stock market soared on Friday based on Trump’s lies. When will traders learn?) Alternatively, given how comically oblivious he is to his own lack of credibility, Trump may think his imaginary “agreements” put some sort of pressure on Iran to match Trump’s exaggerated claims. The most frightening explanation: Based on snippets of TV coverage and happy talk among his sycophants, Trump may actually believe that Iran is acceding to his demands.

He has no doubt become accustomed to spewing lies to the American press, confident that right-wing media will clean up any discrepancies, while legacy media won’t say flat out that he is lying. Iran does not play along. Instead, the Iranians seem to delight in calling out his lies. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported:

“The President of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false,” chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Ghalibaf wrote on X late Friday. “They did not win the war with these lies, and they will certainly not get anywhere in negotiations either.”

“Media warfare and engineering public opinion are an important part of war, and the Iranian nation is not affected by these tricks,” Ghalibaf said, adding: “With the continuation of the blockade, the Strait of Hormuz will not remain open.”

Iran FlagA Foreign Ministry statement, posted by state broadcaster IRIB, said: “The Americans talk excessively and create noise around the situation. Do not be misled! There is no new agreement.”

When the Iranians sound like Daniel Dale, CNN’s master fact checker, one must grudgingly acknowledge they are more credible than the Trump regime. Trump, deep into self-delusion, insists Iran’s debunking is simply catering to its domestic audience! He simply will not accept “no” as an answer. So desperate to avoid the economic calamity he unleashed and his plunging poll numbers, his fictional agreements amount to magical thinking (arguably, another sign of his raging narcissism and mental decompensation).

Trump continues to make several fundamental errors, all of which reinforce the Iranians’ view that if they hang tough, Trump will eventually walk away from his pie-in-the-sky demands, maybe even lift sanctions if Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz. (Yes, that would also be a catastrophic blunder, since after weeks of war, Iran would have obtained the economic relief it desperately wants simply by returning to the pre-war status quo on the Strait of Hormuz.)

First, Trump may be convinced his lies are some clever maneuver to box in the Iranians. To the Iranians, his fantasy deals signal his desperation to reach a deal that he can tout. They could reasonably conclude that to prevail on key issues (e.g., keep its enriched uranium and missiles, gain sanctions relief, achieve diplomatic recognition of a regime led by leadership as fanatical as its predecessor), all they need is some gauzy window-dressing to keep Trump happy.

Second, Trump inadvertently helps the regime gain credibility with its people. Sending Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to throw around threats and spout fire and brimstone only convinces Iranians that their despotic government is the only thing standing between them and obliteration. Likewise, Trump’s casual references to returning to his military campaign of civilian destruction (i.e., war crimes) cement Iranians’ conviction that the U.S. poses an existential threat to their country. For this reason (and its experience with decades of war and sanctions), Iran’s ability to absorb economic pain surely exceeds Americans’ willingness to tolerate high gas prices.

Third, each time Witkoff and Kushner enter the negotiation room, the Iranians must breathe a sigh of relief. The Iranians know the pair lack the background, knowledge, and patience to negotiate a deal that would actually bind Iran to any real restrictions. Any abbreviated “deal sheet” will leave plenty of room for Iran to drag out “technical” negotiations for months, if not years. Empty statements, like “Iran won’t pursue a bomb” (which are identical to the sort of vague promises Iran has made for years), may impress Trump and his negotiators — but the Iranians know it is pure fluff. As with every other policy issue, Trump does not much care what is in the “deal,” so long he can claim he made one. The Iranians undoubtedly have caught on.

In sum, whenever Trump says Iran “agreed” to some amazing concession, you can bet it hasn’t (especially if Trump attaches a telltale absolute that signals he is fabricating: “never,” “everything,” “totally”). As time goes on, the likelihood that Iranians will agree to nothing (or merely approve a list of meaningless generalities) increases. It is certainly reasonable for them to bet Trump will simply pack up and go home rather than restart a hugely unpopular war.

The Iranians won the war by surviving, inflicting damage on its neighbors with cheap drones, and capturing the Strait of Hormuz. They are not about to forfeit their victory to feckless, deluded Americans led by a compulsive liar.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Advisors Worry About the President's Temperament and Discipline, Trump Warns of "Disaster" for Republicans, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 21, 2026. Trump’s own advisers are now signaling they don’t trust him to stay disciplined enough to close a deal with Iran, especially as his repeated off-message comments have actively undermined negotiations. At the same time, I break down a series of claims the president has made over the past week that quickly fell apart or were flat-out wrong.

Trump is also warning Republicans ahead of tonight’s Virginia election that a loss could be disastrous for their political futures, while Tucker Carlson is now apologizing to supporters for backing him. Meanwhile, JD Vance has arrived in Pakistan for more Iran talks, but there’s growing doubt Iran will even show up.

Here’s what you missed:

According to CNN, as the U.S. and Iran appeared close to a deal, Donald Trump undercut negotiations by publicly discussing and overstating progress on social media, frustrating both Iranian officials and his own team. U.S. officials privately acknowledged his comments were damaging and showed concern about his inability to stay on message during sensitive talks. Conflicting statements from Trump and his administration further eroded credibility, creating confusion and weakening trust in the U.S. position. As a result, momentum toward a deal stalled, leaving negotiations uncertain. Here is a list of some conflicting statements from the President:

Donald Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz situation “over” but tensions clearly continued right after. Iran has since closed the Strait again. For example, Donald Trump this morning claimed “We totally control the strait, just so you understand. For all the fake news out there,” projecting full U.S. control over a highly contested and volatile waterway.

He claimed Iran agreed to never close the Strait again but Iran shut it down the very next day.

He said JD Vance wouldn’t attend the Pakistan talks but his own officials contradicted him almost immediately. And now, Vance is currently on his way to Pakistan.

He claimed Iran’s military was basically wiped out even though it still has major destructive capabilities. According to reports, Iran has been able to retain a significant portion of its missile capabilities, and is even able to quickly rebuild much of what the United States has bombed.

He falsely said the pope supported Iran having nuclear weapons even though no such statement exists.

He insisted Iran retaliating against Gulf countries was unexpected even though it was widely anticipated by officials, according to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting.

He said U.S. plane losses were mostly due to friendly fire despite previously discussing Iran shooting one down.

It’s election day in Virginia. Voters in Virginia are deciding on a constitutional amendment that would allow Democrats to redraw congressional districts before the 2026 midterms, potentially shifting the state’s balance to as many as 10 Democratic-leaning seats out of 11 and influencing control of the U.S. House. The vote is expected to be close, with polls showing a slight advantage for supporters, and its outcome could have major national implications given the narrow margin in Congress.

Donald Trump warned that a proposed vote in Virginia could be “a disaster” for Republicans, saying it could allow Democrats to gain many seats. The comments come as voters head to the polls on a measure related to redistricting and election fairness. He argued the change would significantly shift political advantage.

Trump further warned that if Virginia voters approve the measure, it could give Democrats additional seats and allow them to influence federal policy. He suggested the outcome could shift the balance of power in Washington. The comments come as part of the broader debate over redistricting and its national impact. They reflect concerns among Republicans about potential political losses.

And this morning, Trump urged his voters to vote “no” to save the country:

Tucker Carlson said, “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Newly released documents show that Jeffrey Epstein maintained deep ties to Harvard University even after his conviction, with multiple professors continuing to engage with and support him. Faculty helped him secure positions, funding, and connections, while Harvard’s earlier investigation failed to fully examine the extent of those relationships. The revelations have exposed how Epstein leveraged money and influence to gain status in elite academic circles and have led to renewed scrutiny and consequences for some involved.

Democrats say James Comer is using informal “roundtables” instead of hearings to limit their ability to force subpoena votes in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. This shift follows months of bipartisan efforts to push subpoenas for high-profile figures tied to the case. Republicans argue roundtables allow more focused discussions, while critics say they weaken oversight and accountability. The dispute highlights growing tensions over how aggressively Congress should pursue the Epstein probe.

According to the New York Times, a fired U.K. official said Keir Starmer’s office pushed to fast-track the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S., despite security concerns tied to his links with Jeffrey Epstein. The official described an “atmosphere of pressure” and said warnings from vetting teams were downplayed or dismissed. Starmer denied being informed of the concerns, while the controversy has fueled political backlash and scrutiny over how the appointment was handled.

Trump this morning claimed: "I would've won Vietnam very quickly if I were president. Look at Venezuela. I took it over in 45 minutes."

Donald Trump is taking part in a nationwide Bible-reading event celebrating America’s 250th anniversary by reading a well-known passage often used by the Christian right. His participation comes at a tense moment, after criticism over a social media post portraying himself as Jesus and ongoing disagreements with the pope. The situation reflects both his outreach to religious supporters and divisions among Christians about his behavior and messaging.

J.D. Vance is expected to travel to Pakistan for talks with Iran aimed at reaching a deal to end the war. The trip comes as a ceasefire is close to expiring, increasing urgency for negotiations. Donald Trump has warned that if no agreement is reached, the U.S. could launch new strikes on Iranian infrastructure. The visit signals a high-stakes diplomatic effort to prevent further escalation. Iran has denied that it will be attending (we will see what happens):

Donald Trump openly signaled that if a deal isn’t reached immediately, he expects the U.S. to resume bombing Iran. He framed continued military strikes as the default outcome, not a last resort, emphasizing that the military is “ready to go.”

Trump alleged this morning that Iran has violated the ceasefire numerous times:

Karoline Leavitt dismissed claims that the U.S. is worse off as “nonsense” and accused the media of bias. However, the situation includes significant costs: at least 13 American service members killed, around 400 injured, over $50 billion spent, and gas prices near record highs. Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei remains in power and the Strait of Hormuz has shifted from open to closed. Taken together, these facts suggest conditions many would interpret as a worsening position for the U.S.

MARISKS warned that fraudulent messages are targeting shipping companies near the Strait of Hormuz. The messages promise safe passage in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. They are being sent to vessels stranded west of the waterway. The alert highlights rising risks and scams amid heightened regional tensions.

Iran launched over 2,800 missiles and drones at the United Arab Emirates, with about 90% aimed at civilian infrastructure. She warned that the scale of the attacks has serious implications for regional stability. The strikes reflect a broader escalation in tensions involving Iran. Her remarks highlight growing concern among Gulf states about further conflict.

Claudia Sheinbaum is demanding a full explanation after two U.S. officials and two Mexican investigators died in a crash following an operation targeting a drug lab in Chihuahua. She said her administration was not informed in advance and warned that any cooperation with U.S. personnel without federal approval could violate Mexican law. Conflicting statements from Mexican officials and the U.S. Embassy about whether Americans were involved in the operation have fueled confusion and suspicion. The incident has intensified tensions over U.S. involvement in Mexico’s anti-cartel efforts, especially as pressure from Donald Trump increases and Mexico pushes to assert its sovereignty.

According to The Guardian, the U.S. has reportedly restricted some intelligence sharing with South Korea after Chung Dong-young publicly identified a suspected North Korean nuclear site. U.S. officials were concerned sensitive information may have been disclosed without authorization, leading to limits on satellite intelligence sharing, though military coordination continues. South Korean leaders denied any leak, saying the information was already public, but the dispute has heightened tensions in the alliance.

House Democrats are preparing to potentially expel Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick following a House Ethics Committee decision on serious allegations that she laundered $5 million in COVID relief funds, which she denies. Many lawmakers from both parties indicate there is enough support for expulsion if recommended, though Hakeem Jeffries has not directed how Democrats should vote. Some members believe the outcome is likely regardless of leadership’s stance, reflecting strong concern about ethics and public trust. However, several Democrats expect she may resign before a vote, as has happened in similar situations in the past.

A report says Israeli soldiers and settlers are using sexual violence and harassment to pressure Palestinians to leave their homes in the Occupied West Bank. Victims have described abuse including invasive searches, threats, and public humiliation, with experts warning these acts are contributing to displacement and disrupting daily life. The report also highlights a lack of accountability, with few prosecutions and growing concerns about a broader culture of impunity.

A gunman opened fire at the Teotihuacán pyramids, killing a Canadian woman, injuring multiple people from several countries, and then killing himself. Authorities say at least 13 people were hurt, including several Americans, and the attacker appears to have acted alone. The motive remains unclear as officials continue investigating and providing support to victims.

U.S. Courts, Law, Regulation, Rights

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown guzzling champagn while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties..

FBI Director Kash Patel is shown gussling champagne while celebrating in the locker room with victorious U.S. hockey players at the Winter Olympics this February in Italy after visiting the nation on what purported to be official business related to his FBI duties.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kash wants cash: Inside the FBI Director’s $250 million defamation lawsuit, Judd Legum, right,judd legum April 21, 2026. On Friday, The Atlantic published a story alleging that FBI Director Kash Patel has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”

According to the report, Patel “is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C.” He has also allegedly been seen drinking “to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas.” In several instances over the last year, The Atlantic reports, “members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” Further, “[s]ome of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety” because “Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions noel simsneeded to advance investigations.”

The story is based on interviews with “more than two dozen people,” including “current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” All of The Atlantic’s sources spoke “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations.”

On Monday, Patel sued The Atlantic and the story’s author, Sarah Fitzpatrick, for defamation, seeking $250 million in damages.

According to Patel’s lawsuit, The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick published “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” The article, according to the complaint, is “replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.” Patel argues that The Atlantic acted with “actual malice” because it was warned that “the central allegations were categorically false” and there was “abundant publicly available information contradicting those allegations.”

In a post on X, Patel described the lawsuit as “a legal lay up.”

But Patel faces an uphill battle in court. Not only must he meet a high bar to prove defamation as a public figure, but Patel’s complaint suffers from several glaring legal deficiencies.

Justice Department log circularThe most basic criterion for any defamation claim is that the underlying speech must be a false statement of fact. Patel’s lawsuit, however, appears to provide factual support for several of the statements he claims are defamatory.

Patel’s lawsuit says it was defamatory for The Atlantic to publish that “[d]ays before the United States launched its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was devoted, in part, to Iran.” But the lawsuit also states that “the squad referenced was within Counterterrorism—not a dedicated Iran counterintelligence squad—with only three affected individuals even tangentially working on Iran-related matters.” So there is really no dispute that individuals who devoted some of their time to Iran-related matters were fired days before the start of the war with Iran.

Similarly, the Atlantic article begins with an anecdote from April 10, 2026, when Patel “struggled to log on to an internal computer system.” According to the story, Patel “became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach.” Two of The Atlantic’s sources described Patel’s conduct as a “freak out.”

The complaint confirms that on April 10, “Patel had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed.” This strengthens the factual underpinning of The Atlantic’s article.

Patel, however, states that The Atlantic was informed prior to publication that the “freak out” claim “was fabricated.” But the impression that Patel had a “freak out” in response to getting locked out of his computer system is not an “objective fact” that is “provably false.” There are no standardized behaviors that constitute a “freak out.” Rather, it is the opinion of two of The Atlantic’s sources, based on their subjective impression of Patel’s conduct. In Milkovich v. Lorain Journal, the Supreme Court held that there is “full constitutional protection for a statement of opinion having no provably false factual connotation.”The high bar

As a public figure, Patel must not only prove that The Atlantic published statements that are provably false, but also that it did so with “actual malice.” The legal standard established by New York Times v. Sullivan requires Patel to prove that The Atlantic published a defamatory statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

The biggest barrier Patel faces is that The Atlantic says it interviewed more than two dozen people for the story. That is evidence of journalistic rigor — not a reckless disregard for the truth. Fitzpatrick is a longtime investigative journalist who held senior roles at 60 Minutes and NBC News.

The complaint emphasizes that The Atlantic published its story “despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false.” Patel argues that his categorical denial should have alerted The Atlantic that its sources were not credible.

But courts have rejected the idea that publishing a claim that the subject denies is accurate is sufficient to establish actual malice. In Edwards v. National Audubon Society, a federal appeals court found that “mere denials, however vehement… are so commonplace in the world of polemical charge and countercharge that, in themselves, they hardly alert the conscientious reporter to the likelihood of error.”The Kavanaugh factor

Patel filed his lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Washington, DC, has a strong anti-SLAPP statute, a law that protects journalists against frivolous defamation claims. Under DC’s law, defendants can file an expedited motion to dismiss within 45 days of being served with a complaint. During that time, discovery is stayed. If the defendant wins, the plaintiff cannot refile and is usually required to pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees.

But in 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that, in federal court, DC’s anti-SLAPP procedures were unavailable to defendants because they conflicted with the federal rules of civil procedure. The opinion was written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is now a Justice of the Supreme Court.

This does not mean that Patel is any more likely to ultimately succeed in his lawsuit, but it does mean that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is the court where his defamation lawsuit is most likely to survive for the longest period of time. And that may be all Patel is after. 

Fitzpatrick’s story alleged that Patel “is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy.” An active defamation lawsuit puts Trump in a difficult position. If Trump fires Patel now — or at any point while the case is active — it effectively confirms The Atlantic’s reporting that Patel was on the chopping block.

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, Supreme Court Reviews F.C.C.’s Enforcement Power Against Communications Companies, Ann E. Marimow, April 21, 2026. AT&T and Verizon were penalized millions of dollars for what the agency said was a failure to protect consumer information. The companies say they were deprived of their right to a jury trial.

The federal agency responsible for policing the nation’s airwaves and telecommunications companies relies on hefty fines to enforce rules designed to protect consumer privacy, combat robocalls and regulate broadcasting.

In recent years that agency, the Federal Communications Commission, has imposed millions of dollars in penalties against two major cellphone carriers, Verizon and AT&T, to punish the companies for what it says is their failure to protect customer data.

The companies contend that those fines have violated their rights because they were assessed without the companies facing a trial in front of a jury. They sued, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The case is a challenge to the power of administrative agencies, long a target of the conservative legal moment. It comes two years after the court rejected the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of in-house tribunals without juries to enforce rules against securities fraud and impose penalties on the financial industry.

In that case, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court said the practice violated the right to a jury trial guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment.

In the F.C.C. case before the court on Tuesday, the Trump administration is defending the agency’s use of fines, calling them one of “most important and frequently used enforcement tools.”

D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, told the justices in a court filing that eliminating the F.C.C.’s ability to assess civil penalties would “risk opening a significant gap in federal oversight.” If the F.C.C. cannot pursue penalties, he argued, then “significant rules concerning matters ranging from privacy to national security might go effectively unenforced.”

The court’s ruling, which is expected in late June or early July, could have implications for at least five other federal agencies that assess similar civil penalties before holding a jury trial. Among the regulations enforced through such penalties: the Energy Department’s oversight of nuclear-safety rules; the Health and Human Services Department’s requirements for employee health benefits plans; and oversight by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Until 2019, the companies tracked cellphone users’ locations and sold the data to other companies, which then used the information to provide services like roadside assistance. The F.C.C. found that the companies’ practices compromised highly sensitive location information for tens of millions of consumers.

The New York Times reported in 2018, for instance, that a Missouri sheriff had exploited the service to obtain unauthorized access to the data of hundreds of customers, including a local judge.

Soon after, the F.C.C. issued notices saying that the carriers had repeatedly and willfully violated rules requiring them to take reasonable steps to protect the confidentiality of customers’ location information.

The Trump administration argued in court filings that the F.C.C. orders were in fact nonbinding and that there was a path for the companies to get their case in front of a jury should they choose it.

That is different from the circumstances in the Supreme Court’s 2024 case in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the administration said. In that case, the S.E.C. previously could enforce penalties in-house without the possibility of a jury trial in federal court.New York Times,

U.S. Politics, Elections

 

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

ny times logoNew York Times, Fight Over Maps Escalates in Race for Control of Congress, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti, April 21, 2026. In the latest gerrymandering clash before the midterm elections, voters in Virginia will decide on Tuesday whether to approve a map that would give Democrats more House seats.

Republicans have built a small structural advantage in the monthslong redistricting war being waged across the country as both parties seek an edge in their efforts to win control of Congress in the midterm elections.

An important election on Tuesday in Virginia could upend that advantage.

U.S. House logoThe state is holding a Democratic-backed referendum on whether to redraw its congressional map to give the party as many as four House seats that are now held by Republicans. Democrats now occupy six of Virginia’s 11 seats; the new map could give them 10.

The Virginia vote is the latest chapter of a rare mid-decade cartographic arms race that Texas Republicans started last year when, urged on by President Trump, they drew a map intended to yield five more Republican seats.

The fight soon spread to a range of red and blue states, including California, which overwhelmingly passed a statewide ballot measure meant to eliminate five Republican seats. Florida is the last remaining state with potential plans to redraw its map this spring.

The one-question election in Virginia has drawn more than $75 million in spending and intense interest from national party leaders. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, has helped fund the Democratic “Yes” side of the referendum, while Speaker Mike Johnson, defending House Republicans’ slim majority, has backed the “No” effort.

On Monday night, Mr. Trump called into a Virginia radio host’s streaming channel and appeared on a conference call with supporters from the state. He warned that if House Democrats won a majority in the midterm elections, “it’s going to be a disaster.”

“I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is, but it’s not good,” he said on the call.

The remarks were the first time the president had addressed the Virginia referendum. Earlier in the day, Mr. Jeffries told reporters at the Capitol that Democrats would gladly pay to broadcast the president’s statement opposing the referendum to all Virginia voters.

“The voters of Virginia have the opportunity to ensure that there is a fair national congressional map,” Mr. Jeffries told reporters on Monday at the Capitol. “Not Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA sycophants.”

In their advertising, both supporters and opponents have turned to the same pitchman: former President Barack Obama. He has appeared in ads supporting the Democratic redistricting effort, but the Republican side has highlighted his past comments opposing partisan gerrymandering.

There is a wild card: In the coming months, the Supreme Court may strike down a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act that effectively bans racial gerrymandering. If that happens, a range of Republican-led states, largely in the South, may try to push through new maps before the midterms, which could give the party an added edge.

Any slight advantage heading into November could be critical for either party. Campaigning in swing congressional districts can cost millions of dollars, and Republicans hold control of the House by just a handful of seats.

While a Democratic wave election might overcome any advantage that Republicans are able to build through new maps, in a close election the outcome of the redistricting battles could make the difference.

Observers in both parties will be closely watching the Virginia outcome — and its margin — for what it suggests about the national political environment months before the midterm elections.How could this change the national state of play?

Republicans have picked up more seats in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio, while Democrats have gained seats in California and courts in deep-red Utah gave the party an unexpected new district.

ny times logoNew York Times, Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes, Devlin Barrett, April 21, 2026. Republicans have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is best known for investigating hate groups, of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations. 

The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.

At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had

Prosecutors describe how one informant, which the law center refers to as a field source, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.”

That rally included torch-wielding marchers chanting antisemitic slogans, and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured.

The informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the S.P.L.C. and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” the charging document said. Between 2015 and 2023, the informant received more than $270,000 from the group, the indictment said.

Another informant affiliated with a neo-Nazi group was paid more than $1 million over a period of about nine years, according to the indictment, and in 2014 that informant stole 25 boxes of documents from an unidentified violent extremist group. The Southern Poverty Law Center later used those documents to create a report about the group.

The center faces charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. No individuals were charged in the indictment, though Mr. Blanche said the investigation was continuing. He accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.Editors’ PicksCan Your Co-op Make You Carry an ID Card?‘I Was a Young Suburbanite and Scared of Big Cities at the Time’What Is Borderline Personality Disorder?

The criminal charges come as the Trump administration makes a broader push to counter what it calls anti-Christian and anti-conservative bias in the government. Last week, the Justice Department issued a report highly critical of how the Biden administration prosecuted anti-abortion activists under a law meant to safeguard access to abortion providers and church services.

Bryan Fair, the group's interim chief executive, expressed outrage over what he called the “false allegations.” The indictment, he said, “will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all.”

In a video statement issued before the charges were filed, Mr. Fair argued that the Southern Poverty Law Center was being targeted for political reasons, saying the Trump administration had “made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Guest Essay: The Trump Administration Is Coming After Birth Control Access in a Terrifying New Way, Jill Filipovic, April 21 2026 (print ed.). Some 60 years ago, American legislators set out to tackle a problem that was driving employment and education rates down, driving health care and welfare costs up and making American family life significantly less stable: Many American women, and particularly poor women and teenagers, were having more children than they wanted or could afford. Close to half of births were to women who had not intended to get pregnant.

Decreasing the unintended pregnancy rate was a bipartisan wish. In 1969, President Richard Nixon recognized that “unwanted or untimely childbearing is one of several forces which are driving many families into poverty.” A year later, Congress passed Title X: the first federal program entirely dedicated to family planning and reproductive health care.

It would go on to become one of the most successful federal programs of the last century, with one study finding it prevented some 20 million unintended pregnancies in just 20 of its 50 years by providing women with free and low-cost birth control. It has significantly reduced child poverty. In 1957, nearly one in 10 teenage girls gave birth. Today, the rate is closer to one in 100. For every dollar spent on family planning funds, the government saves $7 in Medicaid costs.

But President Trump seems intent on killing Title X. This month, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly issued new funding guidelines that have effectively subverted the program’s entire purpose. Instead of getting highly effective contraception methods to the country’s poorest women so that they may decide if and when to have children, Title X under Mr. Trump seems aimed at getting more women pregnant, whether they want to be or not. And it appears to cater to three influential parts of the Trump coalition: The anti-abortion movement; the MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, movement; and pronatalists who want to see birthrates rise at nearly any cost.

More than half of patients at Title X clinics use modern contraceptive methods to prevent pregnancy. But the word “contraception” comes up just once in the Title X funding document, and only in a section on “reducing overmedicalization in health care.” Instead, in a change pulled directly from Project 2025, H.H.S. tells Title X clinics to emphasize “fertility-awareness-based methods,” a broad category that includes things like tracking your periods or your body temperature to estimate which days you might be fertile. These methods can be helpful for getting pregnant, but are generally far less so for preventing pregnancy. Fertility awareness methods have typical-use failure rates between 12 and 24 percent in the first year, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The intrauterine device, by contrast, has a failure rate of less than 1 percent.

ny times logoNew York Times, Election Day Turnout in Virginia Is Down Significantly From 2025, After Strong Early Voting, Luke Vrotsos and Alex Lemonides, April 21, 2026. In-person turnout on Tuesday is trailing far behind that of last year’s governor’s race, which set a state record in a nonpresidential election.

Election Day turnout in Virginia is on track to be considerably lower than it was during the 2025 governor’s race, breaking with the high interest seen during the early voting period, in which nearly 1.4 million people cast ballots.

Election Day turnout tends to lean toward Republicans, and early voting and mail-in ballots tend to favor Democrats. But while the partisan split of the early vote was similar to what was seen in the governor’s race, the Election Day vote on Tuesday appeared to be down more significantly in Democratic areas, according to precinct-level turnout data available at midday. Precincts that voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in the past had smaller declines when compared with 2025.

Drawing conclusions about the final outcome of an election based wholly on turnout is unreliable, even once the data is complete, as partisan affiliation is not a reliable indicator of vote choice. And this election, in which voters are deciding on an amendment to the state’s Constitution, falls outside traditional partisan lines.

The amendment would temporarily restore redistricting powers to the General Assembly, in an attempt to offset redistricting efforts made in other states with the encouragement of President Trump. If passed, Democrats could potentially pick up as many as four additional House seats, leaving Virginia with only one safe Republican district, though the amendment would still face court challenges.

While Election Day turnout at midday was on track to be down throughout the state, the decline was particularly steep in Northern Virginia, a region where Democrats typically win by large margins.

In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest, Election Day turnout showed a 25 percent decline from where it stood at the same point in last year’s election. In Alexandria, the state’s seventh most populous city, turnout was 21 percent below where it was at the same point last year.

Wall Street Journal, MAGA attorney general admitted under oath to ethics violation as Senate race heats up, Matthew Chapman, April 21, 2026 (print ed.). 

Newly unsealed deposition transcripts obtained by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton admitted under oath to violating attorney-client privilege by handing over data from a former client to a plaintiff suing them.

This comes as Paxton fights in a heated runoff for the GOP Senate nomination against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who trails him in most polls. President Donald Trump was previously considering an endorsement of Cornyn to bail him out, but now appears not to be interested in doing so.

"The deposition marked a rare instance of Paxton being made to answer questions under oath," noted the report. "It remained effectively sealed when the case’s judge, a donor to Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, delayed ruling on its sealing for more than four years until the case was settled in 2023."

One of the details from the deposition, reported the Journal, is that he confessed to handing over information that he had an ethical obligation to keep confidential.

"Charles Loper III, trustee of Paxton’s blind trust, sued Byron Cook, a former business associate, claiming fraud by Unity Resources, an energy investment company. Paxton wasn’t a defendant in the suit, but was Unity’s former lawyer, board member and investor," said the report. In the deposition, "Attorneys pressed Paxton on having given Unity records to his own attorney Mitch Little — who was also representing Loper in suing Unity — but not to Unity itself. 'I’m sure I did,' Paxton said of giving the communications to Little, saying that he had done so to see if they were privileged."

"Legal ethics experts declined to read the deposition because it is under a protective order, but said giving former client communications to anyone — especially someone suing the client — is a violation of attorney-client privilege," said the report. "And, records belong to the client and can’t be withheld, they said."

Paxton campaign spokesman Nick Maddux denied the report, saying, “The Wall Street Journal has spent the last year bending over backward to be an extension of the Cornyn campaign, but this one takes the cake.”

ny times logoNew York Times, A Governor Who Stressed Pragmatism Is Hounded by Politics, Campbell Robertson, April 21, 2026. Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia has emphasized practical governance as her brand, but the political fight over redistricting has dominated her term so far.

On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger, right,abigail spanberger twitter told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”

But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.

The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.

Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.

Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering

Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.

But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.

 

bulwark morning shots logo
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Decision Day, Andrew Egger, right, andrew eggerApril 21, 2026. It’s decision day in your Morning Shots correspondents’ home state of Virginia, where Democrats have used their shiny new governing trifecta to go all-in on a controversial measure: a proposed constitutional amendment that would—let’s not get cute about it—temporarily gerrymander the hell out of the state.

bulwark logo big shipThe current congressional maps in Virginia, a bluish-purple state that hadn’t previously given either party a trifecta since 2012, are admirably representative, thanks in part to years of good-government advocacy work that led to the establishment of a bipartisan redistricting commission in 2020. But Democrats want to throw out the current map, which favors Democrats 6–5, for a breathtakingly audacious one: a likely 10–1 gerrymander in their own favor.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, of course. It’s one of the last punches in an all-out mid-cycle redistricting war that Republicans kicked off last year in Texas, redrawing their maps to move the Lone Star State House delegation from a 25–13 GOP advantage to a 30–8 split. Led by ferocious exhortations from President Donald Trump, Republicans nationwide went scrounging through the couch cushions to find gerrymanderable districts, producing maps designed to eke out new seats in Missouri, North Carolina, and Indiana.²

Democrats, who for years have been likelier than Republicans to support anti-gerrymandering reforms in their home states, ultimately decided to fight fire with fire. California voters approved a mid-cycle gerrymander to tip their own maps approximately five seats in Democrats’ favor. The second major battlefield has been Virginia, where Democrats are asking voters to suspend the normal redistricting rules temporarily to give them a massive advantage in this year’s midterms. The ballot language is, basically, ludicrous: Should the state Constitution be amended, it asks, to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections”?³

Is this just? On a national level, Democrats can still reasonably make the argument that all they’re trying to do is to neuter unfair advantages Republicans are trying to pick up elsewhere. If Virginia’s redistricting measure passes (and if it survives the courts), the GOP is still likely to come out ahead in the House of Representatives, thanks to a special redistricting session Gov. Ron DeSantis just convened in Florida. This is the basic argument: Republicans have dropped all pretense of fairness in redistricting, and for us to do anything less now amounts to unilateral disarmament. Against charges of anti-democratic hypocrisy, Democrats have argued that they are breaking no laws and that it would be grievously short-sighted to set aside their best chance of constraining Trump legislatively next year over good-government scruples.

All this is compelling on a certain level. Yesterday on the Bulwark podcast, Bill laid out his reasons for supporting the gerrymander; today I’m pretty sure⁴ I’m going to vote for it, too. For better or worse (worse), practically the entire role of our desiccated federal legislature today is to rubber-stamp stuff our imperial president wants, or else to refuse to do so. I want more people in there who will refuse to do so, and, well, here’s a legal way to get them.

But there’s a lot of fear and trembling involved—as there should be any time a movement deliberately sets aside a supposedly dear principle, like the importance of fair maps, in order to accrue for itself political power. The justification for this is ever and always the same: Just think of all the good we’ll be able to do with that power if we get it and all the harm THEY’LL do if we don’t! But I’m old enough to remember when, a decade ago, the Republican party made a bargain like that, embracing a ludicrous outsider candidate named Donald Trump on the Flight-93-election theory that a Hillary Clinton presidency would blow up the country and at least Trump would prevent that.

Obviously, a decade ago, that argument was not only stupid but wrong: Clinton wouldn’t have blown up the country, while Trump, who within a few short years had utterly remade the GOP in his image, seems well on his own way to doing so. But the fact that so many people talked themselves onto that path with the same rhetorical justifications as Democrats are making for their maps today should give us all pause. Momentary unscrupulous strategic decisions—just a little taste of the offerings of the devil, and then we’ll get back on the side of the angels—have an unfortunate tendency to turn into bad habits.

AROUND THE BULWARK

The Return of Communism Chic… A new generation discovers the workers’ paradise, observes CATHY YOUNG.

Will Wins Wars. We’re Forgetting That… MARK HERTLING reminds that Power = Will × Resources.

The Tough Guy Really, Really Means It This Time… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to talk about Trump’s failures in Iran and his hollow attempts to save face.

Is Mike Waltz Saying We Should Bomb Hospitals? On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SALETAN takes on Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s infrastructure—and the chilling defense from top officials who say “all options” includes targets that blur into civilian life. The gang returns to California for two live shows in May. Join Sarah, Tim, and Sam in San Diego on May 20 or in L.A. on May 21 for a night of politics and laughs, and a community built on good faith. Bulwark Live: California is sure to sell out—don’t delay.

Quick Hits

KASH FILES LAWSUITS ALL AROUND ME: Kash Patel’s promised lawsuit against the Atlantic for reporting he’s been binge-drinking on the job is as silly as advertised. Its $250 million argument: If the FBI director is as bad as all that, why is crime down? CNN has more:

The defamation suit says statements in Fitzpatrick’s article “falsely assert” that Patel “is a habitual drunk, unable to perform the duties of his office, is a threat to public safety, is vulnerable to foreign coercion, has violated DOJ ethics rules, is unreachable in emergencies, has required the deployment of ‘breaching equipment’ to extract him from locked rooms, allows alcohol to influence his public statements about criminal investigations, and behaves erratically in a manner that compromises national security.” . . .

The lawsuit says The Atlantic sent the FBI a “request for comment” and asked for a response in less than two hours, then “refused to honor” a request for more time. The magazine published the article online later the same afternoon.

Patel’s goal, of course, isn’t actually to win in court. He’d face an extraordinarily high bar in doing so—needing not only to prove that the Atlantic’s allegations were false, but that the publication had known they were so when they published them, or at least didn’t care if they were true or not. Patel’s real goal appears to be to punish a publication that offended him with a nuisance suit—and to demonstrate to an audience of one that he’s fighting the lying lib media.

BROTHER, MAY I HAVE SOME LITHIUM?: For countries around the world, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the war in Iran is a wake-up call that fossil fuels shipped from afar can prove an unreliable source of energy in times of global instability. Many governments are working to accelerate their rollout of clean-energy infrastructure that can be generated at home as a result. This may be good for the climate, but there’s one obvious drawback: It risks tying more countries more tightly than ever to China. Politico reports:

Governments see clean, domestic energy sources, such as renewables and nuclear power, as the obvious long-term solution to protect their economies from the ups and downs of global fossil fuel markets.

But there’s also an obvious catch: The faster they move to decarbonize, the more they will have to rely on China to supply the necessary materials. After all, Beijing controls the overwhelming majority of the world’s clean technology and critical mineral supply.

Governments, uneasy about the idea of swapping one dependence for another, are keenly aware of that fact. The question now is whether they’ll put those reservations aside in favor of bolstering their energy security or continue taking measures to protect their economies from China’s dominance.

ny times logoNew York Times, How the California Governor’s Race Is Changing Post-Swalwell, Laurel Rosenhall, April 21, 2026 (print ed.). Xavier Becerra, who once struggled to gain traction, has found growing support after Eric Swalwell left the race amid sexual harassment allegations.

In the 10 days since Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race for California governor, two of his Democratic rivals’ fortunes have turned in opposite directions. Betty Yee, a former state controller, ended her campaign on Monday, while Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general, has drawn a surge of support in multiple polls.

Mr. Becerra, whose polling numbers had languished for months, has jumped into the top tier of Democratic candidates since Mr. Swalwell’s campaign imploded amid accusations of sexual assault. Four polls in the last week have shown Mr. Becerra as receiving at least 10 percent support, at least twice what he previously had, putting him in contention in a sprawling field of candidates.

But the competition is stiff, and the race remains fluid. Mr. Becerra, who served as health and human services secretary under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has roughly the same level of support as two other Democrats: Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, and Katie Porter, a former congresswoman.

Many voters remain undecided two weeks before Californians begin receiving ballots by mail for the June 2 election. The state’s nonpartisan primary rules have added extra intrigue to the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who must leave office in January because of term limits. In this deeply Democratic state, no Democrat has dominated, and two Republicans — Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host who has been endorsed by President Trump, and Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County — have been among the front-runners.

In California primaries, all candidates run on the same ballot, and the two who get the most votes advance to the general election, regardless of their party. With a gubernatorial field that once included eight prominent Democrats, polls suggested that two best-known Republicans might take the top two spots because the minority party had far fewer candidates to split its votes.

Such a scenario would block Democrats from the general election and hand the governor’s office of the nation’s largest blue state to a Republican.

To prevent that possibility, Rusty Hicks, chairman of the California Democratic Party, has been encouraging Democrats to drop out if their campaigns did not seem viable. Mr. Hicks on Monday urged flagging candidates to follow Ms. Yee’s example.

“I continue to believe there are too many Democrats in the field,” Mr. Hicks said as he released the results of a poll that the California Democratic Party commissioned in an effort to thin the field.

The poll was one of four that have demonstrated momentum for Mr. Becerra since Mr. Swalwell dropped out. Mr. Becerra hired a new social media strategist last week, Tonya Lamont, Mr. Newsom’s former digital communications director, and his online presence has since boomed.

Other Democrats are also positioning themselves as the candidate who can best lead California’s fight against the Trump administration. Mr. Steyer has run on a liberal platform and received an endorsement on Monday from Our Revolution, which was founded by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.

It was a notable endorsement of a billionaire by a group established to fight what it calls “the billionaire class.”

Ms. Porter, a former Democratic congresswoman from Orange County, was endorsed Monday by Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She already had support from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, Calif., has received millions of dollars in support from Silicon Valley executives this month.

Supporters believe that Mr. Mahan, a moderate Democrat, has an opportunity to win over former backers of Mr. Swalwell and other voters who are undecided, though he has faced criticism that he is too aligned with California billionaires, and he has not made big gains in polls over the past week.

Ms. Yee, 68, announced her withdrawal from the race in an emotional call with reporters on Monday. She had pitched herself as a budget expert who would be the scandal-free choice following Mr. Swalwell’s demise. She called herself “Boring Betty” in social media posts that highlighted her deep experience in California state government, including two terms as the state’s chief fiscal officer. 

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Scandal Is the Men Trump Hasn’t Fired, William Kristol, right, April 21, 2026.It wasn’t the biggest story of the news cycle, but you might have noticed that another cabinet secretary put in her notice yesterday. “Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung posted on social media, not even allowing Chavez-DeRemer the dignity of announcing her own departure.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet secretary to be forced out by Donald Trump in the last seven weeks. She follows in the footsteps of Kristi Noem, who departed the Department of Homeland Security on March 24,¹ and Pam Bondi, who exited the Department of Justice on April 2.

Needless to say, none of these departures should be lamented by anyone who values competence, integrity, or honesty in government.

If you value competence, integrity, and honesty in government, you belong with us. Join Bulwark+.Subscribed

Still, does anyone see a . . . pattern here? As the eponymous villain of Ian Fleming’s 1959 James Bond novel, Goldfinger, says: “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’” I suppose it’s too strong to call this gender-inflected pattern “enemy action.” But when it comes to finding someone to fire, the Trump White House does seem to chercher la femme.

After all, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has surely done as much damage to his department and to the nation as Kristi Noem did. But Pete’s still on the job, strutting around and displaying his machismo at the Pentagon. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has profited on a larger scale from the Trump administration than Chavez-DeRemer did. But Lutnick is still there, grifting as men in the Trump orbit do. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is more of a crackpot than Pam Bondi was, but Kennedy remains in place, working out in his manly, denim-clad way as secretary of health and human services. And for that matter, Kash Patel still presides in all his male adolescent glory as director of the FBI (about which more below).

Maybe the president will soon rectify what might be an appearance of reverse DEI discrimination, and fire one of these men soon? Or some other male head could end up on the chopping block. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNN on Sunday that gas prices might not drop below $3 until next year. President Trump told the Hill Monday that Wright is “wrong on that. Totally wrong,” and that gas prices will drop as soon as the Iran war ends. One might think Trump would be annoyed at Wright for calling into question his happy talk. But for now Wright still has his job.

Gender bias in firing incompetent cabinet secretaries is not the most important indictment of the Trump administration. But it’s worth noting. And it’s also worth stressing that the problem isn’t that he’s fired the women. The problem is that he hasn’t fired the men.

Needless to say, Trump doesn’t want to be held accountable for his own appointments. But you know whose actions he wants to take credit for, and in whose embrace he wants to wrap himself? The military.

For example, yesterday Trump attacked Democrats as “TRAITORS” who “belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration.” Trump wants to conflate the U.S. military and his administration. But the military that is achieving those accomplishments is a military Trump inherited. Every one involved in the disciplined and well-executed military operations we’re seeing was trained and promoted under his predecessors. The servicemen and women who organized and executed the rescue of the pilots in Iran—while Trump was kept out of the room so military officers could get their work done free of his ranting—rose through the ranks under Bush and Obama and Biden. And yes, under Trump in his first term, when his secretaries of defense were James Mattis and Mark Esper, who refused to let Trump damage the military as Hegseth is now trying to do.

The contrast between how Trump treats the men and the women in his cabinet is notable. But even more striking is the contrast between the professionalism and expertise of a military that was shaped prior to this administration, and the buffoonery and incompetence of the cabinet members of this administration.

The Long View, Political Opinion: A Strong Party Leader Who Doesn’t Care About The Party, Julian Zelizer, April 21, 2026.The Republican Dilemma.

Republicans have put themselves in a precarious position. By allowing party power to become centralized under a president who has little regard for the GOP’s future, they’ve ceded control of their own fate to an unpredictable and unstable leader. Trump’s decisions are designed to maximize his personal political leverage with little consideration for the consequences that may befall the rest of the Republican Party.

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At the same time, Trump has kept an iron grip on the GOP. He has governed as a strong party boss since his first term. He has maintained strong control over the congressional wing of the party and the broader Republican electorate alike. He has intimidated dissenters, rewarded loyalty, and moved swiftly against anyone who dares to defy him. With voters, he has deployed social media, rallies, and an army of influencers to sustain his base, even as his decisions have grown more controversial.

Trump has gone even further in his second term, weaponizing the Justice Department and using federal money as a cudgel. Any Republican tempted to cross him will think carefully before doing so. He has also consistently demonstrated a keen understanding of how the red-blue map dominates American politics. Given the intensity of Republican partisan loyalty, little can shake the support of legislators for the president, regardless of what he does or does not do.

More than any other recent president, he has been able to centralize control of the party within the Oval Office and contain intra-party tensions that typically persist—and intensify—once a new administration takes office.

But Republicans face a big problem as a result of this tie: Trump views his relationship to the rest of the party as purely transactional. He is not trying to build a lasting party coalition—as Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s or Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. The Republican Party is a vehicle for his own ends, whether it’s shielding himself from congressional accountability or generating significant revenue for his family.

This means that decisions causing immense economic instability or pain for the very voters who elect Republicans aren’t immediately troubling. If prices keep rising and steep Medicaid cuts hurt his base, he can live with that—so long as there is no immediate blowback for him. Indeed, he is enacting an agenda that could erode Republican support in the near term, opening a window for a Democratic Party that has struggled to craft a compelling message or produce leaders who can break through an increasingly difficult electoral map.

While the relationship may be serving the GOP in the short term, the party is taking a considerable risk going forward. There has been some evidence that Republican support for Trump is weakening, particularly over the economy, the war in Iran, and the Epstein files, but the verdict is still out.

The president’s apparent bet that he can contain or overcome a midterm loss, one that hands Democrats institutional power in the House or Senate, may underestimate what a determined majority can do to complicate his second term. Democrats are also mobilized and prepared to challenge any efforts to interfere with the democratic process on Election Day.

Unless a sizable block of Republican leaders is willing to push back against the administration’s most consequential moves and act as a united and disciplined coalition, the party may soon discover how blind loyalty leads to a steep political cliff. READ IN APP

Julian Zelizer @julianzelizerJulian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of The Long View newsletter on Substack. Zelizer, the author and editor of 27 books, is also a columnist for Foreign Policy.

U.S. Inflation, Jobs, Economy, Jobs

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Vindication of Bidenomics, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 21, 2026. Are we finally ready to acknowledge its successes? 

Consumer sentiment, which fell off a cliff in 2022, has declined further under Trump II. Indeed, according to the venerable Michigan Survey, it is at the lowest level ever recorded. Other measures, like the index of consumer confidence produced by the Conference Board, are somewhat less dismal but also show that Americans feel worse now than they did during the Biden years. And as the chart above shows, Americans — a crucial segment of whom voted for Trump because they believed his fabulist promises to bring prices down “on Day One” — are now saying that the Biden economy was better than the Trump II economy.

The question of why Americans are so negative about the economy is important, and I will have much more to say about that question in future posts. First, however, it will be necessary to dispel some widespread misperceptions — misperceptions that were especially acute during the Biden years. So today I’ll talk about what actually happened to ordinary Americans under Biden.

Let me address three issues in particular: Purchasing power, inequality, and the labor market.

Purchasing power: Biden had the misfortune of being president when there was a large jump in prices, a jump that was out of his control and happened around the world. This came as a shock to Americans after decades of low, stable inflation. From my post last week: A graph showing a price increase AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This price jump clearly depressed consumer sentiment. However, it’s often asserted that the jump in prices from 2021 through 2022 left most Americans substantially poorer. And that just isn’t true.

The next chart compares the rise in consumer prices to what has happened to the wages of ordinary workers since late 2019. Why start in 2019? Because average wage data in 2020 and much of 2021 were distorted by the pandemic, during which low-wage workers were disproportionately laid off. Using the eve of the pandemic as a baseline, we see that large increases in consumer prices were more than matched by large increases in wages:

Now, many people have the sense that prices are up more than the official numbers say. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces these numbers, is careful and scrupulous. And independent measures of prices, for example for groceries and rents, have generally been consistent with BLS estimates.

What is true is that the Consumer Price Index doesn’t take account of rising interest rates. In particular, monthly mortgage payments for new home buyers have risen much more than average wages, and the chart above doesn’t reflect that. But while this is a real issue, it isn’t consistent with complaints about huge, widespread declines in overall purchasing power.

OK, I can safely predict many hostile comments, not just from Trump supporters sure that the Biden economy was terrible but from people insisting that to point to rising real wages is to deny the struggles of working families. So let me say that throughout the past 5 years many millions of Americans have had a hard time making ends meet. But this is always true, in good times and bad. It was actually less true than usual during the Biden years, a period in which wages at the bottom rose more rapidly than wages at the top.

Which brings me to the question of inequality.

Inequality: The economist Peter Atwater coined the term “K-shaped economy” in 2020, to describe an economy in which those at the top get ahead while those at the bottom fall behind. The phrase has stuck, as has the narrative.

But what actually happened during the Biden years, at least in terms of wages, was the opposite. In 2023 and in subsequent work, David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew documented that there had in fact been an “unexpected compression” in which the wage gap between the highly paid and the less well paid suddenly narrowed.

Dube has a terrific new book out, The Wage Standard: What’s wrong in the labor market and how to fix it, which is a manifesto on how to improve the state of workers. I will lift a couple of charts relevant to the tale of inequality during the Biden years to illustrate my point.

The chart below plots annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for two periods in time. On the horizontal axis is the wage distribution. For example, a person at the 10th percentile is considered low income: they earn a wage that is at or below 90% of other Americans. Someone at the 90th percentile is high income: only 10% of Americans earn a wage higher than theirs.

The solid line shows annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for the years 1979 to 2019. The dashed line shows it for the years 2019 to 2024, the Biden years.

This chart shows that during the Biden years, real wages for the bottom 80 percent of workers grew substantially faster than they had over the previous 40 years. Moreover, growth was especially high at the very bottom of the wage distribution. This was the “unexpected compression”: because low-earning workers experienced faster wage growth than those with higher pay, the wage gap between low income workers and high income workers was squeezed during the Biden years.

Second, let’s look at a direct measure of wage inequality, the ratio of wages at the 90th percentile to wages at the 10thpercentile:

This ratio began rising under Ronald Reagan and was still near its peak on the eve of the pandemic at 4.8. But from 2020 to 2024 it declined substantially. America at the end of the Biden years was still a hugely unequal society, but less so than it had been for a generation.

Granted, stock prices rose substantially under Biden, and stock ownership is highly concentrated at the top. So the Biden economy was K-shaped in that sense. But if you think about it, it’s hard to see how rising prices for stocks, which are both bought and sold mainly by the richest 10 percent of the population, hurt those below.

So wage inequality fell dramatically during the Biden years. Is income inequality now rising again under Trump? There are faint hints in the data to that effect, but no more than that so far. One thing we do know, however, is that the force Dube identifies as the strongest driver of wage compression — a “tight” labor market — has largely disappeared.

The labor market: Dube’s thesis is that a tight labor market – one in which workers find it easy to get jobs and employers find it hard to get workers -- is essential to wage growth, especially among the low paid.

And for much of the Biden era the U.S. job market was very tight. For evidence, look at the Conference Board’s “labor market differential” — the difference between the percentage of people saying that jobs are plentiful and those saying that jobs are hard to get. That number is usually positive — we are an optimistic nation — but it was exceptionally positive during the Biden years:

So, why is it important to set the record straight about the Biden economy? We can’t rerun the 2024 election (although if we could, Kamala Harris would win.) But misperceptions about that economy may prevent us from appreciating policies — especially the strong response to the pandemic — that were actually very good, and which we should be prepared to emulate in future crises.

And understanding economic reality when consumer sentiment plunged is crucial to making sense of the vibecession debate, about which I’ll write more soon.

April 20

Top Headlines

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Iran Vows Retaliation for U.S. Attack on Cargo Ship, Tyler Pager, Shirin Hakim, Sanam Mahoozi, Rebecca F. Elliott and Aaron Boxerman, April 20, 2026. President Trump said that a U.S. Navy destroyer had fired on an Iran-flagged vessel that was trying to evade a blockade. He also said an American delegation was heading to Pakistan for more peace talks, but an Iranian official said there were “no plans” for negotiations.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Not Paying Attention to His Own War, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 20, 2026. As the Iran crisis spirals back out of control, it’s a big day for the president of the United States: His official schedule suggests he will have “Executive Time” all morning until 1:30 p.m., followed by a ninety-minute policy meeting and a closed-press session to sign executive orders.  Happy Monday. 

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump's Labor Secretary Resigns, Veterans Launch Largest Protest Since War Began, Aaron Parnas, right, April 20, 2026. aaron parnas new headshotLori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned, marking the latest Cabinet shake-up. She had been facing significant internal investigations within the United States Department of Labor and is now the latest female secretary to leave the administration.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Significant Conflict of Interest Concerns as Trump Family Enriches Itself With the War, Insider Trading Exposed, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 20, 2026. This morning, I take a deep dive into serious conflict-of-interest concerns involving Donald Trump’s family and the war with Iran. His sons are trying to sell drone interceptors to Gulf states seeking protection from Iran, while his son-in-law is pursuing major investments from those same regions as he serves in a government role. At the same time, new data points to troubling signs of market manipulation and potential insider trading tied to major policy announcements. The bottom line is simple. The longer the war continues, the more the Trump family stands to benefit.

Trump Team Investigations

The Hartmann Report, thom hartmann newCommentary, This What Trump Meant by “My Way” — Power, Control, Darkness, and Evil?, Thom Hartmann, right,April 20, 2026. How power, money, and ideology converged to reshape American democracy into something darker and more dangerous…

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Person Playacting as President May Be Getting Addicted to Snuff Films, marcy wheelerEmptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, April 20, 2026. Even before WSJ posted this story about the guy legally occupying the position of President, I had gotten worried that Donald Trump is growing addicted to snuff films.

The New Republic, Investigative Commentary: Trump Library Saga Takes Dark Turn: Where Did Millions in Funding Go? Greg Sargent, April 20, 2026. greg sargentFour huge media conglomerates forked over $63 million in “settlements” earmarked for Trump’s presidential library.Democrats are trying to track that money—and the latest developments don’t inspire confidence.

More On Iran War

Iran Flag

New York Times, News Analysis: The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World, Damien Cave, April 20, 2026. The Asia-Pacific was hit hard and quick by the war in Iran and its energy bottlenecks. Scenes of crisis there indicate that problems are multiplying and spreading.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Distracted, Andrew Egger, right, andrew eggerApril 20, 2026. Well, here we are again: The ceasefire in Iran is once again in a state of near-total collapse. The U.S. military hasn’t yet resumed its bombing campaign of the Iranian mainland, but the danger in the Strait of Hormuz is as bad as ever.But what’s becoming shockingly apparent now is how little he’s even paying attention to the problem.

New York Times, Vance Heads to New Talks With Iran. At Stake: Peace and His Own Standing, Tyler Pager, April 20, 2026. The vice president is again center stage, after abruptly leaving the first round of high-level Iranian peace talks without an agreement.

New York Times, Israeli Soldier in Lebanon Sledgehammered a Statue of Jesus, David M. Halbfinger, April 20, 2026. The military is investigating the soldier. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed regret for any hurt caused to “believers in Lebanon and around the world.”

U.S. Tariffs, Inflation, Jobs, Economy

New York Times, Trump Administration to Begin Refunding $166 Billion in Tariffs, Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, April 20, 2026. The government will debut a system to repay importers two months after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs at the heart of the president’s trade policy.

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

One First, Legal Commentary: Chief Justice Roberts and the Clean Power Plan, Steve Vladeck (Georgetown Law Center professor), right, April 20, 2026. Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.

More On U.S. Governance, Pollitics, Elections

The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Second Coming? Jonathan V. Last, April 20, 2026. We know who the Republican nominee will be in 2028 . . . if he wants it.

New York Times, Big Names Wait in the Wings as Virginians Decide Their House Maps, Kate Zernike, April 20, 2026. With Virginians voting Tuesday to accept or reject redistricting, candidates from both parties await the voters’ judgment to decide whether — or where — to run for Congress.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark Political Opinion: Donald Distrusted, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 20, 2026. It was the afternoon of April 3. An American F-15E fighter jet had been shot down over Iran. The two airmen aboard were missing. The president of the United States was screaming at aides about Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis and how this incident could cost him the next election.

MS Now, Political Commentary: In Michigan, Democratic contenders perform a 2024 autopsy of their own, Nnamdi Egwuonwu, April 20, 2026. At a party convention in Detroit, party leaders sparred over purity tests, kitchen-table politics and Gaza — and could not agree on a diagnosis.

MSNow Daily, Senate’s political vibe shift, A political vibe shift: The Senate is suddenly in play, Ebony Davis, April 20, 2026. For most of the 2026 cycle, Republicans have been all but certain they will hold the Senate after November.

More Global News

The Contrarianjennifer rubin new headshot, Opinion: Trump Is Making China Great, Jennifer Rubin, right,April 20, 2026. His blunders inure to our chief rival. Donald Trump’s exaggerated, confusing, and downright false remarks about a deal with Iran only underscore the perception of the American president as untrustworthy and chaotic, if not insane.

New York Times, Starmer Will Tell Parliament He Was Kept in the Dark on Mandelson Vetting, Michael D. Shear, April 20, 2026. Prime Minister Keir Starmer will address British lawmakers on Monday after it emerged that Peter Mandelson, his onetime ambassador to the United States, was rejected for top security clearances.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Harm from Hormuz, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 20, 2026. Why we should still fear a global slump from Another week, another false all-clear.

U.S. History, Culture, Media, Education

Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: April 19, 2026 [Roots of U.S. Revolution], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 20, 2026. On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.

The New Republic, Investigative Commentary: Trump and FIFA Have Already Broken the 2026 World Cup, Alex Shephard/, April 19, 2026. ICE fears, and astronomical costs are ruining the tournament before it begins—not that Trump or Gianni Infantino care.

New York Times, In Trump’s Orbit, Women Aren’t the Only Ones Concerned About Their Looks, Jesse McKinley, April 18, 2026. In Trump world, the male ego is often evident — and their appearance scrutinized — under a president’s gaze.

Epstein Files, Coverups

New York Times, Epstein Craved Harvard Connections. Many There Were Eager to Help, Mark Arsenault and Debra Kamin, April 20, 2026. New documents reveal what professors did to help Jeffrey Epstein get inside Harvard’s gates. Jeffrey Epstein had a special obsession with Harvard, which he sought to infiltrate more than any other American institution. 

Top Stories

 

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Iran Vows Retaliation for U.S. Attack on Cargo Ship, Tyler Pager, Shirin Hakim, Sanam Mahoozi, Rebecca F. Elliott and Aaron Boxerman, April 20, 2026. President Trump said that a U.S. Navy destroyer had fired on an Iran-flagged vessel that was trying to evade a blockade. He also said an American delegation was heading to Pakistan for more peace talks, but an Iranian official said there were “no plans” for negotiations.

Here’s the latest.

Iran on Monday toughened its threats to retaliate after the United States attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz, an escalation that put pressure on the fragile cease-fire set to expire this week.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman also said Monday that there were “no plans” in place for the next round of peace talks in Pakistan, even as President Trump said American negotiators would arrive in the country in the evening for a second round of negotiations since the two-week truce went into effect on April 8. A White House official said Vice President JD Vance was expected to lead the delegation.

Iran FlagEsmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, accused the United States of engaging in actions that in “no way demonstrate seriousness in pursuing a diplomatic process,” according to Iran’s state news agency, IRNA.

The comments from Iran echoed similar rhetoric from the run-up to the first round of talks, which took place over a week ago and ended without an agreement to end the war. At the time, Iran’s top negotiator had cast doubt on the negotiations even taking place just hours before the Iranian delegation arrived in Pakistan.

A U.S. Navy destroyer fired on the Iranian cargo ship on Sunday after it defied a weeklong American blockade of Iran’s ports, Mr. Trump said. Marines were searching the ship as officials weighed whether to tow it to Oman, a U.S. official said.

Iran’s armed forces warned that they would soon retaliate against the United States for what they called “armed piracy,” according to Tasnim, a semiofficial Iranian news agency.

The attack occurred in the Arabian Sea, south of the Strait of Hormuz, an economically vital waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil normally travels. Iran choked shipping traffic in the strait in the early days of the war, and the United States began blocking traffic to Iranian ports last week in its latest effort to force Iran to reopen the waterway and agree to a deal to end the war.

The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, climbed more than 6 percent on Monday, to around $96 a barrel after the attack. Oil prices are up by about 33 percent since the war began on Feb. 28.

Here’s what else we are covering:

Pakistan: Pakistan appeared to be preparing to host a fresh round of talks between the United States and Iran, an indication that negotiations might go forward even as the two sides sent conflicting public messages. Islamabad, the capital, went on a security lockdown on Sunday night, and officials said they would deploy 10,000 extra security forces in the city.

Energy prices: The U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, acknowledged on Sunday that gasoline prices in the United States had probably peaked but could remain elevated for months, undermining Mr. Trump’s earlier claim that high fuel prices resulting from the war in Iran would be “short-term.”

Lebanon: Thousands of displaced Lebanese families were making their way home on Sunday, two days after a 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, went into effect. During the truce, Israel has said it will continue to carry out strikes that it describes as defensive and to demolish buildings in the Lebanese zone it has invaded.  

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Not Paying Attention to His Own War, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 20, bulwark logo big ship2026. As the Iran crisis spirals back out of control, it’s a big day for the president of the United States: His official schedule suggests he will have “Executive Time” all morning until 1:30 p.m., followed by a ninety-minute policy meeting and a closed-press session to sign executive orders. ead. Happy Monday. 

News Updates 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump's Labor Secretary Resigns, Veterans Launch Largest Protest Since War Began, Aaron Parnas, right, April 20, 2026. aaron parnas new headshotLori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned, marking the latest Cabinet shake-up. She had been facing significant internal investigations within the United States Department of Labor and is now the latest female secretary to leave the administration.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned minutes ago, becoming the latest female Cabinet secretary to leave the Trump administration amid mounting internal turmoil. Her departure follows a months-long investigation by Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito into allegations of misconduct, including misuse of government resources and inappropriate workplace behavior, which she has denied.

The probe had already led to several resignations among her senior staff and created tensions within the United States Department of Labor. Her exit underscores broader instability in the administration’s leadership ranks and highlights the growing list of female Cabinet officials who have stepped down or been fired under pressure.

A group of U.S. veterans staged a protest inside the Cannon House Office Building on Monday, calling for an end to the Iran war. United States Capitol Police responded by moving in and arresting the demonstrators, who were peacefully detained. The protest was part of broader anti-war actions involving veterans opposing the conflict.

Donald Trump said he believes he is “winning the war by a lot,” expressing confidence in the current situation. Donald Trump blamed Democrats for the lack of a deal with Iran, arguing their actions weakened the U.S. negotiating position.

Donald Trump said the deal his administration is negotiating with Iran would be “far better” than the 2015 nuclear agreement reached under Barack Obama. He criticized the earlier deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a threat to U.S. security, though he did not provide details on how the new agreement would differ.

Donald Trump said he was not influenced by Israel to support a war with Iran, citing the October 7, 2023 attack and his long-standing opposition to Iran obtaining nuclear weapons as his reasons. He also suggested Iran could have a prosperous future under new leadership.

The United States is set to host a second round of direct talks between Israel and Lebanon next week at the State Department, following a historic first meeting that led to a fragile 10-day ceasefire. The negotiations, involving officials such as Yechiel Leiter and Nada Hamadeh, mark the first direct dialogue between the two nations in decades. Lebanon aims to end hostilities and Israeli presence in southern areas, while Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated Israeli forces will continue operating in a security zone despite the ceasefire.

A senior United Nations official criticized the high cost of the Iran war, saying the roughly $2 billion spent weekly by Donald Trump could have instead helped save tens of millions of lives through humanitarian aid. He warned that escalating rhetoric and violence risk global consequences, including increased poverty and instability. The official also highlighted severe funding shortfalls for humanitarian efforts, worsened by widespread international aid cuts.

The Trump administration has begun processing applications to refund over $166 billion in tariffs after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the tariffs were imposed without legal authority. A new digital system will handle most claims, though some cases may face delays or limitations. Thousands of companies have already sued to recover funds, but only businesses that directly paid the tariffs are eligible, leaving consumers dependent on whether companies pass along any savings.

Kash Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and a reporter over allegations about his conduct, including claims of excessive drinking and erratic behavior. Patel argues the article contained false statements published with “actual malice,” while the magazine says it stands by its reporting and will defend the case. The lawsuit highlights the high legal bar public figures face in proving defamation.

The United States Air Force, in coordination with the Secretary of War, is extending the service life of the A-10 Thunderbolt II through 2030 to maintain combat strength while aircraft production ramps up. The plan keeps one active-duty and one reserve squadron at Moody Air Force Base operational until 2030, with another squadron continuing through 2029. The move aims to sustain close air support capabilities and ensure continued training for Airmen.

X avatar for @SecAFOfficial Office of the Secretary of the Air Force@SecAFOfficialIn consultation with @SecWar , we will EXTEND the A-10 “Warthog” platform to 2030. This preserves combat power as the Defense Industrial Base works to increase combat aircraft production. Thank you to @POTUS for your unwavering support of our warfighters and quick, decisiveImage5:18 PM · Apr 20, 2026 · 163K Views196 Replies · 527 Reposts · 3.39K Likes

Two Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 jets came dangerously close near Nashville International Airport, triggering cockpit collision alarms and forcing pilots to take evasive action. The incident occurred when one flight aborted its landing and was directed into the path of another departing aircraft. The planes passed within about 500 feet of each other before both continued safely, and the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.

In California, Betty Yee has suspended her gubernatorial campaign, citing weak polling numbers and limited resources. She announced the decision independently during a virtual press conference and chose not to endorse any other candidate. Her exit narrows the crowded Democratic field, leaving six leading contenders in the race.

D4vd has been charged with first-degree murder in the killing of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, whose dismembered remains were found in an abandoned vehicle linked to him. Prosecutors allege a sexual relationship and additional charges involving abuse and mutilation, while his attorneys deny the accusations and say he is innocent. The case, which has drawn widespread attention in Los Angeles, marks a major development after months of investigation.

The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a case involving Catholic preschools in Colorado that claim they were wrongly excluded from a state-funded preschool program due to their policies on LGBTQ+ admissions. Backed by the Trump administration and the Archdiocese of Denver, the schools argue the exclusion violates their religious rights. State officials contend that participating schools must follow nondiscrimination laws. The case, set for argument in the fall, highlights ongoing tensions between religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights.

A shooting in Winston-Salem left two people dead after a planned fight between juveniles escalated into gunfire near a middle school. Authorities said multiple individuals began shooting at each other in a park close to Jefferson Middle School. Police have identified several victims and suspects, and the incident remains under investigation, though officials say nearby schools are safe. 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Significant Conflict of Interest Concerns as Trump Family Enriches Itself With the War, Insider Trading Exposed, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 20, 2026. This morning, I take a deep dive into serious conflict-of-interest concerns involving Donald Trump’s family and the war with Iran. His sons are trying to sell drone interceptors to Gulf states seeking protection from Iran, while his son-in-law is pursuing major investments from those same regions as he serves in a government role. At the same time, new data points to troubling signs of market manipulation and potential insider trading tied to major policy announcements. The bottom line is simple. The longer the war continues, the more the Trump family stands to benefit.

This week will be packed. I will be meeting with Epstein survivors, covering White House Correspondents’ events, and tracking ongoing Iran negotiations. I will not be attending the dinner because I do not believe it should include a president who attacks the First Amendment.

If you can, please subscribe to support my work, gift a subscription, or upgrade your current one. I am committed to calling out clear conflicts of interest and following the facts wherever they lead. With your support, we can continue building independent media and bringing the truth about this war to the public.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

donald trump money palmer report Custom

Analysis of market data done by BBC shows repeated spikes in trading activity just before major announcements by Donald Trump, raising suspicions of possible insider trading. In several cases, large bets were placed minutes or even nearly an hour before public statements that moved oil prices or stock markets, generating huge profits. Some analysts say the pattern resembles illegal use of non-public information, while others argue traders may simply be anticipating Trump’s actions. Despite concerns and calls for investigation, proving insider trading remains difficult and no charges have been brought.

A company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump is trying to sell military drone interceptors to Gulf countries facing attacks from Iran, raising ethical concerns about profiting from a conflict tied to their father, Donald Trump. Critics argue the situation creates potential conflicts of interest, suggesting foreign governments may feel pressure to do business with the president’s family. The company says its technology is meant to help defend against drone attacks and strengthen U.S. manufacturing. The move highlights broader concerns about the Trump family expanding business ventures while in political power.

Jared Kushner is seeking to raise billions for his private equity firm while also serving as a key Middle East envoy for Donald Trump. He has reportedly been meeting with foreign investors, including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, despite previously saying he would avoid fundraising during Trump’s second term. Critics say this blurs the line between public service and private business, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest. The situation highlights ongoing scrutiny of financial ties between Trump allies and foreign governments.

A survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse at his New Mexico ranch says she was groomed and assaulted there as a young massage therapist, describing years of trauma and isolation. She is one of multiple women who allege they were lured with promises of money or opportunities before being abused. Despite repeated allegations over decades, authorities never fully investigated the ranch at the time. She now says she wants the full truth exposed and for anyone who enabled Epstein to be held accountable.

New investigations have recently been launched by New Mexico officials following the release of additional documents, with authorities promising to pursue all leads and center victims’ voices. The survivor says she is willing to testify and believes there are still unidentified co-conspirators who should face justice. Past failures by law enforcement to coordinate and act on evidence have drawn criticism, with some calling it a major breakdown in the justice system. The renewed effort reflects growing pressure to address unanswered questions and deliver accountability, even years after Epstein’s death.

Donald Trump is set to read a Bible passage from the Oval Office as part of a national event on Tuesday, highlighting his administration’s increasing use of religious themes in official settings. The move comes after a public feud with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran conflict and backlash over an AI-generated image depicting Trump as Jesus. Critics say these actions blur the line between church and state, while supporters view them as an expression of faith in public life. The event will include other top officials and reflects a broader trend of incorporating Christianity into government messaging.

The Bishop of Palm Beach—whose diocese includes Mar-a-Lago—shared a message at Mass condemning Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV.

A Catholic supporter of Donald Trump criticized his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, saying, “I don’t think it helps the president at all. I think it’s colossally stupid.”

Families of more than 100 children killed in a U.S. bombing of an Iranian school sent a letter thanking Pope Leo XIV for advocating for peace and honoring their children, while the White House has not issued an apology. Here is a rough translation of the letter. 

Hundreds of journalists have signed a petition urging stronger action and messaging from media professionals at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Notable signers include Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson, and Jackie Judd. The petition calls for a more forceful stance on press freedom and related issues during the event. I will not be attending the event this year in solidarity with the journalists the President regularly attacks.

Oil prices rose sharply after the U.S. seized an Iranian ship in the Strait of Hormuz, raising concerns about escalating tensions and disrupting hopes for a peace process. Brent crude climbed about 5% to over $95 per barrel, while U.S. crude increased around 6% to nearly $89. The strait is a critical route for roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, so instability there quickly impacts global markets. The renewed tensions also caused stock futures to fall as uncertainty spread.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a public feud has emerged between Pete Hegseth and Dan Driscoll, highlighting tensions within military leadership. The conflict reportedly began early in Hegseth’s tenure when he sharply rebuked Driscoll over a proposal, asserting his authority. The dispute has since spilled into public view, raising concerns about internal divisions. It comes at a time when the U.S. military is facing growing global demands and pressure.

The United States has suspended funding, security coordination, and dollar shipments to Iraq’s central bank amid political deadlock and concerns about ties to Iran-backed militias. Officials allege some elements within the Iraqi government are enabling groups planning attacks on U.S. facilities, including the embassy in Baghdad. The State Department also halted consular services and issued a security alert warning of potential attacks on U.S. citizens across the country. A Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory remains in place due to the heightened risks.

Iran said it plans to retaliate after the U.S. seized an Iranian-flagged ship in the Arabian Sea, but will first ensure the safety of crew members and their families on board. A spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya described the incident as “blatant aggression” and warned of a “decisive response.” Officials indicated that concerns over civilians on the vessel are temporarily delaying any action. Once their safety is secured, Iran says its armed forces will take what it calls necessary measures against the United States.

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed that a photo of a soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ in southern Lebanon is authentic, and said “appropriate measures will be taken against those involved” under its Northern Command. Here is the image released:

Iran said it currently has no plans to resume negotiations with the U.S., with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei citing repeated U.S. violations of a ceasefire. He pointed to actions like a naval blockade and the seizure of an Iranian ship as undermining trust and contradicting diplomatic efforts. Meanwhile, Donald Trump said he is sending negotiators to Pakistan for potential talks. The statements highlight rising tensions and uncertainty around any renewed diplomatic process.

A 44-year-old Los Angeles woman, Shamim Mafi, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for allegedly helping Iran traffic weapons to Sudan amid its ongoing civil war. Prosecutors say she brokered deals involving drones, bombs, ammunition, and tens of thousands of bomb fuses, using a company in Oman that received over $7 million in 2025. Mafi, an Iranian national and U.S. permanent resident since 2016, is accused of coordinating directly with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. She is scheduled to appear in court and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf criticized hardline opponents of a potential U.S. deal, accusing figures like Saeed Jalili and Amirhossein Sabeti of acting like extremist forces that could harm Iran. He said they are using state media and mobilizing supporters to block negotiations. Ghalibaf also expressed concern about political pressure that could remove him or Abbas Araghchi from their positions.

In an interview, Kristen Welker pressed Mike Waltz on why the U.S. was extending sanctions waivers that could benefit Russia despite its ties to Iran. Waltz defended the move, saying it simply allowed oil already in transit to reach global markets and be redirected to U.S. allies instead of just China. Welker pointed out the policy appeared to contradict earlier statements from the Treasury Secretary, highlighting a reversal in the administration’s stance.

Iran executed two men, Mohammad Masoum Shahi and Hamed Validi, after convicting them of cooperating with Israel’s Mossad and planning attacks, according to the judiciary’s news outlet. Authorities said the men were part of a spy network and had received training abroad, including in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. The opposition group People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran denied the allegations, with Maryam Rajavi claiming their only “crime” was supporting freedom. She also warned that more political prisoners remain on death row and urged international action to stop further executions.

A new ProPublic investigation has revealed that Donald Trump and his administration have significantly reshaped federal election oversight ahead of upcoming midterms. Longstanding safeguards have been dismantled, with many career officials removed or reassigned. In their place, new appointees—some linked to efforts to challenge the 2020 election—have taken key roles. These changes mark a major shift in how elections are managed at the federal level.

Critics warn these moves could increase political influence over election administration and investigations. They argue that weakening independent oversight and replacing experienced officials raises the risk of partisan interference. Some experts say the integration of election-denial figures into government roles is especially concerning. The changes have also strained trust between federal agencies and state election officials.

The administration maintains that its actions are intended to strengthen election security and ensure integrity. Officials say reforms are focused on preventing fraud and enforcing voting laws. However, experts caution that the upcoming elections could serve as a major stress test for U.S. democratic institutions. The outcome may reveal how these structural changes affect confidence in the electoral process.

dana nessel oMichigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, right, rejected a request from the Trump administration’s Justice Department to turn over ballots and voting materials from the Detroit area, calling claims of widespread voter fraud “baseless.” Donald Trump and his allies have pushed to investigate past elections, but Nessel argued there is no credible evidence to justify such a broad demand. She emphasized that previous reviews found only minimal fraud cases and vowed to defend the integrity of Michigan’s elections. The dispute is part of a wider federal effort to examine ballots in key battleground states, raising concerns about potential interference in future elections.

Take a look at this striking video filmed by astronaut Reid Wiseman using an iPhone. It’s one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen.

A powerful offshore earthquake struck northern Japan, with its magnitude later revised to around 8.0, prompting a tsunami alert and urgent evacuation warnings. Waves of up to 3 meters were expected, and tsunami activity had already been observed in some areas. Authorities warned residents to move to higher ground immediately and remain alert, as wave timing and size can be unpredictable. Officials also cautioned that additional strong earthquakes could occur in the coming days.

Mark Carney said Canada’s close economic ties to the U.S. have shifted from a strength to a vulnerability, citing tariffs and policy changes under Donald Trump. He emphasized the need for Canada to diversify trade, attract new investment, and become less dependent on a single partner. Carney warned that global instability and shifting U.S. policies are creating uncertainty for Canadian industries and workers. He pledged to strengthen Canada’s economy and reduce reliance on the U.S. moving forward. 

Trump Team Investigations 

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, This What Trump Meant by “My Way” — Power, Control, Darkness, and Evil?, Thom Hartmann, shown at right along with the cover of his latest book, thom hartmann newApril 20, 2026. How power, money, and ideology converged to reshape American democracy into something darker and more dangerous…

People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations, and is being hartmann report newembraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

thom hartmann last american presidentIn fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.— Unions hurt and rip off their members.— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.— Social Security is going broke.— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.

This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Person Playacting as President May Be Getting Addicted to Snuff Films, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 20, 2026. Even before WSJ posted this story about the guy legally occupying the position of President, I had gotten worried that Donald Trump is growing addicted to snuff films.

I had been planning on a post describing how Trump really spends his time, in part as a way to convey that he’s really not acting in the role of President. And the WSJ story demonstrates what it looks like for a longtime Trump-whisperer like Josh Dawsey (along with Annie Linksey, who’s doing a lot of WSJ’s Iran reporting) to try to fit Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior into the conceit that he actually is acting as President.

To be sure, legally he is the President.

That’s why people continue to allow him to do whatever he wants, no matter if it destroys the world economy, the metonymy for the state in the form of the White House, or lives of Americans, all the while managing him in an attempt to limit the damage investing power in such an unfit man can do.

The entire [Journal] story is hung onto events that transpired during the rescue of two airmen shot down in Iran and the visceral fear Trump has — which I noted he repeatedly expressed in his January NYT interview — that he’ll suffer a catastrophic failure like Jimmy Carter did in Operation Eagle Claw.

It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours. The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.

“If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” Trump had said in March. “What a mess.” [my emphasis]

Trump made the reference to Jimmy Carter quoted by WSJ at the GOP retreat in Doral on March 11, two months and a new war after he obsessed about it publicly with NYT in conjunction with the Venezuelan invasion.

WSJ used that visceral fear to explain why Trump kept screaming at everyone.

After introducing Trump’s visceral fear and the screaming, the next paragraph – ¶4 – cites a single Senior Administration Official describing unnamed aides, plural, keeping Trump out of the room as the administration put together a rescue mission.

Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said. [my emphasis]

Forty-some paragraphs later, WSJ returns to the detail that they’ve excluded the Commander-in-Chief from the room, this time described as the Situation Room and filled with details as to who else was not present (JD Vance, who serves as President when Trump is incapacitated, and Susie Wiles, whose job it is to manage access to the President), but were instead participating by phone. It did not explain who was actually there in the Situation Room or who was enforcing the decision, much less who had made the decision, that Trump would not be in the room, as he had been for the Venezuela operation and the initial Iran attack.

For 24 hours over Easter weekend, Trump’s team dialed into the Situation Room: Vice President JD Vance from Camp David, Wiles from her home in Florida. They received almost minute-by-minute progress reports, of the military entering Iran, the rescue planes getting stuck in the sand, the efforts to distract the Iranians. They called the last airman by a code name.

Trump wasn’t included in the meeting but received updates by phone.

Trump demanded the military go rescue the airmen, the operation was (I’d say, unsurprisingly, but several such operations have been run from a curtained room at Mar-a-Lago) run from the Situation Room, but Trump wasn’t there. As WSJ said in ¶4, shortly after describing that Trump had been screaming for hours, aides kept him out of the Situation Room, but they “updated” him.

By phone, it says.

That line, “by phone,” is rather suggestive. Someone did have Trump’s phone in hand during this period. Trump’s phone did tweet during the rescue period, attacking Jonathan Karl and NYT, making one racist attack, and posting several charts from a poll of how many in the noticeably smaller crowd that went to CPAC this year thought he was the greatest President evah, a hint about how they kept the Commander-in-Chief occupied while others oversaw an insanely risky military operation (they also had him sign an illegal Executive Order on NCAA sports, something else I suspect Stephen Miller does to administer dopamine hits giving Trump the illusion of power). That stuff – what Trump was doing while others were running the operation – was not mentioned by Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey.

The claim that Trump got updates by phone materially conflicts with a different WSJ story linked in the piece, which provided a very detailed description of the rescue just the day after it happened.

That story describes Karoline Leavitt, not known for her candor, claiming that Whiskey Pete went to the Oval Office to brief Trump directly.

Trump was in the Oval Office on Friday and Saturday to receive constant updates from Hegseth, Leavitt said. Hegseth repeatedly visited the White House to deliver in-person briefings.

That earlier story was published during a period when Leavitt and Steven Cheung were franticly attempting to explain away Trump’s silence during the rescue, in part by blaming those who wondered if Trump had had a medical incident, rather than Trump’s own communication team, of being at fault for Questions Being Raised about Trump’s fitness.

God Bless Steven Cheung. Trump had been in the Oval Office (as people noted, the Marine Guard never left his post), but the work occurring at the White House during the rescue was happening somewhere else, with Trump deliberately kept, by persons unknown, far away. It turns out, in the period when everyone was wondering about Trump’s fitness, someone had decided to exclude the Commander-in-Chief from participating in Commander-in-Chief stuff, because his his presence (described as “impatience” but incorporating all that screaming) would be unhelpful.

WSJ only indirectly addresses the elephant in the room about that phone, which Josh Dawsey wrote more directly about on January 12, 2021 during public discussions of invoking the 25th Amendment; when Trump is confronting failure, his aides often fail (as they did when Trump almost got Mike Pence killed on January 6) to prevent him from posting the most dangerous shit: “he has made risky pronouncements without input from his national security team,” WSJ described, without considering the legal and security ramifications of all that.

WSJ’s concerns about Trump’s tweets focused on the third post after the rescue ended, the “Praise be to Allah” post, and the later one threatening to destroy Iranian civilization.

WSJ ignored the taunting post during the rescue, boasting that an attack on Tehran had “terminated” “Many of Iran’s Military Leaders” and posting a picture of a spectacular attack — did Whiskey Pete share this with him during his updates? — and another post shifting his claimed deadline for compliance, “Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” WSJ also said nothing of the first two posts Trump posted after the rescue, both of which likely reflect the full content of briefings Trump got after the fact, the first announcing the rescue and the second which surely provided more detail (that the rescued officer was a Colonel and the operation took seven hours) than the military wanted to provide at that early hour.

Let’s be honest: if Trump had been fully briefed during the operation, he would have disclosed important details, as he did immediately after it ended.

As a result, WSJ dodges the full import of all these tweets, treating select ones as agency – a “chest-thumping president” making an “audacious gamble” – rather than reflecting Trump’s fundamental unfitness.

Six hours later, the chest-thumping president was back with another audacious gamble to loosen Iran’s grip on its most powerful point of leverage, the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he blasted on social media Easter morning from the White House residence, adding an Islamic prayer to the post.

A president who thrives on drama is bringing an even more intense version of his unorthodox, maximalist approach to a new situation—fighting a war. He is veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.

At the same time, the president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.

The bullshit descriptions that package up Trump’s actions as agency — Trump presided over both the Afghan War and individual campaigns in his first term, after all, when he had more competent babysitters; his “grappling” about how badly things could go wrong has not been behind the scenes, it is public, and his concerns about personal failure pointedly ignores the biggest things that are going wrong; Trump is not losing focus, he in fact really would prefer to spend most of his time building things, as a WaPo story laid out and as was also obvious from that NYT interview, when Leavitt used the White House renovation to distract Trump from precisely the debilitating fear that WSJ makes the cornerstone of this story.

President Trump

You know, they had — they had a — they had a sandstorm. Did you know that? And they decided to go forward. We would go back, and let’s hit it three days later. They wanted to go forward, and they said, keep going. Helicopters don’t work well in the sand.

Karoline Leavitt

Sir, do you want to show them the renovations?

President Trump

Yeah, let’s go, come on. We’ve had enough. Nice setup, right?

Karoline Leavitt

Two hours.

There are other layered lies in this piece, none more telling than the discussion of how Trump allowed Iran to shut down Hormuz in the first place.

The strait has been a particular source of frustration. Before the U.S. went to war, Trump told his team that Iran’s government would likely capitulate before closing the strait, and that even if Tehran tried, the U.S. military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Some of the president’s advisers were caught off guard that tanker traffic would grind to a halt so quickly after the bombing began, according to a person in contact with the White House.

Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable. He has publicly oscillated between demanding support from allies to help open it and insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need or want military assistance.

It again cites reporting from other WSJ reporters describing Dan Caine warning about Hormuz but Trump, operating from a confidence based on watching snuff films of the Venezuela invasion, was sure there would be a military solution to any Iranian effort to shut down Hormuz. WSJ describes not that Trump had purged all the advisors, including Nate Swanson, who had warned of such issues before the war, but simply records unqualified people who were surprised by things without explaining that Trump has chosen to surround himself with underqualified people. And rather than describing Trump’s cavalier failure to ward off threats to Hormuz as a failure far greater than ones Jimmy Carter made, WSJ instead describes Trump as “marveling” and expressing “irritation,” measuring the effect of a preventable global catastrophe only in terms of Trump’s volatile mood.

Here’s how Tufts Professor Dan Drezner treated all this, as if it really were a competent performance of Dick Nixon’s madman theory:

Belief in the madman theory. “When one adviser later asked him about [one of his belligerent tweets], he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand…. top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate. What Trump really wanted, advisers said, was to scare the Iranians, and to end the conflict.”

Drezner does not account for the levels of filtering going on: Trump is a conman attempting to make his outburst look smart and strong after the fact, the advisor is peddling that explanation as if it were true to WSJ, “top aides,” including Florsheim-wearing Marco Rubio, then took the unfortunate outburst as if it might have a function. And foreign policy expert Drezner himself fits this into one of five characteristics of what he calls Trump’s “leadership,” placing it into the measure of history and expertise.

Drezner characterizes this as “defects in decision-making,” rather than the absence of any kind of rational decision-making at all, at least from Trump.

The most rational decision-making described in the WSJ story, after all, was the decision by some as-yet unidentified person to remove the Commander-in-Chief from any operational control over an operation that only Trump could authorize, a decision executed outside the physical presence of the Vice President or Chief of Staff.

This story reflects an entire economy, from the conman wailing, to aides spinning wildly, to journalists retaining access, to categorization of an unprecedented danger using existing scholarly doctrine, that still treats Trump as a rational agent here.

With all that said, here’s what I would have described had the WSJ not published this story first.

How does Trump spend his time?

Corruption. Trump spends a great deal of his time, perhaps his primary focus, finding ways to milk his position for personal or familial gain, and until we learn who is profiting off inside knowledge of his market-manipulating tweets about Iran, that may extend to his erratic comments laid out here.

Bunker-ballroom. He spends a lot of time planning to build things and it increasingly seems like his aides [to] view construction as a less dangerous pursuit for the old man than almost anything else he tries. They may be right.

Cons. The conman spends a lot of time pitching journalists and the WSJ describes he does this outside any intervention from his staff: “Trump would joke with Leavitt that he had talked to a reporter and made big news, but she would have to wait and see what it was.” When WSJ says he didn’t consult with aides before doing this, it glosses the extent to which an entire press corps reconstructs Trump’s abject bullshit so as to convey it as some kind of plan.

None of those things fulfill normal actions of a President. Rather, they are the actions of an old man retreating into the hobbies he has loved his entire life, that which he knows best: cons, construction, and corruption.

Which brings me to the snuff films.

We learned about the snuff films – films like that spectacular one Trump posted during the rescue attempt – from this important NBC story. In lieu of briefing Trump on the real state of his invasion of Iran, his aides show him a daily snuff film, the most spectacular greatest hits DOD can create.

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.

That report is echoed in this WSJ story.

Trump was shown clips every morning of stunning explosions across the Iranian terrain. Advisers said Trump remarked to them how impressive the military was, seeming in awe of the scale of bombs.

But much else in that earlier NBC story, including the use of positive polling and Trump’s outreach to hear what sycophants say about him, reflects on what occurred during the rescue. That includes restricting real operational discussions to a smaller group.

One of the U.S. officials said that while discussions about sensitive military operations are limited to a smaller group, Trump continues to solicit input broadly and encourages every participant to weigh in candidly.

The important detail, though, is that the snuff films in Venezuela (which built on the snuff murderboat films, which DOD has resumed during the ceasefire, as well as the video from the inconclusive June attack on Iran’s nuclear sites) are what led Trump to ignore warnings Dan Caine gave, what led Trump to dismiss concerns about the Strait of Hormuz. Difficult questions about Iran’s nuclear facilities must have an easy answer because the sheer spectacle of the June strikes exuded power that has drowned out discussions of their fundamental failure to achieve any strategic objective. And to someone with a fragile grasp on reality, there may be little distinction between those real snuff films and the AI slop that Trump’s White House increasing disseminates.

This is a description of managing (and measuring success in terms of) a volatile old man’s moods, not of a President making decisions about how to benefit the country. His handlers resort to various tactics to manage his moods, whether that involves channeling his time into less destructive activities, finding increasingly ridiculous polling to make him feel better, allowing him unmonitored conversations with people who are sure to avoid real criticism, or — via some as yet unexplained means — excluding the Command-in-Chief from operations where his involvement and uncontrolled emotional outbursts would doom the mission.

And showing him snuff films, spectacular footage of the power he wields, which in this case led directly to the disastrous decision to let his desire for more snuff, his belief that that snuff equated to real power, overcome his pathological fear of failing like he believes Jimmy Carter did.

The New Republic, Investigative Commentary: Trump Library Saga Takes Dark Turn: Where Did Millions in Funding Go? greg sargentGreg Sargent, right, April 20, 2026. Four huge media conglomerates forked over $63 million in “settlements” earmarked for Trump’s presidential library. Democrats are trying to track that money—and the latest developments don’t inspire confidence.

Last year, four huge companies pledged tens of millions of dollars to help fund the creation of Donald Trump’s presidential library, a planned monstrosity in Miami that—in a perfect Trumpian twist—may also double as a hotel. The companies—ABC; Paramount; Meta; and X, formerly Twitter—entered into the agreements with Trump to settle legal new republic dailycases he’d brought against them which experts had dismissed as dubious.

After the companies agreed to these shakedowns—sorry, settlements—the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last September. Since then, Senate Democrats have been asking: What happened to the money?

Now there’s been an important new turn in this saga. The four companies have provided fresh information to Senate Democrats in written responses to their questions. For these Democrats, those responses—obtained by The New Republic—raise more questions than they answer.

In these formal replies, all four companies confirmed that they did pledge that money to Trump’s library—itself a notable development. More importantly, however, the Democrats say the responses reveal that the money is still largely unaccounted for.

“Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are, or where they will go,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who’s taken the lead in tracking this money, tells me in a statement.

In a new letter to Trump, Warren and several other Democrats raise fresh questions about the replies and the money. They label the situation “deeply troubling,” particularly given Trump 2.0’s “vast tide of corruption and self-enrichment.”

Indeed, the library saga combines many of the worst elements of Trump’s imperial presidency all in one project: his use of lawsuits to extort private entities for tribute, his garishly awful decorative and architectural taste, and his Nero-scale megalomania.

To wit: Trump recently released a video rendering of the library that displayed a soaring skyscraper with the word “TRUMP” at the top in huge letters, massive screens playing his world-historical speeches, and enough Mar-a-Lago chintz to make you go blind. Trump recently declared that his library-and-hotel will outclass Barack Obama’s presidential library, which Trump derided as a “very unattractive building that’s seriously late and seriously over budget.”

Clearly, Trump wants the world to know that he can erect a presidential skyscraper that’s bigger and more awesome than any presidential building that Obama erects.

But we digress: Let’s talk about the money! The companies all settled lawsuits with Trump after his 2024 victory: Paramount for $16 million over a claim of fraudulent editing by CBS; Meta for $25 million and X for around $10 million over supposed censorship of Trump; and ABC for $15 million over alleged defamation. Experts criticized the lawsuits as weak and denounced the settlements as akin to extortion payments.

Under those settlements, the companies donated virtually all that money to the library project, totaling at least $63 million. But then the fund where most of that money appeared to be directed—the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund—was dissolved by Florida officials amid the failure to file a required annual report.

At that point, The Washington Post scooped that Democrats sent letters to the companies demanding information on what they knew about the whereabouts of their donations. Trump had established another, separate organization—the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc.—as a tax-exempt nonprofit also created to raise money for the library. The Democrats also demanded to know if the funds had been redirected to that foundation.

Now those companies have all responded to the Democrats. ABC is the only company that shared any detail: It said it received word that the foundation has been authorized by the IRS as a nonprofit and that ABC expects to direct the money there. Paramount, Meta, and X confirmed their initial payments—but added nothing about the money’s current or intended whereabouts, the latter two citing confidentiality agreements in settlements with Trump.

Warren says this leaves the location of most or all of the $63 million unknown. “Tens of millions of dollars are unaccounted for, and the American people are left completely in the dark,” Warren tells me.

In their new letter to Trump, Warren and the other Democrats point out that at minimum, three of the companies “do not know or are not willing to share” information about the location of the money. They ask: Why was the initial fund dissolved? Did it contain the money when that happened? Why the need for a second organization—the foundation—on top of the fund? How much of the money is now in the foundation? Does Trump control this money?

It is possible, of course, that it all could prove legally aboveboard. If what ABC says is true, then the foundation has received IRS approval, and at least one company (ABC) plans to direct its money there. That could end up happening, and the three other companies could do the same.

But even if one grants those possibilities, the outstanding unknowns are glaring and the situation demands ongoing congressional scrutiny. “There remain a number of serious unanswered questions,” David Leviss, a former veteran House oversight lawyer now in private practice, tells me. “The congressional oversight process is well-suited and historically appropriate to address these types of issues.”

Molly Clafin, a lawyer who represents people targeted in congressional investigations, points out that without more transparency, there’s no way to know whether the transfer to the foundation is even happening. “It should be simple enough for the Trump team to show the legal transfer,” Clafin says.

There are also questions about what will happen even if the cash ends up with the foundation. “Is the money truly going to be used for the library?” Clafin asks. “Does Trump himself control the foundation?”

Recall that when Trump accepted a $400 million luxury plane gift from Qatar, he then promised to donate it to his library, which raised questions about whether he’d simply help himself to it once out of office. Warren tells me she’s concerned that the same might happen with the library cash: “Why should Americans trust that this money isn’t going straight into Trump’s pockets?”

If these payments do end up funding the library, they’re still deeply problematic in another way. Consider that these companies are contributing to a triumphal monument to Trump’s supreme greatness. By bringing frivolous lawsuits as president, Trump is inviting big corporations to choose between reaching “settlements” with him that put them on his good side—or not settling, which does the opposite. This, even as he’s in office and deciding on their business before the government, such as mergers and other matters.

“Even if the money doesn’t go to the president personally, he’s soliciting large amounts for something that’s very important to him—from companies that are enormously affected by his decisions,” government ethics expert Noah Bookbinder told me. “This creates a massive ethical problem.”

In this sense, the whole system of fundraising for presidential library nonprofits—which aren’t required to disclose donors—is ripe for abuse. Bill Clinton faced scrutiny over library donations during his presidency. This shouldn’t be allowed except under very limited circumstances: Warren has introduced legislation barring all presidents from raising money for presidential-library funds while in office, mandating disclosure of big donors, and barring personal use of the money.

Throw in Trump’s intimidation lawsuits and it all gets still worse: This is yet another way he’s turned the presidency into a giant Bribe Delivery System. Trump family members are launching a $500,000-per-member club enabling the ultrawealthy to channel cash their way. Trump’s donor-funded ballroom, and the family’s crypto deals and overseas real estate projects, create still more avenues for buying favoritism from the president. His threats against law firms and universities have incentivized them to fork over enormous sums to Trump’s pet causes.

“He’s constantly coming up with new ways to pay tribute to him,” Bookbinder said.

Whether the loot ends up in Trump’s pocket or goes to causes he pretends to care about, these are functionally extortion payments. They will continue to unfold in plain sight. They are already growing increasingly normalized. As for who can put a stop to this lunacy—well, only we can.Greg Sargent

Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.

More On Iran War

ny times logoNew York Times, News Analysis: The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World, Damien Cave, April 20, 2026. The Asia-Pacific was hit hard and quick by the war in Iran and its energy bottlenecks. Scenes of crisis there indicate that problems are multiplying and spreading.

When the war in Iran started on Feb. 28, Asia expected to see serious, gradual impacts from losing access to a huge portion of the world’s oil and gas. But the conflict’s economic and social impacts have hit the region harder and faster than officials and experts expected.

Many countries across the Asia-Pacific are experiencing sudden jolts of disruption that they are struggling to manage, with some comparing the crisis’s breakdowns and scope to the Covid pandemic.

Even if there is a peace deal soon, the future of this industrious region that has driven global economic growth for decades will likely include months of canceled flights, surging food prices, factory pauses, delayed shipments and empty shelves for products long considered quick and easy to buy worldwide: plastic bags, instant noodles, vaccines, syringes, lipstick, microchips and sportswear.

Collectively, according to many officials and experts, if the war’s strangling of commercial traffic through the Middle East lasts for even a few more weeks, and uncertainty lingers, shortages could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession.

Countless businesses are verging on insolvency. Governments are taking on enormous debt to slow inflation. By year’s end, in the most dire projections by the United Nations and others, millions across Asia could be pushed into poverty.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Distracted, Andrew Egger, right, andrew eggerApril 20, 2026. Well, here we are again: The ceasefire in Iran is once again in a state of near-total collapse. The U.S. military hasn’t yet resumed its bombing campaign of the Iranian mainland, but the danger in the Strait of Hormuz is as bad as ever.

After claiming Friday that the strait was now open and letting a trickle of ships through, Iran abruptly reversed course Saturday, firing on at least two merchant vessels and insisting the strait would remain closed as long as America maintained its military blockade of Iran’s ports. Then, yesterday, U.S. forces fired on and seized an Iranian cargo ship that they said had tried to run their blockade—causing Iran to announce it was pulling out of the second round of Islamabad peace talks, which were scheduled to begin today. Oil prices, which on Friday had fallen by more than $10 a barrel on Iran’s claims of an open strait, rocketed back upward, now hovering back around $100.

In one sense, we’re right back where we were last month—the strait closed, Iran intransigent, Donald Trump threatening. But that undersells the damage. A cancer patient who goes under the knife and wakes to discover they couldn’t remove the tumor isn’t likely to be comforted that at least the doctors stitched him up properly. The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is becoming a global economic catastrophe, and it’s clear Trump is running out of options to compel Iran to stop throttling it.

The White House has suggested two ways this all might end, and neither seems particularly close to materializing. Trump still seems to think he can bully the Iranians into submission, even though his strategy of making theatrical threats and then backing down at the last second has already failed to accomplish this four or five times. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps announcing confidently that Iran’s weapons stockpiles are all but depleted. But the Pentagon has quietly acknowledged the hollowness of this story: “Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. James Adams noted in a budget memo to the House Armed Services Committee last week. “In addition, Iran poses a persistent threat to freedom of navigation through the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman, including retaliatory seizures of commercial ships and the threat of mining the Strait of Hormuz.”

But it isn’t just that Trump low on options: More and more, he barely seems to understand what’s going on in the conflict at even a basic layman’s level. His pronouncements—whether they be threats, triumphant announcements, or even just descriptions of what’s underway in the strait—resemble reality less with every passing day.

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Sometimes this is a good thing: His genocidal threats that “a whole civilization will die tonight” never materialized. But other times it’s simply an alarming reminder of how fitfully and flightily the president is monitoring his own war. “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Trump posted Friday morning. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!” He was so confident the end was in sight that he was already throwing the conflict in Iran and the proxy fight in Lebanon on his fanciful list of eight wars he’s “solved”: “It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and [Lebanon] will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE!” he posted. None of these statements had the slightest bearing on reality.

One other weekend example of Trump’s unaccountably gauzy grasp of the conflict bears pointing out. In announcing America’s blockade of Iran last week, Trump claimed that the United States would be “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” In the following days, U.S. leaders hastened to clarify that America was not blockading the entire strait—which would have violated international law—but was merely blockading Iran’s ports.

But somehow nobody managed to get this simple and crucial fact to lodge in the president’s tortuous mind. “Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait,” Trump posted Saturday, “which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it. They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day!”

The hour is growing very late. Already the political damage is irreversible for Trump and his party: Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged Sunday that domestic average gas prices would likely not return below $3 a gallon until 2027. (Today gas is north of $4.) And the simple fact causing it all—the same as it’s been all along—is that Trump, having chosen to kick the Iranian hornet’s nest, remains at a loss for what to do next. We’ve known he had no plan for months. But what’s becoming shockingly apparent now is how little he’s even paying attention to the problem.

ny times logoNew York Times, Vance Heads to New Talks With Iran. At Stake: Peace and His Own Standing, Tyler Pager, April 20, 2026. The vice president is again center stage, after abruptly leaving the first round of high-level Iranian peace talks without an agreement.

JD Vance will try again.

The vice president is scheduled to lead an American delegation back to Islamabad, Pakistan, this week for another round of in-person negotiations with Iran after failing to secure a deal just over a week ago.

Whether the talks even occur seems in dispute. Hours after President Trump announced the trip on Sunday, Iranian state media said that Tehran had not yet agreed to any such meeting. Later, Mr. Trump announced that a Naval destroyer had attacked an Iranian-flagged cargo ship that tried to skirt the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz.

The conditions for a new round of diplomacy were, at best, imperfect, and the stakes for a second failure high, both for ending a war that neither side seems to want to prolong and for Mr. Vance himself.

As a two-week cease-fire nears an end, and as Mr. Vance prepared for another long journey to Pakistan, Mr. Trump again threatened maximalist consequences if Iran failed to agree to his terms.

“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” the president wrote on social media on Sunday. “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Pakistan? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

While Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will also be at the talks, Mr. Vance is center stage, tasked with finding a way out of a war that is increasingly unpopular with Americans and that has continued to weaken the global economy and the vastly complex energy supply chain. It is also a conflict that Mr. Vance told Mr. Trump, during deliberations on whether to attack, could be seen as a betrayal to loyal voters who did not want more wars. He has nonetheless defended it publicly

Mr. Vance spent 21 hours in Pakistan last weekend negotiating with the Iranians, only to walk away with no deal. Allies and adversaries alike say that if he is unable to make any progress this time, it will be the latest political setback, as the world watches, for a man who wants to succeed Mr. Trump.

U.S. Tariffs, Inflation, Jobs, Economy

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Administration to Begin Refunding $166 Billion in Tariffs, Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, April 20, 2026. The government will debut a system to repay importers two months after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs at the heart of the president’s trade policy.

When President Trump unveiled his sprawling global tariffs last spring, he boasted that they would generate windfall profits and “make America wealthy again.”

But after suffering a significant Supreme Court defeat, Mr. Trump is about to pay the money back.

The Trump administration on Monday is set to take its first steps toward returning more than $166 billion collected from tariffs that were struck down in February. Just over a year after imposing many of the duties, the government is expected to begin accepting requests for refunds, surrendering its prized source of revenue — plus interest.

For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president’s trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers.

By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs. In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court’s ruling.

But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump’s policies — including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought — are not able to apply for direct relief.

The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout.

Many business owners said they weren’t sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump’s stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds.

Melkon Khosrovian, the co-founder of Greenbar Distillery in Los Angeles, prepared for the refund process by readying documents and registering on the new government refund portal. Mr. Trump’s duties had been a “nightmare” for his distillery, he said, which requires foreign-grown ingredients like vanilla, nutmeg, juniper berries, coffee, tea and hibiscus.

Mr. Khosrovian, a participant in We Pay the Tariffs, a coalition of small businesses that have opposed the president’s policies, admitted he didn’t have high hopes that he would see a refund anytime soon. His company had paid nearly $100,000 in tariffs that are now deemed illegal.Editors’ PicksEven Michael Jordan Will Sit Down to Talk About This Basketball Legend7 Ways to Turn a Can of Tuna Into Lunch (or Even Dinner)The Performances That Changed Their Lives

“We’re thinking we might get it back, we might not get it back,” he said. “It feels like a very opaque process.”ImageThe outside of a Costco store with traffic cones in the parking lot.More than 3,000 businesses, including Costco, sued the federal government in a bid to secure tariff refunds. Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which manages the tariff refund process, declined to make officials available for an interview.

At the heart of the matter is the ever-changing slate of so-called reciprocal tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed last year using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. No president before him had ever used the 1977 law to apply tariffs, prompting the Supreme Court to rule against Mr. Trump in February. The decision ended Mr. Trump’s most nimble and potent trade power, which he had used for a vast array of purposes — from fighting illegal drugs to protecting political allies abroad.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

While the government has lost trade cases in the past — and has been forced to refund money as a result — the repayment process now awaiting Mr. Trump is unlike any in recent history. By the administration’s own count, there were more than 330,000 importers by March that had paid IEEPA duties on more than 53 million entries.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justicesupreme court building

One First, Legal Commentary: Chief Justice Roberts and the Clean Power Plan, Steve Vladeck (Georgetown Law Center professor), stephen vladeck resizedright, April 20, 2026. Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.

Welcome back to “One First,” a newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks.

Every Monday morning, I’ll be offering an update on goings-on at the Court (“On the Docket”); a longer introduction to some feature of the Court’s history, current issues, or key players (“The One First ‘Long Read’”); and some Court-related trivia. If you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one—and upgrading to a paid subscription if your circumstances permit:Subscribed

Back in February, I wrote about the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unsigned, unexplained February 2016 rulings blocking President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” and how they ushered in what might be called “the modern emergency docket.” In my earlier post, I raised a series of questions about what had led the Court to do something that, in 2016, was completely unprecedented (blocking an executive branch program then under review in the lower courts), and whether the justices had any idea of the Pandora’s Box they were opening. As I wrote, “because the Court didn’t write then, and hasn’t explained itself since, we’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period).”

It turns out, thanks to some truly remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak for the New York Times, that we didn’t have to wait quite that long. On Saturday, Kantor and Liptak published 16 pages of (leaked) internal memoranda from six of the justices providing a window into how and why the Court did what it did on February 9, 2016. And the memos are, at least to me, a remarkable combination of eye-opening and sadly unsurprising. As I explain below, I think there are at least five significant takeaways from these materials—none of which paint the Court in an especially flattering light. And at the heart of most of them is Chief Justice Roberts.

Behind the scenes, Roberts led the charge for the Court to blaze a new trail—relying on statements outside the record; invoking the wrong standard for the kind of relief the applicants sought; failing to even acknowledge the irreparable harm the government (and the environment) would suffer from the Court intervening; and pushing back aggressively when Justices Breyer and Kagan both urged a compromise that should have accounted for his ostensible concerns. I’ve suggested before that the real acceleration of the Court’s modern emergency docket behavior can be traced to 2018, right around when Justice Kavanaugh succeeded Justice Kennedy. But in the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes.

Much more on that below, but first, the (other) news.On the Docket

Although the justices made plenty of news outside the Court (more on that in a moment), it was a pretty quiet week for the Court’s formal output. The only set of orders from the full Court were housekeeping orders relating to the April argument session (which starts later this morning); and there was a single ruling on the merits docket—with Justice Thomas writing for an effectively unanimous Court in allowing Chevron to remove a particular climate change suit from state court to federal court. (If you’re curious about the details, see the footnote at the end of this parenthetical.)¹

Off the bench was a different story. On Monday, Justice Jackson delivered the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School, titled “Equity and Exigency: A First-Principles Solution for the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket.” As you might imagine, Justice Jackson was quite critical of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications, especially over the past 14 months. And although she did not call any of her colleagues out by name, she was unsparing in her criticisms of how the Court, almost entirely in rulings that have divided the Republican appointees from the Democratic appointees, has gotten away from the role that “equity” is supposed to play in all emergency relief—in a manner that has allowed the Court to minimize, if not entirely ignore, the real-world harms its rulings have imposed. More than just a critique, Jackson also made a specific proposal—that the Court should formalize a two-step process for resolving emergency applications, in which it balances the equities first, and evaluates the likelihood of success on the merits only after concluding that the equities would support intervention. There’s a lot to be said for such an approach, in my view (only the more so in light of Saturday’s developments).

And then on Wednesday, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a speech of his own at the University of Texas. Unlike Jackson’s surgical critique of the Court’s behavior, Thomas’s speech was a Jeremiad against … progressivism in general. Ostensibly tied to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas argued, repeatedly, that such a political view “requires of the people a subservience and weakness” that is “incompatible” with the Constitution. (The speech is worth watching; I’m not quite doing justice to his disdain for what people like me believe.)

I’m not at all surprised to hear that Justice Thomas believes all of these things. But it’s pretty striking that he used such a rare public platform not to articulate or defend some particular interpretive philosophy or methodological approach to the Constitution, but to launch a series of thinly veiled broadsides at, let’s just say it, the modern Democratic Party. That’s not a defense of a particular set of legal principles by someone who is lionized on the right for his principles; it’s demonizing the left. It’s his right to say all of these things, but … ugh.

More On U.S. Governance, Pollitics, Elections

 

jonathan v last jvl triad logo
Shown above, President Trump flanked by Vice President JD Vance at left and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.Shown above, President Trump flanked by Vice President JD Vance at left and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Second Coming? Jonathan V. Last, April 20, 2026. We know who the Republican nominee will be in 2028 . . . if he wants it.

We can already see the contours of 2028 on the Republican side. The GOP nominee is likely to be one of five people.

bulwark logo big shipDonald J. Trump (more on this in a minute)

JD Vance

Marco Rubio

Tucker Carlson

And the fifth? He’s my darkhorse pick to win. You’re going to love this . . .

Donald J. Trump Jr.  Let’s start with DJTJ and work backwards.

There have been a bunch of Republican primary polls over the past three months. Vance has been first in every one of them.

Want to guess who’s been second or third in every single one of them?¹ Donald Trump Jr.

He’s in double-digits in all but one of the polls and his head-to-head record against Rubio is 5–1–1.

donald trump jr book cover triggeredThis—for a guy who has been invisible in the news, has never run for office, and has barely even nodded in the direction of the White House.

That’s a good starting position. There is an appetite among a significant percentage of Republican voters to take a look at DJTJ. Unlike Eric, or Invanka, or any of the other Trump children, DJTJ, shown at right on a book cover, is a plausible candidate. Republican voters are interested in him.

But his position is even stronger than it looks.

If DJTJ were to run, he’d inherit the Trump political organization and lists. He’d probably be able to finagle access to Trump’s campaign war chest,² but even if he couldn’t, he’d have made enough money to self-fund.

DJTJ’s biggest advantage is that if he decides to run, Vance and Rubio will have their knees cut out from under them. Neither would be able to oppose him. A DJTJ candidacy would carry the explicit endorsement of Trump the Father, making it impossible for the vice president or secretary of state to contest the race without becoming un-personed. Challenging Don Jr. would turn them into enemies of the people.

Who could plausibly challenge Trump Junior? Tucker Carlson is the obvious answer.

Tucker pulls surprisingly small numbers when he’s included in the field. But he has his own media company and he’s one of the most gifted talkers on the planet. That’s also his liability. Tucker has a long list of positions he’s taken over the years. DJTJ is closer to a blank slate. Trump Junior is just a mascot for the MAGA lifestyle brand. As such, I suspect he’d be amenable both to the Trump base and to the anti-anti establishment types—or at least more amenable to them than Tucker would be.

I promise you that if the choice was Tucker or DJTJ, Fox and the Wall Street Journal editorial page would make their peace with Junior.

The only real question about a Trump Junior candidacy is whether he decides to run. If he does, he should be the overwhelming favorite.

Why would DJTJ run for president? We’ll talk about that in #3.

But let’s tick through the other four possibilities, first.

(1) Trump Sr. I still believe there is a > 0.00% chance he decides to seek a third term. The reasons are straight forward:

  • To step aside would be to relinquish control of the Republican party and invite intra-party criticism.
  • To lose control of the party would be to give up significant revenue streams.
  • He may be reluctant to test the limits of presidential immunity.³

And there is path. Trump could claim that (1) The Constitution really means only two consecutive terms and (2) He was cheated out of his consecutive term in 2020. You and I may find these arguments are ludicrous on their face, but I’d bet a fair sum of money that there are at least two votes on the Supreme Court to concur with them.

For Trump, the trick would be to get a primary result in the bag before the Supreme Court heard the inevitable challenge, because then Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch would be in the position of having to disenfranchise Republican voters who had already chosen Trump.

Would they create a third-term carveout for Trump? Probably not. But in a situation where, say, Iowa and New Hampshire had already given President Trump overwhelming majorities, what percentage chance would you give it?

JD Vance is shown with longtime Hungarian strongman Viiktor Orban On April 6, 2026, just before Orban and his party suffered massive defeats at the polls despite strong support from the Trump family, Vance and their allies, including Russia (Pool photo)..

JD Vance is shown with longtime Hungarian strongman Viiktor Orban On April 6, 2026, just before Orban and his party suffered massive defeats at the polls despite strong support from the Trump family, Vance and their allies, including Russia (Pool photo)

(2) Vance. His entire scheme relies on convincing Trump, Trump Jr., and Tucker not to run. Because JD Vance could not beat any of them.

The good news is that Vance has a long history of convincing more powerful people that he will be a faithful servant if they give him what he wants. So it’s entirely possible that Vance could sucker all three of those men by telling them that they don’t need to run because he’ll be their cat’s paw.

(3) Rubio. You and I remember when Rubio was a neocon. I’m not sure anyone else does. (Except for Tucker.) Republican voters are open to Rubio because most of them seem to have forgotten that he existed before 2017. I suppose that gives him a shot; but not a good one.

tucker carlson djt

(4) Tucker. If he runs, he should not be underestimated. 

Two Billion Reasons

Why would Donald Trump Jr. run for president?

The Center for American Progress estimates that the Trump family has seen its net worth balloon to $6.3 billion since January 20, 2025. That number includes lots of goodies: unrealized profits from the sale of various crypto holdings; the stock value of his media company.

In just cash and gifts, the Trump family’s total take is already more than $2 billion (and that doesn’t include Jared and Ivanka or Barron Trump). That’s a hard number, not a paper value.⁵ If the Trump family no longer occupies the White House and relinquishes its claim on the Republican party—thereby removing the possibility that it could return to the White House—does that money keep flowing based on the business genius of Don, Eric, Barron, and Jared?

Probably not.

Does this seem like a group of people who would willingly let go of revenue streams that are measured in the billions?

One last thing: If you were part of the Trump family and your concern was preserving revenue streams which depended on the credible possibility that you might become president of the United States, DJTJ is actually the hedged choice.

If President Trump runs for a third term and loses, suddenly the party is up for grabs. But if DJTJ were to run, even if he lost he would be the presumed front-runner for the 2032 election—buying the family another half decade in which to print money.

I have yet to find a compelling explanation of why this family would choose to give up the power to have money funneled to them by the billions, when all it requires is a Trump controlling the Republican party.

 

Before map in Virginia: Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 10 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 10 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create nine Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 11 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 11 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

After map in Virginia: Shown above is the Virginia map showing its 10 U.S. House Districts. Shown below is the map of the 10 districts if voters approve an unusual mid-decade reapportionment to create a liklihood, based on 2024 voting patterns, that the results in 2026 would create nine Democratic seats and one Republican seat, marked by red areas for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Democrats in Virginia's legislature approved the changes in reaction to Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere expected to create 10 new Republican seats in Texas alone by packing Democratic voters into a few gerrymandered districts.

ny times logoNew York Times, Big Names Wait in the Wings as Virginians Decide Their House Maps, Kate Zernike, April 20, 2026. With Virginians voting Tuesday to accept or reject redistricting, candidates from both parties await the voters’ judgment to decide whether — or where — to run for Congress.

Beth Macy, the best-selling author of books like “Dopesick,” about the struggles of Appalachia, had planned to test her contention that Democratic candidates could win back the House by talking and listening to rural voters.

But after Tuesday, if Virginia voters approve a wholesale redrawing of the commonwealth’s House districts, Ms. Macy will instead have to campaign mostly in college towns, talking and listening to well-off, well-educated people who are more likely to be readers of her books than their subjects. Her more immediate challenge will be fighting another Democrat in the primary for a newly drawn seat.

Ms. Macy is not the only candidate whose political fate swings on Tuesday’s vote. Several Democrats have declared that if voters approve the new map, then they will run in a district that does not yet exist. Such if-then candidates include a Mike-Pence-adviser-turned-Trump-scourge, a former Virginia first lady, an architect of the Democrats’ redistricting push and a former top deputy to the special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump.

Virginia voters are the latest to weigh in on a mid-decade redistricting war that President Trump started when he asked Texas Republicans last summer to redraw their state’s map to help his party stave off a Democratic takeover of the House. Since then, California voters approved a new map that could offset whatever gains Republicans made in Texas. Missouri legislators redrew their state to erase one Democratic seat, while North Carolina legislators redrew their already-gerrymandered map to try to grab a swing district now held by a Democrat.

The Democrats who control Virginia are asking voters to approve a map that could shift the Commonwealth’s delegation from a 6-to-5 Democratic advantage to a 10-to-1 rout. But the vote is expected to be close, as Republicans try to appeal to a sense of fairness in the electorate.

Waiting in the wings are candidates whose campaigns could be radically altered by the outcome.

If the new map prevails, Tom Perriello, a one-term Democratic congressman who lost his seat in the Tea Party wave of 2010, would have his comeback bid complicated by a competitive primary against Ms. Macy. (Both have been endorsed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger — in their existing districts.)

Then there are the Republicans: Ben Cline, the representative for the current Sixth District, lives in what would be the Ninth District in the new map. Morgan Griffith, the incumbent in the current Ninth, would find his house in the new Sixth. A neat swap isn’t possible; the proposed Ninth District, where Mr. Trump would have won 74 percent of the vote in 2024, is the only one the mapmakers in a legislature controlled by Democrats created as a sink for Republican voters.

MSNow Daily, Senate’s political vibe shift, A political vibe shift: The Senate is suddenly in play, Ebony Davis, April 20, 2026. For most of the 2026 cycle, Republicans have been all but certain they will hold the Senate after November.

msnow new logoThe confidence was structural. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the chamber. They have a favorable map: To win 51 seats, Democrats would need to hold all their current seats, flip North Carolina and Maine — and still win another two states that Trump carried by at least 13 points in 2024. The geography was so forbidding to Democrats that analysts with the Cook Political Report last August called the party’s path to a majority “herculean.”

Now, just over six months out from Election Day, the herculean suddenly seems plausible.

“There’s a storm coming,” Matt Rexroad, a Republican consultant, told MS NOW. “This is the time to hold what you’ve got, get good candidates and just try to hold on to the seats we have.”

MS Now, Political Commentary: In Michigan, Democratic contenders perform a 2024 autopsy of their own, Nnamdi Egwuonwu, April 20, 2026. At a party convention in Detroit, party leaders sparred over purity tests, kitchen-table politics and Gaza — and could not agree on a diagnosis.

msnow new logoDemocrats gathered here this weekend with a shared premise. “The path through 2028 runs through Michigan,” said Jocelyn Benson, the state’s leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate and sitting secretary of state.

What they couldn’t agree on was something thornier: why exactly they had lost it in 2024.

In the absence of a formal election autopsy from the Democratic National Committee — which opted against releasing its analysis of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss — leaders effectively performed one of their own at Michigan Democrats’ endorsement convention, prescribing solutions they hope will fuel victories in this fall’s senate and gubernatorial races and help the party retake the White House in 2028.

For some, the answer was straightforward: Democrats needed to meet voters where they are. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the current chair of the Democratic Governors Association and a potential 2028 contender, chided the party for letting “advocacy speak seep into our Democratic language.”

“Sometimes these terms make it feel like we’re talking down to people, like we’re talking at them instead of to them,” Beshear said. “If we want to be the party of the people, we’ve got to talk like we are people.”

Others declined to engage the question at all. Harris, appearing at the Democratic Women’s Caucus luncheon on Saturday, was characteristically measured. She answered two questions during a moderated conversation with state Sen. Sarah Anthony, and declined to refer to her 2024 performance during her brief appearance.

“We are going to win the midterms,” Harris said. “But it’s going to be very difficult.”

Some blamed purity tests for sowing division.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — widely considered a 2028 contender — called on Democratic voters who disagree with the party’s standard-bearers on a single issue to prioritize unity, warning that “our kryptonite is division.”

“I saw it with Kamala Harris. There were too many people that say ‘I don’t agree with her on everything,’” Booker said on Saturday. “Well, you may disagree with her on 10% of her views, but you let someone get in office who you disagree with on everything,”

Some rejected that view entirely, framing it as a deflection from the one issue they argued cost Democrats Michigan most: Gaza.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Distrusted, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 20, 2026. It was the afternoon of April 3. An American F-15E fighter jet had been shot down over Iran. The two airmen aboard were missing. The president of the United States was screaming at aides about Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis and how this incident could cost him the next election.

Meanwhile, the military was devising and then executing a complex and challenging operation to rescue the airmen. And in order to help make this operation a success, “Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”

bulwark logo big ship“Aides kept the president out of the room.” It’s worth dwelling for a moment on this remarkable detail from a Wall Street Journal report this weekend on the state of Trump’s psyche. Aides—presumably senior military officials in particular—believed that they had to exclude the president from the decision-making if it were to succeed.

And Trump was excluded, and the operation succeeded.

On the one hand, it’s good news that some of Trump’s subordinates understand, at least somewhat—the truth about the man and the dangers he poses. And it’s good news that they are willing and able—at least in some circumstances, and to some degree—to act on it.

In the short term, we can only hope that other aides will similarly act to mitigate their boss’s furious irresponsibility.

On the other hand, it’s an untenable situation when the president can’t be trusted to be part of—or even present at—a crucial national security operation.

So as soon as is practically possible, which probably means early in 2027, Congress should take responsibility and remove him from office.

The fact is that Trump is far more reckless, unstable, and detached from reality than Richard Nixon was in 1974, when some of his senior aides also acted to protect the nation from his worst impulses. They did their job, but it was a short-term expedient. Two more years of Nixon in office would have been dangerous. Today, two more years of Trump in office would be unacceptably dangerous—not least because many more of Trump’s subordinates than Nixon’s are pandering to his whims rather than checking them.

As it happens, Trump has also committed acts of corruption and abuse of power even more deserving of impeachment and removal than Nixon’s. In other words, Trump’s removal from office would be in the national interest and would serve the cause of justice.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we would be much better off if someone like Gerald Ford were vice president. But JD Vance isn’t deranged. And to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you have to go to impeachment with the vice president you have, not the vice president you might wish to have.

But it’s important to the country’s well-being to remove the unfit president we do have.

AROUND THE BULWARK

What Would You Give Up to Make American Health Care Better? It’s a question everyone—from executives to practitioners to consumers—needs to ask. But few seem willing to think about it, observes EZEKIEL EMANUEL.

Ukraine’s Second Miracle Year… The war isn’t won, but for the first time in years, outright victory seems possible, argues BRYNN TANNEHILL.

How Trump Could Weaponize Surveillance… On The Bulwark on Sunday, RYAN GOODMAN joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss how surveillance powers could be used—and abused—by the Donald Trump administration.

A Beautiful Victory in Hungary… On The Mona Charen Show, MONA CHAREN brings the Beg to Differ panel (BILL GALSTON, LINDA CHAVEZ, and DAMON LINKER) back for a reunion. They address Orban, Democrats, and Trump Jesus, among much else.

Eliot’s Return & Schrodinger’s Strait… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN welcomes ELIOT COHEN back from his sojourn in Spain to break down the latest jackassery from the administration. They discuss the current state of the Iran war, including the somehow simultaneously open and closed Strait of Hormuz, the ongoing negotiations, and how China factors into the conflict.

The gang returns to California for two live shows in May. Join Sarah, Tim, and Sam in San Diego on May 20 or in L.A. on May 21 for a night of politics and laughs, and a community built on good faith. Bulwark Live: California is sure to sell out—don’t delay.

Quick Hits

KASH IN JEOPARDY: If you’re a Trump mook in hot water, there’s one accepted best practice for making sure you don’t lose the boss’s favor: Immediately make a big show of the work you’re doing to punish his enemies.

Last week, we noted how Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been availing herself of this strategy. Now it’s FBI Director Kash Patel’s turn. Fresh off the Atlantic’s lacerating Friday report alleging an impulsive, binge-drinking, oversleeping FBI director who is “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy” and has good reason to be, Patel took to Fox News on Sunday to do some damage control: He says the Atlantic’s report is all a pack of lies, and he says he’s suing. And he tried to change the subject by tossing out some red MAGA meat of his own.

Fox’s Maria Bartiromo teed him up: “Every time I see President Trump, he says this repeatedly, that the election was rigged in 2020. . . . You’ve been at the FBI now fourteen months. Have you done anything about that? Do you have anything to tell us about that?”

“I am never going to let this go,” Patel said. “They tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system. And that is not something that I am going to allow on my watch. But you just have to remember. They built this disease temple over twenty and thirty years. We’ve got all the inference—I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. . . . We are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you it’s coming soon.”

The Department of Justice formally has a policy never to comment on ongoing investigations, which apparently has an out clause for those desperate enough for Trump’s praise.

TOO GOOD TO QUIT: Officially, the Defense Department considers the AI company Anthropic a klatch of radical-left psychos who are too dangerous and untrustworthy for their products to be allowed to touch the U.S. government in any way. But it turns out Uncle Sam is finding it tough to quit Claude. Axios reports that the National Security Agency—a component agency of the Department of Defense—is already using Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, despite the DoD’s ongoing claim in public and in court that the company is a “supply chain risk”:

The government’s cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon’s feud with Anthropic. . . . The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic’s tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security.

It’s unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities.

DUBAI TO ALL THAT: As the world grapples with the fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf states that have spent years cultivating close ties with Donald Trump are starting to call in favors. The Wall Street Journal reports that the United Arab Emirates has begun petitioning the White House about America backstopping a possible Persian Gulf financial crisis:

U.A.E. Central Bank Gov. Khaled Mohamed Balama raised the idea of a currency-swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials in meetings in Washington last week, the officials said. The Emiratis emphasized that they had so far avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but might still need a financial lifeline, the officials said.

The talks highlighted the U.A.E.’s concern that the war could inflict major damage on its economy and its position as a global financial hub, depleting its foreign reserves and scaring away investors who once saw it as a stable and secure place for their money. The conflict has damaged Emirati oil-and-gas infrastructure and shut off their ability to sell oil using tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, depriving it of a key source of dollar revenues.

Emirati officials haven’t made a formal request for a swap line, which would give the U.A.E. central bank inexpensive access to dollars to support its currency or shore up its foreign reserves in case of a liquidity crisis. In talks with the U.S. in recent days, they have portrayed the proposal as preliminary and precautionary, the U.S. officials said. 

More Global News

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Is Making China Great, Jennifer Rubin, right, jennifer rubin new headshotApril 20, 2026. His blunders inure to our chief rival. Donald Trump’s exaggerated, confusing, and downright false remarks about a deal with Iran only underscore the perception of the American president as untrustworthy and chaotic, if not insane.

A chief beneficiary of his embarrassing performance, coupled with his bullying, disastrous wars, and mindless tariffs, is China. Since Trump does not understand what makes America so powerful, he cannot comprehend that his actions destroy those advantages, thereby boosting China on the world stage.

contrarian logoNowhere is Trump’s penchant for self-owns more evident than in his determination to blow up alliances. Long ago, Trump alienated progressive leaders in Europe (e.g. Spain, UK, France), and now has become toxic to ones on the far rightwing. Politico reports that far-right French leader Marine Le Pen warned her party “to keep our distance” from Trump. Ouch. Not even the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany wants to get too close to him, observing that Vice President JD Vance’s visit “hung like millstones around [the former Hungarian leader’s] neck.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s biggest supporter in the EU, had enough when Trump attacked Pope Leo. “I find President Trump’s words towards the Holy Father unacceptable,” she said in unusually harsh terms. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.” Given that her voters abhor Trump and he has diminished the value of the U.S. as an ally (by launching tariffs, abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to Russia), her move after losing a recent referendum makes perfect political sense.

The deterioration in U.S. standing with the public in democratic countries, which in turn affects leaders’ decision-making, is breathtaking. When Politico pollsters asked if China or the U.S. was a more reliable partner, “57 percent of Canadians, 40 percent of Germans, and 42 percent of Britons said China — a sharp decline in America’s perceived trustworthiness,” Robert Kagan wrote recently. “In the past, America’s alliance relationships have survived waves of public disapproval because governments knew that whatever errors the United States made and however unpopular Washington might be, it remained fully committed to defending the order that protected them.” Well, not anymore.

And here is where China makes its move. When Trump snapped back at Meloni, declaring, “She’s the one who’s unacceptable,” China was quick to rush forward. At a meeting in China on economic and trade cooperation, Minister Wang Wentao told Italy’s delegation: “China is willing to work with Italy to further tap into the potential for cooperation.” He added, “Italy is expected to play a constructive role in promoting the healthy and stable development of China-European Union economic and trade relations.”

Time and again, China has shown finesse in capitalizing on Trump’s compulsion to offend and attack allies. Trump’s moves to bludgeon trading partners with tariffs and leave them to bear the brunt of a reckless, counterproductive war with Iran (then threatening NATO when Europeans refused to back him) opened the door for China to present itself as a model of stability in a world of Trumpian chaos.

The Iran war certainly intensified the shift in power and influence away from the U.S. Trump’s decision to move assets to the Middle East furthered China’s strategic objectives, ceding (at least temporarily) the U.S.’s ability to project force and offer protection for its allies. China did not lift a finger to push U.S. forces out of the Indo-Pacific.Subscribed

As Andrew P. Miller and Michael Clark explained, Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela and Iran have served “to deplete U.S. resources, tank the United States’ reputation, and raise fuel prices,” as well as force the U.S. to reposition personnel and material away from Asia. “With the U.S. military bogged down in the Middle East, China has a freer hand in East Asia,” they wrote. “China can present itself as a responsible peacemaker … [after] the United States has injured its reputation by acting unpredictably, betraying its allies, and starting a war that has done serious damage to the global economy.”

China’s position, if anything, will only improve after (and if) the fighting stops in the Middle East. China no doubt will eagerly offer to participate, if not lead, reconstruction in the region. Trump has given it a golden opportunity to make itself a more attractive partner than the United States, which caused the wreckage. Given resentment toward the U.S. over casualties and physical destruction, its deceptive promises (Regime change! Gulf allies will be fine!), and virulent anti-Muslim language, Middle East leaders may be quite receptive to China’s overtures.

Consider China’s advantage (facilitated by Trump anti-green energy derangement) in clean energy. Its ability to sell EV’s and solar panels throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa is now unmatched. “It’s not hard to imagine policymakers from across the developing world looking at examples like these and concluding that betting on Beijing isn’t actually the riskier option,” Bloomberg reports. Given Trump’s hostility to green energy and his bewildering international conduct, if “the only options are dependence on predictably mercantilist Beijing and on an erratic, self-centered and disruptive U.S., the choice is obvious.”

If there were any doubt as to the fallout from Trump’s war, diplomatic cables show the damage the war has done to U.S. relations with Muslim countries such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, Politico reports. “Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer.”)

In sum, Trump has never understood that U.S. power and prestige rely on our long-standing alliances, technological prowess, attractiveness as a destination for the best and the brightest, and moral stature. Whether isolating the U.S. from European allies, waging a reckless war, burning through U.S. munitions, ceding China the lead in green energy, undercutting our university scientific research system, chasing away immigrants, or destroying our moral authority (hence, our standing to pressure China on human rights), Trump has unilaterally disarmed the U.S. By jettisoning our inherent strengths, Trump boosts China, which never had those advantages.

When historians look back on this period to understand how the U.S. lost global preeminence to China, the question will not be “Who lost China?” but “Who lost superpower status to China?” We will pay the price for decades for an ignorant, mentally unwell U.S. president’s sabotage of America’s distinctive assets, stupidly abetted by cowardly Republicans.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Harm from Hormuz, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 20, 2026. Why we should still fear a global slump from Another week, another false all-clear.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. It appears increasingly obvious that the 20 percent of world oil supply that normally flows through it to world markets won’t be restored to normal anytime in the near future — quite possibly for many months. What will this disruption do to the world economy?

The International Monetary Fund raised the economic anxiety level last week with a projection of a global slowdown “in the shadow of war.” Yet while the IMF brings great expertise to this subject, I think that it is seriously underestimating how badly the global economy could be hit. In my view, a full-on global recession is more likely than not if the Strait remains closed for, say, another three months, which seems all too possible.

China FlagWhy do I think most forecasts are insufficiently alarmist? Because I believe that most economists are thinking about the Hormuz crisis the wrong way.

The usual approach, which appears to be how the IMF is making its projection, is to start with a guesstimate of the price of oil over the next year, then try to model the effects of that oil price trajectory on the world economy.

An immediate problem with this approach is that, as I argued a few weeks ago, there’s a huge range of uncertainty about the future price of oil if the war goes on, reflecting underlying uncertainty about both the severity of the disruption and the responsiveness of demand to prices. The following table shows various scenarios for the price of oil depending upon the level of disruption of supplies (low, medium or high disruption) and the responsiveness of demand to price (high, medium or low responsiveness). As you can see below, there is a wide range of price scenarios, from $99/bbl to $372/bbl: A screenshot of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

More generally, I would argue that the usual approach to modeling the effects of the Hormuz crisis goes about it the wrong way around. We should start with the physical supply constraints, not a guess about oil prices. One way or another, the world will have to burn significantly less oil in the near future than it would have if this war had been avoided. In the jargon of energy analysts, there will have to be large “demand destruction.” But how can oil demand be destroyed? Three ways:

· People can switch away from oil to other energy sources. But there’s very little ability to do that in the short run

· People can switch away from economic activities that use a lot of oil — e.g., they can take buses rather than driving. But for many, perhaps most, people, this option is very limited. For example, there are no buses in American suburbs and there is no substitute for oil to power emerging-market trucks.

· People can just do less overall — consume less, produce less. That is, we can reduce oil consumption by having a global slump. And demand destruction through a global slump can happen quickly.

What about the price of oil? In the face of a major loss in supply it must rise enough to cause an equal destruction of demand. Because there’s very limited ability to reduce the demand for oil through options 1 and 2 above, it appears inevitable that some (if not most) of the demand destruction required will happen through a global recession.

Indeed, as I’ll show in a minute, in past world oil crises a significant share of the demand destruction needed to match reduced supply was indeed “achieved” by having a global recession.

So if your guess about the world price of oil in the face of a large disruption of oil supply doesn’t look high enough to cause a global slump, you’re projecting too low a price.

What does history tell us?

The closest parallel I know to the Hormuz crisis is the oil shock that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (The 1979 Iran crisis was more complex, involving a lot of speculative price changes.) World oil supply fell only moderately after 1973, but it had been on a rapidly rising trend until then, so there was a large shortfall relative to that trend. In the chart below I show the natural log of world oil consumption with 1965 as the base year:

The percentage difference between two numbers is approximately the difference in their natural logs times 100. So this chart shows that the world was burning approximately 17.5 percent less oil in 1975 than it would have under the pre-1973 trend — a supply shock not too different from what we will see now if the Strait remains closed.

What happened to global economic growth? It also fell substantially relative to the pre-1973 trend — a shortfall of roughly 7.5 percent:

A comparable slowdown now would mean zero or negative world growth over the next two years, compared with the current IMF forecast of 3 percent. This would be a true global disaster.

OK, before everyone jumps off ledges, there are large potential mitigating factors this time around. First and foremost is the likelihood that a deal to reopen the Strait will in fact be struck. Basically, the U.S. can get the Strait reopened by loudly proclaiming victory while quietly accepting de facto defeat. All this will take is for Trump to accept reality, admittedly a hard climb.

Even if the Strait remains closed, the world economy is far less dependent on oil than it was in 1973. Here’s an index of world “oil intensity” — barrels of oil consumed per dollar of real GDP — with 1973=100:

This will reduce the impact of higher oil prices on world production — although the remaining oil demand may be less “compressible” than demand in 1973. So reducing consumption in the short run may be harder today than it was in the 1970s.

Finally, beyond the short run there are far more alternatives to oil now than there were in 1973. Given time — even a year or two — the world could make major shifts to other energy sources.

Despite these caveats, however, I would argue that most analysts are still far too sanguine about the effects of a prolonged Hormuz crisis. I don’t know how high the price of oil will go if the Strait remains closed, but it will, more or less by definition, have to go high enough to be seriously destructive.

ny times logoNew York Times, Starmer Will Tell Parliament He Was Kept in the Dark on Mandelson Vetting, Michael D. Shear, April 20, 2026. Prime Minister Keir Starmer will address British lawmakers on Monday after it emerged that Peter Mandelson, his onetime ambassador to the United States, was rejected for top security clearances.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer will face Parliament on Monday afternoon as his government reels from revelations that Peter Mandelson, his pick to be ambassador to the United States early last year, initially failed security vetting.

Mr. Starmer is expected to tell lawmakers that he was kept in the dark until last Tuesday about the recommendation by a specialist vetting team that Mr. Mandelson should not be granted “developed vetting” — the highest level of security clearance in Britain. That recommendation was overruled by officials at the Foreign Office, the prime minister’s office said last week, and no government minister was informed.

The Foreign Office has refused to reveal what the vetting team found that led it to recommend denying Mr. Mandelson’s clearances. A spokesman for Mr. Starmer on Monday said that the information would eventually be released but declined to say whether the prime minister had been told those details even now.

But the spokesman, who briefed reporters on the usual condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Starmer knew enough by Thursday night to fire Olly Robbins, the top civil servant at the Foreign Office, saying that he had lost confidence in him.

Allies of Mr. Robbins fought back over the weekend, saying that British law had prohibited him from disclosing the sensitive contents of the security review. In response, officials from the prime minister’s office released a statement late Sunday night arguing that “no law stops civil servants sensibly flagging U.K. security vetting recommendations.”

In Parliament, Mr. Starmer is expected to say that he did not intentionally mislead lawmakers over the past several months when he assured them that “full due process” had been followed during Mr. Mandelson’s appointment. The leaders of all of the opposition parties in Britain have called on the prime minister to step down, accusing him of lying to his colleagues and to the public.

Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, said on Friday that Mr. Starmer must resign, adding, “There can be no more cover-up, no more excuses, no more delays.”

Mr. Starmer has vigorously denied that he deliberately misled Parliament, saying that he was “furious” about the situation and calling the decision not to inform him about the vetting decision “unforgivable.”

The spokesman for the prime minister acknowledged on Monday that Mr. Starmer had inadvertently passed along information to lawmakers and to the public that was wrong. The spokesman noted that Mr. Robbins had had multiple opportunities over the course of months to prevent the misinformation by informing the prime minister but had not done so.Editors’ PicksEven Michael Jordan Will Sit Down to Talk About This Basketball Legend7 Ways to Turn a Can of Tuna Into Lunch (or Even Dinner)The Performances That Changed Their Lives

The clash between Mr. Starmer and Mr. Robbins is expected to continue on Tuesday, when Mr. Robbins has been called to appear before a committee of lawmakers.

U.S. History, Education

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 19, 2026 [Roots of U.S. Revolution], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 20, 2026. On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.

It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.

Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves. 

U.S. Culture, Sports, Entertainment, Media 

 

FIFA boss Gianni Infantino shows Donald Trump the World Cup trophy.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesFIFA boss Gianni Infantino shows Donald Trump the World Cup trophy.FIFA boss Gianni Infantino shows Donald Trump the World Cup trophy.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesFIFA boss Gianni Infantino shows Donald Trump the World Cup trophy.

The New Republic, Investigative Commentary: Trump and FIFA Have Already Broken the 2026 World Cup, Alex Shephard/, April 19, 2026. ICE fears, and astronomical costs are ruining the tournament before it begins—not that Trump or Gianni Infantino care.

new republic dailyTake a random moment from Trump’s second term—his inauguration, a state visit to the Middle East, a meeting of the preposterous “Board of Peace,” even just a random day when cameras are allowed into the Oval Office—and there is a decent chance that Gianni Infantino will be somewhere in the frame. From practically the moment Trump returned to office, the FIFA president has slavishly followed him, like an Italian golden retriever, practically everywhere.

Infantino likes to pitch himself as a partner, which to some extent he is: Beginning in June, he and Trump will put on the 2026 World Cup, the majority of which will take place in the United States. Together, the FIFA boss said when Trump was inaugurated, they will “make not only America great again, but also the entire world.” Over the last 15 months, Infantino has backed Trump as he has has gone to war with one World Cup qualifying nation (Iran), placed severe travel restrictions on several others, and threatened more or less the entire world, including World Cup co-hosts Mexico and Canada. In October, Infantino donned a red MAGA hat and pledged FIFA money to Trump’s offensive Gaza redevelopment plan; two months later, he handed him the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize,” which may be the most ridiculous prize in human history. Infantino has even started to talk like Trump: The World Cup, he said shortly before handing Trump the gilded FIFA Peace Prize in December, is “simply the greatest event that humanity, that mankind, has ever seen and will ever see.”

Trump and Infantino are two peas in a rotten pod: They’re both greedy, corrupt international leaders who lie to get what they want, flout the rules, and gouge everyday people. It’s no surprise, then, that their respective domains have come to resemble each other, too. Ostensibly a celebration of global diversity, harmony, and sport, the 2026 World Cup under Infantino has become a lot like the U.S. under Trump: chaotic, divisive, and increasingly derailed by scandal and conflict. What deeper level of hell awaits us when these two forces converge in June?

Infantino is fond of describing the World Cup in messianic terms. The tournament, he said in 2024, “is a unique catalyst ... for positive social change and unity.” In New Jersey, at least, the tournament is proving to be exactly the opposite. The state reportedly is going to charge World Cup fans close to $150 for the 15-minute train ride from Penn Station in Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey—a trip usually costs $12.90. But this is not a case of a blue state trying to get rich off of World Cup fans. Rather, New Jersey is just trying to cover the onerous cost of hosting eight of the tournament’s matches.

“You may have seen some recent headlines about transportation costs for World Cup games in New Jersey,” New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said in a video posted on social media on Thursday. “Our administration inherited an agreement where FIFA is providing $0 for transportation to the World Cup. Zero.” She explained that it will cost New Jersey Transit $48 million “to safely get 40,000 fans to and from every game. At the same time, FIFA is making $11 billion off of this World Cup, and charging fans up to $10,000 for a single ticket for the final. I won’t stick New Jersey commuters for that tab for years to come, that’s not fair. So here’s the bottom line: FIFA should pay for the rides, but if they don’t I’m not going to let New Jersey commuters get taken for one.”

In a statement issued hours later, FIFA said it was “quite surprised” by the attack—on Friday the organization went even further, absurdly accusing New Jersey of a “chilling effect” on the tournament—and laboriously detailed negotiations over transit costs, effectively arguing that it’s not FIFA’s fault that Sherrill’s predecessors struck a deal she doesn’t like. FIFA also said it “is not aware of any other major event at [MetLife] where organizers were required to pay for fan transportation.”

But hosting the World Cup is hardly the same as, say, a New York Giants game or a Beyoncé concert. Parking will be extremely limited at the stadium because FIFA insisted on an unprecedented security cordon that will envelop the entirety of the stadium’s massive parking lots—which also means there will be no tailgating at the World Cup. (Oh, by the way, FIFA is operating the limited parking that is available and charging $200-$300 for the privilege.) States and municipalities also must cover security costs both generally and for FIFA officials, meaning that New Jersey will foot the bill whenever Infantino deigns to show up at a game. So New Jersey did what Massachusetts did before it, deciding that the fans who are already shelling out hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for tickets can afford to pay a little more.

Who are these fans? We can guess who they’re not. Fans from four qualifying countries—Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal—currently face travel bans. If Ivorian and Senegalese fans do make it through customs, they will be required to submit bonds of up to $15,000, a burden that is also placed on those from Cape Verde and Algeria. As for Iran, its participation is still far from guaranteed, though FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, has repeatedly said that the team will compete despite the U.S. war against the country. (Trump has been far less welcoming: Last month he warned the Iranian team to stay away “for their own life and safety.”) Of course, many fans from countries that aren’t facing travel bans or onerous entry requirements may nonetheless be wary of traveling to the U.S. because of Trump’s belligerence toward other countries and his increasingly authoritarian immigration enforcement at home.

Even FIFA is worried about the latter. The Athletic reported earlier this week that senior managers in the organization may urge Infantino to ask Trump to halt all ICE raids during the tournament. It would be bad optics, to say the least, for foreign fans to witness such raids—and immeasurably worse if any fans got rounded up themselves. But FIFA might have other reasons for seeking a pause: In Los Angeles, UNITE HERE Local 11—which represents food service workers at SoFi Stadium, which will host eight World Cup matches—have said they will go on strike unless FIFA assures them that ICE agents will not be present at their workplace during the tournament. “The World Cup can’t happen at SoFi if there’s no food, if there’s no drinks—those are amenities that are essential,” Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen told me. “Someone needs to hold them accountable—who better than the workers who make the games possible.”

Where these conflicts go from here is anyone’s guess, but FIFA undoubtedly is taking the long view. It has been here before, and survived relatively unscathed. The lead-up to the 2022 tournament was also a public relations nightmare for its host nation, Qatar. In the weeks before kickoff, there was a flood of stories highlighting its exploitation of foreign workers (many of whom died building stadiums), its abysmal treatment of its LGBTQ population and women, and its generally poor human rights record. The situation grew so dire that Infantino had to step in. “Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker,” he said at a press conference where he defended the host nation.

If the goal was to create a distraction by delivering one of the most embarrassing statements in history, it worked. Once the tournament was underway, the negative stories slowed to a trickle and the focus shifted to soccer. The final, in which Argentina’s Lionel Messi prevailed over France to lift his first World Cup trophy, was perhaps the best in the tournament’s history. If you still think about that tournament at all, you probably think about that game—not Qatar’s abysmal treatment of migrants. It took time to get there, in other words, but Qatar got what it wanted out of the World Cup: to be seen as a modern economic power that is welcoming to people from all over the world and capable of hosting the most important sporting event in the world.

Qatar, of course, is an authoritarian country, so it was eager to launder its reputation through the riveting spectacle of the World Cup—just like Russia in 2018. But with two months before the start of the 2026 tournament, it’s not clear what the United States wants from the tournament. The U.S. is not yet Qatar, but it’s a lot more authoritarian than it was when, just a few weeks before the 2016 election, it won its bid as a co-host. For Trump and his administration, the World Cup is an opportunity not so much to launder his unsavory reputation as to embrace it: to take center stage as a global strongman. For Infantino and FIFA, it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rake in a fortune, as the tournament may never be held in such an unrestrained cesspool of capitalism again. But what does everyone else get out of it?

Americans are increasingly asking that question—but not Infantino and Trump. That question simply never has occurred to them.Alex Shephard

Alex Shephard is senior editor of The New Republic, where he has covered politics and culture since 2015. His work has also appeared in New York, GQ, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other publications. 

New York Times, In Trump’s Orbit, Women Aren’t the Only Ones Concerned About Their Looks, Jesse McKinley, April 18, 2026. In Trump world, the male ego is often evident — and their appearance scrutinized — under a president’s gaze.

President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth all wear suits and blue ties. Mr. Trump in a yellow tie looks forward; others in blue suits look toward their right.For all the talk about Mar-a-Lago-inspired cosmetic surgery for women in Trump’s world, the attention paid to, and the efforts to safeguard, the male ego also stand out. Many of the men in his administration have adopted a signature look.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJesse McKinley

By Vanity among male politicians is nothing new, with big egos as commonplace as primary campaigns.

For the men of the Trump administration, however, the concentration on their appearance is a constant, with policy pronouncements and social media feeds suffused with displays of physical strength, tough-guy talk and masculine mojo.

At the same time, those traditional tenets of masculinity have been accompanied by flashes of vulnerability about how the men look and dress: Last fall, for instance, the president groused about a photo from Time magazine for a shot that he suggested made him look bald.

“They ‘disappeared’ my hair,” the president said on Truth Social, adding that the photo was “a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out.”

In December, a raft of photos for Vanity Fair — including close-ups of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance — were harshly criticized by Mr. Rubio, who called them “deliberately manipulated.” (The magazine denied any alteration of the photos.)

And allegations of photographic malpractice surfaced anew last month, when The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had barred press photographers from Iran-war briefings because he found their snaps of him “unflattering.” (The Pentagon denied this, saying they had made accommodations for multiple photographers during recent briefings, and calling the premise of the Post story “false.”)

For all the talk about Mar-a-Lago-inspired cosmetic surgery for women in the Trump orbit, the attention paid to, and efforts to safeguard, the male ego also stand out.

“It’s constant attempts at trying to cultivate a persona that in their eyes seems strong and powerful and dominant and stoic,” said Zac Seidler, a clinical psychologist and the global director of research at Movember, a men’s health charity. “But once you scratch the surface of that, all you see is fragility.”

President Trump, of course, has long been obsessed with personal aesthetics and known for unforgiving and sometimes offensive takes on women’s appearances.

But Mr. Trump has also normalized talking about and critiquing men’s looks, ushering in a new era of fawning assessments and regular commentary about the appearance of his cabinet members and others.ImageDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking at a podium as seen through a booth window.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly barred press photographers from Iran-war briefings because he found their snaps of him “unflattering,” which the Pentagon denied.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said that “President Trump has assembled the most talented and accomplished administration in history.” 

Epstein Files, Coverups

ny times logoNew York Times, Epstein Craved Harvard Connections. Many There Were Eager to Help, Mark Arsenault and Debra Kamin, April 20, 2026. New documents reveal what professors did to help Jeffrey Epstein get inside Harvard’s gates. Jeffrey Epstein had a special obsession with Harvard, which he sought to infiltrate more than any other American institution. 

Jeffrey Epstein walked out of Palm Beach County jail in July 2009, after serving 13 months for solicitation and prostitution with a minor.

Back at his waterfront mansion, he immediately began working to rebuild a cherished relationship, his connection to Harvard University.

“home and free,” Mr. Epstein wrote by email the day of his release, in a message contained among documents recently made public by the federal government. The recipient was Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard professor of psychology at the time.

“HI Jeffrey!!!!!” the professor replied. “THIS IS FABULOUS!”

For a decade, Mr. Epstein had used the power of his money and the force of his personality to carve a unique place for himself at Harvard. He became not just a patron of the sciences but also a faux researcher himself.

While that relationship has been well documented for years, a review of the new materials released by the Justice Department shows for the first time how far Harvard professors went to help him, even after he became a convicted sex offender and Harvard banned his donations. It also highlights gaps in Harvard’s own review of the depth and extent of Mr. Epstein's ties to powerful people on campus.

After Mr. Epstein died in 2019, the university investigated connections to the sex criminal, including those of Dr. Kosslyn, who helped Mr. Epstein get a Harvard research fellowship. That investigation led to sanctions against a math professor, Martin Nowak, and the closure of a program that Dr. Nowak had led and Mr. Epstein had funded.

But the review, completed in 2020, did not explore a number of clues suggesting that Mr. Epstein’s ties to people at Harvard went far deeper.

Some of the evidence was already public, including past news coverage of Mr. Epstein’s friendship with the Harvard economist and former university president Lawrence H. Summers. Other evidence, it is now known from recently released files, may have been in the work or personal email accounts of various Harvard faculty members. Investigators noted but did not follow up on donations from Mr. Epstein to a nonprofit run by Mr. Summers’s wife, Elisa New, a Harvard professor emeritus, for example.

A number of Harvard faculty members acknowledged during the investigation that “they visited Epstein at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico or the Virgin Islands, visited him in jail or on work-release, or traveled on one of his planes,” according to Harvard’s 2020 investigative report. But the review did not dig into those relationships, noting “these actions did not implicate Harvard rules or policies.”Editors’ PicksEven Michael Jordan Will Sit Down to Talk About This Basketball Legend7 Ways to Turn a Can of Tuna Into Lunch (or Even Dinner)The Performances That Changed Their Lives

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, offered some of the rare public criticism of the 2020 review, which mentioned Mr. Summers just once in passing. Harvard should have done more to dig into Mr. Epstein’s ties with one of its most famous and powerful academics, Mr. Lessig said in an interview.

“They wanted to minimize the embarrassment,” he said.

Mr. Epstein had a special obsession with Harvard. His exploitation of his attachments to the elite school granted him status, business and personal connections, and a chance to repair his reputation after serving jail time. The emails show how multiple people at Harvard helped him, treating him as if he belonged among academia’s towering intellects.

Some recently discovered emails, such as the ebullient exchange with Dr. Kosslyn on Mr. Epstein’s release day in 2009, have not been previously reported. Mr. Epstein also eagerly sought to reconnect with Mr. Summers not long after leaving jail, the new messages show.

Now six years after its prior investigation, Harvard is engaged in yet another painful examination of Mr. Epstein’s ties to professors at the school, reviewing millions of documents released by the government since November. Already, two professors, Dr. Nowak and Mr. Summers, face consequences over the new revelations.

“The university will continue to evaluate, based on its ongoing review, what additional actions may be warranted considering information that has come to light in these documents,” said Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesman, in a statement.

The school did not address criticisms of the 2020 report, and it is unclear when the new review might be complete.

Mr. Epstein entered the Harvard community more than three decades ago, long before any of his crimes became public. Senior leaders at Harvard, smelling a potential donor, began courting him as far back as 1992.

His first donation was in 1998. By the time of his 2006 arrest in Florida, he had made 22 gifts to the school totaling $8.4 million.

That appears to be more than he directly donated to any other school, according to a New York Times analysis of available records and prior reporting, and about 10 times the amount he directly donated to M.I.T., another institution where he concentrated time and money.

April 19

Top Headlines

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says U.S. Officials Will Travel to Pakistan for Talks, Aaron Boxerman, Shirin Hakim and Lynsey Chutel, April 19, 2026. President Trump said the officials would arrive Monday evening in Pakistan, which has been mediating negotiations. The Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed on Sunday, after Iran said the parties were far from a final deal to end the war. 

Wall Street Journal, Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, April 19, 2026. The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict; ruminating on Jimmy Carter. 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Péter Magyar Calls for CPAC Funding Investigation After Ousting Viktor Orbán, Brian Daitzman, April 19, 2026. Hungary’s prime minister-elect alleged that the Hungarian government had been funding CPAC events in Budapest with taxpayer money and called for a formal investigation.At right, President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Nov. 7, 2025. President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok via Flickr).

U.S. Law, Courts, Vote-Rigging, Russian Influencers, Justice 

John Solomon, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing

 Former Trump attorney Joseph diGenova, center, who has been newly appointed by the Trump Administration to investigate those who showed that his 2016 election victory was assisted by Russians and their American assets, his shown in a Fox News during the first Trump term with diGenova's wife and law partner Victoria Toensnig (who represented a number of accused Russian and Russian-American assets and operatives), and the couple's pro-Trump ally, operative and news commentator John Solomon, at right.

New York Times, U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer, April 19, 2026 (print ed.).A former lawyer for President Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, is said to be planning to split time between Miami and Fort Pierce, where a grand jury overseen by a Trump-favored judge sits.

Emptywheel, marcy wheelerAnalysis: Todd Blanche Puts Dmitry Firtash’s Onetime Lawyer In Charge of Criminalizing the Russian Investigation, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right,April 19, 2026. Before Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney.

Lev Remembers, Investigative Commentary and  Whistleblowing: WHO IS REALLY BEHIND TRUMP? (Part One), Lev Parnas, right, April 19, 2026. lev parnas headshotFrom tech billionaires to shadow ideologies to a blueprint for power—this is Part One of the story they don’t want you to see.

The Opposition via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Dems Aren’t Buying Reports of Alito Staying Put, Lauren Egan, above, April 19, 2026. Today, the two oldest members of the Supreme Court are conservatives. Many Democrats are convinced that there will be at least one retirement this year, and they’re already thinking about how it could impact the midterms.

News Updates

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Military Leaders Excluded Trump from Situation Room Over Concerns, Mass Shooting Kills 8 Children, Trump Threatens War Crimes, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 19, 2026. A new bombshell report reveals that military leaders deliberately kept Donald Trump out of the Situation Room during critical moments of the Iran conflict because they feared he would interfere with the operation.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 18, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 19, 2026. And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours.

More On Iran War

New York Times, In Qatar, Trapped Between the U.S. and Iran, War Forced a Reckoning, Vivian Nereim, April 19, 2026. The gas-rich Gulf nation is in a state of “strategic shock” after the war dealt a serious blow to its economy, sending ripples around the world.

Associated Press via Politico, UAE official: More than 90% of Iranian targets were civilian infrastructure, Jacob Wendler, April 19, 2026. The United Arab Emirates’ minister of state said Sunday the country had been hit with over 2,800 missiles and drones in the first 40 days of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, adding that more than 90% of the targets were civilian infrastructure.

More On Hungarian Dictorship, Russian-Trump Vote-Rigging, Implications for U.S.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Todd Blanche Puts Dmitry Firtash’s Onetime Lawyer In Charge of Criminalizing the Russian Investigation, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 19, 2026. Before Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney (continued).

Lev Remembers, Investigative Commentary and  Whistleblowing: WHO IS REALLY BEHIND TRUMP? (Part One), Lev Parnas, right, April 19, 2026. From tech billionaires to shadow ideologies to a blueprint for power—this is Part One of the story they don’t want you to see (continued).

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Kim Lane Scheppele on Hungary, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 18, 2026. Democracy wins big.

MS Now, Opinion: New Hungarian PM says government was funding CPAC but won’t anymore, Ja'han Jones, April 14, 2026. In the wake of authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s political defeat over the weekend, Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, is looking to sever his government’s financial ties to the influential pro-Trump activist group the Conservative Political Action Conference.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

 

Donald Trump portrayed himself as pope, as shown above, after Pope Francis died, then ramped up criticism of Pope Leo XIV with harsh comments last week.Donald Trump portrayed himself as pope after Pope Francis died, as shown above, then ramped up criticism of Pope Leo XIV with harsh comments last week.

Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: The Strait Remains Closed, Trump Is More Far More Mad Than King, Farmers Are Really Struggling in America, Virginia Votes Tuesday, Simon Rosenberg, right, simon rosenberg twitterApril 19, 2026. The Wall Street Journal has a new, very worthy deep dive into Trump’s handling/mishandling of the war. It is full of remarkable, even comical, moments. Here are a few excerpts: The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict. Unlike the successful operation in Venezuela, which buoyed his confidence, Trump is confronting a more intractable foe in Iran, which is so far unwilling to bend to his demands.

PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Completely Out Of It Trump Doesn't Even Know Where JD Vance Is, Jason Easley, April 19, 2026. Trump claimed that Vice President Vance would not be attending peace talks with Iran, but the administration said that Vance was attending the talks, meaning that Trump has no idea what's happening.

More Global News

Politico, Russia-aligned Rumen Radev set to win Bulgarian election, Christian Oliver, April 19, 2026. Key question is whether he will now need to build coalition — and whether he will then choose allies from the pro-EU or pro-Moscow camp.

Politico, Spain pushes to end EU-Israel association agreement, Gregorio Sorgi, April 19, 2026. pedro sánchez 2023 wMadrid will propose the measure at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday, said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, right.

Top Stories

 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says U.S. Officials Will Travel to Pakistan for Talks, Aaron Boxerman, Shirin Hakim and Lynsey Chutel, April 19, 2026. President Trump said the officials would arrive Monday evening in Pakistan, which has been mediating negotiations. The Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed on Sunday, after Iran said the parties were far from a final deal to end the war. Here’s the latest.

The Strait of Hormuz on Sunday was largely shut to Western shipping, as Iran’s top negotiator said Tehran and Washington were far from a final deal to end the war.

On Sunday, MarineTraffic, a shipping monitor, showed multiple vessels appeared to enter the strait only to backtrack, seemingly unable to cross. Also, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior Iranian official, renewed a threat that Iran could shut down a second critical waterway — the Bab al-Mandeb strait on the Red Sea, close to parts of Yemen governed by Iran’s Houthi allies

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the chief Iranian negotiator in talks with the United States, said in a televised address late Saturday that America had failed to pressure Iran through ultimatums or secure international backing for the war, which began with a U.S.-Israeli air assault in late February.

Now, Iran hopes to consolidate what Iranian leaders view as their military achievements with diplomacy, said Mr. Ghalibaf, who is also the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. Nonetheless, he added, its army was ready to restart fighting at any moment.

The deadlock over the strait has raised the prospect of renewed fighting between the United States, Israel and Iran, with the two-week truce that suspended the war set to expire on Tuesday.

President Trump had conditioned the temporary truce on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But Iranian forces are still choking global energy markets through their blockade of the Persian Gulf waterway, a conduit for a significant share of the world’s energy.

On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister declared the strait open to commercial ships that followed an Iranian-designated route. The announcement came in response to the start of a cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia.

But on Saturday, Iran’s military announced that it was again tightening its grip on the strait. It said in a statement that the strait would stay closed in retaliation for Mr. Trump’s decision to leave in place a U.S. blockade on ships from Iranian ports.

Also Saturday, India summoned the Iranian ambassador over what it called “a serious incident” involving two Indian-flagged ships that came under fire.

As of Sunday, it was unclear when the two countries’ negotiating teams would meet again. Vice President JD Vance met Mr. Ghalibaf in Pakistan last weekend without reaching an agreement on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, among other issues.

Here’s what else we are covering:

Lebanon: Thousands of displaced Lebanese families were making their way back home to Lebanon’s south after a 10-day cease-fire went into effect Friday.

Hezbollah: The head of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, said Saturday that it was willing to cooperate with the Lebanese authorities to end the war with Israel and laid out a series of conditions for a lasting truce, including a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon.

Energy crisis: Even if the Strait of Hormuz opened fully, it would take weeks for oil and gas prices to recover. Read more ›

Wall Street Journal, Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, April 19, 2026. The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict; ruminating on Jimmy Carter.  

It seemed like Donald Trump’s appetite for risk had run out, and his fears were ramping up.

It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours. The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.

 

President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok via Flickr).

Péter Magyar, right, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, is shown at left with file photos of U.S. President Trump, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlaap and defeated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Oban, whom Magyar described as illegally funding CPAC's Hungarian events with Russian money.Péter Magyar, right, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, is shown at left with file photos of U.S. President Trump, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlaap and defeated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Oban, whom Magyar described as illegally funding CPAC's Hungarian events with Russian money.

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Péter Magyar Calls for CPAC Funding Investigation After Ousting Viktor Orbán, Brian Daitzman, April 19, 2026. Hungary’s prime minister-elect alleged that the Hungarian government had been funding CPAC events in Budapest with taxpayer money and called for a formal investigation.

lincoln square media logoPéter Magyar, right, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, said he would halt any use of state money to finance the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest and called for an inquiry into what he described as improper government spending, according Péter Magyar o 2024to remarks reported by Mediaite.

The comments come after an election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure and have raised questions about whether public funds were used to support recurring political events in Budapest. English-language accounts rely on translation from Hungarian. No full official transcript tied specifically to the CPAC allegation has been released. He did not present documentary evidence to support the claim.

A transcript of Mr. Magyar’s broader post-election press conference shows him outlining wider concerns about government transparency during the transition. He alleged that documents were being destroyed within ministries and said the incoming leadership lacked access to key state records. Those statements, delivered in Hungarian and reflected in available transcripts, underscore his broader framing of institutional opacity, though the CPAC-specific allegation is not contained in the excerpt reviewed.

 

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and a close political ally of President Trump, is shown greeting attendees at its 2019 annual conference.

The Conservative Political Action Conference has been held multiple times in Budapest, including a fifth gathering announced in 2026, according to the Hungarian outlet Telex. The event has featured Mr. Orbán alongside conservative political figures from Europe and the United States and has become a recurring fixture in Hungary’s political landscape.

Independent investigative reporting by the Hungarian outlet Átlátszó has found that earlier CPAC events in Budapest were financed through government-linked institutions, with estimated costs reaching into the millions of euros. Those findings were not cited as evidence in Mr. Magyar’s remarks but provide context for how the events may have been financed.

hungary flagMr. Magyar said his concern was not the conference itself but how it may have been financed, adding in translated remarks that political conferences should not be funded with taxpayer money, as the outlet reported. His framing presents the issue as one of public accountability rather than political alignment, in line with his broader anti-corruption message.

His statement follows reporting by The Associated Press and The Guardian confirming Mr. Orbán’s electoral defeat and the transition of power after more than a decade and a half in office. Those outlets have described the shift as a major change in Hungary’s political direction, raising questions about how institutions will function under new leadership.

Reporting by The Guardian also confirmed that U.S. Vice President JD Vance traveled to Budapest during the campaign period, underscoring the conference’s international political profile and the extent to which Hungary’s domestic politics have drawn global attention.

In his broader remarks, Mr. Magyar outlined an anti-corruption agenda that includes reviewing government decisions, examining past agreements, and increasing transparency around public spending. He also indicated that previously undisclosed international commitments and financial arrangements may require scrutiny, reinforcing his stated intention to investigate how state resources have been used.

It remains unclear whether any formal investigation into CPAC financing has begun. No Hungarian government agency has publicly confirmed an inquiry, and no specific amounts tied to the alleged funding have been formally identified in official records. In the absence of publicly available documentation, Mr. Magyar’s statements remain allegations rather than established findings.

No public statements addressing Mr. Magyar’s allegations were identified from Mr. Orbán, Hungarian government institutions associated with event funding, or CPAC organizers in the sources reviewed.

Whether public funds were used to support CPAC events, and whether such use would violate Hungarian law, will depend on official documentation, applicable budget and procurement rules, and the outcome of any formal review. For now, the issue is defined by Mr. Magyar’s remarks, prior investigative reporting, and the absence of confirmed institutional findings.ReferencesMagyar’s Statements and Allegation Frame

Mediaite, Newly-Elected Hungarian PM Says Orbán Was Paying CPAC, Calls It a ‘Crime’ That ‘Will Have to Be Investigated,’ Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, frames the allegation of improper or potentially unlawful public financing of CPAC events. The source establishes the existence, tone, and direction of his claim. It does not provide a full Hungarian transcript or underlying documentation.

U.S. Law, Courts, Vote-Rigging, Russian Influencers, Justice 

John Solomon, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing

 Former Trump attorney Joseph diGenova, center, who has been newly appointed by the Trump Administration to investigate those who showed that his 2016 election victory was assisted by Russians and their American assets, his shown in a Fox News during the first Trump term with diGenova's wife and law partner Victoria Toensnig (who represented a number of accused Russian and Russian-American assets and operatives), and the couple's pro-Trump ally, operative and news commentator John Solomon, at right.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer, April 19, 2026 (print ed.).A former lawyer for President Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, is said to be planning to split time between Miami and Fort Pierce, where a grand jury overseen by a Trump-favored judge sits.

As a sprawling inquiry expands into whether former federal officials committed crimes in investigating President Trump, two unusual factors could ease the way toward securing the indictments he craves.

A former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed from that post this week, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday.

And at least part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury based in Fort Pierce, Fla., overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Justice Department log circularCannon, who issued rulings favorable to Mr. Trump during the classified documents case against him, the official added. Mr. diGenova is expected to split his time between Miami and Fort Pierce.

Together, the moves show how the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control has been willing to embrace politically charged tactics and unorthodox personnel decisions in its efforts to satisfy his demands to prosecute his perceived foes — even as other prosecutors loyal to himhave encountered forceful pushback from courts against his wide-ranging retribution campaign.

Mr. diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida, where the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, another Trump loyalist, is supervising the inquiry.

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Meditis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, right, the former C.I.A. director.

john brennan officialThe law enforcement official familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal issue.

Because Judge Cannon is the only federal jurist in the Fort Pierce courthouse, she could be in a position to make critical decisions if Mr. diGenova uses the grand jury there to subpoena documents or witness testimony and the recipients balk, asking her to quash the demands.

Judge Cannon, below, was criticized by an appeals court in 2022 after she effectively stalled the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by appointing a so-called special master to sort through reams of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. Later, Mr. Trump praised her lavishly, calling her “strong” and aileen cannon“brilliant,” after she tossed out the indictment altogether, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the charges, had been improperly appointed.

In another unusual move, Christopher-James DeLorenz, who worked as a law clerk for Judge Cannon during the documents case and later served as an aide to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to Mr. Quiñones’s office earlier this year and is working on the portion of the inquiry that is focused on Mr. Brennan, the official said.

Mr. diGenova will work on the Brennan matter, too, but also the broader inquiry.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s allies began pushing for what they referred to as a “grand conspiracy” case that would portray all of the criminal inquiries of Mr. Trump as a unified plot to violate his constitutional rights. The conspiracy, by their telling, began with the investigation into Russia and its potential ties to the 2016 Trump campaign, then extended to the classified documents and 2020 election indictments.

russian flag wavingThat far-fetched theory would allow the Justice Department to scrutinize in a single case matters that would normally be barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It would also give Mr. diGenova and Mr. Reding Quiñones the authority to scrutinize events that took place in Washington from their jurisdiction in Florida.

The Justice Department has also given Mr. Reding Quiñones special authority under a statute known as Section 515, the official said. That would enable him to bring indictments in jurisdictions where he is not the U.S. attorney.

While many details remain unknown, Mr. diGenova is inheriting an inquiry whose most developed portion appears to be focused on trying to find a basis to charge Mr. Brennan with lying to Congress over a January 2017 intelligence community assessment. It concluded, among other things, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in part because Moscow hoped to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

As the top federal prosecutor in Washington in the 1980s, Mr. diGenova secured an espionage conviction against Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who passed sensitive information to Israel. He later became a political commentator who gravitated toward Mr. Trump during his first term.

 

Todd Blanche Lies 1080x675Emptywheel, Analysis: Todd Blanche Puts Dmitry Firtash’s Onetime Lawyer In Charge of Criminalizing the Russian Investigation, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right,marcy wheeler April 19, 2026. Before Todd Blanche, shown above, was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney.

Before Todd Blanche was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney, he represented Igor Fruman in his unlawful donation and influence-peddling prosecution, the investigation of which extended to getting Marie Yovanovitch fired, undermining the Mueller investigation, and framing Hunter Biden.

Before Todd Blanche was Igor Fruman’s attorney, he represented Paul Manafort in a successful bid to prevent New York State from prosecuting Manafort for the mortgage fraud charges that Trump had pardoned.

Justice Department log circularThat’s all important background to the news that Blanche has appointed Joe DiGenova as Counsel overseeing the investigation into John Brennan and, ultimately, the grand conspiracy that, in their fevered imaginations, led everyone to be mean to Donald Trump.

The appointment was first reported by John Solomon, right, john solomonthen matched by CBS, NYT, Bloomberg, CNN, and ABC. And while, between them, those real media outlets list a number of the reasons DiGenova is inappropriate, which (as NYT lays out) include almost representing Trump on the Russian investigation (which was scotched because DiGenova’s wife Toensing had already represented Sam Clovis, Mark Corallo, and Erik Prince) and threatening several of the people targeted by DOJ, including John Brennan, below left, and Chris Krebs:

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that john brennan officialChristopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

And while Solomon notes that DiGenova and Toensing represented him on an issue years ago (I don’t think that includes championing Solomon when his calls with mobbed-up Senator Toricelli were leaked years ago), they’re all missing perhaps the most important reason DiGenova should not be anywhere near this investigation.

With Toensing, DiGenova played a central role in matters leading to Trump’s 2019 impeachment, as part of a team that included Fruman (Blanche’s eventual client, who had the alleged mob ties, including to Firtash), Lev Parnas, and John Solomon, a mess first publicly revealed when Trump attorney John Dowd sent this letter on October 3, 2019 attempting to stall the Ukraine impeachment, the same day DiGenova and Toensig’s Firtash tie became clear, and less than a week before Parnas and Fruman were arrested on their way to meet Firtash.

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Ultra-right partisan Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest person as owner of Tesla, Space X, and many other properties often reliant on U.S. government contracts, is shown in a collage with President Trump, whose campaigns Musk has strongly supported with hundreds of millions in donations. Ultra-right partisan Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest person as owner of Tesla, Space X, and many other properties often reliant on U.S. government contracts, is shown in a collage with President Trump, whose campaigns Musk has strongly supported with hundreds of millions in donations. 

Lev Remembers, Investigative Commentary and  Whistleblowing: WHO IS REALLY BEHIND TRUMP? (Part One), Lev Parnas, right, former Trump operative, whistleblower and author of "Shadow Diplomacy," shown below, April 19, 2026. lev parnas headshotFrom tech billionaires to shadow ideologies to a blueprint for power—this is Part One of the story they don’t want you to see.

A lot of people keep wondering why Donald Trump does what he does.

Why he praises strongmen. Why he undermines institutions. Why he seems more comfortable with chaos than stability.

lev parnas coverAnd I keep telling you the same thing: It’s not just Donald Trump. It’s the people around him. It’s the people behind the scenes. It’s what you don’t see. It’s what you don’t hear. It’s what doesn’t get reported.

That’s the part that should scare you.

Because Donald Trump, at his core, has always been driven by one thing—money, image, and legacy. The buildings, the branding, the gold letters, the obsession with being the biggest, the best, the most powerful name in the room.That’s who he is.

But the machinery around him? That’s something very different. And that’s what I’ve been working on putting together for you.

This is Part One.

THE IDEOLOGY: WHERE IT REALLY BEGINS

 

Curtis Yarvin portrait 2023 3x4 cropped

To understand what’s happening today, you have to go back—not to 2016, not to 2020—but to 2007.That’s when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin, shown above, began laying out a framework that would later echo through politics, tech, and power.

He called it the “Dark Enlightenment.”

This wasn’t just criticism of government. It was a rejection of democracy itself.

Yarvin argued that democracy was inefficient, unstable, and ultimately unsustainable in a modern world. In its place, he proposed a centralized system run more like a corporation—led by a small elite, powered by technology, and enforced through structure and control.

He wrote about dismantling federal institutions. Eliminating bureaucracy. Rebuilding governance from the top down. And those ideas didn’t stay isolated.They moved.

FROM THEORY TO POWER: THIEL AND VANCE

Among those paying attention was Peter Thiel. Thiel had long questioned whether democracy could coexist with rapid technological progress. He believed systems were too slow, too constrained, too outdated.

In 2011, he gave a lecture that would quietly shape the future of American politics.

In the audience: J. D. Vance.That moment turned into a relationship—mentorship, funding, alignment. Thiel didn’t just influence Vance—he helped build him into a political figure connected to the same networks of power, capital, and long-term thinking.

Vance represents something different than Trump. He represents continuity .A bridge between ideology and implementation.

THE EXPANSION: TECH POWER, MEDIA, AND INFLUENCE

At the same time, a broader ecosystem was forming.Investors, platforms, influence networks.

Figures like Elon Musk stepping directly into political discourse.

Voices like David Sacks helping shape alternative narratives.

Platforms like Rumble shifting how information flows.

This wasn’t random.It was a growing alignment around a belief:

That traditional institutions—government, media, bureaucracy—were broken.

And that something new needed to replace them.

A QUIET PARALLEL: THE PUTIN MODEL

Now look at a system that already exists.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has operated under a model of centralized authority, reinforced by a network of loyal elites—often described as oligarchs. Power is consolidated. Media is controlled. Opposition is limited.A nd while the United States is not Russia—there are ideological echoes: A skepticism of democratic systems. A preference for centralized power. A fusion of wealth and governance.

PROJECT 2025: THE BLUEPRINT FOR POWER

project 2025 mainAnd then there is the structure.The planning.The roadmap.Organizations like The Heritage Foundation didn’t just react to political change—they prepared for it. Through Project 2025, they developed a detailed, coordinated strategy to reshape the federal government from the inside out under the next conservative administration. This isn’t just a policy wishlist. t’s a governing manual.

A plan to:• Replace thousands of federal employees with ideologically aligned personnel• Consolidate executive power• Restructure agencies to align with a specific vision of governance• Reduce institutional independence across departmentsFigures like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller have been associated with pushing aggressive executive authority and structural changes to government.This is about control of the system itself.Not just winning elections—But controlling what happens after.

AND WHILE THIS WAS HAPPENING — DONALD TRUMP

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lauren egan bulwark
The Opposition via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Dems Aren’t Buying Reports of Alito Staying Put, Lauren Egan, above, April 19, 2026. Today, the two oldest members of the Supreme Court are conservatives. Many Democrats are convinced that there will be at least one retirement this year, and they’re already thinking about how it could impact the midterms.

ONE OF THE MAJOR OPEN QUESTIONS that could jolt this year’s midterms—a known unknown—is whether Donald Trump will get a chance to nominate another Supreme Court justice before Election Day. Will 76-year-old Justice Samuel Alito, above, retire? What about 77-year-old Justice Clarence Thomas? Or both?

bulwark logo big shipOn Friday night, CBS News’s Jan Crawford, a journalist well connected in conservative legal circles, reported that neither of the Court’s two oldest members would step down “this year”—that timeframe being significant as it would extend to after the election and assuredly into the next Congress. Fox News followed up with a similar report. Yet both men are under pressure from Republicans to vacate their posts before the possibility arises that control of the Senate changes hands. And Democrats, for their part, are treating the reports as smokescreens, choosing instead to plow forward with a major campaign for the likelihood that a vacancy (or two) will emerge before November.

That campaign is being led by Demand Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group. The group plans to spend an initial $3 million on framing a pending Supreme Court nomination battle in the public mind, and another $15 million if and when a justice retires. Its executive director, Josh Orton, told me the reporting of Alito and Thomas sticking around for another term was a case of the justices simply wanting “to look like they’re in control of their own destiny. Ultimately, he said, “if Trump wants them off, they’re off.”¹

Even before this weekend’s reporting, the possibility of a Supreme Court confirmation fight has been the subject of rampant chatter among the Washington political class. A retirement—whether truly voluntary or forced by Trump—would not just reshape the contours of the midterm elections, it would give the president the chance to have the most enduring stamp on the judiciary of anyone to hold the office in nearly a century.

“This could be unlike any other Supreme Court nomination fight in modern times, in that the first question will be: Is this person loyal to the truth or loyal to Donald Trump?,” said Orton. “In the coming months, we have this opportunity to call the question on whether or not we will continue to allow Trump to attack and undermine our democratic institutions.”

News Updates

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Military Leaders Excluded Trump from Situation Room Over Concerns, Mass Shooting Kills 8 Children, Trump Threatens War Crimes, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 19, 2026. A new bombshell report reveals that military leaders deliberately kept Donald Trump out of the Situation Room during critical moments of the Iran conflict because they feared he would interfere with the operation.

At the same time, Trump is openly floating the idea of awarding himself the Medal of Honor while once again threatening to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure as soon as this week. Meanwhile, a devastating mass shooting in Louisiana has left eight children dead, including a one-year-old. This is a heavy and urgent news cycle, and I have the latest.

Today I am speaking with sources about the Epstein files and the condition of U.S. troops in the Middle East, and on that front the situation is deeply concerning. I expect to have more updates soon.

Here’s the news:

A bombshell report by The Wall Street Journal describes a tense U.S. military operation to rescue a downed airman in Iran, alongside internal concerns about Donald Trump’s conduct at the time. According to the account, military advisers deliberately limited Trump’s involvement in the command center during the mission. They reportedly worried that his behavior—described as volatile—could interfere with decision-making during a high-risk operation, choosing instead to brief him only at key moments rather than provide continuous updates.

The report also portrays Trump as highly agitated in the aftermath of Iran shooting down a U.S. aircraft. He is said to have spent hours expressing anger toward aides and focusing on the potential political consequences, including comparisons to Jimmy Carter and the 1979 hostage crisis. These concerns about his reactions contributed to the decision to restrict his direct, real-time role in overseeing the mission.

Meanwhile, the rescue operation itself faced significant challenges on the ground. U.S. forces reportedly encountered logistical issues, such as aircraft becoming stuck in desert terrain, and had to act quickly to avoid detection by Iranian forces. Despite these complications, the mission ultimately succeeded in recovering the airman.

The situation remained tense even after the rescue. Within hours, Trump publicly issued a strongly worded warning to Iran, escalating rhetoric and underscoring the high-stakes atmosphere surrounding both the mission and its political aftermath. This is the post:

President Donald Trump threatened war crimes again this morning and accused Iran of violating a fragile ceasefire by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and warned that the U.S. could strike key Iranian civil infrastructure if a deal is not reached. The situation has escalated as Iran reimposed restrictions on the vital waterway, citing an ongoing U.S. naval blockade, while both sides exchange threats and conflicting claims about maritime incidents. Diplomatic efforts remain uncertain, with planned talks in Islamabad in doubt as Iranian officials signal reluctance to negotiate under current conditions.

Donald Trump said the United States is prepared to take extremely strong military action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, emphasizing that the country has “massive” stockpiles of ammunition. He suggested that past conflicts have not deterred Iran, expressing frustration and warning that the U.S. is ready to escalate force if necessary.

A new NBC News poll shows Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped to a second-term low, with just 37% of Americans approving and 63% disapproving, driven largely by dissatisfaction with the economy and the Iran war. Most respondents disapprove of his handling of inflation and rising living costs, with many saying their personal financial situation has worsened over the past year, while concern over gas prices remains widespread. The poll also finds strong opposition to Trump’s approach to the Iran conflict, with about two-thirds disapproving and a majority of Americans saying the U.S. should avoid further military action.

In an exchange with Maria Bartiromo, Kash Patel said he planned to file a defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, indicating it would be submitted as soon as the following day.

During a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, Chris Wright said gas prices could drop below $3 per gallon either later this year or sometime next year. He suggested prices have likely already peaked and described sub-$3 gas as a strong outcome when adjusted for inflation, though he did not commit to a specific timeline.

Iran has rejected European calls to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with officials mocking criticism from Kaja Kallas and arguing that international law allows Tehran to restrict access in response to perceived military threats. Iranian authorities say the closure is justified by U.S. and Israeli actions in the region, while Western leaders warn that blocking the vital waterway—through which a significant share of global energy supplies passes—risks major economic consequences. The dispute highlights escalating tensions as diplomacy falters and disagreements persist over Iran’s nuclear program and regional security.

A mass shooting in Shreveport left eight children dead and two others injured after police responded to a reported domestic disturbance, with victims ranging in age from 1 to 14. The suspect, believed to be the sole shooter and related to some of the victims, fled the scene, carjacked a vehicle, and was later killed by police following a chase. Authorities described the crime scene as extensive, spanning multiple homes, and confirmed the shooting took place the night before officers arrived. The investigation is ongoing, with limited details released so far about the suspect and motive.

The U.S. Department of Justice has requested that Wayne County turn over ballots, receipts, and envelopes from the 2024 election, prompting sharp pushback from state officials. Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, called the demand “absurd” and without merit, arguing it relies on claims that are inaccurate and unsupported. State officials maintain that the allegations cited involve isolated instances of fraud that were already identified and successfully prosecuted. The dispute underscores ongoing tensions over election oversight and the handling of past voting processes.

In an interview with Maria Bartiromo, Kash Patel claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged” against Donald Trump and said he intends to continue pursuing the issue. He asserted that there would be future arrests related to these claims, though he did not provide evidence to support the allegations or specify who might be targeted. His comments echo longstanding assertions about the election that have been widely disputed and rejected by courts and election officials.

During an exchange on a news program, Jake Tapper asked Elise Stefanik about remarks by Donald Trump in which he threatened severe action against Iran. Stefanik responded that Trump was referring to the Iranian regime and argued that his strong rhetoric helped bring Iran to negotiations, noting his history of forceful public statements. Tapper pressed the issue by contrasting Trump’s language with other controversial political speech, questioning the consistency of reactions. The exchange became tense, with Stefanik interrupting as Tapper attempted to continue his point.

At a high school in Pauls Valley, principal Kirk Moore was honored as prom king after heroically stopping an armed intruder who entered the school with semi-automatic weapons. Moore, who was shot in the leg while tackling and disarming the attacker, is credited by authorities with preventing a potential mass shooting and saving students’ lives. The suspect, identified as a former student, had fired shots and attempted to target students before being subdued with the help of another staff member. The emotional prom tribute reflected widespread gratitude from students and the community for Moore’s actions during the crisis.

A profile of Harmeet Dhillon highlights her growing influence within the Department of Justice under Donald Trump, as she emerges as a key figure in efforts to reshape the agency and potentially pursue actions against political rivals. As head of the civil rights division, Dhillon has shifted priorities away from traditional anti-discrimination enforcement toward issues like alleged bias against conservatives and white Americans, a move that has prompted criticism and led to the departure of many career attorneys.

Pete Buttigieg criticized Donald Trump over U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, suggesting some voters supported Trump because they believed he would avoid such wars. Drawing on his own military experience, Buttigieg described the gravity of being deployed to a war zone and the trust service members place in national leaders’ decisions. He argued that current leadership is falling short of that responsibility, saying U.S. troops deserve better judgment and accountability from both the Pentagon and the White House.

Pete Buttigieg commented on outreach efforts by Turning Point USA, noting that their strategy of engaging on college campuses mirrors his own approach of appearing on outlets like Fox News to reach different audiences. He acknowledged their willingness to enter spaces where their views may be challenged, but drew a contrast by asserting that his own appearances are grounded in what he considers truthful messaging.

Donald Trump praised Israel as a strong and reliable ally of the United States, describing it as courageous, loyal, and effective in times of conflict. He suggested that Israel has demonstrated steadfast support for the U.S., contrasting it with other countries that, in his view, have not shown the same level of reliability during periods of tension.

Pete Buttigieg argued that the intense focus on cultural issues by conservatives may be a strategic distraction, suggesting it raises questions about what other topics they may be trying to avoid. He said the emphasis on culture wars could be intended to shift public attention away from more substantive policy concerns, and urged that people remain focused on those underlying issues rather than getting sidetracked.

Voters in Virginia are deciding on a closely contested redistricting referendum that could significantly reshape the state’s congressional map ahead of the midterm elections. Supporters, including Democrats, argue the measure is a necessary response to nationwide redistricting efforts encouraged by Donald Trump, while opponents—including some Republicans and reform advocates—warn it could undermine anti-gerrymandering reforms approved in 2020. Polls ցույց a narrow divide among voters, reflecting Virginia’s status as a political swing state and highlighting tensions between fairness in representation and strategic partisan advantage. The outcome could have national implications for control of the U.S. House, where margins remain tight.

An early clinical trial of a personalized mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer showed promising long-term results, with several patients who responded to the treatment still alive six years later. The vaccine works by training the immune system to target cancer cells after surgery, helping prevent recurrence rather than eliminating existing tumors. Although the findings are encouraging—especially for a cancer with low survival rates—experts caution that the study is small and more research is needed to confirm effectiveness. Larger trials are already underway to better understand how and for whom this treatment works.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 18, 2026 [Iran Denies Strait Reopening], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 19, 2026. And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours.

Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”

Susannah George of the Washington Post noted that the fragile temporary ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon also appears to be cracking. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that it believed Hezbollah had violated that ceasefire. It said: “IDF is authorized to take the necessary measures in self-defense against threats, while ensuring the security of Israeli civilians and the soldiers deployed in the area.”

This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.” In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28. Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.

MeidasTouch reports that Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”

The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iranian political officials are not the ones controlling decision-making. Instead, it appears the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the primary force of the Iranian military, is in charge. Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal writes that disagreements about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz suggest divisions in Iran’s leadership.

Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”

Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.

Meanwhile, Shelby Holliday, Michael R. Gordon, and Costas Paris of the Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. military is “preparing…to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters” in an attempt to force Iran to reopen the strait and back away from its nuclear program. President Barack Obama’s team, along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom had achieved both of those goals with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump tore up in 2018.

The journalists report that, as part of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the U.S. Navy has already forced twenty-three ships trying to leave Iranian ports to turn back. Now it intends to take control of vessels around the world that are linked to Iran. The administration is calling this phase of the U.S. war against Iran “Economic Fury.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, said yesterday that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran. This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions or insurance requirements.”

On Wednesday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, broke the record for the longest deployment of an aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War: 295 days. The vessel left its home port in June 2025 for the Mediterranean but was rerouted to the Caribbean as part of Trump’s buildup there. It took part in the capture of then–Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, then headed to the Middle East. A fire in one of its laundries left 600 sailors without berths, and it went to the Mediterranean for repairs.

Nahal Toosi of Politico wrote yesterday that, according to diplomatic cables she obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.

Trump’s erratic behavior has caught the attention of the New York Times, where on April 13 Peter Baker wrote that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Baker noted that retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.

Yesterday Steve Hendrix and Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s erratic behavior is alienating even those right-wing populists in Europe who hailed his reelection in the belief that it would strengthen their own hand. The authors say that Trump’s high tariffs, demands for Greenland, and surprise attack on Iran had already put right-wing leaders in an awkward position. For some of them, his portrayal of himself as Jesus on Orthodox Easter and his attacks on the pope are a bridge too far.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Catholic, said Trump’s attack on the Pope is “unacceptable.” In turn, Trump attacked Meloni, saying: “She doesn’t want to help us with NATO, she doesn’t want to help us get rid of nuclear weapons. She’s very different from what I thought. She’s no longer the same person, and Italy won’t be the same country.”

Supporting Trump appears to be a losing proposition in Europe, where last summer Europeans thought Trump was only slightly less dangerous to peace and security in Europe than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In March a YouGov poll showed Trump with unfavorability ratings of 78% in France, 86% in Germany, and 80% in Italy.

On Wednesday, April 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would not renew the sanctions waivers that had permitted the sale of Russian oil. Yesterday the administration reversed that, renewing the waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil and petroleum products loaded through May 16. The sale of oil provides a financial lifeline for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Last night in Kansas, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is speaking across the country in support of Democratic candidates, explained to an audience why he is working so hard to restore American democracy. He said: “[W]hen you have one of those long nights, when you’re asking yourself, can I really do any more that I’ve already done? I want you to reach into whatever is your personal why.

“For me, the reason I make sure to hit the road and be with you on a night like this is actually, ironically, the very same thing that makes it a little bit harder than it used to be. When I woke up this morning before I headed to the airport, about 6:30 this morning, as usually happens, my first interaction was with a four-year-old boy. And I’m putting out the cereal for him and his sister. And he says, ‘Papa, can I come with you? On this trip?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll work out. I gotta go to Kansas. You gotta go to preschool, and…’ And then he walks up to me with, um, a Sonic the Hedgehog walkie-talkie. He tells me to put it in my briefcase. He says, ‘Take this with you. That way we can talk to each other.’

“I wasn’t sure whether I should explain how range works on walkie-talkies or not. Just gave him a big hug instead. But what I know is that it won’t be so long before he and his sister, who right now are asking me questions I can handle—like, the other day, I got: ‘Papa is a grapefruit bigger than a pineapple?’ I can handle that. But,what am I gonna do when they say, ‘Papa, back in the 2020s, did you do enough?’

“They’re gonna ask that, and I want to make sure we have a very good answer by the time they’re old enough to ask that question.”

More On Iran War

ny times logoNew York Times, In Qatar, Trapped Between the U.S. and Iran, War Forced a Reckoning, Vivian Nereim, April 19, 2026. The gas-rich Gulf nation is in a state of “strategic shock” after the war dealt a serious blow to its economy, sending ripples around the world.

To grasp the global collateral damage from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, consider the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

A close U.S. ally and longtime mediator between Washington and Tehran, Qatar’s government sought to avert the war. When that failed, Qatari officials warned of the dangers of a prolonged conflict.

Resource-rich Qatar nonetheless faced more than 700 Iranian missile and drone attacks, which have targeted Gulf countries that host American military bases. These attacks forced Qatar to suspend natural gas production, which generates its vast wealth and normally accounts for a fifth of the global supply.

Iran FlagIt was one of a number of disruptions caused by the war that sent economic shock waves around the world.

A fragile cease-fire announced on April 7 suspended U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and Iran’s retaliation against Israel and the Gulf Arab states. Yet, even if the truce holds, the war has struck at the heart of Qatar’s interests, upending the economy and shaking the nation’s reputation as a haven for business.

As it takes stock, the Qatari government will be forced to swallow a bitter pill, analysts say: Neither its strong ties with the United States nor its cordial relationship with Iran have spared it from pain.

Qatar’s case reflects the thorny position that Gulf countries have found themselves in during the war. Trapped between their chief ally and their neighbor, they are now forced to rethink their security strategies.

Associated Press via Politico, UAE official: More than 90% of Iranian targets were civilian infrastructure, Jacob Wendler, April 19, 2026. The ap logoUnited Arab Emirates’ minister of state said Sunday the country had been hit with over 2,800 missiles and drones in the first 40 days of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, adding that more than 90% of the targets were civilian infrastructure.


andrew weissmann croppedReem Al Hashimy, the UAE’s minister of state for international cooperation, said during a Sunday morning appearance on ABC’s “This Week” that Iran was seeking to destroy the UAE’s “model of prosperity and tolerance.

politico Custom“We used our oil wealth to build an economic powerhouse. They used their wealth for nuclear programs that are nefarious, for missiles, drones, proxies, etc.,” she told host Jonathan Karl. “So whereas we tried to become and have become an international, global, responsible player, they are a pariah state. And they wanted to break that model, but they underestimated our resolve.”


The UAE has faced a barrage of attacks from Iran since the U.S. and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran in late February. While the Gulf state — like many of its neighbors — initially opposed the war, it has since shifted its tone as it considers how to avoid the breakout of a larger regional war.

uae embassy sealAsked if she agreed with President Donald Trump’s assessment that there had been regime change in Iran, Al Hashimy expressed skepticism that Iran’s leadership had changed meaningfully.

“I know that personalities have changed. You have different characters that are currently in place,” she said “But how has that changed the character of the Revolutionary Guard? That’s yet to see — doesn’t seem very hopeful, though. Right now.”

Trump said Sunday morning that the U.S. would resume peace talks with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Monday after an initial round of negotiations failed to yield meaningful progress. Trump initially told Karl that Vice President JD Vance would not attend the second round of talks, but the White House later walked that back.

The president previously threatened to decimate Iranian civilian infrastructure and eliminate “a whole civilization” if Iran did not agree to open the Strait of Hormuz, sparking sharp recriminations from Democrats and human rights experts. Speaking to Karl on Sunday morning, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz insisted that “all options are on the table.”

Asked if she harbored concerns about Trump’s threats, Al Hashimy said the UAE believes that “maximum pressure” is necessary to move forward, while cautioning against civilian attacks. 

More On Hungarian Dictorship, Vote-Rigging, Implications for U.S. 

 

Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor and expert on authoritarian regimes.

Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor and expert on authoritarian regimes.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Kim Lane Scheppele on Hungary, Paul Krugman, right, April 18, 2026. Democracy wins big.paul krugman

More than a year ago I interviewed my old friend and colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, a constitutional scholar who speaks Hungarian and knows Hungary, about the march of autocracy. Now, suddenly, a much happier occasion. I found her account of how this happened startling — a lot I didn’t know, even though I’ve been following the news obsessively. And some of it is wild. Here’s a transcript:

Paul Krugman: it’s been quite a week. You were on this case on my blog starting in 2010, but I think we want to just talk about first reactions to this extraordinary election on Sunday.

Scheppele: Well, yeah. It’s been hard to even comprehend the magnitude of this. I mean, not only did Péter Magyar win this election, but he won the election overwhelmingly in a rigged system. And so that’s the miracle magic of it. It turns out that Viktor Orbán had rigged the election rules so that only he could win. And the shortcut of what he did was that essentially a vote in the countryside counted three times as much as a vote in the cities. And what he counted on was that usually, if you get a challenger to a right-wing autocrat, they’re all going to be liberals, right? They’re all going to get their votes from the cities, from the educated populations. And Orban had a lock on the countryside. And then he put all the weight of the system on counting his people more than others. So Peter Magyar spent the last two years going out to villages, just meeting all of these people in person and getting around the fact that Orban also controlled all the media. So the media was rigged, the election system was rigged. And when the vote came in on Sunday, he was at 15 to 20 points ahead in the polls.

Krugman: Right.

Scheppele: But that did not guarantee he was going to win. And it did not guarantee that he was going to win by the majority. And so when the numbers started piling up, like I was watching the early returns and the early returns were coming in from villages that should have been the Orban vote. And it was a Tisza vote, it was a Peter Magyar vote. And so you knew just from the first 2 or 3% of the vote that it was going to be overwhelming. And sure enough, the whole evening the results came in and Peter Magyar won. It might shift a little bit, 1 or 2 numbers now, but about 138 seats out of the 199 seats in the parliament, and Orban had to concede. There was just no way that he could even claim fraud or try to do anything to change it, because he just didn’t have votes come in from anywhere.

Krugman: Okay, it’s funny but that’s the first clear explanation I’ve gotten of how the rigging worked. Because the reporting has been pretty vague. And, you know, there’s still a fair number of people saying, “oh, it can’t really have been rigged, because after all, he lost.”

Scheppele: Yeah. No, it was so rigged. I mean, literally, Orban rewrote all the rules in 2015. And, Paul, I need to give you a shout out here because, you know, Americans didn’t know anything about this. And I live in my head in Hungary. And I would come in every day to campus and see you in my office next door and go on whining and complaining about how Orban had been building a dictatorship starting in 2010. And you said, “Well, how come The New York Times isn’t covering it?” And I said, “Well, no one’s covering it because no one can see it.” It was all legal. It was all technical. It was really hard to see how Orban was nailing things down.

And then you called me up on a Sunday and said, “Okay, I’m going to do tomorrow’s column on Hungary.” And so, remember, we scrambled around, I was translating documents. The fact checkers were calling me up, and you wrote that blog post on a Monday, and then you said to me, “Look, you know, it’s more complicated than I could say. You can put something up on my blog.” And then we did that for like 3 or 4 years. You were putting all my commentaries up on your blog, and I was the only one covering it in English at that time. So, you know, if it wasn’t for your venue, it would have been impossible to get this on the radar screen of Americans. So, Paul, it’s your victory, too.

Krugman: I hope it is. I mean, I feel like I was facilitating your victory, it’s obviously the Hungarian people’s victory. But actually one of the things that strikes me here is that, we talk a lot about how Orban muzzled and controlled the media in Hungary, but, effectively, there was an international muzzling coming out of a couple of things.

Scheppele: Yeah.

Krugman: I remember you saying that basically even big international news organizations sort of had one stringer in Budapest who often turned out to be somebody affiliated with Fidesz. So.

Scheppele: Right. Well, there were a whole bunch of ways that he muzzled the international press. So one was just that, if you were a domestic journalist reporting for the international press, you were under surveillance, you were under threat. The international news organizations, including, by the way, the New York Times, had to start providing physical security for the reporters because they were really being threatened with death threats and the whole nine yards. And, you know, I got death threats, too, sometimes through the comments section on your blog. Right? So, everybody commenting on it was really under threat in some sense.

MS Now, Opinion: New Hungarian PM says government was funding CPAC but won’t anymore, Ja'han Jones, April 14, 2026. In the wake of authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s political defeat over the weekend, Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, is looking to sever his government’s financial ties to the influential pro-Trump activist group the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in Hungary, campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. When U.S. Vice President JD Vance made a last-second visit to Hungary to deliver his and Trump’s ultimately futile endorsements of the prime minister, I noted in a blog that an Orbán loss could disrupt the work of activist groups like CPAC operating in Hungary, which they portray as a model of the illiberal rule they’d like to bring to the U.S. (You can read some of my coverage on CPAC Hungary here and here.)

At a press conference on Monday, Magyar said Orbán’s government had given government funds to CPAC and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian residential college that Orbán critics have described as “an institution designed to breed right-wing intellectuals,” according to The New York Times. In condemning the alleged payments, Magyar called for investigations and said that while CPAC is welcome in Hungary, the government would no longer pay the group.

According to CNN:

Magyar told CNN that neither MCC nor CPAC would receive state funds under his government. ‘I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place. It was a crime. Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense,’ Magyar said. He added that institutes like MCC ‘should be investigated’ by anti-corruption institutions he plans to set up. ‘CPAC can come to Budapest. They’re very welcome. But not from Hungarian taxpayers’ money. From Fidesz’s money, or Orbán’s buddies’ money — before we take it back,’ he said.

Scandal-plagued CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp posted in response to Magyar’s comments but didn’t address the payment claims, saying only that he was “gratified” that Magyar “has invited us back to have CPAC.”

Neither Magyar nor the Hungarian government provided further details about the reported payments to CPAC. Following the comments, U.S. critics of the conservative group — including MS NOW contributor Joyce Vance, below — have an eye out for what information may emerge from the Hungarians’ anti-corruption investigation:

In the other direction, there’s been reporting on efforts by Trump officials, like State Department undersecretary Sarah Rogers, to name one, to fund far-right groups in Hungary and elsewhere. Rogers met last November with members of an Orbán-backed Hungarian propaganda group that was connected to CPAC Hungary.

It’s easy to see how Orbán’s loss could prove injurious to the MAGA movement in a variety of ways. With the downfall of Trump’s favorite authoritarian, the U.S. conservative movement appears to be losing its free rein (and apparently some financing) to use Hungary as an ideological testing ground. 

Todd Blanche Lies 1080x675Emptywheel, Analysis: Todd Blanche Puts Dmitry Firtash’s Onetime Lawyer In Charge of Criminalizing the Russian Investigation, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right,marcy wheeler April 19, 2026. Before Todd Blanche, shown above, was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney.

Before Todd Blanche was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney, he represented Igor Fruman in his unlawful donation and influence-peddling prosecution, the investigation of which extended to getting Marie Yovanovitch fired, undermining the Mueller investigation, and framing Hunter Biden.

russian flag wavingBefore Todd Blanche was Igor Fruman’s attorney, he represented Paul Manafort in a successful bid to prevent New York State from prosecuting Manafort for the mortgage fraud charges that Trump had pardoned.

Justice Department log circularThat’s all important background to the news that Blanche has appointed Joe DiGenova as Counsel overseeing the investigation into John Brennan and, ultimately, the grand conspiracy that, in their fevered imaginations, led everyone to be mean to Donald Trump.

The appointment was first reported by John Solomon, right, john solomonthen matched by CBS, NYT, Bloomberg, CNN, and ABC. And while, between them, those real media outlets list a number of the reasons DiGenova is inappropriate, which (as NYT lays out) include almost representing Trump on the Russian investigation (which was scotched because DiGenova’s wife Toensing had already represented Sam Clovis, Mark Corallo, and Erik Prince) and threatening several of the people targeted by DOJ, including John Brennan, below left, and Chris Krebs:

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that john brennan officialChristopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

And while Solomon notes that DiGenova and Toensing represented him on an issue years ago (I don’t think that includes championing Solomon when his calls with mobbed-up Senator Toricelli were leaked years ago), they’re all missing perhaps the most important reason DiGenova should not be anywhere near this investigation.

With Toensing, DiGenova played a central role in matters leading to Trump’s 2019 impeachment, as part of a team that included Fruman (Blanche’s eventual client, who had the alleged mob ties, including to Firtash), Lev Parnas, and John Solomon, a mess first publicly revealed when Trump attorney John Dowd sent this letter on October 3, 2019 attempting to stall the Ukraine impeachment, the same day DiGenova and Toensig’s Firtash tie became clear, and less than a week before Parnas and Fruman were arrested on their way to meet Firtash.

As I noted at the time, this letter was an announcement that the President was in a Joint Defense Agreement with the mob.

The effort that led up to that moment started with the efforts to get Marie Yovanovitch fired in 2019, which Lev Parnas, right, described in his lev parnas headshotbook. Here’s Parnas’ description of a Fox News appearance DiGenova made the day the Mueller investigation closed up shop, at a time when Toensing was discussing getting pro-Russian Ukrainians to pay her and DiGenova to carry out this hit job.

Trump ally Laura Ingraham dedicated the March 29 [sic; this happened on March 22] episode of her show to discuss what its tagline called “Joe Biden’s Ukraine Connection,” although it was the revelations of Manafort’s activities that had put Ukraine into the news at the time. In her first sentence, Ingraham deflected any attention to Manafort and concentrated on other “bad actors” in Ukraine, then she referred to Sessions’ “urgent letter imploring” Pompeo to remove Yovanovitch. She characterized the ambassador as “part of Obama’s orbit” and pointed out that Greg Craig — a lawyer for Obama and Bill Clinton and an adviser to Democrats Ted Kennedy and Madeleine Albright — lied about his work for Yanukovych, although she failed to mention that he did so while working directly for Manafort. And, to sweeten the pot, she pointed out that Biden had visited Ukraine just 10 days before Trump was inaugurated.

[snip]

Instantly, diGenova joined in, also reporting speculation that supported a pro-Trump narrative as fact. “There’s no question about it, that this has all the markings of bribery and extortion, and it’s something that deserves a full-blown investigation into the conduct of the Biden family in Ukraine,” he said. “There’s some very disturbing details about it that are about to come out in reporting by John Solomon, and I think once those details come out, I think there’s going to have to be a full-fledged criminal investigation.” This is exactly how our plan worked. [Viktor] Shokin had admitted the Bidens hadn’t broken the law, but we made it sound like they did — or something bad, at least. It’s a blueprint Trump and his people used over and over again. Accuse someone of being underhanded, but keep it vague, not even the slightest amount of detail. Then hold your supposed evidence away from anyone’s examination. The evidence could be blank sheets of paper, it doesn’t matter. It’s like a street-corner card game — the suckers are the only one who don’t know it’s rigged.

[Laura] Ingraham, sounding a touch less than impartial, egged them on, asking if such an investigation would be aimed at “revealing, perhaps, deep connections to how the Mueller probe started?”

Then diGenova made a paper-thin attempt at defending Manafort, while accusing Yovanovitch and unnamed others in being part of the reason behind the Mueller Probe, with no evidence to back it up. “Oh, absolutely, because what happened was, the ambassador there, who has been removed, was involved in generating false information about Manafort, other information that went into the so-called black, black binders,” he said, referring to the Black Ledger, Manafort’s list of accounts received. On it were $12.7 million from the Party of Regions (which, of course, he helped create and included Yanukovych, Manafort’s personal project).

The clip and transcript is here.

According to warrants from the investigation liberated by NYT, Parnas and Toensing were discussing this appearance in conjunction with james comey fbi portraitgetting paid by the Ukrainians.

One object of the investigation (on which Rebekah Donaleski, who represented Jim Comey, left, in the EDVA case, played a lead role) was to learn whether the opinions DiGenova expressed on Fox News were funded by pro-Russian Ukrainian entities.

But the Parnas-related effort extended to efforts to get a Chicago corruption indictment against Dmitry Firtash thrown out. Some cockamamie part of that involved claiming it was inappropriate for Andrew Weissmann to attempt to flip Firtash to learn of Trump’s Putin ties.

We came back and assembled the BLT Team. We told them all that we were arranging a meeting with Firtash. Solomon’s jaw dropped and his eyes lit up. Firtash was kind of like a White Whale for him. Not only was he one of the most well-connected people in Ukraine, he was also involved with the Mueller investigation. If we could talk to him, he told us, we might be able to discredit Mueller and his people as well as the Bidens. But all attempts to get to him had been blocked by his American lawyers, Lanny Davis and Dan Webb. We considered Davis to be part of the Democrat machine.

At a meeting of the BLT Team, John Solomon told me that we were not the first Americans trying to get Firtash to agree to a deal. Andrew Weissman had already secretly offered him a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to his U.S. extradition, but only if he would agree to testify about the relationship between Trump and Putin, as part of the Mueller investigation. In fact, he told us that Weissmann had offered a deal before Mueller had added him to his team (he was working for Mueller in the FBI at the time).

We knew that we had to get rid of, or sideline, Webb and especially Davis, offer Firtash a better offer than the one from Weissmann that he turned down. And we also had to get testimony, or at least some evidence of the Weissmann deal, to further discredit the Mueller investigation.

Months later, when Toensing and diGenova were working for Firtash, she confronted Webb about the Weissmann deal. He reluctantly admitted that it was true.

As Parnas testified to Congress, it also allegedly involved a quid pro quo trading help with that indictment for information framing Hunter and Joe Biden.

Ro Khanna: Did Bill Barr know that you were involved in getting this dirt?

Parnas: Absolutely. Bill, Bill Barr was informed of our investigation from the day he took office.

Khanna: Did you ever have a conversation with Bill Barr being lenient towards Dmitry, in Bill Barr’s role as Attorney General?

Parnas: I personally did not but I was witness to Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, having a conversation with Bill Barr about Dmitry Firtash.

Khanna: What did they say to Bill Barr?

Parnas: Basically, they were telling him that the charges were false, and that he needs to drop the charges and, basically, end the case.

Khanna: And why did they tell him to drop the charges on this Russian [sic] oligarch?

Parnas: Because Dmitry Firtash was going to help us getting dirt on the Bidens, or whatever else the Trump campaign needed.

Khanna: So my understanding is you have the Trump campaign telling you to talk to a Russian [sic] oligarch to get dirt, on the President of the United States for political reasons, and then someone from the Trump campaign is talking to the Attorney General to drop the charges because this foreign national is helping get dirt on a political candidate?

Parnas: Absolutely.

During the Special Master Process, Toensing made efforts to protect both her communications with Firtash (on attorney-client grounds) and DiGenova (on spousal privilege grounds), and Firtash eventually entered an appearance to invoke his own privilege. There’s no evidence that the Firtash representation was pierced. Austria finally refused the extradition case against Firtash last year, citing new evidence.

In the end, SDNY did not charge anyone for the key influence peddling here. Most of Rudy’s phones were found to be corrupted (and Jack Smith later learned he had had more that weren’t seized), and SDNY expected to find multiple Toensing phones but found just one.

But some of the very same opinions that Joe DiGenova expressed in an effort to discredit the Russian investigation were expressed with the hope, at least, that Russian-backed Ukrainians would pay for those opinions. Plus, he was in the thick of efforts to work with an allegedly mobbed up Ukrainian to frame Joe Biden as part of an effort to undercut the Russian investigation.

Todd Blanche knows that.

He would have read these warrant affidavits and the underlying evidence behind them while representing Fruman.

And this appointment comes just weeks after Tulsi Gabbard’s wildly suspect criminal referral of the whistleblower in the Ukraine impeachment.

To make things still worse, at a time when the DiGenova appointment must have been in the works on Friday, DiGenova’s buddy Solomon told Russian useful idiot Benny Johnson Friday that Trump would declassify a load of documents in part to avoid the CIPA proceedings that delayed Trump’s own prosecution and have delayed John Bolton’s.

So Todd Blanche is appointing a lawyer formerly paid by Russian allies to discredit the Russian investigation to declassify and release a load of intelligence — things like cybersecurity collection, more intelligence shared by Dutch spooks, and human intelligence — in the guise of criminalizing counterintelligence investigations.

This was never a real criminal investigation. But it just moved into something far more ominous.  

 

Ultra-right partisan Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest person as owner of Tesla, Space X, and many other properties often reliant on U.S. government contracts, is shown in a collage with President Trump, whose campaigns Musk has strongly supported with hundreds of millions in donations. Ultra-right partisan Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest person as owner of Tesla, Space X, and many other properties often reliant on U.S. government contracts, is shown in a collage with President Trump, whose campaigns Musk has strongly supported with hundreds of millions in donations. 

Lev Remembers, Investigative Commentary and  Whistleblowing: WHO IS REALLY BEHIND TRUMP? (Part One), Lev Parnas, right, former Trump operative, whistleblower and author of "Shadow Diplomacy," shown below, April 19, 2026. lev parnas headshotFrom tech billionaires to shadow ideologies to a blueprint for power—this is Part One of the story they don’t want you to see.

A lot of people keep wondering why Donald Trump does what he does.

Why he praises strongmen. Why he undermines institutions. Why he seems more comfortable with chaos than stability.

lev parnas coverAnd I keep telling you the same thing: It’s not just Donald Trump. It’s the people around him. It’s the people behind the scenes. It’s what you don’t see. It’s what you don’t hear. It’s what doesn’t get reported.

That’s the part that should scare you.

Because Donald Trump, at his core, has always been driven by one thing—money, image, and legacy. The buildings, the branding, the gold letters, the obsession with being the biggest, the best, the most powerful name in the room.That’s who he is.

But the machinery around him? That’s something very different. And that’s what I’ve been working on putting together for you.

This is Part One.

THE IDEOLOGY: WHERE IT REALLY BEGINS

 

Curtis Yarvin portrait 2023 3x4 cropped

To understand what’s happening today, you have to go back—not to 2016, not to 2020—but to 2007.That’s when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin, shown above, began laying out a framework that would later echo through politics, tech, and power.

He called it the “Dark Enlightenment.”

This wasn’t just criticism of government. It was a rejection of democracy itself.

Yarvin argued that democracy was inefficient, unstable, and ultimately unsustainable in a modern world. In its place, he proposed a centralized system run more like a corporation—led by a small elite, powered by technology, and enforced through structure and control.

He wrote about dismantling federal institutions. Eliminating bureaucracy. Rebuilding governance from the top down. And those ideas didn’t stay isolated.They moved.

FROM THEORY TO POWER: THIEL AND VANCE

Among those paying attention was Peter Thiel. Thiel had long questioned whether democracy could coexist with rapid technological progress. He believed systems were too slow, too constrained, too outdated.

In 2011, he gave a lecture that would quietly shape the future of American politics.

In the audience: J. D. Vance.That moment turned into a relationship—mentorship, funding, alignment. Thiel didn’t just influence Vance—he helped build him into a political figure connected to the same networks of power, capital, and long-term thinking.

Vance represents something different than Trump. He represents continuity .A bridge between ideology and implementation.

THE EXPANSION: TECH POWER, MEDIA, AND INFLUENCE

At the same time, a broader ecosystem was forming.Investors, platforms, influence networks.

Figures like Elon Musk stepping directly into political discourse.

Voices like David Sacks helping shape alternative narratives.

Platforms like Rumble shifting how information flows.

This wasn’t random.It was a growing alignment around a belief:

That traditional institutions—government, media, bureaucracy—were broken.

And that something new needed to replace them.

A QUIET PARALLEL: THE PUTIN MODEL

Now look at a system that already exists.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has operated under a model of centralized authority, reinforced by a network of loyal elites—often described as oligarchs. Power is consolidated. Media is controlled. Opposition is limited.A nd while the United States is not Russia—there are ideological echoes: A skepticism of democratic systems. A preference for centralized power. A fusion of wealth and governance.

PROJECT 2025: THE BLUEPRINT FOR POWER

project 2025 mainAnd then there is the structure.The planning.The roadmap.Organizations like The Heritage Foundation didn’t just react to political change—they prepared for it. Through Project 2025, they developed a detailed, coordinated strategy to reshape the federal government from the inside out under the next conservative administration. This isn’t just a policy wishlist. t’s a governing manual.

A plan to:• Replace thousands of federal employees with ideologically aligned personnel• Consolidate executive power• Restructure agencies to align with a specific vision of governance• Reduce institutional independence across departmentsFigures like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller have been associated with pushing aggressive executive authority and structural changes to government.This is about control of the system itself.Not just winning elections—But controlling what happens after.

AND WHILE THIS WAS HAPPENING — DONALD TRUMP

Continued below

And while all of this was taking shape in the background—while ideologies were being written, networks were forming, and power structures were being mapped out—you had Donald Trump moving through it all in his own way.Starting in the late 1980s, with his marriage to Ivana Trump and his early exposure to Soviet-connected circles, Trump’s name began appearing in conversations tied to foreign money and influence. Through the rise and fall of his casinos, the bankruptcies, and the years when traditional American banks began pulling back, new streams of financing emerged—many tied to individuals connected to Russian business and oligarchic networks.Trump’s orbit also intersected with figures like Jeffrey Epstein, raising further questions about the circles he moved in and the leverage those relationships created.As Trump moved closer to politics, those connections didn’t disappear—they evolved. By 2016, his campaign was being managed by Paul Manafort, a man with well-documented ties to pro-Russian interests and work connected to Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. That same election cycle saw confirmed efforts by Russia to interfere in the U.S. election—an operation that U.S. intelligence agencies publicly assessed was intended to benefit Trump. In 2020, there were continued efforts tied to Russian sources to surface damaging information on Hunter and Joe Biden.Through it all, Trump remained consistent in one way—public admiration for Putin, repeated deference, and a pattern that raised alarms across intelligence and national security communities.

THIS IS NOT THEORY — THIS IS LIVED

And I want you to understand something clearly.I’m not writing this to you as someone sitting on the outside piecing together headlines.I’m telling you this because I lived it.Because I saw it.Because I was in rooms where these conversations were happening.And even beyond that—through my sources and relationships across the United States, Europe, and Ukraine—I continue to see how these networks operate, how they communicate, and how they move behind the scenes.This is not speculation to me.This is experience.T

HE MOMENT OF ALIGNMENT

So now step back.You have:An ideology questioning democracy and promoting centralized control.A network of tech power, money, and influence ready to disrupt old systems.A geopolitical model that demonstrates how centralized authority can operate.And a detailed policy roadmap designed to restructure government itself.And in the middle of all of it—Donald Trump.Not as the architect.But as the catalyst.The one who breaks the system open.The one who commands attention.The one chasing power, money, legacy—the shiny objects.While behind him—The real architecture is being shaped.The long-term strategy.The ideological framework.The structural transformation.Trump didn’t create this alignment—but he became the center of it. The perfect vehicle at the perfect time. Someone driven by personal ambition and visible rewards, while the real architecture of power—those shaping systems, policies, and long-term direction—operates behind the curtain. This is not the end of the story. This is the opening chapter. In Part Two, I’m going to take you deeper—connecting these relationships, following the financial and political pathways, and showing you exactly how these worlds intersect in ways that have not been fully exposed. SubscribedShareWhile they build networks—We build a movement.

Enough is enough. We are not waiting quietly for the midterms. We are organizing now. We are mobilizing now. We are making our voices heard now.

Register today:CallsForCongress@Proton.me This is how we coordinate.This is how we act.This is how we make our voices impossible to ignore.Join our volunteer group:levpttp@Proton.me We are growing every day. Thousands of calls. Thousands of voices.And we are just getting started.

SUPPORT THE MISSION

I risk a lot bringing you this information.We’re talking about some of the most powerful people and networks in the world. And that’s why I need your help.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

Donald Trump portrayed himself as pope, as shown above, after Pope Francis died, then ramped up criticism of Pope Leo XIV with harsh comments last week.Donald Trump portrayed himself as pope after Pope Francis died, as shown above, then ramped up criticism of Pope Leo XIV with harsh comments last week.

Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: The Strait Remains Closed, Trump Is More Far More Mad Than King, Farmers Are Really Struggling in America, Virginia Votes Tuesday, Simon Rosenberg, right, simon rosenberg twitterApril 19, 2026. The Wall Street Journal has a new, very worthy deep dive into Trump’s handling/mishandling of the war. It is full of remarkable, even comical, moments. Here are a few excerpts:

The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict. Unlike the successful operation in Venezuela, which buoyed his confidence, Trump is confronting a more intractable foe in Iran, which is so far unwilling to bend to his demands.

……..

Soon after Trump’s holiday post, aides fielded calls from Republican senators and Christian leaders. They asked, why would he say “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning? Why would he use the F-word? Trump swears profusely in private but usually calibrates it in public and on social media.

When one adviser later asked him about it, he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. But he was also concerned about the fallout. “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers. (Iran’s parliamentary speaker called the threat reckless.)

On the Tuesday after Easter, he issued the most dramatic ultimatum of his presidency, saying that unless Iran struck a deal in 12 hours, a whole civilization would die.

Again, the post was improvisational, and not part of a national security plan, the administration officials said. A screenshot of a Truth Social post by Donald J. Trump threatening the Iranian civilization.

People around the U.S. and the world were gripped with fear and confusion about what the president intended to do. Behind the scenes, top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate.

What Trump really wanted, advisers said, was to scare the Iranians, and to end the conflict. Less than ninety minutes before his deadline, Trump announced a precarious two-week cease-fire.

“President Trump campaigned proudly on his promise to deny the Iranian regime the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, which is what this noble operation accomplishes,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. She said the president had “remained a steady leader our country needs.”

Um, look at these quotes!

“He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said.”

“Again, the post was improvisational, and not part of a national security plan, the administration officials said.”

Of course the way the Iranians, and the rest of the world are reading this completely unhinged behavior is that they are the pathetic, childish screams of an addled, old man who has badly fucked up and lost control of this ridiculous war. Note that in the quote above Leavitt repeats the Trumpian invention that Iran has agreed to end its nuclear program; and note this morning that Strait remains closed, Trump looks like a buffoon for lying to the world about his imagined victory, and he has, not surprisingly, returned to all caps unhinged threats this morning - for there is no deal on the table Trump can possibly accept that doesn’t look like some form of humiliating surrender. He literally made up the cease fire “deal” - Iran gives up their nuclear program, the Strait reopens, talks commence all due to his MIGHTY STRENGTH. Iran didn’t agree to give up their nuclear program, and the Strait would only re-open when Trump ended the blockade, which HE HAS REFUSED TO DO for it would look like he has retreated.

I have no idea what happens now. But as I’ve been writing these last few weeks the only way this thing ends is if Trump makes major concessions, something I just don’t think he is capable of doing - as evidenced by his refusal to abide by the cease fire deal negotiated last week. So it’s groundhog day now. He issues big threats. Iran and the world laugh at him. The Strait remains closed, “talks” recommence, he and MAGA continue to melt down, and we are left with someone, it is increasingly clear, who is far more mad than King….

Some other stories worth your time in the coming days:

“The FBI Director Is MIA: Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences” - Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic (gift link). The worst cabinet in history stays true to form.

“The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court” - Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, NYT. “Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.” A Sunday must read.

“It’s The End of the Internet as We Know It” - Raffi Krikorian, NYT (gift link). AI is here, and changing everything. Something we will be talking about much more in the days ahead. Raffi is the former CTO of the DNC.

Politico has two new stories about how the mid-term battlefield favors the Democrats: Battleground Republicans are starting to worry about the Senate and ‘A trend that can’t be ignored’: Dems have made up ground in nearly every election since Trump took office.

“Russian blogger’s fierce critique of Kremlin goes viral: ‘People are afraid of you’ “- The Guardian. “The Kremlin is grappling with the fallout from the viral spread of a celebrity blogger’s criticism of Russian authorities, as Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings register their sixth consecutive weekly decline.”

As Putin falters Trump continues to act on his behalf: Zelensky condemns US extension of Russian sanctions waiver and U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes

“Nationwide Survey: Most Farmers Can’t Afford Fertilizer“- The Farm Bureau. “Conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation April 3-11, the survey shows 70% of respondents say fertilizer is so expensive that they will not be able to buy all the fertilizer they need.”

PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Completely Out Of It Trump Doesn't Even Know Where JD Vance Is, Jason Easley, right, jason easleyApril 19, 2026. Trump claimed that Vice President Vance would not be attending peace talks with Iran, but the administration said that Vance was attending the talks, meaning that Trump has no idea what's happening.

politicus usa logoThere is mounting evidence that Donald Trump’s cognitive decline is getting worse by the day, and it appears that he might not have much of an understanding of what is happening in his own administration.

On Saturday, Trump wanted praise for being able to sign his own name.

The only tool that Trump has to end the war that he started, since he is clueless about real diplomacy, is threats.

Donald Trump keeps making the same threats over and over again:

Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement! Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations. Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it. They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing. In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be “the tough guy!”

We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END,

Trump said that one of his representatives attending the talks would not be Vice President JD Vance.

Trump told ABC News on Sunday morning: It’s only because of security,” Trump told ABC News of the reason Vance is not making the trip. “JD’s great.”

Almost immediately, the White House corrected the declining president. CNN’s Alayna Treene posted on X:

The White House tells CNN that VP Vance is traveling to Pakistan for talks, in addition to Witkoff & Kushner, despite POTUS saying Vance wasn’t attending As for Trump’s comments this morning saying Vance wasn’t making the trip, a White House official told CNN: “Things changed” 

More Global News

Politico, Russia-aligned Rumen Radev set to win Bulgarian election, Christian Oliver, April 19, 2026. Key question is whether he will now need to build coalition — and whether he will then choose allies from the pro-EU or pro-Moscow camp.

bulgariapolitico CustomRumen Radev, a Russia-aligned former president, looks on course for an emphatic win in Bulgaria’s election on Sunday, but may still have to team up with at least one other party to form a governing majority.

Radev’s newly created Progressive Bulgaria movement was on track to secure around 40 percent of the vote, according to projections broadcast on television after the polls closed.

That meant he had more than twice the support of any other party.

Whether he can win an outright majority will depend on how many minor parties make it into parliament — past the 4 percent threshold.

If he needs partners in government, the big question is whether he will seek to form a majority with pro-EU liberal reformists (on about 14 percent), or whether he will ally himself with the Socialist party (on about 4 percent) and nationalists (on about 5 percent), which could allow him to form a pro-Moscow governing bloc.

In remarks immediately after the vote, Radev hinted he could find common ground with the pro-Brussels reformist camp over shaking up the corruption-plagued judiciary.

The election is the Balkan country’s eighth in five years — amid rolling political crises and fragile coalitions — and 62-year-old former air force commander Radev has been seeking to pull together a new political party to break the impasse.

Radev has established his political reputation by casting himself as an enemy of the country’s oligarchic “mafia state,” but his opponents argue his policies often align with the Kremlin’s, particularly on the war in Ukraine.

Radev has encouraged Ukraine to sue for peace, does not support sending arms to Kyiv and says his insistence that Crimea is “Russian” simply reflects a strategic reality. He is also a critic of Sofia’s accession to the euro this year, arguing the new currency has stoked inflation.

In his remarks after voting on Sunday morning, Radev said the election was an opportunity to “take back” the country from oligarchs, but also called for relations of “mutual respect” with Moscow, based on Russia’s role in liberating Bulgaria from the Ottoman empire in 1878.

While these positions have helped him build up a base of support at home, he has avoided direct confrontation with the West and has generally fallen in step with the European mainstream when attending European Council meetings in Brussels.

European funds are vital to the EU’s poorest member country and Bulgarian leaders have traditionally avoided any provocative antics in Brussels in the style of outgoing Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.

A senior EU diplomat said Radev was nowhere close to Orbán as a disruptive force. They said Radev was in a “much different league” when it comes to his ability, and desire, to upend policy. He and others like Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico “don’t come close [to Orbán] in experience, tenacity, network and ideas,” the diplomat added.

In the days before the election, former MiG-29 pilot Radev pushed back against the accusations that he was pro-Russian.

“I don’t see what kind of pro-Russian position I have. I have completely pro-Bulgarian positions, I have pro-European positions,” he said.

 

european union logo rectanglePolitico, Spain pushes to end EU-Israel association agreement, Gregorio Sorgi, April 19, 2026. Madrid will propose the measure at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday, said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, right.pedro sánchez 2023 w

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday urged the EU to end its association agreement with Israel.

In an escalation of his criticism against Israel, he said during a rally in Andalusia that “a government that violates politico Custominternational law or the principles of the EU cannot be its partner.”

Spain will formally propose the termination of the agreement at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday in Luxembourg.

Sánchez has emerged as one of Israel’s most vocal critics in the EU. He accused Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing genocide in Gaza and denounced the joint U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran as an “immense error.”

Israel FlagCritics claim that Israel’s continued strikes against Lebanon are undermining a peace settlement in the broader region. During his speech in Andalusia, Sánchez called for an immediate end to the war in the Middle East that has led to a surge in global oil prices and mass displacement across the region.

The foreign ministers of Spain, Ireland and Slovenia accused Israel of breaching the association agreement with the EU in a letter to the bloc’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, on Saturday. They said that the approval of the death penalty by the Israeli parliament and violent action by Israeli settlers in the West Bank are violations of fundamental human rights.

Madrid’s proposal to end the association agreement, however, is unlikely to immediately succeed as it requires unanimity among the EU’s 27 member countries.

The idea is likely to be opposed by a German-led group of countries that have consistently voted against tougher measures. A European Commission proposal in September to sanction some Israeli ministers and suspend trade-related sections of the association agreement failed to reach a majority in the European Council.

April 18

Top Headlines

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Iran’s Military Says It Has Reimposed ‘Strict Control’ of Strait of Hormuz, Aaron Boxerman, John Yoon, Ashley Ahn, Pranav Baskar and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, April 18, 2026. The military said it would keep the vital waterway under its control until the U.S. ended its blockade of Iranian ports. The statement added to the uncertainty over access to the strait. Here’s the latest.

Hopium Chronicles, Opinion: Trump's Ridiculous Story About The Iranian Negotiations Crashes And Burns, And The Strait Of Hormuz Is Closed Once Again, Simon Rosenberg, April 18, 2026. Our country is on an unsustainable path, and must change course.

News Updates

 

kash patel headshot smile

The Parnas Perspective, News and Commentary: Explosive New Melania/Epstein Allegations, Trump May Fire Kash Patel Over Alcoholism, Iran Closes Strait of Hormuz, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 18, 2026. FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly under intense pressure right now with the President after explosive allegations about his alcoholism surfaced overnight in a major report. From what I am hearing, the President is deeply concerned that Patel is no longer trusted to lead a critical national security agency, and his position may be in jeopardy.

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

 

Former CIA Director John Brennan, shown in his official portrait.Former CIA Director John Brennan, shown in his official portrait.

New York Times, Prosecutor Withdraws From Trump Team’s Investigation of Ex-C.I.A. Chief, Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). A career Justice Department lawyer, Maria Medetis Long, in Miami is said to have raised concerns about whether the evidence justified moving forward with a bid to prosecute John O. Brennan.

The Atlantic, Investigation: The FBI Director Is MIA, Sarah Fitzpatrick, April 17, 2026. Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

Michael Cohen via Substack, Opinion: The Unraveling of Patel, Michael Cohen, right, michael cohen palmer portraitApril 18, 2026. A jittery FBI chief spirals from login glitch to full blown panic, as whispers of chaos, paranoia, and late night excess collide with a job far bigger than him.

RawStory, MAGA loyalists believe Trump staged his assassination attempt and demand he admits it, María Teresita Armstrong-Matta, April 17, 2026. Conservative podcaster Tim Dillon suggested the shooting was fabricated and called for Trump to publicly admit it.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Advocacy, Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi’s Trophy Stunt, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 18, 2026. I’ve been closely tracking two sets of cases in Minnesota: (1) the Don Lemon conspiracy case, in which (among other things) DOJ arrested and then dismissed the case against the wrong woman, and (2) the cases against 16 people that Pam Bondi used as trophies in one of her trips to Minnesota, which is one of the things that led the US Attorney’s office to fall apart.

New York Times, Federal Appeals Court Opens Door to Moving Trans Inmates Under Trump Gender Order, Mattathias Schwartz, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). A three-judge panel gave a group of 17 transgender women a few weeks to seek further recourse in court before their transfer to men’s facilities could take effect.

MS Now: Opinion, Jamie Raskin’s push for 25th Amendment to end Trump presidency is a mistake, Andy Craig (senior editor at The UnPopulist), April 18, 2026. Is it time for the 25th Amendment? The 25th Amendment is no substitute for impeachment. A proposed panel of doctors and ex-politicians can’t replace Congress doing its job.

More On Iran-Lebanon War

Paul Krugman on Substack, Trump Can't Even Surrender Right, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 18, 2026. That was the peace that was.

New York Times, Reopening Strait of Hormuz Would Ease Oil Crisis but Only So Much, Rebecca F. Elliott, April 18, 2026. Analysts said energy and Iran Flagshipping companies would be reluctant to fully restore operations until they were confident that hostilities were over.

New York Times, Trump Extends Sanctions Exemption on Some Russian Oil as High Gas Prices Persist, Ashley Ahn, Updated April 18, 2026. The Trump administration made the announcement hours after Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships, though the status of the waterway remained uncertain.

The Bulwark, Opinion: Iran Closes Strait, Fires on Ships — While Trump Hangs with Joe Rogan, Tim Miller, April 18, 2026. Tim Miller takes on fast-moving developments after Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz again and fires on commercial ships—less than a day after Donald Trump said it would "never" close again. Plus: Trump’s appearance with Joe Rogan, his response to the crisis, and his decision to shut down questions from reporters.

Forbes, Ships Make U-Turns In Strait Of Hormuz After Iran Fires On Multiple Vessel, April 18, 2026.

Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump PANICS and KICKS OUT PRESS as Iran RETALIATES!!! April 18, 2026. Host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump kicking out the press during a bizarre Saturday press conference with Joe Rogan and refusing to answer questions on Iran as Iran has retaliated against Trump’s latest threats by fully closing the Strait of Hormuz again.

More Global News

The New Republic, Hard Power: Trump Is Waging One Big War Against the Rest of the World, Jonathan Guyer, April 15, 2026. The bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings that have defined much of Trump’s second term make more sense understood together, rather than as disparate events.

pedro sánchez 2023 wNew York Times, How a Fight With Trump Threw Spain’s Leader a Political Lifeline, Jason Horowitz, April 18, 2026. To leftists abroad, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, right, is a hero for standing up to President Trump. At home, Mr. Trump is seen as Mr. Sánchez’s political savior from thorny domestic challenges. 

The New Front, Analysis: Putin’s Billion-Dollar Nightmare Just Started, Ben Hodges, April 18, 2026. Russia thought it had cracked the code, but the geopolitical landscape just shifted forever. In this video, we dive deep into the current state of the Russia Ukraine war and reveal how Ukraine is systematically dismantling the Russian military from behind the front lines.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Kim Lane Scheppele on Hungary, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 18, 2026. Democracy wins big.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Trump's Lost his Mojo, Rick Wilson, right, and Andrew Wilson,rick wilson screengrab April 18, 2026. Behind The Numbers: "Donald Trump is finished. He is finished forever. He has no motion as far as electoral politics goes anymore. He has no motion with the American people."

New York Times, The Doctor Will Seek Your Vote Now, Nina Agrawal, April 18, 2026. Dozens of Democratic doctors are running for office in the midterms, including some spurred by opposition to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaccine stance.

New York Times, Primary Becomes Purity Test for a State G.O.P.: ‘You Can’t Serve Two Masters,’ David W. Chen, Photographs by Will Warasila, April 18, 2026. For years, Republican state legislators in Montana have been willing to team up with Democrats, but in nearly two dozen races on June 2, a nationally attuned right has those lawmakers in its sights.

U.S. Culture Wars, Media, Religion

MS Now, Opinion: New Hungarian PM says government was funding CPAC but won’t anymore, Ja'han Jones, April 14, 2026. In the wake of authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s political defeat over the weekend, Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, is looking to sever his government’s financial ties to the influential pro-Trump activist group the Conservative Political Action Conference.Lucian Truscott Newsletter, Commentary: The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Six, Lucian K. Truscott IV, April 18, 2026. Having come within one very tense Superintendent’s Board of not graduating from West Point, I can’t tell you that I had very high hopes for my nascent army career. But I was a second lieutenant on the way to my first station at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and I was determined to give it my best shot.

New York Times, Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading, Ruth Graham, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). He will read a passage from the Old Testament that his Christian supporters cite as a call to national repentance and divine blessing.

The New Republic, Anti-Trans Influencer Sucks Up to Trump After He Humiliates Her, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, April 15, 2026. Riley Gaines was a fan of Donald Trump’s again after he deleted the AI photo depicting him as Jesus.

The New Republic, Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, April 14, 2026. Péter Magyar called the payments a “crime” and said his government would stop the funds.

Top Stories

 

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Iran’s Military Says It Has Reimposed ‘Strict Control’ of Strait of Hormuz, Aaron Boxerman, John Yoon, Ashley Ahn, Pranav Baskar and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, April 18, 2026. The military said it would keep the vital waterway under its control until the U.S. ended its blockade of Iranian ports. The statement added to the uncertainty over access to the strait. Here’s the latest.

Iran said Saturday that it had reasserted control over the Strait of Hormuz because the United States was maintaining a naval blockade, just hours after Iranian officials and President Trump had said that the critical waterway was open, raising hopes for an end to the six-week war.

The announcement added more confusion to the status of transit through the strait, where Iran had choked global energy supplies by menacing nearby ships during the war with the United States and Israel. Iran’s military, in a statement carried by government media, said it was now “under strict control” unless the United States ended its own blockade of Iranian ports.

A day earlier, Iran’s foreign minister called the strait “completely open.” At the same time, however, Iranian officials had insisted ships would still need Iranian permission and must travel an Iranian-designated route.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump framed the Iranian announcement as a breakthrough and presented the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran as all but concluded. He immediately added, however, that the American naval blockade of Iran’s ports would remain in place until a deal was reached to end the war.

Iran FlagThe president has often made overly optimistic claims about the war, which began in late February. Although Mr. Trump expressed confidence late Friday about the negotiations with Iran that he said would be happening over the weekend, no new face-to-face talks were announced as of Saturday morning.

Mr. Trump also claimed in a phone interview with CBS that Iran had “agreed to everything.” But Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly denied Iran had agreed to any of their adversaries’ core demands.

The announcement of the strait’s reopening brought immediate relief to energy markets on Friday, sending international oil prices tumbling to around $90 a barrel.

Hopes for an end to the war were boosted by the 10-day cease-fire in Lebanon that went into effect on Friday. The deal prompted celebrations in Lebanon as thousands of displaced families made their way home, and there was heavy traffic again Saturday morning as people continued to head south.

Iran had demanded the truce with the United States extend to Lebanon as a condition for a broader deal. Mr. Trump and U.S. officials worked to make that happen, even as they denied they were trying to meet Iran’s conditions.

Here’s what else we are covering:

Iranian threat: The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ small and fast boats have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Read more ›

Energy crisis: Even if the Strait of Hormuz opened fully, it would take weeks for substantial amounts of Persian Gulf oil and gas to reach buyers — and much longer before damage to energy infrastructure was repaired — meaning that high gas prices and shortages of products like jet fuel could persist. Read more ›

 

djt strait opened 4 17 2026

djt oil shorts 4 17 2026

djt strait opened 4 17 2026

Hopium Chronicles, Opinion: Trump's Ridiculous Story About The Iranian Negotiations Crashes And Burns, And The Strait Of Hormuz Is Closed Once Again, Simon Rosenberg, right, simon rosenberg twitterApril 18, 2026. Our country is on an unsustainable path, and must change course.

Yesterday, Donald Trump, once again, tried to sell the world a wildly implausible and false story about the peace negotiations with Iran, a story that made it appear that Iran had made major concessions to our STRONG and MIGHTY leader. The Strait was open we were told (as shown byTrump statements above). The Iranians had agreed to give up their nuclear program our addled leader told the world.

Essentially what Trump sold to us was yet another imaginary Iranian surrender, which as the Iranians have made clear over the last 24 hours, did not happen. They have not agreed to end their nuclear program, not agreed to re-open the Strait while Trump maintained his blockade. 

Just as there is no longer a path for Putin to win in Ukraine, there is no path for victory for Trump in Iran. Both Putin and Trump have lost. But they cannot accept the humiliation that will come from admitting defeat and so the exhausting fighting, the gaslighting, the threats, continue.

I have offered a lot of commentary in recent days about the dark place America finds itself in now; how the Trump regime and Greater MAGA are unraveling, crumbling, and falling apart; and why we should be optimistic that the spectacular historic failure and Olympian awfulness and madness of Trumpism will weaken oligarchical and autocratic forces and bolster pro-democracy forces around the world, as we saw in Hungary this week. Get to it when you can.

What caused Trump to lie to the world about the negotiations?

Impatience, lack of impulse control, desperation, a negotiating tactic, another act of self-enrichment? I don’t know.

But we do know, as we discussed yesterday, that Trump is now facing repeated, open rebellion from Republicans in both the House and Senate. His hold on the Capital has weakened, significantly, and defiance, even on that things that really matter to the White House, is becoming routine. There has to be tremendous pressure on him coming from inside his own party, and from his Gulf Arab business partners, to fix this incredible mess he has made in the Middle East.

 

djt superheroBut he can’t. For fixing it would require him to admit failure, and to leave Iran in a stronger position in the region. And so we are, with the addled, vainglorious idiot in the White House screaming victory, again, and praying that somehow by summoning these words it would all magically become true; and he would be the STRONG and MIGHTY God-Emperor again that he sees in the mirror (as exemplified by his self-portrait above) when he wakes each morning rather the failed, pathetic, buffoon the whole world knows him to be.

News Updates

kash patel headshot smile

The Parnas Perspective, News and Commentary: Explosive New Melania/Epstein Allegations, Trump May Fire Kash Patel Over Alcoholism, Iran Closes Strait of Hormuz, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 18, 2026. FBI Director Kash Patel, above, is reportedly under intense pressure right now with the President after explosive allegations about his alcoholism surfaced overnight in a major report. From what I am hearing, the President is deeply concerned that Patel is no longer trusted to lead a critical national security agency, and his position may be in jeopardy.

At the same time, there are new and serious claims emerging from an interview involving Melania Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Overseas, tensions are escalating as Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz despite Trump’s earlier claims, with his naval blockade still in place. There is a lot unfolding all at once.

I spent much of the night speaking with individuals about the Patel story, running on very little sleep thanks to my daughter. I will be working continuously today to bring you real-time updates on Patel, Epstein, Iran, and more. You can expect another update this afternoon.

If you can, please consider subscribing to support my work. I rely on your support to remain independent. Let’s build a stronger model for independent journalism together.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

FBI headquarters in Washington, DC (Photo via wikiemedia cc by sa 3.0).

FBI headquarters in Washington, DC (Photo via wikiemedia cc by sa 3.0).

FBI Director Kash Patel is in the hot seat this morning, especially after a late-night bombshell article from the Atlantic which highlighted significant concerns about his excessive drinking. This may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the President with Patel. One particularly alarming claim involves his security team allegedly considering the use of “breaching equipment” (similar to a battering ram) to access his locked room when he was unresponsive, reportedly due to intoxication. These incidents, along with reports of frequent absences and impaired judgment, have led colleagues to question hisreliability during critical moments. While the administration has publicly defended him, such behind-the-scenes concerns—especially around alcohol use—have added pressure and uncertainty about his standing.

The article details how Patel has come under intense scrutiny following reports of erratic behavior, including a widely discussed incident where he atlantic logo horizontalmistakenly believed he had been fired after a routine IT issue. According to multiple sources that spoke to the Atlantic, he reacted by urgently contacting aides and allies in what some described as a panic. The episode raised concerns within the FBI about his judgment and emotional stability in high-pressure situations. It also fueled broader doubts about his ability to effectively lead a major national security agency.

Allegations of excessive drinking and inconsistent attendance have further deepened concerns about Patel’s leadership. Officials claim his alcohol use has at times interfered with his schedule, delaying briefings and making him difficult to reach during critical moments. Some insiders worry this behavior could pose risks to national security, especially during crises requiring immediate response.

While the Trump administration has publicly defended Patel, backing his performance and alignment with its agenda, there are signs of frustration behind the scenes. Based on what I understand, behind the scenes, Trump has been particularly displeased with the drinking allegations, given his own sobriety and personal sensitivity to alcohol-related issues. Altogether, the situation points to growing uncertainty about Patel’s standing within the administration.

Kash Patel lashed out today and threatened legal action against The Atlantic after it published allegations about his conduct, including claims of excessive drinking and irregular attendance at work. Patel denied the accusations, calling them false and defamatory, and said he would see the outlet “in court.” 

 

amanda ungaro melania trump collageIn a new interview released this morning with Courier, Amanda Ungaro (shown above left in a file photo collage with Melania Trump at right) has made a series of explosive allegations involving Melania Trump and Paolo Zampolli, claiming she witnessed compromising interactions over decades and would be paolo zampolli owilling to testify before Congress. Ungaro alleges abuse and manipulation by Zampolli, right, as well as broader connections involving Jeffrey Epstein, though these claims are disputed or denied by those involved. The accusations come amid a larger controversy following Melania Trump’s public denial of ties to Epstein, intensifying scrutiny around past relationships and potential investigations.

Part two of the explosive interview:

Part three of the explosive interview:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, with state media signaling full control over the critical shipping route. Maritime tracking groups say at least two vessels have come under fire, and roughly 20 ships have already turned around rather than risk transit. Regional intelligence sources describe the strait as effectively shut down, with vessels being actively deterred from passing through. The situation raises major concerns about global energy supply disruptions and the potential for rapid escalation in regional conflict.

An Iranian official, Ebrahim Azizi, said the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a direct response to what he described as longstanding U.S. “untrustworthiness.” He argued that Washington’s actions and messaging—particularly from Donald Trump—were misleading, accusing the U.S. of creating a false impression of progress in negotiations. Azizi warned that Iran would not be swayed by rhetoric and is prepared to respond decisively at key strategic chokepoints if tensions escalate further. His remarks underscore how the strait’s closure is being framed by Iran as both a defensive move and a signal of readiness for further confrontation.

Donald Trump signaled uncertainty about the future of the ceasefire, saying he may not extend it if no deal is reached by the Wednesday deadline. He suggested that failure in negotiations could lead to a resumption of military action, including renewed airstrikes. The remarks highlight the fragile state of current talks and the risk of rapid escalation. They also reinforce pressure on ongoing negotiations, with the possibility of conflict intensifying if diplomacy breaks down.

Senior Iranian negotiators are also actively calling out the President of the United States this morning:

mojtaba khameneiMojtaba Khamenei, right, said in a Telegram message that Iran’s navy is prepared to deliver new “bitter defeats” against its enemies. The statement reflects a defiant and aggressive tone from Iran’s leadership amid rising regional tensions and military activity. It signals that Iran is emphasizing military readiness and deterrence in response to its adversaries.

A U.S. defense official says Iran’s IRGC has carried out at least three attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz since Saturday morning. The incidents suggest a sharp escalation in maritime tensions in a critical global shipping route. They raise concerns about the safety of commercial vessels and the potential for broader regional conflict.

Donald Trump acknowledged conflicting messaging between the U.S. and Iran, saying Tehran is presenting a different version of negotiations for its own internal audience. He suggested Iranian leaders are tailoring their public statements to satisfy domestic political pressures, even if the underlying talks are more aligned than they admit. Trump framed his own comments as more direct and transparent, emphasizing that he is “just saying it like it is.” The exchange highlights ongoing inconsistencies in public narratives from both sides amid fragile and high-stakes negotiations.

The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) has redeployed to the Red Sea after transiting the Suez Canal, extending what is already a record-setting deployment of over 296 days—the longest for a U.S. carrier since the end of the Cold War, according to the Associated Press. The carrier had been expected to return home after a serious onboard fire earlier this year and a period operating in the Mediterranean, but has instead been kept in the region to support U.S. centcom logoCentral Command amid rising tensions near Iran.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations has issued a warning about escalating activity in the Strait of Hormuz after a tanker reported a direct encounter with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces. According to the vessel’s master, two IRGC gunboats approached and opened fire, marking a significant escalation in maritime tensions.

According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials say the American military is preparing to board and seize Iran-linked oil tankers in international waters in the coming days, expanding its naval crackdown globally.

Sen. Jon Ossoff criticized Jared Kushner, alleging he has financial ties to Saudi Arabia while playing a role in U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Ossoff argued this would be unacceptable for a typical U.S. official and suggested it reflects broader corruption tied to Donald Trump and his circle. He described the situation as an unprecedented lack of transparency and accountability in government dealings. Ossoff criticized JD Vance over a recent visit to Georgia, accusing him of attacking the pope. Ossoff also took aim at Donald Trump, linking him to controversial rhetoric and foreign financial ties. He said, “The faithless president depicts himself as Christ while he plunges the nation into wars of choice, while he and his family rake in billions from foreign princes.”

After a summit involving 51 countries co-chaired by France and the U.K., the British ambassador to the U.S., Christian Turner, said Iran is increasingly isolated and must negotiate a deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer issued a joint statement urging the immediate and unconditional reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Turner emphasized the importance of restoring freedom of navigation in the strait. He also noted that a new multinational mission, supported by U.S. leadership, aims to secure shipping routes and help stabilize energy prices.• António Guterres condemned a deadly attack on United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon that killed a French peacekeeper and injured three others. He expressed condolences to the victims’ families and called for a swift recovery for those wounded. Guterres noted this was the third such fatal incident in recent weeks and urged all parties to respect the ceasefire. He emphasized that attacks on peacekeepers must stop.

Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are not planning to retire this year, according to sources, meaning Donald Trump is unlikely to get an opportunity to nominate a new justice in the near term. Both justices—key members of the Court’s conservative majority—have been the subject of recurring retirement speculation, especially as the Court approaches the end of its term. Trump has said he is prepared to appoint additional justices if vacancies arise, but for now, no openings are expected. As a result, the current 6–3 ideological balance on the Supreme Court of the United States is set to remain unchanged heading into a consequential election year, with several major rulings still pending.

According to CNN, The White House has moved to nominate Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aiming to stabilize an agency shaken by months of turmoil, leadership turnover, and declining public trust. Officials prioritized selecting a steady, mainstream figure with strong public health credentials—particularly on vaccines—after earlier nominees faltered amid controversy. The decision also reflects a broader effort by Donald Trump’s team to rein in the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and shift away from politically damaging health debates ahead of midterm elections.

The UN Women reports that an average of 47 women and girls were killed daily during Israel’s attacks on Gaza, with more than 38,000 deaths recorded between 2023 and 2025. The agency warns that fatalities have continued even during the fragile ceasefire, with limited data making the full toll unclear. Ongoing displacement, lack of healthcare access, and continued violence highlight the severe humanitarian crisis facing women and girls in Gaza.

According to The Guardian, Keir Starmer was reportedly not informed for weeks that Peter Mandelson had failed a key security vetting process before his appointment as ambassador, despite senior civil servants knowing earlier. The delay, involving top officials including Antonia Romeo, has sparked controversy and raised concerns about transparency and internal government handling of sensitive information. Starmer called the situation “unforgivable,” as questions grow over whether critical details were withheld or delayed amid internal debates about disclosure.

maria corina machadoMaría Corina Machado ,left, is attempting to revive her push for political change with a major rally in Madrid, even as she remains unable to return to Venezuela following the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Despite expectations that she would take power after Maduro’s removal, Donald Trump instead backed Delcy Rodríguez, leaving Machado sidelined and her supporters increasingly frustrated. Rodríguez has since consolidated control, delaying elections and strengthening her position while opposition figures warn that Venezuela’s democratic transition has stalled.

A Tennessee death row inmate, Tony Carruthers, is seeking new DNA testing ahead of his scheduled execution, arguing that existing evidence could prove his innocence in a 1994 triple murder case. His attorneys say no physical evidence links him to the crime, and previously untested DNA and fingerprints point to an unidentified individual, while a co-defendant later recanted and claimed Carruthers was not involved. Despite these claims, courts have so far denied additional testing requests, leaving his execution date in place as legal efforts continue.

A federal appeals court has temporarily allowed Donald Trump to continue construction of a $400 million White House ballroom, pausing a lower court order that had blocked above-ground work. The appeals court will review the case in June, while construction can proceed for now. The project, which replaces the former East Wing, faces a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which argues Trump bypassed required approvals. Trump maintains the project is justified and funded largely through private donations, though taxpayers will cover security-related costs.• Donald Trump signed an executive order to speed up access to psychedelic drug treatments, directing the Food and Drug Administration to fast-track reviews of substances like ibogaine. The plan includes $50 million in federal funding for research, with a focus on treating conditions such as PTSD and substance abuse. Trump said the drugs could have a major impact if proven effective, while joking about trying them himself. The announcement was made alongside officials including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and podcast host Joe Rogan. Trump said, “I don’t have time to be depressed. You know, if you stay busy enough, maybe that works too. That’s what I do,” suggesting he manages stress by staying occupied and focused on work.

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

 

Former CIA Director John Brennan, shown in his official portrait.Former CIA Director John Brennan, shown in his official portrait.

ny times logoNew York Times, Prosecutor Withdraws From Trump Team’s Investigation of Ex-C.I.A. Chief, Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). A career Justice Department lawyer, Maria Medetis Long, in Miami is said to have raised concerns about whether the evidence justified moving forward with a bid to prosecute John O. Brennan.

CIA LogoA senior federal prosecutor in Miami has withdrawn from an investigation into John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, over concerns about the legal viability of a politically charged case Trump administration officials have tried to fast-track, people familiar with the matter said.

The prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, is a career official who oversees national security investigations for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern Districtof Florida. The top prosecutor there, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, is an ardent Trump loyalist who has been leading a far-ranging inquiry into the president’s perceived political adversaries, including Mr. Brennan.

Justice Department log circularThe exact circumstances of Ms. Medetis Long’s departure from the case were unclear, though she notified lawyers for various people who had received subpoenas or interview requests that she was no longer involved in the inquiry, several of the people said. And Mr. Reding Quiñones has told senior Justice Department officials he plans to take action — possibly asking a grand jury to indict Mr. Brennan — in the next few weeks, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The investigation into Mr. Brennan has the potential to be a critical early test for the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, whom President Trump elevated to the top of the Justice Department after firing Pam Bondi this month as attorney general. Mr. Trump is said to have been frustrated in part over her failure to push through more indictments of his perceived foes.

Mr. Blanche has made it clear to senior White House officials that he plans to move more quickly than Ms. Bondi against a handful of Trump targets, according to people in Mr. Blanche’s orbit. Those targets include Mr. Brennan, the Democratic fund-raising group ActBlue and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.

The Justice Department press office did not deny that Ms. Medetis Long had been removed from the case, but asserted that changing members of legal teams is normal.

The Brennan investigation is not the first inquiry into Mr. Trump’s foes that has been plagued by internal dissent.

The Atlantic, Investigation: The FBI Director Is MIA, Sarah Fitzpatrick, April 17, 2026. Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

atlantic logo horizontalPatel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

In response to a detailed list of 19 questions, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement that under Donald Trump and Patel, “crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told me in a statement, “Patel has accomplished more in 14 months than the previous administration did in four years. Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not constitute journalism.”

The FBI responded with a statement, attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

 

From left, Deputy Assistant Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel appear with President Trump during is remarks on Oct. 15, 2025 (New York Times photo). From left, Deputy Assistant Attorney Gen. Todd Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel appear with President Trump during is remarks on Oct. 15, 2025 (New York Times photo).

Michael Cohen via Substack, Opinion: The Unraveling of Patel, Michael Cohen, michael cohen palmer portraitright, April 18, 2026. A jittery FBI chief spirals from login glitch to full blown panic, as whispers of chaos, paranoia, and late night excess collide with a job far bigger than him.

There comes a point in every administration when the bullshit stops selling and reality kicks the door in. Not the press release version. Not the carefully rehearsed garbage fed to cable news and donors over dry chicken dinners. I’m talking about the moment when the illusion of control shatters and you see the operation for what it really is. And right now, that moment is unfolding inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kash Patel has cracked.

You can dress it up however you want. You can call it stress. You can call it a misunderstanding. You can even scream fake news into the void and threaten lawsuits like a man clutching a life raft made of cotton balls. But when the director of the FBI cannot log into a computer system and immediately spirals into a full blown panic, convinced he has been fired, calling allies in a frenzy, that is not a technical glitch. That is a human one.

And it is a dangerous one.

We are not talking about a mid level bureaucrat having a bad day. This is the man responsible for an institution of nearly forty thousand people. People trained to separate fact from fiction. People who build cases that can withstand the scrutiny of a courtroom, not just a social media meltdown. Yet the person at the top, the one entrusted with judgment, restraint, and clarity, is reportedly jumping to conclusions before gathering evidence. That is not irony. That is dysfunction at scale.

I have been around Donald Trump long enough to recognize the pattern. Loyalty over competence. Instinct over expertise. Confidence masquerading as capability. Kash Patel was never selected because he was the most qualified person to run the FBI. He was selected because he was the most willing to bend it.

But here is the problem with putting someone unqualified into a role that demands precision. Eventually, the job finds you out.

What we are seeing now is not just pressure. It is exposure.

Reports of erratic behavior, of suspicion toward colleagues, of conclusions formed before facts are in place, paint a picture that should make every American uneasy. The FBI is not supposed to operate on vibes. It is supposed to operate on evidence. When the person at the top cannot distinguish between the two, the entire system begins to wobble.

Now, to be fair, Patel and his defenders are doing exactly what you would expect. Deny everything. Attack the press. Threaten lawsuits. Wrap it all in the familiar language of fake news and political hit jobs. I have used that playbook. I helped write parts of it. It works, until it doesn’t.

Because here is the inconvenient truth. When more than two dozen people, current and former officials, are willing to speak, even in whispers, even under the threat of retaliation, you are not dealing with a single rogue narrative. You are dealing with a pattern.

And patterns are hard to sue away.

What makes this even more alarming is the context. We are not living in quiet times. There are global conflicts simmering. Domestic threats evolving. The FBI is not a ceremonial position. It is a crisis management role. It requires steadiness. It requires discipline. It requires someone who, when faced with uncertainty, does not immediately assume the worst and start dialing for reassurance.

Instead, we have a director who, according to these accounts, saw a login error and jumped straight to termination.

That is not leadership. That is panic. The kind requiring 80mg of Prozac.

Inside the bureau, the reaction tells its own story. Rumors spreading. Officials asking who is actually in charge. Some even expressing relief at the idea that he might be gone. Relief. Let that sink in. Relief at the possibility that the sitting FBI director had been fired, because it might mean stability.

 

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is shown with Secret Service aggents following a reputed assassination attempt that killed a bystander during a rally in Butler, PA on July 14, 2024, helping provide positive momentum to the Trump re-election campaign.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is shown with Secret Service aggents following a reputed assassination attempt that killed a bystander during a rally in Butler, PA on July 14, 2024, helping provide positive momentum to the Trump re-election campaign.

RawStory, MAGA loyalists believe Trump staged his assassination attempt and demand he admits it, María Teresita Armstrong-Matta, April 17, 2026. Conservative podcaster Tim Dillon suggested the shooting was fabricated and called for Trump to publicly admit it.

raw story logo squareThe conspiracy theories gained traction after former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent told Tucker Carlson the investigation was prematurely shut down, though Kent provided no evidence.

QAnon promoter MJ Truth polled his 100,000 followers about the shooting narrative, and the vast majority agreed it had been staged.

Dillon joins a list of right-wing influencers who are pushing back on President Donald Trump's image and narrative. Some have further speculated that Trump is the antichrist, citing biblical prophecy and his comparisons of himself to Jesus Christ. Conspiracy theories also incorporate antisemitic tropes, including claims about Israeli involvement in the assassination plot.

Wired noted, immediately after the shooting, left-wing accounts had similarly pushed false staging claims.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Advocacy, Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi’s Trophy Stunt, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, marcy wheelerApril 18, 2026. I’ve been closely tracking two sets of cases in Minnesota: (1) the Don Lemon conspiracy case, in which (among other things) DOJ arrested and then dismissed the case against the wrong woman, and (2) the cases against 16 people that Pam Bondi used as trophies in one 

In this post, I talked about some of those 16 cases. In this post, I described how DOJ was putting JAG officers with very little experience on these cases.

I’ve laid out summaries for those cases below. A number of them are trying to throw out the cases, basically, because (as happened in Chicago and Los Angeles as well) DOJ charged them after and seemingly because they were assaulted by ICE or CBP goons.

On the issue of the use of JAG officers to prosecute civilians, several defendants have moved to strike the JAG on Posse Comitatus grounds. There was recently a hearing in defendant Paul Johnson’s bid to disqualify his prosecutor, for which some retired military officers filed an interesting amicus.

But an even more interesting development occurred last week.

pam bondi 2025As you can see below, multiple defendants have filed some kind of complaint, often fashioned as a motion to show cause, regarding Pam Bondi’s trophy stunt on January 28, in which each of them were lined up with a DHS goon for a perp shot and Bondi, right, bragged about it on Xitter.

The problem is, Bondi released those trophy photos during the period when sealing motions requested by the government were in effect. Effectively, DOJ asked to keep charges against the defendants secret (though several had already been arrested), and in the period they were keeping them secret, then staged posed trophy photos announcing the charges and made unsubstantiated claims about them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, several of the defendants are likely Somali-Americans, at least one seems to be trans (and DOJ is misgendering them), and at least one more seems to be gay.

They were paraded as trophies for Trump’s culture wars and trophies in the attempt to frame DHS invasions as a cultural fight for America.

us dhs big eagle logo4In one such case, that of Kirubele Adbebe, after a hearing last week went badly for the government, the AUSA who originally filed the case (but who sent the Special AUSA to the hearing) submitted a letter offering excuses. And the government moved to dismiss the case, without prejudice.

In a response fashioned as a motion for the case to be dismissed with prejudice, Adbebe’s attorney, Manda Sertich, laid out what happened, which reinforced my suspicion that — aside from having very little evidence against Adbebe — the government dismissed the case to avoid any more scrutiny of Bondi’s perp walk stunt.

 

bureau of prisons logo horizontal

ny times logoNew York Times, Federal Appeals Court Opens Door to Moving Trans Inmates Under Trump Gender Order, Mattathias Schwartz, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). A three-judge panel gave a group of 17 transgender women a few weeks to seek further recourse in court before their transfer to men’s facilities could take effect.

The Bureau of Prisons could soon move forward with the transfer of 17 incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities, after a federal appeals court on Friday vacated rulings by a district court judge that had been blocking the transfers for more than a year.

In a 27-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found there was insufficient evidence to support the claim Justice Department log circularthat the transfers would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Such a claim, two of the judges found, would need to be supported by a specific finding about the prisoners’ individual vulnerabilities “to violence, abuse, and psychiatric harm in men’s prisons.”

The ruling left open the possibility that the transfers could be blocked again in the future if those facts were presented to the court, or potentially for other legal reasons. It noted that the court record already contained “ample, uncontested evidence” that, according to the prisoners, made them “distinctively vulnerable to harm in men’s facilities” and left it to the lower court to decide whether, for each prisoner, that evidence amounted to a constitutional violation.

The appeals judges also delayed the implementation of their ruling, leaving in place a legal barrier to any immediate transfers. Lawyers for the transgender women who brought the case will have a few weeks to either ask for a rehearing by a larger appeals panel or persuade the district court judge to block their transfers once again.

At one point 18 transgender women, identified by pseudonyms, were bringing the lawsuit against the government. One recently died, according to their legal team, leaving 17 plaintiffs.

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for L.G.B.T.Q. Rights and one of the lawyers representing the prisoners, said he was “very encouraged” by the ruling’s legal findings despite the more immediate defeat. “We’re going to do exactly what the court directed us to do,” he said. “Go back to the district court judge and ask him to put these individualized findings on the record in a ruling.”

But in the view of the Justice Department, the ruling was a victory for its side. “Today’s decision is a win for common sense and biology,” Emily Covington, a department spokeswoman, wrote in a statement. The appeals court “correctly held that the district court erred in preventing the Bureau of Prisons from housing inmates according to their biological sex,” she added.

The transfers are a consequence of one of the first executive orders that President Trump signed after taking office. It mandates that imprisoned transgender women be housed in men’s facilities and be barred from receiving medical treatment for gender dysphoria. The order has been the subject of a number of lawsuits before Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. He had previously issued the preliminary rulings blocking the transfers that were vacated on Friday by the appeals court.

Friday’s ruling was split, with Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Cornelia Pillard, both appointees of President Barack Obama, in the majority. Judge Raymond Randolph, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, filed a dissent, arguing that the plaintiffs’ claims in the lawsuit should be thrown out because, in his view, a federal law requires that they first exhaust their administrative remedies within the Bureau of Prisons. He also questioned whether Judge Lamberth had the authority to issue a series of rulings that although temporary in nature, have effectively blocked the transfers since February of last year.

In a separate but related case, Judge Lamberth has ruled that more than 1,000 transgender inmates must continue to receive hormone therapy while their lawsuit moves forward. That block remains in effect and the government has not yet appealed.

MS Now: Opinion, Jamie Raskin’s push for 25th Amendment to end Trump presidency is a mistake, Andy Craig (senior editor at The UnPopulist), April 18, 2026. Is it time for the 25th Amendment? The 25th Amendment is no substitute for impeachment. A proposed panel of doctors and ex-politicians can’t replace Congress doing its job.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., together with 50 Democratic co-sponsors, has reintroduced his bill to create a “Commission on Presidential Capacity” under msnow new logoSection 4 of the 25th Amendment. It is being framed as a response to the crisis of a president who threatened to annihilate an entire civilization, whoshares renderings of himself as Jesus Christ while feuding with the pope and who posts snuff videos on social media — to name the highlights from just the past couple of weeks.

In other words, the most powerful man in the world appears to be manifestly insane. It’s not great. But this proposal is misguided on the details, and more importantly, a distraction from what Congress can and should do: impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office.

jamie raskin headshotThis is not a new idea from Raskin, right. He first proposed essentially the same bill in 2017, and again in 2020 during Trump’s bout with Covid. I wrote about it at the time for the Cato Institute, and my objections have not changed. If anything, the current situation makes the flaws in this approach more glaring.

The most powerful man in the world appears to be manifestly insane. It’s not great.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows for the involuntary transfer of presidential power to the vice president. It was designed for genuine incapacity: a president who is comatose, or has been shot, or has gone missing in a plane crash. It was drafted in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination and ratified at the height of the Cold War, when the overriding concern was nuclear command and control. The nightmare scenario was having nobody authorized to act if the president was suddenly unable. The text grants this power to the vice president together with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [i.e., the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide.”

Raskin’s bill would create that “other body” to displace the Cabinet. This new entity would be a 17-member commission of physicians, psychiatrists and retired government officials chosen by congressional leaders of both parties. The commissioners would, if directed by Congress, conduct a medical examination (or try to; the president can’t be forced to cooperate) and then report back. The agreement of the vice president would still be needed to initiate a transfer of power.

Set aside the immediate unlikeliness of this passing a Republican-controlled Congress, overriding a presidential veto and then getting JD Vance to use it. Messaging bills can still serve a purpose. The deeper problem is conceptual. What is happening with Trump is not a medical question. Or rather, it is not merely a medical question, and framing it as one lets both him and Congress off the hook.Democratic lawmaker calls for Trump’s removal using the 25th Amendment April 17, 2026 / 04:39

Trump may be deranged, but he is not incapacitated in the way the framers of the 25th Amendment envisioned. He is likely committing high crimes and misdemeanors, but he is not literally “unable” to issue orders and wield his powers, however ludicrously and improperly. The fact that he is also experiencing evident mental and physical decline while he goes on a constitutional crime spree does not change the required remedy. If he were sharp as a tack, perfectly healthy and several decades younger, he would still need to be removed.

The bill’s inclusion of psychiatrists is particularly troubling. Diagnosing a political leader with a mental health condition, and then using that diagnosis as the basis for removing him from office, is extremely problematic.

U.S. House logoThe medical ethics are dubious, to put it mildly. This is a political decision of the highest order, a matter for our nation’s constitutional officers. It is not a diagnostic exercise for deciding how best to treat a patient. Consultation with medical experts might inform the decision-making, but doctors do not belong in the driver’s seat.

There are practical problems as well. The 25th Amendment was designed for speed, when a new commander-in-chief is needed within minutes, not days.

Trump may be deranged, but he is not incapacitated in the way the framers of the 25th Amendment envisioned.

ICE logoCabinet members are already serving, in the loop, reachable at a moment’s notice. A commission including retiredofficials scattered across the country, most of whom are elderly themselves, is not an improvement. And for the purpose envisioned here — removing a president whose behavior is dangerous but who remains ambulatory and vocally resistant — it is worse than useless. Even if the commission declared Trump incapable, he could simply send a letter to Congress saying he disagrees. You would then need two-thirds of both chambers to side against him under the 25th Amendment, a higher hurdle than impeachment.

Democratic-Republican Campaign logosThe authors of the 25th Amendment deliberately wanted to avoid creating a tempting workaround to impeachment. So they made it more difficult, requiring an even greater degree of consensus. It’s also less permanent: The vice president merely becomes acting president. Officially, the president is still the president and the vice president is still the vice president. The powers are transferred but not the title. He would still be hanging around as a sort of president in limbo, able to repeatedly challenge the alleged incapacity for the remainder of his term.

More On Iran-Lebanon War 

Paul Krugman on Substack, Trump Can't Even Surrender Right, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 18, 2026.  That was the peace that was.

When you’re losing a war, but it’s not an existential defeat, your country, your government can continue pretty much as before. Aside from the humiliation, there’s a well-established technique, which is to declare victory and pull out. But it appears that Trump can’t even pull that off.

Hi, Paul Krugman with a Saturday update on the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and all of that. It’s been clear for a while that the United States has basically lost this war. The goal was to achieve regime change, possibly to take Iran’s uranium. Neither of those is going to happen. The Iranian regime is harder line than it was before. Iran has ended up strengthened because it’s demonstrated its ability to shut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. No way the United States, even under current management, is going to commit ground troops to attempt to really do in Iran’s nuclear program on a sustained basis.

So the indicated strategy was to essentially give up, but claim that something wonderful was accomplished, and that’s certainly something that Trump is good at doing. But he hasn’t been able to pull that off, I think because he himself is incapable of facing reality.

So the Iranians said that they are willing to allow free passage of shipping through the strait, by which it turns out they mean basically passage that stays close to the Iranian coast and pays a toll along the way. Well, what’s our alternative to that? What is it that we want to get?

The United States has started imposing a blockade on Iran, which hurts the Iranians. It does give them a reason to seek a deal, but only if they get something out of it. So if allowing ships to start carrying oil and LNG and fertilizer and helium out of the Gulf allows them to sell their own oil again and to import food, which apparently is an important issue for Iran, then that’s a deal that can be done. It will, in practice, be a strategic defeat for the United States, but something that the Trump administration could try to spin as a victory.

But in order to get that, you have to actually deliver on that deal. You can claim that you’re winning and that they’re surrendering, not us, but you have to actually deliver on the deal. What Trump tried to do was to say, great, they’re opening up the strait, but meanwhile, we’re going to continue our blockade. And also, they have promised that we can have the uranium, which they had not.

That doesn’t work. It’s just basic logic. Why would the Iranians agree to a deal if they don’t get a lifting of the US embargo, don’t get their ability to sell oil and their ability to import food back? If that’s what’s going to happen, then you might as well keep the strait blocked. So what was this supposed to be? What was the idea? What was the thinking?

Well, as best I can tell, and this is all speculation now, I don’t think that Trump has taken on board, maybe he’s emotionally incapable of taking on board the reality that he screwed up, that he took us to war and lost, that he, in his mind, still thinks that America has the upper hand and that the Iranians are cowering in fear over the might of the U.S. military, and that he doesn’t need to make any concessions,

Does he really believe that? Do we even know? Is really believing a thing that makes sense in his case? Probably not. But to some extent, he is at least incapable of accepting as a basic proposition, never mind in public, but at least in terms of actual policymaking, accepting as a proposition that, well, the U.S. just found the limits to its power, and they turn out to be closer to our goal than they are to the Iranians’ goal. So we basically have to cut our losses by making a deal that leaves the Iranians with some stuff that they didn’t have before.

He can’t seem to do that. But if he doesn’t do that, then the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed. In fact, it’s more closed than before because the Iranians are not managing to export oil, which is new. They were exporting oil before, and now that little bit of supply to the world market has been cut off. It’s about 2% of world oil supply. Not huge, but in a very tight oil market, it is significant. And I have no idea where it goes from here. Once again, we’re in a situation of total uncertainty.

Now, I might be willing to say, maybe I’m misunderstanding, maybe the United States does have, in some sense, more leverage. But, you know, we do have markets. The futures markets are closed for the weekend. So let’s see what happens when they reopen Sunday night. But the prediction markets are open, and for all the problems with the prediction markets, they show very clearly that the perceived probability that the strait would reopen by June 1st spiked last week and is now back basically to where it started. All of a sudden, we’re down to a 30% or so probability of getting the strait open anytime soon, which looks about right. Maybe that’s even a bit high.

But, my God, like I said, we are led by people who not only can’t plan a war right, they can’t even successfully execute a surrender. And that’s a really bad omen, not just for the Iran conflict, but for everything else.

ny times logoNew York Times, Reopening Strait of Hormuz Would Ease Oil Crisis but Only So Much, Rebecca F. Elliott, April 18, 2026. Analysts said energy and shipping companies would be reluctant to fully restore operations until they were confident that hostilities were over.

Shipping companies are facing confusion and uncertainty about the status of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway through which a significant share of the world’s energy flows, as they assess mixed messages from officials in Iran and the United States.

But even if the strait opens fully — on Saturday, Iran’s military said it would reimpose “strict” control over traffic — it will take weeks for substantial amounts of Persian Gulf oil and gas to reach buyers around the world.

And it will be much longer before companies repair the damage that has been inflicted on one of the world’s most important energy-producing regions.

Iran FlagIt is likely to be a long time before a gallon of gasoline costs less than $3 a gallon, as it did before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Shortages of certain products like jet fuel and natural gas may also persist in some countries for weeks or longer.

“We don’t expect oil prices — and therefore pump prices — to go back to prewar levels,” said Arjun Murti, a partner at Veriten, an energy research and investment firm based in Houston.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: lebanon resized flagGlobal Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Think of the Strait of Hormuz, which sits between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, as a valve. It must be open for energy to flow. But whether shipping companies reposition tankers and producers turn wells back on will depend heavily on whether they believe that the détente between Iran and the United States and Israel is durable.

Spencer Dale, who until recently served as the chief economist of the London-based oil company BP, said that producers who have been forced to turn off their oil and gas wells will be reluctant to restart them “until people have confidence that you have a lasting agreement.”

Traders were hopeful on Friday, when the most commonly cited international price of oil, Brent futures, fell 9 percent to about $90 a barrel, the lowest settlement price since the second week of the war.

But for those who needed an actual tanker full of oil, the price on Friday was higher: almost $99 a barrel, according to Argus Media. That second price, often called the spot price, more closely reflects what companies, such as refiners, pay for commodities — and therefore how much energy will cost the economy as a whole.

“Normally this distinction between the two markets is something for oil geeks and traders to worry about,” said Mr. Dale, now a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “It really matters right now.”

The Bulwark, Opinion: Iran Closes Strait, Fires on Ships — While Trump Hangs with Joe Rogan, Tim Miller, April 18, 2026. Tim Miller takes on fast-moving developments after Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz again and fires on commercial ships—less than a day after Donald Trump said it would "never" close again. Plus: Trump’s appearance with Joe Rogan, his response to the crisis, and his decision to shut down questions from reporters.

Forbes, Ships Make U-Turns In Strait Of Hormuz After Iran Fires On Multiple Vessel, April 18, 2026.

Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump PANICS and KICKS OUT PRESS as Iran RETALIATES!!! April 18, 2026. Host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump kicking out the press during a bizarre Saturday press conference with Joe Rogan and refusing to answer questions on Iran as Iran has retaliated against Trump’s latest threats by fully closing the Strait of Hormuz again.

scott bessant

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Extends Sanctions Exemption on Some Russian Oil as High Gas Prices Persist, Ashley Ahn, Updated April 18, 2026. The Trump administration made the announcement hours after Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships, though the status of the waterway remained uncertain.

Just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, above, said the United States would not extend a sanctions exemption on the sale of some Russian oil, theTreasury Department did just that on Friday, issuing one for about a month.

The renewed license will be in effect until May 16 and supersede the sanctions waiver on Russia that expired on April 11.

The Trump administration has loosened restrictions on Russian oil exports since the war in the Middle East began to rattle energy markets in March. The goal was to lower oil prices by allowing countries to legally purchase hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil that the United States had blacklisted.

Mr. Bessent said at a White House briefing on Wednesday that the federal government would not renew the sanctions exemption on Russian oil that was stranded at sea, as well as one on Iranian oil that is set to expire on Sunday.

“That was oil that was on the water prior to March 11,” he said, referring to when the United States first lifted sanctions on Russian oil. “So all of that has been used.”

The last-minute renewal of Russia’s sanctions exemption came as Iran announced earlier on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that once carried a fifth of the world’s oil, was completely open to all commercial ships. President Trump celebrated the move on social media, claiming that “Hormuz Strait situation is over” and that Iran had agreed to never close the waterway again.

But Iran made no such commitment, and while the announcement of the reopening prompted a sharp decline in oil prices on Friday, the status of the waterway remained murky.

Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, only went so far as to say that the waterway would be open “for the remaining period of cease-fire.” Iranian officials later added that the strait would remain under tight Iranian supervision, in line with what they said were the previously agreed-upon cease-fire terms. And on Saturday, Iran’s military said it would maintain “strict control” over the strait until the United States ended its blockade of Iranian ports.

The cease-fire between the United States and Iran is set to expire next week with American and Iranian negotiators expected to meet for another round of peace talks in Pakistan soon.

Mr. Trump has downplayed the economic repercussions of the conflict and brushed aside soaring oil and gas prices since the start of the war on Feb. 28. The price of regular gasoline in the United States jumped 25 percent from February to March, the highest monthly percentage increase on record. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, has failed to mellow despite the release of a record amount of oil from countries’ strategic reserves.

More Global News

The New Republic, Hard PowerTrump Is Waging One Big War Against the Rest of the World, Jonathan Guyer, April 15, 2026. The bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings that have defined much of Trump’s second term make more sense understood together, rather than as disparate events.

new republic dailyBefore Donald Trump’s recent military campaigns, Iran and Venezuela weren’t often spoken of in the same breath. But in fact, the countries share much in common. They’ve both been demonized as evil, as bad guys, formally designated as states that promote terrorism. They’ve both suffered under intensive sanctions that have damaged life for civilians. And influential advocates from both places have been gunning for regime change for decades. Although recently their paths have diverged, with Iran’s battered regime hanging on even after a month of American and Israeli fire, and Venezuela’s government left intact but co-opted, their fates may yet converge again, thanks to a recently rebranded “Department of War” directed by a president who has heedlessly started confrontations around the globe without much of a plan. As the retired career diplomat Chas Freeman put it in January, “The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy.”

Trump’s foreign policy has long been misunderstood because of its inherent incoherence. He came to power in 2016 by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. He had little interest in laying out a grand strategy or a bigger worldview beyond his promise to “Make America Great Again,” itself a slogan in which voters could hear what they wanted. His forceful criticism of the Iraq War, however, differentiated him from Hillary Clinton, who voted for it when she was in the Senate in 2002. But it was never all too clear whether Trump had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion or just thought his Republican predecessor should have taken the oil.

The president’s more recent turn to militarism has led to immense changes in U.S. statecraft. In the first months of his second term, he enlisted Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle America’s soft-power infrastructure, notably the humanitarian and development arm USAID, but also government-funded think tanks, media organizations, and other Cold War legacy programs. In Trump’s world, soft power apparently has little value. At the same time, Trump has dismantled the global alliance system. He has slowly chipped away at NATO, built a “Board of Peace” to counter the United Nations, and levied tariffs in contradiction of the global economic order.

Trump is known to cut bait on unpopular policies, but his war continues. The risk-averse president who turned away the jets from striking Iran in June 2019, much to the chagrin of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, is gone. In his place is a careless, casual warmonger, a leader who thinks that he can recklessly use force whenever and practically wherever he wants—and that his past track record of avoiding quagmires and entanglements means he can do so with few long-term consequences.

Bolton, the perennial hawk, has transformed himself into a critic of Trump’s latest misadventures. One recalls his candid admonition from 2022: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat—not here but, you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.” In his second term, Trump has embraced the coup—but not the work.

The president’s tendency to jump from conflict to conflict has made it difficult to understand where one war ends and another begins. But Iran and Venezuela are part of the same war—and that war is at the center of America’s foreign policy under Trump. 

The first act of the Iran war, it must be noted, was the strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The fact that Trump can launch a war on a whim that has already killed thousands and is sending the global economy into shock is not so much an indictment of him—although it is that, too—but of the security state he presides over. It’s remarkable that decades after the Cold War, it’s still possible to stumble into war without guardrails or stopgap measures to get in the way. The national security infrastructure cobbled together in the paranoid, red-baiting moments at the end of World War II gave the American president the capacity to launch shadow wars; after the September 11 attacks, those powers were further consolidated. There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.

There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.

Trump is also breaking conventions and laws from the era before that. Political assassinations have technically been banned since 1976, but Executive Order 11905 was not enough to stop Trump (along with Israel) from killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the same day bombs killed the students in Minab.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, enacted in the midst of Nixon and Kissinger’s endless Vietnam folly to prevent the prospect of secret campaigns, like the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, is no match for Trump either. Congress has long undermined its coequal foreign policy–making powers. Democratic members failed to assert themselves over Venezuela and did little in response to Trump’s strikes on Iran last June. The most Democratic leadership has offered is procedural criticisms of the warpath-president. As Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement released on February 28, the day Trump launched the first airstrikes, “House Democrats remain committed to compelling a vote on this resolution upon our return.”

The multitude of U.S. military bases in the Middle East and environs makes them far too easy to use—and to become targets for adversaries in counterstrikes that lead to Gulf of Tonkin–level flubs. More than a month into the war, 13 American troops have been killed and nearly 400 injured. In late March, Iran showed further capacity to cause havoc by reportedly launching its first intermediate-range ballistic missile toward Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base in the Indian Ocean. In Washington, however, the policy discussion rarely considers the deeper question of how and why the United States has a base on the island territory and other far-flung places to begin with.

And so a military budget exceeding a trillion dollars for the first time in global history can all too easily be augmented with a supplemental $200 billion for a new war. Republicans who are cautious about government spending can’t curb their appetite for military spending, which only serves as encouragement for the president’s militarism.

ny times logoNew York Times, How a Fight With Trump Threw Spain’s Leader a Political Lifeline, Jason Horowitz, April 18, 2026. To leftists abroad, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain is a hero for standing up to President Trump. At home, Mr. Trump is seen as Mr. Sánchez’s political savior from thorny domestic challenges.

pedro sánchez 2023 wFor many on the global left, Pedro Sánchez, right, the prime minister of Spain, has emerged as a progressive superhero. He has not only championed liberal positions on immigration, renewable energy and civil rights, but he has also stood up to President Trump over tariffs, the abduction of Venezuela’s leader and now, most prominently of all, the war in Iran.

But as liberal leaders gather to venerate Mr. Sánchez at a global progressive summit in Barcelona, they are inhabiting an alternate Spanish universe where Mr. Trump is widely seen as coming to Mr. Sánchez’s rescue by engaging him in international quarrels that spain flag Customdistract from the Spanish leader’s domestic problems.

Far from a political threat, Mr. Trump is seen here as a life preserver in a sea of Spanish scandals and setbacks aiding the political survival of Europe’s most accomplished escape artist.

Mr. Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister since 2018, is better known at home for his willingness to say and do anything to stay in power. His liberal backers applaud him for his deftness in wielding a political dagger — a skill that, they say, is in short global supply and is necessary to defy the rise of the right.

“He needs to be a great prime minister in this vital time,” said Carmen Calvo, Mr. Sánchez’s former deputy prime minister. With a general election due by next year, his aides said in interviews, he will go to any legitimate length to stay in power and prevent the country falling to the far right, 50 years after the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. When it came to doing what was necessary to survive, Ms. Calvo called him “a very flexible leader.”

The New Front, Analysis: Putin’s Billion-Dollar Nightmare Just Started, Ben Hodges, April 18, 2026. Russia thought it had cracked the code, but the geopolitical landscape just shifted forever. In this video, we dive deep into the current state of the Russia Ukraine war and reveal how Ukraine is systematically dismantling the Russian military from behind the front lines.

While the world focuses on political debates, Ukraine’s mid-range drones are executing an unprecedented 11,000 missions a day—obliterating Russian supply lines, command posts, and vital oil infrastructure. We explore the terrifying reality inside the Kremlin: a massive information vacuum where Vladimir Putin remains isolated, ignoring the warnings of his own Defense Minister and military bloggers. From devastating strikes on Baltic ports that cost Moscow billions in oil revenue, to the collapse of Russia's European allies, the signs of a total Russian military collapse are hiding in plain sight.

Why is Russia's aerial superiority failing? How did Ukraine gain such massive technological and numerical dominance? Watch to uncover the brutal truth about the war of attrition that is bankrupting Putin’s war machine from the inside out.

 

Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor and expert on authoritarian regimes.

Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor and expert on authoritarian regimes.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Kim Lane Scheppele on Hungary, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 18, 2026. Democracy wins big.

More than a year ago I interviewed my old friend and colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, a constitutional scholar who speaks Hungarian and knows Hungary, about the march of autocracy. Now, suddenly, a much happier occasion. I found her account of how this happened startling — a lot I didn’t know, even though I’ve been following the news obsessively. And some of it is wild. Here’s a transcript:

Paul Krugman: it’s been quite a week. You were on this case on my blog starting in 2010, but I think we want to just talk about first reactions to this extraordinary election on Sunday.

Scheppele: Well, yeah. It’s been hard to even comprehend the magnitude of this. I mean, not only did Péter Magyar win this election, but he won the election overwhelmingly in a rigged system. And so that’s the miracle magic of it. It turns out that Viktor Orbán had rigged the election rules so that only he could win. And the shortcut of what he did was that essentially a vote in the countryside counted three times as much as a vote in the cities. And what he counted on was that usually, if you get a challenger to a right-wing autocrat, they’re all going to be liberals, right? They’re all going to get their votes from the cities, from the educated populations. And Orban had a lock on the countryside. And then he put all the weight of the system on counting his people more than others. So Peter Magyar spent the last two years going out to villages, just meeting all of these people in person and getting around the fact that Orban also controlled all the media. So the media was rigged, the election system was rigged. And when the vote came in on Sunday, he was at 15 to 20 points ahead in the polls.

Krugman: Right.

Scheppele: But that did not guarantee he was going to win. And it did not guarantee that he was going to win by the majority. And so when the numbers started piling up, like I was watching the early returns and the early returns were coming in from villages that should have been the Orban vote. And it was a Tisza vote, it was a Peter Magyar vote. And so you knew just from the first 2 or 3% of the vote that it was going to be overwhelming. And sure enough, the whole evening the results came in and Peter Magyar won. It might shift a little bit, 1 or 2 numbers now, but about 138 seats out of the 199 seats in the parliament, and Orban had to concede. There was just no way that he could even claim fraud or try to do anything to change it, because he just didn’t have votes come in from anywhere.

Krugman: Okay, it’s funny but that’s the first clear explanation I’ve gotten of how the rigging worked. Because the reporting has been pretty vague. And, you know, there’s still a fair number of people saying, “oh, it can’t really have been rigged, because after all, he lost.”

Scheppele: Yeah. No, it was so rigged. I mean, literally, Orban rewrote all the rules in 2015. And, Paul, I need to give you a shout out here because, you know, Americans didn’t know anything about this. And I live in my head in Hungary. And I would come in every day to campus and see you in my office next door and go on whining and complaining about how Orban had been building a dictatorship starting in 2010. And you said, “Well, how come The New York Times isn’t covering it?” And I said, “Well, no one’s covering it because no one can see it.” It was all legal. It was all technical. It was really hard to see how Orban was nailing things down.

And then you called me up on a Sunday and said, “Okay, I’m going to do tomorrow’s column on Hungary.” And so, remember, we scrambled around, I was translating documents. The fact checkers were calling me up, and you wrote that blog post on a Monday, and then you said to me, “Look, you know, it’s more complicated than I could say. You can put something up on my blog.” And then we did that for like 3 or 4 years. You were putting all my commentaries up on your blog, and I was the only one covering it in English at that time. So, you know, if it wasn’t for your venue, it would have been impossible to get this on the radar screen of Americans. So, Paul, it’s your victory, too.

Krugman: I hope it is. I mean, I feel like I was facilitating your victory, it’s obviously the Hungarian people’s victory. But actually one of the things that strikes me here is that, we talk a lot about how Orban muzzled and controlled the media in Hungary, but, effectively, there was an international muzzling coming out of a couple of things.

Scheppele: Yeah.

Krugman: I remember you saying that basically even big international news organizations sort of had one stringer in Budapest who often turned out to be somebody affiliated with Fidesz. So.

Scheppele: Right. Well, there were a whole bunch of ways that he muzzled the international press. So one was just that, if you were a domestic journalist reporting for the international press, you were under surveillance, you were under threat. The international news organizations, including, by the way, the New York Times, had to start providing physical security for the reporters because they were really being threatened with death threats and the whole nine yards. And, you know, I got death threats, too, sometimes through the comments section on your blog. Right? So, everybody commenting on it was really under threat in some sense.

But the other thing that happened was once the international press pulled out because they couldn’t pay for the security anymore, they’d hire Hungarian stringers and then the Hungarian stringers would have other things happen to them, like they’d get doxxed and there’d be mobs outside their apartment and they’d have to move out of their houses. And really, it was a huge campaign. And then the final thing, and maybe not the final thing, but at every single Hungarian embassy in the world, the ambassador was told, “Your job is to keep negative news about Hungary from appearing in the press.” So every time there was a story criticizing Orban, the embassy would call the editors and say, “You’ve got to give us equal time,” or “you can’t trust those journalists,” or “you should never use those sources again.” Going back, this was during your days at the Times, there was a Hungarian-American reporter who was writing for the Times, and the Hungarian government called the Times and said, “we don’t trust this guy.” And they stopped putting his byline on stories until they did a full check on him.

Krugman: Okay.

Scheppele: So that was happening to the international press. So it’s not just the domestic press that was muzzled, but the international press as well. And so it took a very long time. I mean, Orban had the whole system locked down in just three years, and it took until five, 6 or 7 years later before the rest of the world caught up to the fact that a dictatorship had been constructed in plain sight.

Krugman: What’s also extraordinary is that even now — I mean, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone, and I’ve been reading the news reporting obsessively, but the first time I’ve had as clear an explanation of how the rigging worked and how Magyar broke it. And, you know, the eyes of the world have been on Hungary a lot, if only because Hungary has been the star of CPAC for years now. And you would think that by now reporting would have gotten it right.

Scheppele: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, part of the problem is that Orban and his circle are lawyers, and they pioneered this sort of 21st-century version of dictatorship where you don’t shut down the media. You just regulate them or you threaten them or whatever. Everything was done technically by law. And I think most Hungarians didn’t understand how the law was rigged. I wrote a quite detailed article about this in the Journal of Democracy after the last election, going in detail step by step through all the stages of exactly how Orban rigged things. So, it was gerrymandering. It was things like, the districts expected to vote for Orban had 30,000 voters, and the district expected to vote for the opposition had 90,000 voters.

Krugman: Right, right.

Scheppele: And then there were all kinds of other election tricks that Orban borrowed. For the 2014 election, I wrote about this on your blog in five parts. Remember? You put up five parts. “Election in Question, part one,” “Election in Question, part two.” There was just every single which way [they could change the rules].

So just another example. Orban said, “we have all these minority groups in Hungary. They should be represented in the parliament.” Everybody’s cheering, like minority representation—what a good thing. So there was this possibility of the Roma having a separate representative in parliament and the Germans and other ethnic groups. And it turns out if you registered to vote on that party list, you only needed 20,000 votes to get a seat. So all those seats got colonized by Orban’s people. The Roma guy was a Fidesz person. That’s Orban’s party. The German guy was a Fidesz person. So all these little things gave Orban one seat here, four seats there and so on. And if you look at Orban’s popularity in Hungarian opinion polls going back to 2010, he never got above 35% in his personal popularity. And in elections, he would struggle to get 45%. But then he would get 67% of the seats in the parliament, and that two-thirds threshold mattered because the Hungarian Constitution can be amended with a single two-thirds vote of the unicameral parliament. And if he could get two thirds, he put himself above the law. So it’s 199 seats in the Hungarian Parliament, 133 is two thirds larger. Magyar just got 138. That’s what’s so stunning.

Krugman: One immediate thought is thinking about the extreme unequal representations, rural versus urban. The closest equivalent I can think of is the US Senate.

Scheppele: Yeah. The Electoral College, too, right?

Krugman: The Electoral College somewhat. But the Senate, where California has two senators and Wyoming has two senators, exactly like that. It over-represents the rural areas. And when you get this urban-rural, educated-uneducated split, it guarantees that the right always has an advantage. And you said Magyar’s been campaigning about two years, right? He was in Fidesz. He had actually been part of Orban’s government.

Scheppele: Yeah. So here’s the good news and the bad news about Peter Magyar. So he came of age and was attracted to Orban’s party because he’s basically a center-right kind of guy and Orban’s is the center-right party. So he went into the party machine sort of right after school, and he stayed in the Orban machine for 20 years. He was posted to Brussels. He was in what’s called the Hungarian Perm Rep, which is the big embassy that every member state of the EU has in Brussels, which handles the state affairs with the EU. He was there. Then he came back and he held a variety of positions in the state-owned companies that Fidesz ran. So he was in the system. He benefited from the system. And then there was this really funny event that brought him to public attention. He had this acrimonious divorce.

Krugman: Okay.

Scheppele: And, like, you can’t make this stuff up. Wait till we get to zebras.

Krugman: Okay.

Scheppele: But his wife, who was always a trailing spouse with all of his appointments, and also a very clever lawyer, really smart. Orban had named her the justice minister of Hungary. Her name is Judit Varga. And she presided over, really defending Orban’s interests at the EU. And she’s kind of a pit bull like Orban. She and Peter had this acrimonious divorce. But it happened around the same time that —probably Orban, we don’t know for sure—but she approved a pardon of a guy who ran an orphanage in which the orphanage had had state employees who engaged in sexual abuse of children, in other words, a pedophilia scandal.

Krugman: Right.

Scheppele: And the principal had known about it and cooperated. She issued the pardon for this guy, and there was this huge firestorm of objection. A pedophilia scandal. I mean, you can think of the American parallels, right? And so Orban insisted that she be fired. So she left the cabinet. And that was the moment when Peter Magyar, having just divorced her, popped out of the woodwork and said, “How dare Orban hide behind women’s skirts?” And then he said, “And because I was married to her, I know where all the corruption happened, where all the bodies are buried.” And he had, it turns out, made audiotapes of his conversations with his ex-wife during the acrimonious divorce. I mean, that’s why you can’t make it up. I have to tell you this because this is something that’s not really making the headlines in the U.S. but he actually had the tapes through which she had talked about some of the corruption scandals inside the Orban government. And so he pops out, accuses Orban of hiding behind women’s skirts, then goes on this YouTube channel.

Krugman: Okay.

Scheppele: So by this time the opposition has no TV, no radio, hardly any major newspapers. The opposition started a YouTube channel. So Peter Magyar goes on the YouTube channel with the audiotapes from his ex-wife, and gives this big interview about how much corruption there is inside the Orban camp. This makes him an instant superstar, right? Because everybody kind of knew it, but nobody knew precisely how. And so he then starts going around the countryside and giving speeches about all the corruption. He attracts a crowd, then he attracts a bigger crowd. This is all a few months before the last European election. I think he begins to get the idea, like “maybe I could form a party and run for the European election.”

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

trump approval 4 18 2026

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Trump's Lost his Mojo, Rick Wilson, right, and Andrew Wilson, April 18, 2026. Behind The Numbers: "Donald Trump is finished. lincoln square media logoHe is finished forever. He has no motion as far as electoral politics goes anymore. He has no motion with the American people."rick wilson screengrab

Another week, another weak set of numbers for the man occupying the Oval Office. On Behind the Numbers, Rick and Andrew look at reasons why Donald Trump is on a downward spiral to the low 30s in approval ratings — and potentially on his way into the 20s.

ny times logoNew York Times, The Doctor Will Seek Your Vote Now, Nina Agrawal, April 18, 2026. Dozens of Democratic doctors are running for office in the midterms, including some spurred by opposition to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaccine stance.

When Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, told voters gathered at the Friendship Baptist Church in Aiken, S.C., earlier this spring why she was running for the Senate, she explained that she wanted to fix the American health care system and fully fund Medicaid.

But she got the biggest cheers of all when she pledged to “lead the charge to impeach and remove RFK Jr.”

Her criticisms of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has brought his brand of vaccine skepticism to the highest echelons of the federal government, struck a nerve in South Carolina, the state with the largest measles outbreak in the country.

Dr. Andrews, 45, is among more than three dozen Democratic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who have jumped into this year’s races for Congress, in what they hope will offer a chance to push back against the health policies of the Trump administration and Mr. Kennedy. Dozens more are running in down-ballot races, and a few are running for governor in Maine, Ohio and Wisconsin.

There have been indications that the White House is beginning to see vaccine skepticism as a vulnerability in the midterms: This week President Trump selected Dr. Erica Schwartz, a physician who supports vaccines, as his nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mr. Kennedy has largely stopped talking about vaccines in recent weeks.

For some of the doctors running for office, like Dr. Andrews, the elevation of Mr. Kennedy to a health leadership role was the breaking point. For others, it was reductions to safety net programs like Medicaid and the decision to let federal health insurance subsidies expire. For still others, it was the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs, enacted to reduce federal spending and advance Mr. Trump’s policy priorities.

ny times logoNew York Times, Primary Becomes Purity Test for a State G.O.P.: ‘You Can’t Serve Two Masters,’ David W. Chen, Photographs by Will Warasila, April 18, 2026. For years, Republican state legislators in Montana have been willing to team up with Democrats, but in nearly two dozen races on June 2, a nationally attuned right has those lawmakers in its sights.

Zack Wirth, a Republican state representative in Montana, arrived at the State Capitol in 2023. By 2025, he was ready to quit. Too often, he said, fellow Republicans were teaming up with Democrats to scuttle the kind of conservative bills that he had come to Helena to pass.

“I threw my books, bags and boxes into the back of the car, and said, ‘I’ll never come back to this ridiculous building again,’” Mr. Wirth, 74, said.

Then he learned that one of those aisle-crossing Republicans was running for State Senate this year, in Mr. Wirth’s district. The Senate president, Matt Regier, was a kindred spirit and asked if Mr. Wirth wanted to jump to his chamber.

“I said, ‘No way in hell, but I will for this purpose,’” said Mr. Wirth, now one of nearly two dozen hard-right Montana Republicans running in bitterly contested primaries on June 2.

Montana has long been something of an outlier in the nation’s Republican midsection. Abortion remains legal until fetal viability. The state expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Its last Democratic governor left office in 2021, its last Democratic U.S. senator in 2025.State Representative Zack Wirth, top right, at Rocking Z dude ranch an hour south of Great Falls, which he once struggled to keep afloat.

And on high-profile issues such as access to maternal health care and a property tax cut to counteract skyrocketing home values, center-right Republicans defied party leaders, collaborated with the Democratic minority and secured passage. They also stymied party leaders’ priorities to make judicial elections more partisan and weaken labor unions.

That is why the primary looms large. The outcome will shape the state — and the soul of a Montana Republican Party that once prided itself on its independence from the larger currents of national politics.

“We’ve always been this bloc that tries to keep the bus on the road,” said State Representative Llew Jones, Mr. Wirth’s opponent for the open Senate seat in the Ninth District, which stretches 177 miles from Helena to the Canadian border. “As Republicans, we want to be on the right-hand side of the road, but I’m not interested in being in the right ditch.”Editors’ PicksLuca Guadagnino Wants a Difficult Opera to Break Free of PolemicsHow Death Doulas Support the LivingYou’ve Heard of the Sky Couch. Get Ready for the Skynest.

Montana may be unique, but the rift in the G.O.P. is not. At North Dakota’s Republican convention in March, conservatives stripped the party label from moderate incumbents. In Wyoming, legislators aligned with the Freedom Caucus, a hard-right group of House Republicans in Washington, ousted incumbents deemed insufficiently conservative to seize the State House in 2024.

U.S. Culture Wars, Media, Religion 

MS Now, Opinion: New Hungarian PM says government was funding CPAC but won’t anymore, Ja'han Jones, April 14, 2026. In the wake of authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s political defeat over the weekend, Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, is looking to sever his government’s financial ties to the influential pro-Trump activist group the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in Hungary, campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. When U.S. Vice President JD Vance made a last-second visit to Hungary to deliver his and Trump’s ultimately futile endorsements of the prime minister, I noted in a blog that an Orbán loss could disrupt the work of activist groups like CPAC operating in Hungary, which they portray as a model of the illiberal rule they’d like to bring to the U.S. (You can read some of my coverage on CPAC Hungary here and here.)

At a press conference on Monday, Magyar said Orbán’s government had given government funds to CPAC and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian residential college that Orbán critics have described as “an institution designed to breed right-wing intellectuals,” according to The New York Times. In condemning the alleged payments, Magyar called for investigations and said that while CPAC is welcome in Hungary, the government would no longer pay the group.

According to CNN:

Magyar told CNN that neither MCC nor CPAC would receive state funds under his government. ‘I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place. It was a crime. Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense,’ Magyar said. He added that institutes like MCC ‘should be investigated’ by anti-corruption institutions he plans to set up. ‘CPAC can come to Budapest. They’re very welcome. But not from Hungarian taxpayers’ money. From Fidesz’s money, or Orbán’s buddies’ money — before we take it back,’ he said.

Scandal-plagued CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp posted in response to Magyar’s comments but didn’t address the payment claims, saying only that he was “gratified” that Magyar “has invited us back to have CPAC.”

Neither Magyar nor the Hungarian government provided further details about the reported payments to CPAC. Following the comments, U.S. critics of the conservative group — including MS NOW contributor Joyce Vance, below — have an eye out for what information may emerge from the Hungarians’ anti-corruption investigation:

In the other direction, there’s been reporting on efforts by Trump officials, like State Department undersecretary Sarah Rogers, to name one, to fund far-right groups in Hungary and elsewhere. Rogers met last November with members of an Orbán-backed Hungarian propaganda group that was connected to CPAC Hungary.

It’s easy to see how Orbán’s loss could prove injurious to the MAGA movement in a variety of ways. With the downfall of Trump’s favorite authoritarian, the U.S. conservative movement appears to be losing its free rein (and apparently some financing) to use Hungary as an ideological testing ground.

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading, Ruth Graham, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). He will read a passage from the Old Testament that his Christian supporters cite as a call to national repentance and divine blessing

President Trump has a complicated relationship with the Bible. He has often called it his favorite book, has posed with it for photographers outside a church and has sold his own edition for $60. But he has also struggled to name a favorite passage or even pick a favorite Testament between the two.

Now, fresh from a week in which he skirmished with the pope and Christians accused him of blasphemy, Mr. Trump will participate in a marathon reading of the entire Bible in Washington, the event’s organizers announced Friday. The event’s leader, a conservative activist who once ran for Congress in Texas, has described it as “a national reading of God’s law.”

The White House issued a statement on Friday praising the event, America Reads the Bible, as an occasion to “honor Holy Scripture, renew our faith, usher in a historic resurgence of religion on American shores, and rededicate the United States as one Nation under God.”

Mr. Trump recorded his segment of the reading from the Oval Office, organizers said. He read a passage from the Old Testament book of II Chronicles that has become a touchstone for many of his Christian supporters, who interpret it as a call to national repentance and subsequent blessing.

The central verse in II Chronicles 7 reads: “If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

“It’s been a hallmark of the religious right to cite this particular passage,” said Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University.

Biblical scholars emphasize that the passage concerns the writer’s understanding of a particular covenant between God and the ancient Israelites. The books of Chronicles cover centuries of Jewish history, including the reigns of Kings David and Solomon.

In recent decades, the verse has become the subject of songs, prayers and sermons that interpret it as a promise with direct political implications for the contemporary United States. For example, at the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, the founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump prayed the passage through a bullhorn over the crowd, which chanted “Fight for Trump!” in response.

Mr. Trump’s reading comes after a tumultuous run of self-inflicted challenges to his relationship with his most loyal Christian supporters. Last weekend, the president posted an A.I.-generated image that appeared to depict him as Jesus Christ performing a miraculous healing. The backlash from Christians was swift, with many describing the image as blasphemous. Mr. Trump deleted the post the next day, and said he believed the image showed him as a doctor.Mr. Trump also unleashed a long diatribe against Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of the American war in Iran. The tirade, which the president opened by calling the pope “weak on crime,” was greeted with confusion and disgust by many American Catholics.

Mr. Trump recorded his Bible reading from II Chronicles on Tuesday, the event’s organizer, Bunni Pounds, said in an interview.

The event has been in the works for more than a year, envisioned in part as an invitation for leaders to “humble themselves in front of the American people” in anticipation of the country’s 250th anniversary, Ms. Pounds said. Under the Trump administration, official celebrations appear poised to emphasize the Christian roots of the nation’s founding.

America Reads the Bible will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for a week, starting with Genesis 1 on Sunday and ending with the last chapter of Revelation on Saturday evening. Most participants will read their passages live at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, but some high-profile participants prerecorded their segments.

Mr. Trump’s recitation will be broadcast on Tuesday between 6 and 7 p.m. Eastern time, a block that also includes Ben Carson, the former housing secretary, and the home-school advocate Heidi St. John.

April 17

Top Headlines

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Tehran Declares Strait ‘Open’ After Lebanon Truce, but Trump Says U.S. Blockade on Iran Continues, Peter Eavis, Jenny Gross and Joe Rennison, April 17, 2026. Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s foreign minister said on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for all commercial ships after the cease-fire in Lebanon. U.S. blockade: President Trump said a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would continue until a “complete,” peace deal, raising uncertainty about what happens next to shipping in the strait. 

New York Times, Hegseth Again Threatens Attacks on Iran’s Civilian Infrastructure, John Ismay, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). The U.S. blockade of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz would last “for as long as it takes,” the defense secretary said.

New York Times, Live Updates: Thousands of Lebanese Try to Head Home After Israel-Lebanon Truce, Christina Goldbaum, Euan Ward, Israel FlagJohnatan Reiss and Max Bearak, April 17, 2026. The cease-fire removes a major obstacle to U.S.-Iran peace talks. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia Israeli forces are targeting in Lebanon, did not say whether it would accept the truce.

New York Times, Opinion: A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality , M. Gessen, April 17, 2026. The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime. We are not in french flagParis, of course. But one reason it was so gratifying to watch Lafarge be convicted and its executives, in their stiff-collared shirts and well-cut suits, be placed under arrest is that these men had surely never imagined that they could be punished for what they did.

U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 16, 2026 [Congress Returns To DC], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 17, 2026. Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.

New York Times, Trump Administration: The 27-Year-Old Diplomat Waging Trump’s Cultural War With Europe, Michael D. Shear, Catherine Porter, Jane Bradley and Christopher F. Schuetze, April 17, 2026. Five years out of college, Samuel Samson has driven the Trump administration’s push to upend America’s postwar relationship with Europe.

New York Times, Trump to Pick Ousted FEMA Head to Lead Agency Again, Tyler Pager,Scott Dance and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). Cameron Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL who ran unsuccessfully for Congress.President Trump intends to nominate Cameron Hamilton to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency after he was pushed out as acting leader nearly a year ago, according to two people briefed on the matter.

New York Times, House Votes to Extend Expiring Law on Warrantless Surveillance for 10 Days, Charlie Savage, April 17, 2026. The Senate would need to also approve the stopgap measure that passed the House early Friday. Libertarian-leaning House Republicans had balked at a long-term extension.

U.S. Immigration, Deportations, Rights

New York Times, She Made Sure Her Baby Was Born an American. Then Federal Agents Separated Them, Caroline Kitchener, Charo Henríquez and Hamed Aleaziz, April 17, 2026. Diana Acosta Verde, who came into the United States illegally when she was six months pregnant, had to leave her baby at a hospital while she returned to a detention center.

New York Times, ICE Arrests 85-Year-Old French Widow Who Married Her G.I. Sweetheart, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Catherine Porter, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). After Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé’s husband died, an inheritance battle exploded. Her stepson then used his influence to have her arrested, an Alabama probate judge said.

New York Times, Acting ICE Director Says He Plans to Resign in May, Madeleine Ngo and Hamed Aleaziz, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). Todd Lyons said he would leave to spend more time with his family. He has spoken about a surge in threats against ICE officers, saying that he knew the reality firsthand.

U.S. Inflation, Markets, Economy, Jobs, Tariffs

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Lies, Damned Lies and Economic Vibes, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 17, 2026. The continuing mystery of feel-bad economics According to Donald Trump, the U.S. economy is doing great. We’re enjoying a huge boom, there’s no inflation, and we’re all getting tax cuts. We have prosperity like nobody has ever seen before.

New York Times, Lutnick Blasts Canada Ahead of Trade Talks, Ana Swanson and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, April 17, 2026. Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, derided Canada’s trade strategy and said a North American deal needed to be reworked.

More Global News

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted in Hungary, Jennifer Rubin, right, jennifer rubin new headshotApril 17, 2026. 'We will no longer be a country without consequences.’ 

Trump Team Watch

MS Now, RFK Jr. takes lashing in first of several contentious health hearings, Brandy Zadrozny, April 17, 2026. The health and human services secretary received a rare rebuke from a Republican lawmaker as he defended his — and Trump’s — handling of the agency.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Democrats need to solve the tactical problems with impeachment, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), April 17, 2026. Following his victory on Sunday, Péter Magyar has turned immediately to demanding resignations and cleaning up corruption (even as he warns that Viktor Orbán’s team is madly shredding documents). Magyar has an incentive — unlocking the funds the EU has put on hold requires assurances on corruption — and he has a supermajority. Citing Magyar’s example, a number of people are talking about what accountability would look like if and when Democrats win back at least the House and possibly even the Senate. Adam Kinzinger wrote a plan, starting with seizing the flying bribery palace.

MS Now, Analysis: Trump’s legal fees slush fund is drying up, Hayes Brown, April 17, 2026. The Save America PAC is $500,000 in the red according to federal filings — and owes three times as much to the president’s many, many lawyers.

Heather Delaney Reese, Political Opinion: Trump’s on the road again selling lies,  Heather Delaney Reese, April 17, 2026. Donald Trump was surprisingly alert, shockingly able to stay on task, and showed the best impulse control we’ve seen from him in a while. But even that couldn’t save him from himself when he began talking about how all Americans have more money in their accounts, joked that the economy is great in a city that has seen its sharpest drop in visitors in over 50 years, and then laughed about how much seniors love him and how he loves them too, before adding that he himself is not one.

U.S. Law, Crime, Courts, Justice

Reuters, Police investigate bomb threat at Chicago-area home of Pope Leo's brother, Doina Chiacu, April 16, 2026. Police on Thursday were investigating a bomb threat made to the Chicago-area home of Pope Leo's brother John Prevost ​after a search found no explosives or hazardous materials.

The Court of History via Legal AF, Legal Commentary: How Justice Alito CREATED the Trump Presidency DISASTER, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz, April 7, 2026. They are joined by author Peter Canellos to discuss Justice Sam Alito's legacy on the court and the destructive triump of the conservative legal movement.

Top Headlines

 


New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Tehran Declares Strait ‘Open’ After Lebanon Truce, but Trump Says U.S. Blockade on Iran Continues, Peter Eavis, Jenny Gross and Joe Rennison, April 17, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s foreign minister said on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for all commercial ships after the cease-fire in Lebanon.

U.S. blockade: President Trump said a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would continue until a “complete,” peace deal, raising uncertainty about what happens next to shipping in the strait. Read more ›

Negotiations: Mr. Trump said Thursday that in-person U.S.-Iran talks could occur this weekend, though there were few signs of an immediate breakthrough. Read more ›

Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is ‘completely open,’ but Trump says the U.S. blockade of Iran will go on.ImageOil tankers and cargo ships line up in the Strait of Hormuz as seen from the United Arab Emirates in March.Credit...Altaf Qadri/Associated Press

The Strait of Hormuz is open for all commercial ships after the agreement of a cease-fire in Lebanon, Iran and the United States said on Friday.

Oil prices dropped soon after the announcement, though Iran said ships would have to take a “coordinated route” that shipping analysts said referred to a route that runs close to Iran’s coast.

Shortly after Iran’s announcement, President Trump responded in social media post: “IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE. THANK YOU!” But later Mr. Trump said that a U.S. blockade of Iranian ships leaving the strait, which began on Monday, would remain in place. Iran said this week it would retaliate against shipping in the Middle East in response to the blockade.

The statements that the waterway is now open raised hopes in markets that oil and gas would start flowing out of the Persian Gulf in significant volumes again.

ny times logoNew York Times, Hegseth Again Threatens Attacks on Iran’s Civilian Infrastructure, John Ismay, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). The U.S. blockade of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz would last “for as long as it takes,” the defense secretary said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday renewed his threat to attack Iran’s electrical infrastructure if the cease-fire between Washington and Tehran failed.

“Our forces are maximally postured to restart combat operations should this new Iranian regime choose poorly and not agree to a deal,” Mr. Hegseth said during a briefing to reporters at the Pentagon. “We are locked and loaded on your critical dual-use infrastructure, on your remaining power generation and on your energy industry.”

“We’d rather not have to do it,” he added, “but we’re ready to go at the command of our president and at the push of a button.”

Under international law, intentionally targeting a country’s energy infrastructure could constitute a war crime.

Standing next to Mr. Hegseth, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that U.S. forces were “postured and ready to resume major combat operations at literally a moment’s notice.”

The two officials then discussed the U.S. naval blockade of ships traveling to and from ports in Iran. President Trump announced the blockade on Sunday, after peace talks with Iranian leaders ended without a breakthrough.

Under international law, a naval blockade is an act of war.

Mr. Hegseth said that the blockade would last “for as long as it takes” and that “if Iran chooses poorly” by not agreeing to a deal with the United States, “then they will have a blockade — and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power and energy.”

The defense secretary also called out journalists who are reporting on the war, comparing them to the Pharisees who criticized Jesus of Nazareth for performing miracles.

“The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation,” Mr. Hegseth said, “only looking for the negative.”

He then referred to the rescue of two downed F-15 aircrew members in Iran over Easter weekend as “miracles.”

In a description of the naval operation in the Gulf of Oman, General Caine said Navy warships would enforce the blockade “inside Iran’s territorial seas” as well as in international waters. Furthermore, he said, naval forces under U.S. Indo-Pacific Command would “actively pursue any Iranian flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”

“This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil,” the general added.

Displaying a map of the Gulf of Oman, General Caine offered the first visual clues as to where the operation was taking place, showing about a dozen Navy destroyers on station more than 400 miles southeast of the Strait of Hormuz — outside a “blockade line” running from Oman to Iran’s border with Pakistan.

ny times logoNew York Times, Live Updates: Thousands of Lebanese Try to Head Home After Israel-Lebanon Truce, Christina Goldbaum, Euan Ward, Johnatan Reiss and Max Bearak, April 17, 2026. The cease-fire removes a major obstacle to U.S.-Iran peace talks. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia Israeli forces are targeting in Lebanon, did not say whether it would accept the truce.

Here’s the latest.

Thousands of Lebanese families displaced by fighting filled the main highway to southern Lebanon on Friday in hopes of returning to their homes, as a 10-day cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah went into effect. The fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has threatened the fragile halt in the war between Iran and the United States. Tehran has insisted that the truce extend to Lebanon, meaning that if the Lebanon cease-fire holds, it could remove a major hurdle to ending the U.S.-Iran war.

In a statement on Friday, Hezbollah sidestepped any direct reference to the cease-fire while offering little indication that they would violate it. Israeli forces continue to occupy southern Lebanon and warned residents not to return there, despite the truce.

The latest round of fighting has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced over one million residents, mostly from the south of the country, according to the Lebanese authorities. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.

Israel FlagIsrael and Hezbollah traded strikes on Thursday right up to midnight, when the cease-fire took effect, according to statements from both sides. And while Israel and Lebanon said they would abide by the U.S.-brokered truce, its enforcement could be complicated by the fact that the Lebanese government does not control Hezbollah, which is more powerful than the Lebanese military.

News of the cease-fire brought relief to many in northern Israel, which has faced daily Hezbollah rocket fire for seven weeks. No incoming rockets have been reported in Israel since the cease-fire took hold.

The State Department, outlining the terms of the truce, said that Israel would retain its right “to take all necessary measures in self-defense” but would not carry out “offensive operations” against Lebanese targets. The Lebanese government, with international support, is expected to take “meaningful steps” to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israeli targets.

The Lebanese army said overnight that it had recorded several Israeli violations after the cease-fire went into effect. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Here’s what else we are covering:

Israel’s leader: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was assailed by allies and critics alike for agreeing to the cease-fire. He faced pressure from Washington to stop the fighting as his goal to gut Hezbollah remained far from fulfilled.

Trump response: President Trump announced the cease-fire on Thursday and wrote on social media: “I hope Hezbollah acts nicely and well during this important period of time. It will be an GREAT moment for them if they do.”

Lebanon-Israel ties: Mr. Trump said he would invite Mr. Netanyahu and President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon to the White House for talks. Here’s a brief history of the relationship between Israel and Lebanon, which do not have formal diplomatic ties. 

 french flag

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality, M. Gessen, right, April 17, 2026. The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime. We are not in Paris, of course. But one reason it was so gratifmasha gessen headshot nytying to watch Lafarge be convicted and its executives, in their stiff-collared shirts and well-cut suits, be placed under arrest is that these men had surely never imagined that they could be punished for what they did.

As the judge read her verdict in Paris Criminal Court on Monday, police officers walked to the defense table to arrest Bruno Lafont, the 69-year-old former chief executive of one of the world’s largest cement manufacturers, Lafarge, and Christian Herrault, the 75-year-old former deputy head of operations. They would begin serving their prison sentences immediately: six and five years, respectively, for financing terrorism in Syria and beyond.

french flagTheir individual sentences were striking, but the big news was something else: For the first time in France, and possibly for the first time ever, anywhere, an entire corporation had been put on trial and found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. Two of the civil rights lawyers who brought the case were still beaming when I caught up with them a short while later by video at the courthouse. Claire Tixeire, of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who spoke to me with her colleague Anna Kiefer, of the human rights organization Sherpa, said seeing a chief executive sentenced to prison was “exceptional.” Also exceptional was the scathing tone of Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez’s verdict, which took almost four hours to read.

The court had concluded that between 2013 and 2014, the cement maker paid about $6.5 million to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, to facilitate the company’s operations there. Lafarge — now owned by the Swiss conglomerate Holcim — will have to pay about $1.3 million in fines for the crime of financing terrorism and $5.3 million for violating international sanctions. In another case, Lafarge is facing charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. If that case goes to trial and Lafarge is again found guilty, a new chapter in the prosecution of war crimes may begin.ImageA man in a brown suede jacket and a necktie holds open a passport as he walks through a security checkpoint in a government building.Christian Herrault arrives on the day of the verdict. Credit...Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu, via Getty Images

In the best-known war crimes prosecutions — at Nuremberg, in Jerusalem, in The Hague — most of the defendants were military or paramilitary officers. But at Nuremberg, industrialists who had aided and abetted the Holocaust were also put on trial. These cases largely fizzled, in part because the defendants successfully claimed that they had merely been doing what businesspeople do, which is try to maximize profits, and that they hadn’t known what kind of atrocities they were enabling.

Eighty years later, Lafarge executives attempted the same basic defense strategy. Prosecutors showed extensive email correspondence documenting agreements with terrorist organizations to help secure the Lafarge cement plant’s continued operations in Syria. They projected a slide of a travel document used by Lafarge drivers. It displayed the black Islamic State flag and the text “In the name of Allah the Merciful, the mujahideen are asked to let this vehicle transporting cement from the Lafarge plant pass through checkpoints, following an agreement with the company for the trade of this material.” Former employees testified that while their European colleagues were evacuated to safety, Syrian workers were forced to keep doing their jobs in a war zone, under bombings, frequently crossing through checkpoints under sniper fire, facing the threat of kidnapping. All while their employer was financing the armed groups that terrorized Syrian civilians. The former chief executive maintained he hadn’t known where the company money was going.

When prosecutors produced an email requesting a meeting between Lafarge executives and terrorist-group representatives, Lafont claimed not to have read it. “I’m not a child of the internet,” he said. “Emails that I’m copied on, I don’t read, and emails from people I don’t know, I don’t open.” (Lafont’s lawyers have said he is appealing.)

Documents showed that Lafarge executives knew they were paying groups classified as terrorist organizations by the United States and international agencies. And in an email message that was introduced into evidence, Herrault observed: “You don’t need much research to see that, internationally, they are hard-core terrorists.” But a lawyer for Bruno Pescheux, the former director of the Lafarge plant in Syria, claimed ignorance on her client’s behalf: “Your court says that everyone knew who ISIS was, and I say to you: Not Mr. Pescheux!”

Besides, Herrault said at one point, “If we had left, what would have become of the plant? We had a choice between two bad options.”

“The worst one and,” the judge clarified, “the less bad one?”

“Exactly,” Herrault responded.

The defendants had known, the judge concluded, that staying in Syria would require cooperation with terrorist groups. That made Lafarge complicit — not only in atrocities committed in Syria but also in acts of terrorism that the Islamic State carried out in France.

One of the prosecution’s witnesses was a survivor of the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan theater, in Paris, which along with coordinated attacks in other locations killed 130 people and left more than 400 injured. In her verdict, Judge Prévost-Desprez kept returning to the testimony of this witness. “I am trying to make you understand how choices made in your offices, thousands of kilometers away, turned into Kalashnikov bullets, into blood,” the judge said.

U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections  

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 16, 2026 [Congress Returns To DC], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 17, 2026. Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.

In Hungary, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar is setting a bar as he appears to want no part of playing business as usual with Orbán’s cronies. A center-right politician, Magyar appeared as a guest on state television after his party’s dramatic win—Orbán’s state media had not let him appear on it before the election—and said he intended to suspend the station’s news service because state media does not provide the journalism that the country deserves. He said that he would end the state subsidies for Orbán’s right-wing-allied university and that Hungarian president Tamas Sulyok, a close ally of Orbán, was “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality” and “must leave office immediately.”

Republicans appear to be trying to grab all the turf they can before the midterm elections.

Today the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140, a bill that overturns a 20-year mining ban upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) in Minnesota. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January. It clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA. Those waters include 1,175 lakes and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. According to outdoor writer Wes Siler, about 165,000 people visit the BWCA annually, generating $1.1 billion in economic activity and supporting 17,000 jobs.

The Republicans’ attack on the BWCA for the benefit of a foreign billionaire feeds President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Minnesota. Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, is targeting New York today as well, saying that the federal government will withhold $73.5 million from the state because it has refused to review the commercial driver’s licenses of almost 33,000 immigrants. New York officials say they are complying with federal law.

Trump is also continuing to try to exert his personal power over the government, threatening again to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term as chair ends in May but who has said he will continue on the board until the administration drops its trumped-up criminal investigation of him over alleged cost overruns on the renovations of Treasury buildings.

As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

Today Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally.

Churchill Ndonwie of the Miami Herald and Garrett Shanley of the Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau reported yesterday that attorneys for the immigrants being held at the Florida detention center called “Alligator Alcatraz” said in court that after a judge protected the detainees’ right to use their phone and access their lawyers, the guards cut off their access to phones and beat and pepper-sprayed detainees, openly defying court orders to respect their civil rights. The facility is operated by the Florida Division of Emergency Management but must operate according to Department of Homeland Security standards.

Prosecutors in Minnesota today charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with two counts of second-degree assault after he pulled alongside a car on a highway in Minnesota and pulled a gun on the occupants. There is a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters: “There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the state of Minnesota.”

Today the new Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, announced that acting director of ICE Todd Lyons will be leaving his position at the end of May. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Todd Lyons led a secret police force for Trump where masked agents attacked our own American streets, violated Constitutional rights, and shot our own citizens. We’ll hold you accountable too.”

Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo noted that in their panic over polls and the popularity of Democratic candidates, Republicans are trying to reclaim their base by turning back to Islamophobia and hoping a culture war will drown out concerns about gas prices, corruption, the Iran war, and Trump’s erratic behavior. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted that Muslims—who first came to the American colonies in the early 1600s, by the way—“don’t belong in American society,” and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called “the demand to impose Sharia Law in America…a serious problem.”

But there are signs that Trump is weakened enough that even past supporters are sliding away. At the beginning of his administration, Trump favored Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who flattered Trump and poured as much as $90 million into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, becoming one of the largest investors in World Liberty Financial, founded by Trump’s sons. The Securities and Exchange Commission had sued Sun for securities and market manipulation in 2023, but in March 2026 it quietly settled the lawsuit for a payment of a $10 million fine.

On Tuesday, Sun accused Trump’s World Liberty Financial of setting up a trapdoor that allows company officers to freeze accounts. Sun says he has been unable to sell since September 2025, a freeze that a blockchain tracking group says has cost Sun about $80 million. On social media, Sun called out “the bad actors at [World Liberty Financial].”

According to Rob Wile of NBC News, World Liberty Financial responded by suggesting Sun himself had engaged in misconduct. “See you in court pal,” it posted.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, was reviewing its investments even before the Iran war hit its finances, and yesterday Andrew Beaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that it is “on the verge of pulling” its funding from LIV Golf, the rival to the PGA Tour it launched with Trump’s blessing—and mostly on his golf courses—in 2022.

Meanwhile, Trump posted four screeds about the proposed White House ballroom today after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, stopped its above-ground construction but permitted construction of the below-ground bunker to continue. In one of his missives, Trump complained:

“The White House doesn’t have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass—which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint—Why wasn’t it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Administration: The 27-Year-Old Diplomat Waging Trump’s Cultural War With Europe, Michael D. Shear, Catherine Porter, Jane Bradley and Christopher F. Schuetze, April 17, 2026. Five years out of college, Samuel Samson has driven the Trump administration’s push to upend America’s postwar relationship with Europe.

When Samuel Samson, a senior adviser at the State Department, sat down privately with far-right German lawmakers in an office just steps from the White House, he was breaking with history.

For eight decades after World War II, America’s foreign policy establishment had usually steered clear of Germany’s hard-right parties, seeking to ensure that they never seized power again. That changed under President Trump, leading last September to Mr. Samson’s meeting with Beatrix von Storch and Joachim Paul of Alternative for Germany, or AfD — a party designated as a suspected extremist organization by German intelligence.

As the meeting evolved into a general gripe session, the AfD politicians told Mr. Samson, then 26, and several other American diplomats that they feared the German government might ban their party, according to Mr. Paul and another person familiar with the conversation. The Americans railed against European regulation of social media, calling it a tool for stamping out conservative opinions. And the group discussed a bogus far-right conspiracy theory that mainstream European leaders were seeking to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants.

“I got the impression — partly from the length of the conversation — that they were very interested in hearing from us,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “They took a lot of notes.”

For much of the past year, Mr. Samson has been at the forefront of President Trump’s effort to reshape America’s relationship with Europe. Touring the continent, Mr. Samson has sought to cultivate Washington’s ties with far-right Europeans and bolster such figures at the expense of Europe’s centrist establishment.

He has shocked its mainstream leaders, many of them with decades of experience in diplomacy, by accusing them of stifling freedom and by frequently meeting with and promoting their hard-line challengers. He is just five years out of college, and he has repeatedly advocated an approach that overturns three generations of American diplomatic orthodoxy. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump to Pick Ousted FEMA Head to Lead Agency Again, Tyler Pager,Scott Dance and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). Cameron Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL who ran unsuccessfully for Congress.President Trump intends to nominate Cameron Hamilton to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency after he was pushed out as acting leader nearly a year ago, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Hamilton, who has limited disaster management experience, is a former Navy SEAL who worked for a defense contractor and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Virginia before taking over FEMA.

Mr. Hamilton was ousted from that position after he told members of Congress that the agency should not be eliminated. Mr. Trump had said early in his second term, “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.” But when Congress pressed him on the agency’s future in a hearing last May, Mr. Hamilton contradicted that outlook.

“I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Mr. Hamilton said on May 7.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Mr. Hamilton.

Mr. Trump has not yet formally nominated him for the role, and as with all personnel matters, aides caution that Mr. Trump could change his mind before officially announcing Mr. Hamilton.

His nomination could raise concern among emergency managers because of a federal law passed after Hurricane Katrina requiring that the FEMA administrator carry extensive experience managing disaster response.

Mr. Hamilton previously worked as an emergency management specialist in the State Department and as a division director in the Department of Homeland Security, where he managed emergency medical technicians on the southern border.

He would take over an agency that has lost thousands of employees since Mr. Trump took office, and whose future has appeared in flux as Kristi Noem, the former homeland security secretary, explored eliminating or dramatically reshaping it.

The FEMA administrator must be confirmed by the Senate, but Mr. Trump has not formally nominated anyone for the job in his second term. Three people have led the agency on an acting basis over the past year, including Mr. Hamilton.

But Markwayne Mullin, who was confirmed as homeland security secretary last month, told senators in his confirmation hearing he planned to name a permanent administrator to take over.

ny times logoNew York Times, House Votes to Extend Expiring Law on Warrantless Surveillance for 10 Days, Charlie Savage, April 17, 2026. The Senate would need to also approve the stopgap measure that passed the House early Friday. Libertarian-leaning House Republicans had balked at a long-term extension.

The House of Representatives voted early Friday to extend an expiring surveillance law for 10 days, after libertarian-leaning Republicans demanded that they be allowed to vote on adding new privacy limits to any long-term extension.

The law, a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is set to expire on Monday. The House bill would push that off until April 30, creating more time for negotiations. The Senate, which reconvenes on Monday, would still need to approve the stopgap measure.

President Trump has been pressuring Republicans to pass an 18-month reauthorization without any changes to the provision, known as Section 702.

Speaker Mike Johnson has been attempting to comply, but he needs the backing of nearly every G.O.P. member in the House to proceed. Twenty balked early Friday morning, making it impossible to move forward even though four Democrats crossed party lines to try to help him bring the matter up for a vote.

President Trump had urged Republicans on Wednesday to “unify” behind Mr. Johnson and extend the law without any new limits.

“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!” Mr. Trump declared on social media, portraying the section as crucial to protecting troops abroad and preventing terrorist attacks.

But that characterization did little to allay the concerns of some Republicans associated with the libertarian-leaning Freedom Caucus. The debate has scrambled the usual polarized party lines: Privacy and civil liberties-focused lawmakers in both parties have allied to press for greater limits, while centrists and national security hawks in both parties are working together to try to extend the surveillance law without changes.

Section 702 allows the government to collect — on domestic soil and without a warrant — the communications of foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Under the law, the National Security Agency can order email services like Google and network operators like AT&T to turn over copies of messages of targeted foreigners.

The provision legalized a form of the Stellarwind program, the once-secret warrantless wiretapping program that the Bush administration launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. When Congress enacted Section 702 in 2008, it added a “sunset” deadline to ensure that lawmakers would periodically review — and potentially modify — the program.

Privacy-minded lawmakers want to require a court order to access information about and the private messages of Americans swept up in the program. They have also proposed using the bill to bar the government from purchasing data about Americans from data brokers if it would need a warrant to collect the information directly.

U.S. Immigration, Deportations, Rights

ny times logoNew York Times, She Made Sure Her Baby Was Born an American. Then Federal Agents Separated Them, Caroline Kitchener, Charo Henríquez and Hamed Aleaziz, April 17, 2026. Diana Acosta Verde, who came into the United States illegally when she was six months pregnant, had to leave her baby at a hospital while she returned to a detention center.

Diana Acosta Verde received the order from the detention officer less than 24 hours after she gave birth.

“Leave the baby in the crib,” Ms. Acosta recalled the officer saying as she held her newborn son. “You need to go.”

Her baby, Gael, was born a month early in a South Texas hospital. As Gael slept, the officer explained that a bus had arrived to take Ms. Acosta back to the detention center where she had lived for the past three months.

It was time to say goodbye.

Ms. Acosta felt her whole body tremble as she moved away from her son. A 27-year-old immigrant from Honduras, she and her partner had crossed the southern border in the fall, when Ms. Acosta was about six months pregnant, after being deported from the United States the previous spring. The couple knew they were taking a chance when they began their 1,700-mile journey back to the United States. But to give their first child together a chance at American citizenship — to be born on U.S. soil — they had agreed that they would do anything.

In arguing at the Supreme Court this month to overturn birthright citizenship, which many see as central to the country’s identity, the Trump administration asserted that the practice acts as a “powerful pull factor,” encouraging people to cross the border illegally and give birth in the United States. With a majority of justices appearing likely to uphold birthright citizenship, Ms. Acosta’s experiences reflect the often fraught choices and questions inherent in the policy.

Ms. Acosta and the baby’s father, Jaime Murillo Padilla, made decisions that put themselves and their future child at risk — desperate for their son to achieve citizenship in a stable country rich with economic promise. They also encountered an immigration system ill equipped to deal with the consequences of a practice that creates strong incentives for noncitizens to have children in the United States, with detention policies and conditions that can put mothers and their babies in jeopardy.

Of all the potential perils they had contemplated, the couple never imagined they would be separated from their newborn. Gael was in the hospital without a family member for more than 24 hours before his grandmother, a U.S. resident, came to collect him.

“I felt so much pain that I didn’t really know where it hurt,” Ms. Acosta said in an interview. “I wanted to vomit. I felt like my world was falling to pieces.”

ny times logoNew York Times, ICE Arrests 85-Year-Old French Widow Who Married Her G.I. Sweetheart, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Catherine Porter, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). After Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé’s husband died, an inheritance battle exploded. Her stepson then used his influence to have her arrested, an Alabama probate judge said.

A few years ago, Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé reconnected with a man named Bill Ross, whom she had met when she was a young secretary and he was stationed in France for the U.S. military. Both widowed and in their 80s, the two fell in love, and last year she moved more than 4,000 miles to Anniston, Ala., to marry him.

But the continent-spanning love story soured in January after Mr. Ross died, setting off an ugly inheritance battle between his two sons and Ms. Ross-Mahé, 85. This month, immigration agents arrested her in her nightgown at her late husband’s home — and a county probate judge overseeing his estate said that one of his sons was responsible for the arrest.

Ms. Ross-Mahé is now in a detention center hundreds of miles away in Louisiana, her own three children back in France unable to reach her and fearing for her health.

The Calhoun County probate judge, Shirley A. Millwood, a Republican elected in 2024, in a Friday ruling urged the federal government to investigate, “especially in light of the ongoing national events surrounding the distrust of federal law enforcement officers and the many investigations ongoing of corruption within our government.”

In her ruling, she appointed an independent administrator for Mr. Ross’s estate and temporarily ordered his sons to give up their keys to their father’s home. The ruling has not been previously reported.

Judge Millwood wrote in her ruling that she believed that Mr. Ross’s younger son, Tony Ross, who she said was a retired Alabama state trooper now working at a federal courthouse in Anniston, had used his position as a government employee to have Ms. Ross-Mahé arrested.

The son testified in probate court that he had not asked co-workers to have Ms. Ross-Mahé arrested. But, Judge Millwood wrote, law enforcement officers told Tony Ross a day before Ms. Ross-Mahé’s arrest that she would be detained, and he also received a text confirming the arrest less than an hour after it happened. Two hours after her arrest, the judge wrote, Mr. Ross’s other son, Gary, went to their father’s house and changed the locks.

Judge Millwood directed that copies of her ruling be sent to the presiding federal judge in Anniston, as well as to the top U.S. marshal for the region, possibly in an effort to prompt an investigation into the sons’ behavior.

ny times logoNew York Times, Acting ICE Director Says He Plans to Resign in May, Madeleine Ngo and Hamed Aleaziz, April 17, 2026 (print ed.). Todd Lyons said he would leave to spend more time with his family. He has spoken about a surge in threats against ICE officers, saying that he knew the reality firsthand.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said on Thursday that he would resign at the end of May, shaking up the leadership at the agency responsible for carrying out President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

In a letter to Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, Mr. Lyons said that it had been a “tremendous honor” to lead the agency, but that he had decided to leave to “spend more time with my family.”

“My sons are both reaching a pivotal point in their lives, and my wife and I wish to spend as much time as possible with them,” Mr. Lyons said in the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “This was not an easy decision, but I believe it is the right one for me and my family at this time.”

CBS News earlier reported Mr. Lyons’s plan to resign this spring.

His exit raises more questions about the direction of ICE, which has faced dimming public opinion over its aggressive tactics. Recent polling shows that most Americans believe the agency has gone too far under the Trump administration. The fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota earlier this year, in particular, drew widespread outrage and calls for reforms.

The planned departure of Mr. Lyons also comes less than a month after Mr. Mullin was sworn in to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE. Mr. Mullin, a former senator representing Oklahoma, was nominated after a string of controversies led Mr. Trump to fire Kristi Noem as secretary.

Mr. Mullin’s arrival has focused attention on how the department will reset its image while also delivering on the president’s pledge to continue cracking down on illegal immigration.

Mr. Lyons, who joined ICE in 2007 as an agent in Dallas, has defended the agency’s work under Mr. Trump. But he has also spoken recently about a surge in threats against ICE officers, saying that he knew the reality firsthand, and that his own family had been targeted.

After being hired at ICE, Mr. Lyons worked his way up to become the executive associate director of the agency’s enforcement and removal arm, before he was tapped to lead the agency.

Stephen Miller, an influential adviser to Mr. Trump and the architect of his deportation agenda, said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Lyons was a “phenomenal patriot and dedicated leader who has been at the center of President Trump’s historic efforts to secure our homeland and reverse the Democrats’ sinister border invasion.” 

U.S. Inflation, Markets, Economy, Jobs, Tariffs

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Lies, Damned Lies and Economic Vibes, Paul Krugman, right, paul krugmanApril 17, 2026. The continuing mystery of feel-bad economics According to Donald Trump, the U.S. economy is doing great. We’re enjoying a huge boom, there’s no inflation, and we’re all getting tax cuts. We have prosperity like nobody has ever seen before.

But it’s probably not news to you that reality doesn’t agree. Inflation was stubbornly elevated even before the Iran debacle, while growth has been sluggish. Jobs for entry-level workers are hard to find while mortgage and car loan rates are up. Gas-pump prices are above $4 on average and around 10 million Americans are projected to lose health insurance by 2028. Yet the one economic variable that stands out, that really is like nothing anyone has ever seen before,is consumer confidence: The long-running University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment just hit its lowest point ever recorded.

And that’s a puzzle. Obviously, I’m no defender either of Trump’s policies or of his lies. But while the U.S. economy isn’t nearly as good as he claims, it’s objectively not bad enough to justify the worst consumer sentiment in history — worse than during the stagflation at the end of the 1970s, worse than in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Warning: Today’s post is wonkier than usual, at least in tone. It basically ends with a question mark. My main goal today is to share a puzzle with readers and explain why I’m not satisfied with the answers smart people — especially two of my favorite data analysis gurus, Jared Bernstein and G. Elliott Morris — are offering. They argue that it’s all about the level of prices. While that is certainly an important factor, I believe that there is more to the story. I believe that the current extremely negative sentiment is a result of Americans’ correct sense that they have been lied to. To discuss this fully will take a couple of posts. So today I will introduce the puzzle and enlarge on the range of explanations in the next post.

Start with the puzzle: Why are Americans so down on an economy that, while not the greatest, isn’t terrible by the usual measures? This isn’t a new question: Kyla Scanlon coined the term “vibecession” in 2022 for a situation in which people feel bad about an economy that doesn’t look that bad by the numbers. But the puzzle has intensified over time, both because the bad feelings have gotten worse and because the vibecession has been so persistent.

Historically, consumer sentiment tracked objective measures of the state of the economy. In fact, you could predict sentiment fairly well using just one variable: the so-called “misery index,” the sum of inflation and the unemployment rate. Here, using annual averages (and the first three months of 2026) is what the relationship between the misery index and consumer sentiment has looked like since 1990:

You can get an even better fit to pre-Covid consumer sentiment by adding other economic variables, such as the performance of the stock market. But any way you cut it, since 2022 Americans have felt much worse about the economy than conventional economic measures say they “should.” Moreover, that pessimism has gotten worse over time: consumer sentiment is much worse now than it was in 2023 and 2024.

Many observers have attempted to explain these unusually bad feelings by claiming that the economy is worse than it looks, especially for working-class families. Going through those arguments would take me too far afield right now. But let me just say that some of those arguments, like claiming that ordinary workers didn’t share in the post-Covid recovery, are just wrong. Others, like pointing to much higher interest rates on mortgages and other loans, have validity. But they aren’t sufficient to explain why consumer sentiment is now worse than it was under stagflation and mass unemployment.

So what does explain the current dismal consumer sentiment? Both Bernstein and Morris argue that it’s about the price level as opposed to the rate of inflation.

The chart below illustrates what they mean. It shows the log of the Consumer Price Index since 2014. I use the log because this means that a given vertical distance always corresponds to the same percentage change, and the slope of the line shows the rate of inflation: A graph showing a price increase AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The U.S. experienced a bout of high inflation in 2021-22, largely because of disruptions to supply chains in the aftermath of Covid, plus fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This inflation spurt ended as supply chains became unsnarled and oil prices stabilized, and inflation since 2023 has been only modestly higher than it was pre-Covid. However, prices have never come back down and have remained persistently higher than the pre-2020 trend would have predicted.

And the story is that consumers aren’t fully mollified by the fact that inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has slowed. They’re angry and upset that the level of prices remains much higher than they expected.

Both Bernstein and Morris find that if one adds a price-level variable to an equation predicting consumer sentiment, it tracks the data well. Morris concludes,

When it comes to how Americans feel about the economy today, whether you are measuring using objective structural price data or the polls, it’s the prices, stupid.

Why am I not fully convinced by this explanation? I have three questions:

First, does correlation imply causation? Consumer sentiment fell off a cliff after 2020. Also, prices surged after 2020. But lots of things changed with Covid. How sure are we that the second observation explains the first? Morris points to other survey data that support the prices to confidence link, but we’re still talking about basically one observation, which is always problematic.

Or to use a bit of jargon, is including the jump in prices in your equation just introducing a dummy variable? That is, is it simply a marker that something changed, but not a clear indication of what?

Second, shouldn’t this story have a sell-by date? The big price surge began five years ago. That’s a long time. Do you remember what groceries cost in April 2021? I don’t, not really. At some point one would expect people to recalibrate their expectations of what things “should” cost. Yet the vibecession is if anything deepening with the passage of time.

Third, what about Morning in America? Joe Biden presided over rapidly falling inflation for the second half of his term, yet received no credit because, we’re told, people were upset that prices hadn’t actually come down. But you know who else presided over falling inflation but a still-rising price level? Ronald Reagan. Here’s what happened to the overall level of consumer prices during Reagan’s first term and the Biden presidency: A graph with a line going up AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The two presidents’ track records on prices were almost identical. Yet Reagan ran a triumphant reelection campaign on the theme that it was Morning in America, while the Biden economy was vilified. What was that about?

Jared is too good an economist to be unaware of this puzzle. He has shared with me a draft of a forthcoming paper with Daniel Posthumus, in which they do indeed find that the level of prices historically didn’t matter the way it seems to now. They suggest that the long era of relatively low inflation since the mid-1980s may have made people more sensitive to price shocks:

Our findings suggest that a huge storm after a long calm can be more upsetting to people who are not used to bad weather.

Indeed. But why has consumer sentiment gotten so much worse over the past year, even as the low prices people remember recede further into the past?

My speculative answer is that it has a lot to do with the lies of 2024. Remember, millions voted for Trump because he promised to reduce grocery prices “on Day One” and promised to cut energy bills in half. Now they know that they were had.

ny times logoNew York Times, Lutnick Blasts Canada Ahead of Trade Talks, Ana Swanson and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, April 17, 2026. Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, derided Canada’s trade strategy and said a North American deal needed to be reworked.

Howard Lutnick, the U.S. secretary of commerce, said on Friday that President Trump was committed to reining back the North American trade deal and blasted Canada for its trade negotiating strategy, adding, “they suck.”

Mr. Lutnick, who was speaking at a conference organized by the media outlet Semafor, was particularly critical of Canada’s effort to push back against the Trump administration. He dismissed a former Canadian trade official’s suggestion that Canada could benefit from negotiating more slowly because political pressure on the Trump administration was increasing, as “the worst strategy I ever heard.”

A spokesman for the Department of Commerce said that Mr. Lutnick was describing America’s unfair trade imbalance with Canada and how Canada “sucks off” America’s $30 trillion economy.

Asked if Mr. Trump was committed to extending the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal he renegotiated in his first term, Mr. Lutnick responded that “he thinks it’s a bad deal.”

While some of the U.S. relationship with Canada and Mexico was “fundamental,” Mr. Lutnick said, the trade deal overall was “a bad industrial policy that harmed America.” 

More Global News

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted in Hungary, Jennifer Rubin, right, jennifer rubin new headshotApril 17, 2026. 'We will no longer be a country without consequences.’

After 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s despotic rule, Hungarians turned out in overwhelming numbers to deliver a landslide victory to Péter Magyar (whose name literally means “Hungarian”) and his center-right Tisza Party. The victory was so large Viktor Orbán could not dispute the results. The new majority is large enough to enact constitutional reforms.

Credit goes to the youthful Magyar (forty-five years old), who came from the ranks of Orbán’s Fidesz Party. (Note to file: Democracy advocates need defectors.) On his path to victory, he weathered a public/political feud with his ex-wife (whom he taped acknowledging the Orbán regime’s corruption), a failed “honey trap” plot, and every election trick in the book (from gerrymandering to propaganda from state-controlled media to hacking and wiretapping to threats on his life).

Orbán had considerable advantages. As scholar Anne Applebaum pointed out, with control of the “judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, as well as a group of oligarchic companies that in turn controlled a good chunk of the economy… Orbán used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters, and funding mechanisms to support some of them.” They did not help. Indeed, Orbán may have been harmed by his coziness with Trump and with Russia. (Hungarians on election night chanted “Russians, go home!” )

Magyar’s campaign was a model of tenacity and street smarts. Rather than create a new party, he revived a moribund one. He “toured Hungary relentlessly for two years, visiting hundreds of cities, towns and villages in an effort to win over some of Orbán’s rural support,” the Associated Press explained. “He appeared before thousands of supporters on Saturday on University Square in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city and traditionally a Fidesz stronghold.”

Magyar focused incessantly on Orbán’s corruption, the economic penalties Hungary incurred because of EU sanctions, restoration of democracy, and national reunification. Pledging renewal and reconciliation, he remained vague on some issues (e.g., LGBTQ+ rights, Ukraine). “As a former member of Fidesz himself, he was able to speak with extra conviction about Fidesz’s corruption,” Applebaum noted. “He portrayed himself as a part of the European, democratic, law-abiding center-right. He waved a lot of Hungarian flags, as did his supporters.”

In his victory speech, Magyar offered a message that should inform democratic movements worldwide. “From now on, we will no longer be a country without consequences,” he declared. He promised that “those who have robbed the country will be held accountable.” And to Orbán’s supporters, he extended his hand: “I promise you that I will also be your prime minister, and I will work to heal wounds and help us accept each other, even if we represent different views.”Subscribed

The massive turnout (an estimated 77.8%!), shattered records, reflecting both economic pain (the highest unemployment in a decade, growth that lagged other Eastern European countries, and a decrepit healthcare system) but also many young adults’ excitement. (The youth vote is critical in dislodging autocrats. The New York Times noted that Generation Z movements “have toppled governments in Bulgaria, Madagascar and Nepal over the past year.”)

It would be a mistake for democracy defenders in other countries to run a carbon copy of Magyar’s campaign. In the U.S., for example, a conservative from Republican ranks is unlikely to galvanize the wide array of groups in the resistance. Issues that in Hungary can be put to one side (e.g., LGBTQ+ rights) are an essential part of the message supporting America’s pluralistic democracy and commitment to self-determination.

However, there are lessons that can carry over to the U.S. context:

Corruption and economic issues are inextricably linked. A despot and his cronies take from ordinary people to fatten their own wallets.

Patriotism and unity are powerful emotions. Casting the autocrat as the one who divided the country, brought disgrace on it, and divided fellow citizens can be extremely effective.

Broad coalitions are essential. Though certain issues are dealbreakers (e.g., reform, democracy), constituencies need not agree on everything. Purity tests are for losers.

Democracy defenders can win even if the playing field is badly tilted in favor of the reigning regime. Dogged effort, coalition building, and massive enthusiasm (converted into record turnout) can overcome considerable obstacles.

Upending an entrenched autocrat takes resilience and patience. Errors, legislative losses, and scandals inevitably occur — but tenacious dedication to democracy can weather temporary setbacks.

Optimism and joy are essential to a pro-democracy movement, serving as a powerful counterweight to the atmosphere of fear and the dystopian imagery despots cultivate.

Democracy defenders must do the hard work to win. There is no substitute for active participation, organization, and voting en masse. People must dedicate time, money, and energy if they want to oust an autocrat.

The outpouring of joy evident on election night in the streets and squares of Hungary reflected ordinary people’s abiding love of freedom and democracy. When roused and inspired (and pushed to their limit by a corrupt regime), they overcame fear and isolation to join fellow citizens in a noble cause.

The undaunted, unrelenting, and unafraid Magyar and the people of Hungary he inspired deserve our thanks and praise. They powerfully demonstrated what is possible when ordinary people take ownership of their country and their democracy. If we want to oust our own autocrat, Americans must muster the same doggedness, commitment, patriotism, sound judgment, and courage Hungarians displayed.

Trump Team Watch

MS Now, Analysis: Trump’s legal fees slush fund is drying up, Hayes Brown, April 17, 2026. The Save America PAC is $500,000 in the red according to federal filings — and owes three times as much to the president’s many, many lawyers.

President Donald Trump’s army of lawyers may be the largest of any Oval Office occupant in history. Aside from the attorneys who work for the office of the president, he has retained a veritable phalanx of personal attorneys over the years to represent him in court. That kind of legal firepower doesn’t come cheap. But according to recent Federal Election Commission filings, the funding stream Trump has been using to pay out millions to law firms is running very, very low on cash.

Both PACs are in a much worse financial state now that Trump isn’t actively running for president.

Trump spent much of his time between presidential terms fending off a string of civil and criminal cases. Despite the mounting threats, he remained loath to spend out of his own deep pockets to cover the equally mounting legal fees. Instead, Trump routed money from the donations pouring into his political action committees, primarily Save America PAC. Some of the money diverted toward legal fees also came from Make America Great Again PAC, the reskinned shell of his 2020 re-election campaign.

Between the two committees, Trump funneled $50 million toward his legal fees over the course of 2023 alone. It was a massive expenditure in an off year, especially with the 2024 presidential race looming. The New York Times reported in July 2023 that Save America was facing “dwindling cash reserves,” when it only had $4 million in its coffers after starting 2022 with $105 million.Trump’s plan for donors to pay legal fees could still cost himMarch 22, 2024 / 06:06

Both PACs are in a much worse financial state now that Trump isn’t actively running for president. Based on its quarterly filing with the FEC, Save America has $1.19 million in cash on hand. That would be a tidy sum for you or me, but Save America also owes a total of $1.6 million, all of which is meant to cover previous “legal consulting” or “reimbursement for legal fees and expenses.” Those debts are what is left after the committee already spent almost $2.3 million covering those budget items so far this year.

Save America also transferred an additional $1.6 million to Make America Great Again PAC since January. Despite that, according to its latest FEC filing, MAGA PAC only has $28,087 in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter, versus $763,000 in debts. Much as with Save America, $1.3 million of the committee’s money likewise went to paying out legal fees in the last quarter.More from MS NOW Daily

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Save America owes the lion’s share of its debt to two firms: NechelesLaw LLP and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. The former’s lead partner, Susan Necheles, represented Trump in the 2024 New York “hush money” case that led to Trump being convicted on 34 counts of fraud. The latter firm has taken up Trump’s appeal of that hush money case and the massive $350 million civil judgement against him and his company, The Trump Organization. Meanwhile, MAGA PAC owes $318,000 to Colorado firm Campbell Killin Brittan & Ray LLC, which represented the 2024 campaign in a defamation suit, and another $183,000 to Virginia’s Binnall Law Group, which served as counsel to Trump on issues regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

On one level, though, exactly which PAC’s bank account these legal debts are eventually pulled from is beside the point.

There is a chance that Trump’s 2024 campaign vehicle — which has been converted into a PAC called Never Surrender — could begin filling in the gaps from the other PACs. Never Surrender has more than $50 million in the bank, according to its latest FEC filing, which is nothing to sneeze at. It has already been paying The Dhillon Law Group, the firm owned by Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon, which Trump retained to block an attempt in 2023 to remove him from the ballot in Colorado.

On one level, however, exactly which PAC’s bank account these legal debts are eventually pulled from is beside the point. It is only thanks to a gaping hole in campaign finance law, such as it is, that not a single penny of those payments will come from the president directly. Instead, those debts will all likely be covered courtesy of his loyal donors, many of whom were never told exactly where their contributions would be going.

It’s in some ways confounding that more MAGA voters don’t feel like victims of a bait-and-switch, especially considering the less than scrupulous tactics his campaigns have employed in the past. But Trump has managed to convince his devotees that his personal life and political life are so intermingled that political attacks on him are attacks on them as well. It follows then that even as the money they’ve sent him in response has gone toward supporting Trump’s lawlessness, his criminality and his avaricious quest to siphon ever more money into his own pockets, the response has been to shrug, pull out their wallets and add more dollars to the collection basket.

Both PACs are in a much worse financial state now that Trump isn’t actively running for president. Based on its quarterly filing with the FEC, Save America has $1.19 million in cash on hand. That would be a tidy sum for you or me, but Save America also owes a total of $1.6 million, all of which is meant to cover previous “legal consulting” or “reimbursement for legal fees and expenses.” Those debts are what is left after the committee already spent almost $2.3 million covering those budget items so far this year.

Save America also transferred an additional $1.6 million to Make America Great Again PAC since January. Despite that, according to its latest FEC filing, MAGA PAC only has $28,087 in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter, versus $763,000 in debts. Much as with Save America, $1.3 million of the committee’s money likewise went to paying out legal fees in the last quarter.

MS Now, RFK Jr. takes lashing in first of several contentious health hearings, Brandy Zadrozny, April 17, 2026. The health and human services secretary received a rare rebuke from a Republican lawmaker as he defended his — and Trump’s — handling of the agency.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a hearing of the House Committee on Ways and Means on Capitol Hill.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee on Capitol Hill on April 16, 2026.Heather Diehl / Getty ImagesApr. 16, 2026, 3:38 PM EDTBy 

Utah Rep. Blake Moore offered a rare Republican rebuke of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday morning before the House Ways and Means Committee, saying that the health and human services secretary underdelivered on his promise to uncover the causes of autism.

“I was underwhelmed with what we ultimately put out,” said Moore — whose son is on the autism spectrum — of Kennedy and Trump’s September claim that autism was caused by women taking Tylenol while pregnant.

“My wife was hurt,” Moore said, and suggested that their announcement improperly placed the blame for a child’s autism on the mother.

Moore’s criticism — respectful as it was — was atypical coming from Republicans on the committee, who questioned the former anti-vaccine activist about Trump’s slashing of the HHS budget and Kennedy’s own chaotic leadership of public health. It was the first in a series of seven hearings, likely to be contentious, at which Kennedy is scheduled to speak over the next week, including another on Thursday afternoon.

It was the first time Kennedy had addressed Congress since September, when he defended his gutting of HHS agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seven months later, many of the problems caused by those cuts remain: Kennedy still has not replaced the CDC director he fired last year (though later on Thursday, Trump reportedly nominated Erica Schwartz, a former deputy U.S. surgeon general, to lead the CDC) and still does not have a surgeon general, and his agencies are still reeling from massive DOGE cuts to programs and staff, all while deadly measles outbreaks rage across the country.

Most of the questioning from members of Congress on Thursday fell predictably along party lines, with Republicans mostly praising Kennedy and Trump’s leadership with regard to public health, including HHS’ focus on nutrition and promises to target fraud and abuse within the agency. Democrats, meanwhile, hammered Kennedy as a dangerous, self-aggrandizing conspiracy theorist, and criticized his stewardship, including the cutting of public service marketing during measles outbreaks in lieu of campaigns that promoted Kennedy himself.

Seeming to take a cue from the questioning of then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month, Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., targeted Kennedy’s personal marketing campaigns directly. She asked Kennedy whether Trump had been aware of the secretary’s recent decision to end pro-vaccine campaigns and replace them with an ad showing Kennedy enjoying a cold plunge pool while wearing jeans and hanging out with a popular MAGA entertainer.

Heather Delaney Reese, Political Opinion: Trump’s on the road again selling lies,  Heather Delaney Reese, April 17, 2026. At exactly 5 p.m. tonight, the entire room stood, phones held high in the air to capture the moment while “God Bless the USA” blasted from the speakers. Just then, Donald Trump appeared to the left, and with his right hand on the rail, he pushed himself up and onto the stage before walking to his place at the table. He stopped right behind his seat, where he smiled and said, “That’s a great song, that’s a great song.” And as the music kept playing, he made the entire room stay standing, cheering for him, until the last note of the music finally faded.

And for the next 46 minutes, Donald Trump was surprisingly alert, shockingly able to stay on task, and showed the best impulse control we’ve seen from him in a while. But even that couldn’t save him from himself when he began talking about how all Americans have more money in their accounts, joked that the economy is great in a city that has seen its sharpest drop in visitors in over 50 years, and then laughed about how much seniors love him and how he loves them too, before adding that he himself is not one.

He was there to speak at a Tax Day roundtable in Las Vegas. A “celebration” of the “no tax on tips” policy he signed into law last year. And it ended up being one of the most revealing insights into how he views working Americans and how little he actually understands or cares about their lives. Not because of any one outrageous moment, but because of how clearly it showed the gap between the man on that stage and the people sitting in that room.

A billionaire who has never lived the kind of financial uncertainty most people face. The kind where you’re deciding between buying groceries and paying rent. Standing in front of working Americans, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, pretending to understand struggles he has never lived, while pushing policies that are actively making their lives harder.

He opened by personally taking credit for the large amounts of money that Americans have in their bank accounts. “Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets this week because of the Republican tax policies,” he said. And then came the threat: “And we got to win the midterms. If we don’t, these policies are going to be taken away from you.” That’s his whole playbook in two sentences. Take credit for what he wants us to believe is true, then scare us into compliance.

Every dollar is because of him, and if you don’t vote for him, they’ll take it all away. It doesn’t matter what people are actually seeing in their own bank accounts, whether the money is there or not. He’s telling us a different reality, one he needs us to believe, regardless of what we’re actually living through. One where everyone is doing better. Where the money is already there, whether we can see it and feel it or not. He wants us to believe that everyone is thriving, and if we’re not, then we’re the problem.

And that’s where the real damage happens. Because when the president of the United States declares on camera that every single American, at every income level is doing better, and you’re sitting at your kitchen table that night trying to figure out which bill gets paid this month and which one has to wait, you don’t think “he’s lying.” You think, “what’s wrong with me?” You think everyone else must have figured it out, and you’re the one who can’t make it work. Maybe you’re not budgeting well enough. Maybe you should be working harder. Maybe you should pick up a second job, a third shift, another DoorDash route. The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure.

So you don’t talk about it or ask for help. You carry it alone, and so does the person next door, and so does the family down the street, all of them convinced that they’re the exception to the prosperity the president just promised is everywhere. And that silence is exactly what he needs. Because the moment people start talking to each other, the moment they sit down and compare notes, everything changes. They realize that millions of families are having the exact same experience. That they’re all choosing between gas and groceries, watching their paychecks shrink while prices keep climbing. And the moment that realization sets in, the whole story he just told in that room falls apart.

That’s what this kind of messaging does. It doesn’t just mislead people about the economy. It isolates them from each other. It takes a shared crisis, one created by his tariffs, war, and policies, and turns it into millions of individual failures. It breaks the thing he fears most, which is people realizing they’re not alone in this. Communities don’t organize when everyone thinks they’re the only one struggling. Families don’t fight back when they think the problem is theirs to solve. He doesn’t want us comparing notes. He doesn’t want us in the same room together without him at the front of it, telling us what to believe. And when that works, when people are convinced they’re alone and that the problem is theirs, they’re easier to control, easier to manipulate, and more likely to vote against their own interests.

And the truth is, so many Americans are not okay right now. And it’s not their fault. It’s not because they didn’t work hard enough. It’s the result of an economy shaped by his decisions, his tariffs driving up the cost of everything from food to fuel, his war sending gas prices to $5 a gallon in the very city where he stood tonight, his “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting Medicaid and food assistance to fund tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people in this country. But instead of admitting any of that, he stands at a podium and tells a room full of working people that everything is great. And the ones who know it isn’t are too ashamed to say so, because he just told them they’re the only ones.

And here’s the thing about those dollars. He claimed the average refund this season is “over $4,000” and that workers in Las Vegas are seeing refunds of “five, six, seven, $8,000 or more.” The actual IRS data tells a different story. The average refund this season is $3,462, an increase of $346 from last year. That’s not nothing for working families, but it is a far cry from the windfall he described. And even that modest increase is being eaten alive. Gas in Las Vegas hit $5.05 a gallon the week before he arrived. Diesel hit an all-time high of $6.39. A congressional report found that Americans are paying 35% more for gasoline since the attacks on Iran began, costing families nationwide $8.4 billion. Nevada’s share alone is $83 million. So yes, some workers got a bigger refund. And then they filled their gas tanks and watched it disappear.

And where was he standing when he said all of this? Las Vegas. The city that just recorded a 7.5% annual drop in visitors in 2025, the sharpest decline since record-keeping began in 1970, outside of the pandemic. That’s 3.1 million fewer people walking through the casinos, eating at the restaurants, tipping the bartenders and bellhops he was supposedly there to celebrate. The Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Southern Nevada, has a name for it. Workers are reporting fewer shifts, smaller tips, and hours cut. Caesars Entertainment saw Las Vegas profits drop 20%.

And while Trump was setting up his roundtable, the Culinary Union and the Nevada State Democratic Party were holding a counter-event across town, where hospitality workers described what’s actually happening to their paychecks. Ted Pappageorge, the union’s Secretary-Treasurer, named the pattern directly. Workers, he said, are living through what they now call the Trump Slump, and it is showing up in their hours and their paychecks. Joe Spica, a bellman at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas who has worked in the industry for years, put it more plainly. Something has to change, he said, and it has to change fast, because the policies of this administration are hurting Las Vegas. Senator Jacky Rosen, unable to be there in person, released a video address from Washington the same day, calling out the rising costs and the tourism collapse that are hollowing out Nevada’s economy under Trump’s watch.

Trump didn’t mention any of that. He told the room the economy was “booming.” And then he got to the part where his impulse control slipped. He was reading from his prepared remarks, listing the kinds of small businesses that have benefited from his tax cuts: “restaurants, dry cleaners, corner stores.” And he stopped. He looked up from the paper and said, “What is a corner store? I’ve never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described. A corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please?”

That’s the whole post in one moment. A man who has never set foot in a corner store, who has never had to decide between buying groceries and paying rent, who was born into wealth so vast that $5,000 is a rounding error in his day, reading words someone else wrote for him about businesses he has never entered, for people whose lives he has never lived. And he couldn’t even get through the script without exposing it.

Then came “DoorDash Grandma,” aka Sharon Simmons from the McDonald’s delivery stunt earlier this week. Trump talked about how beneficial “no tax on tips” was for her, but again, he couldn’t control himself. He veered off course, describing the whole thing as: “It was a little bit of a, you know, I mean, to be honest, it was a little tacky. You know, they come up with these crazy ideas like McDonald’s. They’re a little embarrassing. They’re a little tiny embarrassing, but we do them and you win by landslides.” Admitting, out loud, just how far he and his administration are willing to go to manufacture moments, spin narratives, and mislead people if it means winning votes.

And the story he’s telling about her is carefully constructed. A hardworking grandmother, out there delivering food, helped by his policy, lifted up as proof that everything is working exactly as it should. And the more we learn about “DoorDash Grandma,” the more it appears that Sharon Simmons may have been part of moments like this before, brought in to help tell that story. These aren’t organic snapshots of everyday life. They’re staged, repeated, and designed to create a version of reality that feels good enough to believe.

But the story still works because people like her do exist. There are real women in this country spending their later years driving for DoorDash, not because they want to, but because they have to. Taking care of sick spouses. Trying to keep up with medical bills. Stretching whatever they have left just to make it through the month. That part isn’t staged; it is very real.

It’s important to say this. Any tax savings help when you’re struggling. $11,000, $7,000, $5,000, even $20 is real money. For anyone who has ever lived paycheck to paycheck, who has had an unexpected expense come up, who doesn’t have a safety net, that kind of money matters. It can be the difference between paying rent and falling behind. It can mean buying diapers without having to choose which other bill doesn’t get paid that month. Not everyone has a safety net to fall back on.

And that’s why what he is saying is so dangerous. A man who has never faced any level of financial hardship where those amounts would make a difference is standing up there acting like he understands how life-changing that money could be in that moment, and taking credit for it as if it came from his own pocket. It’s not just out of touch. It’s terribly disrespectful and disgusting coming from the president of the United States. Especially since he is one of the few people who could actually fix what she is going through.

He could make sure people have healthcare, so someone like Sharon Simmons doesn’t have to drive DoorDash to pay for her husband’s treatment. He could put safeguards in place so people can spend their later years with their families instead of working just to survive. He has the power to change the system that forces people into these positions in the first place. He just doesn’t have the interest. Because these aren’t his people. They never were.

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

Then came Officer Cruz Littlefield, a Las Vegas police officer whose wife had just given birth to their daughter a week ago. He thanked the president for eliminating taxes on overtime and said he had already contacted his CPA to set up a Trump account for his newborn. He was grateful, genuinely grateful, and it showed. But then he said something that cut through the entire performance of that room without him even realizing it. He said the overtime tax cut was helping his family “stretch every dollar in an increasingly expensive world.”

An increasingly expensive world. He said it himself, and he said it while sitting at the table of the man who helped make it that way. Trump’s tariffs raised the cost of everyday goods. His war sent gas to $5 a gallon in the city where Cruz lives and works. His “Big Beautiful Bill” slashed Medicaid by hundreds of billions and cut food assistance for the families who need it most. And the tax cuts he’s celebrating? They’re not making working families wealthy, building anyone’s retirement or creating generational security. They’re keeping people’s heads just barely above water in an economy his own policies are drowning them in. The extra money in Cruz’s paycheck isn’t a windfall. It’s a life raft. And the man who threw him into the water is the same one standing there taking credit for the rope.

Then Erin Phillips, a nonprofit founder and mother of five, thanked Trump for “protecting women’s sports” and said it helps her daughters know “they’re worth protecting and that they matter.” She’s right about her daughters. They are worth protecting. And they do matter. But they were never at risk while playing sports. Trump’s attack on transgender human beings is just another manufactured culture war used to distract and divide.

But there was a risk, and it was sitting close by. The man whose name appears thousands of times in the Epstein documents was the man she was sitting beside. A man with multiple sexual assault allegations. A man who just this week posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ and got into a public feud with the Pope. A man whose administration has stripped reproductive rights, defunded programs that serve women and children, and cut the very social services that protect families like hers. For any parent to sit in proximity to all of that and say their children are being protected, it’s not just ironic. It’s the thing that keeps me up at night, because people are being convinced of something that isn’t real, while innocent, harmless, and vulnerable people are being put at real risk, and the divide just keeps growing.

Even at his own event, named after his own policy, the truth was still revealed. His no tax on tips did not magically hide a bad economy, nor did it convince people to care about it more than the things they’re actually struggling with.

For years, Viktor Orbán was the model of the behavior and gaslighting that Trump is now famous for. Steve Bannon called him “Trump before Trump.” The Heritage Foundation, the same organization that built Project 2025, described Orbán’s Hungary as “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” Trump praised him publicly, called him “a true friend,” “a winner,” “a fighter.” Orbán built exactly what Trump is trying to build here: state media capture, judicial control, crony capitalism, a propaganda machine so complete that truth became contraband. He consolidated power for 16 years. He won four consecutive supermajorities. He looked untouchable.

And we now know he wasn’t. Hungarians showed up and took back their country. Péter Magyar won in a landslide. And I’ve been watching what he has been doing closely after his historic win. It’s been nothing short of extraordinary.

Yesterday morning, he walked into the Hungarian state television studio, the propaganda machine that had banned him from appearing for 18 months, that had lied about his family, that had served as Orbán’s mouthpiece for 16 years, and he sat down across from them and said it to their faces. “What has been happening here since 2010 is something that Goebbels or the North Korean leadership would admire. Not a single true word being spoken. This cannot continue.”

And he didn’t stop there. He told them, “One element of our programme is that this factory of lies will end once a Tisza government is formed. The fake news broadcast here must stop, and we will create independent, objective and impartial conditions to end this propaganda.” After the interview, Magyar posted that the staff at the state broadcaster had been “working under constant intimidation and political terror” and that many of them viewed Tisza’s victory “as a form of liberation.” He announced he would suspend their signal until its public service character was restored, and that he would create conditions that rival or exceed BBC standards, where opposition politicians under his government would be able to appear on broadcasts to express their views and engage in debate. “Every Hungarian deserves a public service media that broadcasts the truth,” he said. He didn’t shout or grandstand. He sat in the chair, looked them in the eye, and told the truth. That’s what the other side of this looks like.

Orbán gave them the roadmap into authoritarianism. Magyar is giving them the roadmap out. And he’s giving it to us, too. Because if 16 years of consolidated authoritarian power, state media control, rigged electoral systems, and a captured judiciary can be swept away in a single day by voters who decided they’d had enough, then so can this. A record number of people showed up and said no more. That’s our midterms. That’s our November moment. That’s what we’ve been building toward every single night. That is exactly what we are going to do. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

U.S. Law, Crime, Courts, Justice

Reuters, Police investigate bomb threat at Chicago-area home of Pope Leo's brother, Doina Chiacu, April 16, 2026. Police on Thursday were investigating a bomb threat made to the Chicago-area home of Pope Leo's brother John Prevost ​after a search found no explosives or hazardous materials.

A ‌bomb threat was reported Wednesday evening at the home of John Prevost in New Lenox, Illinois, according to media outlets that cited police. ​Prevost lives on the same street cited as the ​location of the attack by police.

The investigation was continuing in order to find the origin of the false ​report, they said.Leo ​leads the 1.4 ⁠billion-member Church and has emerged as an outspoken critic of the war.

In unusually forceful remarks ​in Cameroon on Thursday, Leo blasted leaders who ​spend billions ⁠on wars and said the world was "being ravaged by a handful of tyrants."While he criticized Leo as being too liberal and "weak ⁠on crime," ​Trump praised his brother Louis, of ​Florida, for his support for Trump's MAGA movement. John Prevost is another of ​the pope's older brothers.

The Court of History via Legal AF, Legal Commentary: How Justice Alito CREATED the Trump Presidency DISASTER, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz, April 7, 2026. They are joined by author Peter Canellos to discuss Justice Sam Alito's legacy on the court and the destructive triump of the conservative legal movement.

April 16

Top Headlines 

 

jan 6 insurrection

Shown above, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, convicted at trial of Jan. 6, Trump-inspired Capitol insurrection-related charges, with the Trump-run Justice Department moving this week to dismiss all charges against him and fellow-insurrectists, some of whom are portrayed above in film used as evidence to obtain the convictions.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Advocacy, Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro Clear Proud Boy and Oath Keeper Terrorists to Rearm, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), marcy wheelerApril 15-16, 2026. Congress, January 6 Insurrection, Terrorism, Weaponized DOJ.

New York Times, Done and Dusted? Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality, Anton Troianovski, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump is confronting a crisis that is not bending to his narrative of a “pretty reasonable” new regime in Iran and all-but-assured victory for the United States.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: $500,000 buys a “one-on-one meeting” with Trump, Judd Legum, right, April 16, 2026. $500,000 buys a “one-on-one meeting” with Trump. judd legum

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Father, the Don, and the Fed Chair’s Post, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 16, 2026. America’s quest to put sufficient economic pressure on Iran to buckle the government’s will continues: Threats of genocide are (for now) out, an ever-tightening blockade is in.

News Updates

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Attacks Epstein Survivors, Minnesota Arrests ICE Agent for Assault, Trump Investigates Missing Nuclear Scientists, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 16, 2026. Today was chaos from start to finish, and on my birthday of all days, of course. Trump attacked Epstein survivors and falsely claimed they refused to go under oath, continued going after the pope, dismissed rising gas prices, and suggested an investigation into scientists with access to sensitive materials who have recently gone missing or died.

More On Iran Lebanon-War

New York Times, Live Updates: Lebanon-Israel Cease-Fire Goes Into Effect, Euan Ward, Tyler Pager, Johnatan Reiss and Pranav Baskar, April 16, 2026. It was unclear if the agreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Lebanese government was being honored. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, acknowledged the temporary truce but did not say if it would abide by it.

The New Republic, One Democrat Sinks Iran War Powers Resolution to Rein in Trump, Hafiz Rashid, April 16, 2026. The resolution, aimed at ending Trump’s war in Iran, failed by just one vote in the House of Representatives. Every Democrat voted for the resolution except for Representative Jared Golden of Maine. 

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Pakistan’s Shuttle Diplomacy Unfolds in Tehran, Francesca Regalado, Aaron Boxerman, Elian Peltier and Aurelien Breeden, April 16, 2026. Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it expected to host a second round of U.S.-Iran talks but did not say when, as a Pakistani delegation visited the Iranian capital.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

New York Times, In the House, Republican Plans Go Awry Amid Party Divides, Michael Gold, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). Fresh off a two-week break, lawmakers returned to turmoil in the House, where legislation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security is stalled and the G.O.P. is struggling to keep its agenda on track. 

New York Times, White House Shrugs Off Shaky Economy as War Exceeds Trump’s Timeline, Tony Romm and Colby Smith, April 16, 2026. Stocks may be soaring again, but the war in Iran has started to pinch the finances of many Americans.

New York Times, Analilia Mejia, a Progressive Democrat, Wins Mikie Sherrill’s House Seat, Tracey Tully, April 16, 2026. Ms. Mejia, who helped to run Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, beat her Republican opponent, Joe Hathaway, to win a seat Ms. Sherrill vacated after she was elected governor of New Jersey.

New York Times, Ahead of 2028, Vance Collects Cash, Chits and Contacts, Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher, April 16, 2026. The vice president is also the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, allowing him to court donors who could prove helpful should he run for president.

sharon simmons doordash grandmaThe Daily Beast, DoorDash Grandma’s Secret Past Revealed, Tom Latchem, April 14, 2026. The grandmother of 10 was flown out from Arkansas to tout a Trump tax policy she said has helped her cover crushing medical bills.

Politics War Room, Opinion: Trump's Future After the Midterms, James Carville, April 16, 2026. The Democrats are going to investigate you to no end. I would like to introduce you to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island....Then they're going to figure out where all your money stolen is. Then they're going to investigate all your stupid, jackass kids and their spouses.

Irish Star, Bettina Anderson don trump jrMarla Maples poses with lookalike daughter at Mar-a-Lago event snubbed by Melania Trump, Ayaan Ali Reporter, April 16, 2026. Marla Maples posed with her daughter Tiffany Trump at a lavish Mar-a-Lago bridal shower as Melania Trump’s absence from the high-profile family event raised eyebrows.

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

Daily Beast, SCOTUS Justice, 77, Goes on Unhinged Rant About ‘Intellectuals,’ Leigh Kimmins, clarence thomas wikipediaApril 16, 2026. SUPREME MELTDOWN. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, right, railed against the nation’s colleges and universities One of the Supreme Court’s most powerful justices launched into a televised meltdown about “intellectuals.”

New York Times, Guest Essay: I Almost Never Predict Supreme Court Outcomes. Trump Will Lose This Case, Linda Greenhouse ((the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008), April 16, 2026. 

More On U.S. Inflation, Economy, Federal Reserve

federal reserve building designed by marriner eccles

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Powell Paradox, Andrew Egger, right, andrew eggerApril 16, 2026. Well, would you look at that: Donald Trump is threatening Jerome Powell again. The president said yesterday that he plans to fire the Fed chair next month, should he not step down from his post “on time.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Wants Regime Change at the Fed, Paul Krugman, paul krugmanright, April 16, 2026. He still thinks he's infallible.

U.S. Media, Religion, Culture, History 

 

Cardinal Christophe Pierre and Undersecretary Elbridge Colby (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense).

Cardinal Christophe Pierre and Undersecretary Elbridge Colby (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense).

The Pillar, Analysis: Nuncio’s Pentagon meeting was ‘frank exchange of ideas,’ officials say  Staff Report, April 9, 2026. U.S. and Vatican officials described the meeting as ‘tense’ and ‘honest’ but dismiss reports of threats.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Trump Fears the Pope, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 16, 2026. Does might make right?

New York Times, Trump Administration: Trump’s Proposed ‘Triumphal Arch’ Would Be Among the World’s Tallest, Marco Hernandez and Anushka Patil, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). The federal Commission of Fine Arts is set on Thursday to review plans for a hulking 250-foot “triumphal arch” to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, one of several construction projects President Trump has conjured up in an effort to leave his aesthetic mark on Washington.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 15, 2026 [Lincoln's Last Evening], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnApril 16, 2026. On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

New York Times, NPR Receives $113 Million From 2 Gifts, Benjamin Mullin, April 16, 2026. The donations, from the philanthropist Connie Ballmer and an anonymous donor, will support the network’s long-term strategy

Top Stories 

 

jan 6 insurrection

Shown above, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, convicted at trial of Jan. 6, Trump-inspired Capitol insurrection-related charges, with the Trump-run Justice Department moving this week to dismiss all charges against him and fellow-insurrectists, some of whom are portrayed above in film used as evidence to obtain the convictions.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Advocacy, Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro Clear Proud Boy and Oath Keeper Terrorists to Rearm, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right),marcy wheelerApril 15, 2026. Congress, January 6 Insurrection, Terrorism, Weaponized DOJ.

Yesterday, DOJ asked the DC Appeals Court to remand the appeal of one batch of Oath Keepers, including Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, so DOJ could move to dismiss their cases in the District Court. In the filing bearing Jeanine Pirro’s signature line, DOJ said they would make the same request in the appeals from the Proud Boy leaders and the second trial group of the Oath Keepers.

Justice Department log circularBecause of the way Trump fucked up his January 6 pardons, there is great variation between the legal statuses of those whose convictions would (will, undoubtedly) be dissolved: Some, like Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean, are convicted seditionists adjudged to be terrorists. Others just got terrorism enhancements at sentencing for their lesser crimes; still others did not.

But the top line meaning of this intervention is that Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro are intervening to let adjudged terrorists like Rhodes and Biggs escape all punishment for their attacks on the country (Enrique Tarrio, whom prosecutors asked to cooperate against Trump, already got a full pardon).

And while the full dismissal may help the veterans among the group (including Biggs) access full VA benefits, the biggest impact would be restoring their right to bear arms.

Lots and lots of arms.

As the sentencing memo laid out,

after January 6, Rhodes purchased and provided thousands of dollars’ worth of firearms and related equipment for certain leaders and instructed them to prepare to distribute them to other Oath Keepers for “civil war.” See, e.g., 3/6/23PM Tr. at 5952-53 (Landon Bentley describing how Rhodes provided him a black AR-15 pistol); ECF 60 at ¶51 (Joshua James Plea Statement of Facts, stating that “At Rhodes’s instruction, James took with him multiple firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, multiple burner phones, scopes, magazines, night-vision equipment, and other tactical gear” and that “Rhodes told James to be prepared to transport and distribute the equipment to others upon Rhodes’s instruction and to be prepared for violence in the event of a civil war.”).

As Judge Amit Mehta, right, explained when he applied a terrorism enhancement and sentenced Rhodes to an 18-year sentence, his crime lay in taking up arms against his own country.amit mehta Custom

We can have civic disagreements about relative merits of policies. We can have discussions about who is the better leader in aparticular point in time. But what we cannot have, we absolutely cannot have, is a group of citizens who, because they didn’t like the outcome of the election and because they think the law was not applied and carried out in the way they believe it should be, who are then prepared to take up arms in order to foment a revolution. That’s what you did. Those aren’t my words. Those are yours. Those are your actions. Those are the actions of your conspirators.

[snip]

For decades, Mr. Rhodes, it’s clear that you have wanted the democracy in this country to devolve into violence, and you have thought that violence is an acceptable means of accomplishing your goals, your ends, putting your views and imposing them upon others, to overcome the Democratic process. It’s reflected in your personal life based upon what your wife has said about your conduct toward her and your children. It is a pattern.

And I daresay, Mr. Rhodes — and I have never said this about anyone who I have sentenced — you, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the Republic and the very fabric of our democracy.

You’re smart, you’re charismatic, you are a compelling figure, and, frankly, that’s what makes you dangerous.

Dozens of people came to Washington, D.C., because you called upon them to do so. You asked them to bring weapons. You asked them to prepare themselves for war. You asked them to take on their government.

[snip]

And the reality is, as you sit here today and based on the words that we heard you speak, the moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be prepared to take up arms against your government, because — not because you think you’re an important person, not because you think the wrong President is in office, because you think that is an appropriate way to resolve conflict, and that is an appropriate way to have redress against the government when you think the law has not been applied the way you believe it should be.

And I’m not making this up. This is what you’ve said under oath.

This is the man that Jeanine Pirro and Todd Blanche, right, just handed a metaphorical gun.

Todd Blanche OAnd every single Republican needs to own the decision to arm terrorists.

There is one minor legal point that may get interesting.

When DOJ successfully argued against LaMonica McIver’s bid to use Jan6ers as comparators in her selective prosecution bid, DOJ said it was inapt because there was no prosecutorial discretion involved in releasing those convicted of violently assaulting cops. Among the many amicus briefs submitted in her appeal is one from January 6 prosecutors, written by James Pearce and signed by at least one prosecutor who worked on Proud Boy cases, arguing that the government is favoring Jan6ers because they support Trump.

But the government is nonetheless selectively pressing forward with its Section 111 prosecution against McIver, after wholly abandoning any effort to enforce that same statute against the far more violent January 6 defendants. Such a “lopsided prosecutorial response” is impermissibly selective if it “turns on ‘unlawful favoritism,’ rather than lawful prosecutorial considerations.”

[snip]

[T]he Executive Branch’s own public statements reveal the actual (and wholly illegitimate) basis for the disparate treatment: The government favors the January 6 defendants’ partisan affiliation, and it has forgone prosecution of their crimes because the President views their conduct as aligned with his own political ends.

Before, you might have argued there was no prosecutorial discretion. Now — unless on review DOJ claims that their invocation of “the Executive Branch” in this filing came from the President — there is. Among those covered by these orders are Dominic Pezzola, was convicted of assaulting a cop.

the New Jersey Democratic congresswoman under federal indictment on an assault charge while inspecting a federal facilitiy as part of her congressional mandate] was a bigger threat by showing up to conduct legal oversight of an ICE facility in her district than the guy, Pezzola (shown below at far right with other convicted insurrectist, who first broke into the Capitol in an effort to overturn democracy.

ethan nordean joseph biggs zachery rehl enrique tarrio dominic pezzola proud boys J6

Republicans, thus far, have avoided paying any prices for their coddling of cop assailants and terrorists. This decision has to change that. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Done and Dusted? Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality, Anton Troianovski, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump is confronting a crisis that is not bending to his narrative of a “pretty reasonable” new regime in Iran and all-but-assured victory for the United States.

President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success.

But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.

“It’s a new regime,” Mr. Trump said in a Fox Business interview that aired on Wednesday, referring to Iran’s new leaders. “We find them pretty reasonable to be honest with you, by comparison pretty reasonable.”

It was the latest instance of Mr. Trump’s trying to spin a “regime change” accomplishment in Iran, even though analysts believe the war may have only increased the internal sway of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the hard-line military force that has long been a major player in Iran’s politics and economy. The new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since he replaced his father, who was killed at the start of the war, but his elevation as head of state has been another symbol of continuity.

“Most generously you could say there is a leadership change,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, the senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank with a hawkish stance on Iran. “It is incorrect for the proponents of the conflict to frame this as a change for the better.”

Indeed, trade through the Strait of Hormuz remains far from normal and Iran’s government is not bending to Mr. Trump’s demands on its nuclear program.

But in Mr. Trump’s telling, U.S. victory in Iran is already clear. In the Fox Business interview, reprising his frequent comments of the last two weeks, Mr. Trump asserted that Iran’s navy, air force and antiaircraft equipment had all been wiped out, along with many top officials. If Iran did not rule out nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “we will be living with them for a little while, but I don’t know how much longer they can survive.”

 

donald trump money palmer report Custom

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: $500,000 buys a “one-on-one meeting” with Trump, Judd Legum, right, judd legumApril 16, 2026. $500,000 buys a “one-on-one meeting” with Trump. 

On Friday, President Trump is scheduled to appear at the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, for a Turning Point USA event. Trump’s appearance at the event is part of Turning Point USA’s “Build the Red Wall” campaign. It is an effort championed by Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, to secure victories for MAGA candidates in the 2026 and 2028 elections by increasing Republican support in Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

The event is free for people who would like to listen to Trump’s speech from the pews at Dream City Church. But a more interactive experience is available — for a price.

noel simsAn email sent by Sinan Kanatsiz, an obscure but well-connected figure in Trump’s political orbit, offers its recipients a “one-on-one meeting and private photo with President Donald Trump” in exchange for a “contribution of $500,000 to TPUSA PAC.”

Kanatsiz describes his invitation as “strictly confidential and non-transferable.” The bottom of the message warns, “NOT FOR SHARING — CONFIDENTIAL.” The email was obtained by Popular Information from a source who received it. The source shared the email on the condition of anonymity, fearing professional consequences for providing information to a journalist.

In a phone interview, Kanatsiz confirmed he made the solicitation.

In addition to the meeting with Trump, donors of $500,000 or more receive a tour of Turning Point USA headquarters, a meeting with the organization’s leadership, a dinner, lodging, and “round-trip travel via JSX to Scottsdale Private Airport.” JetSuiteX (JSX) is a semi-private charter plane service. Flights to Scottsdale on JetSuiteX are available from a variety of cities for a few hundred dollars.

Kanatsiz is the founder and CEO of KCOMM, a PR and government affairs firm, and the chairman of the Internet Marketing Association (IMA). Amanda Gort, KCOMM’s Vice President of Government Affairs, is a registered federal lobbyist. (Gort also works for IMA.) Kanatsiz has never registered as a lobbyist but operates as a high-level networker.

Kanatsiz has transformed IMA from a marketing group to an organization that connects business executives to government officials. The IMA website promises “access to an elite network“ for an annual membership fee of $10,000. The 2025 flagship event, IMPACT, touted that 17 members of the Trump administration, including Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and 12 members of Congress, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), attended.

In December 2024, Kanatsiz coordinated an event at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Florida, according to a report in the Orange County Business Journal (OCBJ). It was attended by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, two of Trump’s top advisors on technology issues. While Trump did not formally address the group, “he did stop by to exchange pleasantries.”

Kanatsiz warned business owners to “align” with Trump or suffer the consequences. “Donald Trump is a businessman and any business owner who doesn’t want to align with this administration will be left in the dark,” Kanatsiz told the OCBJ. “I am all in to help my network grow, communicate and engage with our administration,” Kanatsiz said.

In a February message posted on LinkedIn, Kanatsiz wrote that “my family and I opened up our Command Center to host Turning Point USA’s leadership for an evening with more than 60 leaders.” According to Kanatsiz, the discussion included “the culture war with Gen Z, President Trump’s strategy with voters going into mid-terms and Turning Point USA’s priorities for the next 2–4 years.” Matt Scherr, the Senior Major Gifts Director at Turning Point USA, who Kanatsiz references in the email, was in attendance.

“My family and I are committed to Turning Point USA, to our country, to the administration, and most importantly the next generation of Americans,” Kanatsiz said.

In the phone interview, Kanatsiz described himself as a “volunteer” helping Turning Point. “I have a network of friends that want to support Turning Point that may have never met them,” he said. Kanatsiz said he sent the offer to meet with Trump to “a few people,” but “unfortunately, no one took it on.” He acknowledged it was a “big request.” Outside of his personal invitations, Kanatsiz said he had “no idea” if anyone had paid $500,000 for the opportunity to meet Trump.

The solicitation of $500,000 contributions, with the help of Trump, is a major acceleration in Turning Point PAC’s fundraising. The organization has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2021, and about one-third of its funds were funneled from other Turning Point organizations. Turning Point PAC has received only five donations from individuals of $100,000 or more in its history. The two largest, from casino mogul Steve Wynn and hedge fund manager Tom Klingenstein in 2024, were $495,000 each.

Notably, Erika Kirk has endorsed Vice President JD Vance for president in 2028. (Vance appeared at a separate Turning Point event on Tuesday.) Turning Point PAC’s aggressive fundraising could signal a push to provide Vance with a shadow political infrastructure in advance of a formal campaign.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Father, the Don, and the Fed Chair’s Post, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, April 16, 2026. America’s quest to put sufficient economic pressure on Iran to buckle the government’s will continues: Threats of genocide are (for now) bulwark logo big shipout, an ever-tightening blockade is in.

Central Command announced this morning, per the Wall Street Journal, that “all Iranian vessels, vessels with active [Office of Foreign Assets Control] sanctions, and vessels suspected of carrying contraband, are subject to belligerent right to visit and search.” CENTCOM said yesterday that no ships have yet breached the U.S. blockade. Happy Thursday.

News Updates

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Attacks Epstein Survivors, Minnesota Arrests ICE Agent for Assault, Trump Investigates Missing Nuclear Scientists, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, aaron parnas new headshotApril 16, 2026. Today was chaos from start to finish, and on my birthday of all days, of course. Trump attacked Epstein survivors and falsely claimed they refused to go under oath, continued going after the pope, dismissed rising gas prices, and suggested an investigation into scientists with access to sensitive materials who have recently gone missing or died. 

A reporter asked whether there should be a public hearing for more Epstein survivors. Trump responded, “I’m okay with that. But I understand the women didn’t want to go under oath. That’s what I heard, that the victims or whatever, they refused to go under oath.” Here’s the truth: no survivors refused to testify under oath and that they have already spoken to the FBI, and Trump saying “victims or whatever” is dismissive and derogatory.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., has been charged with felony assault after allegedly pointing a handgun at another vehicle during a February incident on Highway 62 in Minnesota. Prosecutors say Morgan was driving on the shoulder when a driver tried to block him, prompting him to pull alongside the car and aim the weapon at its occupants. The charges mark the first criminal case against a federal agent tied to Operation Metro Surge, which has faced numerous allegations of civil rights abuses and is linked to two civilian deaths. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty emphasized the importance of accountability, rejecting claims from federal officials that agents have immunity from state prosecution.

Peter Doocy asks about the 10 scientists with access to sensitive areas like nuclear materials and aerospace who have recently gone missing or died, questioning whether something suspicious is happening. Trump responds that he hopes the incidents are random and just a coincidence, though he acknowledges the seriousness. When asked if a foreign adversary could be responsible, Trump suggests it’s possible but shifts focus. He then brings up border security, implying that U.S. policies under Biden could be a factor.

Trump now says that gas prices are not actually that high:

Trump said he wasn’t fighting with the pope, stating he had nothing against him but disagreed with his views. He claimed the pope said Iran could have a nuclear weapon, which the reporter pushed back on, and added, “I can disagree with the pope. I have the right to do that.”

Congresswoman Sewell pressed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, over remarks suggesting that Black children on ADHD medication should be “re-parented,” asking whether he had ever parented a Black child himself; Kennedy refused to engage, responding, “I’m not going to answer rfk jr osomething that I didn’t say,” while Sewell pushed back, insisting, “You absolutely said it.”

Donald Trump and Andy Biggs are set to hold a rally in Arizona at Dream City Church, in partnership with Turning Point USA. The venue has drawn scrutiny because it was named in a lawsuit involving the sexual abuse of a 15-year-old girl by a staff member at an affiliated school. Critics argue that hosting a political event at the church raises concerns about institutional accountability and sensitivity toward abuse victims.

Trump said the proposed ballroom would include extensive security and military features, describing it as a highly complex, interconnected structure essential for national security and military operations.

In a tense exchange, Rep. Lloyd Doggett challenged Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the reinstatement of 850 individuals previously suspended for fraud, asking whether he was shocked by the decision; Kennedy began to deflect by referencing President Biden, but Doggett cut him off, noting that while the Biden administration had suspended the suspected fraudsters, Kennedy’s side allowed them to return to work.

Israeli government ministers were reportedly outraged by a ceasefire with Lebanon that was announced by Donald Trump on Truth Social. According to i24NEWS, Trump revealed Israel’s consent to the ceasefire before it had been approved by the Israeli Security Cabinet.

A House vote on a war powers resolution regarding Iran narrowly failed, 213–214. Democratic Rep. Jared Golden joined Republicans in opposing it, while Republican Rep. Thomas Massie sided with Democrats in support. Republican Rep. Warren Davidson, who had previously supported the measure, voted “present” this time. Here is Golden’s statement on why he voted with Republicans:

Sen. Lindsey Graham enthusiastically praised Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget, saying it was “the budget [he’s] been dreaming of” and calling it the best military funding plan he has seen during his time in Congress.

Rep. Kamlager-Dove criticized government spending on the war, saying, “Stevie Wonder can even see how much this war is costing us. Prices have gone up, and this dude is wanting to spend $2 billion of your money every single day rather than help you. Fuck him.”

A federal judge has again halted construction of Donald Trump’s proposed $400 million White House ballroom, ruling that the administration improperly tried to use a prior safety exception to justify continuing the full project without congressional approval. While U.S. District Judge Richard Leon blocked above-ground construction, he allowed work on underground security features, including a bunker, to proceed for national security reasons. Leon rejected the administration’s argument that the entire ballroom project qualified as a security measure, calling that interpretation unreasonable.

The Trump administration planned to begin a new student loan collection program targeting borrowers in default, with outreach expected to start as early as July. The effort was part of a broader plan to shift the federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department, though details and timelines remained unclear and were disputed by officials. While aggressive measures like wage garnishment were not expected immediately, the move signaled a restart of debt collection efforts after a pandemic pause.

The Secret Service determined there were no credible threats to a Turning Point USA rally at the University of Georgia, despite Erika Kirk canceling her appearance due to reported security concerns. While Kirk was said to have received serious threats, officials did not identify any specific or actionable risks tied to the event or Vice President JD Vance. After being briefed, Vance proceeded with the rally, which was deemed safe by authorities.

The House passed a bill to restore temporary protections for Haitian immigrants, with some Republicans joining Democrats despite opposition from Trump. The legislation would grant Temporary Protected Status for three years, though Trump was expected to veto it if it reached his desk. The vote reflected divisions within the Republican Party and highlighted how a small group of members can influence outcomes in a closely split House. The issue remained unresolved as the bill moved to the Senate, where its chances were uncertain.

A federal arts commission gave preliminary approval to a proposed 250-foot “Arc de Trump” monument in Washington, D.C., though members raised concerns about its size, design, and accessibility. The arch would be built near the Lincoln Memorial and feature large golden statues, but has faced significant public opposition, with all submitted comments reportedly against it. The design may be revised before a final decision, and the project is already facing a legal challenge from veterans.

David Ellison said a planned merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery would not reduce film production, promising the combined company would make at least 30 movies a year. He reassured theater owners that the deal would support the theatrical experience, despite criticism from industry figures who warned it could hurt jobs and creativity. The merger remained under review by the Justice Department amid ongoing concerns about its broader impact on the film industry.

More On Iran Lebanon-War 

ny times logoNew York Times, Live Updates: Lebanon-Israel Cease-Fire Goes Into Effect, Euan Ward, Tyler Pager, Johnatan Reiss and Pranav Baskar, April 16, 2026.  It was unclear if the agreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Lebanese government was being honored. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, acknowledged the temporary truce but did not say if it would abide by it.

A 10-day cease-fire went into effect at midnight on Friday morning in Lebanon. The truce pauses fighting between Israeli forces and the militant group Hezbollah, removing a major obstacle to peace talks between the United States and Iran.

Israeli and Lebanese officials had confirmed they would implement the truce, which was first announced by President Trump after a diplomatic push by the U.S. government earlier in the day. Hezbollah acknowledged the cease-fire in a pair of statements on Thursday, but did not directly address whether it would accept the truce, saying its actions would be “based on how developments unfold." 

The New Republic, One Democrat Sinks Iran War Powers Resolution to Rein in Trump, Hafiz Rashid, April 16, 2026. The resolution, aimed at ending Trump’s war in Iran, failed by just one vote in the House of Representatives. Every Democrat voted for the resolution except for Representative Jared Golden of Maine.

The House of Representatives voted down a war powers resolution that would have restricted President Trump’s war in Iran by just one vote Thursday, 214–213.

Representative Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to vote in favor of the measure, while Republican Representative Warren Davidsonvoted present and three Republicans abstained.

democratic donkey logoDemocratic Representative Gregory Meeks proposed the bill, which “directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” making exceptions for extreme cases, “unless explicitly authorized” by Congress.

U.S. House logoBefore the vote, Meeks said on the House floor, “Donald Trump has dragged the American people into a war of choice, launched without congressional authorization. The president has no coherent strategy, and this open-ended, undefined military engagement is precisely what the War Powers Resolution was designed to restrain. Every day we delay, we inch closer to a conflict with no exit ramp.”

Golden also voted against a war powers resolution March 5, writing in a statement at the time that “The president has so far acted within the authorities given to him by Congress through the War Powers Act of 1973. He has been briefing Congress, and he has 60 days to make his case for ongoing operations. This is not an illegal war — but it could become one.”

Since then, despite damage to multiple schools and medical facilities in Iran as a result of the war, Golden is the only Democrat in the House who thinks that Trump’s Iran war hasn’t crossed any lines. Symbolic or not, Thursday’s vote shows that Congress is willing to let Trump keep using the military however he sees fit. 

ny times logoNew York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Pakistan’s Shuttle Diplomacy Unfolds in Tehran, Francesca Regalado, Aaron Boxerman, Elian Peltier and Aurelien Breeden, April 16, 2026. Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it expected to host a second round of U.S.-Iran talks but did not say when, as a Pakistani delegation visited the Iranian capital.

Here’s the latest.

Pakistan said Thursday that it expected to host a second round of peace negotiations between the United States and Iran but declined to give a date, as senior Pakistani mediators visited Tehran in an effort to shore up the U.S.-Iran cease-fire before it expires next week.

American and Iranian officials have said that indirect negotiations are continuing but have not confirmed they will hold another round of direct discussions. Tahir Andrabi, a spokesman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, said on Thursday that a second round was expected in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, after initial talks there ended on Sunday without an agreement.

A Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations, said that Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, was still in Iran on Thursday morning, after arriving with a delegation a day earlier.

Iran threatened on Wednesday to halt all trade in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea in response to an American naval blockade of its ports. It was unclear how much control Iran could exert over shipping in the region. Its battered armed forces can still use mines and fast boats to harass ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Its allies in Yemen, the Houthi militia, have also shown they can attack shipping in the Red Sea.

Analysts say the U.S. blockade will squeeze Iran’s economy but might not be enough to force concessions from its government or lessen the global energy crunch.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

Israel-Lebanon: As the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia, threatens to upend the cease-fire, President Trump said that Israeli and Lebanese leaders would speak on Thursday, though neither side confirmed it. Israel is considering a short-term cease-fire in Lebanon that could begin as early as Thursday, Israeli and Lebanese officials have said. Lebanon’s official news agency reported new Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon on Thursday.

Pentagon update: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were scheduled to hold a news conference at 8 a.m. Eastern. The Times will cover it live.

World Cup: Gianni Infantino, the head of world soccer’s governing body, said that the “Iranian team is coming, for sure,” to play in the World Cup in the United States this summer.

Rescues in Iran: Emergency teams have rescued over 7,200 Iranians from rubble after U.S. and Israeli bombings throughout the war, the president of Iran’s Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, said. The Iranian authorities have released little comprehensive information about casualties from the war.

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

ny times logoNew York Times, In the House, Republican Plans Go Awry Amid Party Divides, Michael Gold, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). Fresh off a two-week break, lawmakers returned to turmoil in the House, where legislation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security is stalled and the G.O.P. is struggling to keep its agenda on track. 

Members of the House of Representatives came back from their two-week break on Tuesday night as planned, and cast votes to name no fewer than 14 post offices.

After accomplishing that, majority Republicans’ plans went awry.

By Wednesday morning, their efforts to renew a warrantless surveillance program that is set to expire next week had run into trouble, and a Democratic bid to force a vote to restore deportation protections that President Trump is trying to end for Haitians living in the United States was on track to succeed.

The one-two punch reflected divisions in the G.O.P. ranks that are on display at the least opportune time, with midterm elections only months away. It also showed how the party’s minuscule vote margin and the political headwinds it is facing have conspired to snarl its agenda.

And it underscored the dysfunction that has taken hold in the House, where a bipartisan deal to end the two-month-long shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security remains stalled while Republican leaders refuse to take it up because of resistance in their ranks.

Speaker Mike Johnson returned from the recess with a packed agenda, including the promotion of tax cuts that Republicans passed last year and the extension of an expiring surveillance program.

But as has often been the case, Mr. Johnson struggled to keep control of the House floor. With libertarian-minded Republicans demanding curbs on the warrantless surveillance program, he was forced to postpone a vote and haggle with the holdouts over possible revisions, even after Mr. Trump took to social media to push the party to authorize it without changes.

Then Democrats chipped away enough Republican support to force action on a bill that would extend deportation protections for Haitian migrants, a direct challenge to Mr. Trump’s decision to terminate them — and to Mr. Johnson’s firm grip over what comes to the floor.

Six G.O.P. defectors from politically competitive districts sided with Democrats to circumvent House leaders and demand a vote on the legislation, now expected on Thursday, though it has little chance of enactment.

And though Democrats have yet to bring it to the floor, they have threatened to force consideration of a measure to limit Mr. Trump’s ability to continue to wage war in Iran — a vote that would be politically tough for Republicans amid growing dissatisfaction over the conflict and the rising prices tied to it.

All the while, the Department of Homeland Security remains shuttered, with no clear timeline for the House to pass an agreement to reopen it. While Mr. Johnson has endorsed it, that timing, too, is out of his hands, as hard-right Republicans have signaled they will not allow the legislation to reach the floor until the Senate moves on a separate, filibuster-proof bill to fund immigration enforcement.

Mr. Johnson has contended with such threats to his hold over the House’s legislative agenda throughout his time as speaker. He generally does not let other representatives or reporters see him sweat, though he has occasionally pulled back the curtain to reveal how overwhelmed he feels in a job that he has compared to firefighting and war.

But during a news conference on the House steps under a sweltering sun, Mr. Johnson’s efforts to re-center Republicans’ tax agenda on Tax Day were entirely overshadowed by the legislative challenges he faced and by actions that Mr. Trump has taken.

After Republican leaders spoke about their tax policies and jabbed at Democrats, the first question Mr. Johnson fielded was about Mr. Trump’s clash with the pope.

 

Vice President JD Vance, right, shares words with President Trump in a February event at the White House Oval Office (New York Times photo).

Vice President JD Vance, right, shares words with President Trump in a February event at the White House Oval Office (New York Times photo).

ny times logoNew York Times, Ahead of 2028, Vance Collects Cash, Chits and Contacts, Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher, April 16, 2026. The vice president is also the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, allowing him to court donors who could prove helpful should he run for president.

Vice President JD Vance’s unusual second job as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee is exactly the kind of role an ambitious presidential aspirant might dream up.

He’s been able to do some good for the party, raising tens of millions of dollars at events for Republicans as they head into the midterms. And he’s been able to do some good for himself, wooing some of his party’s richest and most influential patrons.

Mr. Vance and his team have been leery of being seen as plotting about anything beyond the 2026 midterms, or of drawing attention to President Trump’s limited time left in the White House and the Republican race to succeed him.

But as the first vice president to serve as the finance chair of the party, Mr. Vance has been taking full advantage of the opportunity to win the hearts and minds of top Republican financiers — both skeptics, of whom there are plenty, and loyalists. And when he shows up at these fund-raisers, guests are prone to ask the obvious: You’re running, right?

That query was posed to Usha Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, as the final question at an intimate fund-raising dinner last month in the Austin, Texas, home of Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, featuring Mr. Vance as the guest of honor and spicy tuna as an appetizer.

Mr. Vance’s staff immediately joked that they had run out of time, four people with knowledge of the moment recalled. When he got to answer, the vice president thanked them for shielding his wife from a politically delicate question, and then spoke about another topic.

Some of Mr. Vance’s higher profile outings on the world stage in recent days have yielded awkward headlines. He went to Hungary to campaign for Prime Minister Viktor Orban a few days before Mr. Orban was resoundingly defeated, and then to Pakistan, where he was given the difficult task of leading negotiations with Iran that failed to yield a deal. And just weeks after Mr. Vance announced that his next book would explore his conversion to Catholicism, he found himself defending Mr. Trump’s attacks on the pope.Editors’ PicksAlex Cooper and Alix Earle Are Fighting. Or Are They?Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes, Study FindsPirate’s Booty Corrects a Myth About West African GoldImageJoe Lonsdale is seated during a panel appearance with his hands clasped and looking to his right.Joe Lonsdale is among the tech leaders who have hosted R.N.C. events for Mr. Vance.Credit...Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

Now Mr. Vance is also increasing his domestic political travel — making his first political trip to Iowa this month to help vulnerable incumbents in the state that kicks off the presidential nominating contest.

But he has also been on a more under-the-radar campaign trail at more than two dozen R.N.C. breakfasts, lunches and dinners that are estimated to have raised more than $60 million.Sign up to get Theodore Schleifer's articles emailed to you. Theodore Schleifer is a political reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. Get it sent to your inbox.

So there he was at the Four Seasons in Nashville to speak last month at a conference of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive Silicon Valley-inflected group of conservative donors that Mr. Vance co-founded. One of his supporters, Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire heiress, attended.ImageRebekah Mercer is standing near a group of seated people and adjusting her hair with her left hand.Rebekah Mercer in 2017.Credit...Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

Or at fund-raising events on a farm in Tennessee, in Britain and at summer hot spots like Jackson Hole and Nantucket.

And he has quietly entertained donors over private meals at the Vice President’s Residence in Washington. In the fall, his cultivation campaign included Paul Singer, the hedge fund titan, a former skeptic he has grown close to.

Donors are willing to pay top dollar for time with a favorite to be next Republican presidential nominee. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the R.N.C., acknowledged that some people are donating because of Mr. Vance’s perceived presidential ambitions.

“In the vice president’s case, he is being mentioned for future office, and so people want to be able to start building that relationship,” he said in an interview. Mr. Gruters called the arrangement “a win for everybody,” saying Mr. Vance “has probably been the most successful finance chairman in the history of the party.” 

About a year ago Michael Whatley, who was then the R.N.C. chair, held a brainstorming meeting to game out how many events they would ask Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance to headline, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Instead, they hit upon the idea of asking the vice president to oversee the finance operation entirely. Mr. Vance’s team jumped at the opportunity, and Mr. Trump later signed off.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, his first vice president, Mike Pence, raised money into his own PAC. But during the 2024 transition, Susie Wiles, the incoming White House chief of staff, and Mr. Vance spoke, and he agreed not to actively raise money for his own separate organization, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation.

Last May, Mr. Vance’s old PAC, Working for Ohio, entered an agreement with the R.N.C. that gives the PAC a 5 percent cut of all small-dollar online fund-raising, federal records and donation disclosures show. The PAC has been transferred $720,000 so far, which Mr. Vance has used to pay for firms of at least two of his advisers.

There are a few ways that donors can show their support for Mr. Vance. In his first year, Mr. Vance raised a record amount, nearly $5 million, for a foundation that helps manage the Vice President’s Residence at the Naval Observatory. And Ms. Vance has also begun to quietly raise money at events for a new childhood literacy nonprofit, the Amaryllis Foundation.

But the main way donors have been told they can register their early backing for Mr. Vance in 2028 is to contribute to the R.N.C. Tickets for his R.N.C. events usually go for $100,000 or $250,000, and each event is expected to raise at least $2 million.

The arrangement has allowed Mr. Vance to do some good for the party, and for himself. Mr. Vance is still a relative newcomer on the national scene — he won his first election less than four years ago, in a race where he faced significant skepticism from some major donors.

Hosts have been heavy on tech leaders, including Mr. Lonsdale, Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive, and the podcaster Chamath Palihapitiya, whose event in Silicon Valley last May raised over $4 million and drew Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the world’s wealthiest people.

Mr. Vance remains close to Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, co-founder of Palantir and his longtime mentor, who financed a $15 million super PAC for Mr. Vance in 2022. Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel shared a meal at the Vice President’s Residence a few weeks ago, two people with knowledge of the event said.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analilia Mejia, a Progressive Democrat, Wins Mikie Sherrill’s House Seat, Tracey Tully, April 16, 2026. Ms. Mejia, who helped to run Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, beat her Republican opponent, Joe Hathaway, to win a seat Ms. Sherrill vacated after she was elected governor of New Jersey.

Analilia Mejia, a progressive Democrat, was elected on Thursday to a New Jersey House seat after a race that was heavily defined by attitudes toward President Trump and outside spending by a pro-Israel lobbying group.

Ms. Mejia, an organizer by trade who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, will replace Gov. Mikie Sherrill in the largely affluent and suburban 11th Congressional District. Ms. Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, resigned from her seat after being elected governor in November, leaving a rare vacancy at a critical moment for Congress.

Ms. Mejia was ahead of her Republican opponent, Joe Hathaway, by about 59 points when The Associated Press called the race in her favor minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m.

Ms. Mejia will serve out the remaining eight months of Ms. Sherrill’s term and has already entered the race for a full, two-year term in November. In a district where registered Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans, she is expected to have a distinct edge as she competes for the seat as an incumbent.

 

sharon simmons doordash grandma

The Daily Beast, DoorDash Grandma’s Secret Past Revealed, Tom Latchem, April 14, 2026. The grandmother of 10, shown above, was flown out from Arkansas to tout a Trump tax policy she said has helped her cover crushing medical bills.

daily beast logoThe DoorDash driver who found herself in the national spotlight while delivering McDonald’s to Donald Trump at the Oval Office was no random courier.

Sharon Simmons, 58, a grandmother of 10 from Fayetteville, Arkansas, went viral after being filmed knocking on the Oval Office door and handing the president two bags of McDonald’s on Monday.

DoorDash confirmed the delivery was a PR stunt in a statement on the company’s website, saying Simmons completed the White House drop-off “to commemorate the first anniversary of the No Tax on Tips policy.”

Trump acknowledged the optics himself, joking to reporters as Simmons arrived: “This doesn’t look staged, does it?”

Simmons would have also required a security screening to get so close to the president on White House grounds, dashing any hopes the administration might have had for making the delivery appear spontaneous.

Sirs logoimmons is said to have completed upwards of 14,000 deliveries since joining DoorDash in 2022, relying on the work’s flexibility to help care for her husband, who was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer in early 2025. She told Trump the No Tax on Tips policy—passed last July as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill—has saved her $11,000 in the year since it was enacted, money that has helped pay for her husband’s treatment.

Independent contractors like Simmons can work on their own schedule, but they don’t receive crucial benefits through their job, such as health insurance.U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with the media next to Sharon Simmons after receiving a McDonald's order via DoorDash.The event, captured by the media, did not look in any way natural.

What the cameras did not capture was that Simmons had previously spoken publicly in support of the very same policy she was celebrating on Monday. Republican Rep. David Kustoff had posted on July 28, 2025, about hearing from Simmons at a Ways and Means Committee field hearing in Nevada, saying she had shared how the One Big Beautiful Bill would “make a real difference in her life.”

Ahead of Simmons’ White House visit, she also featured in a promotional video for the No Tax on Tips Policy posted on social media by Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee. In that video, posted Friday, Simmons praised the policy for helping to deal with unforeseen expenses, noting that she’d recently been hit by unexpected problems with her own car that required extra funds.

“Thank you for finally hearing the little people,” she said.

Simmons introduced herself in the video as a resident of Boulder City, Nevada, and public records confirm that she has lived there, though she told reporters outside the White House on Monday that she now lives in Arkansas.

It’s not clear when the promotional video was filmed, despite it having been posted to coincide with Tax Day this week.

Julian Crowley, a public affairs official at DoorDash, pushed back on X on claims that the grandmother of 10’s confusing history might suggest she’s a paid Republican prop, noting that Simmons had simply moved from Nevada to Arkansas and had spoken out repeatedly because she genuinely believes in No Tax on Tips.

Crowley also pointed out that a standalone No Tax on Tips bill passed the Senate unanimously in May 2025, with bipartisan backing, including from Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen. The House never took it up separately, however, as the policy was folded into the One Big Beautiful Bill, which cleared the Senate narrowly and without a single Democratic vote.

The policy allows workers who earn tips to deduct up to $25,000 in “qualified tips” but applies only to federal income tax.

Max Rettig, DoorDash’s Global Head of Public Policy, said in a statement that Monday’s delivery “represents something bigger than a single delivery,” and that Dashers across the country had collectively saved “hundreds of millions of dollars” under the no-tips-tax policy last year.

Politics War Room, Opinion: Trump's Future After the Midterms, James Carville, April 16, 2026. The Democrats are going to investigate you to no end. I would like to introduce you to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island....Then they're going to figure out where all your money stolen is. Then they're going to investigate all your stupid, jackass kids and their spouses.

 

From left: Donald Trump's daughter Tiffany Trump, Bettina Anderson, who is engaged to Donald Trump, Jr., and Tiffany Trump's mother, Marla Maples, Donald Trump's second wife, pose at the Trump golf club Mar-a-Lago (Photo via Instagram). tiffany trump bettina anderson

From left: Donald Trump's daughter Tiffany Trump, Bettina Anderson, who is engaged to Donald Trump, Jr., and Tiffany Trump's mother, Marla Maples, Donald Trump's second wife, pose at the Trump golf club Mar-a-Lago (Photo via Instagram).

Irish Star, Marla Maples poses with lookalike daughter at Mar-a-Lago event snubbed by Melania Trump, Ayaan Ali Reporter, April 16, 2026. Marla Maples posed with her daughter Tiffany Trump at a lavish Mar-a-Lago bridal shower as Melania Trump’s absence from the high-profile family event raised eyebrows.

irish star logoMarla Maples has shared a glimpse inside a glamorous Trump family celebration at Mar-a-Lago on social media.

Marla took to her Instagram page on April 15 to show a photo where she is seen posing alongside her lookalike daughter Tiffany Trump, as Melania Trump was notably absent from the event.

The former wife of Donald Trump, 62, attended Bettina Anderson’s bridal shower over the weekend, celebrating her upcoming wedding to Donald Trump Jr., while Melania was a no-show. Bettina, 39, hosted the lavish bridal shower at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, April 12. The event came ahead of her wedding to Don Jr., 48, just months after their engagement was announced at a White House event in December.

Bettina Anderson don trump jrDespite the high-profile guest list, a Palm Beach source claimed First Lady Melania Trump, 55, did not attend -- fueling rumors she has distanced herself from family events. Her absence comes almost exactly a year after she was said to have skipped Tiffany Trump's baby shower. However, other members of the Trump family showed their support for Bettina, including Ivanka Trump, Tiffany and her mother Marla.

Marla later took to Instagram to share a sweet message alongside photos from the day, writing, "Last Sunday was such a beautiful day celebrating Bettina’s bridal shower.

"Sharing this special moment with my daughter Tiffany made it even more meaningful. What a gift to celebrate love, friendship, and family .. these are the moments we cherish forever. Congratulations to Don Jr. and Bettina… we are so blessed to share in your joy!”

Other members of the Trump family showed their support, including Ivanka Trump, Tiffany Trump and her mother Marla Maples.(Image: Instagram)

Fans were quick to react to the snaps, with one person saying, "This photograph radiated love and joy.” Another person wrote, "You are all STUNNING." A third person added, "I love how the Trump family all comes together to celebrate each other."

While most Trump family weddings have taken place at Mar-a-Lago, a political source told the publication the White House has also been considered as a possible venue. "This would set them up for future political roles, whether Don Jr. goes after the presidency or something else," the source said. "This is a consideration."

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

Daily Beast, SCOTUS Justice, 77, Goes on Unhinged Rant About ‘Intellectuals,’ Leigh Kimmins, April 16, 2026. SUPREME MELTDOWN. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas railed against the nation’s colleges and universities One of the Supreme Court’s most daily beast logopowerful justices launched into a televised meltdown about “intellectuals.”clarence thomas wikipedia

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, right, railed against progressivism, calling it an existential threat to the principles that founded the United States 250 years ago.

Thomas, speaking at the University of Texas at Austin Law School in remarks carried live on C-SPAN, said a spirit of “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” toward America has taken hold among Americans...

ny times logoNew York Times, Guest Essay: I Almost Never Predict Supreme Court Outcomes. Trump Will Lose This Case, Linda Greenhouse, right, (the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008), April 16, 2026. linda greenhouse headshot

The surprise wasn’t that the Supreme Court last month agreed to decide whether the Trump administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.

Federal District Courts had deemed the revocations improper, and similar cases were pending as Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, methodically revoked or denied extensions of grants of protected status that immigrants had received under previous presidents. The situation seemed tailor-made for the Supreme Court’s intervention.

The surprise in that Supreme Court order lay in what the court didn’t do. The justices turned down the administration’s request for an immediate pause of the district court decisions.

That means that while the Supreme Court considers the cases — Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe have been consolidated for a single argument on April 29 — these Haitians and Syrians remain protected against deportation, free to work legally and live openly. In other words, at least for now, they get the benefit of their lower-court victories. That relief is something the Supreme Court has denied other winning parties by routinely granting the administration’s requests to put adverse decisions on hold.

The justices have failed to explain themselves in granting earlier stays and in denying this one. So we are left to guess at their reasoning and to wonder at the apparent unanimity of the latest order, which was issued without noted dissent.

There has been educated speculation. Mark Joseph Stern, an astute Supreme Court observer for Slate, suggested that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had shamed her colleagues into denying the stay with her withering dissent back in October, when the court stayed a decision invalidating the stripping of protected status from Venezuelans. Justice Jackson declared then that “I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance.”

Those were strong words, but I don’t think that Justice Samuel Alito, for one, is capable of shame. I see a different reason for the court’s departure from its usual practice: The justices know the Trump administration is going to lose. With that knowledge, granting a stay to enable the deportation of some 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians, who would regain their protected status within months, became unthinkable.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Decades of writing about the Supreme Court have taught me that it’s foolish to predict the outcome of cases, and I have rarely done so. My prediction here rests on one word: procedure.

The records in both the Haitian and Syrian cases reveal a brazen violation of procedural requirements on the part of Ms. Noem. The 1990 law that established the Temporary Protected Status program requires consultation “with appropriate agencies” about conditions in a country before terminating protected status for the country’s nationals. But Ms. Noem “did not consult other agencies at all,” Judge Ana Reyes of Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., found in her opinion in the Haitian case in February.

Questioning the government’s lawyer, the judge learned that the consultation consisted of a single email exchange between the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department late on a Friday afternoon, while litigation was already underway. “Can you advise on State’s views on the matter?” the Homeland Security email asked. The response came 53 minutes later: “State believes there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the T.P.S. status of Haiti.”

“That was it,” Judge Reyes wrote in evident disgust. She added: “Congress did not vest the secretary with Humpty Dumpty-like power to make the word ‘consultation’ mean ‘just what [she] chooses it to mean — neither more nor less.’”

A “‘meaningful exchange of information must occur,” the judge wrote. Noting that the State Department’s current advisory warns Americans not to travel to Haiti, Judge Reyes said that Ms. Noem’s determination that it was now safe for Haitians to return “runs counter to the evidence.”

Judge Katherine Polk Failla, in an order she read from the bench, made a similar finding on Ms. Noem’s termination of protection for immigrants from Syria without the required fact-finding. “The context in which the secretary’s decision was reached belies any notion of considered and good-faith review of country conditions,” she said.

Both judges concluded that the secretary’s termination of protection was most likely “arbitrary and capricious” within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act.

Procedure mattered to two federal district judges. Why do I think it will matter to the Supreme Court? Because there is strong evidence that it does.

The Constitution gets star billing in discussions of the Trump administration’s flagrant overreach, as in the pending challenge to the president’s rejection of birthright citizenship. But procedural irregularity has proved to be the administration’s Achilles’ heel in dozens of adverse court decisions. These are the first such cases to reach the Supreme Court on the merits since Mr. Trump took office again. Being first in line makes these cases even more important than they might appear. The justices’ response to the sordid record of the administration’s behavior will set the tone for the cases to come.

More On U.S. Inflation, Economy, Federal Reserve

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Powell Paradox, Andrew Egger, April 16, 2026. Well, would you look at that: Donald Trump is threatening Jerome Powell again. The president said yesterday that he plans to fire the Fed chair next month, should he not step down from his post “on time.”

“I’ll have to fire him, okay?” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve held back firing him. I’ve wanted to fire him, but I hate to be controversial.”¹

bulwark logo big shipSuch threats are nothing new: Trump has long seethed over what he sees as the Federal Reserve chair’s intolerable reluctance to lower interest rates, and has pursued many fruitless strategies to jawbone him into doing so. What is new is how apparent it’s become that here, far from holding all the cards, Trump is caught in yet another negotiating trap of his own making.

Powell’s term is up on May 15. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: He would hand the role off to his successor without fuss. But right now Powell has no successor. Trump’s nominee for the position, financier Kevin Warsh, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. By law, Powell will stay in his current role unless and until the Senate confirms Warsh—or someone else.

But why hasn’t Warsh been confirmed? Because of the determined opposition of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Why won’t Tillis advance Warsh’s nomination? Because he has sworn not to allow any Fed nominees to move ahead in the Senate until the Trump administration calls off its ludicrous criminal investigation of Powell over supposed cost overruns during the renovation of the Fed headquarters in D.C.

And why is Powell under investigation in the first place? Because Powell, as head of an independent agency, has legal protection against being fired except for cause. All along, the Fed renovation “investigation” was a transparent attempt to get more leverage on Powell—either to twist his arm a little more on his interest-rates decisions, or to provide the legal predicate for Trump firing him after all. The president has barely tried to deny this: Last year, asked what Powell could do to assuage his concerns about the renovation-cost overruns, Trump replied that “well, I’d love to see him lower interest rates.”

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But it didn’t work. Powell refused to be bullied. In January, he publicly accused Trump’s Justice Department of threatening him with criminal indictment over a pretext. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions,” Powell said in a direct-to-camera video, “or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

Last month, a federal judge agreed, invalidating a pair of subpoenas sent by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office to the Federal Reserve. There was “abundant evidence,” Judge James Boasberg wrote, that the “dominant (if not sole) purpose” of the subpoenas was “to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.”

Their legal legs cut from under them, Trump and Pirro have been resorting to sillier, more thuggish tactics: Prosecutors from Pirro’s office made an unannounced visit to the Fed building yesterday, seeking to “check on progress” via a “tour” of the renovations.

The Fed, having declined to buckle under more dangerous pressures, practically laughed this one off. “As you know, Chief Judge Boasberg has concluded that your interest in the Federal Reserve’s renovation project was pretextual,” Robert Hur,² the Fed’s outside legal counsel, wrote to Pirro’s office after the incident. “Should you wish to challenge that finding, the courts provide an avenue for you; it is not appropriate for you to try to circumvent it.”

Trump, then, is stuck. His investigation was supposed to give him the means either of bending Powell to his will or of getting the irritating Fed chair out of his hair. Instead, it has been completely thwarted—first by Powell’s courage, then by the courts. But the ongoing existence even of such a feeble and impotent investigation is enough to keep Sen. Tillis from giving his permission for the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh. Far from accelerating Powell’s departure, then, the investigation now seems likely to prolong his stay.

Okay, so: Why not just end the investigation? Many of Trump’s allies, no longer seeing much merit in pretending the Powell investigation is some righteous, apolitical action by Pirro that Trump has nothing to do with, are asking exactly this. “You want Jay Powell out of the way,” Bartiromo said during her interview with Trump yesterday. “Isn’t the easiest way to get him out of the way to end the probe?”

And here we arrive at the most fascinating part of the whole business, at least when it comes to the president’s personal psychology: because Trump does not agree with this assessment. “Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s gonna cost maybe $4 billion?” he blustered. “Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?”

Trump wants Powell gone. If he dropped his probe, Tillis would drop his objection to Warsh’s confirmation, and Powell would be out as Fed chair in thirty days. But Trump remains dispositionally incapable of such a tactical retreat. Either he has become so high on his own supply that he has genuinely convinced himself Powell has committed vile crimes as part of the Fed renovation, or Powell has simply become so irksome to him that he cannot bear to see him go unpunished, or he just isn’t willing to give Powell the win. For whatever reason, he finds himself unable to make the one move that everyone save him can see would solve his problem immediately.

Trump is a ratchet that turns only one way—toward further threats and more intimidation. Who cares if Powell won’t leave voluntarily or by law? Trump will just fire him, he insists—notwithstanding that his for-cause predicate has gone up in smoke. And who cares that Tillis will gum up the works? “That’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump scoffed.

Either Tillis will have to blink, or Trump will. Until then, Powell’s not going anywhere. 

AROUND THE BULWARK

Trump Said “Total Blockade”—That’s Not Happening… On the latest Command Post, MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER examine the growing gap between political messaging and military reality, focusing on how Trump’s public statements often differ from what the military actually executes.

Dumped by Trump… The Riley Gaines side story from this week is just the latest reminder of how casually the president tosses aside allies, reminds PETER ROTHPLETZ.

Trump Is a Wanker… The Irish are protesting in the streets over the price of fuel, Qatar’s GDP is plummeting, and heating bills are skyrocketing in France. All because of Trump’s war of choice in Iran. ALASTAIR CAMPBELL joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break it all down.

Calling all West Coast Bulwark+ members: Today is the final day for the members-only presale for Bulwark Live in San Diego and LA in May. Tickets go on sale for everyone Friday at 9 a.m. PT. Click here to get the members-only presale code and links to the ticketing sites.

Quick Hits

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?: The New York Times brings a quick vibe check on the ongoing state of things in Iran:

In Mr. Trump’s telling, U.S. victory in Iran is already clear. In the Fox Business interview, reprising his frequent comments of the last two weeks, Mr. Trump asserted that Iran’s navy, air force and antiaircraft equipment had all been wiped out, along with many top officials. If Iran did not rule out nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “we will be living with them for a little while, but I don’t know how much longer they can survive.”

In fact, analysts say, the 40 days of U.S.-Israeli bombardment that ended with last week’s cease-fire appear to have increased the power of the military and hard-liners in the Iranian system. Despite the widespread destruction and the killings of officials by the U.S. and Israeli militaries, the Iranian regime is acting emboldened, having demonstrated that it can wreak havoc in global trade and send U.S. gas prices soaring.

Nevertheless, markets seem to have determined the worst is behind us: The S&P is higher today than it was when the war began, and oil prices—while dramatically higher than before the war—are still well down from their peak-panic highs, despite maritime traffic remaining largely choked in the Strait of Hormuz. Hope springs eternal!

BACK IN THE GOOD BOOKS: She may be totally crosswise from him on the war in Iran, but Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard knows how to keep the bossman happy. Yesterday, Gabbard sent the Justice Department a criminal referral for two former government officials who played a major role in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019: a whistleblower who revealed the existence of Trump’s efforts to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “dirt” on his future presidential rival Joe Biden, and the former intelligence-community watchdog who handled the whistleblower report. CBS News reports:

“I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” . . .

Gabbard alleged in a post on X Monday that “deep state actors” in the intelligence community “concocted a false narrative that Congress used to usurp the will of the American people and impeach duly-elected President @realDonaldTrump in 2019.” She argued that the inspector general relied on “second-hand evidence” in looking into the whistleblower complaint.

The documents, however, do not provide any direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Wants Regime Change at the Fed, Paul Krugman, paul krugmanright, April 16, 2026. He still thinks he's infallible.

When Donald Trump took us to war with Iran, he dismissed warnings from the experts, from the military, from the intelligence community, saying that this was a highly risky proposition. Now he wants to bring that same level of clarity and judgment to monetary policy, and we should all be very afraid.

Hi, Paul Krugman here. Today, I’m going to do a video rather than a proper post because I just have too much stuff going on. I’ve been too busy to actually do the charts and quantitative analysis that would be involved in actually writing a post about this stuff. I’m recording this on Wednesday afternoon.

The news to which I’m reacting is that in the midst of everything else that’s going on, Trump is doubling down on his attempt to turn the Federal Reserve into a personalized institution that will do what he wants, and never mind the fact that it’s set up to have substantial independence, never mind the fact that there’s a long tradition of respecting the Fed’s independence. Trump thinks that he should be, as George Bush would say, the decider on monetary policy.

This would be a bad thing even if Trump was somebody who generally had good judgment. Monetary policy, what the Fed does — control of short-term interest rates, control of the money supply— monetary policy is technical. Doing it right does require that you know quite a lot about what’s going on. It’s something that you really do want, technocrats at least having a strong role in the decision-making process. And in fact we generally leave it up to technocrats.

Part of the reason for doing that is it’s too easy. It doesn’t require legislation to change interest rates. It just requires a phone call to the open market desk in New York City. So it’s really easy for a president who wants to rev up the economy, wants to juice things up before an election or just plain has crackpot economic ideas, it’s just too easy for a president to do a lot of damage.

So we put layers of insulation. Members of the Federal Reserve Board are appointed for long terms. The whole setup is one that is designed to at least take some time. It doesn’t allow a madman in the Oval Office to muck with monetary policy.

It’s especially bad if the guy in the Oval Office is somebody like Trump, who is impulsive, very much short-term reward-centered, and, of course, doesn’t read, doesn’t study, doesn’t listen to experts. And we know that Trump has a bee in his bonnet, that interest rates should be drastically lower than they are now, which is simply not supported by any of the facts about what’s happening to the economy.

Inflation is running hotter than it should be. The Fed has a target of 2 percent inflation on the PCE price index. It’s actually running at around 3.

That’s not good conditions for a rate cut. The economy doesn’t need a rate cut, at least it doesn’t appear to right now. We’re not in a recession. So technocrats at the Federal Reserve will not actually deliver the rate cuts Trump wants unless he’s able to exert personal control.

Now, the way he’s been trying to do that is itself outrageous. His minions at the Justice Department have tried to force Lisa Cook off the Federal Reserve Board based on totally spurious charges about her mortgage applications long before she was at the Fed. And they’re trying to force Powell out over allegations of cost overruns in Federal Reserve construction projects. This is crazy stuff, and nobody takes it seriously. Nobody thinks those are genuine charges. This is all about trying to use the mechanisms of the Justice Department to intimidate monetary policy makers and turn them into instruments of the presidential will.

The presidential will here, aside from being utterly self-centered, is also deeply uninformed. If you read what Trump has had to say about monetary policy, it’s clear that he doesn’t think of interest rates as a tool to manage the economy, as a tool to control inflation, and so on. He thinks of low interest rates as a gold star that you get if we have a great economy. So he keeps on saying that it’s a wonderful golden age, the economy is terrific, none of which is actually true. It’s not a golden age. Inflation is running high.

None of that is true, but in any case, that’s not how it works. Monetary policy is not a reward for good behavior. It’s not a reward for achievement. It’s something that is a tool for keeping the economy on an even keel. If he does get his way, this will be bad.

The Federal Reserve has credibility, the fact that people making decisions, particularly decisions about pricing, believe that the Fed will keep the economy on an even keel, that it will not allow inflation to remain stubbornly too high. It did allow some inflation for 21-22, which was arguably the right thing to do to allow some, but it quickly took the steps needed to bring it back down again. And that credibility, the fact that people believed that the Fed would do the right thing actually helped it to do the right thing, allowed us to have “immaculate disinflation,” a big fall in the inflation rate without a big rise in the unemployment rate.

If Trump gets his way, that will all be gone. The credibility of the Federal Reserve will be shot. Now, I don’t think he’ll get his way there. I don’t think he will get his way on monetary policy. But he might.

And more than that, what the fight over the Fed is telling us is that Trump has learned nothing. You would think that the debacle in Iran would lead to some loss of self-confidence, some dent in the arrogant ignorance, the belief that just because the intelligence agencies and the generals and the admirals say that this is very risky and what about the Strait of Hormuz, never mind, I know this will be a quick, easy war.

And apparently the fact that it hasn’t turned out that way hasn’t led to any questioning of his own impeccable, perfect judgment. So the attack on the Fed is a bad thing in itself, and it’s also a symptom of “this is not a guy who should be in the White House.”

And the fact that he still commands so much deference from his own party and so much timidity on the part of people who should be standing up to him really makes me worried about the future of America and the world. 

ny times logoNew York Times, White House Shrugs Off Shaky Economy as War Exceeds Trump’s Timeline, Tony Romm and Colby Smith, April 16, 2026. Stocks may be soaring again, but the war in Iran has started to pinch the finances of many Americans.

Roughly seven weeks into the war with Iran, investors have shrugged off the sky-high price of oil, sending the S&P 500 roaring back by Thursday, one day after reaching its latest record high.

That exuberance on Wall Street has offered a sharp contrast with the hardships facing many Americans, who are feeling the financial blowback of a conflict that President Trump once promised would be brief but seems to have no end in sight.

With high gas prices cutting deeply into many families’ budgets, the U.S. economy is under increasing strain, raising the odds that inflation will worsen, unemployment will rise and growth will slow this year.

Under Mr. Trump’s original timeline, America’s entanglement in the Middle East was supposed to have been completed by now, paving the way for a swift reduction in energy costs that have roiled consumers and businesses around the world.

Instead, Mr. Trump’s war remains at a standstill, governed by a fragile cease-fire between Washington and Tehran. Among economists, the persistent uncertainty means that it is no longer a question of if, but rather, how much the standoff will come to impede U.S. growth and worsen inflation. 

U.S. Media, Religion, Culture, History 

 

Cardinal Christophe Pierre and Undersecretary Elbridge Colby (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense).

Cardinal Christophe Pierre and Undersecretary Elbridge Colby (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense).

The Pillar, Analysis: Nuncio’s Pentagon meeting was ‘frank exchange of ideas,’ officials say  Staff Report, April 9, 2026. U.S. and Vatican officials described the meeting as ‘tense’ and ‘honest’ but dismiss reports of threats.

Pentagon officials have insisted that a January meeting with the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio was a “cordial” and frank conversation, while some Vatican sources have told The Pillar that while no threats were implied or made by U.S. officials, the discussion between defense leaders and Cardinal Christophe Pierre was at times “tense.”

The comments came in response to an April 6 report from the Free Press, suggesting that Pierre had been summoned to the Pentagon for a dressing down, reportedly in response to a speech on world peace by Pope Leo XIV.

“Under Secretary Colby’s meeting with Cardinal Pierre was a productive, cordial meeting, and a chance for real dialogue on serious issues. They had an honest and respectful conversation. Reporting about threats or disrespect is false and scurrilous,” a senior defense department official speaking on background told The Pillar on Thursday.

Meanwhile, a Vatican official described the meeting as “tense” at times, characterizing some exchanges as “aggressive,” but confirmed that there was “no question of anyone threatening anyone,” despite suggestion in recent media reports.

The Free Press published April 6 a report stating that the Defense Department’s policy undersecretary Elbridge Colby had “summoned” the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.

According to the Free Press, defense officials were “enraged” by a speech made by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican diplomatic corps earlier that month which was interpreted as a “hostile message directed at Trump’s policies.”

Citing Pentagon and Vatican sources briefed about the meeting, the article claimed “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

Pentagon officials were, according to the Free Press, upset over a speech delivered by the pope to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, in which he criticized “a diplomacy based on force” – interpreted by the Pentagon officials as a direct criticism of U.S. policy.

Since becoming the first pope from the United States last year, Pope Leo has spoken out repeatedly against the use of violence in foreign policy, in remarks that have sometimes been seen as a direct commentary on U.S. military action, including recently in Venezuela and Iran.

“The reports of the meeting with Cardinal Pierre and his staff were wildly distorted and grossly exaggerated,” a senior Pentagon official speaking on background told The Pillar.

“The purpose of the meeting was a good faith effort to engage with the Vatican on a variety of foreign policy matters. It was an attempt to engage seriously and respectfully with the Holy See’s position on matters relevant to the Department of War.”

“The meeting discussed issues on Latin America, NATO, Europe issues, and Africa,” the official said. “In the context of the pope and senior Church officials talking about these issues, we decided to reach out to the nuncio to understand the Church’s perspective directly. The Pentagon deals with ambassadors all the time, so while it might be a relative first with the Vatican’s ambassador, it isn’t unusual from the department’s perspective.”

Pentagon sources also told The Pillar that in addition to specific issues, U.S. officials also wished to discuss the concept of just war and the nature and scope of legitimate military action.

That conversation, a senior Pentagon official told The Pillar, was “a frank exchange of ideas,” and “was very respectful.”

“There were somewhat different perspectives, but definitely no hostility or even hint of an attempt at coercion. That’s frankly just absurd and a calumny,” the official said.

Senior officials at the Holy See’s Secretariat of State in the Vatican also confirmed to The Pillar that the meeting took place, and that the discussion focused on public speeches and statements by Pope Leo about war and peace in the light of U.S. military action and priorities, but offered a different assessment of the meeting’s tone.

One senior official in Rome described the conversation as being “tense” at times and suggested that U.S. officials had been “aggressive” and “bullying” at points, but insisted that the conversation had been mutually forthright, with Cardinal Pierre “making himself heard, too.”

“There was no question of anybody threatening anyone,” the Vatican official said. No one at the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted by The Pillar could recall or confirm any reference to the Avignon papacy during the conversation.

In a response to the Free Press article published on twitter.com on April 9, the U.S. Department of Defense said that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”

The department confirmed that the meeting had taken place between Pierre and Colby and their respective staffs on Jan. 22, 2026, but said that the meeting was “substantive, respectful, and professional.”

“During the cordial meeting, they discussed a range of topics, including issues of morality in foreign policy, the logic of the U.S. National Security Strategy, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and other topics. Cardinal Pierre expressed his appreciation for the outreach and both sides looked forward to continued open and respectful dialogue,” the department said.

The United States ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, also released a statement Thursday, saying on social media that he had spoken with Cardinal Pierre, who now lives in Rome.

According to Burch, Pierre “​​confirmed that recent media characterizations of his meeting with Colby are ‘fabrications’ that were ‘just invented.’”

“I was likewise not surprised when His Eminence acknowledged there were no threats of any kind in the meeting. ‘It was a frank and cordial meeting that took place two months ago.’ Threat of Avignon? ‘None,’” said Burch.

Pope Leo accepted Cardinal Pierre’s resignation in March, after the cardinal turned 80, appointing in his place Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia, who had been serving as the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations.

 

bulwark morning shots logoMorning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Trump Fears the Pope, William Kristol, right, william bill kristol imdbApril 16, 2026. Does might make right?

It’s an age-old question, and there’s no great mystery about the Trump administration’s answer. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller articulated it clearly a few months ago, in the course of defending President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland:

bulwark logo big shipWe live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.

According to Miller, in the real world, it’s power—not justice—that matters. The “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” rule, and the essence of those iron laws is that might makes right.

This is the worldview of the Trump administration, and not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy. It’s also the worldview of the president, and not just for public but for private life (“when you’re a star . . . you can do anything”).

That Trumpist view—that power is to be worshiped, that might makes right—can be dressed up in religious garb, whether through the unctuous sophistry of JD Vance or the grotesque weaponization of faith by Pete Hegseth. But the costume clearly doesn’t fit. The claim that we have no choice but to follow “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” indeed that we should exult in doing so, is fundamentally at odds with a Judeo-Christian world view. After all, if Miller is right, if those iron laws from the beginning of time are unchangeable and unchallengeable, then there is no God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t matter.

Of course, if the Trumpist claim is right, if those iron laws since the beginning of time are all-powerful, then the Declaration of Independence doesn’t matter either. Whatever human rights we may think we should respect don’t matter. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

And that’s why the Trump administration and its surrogates have chosen to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV. They’re attacking Pope Leo not simply because he’s the pope but because he’s the first American pope. He’s a threat to their ambition to change the meaning of America.

And he’s popular here in America.

A poll last month found that 42 percent of Americans had a positive feeling about the Pope, while only 8 percent had a negative view. Half said they were neutral or not sure. If you’re Trump, and you see a critic with those numbers, a critic who can command attention and who shows no signs of being afraid of you or of shrinking from a fight, you want to weaken him. You want to try to drive up his negatives and to drag him down into the polarized political mud in which all other American public figures exist. So you try to reduce him to just another political actor—to a radical leftist who’s “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

Trump claimed that Leo only got elected “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” Trump may be wrong to ascribe his own kind of political thinking to the College of Cardinals. But he’s not wrong to sense that their choice of Robert Prevost as the first American pope posed a kind of threat to him. After all, the first Polish pope helped liberate his home country from authoritarian rule. Trump and the Trumpists are worried that the first American pope could contribute to such a development here.

And they should be. The view Pope Leo is upholding—that right matters, not just might—is an American one. It’s the view not just of Augustine but of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln attacked the heresy that might makes right. Lincoln in his great 1860 Cooper Union speech reversed the equation: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The Trumpists fear Pope Leo not simply because he’s defending the views, and speaking to the communicants, of his church. They fear him because he’s defending the principles, and speaking to the citizens, of his country. Of our country.

ny times logoNew York Times, Trump Administration: Trump’s Proposed ‘Triumphal Arch’ Would Be Among the World’s Tallest, Marco Hernandez and Anushka Patil, April 16, 2026 (print ed.). The federal Commission of Fine Arts is set on Thursday to review plans for a hulking 250-foot “triumphal arch” to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, one of several construction projects President Trump has conjured up in an effort to leave his aesthetic mark on Washington.

Mr. Trump has reason to be optimistic about the fate of the review: He fired all of the panel’s members in October and replaced them with his allies.

His intention is for the arch to rise up from a roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. The design prominently features the heavy gold embellishments that have come to be known as a signature Trump style.

The proposed arch, whose cost the administration has not released, carries the feel of a Trump design for another reason: It is simply massive.

Though it is loosely modeled on the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical monument in Paris commissioned by Napoleon, the arch Mr. Trump proposes would dwarf that by some 86 feet.

In fact, the proposed arch would be taller than nearly every other monumental arch across the United States and across the world. Here’s a sampling:

Many of the world’s monumental arches are war memorials, such as New Delhi’s India Gate and New York City’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch. Some commemorate revolutions, like Mexico City’s Monumento a la Revolución, and others, like Lisbon’s Rua Augusta Arch, symbolize the strength of a people.

Asked in October who the proposed Washington arch would be for, Mr. Trump responded, “Me.”

If built as planned, the arch would remake Washington’s landscape. Its proposed location means it would be in full view when entering or leaving the capital via the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Its proposed height means it would be taller than the Lincoln Memorial and nearly as tall as the U.S. Capitol building.

Washington landmarks

The White House expects to complete construction before the end of Mr. Trump’s term. But questions remain on how the arch would be built, including who would pay for it.

It remains possible that, like Mr. Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom, the proposed arch could get caught up in a legal quagmire.

A group of Vietnam War veterans, as well as an architectural historian, have sued in federal court to stop its construction. The lawsuit argues that the arch would require congressional approval under various statutes, including the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which dictates that a memorial built in the proposed location must be of “pre-eminent historical and lasting significance to the United States.”

Several congressional Democrats filed an amicus brief in support of that lawsuit in March. Washington, the brief states, “is not the President’s backyard to renovate, relandscape, and build in as he sees fit.” 

npr logo

ny times logoNew York Times, NPR Receives $113 Million From 2 Gifts, Benjamin Mullin, April 16, 2026. The donations, from the philanthropist Connie Ballmer and an anonymous donor, will support the network’s long-term strategy.

NPR on Thursday said it had received two gifts totaling $113 million, including the largest donation from a living donor in the network’s history.

Connie Ballmer, the philanthropist and co-founder of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization she leads with her husband, the billionaire former Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer, gave NPR $80 million for its digital innovation efforts. An anonymous donor gave $33 million to the NPR Network, a web of affiliated public radio stations across the United States.

“I support NPR because an informed public is the bedrock of our society, and democracy requires strong, independent journalism,” Ms. Ballmer said in a statement. “My hope is that this commitment provides the stability and the spark NPR needs to innovate boldly and strengthen its national network.”

Last year, Congress clawed back $500 million in annual funding from public broadcasters, sending hundreds of stations scrambling. NPR was somewhat insulated from the direct financial impacts of that decision, because a small fraction of its budget came directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded company that gave away funds to NPR and PBS stations. But the ripple effects still have taken a toll.

 

abraham lincoln gardner

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 15, 2026 [Lincoln's Last Evening], Heather Cox Richardson, right, April 16, 2026. On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The very heavens seemed to reflect the dawn of a new era. Poet Walt Whitman noted that after months of fog and clouds, the weather had cleared. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear,” he wrote. “It seems as if it told something as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

When the Lincolns and their guests arrived at the theater at about 8:30, the people in the audience leaped to their feet to applaud and the actors stopped the production while the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” About a half-hour later, the president felt chilly and put on his overcoat but was clearly relaxed and enjoying the play. Shortly after 10:00 the Lincolns were holding hands, and Mrs. Lincoln worried their public affection would scandalize the young Clara Harris, daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, who shared their box with her fiance, Major Henry Rathbone. Mrs. Lincoln whispered to her husband that she wondered what Clara would think of them holding hands, and Lincoln answered: “She won’t think anything about it.”

They would be the last words he ever spoke. On the stage, the play had just reached its best joke, and as the audience roared with laughter, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head, then slashed Rathbone’s arm as the officer tried to stop him from getting away. He jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, and shouted the state motto of Virginia, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” thus always to tyrants.

As Booth escaped, news spread that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also been attacked, and in the days to follow, the euphoria of the last days of the war gave way to grief. The windows in Washington, D.C., were hung with black garlands. And then the rain came back. In New York City, Whitman wrote in his diary: “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black—as you look toward the sky—long broad black like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction—New York is distinguished for its countless gay flags—every house seems to have a flag staff—on all these the colors were at half mast.”

At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned.

But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.

At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.

Congress fought back, trying to protect the principles for which Lincoln had died, but with no accountability for a war that had left 620,000 Americans dead and cost more than $5 billion, the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious. Former Confederates still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.

By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.

That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.

By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.

In the 1930s, with the southern economy dependent on New Deal programs from the federal government, Confederate iconography fell out of sight, but it sprang back to popularity after President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948. That year, the Democratic Party split in two as half of the party followed Truman and half refused. Southern racists under then–South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond—who had fathered the child of his family’s teenaged Black housekeeper in 1925—formed the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party, called “Dixiecrat” in a play on the South’s nickname, and took the Confederate battle flag as their party flag.

The ruling of a unanimous Supreme Court that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision resurrected Confederate ideology more widely. In Georgia the Ku Klux Klan had reformed near Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta in the early twentieth century, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to create a giant carving of Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain. The plan had been abandoned by 1928 as interest in the project waned, but it was reborn after Brown v. Board. Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the monument, which features Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, in May 1970.

The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

Former Army gunner Timothy McVeigh wrote to a newspaper in 1992, saying: “Taxes are a joke. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement…. Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.”. Three years later, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including nineteen children younger than six, and wounding more than 800 others. When captured, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”

In 2009, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former paratrooper who had been a staffer for Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), started a right-wing gang called the “Oath Keepers.” Claiming to take their inspiration from the patriots who stood against the British regulars on Lexington Green in 1775, they pledged to stand against what they considered a tyrannical government.

In 2021, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, along with the right-wing Proud Boys, were part of the planning and execution of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when they tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Biden had won both the electoral vote and the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but the insurrectionists wanted their own leader, President Donald Trump, to stay in office. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate flag into the United States Capitol.

In November 2022 a federal jury convicted Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for using force and violence to try to stop the process of the democratic election of a president. Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes.

As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.

Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.

Exactly 161 years before, on the night of April 14, 1865, bystanders at Ford’s Theater had carried the grievously wounded Lincoln to a boardinghouse across the street, where members of his Cabinet crowded around his bed. At 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. His secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had tried to preserve American democracy and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

When he tried to put his own loss, and that of the nation, to poetry, Walt Whitman thought back to the heady days of Spring 1865 when the heavens themselves seemed to promise a glorious democratic future, and their contrast to what came after.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” he wrote, “And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

“I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

 

See Part 1 in our News Reports section for clips April 1 to 15 during this unusually heavy news period.

 

]]> MyBlog Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:17:08 +0000 Election Truth Expert Shares Findings On U.S. Fraud Claims https://www.justice-integrity.org/2173-election-truth-expert-shares-findings-on-u-s-fraud-claims https://www.justice-integrity.org/2173-election-truth-expert-shares-findings-on-u-s-fraud-claims  

di new logo 2024

 

Nathan Taylor, a cybersecurity professional with the non-partisan, non-profit Election Truth Alliance (ETA), shared on the most recent edition of the District Insiders podcast his analysis of recent and forthcoming U.S. elections security issues.

District Insider hosts Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen, reporters who have covered election rigging scandals for more than a decade, explored with Taylor, left, nathan taylorwhat the public most needs to understand about recent allegations about illegal or suspected election manipulation in U.S. elections.

Taylor’s concern is that top state elections officials from across the United States often avoid reviewing evidence of eta reports january 2025 graphicsuspicious vote tabulation results illustrating irregularities.

A further problem, he adds, is that private contractors often obtain contracts from officials due to questionable relationships and potential lobbying and bribes, and these companies often obscure their ownership and top management. which hinders oversight of who owns the systems that count the public’s votes.

Even so, the ETA has documented significant problems with election security. Taylor points to the ETA’s recent litigation in Pennsylvania as an illustration of procedural gaps identified in a key 2024 swing state.

With the stakes rarely higher than this year’s U.S. elections, Taylor invited support via ETA’s website to join ETA’s all-volunteer efforts that include research, events and other outreach to protect local communities and democracy.

Click and watch the Nathan Taylor interview on District Insiders via one of the top-rated podcast sites below:.

 Apple Podcast, Podbean, Spotify and YouTube

About Nathan Taylor and the Election Truth Alliance:

Nathan Taylor, Executive Director of Public Engagement for the Election Truth Alliance (ETA), is a co-founder of the non-profit, non-partisan group. A cybersecurity professional, he previously worked as a U.S. Army Information Technology Specialist and an election-integrity researcher with a background in network security, systems analysis, and incident response.

etc happy birthday jan 2026The face of the Election Truth Alliance, Taylor presents its findings through videos, town halls, and community events with a goal of translating complex findings into actionable insights that inspire action.

ETA is a coalition of citizens, experts, and advocates united for election integrity and accountability and founded in December of 2024 when multiple individuals came together to share independent data, analysis, and research into the results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. As concerning trends emerged from data, ETA moved quickly to present findings accessible and understandable to the broader public.

“In today’s landscape of pervasive disinformation, misinformation, and ‘weaponized unreality,’ its mission statement says, “we believe the truth still matters. Our membership includes volunteers from multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We recognize that foreign and domestic election interference is a global challenge, and that we are all made weaker when our interconnected democracies are compromised. While our organization is currently focused on the 2024 US Presidential Election, in the longer-term we plan to broaden our scope. The Election Truth Alliance (https://electiontruthalliance.org/statements-and-press-releases/) is an exclusively volunteer led and operated organization led by a three-person board of directors. Among the case histories and ongoing research projects:

Florida Election Data Concerns

ETA is working with local voters and investigative journalists in Florida. used publicrecords, voter data, fieldwork, legal filings, and prior U.S. intelligence reporting.

Pennsylvania (2024) – Statistical Analysis and Lawsuit

ETA conducted statistical analysis comparing votes cast to registered voters usingestablished election forensics methods.

Key findings:• Irregular voting patterns identified across multiple Pennsylvania counties• The scale of these anomalies, if confirmed, could exceed the reportedpresidential margin of ~120,000 votes

Cambria County, Pennsylvania – Ballot Processing Issues

• Ballot scanners failed to read completed ballots across all precincts• Issue attributed to missing “Time in Security (TIS)” markings• Ballots were initially hand-counted, then duplicated onto new ballots for scanning• Officials expected 35,000 ballots but processed approximately 65,000• Official results show 55,661 Election Day votes• This leaves a gap of over 9,000 ballots between processed and reported totals

 

About District Insiders and Co-Hosts

“District Insiders” features experts on timely topics affecting “districts” globally that are in the news.

Co-Host Wayne Madsen is a journalist, newspaper columnist, and author of more than 25 books on intelligence matters, historical events, and the dangers of neo-fascism in threatening democracy in the United States and abroad. Based for many years in Washington, DC, he is a former U.S. Navy officer and NSA analyst. Madsen is also the third generation of Madsens who have opposed fascism in its varied forms. For more than two decades, he has published The WayneMadsenReport.com, an investigative news website now on Substack. His most recent books include “A Parade of New Sovereignties: A Post-Hegemonic World,” an encyclopedia-style 350 global hot spots and “Anti-Fascism: American As Apple Pie.”.

Co-Host Andrew Kreig is non-profit executive, reporter and attorney who edits and otherwise directs the Washington, DC-based Justice Integrity Project (Justice-Integrity.org) and comments on the news via broadcasts, books and lectures. His most recent book Is “The Complete Annotated Durham ‘Russiagate’ Report: A Corrupt, Cruel Fraud,” which documents Russian interference in U.S. elections and efforts of denial or diversion by politically motivated Justice Department prosecutors.

Contacts for “District Insiders” hosts for guests, interviews, lectures, questions:

• Andrew Kreig, Andrew [at] justice-integrity.org• Wayne Madsen, waynemadsendc [at] gmail.com

 

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Related News Coverage 

April 23

 

Civil Discourse, Legal Commentary: Voting rights. Southern resistance. National stakes, Joyce Vance, right, April 23, 2026. From the front lines at Fair Fight, we deliver sharp insights on the fight to protect democracy.joyce vance

My friends at Fair Fight, the Georgia-based pro-voting and pro-democracy organization, reviewed the results of a ProPublica investigation into how Trump is systematically removing election protections, and produced this summary, that brings you up to date and also provides an important suggestion for what you can do.

We're all responsible for protection the right to vote. So this is important information to take in.Trump Has Eliminated Election Safeguards and Installed Loyalist Election Deniers in Key Roles“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government.”Rights & Insights and Joyce VanceApr 15 READ IN APP

On Monday, ProPublica released a massive new investigation breaking down how Donald Trump has dismantled federal guardrails that stopped him from overturning his 2020 election loss.

The 4,700+ word investigation, based on interviews with about 30 current and former executive branch officials, provides an unprecedented and detailed account of how thoroughly critical election security guardrails have been gutted within the federal government ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.Key Findings from ProPublica’s Investigation:

 

pro publica logoProPublica, Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, April 13, 2026. Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.

Changing of Guard: At least 75 career staff are gone. Two dozen appointees, including many from the election denial movement, have been hired. Ten helped try to overturn the 2020 vote. Political Interference: Once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers, which they’ve already used to push forward unprecedented actions that critics say amount to partisan interference.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

We read the entire piece (twice) to make sure you’re aware of the findings: 

Career officials who protected elections are gone – election deniers have taken over. ProPublica found that at least 75 career officials across several agencies who played key roles in safeguarding the 2020 election have been fired, resigned, or reassigned. They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Many are election deniers, and ten actively worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss.

Federal programs designed to safeguard elections have been dismantled. Since Trump took office, nearly all federal election protection programs have been eliminated, severely defunded, or had nearly all their staff removed or reassigned:

  • CISA election team
  • NSC election security group
  • ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center
  • DOJ Public Integrity Section
  • DOJ Civil Rights Division’s voting section
  • FBI Public Corruption Team
  • FBI Foreign Influence Task Force
  • FBI and DOJ Election Day command posts

False claims and politicization now drive federal election policy. ProPublica reports that White House election lawyer Kurt Olsen – sanctioned by judges for false 2020 claims – pressured the FBI’s Atlanta chief to seize Fulton County’s 2020 ballots using a discredited report. When the FBI chief examined the evidence and found it didn’t hold up, and was already dismissed by Georgia Republican officials, he was forced out. The raid happened anyway – using a version of the same rejected evidence. Former DOJ Public Integrity lawyers said they likely would have tried to block the investigation.

Trump is “flooding the zone” to distract us. Billionaires are trying to control what you see, buying up media and controlling algorithms. 

April 15

Checks & Balances from the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, Political Opinion: There is No Role for the President in Our Elections, Trevor Potter, right, trevor potterApril 15, 2026. The Constitution makes itself clear.

A major effort of the second Trump administration has been a relentless attempt to expand executive branch power by applying a shockingly broad interpretation of the authority of the president under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. That provision establishes the president and the executive branch of government, whose role is to “execute” the laws passed by Congress.

Among the many examples of the Trump administration’s campaign to run roughshod over the rule of law and our government’s constitutional separation of powers are unconstitutional attempts by the president to control who can vote in our elections and how elections for federal office are administered.

To be clear, the Constitution does not give the president any role in this aspect of our democratic republic. The elections clause of the Constitution is, in fact, quite specific: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”

Despite this clear delegation of powers to the states and Congress, President Donald Trump has, almost from the start of his second term, attempted to make law from the White House governing our elections.

The president’s most recent executive order provides a clear example of an administration trying to will new election laws into existence, including new requirements for mail-in voting; creating a national database of “verified” eligible voters based on faulty information; and directing the U. S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to certain individuals.

My organization, Campaign Legal Center, alongside Democracy Defenders Fund, has sued the Trump administration to block this illegal and unconstitutional order. The lawsuit echoes arguments in a complaint we filed last March challenging a different executive order, which, at its core, is an illegal attempt to prevent millions of Americans from registering to vote or have their ballots counted by adding unnecessary, burdensome hurdles.

Regardless of what any executive order calls for in terms of changing election rules, the key point is that the executive branch is not legally entitled to make new changes to voting and election administration rules. That is the job of the states and Congress. Federal judges hearing this case have said as much in numerous rulings putting the order’s provisions either temporarily or permanently on hold.

The Trump-appointed leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice has also gone to unprecedented lengths to insert the DOJ into the electoral process. The Justice Department is currently suing 29 states and Washington, D.C., to obtain unredacted voter registration lists, pressuring states to use error-prone processes for vetting those lists and backing a lawsuit — recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court — that could invalidate more than 30 state laws on deadlines for receiving absentee ballots.

To illustrate the proper role of the federal government in regulating our elections, consider the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The former was created by an act of Congress following the Watergate scandal, for the express purpose of enforcing federal campaign finance laws aimed at reducing the corrupting influence of money in our political system.

Congress created the EAC after the 2000 presidential election, when, in the wake of Florida’s controversial election process, it became clear that national standards for voting systems were necessary to ensure every vote is counted accurately, even if those standards are voluntary. The EAC also serves as a national clearinghouse for information on election administration, accredits voting machine testing laboratories, and certifies voting systems.

The FEC and EAC were expressly designed by Congress to be independent agencies, controlled by a group of commissioners evenly divided between the two major political parties. The law does not make the regulatory decisions of these commissions subject to presidential oversight. However, in yet another demonstration of this president’s failure to honor Congress’ legislative prerogative, President Trump signed an executive order in February of last year asserting that the president can overrule regulatory decisions by independent federal agencies.

The president has further overstepped the limits of executive power by asserting the right to fire the heads of independent federal agencies at will, an issue that the U.S. Supreme Court will be ruling on this year in a case called Trump v. Slaughter.

It should go without saying that the president (any president), who is surely invested in the political success of his party, should not have any substantive role in controlling agencies empowered to regulate our elections. In opposing the president’s firing of independent agency leaders, Campaign Legal Center and I made this same argument to the justices at the Supreme Court in our Slaughter amicus brief.

As records from the Constitutional Convention capture, avoiding the concentration of too much power in a single person in the new American government was high atop the list of priorities. Indeed, the branch invested with arguably the most substantial powers in our government — the power to tax, to establish tariffs, to declare war and the like — is Congress, based on the idea that large bodies of elected officials are best suited to make such decisions.

In a concurrence to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in February invalidating the president’s sweeping tariff policy, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote: “It can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.”

That design was not invalidated by the inauguration of Donald Trump last January. A key aspect of the current battle to ensure the Framers’ vision persists beyond 2028 is opposing the president’s attempts to wrest control over the electoral process away from the states and Congress.

Trevor Potter is the president and founder of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy through law. A former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, he also served as general counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

 April 13

 

pro publica logoProPublica, Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, April 13, 2026. Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.

Changing of Guard: At least 75 career staff are gone. Two dozen appointees, including many from the election denial movement, have been hired. Ten helped try to overturn the 2020 vote. Political Interference: Once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers, which they’ve already used to push forward unprecedented actions that critics say amount to partisan interference.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

 

 

 

 

]]> MyBlog Wed, 01 Apr 2026 03:19:12 +0000 Epstein Justice Director Nick Bryant Connects Dots About Scandals https://www.justice-integrity.org/2169-epstein-justice-director-nick-bryant-connects-dots-about-scandals https://www.justice-integrity.org/2169-epstein-justice-director-nick-bryant-connects-dots-about-scandals  

di new logo 2024
Epstein Justice Director Nick Bryant, a courageous investigative reporter, child abuse expert, shares his analysis of Epstein Files revelations on the most recent edition of the District Insiders podcast.

 

District Insider hosts Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen, reporters long based in Washington, DC who have also covered aspects of the Epstein scandals and their huge implications, explore with Bryant, right, what the public most needs to understand about the victims’ fight for justice and the larger implications for both Americans and others impacted globally.

nick bryant head shot

“This isn't about tabloid eyebrow-raisers or scandals,” Bryant, right, and his team are saying. “This is about seeking justice for real women — alive today — who were brutally victimized by corrupt people in power. Three million documents. Daily testimonies on Capitol Hill. Constant statements from politicians, proposed bills, interviews. The information is relentless and everywhere.”

 

Nick Bryant helps make sense of it all by connecting the dots between the document dumps, the latest developments, and the prosecutable cases that could actually bring corrupt, powerful individuals to justice.

Click and watch the Nick Bryant interview on District Insiders via one of the top-rated podcast sites below:.

 Apple Podcast, Podbean, Spotify and YouTube

  

jeffrey epstein justice logoClick here to join Join the Epstein Justice monthly webinar on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. EST

The webinar will feature Epstein survivors discussing how the FBI and Justice Department coverup has exacerbated their odysseys for justice and accountability, and the toll it's taken on them. They will also share their experience, strength and hope. So, please click on the link and join us!

About Nick Bryant and Epstein Justice:

Nick Bryant, right, Director of Epstein Justice (https://epsteinjustice.com/) is an activist and writer. His writing has recurrently focused on the plight nick bryant head shotof disadvantaged children in the United States. He's been published in numerous national journals, including the Journal of Professional Ethics, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Journal of School Health. He co-authored America’s Children: Triumph or Tragedy, addressing the medical and developmental problems of lower socioeconomic children in America.

He published Epstein's "Black Book" on the internet in 2015. The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine have reported on his investigation into the Epstein child trafficking network.

Bryant has contributed a chapter on child trafficking to Global Perspectives on Dissociative Disorders: Individual and Societal Oppression, a book addressing various facets of dissociative disorders that features chapters from an international panel of psychiatrists and psychologists. He has also spoken about child trafficking at several conferences, including the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation’s international convention and the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Global Summits that are sponsored by National Center on Sexual Exploitation. He received the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation's 2022 Therese O. Clemens Advocacy Award.

 

district insiders logo

 

“District Insiders” features experts on timely topics affecting “districts” globally that are in the news

Hosts

Wayne Madsen is a journalist, newspaper columnist, and author of more than 25books on intelligence matters, historical events, and the dangers of neo-fascism in threatening democracy in the United States and abroad. author and syndicated columnist based for many years in Washington, DC. A former U.S. Navy officer and NSA analyst, Madsen is also the third generation of Madsens who have opposed fascism in its varied forms. For more than two decades, he has published The WayneMadsenReport.com, an investigative news website now on Substack. His most recent books include “A Parade of New Sovereignties: A Post-Hegemonic World,” an encyclopedia-style, 380-page description of nearly 350 locales, and “Anti-Fascism: American As Apple Pie.”.

Andrew Kreig is non-profit executive, reporter and attorney who edits and otherwise directs the Washington, DC-based Justice Integrity Project (Justice-Integrity.org) and comments on the news via broadcasts, books and lectures. His most recent book Is The Complete Annotated Durham ‘Russiagate’ Report: A Corrupt, Cruel Fraud, which documents Russian interference in U.S. elections and efforts of denial or diversion by politically motivated Justice Department prosecutors.

 

Major Recent Epstein-Related Stories

 

A group of Jeffrey Epstein sex assault and trafficking survivors raise their hands to signal they’ve been ignored by Trump’s DOJ as Attorney General Pam Bondi, wearing a gold crucifix as a neck ornament and backed by youthful Justice Department personnel seated to hear rear, refuses to look at the victims during a hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 11, 2026. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt for AFP via Getty Images and Bluesky).A group of Jeffrey Epstein sex assault and trafficking survivors raise their hands to signal they’ve been ignored by Trump’s DOJ as Attorney General Pam Bondi, shown at right front wearing a gold crucifix as a neck ornament and backed by youthful Justice Department personnel seated to hear rear, refuses to look at the victims during a hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 11, 2026. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt for AFP via Getty Images and Bluesky).

Visit the #MeToo/Trafficking link on the Justice Integrity Project site for near-daily updates of relevant news beyond the samples below: https://www.justice-integrity.org/metoo-news-all/metoo-news-posts

March 24

 

  

From left, American real estate developer Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife) Melania Knauss, a former nude model and beauty contestant awarded U.S. citizenship on a special "genius" immigration grant, along with financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite and convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000. (Photo by Davidoff Studios via Getty Images).F

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: No Escape for Trump, Rick Wilson, right, March. 24, 2026. rick wilson screengrabMisery, humiliation, and shame await.

There’s a moment in every failed strongman’s story when the noise fades, the flunkies fall silent and slip from the throne room one final time before the shooting starts. There’s a moment where the court jesters stop laughing at the Dear Leader’s every joke, and when reality comes crashing through the gilded walls like a breaching charge. There’s a moment when the loyal bodyguard’s eyes flicker with some new signal, and the dictator wonders if the tools of oppression and brutality will be turned on him.

lincoln square media logoFor Donald Trump, that moment isn’t coming someday.

It’s here.

Nothing will save you now, Donald.

Not the war. Not the lies. Not today’s loyalists, tomorrow’s traitors. Not the terrified little men orbiting your shrinking political sun. Not the algorithms, not the oligarchs, not the endless stream of garbage Fox and Twitter propaganda pumped into the veins of a movement that’s finally, visibly, unmistakably breaking apart.

 

donald trump flag mouthYou chose this.

You chose a foolish, off-the-rails war, launched in folly and haste, sold with the usual cocktail of bravado and bullshit, and already curdling into the kind of slow, grinding catastrophe that has buried presidencies before yours. You wrapped yourself in the flag, barked about strength, and promised an easy victory.

What you delivered instead was chaos.

The markets know it. The military knows it. Our former allies know you’ve handed the world to China with your ignorance and impulsivity. The American people, even the ones who once cheered your every move, can feel it in their bones.

And they’re feeling it at the pump and the grocery store. You’ve put a gun to the head of an economy you had already wounded with tariffs and delivered the coup de grace.

Gas prices are spiking, not in some abstract economist’s chart, but in the lived reality of millions of Americans who now wince every time they swipe their card. Every extra dollar per gallon is a reminder that your “easy war” isn’t easy, isn’t contained, and sure as hell isn’t cheap.

You can spin a lot of things in modern America. You can tell MAGA cultists we’ve always been at war with the planet Saturn, and they’ll spin up a billion memes about it just to own the libs, but you can’t spin the price on the sign at the gas station.

That number is your approval rating now.

And speaking of approval, let’s talk about the numbers that are keeping your political team up at night, staring into the void, whispering to each other that maybe, just maybe, the magic is gone. Chris and Tony know. They’re getting roasted by elected Republicans behind closed doors.

Your allies outside of deep-red districts are flailing, failing, and getting ready to spend more time on LinkedIn than on the floor of Congress.

Your poll numbers aren’t just slipping. They’re collapsing. The topline is bad; the demos with younger voters and independents are as radioactive as Chernobyl’s basement.

The coalition that once carried you, that strange and volatile alliance of grievance, nostalgia, and performative rage, is cracking under the strain of reality, economics, war, and your personal cover-up for yourself and your dear friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Wars have a way of doing that. So do empty wallets. So does the creeping realization that the showman has run out of tricks.

And then there’s Epstein.

You thought the war would bury it. You thought the noise, the spectacle, the sheer overwhelming force of headlines and explosions would push it off the front page, out of the conversation, into the memory hole where so many of your scandals have gone to die.

You were wrong.

Dead wrong.

Oh, you won a few days’ respite, but the Epstein story didn’t disappear. It metastasized. It seeped into the cracks of your narrative, into the corners of your coalition, into the minds of voters who may not follow every twist and turn but understand one simple, devastating truth:

Something is being hidden. What’s being hidden is a tale of your degeneracy, and his. Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche better get that pardon soon, because otherwise, they’re both going to prison.

The cover-up didn’t work. It failed. Spectacularly.

And now it’s fused, in the public imagination, with everything else people already suspect about you: the lavish, ugly corruption, the lies, the endless sense that there’s always another layer, another secret, more rotting, moldy wallboard beneath the gold leaf.

You can’t bomb that away, Donald.

And here’s the part that should truly terrify you: the people who are about to hold the gavel.

Even the hapless, often self-sabotaging Democrats are now staring at a political landscape that looks, to their astonishment, like opportunity. The House is in reach. The Senate is within reach. Not because they suddenly became political geniuses, but because you and your allies have spent months lighting their (and your own) credibility on fire.

You’re afraid of impeachment. Of course you are. It’s the word that haunts you, the specter you can’t quite outrun.

But impeachment is the least of your problems.

What you should fear, what should keep you pacing the halls of the Residence at three in the morning, is oversight.

Relentless, grinding, methodical exposure.

A Democratic House and Senate won’t just vote on articles of impeachment. They’ll open the books. They’ll drag the secrets into the light. They’ll subpoena documents, bank records, and communications. They’ll put your allies, your bagmen, your enablers, and yes, your crapulous, scumbag low-tier crypto criminal family members, on the hot seat.

Over and over and over again.

Televised. Streamed. Clipped. Shared.

Day after day, week after week, the American people will watch as the mythology of Donald Trump, the bullshit titan, the pretend mastermind, the untouchable force of ETTD, gets peeled back to reveal something far smaller, far weaker, and far more compromised than you ever let them see.

And it won’t just be you.

The tech-bro billionaire class that decided, in a fit of adolescent contrarianism and naked self-interest, to hitch their wagons to your movement? They’re next in line. Let’s see how Boy Elon does under the hot lights for 8 hours a day for two weeks.

They’ve been very comfortable lavishing you with swag and praise, funding, amplifying, and cheering on the chaos, convinced that they were too rich, too smart, too insulated to ever face real consequences.

Congressional oversight is about to disabuse them of that notion.

Subpoenas don’t care about your net worth. Hearings don’t care about your follower count. Under oath is a very different environment than a podcast or a tweet.

They’re about to find out.

And as all of this unfolds, as the war grinds on, as the prices climb, as the investigations widen and deepen, something else is happening, something quieter, but far more consequential.

Boomer MAGA is dying, mutating into a worse form, not in a single dramatic collapse, not in one decisive moment, but in the slow, inevitable erosion that comes when a movement built on spectacle and grievance runs headlong into reality. The younger generation of MAGA is more overtly, well…Nazi, and that, even in this fallen era, is a hard sell to American normies.

The energy fades. The crowds thin. We both know why you don’t do rallies; it’s hard to even fill the seats behind the stage, much less in front of it. The slogans lose their punch. The contradictions become impossible to ignore. The physical and mental maladies are more evident.

rick wilson screengrab

If you want to understand what kind of people would inflict a fresh round of suffering on the lives and souls of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their wealthy friends, look no further than Washington, where Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, lincoln square media logoand the Department of Justice just abused Epstein’s victims to protect Donald Trump and his friends from accountability.

The specific kind of pain Jeffrey Epstein’s victims carry, a long, chronic pain that doesn’t fade, doesn’t “move on,” doesn’t get politely folded into a news cycle, was made more acute this Friday, the government pretended to give them transparency and distributed an incomplete tranche of documents and photos redacted to protect Donald Trump Justice Department log circularand his allies.

This week, the Trump Justice Department did what this administration does best: it performed concern for victims while practicing control over the narrative. They complied with the concept of accountability and the aesthetics of disclosure, then used wildly overbroad redactions, selective releases, and procedural gamesmanship to make sure the public learned as little as possible about the things that actually matter.

 

Vicky Ward from Vicky Ward Investigates, Inside Epstein's Non-Sexual Seduction Techniques, Vicky Ward, March. 24, 2026. Join Me At 5pm ET Tomorrow (Wednesday) with the author Holly Peterson to chat about Epstein’s seduction of the moneyed class. You can read Holly’s WSJ Piece on the subject here.

Holly has spent her life among the billionaire class. So she can talk fluently about the psychology of members of the so-called elite Epstein club. And she can explain why the “clubbiness” of the thing encouraged so many of them to drop their guard and snuggle up (metaphorically) to a convicted sex felon.

I also want to get into the latest reporting on the billionaire financier Leon Black, who is of course a platinum member of Epstein’s elite concierge service. Black met extra-marital girlfriends through Epstein, yes.

But the biggest outstanding question about their relationship is why on earth Black would pay Epstein over $170 million for “tax advice.” The New York Times has an excellent piece on the breadcrumb trail regarding that in the Epstein Files, that you can read here. And I encourage everyone to also read a letter, sent last week from Sen. Ron Wyden to Black, here. No one has been more diligent investigating Black’s financial ties to Epstein than Wyden.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Daily Telegraph’s Abigail Buchanan has written a piece on how I tried to get the Farmer sisters’ allegations into Vanity Fair in 2003 and failed.

March 23

 

leon black jeffrey epstein

ny times logoNew York Times, How Epstein Helped Solve a Billionaire’s Problems With Women, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Steve Eder and David Enrich, March 23, 2026. The Wall Street titan Leon Black, above left, paid Jeffrey Epstein, above right, $170 million for what he said was tax and estate work. But his services went beyond that.

In October 2017, a yoga instructor emailed Jeffrey Epstein with a delicate question: When might she receive the tens of thousands of dollars she’d been promised by the billionaire Leon Black?

She and Mr. Black had been in a sexual relationship, and since at least 2009, hundreds of thousands of dollars had flowed to her from Mr. Black’s bank accounts. But in 2017, the setup changed. Now Mr. Epstein would wire the money — in this case, $100,000.

“He said that now he does it through you,” the woman wrote to Mr. Epstein in an email that the Justice Department released this year. Mr. Epstein wrote back, confirming the arrangement.

In the later years of Mr. Epstein’s life, after he was incarcerated and registered as a sex offender, no one did more to bankroll his opulent lifestyle than Mr. Black, 74, a towering figure on Wall Street and a fixture of the global art scene.

Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million over six years for what Mr. Black has said were tax and estate-planning services. The sum dwarfed what elite law or accounting firms would have charged for similar work, baffling both his Wall Street peers and investigators on Capitol Hill.

The millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and other documents that the Justice Department released this year offer a potential explanation for the size of the payments: Mr. Epstein essentially served as a fixer whose services went beyond modernizing Mr. Black’s finances or reducing his taxes, according to a New York Times review of those records.

Mr. Epstein suggested ways to obscure millions of dollars that Mr. Black paid to women, as well as to Mr. Epstein himself. He brainstormed about how to avoid taxes on some of the payments. He took credit for defusing a government audit of a woman to whom Mr. Black had paid millions of dollars. He planned ways to surveil, intimidate and silence another woman who was threatening to publicly accuse Mr. Black of abuse. He even counseled Mr. Black to separate from his wife after she learned of his infidelity.

Mr. Black paid about $20 million to a dozen women, at least some of whom he’d had sexual relationships with, according to the recently released files and notes taken by congressional investigators and shared with The Times. Mr. Epstein was involved in figuring out ways to dispense a significant portion of that money.

Mr. Epstein summed it up to Mr. Black in a 2017 email: Mr. Epstein’s job, as he saw it, was partly about “saving you from yourself.”

In a statement, Mr. Black’s lawyers, Courtney Forrest and Susan Estrich, said the Justice Department documents “make clear that Mr. Epstein embellished, exaggerated and lied about Mr. Black.” They said Mr. Black was not aware of Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking or that he paid any women on Mr. Black’s behalf.

The recently released documents, which include some of Mr. Black’s financial records, have intensified congressional scrutiny of his relationship with Mr. Epstein and whether it crossed ethical or legal boundaries.

The House Oversight Committee recently asked Mr. Black to sit for an interview. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been investigating Mr. Black’s financial ties to Mr. Epstein for years, accused him in a letter last week of seemingly using Mr. Epstein to hide payments to women. He also questioned whether Mr. Black had complied with tax laws.

In an interview, Mr. Wyden said that he had never believed that Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million solely for estate and tax advice. “I think this all comes down to hush money,” he said, as well as Mr. Epstein doing “the kinds of things that would keep Black ahead of the law.”

Ms. Estrich said that Mr. Wyden’s claims were “outrageous and false” and were meant to serve “his own selfish political interests.” She accused him of leaking Mr. Black’s confidential financial information and of trying to distract from the fact that Mr. Wyden’s son, a hedge fund manager, sought an investment from Mr. Epstein in 2016.

Mr. Wyden said his son’s presence in the Epstein documents would not change the course of his investigation.

March 22

Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

Lincoln Square, Commentary; The Day the Music Died in MAGA World, Kristoffer Ealy, kristoffer ealyright, March 22, 2026. Donald Trump has done almost everything imaginable to get Americans to stop talking about the Epstein files.

He has thrown chaos at the country like a man emptying every drawer in the house because he cannot find the one receipt that matters. He escalated attacks on critics. He cheered punitive action against late-night enemies. He watched Don Lemon get dragged into a federal prosecution tied to anti-ICE protest coverage. He sent troops into American cities. He lurched into a widening war with Iran. He has tried almost everything short of faking his own death and reappearing as someone who never met Jeffrey Epstein. Yet the files are still there, hanging over him like a chandelier made of guilt and bad decisions that nobody will let him redecorate around.

lincoln square media logoThat alone tells you something important.

Other stories come and go. They are born with a chyron, peak with a panel segment, and die somewhere between a podcast clip and the next algorithmic panic attack. Journalism students learn early that one of the central elements of newsworthiness is timeliness. Stories are supposed to age out. They get replaced by fresher outrage, newer horror, shinier scandal. That is how the modern news cycle works. It is an industrial shredder for public attention. But the Epstein files have refused to obey the normal rules of political gravity. They became front-page news, stayed front-page news, and then did something even more dangerous for Trump: they became permanent background noise. They are no longer just a story. They are the ringing in the administration’s ears that no amount of noise elsewhere can drown out.

That is why every attempted distraction now lands with the same response. Trump picks a fight with another media enemy. That’s nice. What about the Epstein files? ICE agents kill civilians in the middle of a crackdown. Horrible. What about the Epstein files? Trump ratchets up martial posturing in American cities and dares critics to stop him. Noted. What about the Epstein files? The administration barrels deeper into war with Iran. People rightly panic over that, protest that, analyze that. And then they keep asking what is in those files and why the government still cannot seem to tell a straight story about them. Reuters reported in February that Americans overwhelmingly believe the files show wealthy and powerful people rarely face real accountability. Which is another way of saying the public understood the moral of this story perfectly well and did not need the ending explained to them.

Some scholars might call what happened next the Streisand Effect. There is truth in that. Trump tried to smother public fascination and instead poured gasoline on it. But what happened on July 15, 2025 goes much deeper than a textbook example of suppression backfiring. July 15, 2025 may not have been the day MAGA died.

But it was the day the music died.

It was the day one of the movement’s most emotionally loaded myths cracked in public, on camera, in Trump’s own words.

That day, Trump did something that would have been hard to improve upon if his goal had been to humiliate his own most conspiracy-minded supporters. Asked about the Epstein story, he called it “sordid but boring” and said, “I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going.” Reuters and other contemporaneous reports place those remarks on July 15, 2025. That date matters because it was the moment Trump stopped speaking to his followers as co-believers and started speaking to them like they were gullible little weirdos who should stop bothering him.

He could have said almost anything else and bought himself time. He could have said, “We’re looking into it.” He could have said, “The American people deserve transparency.” He could have said, “We’ll release whatever is credible.” He could have lied with craftsmanship. He could have done what politicians do every single day of the week and wrapped a non-answer inside a patriotic casserole. Instead he shrugged. He rolled his eyes. He treated one of MAGA’s sacred obsessions like a spam email he was tired of flagging. That was the mistake. And it was not a small one.

Because the Epstein files were never just another scandal inside MAGA world. They were a promise. More than that, they were a kind of secular scripture for a movement that had spent years marinating in Pizzagate-adjacent fantasies about a hidden elite of depraved Democrats, celebrities, financiers, fixers, and media ghouls. Trump was supposed to be the avenging hero who kicked the door open, turned on the fluorescent lights, and let the monsters scatter. He and the ecosystem around him helped build that expectation for years. The podcast bros fed it. The influencer class fed it. Republican politicians winked at it. Every half-literate fascist with a webcam and a supplement code fed it. For a significant portion of his base, exposing the Epstein network was not a side issue. It was the holy grail. It was the whole point.

That is why the right language here is not just political backlash. It is psychological rupture.

The first term is motivated reasoning. MAGA did not arrive at the Epstein files through a calm, neutral weighing of evidence. People wanted to believe Trump would expose the powerful and humiliate their enemies, so they interpreted everything through that desire. The second term is identity-protective cognition. The belief that Trump would reveal elite corruption was not merely an opinion; it became part of the group’s identity, part of what made them righteous in their own minds. The third term is cognitive dissonance. That is the mental discomfort people experience when two cherished beliefs collide. Trump is the man who will expose the truth. Trump is treating this like “pretty boring stuff.” Those two beliefs cannot sit comfortably in the same room. One has to move, and when it does, the whole house starts creaking.

That creaking is the story.

People tell me all the time that Trump still has plenty of loyal followers. Fair enough. He does. Loyalty, though, is not the story. The fractures are. It does not matter how many eventually crawl back into line if, for one long ugly stretch, they were scattered, defensive, and arguing with themselves in public. Once a movement built on certainty starts sounding confused, the crack matters more than the headcount.

You can hear the confusion in the arguments. “Democrats are in the files more than Trump.” Fine. Then expose them all. That is not the escape hatch they think it is. It is actually proof of how the ground shifted beneath them. Once Trump fumbled the issue on July 15, the files stopped being a right-wing revenge fantasy and became a broader transparency issue. Reuters/Ipsos polling in July 2025 found that 69 percent of Americans believed the government was concealing details about Epstein’s clients. Reuters polling in February 2026 found broad public belief that the files showed the powerful often escape accountability. That is not a narrow partisan demand. That is national suspicion with a mailing address in every ideology.

People also ask why Joe Biden and Merrick Garland did not blow the whole thing open when they had the chance. That is a fair question. Maybe they thought full disclosure would divide the country even more. Maybe they feared detonating a scandal that could touch powerful people across politics, media, business, and polite society’s preferred list of dinner guests. Maybe they simply lacked the nerve. At this point, though, their motives are almost beside the point. Once Trump shrugged the files off in July 2025, Democrats who had not initially treated the issue as central suddenly had every reason to care. The fractures inside MAGA made the story politically irresistible. What had been a grievance engine for the right turned into an accountability weapon for everyone else.

And the mishandling since then has only kept the bonfire lit.

The Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files has been, to use a technical term, a complete mess. The department released millions of pages under the law Trump signed in November 2025, but lawmakers soon complained of incomplete disclosures, over-redactions, and failures to protect victims’ identities while simultaneously obscuring information about prominent people.

A bipartisan group of senators asked the Government Accountability Office this week to review the DOJ’s handling of the files, and the House Oversight Committee has already subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi. Reuters reported last week that the Justice Department also had to release previously missing FBI interview summaries containing allegations against Trump after Democrats accused the department of withholding them. The Washington Post separately reported that the law required disclosure by December 19, but the department missed the deadline and did not release the bulk of the files until late January. Which is the kind of thing that happens when you are either incompetent or stalling, and in this administration the two conditions are not mutually exclusive.

Which brings us to the New York Times reporting that has poured fresh gasoline on this already raging fire.

In late July, FBI agents exchanged early-morning emails about a sensitive task. One agent listed the names of 14 prominent men with President Trump at the top, and issued instructions that read like something out of a mob drama: “Take these names and build out new spreadsheet w all the derog on them.” That same morning, agents prepared summaries of what the files called “salacious statements” made against Trump and others. The rundown on the president was two bullet points. One was an allegation from a woman who said he sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. The other was a claim that Epstein once introduced a teenager to Trump saying, “This is a good one, huh?” with Trump replying, “Yes.” The Times notes the woman’s account lacked corroborating detail, and Karoline Leavitt called it “completely baseless.” The bulk of references to Trump in the FBI files did not suggest wrongdoing but did document his closeness to Epstein: people who recalled being introduced to Trump at social affairs, employees who described him visiting Epstein’s homes, multiple people who remembered hearing him on the phone with Epstein.

There is also the matter of the Palm Beach police chief. One FBI document described Trump calling Michael Reiter shortly after news broke that Epstein was under investigation for abusing girls. Years later, Reiter told the FBI what he remembered Trump saying on that call: ‘Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.’ That line does not prove criminal liability. What it does prove is that Trump knew. And it makes the ‘sordid but boring’ shrug of July 15 land considerably harder in retrospect.

These summaries were compiled the same day Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was in Florida interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell, and Trump came up in that interview too, alongside Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Wall Street billionaire Leon Black. The FBI then converted the summaries into a slide for a 21-page internal presentation on the Epstein case, shared in unclassified form with FBI director Kash Patel. A draft of the presentation, released by the DOJ, exposed the names of alleged victims. In December, Blanche had pledged publicly that the administration would not redact information involving the president. What followed was over three million pages released late, 76,000 documents temporarily taken offline, witnesses’ names sometimes visible and sometimes blacked out, missing FBI interview memos that had to be forced out under political pressure, and a three-stage filtering process that somehow still managed to lose the documents the original investigators had treated as most significant.

That is not transparency. That is a bureaucracy trying to vacuum glitter out of carpet with a leaf blower and calling it a clean house.

None of the allegations in those files amount to proven wrongdoing in court. The Times is careful about that. But the story is not fundamentally about what Trump did or did not do with Jeffrey Epstein. The story is about what the government knew, when it knew it, and how it has handled the telling. Which is to say: badly, slowly, and in a way that has convinced a majority of Americans that something is still sitting just out of view.

That is also why the current war with Iran has not displaced the scandal so much as fused with it in parts of the public imagination. In some online corners, the conflict is already being reframed through the lens of Epstein, with propagandists pushing the idea that war itself is functioning as cover for elite crimes. The Washington Post reported this week on a pro-Iran disinformation network using AI-generated content and Epstein-related conspiracy claims to push anti-U.S. narratives. That does not validate the propaganda. It does illustrate something politically important: once a scandal becomes sticky enough, people start stapling it to every new crisis. The war becomes the backdrop. The Epstein files become the stain.

All of this helps explain why the Epstein issue has become such a corrosive force inside the right. It is not simply that some people think Trump mishandled a release. It is that he violated the emotional contract. He asked people who had spent years treating this issue like a moral crusade to suddenly accept that it was boring, fake, and overblown, or a distraction cooked up by bad people and fake news. That kind of reversal makes even committed loyalists feel played.

March 21

 

A PowerPoint published among the Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein. A Miami Herald analysis of thousands of pages in the Epstein files found there were bags of shredded documents at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the days after Epstein’s death there.

A PowerPoint published among the Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein.

bureau of prisons logo horizontal

Miami Herald, Investigation: Documents reportedly shredded by BOP after Epstein's Death, Julie K. Brown,right, and Claire Healy, Updated March 21, 2026. julie brown rachel maddowA Miami Herald analysis of thousands of pages in the Epstein files found there were bags of shredded documents at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the days after Epstein’s death there. A Corrections officer called the FBI, then writes letter to judge about document cover-up.

A Miami Herald analysis of thousands of pages in the Epstein files found there were bags of shredded documents at theMetropolitan Correctional Center in the days after Epstein’s death there. Department of Justice TNS

Less than a week after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, something was miami herald logoafoot inside an office where the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ After Action Team had set up a probe into what had happened to their most high-profile inmate.

The FBI was told that there were people shredding documents. Bags of them.

An inmate at the jail was ordered to take the bags of shredded material to MCC’s rear gate and throw them in a dumpster on Thursday, Aug. 15, and again on Friday, Aug. 16, days after Epstein’s Aug. 10 death, records show. The sheer volume of material seemed unusual, the inmate noted.

“They are shredding everything,” the inmate told one of the guards, adding that he was asked to give the officials, whom he did not recognize, a hand with the shredding.

“Make sure you get that box too,” one of the men allegedly told him.

perversion of justice miami herald logoThe inmate wasn’t the only one who found it out of the ordinary. A corrections officer at the detention facility called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center that same night, a Friday, at 6:28 p.m. to report that he had “never seen this amount of bags of shredded documents coming out to be put in the dumpster at the rear gate of MCC.”

A back gate corrections officer was also troubled by what he witnessed as the inmate brought down “bales” of shredded paper, according to a memo he wrote to investigators three days later, on Monday, Aug. 19.

“I believe that this conduct may be inappropriate for [an] investigative team to be shredding paperwork related to the investigation and you may want to investigate why BOP employees are destroying records,” the correctional officer wrote on Aug. 19 around 11 a.m.

“Can we take a look at the Dumpster ASAP to see if the paper is still there? Possible they didn’t dump it yet,” replied one of the federal agents whose name is redacted in the memo.

But it was already too late. The trash was picked up that very morning.

By that time, federal prosecutors had also found something else amiss: “We learned today that all institutional count slips for dates prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently ‘missing.’”

The discovery was only one of many suspicious events that unfolded in the days and weeks both before – and after – Epstein’s death, the Miami Herald has found from an analysis of thousands of pages of documents released by the Justice Department. In fact, there were so many irregularities discovered at the Manhattan jail that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) opened three separate probes into the case, with different case numbers, records and emails show.

First, there was the probe into Epstein’s death, which the medical examiner concluded was a suicide by hanging. Despite the ruling, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s estate disputes the finding by Dr. Barbara Sampson, who was then the chief medical examiner of the City of New York.

Dr. Michael Baden, also a former New York City chief medical examiner, argued that the injuries found in Epstein’s neck and the ruptured capillaries in his eyes were more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging.

michael baden office cbs CustomBaden, shown above in a photo used in a special by the CBS show 60 Minutes served for decades as a member of the New York State Correction Medical Review Board, an entity responsible for reviewing deaths of inmates in custody. Baden has conducted more than 20,000 autopsies including reviewing those of former President John F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.

But there were also two corruption probes associated with Epstein’s death: one, an obstruction-of-justice case involving the shredding of documents and possible charges of dereliction of duty and other misconduct by correctional officers; and second, a blackmail-for-sex scheme involving a correctional officer that the DOJ labeled a “Color of Law” probe.

That investigation grew out of inmate and correctional officer interviews in the aftermath of Epstein’s death. It’s not clear why it was attached to Epstein’s case. The Herald could find no connection.

What stands out, however, is that at some point early on, the cases seem to have changed hands from being an FBI criminal case — to matters that were handled by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has no criminal prosecution powers. The OIG is an independent agency that investigates allegations of fraud, waste or misconduct, but it must refer its findings to the DOJ for potential prosecution.

william barr at doj

The reason for the OIG taking over the probes isn’t entirely clear. From the outset, on the day Epstein’s body was found, then-Attorney General William Barr, above, immediately announced that Epstein died of an “apparent suicide.” And then, six days later, on Aug. 16, Sampson confirmed the suicide ruling.

With the cause and manner of death already determined, and no foul play suspected, the only aspects of the case left unresolved – at least in the eyes of the Justice Department – was whether the actions of any of the officers contributed to Epstein’s suicide.

This seemed to color the investigation almost from the beginning, since Epstein’s death was never treated as suspicious. As a result, his cell was never considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples and other evidence. One thing that got lost as a result of the cell not being examined was that the piece of fabric that Epstein allegedly used to hang himself was never identified.

It also should have been looked at carefully because on July 23 — just 18 days before he died — Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his cell. He initially told prison officials that his cellmate, Nick Tartaglione, had tried to kill him and that Tartaglione, a quadruple killer, had been threatening and extorting him. Tartagione denied he tried to harm Epstein, and Epstein later said he couldn’t recall what happened.

Prison officials concluded it was an attempted suicide. Still, the fact that Epstein had reported being threatened by inmates should have been enough for the DOJ to treat his death as suspicious.

Many, if not most, of the entities and investigators contained in the Epstein file documents reviewed by the Herald are redacted. This means that it’s impossible to fully understand which agents or agencies were communicating with each other about the various aspects of the Epstein investigations.

The Herald pieced some of the correspondence together in order to draw as complete a picture as possible of the various cases.

Separately, the Herald also found that the federal Bureau of Prisons wrote an “After Action Review” of Epstein’s suicide on Aug. 10, 2019. This 18-page report was conducted by an “After Action Review Team,” whose names are redacted from the report. This is likely the team that was in the prison in the days following Epstein’s death. The report refers to a review of “written documentation, electronic databases and limited staff conversations.”

us bureau of prisons seal CustomThe BOP said in a statement that the team is standard following prison suicides.

“These teams review such things as various background information for the inmate, health care and personality information, antecedent circumstances, and various other details surrounding the suicide. This team then draws conclusions and makes recommendations to the facility,” the BOP said.First call about documents being shredded

The first mention of document shredding was a call to the FBI’s Threat Operations Center from a corrections officer at 6:28 p.m. on Aug. 16, six days after his death. An FBI 302 form containing an interview with the officer noted that “Caller found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigating would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork” with all the officials from the FBI, BOP and OIG in the building.

The caller advised that if “anyone cares about what was shredded,” they needed to check the dumpster before it was collected at 8 a.m. on Monday. But that doesn’t appear to have happened.On Aug. 16, 2019, at 6:28 p.m. a correctional officer called the FBI tip line to report shredded documents.On Aug. 16, 2019, at 6:28 p.m. a correctional officer called the FBI tip line to report shredded documents.

Instead, about 11 a.m. Monday, a corrections officer wrote an email to the OIG reporting the shredding said that it appeared to be an unusually large number of trash bags at MCC’s back gate. It’s not clear whether the officer was the same one who had called on Friday.

Later that day, at about 7:30 p.m., an assistant federal prosecutor requested permission to interview the inmate who was identified as dumping the material. In the email, the prosecutor notes, “We are also investigating any efforts, following Epstein’s death, to obstruct justice by destroying relevant records at MCC. In particular, we learned today that all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently “missing.”

Two correctional officers on duty the night Epstein died, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were both interviewed in 2021 by the OIG. Both were questioned about whether they knew anything about Epstein’s “missing” MCC file.

“Did you ever remove or destroy any of Epstein’s paperwork?” the OIG agent asked Noel and Thomas in each of their interviews. Both replied, “no.”The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General interviewed Michael Thomas on June 17, 2021.The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General interviewed Michael Thomas on June 17, 2021.

The inmate who was identified as removing the shredded documents was interviewed by OIG agents on Aug. 20. One report indicated that a prison lieutenant whose name is redacted may have been present during the time the inmate was questioned. It was clear from the transcribed interview, however, that the inmate was concerned about whether he would face retaliation for talking about what he saw.

The inmate’s interview was not transcribed until four months later, on Dec. 19, 2019, and the original handwritten notes are not included in the report. The interview was 15 minutes.

The inmate, Steven Lopez, did not explain what he saw, and the agents didn’t ask.

Instead, they gave Lopez questions that he could respond with either yes or no answers.

“Do you have any information about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Did you overhear anyone talk about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Do you know what, if any documents were shredded?”

Lopez: “No idea what if anything was shredded, just did usual trash bin runs.”

The report ended with the statement: “Lopez had no other information relating to Epstein or the tip and informed that he is just trying to stay out of trouble, keep his head down and do his work. Lopez informed that he enjoyed the position he has and doesn’t want to screw it up in any way.”

Eight days later, the corrections officer who sent the email to the FBI was interviewed. While his name is redacted in the interview, an email sent days later identifies the complainant as officer Michael Kearins, and a subpoena for Kearins by OIG agents is included in the files. He said he had been working for BOP for almost 30 years. He admitted he sent the email and provided a first-hand account of what he heard and saw, records show.

According to the report, Kearins said that about 10:30 a.m on Aug. 15, Lopez approached the post at the rear gate at MCC with approximately three bags of shredded paper. Kearins recalled that Lopez said “they are shredding everything back there.”

According to Kearins, Lopez described one of the men involved in the shredding as white, with a Southern accent. Kearins said he didn’t know anyone at the prison who fit that description, so he surmised that he must have been part of the BOP’s After Action team related to Epstein’s death.

Lopez told him that the man ordered him to “make sure you get that box over there too.” Kearins said that another inmate (whose name is redacted) was also asked to help shred the documents. Kearins admitted he did not know what documents were being shredded or where they originated.New York City emergency workers remove Jeffrey Epstein from a federal prison in Manhattan with a gurney for transport to a hospital emergency room.

New York City emergency workers remove Jeffrey Epstein from a federal prison in Manhattan with a gurney for transport to a hospital emergency room.

March 20

 

President Trump and financier Jeffrey Epstein
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: March 19, 2026 [Blocking Epstein Files], Heather Cox Richardson, right, heather cox richardson cnnMarch 20, 2026. After yesterday’s revelation that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is blocking the release of a memo related to a Drug Enforcement Agency investigation into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and 14 co-conspirators, Attorney General Pam Bondi added more evidence to the idea that the DOJ is engaged in covering up the relationship between members of the Trump administration, including President Donald J. Trump himself, and Epstein.

On March 4, 2026, five Republicans joined the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to agree to subpoena Bondi to testify before it under oath about how the DOJ handled the release of the Epstein files. Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued the subpoena on March 17, requiring Bondi to appear before the committee on April 14. Kyle Stewart and Kyla Guilfoil of NBC News reported yesterday that a DOJ spokesperson said the subpoena was “completely unnecessary” and said Bondi “continues to have calls and meetings with members of Congress on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is why the Department offered to brief the committee.”

pam bondi 2025Yesterday, March 18, Bondi, left, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared at that “briefing,” a closed-door hearing before the committee in which they were not under oath. Democrats asked repeatedly if Bondi intended to comply with the subpoena; she refused to commit. When Summer Lee (D-PA) asked Comer if he would compel Bondi to comply and hold her in contempt if she doesn’t, Comer told her she was “bitching.”

Ultimately, the Democrats walked out of the briefing. Talking to reporters, Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who has been key to untangling the released Epstein files, said: “[T]o me, it’s very clear that the purpose of this entire fake hearing, this fake deposition, is the attorney general trying to weasel herself out of sitting in front of us under oath, under a bipartisan subpoena…. We asked her multiple times, ‘Are you going to come and speak with us under oath?’ She would not say yes.”

Frost pushed back on Republican colleagues who argued that the briefing should be enough. “We want her under oath because we do not trust her. Why don’t we trust her? Because she’s a liar.” He noted that in the recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee about the files, Bondi’s documents revealed the DOJ is keeping track of what documents members of Congress are reading. He also noted the DOJ has put up documents related to Trump only when investigators called out that they were missing.

“We want her under oath because we don’t trust her,” Frost reiterated. “We want her under oath because she has shown that she is involved in a cover up…. So we see this for what it is. This is not a briefing; a briefing is when we sit down and we’re getting information from the person giving the briefing. That didn’t happen here. She sat down, they started the clock like a hearing. It’s a hearing. It is a fake deposition, where no one can see what’s going on, with zero transcription, where it’s not on C-Span or anything, and where no one is under oath, and they are allowed to freely lie to members of Congress.”

March 19

 

 

Four Jeffrey Epstein trafficking victims file suit against Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, shown below right, with Epstein shown at center (March 10, 2026).

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: March 18, 2026 [Epstein Trafficking Probe], Heather Cox Richardson, right, March 19, 2026. I was intending to take tonight off, but there’s big news—I mean, aside from all the other big news—that I want to make sure gets attention.

Back on February 23, Daniel Ruetenik, Pat Milton, and Cara Tabachnick of CBS News reported on a newly uncovered document in the Epstein files showing that beginning in December 2010 under the Obama administration, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

The document showed the investigation, called “Chain Reaction,” was still underway in 2015. But the investigation disappeared, although the document suggested that it was a significant investigation and that the government was on the verge of indictments.

As soon as the story broke, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”

Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex-trafficking organization: it was his investigation that turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $1 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Wyden has pushed hard for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to produce the records of those suspicious transactions for the Senate Finance Committee, but Bessent refuses.

On February 25, two days after the story of the DEA investigation broke, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s [organized crime drug enforcement] task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and that since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.”

Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, including an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when Operation Chain Reaction concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

Today Wyden sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, saying: “It is my understanding that shortly after I requested an unredacted copy” of the document in the Epstein files, the Department of Justice “stepped in to prevent DEA from complying with my request. According to a confidential tip received by my staff, DEA Administrator Terry Cole was ready to provide an unredacted copy of the memorandum, but you stepped in to prevent him from doing so. My staff inquired with the DEA about the status of the production of this document and the DEA responded by directing questions to your office.”

The letter continued: “Your alleged interference in this matter is highly disturbing, not just because it continues the DOJ’s long-running obstruction of my investigation, but also because of your bizarrely favorable treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Epstein’s closest criminal associates. I should not have to explain the significance of the fact that Epstein was a target of [this high-level DEA] investigation. It suggests the government had ample evidence indicating he was engaged in large scale drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy and that Epstein was likely pumping his victims, including underage girls, with incapacitating drugs to facilitate abuse. I am at a loss to understand why you are blocking further investigation of this matter.”

Noting that the document in the files was “clearly marked as ‘unclassified’ at the top of every single page,” Wyden noted: “There is absolutely no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.” He added: “In order to assist my investigation into this matter, I demand that you immediately authorize the release of this document.”

Wyden also posted today on social media: “HUGE: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer who was also responsible for Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a cushy club fed—has intervened to block the DEA from providing details of a mysterious Epstein investigation to my Finance Committee team…. This is stunning interference. The document I’m after literally says ‘unclassified’ at the top. The investigation it details is closed. Given Blanche’s close personal ties to Donald Trump, this reeks of a continued coverup to protect key names in the Trump administration.”

Wyden’s post echoes the September 13, 2019, letter from then-chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, in which Schiff called out Maguire for illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint.

In that 2019 letter, Schiff warned: “The Committee can only conclude…that the serious misconduct at issue involves the President of the United States and/or other senior White House or Administration officials. This raises grave concerns that your office, together with the Department of Justice and possibly the White House, are engaged in an unlawful effort to protect the President and conceal from the Committee information related to his possible ‘serious or flagrant’ misconduct, abuse of power, or violation of law.”

Schiff was right: the whistleblower had flagged Trump’s July 2019 phone call with newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding Zelensky smear Joe Biden’s son Hunter before Trump would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine to fight off the Russian invasion that had begun in 2014. That information led to the story that Trump’s White House was running its own secret operation in Ukraine, apart from the State Department, for Trump’s own benefit. That story led to Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Schiff was the lead impeachment manager of the impeachment trial in the Senate, and in his closing argument, he implored Senate Republicans to bring accountability to “a man without character.” “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.”

“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country,” Schiff said. “You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.” “A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

But Republican senators stood behind Trump. They acquitted him of abuse of power, by a vote of 48 for conviction to 52 for acquittal. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah crossed the aisle to vote with the Democratic minority. Senate Republicans were unanimous in their vote to acquit Trump of obstruction of Congress.

And here we are.

Politico, Epstein’s lawyer tells House Oversight investigators he had ‘no knowledge’ of Epstein’s crimes, Hailey Fuchs, March 19, 2026. Darren Indyke’s appearance is the latest in the Oversight committee’s string of closed-door depositions with people in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit.

Darren Indyke, right, Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer and a co-executor of his estate, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he had no knowledge of the convicted sex offender’s crimes and rejected aspersions that he knowingly facilitated Epstein’s trafficking, according to a copy of prepared remarks obtained by POLITICO.

Darren indykeThe attorney’s defensive posture in the closed-door deposition on Thursday comes amid mounting pressure on the Justice Department and lawmakers to pursue criminal accountability for others who could have played a role in Epstein’s scheme. In his prepared opening statement, Indyke noted that he was appointed a co-executor of Epstein’s estate in 2019 by the U.S. Virgin Islands probate court, has cooperated with the Justice Department and helped found the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program.

“Let me be clear: I had no knowledge whatsoever of Jeffrey Epstein’s wrongdoings,” Indyke told congressional investigators, according to the prepared remarks. “My complete lack of involvement in that misconduct is a matter of record: not a single woman has ever accused me of committing sexual abuse or witnessing sexual abuse, nor claimed at any time that she or anyone else reported to me any allegation of Mr. Epstein’s abuse.”

He maintained that his relationship with Epstein was not social in nature and that he was only one of the lawyers with whom Epstein consulted — a list that included Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated the fallout of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

“My primary role was to provide corporate, transactional and general legal services to Mr. Epstein and his companies, and I did so,” Indyke planned to say.

Only one person has been convicted as part of Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme: Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate now serving 20 years in prison for her role in the crimes. She is seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Indyke is the latest in the Oversight committee’s string of closed-door depositions with people in Epstein’s orbit. Epstein’s onetime client and former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner and another co-executor of Epstein’s estate Richard Kahn also testified. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has also subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify before lawmakers over her handling of the Epstein files.

Unlike Wexner and Kahn, Maxwell invoked her Fifth Amendment right when she was questioned by the Oversight committee in a virtual deposition as part of its investigation into Epstein.

According to his prepared remarks, Indyke also denied any involvement in the facilitation of so-called “sham marriages” for women around Epstein, an allegation that appeared in a complaint filed in court by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. He described his onetime client as being “extremely contrite” after his 2008 sex crime conviction and added that he believed Epstein when he said did not know the woman was a minor.

César Chavez #MeToo Scandal

Dolores Huerta hands up

New York Times, Cesar Chavez Investigation: ‘We’re Just Seen as Sex Objects’: Dolores Huerta’s Years in the U.F.W., Sarah Hurtes and Manny Fernandez, March 19, 2026. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers talked about her relationship with César Chavez, and the night he raped her.

In the days after Thanksgiving in 1986, Dolores Huerta, shown above and below left in file photos, was ready to celebrate. As one of the co-leaders of the United Farm Workers union, she had spent four months in Washington lobbying lawmakers to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act, landmark legislation that granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants.

A news conference was scheduled to celebrate the victory, but Ms. Huerta said she was not made aware of the event. Instead, she said, her fellow U.F.W. leader, César Chavez, told her there was a crisis in Florida that required her immediate attention. Ms. Huerta flew to Florida, only to realize that the emergency was nonexistent and no one was expecting her. She spent the next few days speaking at senior centers.

“I realized afterward they just wanted to get me out of the way so they could take credit for the work,” she said of her male co-workers in an interview last week. “Straight male-chauvinist trick, and I was really upset about that.”

Dolores Huerta smileIn the interview, Ms. Huerta talked about the challenges she had faced as a woman in the machismo culture of the movement, which Mr. Chavez had come to dominate with the sheer force of his personality.

And in a stunning disclosure, she said that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted her on one occasion and manipulated her into sex on another, encounters that produced two children. A New York Times investigation detailed strong evidence that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted several women in the farmworkers’ movement, including two young teenagers.

Ms. Huerta and Mr. Chavez, standing together with raised fists at rallies and marches, were the public face of the Latino-led union organizing movement that swept through American farm fields in the 1960s.

Now 95, Ms. Huerta is often referred to as Grandmother of the Resistance. Her portrait hangs in some American embassies. She fought for years for better wages, maternity protections and basic safety measures for women doing the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting crops.

But in the interview, Ms. Huerta described a culture in U.F.W. under Mr. Chavez that forced her to struggle to be heard and to suppress any negative feelings she felt about him and his leadership — including the trauma of rape.

Ms. Huerta said the assault occurred in the winter of 1966, when she was at the People’s Bar and Cafe in Delano, Calif. — a well-known hangout for farmworker organizers. She was having a beer when Mr. Chavez stormed in, tapped her shoulder and asked for a word.

Assuming that the matter concerned an upcoming strike, she said, she followed him outside. It was common for them to have meetings in the car — Mr. Chavez worried that his office was bugged. He drove her to a secluded grape field on the outskirts of town, she said, and assaulted her.

She also described an earlier episode in 1960 — five years after first meeting Mr. Chavez — in which she felt pressured and manipulated into having sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano, in Southern California.

After the assault in 1966, she was left in a numb, shocked state, she said, but told no one. Not her friends, not her family, not even her daughter born from the assault.

She said she believed that the work of advancing rights for farmworkers was more important, and worried that publicly criticizing Mr. Chavez would tarnish the movement’s legacy and be exploited by political opponents.

“I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” she said. “I never talked about it to anybody and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

Ms. Huerta said she viewed Mr. Chavez as a contradictory figure when it came to women. He believed in promoting them, she said, but only so far.

Women ran the credit union, the clinic, the field offices. They were trusted with the operational machinery of the movement. But making the decisions that shaped the union’s direction, she said, remained out of reach. “Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said.

It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.”

 

César Chávez eagle photoPolitico, Sexual assault allegations roil bills honoring César Chávez, Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp and Heather Richards, March 19, 2026. California Democrats pursuing a national historical park to honor the activist said they would revise legislation to “respect the victims.”

politico CustomLawmakers are rethinking legislation that seeks to further honor the late activist César Chávez, shown above, after sexual misconduct allegations have now surfaced decades after his death.

President Barack Obama in 2012 created the César E. Chávez National Monument in Keene, California, and lawmakers have been wanting to turn the site into a national historic park. Those plans will now change.

Two California Democrats, Rep. Raul Ruiz and Alex Padilla, signaled yesterday they would no longer seek to advance legislation they previously championed, which would sought to “preserve the nationally significant sites associated with César E. Chávez and the farm worker movement across California and Arizona.”

Their companion bills also would have called for a study to create the “Farmworker Peregrinación National Historic Trail,” marking a 300-mile march that occurred in 1966.

“As the lead sponsor in House of the César E. Chávez and the Farmworker Movement National Historical Park Act, Congressman Ruiz will take steps to rename and revise the legislation in honor of farmworkers both to respect the victims and to serve as an initial step toward accountability,” a Ruiz aide said Wednesday.

Padilla’s office said that the senator supports the removal of Chávez’s name from any landmarks, institutions or honors, and plans to rework the Senate version of the legislation.

“There must be zero tolerance for abuse, exploitation, and the silencing of victims, no matter who is involved,” Padilla said in a statement. “Confronting painful truths and ensuring accountability is essential to honoring the very values the greater farm worker movement stands for — values rooted in dignity and justice for all.”

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus also issued a statement on social media calling Chávez “flawed beyond absolution,” while vowing to work to rename “streets, post offices, vessels and holidays” that honor Chávez.

A New York Times story this week detailed allegations that Chávez sexually assaulted women and girls, including Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with him. The existing 187-acre monument site includes the union headquarters.

Dennis Arguelles, the Southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, called the allegations against Chávez “deeply disturbing” but noted that the national monument is not about a “single person.”

“For many years, NPCA supported a national park site — the current national monument as well as a proposal that would include sites in several western states — that would honor the farmworker movement and those who fought for dignity, better working conditions, and fair wages,” Arguelles said in a statement. “This movement, which the National Park Service found to be nationally significant history, is not about a single person.”

He said the site, “the first to recognize contemporary Latinos, plays a critical role in ensuring that our country’s diversity and complex stories are shared.”

March 18

Associated Press, Democrats storm out of Justice Department leaders’ briefing on the Epstein files, Alanna Durkin, Richard and Stephen Groves, March 18, 2026. Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday stormed out of a closed-door briefing on the Jeffrey Epstein files by Justice Department leaders, and said they would push to force Attorney General Pam Bondi to answer questions under oath about the case that has plagued the Trump administration.

Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went to Capitol Hill to try to quell bipartisan frustration over the Justice Department’s handling of millions of files related to Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation.

But less than an hour into the briefing, Democrats walked out in protest of the arrangement and said they would press to enforce a subpoena for Bondi to appear for a sworn deposition next month.

“We want her under oath because we do not trust her,” said Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost.

Asked by reporters after the briefing whether she would comply with the subpoena, Bondi said, “I made it crystal clear I will follow the law.” She also defended the department’s handling of the Epstein files, saying officials are proud of their work to release millions of documents to the public.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. James Comer, accused Democrats of political grandstanding.“This for us, for the Republicans, it’s about getting answers,” Comer said after the briefing. “For the Democrats, it’s a political game, and they just demonstrated that today. There’s no reason for them to walk out and clutch their pearls and act like they were offended and outraged.”

Justice Department leaders had hoped the release of documents tied to the disgraced financier would put an end to a political saga that has dogged the president’s second term, but the agency remains consumed by questions and criticism over Epstein’s case and its management of the files. Bondi has accused Democrats of using the furor over the documents to distract from Trump’s political successes, even though some of the most vocal criticism has come from members of the president’s own party.

Five Republicans on the committee voted with Democrats to support the subpoena for Bondi to appear for a deposition on April 14. Lawmakers have accused the Justice Department of withholding too many files and criticized the agency for haphazard redactions that exposed intimate details about victims.

The Justice Department has called the subpoena “completely unnecessary,” noting that members of Congress have been invited to view unredacted files at the Justice Department and that department leaders have made themselves available to answer questions from lawmakers.

The department has sought to assure lawmakers and the public that there has been no effort to shield President Donald Trump, who says he cut ties with Epstein years ago after an earlier friendship, or any other high-profile figures close to Epstein from potential embarrassment. Justice Department leaders have also rejected suggestions that they have ignored victims and insist that while there is no evidence in the files to prosecute anyone else, they remain committed to investigating should new information come forward.

March 17

 

 

President Joe Biden kept a bust of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, above center, in the White House Oval Office.

President Joe Biden kept a bust of the late United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, above center, in the White House Oval Office.

ny times logoNew York Times, Investigation:Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years, Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes, March 18, 2026. An investigation by The New York Times found extensive evidence that the United Farm Workers co-founder groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement. The reporters interviewed several women who told their stories for the first time, as well as more than 60 other people, including Cesar Chavez’s top aides and relatives. The reporters also reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material.

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.Editors’ PicksRead These Books Before They Hit Your Screens in 2026With Twin Babies, the Opera Star Lise Davidsen Wonders What Comes NextWhy Do Men Buy Shoes That Are Too Big?

“I wanted to die,” she said.ImageCesar Chaves marching alongside Ana Murguia, who is holding a flag, in a black-and-white photograph.Cesar Chavez, center, and Ana Murguia, right, in a black shirt, during the United Farm Workers’ 1,000 Mile March in 1975.Credit...Cathy Murphy/Getty Images

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent. (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.

The findings are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.

The accounts of abuse from Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas were independently verified through interviews with those they confided in decades ago and in more recent years. Elements of their stories were also corroborated in documents, emails, itineraries and other writings from union organizers, supporters of Mr. Chavez and historians.

The Times spoke at length with Ms. Huerta, the renowned Latina activist who helped run the farmworkers’ union with Mr. Chavez and coined the social-justice rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” loosely translated as “Yes, we can.”

She said she has held on to a dark secret for nearly 60 years.

One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.

Ms. Huerta later began a long-term domestic partnership with Mr. Chavez’s brother Richard, with whom she had four children. He died in 2011.

Ms. Huerta turns 96 on April 10. Her memories of the details of the assault that night in Delano are at times hazy. But she speaks of the attack in a startlingly matter-of-fact manner.

She described being stunned by Mr. Chavez’s aggression, and then numb to it. She framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing. Now, her accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history.

“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children — it’s really awful,” Ms. Huerta said.ImageDolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez smiling in a crowd.Dolores Huerta, left, and Cesar Chavez in Fresno, Calif., in 1965.Credit...Carl Crawford/Fresno Bee/ZUMA Press, via Reuters

More than 30 years after his death, Mr. Chavez has become only more revered in the Latino community, as President Trump’s efforts to limit immigration and scale back rights threaten to destroy many of the gains secured by decades of his work.

Through a series of grueling fasts, grape boycotts and marches that captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Chavez drew a spotlight to the plight of the American farmworker. He not only improved wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families but also strengthened the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.

He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1994. When Joseph R. Biden Jr. entered the White House in 2021, he put a bronze bust of Mr. Chavez on display in the Oval Office.

The allegations of rape and sexual abuse are likely to have far-reaching consequences.

On Tuesday, the United Farm Workers issued a statement saying that the organization would not take part in any activities celebrating Mr. Chavez’s birthday on March 31. The union said the “troubling allegations” that were surfacing were incompatible with the organization’s values, adding that it did not have firsthand knowledge of any misconduct.

“We need some time to get this right, including to ensure robust, trauma-informed services are available to those who may need it,” the union said in its statement.

Mr. Chavez’s family said on Tuesday night that they were “not in a position to judge” the claims. “As a family steeped in the values of equity and justice, we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual misconduct,” they said in a statement. “These allegations are deeply painful to our family.”

A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.

Internal emails dating back over a decade show union members discussing Ms. Murguia’s claims of abuse and the impact it had on her life. One of Ms. Murguia’s relatives confronted Mr. Chavez while he was still alive, in the 1980s. According to the relative, Mr. Chavez offered no defense and responded only by clearing his throat.

More than 10 years ago, members of a private Facebook group for longtime Chavez organizers and supporters were stunned to read a post from Ms. Rojas that she wrote in a fit of anger as they prepared to celebrate the holiday in his name.

Al Jazeera, Photos show ‘grave-like plots’ at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, tipster claims, John Power, March 17, 2026. Member of the public sent images to state lawmakers, claiming they showed dug-up burial sites, emails show.

A member of the public claims to have seen “grave-like plots” at Jeffrey Epstein’s former ranch in New Mexico and has shared photos of the purported burial sites with lawmakers investigating the late American sex offender.

The tipster shared the images with the two state lawmakers last month amid renewed scrutiny of Epstein’s activities at the Zorro Ranch.The claims, which have not been independently verified, have not been previously reported and do not appear to be included in the Epstein files publicly disclosed by the United States Department of Justice.

The department had releases millions of pages related to criminal investigations of the financier in late January, some of which referenced Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.

Al Jazeera obtained the tipster’s correspondence and photos via a public records request with the New Mexico Department of Justice.

In an email on February 16, a member of the public whose name has been redacted told Democratic Representatives Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya that he or she had broken into Epstein’s former ranch in 2020 and come across multiple plots that “were dug up”.

The tipster, who included two photos of purported plots with the email, speculated that bodies had been “removed” from the sites.

“I realize this might be illegal,” the person wrote, referring to their act of venturing onto the property, “but men like that don’t deserve the protection of the law.”

Epstein ranchEpstein ranchA tipster claims these photos show ‘grave-like plots’ at Jeffrey Epstein’s former ranch in New Mexico [New Mexico Department of Justice]

The tipster also shared photos of the exterior of Epstein’s mansion and a white yurt located on the grounds of the property, as well as pictures of a defibrillator and a statue of a man of African appearance purportedly taken from inside the tent.

“In the White Yurt, they must have been doing rituals where they felt like they needed a defibrillator,” the person wrote.Get instant alerts and updates based on your interests. Be the first to know when big stories happen.

Romero, who is leading a bipartisan commission looking into Epstein’s activities in New Mexico, forwarded the correspondence to Kyle Hartsock, the director of special investigations at the New Mexico Department of Justice, who assured the lawmaker that the tip was “being looked into.” 

jp morgan chase logo
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, Exhibit 144: The JP Morgan Files, Escape Key, March 17, 2026. In 2023, JPMorgan Chase was forced to hand over its own internal files on Jeffrey Epstein as part of a lawsuit brought by his victims. The bank’s lawyers compiled a twenty-three-page summary of what they found.

It was meant to assess legal risk.

He managed the career of JPMorgan’s investment bank chief, designed a major financial product linked to Bill Gates, arranged private meetings with fourteen foreign ministers, deployed a British royal and a former EU trade commissioner as commercial assets, and held security clearance. He also designed a new type of ‘social good’ currency — initially called a ‘charitable currency unit’ — and sent the blueprint to Gates’s chief science adviser, eight years before the Bank for International Settlements began building the same thing.

The bank's compliance review — compiled specifically to assess exposure in a sex trafficking lawsuit — contains a handful of oblique references to young women. It devotes twenty-two pages to all of this.

A separate investigation by the US Senate found that JPMorgan reported just $4.3 million in suspicious transactions from Epstein’s accounts while he was alive — but reported $1.3 billion after he died. The bank paid $365 million in settlements.

This essay walks through the document line by line, and shows how it independently confirms everything documented in the previous Epstein essays on this Substack — from a source produced three years before those essays were written.

The ultimate implication here — beyond confirming Epstein's status as a switchboard operator — is that a significant portion of the development finance industry is built on a foundation it would prefer not to have examined.

On 25 July 2023, JPMorgan Chase filed Exhibit 144 in Case 1:22-cv-10904-JSR — the sex trafficking facilitation lawsuit brought by Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in the Southern District of New York. The exhibit is a twenty-three-page internal compliance summary of the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, compiled from internal emails and correspondence between Epstein and senior JPMorgan executives.

Jeffrey Epstein and Jes Staley 2The bank produced it to assess institutional exposure. Its compliance lawyers had one narrow question: how deep was the relationship between Epstein, above left, and Jes Staley, above right, then head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, and what did senior management know?

Their answer runs to twenty-two pages of chronological, bullet-pointed evidence — and it reads, unintentionally, as independent corroboration of every major claim made in the essays published on this Substack since February 2026: the original trilogy — Epstein: The Switchboard Operator, Epstein II: The Development of a Digital Currency, and Epstein III: The Intelligence Channel — as well as Epstein’s Seven, The Epstein/Bannon Interview, and Agents for the Rothschilds.

Those essays drew exclusively on the Department of Justice’s 2025–2026 document releases — the Epstein side of the correspondence. This exhibit provides the other side: JPMorgan’s internal records. A November 2025 memorandum from the Senate Finance Committee, based on further unsealed records from the same litigation, adds a third independent source.

The three archives were produced by different legal processes, compiled by different lawyers, for different institutional purposes. None had any interest in confirming the others — yet, they interlock almost perfectly

The previous essays documented Epstein as a switchboard operator — a coordination node routing connections between finance, intelligence, and governance. The JPMorgan document confirms this and goes further, revealing something the DOJ releases did not: the depth of Epstein’s operational control over the bank’s own senior executive.

On 31 July 2008 — while Epstein was incarcerated in Palm Beach — Staley wrote: ‘Hey boss, We just got done with Jamie’s off site’. On 16 July, he had asked Epstein how much he should tell Jamie Dimon to pay him, describing the expected results and asking for guidance. Epstein replied with a precise negotiating strategy: ‘Tell him a one million dollar increase to 25 million... DO Not give in’.

Throughout September 2009, the document records Epstein managing Staley’s promotion to sole CEO of JPMorgan’s investment bank. On 3 September, Epstein wrote: ‘I am told you are on track’. On 11 September: ‘steves really a dead man walking. so little he can do’ — a reference to Steve Black, then head of the investment bank. On 25 September, Epstein scripted the message Staley should deliver in three numbered parts. Two days later, Staley forwarded a draft organisational announcement to Epstein as ‘FYI’ before it was released internally.

On 18 October 2009, Epstein wrote: ‘feel free to call often, it is difficult for the quarterback to see the playing field. That’s why he calls up to the box’. The man in the box, watching the entire field — that was the role he had assigned himself.

The relationship went well beyond advice. Jes Staley — the head of JPMorgan’s investment bank — called Epstein ‘boss’, sought his permission to visit properties, forwarded confidential internal documents, accepted detailed operational direction on hiring, compensation, strategy, and presentation — and reported back on his meetings with heads of state. III. The Dynastic Capture

The document also reveals a subtler dimension to the control. Epstein did not merely manage Staley’s career; he embedded himself in his family.

A separate section of the compliance summary records Epstein helping with the graduate school admissions process for Staley’s daughter. On 27 April 2009, Epstein emailed Staley with a list of scientists his daughter could meet: ‘seth lloyd mit quantum computing.. gell-man, santa-fe institute, quarks... brian columbia - string theory... leonard susskind... she can see the large hadron collider in switzerland. private tour’.

When Staley forwarded his daughter’s CV and expressed concern about her prospects, Epstein replied: ‘she can sit with Richard Axel when I get back, he won the Nobel prize.. he has guaranteed me’. Staley remained anxious. Epstein: ‘john kluge gave 4 billion to the school,, will you relax’.

In January 2011, Epstein wrote that Lee Bollinger — President of Columbia University and a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York² — ‘will come say hi, in davos as well’. Epstein was deploying Nobel laureates and Ivy League presidents to smooth a banker’s daughter’s path through graduate school.

The effect was to bind Staley to Epstein at a level beyond professional convenience. Career management can be replaced; the man who guaranteed your daughter’s future through the scientific establishment and the president of Columbia is a different category of obligation. IV. The Jailhouse Switchboard

In the Bannon interview — filmed in early 2019 and partially released in the DOJ’s 2026 document dump — Epstein described his role during the 2008 financial crisis with characteristic bluntness. He told Bannon he had been advising the US Treasury from a jail cell, calling the president of Bear Stearns on one phone and a contact at JPMorgan on the other: ‘I was actually going between two phones talking to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan at the same time’. The following day, he called ’another person in Washington... they were at the Treasury Department’.

The JPMorgan document confirms this was not an exaggeration. The July–October 2008 email sequence records Staley writing to Epstein while he was incarcerated, reporting on the crisis in real time. On 26 September: ‘Wamu is an unbelievable deal. But thus is still going out of control’. On 27 September: ‘What a deal Jamie did. I’m spending a lot of time with Treasury. The Private Bank has brought in $44 billion dollars in the last two weeks’. On 29 September: ‘I hope you keep the island. We all may need to live there’.

On 10 October, Staley wrote: ‘I am dealing with the Fed on an idea to solve things. I need a smart friend to help me think through this stuff’. The following day, he forwarded a term sheet that had been sent to Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

The switchboard was operational during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, run from a prison cell in Palm Beach — with JPMorgan’s investment bank chief as the reporting line.The Epstein/Bannon Interview The Epstein/Bannon Interviewesc · Mar 16Read full story V. The Sovereign Routing Function

The original essays documented Epstein routing sovereign contacts between intelligence, finance, and political nodes. The JPMorgan document shows the same function operating directly through the bank.

On 1 October 2010, Epstein forwarded an email to Staley with the subject line ‘this is nuts’ and the text: ‘jeffrey, please come. you may have private time with each. your security clearance is approved’. Below it, fourteen sovereign representatives:

Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

Epstein had security clearance. He was arranging private audiences with foreign ministers and heads of state for JPMorgan’s investment bank CEO. This detail — Epstein holding security clearance — does not appear in any of the DOJ releases used in the original essays.

On 29 October 2010, Epstein wrote to Staley: ‘some of the bigger players, and now sheik mohammed from dubai, have asked for private talks. I need to decide how to gear up my advisory business. grab a group from ___? Hire 5-10 stars? Larry?, peter? andrew?’ The three names — Summers, Mandelson, and Prince Andrew — correspond exactly to the American, British, and intelligence channels documented in the trilogy, here being assembled into a formal advisory structure for Gulf sovereign clients.

On 28 July 2012, Epstein forwarded Staley an email from the President of the Maldives, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, seeking to borrow $500 million repayable over ten years³. One month later, Reuters reported that China had made a $500 million loan to the Maldives⁴. The switchboard had sight of sovereign borrowing requirements before they were fulfilled.

 

Cesar Chavez

César Chavez Foundation, Statement from the César Chavez Foundation, Staff Report, March 17, 2026, The César Chavez Foundation has become aware of disturbing allegations that  César Chavez, shown above, engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with women and minors duringhis time as President of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).

We are deeply shocked and saddened by what we are hearing.

The Foundation is working with leaders in the Farmworker Movement to be responsive to these allegations, support the people who may have been harmed by his actions, and ensure we are united and guided by our commitment to justice and community empowerment.

In partnership with the UFW, we are establishing a safe and confidential process for those who wish to share their experiences of historic harm, and, if they choose to, participate in efforts toward repair and reconciliation. In addition, we are investing time and resources to ensure the Foundation promotes and strengthens a workplace culture that is safe and welcoming for all.

We ask for our community’s patience as we learn more. Throughout this process, our organization and our partners in the movement will continue our work together to protect and uplift the families and communities that we serve.

Today, the Cesar Chavez Foundation impacts the lives of millions of Latinos and working families across the Southwest by inspiring and transforming communities through social enterprises that address essential human, cultural, and community needs.

March 16

New York Times, One of Epstein’s Levers of Power: Access to Elite Private Schools, Jan Ransom, March 16, 2026. Jeffrey Epstein used his money and influence in the world of elite private schools to assist friends and acquaintances.

After Jeffrey Epstein agreed to pay more than $14,000 in private school tuition for the children of a German artificial intelligence researcher, he followed up with a pointed request: “You have yet to tell me your insights into how people see me.”

It was the summer of 2017. Mr. Epstein had recently been sued by yet another woman who had accused him of having trafficked her for sex, and he was eager for the opinion of the researcher, whose work he was funding.

The exchange, which was included in the millions of files related to Mr. Epstein released by the Justice Department, shows how he wielded tuition payments to private primary and secondary schools, and the perception that he could sway their admissions processes, to build relationships and gain influence even after he was convicted of sex crimes in Florida.

A review of the Epstein files turned up dozens of mentions of the Trinity School in Manhattan, Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, the Masters School in Westchester and other elite academies across casual conversations, dashed off emails and other records. In some cases, hopeful parents contacted Mr. Epstein for help with tuition or gaining admission for their children. In others, he appeared to reach out to the parents on his own initiative.

Among the parents were the researcher, Joscha Bach; the media and real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman; Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Trinity board member who dated Mr. Epstein before marrying the hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; and Mr. Epstein’s private banker.

All the exchanges occurred after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes in Florida in 2008, and before federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused him of sexually abusing dozens of girls and indicted him on sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019. There is no suggestion in the files that the parents aided Mr. Epstein in any wrongdoing.

But the messages underscore how deeply entrenched Mr. Epstein had remained in the circles of the powerful even after he registered as a sex offender.

Mr. Epstein had long associated with prestigious private schools. He served briefly as a math and science teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side before he was dismissed for poor performance and went to work in finance, and in the years that followed he moved in the same circles as some of the school’s leaders and prominent alumni.

In doing so, and occasionally offering to call in favors, Mr. Epstein was following a well-worn path for Americans of wealth and privilege, said Adam Howard, an education professor at Colby College who has studied prestigious private schools.

“This issue is not simply about Epstein or one man,” Mr. Howard said. “It is that these elite institutions often operate in a culture of quiet sponsorship and leverage and social networks. Most of us in the U.S. have no way of accessing these kind of networks that have one function and one function only: to make and remake elites.”

mit logoFor Mr. Bach, the tuition payments came as part of an agreement that Mr. Epstein would fund his research at M.I.T. and Harvard — and his family’s living costs in the United States — from about 2013 to 2019.

Mr. Bach, who studies theories of consciousness and artificial intelligence, said he was connected with Mr. Epstein by other prominent scientists. In all, Mr. Bach accepted more than $180,000 from Mr. Epstein and stayed in one of his Manhattan apartments for a time in 2015.

The payments included more than $31,000 in tuition for Mr. Bach’s children to attend the private German International School Boston in 2016 and 2017, emails show. School officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Editors’ PicksA TV Empire Built on Humor and HeartHow Gin, Wax and Heat Guns Make Onscreen Meals Look DeliciousCan You Really ‘Detox’ From Plastic?

In an email to The New York Times, Mr. Bach said he received advice from scientists he respected saying that he should accept funding from Mr. Epstein.

“However, if I had known or suspected the horrible things that Epstein had been accused of after he was arrested again, or that he might engage in any renewed criminal conduct, I would not have accepted his funding or associated with him in any way,” Mr. Bach said.

“When Epstein offered to fund my research,” Mr. Bach said, “I told him that this might be difficult, because I have two children and would have to move my family to the U.S., which I could not afford.”

“He told me that he would take care of our living expenses for the time of the project,” he added, and said of the tuition payments: “This was part of the research funding he gave me.”

The files do not include a reply from Mr. Bach in which he shared his views about Mr. Epstein’s reputation. In a post on the website Substack late last year, he described Mr. Epstein as a “high-functioning sociopath” who was “high strung, intensely curious and utterly devoid of fear, guilt or shame.”

In the case of Mr. Zuckerman, he and Mr. Epstein had a long association, socializing and even at one point investing alongside one another. But by early 2014, their relationship had become tense: Mr. Epstein was aggressively pushing for Mr. Zuckerman, a billionaire, to hire him for estate planning, and Mr. Zuckerman had decided against doing so, the files show.

March 14 

 

larry krasner epsteinThe Other 98%, Advocacy: This is the move everyone has been waiting for, March 14, 2026. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, above top, just told every person connected to Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking empire that state prosecutors are coming for them, and there's not a thing Donald Trump can do about it.

other 98 percent logo"Hey Epstein class, you may think that whatever happened on that island or happened in Epstein's mansion is not going to haunt you," Krasner said. "Let me tell you who is going to haunt you. It's the prosecutors at the state court level who still care about the Constitution, the laws, and justice."

Because Epstein's operation was sprawling and transnational, it crisscrossed through countless local jurisdictions. That means state prosecutors across the country potentially have standing to bring charges. And here's the part that should have every powerful person on that client list losing sleep: state court convictions cannot be pardoned by any president. Period.

Krasner emphasized that the statute of limitations for crimes involving children extends for years, giving prosecutors a long runway. Any conviction at the state level means real time served, no matter who's in the White House.Krasner already founded the F.A.F.O. coalition, a network of progressive prosecutors from cities including Minneapolis, Dallas, Austin, and multiple Virginia jurisdictions, built specifically to hold powerful people accountable when the federal government refuses to.

He's not bluffing. He's building infrastructure.Under Pam Bondi, the DOJ has shown zero interest in pursuing Epstein's associates. The files have been buried. The investigations have stalled. The coverup is happening in plain sight.So if the federal government won't do its job, Krasner is saying the states will. And the beauty of this approach is that it only takes one indictment. One associate flips. Then another. Then the whole thing unravels.The powerful have spent years assuming they were untouchable. Krasner just told them they're not.

other 98 percent logoOther98 uses meme warfare and strategic coalition-building to challenge the corporations and billionaires that have hijacked our democracy. We're elevating stories from the front lines of crucial struggles for justice to fight like hell for an America that works for the other 98% of us.

March 10

 

Four Epstein trafficking victims file suit against Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, shown below right (March 10, 2026).Four Jeffrey Epstein trafficking victims file suit against Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, shown below right, with Epstein shown at center (March 10, 2026).

The Search for Accountability, The Epstein Cover-Up: A Lawsuit Against Pam Bondi and the Fight for Justice, Duyen Elaine and Tháng Ba, March 11, 2026. In a shocking turn of events, dozens of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have filed a lawsuit against former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, alleging that she played a crucial role in shielding Epstein from a more thorough investigation.

This lawsuit, led by Maria Farmer—one of the first women to accuse Epstein publicly—has become a focal point for those who have fought for years to bring the truth about Epstein’s crimes to light.

The plaintiffs claim that critical details about Epstein’s activities were concealed during the initial investigation and that influential figures, including Bondi, may have deliberately allowed Epstein to avoid more serious charges. This explosive lawsuit has not only rekindled interest in the Epstein case but also raised serious questions about the role of powerful individuals in protecting one of the most infamous sex traffickers in modern history.

As the case gains momentum, it could reveal new, vital information about the way Epstein’s case was mishandled—and whether those who could have stopped him were instead complicit in his ability to evade justice for years.

Bondi faces pressure after first release of Epstein files fell short of expectations | PBS News

The Jeffrey Epstein case has become a symbol of corruption and the deep-rooted power dynamics that allow sexual abuse and trafficking to flourish within the elite circles of society. For years, Epstein’s wealth and connections seemed to shield him from prosecution, despite mounting evidence of his crimes. It was only in 2019, after Epstein’s arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors, that the full scope of his abuse began to unravel.

Before his arrest, Epstein had faced allegations of sexual abuse from numerous women, some of whom were minors at the time. Yet, his high-profile connections—spanning politicians, business leaders, and celebrities—allowed him to avoid serious consequences for years. The leniency with which his previous cases were handled raises unsettling questions about the extent to which Epstein was protected by those in power.The Role of Pam Bondi: A Controversial Figure

Pam Bondi, the former Attorney General of Florida, has come under intense scrutiny for her actions during the handling of Epstein’s case in the early stages. According to the lawsuit, Bondi, alongside other officials, played a role in covering up crucial information that could have led to more serious charges against Epstein.

In 2008, Epstein struck a controversial plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to two state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor. The deal, which many have criticized as a “sweetheart deal,” allowed Epstein to serve just 13 months in a county jail, with work release privileges. Despite the severity of the charges, the deal effectively protected Epstein from facing federal charges related to sex trafficking.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that Bondi, as the Attorney General at the time, was part of a larger effort to protect Epstein. They claim that key details about his crimes were intentionally overlooked or suppressed, allowing him to continue his predatory behavior unchecked for years. The survivors believe that Bondi’s involvement in the investigation’s early stages helped Epstein avoid more severe charges and prolonged his reign of abuse.

alexander brothers

March 6

 

djt epstein hand on shoulder

djt epstein fbi excerpt 85 85 teen rape claimThe FBI released in redacted form this week its 2019 reports recording claims by a woman stating that she had been sexually assaulted and then threatened by Donald Trump and his friend Jeffrey Epstein in the period 1983 to 1985 when she was in her early teens.

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Alleged Trump Victim’s Claims about Blackmail Are as Important as Her Claims about Rape, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), March 6, 2026. marcy wheelerYesterday, DOJ released the three interview reports from a woman who alleged she was abused by Donald Trump that it had previously withheld.

As NPR notes, DOJ is still withholding a number of materials (notes from her interviews and, far more importantly, details about the handling of the interview) relating to the accusation. That matters because, it is now clear, DOJ withheld — and is still withholding — the originals of the interview reports.

And that matters given the timeline of the accusations and the fact that, just days before Epstein suicided, the victim claimed Epstein and Trump spoke about blackmail.

Here’s what the timeline looks like:

July 8, 2019: SDNY [Southern District of New York] announced arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and included a tip line for others who had been abused by Epstein.

July 8: The alleged victim’s friend called the tip line. She explained that the friend had recently told her about the Trump incident. And on the day of the Epstein arrest, the friend asked the victim if Epstein had also abused her, too, and the victim said yes.

July 24: 16 days later, the FBI interviewed the alleged victim for the first time. That interview (the one that did originally get released) focused almost entirely on Epstein. Trump only came up in the context of that conversation with the friend who called the tip line and one other friend. And she went to some (futile) length to crop Trump out of that picture.

djt epstein fbi teen victim july 24

August 7: On August 7, the FBI did a follow-up interview. The interview started with the alleged victim saying that she felt comfortable enough describing the other men who abused her, starting with a guy named Atkins (who also had a relationship with her mother). Nevertheless, more than half the interview focused on Epstein. At the bottom of page 7 of 10, the report begins to record her allegations about Trump: He didn’t like that she was a tomboy, he got her alone in a room and forced her down on him saying something to the effect of, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.” She bit him. He said, “get this little bitch the hell out of here,” but in the telling, others came back in the room and a beautiful blonde lady told her to wear a bra, which is to say a description of the claim later produced in a power point is inaccurate — she described that he called for her to be removed, but she was not.

djt epstein fbi excerpt 85 85 teen rape claimAnother paragraph describes the victim describing further conversations between Epstein and Trump. Then the interview focused back on Epstein for six paragraphs, including a claim that Epstein came to trust her, that he spoke another language occasionally.

The interview ended with these two paragraphs — one mixing details of Epstein blackmailing her mother and discussing blackmail with Trump, with additional random details suggesting more contact with Trump than any other document, and a final paragraph describing she was afraid Epstein’s people would come after her.

djt epstein teen blackmail claim fbi 1983 85

August 9: The first interview report was finalized on August 9, two days after the second interview in which the victim claimed that she had heard Epstein and Trump talk about blackmail.

August 10: And then, three days after this woman described Epstein and Trump discussing blackmail and the day after FBI entered the first interview with this woman, Epstein suicided. There’s no public evidence the timing was anything but a wild coincidence. But at the very least, it must have made the treatment of these documents even more politically fraught.

August 20: The third interview with the woman took place at a time when Epstein could no longer be held accountable because he was dead, on August 20. After a completely redacted administrative paragraph, that interview report started by focusing on Trump, whose alleged abuse of the woman might have taken place in SDNY, or New Jersey, either of which would have given those FBI agents jurisdiction to investigate.

djt espstein teen first djt interaction

The next paragraph described her claim that her mother’s embezzlement conviction had a tie to Epstein and the Atkins guy she claimed had also abused her. It was followed by a reference to Epstein’s brother (which is pertinent not least because Mark Epstein says Jeffrey never spent summers in South Carolina, where all this allegedly started).

djt epstein fbi teen rape threats 1983 85

And then the remainder of the interview, nine paragraphs over three pages, focused on threats she believed arose from harassment from Epstein. In just one of those paragraphs, in which she explained why she attributed these threats to Epstein even though no one ever said they came from him, is she recorded as mentioning Trump.

August 22: The second interview — the one where the alleged victim claimed that Epstein and Trump talked about blackmail just days before Epstein suicided in prison — was entered weeks later, on August 22, two days after describing that she had been harassed for years and she attributed that harassment, with no evidence, to Epstein.

August 30: The third interview was entered on August 30.

October 16: The final interview took place on October 16. The attorney who had represented her to date was not present and she had, in the interim, told the FBI that she was working with what must be Lisa Bloom on a civil suit, which would be filed in December. She refused the FBI request to record the interview. They explained that they wanted to focus the interview on Epstein’s associates who abused her (which makes sense given that Epstein himself was dead). and asked her if she would provide more details about what happened with Trump. She said nothing could be done about it, which is why she stopped cooperating.

October 22: That final interview was entered on October 22, well into the focus on impeachment.

December 27: On December 27, a Jane Doe 4 made an allegation in a lawsuit that had not been shared with the FBI: that after hitting her in the face, a prominent businessman (who is not described as Trump, though Trump is mentioned elsewhere) vaginally and anally raped her. The lawsuit also states with certainty this happened in New York when, in her interviews with the FBI, the victim was not sure whether it happened in New Jersey or New York.

46. Jane Doe 4 was brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally. On information and belief, Epstein was aware of and, indeed encouraged, the assault of Jane Doe 4 by these other men.

These interviews reveal several things. First, the victim’s allegations were not focused primarily on Trump; she was focused on a man she claimed to be Epstein. Indeed, in the first interview, Trump came up primarily in the context of explaining the role of the photograph used to ID Epstein, not Trump. Her second interview did include the Trump allegation amidst a much greater focus on Epstein, but her claim that the two discussed blackmail in front of her is every bit as inflammatory as the rape claim.

Remember, when Pam Bondi and Kash Patel attempted to dismiss this whole issue last July, they claimed, “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” That’s factually false; there’s clear evidence Epstein was pressuring Bill Gates. But given that, weeks later, the FBI listed the allegation from this woman first in what appears to be prep for Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, it is exceedingly likely they had this claim in mind when they dismissed the credibility of all blackmail claims. The Alleged Trump Victim’s Claims about Blackmail Are as Important as Her Claims about Rape

This woman told the FBI that Epstein and Trump discussed blackmail, and days later he suicided in prison.

And after that, the FBI wanted to focus on Trump because, well, Epstein wasn’t around to be prosecuted anymore.

Then, years later, DOJ attempted to withhold documents recording all that.

When faced with overwhelming evidence that they had withheld documents implicating Trump, DOJ released them. But the excuses it gave are as suspect as the withholding.

As NPR explained, when caught withholding these documents, DOJ claimed they had withheld them because they were duplicates, and now is effectively saying, oops, they weren’t duplicates.

The Justice Department has repeatedly told NPR that any documents withheld were “privileged, are duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation.”

Last week, after NPR’s initial story, the Justice Department said it was determining if records had been mistakenly tagged as duplicates and if any were found, “the Department will of course publish it, consistent with the law.”

But in fact, these documents — every one of the documents released so far — are duplicates.

As NPR focused in their original story on the withholding, what got released was the discovery shared with Ghislaine. Both the original release and these includes three Bates stamps, including the series — 3501.045-003, here — tied to discovery to Ghislaine, along with stamps from that production.

The Ghislaine material is the definition of duplicate material, because everything that went to her should have an original copy in the FBI’s case file.

But we didn’t get any of those originals. We still haven’t gotten those originals. We can’t be sure if the originals still exist. DOJ certainly hasn’t given us the originals, they gave us duplicates after saying these were duplicates.

DOJ not only withheld documents documenting a claim that Trump raped a teenager, and with it, a claim that Trump and Epstein discussed blackmail, but they’re still withholding the originals of all that. 

 

  Visit the Justice Integrity Project #MeToo/Trafficking site for other daily updates.

 

 

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