Louisiana Stopped a Vote in Progress. The Ruling That Made It Legal Isn’t Even Final Yet.

The Callais decision came down on Wednesday. By Thursday morning, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry had suspended the state’s May 16 House primary by emergency order. Over 100,000 absentee ballots had already been mailed out. Some had been returned. He stopped a live election so the legislature could redraw the congressional map without majority-Black districts. The Florida Senate passed its own GOP gerrymander the same day. Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama are queued up next.

Heather Cox Richardson laid out what the six Republican justices actually did: they didn’t formally strike Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, they made it impossible to enforce. Plaintiffs now have to prove intentional racial discrimination, a standard the same Court has already declared off-limits to federal review when it shows up as partisan gerrymandering. Stacey Abrams said the ruling “all but killed the law that helped kill Jim Crow.” Justice Kagan, in dissent, accused the majority of betraying its duty to faithfully implement the statute Congress wrote.

Robert Hubbell caught the detail nobody else has surfaced: the Callais judgment isn’t even final for another 25 days. Landry’s emergency order is legally premature. He stopped a sitting election to redraw a map based on a ruling that hasn’t taken effect. Multiple lawsuits are already filed. On Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer and Alex Wagner walked through the seat math: somewhere between 10 and 19 House seats are now in play for Republicans before the midterms. Fair Fight Action’s response is that Democrats have to gerrymander hard in seven blue states — New York, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota — to neutralize it. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark pushed back: “Gerrymandering Total War” is a bleak definition of pro-democracy strategy, and a coalition built on “we have to rig it back” doesn’t win persuadable voters.

The gerrymandering race to the bottom is on, and Democrats have to retaliate. When the “moderate” DC pundits start pointing at both sides, remember how this actually happened. Trump asked Texas to rig the map. They did it without asking voters. California responded at the ballot. Virginia responded at the ballot. Florida is rigging its map in direct violation of a constitutional amendment 63% of its own voters passed. Then the conservative Supreme Court poured gas on the fire.

One side is fighting for democracy. The other is fighting to rig it.

The good news: this can end tomorrow. Democrats already have a bill in Congress that would ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide. If Republicans got behind it, it would pass with veto-proof majorities.

Read more: Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark, Pod Save America, Democracy Docket.

The Iran War Hits 60 Days. Intel Says Iran Can Outlast Him.

Today is the 60-day deadline under the 1973 War Powers Act. Trump has to either end hostilities or get congressional authorization. He’s done neither. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s solution, delivered to the House and Senate Armed Services committees this week: the administration believes the clock pauses during a ceasefire. Brennan Center attorney Katherine Yon Ebright told CBS News the law accommodates no such theory by text or by design. Senator Tim Kaine made the same point. Senate Republicans have now blocked six Democratic War Powers measures. Speaker Mike Johnson told NBC the U.S. is “not at war.” A position that the 13 dead American servicemembers and 400+ wounded would have a hard time confirming.

The bigger story broke at Zeteo. Swin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez, citing two administration officials and two other sources briefed on classified intelligence, reported that Iran isn’t close to breaking. Iranian leadership has war-gamed how long it can absorb the strikes and concluded the answer is: through the end of the year, at least. “They know they can Carter him,” one senior official told Zeteo, invoking the 1980 hostage crisis that sank Jimmy Carter’s reelection. Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, has explicitly said Tehran will not surrender its missile or nuclear program. Iran isn’t trying to win. Iran is trying to wait.

In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson pulled Senator Jack Reed’s accounting from the Hegseth hearings: 13 Americans dead, 400+ wounded, dozens of aircraft lost, the Strait of Hormuz closed, missile inventories drained. Senator Angus King put the consumer cost of the price spike at $700 million a day. Brent crude briefly topped $114. Pump prices are above $4 nationally and around $5 in some states. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion on the war so far; outside estimates run higher. Reuters/Ipsos now finds this is the most unpopular American war in 76 years.

Read more: Zeteo, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell, CBS News, AP.

Maine Just Told Chuck Schumer No Thanks.

Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday, a month before the primary, officially citing money. Oysterman and veteran Graham Platner is now the de facto Democratic nominee against Susan Collins.

Dan Pfeiffer’s read at The Message Box is that money has nothing to do with it. Mills was trailing Platner by as much as 30 points, and that was after weeks of brutal opposition press over Platner’s old online comments and a tattoo with Nazi symbolism. He survived all of it. Janet Mills, the sitting Governor of Maine, who was endorsed by Chuck Schumer and was fully backed by the DSCC, couldn’t make it to election day

Running a 78-year-old establishment Democrat against a Republican incumbent, after watching it happen at the top of the ticket in 2024, is insane. Schumer endorsing her, driving a younger centrist out of the race, watching the polls show her trailing, and then doubling down on negative oppo against Platner. That’s political malpractice and the signs of an out-of-touch leader.

There is no Senate majority without Maine. Schumer didn’t just lose Mills the primary, he made winning the general harder. Platner surviving genuinely bad opposition research is the strongest signal yet that the base wants outsider candidates and is willing to absorb risk to get them.

The establishment is toxic. Figures who represent it are an albatross. The DSCC’s job for the next twelve months is to figure out whether it has learned that lesson, or whether it’s going to spend another cycle losing winnable Senate races by recruiting the wrong people.

Read more: The Message Box, New York Times.

May Day Strong, and Democrats Finally Wrote It Down.

Today’s May Day Strong actions — coordinated walkouts, marches, and a “no school, no work, no shopping” economic blackout, organized by Indivisible alongside immigrant rights and labor groups — are tracking as one of the largest single-day labor mobilizations in years. The Guardian reported that CEO pay rose roughly 20 times faster than worker wages in 2025, while real wages have fallen 12% since 2019 in inflation-adjusted terms. Conditions for a labor mobilization aren’t subtle.

The piece I’d flag for readers is Matt Stoller’s at BIG, because for the first time in this term, there is a written-down progressive Democratic agenda for what the next majority actually does. Senators Booker, Warren, Heinrich, Murphy, and Hirono introduced the CLEAN Mergers Act, which would automatically unwind every corporate combination above $10 billion executed under Trump — Paramount-Warner, Sysco-Restaurant Depot, Compass-Anywhere, HP-Juniper, Google-Wiz, Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern. Every one of them. Greg Casar’s House Progressive Caucus rolled out a 10-plank affordability agenda anchored by the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, which would ban algorithmic surveillance pricing outright. Schumer is co-sponsoring a bill to break up meatpackers. Per Semafor, House Democrats are pledging a unified caucus response to what they’re calling Trump’s “all-out assault” on the country.

The fight inside the caucus — between Hakeem Jeffries’s tech-friendly leadership and the Casar-Booker-Warren bloc — is the one to watch now, not after the midterms. Democrats have spent a decade getting asked “what would you actually do?” and answering with small incremental steps. They finally wrote down something else. The question is whether the leadership runs on it.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, BIG, The Parnas Perspective, Semafor.

That's your Friday. A governor stopped a live election to redraw a map. The administration invented a clock-pause to dodge the War Powers Act. Maine fired Chuck Schumer. And Senate Democrats have finally written down a real economic agenda.

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The Supreme Court Just Gutted the Voting Rights Act

In a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map on Wednesday after years of legal battles over minority representation. The conservative majority concluded the map constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court’s liberal dissenters argued the majority had gutted the landmark civil rights law.

The ruling effectively limits a core provision of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a legal mechanism used for six decades to challenge racially discriminatory maps. The Washington Post called it “seismic,” warning it could trigger a scramble by Republican-controlled legislatures across the South to immediately begin redrawing districts in ways that dilute Black voting power and flip seats currently held by Black Democratic incumbents.

Section 2 was the enforcement mechanism — the legal tool that allowed communities to challenge maps drawn specifically to minimize their political power. That tool just got gutted by a 6-3 conservative supermajority, at a moment when the same Republican Party that controls most Southern state legislatures is already engaged in aggressive mid-decade redistricting.

The timing is devastating. Ron DeSantis convened a special session in Florida this week to ram through a new gerrymander that openly defies Florida’s own “Fair Districts” constitutional amendment, passed by 63% of Florida voters in 2010. Now, with the Voting Rights Act weakened, similar efforts in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama face fewer legal obstacles. The Virginia redistricting win Democrats banked last week just got more important — because the legal landscape for challenging unfair maps everywhere else just got much worse.

Read more: Washington Post, The Hill.

A Photo of Seashells Is Now a Federal Crime. A Late-Night Joke Could Cost ABC Its License.

On Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department secured a second grand jury indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. This time, over a photo he posted last May of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” on a North Carolina beach. “86” is common slang for “throw out” or “get rid of.” The DOJ characterized it as an explicit threat against the president’s life. Comey denied any such intent, posting a video response: “Well, they’re back. This time, about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. This won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid.”

Former White House attorney Ty Cobb told CNN the case is “specious,” “vindictive prosecution,” and “classic revenge” that will likely be thrown out. Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “surreal and absurd.” Heather Cox Richardson noted that Attorney General Todd Blanche “appears to be currying favor with Trump by going after Comey again.” Even Republicans privately worry the DOJ’s political prosecutions are distracting from the economy heading into the midterms.

The same day, the FCC, under Chairman Brendan Carr, launched an early review of Disney’s broadcast licenses. Every ABC station in the country broadcasts over publicly owned airwaves, and the FCC has the power to revoke those licenses. The stated trigger: Jimmy Kimmel’s pre-WHCD joke that Melania looked like “an expectant widow.” Semafor reported exclusively that the FCC is preparing the review process, though it may ultimately choose not to trigger it. Carr has threatened Disney’s licenses before, as recently as this month, over diversity programs. Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called it “the most chilling thing I have witnessed since joining the FCC.”

Robert Hubbell framed both actions as a coordinated pattern: criminal prosecution and broadcast regulation used together to silence any public figure who mocks or criticizes the president. A federal indictment over seashells. A license review over a joke. The message is clear: criticize this president, and the government will come for you. The fact that both cases are legally absurd is beside the point. The threat is the punishment. Comey has to hire lawyers. Disney’s stock dropped. The cost of dissent just went up for everyone watching.

Read more: Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell, Semafor.

Trump Has Used the Presidency to Promote His Business 43 Times Since December

Judd Legum at Popular Information counted. Since December 22, President Trump has used his official platform — speeches, social media posts, official events — to promote his personal business interests 43 separate documented times.

He plugged his Trump National Doonbeg golf club in Ireland during official remarks about the Irish Open. He promoted Trump-branded fragrances on Truth Social. He hosted the “Shield of the Americas,” a new Latin American security alliance, at Trump National Doral, his Miami-area resort. The One Big Beautiful Bill created “Trump Accounts,” a new category of custodial IRAs for children, named after the sitting president and written into federal law. The State Department is finalizing a plan to print Trump’s image on a limited-edition commemorative U.S. passport.

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, put it plainly: “Every other president since the Civil War has divested from business interests that would conflict with official duties. President Trump has done the opposite.”

I often told anyone who would listen that my biggest prediction for Trump’s second term was that it would end with him as the richest man in the world. Through all the wars and deportations, his ultimate goal is to get as rich as possible. Trump's personal net worth has nearly tripled since the start of his second term, from $2.4 billion to $6.3 billion, according to Forbes, driven overwhelmingly by crypto ventures and business deals tied directly to his political power. His son-in-law is making hundreds of millions of dollars investing Saudi money while negotiating peace deals with Iran. His son, Don Jr., serves as an advisor to two prediction markets, which are prime targets for insider information.

Donald Trump is the grifter in chief.

Read more: Popular Information.

Peter Thiel Built an AI Court to Punish Journalists. For $2,000 a Complaint.

Oligarch Watch published a detailed investigation of Objection AI, a Peter Thiel-funded startup launched this month by Aron D’Souza, the same lawyer who led the secretly Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016. The platform uses a panel of AI models from xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Mistral to “adjudicate” journalism complaints. For $2,000, anyone can pay Objection to investigate a reporter who covered them unfavorably. Each reporter gets an “Honor Index” score. Case numbers are styled after court filings. The goal is to make it look like a legal proceeding without any of the legal protections a real court provides.

D’Souza has suggested journalists who want to be taken seriously will need to submit their anonymous sources to Objection’s AI systems for “verification.” So far, every single case the company has investigated publicly was initiated by Objection’s own employees. The AI systems have already produced results, including a ruling with “89% confidence” that Brigitte Macron is not a man (adjudicating a Candace Owens conspiracy theory) and an investigation into whether Netanyahu is a war criminal.

The company is backed by Thiel, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and others in the same network. It fits into a broader pattern: Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Jason Calacanis have all publicly attacked the “legacy media,” with Calacanis going so far as to fantasize about a hostile takeover of the New York Times and to demand that its tech reporters pitch him stories before publication. Objection’s long-term stated goal is to become “a global AI arbitration court” for all disputes.

Connect this to the FCC story above and the Comey indictment, and you see the full architecture. The government prosecutes critics through the DOJ. The FCC threatens broadcast licenses. And the tech oligarchy builds a private tribunal to grade, score, and intimidate journalists who cover them critically while demanding access to their confidential sources. The man who killed Gawker now wants to build the infrastructure to kill investigative journalism at scale. The price of admission is $2,000.

Read more: Oligarch Watch

That's your Wednesday. The Voting Rights Act just got gutted. Seashells are now a federal crime. A late-night joke could cost ABC its license. The president promoted his business 43 times in four months. And Peter Thiel is building an AI court to punish reporters.

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The Trump administration has made that line harder to see than at any point since the Nixon era. The same administration that has invoked national security to justify mass deportations without due process, demanded voting data from states, and moved to consolidate federal databases across agencies, is now asking Congress to extend, without a warrant requirement, a surveillance authority that gives the FBI access to Americans’ private communications. Congress has until April 30 to decide whether to keep saying yes.

How the Database Gets Built

The story starts in the 1960s and 1970s, when the FBI surveilled civil rights leaders, antiwar protesters, and political opponents of sitting presidents, all without legal authority, all under the label of national security. The assumption, then as now, was that Americans who protest their government must have foreign sponsors. The Church Committee exposed the abuses. Congress responded in 1978 by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which for the first time required judicial oversight of foreign intelligence surveillance. The name describes what Congress was regulating: the government’s practice of calling domestic surveillance foreign intelligence work to avoid legal accountability. FISA required that any surveillance work obtain a warrant. Ending the loophole.

That line held for about 25 years. After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration began conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications in secret, in violation of FISA and outside the law. When the New York Times exposed the program in 2005, the administration did not shut it down. It went to Congress and asked for legal cover. Congress provided it. The result was Section 702, added to FISA in 2008. The original FISA required a warrant. Section 702 changed that to a warrant is not needed if the target is located outside the United States, even if American communications are swept up in the process.

Here is how it works. The government designates foreign nationals located outside the United States as surveillance targets. It issues directives to American technology companies, Google, Microsoft, and others, requiring them to hand over those targets’ communications. When a foreign target communicates with someone in the United States, that American’s side of the conversation is collected too. This is called incidental collection. The result is a database held by the intelligence community containing the private communications of millions of Americans: emails, texts, and phone calls.

The Backdoor

Congress knew American communications would be swept up. Its response was to require agencies to minimize the retention and use of that data. What it did not anticipate was that the intelligence community would find a way to exploit that gap.

The government calls these searches “U.S. person queries.” Critics call them backdoor searches: the government cannot wiretap an American without a court order, but it can search a database it knows contains that American’s communications without one.

The scale of these searches is worth noting, as are the FBI’s persistent efforts to get around the rules. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million searches of Americans’ communications. Searches have targeted George Floyd protesters, January 6 participants, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, members of Congress, and people who simply called the FBI to report a crime. Even after modest new safeguards were put in place in 2024, the Justice Department discovered the FBI had been quietly using a querying tool that bypassed those safeguards entirely. It took months to shut it down. The pattern is consistent: the database has been used wherever the government saw a threat, defined broadly.

One more thing Congress did not anticipate in 2008: artificial intelligence. AI-assisted analysis can now query, pattern-match, and summarize communications at a scale and speed that makes the word “incidental” functionally obsolete. The legal framework has not kept pace with what the government can now do technically with the data it collects.

What Congress Is Being Asked to Decide

Andrew Weissmann, who served as FBI General Counsel from 2011 to 2013, identifies three options before Congress:

• Clean reauthorization: extend Section 702 as written, FBI access to the database unchanged.

• Reauthorization with a warrant requirement: before the FBI searches Americans’ communications in the database, a federal judge must approve.

• Do nothing and let the authority expire on April 30.

Last week, House Republican leadership tried to pass a five-year clean extension in the middle of the night. Twenty Republicans joined Democrats to defeat it. A second attempt failed. What passed was a 10-day stopgap. Bipartisan negotiations are now underway, but whether any final deal will include a genuine warrant requirement is unresolved.

What “Trust Us” Has Come to Mean

Congress has reauthorized Section 702 three times since 2008. Each time, the intelligence community has made the same argument: a warrant requirement would create delays that cost lives. Each time, Congress has accepted that claim largely on faith. It has never been independently verified.

It is worth noting that this debate does not break down along party lines. A cross-partisan coalition of libertarian conservatives, think Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, and progressive Democrats has been trying to rein in warrantless surveillance of Americans since 2012. They have lost every reauthorization vote.

The question for April 30 is whether the current political environment changes the calculus for enough members to matter. The administration asking Congress to trust it with warrantless access to Americans’ communications is the same one invoking national security to expand executive power across immigration, voting data, and federal databases. We have been here before. FISA was created because the executive branch spent decades surveilling Americans without legal authority and calling it national security. Congress drew a line. The line moved. It is up for renewal again.

What You Can Do

The ACLU has a current action page at action.aclu.org that connects you directly to your representative and senators in under two minutes. The Brennan Center’s resource page is the most comprehensive source for anyone who wants to go deeper on the history, the abuses, and the reform proposals currently on the table.

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Endnotes

1. The Church Committee’s investigation and its role in FISA’s passage: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as Originally Enacted.

2. Section 702 added to FISA in 2008, legislative history and reauthorization record: Congressional Research Service, FISA Section 702 and the 2024 Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act.

3. How Section 702 works, incidental collection, and the backdoor search mechanism: Brennan Center for Justice, Why Congress Must Reform FISA Section 702 and How It Can.

4. FBI conducted up to 3.4 million searches of Americans’ communications in 2021; documented abuses including protesters, donors, and members of Congress: Brennan Center for Justice, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 2026 Resource Page.

5. FBI querying tool that bypassed 2024 safeguards, discovered by DOJ overseers in August 2024: Penn Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, The Need for FISA Section 702 Reform Is Greater Than Ever.

6. Andrew Weissmann on the three options before Congress: Just Security, Former FBI General Counsel Weissmann on FISA Reforms.

7. House Republican revolt, 10-day extension, bipartisan negotiations: The Hill, GOP Rebels Block Leaders’ Last-Minute FISA Section 702 Deal.

8. Congress passes 10-day extension, Trump signs: NPR, Congress Extends Controversial Surveillance Powers for 10 Days.

9. Electronic Frontier Foundation on the current reform fight and the 10-day extension: EFF, Keep Pushing: We Get 10 More Days to Reform Section 702.
   
   

What Actually Happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

On Saturday night, a 31-year-old California man named Cole Tomas Allen sprinted through a magnetometer at the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He made it to the floor above, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place. Secret Service tackled him before he could enter the ballroom. One agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot and has since been released from the hospital. Allen was apprehended alive. He will be charged with two firearms counts and one count of assault on a federal officer.

The event was not designated a “National Special Security Event,” which would have triggered the highest federal security tier, even though Trump and much of his Cabinet were present. Security experts told the New York Times the perimeter worked as intended: Allen never entered the ballroom, no officials were in danger, and the protocols held. Allen’s manifesto, reported by The New York Post, indicated he was targeting Trump administration officials. He called himself a “friendly federal assassin.” His manifesto called Trump a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” When CBS’s Norah O’Donnell raised this in an interview, Trump snapped: “I knew you would read that because you’re horrible people.”

Political violence is abhorrent. That message needs to be shouted loudly and clearly. Credit to the Secret Service and the DC police for doing their job. The security system worked. A man with weapons was stopped before reaching anyone. That’s the full story.

But unfortunately, it’s not where the story ends. Within hours, Republicans and administration officials began exploiting this event to further Trump’s most important initiative, his East Wing ballroom.

Within twelve hours, the acting attorney general demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit blocking Trump’s White House ballroom project — citing “last night’s assassination attempt” as justification — by 9 AM Monday or face legal action. Robert Hubbell notes the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people. Trump’s proposed ballroom seats 999. The shooting happened entirely outside the ballroom. Trump’s new facility wouldn’t have changed anything about Saturday’s incident.

The pile-on was immediate. Bill Kristol at The Bulwark cataloged the same-day maneuvers: House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan tied the shooter to the Southern Poverty Law Center with zero evidence. Sen. Ron Johnson called it the moment to nuke the Senate filibuster over DHS funding. Speaker Mike Johnson is using the shooting to ram through Section 702 FISA reauthorization without civil liberties protections — even though FISA has nothing to do with Saturday’s events.

And buried under all of it: the New York Times reported that the day before the shooting, the same ballroom contractor, Clark Construction, was quietly handed a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park. The Biden administration estimated the same work at $3.3 million in 2022. The Trump administration inflated it to $17.4 million by stacking inflation adjustments — 27 percent, then 24 percent, then a 50 percent “urgency” premium — and invoked the urgency exception to competitive bidding rules, a provision meant for wartime or natural disasters.

Read more: The Bulwark, Robert Hubbell, Off Message

The Iran War Hits Its Legal Deadline Friday

The 60-day War Powers Act clock expires May 1. Trump launched strikes against Iran without congressional authorization, justifying it as a response to an “imminent threat,” a claim his own intelligence agencies contradicted. The law requires congressional authorization or a declaration of war within 60 days. Democrats have pushed for a vote. Republicans have stalled, hoping Trump would find an exit. He hasn’t.

Heather Cox Richardson laid out the trap: if Congress doesn’t act by Friday, Trump will have demonstrated that the War Powers Act is effectively dead. That a president can wage open-ended war without congressional consent. That’s not a Trump-specific problem. It’s a permanent precedent.

The diplomacy is broken. Trump canceled a planned trip to Islamabad by Kushner and Witkoff over “too much time wasted on traveling.” Iran’s Foreign Minister spent Sunday in Oman lining up regional support, then flew to Moscow to meet Putin. Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade, without concessions on its nuclear program. Trump rejected the terms. Brent crude is above $107. The Atlanta Fed’s GDP nowcast is at 1.2%. Consumer sentiment hit an all-time low.

Rep. Katherine Clark told The Hill: “Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”

Republicans now face an impossible choice: vote to authorize an already deeply unpopular war, or let Trump continue it illegally. Either way, every week the Strait stays closed, gas prices rise, and recession risk climbs.

Read more: Letters from an American

“The World Is a Casino.” And the President’s Son Runs the House

Last week, the DOJ indicted Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Army Special Forces operator who was on the team that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Eighteen days after being read into the classified operation and signing NDAs, Van Dyke opened a brand-new Polymarket account under the username “Burdensome-Mix,” funded it with $35,000, and bet heavily on “Maduro out by Jan. 31” and “U.S. invades Venezuela by Jan. 31.” He made over $400,000.

Polymarket’s chief legal officer immediately spun the arrest as proof the system works, posting that the case “proved just how easy it is to find & charge criminal insider trading when markets are on-chain.” Judd Legum at Popular Information dismantles that claim: the indictment itself credits press coverage and social media buzz about the unusual betting patterns for triggering scrutiny, not Polymarket’s internal systems. Van Dyke got caught because he was sloppy. He opened a new account, used a single username, and placed obvious bets on a narrow range of contracts. Had he spread his bets across established accounts or passed the tip to a third party, he almost certainly would have walked.

More fundamentally, the legal theory that caught Van Dyke only works because the information was classified and he had a specific duty not to disclose it. That framework doesn’t apply to the vast majority of Polymarket’s markets. Anyone with advance knowledge of a corporate decision, a celebrity announcement, or a political action that isn’t classified faces no legal exposure under this precedent. The system didn’t catch an insider trader. It caught the dumbest possible version of one and declared victory.

Trump’s response was the most revealing part. Asked about Van Dyke, he compared him to Pete Rose, betting on his own baseball team: “He bet on his team.” Asked whether he was concerned about insider trading on prediction markets tied to the Iran war, Trump said: “The world is a casino. It is what it is.”

Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor to both Polymarket and its rival, Kalshi. The president is publicly defending insider trading. His son profits from the platforms where it happens. And the only enforcement mechanism in place applies to a category of information that covers a tiny fraction of the markets these platforms operate in.

Read more: Popular Information

Democratic Donors Are Done With Schumer

Trump’s approval ratings are crashing. His economic numbers are dismal. Poll after poll shows a real wave of momentum mounting for Democrats. It may feel premature, and there is a lot of work left to do, but a conversation about the post-Trump world is beginning to take shape. And Chuck Schumer appears to be at the center of it.

Puck’s Leigh Ann Caldwell talked to more than half a dozen Democratic donors and bundlers. The consensus is blunt: “Schumer is not anybody’s favorite. It’s been a great run, but it’s run its course.”

The mutiny against him is no longer just rhetorical. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich co-hosted a D.C. fundraiser for Maine oysterman Graham Platner, Schumer’s explicit non-choice, over Schumer’s recruited candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. Susan Collins’s super PAC has already dropped $2 million in attack ads against Platner five weeks before the primary — meaning the general election in Maine is, in effect, already underway.

Schumer’s problems extend beyond Maine. His recruited candidates in Michigan (Haley Stevens), Minnesota (Angie Craig), and Iowa (Josh Turek) are all in trouble. Meanwhile, Platner, Mallory McMorrow in Michigan, Zach Wahls in Iowa, Juliana Stratton in Illinois, and Seth Moulton in Massachusetts have all said publicly they won’t back Schumer as leader. For many Dems, it has become the litmus test of the cycle. But the anti-Schumer energy, real as it is, points to something bigger than one leader.

As of now, the story for the Democrats is huge momentum for individual candidates, low approval for the national party. To see proof of that trend, just follow the money. Individual Democratic candidates are raising enormous sums — Jon Ossoff, James Talarico, and dozens of others are far outpacing their Republican opponents. But the national party is a different picture entirely. The DNC trails the RNC $145 million to $228 million. The official Senate and House campaign committees trail Republicans by $27 million and $4 million, respectively. And the Democratic Party's favorable rating has collapsed to 28%, four points below Republicans, despite everything.

Trump and the Republican Party have governed so badly that they may hand Democrats the House and even the Senate by default. And that's exactly the problem.

Winning by default is enough to regain committee seats and subpoena power. It is not enough to break the MAGA movement's hold on American politics heading into 2028 and beyond. A party with a 28% favorability rating that stumbles into a majority because the other side is worse is a party that will lose that majority the moment conditions shift.

The question Democrats need to be asking right now isn’t just whether they can win the House and Senate. It’s what the party stands for once they get there. Who is the next generation of leadership? What is the governing vision that makes voters choose Democrats, not just reject Republicans? Those are the questions that determine whether 2026 is the beginning of something or just a temporary reprieve.

Schumer didn’t create all of these problems. But he’s clearly representative of them, and he’s going to be the scapegoat whether he deserves it or not. I actually don’t really care who the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader is. What I care about, and what I think Democratic politicians and voters should as well, is how much power that person holds. Are they in charge of the caucus, or is the caucus in charge of them? Because if the next Senate leader can handpick candidates and set the party's direction from a back office, it doesn't matter whether that person's name is Schumer or someone else. The problem will be the same.

Read more: Puck

That's your Monday. The War Powers deadline is Friday. The President is ok with insider trading. And Democratic donors are openly done with Schumer.

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Democrats Lead by 6 in the Districts That Will Decide the House

A new Cook Political Report poll of the 36 most competitive House districts — seats Trump carried by an average of 2 points in 2024 — shows Democrats leading by 6 points, 50–44. Independent voters in those battleground districts now prefer Democrats by 25 points.

Let that sink in. Twenty-five points among independents. In districts Trump won a little over a year ago.

Trump’s approval in these same districts sits at 42/58, with independents disapproving at 70%. On every major issue except border security — the economy, gas prices, fraud protection — independents trust Democrats by double digits. Democratic enthusiasm holds a 14-point advantage in willingness to vote.

For context: the 2018 Democratic wave that flipped the House happened on a D+12 independent swing. Democrats are currently showing D+25. Polling also shows Democrat Mary Peltola leading incumbent GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan by 7 points in Alaska, hitting 50% in the second round of ranked-choice voting. In the past month, credible polls have shown Democrats ahead in Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, all states Trump carried in 2024. Cook’s summary: if the current environment holds, Democrats could flip not just the three seats needed for a majority, but also seats Trump carried by high single or low double-digit margins.

An 8-point structural shift in a midterm environment, combined with a 14-point enthusiasm advantage, suggests a wave bigger than 2018 is structurally possible. The conditions are there. The question, as always, is whether Democrats are disciplined enough not to blow it.

Read more: Cook Political Report

Trump Said the Strait Would Open in 48 Hours. It’s Been 8 Weeks.

Eight weeks into “Operation Epic Fury,” the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Here’s the timeline of every Trump ultimatum versus what actually happened.

March 6: Trump demands Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

March 23: Trump says, “We want to make a deal” — a complete reversal.

April 1: Trump says, “I don’t want anything to do with the Strait.”

April 6: Trump posts that Tuesday will be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one.” Deadline passes. Nothing happens.

April 7: Trump says a “whole civilization will die tonight.” Deadline passes. Nothing happens.

April 8: Iran’s foreign minister offers a 10-point framework. Trump takes it. Ceasefire announced.

April 20: Ceasefire collapses. Trump extends it indefinitely with zero Iranian concessions.

April 24: The Strait is still closed. Iran controls the passage. Brent crude sits at $105. Gas is over $4 nationally.

Bill Kristol at The Bulwark argues that Trump has simply abandoned his own stated war goals. After demanding the Strait be “FULLY OPEN” or face obliteration, Trump is now posting that the U.S. has the Strait “sealed up tight” as leverage. Iran proved it can close global oil shipping lanes at will. The U.S. proved it can’t reopen them by force. That’s the scorecard.

Meanwhile, Trump spent Thursday night posting dozens of messages on Truth Social calling for the arrest of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for treason, demanding the 2020 election “be permanently wiped from the books,” and attacking Chuck Schumer.

A retired NATO commander told The Hill that the actual military key is stopping Iranian mine-laying vessels, a strategy the administration hasn’t publicly prioritized. U.S. missile stockpiles are depleted enough that CSIS analysts say the military’s two-theater war capability is in question for the next three to five years.

Trump promised unconditional surrender. He got an indefinite ceasefire with zero concessions, a closed Strait, depleted missiles, and $4 gas.

Read more: The Bulwark, The Hill

Palantir Published a Manifesto Calling for a Military Draft.

This one got buried under the Iran coverage, and it shouldn’t have.

Oligarch Watch broke down a 22-point manifesto published last week by Palantir, the Peter Thiel-cofounded AI company that holds major contracts with the Pentagon, the VA, and immigration enforcement agencies, and helps generate automated kill lists for the U.S. and Israeli militaries. The manifesto, derived from CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, calls for a mandatory universal military draft. A full rearming of Germany and Japan, which Palantir says were “neutered” after World War II in an “overcorrection.” Expanded AI weapons development. An explicit role for Silicon Valley in “addressing violent crime.”

A company that profits from war is calling for a mandatory draft. A company that builds kill-list software wants Silicon Valley to police American cities. A company cofounded by one of Trump’s biggest donors is publishing racial hierarchy arguments in a corporate manifesto. And this company holds billions in federal contracts.

Also from Oligarch Watch: a Nashville man was arrested for allegedly using Grok, Elon Musk’s AI model, to generate over 40 images of child sexual abuse material. The Justice Department’s response? Not investigating xAI, but refusing to cooperate with French authorities investigating child sexual abuse on X, calling it “a politically charged criminal proceeding.”

The tech oligarchy isn’t coming. It’s here. It has federal contracts, its own foreign policy vision, and a manifesto that says your kids should be drafted to fight its wars.

Read more: Oligarch Watch

That’s your Friday. Democrats lead by 6 in the districts that matter. Independents have swung 25 points. The Iran war has failed every objective Trump set. And Palantir wants to draft your children.

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This rule makes it easier for employers to allocate workers’ retirement savings to risky, hard-to-sell investments such as private equity and private credit funds. Wall Street has been trying to get access to retirement funds for more than a decade.

This proposed rule is part of a broader effort by this administration to protect Wall Street at the expense of ordinary people. Some of those efforts are happening in plain sight: extending tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting health insurance subsidies for people who need them. But many more are happening at the regulatory level, with little public discussion.

Why Wall Street Needs This Now

Private equity firms buy companies using borrowed money, hold them for years, and then sell them at a profit. That model worked well when interest rates were near zero. When rates rose sharply in 2022, it stopped working. The industry is now sitting on an estimated 31,000 unsold companies that it cannot unload at the prices it needs. It needs a new pool of capital. Workers’ 401(k)s, nearly $14 trillion in total across all retirement accounts, are that pool.

Private credit funds are in more immediate trouble. These funds lend money to non-publicly traded companies, including many software firms. As artificial intelligence tools have begun threatening the business models of those firms, investors have grown nervous that the loans may not be repaid.

Private equity made its bets. Now they want us to share the risk with them.

What the Rule Actually Changes

For more than 30 years, I managed 401(k) plans. I took that responsibility seriously. I reviewed investments carefully, paid close attention to fees, and understood that the people whose retirement savings I was overseeing were counting on me to act in their interest, no one else’s.

This rule changes that calculus for every employer that sponsors a retirement plan. It makes it easier to include private equity, private credit, and cryptocurrency in workers’ 401(k) options. It also makes it harder for employees to sue their employers if those investments fail.

Speaking Up to Protect Workers’ Retirement Savings

There is no congressional debate on this rule. No public hearings. No vote. This is being done through executive action, with no requirement that anyone in Congress weigh in. Most of the news coverage has been minimal.

Eileen Appelbaum, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and one of the country’s leading experts on private equity, put it directly: “It is much more risky for an ordinary worker who relies on his or her 401(k) for a dignified retirement to have retirement savings in opaque, highly illiquid assets like private equity and private credit funds. These are not suitable investments to be included in 401(k)s.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, called this “another Trump giveaway to the billionaires on the backs of working people.” She has called on anyone who cares about working people’s financial security to oppose the rule. The comment period is open. That is the mechanism for doing exactly that.

What You Can Do

Comment. Financial analysts and other experts are likely to weigh in on this rule. But your voice matters too. Personal comments from workers are impactful, and even if you do not have an employer-sponsored plan, if you object to the government repeatedly tilting the rules in Wall Street’s favor, your voice belongs in this record. The comment period is open now. Information on submitting comments and a draft template can be found here.

Signal. If you have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, let your HR or benefits administrator know you are aware of this proposed rule. Ask to be kept informed if your plan ever considers adding these kinds of investments. Nothing is changing yet, but plan administrators who are already skeptical will feel the difference between employees who are paying attention and those who aren’t.

The Trump administration is democratizing the financial risk that Wall Street created and no longer wants to carry alone. Workers didn’t create this mess. We shouldn’t be asked to absorb it.

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Sources:

1. Department of Labor, “Fiduciary Duties in Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives,” Federal Register, March 31, 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/31/2026-06178/fiduciary-duties-in-selecting-designated-investment-alternatives

2. Executive Order 14330, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” August 7, 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-order/14330

3. Eileen Appelbaum, “Private Equity Gets the Green Light to Tap Workers’ Retirement Accounts,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 7, 2026. https://cepr.net/publications/private-equity-gets-the-green-light-to-tap-workers-retirement-accounts/

4. Eileen Appelbaum, “Private Equity in the Doldrums and Out of Favor,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 7, 2026. https://cepr.net/publications/private-equity-in-the-doldrums-and-out-of-favor/

5. Bloomberg, “Blue Owl Reels as Investors Who Fueled Its Growth Now Want Out,” April 2, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-02/blue-owl-reels-as-investors-who-fueled-its-growth-now-want-out

6. Bain & Company, “2026 Global Private Equity Report: Gaining Traction,” February 2026. https://www.bain.com/insights/outlook-gaining-traction-global-private-equity-report-2026/

7. CNN Business, “Employers that want to offer 401(k) participants access to private equity get new rule,” March 30, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/business/401ks-private-equity-dol

8. Senator Elizabeth Warren, statement on Executive Order 14330, Senate Banking Committee, August 2025. https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/statement-by-senator-warren-on-president-trumps-executive-order-opening-up-americans-401ks-to-risky-assets

Democrats Stopped Writing Op-Eds and Started Winning

Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that will flip the state’s congressional delegation from 6–5 Democrat to 10–1 Democrat — a net pickup of four House seats heading into November.

Bill Kristol at The Bulwark called it what it is: Democrats finally playing hardball. For years, Republicans gerrymandered aggressively while Democrats wrung their hands about norms. Virginia, combined with California’s November 2025 voter-approved maps and Utah’s court-ordered redistricting, has — as Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box put it — “largely nullified” the GOP’s mid-decade gerrymandering push in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Missouri.

This is a win. Democrats fought back, and they should. You cannot defeat an authoritarian movement that is actively trying to rig elections by clinging to norms the other side abandoned years ago. I am not a norms defender. I think many of our political norms — the filibuster, the refusal to reform the Supreme Court — are actively detrimental to our pro-democracy cause. Democrats needed to use every tool available, and in Virginia, they did.

But we need to treat this victory with the gravitas that it requires. Gerrymandering is not a pro-democracy action. It never has been. It is a weapon we are picking up because the other side has been using it against us for two decades, and unilateral disarmament was killing us. That’s a defensible choice. It’s also one we should make with clear eyes — not celebration, but determination. Win this fight, survive this moment, and then fix the system so nobody has to make this choice again.

That means, concretely: if Democrats win the House, the Senate, and the presidency in 2028, they must move aggressively toward national legislation requiring independent commissions to draw non-gerrymandered maps in every state. No exceptions. No delays. No “we’ll get to it later.” Because this victory in Virginia, and what happened in California, will mean nothing if all we’ve done is trade one set of rigged maps for another. It will be worse than nothing. It will prove that neither party actually believes in fair representation. The whole point of fighting fire with fire is to put the fire out, not to keep it burning in your favor.

Read more: The Bulwark, The Message Box, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo

Four Polls, One Verdict: Trump Hits Historic Lows

Four national polls dropped on Tuesday, and they all say the same thing. AP-NORC: 33% approve, 67% disapprove. ARG: 32–65. Ipsos-Reuters: 36–62. Strength in Numbers: 35–61.

Heather Cox Richardson highlighted the Strength in Numbers result: 72% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of prices. Democrats lead the generic ballot 50–43. Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles found impeachment support has reached Nixon-era levels — with a fifth of Republican voters now backing it.

The fundamentals are moving with the numbers. The Atlanta Fed’s GDP nowcast has fallen from above 3% before the Iran war to around 1%. New data from Echelon, a Republican pollster, shows Democrats leading Senate races in Iowa, Georgia, and Maine, on top of earlier leads in Alaska, North Carolina, and Ohio. Zeteo reports even Texas is “in the conversation.” The 2024 battleground was Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The 2026 battleground may be Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Texas. A map no Democrat has credibly contested in a generation.

At 33% approval with the midterms 196 days away, Trump isn’t just unpopular. He’s approaching territory where his own party starts making survival calculations.

Read more: Hopium Chronicles, Letters from an American, Zeteo

Your Taxes Are About to Bail Out the Country That Bought Trump’s Crypto

Judd Legum at Popular Information documented a corruption timeline so clean it reads like a case file.

Trump told CNBC on Tuesday that he is “open” to a U.S. currency-swap bailout for the United Arab Emirates, whose economy is buckling under the Iran war. The UAE’s Central Bank governor raised the idea last week in meetings with Treasury Secretary Bessent. Total U.S.–UAE trade is $47.9 billion a year — a fraction of the $909 billion we trade with Canada. There is no conventional economic case for a bailout.

There is, however, a family case. Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan bought a 49% stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial for an upfront windfall of $187 million to Trump-tied entities. (Plus $31 million to the family of Steve Witkoff, who is now Trump’s Iran envoy.) Tahnoon’s state-backed MGX fund then used $2 billion of World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin to finance a Binance investment, generating hundreds of millions more for the family. Two weeks after that deal, the administration cut the UAE a deal giving them hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips they’d sought for years. Separately, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners has taken $200 million from the UAE sovereign wealth.

Here’s the grift: UAE pays into Trump family businesses → Trump gives UAE advanced chips → UAE’s economy gets damaged by Trump’s war → Trump proposes bailing out the UAE with American taxpayer money.

Read more: Popular Information, Letters from an American

Trump’s Fed Chair Pick Won’t Say Who Won in 2020

Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and failed every test that matters.

Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark laid it out: Asked whether Trump’s ongoing criminal investigation of Powell was appropriate, Warsh declined to answer. Asked whether he’d defend Fed Governor Lisa Cook — whose firing by Trump is now before the Supreme Court — he deflected. Asked by Sen. Elizabeth Warren whether Trump lost the 2020 election, he refused to answer.

Rampell notes Warsh spent nearly his entire career as an inflation hawk, only to conveniently become a rate-cut dove at precisely the two moments Trump was scouting for a Fed nominee — an “evolution” he attributed to “facts changing.”

The stakes here are enormous and underreported. Trump has escalated from publicly badgering Powell to launching a criminal investigation into him over cost overruns in building renovations. The Fed’s independence is one of the last meaningful institutional checks on executive economic overreach. A nominee who won’t defend that independence under oath provides zero assurance he’ll defend it when it actually matters, and with war-driven inflation already building, the confrontation is coming fast.

If Warsh is confirmed and then folds under pressure from the White House, the consequences ripple through every mortgage rate, every savings account, every retirement fund in the country.

Read more: The Bulwark

That's your Wednesday. Democrats flipped Virginia's map. Trump is at 33%. The UAE bailout is pure self-dealing. The Fed nominee won't defend the Fed.

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The Ceasefire Expires Wednesday. Iran’s Military Already Killed It.

The two-week ceasefire expires this Wednesday, and a Wall Street Journal report published Monday reveals the detail that explains why it was never going to hold: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps overruled its own civilian government’s decision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s president wanted peace. Iran’s military vetoed it.

That split changes everything. It means even a diplomatic agreement between Washington and Tehran may be unenforceable if the IRGC refuses to comply. No peace envoy can negotiate away a military that doesn’t answer to its own government. The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger documented how Trump doesn’t seem to grasp any of this — declaring last Friday that “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” hours before the ceasefire collapsed. A Defense Intelligence Agency memo quietly acknowledged that Iran “retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs,” directly contradicting Hegseth’s repeated claims that Iran’s stockpiles are depleted.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters Monday that gas may not drop below $3 per gallon until next year. Trump publicly contradicted him in a phone interview with The Hill: “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong.” Senior Republican senators are privately alarmed. Sen. John Kennedy warned Fox News that if Republicans lose the midterms, it will be because they didn’t talk about cost-of-living and because of “this new holy war with the pope.” Multiple GOP lawmakers have told reporters they fear the Iran war will cost them in November.

Vance is heading back to Islamabad for another round of talks. Tehran hasn’t even confirmed it will attend. The pattern holds: announce talks, claim progress, watch it collapse, blame Iran, repeat.

Read more: The Bulwark, The Parnas Perspective

The Trumps Are Getting Rich Off This War. 97% of Media Coverage Ignores It.

Judd Legum at Popular Information dropped a methodical, damning analysis: of 202 articles published by major outlets covering Jared Kushner’s role as Iran peace negotiator, only 6, fewer than 3%, mentioned his financial conflict of interest with Saudi Arabia.

Here’s what those 196 articles left out: Kushner raised $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince’s sovereign wealth fund after leaving the White House, over the objections of the fund’s own advisors, who cited his inexperience and called his operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” MBS personally overruled them. Kushner has since collected over $110 million in management fees. He’s now seeking billions more from Saudi investors, while sitting at the negotiating table in Islamabad. And MBS, the man who controls that fund, reportedly lobbied Trump both to start and to continue the Iran war. Saudi Arabia and Iran are enemies. Kushner’s financial patron has a direct interest in this war continuing.

Aaron Parnas adds that Trump’s sons are simultaneously trying to sell military drone interceptors to Gulf states facing Iranian attack, raising money from the very countries the U.S. is supposedly negotiating on behalf of. BBC analysis flagged repeated spikes in trading activity, including in oil markets, minutes before Trump’s major policy announcements. Rep. Jamie Raskin launched a formal congressional investigation, writing that Kushner “cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”

The big question has been, why did Trump start the war in Iran? The administration’s arguments have been inconsistent and nonsensical. Reports suggest Israel and Saudi Arabia convinced him. That could be true. It’s also possible that Trump determined war was good for business. And at the end of the day, Trump will always do what is good for his pocket.

Read more: Popular Information, The Parnas Perspective

Roberts Rigged the Court. Now We Have the Receipts.

This one flew under the radar over the weekend, and it shouldn’t have.

The New York Times published 16 pages of leaked internal Supreme Court memos from 2016, revealing how Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Court’s unprecedented decision to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan before any lower court had even ruled on its legality. That had never been done before. Roberts acknowledged in the memos that “the posture of this stay request is not typical,” but argued the plan was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector” and too consequential for the Court not to act immediately.

Roberts circulated an aggressive memo during the Court’s winter recess, insisting that the justices halt the president’s plan and confidently predicting that the Court would eventually overturn it. Justice Alito backed him with a stark argument: if the Court failed to act, regulated companies would be forced to comply before judicial review could matter, threatening to render the Court’s “institutional legitimacy a nullity.” Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor pushed back, but Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and swing Justice Kennedy ruled against the Obama regulation just two weeks after West Virginia filed its emergency request.

That night, legal experts now believe, was the birth of the modern “shadow docket” — the secretive track the Court has used ever since to issue major rulings without full briefing, oral argument, or signed opinions. The shadow docket has widely helped Trump push through his agenda throughout his second term, allowing the administration to cut the federal workforce while litigation continued in lower courts and keeping a ban on transgender military service in effect while cases were pending.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson devoted a lecture at Yale Law School last week to the topic, calling herself “very troubled by the institutional costs” the Court’s emergency actions impose on its relationships with lower courts and the American people. Her point is devastating when paired with the memos: Roberts claimed in 2016 that he had to act to protect industry from irreparable harm. A decade later, the Court treats the Trump administration’s desire to implement its preferred policies with the same deference on the shadow docket, but with no similar concern for the Americans harmed by those policies.

The distance between Roberts’ famous “balls and strikes” confirmation pledge and his actual conduct is, the memos show, exactly as vast as anyone suspected.

Robert Hubbell provides the essential takeaway: Roberts established that bending procedural rules to reach ideological outcomes is acceptable when “legitimacy” is at stake. When Democrats regain Congress and the presidency, they should accept that precedent — and use it. Reform Citizens United. Reform Shelby County. Reform Dobbs. Reform Trump v. United States. The leaked memos provide exactly the political and legal ammunition to make the case that this Court abandoned neutrality a decade ago, and democratic reform isn’t radicalism — it’s a response to what the Chief Justice already did.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, NYT, SCOTUSblog

Trump’s Floor Is Falling Out. And the Numbers Are Historic

The NBC News poll released Sunday deserves its own section, because these aren’t normal bad numbers. They’re structural collapse.

Trump’s approval is at 37% — a second-term low. Sixty-three percent disapprove, with 50% disapproving strongly. Two-thirds disapprove of his handling of Iran. Two-thirds say gas prices are a personal hardship. He’s down 4 points even among Republicans. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit 47.6, the worst reading in 70 years, down nearly 11% from March alone.

But the number that should keep the White House up at night is this one: “strong approval” has fallen from 26% to 20% over the past year, a nearly 25% drop. That’s not soft supporters drifting away. That’s the true believers losing faith. Brian Beutler at Off Message makes the structural case: MAGA isn’t just losing support, it’s cannibalizing itself. The MAGA identity is shrinking — down to 53% of Republicans in the latest NBC poll. Beutler’s line: “Invasive species eventually exhaust their food supply.”

And Trump keeps opening new fronts. He’s at war with Catholics over Pope Leo. He’s at war with his own business community over the economy. He’s at war with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, the media apparatus that built him, over Iran. Every new fight further splinters the coalition. At 37% approval with the midterms 197 days away, there is no cavalry coming. The floor is falling out.

Read more: Off Message

That’s your Monday. The ceasefire expires on Wednesday. Kushner is getting rich while negotiating peace. MAGA is shrinking. Roberts got caught. And the midterms are 197 days away.

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“This represents the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care, by far.”

- President Trump, announcing pricing deals with 14 major drug companies, December 2025

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order imposing 100% tariffs on imported brand-name drugs. The announcement was sweeping: pharmaceutical companies would finally be held accountable, American patients would win, and drug manufacturing would come home to the United States.

The policy will produce some benefits. It may also raise costs for many Americans. And it leaves the core reasons why drugs are so expensive in this country largely untouched.

Why Drug Prices Are High

Americans pay more for prescription drugs than people in any other developed country — often two to four times more for the same medication. The core reason is simple: unlike most wealthy nations, the United States does not set or negotiate drug prices at a national level. Drug companies largely set their own prices.

About 40% of U.S. drug spending flows through government programs, primarily Medicare and Medicaid, where some pricing controls are in place. The other 60% moves through the private market, where prices are negotiated through a complex chain involving insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, and pharmacies. Most patients at the end of that chain have little visibility into any of it, and even less leverage.

Trump’s Drug Tariffs

The new executive order imposes 100% tariffs on imported brand-name drugs, using the national security authority that survived the Supreme Court’s February ruling against Trump’s broader tariffs. But the tariff is less a trade policy than a pressure campaign.

The structure makes this clear. Companies that agree to “Most Favored Nation” pricing — matching the lowest prices they charge in other wealthy countries — and commit to building U.S. manufacturing facilities pay zero tariffs. Companies that only commit to domestic manufacturing pay 20%. Companies that do neither face the full 100%. The order applies broadly, including to small and mid-size biotech companies that develop more than half of all FDA-approved medicines and lack the resources to absorb a 100% tariff or build a domestic facility.

Throughout 2025, the threat of these tariffs prompted 14 of the 17 largest drug companies to sign pricing deals with the administration. Last week’s formal order targets the remaining holdouts. As with any tariff, the cost of non-compliance does not fall on the drug company. It is paid by American importers and passed through the supply chain to insurers and patients.

What the Deals Deliver

For Medicaid patients, the practical benefit is limited. Federal law already requires manufacturers to give Medicaid the lowest price offered to any commercial buyer. The Most-Favored-Nation deal adds little to that.

For Medicare patients, the Inflation Reduction Act’s negotiated prices remain far more meaningful than anything in the MFN agreements. Those prices are statutory, binding, and verified. The MFN deals are voluntary, confidential, and time-limited to three years. A Senate HELP Committee report released this week documents the consequences of that distinction: companies that signed pricing deals with the administration have raised the cost of hundreds of medications, and launched new drugs at an average price of $353,000 a year.

For commercially insured Americans, the deals do almost nothing. When manufacturers lower list prices, the pharmacy benefit managers that extract rebates calibrated to those prices simply adjust accordingly. The savings rarely reach the patient’s copay.

The Manufacturing Question

Rebuilding domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing addresses a real vulnerability. Roughly 53% of patented drugs distributed in the United States are currently produced abroad. The $400 billion in manufacturing commitments announced so far, if they materialize, represent real jobs and a more resilient supply chain.

But companies can commit to U.S. manufacturing without agreeing to lower prices. Higher domestic production costs, if anything, push prices up. Manufacturing jobs and drug affordability are two separate goals. This policy treats them as one.

A Familiar Approach to Affordability

The federal government already knows how to control drug costs. The VA has used its purchasing power to pay dramatically less for the same drugs for decades. And since January 2026, Medicare’s new negotiating authority, established by the Inflation Reduction Act, has begun delivering the same result at a far greater scale, reducing prices by 38% to 79% on the first ten negotiated drugs.

Trump is continuing the Inflation Reduction Act’s negotiation program and claiming credit for its results. He is also quietly weakening it. Recent legislation shields more drugs from negotiation, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating the change will cost Medicare $8.8 billion in foregone savings.

A more serious affordability agenda would expand Medicare negotiation to more drugs and extend those prices to the commercial market. It would require pharmacy benefit managers to pass savings through to patients. It would build on what is already working rather than substitute leverage for policy.

Affordability is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2026 midterms. Voters are already feeling the pressure of rising drug costs, expiring ACA subsidies, and Medicaid cuts. The gap between what this administration claims and what it delivers is exactly the conversation those elections will turn on.

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End Notes:

1. Trump executive order on pharmaceutical tariffs, April 2026 White House Fact Sheet: President Trump Bolsters National Security and Strengthens U.S. Supply Chains by Imposing Tariffs on Patented Pharmaceutical Products. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-bolsters-national-security-and-strengthens-u-s-supply-chains-by-imposing-tariffs-on-patented-pharmaceutical-products/

2. U.S. drug prices compared to other countries RAND Corporation analysis of international drug price comparisons. https://www.rand.org/health-care/projects/drug-prices.html

3. Government vs. private market drug spending CMS National Health Expenditure Data, 2024. https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/nhe-fact-sheet

4. MFN pricing deals and price increases despite agreements Senate HELP Committee Minority Report: Drugmakers Raised Prices on Hundreds of Drugs Despite Trump Deals. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ranking Member, April 16, 2026. https://www.sanders.senate.gov NBC News coverage: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/drugmakers-raised-prices-hundreds-drugs-trump-deals-senate-democrats-r-rcna332036

5. TrumpRx analysis: one drug with genuinely new savings Center for American Progress: TrumpRx Discounts Only One Drug While 22 Million Americans See Costs Rise. March 17, 2026. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumprx-discounts-only-one-drug-while-22-million-americans-see-costs-rise/

6. Small and mid-size biotech companies and tariff impact Axios: Pharma tariffs force biotech to weigh price deals. April 13, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/pharma-tariffs-trump-pressure-biotech-deals

7. IRA Medicare drug price negotiation results KFF: Key Facts About Medicare Drug Price Negotiation. March 2026. https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/faqs-about-the-inflation-reduction-acts-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program/

8. IRA weakening: orphan drug exemption expansion and CBO estimate Center for American Progress: Medicare Negotiation Is Working, but the Trump Administration’s Rollbacks Diminish Potential Savings. November 2025. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/medicare-negotiation-is-working-but-the-trump-administrations-rollbacks-diminish-potential-savings/

9. VA drug pricing model U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Federal Supply Schedule and VA National Formulary. https://www.va.gov/formularyadvisor/
   

I’ve received some feedback that reading these daily updates has given some readers ulcers. I get it. The news is dark. So today we will do something different. A purely good news edition of “What I’m Hearing.”

JD Vance Just Had the Worst Week of Any Vice President in Modern History

There is nothing better than bad things happening to bad people. And JD Vance is the worst person in our country. So today, we are going to bask in the glory of how terrible JD Vance’s week has been.

On Monday, he flew to Budapest to campaign for Viktor Orbán. Held up his phone so the crowd could hear Trump say, “I am a big fan of Viktor.” Orbán lost in a historic landslide the next day. Vance then flew to Pakistan to lead the most direct U.S.-Iran diplomatic engagement in 50 years. After 21 hours of negotiations — while Trump sat courtside at a UFC fight in Miami — Vance left without a deal. Iran said the American delegation failed to “gain the trust of the Iranian delegation.” It later emerged that Jared Kushner had been feeding Netanyahu daily updates from inside the talks.

He came home to the worst VP approval ratings in recorded history — a 21-point net approval collapse since January 2025. Then he appeared at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia that was barely a quarter full. He got heckled over the war in Iran. He publicly acknowledged that “young voters do not love” Trump’s Middle East policy. Then, as a Catholic convert, he told Pope Leo XIV to be “more careful” about speaking on theology, while his boss was posting AI images of himself as Jesus.

Brian Beutler at Off Message has the sharpest analysis of why this isn’t just a bad week. Vance’s quiet campaign to position himself as “the lone voice of reason” who opposed the war has actually made peace harder. By framing the war as a failure only he predicted, he’s hardened every other official’s incentive to prove him wrong. “To discredit Vance’s narrative, and vindicate themselves, they must somehow transform the failure of the war into a success.” Zeteo’s analysts predicted this trajectory in late 2024, calling Vance “Boy Kamala” — destined to inherit Trump’s failures the way Harris inherited Biden’s. Sources inside the administration told Zeteo bluntly: “Trump is imploding, and he’s probably going to take JD down with him.”

The race to succeed Trump was supposed to be Vance’s by default. He is now the face of a disastrous war, a failed diplomatic mission, a humiliating foreign campaign trip, and a confrontation with the Pope. The authoritarian network he championed just got repudiated at the ballot box. And his approval ratings track almost exactly with Trump’s.

JD Vance is having a really bad time. And I couldn’t be happier.

Read more: Off Message, Zeteo, The Bulwark

Orban’s Loss is Really Good for Us.

The victory of the incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar must be studied by Democrats. Former Biden Ambassador David Pressman’s analysis, highlighted by Bill Kristol in The Bulwark, is sharp: Magyar didn’t run on policy proposals. He ran on system change. He told conservative Hungarians in Orbán’s own rural strongholds that the reason their schools and hospitals are crumbling is that “these guys are stealing from you.” He connected Orbán’s relationship with Putin as a “vector of mass corruption.” He didn’t hedge. He was fearless — and he won a supermajority with 77% turnout.

JVL at The Bulwark adds an important caution: winning isn’t enough. He walked through exactly what Orbán did to entrench power — captured courts, gerrymandered maps, and rigged the parliamentary math so that 44.9% of the vote still produced a supermajority. The lesson: Magyar has to use his mandate to restructure, not just govern. Democracy can’t survive on the honor system.

Brian Tyler Cohen grounds it in the data: 78% turnout, a broad coalition, Magyar as a former Orbán insider turned democracy champion, and Trump-aligned conservatives losing ground across Europe and Canada. The key lesson isn’t ideological — Magyar is center-right, not progressive. It’s about turnout, coalition size, and making authoritarianism unaffordable for voters.

Viktor Orban led a successful authoritarian takeover of Hungary and ruled for 16 years. He turned the media into state-run propaganda. He enriched his billionaire friends. He cozied up to Vladimir Putin. He changed election laws in an attempt to rig them in his favor. His goal was to remain in power forever.

On Sunday, he lost, showing the world that if the people rise up, fascists don’t stand a chance.

Read more: The Bulwark, Brian Tyler Cohen

Democrats Can Win the Senate.

Cook Political Report — the gold standard of nonpartisan race ratings — moved four Senate races toward Democrats this week. Robert Hubbell has the sharpest breakdown: North Carolina (Roy Cooper) and Georgia (Jon Ossoff) both moved from Toss Up to Lean Democratic. Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. John Husted) moved from Lean Republican to Toss Up. Nebraska (independent Dan Osborn vs. Pete Ricketts) moved from Solid Republican to Lean Republican. Cook editor Jessica Taylor cited “an increasingly sour national environment for Republicans” as the driver.

The context matters: the 2026 Senate map was supposed to be structurally favorable for Republicans. Six months ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Senate wasn’t in play. These four shifts don’t flip the chamber on their own — Cook still projects Republicans retaining control — but they represent a seismic change in the landscape, driven directly by the Iran war’s economic fallout and Trump’s collapsing approval.

Meanwhile, the special elections keep telling the same story. Democrats overperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by 13 points in recent specials, including flipping the Florida state house district that contains Mar-a-Lago. More Democrats voted in the Texas primary than Republicans. And a new Zeteo exclusive poll shows the Michigan Democratic Senate primary is wide open, another signal of competitive energy down-ballot.

It often feels like Trump is Teflon. That there are no consequences for his disastrous and incompetent administration. But don’t forget. In Trump’s first term, he was the first president since Herbert Hoover — the president during the onset of the Great Depression — to have the House, Senate, and presidency flip in a single term.

He is on the path to do that again.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, Zeteo — Michigan poll

That’s your Wednesday. The midterms are 202 days away.

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The Blockade Is Already Failing — And Three Inflation Reports Just Landed

Yesterday I wrote about Trump’s naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. It took less than 24 hours for the cracks to show.

Aaron Parnas reports that a Chinese oil tanker successfully passed through the Strait on Monday despite the blockade, using misleading registration details. Iran’s state media immediately seized on it, mocking Trump across every channel. U.S. officials then quietly clarified the blockade targets Iranian ports only, not all ships, a significant walk-back from Trump’s sweeping “any and all ships” rhetoric on Truth Social. Robert Hubbell put it best: CENTCOM has been forced to “retrofit Trump’s statements into the law of the sea, the law of war, and the laws of logic.”

Meanwhile, the economic data is now screaming. The IMF released its World Economic Outlook today warning the war has “abruptly darkened” the global picture. Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles walks through a brutal trifecta of inflation reports: the Producer Price Index rose 0.5% in March (6.2% annualized), the Consumer Price Index surged 0.9% (10.8% annualized), and the Personal Consumption Expenditure index came in “way too hot” — all before the war’s full impact hit the data. The IMF’s worst-case scenario: global growth at 2% with inflation at 6%. Gas is averaging $4.11 nationally. And in a detail that should surprise no one: the NYT reports the IMF identified the biggest economic winner from Trump’s war as Russia, whose growth outlook has improved on higher oil prices and the partial lifting of U.S. sanctions.

Rosenberg’s most important point: inflation was already rising before the war started. Tariffs, mass deportation disruptions, and healthcare cuts had already slowed GDP from 3.2% to 1.3%. The war didn’t create the crisis. It poured gasoline on one that was already burning. A ceasefire won’t fix what Trump broke.

Read more: Hopium Chronicles, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell

Orbán Was Funding CPAC. Kushner Was Feeding Netanyahu. The Corruption Is Structural.

Yesterday I covered Orbán’s landslide defeat and what it means for the authoritarian playbook. Today, two revelations change the scale of the story.

First: incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar revealed Monday that Orbán had been using Hungarian government money to finance CPAC — the American conservative organizing hub. Magyar’s team also disclosed that Orbán’s outgoing foreign minister was caught shredding confidential documents, and that Orbán told Putin last October: “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.” Heather Cox Richardson connects the dots: this is a direct line from a foreign government working for Putin to the domestic machinery of American authoritarianism. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts built close institutional ties to Budapest. Tucker Carlson interviewed Orbán on Hungarian soil. CPAC invited him to speak. And now we know CPAC’s conferences were partially bankrolled by Orbán’s government, which was itself serving Putin.

Second: Zeteo dropped a major report that Jared Kushner was feeding Benjamin Netanyahu daily updates from inside the Iran peace negotiations in Islamabad. The implications are devastating: the U.S. peace delegation may have been structurally compromised from the start, with Israel — whose interests in these negotiations are diametrically opposed to a diplomatic resolution — receiving a running intelligence feed on American negotiating positions. That helps explain why 21 hours of talks produced nothing.

It’s important to note that Jared Kushner has no formal role in the United States government. His private equity firm, Affinity Partners, received $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince's sovereign wealth fund, over the objections of the fund's own advisors, who cited Kushner's inexperience and called his operations 'unsatisfactory in all aspects.' The fund has since swelled to $4.8 billion in Saudi and Gulf money. Kushner has collected $157 million in fees and generated zero profits for his investors. Saudi Arabia and Iran are enemies. Having Kushner present at these negotiations is insane.

Why Tucker Carlson Attacking Trump Matters More Than All of MSNBC

Trump’s political coalition is continuing to fall apart. The pieces being left behind are critical for the Democratic comeback. Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box explains why the standard dismissal — “MAGA voters are still with him, so who cares?” — fundamentally misreads what’s happening.

Pfeiffer makes a crucial distinction. Yes, 85% of self-identified “MAGA Republicans” still support the Iran war. But only 54% of non-MAGA Republicans do. And “MAGA” isn’t an ideology, it’s a proxy for Trump loyalty. The non-MAGA Republicans breaking away aren’t moderates. Many are younger, first-time Republicans who got on board specifically because Trump promised to end wars and lower costs. He has now failed on both.

Trump’s political superpower has never been his polling. It’s his media apparatus — a system that attacks critics, amplifies his message, and shapes coverage for the softer voters who powered his 2024 win. That apparatus is fracturing. Tucker is going on hour-long tirades. Alex Jones is calling for the 25th Amendment. Megyn Kelly told Trump to “shut the fuck up.” Candace Owens called him a “genocidal lunatic.” Joe Rogan and Theo Von are both harshly critical. And in the modern media ecosystem, the impact isn’t measured by who watches Tucker’s full show; it’s measured by which clips go viral to people who would never seek out that content. A single Tucker clip attacking Trump reaches more persuadable voters than a thousand statements from Gavin Newsom. Those viewers trust Tucker. They don’t trust Democrats.

We don't need to welcome Tucker, Candace, or Kelly into the Democratic tent. We don't need to amplify them or agree with them. But when the people Trump's base trusts most are telling them the war is wrong and the economy is broken, that does more to move persuadable voters than anything Democrats could say themselves. The smart play isn't to celebrate the MAGA revolt — it's to watch where the cracks are forming and drive a wedge into every single one.

Read more: The Message Box

Cuba Is Next. And Nobody in Congress Is Asking for a Vote.

While the Iran war grinds on, Zeteo reports — sourced to two people familiar with the situation and a third briefed on it — that Pentagon officials have been quietly given a new White House directive: ramp up preparations for possible military operations against Cuba. Trump mentioned it Monday, standing next to a DoorDash delivery grandmother at a White House photo-op: “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this.” One Trump adviser compared his frustration with Cuba’s defiance to how he felt watching Maduro dance before ordering the Venezuelan president’s abduction.

The playbook is identical to Venezuela: DOJ is reportedly pursuing fast indictments against Cuban leaders for drug, immigration, and violent crimes, creating the legal pretext for action. Cuba’s leadership has publicly responded by calling on its people to “responsibly protect our country.”

No congressional vote authorized the war in Iran. No congressional vote authorized the operation in Venezuela. And now a second front is being war-gamed while the first remains unresolved, the economy is cratering, and Congress is on recess. The pattern — manufactured legal pretexts, media ridicule of foreign leaders, followed by military action — is now fully established. At what point does someone in Congress demand a vote?

Read more: Zeteo

That’s your Tuesday. The blockade is leaking. Inflation is accelerating. CPAC was funded by a Putin ally. Kushner was briefing Netanyahu during peace talks. Tucker is turning on Trump. Cuba is next.

The midterms are 203 days away.

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Orbán Is Gone. Vance Was There to Watch It Happen.

Viktor Orbán, the 16-year authoritarian ruler of Hungary who served as the blueprint for Project 2025 and MAGA’s global playbook, was defeated in a landslide on Sunday. With 77% voter turnout, opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza party won a supermajority in Parliament, meaning they can undo Orbán’s constitutional changes. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted: “Hungary has chosen Europe.”

JD Vance had literally traveled to Budapest to campaign for Orbán on the eve of the election. He held up his phone to the podium so the crowd could hear Trump say, “I am a big fan of Viktor.” The result: a humiliating personal defeat for Vance, a massive blow to the authoritarian international, and — as The Bulwark noted — the darkly comic detail that Hungary’s population has been shrinking since 1980, a direct consequence of the anti-immigration policies Trump praised Orbán for implementing.

Jason Stanley at Zeteo has the essential analysis. His core argument: Orbán promised cultural red meat — owning the libs, protecting white Christian identity — but delivered corruption and economic ruin. When material conditions got bad enough, even the propaganda machine couldn’t hold. Stanley’s line: “Owning the libs, apparently, can get old.”

Brian Beutler at Off Message connects this to Vance’s broader collapse. In rapid succession: Vance failed to talk Trump out of starting the Iran war. Failed to negotiate its end in Pakistan. Failed to help Orbán win in Hungary. And his quiet campaign to position himself as “the lone voice of reason” in Trump’s war cabinet has backfired by making it politically impossible for Trump to end the war without vindicating Vance’s critique, while alienating everyone else in the administration. Beutler’s verdict: “Vance has saddled Trump and every other rival official with the failure of a war Trump now cannot end without vindicating Vance’s line that the war was a predictable error.”

Here’s why this matters beyond Hungary: the conditions that toppled Orbán — economic pain, corruption fatigue, record turnout from voters who’d been written off — are the same conditions building in the United States right now. Mass mobilization works, even in a rigged system.

Read more: Zeteo — Jason Stanley, Off Message — “JD Vance Goes Bust”, The Bulwark

Trump Blockaded the Strait, Attacked the Pope, and Posted Himself as Jesus — In One Weekend

I considered separating these into different sections. But the point is that they happened simultaneously, and that’s the story.

On Sunday, Trump announced a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, effective Monday morning. Under the order, the Navy will interdict any vessel that has paid Iran’s transit tolls — including ships from allied nations. The UK immediately announced it would not participate. China, which has been transiting under Iran’s terms, could theoretically face U.S. interdiction. No other nation has joined. Iran called it a “bluff.” The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted the U.S. has no more legal right to blockade the Strait than Iran does under international law, and Trump announced it apparently without consulting allies or thinking through the consequences for global shipping.

This came after the Islamabad talks collapsed. Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff flew to Pakistan for the most direct U.S.-Iran diplomatic engagement in nearly 50 years. After 21 hours, they left without a deal. At the exact moment Vance’s delegation was walking out, Trump and Rubio were courtside at a UFC fight in Miami.

Then, on Orthodox Easter Sunday night, Trump posted a lengthy screed on Truth Social calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” demanding the Pope “stop catering to the Radical Left.” About 45 minutes later, Trump posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus in robes, healing the sick, with eagles overhead and fighter jets in the sky.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.” MAGA influencers, politicians, and commentators erupted in a rare open fracture. The Pope responded Monday morning from Algiers: “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel. The future belongs to men and women of peace.”

This is the same weekend Trump publicly attacked Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and MTG in a 500-word Truth Social rant, all of whom had criticized the Iran war from an “America First” perspective. MTG told Politico she doesn’t know if she considers herself a Republican anymore. The MAGA coalition isn’t fraying at the edges. It’s fracturing at the core. Over the war, over the economy, and now over whether the president posing himself as Christ is the line.

Read more: The Bulwark, Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective

The Economy Is Now Officially a Catastrophe — And the Numbers Prove It

Friday’s data landed like a bomb and deserved more attention than it got over the weekend.

The March CPI came in at 3.3% annual inflation, the highest in nearly four years, driven by a 21.2% surge in gasoline prices. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey, also released Friday, hit its worst recorded level since 1961. Americans are paying $4.15 per gallon nationally. As Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles emphasized, before the war even started, Trump’s policies — illegal tariffs, mass deportation disruptions, and healthcare cuts — had already slowed GDP growth from 3.2% to 1.3% and produced the worst net job performance since Hoover.

The tariff situation is its own disaster. The Supreme Court ruled Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs illegal in February. The government must now return the $160 billion it collected. But in a particularly cruel twist, consumers, who bore nearly 80% of the tariff burden, an estimated $2,000 annual loss per household according to the Yale Budget Lab, won’t see a penny back, because they didn’t directly pay the tariffs themselves. The importers did. Consumers just paid higher prices.

Scott Galloway introduced a framework worth bookmarking: BNFL — Break Now, Fix Later. It describes Trump’s pattern across every domain. The Iran war: launched 12,000 airstrikes to install a friendly regime, got the dictator’s angrier son instead. Tariffs: levied the largest hike in a century, the Supreme Court ruled them illegal. DOGE: fired 200,000 workers, claimed $215 billion in savings that turned out to be a fraction. The White House East Wing: demolished without authorization to build a $400 million ballroom, now halted by a federal judge — leaving a literal crater on the grounds of the most famous building in America. And in a detail that writes its own punchline, Democrats discovered Friday that Trump is accepting foreign steel for the project.

Break Now, Fix Later. Except the fixing never comes.

Read more: Hopium Chronicles, Prof G, Letters from an American

That’s your Monday. Orbán is gone. The Strait is blockaded. Inflation is at 3.3%. Consumer confidence is at a 65-year low. The Pope is fighting back. And Trump’s own base is turning on him over a war, an economy, and an AI portrait of Jesus. The midterms are 204 days away.

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“We’ve got to get Viktor Orbán reelected as prime minister of Hungary, don’t we?” Vance told the crowd at a sports arena. Trump joined by speakerphone to offer his own endorsement. It is highly unusual for a senior U.S. official to visit a foreign country close to a national election, let alone to address a campaign rally.

Who Is Viktor Orbán, and Why Does He Matter Here?

Orbán has ruled Hungary for 16 years. In that time, he has systematically weakened democratic institutions and is aligning Hungary ever more closely with Vladimir Putin while nominally remaining in the European Union. He has become a model and a hero for the global hard right, including the American MAGA movement. Trump has called him “a strong and powerful leader.”

This Sunday’s election is Orbán's most serious electoral challenge in 16 years. Vance’s visit comes with Orbán trailing the pro-European opposition Tisza party by 19 percentage points among decided voters. Vance praised Orbán’s leadership as a “model for the continent,” and accused the EU of interfering in Hungary’s election. The man accusing others of foreign interference was standing on a stage in Budapest five days before the election.

The Pattern Closest to Home

Vance’s Budapest trip would be remarkable on its own. But it lands in the middle of a sustained administration campaign to reshape American elections before November’s midterms.

On March 31, Trump signed an executive order with two distinct mechanisms to take control of US elections. The first directs the Department of Homeland Security, with assistance from the Social Security Administration, to compile a master list of eligible citizens in each state and send it to state election officials. The second directs the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots only to voters on a separately maintained, federally pre-approved list. States that don’t comply risk losing federal funding.

This is Trump’s second attempt to take over the elections. A nearly identical executive order from 2025 was blocked by multiple federal judges who concluded the president lacks constitutional authority to rewrite election law unilaterally. One judge called the government’s demands “unprecedented and illegal.” The administration issued a second order anyway.

Trump has also been pushing hard in Congress for the SAVE Act, legislation that imposes strict new voter identification requirements. This bill would effectively disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans. It passed the House and is stalled in the Senate.

The “Perfect” List

Central to the administration’s argument for taking over elections is that it has the data to do so accurately. Their agency of choice is the Department of Homeland Security, using DHS’s SAVE system. The SAVE system was built to check immigration status against federal databases. And we know how well their list is working. DHS has arrested U.S. citizens who showed up erroneously.

But the deeper problem is what the list cannot know. Voter eligibility is not simply a matter of citizenship and age. Felony disenfranchisement rules vary by state. Residency requirements differ. Registration deadlines are set by state laws. It has no systematic access to state-specific eligibility rules. The gap between what the administration claims this list does and what it can actually do is significant.

There is also the question of what else the list might be used for. The voter data the DOJ has been demanding from states includes driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. When a federal judge asked what DHS would do with that data, the DOJ attorney could not promise it would not be used for immigration enforcement. That is not a list being built purely for election administration, and multiple active lawsuits are pressing exactly that point.

The idea that DHS maintains a database accurate enough to serve as a gatekeeper of who can vote strains credulity. Federal judges are saying so in real time.

The Post Office as Manipulator of Elections

Under the executive order, a state may allow mail voting, but USPS would only deliver a ballot if the voter appears on the federally pre-approved list. The state says you can vote by mail. The federal government’s mail carrier may disagree. If your name is missing from the list due to a database error, administrative lag, or a recent move, your ballot will not be delivered.

There is also the postmark. Normally, mail was postmarked the day it arrived, even if processed later. In December, a new rule was quietly implemented, allowing mail to be postmarked on the day it is processed. Many states allow mail ballots to count if postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive afterward. Under the new rule, a ballot mailed on Election Day could be postmarked the next day and disqualified. Trump’s 2025 executive order had already attempted to prohibit counting such ballots. That provision was blocked in court.

It is also worth noting that this change creates the conditions for manipulation. We have seen other seemingly innocuous changes to rules that the Trump Administration has abused. To be clear, no deliberate ballot delay has been reported, but there is more opportunity for abuse.

Taken together, the executive order, the postmark rule, the DHS citizenship lists, and the SAVE Act describe a coordinated effort to narrow who votes.

What This Administration Believes About Elections

The administration has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that American elections are rife with fraud. Courts have not agreed, and investigations have not substantiated it.

So far, the courts and the states have pushed back against the federal government's encroachment on elections. They have blocked executive order after executive order. But the pressure is sustained, the tactics are multiplying, and November is not far away. Understanding what is at stake and staying clear-eyed about what is happening is not alarmism. It is the minimum moment requires.

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Sources:

CNN: JD Vance makes time to visit Hungary to support Orbán amid Iran negotiations (April 7, 2026): https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/07/politics/hungary-orban-vance-budapest-iran

Euronews: US Vice President Vance attacks Brussels and vows to help Orbán ahead of Hungarian vote (April 7, 2026): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/07/us-vice-president-vance-attacks-brussels-and-vows-to-help-orban-ahead-of-hungarian-vote

PBS NewsHour: Vance speaks in Hungary on trip to help boost Orbán’s reelection bid (April 7, 2026): https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/watch-live-vance-speaks-in-hungary-on-trip-to-help-boost-orbans-reelection-bid

CNBC: Trump signs executive order limiting mail-in voting ahead of 2026 U.S. elections (March 31, 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/trump-mail-in-voting-executive-order.html

Votebeat: Trump issues executive order giving U.S. Postal Service oversight over mail voting (March 31, 2026): https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/03/31/donald-trump-2026-midterm-election-executive-order-absentee-mail-ballots-postal-service-citizenship-list

Democracy Docket: Democrats sue to block Trump’s unlawful order targeting mail-in voting: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/democrats-sue-trump-unlawful-order-mail-voting

NPR: As DOJ prepares to share state voter data with DHS, a key privacy officer resigns (April 3, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5768455/privacy-doj-dhs-voter-data

CNN: Trump is trying to build a massive voter database (April 5, 2026): https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/05/politics/trump-voter-database-election-fraud

Ballotpedia: Here’s what the new USPS rule on postmarks means for absentee/mail-in voting (January 9, 2026): https://news.ballotpedia.org/2026/01/09/heres-what-the-new-u-s-postal-service-rule-on-postmarks-means-for-absentee-mail-in-voting-2

Trump Went To War. Iran Won The Strait.

Ninety minutes before Trump threatened to cause “a whole civilization to die tonight,” Iran’s foreign minister offered a 10-point framework for negotiations and Trump took it. The result: a two-week ceasefire that looks a lot like a strategic defeat dressed up as a win.

Writing in The Bulwark, Bill Kristol laid it out: Iran’s regime remains in place. Its enriched uranium is still stockpiled. Russia and China remain ready to rearm Tehran. A month ago, Trump promised “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” What he got was Iran’s 10-point proposal as the basis for negotiations. Kristol called it “a defeat and a warning.”

Zeteo went further, quoting former Israeli intelligence officer Danny Citrinowicz: if Iran secured guarantees based on its 10 principles, “that is not a marginal outcome, it is a strategic win for Tehran.” Former State Department official Aaron David Miller put it simply: “Iran has won another round.” Political scientist Robert Pape called it “the biggest US strategic defeat since Vietnam.”

The ceasefire framework reportedly includes potential Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz passage — with Iran eyeing a $2 million fee per ship — and sanctions relief. Trump, apparently taken with the concept of tolls, told ABC this morning he was “thinking of doing it as a joint venture.” That arrangement is markedly worse for the United States than before the war.

And now we know how we got here. The New York Times published a devastating reconstruction of how Trump decided to go to war. On February 11, Netanyahu sat across from Trump in the White House Situation Room and delivered an hour-long pitch: Iran was ripe for regime change, its ballistic missile program could be destroyed in weeks, the Strait of Hormuz would stay open, and retaliation against U.S. interests would be minimal. Mossad would help ignite an uprising. They even had a replacement leader picked out: the exiled son of Iran’s last shah. Every single one of those predictions was wrong.

The next day, Trump’s own team pushed back hard. CIA Director Ratcliffe called Netanyahu’s regime change scenario “farcical.” Rubio’s response: “In other words, it’s bullshit.” Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine told Trump the Israeli plan was overblown. White House communications staff warned of the political fallout from starting a war after campaigning against new wars. U.S. intelligence concluded the opposite of what Netanyahu promised, that war would harden the regime, not topple it.

Trump’s response to Netanyahu’s pitch: “Sounds good to me.” Seventeen days later, he authorized Operation Epic Fury from Air Force One. No congressional vote. No imminent threat to the United States. A war launched on the word of a foreign leader whose own intelligence services oversold every claim, and whose predictions have now been proven wrong on every count. Over 3,400 people are dead. The Strait is now under Iran’s control. Its regime is still standing. And the president who started it just accepted their terms.

Read more: The Bulwark, Zeteo, Popular Information, NYTimes

That's your Wednesday. The ceasefire clock is ticking — two weeks until we're right back where we started. And last night's election results from Georgia and Wisconsin are in.

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"I Don't Know": Trump's Press Conference Removed Any Pretense of a Plan

I really want to stop leading this newsletter with Trump’s war in Iran. But every day, Trump becomes more unhinged, and our situation becomes more dangerous.

At a White House press conference, hours after posing with a human-sized Easter Bunny at the egg roll, Trump was asked directly whether the U.S. is moving toward escalation or de-escalation. His answer: “Can’t tell you. I don’t know.” He then said he was “going to Venezuela” to “run for president.” He called Americans who oppose the war “foolish.” He threatened to jail journalists who revealed details about the downed F-15. He proposed that the U.S. should charge its own tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. He claimed Iranians were calling him, saying, “Please keep bombing.”

Watch that press conference and tell me this is a person who should be commanding a military operation. This is why we have the 25th Amendment.

JVL at The Bulwark published the most analytically important piece of the day: a full chronological timeline of every Trump-Iran demand since February 28, documenting at least seven complete reversals. From “unconditional surrender” on March 6 to “we want to make a deal” on March 23 to “I don’t want anything to do with the Strait” on April 1, back to tonight’s civilization-level threat. JVL’s verdict: “a picture of either a degenerate bullshitter, or a man who’s lost his mind.”

But JVL’s most critical contribution is the endgame framing. The best-case scenario is Trump caving — giving Iran whatever they need to reopen the Strait and declaring victory. The alternative is what JVL calls America’s Suez Crisis: the United States simply leaves without resolving the Strait, “shifting the locus of the entire global political order several thousand miles eastward” toward China and the EU. A former NATO commander told CNN that the shift is already underway.

The updated numbers: both crew members from the downed F-15E have been rescued after nearly two days in hostile territory. An Iranian drone strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait injured 15 Americans, bringing total U.S. service member injuries to 373. Over 3,400 people have been killed across the region, including more than 1,600 civilians. Iran is under a near-total internet blackout. Gas prices have passed their 2004 peak — the highest ever recorded outside the pandemic. And Republicans, including Greg Abbott, posted an AI-generated fake image of the rescued airman before being publicly humiliated when it was debunked.

Congress is on Easter recess. No sign of coming back. Tonight’s “Power Plant Day” deadline hits at 8 PM Eastern. The most important question in American foreign policy right now is one the president cannot answer.

Read more: The Bulwark — JVL timeline

Hegseth Has Fired More Four-Stars in 14 Months Than Previous Administrations Did in 150 Years

Pete Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George for refusing to block promotions of women and Black officers. It looks like he is not stopping there.

Zeteo published a more detailed account of Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of the military. Hegseth has now dismissed nearly as many four-star generals in 14 months as previous administrations fired over the past 150 years. Last week’s purge included General David Hodne and Major General William Green — the Army’s top chaplain and a senior Black officer. The former Defense Intelligence Agency Director lost his job for contradicting Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.” The pattern is consistent: anyone who offers facts that contradict the president gets removed.

The palace politics are revealing. Hegseth is in direct conflict with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a better-respected figure Hegseth fears could replace him, because Driscoll resisted the promotion blocks. Firing George was designed to punish Driscoll indirectly, since Hegseth can’t fire a Senate-confirmed civilian. The officer being elevated as replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, came to Hegseth’s attention for one reason: he sent a congratulatory video when Trump was inaugurated.

On Monday, Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force general and Republican, broke with his party publicly: “The Secretary of Defense has the legal right to fire these Flag Officers, but it is not morally right nor wise.” That’s the clearest GOP rebuke yet from someone with actual military credibility. Rep. Yassamin Ansari went further, filing articles of impeachment against Hegseth. Neither will go anywhere under Republican control. But the record matters.

Our military is elevating sycophants and purging truth-tellers during a war. That is a very bad combo.

Read more: Zeteo, The Hill — Bacon, The Parnas Perspective

Trump’s Mail Voting Executive Order: Stealing Elections While You Watch Iran

It’s not much of a question that Democrats will take back the House in the upcoming midterm election… as long as we have free and fair elections.

So with that in mind, this next story might be the most important of them all.

Andrew Egger at The Bulwark argues that while the war commands every headline, this is exactly when Trump does his most dangerous domestic work. Last week, he signed an executive order attempting to seize federal control of mail voting. It orders DHS to compile a list of “approved” absentee voters and instructs USPS to refuse to mail ballots to anyone not on that list. Trump signed the order days after casting his own mail-in ballot in Florida.

Legal analysts say it has no basis in federal law — states control elections, not DHS — and lawsuits are already filed. But the point isn’t to win in court. Alexandra Chandler of Protect Democracy explains the logic: if there’s a slim chance courts don’t stop him, he wins outright. If they do stop him, he still wins — he gets the pretext for the next round and a “rogue judges” grievance narrative to deploy when it matters.

This EO is part of a documented pattern: the FBI’s January raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office. The failed SAVE America Act requiring citizenship documents to vote. Ongoing rhetorical attacks on election integrity. Each move muddies the water, intimidates election officials, and confuses voters about their rights.

Read more: The Bulwark

Schumer Is the Democrats’ Biggest Threat to a Senate Majority

Yesterday, I wrote about the favorable 2026 environment and today’s Georgia runoff. Now we need to talk about how the Democratic Party’s own leadership could blow it.

Writing in Zeteo, Ryan Cooper delivers a devastating case study in self-sabotage. In Maine, Schumer backed 79-year-old Governor Janet Mills — who vetoed a farmworkers’ minimum wage increase — over military veteran Graham Platner, who is polling 27 points ahead of Mills in the primary and four points better against Susan Collins in the general election. Schumer’s rationale, which he personally told the NYT’s Bret Stephens: “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.”

In Michigan, Schumer backed AIPAC-aligned Haley Stevens, who recently recorded promotional videos for AIPAC’s social media, in a state with one of the largest Palestinian-American communities in the country. More electable progressives like Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed are running.

This matters because the macro environment is extraordinary. Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box reports Democrats are overperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by 13 points in special elections — including flipping the Florida state house district that contains Mar-a-Lago. More Democrats voted in the Texas primary than Republicans. But here’s the warning sign buried in the data: the Democratic Party’s favorable rating has collapsed to 28%, four points below Republicans, despite everything. Candidates are winning. The party brand is losing.

Gallup just flipped Americans’ Israel-Palestine sympathies to net-Palestinian for the first time in the survey’s history — by 10 points. In that environment, Schumer is recruiting Israel-aligned candidates in Michigan and installing DC-handpicked career politicians over insurgents in Maine.

Putting the politics of Israel aside, it is an objective fact that running a pro-AIPAC candidate in Michigan is political malfeasance. Putting your finger on the scale for a 79-year-old Governor with a 47% approval rating is equally troubling. Schumer, the DNC, and every establishment member of DC should let the primaries play out without interference. You don’t need to guess who will be more electable. We will know. Because that person will. . . win.

The conditions for a major Democratic wave are real. The question is whether Democratic leadership is smart enough to get out of the way.

Read more: Zeteo — Schumer recruiting, The Message Box, Hopium Chronicles

That's your Tuesday. Trump's deadline hits at 8 PM. Georgia votes.

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This is “What I’m Hearing,” a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

“Praise Be to Allah” — Trump Spent Easter Threatening War Crimes

On Easter Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fckin’ Strait, you crazy bstards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Then, in an ABC News interview, he said he would blow up “the whole country” if Iran didn’t comply. Asked what’s off the table: “Very little.”

Heather Cox Richardson put this in historical context. Trump privately contemplated a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea in 2017, and it took John Kelly physically in the room to talk him down. She also tracked something the media keeps missing: Trump has now issued and abandoned six separate escalation deadlines. The threats keep getting louder. The follow-through keeps being chaotic. Oil markets, per the New York Times, have stopped believing his peace signals entirely.

On the ground, Aaron Parnas reported that Sharif University of Technology, Iran’s MIT equivalent, was bombed. Israel struck South Pars, the facility responsible for roughly half of Iran’s petrochemical production. Iran responded with cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones aimed at UAE targets in a single 24-hour window. Simon Rosenberg estimates that the total economic cost of the war now rivals that of the 2008 financial crisis, with Cleveland Fed projections showing annualized inflation approaching 10%.

European Council President António Costa explicitly compared Trump’s infrastructure threats to Russian war crimes in Ukraine. FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi said, “The American president has lost his mind.” Even Marjorie Taylor Greene posted that Trump “has gone insane” and called on his cabinet to “intervene.” Prediction markets now put 25th Amendment invocation at 35%.

Six weeks into a war that only 28% of Americans support, the president spent Easter morning threatening to bomb power plants and bridges. Under international humanitarian law, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime. He told you his plan. Believe him.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective, Hopium Chronicles, Zeteo

The Impeachment Conversation Is No Longer Fringe

Two of the sharpest voices in anti-Trump conservatism and progressive strategy made the same argument this weekend from completely different directions.

At The Bulwark, Bill Kristol argues Trump “deserves to be impeached and convicted” and that a formal trial would allow all the evidence of his offenses to be presented coherently in one place. Kristol, a lifelong conservative, acknowledges he’d prefer JD Vance’s presidency to what he calls “Mad King Donald.”

Brian Beutler of Off Message goes further with a concrete tactical argument: Hakeem Jeffries should force a privileged floor vote on impeachment immediately. Even if Republicans table it, every single House Republican would have to cast a public vote endorsing Trump’s conduct — including his threatened war crimes. But Beutler’s sharpest critique is aimed at Democrats themselves: the party has spent more energy debating whether to associate with anti-war streamer Hasan Piker than staking out a clear anti-war position. His line is worth sitting with: “A party with muddled views on this war, arguing over whether or not to blacklist antiwar podcasters, will have a hard time instilling confidence in skeptics that it means to end the war.”

With Senator Chris Murphy publicly invoking the 25th Amendment and even MTG breaking with Trump, the political coalition enabling this war is visibly cracking. The question Democrats face isn’t whether impeachment would succeed — it’s whether forcing the vote defines the party heading into 2026 or hands Republicans their favorite talking point. I think Beutler has the better argument: Democrats need to focus less on condemning Hasan Piker and more on defining their stance as the anti-war party.

Read more: The Bulwark, Off Message

Lina Khan Is Playing the Long Game While Everyone Watches the Fire

While the war dominates every cycle, Matt Stoller published something this week that deserves attention on a completely different timeline.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan announced the founding of the Center for Law and Economy at Columbia University. Stoller draws a historical parallel that reframes what this means: after Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, Robert Bork channeled Lenin — “our general attitude should be that of the Bolsheviks after 1905” — and spent two decades building the Heritage Foundation, the Law and Economics Center, and the intellectual infrastructure that enabled Reagan’s deregulatory revolution. Khan is running the same playbook from the other direction.

And the anti-monopoly movement is already producing results at the state level. Arizona AG Kris Mayes’ RealPage rental cartel bust is already lowering rents. State AGs are fighting Ticketmaster and pursuing illegal tariff refunds from Lululemon. Maine became the first state to ban data center construction. Italy ordered Netflix to refund seven years of illegal price increases. Americans oppose data centers in their communities 65-24.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Antitrust Division has dropped more than 40 cases under former Attorney General1 Pam Bondi — more than double any prior new administration. The fight over who controls the American economy is happening. Khan is betting that patient institution-building beats the next election cycle. History says she’s right.

Read more: BIG Newsletter

Democrats Are Getting Bullish on 2026. Tomorrow Is the First Real Test.

There’s a mood shift happening in Democratic circles.

The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan reports that Democratic operatives have moved from cautious optimism to near-euphoria. Pollster Zac McCrary now sees 35–40 competitive House seats, up from 15–20, and calls a 51 or 52-seat Senate majority “very plausible.” The main Senate Republican super PAC is spending $342 million defensively — with Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio as its most-worried holds. The DLCC announced its first state legislative target slate Monday, signaling a full-ticket strategy from the statehouse up.

The structural conditions are real: an unpopular war, high gas prices, Medicaid cuts, and declining consumer sentiment. Democrats haven’t had this kind of alignment since 2006.

Tomorrow’s Georgia 6th District runoff, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former seat, is the first actual data point. The NYT reports the Iran war has split the GOP field there, which is exactly the kind of fracture Democrats need to exploit nationally. Meanwhile, a WaPo/Schar School poll out of Virginia is a useful reality check: even Gov. Spanberger, who won in a landslide, faces a brutal approval environment because of affordability concerns. The conditions favor Democrats, but vibes aren’t votes. Now is the time for Democrats to define what they stand for, not just what they are against.

Read more: The Bulwark, NYT — GOP super PAC spending, NYT — Georgia runoff

That's your Monday. The House is back in session, markets reopen after the Easter weekend, and Trump's "Power Plant Day" deadline is tomorrow. If the pattern holds, he'll either escalate or quietly move the goalposts again.

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A US Fighter Jet Is Down Over Iran. This War Just Changed.

This is the story that should stop everything else today.

Iranian state media claims it shot down a US F-15E over central Iran using an advanced air defense system. Aaron Parnas confirmed the US has launched a search-and-rescue mission, with a Combat King II aircraft spotted flying at low altitude over southern Iran. The US military hasn’t officially confirmed the loss. Two crew members are unaccounted for inside Iranian territory.

This comes one day after US airstrikes destroyed a major bridge near Tehran — the first confirmed strike on civilian infrastructure — which Zeteo reports killed eight people. Trump then bragged on Truth Social that “bridges next, then electric power plants” were coming.

Meanwhile, Heather Cox Richardson notes that during Trump’s primetime address on Wednesday, which offered virtually no new information, US stock futures plummeted $550 billion in 25 minutes. Oil is now at $112 a barrel, up from $54 at the start of the year. And in a detail that should be leading every newscast: 40 nations led by Britain and France convened Thursday to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: there was no Congressional vote authorizing this war. There’s no exit strategy. It’s destroying our economy and leaving us isolated in the world. Trump claimed to have “dramatically curtailed” Iran’s capabilities, yet CNN reports they still have roughly half their missile launchers and thousands of drones. The markets are closed today and through the weekend; look for more escalation by a desperate Trump.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, Zeteo, Letters from an American, The Bulwark

Trump’s Budget: No Childcare, More War.

Trump is releasing his 2027 budget proposal today, featuring a 50% jump in defense spending — from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. That’s the largest single-year increase since the Korean War. Bigger than Reagan’s buildup. Bigger than the post-9/11 spike.

And he told you exactly how he plans to pay for it. At an Easter lunch on Wednesday, Trump said plainly: “The United States can’t take care of day care… We’re fighting wars… It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

Richardson points out that this is nearly word-for-word Barry Goldwater’s vision from 1960: military supremacy, no federal safety net. The difference is that it’s no longer a political pamphlet. It’s the governing philosophy of the United States during a hot war.

Zeteo provides the cost comparison that should be tattooed on every campaign ad between now and November: the 850 Tomahawk missiles already fired at Iran cost $3.1 billion. That’s enough to eliminate 15 years of school lunch debt, fund cancer treatment for 28,000 Americans, or provide solar power for 393,000 homes. Raytheon’s parent company hit an all-time stock high the day the war began.

Trump is putting America and Americans last. There’s no grift for him in increased spending on childcare and healthcare. No polymarkets to bet on. No foreign bribes to accept. The bottom line is he has found a way to profit from war. So more war is what we will get.

Read more: Zeteo, Letters from an American

$433 Million Is Already Buying the 2026 Midterms

While everyone is watching the war story, Robert Reich published a detailed accounting of the billionaire money already flooding 2026 midterm races — and the scale is staggering.

As of March 1, the 50 biggest-spending billionaires had contributed over $433 million, with 80% going to Republican candidates or conservative groups. At the top: Elon Musk at $71 million to Republicans so far in 2026 (on top of $278 million in 2024). Wall Street financier Jeff Yass at $55 million — with documented correlating Trump decisions protecting Yass’s TikTok investment. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman at $25 million, apparently to prevent state-level AI regulation. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman at $12 million split across Trump’s super PAC and Republican leadership funds.

Reich frames this as a doom loop: concentrated wealth buys political decisions that make the wealthy even wealthier. Musk’s net worth grew 220% since Trump won in 2024. Raytheon hit all-time highs the day the war started. This isn’t random. It’s a documented transactional ecosystem — donate, receive policy favors, get richer, donate more. This is what the oligarchy looks like when it stops pretending.

Read more: Robert Reich

One Year Since “Liberation Day”

One more for your Friday: today marks exactly one year since Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff rollout. Over at The Bulwark, Andrew Egger and Catherine Rampell look back at what actually happened. The Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal. Companies are still waiting on refunds. And the White House is quietly tinkering with new versions of the same failed policy.

Here's the scorecard: tariff policy changed more than 50 times in the months that followed. Manufacturing employment didn't reverse — it declined by 89,000 jobs between April 2025 and February 2026. Consumer goods prices went up another 2%, with estimates that 90 to 95% of the tariff cost was passed directly to consumers1. The Supreme Court ruled most of the tariffs unconstitutional in February, and around half of the revenue generated last year must now be refunded. Trump's response? He immediately used a separate statute to reimpose a 10% tariff for a temporary five-month period.

That’s your Friday. Markets are closed for Easter weekend, which historically is when this administration escalates, so keep your notifications on.

And if you’re not already subscribed to the writers I’m pulling from here, you should be. They’re doing some of the best political journalism in the country right now.

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Trump’s Iran Speech Was a Disaster. Even His Own People Said So.

Multiple newsletters lit up on last night’s primetime address, and the consensus is brutal, including from inside the White House.

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box argues this speech may be the moment historians point to as when Trump’s presidency became functionally over. The Bulwark and Aaron Parnas both zeroed in on the internal dissent, with one senior official comparing watching Trump to “listening to Joe Biden.”

Here’s what jumped out to me: Trump claimed the war is “nearing completion” and that Iran’s missiles are “just about used up” — hours after Iran launched its largest missile strike on Israel in weeks. He told other nations to go “take” the Strait of Hormuz themselves, which is an extraordinary abandonment of the rationale for the war he started. Oil prices surged, and stock futures dropped while he was still speaking.

The two promises that built Trump’s political brand were lower costs and no new wars. Gas is above $4 a gallon. The Strait is still closed. His approval is below 40%. That’s not a messaging problem. That’s a credibility collapse.

Read more: The Message Box, The Bulwark, The Parnas Perspective

Trump Tried to Intimidate the Supreme Court in Person. It Backfired.

Heather Cox Richardson had the best historical context on this one, and The Bulwark and Zeteo covered the courtroom dynamics.

Trump physically sat in the front row of the Supreme Court gallery while justices heard arguments on his executive order to end birthright citizenship. He brought his AG and Commerce Secretary. He left the moment the ACLU attorney started arguing.

It didn’t work. The conservative majority joined liberals in aggressively questioning the administration’s position.

What Richardson’s piece makes clear is how settled this law actually is. Birthright citizenship was established by the 14th Amendment in 1868 to reverse Dred Scott. It was upheld in 1898 in Wong Kim Ark. Trump isn’t offering a new legal theory — he’s trying to overrule 125 years of precedent by showing up and staring down the justices. That a sitting president thought physical intimidation was worth trying tells you everything about where we are.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark, Zeteo

Trump Wants to Fire His AG for Not Weaponizing the DOJ Fast Enough

The Guardian has revealed that Trump is considering replacing Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence for not fully backing the Iran war justification. According to the NY Times, he has also discussed replacing AG Pam Bondi with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin because the DOJ hasn’t prosecuted Trump’s political enemies aggressively enough.

Firing your attorney general and intelligence director simultaneously — during an active war — because they aren’t loyal enough isn’t governance. It’s a loyalty purge. And if Bondi’s replacement faces pressure to weaponize the DOJ from day one, that’s not a personnel story. It’s a rule-of-law story.

Read more: The Guardian, NY Times

That’s What I’m Hearing. If you’re only going to click one link today, make it Pfeiffer’s piece at The Message Box on why that Iran speech may be the inflection point.

And if you’re not already subscribed to the writers I’m reading here, you should be. They’re doing some of the best political journalism in the country right now.

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A federal judge just said no. And the case he ruled on, about vaccines, may be one of the clearest illustrations yet of what this administration’s theory of power actually looks like in practice.

The Setup

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to the Department of Health and Human Services with a decades-long record of spreading misinformation about vaccine safety. Once confirmed, he moved quickly. In May 2025, he downgraded the federal COVID vaccine recommendation from routine to “shared clinical decision-making.” The name sounds reasonable. Who could object to shared decision-making? But the practical effect is significant: a vaccine that is recommended carries the full backing of the public health system — and makes it far harder to restrict access. Remove that backing, and the erosion begins quietly. As I wrote in an earlier post, it is the mechanism of slow erosion — death by a thousand restrictions.

Kennedy made this change with no evidence review and no input from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP. ACIP matters. It is the independent panel of medical and public health experts that has guided vaccine policy since 1964 — the firewall between politics and vaccine science. Its members review evidence, deliberate in public, and vote through a process the medical community and the public can scrutinize. Kennedy bypassed this process.

Then Kennedy fired all 17 sitting ACIP members and replaced them with people chosen for their skepticism, not their expertise. The judge in this case later found that of the 15 members Kennedy installed, only six had any meaningful experience in vaccines. That reconstituted committee kept going: by September, they had extended the shared decision-making designation further across the schedule; by December, they had voted to end the routine recommendation for the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. In January 2026, the childhood vaccine schedule was cut from 17 recommendations to 11. Each step bypassed the legal process. None of it was grounded in science.

The Legal Theory

When medical organizations took Kennedy to court, the administration’s defense revealed something important. The government argued that the CDC director has essentially unlimited discretion to issue or change vaccine recommendations — no ACIP vote required, no evidence review, no process at all. Pure executive authority.

The judge asked the government’s attorney to follow that logic to its conclusion: under that theory, could the CDC recommend that people go have lunch with someone who has measles instead of getting vaccinated?

The government’s attorney said yes.

That answer is not just alarming. It is clarifying. It is the same argument this administration has made about tariffs, about immigration, about funding cuts to universities and law firms. The law does not constrain us. Process does not bind us. Evidence does not obligate us. We decide. The vaccine case just happened to produce a moment where that argument was stated with unusual, almost surreal, candor.

What the Court Said

The judge blocked all of it.

He invalidated Kennedy’s ACIP appointments. He voided every vote that the reconstituted panel had taken. He blocked the January 2026 schedule changes. Every change made to federal vaccine policy since May 2025 is on hold. The pre-Kennedy recommendations are back in effect. The universal COVID vaccine recommendation is restored.

The law, the judge ruled, requires a process — one grounded in science, conducted by qualified experts, and open to public scrutiny.

This is a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment. The administration will appeal. The outcome is not certain. But for now, the adults are back in the room.

What This Means for You

The confusion from months of policy chaos is real. The bottom line is straightforward.

All vaccine recommendations in place before Kennedy took office are back in effect.

• Get vaccinated.

• Not sure of the frequency or timing? Check with your doctor.

• Pregnant? Talk to your OB/GYN.

• And do not worry about coverage — insurance will continue to cover vaccinations.

Parents, do not hesitate to ask your pediatrician for clarification. If you are looking for a resource you can trust regardless of what Washington does next, the American Academy of Pediatrics published its own 2026 childhood immunization schedule in January, independently of the federal government and endorsed by 12 major medical organizations representing more than 1 million clinicians. It is at HealthyChildren.org. Your pediatrician is following it. So should you.

The courts, with the notable exception of the current Supreme Court, are holding. Facts still matter in federal courtrooms. That is not nothing. In this political moment, it might be everything.

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Endnotes

1. AAP 2026 Childhood Immunization Schedule, HealthyChildren.org: https://www.healthychildren.org/English/news/Pages/AAPs-recommended-childhood-and-adolescent-immunization-schedule-for-2026.aspx

2. New England Journal of Medicine analysis of the May 2025 COVID vaccine recommendation changes: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2507766

3. CIDRAP op-ed on shared decision-making as a mechanism for weakening vaccine policy: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-vaccines/cidrap-op-ed-quiet-dismantling-how-shared-decision-making-weakens-vaccine-policy

4. ABC News on Kennedy’s removal of all 17 ACIP members: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/rfk-jr-removing-17-members-cdcs-vaccine-advisory/story?id=122670046

5. Association of Health Care Journalists explainer on the court ruling: https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2026/03/federal-judge-halts-hhs-acip-vaccine-decisions-what-to-know/

6. CIDRAP special edition on the state of U.S. vaccine policy after the ruling: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-vaccines/state-us-vaccine-policy-special-edition-mar-17-2026

7. MurMur Impact, earlier post on the subtle COVID vaccine guideline change: https://www.murmurimpact.com/p/a-subtle-covid-vaccine-guideline

Congress didn’t vote. There was no Authorization for the Use of Military Force. No hearing. No debate. Trump just declared war, and nobody stopped him.

Since then, 160 children have been killed in a U.S. strike on a girls' school. Gas prices have spiked more than a dollar a gallon. The global oil market is in its worst disruption in recorded history. And a pattern of suspicious trading activity suggests that people in Trump's orbit knew about market-moving announcements before the public did.

Congress responded to all of this by going on spring break.

This war is illegal.

The Constitution is explicit: Congress declares war. The president commands the military. Those are separate jobs.

Trump skipped the first one.

He launched strikes on Iran in early March without a congressional vote, without an AUMF, without anything. At a private Republican fundraising dinner, he told donors he wouldn’t use the word “war” to describe what was happening because, in his words, “you are supposed to get approval.”

Since then, Democrats and a handful of Republicans have called for an AUMF vote. Nothing has happened. Pete Hegseth has requested over $200 billion in emergency supplemental war funding — one of the largest wartime funding requests in American history — and Republican leaders won’t say whether they have the votes to pass it.

Meanwhile, a congressional memorial was held for the 160 children killed in the girls’ school strike. Nine members of Congress attended. Out of 532.

Wars can have catastrophic consequences for our national safety and economy. This is why the War Powers Clause exists: to prevent one person from starting a war on impulse. The Republican Congress has ceded that responsibility to the president. One of the most significant constitutional erosions in modern American history.

Iran posed no imminent threat.

The administration’s justification for attacking Iran was an “imminent threat” — the legal and moral standard for preemptive military action under both U.S. and international law.

That claim fell apart from the inside.

Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest. Kent isn’t a liberal critic. He’s a veteran of 11 combat deployments and a Gold Star husband. He said publicly that Iran did not pose an imminent nuclear threat, that the case for war was driven by pressure from Israeli officials and American political allies, and that the arguments echoed the false intelligence used to justify Iraq in 2003.

Trump's own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified as recently as 2025 that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. When she appeared before the Senate this month, she reversed course and offered a stunning explanation: "The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president.

Read that again. The entire intelligence community — analysts, career officers, the NCTC — exists to provide independent threat assessments. Gabbard just said those assessments don't matter. Only the president's judgment counts. No institutional check. No independent review. And the last person who publicly applied that check — Joe Kent — just quit in protest.

Trump’s War Is Causing Economic Turmoil.

The International Energy Agency has called the Iran War the worst energy supply disruption in global history. Worse than the 1973 oil embargo. Worse than the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Worse than both of those combined.

What that means at ground level:

• Gas prices are up more than a dollar per gallon since January. The national average has crossed $4 in eight states.

• Oil has topped $127 a barrel.

• Fertilizer and petrochemical supply chains are disrupted, which means grocery prices will follow this fall.

• The S&P 500 just had its worst month since 2022.

• The VIX — Wall Street’s fear index — spiked to 42. Anything above 30 signals panic.

Remember how Trump mocked Biden's gas prices at every single rally? Remember the promise of energy abundance and lower costs?

But that’s not it. Republicans are now floating cuts to Medicaid and Medicare to fund the $200 billion war supplemental. So the people getting crushed by a regressive gas-price spike, working and middle-class families, would also lose healthcare to pay for it.

Trump ran on lowering prices. Instead, he started an unauthorized war against a country embedded in global oil supply chains, presided over the largest gas price increase in modern presidential history, and now wants you to give up your healthcare to fund it.

This War is Corrupt.

At 6:49 a.m. on Monday, March 23, someone started selling oil futures. A lot of them. In a single minute, 6,200 contracts changed hands — worth $580 million. 10x the normal volume in a one-minute window with no public news to explain it.

Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in "productive conversations" with Iran and would pause strikes on Iranian power plants. Oil prices tumbled. The Dow surged over 1,000 points. Nearly $2 trillion moved within minutes.

Then Iran denied any talks had occurred. Markets pulled back. The "deal" evaporated.

Traders had also bought roughly $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures and sold $192 million in oil futures, all minutes before Trump’s announcement.

And it's not just Wall Street. On Polymarket, the prediction market platform where Donald Trump Jr. serves as an adviser and investor, one trader won 93% of their five-figure wagers on Iran, netting nearly $1 million from correctly predicting unannounced military operations. Six freshly created accounts made another $1 million by betting the U.S. would strike Iran by February 28. A user called "Magamyman" made over $553,000 betting on the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader just before an Israeli strike. In total, $529 million was traded on Polymarket contracts tied to the timing of strikes on Iran.

The one person whose job it was to investigate? Gone. Margaret Ryan, the SEC's top enforcement official, resigned after clashing with Trump's hand-picked SEC chair over pursuing cases with ties to Trump's circle. The Trump administration had already dropped two federal investigations into Polymarket that were opened under Biden. Senator Chris Murphy has introduced the BETS OFF Act to ban betting on war, assassinations, and government actions, but with Republicans controlling Congress, its odds aren't great.

It’s clear. As schools are bombed, US service members are killed, and costs increase, someone in Trump’s inner circle is getting very rich off this war. The pattern is undeniable. We have $580 million in trades placed in a one-minute window before a presidential announcement. We have a prediction market where Trump's own son is an adviser. We have the enforcement chief who tried to investigate, pushed out the door.

The question isn't whether corruption is happening. The question is who's going to stop it.

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Sources

War Powers & Legality

• Joe Kent, key U.S. counterterrorism official, resigns in protest of Iran War — MSNBC

• Joe Kent, high-ranking US intel official, resigns over Iran war — CNN

• FBI conducting leak investigation into former Trump official who resigned over Iran war — NBC News

• Gabbard contradicts Trump on key claims about Iran war — TIME

• Gabbard defers to Trump when asked if Iran posed “imminent threat” — Axios

• Gabbard says president, not intelligence community, determines imminent threats — PolitiFact

Economic Impact

• Global economy takes gut punch from war in Iran — Associated Press / Fortune

Insider Trading & Market Manipulation

• Oil trades surged just before Trump’s post on Iran talks — CBS News

• Oil market sees spike in trades ahead of Trump’s Iran pivot post — Bloomberg

• Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war — Axios

• Nobel laureate Krugman calls it ‘treason’: $580 million traded minutes before Trump’s oil reversal — Fortune

• Murphy on ‘$1.5 billion’ stock trade before Trump Iran announcement: ‘Mindblowing corruption’ — The Hill

• U.S. Senator alleges insider trading over $1.5B trade before Trump-Iran halt — Yahoo Finance

• Evidence of insider trading on Iran war grows — Salon

Prediction Markets & Polymarket

• Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets — CNN

• Someone made $553K on a Polymarket bet on Khamenei’s death — NPR

• Polymarket saw $529M traded on bets tied to bombing of Iran — TechCrunch

• Large Polymarket, Wall Street bets on Trump’s war news under scrutiny — Al Jazeera

• Insider trading concerns around the Iran war are on the rise — NBC News

• Organized Money: The Business of Betting on Murder with Sen. Chris Murphy — The American Prospect