Trump's Corrupt, Chaotic Nuclear Deal

He gave the Saudis enrichment, gave Kushner's patrons a win, and tried to un-sign the deal by tweet a day later.

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

Trump’s Corrupt, Chaotic Nuclear Deal

On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that paves the way for the kingdom to enrich uranium on its own soil. Per the Wall Street Journal, American companies would build the enrichment facility if a joint U.S.-Saudi study green-lights it. A “black box” arrangement without the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, the monitoring regime prior administrations of both parties considered non-negotiable. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has publicly vowed to build a nuclear weapon if Iran gets one. Saudi Arabia signed a defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan last year. Nonproliferation expert James Acton, via What A Day: “If you have an enrichment plant up and running, you can build enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in days.”

Rep. Brad Sherman said the quiet part at Wednesday’s hearing: the U.S. is “bombing Iran because they insist upon enriching” while “giving [Saudi Arabia] the green light… and the only difference I see here is that Westinghouse stands to make an awful lot of money on this deal, whereas the Iranians were not enriching American companies.” Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors would anchor the program; the company is already backstopped by $17.5 billion in Energy Department loans.

Then came Thursday, and one of the most humiliating rollout collapses of this presidency. Trump posted that the already-signed deal “will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” Trump insisted there would be “no enrichment,” contradicting the central provision of the agreement his own energy secretary had signed 24 hours earlier. Karoline Leavitt confirmed: no Abraham Accords, “the deal is off.” Asked why no one had mentioned this condition at the signing, she explained that Trump “is always the final dealmaker.”

Here’s what makes it damning rather than just chaotic. Israeli normalization wasn’t some new idea Trump invented Thursday, it was Washington’s longstanding condition for Saudi nuclear cooperation, held as recently as the Biden administration. And it was Trump’s own team that dropped it: Reuters reported in May 2025 that his administration had formally delinked the nuclear talks from Israel recognition — the concession that made this deal closable at all, because the Saudis have said for years they will not recognize Israel without a pathway to a Palestinian state, which Israel rejects. So Trump gave away America’s decades-old leverage to secure a signing ceremony, then reimposed the condition via a social media post after the ink dried. The Washington Post’s headline says where this stands: the pact is now in doubt.

And then, as always, there is the corruption. Judd Legum did the accounting: the Saudi Public Investment Fund put $2 billion into Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners; Kushner has collected over $110 million in management fees from the Saudi government since 2021; as of March, he was seeking billions more, and he is back inside the government as a top foreign-policy hand on exactly this portfolio. Legum surveyed the coverage: of 202 major-outlet articles on Kushner’s Iran diplomacy, six mentioned his Saudi financial ties. The nuclear-deal coverage at the Journal, the Post, AP, and CNN omitted it entirely. The son-in-law on the Saudi payroll, the decades-old condition quietly traded away, the “black box” enrichment deal signed, and the president conditioning it back by post because he didn’t know what he’d given up. Sen. Ed Markey called the deal “irresponsible and dangerous.” It’s also for sale, and its own author can’t tell you what’s in it.

Read more: CNN, NPR, The Hill, Reuters, Popular Information, Time

A Judge Threw Out the Times Subpoenas

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian made the DOJ withdraw every subpoena sent to New York Times reporters over their Air Force One security stories. The government’s own lawyer admitted the subpoenas were “rife with inadvertent errors,” including that the DOJ had subpoenaed the phone records of one reporter’s mother and two reporters’ spouses. Subramanian found that the department had issued subpoenas two days after publication without exhausting any other investigative avenue, said the government had turned the law “on its head,” raised the question of whether prosecutors misled the judge who authorized the phone subpoenas, and floated sanctions. Rather than face a ruling, the DOJ folded. The subpoenas are “null and void,” and the department must now notify the court before issuing new subpoenas targeting these reporters. Per PBS, the administration also quietly withdrew similar subpoenas targeting Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters in Virginia.

The DOJ’s response to losing was to attack the judge. A spokesperson accused Subramanian of “overriding clear longstanding principles and common sense” and vowed the leak investigation “remains ongoing.” Robert Hubbell’s diagnosis rings true: after Trump and Blanche purged hundreds of career prosecutors, what’s left is a department too hollowed out to execute even its intimidation campaigns competently. Times counsel David McCraw called it “a great day for the First Amendment and a great day for the rule of law.” He is right, but it only happened because the Times fought rather than complied, and a judge did his job. That’s the lesson to bank for the next one, because there will be a next one.

Read more: CBS News, PBS/AP, NPR, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo

They're Rigging the Census in Plain Sight

Follow the pattern. The election speech flopped. The SAVE Act stalled. So the project moved somewhere even quieter: the census.

The Bulwark’s Receipts walks through a little-noticed OMB regulatory filing from late June that could exclude some or most immigrants from the census count — the constitutionally mandated enumeration that sets House apportionment, Electoral College weight, and a decade of federal funding. Unlike the loud, failed citizenship-question fight of 2020, this version is deliberately boring and, in The Bulwark’s words, “far more professionalized.” The day after filing, the administration asked a judge to pause a related lawsuit. Brian Tyler Cohen calls it what it is: a power grab “disguised as boring technical guidance” that could shift congressional seats and hundreds of billions of dollars for a decade.

Brian Beutler’s warning is the one Democrats need taped to their desks before the budget fight: the party is “gaming out responses to Trump’s election-subversion schemes, but they seemingly won’t withhold their votes for a budget that funds those schemes.” He’s right, and it’s maddening. If control of the count is control of Congress, then a budget vote that funds census manipulation is where we need to fight back.

And the pressure isn’t only external. Zeteo reports that 13 House Democrats — Cuellar, Davis, Golden, Gonzalez, Gluesenkamp Perez, Castor, Gottheimer, Kaptur, Lee, Moskowitz, Pappas, Soto, and Tran — voted for a national voter-ID bill tucked inside the insider-trading legislation I wrote about Wednesday. The Campaign Legal Center warns its ID list is “unreasonably narrow” — excluding the student, employee, public-assistance, and many tribal IDs that young voters and voters of color disproportionately carry.

The Senate can still filibuster the voter-ID bill. The census change is harder to block; that’s why we need to attack the funding source.

Read more: The Bulwark, Off Message, Zeteo

That's your Monday. The White House sold Saudi Arabia the enrichment it bombed Iran to stop. A judge made the DOJ crawl back on the Times subpoenas. And the census is being quietly rigged while Democrats debate whether to fund it.