Donald Trump’s favorability ratings have started to decline. On its own, that would typically signal an advantage for Democrats. But recent polling tells a more complicated story: even as Trump weakens, the generic Republican candidate remains competitive with the generic Democrat.

Dissatisfaction with Trump is not automatically translating into support for Democrats. Voters may be open to change, but they need to understand what that change looks like in practical terms. A December Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67 percent of Democratic voters want affordability to be the party’s central focus, while only 38 percent believe national Democratic leaders have a clear plan for delivering it.

National Democrats have a limited ability to advance policy while out of power in Washington. But at the state and local level, Democratic leaders are doing something the national party has struggled to do: translating values into specific, legible commitments that voters can evaluate. That work deserves more attention than it is getting.

New York City and the Mamdani Model

Zohran Mamdani took office as New York City’s 112th mayor on January 1, 2026, the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century and its first Muslim and first Asian American mayor. He won a near ten-point victory on a platform built around three concrete promises: freeze the rent, make buses free, and deliver universal child care.

What set Mamdani apart was not simply the content of those promises, but how he connected them. His agenda is organized around a single animating insight, articulated in a Columbia University public health analysis published before he took office: that housing, transit, food security, and child care are not separate policy buckets but interlocking systems that determine who gets to live well in a city and who gets left behind. That framing gave his platform structural coherence that most political agendas lack.

What He Has Done

The administration moved quickly on multiple fronts.

On housing, Mamdani revived a mothballed tenants’ rights office on his first day in office, appointed a housing commissioner with deep experience in tenant advocacy, and directed city agencies to hold “Rental Ripoff” hearings throughout his first 100 days, allowing renters to document the conditions they face. The Rent Guidelines Board, now majority-appointed by Mamdani, is expected to vote on a rent freeze in June.

On cost of living, he signed executive orders directing city agencies to crack down on junk fees and subscription traps, framing hidden charges as a direct affordability concern.

On childcare, Mamdani and Governor Hochul announced and funded a free care pilot for 2-year-olds, beginning with 2,000 seats in high-need neighborhoods and scaling to over 30,000 seats within four years. More than 50,000 families applied for 3-K and Pre-K seats after applications opened. Hochul provided state funding for the pilot, though she has declined Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund the broader agenda.

On public safety, the administration has committed to significantly expanding B-HEARD, the program that dispatches social workers and emergency medical technicians, rather than police officers, to mental health 911 calls. The city recorded its fewest murders, shooting victims, and firearm incidents in recorded history in the first two months of 2026, along with a nearly 25 percent decline in retail theft and a 20 percent drop in burglary rates. Whether those results are directly attributable to the new administration is too early to say with confidence, but they do not suggest the approach has created risk.

What Still Needs to Happen

Public transit is controlled by the state, so Albany has to be on board. Mamdani has secured support from state legislative leaders for reviving a fare-free pilot program, but Governor Hochul has not signed on and the issue remains unresolved.

Questions about long-term cost and fiscal sustainability are legitimate and have not been fully resolved. The administration’s approach is to seek new revenue from the state, primarily through taxes on high earners and corporations, while demonstrating that progressive policy and fiscal discipline are not mutually exclusive. That argument is still being made.

What This Means

When voters ask what Democrats stand for, the honest answer used to feel abstract. Mamdani has made it concrete. His platform was not a list of proposals. It was a coherent account of what makes daily life in a major American city costly, unstable, and unnecessarily difficult, followed by specific interventions aimed at each of those conditions.

Six months is not enough time to declare success. It is enough time to see whether a progressive agenda organized around lived experience, rather than policy categories, can be both politically viable and administratively serious. In New York City, the early answer is yes.

Trump’s declining numbers create an opening. Whether that opening becomes votes will depend less on the case against him and more on voters’ confidence that something better is already being built. That work is already underway. This series is about the people doing it.

Next in this series: Andy Beshear, who attracted $13 billion in manufacturing investment to one of the reddest states in the country, without a sympathetic legislature.

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“I Love the Inflation.”

Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether he was worried about the morning’s inflation report, the President of the United States said: “No, I love it, the numbers were great… I love the inflation.”

The numbers were not great. May inflation came in at 4.2% year over year, the highest in three years and the first time it’s topped 4% since 2023. It’s the third straight month prices accelerated. And the cause is the war. Fuel oil is up 59% from a year ago, gasoline up 41%, and airfares up 27%. Strip out food and energy, and core inflation was a tame 2.9%, right where economists expected. It turns out that closing the Strait of Hormuz is not good for our economy. And things are likely to get worse before they get better.

The war is now 100 days old, and this week it got worse. After an Iranian drone downed a U.S. Army helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, Trump ordered two straight nights of strikes on Iran. Iran responded by declaring the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint a fifth of the world’s oil passes through, fully closed. The Financial Times reports that roughly 15 ships a day are getting through now, compared with about 135 before the war. The U.S. Navy has escorted just over 200 ships in a month; the pre-war norm was around 3,000.

Asked why oil hasn’t hit the $250 a barrel analysts predicted, Trump described a “secret mission”: “We took out the other night, 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, because they don’t have any radar, because we blasted the crap out of it.” He claimed the U.S. has been quietly pulling “millions of barrels of oil” out of the strait. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, testifying before Congress the same day, said he was not aware of any such operation.

And the strikes are no longer hitting only military targets. NYT visual investigators confirmed that a U.S. strike destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility near Sirik; Iran says the hit cut water to 20,000 people. Targeting civilian water infrastructure can be a war crime. Trump’s message to Iran from the Situation Room, delivered over the phone to a Fox News reporter, was that if they don’t sign his deal, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” and that “in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.” JD Vance told CBS a deal “could happen in the next week.” What A Day notes Trump has now claimed a deal is imminent at least 38 times.

So that’s the picture behind “I love the inflation.” A war with no congressional authorization, now 100 days long, escalating toward an island invasion, with the world’s most important oil passage shut and civilian targets on the list — and the resulting price spike landing on Americans at the gas pump and the grocery store. Trump’s net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 34, down from plus 12. He told a reporter prices will “come down like a rock” after the war. There is no sign the war is ending, and he just promised to widen it.

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

They’re Building the 2026 Fraud Lie Right Now.

The MAGA uproar over the election results in California foreshadows how Trump plans to challenge the midterm elections.

Start with what happened after Nithya Raman overtook Spencer Pratt in the LA count. Trump posted that there was “BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” and the Republican Party fell in line. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger documents, Speaker Mike Johnson called the supposed fraud “so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove.” Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, and Ron DeSantis piled on. Egger’s warning is the one to sit with: unlike 2020, the base no longer even asks for fake evidence. Johnson is selling fraud that is, by his own admission, impossible to prove.

Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor, is publicly promising California election-fraud charges in “one to two months” — while admitting “what we need now are witnesses.” Read that again. He has announced the charges and is now looking for the evidence to support them. Meanwhile, JD Vance referred Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to the DOJ over Medicaid fraud that Minnesota’s own agencies had already caught and acted on. And Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 fraud convicts who together owe roughly $700 million in restitution. Actual fraud gets pardoned, while invented fraud gets a prosecutor and a press release.

The road to a House majority runs through California. After last year’s Prop 50 redistricting, the state is expected to deliver Democrats somewhere between three and five seats — and Republicans’ House majority is thin enough that five seats flip the chamber. The catch is which seats. The decisive districts are in the Central Valley and inland Southern California — places like David Valadao’s and Darrell Issa’s seats — and they count exactly the way Los Angeles just did: slowly, by mail, with the Democratic votes arriving last. One of these districts was decided by fewer than 200 votes in 2024.

So picture November. Control of the House comes down to a handful of California seats. On election night, as the in-person and early votes are counted first, the Republican leads in several of them. Over the next week or two, exactly as every election expert predicts, the mail ballots come in, they break Democratic, and the Democrat pulls ahead and takes the seat that hands the party the majority. That two-week gap, the one that is normal and legal and happens every single cycle in California, is the gap Mike Johnson and Donald Trump are right now rehearsing how to exploit. They are not litigating the LA mayor’s race because they care about the LA mayor’s race. They are practicing the move they intend to run when the House is on the line.

What weakens it is a blowout. If turnout is big and the Democratic wave is undeniable, the “it was stolen” story is much harder to sell over the noise of an obvious national verdict. What feeds it is a squeaker: a few close California seats, a two-week count, just enough ambiguity to pour the lie into. The defense, then, is the same as last week, only bigger: say plainly, now and through November, that a slow count is not a stolen one.

Read more: The Bulwark (Egger), Robert Hubbell, Hopium Chronicles.

The Man Who Buried the Epstein Files Is Up for Attorney General.

We now have a detailed account of how the Trump administration tried to make the Epstein story go away, and the lawyer at the center of it is the same man Trump just nominated to run the Justice Department.

The account comes from “Regime Change,” the forthcoming book by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, excerpted this week. On July 17, 2025, ten days after the DOJ declared there was no Epstein client list, the administration’s most senior officials gathered in the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker built for national-security crises — to manage the political fallout from a dead sex offender’s files. In the room or on the phone: JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-AG Pam Bondi, then-Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Two ideas came out of that meeting. Vance floated enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, in hopes she’d say on camera that Trump was never involved in Epstein’s crimes. Blanche offered a variation: he, or another DOJ lawyer, would interview her instead. And Blanche proposed petitioning the courts to unseal the Epstein grand-jury testimony — knowing, the authors write, that grand-jury material is almost never released, and the request would almost certainly be denied. It was a way to appear transparent while guaranteeing that nothing would come out. A week later, Blanche personally interviewed Maxwell, who was given limited immunity and said she’d never seen anything untoward involving Trump. Shortly after, she was moved from her Florida prison to a lower-security federal camp in Texas.

Andrew Egger’s summary is hard to improve on: Trump found his new Roy Cohn. This is the man now nominated to be the permanent Attorney General — and it’s worth remembering what else he’s done in the acting role. Blanche indicted James Comey. He signed, alone, the settlement immunizing Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from future IRS claims, the one we covered last week that survived the slush fund’s death. Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s verdict on that immunity is plain: “You cannot give immunity for future crimes.”

His confirmation hearing is about a month out. Brian Beutler argues Democrats should stop being “incredibly inhibited about wielding procedural power” and force impeachment votes on Blanche and Bill Pulte rather than wait. The simpler point is the one every senator will have to answer: a vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote for the man who ran the Epstein cover-up. The senators to watch, per Semafor, are Tillis, Kennedy, and Cornyn.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark (Kristol & Egger), Off Message (Beutler), Zeteo.

That's your Thursday. Inflation hit a three-year high, and Trump said he loves it. The lawyer who ran the Epstein cover-up is up for Attorney General. And the big lie is back.

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America’s 250th anniversary is five weeks away. Here is what the president has done to prepare.

He has moved to put his face on the currency. His portrait has been hung in giant banners on federal buildings across Washington. He has ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted “American flag blue” on a no-bid contract that cost seven times his public estimate. He has proposed a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. When asked whom it would honor, he said: “Me.”

This is not the country’s birthday party. It is a rebranding of the country as his.

His Face on the Money

The US Mint has a full program of 250th anniversary coins available to every American: redesigned quarters, dimes, and half dollars celebrating the nation’s founding ideals, available for face value or a few dollars above. And then there is something else entirely. A federal commission consisting solely of Trump’s own appointees approved a separate 24-karat gold commemorative coin featuring Trump leaning over the Resolute Desk with clenched fists. Only 47 will be produced. Each contains an estimated $90,000 worth of gold. The standard coins celebrate the country. The Trump coin celebrates the man.

For more than a century, federal law has stipulated that only deceased individuals may appear on United States currency. Congress is now being asked to change that law for one reason and one person. The Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act would amend the Federal Reserve Act to allow a living president’s portrait on a new denomination of currency. The Treasury Department has already designed the bill and is waiting for Congress to act. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked to confirm whom the bill was designed for, he answered: “Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s signature is also set to appear on standard paper currency for the first time in history, a move the Treasury Department characterized as a celebration of the anniversary. Meanwhile, the Trump Organization has filed a trademark for “Trump 250” images, covering bumper stickers, tote bags, drinkware, and clothing. The government creates the brand. The Trump Organization sells the merchandise.

His Name on the Buildings

Every president’s official portrait hangs in the lobbies of federal agencies. What is hanging on the outside of the Justice, Agriculture, and Labor Department buildings in Washington is different: large exterior banners bearing Trump’s face, paid for with taxpayer funds. The Labor Department spokesperson said the banners would stay up through the 250th celebration due to “tremendous positive response.”

The Kennedy Center, which Congress designated as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy, was renamed by Trump’s appointed board in December 2025. On May 29, a federal judge ruled that only Congress has the authority to rename a congressionally designated memorial and ordered Trump’s name removed from the facade and all signage by June 12. The Kennedy Center is complying with the court order while the administration evaluates its legal options. Lin-Manuel Miranda had already canceled Hamilton’s planned performances there. “We’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center,” he said.

Federal law requires the annual America the Beautiful national park pass to feature the winning photograph from a public photo contest. The 2026 winner was amateur photographer Akshay Joshi, whose image of Glacier National Park in Montana was selected through that process. The Interior Department discarded it and replaced it with a close-up of Trump’s face. Joshi’s photograph was relegated to a newly created pass category that federal law does not authorize. A lawsuit followed.

His Aesthetic on the Landscape

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been repainted “American flag blue” on a no-bid contract awarded under an exemption reserved for urgent situations. Trump told reporters the project would cost under $2 million. Federal records show $14.8 million in contracts were awarded, seven times his public estimate. The Interior Department explained that the cost reflected the need to expedite the timeline for the 250th anniversary celebrations. The pool is the space in front of where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech to 250,000 people in 1963. A nonprofit filed suit arguing the project bypassed federally required historic preservation reviews.

The triumphal arch is Trump’s own idea. A senior White House official confirmed he “came up with the design and has been part of the process every step of the way.” It will be located near Arlington National Cemetery. When asked whom it would honor, Trump said: “Me.”

On June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, a UFC fight will take place on the White House South Lawn as part of the official 250th anniversary celebration. The event will stream exclusively on Paramount+, which was acquired by Trump ally David Ellison just weeks before Paramount locked down a $7.7 billion exclusive UFC streaming deal. A UFC fight on the president’s birthday is not a neutral entertainment choice. UFC has become the defining sport of Trump’s political coalition, a celebration of physical dominance and the idea that strength is the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy. Using it as the symbolic centerpiece of a national anniversary is a statement about whose America this is: not the founding promise that every person deserves a voice regardless of their power, but something closer to its opposite.

What Historians Tell Us

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She told NPR that we are living through the building of a personality cult, one in which “the leader must be everywhere, his face must be everywhere, his name must be everywhere, and his aesthetic, his taste must be reflected in buildings, in the people around him. The autocrat wants to remake the world in his own image.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss put the power calculation plainly: “This is not just egotistical self-satisfaction. It’s a way of expanding presidential power. A president is more powerful, I assume he believes, if he is ever-present than if he keeps his head down.”

The founders understood this danger. It is why they were explicit about the separation of church and state, why they prohibited titles of nobility, why they wrote the emoluments clauses, provisions barring the president from receiving personal financial benefit from foreign governments or from federal office, into the Constitution. They built a republic specifically to prevent a leader from converting the machinery of the state into a monument to himself. What they could not fully anticipate was the no-bid contract, the appointed commission that approves its own designs, the trademark filed the same week as the commemorative coin.

Closing

Ben-Ghiat calls this a personality cult. The founders called it tyranny. They built a republic specifically to prevent it.

No wonder so many of us are having trouble getting into celebration mode. My next post is about the America the founders were actually trying to build, and the people who are still building it.

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Endnotes

1. Kennedy Center renamed by Trump board, December 2025: NPR, Trump’s Name Added to Kennedy Center.

2. Federal judge rules only Congress can rename the Kennedy Center, orders Trump’s name removed by June 12, Kennedy Center complying: CNN, Judge Says Trump Can’t Add His Name to Kennedy Center and Blocks Planned Closure; PBS NewsHour, Trump’s Name Must Be Removed from Kennedy Center by June 12.

3. Lin-Manuel Miranda cancels Hamilton at Kennedy Center: Lin-Manuel Miranda Cancels Hamilton Run at ‘Trump Kennedy Center’.

4. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool no-bid contract, $14.8 million in awarded contracts, seven times Trump’s public estimate; historic preservation lawsuit: NPR, Nonprofit Sues the Federal Government Over Plans to Paint Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Blue; Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Blue Paint: Records Show $14.8 Million.

5. 24-karat Trump commemorative coin, 47 produced, $90,000 in gold each; US Mint 250th anniversary program: reporting on federal commission approval.

6. Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act; Treasury Secretary Bessent confirms design for Trump; Trump signature on standard currency: Treasury Department statements and congressional bill.

7. Exterior banners on Justice, Agriculture, Labor buildings: Labor Department spokesperson statement.

8. Akshay Joshi park pass photo replaced with Trump image; unauthorized new pass category; lawsuit: reporting on Interior Department decision.

9. Triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery; Trump says it will honor him; senior White House official confirms his design role: White House statements and press pool reports.

10. UFC fight on White House South Lawn, June 14; Paramount+ exclusive streaming deal; David Ellison acquisition of Paramount: press pool reports and entertainment industry coverage.

11. Ruth Ben-Ghiat on personality cults: NPR interview.

12. Michael Beschloss on presidential power: press interview.

13. Trump “Trump 250” trademark filing: USPTO records.

Iran Ceasefire Ends.

Two months after the ceasefire Trump took credit for brokering, the missiles are flying again.

This weekend, for the first time since the April truce, Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at Israel, calling it a “warning” and saying the ceasefire had been “conditional on a cease-fire on all fronts.” Per Aaron Parnas, Trump’s first move was to call Netanyahu and, according to Axios, “tell him not to strike back.” Netanyahu struck back anyway. Israel hit Iranian missile-launch sites overnight, the Houthis fired on Israel, and Saudi Arabia sounded air-raid sirens near a base housing U.S. troops.

By Monday, Trump was reduced to posting “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting’” on Truth Social. Asked about being ignored, he told reporters: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” People don’t usually say that when it’s true. A White House official told MS NOW the renewed fighting “exposed a fundamental miscalculation,” and that Trump “underestimated the willingness of Iran to restart the conflict.”

This is the same war four House Republicans broke ranks last week to constrain, passing a measure that would force Trump to halt action against Iran or come to Congress for authorization. Robert Hubbell argues Trump, Pete Hegseth, and JD Vance have spent the conflict burning America’s credibility with allies who no longer trust U.S. leadership to be coherent.

This weekend exposed just how little control Trump has over the war he started; meanwhile, gas prices continue to rise as the Strait of Hormuz continues to be controlled by Iran.

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

Last Week I Told You the Slush Fund Was Dead. I Was Wrong.

It isn’t dead. And how it isn’t dead is worth your time, because it’s a lesson in how this administration manages bad news.

Here’s what I got right. Under pressure from about half the Republican conference, who refused to pass the spending bill while the fund was attached, Acting AG Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee, “We are not moving forward with the fund. Period.” Politico ran the headline “Anti-Weaponization Fund is dead.” The Washington Post called it “abandoned.” None of that was entirely accurate.

Judd Legum makes the case that the press got played, and I think he’s right. Trump just nominated Blanche to be the permanent Attorney General, and can replace him at will. A man Trump controls saying he won’t pursue something “for now” isn’t a binding decision. And killing the fund did nothing to the part of the deal that always mattered most: the IRS provisions shielding Trump’s family businesses from audits are still fully in place. Legum notes Trump’s contested $72.9 million refund from 2010, which could have exposed him to a tax bill north of $100 million, is still protected.

Robert Hubbell puts the politics plainly: “every congressional Republican now owns the thug fund.” A Democratic amendment to block it got three Republican votes — Susan Collins, Dan Sullivan, and John Husted — and failed. Everyone else voted to protect $1.776 billion built in part to pay January 6 rioters, at least 97 of whom have already been arrested or charged with new crimes since Trump pardoned them.

So here is where we are. Trump and his family remain immune from future IRS audits, and although they aren’t currently pursuing the Thug Fund, nothing prevents them from activating it later.

Read more: Popular Information, Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark.

Trump Denies Another Election.

On Sunday, the President of the United States walked off a television set because a reality-TV star is losing a mayoral primary in Los Angeles.

NBC’s Kristen Welker taped a Meet the Press interview with Trump in Wisconsin. They covered Iran, gas prices, and farmers. Then they got to California, where ballots from Tuesday’s primary were still being counted. In the LA mayor’s race, Republican Spencer Pratt led on election night by about 40,000 votes. As the mail ballots came in, his lead shrank and then disappeared. By Sunday, Democratic City Councilmember Nithya Raman had passed him for the second runoff spot behind Mayor Karen Bass. Trump’s response: “The election was rigged. It was a dirty election and it’s happening again right now in California.” Welker asked for evidence. He said, “All I have to do is look.” She explained that California just counts slowly. He said, “I’ve had enough, thank you darling,” and walked out. By Monday morning, he was on Truth Social: “No way this could have happened. Rigged Election!”

You’re going to hear this claim from people in your life, so here’s how to take it apart.

Start with the logic. If California Democrats were rigging elections, this is the dumbest possible way to do it. In the governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton came in second and led for much of the count — and the runoff isn’t even Democrat-versus-Democrat. In LA, the supposed riggers let Spencer Pratt jump out to a 40,000-vote lead on election night, then slowly clawed it back over days in a way that looks the most suspicious. If you were actually fixing the result, you’d never let the Republican lead in the first place. You’d have Raman and Bass on top election night and never give Pratt the illusion of a chance.

Then ask who’s supposedly doing it. The head of the LA Democratic Party, in effect, is Mayor Karen Bass — and Bass is the one hurt by this outcome. She would have crushed Spencer Pratt, a celebrity with no real base, in a landslide. Nithya Raman, a fellow Democrat with an actual constituency, is a far tougher opponent. If Bass had the power to rig the runoff, she’d rig it to face Pratt, not Raman. The result Trump is calling fraudulent is the one that makes life harder for the most powerful Democrat in the city.

Most important: nothing unusual happened here. This is how California counts votes, and it always has. The state sends every registered voter a mail ballot — 81% of California’s vote was cast by mail in 2024, the highest rate in the country — and every one of those ballots has to be verified by hand: signatures checked, duplicates ruled out, late-arriving ballots counted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. State law gives counties up to 30 days. It’s slow by design. And because Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans, the count drifts Democratic as it goes. California’s own Secretary of State called the delay “normal” on election night. Paul Mitchell, the California elections-data expert, has been warning for years that this exact scenario — a candidate ahead on election night who loses as the mail ballots are counted — is the one that breeds bogus fraud claims. He predicted it. So did everyone who knows how California votes. There is nothing abnormal here and no evidence of anything abnormal. There’s just a slow count producing a result Trump doesn’t like.

It’s a frustrating system, and California should speed it up, precisely because the delay hands bad actors the appearance of impropriety. But slow is not rigged. Brian Beutler argues the worst thing Democrats can do is what they did in 2020 and 2024 — roll their eyes and wait for the lie to collapse on its own. It doesn’t. Trump is rehearsing in a city election the same claim he’ll make about the midterms in November: that any count a Republican loses is fraud. The answer is to say plainly why that’s false every time, before it hardens.

Read more: Off Message (Beutler), Zeteo, Time, Letters from an American.

That's your Monday. The Iran ceasefire is over. The Slush Fund isn’t dead. And the President walked off a TV set rather than admit Spencer Pratt lost an election.

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The Spy Who Served Only Him.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump named Bill Pulte the acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte will sit atop the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and set the priorities for what those agencies investigate, whom they target, and what the President is told about the world. Donald Trump has appointed some seriously unqualified people to his cabinet. Pulte might be the worst yet.

Pulte’s qualifications for this job, per his FHFA biography, are in real estate and philanthropy. He has no background in intelligence, foreign policy, or national security. He will also keep his existing job running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because apparently overseeing $10 trillion in mortgage assets and the entire U.S. intelligence community is something one man can do as a side hustle.

When Congress created the DNI position after 9/11, it required by statute that anyone in the job have “extensive national security expertise.” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has already flagged that the appointment plainly violates that statute. And Pulte’s actual job at the FHFA over the last sixteen months has been to use the housing-finance machinery to investigate Trump’s political enemies. As CBS News documents, Pulte has sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and former Rep. Eric Swalwell — all of them perceived Trump adversaries, all of them denying wrongdoing, and only one of those referrals resulting in actual charges, which were eventually dismissed. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is currently investigating whether Pulte “potentially misused federal authority and resources” to attack Trump’s enemies. The GAO’s findings are expected late this year or early next year, by which point Pulte will already be running the intelligence community.

Pulte is so unqualified that even Republicans are sounding the alarm. Sen. John Thune — the Republican Majority Leader — told reporters on the Hill: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there.”

Robert Hubbell called Pulte “a political hack” now installed as “the nation’s chief intelligence officer.” Brian Beutler at Off Message had already, before this week’s news, made the case that Pulte should be impeached for what he was doing at FHFA. Beutler’s argument is that the housing-finance machinery, the slush fund, and the election infrastructure are the same project, run by the same people, aimed at the same goal. The DNI elevation makes that case immeasurably stronger.

In May, Trump fired Tulsi Gabbard over her warning that the Iran war could go nuclear. The replacement candidate was the deputy DNI, Aaron Lukas, a career intelligence professional. Trump skipped him. Instead, the man who has spent the last year building criminal cases against Trump’s political opponents from inside a housing agency now has the keys to the FBI’s intelligence files, the NSA’s surveillance apparatus, and the President’s Daily Brief. Pulte’s job will not be to keep Americans safe. It will be to use the full force of America’s spying apparatus to investigate Trump’s enemies and interfere in our election.

The only good news is that Pulte appears to be incompetent. Rooting for the incompetence of the nation's chief intelligence officer is not where any of us should be in 2026.

Read more: Letters from an American (Hubbell), Off Message (Beutler), Time, CBS News.

They Murdered 60 Minutes.

A few hours after a Bulwark Triad column called Scott Pelley “the hero we need,” CBS News fired him.

The official letter to Pelley, from newly installed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, said his “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear” and that his employment was terminated “for cause, effective immediately.” The unofficial version is on the record in Pelley’s own statement, reported by HuffPost and The Hill and confirmed by NBC News: “For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.” Pelley added that the “collapse of values at the top” had “become untenable” and that the new ownership was casting the show aside “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”

To which the new ownership at Paramount Skydance, run by tech scion nepo baby David Ellison, with Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and Bilton (a former NYT tech columnist with no broadcast-news experience) as the new EP — responded by firing him the next day for cause. Robert Reich gave Pelley his weekly Joseph N. Welch Award and called the piece “The Murder of ‘60 Minutes.’” That was written before the firing made the title literal.

This is the latest chapter in the corporate capitulation to Donald Trump. Trump sued CBS in 2024 over the network’s interview with Kamala Harris, on a legal theory that most experts considered frivolous. Paramount’s previous ownership settled it in July 2025 for an eight-figure sum, days before the Trump FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance. Then, in October, Bari Weiss was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief. In May, Weiss spiked a finished 60 Minutes segment on the Trump administration’s CECOT deportations hours before it was set to air. Executive producer Tanya Simon was replaced. Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega left or were fired. Bilton replaced Simon. And now Pelley — who called out Weiss and Bilton — is gone too.

The public story is that Bari Weiss was hired to recruit younger viewers and breathe life into a stale newsroom. Six months in, we have the results. CBS Evening News has shed 23% of its total audience and 15% in the 25-54 demo — the exact viewers she was supposedly hired to recruit. April 2026 was the lowest-ever month for CBS Evening News in the 25-54 demographic in the program’s history. Meanwhile, 60 Minutes just closed its 52nd consecutive season as America’s #1 news program, averaging 9.1 million viewers, up 9% from last year. The show she’s dismantling was growing. The one she rebuilt is in free fall. If her job were really about ratings, she would have been fired in April.

So why is she still in charge? Larry and David Ellison just spent $8 billion to acquire Paramount and are about to spend $81 billion to acquire Warner Bros., which owns CNN. Weiss’ job was to make sure that nothing at CBS News hurt Larry and David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount and now Warner Bros. Her job is to spike stories unfavorable to the administration and show Trump that under the Ellisons’ control, CBS News won’t be an issue.

Bari Weiss is succeeding at exactly the job she was actually hired to do. If the Ellisons close the Warner deal, Weiss isn't getting fired. She's getting promoted to do this at CNN next.

Read more: Robert Reich, The Bulwark (Triad), NBC News, HuffPost.

Everyone Is Resigning. The Slush Fund Is Dead. Trump Is Still Immune.

Underneath the spectacle of the week is the quieter, harder story: the people who execute Trump’s agenda are walking out. Robert Hubbell catalogs the exits. Per the New York Times, more than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the administration, leaving entire agencies understaffed; the administration has replaced them with about 3,000 mostly junior, party-credentialed attorneys. Treasury general counsel Brian Morrissey, a former Sidley Austin partner, resigned the day Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The lead federal prosecutor in the Comey “seashell” case withdrew, per The Guardian, abandoning the prosecution mid-stream. House Republicans, per Semafor, fled Washington before the Memorial Day recess rather than vote on amendments tied to the slush fund and the Iran War Powers Resolution.

And on Tuesday, the slush fund itself died. Blanche, testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee, told Rep. Grace Meng: “We are not moving forward with the fund. Period.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune and roughly half the Republican conference had told the administration they would not pass the underlying $72 billion legislative package unless the fund was killed in writing. So Blanche killed it.

Read the quote carefully, though. Blanche killed the fund. He didn’t undo the settlement that created it. The “FOREVER BARRED” addendum granting Trump and his family permanent immunity from IRS audits is still in effect. “Nothing has changed” on the immunity, Blanche told the same hearing. Rep. Rosa DeLauro put it cleanly: “you’ve taken one piece... but as part of the settlement, which is this immunity for the President and his family and his business, etc. that stands.” The fund is dead. The personal tax pardon survives. And meanwhile, the trademark filings for “Trump 250” are still active, the Freedom 250 sponsor price list still runs $500,000 to $10 million, and most of the musical acts originally booked for Trump’s Fourth of July spectacle on the National Mall have backed out, prompting Trump to post on Truth Social: “Cancel it… We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers… whose music is boring.” He then floated himself as the headliner, calling himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World.”

The temptation right now is to read the week as a string of Trump losses and call it a turning. The fund died. The party collapsed. Republican senators broke. Ten thousand lawyers quit. And those are all real. But notice what didn’t break. The immunity addendum stayed. The DOJ is now running on roughly a third of its prior legal staff, staffed instead by political hires loyal to the man making the rules. The intelligence community was just handed to Bill Pulte. The president’s family is still on track to clear $11.6 billion in crypto wealth and roughly $20 billion in inheritance from a tax-immunity deal that, by the administration’s own admission today, is still alive. Trump is genuinely losing on the things that make for embarrassing news cycles. He is still winning on the things that compound.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark — Fyre 250, Robert Reich on Trump 250, Time on the slush fund, The Hill.

That’s your Wednesday. Trump handed America’s spy agencies to a real-estate executive. CBS fired Scott Pelley. The slush fund died, but Trump’s personal tax immunity didn’t.

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The confusion the artists experienced is real. There are two organizations running the 250th-anniversary celebration, and they are not the same. Understanding the difference explains a great deal about why this birthday party feels the way it does.

What Congress Built

In 2016, lawmakers from both parties created a nonpartisan commission, America250, and gave it a decade to plan the commemoration. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama agreed to serve as honorary co-chairs. The mandate was straightforward: engage all 350 million Americans through civic education, oral history, and volunteering. A celebration that belonged to everyone, not to Republicans or Democrats.

Congress appropriated $150 million to make it happen.

What the Administration Built Instead

Nine days after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order creating his own 250th anniversary operation, with himself as chair. He named it Task Force 250. In December 2025, he announced a public-private fundraising arm called Freedom 250. He appointed his top fundraiser and his 2024 campaign manager to run it.

The Interior Department instructed staff in internal documents to make the Trump operation the “primary branding” for all national anniversary events. The congressional commission would still appear in co-branded materials, but Freedom 250 would lead. Staff were encouraged to add Freedom 250 to their email signatures.

By early 2026, the congressional commission had received $25 million of its $150 million appropriation. A $10 million grant designated specifically for the commission’s program had been transferred to the Trump operation instead. The remainder had not been released.

What It Actually Is

Freedom 250 is structured as a limited liability company housed inside the National Park Foundation, the congressionally chartered nonprofit that supports the National Park Service. That structure puts the money outside the normal rules for public disclosure. A government watchdog filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking basic funding details. The Interior Department said it would not respond before August 3, after the main celebrations have concluded.

The New York Times obtained a donor solicitation document that was circulating privately among potential contributors. Contributing $500,000 or more buys VIP access and preferred seating at all events. Contributing $1 million buys a private reception hosted by President Trump, with a photo opportunity. Contributing $2.5 million buys a speaking role at the July 4 celebration in Washington.

When Congress asked the National Park Foundation’s president to identify donors and provide copies of donor contracts, he declined both requests and promised anonymity to donors who had requested it.

Seven Democratic senators, led by Adam Schiff, sent a formal letter to the White House chief of staff, describing the arrangement as raising serious concerns about “the auctioning of government activities” and potential violations of federal bribery, conflict-of-interest, and ethics statutes. The White House did not provide the requested donor list.

The Same Fundraiser, The Same Deal

Freedom 250 is not the only place this structure has appeared. The White House ballroom renovation, a privately funded project estimated at $400 million, is being run by the same fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke. Donors who give $1 million to the ballroom project receive the same benefit: a photo opportunity with President Trump. Senator Schiff launched a separate inquiry into the ballroom financing last October, raising the same concerns about donor influence over the executive branch.

The fundraiser, the terms, and the access are identical. Only the occasion is different.

The Founders Feared This Exact Thing

The founders were not naive about corruption. For them, personal gain and the seizure of power were one and the same. They wrote two emoluments clauses directly into the Constitution, provisions barring the president from receiving personal financial benefit from foreign governments or from federal office beyond his salary. Both were direct responses to what they had watched the British crown do. A man who used public office for personal gain was, in their view, already on the path to becoming a tyrant.

What they did not anticipate was the LLC, the private donor solicitation circulating among millionaires, the parallel nonprofit structure capturing congressionally appropriated funds. They built locks for a simpler set of doors. The mechanism being used to monetize America’s 250th birthday fits through the gaps they left.

If you want to follow the full scope of the administration’s financial self-dealing, three organizations are tracking it in real time: the Campaign Legal Center, the Center for American Progress, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

My next post is about something else the founders did not anticipate: a president who would use the nation’s birthday to place his face, his name, and his aesthetic on the permanent symbols of American life.

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Sources

1. America250, congressional commission, Bush and Obama as honorary co-chairs: america250.org

2. Congressional appropriation, $25 million received of $150 million, $10 million diverted: Roll Call, 100 Days to 250 Years, With 350 Million Invited

3. Executive Order 14189, Task Force 250, Freedom 250 structure: Wikipedia, White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday

4. Interior Department primary branding directive: Washington Post, Rise of Trump-Backed Freedom 250 Draws Questions from Democrats

5. Donor solicitation document, access tiers: New York Times via Mediaite, Freedom 250 Group Offering Access to Trump for $1M

6. National Park Foundation president declining donor list: ABC News, Sen. Schiff Leads Probe into Freedom250

7. Senate probe, “auctioning of government activities”: Senator Schiff press release, Senators Launch Probe into Freedom 250

8. Ballroom renovation, same fundraiser, Schiff inquiry: The Hill, Democrats Launch Probe into Organization Leading White House Efforts

9. FOIA lawsuit, Interior Department stonewalling: Common Dreams, Watchdog Sues Trump Interior Dept, Demanding Transparency on Freedom 250 Funding

10. Trump Organization “Trump 250” trademark filings: MS NOW Opinion, Trump Moves to Cash In on the United States’ 250th Anniversary

11. Great American State Fair, artist withdrawals: CNN, Artists Are Bailing on a Trump-Backed Concert for America’s 250th

12. McBride, Young MC quotes on being misled: ABC News, Growing Number of Artists Pull Out of 250th Anniversary Celebration on National Mall

John Cornyn Spent a Decade Bending the Knee. It Got Him Nothing.

On Tuesday night, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who has been indicted on three felony securities-fraud counts, impeached by his own Republican legislature, and reported to the FBI for bribery by eight of his own former staffers, beat four-term Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP runoff by more than 28 points.

Cornyn did everything the accommodationist playbook told him to. He spent a decade defending Trump, flattering Trump, voting with Trump, and trying to name a highway after Trump. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark articulated it perfectly: Cornyn made himself a dog for Trump, and Trump put him down like a dog. The reward for ten years of loyalty was a Truth Social post calling him “VERY disloyal” and an endorsement of the most scandal-soaked man in Texas politics.

Dan Pfeiffer makes the case that Paxton just handed Democrats their best Texas opportunity in a generation. Paxton is “uniquely vulnerable” — a corruption-plagued nominee against state Rep. James Talarico, a young, seminary-trained Democrat who already polls better against Paxton than Cornyn did. Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024, but the ground is shifting: earlier this year, a Democrat flipped a state Senate seat Trump had carried by 17 points, with majority-Hispanic precincts swinging by 34 points. The DCCC says turnout in 46 majority-Hispanic counties ran 33% above the 2024 primaries, with Democrats casting two-thirds of those ballots. This is shaping up to be the most competitive Texas Senate race in over 30 years.

Inside the Republican Party, Trump’s power is now close to absolute. He can end the career of a four-term senator from a safe seat over a personal grudge, and thanks to the slush fund, he can buy the silence of everyone left standing. That is real, and it is dangerous. But the price of that total internal control is that the GOP keeps nominating people like Ken Paxton, and Paxton has to win a general election. That's not a trade Republicans can keep making forever.

Read more: The Bulwark (Egger & Kristol), The Message Box (Pfeiffer), The Bulwark (JVL), Hopium Chronicles.

Senator Andy Kim Was Pepper-Sprayed by ICE.

On Monday, federal ICE agents pepper-sprayed a sitting United States senator.

Andy Kim of New Jersey was pepper-sprayed outside of Delaney Hall — a 1,000-bed immigration detention center in Newark run by the GEO Group under a 15-year, billion-dollar federal contract. Heather Cox Richardson lays out what set it off: roughly 300 detainees launched a hunger and work strike on Friday over worm-infested food, denied medical care, and a court docket so overloaded that one judge handled 74 cases in a single day. Senator Kim and Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. toured the facility Saturday. Kim came out describing an 18-year-old crying that she just wanted to graduate high school, a pregnant woman with no OB-GYN care, a woman who had miscarried with no medical attention, a mother separated from her four-month-old, and a man being threatened with deportation to a country with an active Ebola outbreak. When Kim returned to protest the conditions, ICE pepper-sprayed him. When Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill tried to enter on Monday, she was turned away, which, as she put it, raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide.”

None of this makes us any safer. The motivation here is profit. Delaney Hall is what the for-profit prison system looks like. GEO Group has a billion-dollar contract that pays them by the bed to detain people, which means every additional detainee, every day, is revenue, and the conditions that produced the hunger strike are the predictable result of running a jail for profit.

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

A Democratic Governor Caved to Trump’s Pressure.

Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk and Steve Bannon acolyte who tried to overturn the 2020 election from inside her own election office, after months of public pressure from Trump.

Peters’ very first move after her release was to claim that the censure of Polis by his own party proved the existence of an election-rigging cover-up — meaning the concession didn’t even buy goodwill; it bought a fresh conspiracy theory. The Colorado Court of Appeals had already vacated Peters' sentence in April, upholding her conviction but ordering that she be resentenced. Polis didn't have to do this.

Brian Tyler Cohen frames this correctly: “Trump now has a blueprint. He knows that if he attacks someone enough, if he threatens to sic his army of supporters on someone enough, they will relent and bend to his will.” Polis now joins the capitulation roster alongside the law firms, the universities, the TV networks, and the tech companies that have already folded.

This coincides with another Democratic unforced error this week. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act, crypto legislation with no ethics guardrails for elected officials, which an analyst at Americans for Financial Reform told Zeteo “could make the Trump family Vanderbilt-level rich if they play their cards right.” The Trump family has already pulled an estimated $800 million from crypto in the first six months of this term. Two Democrats, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, voted to advance it, with Gallego conceding they hadn’t even finished negotiating the ethics provisions.

Trump’s leverage is real, but a meaningful amount of it is donated by Democrats unable or unwilling to acknowledge where we are as a country. There's a fair argument that Peters' original sentence was harsh, and in normal times, a governor working to remedy that would be unremarkable. But it isn't 2015. The court had already vacated it, and the move only made sense as a concession to Trump.

Polis didn’t need to act here, and he got nothing in exchange. Not a concession from Tina Peters, not an admission that what she did was wrong, not an admission that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Gallego and Alsobrooks were not cornered either; they cast votes that moved a bill enriching the president’s family.

This story is part of a reality that both parties keep refusing to acknowledge. John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy spent years capitulating to Trump. Both had their careers ended by him. Capitulating to Trump gets you nothing. Republicans are figuring that out one career at a time. Some Democrats are still learning.

Read more: Brian Tyler Cohen, Zeteo.

That's your Wednesday. Ken Paxton ended John Cornyn's career by 28 points — and may have put Texas in play. ICE pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim outside a billion-dollar for-profit prison. And Jared Polis folded to Trump.

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For 48 Hours, Senate Republicans Told the Truth.

On Thursday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche walked into a closed-door briefing to sell Senate Republicans on the $1.776 billion slush fund and the tax-immunity deal attached to it. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reported the room was “incredibly hostile” — roughly half the conference stood up to object. One Republican senator texted him: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.” And Mitch McConnell, in a statement afterward, said: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.”

That’s the former Senate majority leader, on the record, calling a Trump initiative morally wrong. As Heather Cox Richardson laid out in her reconstruction of the week, this was a genuine revolt. As many as 25 Republican senators are looking for ways to rein in the fund, openly questioning its legal basis, refusing to swallow Blanche’s explanation of how the money would flow.

Then the Iran deal blew up alongside it. By Tuesday, Bill Kristol at The Bulwark had three sitting GOP senators on the record trashing Trump’s exit from the war he started. Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker said it “would be a disaster.” Ted Cruz called it “a disastrous mistake.” Lindsey Graham blasted it on Friday — then reversed himself within 24 hours to call it “simply brilliant,” which is very on-brand for Lindsey Graham. Robert Hubbell reports 14 American service members have now died in what he calls Trump’s “war of choice.” Iran is preparing to charge “fees for navigational services” through the Strait of Hormuz, and CENTCOM struck southern Iran again Monday night. Brown University’s Iran War energy tracker puts the extra cost to the average household at $330 and climbing.

You’ve probably heard a lot about this Republican revolt over the long weekend. And the dissent is certainly notable. This is the first stretch of Trump’s second term with both Mitch McConnell and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee on the record calling Trump’s moves “morally wrong” and “a disaster.” The hawk wing and the MAGA-isolationist wing are visibly at each other’s throats, and Democrats now have on-camera Republican quotes for every 2026 ad they’ll ever need. And yet, none of the dissenters are willing to call out Trump by name. McConnell aimed his ire “at the nation’s top law enforcement official,” not Donald Trump. McConnell is willing to see the administration's moral corruption, but is still unwilling to lay it at Trump's feet.

This so-called “revolt” is meaningless until real actions are taken. A vote on the War Powers Act is coming. And a bill to prevent any federal funds from going to Trump’s slush fund is reportedly working its way through Congress. If Republican Senators break from their dear leader on those votes, then we can start to talk about an actual “revolt.” Until then, it’s all just empty words.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark (Kristol), Robert Hubbell, Off Message (Beutler).

3,600 Trades in 90 Days.

I wrote last week about Trump’s financial disclosure and the same-day stock buys that followed his public praise of specific companies. The new numbers make the pattern impossible to wave off. A fresh Office of Government Ethics disclosure, broken down by The Bulwark, shows the president executed more than 3,600 individual stock trades worth up to $750 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Three thousand six hundred trades in ninety days.

Judd Legum at Popular Information has more. Trump bought Thermo Fisher stock the same day he toured one of the company’s facilities, and bought Apple after praising it from a stage. Sent to the podium to answer for it, JD Vance told reporters the president “doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying stocks” — a denial that would be more persuasive if the federal disclosure didn’t list 3,600 trades. Worth remembering: Vance has said he and Trump both support banning members of Congress from trading stocks. Democrats should hand him that quote every single time a new brokerage statement leaks.

Four days later, Legum reported, Trump posted four Truth Social ads for Stake.us — an online casino that regulators in multiple states call flatly illegal, now blocked in at least 17 states and facing a Los Angeles City Attorney lawsuit that calls its coin mechanic “a ruse.” Stake’s co-founder gave Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC $1 million on April 27.

The president is running a personal brokerage account out of the Oval Office, buys stock in companies on the same day he promotes them, and posts paid-looking ads for an illegal casino that cut his super PAC a seven-figure check. His own vice president went on television and said it isn’t happening, while the federal government’s own disclosure form says it is 3,600 times over. There is a clean word for trading on information and access that the public doesn’t have, and for taking money to promote a product to the people who trust you.

And the family is doing even better than the patriarch. The venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, 1789 Capital, has gone from managing $200 million in assets to $3.5 billion in the single year since his father returned to office — a 1,650% surge that the firm markets, without irony, as "patriotic capitalism."

Read more: The Bulwark (Press Pass), Popular Information.

The DOJ Spent the Holiday Weekend Deleting January 6 From the Internet.

While the Senate was fighting over whether to pay the January 6 rioters, the Justice Department was quietly erasing the record that they were ever prosecuted. Aaron Parnas reported that the DOJ began a mass overnight purge of its own website to remove references to Capitol-riot prosecutions — press releases, sentencing summaries, and the conviction record of the Oath Keepers. The department didn’t deny it. It reframed the deletions as undoing “weaponization” and “partisan propaganda” from the Biden era.

Parnas spent the weekend screenshotting and archiving the pages before they vanished. Decoding Fox News tracked the specific deletion of the Oath Keepers conviction release. One of the scrubbed pages, per the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield, documented a January 6 defendant who also faced child-solicitation charges in Texas. The government is not just preparing to pay these people. It is deleting the evidence of what they did.

On one side of the Capitol, the administration is building a $1.776 billion fund to write checks to the people who attacked it. On the other side, the Justice Department is going page by page through its own website, on a holiday weekend, deleting the official record that those people were ever charged. Pay the perpetrators; erase the crime. This is how a government rewrites history.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, Decoding Fox News.

What Can You Do - Build Your Power

Read and bookmark this post from Antonia Scatton. It contains fifty ways you can use your voice and lived experience to counter the corruption seeping through our politics.

Reframing America

Fifty Ways to Build Your Power

Personal outreach in the real world can beat money in politics, but we have to scale it way the heck up. Here are fifty ways people and communities can tap into their experience, relationships, and local knowledge to elect people who will answer to them…

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20 days ago · 24 likes · Antonia Scatton

That's your Tuesday. Mitch McConnell called Trump's slush fund “morally wrong,” three Republican senators called the Iran deal “a disaster.” Trump made 3,600 stock trades in three months and went on TV to promote an illegal casino that paid his PAC a million dollars. The DOJ spent the holiday deleting January 6 from the internet.

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Trump’s new immunity deal.

Trump’s corruption keeps on corrupting. Earlier this week, I wrote about how Trump sued his own government, settled the case with himself, routed nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money through the Judgment Fund, and handed his former personal defense lawyer the checkbook. (If you missed it, the full breakdown is here.) Since then, two developments have made an already historic act of corruption worse.

First, the immunity. In an addendum to the settlement signed solely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the DOJ declared that the IRS is now “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing pending tax claims against Trump, his sons, or the Trump Organization. Read that again. The president didn’t only divert $1.776 billion to a fund he controls. He used a lawsuit he filed against his own government to win permanent immunity from his own tax liability.

Second, the price tag in human terms. Brian Tyler Cohen did the arithmetic: divide $1.776 billion among the roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants Trump has already pardoned, and you get more than $1 million per rioter. And the money does appear headed their way. Robert Hubbell flags NBC reporting that a DOJ official told a Republican ally that large checks are coming for January 6 defendants, one of whose lawyers said he was “pretty darn excited.” The Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have now filed suit to block the fund. They are suing to stop their own government from paying the people who beat them.

Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, on The Bulwark Podcast this week, gave it the cleanest name I’ve heard: this is “reparations for white insurrectionists.” JD Vance seems to agree with him.

Sent to the podium to address the fund, Vice President JD Vance argued that January 6 participants “never ever get an ounce of sympathy” for what he framed as disproportionate sentencing — while, in his telling, other people who’ve gone to prison get too much. He didn’t have to name who he meant by “other people.” Andrew Egger at The Bulwark called the performance “faux-earnest aw-shucks folksy reasonableness.” Rep. Jones put the subtext where it belongs: we run two systems of justice in this country, and this fund is the government formalizing the one where you get grace if you’re white and an insurrectionist, and an execution if you’re Black in Tennessee. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for his part, would only say he’s “not a big fan.” And the Bulwark’s Jonathan Last has the right framing and the right instruction: brand it the “Slush Fund from Hell,” and the moment Democrats hold the House, subpoena the five secret commissioners and the full list of who got paid.

The immunity addendum should end the “it’s just a settlement” defense for good. A settlement resolves a dispute between adverse parties. There were no adverse parties here. There was Trump on one side and Trump’s government on the other, with Trump’s personal lawyer holding the pen. And Rep. Jones is right that the danger runs forward, not just back: if you tell people they can attack the Capitol and get rewarded for it, you are not closing the book on January 6. You're having taxpayers fund the sequel. The remedy is the same as it was Tuesday: litigation now, subpoenas in January, a House majority with the power to compel every name.

Read more: Zeteo, Brian Tyler Cohen, The Bulwark Podcast, The Triad - JVL, Andrew Egger, Robert Hubbell.

Massie’s defeat isn’t the flex Trump thinks it is.

The narrative out of Tuesday night writes itself if you let it: Trump is unstoppable inside his own party. He spent nearly $20 million to end Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky libertarian who crossed him on the Iran war, the tax bill, and the Epstein files. Massie lost to a Trump-backed challenger whose name is honestly irrelevant. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused Trump’s 2020 demand to “find 11,780 votes,” lost his bid for governor. Sitting Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach Trump after Jan 6, finished third in his primary. Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over sitting Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. By morning, the takes were uniform: this is Donald Trump’s party, and Republican resistance is finished.

I don’t buy it. These small victories could spell trouble for Trump and the Republicans. Dan Pfeiffer’s piece this week — “Everyone Thinks Trump Won Last Night. They’re Wrong” — touches on what is really happening here. Start with the Massie number itself. He took 45% of the vote in a district Trump carried by 35 points, against the most money ever spent against a candidate in a House primary. Compare that to Liz Cheney, who got 28.9% after voting to impeach, and you see a growing dissent among Republican primary voters. The key is that Massie didn’t run against Trump’s character the way the Never Trumpers did. He ran at Trump from inside the base, on the Iran war, on Epstein, and on spending. Forty-five percent of Republicans in a red district followed him there.

But Pfeiffer’s most important point is about what comes next. Trump’s approval is under 40%, he’s mired in an unpopular war, voters blame him for the economy, and his 2024 coalition has cracked. Which means the single best thing a vulnerable Republican can do to save their own seat this November is to show some independence from him. But Trump won’t allow it. Cross him, and he’ll turn on you — a social-media broadside, the MAGA base told to stay home, a Super PAC spigot shut off. “A smarter, savvier, less megalomaniacal leader,” Pfeiffer writes, “would give his party the room to do what they need to win. Trump is incapable of doing so, and the GOP will pay a price for it.”

The Massie result tells two stories. On one hand, it fully exposes how shallow the diehard Trump supporters are. Unlike Liz Cheney or Bill Cassidy, Massie’s crossing of Trump wasn’t personal. It was policy. Massie’s transgression was voting to release the Epstein files and opposing the Iran War. Two things the most diehard Trump supporters claim are critically important to them. Yet the majority of them in Massie’s district decided that loyalty to Trump was more important than policy. That is a revealing result.

On the other hand, in a district Trump won by 35 points, he needed to spend 20 million dollars to enact political revenge on a fellow Republican who still got 45% of the vote. Trump still has a firm grip on the core Republican base, but that grip is certainly slipping. And in more competitive districts, Trump's loyalty demand will prove fatal.

My take is that Trump doesn’t really care about being competitive nationally anymore. His sole focus is on keeping an iron grip on the Republican Party. He has figured out that remaining the kingmaker in his party is all he needs to further his self-interests, even if that means a shrinking Republican party.

Read more: The Message Box (Pfeiffer).

Tennessee goes full Confederate.

This is the story I most want you to know about this week.

Start with May 7. At Trump’s request, Tennessee convened a special session for a single purpose: to redraw the congressional map mid-decade to hand Republicans a 9-0 sweep. Within 24 hours, between the committee and the floor, it was law. The target was Memphis, the state’s only majority-Black, majority-Democratic district. The new map cracks it into three and connects a city that is 51% Black to Williamson County, 300 miles away, to dilute the vote. Every one of Tennessee’s nine districts is now majority-white, in a state that is 25% Black and brown. As Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones put it, you can now drive from one Krispy Kreme in Nashville to another on the city’s outskirts and pass through five congressional districts. The Republican sponsors said on the record that the map was drawn to “maximize partisan advantage.” The NAACP and the League of Women Voters are suing for intentional racial discrimination.

When Democrats protested on the floor — linking arms, sounding air horns — Speaker Cameron Sexton stripped all 24 of them from every committee and subcommittee, citing “decorum” and “prohibited props and noisemakers.” Because of who makes up the Tennessee Democratic caucus, that means every Black elected official in the state legislature was removed from every committee they served on. Rep. Jones went further on The Bulwark Podcast, describing reporting from the Tennessee Holler that the punishment wasn’t even applied evenly: he says the caucus’s four white male members were left off the removal list and allowed to resign their assignments on their own, rather than be formally stripped like everyone else. If that holds up, it means that when the supermajority punished the opposition for protesting a racial gerrymander, it drew the punishment list itself along racial lines. “It does show that they see race,” Rep. Jones said, “even in that regard.”

And it isn’t only the maps. The National Guard is still occupying Memphis. ICE is running raids across the state in joint operations with the Tennessee Highway Patrol. Tennessee was the first state to pass a slate of bills written by Stephen Miller, which is why Miller was in the White House this week, handing Tennessee Speaker Sexton a proclamation celebrating the “partnership.” The gerrymander, the occupation, the committee purge, and the Miller bills. Tennessee has gone full confederacy.

Rep. Jones calls his state “the tip of the spear,” and he’s right. Since the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida are all running versions of the same Jim Crow-era play: erase Black-majority districts, then punish whoever objects. Rep. Jones names it plainly: this is a Jim Crow legislature, and these are the Bull Connors and George Wallaces of the 21st century. The Congressional Black Caucus could lose up to a third of its members to Southern redistricting — a contraction of Black political representation unseen since the end of Reconstruction.

The people fighting it are doing it from the streets and the courts because the committee rooms have been taken from them. The least the rest of us can do, wherever we live, is refuse to let it happen quietly: fund the organizers running voter registration on the ground, amplify the local outlets like the Tennessee Holler actually covering it, and demand our own blue-state governors answer Tennessee’s gerrymander with one of their own.

Rep. Jones marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma this month, as part of one of the largest Southern mobilizations since the 1960s. He says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez named the assignment there better than anyone: it’s time for the North to pull up on the South because what happens in Tennessee is connected to what happens in New York. If Democracy dies in Tennessee, it can die everywhere.

So pull up.

Read more: The Bulwark Podcast, Tennessee Lookout, Democracy Docket.

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Step one: Trump sued his own government.

In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department over the 2019 leak of his tax returns by a government contractor who has since pleaded guilty. A sitting president was personally suing the executive branch he runs. The judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, in the Southern District of Florida, noticed the obvious problem: the two sides of the lawsuit were the same side. She gave both parties until May 20 to explain why the case should proceed, given that Trump and his agencies might not be "sufficiently adverse" to each other.

Step two: Trump settled the lawsuit with himself.

Rather than answer the judge's question, the administration moved to drop the suit on Monday. In exchange for dropping it, the DOJ agreed to create the $1.776 billion fund. As part of the settlement, Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization will receive formal apologies from the government. He won’t get money from the fund directly, but he doesn't need to. He just rerouted $1.776 billion of taxpayer money to a slush fund his Acting Attorney General controls.

Step three: Remove the Judge from the process.

When the case was dropped, Judge Williams issued a brief order Monday afternoon saying she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing it. The settlement agreement was never docketed in court, which means there is no "settlement of record" for any judge to review. The judge whose deadline pressure created the entire scheme has not been able to provide any oversight into the agreement.

The $1.776 billion comes from the federal Judgment Fund, a permanent Treasury appropriation that Congress established to pay legitimate court judgments and settlements against the government. By routing the slush fund through the Judgment Fund, the administration bypasses Congress's constitutional appropriations power entirely. Congress never voted on this. Congress will never vote on this. Jamie Raskin made the point bluntly on ABC's This Week: "Only Congress has the power to appropriate money, and Congress never voted on creating this $1.7 billion political slush fund." Ninety-three House Democrats filed an amicus brief calling the suit a "collusive" one with "the specter of corruption unparalleled in American history."

Then look at how the fund will actually operate.

There are five commissioners, all appointed by the Attorney General. One is selected “in consultation with congressional leadership,” which is cosmetic. The AG still appoints them, the AG can remove them, and Trump can remove any of them at will.

There are no published eligibility criteria. The DOJ’s release says only that submitting a claim is “voluntary” and that there are “no partisan requirements.” Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School ethics scholar, told CBS News he can’t tell “what — if any — kind of screening mechanism they’re going to use. How they can decide who’s going to get how much money.” There isn’t one in the announcement. There is no statutory definition of “lawfare.” There is no statutory definition of “weaponization.” There is no requirement that a claimant prove harm. There is no requirement that a claimant ever have been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. There is no public list of who is eligible and who is not.

There is no public disclosure of recipients. The fund’s only reporting requirement is a quarterly report sent to the Attorney General — the same Attorney General who appoints the commissioners. The reports are not required to be public. The identities of recipients are not required to be public. The amounts paid are not required to be public. The reasoning behind each payment is not required to be public. The only entity that has to know who got money is Todd Blanche.

There is no independent review. The DOJ said Blanche “or a future attorney general” is authorized to audit the use of the fund. The auditor is the same person who created the fund.

There is a sunset date built to outrun accountability. The fund stops processing claims on December 1, 2028, and shuts down on December 15, 2028, roughly a month before the next president is inaugurated. Anything left reverts to the federal government. The structure incentivizes spending it all before someone other than Trump gets a chance to look at the books. Robert Hubbell flagged the obvious: this is a three-and-a-half-year window for Trump to direct nearly $2 billion to anyone he wants, with no court, no Congress, and no public oversight.

And then look at who the likely beneficiaries are. The universe of people Trump has publicly described as “wrongly targeted” by the Biden DOJ is well-documented and not subtle: the nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants he has already pardoned, members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, election deniers, Trump family members, his own attorneys, and drug dealers.

Even inside the administration, the fund is generating exits. The Treasury Department’s general counsel, Brian Morrissey — a respected attorney — resigned the day the deal was announced. In the legal profession, this is what’s called a “noisy exit”: a lawyer publicly walking away from a transaction he refuses to sign off on. The administration’s own Treasury lawyer looked at the fund, read what it was, and chose to quit rather than be on the paperwork.

Let’s call this what it is. The President of the United States sued his own government. His own former defense lawyer, whom he made Attorney General, settled the case with itself. The judge was cut out. Congress was cut out. The public was cut out. What’s left is a $1.776 billion taxpayer fund with no eligibility rules, no public disclosure, no independent review, and a three-year window to spend it all before Trump leaves office. The likely recipients are the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and the political allies who covered for him during his criminal cases. The man overseeing the fund is the lawyer who defended him in those criminal cases. The Treasury official asked to wire the money quit rather than do it.

For one moment, take the administration's argument at face value. The Biden administration was weaponized, and the victims deserve restitution. We already have a system for that — the same Judgment Fund Trump is stealing this money from. The difference is that the legitimate Judgment Fund process pays out only on court judgments and validated settlements, with public records and statutory rules. Trump doesn't want that. He wants the pot of money without the rules that come with it.

Trump wants to spend your money with no transparency and no accountability. He wants to spend it on the people who attacked the Capitol on his behalf, on the lawyers who tried to overturn an election on his behalf, and on the family members who profited from his presidency. He wants to do it in secret, on a four-year clock, with his personal defense attorney holding the checkbook. And he wants to do it without a single vote in Congress, a single ruling from a court, or a single name disclosed to the public.

The only remedy is to make him pay for this in the midterms and then hold everyone involved accountable.

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Trump’s Own Paperwork Documents the Corruption.

Judd Legum spent the weekend reading Trump’s late-filed 113-page financial disclosure, and the document is its own indictment. On March 11, Trump toured a Thermo Fisher facility in Reading, Ohio, complimented CEO Marc Casper from the podium, and bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in Thermo Fisher stock. Between February 12 and March 11, he purchased up to $215,000. The same day he praised Tim Cook from a stage in Kentucky, he bought between $250,000 and $500,000 in Apple, one of five “unsolicited” Apple buys in March that totaled $2 million to $7.2 million. On March 25, he bought Micron; the next morning he was on Fox News’ The Five talking it up. Nine days after he bought between $1 million and $5 million in Dell, he told a Georgia rally crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”

NOTUS surfaced the cleanest example. On January 6, Trump bought between $500,000 and $1 million in Nvidia and between $50,000 and $100,000 in AMD. A week later, the Commerce Department approved chip sales to China. He missed the 45-day reporting deadline on multiple trades. The fine was $200.

At Puck, Bill Cohan wrote up “Trump’s S.E.C. Omerta,” and Leigh Ann Caldwell flagged the broader “Wall Street Silence” as the under-covered subplot — a sitting president front-running his own public statements while the agency that exists to police exactly this conduct says nothing. Aaron Parnas noted the disclosure was filed months late and confirmed what we already suspected: the CEO photo ops aren’t ceremonial. They’re trades.

The President of the United States is an active stock trader. He is using his influence to bring attention to companies he is actively profiting from. Every CEO standing next to him, every Fox News hit where he plugs a stock, every public statement is an investment opportunity for him. His defenders will claim that all of these decisions are fully managed through a third-party financial advisor. The timing of his trades contradicts this.

Previous Presidents created qualified blind trusts to fully and legally remove themselves from investment decisions. Before returning to the White House, instead of creating a blind trust, Donald Trump transferred his assets into a trust managed by Don Jr.

Read more: Popular Information, The Parnas Perspective.

Strongly Disapprove Is the New Swing Vote.

A new CBS News/YouGov poll of more than 2,000 adults shows Trump’s approval falling for the fifth straight month: 41 in January, 40 in February, 39 in March, 38 in April, 37 in May. A new NYT/Siena poll lands at 38. Bulwark Morning Shots flagged Ron Brownstein’s read: Trump is now in a deeper hole than any modern president whose party went on to lose the midterms.

But the topline isn’t the story. CBS asked respondents how strongly they felt: 52% strongly disapprove, 20% strongly approve. A 32-point intensity gap six months out from an election. The same poll found 51% say Trump “does not care about people like you at all,” and 77% can’t cope with inflation.

Dan Pfeiffer’s read of the NYT/Siena crosstabs at The Message Box is where the picture gets clearer.

Trump’s approval among Latinos is 20-71 — a 51-point negative spread.

Among voters 18-29, it’s 19-76, off by 57.

Among independents, 26-69, off by 43.

Trump’s approval among his own 2024 voters is just 79%. “Midterms are won or lost on a party’s ability to turn out a high percentage of its presidential-year coalition,” Pfeiffer writes. “Trump voters being unhappy with Trump is a very bad sign for the GOP.”

The generic ballot follows the same shape. Democrats lead by 10 points among registered voters. Among those most certain to vote, the lead jumps to 14.

Democrats are up 40 with voters under 30, up 30 with Latinos, up 18 with independents, and up 31 with people who didn’t vote in 2024. Eight percent of Trump 2024 voters say they’ll vote Democratic next year. Sixty-four percent of all voters disapprove of the Iran war; nearly two-thirds call it the wrong decision; 44% say Trump’s policies have personally hurt them.

This is the closest thing to a hard floor under Democratic prospects in 2026: a 32-point intensity gap, a 14-point lead among likely voters, and a president whose own 2024 coalition has cracked. The catch, which we’ve covered for weeks, is structural: Trump can be historically unpopular, and Democrats can lead the generic ballot by double digits, and Republican judges can still rig enough maps in enough states to hold the House. Pfeiffer ends his post by noting that Republicans “should be panicking instead of bragging.” The same is true on our side, in reverse: Democrats should be organizing like a 14-point lead is something you can lose. Because it is.

Read more: The Bulwark, The Message Box (Pfeiffer), Hopium Chronicles.

Democrats Still Can’t Say the Word “Old.”

Lauren Egan at The Bulwark published a heavily reported piece this weekend arguing Democrats are sleeping on Trump’s visible decline as he approaches 80 next month. The list is long: nude makeup on his right hand; three undisclosed dentist visits this year; an unexplained MRI last fall; swollen ankles in beach photos; repeated cognitive tests; a thin public schedule; on-camera dozing.

The political response from the Democratic Party is silence. The DSCC and DCCC have posted nothing about Trump’s age on X. House Leader Hakeem Jeffries briefly floated an Oversight investigation into Trump’s health, then dropped it. Rep. Seth Moulton — currently primarying 79-year-old Sen. Ed Markey on a generational-change platform — gave Egan the on-the-record version of what every Democrat says privately: “There are a lot of Democrats who legitimately feel hypocritical attacking Trump for his health and age issues when they refused to confront Biden… We’re missing a huge opportunity.”

Meanwhile, the work is being done by everyone except the official party. DNC TikToks mocking the makeup have cleared six million views. Gavin Newsom is dunking on Trump’s AI-image posts in real time. Reuters/Ipsos polling now shows most Americans see Trump as erratic.

The cowardice gap here is genuinely embarrassing. Twenty-something DNC staffers running a TikTok account are doing the political work that the DSCC, the DCCC, and the House Democratic leadership have decided is too risky to do themselves.

The voters have eyes. They watched the man fall asleep in the East Room last week. They have seen the hand. The party that refused to confront Biden’s decline owes the country one act of contrition, and it isn’t an apology tour. It is to look at the 79-year-old president posting AI nukes at 2 a.m. and say, out loud, in a press release, on the record: “He is not well enough to be doing this job.”

Read more: The Bulwark

That's your Monday. Trump's own paperwork documents $7 million in trades and a $200 fine. Fifty-two percent strongly disapprove of the president, and that's the number that matters. Trump is showing up with makeup on his hand, and Democrats still can't say the word "old."

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Powell fared better than most. Across the federal government, Trump fired commissioners and board members from agencies that Congress established to operate independently of the White House: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and others. Trump was direct about his intentions when he signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” stating explicitly that his administration’s policy is “presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch,” including agencies Congress designed to be independent of it.

Why Independent Agencies Exist

The Federal Reserve sets interest rates, which ripple through mortgage rates, car loans, savings accounts, and retirement portfolios. The SEC oversees stock markets and protects investors. The CFPB sets rules against predatory lending, abusive credit card fees, and mortgage fraud. The FTC enforces antitrust law and the rules against price-fixing that affect what people pay for goods and services.

When Congress established these agencies, it took steps to ensure they could operate independently of whoever holds the presidency. Agency leaders are nominated by the president but must be confirmed by the Senate. Members serve fixed, staggered terms, so that no single president can appoint an entire board at once. And most relevant to the current situation: members cannot be fired without cause. A president who disagrees with an agency’s decisions cannot simply remove the people making them.

Why Powell Was Protected, and Others Were Not

Powell survived where others did not because of a specific and largely unrepeatable set of conditions that had nothing to do with the legal protections Congress built.

First, Wall Street protected him. The Fed’s decisions move through the economy in ways that financial markets feel immediately and directly. As a result, Trump never followed through on his threats to fire Powell outright, constrained not by the law but by Wall Street’s reaction to the prospect.

The agencies designed to protect consumers and workers have no equivalent constituency. When their commissioners were fired, markets did not react.

Second, one Republican senator stepped in. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina and a member of the Senate Banking Committee, refused to advance Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as Powell’s replacement until the criminal investigation was dropped, calling it “bogus.” Warsh has since been confirmed. That combination, Wall Street’s self-interest and one senator willing to use his leverage, was the exception, not the pattern.

What the Supreme Court Will Decide

The legal protections Congress established for independent agencies are now before the Supreme Court. The central question is narrow but consequential: Does Congress have the power to protect independent agency leaders from being fired by the president without cause? For 90 years, a 1935 decision, Humphrey’s Executor, has held that it does. Trump is arguing that protection is unconstitutional: that the Constitution gives him control over everyone in the executive branch, and that means he must be able to remove anyone, for any reason.

Trump v. Slaughter, involving fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, and Trump v. Cook, involving the attempted removal of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, are both before the Court this term. A ruling is expected next month. Legal observers describe the conservative majority as likely to side with Trump, which would effectively end the 90-year framework protecting independent agency commissioners.

The Federal Reserve may be treated differently. The Court has already signaled that the Fed occupies a unique constitutional position, given its historical roots in the nation’s earliest banking institutions. That is cold comfort for the people the other agencies are designed to protect: consumers, workers, investors, and anyone whose financial life depends on rules that don’t change based on who won the last election.

What Is Actually at Stake

The question is whether the structural protections Congress spent 90 years building survive. If they do not, the guardrails on the American economy will be set by whoever wins the next election, adjusted with each new administration, and subject to the same political pressures that produce short-term thinking at the expense of long-term stability.

Congress built those protections from hard experience. Next month, the Supreme Court will decide whether they hold.

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Endnotes

1. Powell statement on legal attacks, “unprecedented in our 113-year history,” and decision to remain on the board: Federal Reserve Board, Statement from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell

2. Criminal investigation opened by DOJ, grand jury subpoenas, judge finds “essentially zero evidence”: NPR, Federal Reserve Receives DOJ Subpoena in Escalating Pressure Campaign

3. Trump executive order “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” February 18, 2025: White House, Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies

4. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 1935, for-cause removal protections for independent agencies: Center for American Progress, What Is Humphrey’s Executor and Why Should You Care About It?

5. Tillis calls investigation “bogus,” blocks Warsh confirmation until probe dropped: NPR, What to Know About Trump’s Ugly Feud With the Federal Reserve

6. Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook before the Supreme Court, ruling expected June 2026: SCOTUSblog, Trump v. Slaughter

7. Supreme Court signals Fed may occupy unique constitutional position: Lawfare, ‘Slaughter’-ing Humphrey’s Executor
   
   

Jim Crow is back in America. Democrats don’t want to get “extreme.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court used its shadow docket to let Alabama Republicans swap in a new gerrymandered map mid-election. Robert Hubbell calls it Roberts and Alito “converting the midterms into a referendum on state-sponsored racial discrimination.” Hours later, Virginia’s Republican-controlled state supreme court threw out a voter-approved counter-gerrymander. South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida are racing to eliminate every remaining Black-majority district. Bill Kristol notes South Carolina’s delegation is already six white Republicans to one Black Democrat in a state that is 26% Black. Rep. Ralph Norman’s stated case for carving up Clyburn’s district was that 47% Black is “too much.”

Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones told Robert Reich the new Republican map was drafted before SCOTUS even ruled, passed out of committee with the public physically barred from the room, and enacted in 24 hours, cracking Memphis (two-thirds Black, 610,000 people) into three majority-white districts and splitting Nashville into five. Jones is calling for a “new Freedom Summer” — a multi-racial voter-registration mobilization across the South.

But the more important story this week, per Brian Beutler, is what Democrats are choosing not to do. Virginia state senate majority leader Scott Surovell told The New Republic that overturning his own state supreme court’s ruling would be “an incredibly extreme step.” This is a terrible sign. If Democrats won’t escalate now, against Republican judges who openly picked a side mid-election, why would anyone believe they’d resist a real coup attempt over a five-seat House majority in November?

Extreme is a 4-3 state Supreme Court overturning an election result. Extreme is the Louisiana Republicans throwing out 40,000 votes already cast so they could suspend an election and redraw their map. Extreme is disenfranchising 610,000 voters along racial lines. Extreme is the courts violating their own rule − the Purcell Doctrine – stating that courts shouldn’t change election maps too close to an election.

Trump is historically unpopular. Democrats lead the generic ballot by double digits. And we are now staring at the genuine possibility of winning the popular vote by ten points and losing the House anyway.

Jim Crow is back in America. It’s time to get extreme.

Read more: Off Message, Robert Hubbell, Robert Reich, The Bulwark, Letters from an American.

Every Gallon Costs More Because of a War He Didn’t Have to Start.

In April, inflation rose to 3.8% year-over-year and 0.6% month-over-month. In February, the last month before Trump started the war in Iran, it was 2.4%. Rising energy costs are almost solely responsible. Gas now averages more than $4.50 per gallon, up more than 50% since the war began. The Dallas Fed’s math is straightforward: every additional month the Strait of Hormuz stays closed adds $10 to $15 a barrel, which is roughly 25 cents per gallon at the pump per month. The Pentagon disclosed in House testimony Tuesday that the war has now cost taxpayers $29 billion.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit 30% this week. That’s one of the lowest of his political career. Aaron Parnas reports that 77% of respondents — including a meaningful number of Republicans — say his policies are pushing prices up in their own communities. His response to CBS’s Nancy Cordes is to ask Congress to suspend the federal gas tax. Brian Beutler does the math at Off Message: that would cost about $500 million per week in revenue while temporarily masking the political damage just long enough to keep the war going.

Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic this week that the Iran war is “worse than Vietnam.” His argument: the Strait isn’t reopening, China and Russia have come out stronger, U.S. weapons stockpiles are depleted, and “the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.” When the original architects of the forever-war consensus are calling your war a generational disaster, you’ve lost the argument.

The two issues voters care about most — gas prices and “are we at war” — are now the same issue. And they are both Trump’s. Iran has handed his presidency a permanent economic drag and a permanent foreign-policy humiliation at the same time. The gas-tax-holiday gambit is the tell. He knows it.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective · Off Message — Beutler · Robert Hubbell · Kagan / The Atlantic

They Sold 500,000 MAGA Voters a Phone That Doesn’t Exist. Trump Brings The Oligarch to China

Two stories, both about the rampant corruption in this administration.

On June 16, 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump launched Trump Mobile and the T1 — a $499, “proudly designed and built in the United States,” gold-plated MAGA smartphone. Customers were asked to deposit $100 to preorder. According to the International Business Times, more than 500,000 did, pouring an estimated $59 million into the venture. Promised ship date: August 2025.

Eleven months later, no T1 has shipped. Judd Legum documents the timeline: “Made in the USA” silently became “designed with American values in mind” within two weeks. “Final assembly in Miami” replaced any actual U.S. manufacturing. Ship dates slid from August to November to December to January to “Q1 2026” — a window that quietly closed March 31. On April 6, Trump Mobile rewrote its terms of service to say the $100 deposit “is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale.” It is merely “a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.” Andrew Egger calls it “1-800-Trump-Scammed-Us.” There is also a live conflict of interest: Trump Mobile operates on T-Mobile’s network, meaning a federally regulated carrier that needs spectrum approvals from the Trump FCC is the gatekeeper for whether the president’s family’s product can ever launch.

Which brings us to this week’s other Trump family business trip. Trump flew to Beijing with sixteen American CEOs in tow, per CNBC: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Kelly Ortberg, Stephen Schwarzman, Brian Sikes, Jane Fraser, Jim Anderson, Larry Culp, David Solomon, Jacob Thaysen, Michael Miebach, Dina Powell McCormick, Sanjay Mehrotra, Cristiano Amon, and Ryan McInerney. Tesla, Apple, BlackRock, Boeing, Blackstone, Cargill, Citigroup, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron, Qualcomm, and Visa. And per Zeteo’s reporting, this is the same Trump who, after reading a draft of his own National Defense Strategy that took a hard line on Beijing, told his team “we’re not fucking doing that” and personally ordered the China section rewritten. A senior U.S. official to Zeteo: “Donald Trump is a pussycat in many ways. He clearly respects Xi a whole lot… and he’s a lot rougher on NATO than [he is] on Beijing.”

The connective tissue between these two stories shows exactly who Donald Trump cares about. Half a million working-class MAGA voters wired $59 million to the First Family for a phone that the company now openly says it has no legal obligation to ever produce. That same week, the patriarch of that family boarded a plane to the country he campaigned on being “tough” with, accompanied by sixteen of the wealthiest men and women in America.

The base pays. The donors get access. This is Trump’s America.

Read more: Popular Information, The Bulwark, Zeteo.

The Cities Trump Wants to Occupy Are the Safest They’ve Been in 60 Years.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association just released its Q1 2026 report, covering 67 major-city law-enforcement agencies for January through March. Compared to the same period in 2025, homicide is down 17.7%, robbery down 20.4%, rape down 7.2%, and aggravated assault down 4.8%.

Judd Legum ran the numbers against Trump’s own quotes. Baltimore, which Trump called a “hellhole” and a “horrible deathbed,” logged its fewest homicides in nearly 50 years in 2025; robbery is down 21.6% so far this year. New York City, where Trump said federal troops could cut crime “70, 80, 90 percent,” just posted the fewest first-four-months murders in NYPD recorded history; homicides down 31.7% in Q1. Los Angeles homicides are down 23.3% this quarter on top of a 19% drop in 2025, the lowest LA homicide count since 1966. Oakland, which Trump called “so far gone,” is seeing homicides down 22% and robbery down 42.7%. Portland, the “burning hellhole,” is down 63.6% on homicides.

The stated rationale for floating National Guard deployments and federal takeovers of blue-city policing is that the cities are crime-ridden hellholes. The empirical reality, in the exact month he is making the argument, is that they are the safest American cities have been in two generations. Memorize these stats. Trump and the Republicans are desperate to portray blue cities as crime-infested and in need of federal deployment. They want to do this as a ploy to intimidate voters or even suspend the midterms. The facts don’t support their rhetoric.

Read more: Popular Information, Letters from an American.

That's your Tuesday. Gas is $4.50 and Trump's economy approval is 30%. Republican judges rigged the map and Democrats called fighting back "extreme." 500,000 MAGA voters got scammed on a phone while sixteen billionaires boarded a plane to Beijing. And the "hellhole" cities are the safest they've been since 1966.

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The Court Picked a Side. Democrats Have to Pick One Too.

The Virginia Supreme Court spent Friday afternoon explaining that voter-approved referendums don’t actually count when Republicans don’t like the result. In a 4–3 partisan ruling, the court threw out the congressional map Virginia voters had ratified — a map that would have given Democrats a likely 10–1 advantage — and reinstated the 6–5 GOP-tilted map instead.

This came less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Callais v. Louisiana. Within 48 hours, Tennessee Republicans moved to carve up the majority-Black congressional district in Memphis. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana are queued up next. Writing at Off Message, Brian Beutler argues this isn’t bad luck or a plot twist — it’s deliberate partisan warfare by Republican judges who have openly adopted a double standard: illegal pro-GOP maps stand through elections while Democratic maps get voided the same week they’re drawn. His line: “It’s unpleasant to coexist with a conservative judiciary; it is intolerable to coexist with a fully partisan one.”

Beutler’s prescription is procedural radicalism without apology — redraw Virginia by statute, use the legislature to remove the justices who struck down the map, and signal to the federal judiciary that a reckoning is coming in 2029.

Layered on top, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to verify voter eligibility and reject mail-in ballots from people not on approved lists. An agency losing $2 billion a quarter is now supposed to police voter rolls it has no legal authority over. He’s also deploying an “Election Integrity Army” across all 50 states. Election lawyer Marc Elias told Zeteo the VRA decision was the “worst Supreme Court decision” of his life. Sen. Raphael Warnock told Pod Save America the Democratic Party isn’t yet fighting at the scale the moment demands. Add in election-denying gubernatorial candidates running competitively in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and the picture is clear. The final defender of democracy has fallen.

Throughout Trump’s terms, the assurance has always been the same — as long as the courts hold, democracy holds. With this Virginia ruling, that line is gone. And honestly, it’s been gone for a while.

I understand the court system isn’t a monolith. A Virginia ruling isn’t a Texas ruling isn’t a Supreme Court ruling. They’re independent entities. But zoom out and look at what the judiciary is telling this country about how our democracy is supposed to function. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. It’s currently allowing Louisiana to disenfranchise voters and redraw maps mid-election against their will. It let Texas launch a mid-decade redistricting that no Texas citizen ever voted for. Done explicitly at Donald Trump’s request to rig the midterms. We don’t have to pretend that’s not what it is. They are stealing an election in slow motion, and the court is waving it through at every turn.

Now compare that to California, which did the same thing the right way. Put it to the voters. Made it temporary. Virginia followed that exact model — a referendum, a temporary map, an automatic reversion — and the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down anyway. Read that ruling carefully, and it gets worse: the court didn’t reject gerrymandering. It rejected voters’ gerrymandering. You can rig the map all you want, but you just can’t let the voters decide. Meanwhile, in Florida, voters passed the Fair Districts Amendments in November 2010 with nearly 63% of the vote — a constitutional ban on partisan-drawn maps — and Ron DeSantis and the legislature are openly defying it to rig their own. We don’t yet know what the courts will say. If the pattern holds, they’ll get away with it.

What the courts have been saying for a while now is that if you have power, you can do whatever you need to do to hold on to it.

Democrats need to hear that message. If we regain power, we have to act on it and raise the bar high enough that the Republican Party never wants to play this game again. That means packing the Supreme Court. I started at 13. Some are suggesting 20, 21. If John Roberts wakes up in 2029 to a Democratic president, House, and Senate, he better have a bunch of new colleagues joining him shortly. It also means statehood for D.C. and statehood for Puerto Rico. Maybe two states out of California. In my angry spiral on Friday, I even suggested forming a state that extends from El Paso through Austin to Dallas and Houston. I mean, why not? Because that would be unconstitutional?

The unfortunate reality is that power is right, and the courts are letting it happen. The Republican Party is unhindered in its attempts to subvert democracy. We have to be just as unhindered in our attempts to protect it.

Read more: Off Message — Beutler · The Bulwark — Southern Apocalypse · Zeteo — Marc Elias

The Dealmaker Goes to Beijing With Nothing to Trade

Trump heads to Beijing this week for the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, and he’s arriving as a weakened president asking Xi Jinping for a favor.

The Iran ceasefire collapsed over the weekend. Trump rejected Iran’s counterproposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” after Tehran demanded an end to the U.S. naval blockade as a condition for any deal. Brent crude briefly jumped 4% to about $105.50 a barrel. Robert Hubbell notes the national average gas price is now $4.50, and Strait of Hormuz traffic is down to 10% of normal. Iran responded with a drone strike on a tanker off Qatar. China vetoed a U.S. resolution at the UN Security Council calling for the strait to reopen, describing the American action as “unauthorized military operations.”

That’s the position Trump is bringing to the summit. Writing at The Bulwark, Bill Kristol notes that Beijing has signaled, via the New York Times, that it “no longer fears another escalation” — recently blocking Meta’s acquisition of a China-founded AI startup and codifying rules to punish foreign businesses that comply with U.S. sanctions. Sen. Jack Reed told Fox News Sunday that Trump enters the summit “terribly weakened” by gas prices, grocery inflation, and the Iran war. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on Meet the Press and refused to repeat his own earlier prediction of sub-$3 gas by summer. Meanwhile, Congress is pressing Trump to complete a delayed arms sale to Taiwan, which the administration has conveniently put on hold ahead of the summit.

Three of four deployed U.S. carrier groups are stuck in the Middle East. Xi holds leverage over both the oil supply and the U.S. economy. Trump needs a deliverable he can bring home. What is he going to trade? Taiwan? Chip restrictions? Both?

Read more: Zeteo — Trump the Golden Calf · Bill Kristol / Morning Shots · Robert Hubbell

Two Courts Said the Tariffs Are Illegal. Trump Is Trying a Third Theory.

The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled Trump’s second-attempt tariff regime illegal this week. The Supreme Court had already struck down the original “liberation day” tariffs earlier this year. The administration tried to re-impose blanket duties under an obscure 1970s trade-law provision. The trade court said no. Trump’s response was to attack the judges and signal he’ll try a third legal theory.

Then he publicly thanked importers who declined to seek refunds for illegally collected duties, telling them to skip the money “out of patriotism.” The refunds are owed to American companies, not foreign governments, and his pressure campaign to make them forfeit those refunds shows the administration treats tariff law as a loyalty test, not a legal constraint.

The economic damage continues regardless. Matt Stoller flags that consumer sentiment hit another record low in May, and Trump’s approval is at a polling-average record low. Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane told Bloomberg this week, “They’re literally running out of money at the end of the month. We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.” April added 115,000 jobs, but wage growth continues to slow, and manufacturing payrolls are down. The tariffs are an inflation tax that two federal courts have now ruled illegal, paid by American businesses, passed through to American consumers, and Trump is asking the victims to give up their refunds.

Read more: David Pakman · Matt Stoller / BIG

That's your Monday. The courts have picked a side. Trump is going to China. Two federal courts said his tariffs are illegal.

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Rivera crossed a clear line. A sitting congressman cannot take money from a foreign government to influence American policy. But let’s be honest, today, the line is pretty blurry. Our campaign finance laws have always encouraged a version of pay-to-play. Big donors to both parties receive favors: political appointments, special consideration in regulatory decisions, and access that ordinary citizens do not have. Trump has not just engaged in pay-to-play. He has redefined it.

He created new channels: a family cryptocurrency business, meme coins, and a privately funded White House ballroom renovation. What surprised me, looking at it all assembled in one place, was the sheer volume. Take a look at the Campaign Legal Center’s tracker. The scale is not what you imagine until you see it laid out. The beneficiaries are, not surprisingly, the wealthy and well-connected. That level of influence gives a small group of people an outsized impact on how the government operates. That is not good for democracy.

In addition, Trump has built something else entirely. The family is not trading access. It is running a business out of the White House.

The Family Business

Since his father’s election, Donald Trump Jr. has joined the advisory boards of at least four companies, including Unusual Machines, a drone component manufacturer. He screened candidates for senior Pentagon positions, claiming on his podcast that he was looking for people who wanted to spend more on drones. The Pentagon’s leadership was shaped accordingly. Unusual Machines subsequently received Army contracts worth millions. A venture capital fund where Trump Jr. is a partner has seen at least four of its portfolio companies win administration contracts this year. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a formal letter to the Defense Department demanding answers. No investigation followed.

Jared Kushner met with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and Putin’s handpicked negotiator, in Miami before joining the Ukraine peace talks. He is simultaneously soliciting billions of dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of the same governments he negotiates with. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has formally notified the White House that his appointment as Special Envoy triggers a legal requirement to file financial disclosures within 30 days. The White House is not requiring him to file. The last administration’s own Justice Department prosecuted a president’s son for a minor tax and gun charge. This one does not require its chief peace negotiator to disclose his financial entanglements with the governments he negotiates with.

The Center for American Progress has a live tracker documenting the Trump family’s financial gains since January 2025. The number changes daily. Check what it is today.

And On Top of That

The Department of Justice answers to an administration whose family members are the subjects of the conduct in question. The fox is not just watching the henhouse. The fox is collecting a management fee.

We are in a new age of corruption. It is no longer a transaction between a government actor and an outside interest. It is baked into how the government operates. The family is the policy. The investment portfolio is the foreign policy. And the people whose job it is to say so in a court of law work for the people who built the portfolio.

There is a path, though not a short one. Democrats are currently favored to win the House in November. A Democratic majority means subpoena power, which means hearings with teeth, which means a public record. From that record, legislation. Probably after Trump leaves power. The Brennan Center has identified nine specific solutions to political corruption worth understanding before that moment arrives.

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Sources:

1. David Rivera conviction, six counts, Venezuela’s state oil company: New York Times, Federal Jury Convicts Former Representative David Rivera of Florida

2. Campaign finance laws and pay to play, donor favoritism: Campaign Legal Center, Trump’s Take Tracker

3. Trump family cryptocurrency business, meme coins, World Liberty Financial: Popular Information, Update: Trump Jr.-Backed Startup Receives $620 Million Pentagon Loan

4. Don Jr. screens Pentagon candidates, advisory board positions, drone company contracts: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Companies See Boost From Trump Administration After Adding Don Jr. to Their Boards

5. Don Jr. venture capital fund, portfolio companies receiving Pentagon contracts: Financial Times, reporting referenced in Popular Information above.

6. Kushner meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund: CBC News, Russia-U.S. Meeting Ends With Nations No Closer to Finding Path to Peace in Ukraine

7. Kushner financial disclosure requirement, CREW notification, White House non-compliance: Representative Jamie Raskin letter to Kushner, April 16, 2026, House Judiciary Democrats

8. Center for American Progress Trump family financial gains tracker: CAP, Trump’s Take

9. Democrats favored to win House in November 2026: current polling and forecasts, Cook Political Report, 2026 House Race Ratings; prediction market odds via Kalshi, tracked at Race to the WH.

10. Brennan Center nine solutions to political corruption: Brennan Center for Justice, Nine Solutions to Political Corruption

The Pentagon Lied About What This War Costs. The Real Number Is $72 Billion.

Judd Legum at Popular Information rebuilt the Pentagon’s books from scratch. The Iran war’s first 60 days cost approximately $71.8 billion — $1.2 billion per day — against the $25 billion Defense Secretary Hegseth swore to Congress under oath.

The gap comes from a specific accounting trick: the Pentagon books munitions at their legacy acquisition price, not at replacement cost. Every SM-2 interceptor missile the U.S. fires will be replaced by an SM-6 — a $5 million price difference per missile that never appears on the ledger. Once you account for replacement costs, co-belligerent military aid to Israel, and destroyed or damaged assets the Pentagon excluded from its count, the number nearly triples.

It gets worse. The Washington Post analyzed satellite imagery this week and found Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed at least 228 U.S. military structures across the region — bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The administration pressured commercial satellite providers to withhold imagery of the damage. David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast called it “the most systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war” since Vietnam.

And it’s still going. A French cargo ship attempting the Strait under U.S. escort was hit Tuesday, eight crew injured. Trump responded by threatening to bomb “at a much higher level and intensity.”

At $72 billion for 60 days, the annualized cost approaches $440 billion. Add a global oil shock, and the U.S. is heading back to a negotiating posture weaker than the one Obama secured in the JCPOA — the deal Trump tore up in 2018.

Read more: Popular Information, Robert Hubbell.

Someone Made $125 Million on the Iran Deal Leak. The DOJ Opened a Probe.

On Wednesday, the U.S. presented Iran with a one-page framework for a ceasefire, and roughly 70 minutes before Axios published the scoop, someone placed a $920 million short position on crude oil. Oil prices plunged 12%. The position cleared an estimated $125 million in profit before prices rebounded when Iran rejected the terms.

Aaron Parnas reported the trade. The DOJ has opened a probe into $2.6 billion in suspiciously timed oil shorts placed minutes before market-moving Iran war news throughout the conflict. This $920 million position is the largest single example.

The timing is precise enough that the question answers itself: someone had material non-public information about that framework before it was published. That information originated inside the U.S. government or its diplomatic channels. The list of people with access to the one-page proposal before Axios published it is finite and knowable.

And remember: Donald Trump Jr. advises both Polymarket and Kalshi. Jared Kushner sits at the negotiating table while collecting hundreds of millions from Saudi Arabia. Trump himself told small-business owners “the world is a casino.” The insider trading probe is important. But the real question is whether the investigation will follow the money wherever it leads, including into the president’s orbit.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, Semafor

Memphis: A Century of Black Representation, Erased in 48 Hours

Tennessee Republicans unveiled a map this week that splits Memphis, a 61% Black congressional district that has existed for over a century, into three districts where Black voters become a minority. The legislature moved in 48 hours. Governor Bill Lee signed it. Sen. Marsha Blackburn said, “This is what it means to be America’s conservative leader. Let’s get it done.”

This is the direct consequence of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week. Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana are following Tennessee’s lead. Robert Hubbell documented the speed: from ruling to map to law in less than a week. The Court then waived its own 32-day cooling-off period to allow Louisiana to redraw maps immediately, mid-election, with voters already showing up at the wrong precincts.

Democrats are responding. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pointed to New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado as examples of counter-redistricting. Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and New Jersey are also in play. National Democratic Redistricting Committee president John Bisognano told The Bulwark: “It is going to be mass redistricting on a nationwide scale.”

Court expansion has moved from a fringe progressive ask to a likely litmus test in the presidential primary. Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, who opposed court expansion in 2020, told The Bulwark a 2028 nominee “sure as hell better have a solution” for the Court. Rep. Ro Khanna: “Reforming the Court must be one of the highest Democratic priorities.”

You’ve heard me say this before: the argument is over. The Court’s legitimacy is gone. Expanding the bench isn’t radical; it’s the minimum response to a Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act and then broke its own rules to accelerate the damage.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark.

The FBI Is Investigating the Reporter Who Exposed Kash Patel’s Drinking. Patel Hands Out Personalized Bourbon.

The FBI has opened an “insider threat” criminal leak investigation into Sarah Fitzpatrick, the Atlantic reporter whose April piece on FBI Director Kash Patel’s drinking prompted his $250 million defamation lawsuit. One source told MS NOW: “They know they are not supposed to do this. But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs.”

Hours after that report dropped, Fitzpatrick published a sequel: Patel travels with personalized Woodford Reserve bottles labeled “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” — some spelled “KA$H” — and threatened polygraphs and prosecution when one went missing at a UFC training event.

The same week, the DOJ indicted James Comey over a photo of seashells. The FCC launched a license review of Disney/ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel joke. And the FBI raided the Virginia office of state Sen. Louise Lucas — the 82-year-old Black Democrat who led Virginia’s redistricting fight — with Fox News cameras on scene before the agents arrived.

Aaron Parnas reported that a former interim U.S. Attorney pressured prosecutors to pursue charges against Lucas because “it could politically benefit the Trump White House ahead of the midterm elections.” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told The Atlantic: “Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency — it makes me frightened for the country.”

This is the pattern, and it’s no longer deniable. The DOJ prosecutes a former FBI director for an Instagram post. The FCC threatens a network over a joke. The FBI investigates the reporter who covered the FBI director’s misconduct. And federal agents raid the politician behind a redistricting win — with the president’s favorite network tipped off in advance. Every one of these actions uses legitimate government authority for illegitimate political ends.

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

That's your Thursday. The war costs $72 billion, not $25 billion. Someone made $125 million on a peace-deal leak. Memphis lost a century of representation in 48 hours. The FBI is investigating the reporter, not the director.

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The Ceasefire Is Over. Gas Is $4.45. Trump Calls It a “Mini-War.”

The ceasefire Trump declared to dodge the 60-day War Powers deadline is functionally over. On Monday, U.S. and Iranian forces traded direct fire in the Strait of Hormuz for the first time since the truce began. Iran launched drones and missiles at two U.S. destroyers and two merchant ships. The U.S. says it sank six Iranian fast boats. Iran struck the Fujairah oil hub in the UAE with 15 missiles and four drones, sparking a fire at the Emirates’ largest oil storage facility. Dubai residents received their first missile alerts since the truce. A tanker is burning off the UAE coast.

Trump’s response: he told small-business owners at the White House that he calls it “a mini-war.” He has now branded this conflict a “military operation,” a “little detour,” a “war,” and a “mini-war” — sometimes within the same speech. Defense Secretary Hegseth told reporters the new naval escort operation, “Project Freedom,” is “separate and distinct from Operation Epic Fury” — a legalistic dodge The Bulwark notes is designed to keep Republicans from having to take a war powers vote. Sen. Tammy Duckworth called it what it is: “He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice — and he’s doing it illegally.”

The economic damage is no longer theoretical. The national gas average hit $4.45. Americans spent $125 million more on gas last Friday alone than the week before. California has broken $7. Brent crude topped $119 after the Fujairah strike. Farm diesel is up 46% since the conflict began. Nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer transits the Strait. Close to 70% of surveyed farmers say they can’t afford the fertilizer they need. U.S. farm bankruptcies are up 70% in 2026. Spirit Airlines blamed jet-fuel costs for its collapse. And oil industry CEOs are openly warning that global buffer stocks are nearly exhausted. When they run out, the economic pain will hit a new level.

Treasury Secretary Bessent told reporters the U.S. has “absolute control” of the Strait and that “help is on the way” on gas prices. He said this hours after Iranian strikes, burning ships, and a paralyzed shipping lane. Trump is now appealing to South Korea and China for coalition support, which is not the posture of a country with uncontested control.

Trump’s central 2024 promise was lower prices. He is now fighting an unauthorized war that is driving fuel costs to four-year highs, destroying an American airline, and pulling Gulf partners out from under the U.S. security umbrella. Every day Congress doesn’t reassert War Powers authority is a day he gets to redefine “war” to mean whatever buys him the next news cycle.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, The Bulwark, Semafor

The Supreme Court Broke Its Own Rules to Rush a Racial Gerrymander Into the Midterms

Fallout from the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act continues.

Eight days after the ruling, the Roberts Court set aside its own Rule 45.3 — the 32-day cooling-off period for major decisions — and let Louisiana redraw its congressional maps immediately. It’s only the third time in 25 years the Court has invoked that remedy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s solo dissent was blistering: “Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation.” Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, called the charge “baseless and insulting.”

Robert Hubbell flagged the significance: the Court isn’t just changing the law. It’s weaponizing its own calendar for a partisan outcome. Louisiana’s early voting began this week, with voters encountering district lines different from the ones candidates had filed under. Some showed up at the wrong precincts. Mid-decade redistricting wasn’t enough for the Republicans. They are literally doing mid-election redistricting.

Republican legislatures are now moving at breakneck speed. Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee called a special session to potentially eliminate Rep. Steve Cohen’s Memphis-area district — the state’s only Democratic seat. DeSantis signed a new Florida map that flips four Democratic seats. Alabama is eyeing new maps. Trump is explicitly encouraging it: “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

At Puck, Abby Livingston reports House Democrats are at “R.B.G.-death level” panic about 2028: with VRA protections gone, Republicans could dismantle roughly a dozen majority-minority districts across the South, potentially unseating nearly every Black Democrat in the region. The seats of Terri Sewell, Jim Clyburn, and Bennie Thompson are all on the chopping block. Sewell’s response: she’d take “52 seats from California, 17 seats from Illinois” in retaliation.

The race to the bottom has begun. Democrats must respond. And it shouldn’t stop at redistricting. The argument over expanding the court is over. From the stolen Merrick Garland seat to this most recent abomination of a ruling, the Supreme Court has lost its credibility. Expanding the court is not just a political weapon anymore; it's essential to restore the court’s legitimacy. If Democrats win the House and Senate and retake the presidency in 2028, expanding the court to 13 seats – matching the number of appellate courts – should be a top priority.

And just another reminder for any hand-wringers over gerrymandering. This can all end tomorrow. There is a Democratic bill that would end partisan gerrymandering nationwide. All it needs is Mike Johnson and John Thune to bring it for a vote.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark, Puck.

ICE Stopped Paying for Medical Care Seven Months Ago. The Death Rate Has Quintupled.

Judd Legum at Popular Information published one of the most important investigations of the year. Since October 3, 2025, ICE simply stopped paying third-party medical providers for detainee care. No dialysis. No prenatal care. No oncology. No chemotherapy reimbursements. ICE’s own internal documents called the situation an “absolute emergency” requiring immediate resolution to prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.

The human toll is documented in deaths. From 2018 to 2024, an average of 8.9 people died in ICE custody annually. In 2025, 33 died. In the first four months of 2026 alone, 18 people have died — a current annualized rate more than five times the pre-policy average.

The individual cases are staggering. Francisco Gaspar-Andrés visited the medical unit nine times, complaining of bloody stool before dying of liver failure. An asylum seeker from Guatemala has gone months without surgery for a large ovarian cyst despite severe pain. A mother of five has been denied a CT scan for a chest growth for months.

ICE’s official response: “For many illegal aliens, this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”

The government is holding 60,000 people in custody, largely without criminal charges, in violation of due process, and is now refusing to pay for basic medical care. This is what we mean when we say “the cruelty is the point.”

Read more: Popular Information

Trump Wants a $1 Billion Ballroom. And “Eight or Nine Years” in Office.

Senate Judiciary Republicans requested $1 billion, yes, that’s a “B”, for “security adjustments and upgrades” to Trump’s East Wing ballroom. The White House has long claimed the project would be free to taxpayers. Trump cited the WHCD shooting as justification, listing “Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations” — for a ballroom.

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box calls it a layup for Democrats: a Washington Post poll found that only 26% support the ballroom, with just 18% of independents backing it. “Building a massive, corporate-funded ballroom to host fancy parties — while Americans are paying $4 a gallon for gas, and groceries, healthcare, and housing prices keep rising — is some real fiddling while Rome burns.”

And yesterday, Trump told small-business owners: “When I get out of office in let’s say eight or nine years from now.” The room laughed and applauded. Separately, judicial nominees in Senate confirmation hearings this week refused to say whether Trump can run for a third term.

A billion-dollar vanity project while gas is at $4.45. A casual reference to serving past the constitutional limit. And nominees who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment. That’s not a series of gaffes. That’s an administration telling you exactly what it plans to do.

Read more: The Message Box, The Parnas Perspective.

That's your Tuesday. The ceasefire is over. Gas is $4.45. The Court broke its own rules to rush a gerrymander. ICE is letting people die. Trump wants a billion-dollar ballroom and eight or nine years in office.

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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.