I have usually been able to find the positive in the most heinous situations. The courageous under fire, the unexpected hospitality, the humor amid sorrow, the stoicism after the most extreme tragedy.
But Trump’s presidency has eaten at my soul. How could a country I love have voted (twice) for a president with so very few redeeming features?
How, indeed, could such a small man be raised to such a big
job? We have been told by those who know him better that in person he exhibits deft and often charming command in his exclusion of all around a table. A few friends of his say he can show flashes of personable allure betwixt the boasts and the boorishness.
But, honestly, I watch in despair most evenings.
And then on Friday night, I saw some hope. Or at least I thought I did.
I was expecting the same old Trump at the reconstituted White House Correspondents’ Dinner..
It seemed a good sign that Trump wanted to give it another go, and the early signs looked promising. He was clearly catching up with some sleep when he first arrived. Maybe because it wasn’t about him.
But he came alive when the award ceremony began.
He shrugged. He smiled. He smirked. He spoke out of the side of his mouth to Karoline Leavitt with quips and asides that felt to the audience like he was genuinely enjoying himself.
Then he shook all the winners’ hands and told them well done.
And imagine: this respect to reporters from The Wall Street Journal who wrote about his birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein (and he sued!).
Also towards the photographer who caught him posing for the cameras, apparently unconcerned that a man was collapsing behind him in the Oval Office.
His nemesis from CNN that he routinely insults and demeans.
Trump threw up his hands in an unusually modest “aw shucks” manner, and looked out at the audience as if to ask them what he should do. But he was grinning.
He didn’t sit on his hands. He was a good sport.
If there is one thing the president understands, it’s good TV. And he woke up from his table nap to realize that he was the star of some surprisingly hilarious television.
No matter that he was the butt of the joke. He was still the center of attention. And that’s what drives him.
Many have criticized the WHCA and the journalists who turned up to the pared-down dinner.
But the evening began with a video featuring journalists talking about the First Amendment, AI footage of Founding Father James Madison talking about “No Kings,” and footage of Trump calling the media “fake news.”
Humiliated Trump Forced to Watch Mocking ‘No Kings’ Video AWKWARD.
The elephant in the room was in full view of everyone present, including the president and many members of his Cabinet.
And the awards, handed out by CNN legend Wolf Blitzer, didn’t shy away from criticizing the president. They challenged his authority. They were personal.
“This has not been an easy evening, all these awards,” Trump laughed as he took the microphone. “A lot of people I like, some I don’t like at all,” he added. Importantly, he said he respected them.
If anything, Trump’s speech started out rather tame. A little boring. The jokes were tired. I was thinking that his speechwriter should be fired.
He targeted Bruce Springsteen (“Bored in the USA”), Chris Christie, Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Adam Schiff, Rosie O’Donnell. Hardly cutting edge and not very cutting.
Still, it was within roasting territory. This was what a president was supposed to do at these things. Be a little rough. Have some fun.
Maybe, just maybe, Trump really did respect the First Amendment and realized that he needed the press as much as they needed him.
Maybe he did have some heart, after all.
But then it got dark. My essay’s thesis of him being good no longer held true. Metaphorically, I ripped it up. Deleted it.
The showman in Trump, perhaps, felt like he was losing the room with his lame jokes and needed to get their attention.
One by one, he went back and made unfair and sometimes despicable attacks on the reputations of the award-winning journalists he had shaken hands with and congratulated earlier in the evening.
He doubled back and blasted the award-winning team at The Wall Street Journal, singling out reporter Josh Dawsey, for writing about him. He even took a dig at CBS boss Bari Weiss, who has staked her reputation on siding with his administration.
The goodwill he had won with his benevolent behavior earlier had vanished.
Next, and worst, Trump spewed out vile insults at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who won an award for her coverage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calamitous visit to the Oval Office.
“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award. It was all about me. It was a fake, she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake; there’s no question about it.
“But she’s a young, attractive woman,” Trump added. “She never smiles. I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile!’ You have a nice position; you’re at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan! Just smile.”
Trump claimed Collins looked like transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who triggered a Bud Light backlash a few years ago when she appeared in an ad for the popular beer.
“I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship,” Trump said. “But then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.”
It wasn’t at all funny. It was cruel and insulting to both Collins and Mulvaney.
He just couldn’t play nice. He felt he was threatened, and he stung like the scorpion he is. He simply couldn’t help himself.
Remember, this is the president who subpoenaed the families of New York Times journalists to try and discover the source of a story he didn’t want told.
And he is still suing the Journal for $20 billion despite the warm handshakes.
Press freedom is undeniably under threat from Trump and his acolytes like Stephen Miller.
But Trump needs to understand that he needs the press.
“The show must go on,” he told the audience, though he more than likely was directing that at himself.
On some level, he must know that when the camera lights fade away, so does he. And by that time, there will be plenty lining up to make his legacy known—first and foremost, that it just wasn’t a very good show.electoral system.”
Brazil denies visas to U.S. delegation aiming to impugn election system, officials say
The U.S. delegation had planned to visit the Brazilian capital and cast doubt on the integrity of the voting system before a presidential election this fall, officials said.
BRASÍLIA — Brazil has denied visas to two senior State Department officials whom the Trump administration planned to dispatch on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system before millions of Brazilians vote in a presidential election on Oct. 4, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
A U.S. State Department delegation, including Trump political appointees Riley M. Barnes, an assistant secretary, and Samuel Samson, a deputy assistant secretary, had planned to depart for Brasília, the capital, in coming days, according to a senior State Department official and three Brazilian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
But Brazilian officials, apprised of the plans, denied the Americans permission to travel, the Foreign Ministry said. The U.S. officials applied for visas through the Brazilian consulate in Washington, saying they planned to hold “meetings with authorities involved in the electoral process,” Brazilian officials said.
Samson has traveled from Africa to Europe, promoting President Donald Trump’s brand of conservative politics and cultivating ties to right-wing groups, at times alienating establishment politicians.
It was unclear whom the U.S. diplomats had planned to meet or how they would impugn a system long seen as an electoral standard-bearer in South America, returning results within hours of Brazilians casting their ballots.
Two senior Brazilian officials told The Washington Post on Thursday that they had recently learned of what they described as the American “ploy” and had vowed to block the U.S. officials from entering the country.
“It is a ploy that is completely incompatible with Brazilian democracy,” said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. This official said the Brazilian government would move to “protect our voting system.”
The Brazilian officials said they suspected that the Americans’ goal was to meet with electoral skeptics and produce a report that could be used to delegitimize the nation’s electronic voting system. Samson in the past has produced department reports that critics say brought a partisan lens to human rights issues.
The attempted mission by the Trump officials marked an escalation in a lengthy feud between the United States and Brazil over the limits of freedom of expression and the criminal case against former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after being convicted of attempting to lead an armed coup and other charges.
This week, Trump imposed significant tariffs on a range of Brazilian goods. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded by calling it a political gambit to help his electoral opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of the former president and a Trump ally.
The U.S. effort also underscores the broader cultural makeover of America’s diplomatic corps, which in the Trump administration has increasingly been deployed to further political goals rather than advance long-standing principles that once superseded partisanship.
“For those of us who lost friends bringing democracy to other countries, it’s incredibly noxious seeing this secretary using American power to undermine credible elections in other countries for ideological purposes,” the senior U.S. State Department official with knowledge of the endeavor said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
“We used to deploy power in dangerous situations for democracy,” the senior State Department official said. “Now we send political appointees to discredit another country’s electoral system.”
The senior official drew a distinction between this diplomatic mission and efforts by the U.S. government in 2022 to fortify Brazilian democracy and avert a military takeover. In the lead-up to that election, Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly sought to sow doubt over Brazil’s electoral system, which he alleged was rife with fraud.
Bolsonaro, a former military officer, simultaneously worked to politicize the Brazilian military and warned of a democratic “rupture” if his power was threatened.
Two days after Bolsonaro proclaimed that “the army is on our side,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke out in support of democracy in Brasília and about the need for civilian control of the military.
The senior official said he saw U.S. intelligence assessments at the time that found “there is no credibility to these accusations against the credibility of Brazil’s electoral system.”
Joe and I went to see “The Odessey” last night. It was great!
There is much to enjoy in “The Odyssey”, Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the epic poem by Homer.
Richard Brody
This is not for the obvious reason that much is left out — putting any extended literary work onscreen inevitably involves omission and compression — but because of a more pervasive absence: the gods. In the poem, the first scene is of a council in Zeus’ palace, on Mt. Olympus, at which the gods argue over Odysseus’ fate. In Nolan’s film, people refer to the gods, but there are no divine debates on Olympus, and, indeed, the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who actually appears is Athena (Zendaya), watching over the action intermittently.
Instead, Nolan unfolds a purely human drama. As the film opens, Odysseus (Matt Damon), a leader of Greek forces in the Trojan War, has been away from his homeland of Ithaca for some twenty years—at war for ten, wandering since. While he has been delayed by a series of encounters and obstacles ranging from Calypso’s enticements to the man-eating Cyclops’ rage, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), has been fending off the attentions of scores of Ithacan noblemen, who are demanding that she marry one of them and are living lavishly on the royal household’s store of food and wine as they wait. Her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), an infant when his father set off for war, is now a young man intent on driving out the suitors – a primordial coming-of-age plot.
Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer, a sense of the gulf that separates modern minds from Bronze Age ones. Homer depicts a strange and troubling world, in which human existence is continuously subject to the deliberations and whims of deities who have motives of their own. By suppressing this continuity between the natural and the supernatural realms, Nolan omits much of what makes the Homeric age so different, including the ambience of the divine and the distinctive moral realm that goes with it.
Some wondered how Nolan would handle some of the other archaic aspects of the story, such as its violence and its ritualism: sacrificial ceremonies with animals gushing blood; the supernatural fury of a monster consuming men who scream in agony as they’re eaten; the chopping off of hands and genitals; the reliance on torture; the deep satisfaction taken in cruel vengeance. How would Nolan deal with the extravagant expressivity of the Homeric world—as when people rend their clothing in anguish or when Odysseus (in Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the poem) is “sobbing and rolling round in grief”? Or with the realm of picturesque fantasy, as when Athena, with Telemachus, in Book I, “flew away like a bird, up through the smoke,” thus revealing her divinity? But, rather than trying to take the audience inside the ancient Greek mind-set, Nolan chooses a slimmed-down, almost naturalistic approach, tamed and tempered. Violence is rendered largely generic with quick-cut battle scenes merely hinting at gruesome deaths; sacrifice, seen only briefly, is surgically clean; vengeance is bloodless and horror-free, meted out very sparingly; tears drop with maudlin precision down a single cheek; and grief is expressed with the stiff-upper-lip silence of modern martial valor.
Nolan advances his vision, however crowd-pleasing and anachronistic, with vigorous confidence and unimpeachable clarity. The dialogue, terse and contemporary, puts his distinguished cast of actors in their comfort zone and turns ancient, iridescently complex figures crystalline and hard-edged. As Penelope, Hathaway has a laser gaze to match; she borrows a sublime gesture from classic Hollywood when, informing Telemachus that he’s not yet enough of a man for a big fight, she momentarily glances down mockingly from his eyes to his body. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, gets, from Jon Bernthal, an oddly apt New York white-ethnic outer-borough accent. As Helen, who is somewhat uneasily married to him and whose abduction led to the Trojan War, Lupita Nyong’o rises to a quiet pitch of fierceness when she laments being used as a justification for death and destruction. In the role of the enslaved swineherd Eumaeus, who is deeply devoted to Odysseus and intensely protective of Telemachus, John Leguizamo exudes worldly wisdom and rough-hewn poise, an inner nobility contrasting with the venality of the lordly suitors. Samantha Morton’s bluff, country-tough performance as Circe almost sells the script’s revisionism, which transforms Homer’s enticing-voiced singer and dangerous seducer into a moralizing critic of manners, who says that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they ate like pigs.
The actor whose performance is most closely bound to Nolan’s conception of the character is Matt Damon, as Odysseus. Homer’s character, notorious as a schemer, here comes off as plain and direct—a gruff, practical tactician, rather than something more energetically inventive and morally dubious. It’s a role that calls for a performance that’s both muscular and glib, powerful and mercurial, but Damon follows Nolan’s premise by making Odysseus impassive and burdened.
And what is Odysseus’ burden? To define the hero’s troubles and thus his character, Nolan boldly expands things referred to only glancingly in the Odyssey into major scenes. Chief among these are the Trojan horse and Odysseus’ leading role in its deployment, which, for Nolan, becomes the crux of the story, shaping Odysseus’ personality and determining the course of his life through his wanderings. The Trojans unquestioningly bring the horse, apparently a religious offering, within their city walls, only for a handful of Greek troops hidden inside, led by Odysseus, to open the gates, letting in a horde of warriors who lay waste to Troy.
Odysseus is portrayed as enduringly guilt-ridden over the ploy; in making an ostensible gift into a deadly weapon, he believes that he has violated Zeus’ law of hospitality. It’s also suggested that he suffers from P.T.S.D., and that his years of wandering are also years of inability to reintegrate into post-combat life. After he’s held by Calypso for seven years, taken to her bed as a virtually captive lover, numbed by the lotus that she feeds him, she says that her actions were a means of healing him: “You weren’t ready to go home.”
Psychologizing Odysseus like this lends “The Odyssey” a readily digestible modernity—ancient Greeks, they’re just like us!—but does so at the expense of the richness of detail and the societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience. And the suppression of much of the story’s cruelty is more than mere bowdlerizing; it represents an effort to redeem Odysseus for modern times and to render him both sympathetic and tragic. The movie has no room for the Odysseus who, in Book IX of Homer’s poem, matter-of-factly tells one of his hosts about an earlier stop in his itinerary, “I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us.” I won’t give away the film’s ending, but it’s not the one in the poem and it’s thrillingly audacious, far-reaching, socially conscious, and ultimately undeveloped.
As a director, Nolan seems to have paid much more attention to the plot, the dialogue, the performances, the landscapes, the settings, the décor, and the costumes than to the images in which he presents them. For the most part, the visual compositions depict the action neutrally, offering little sense of style or texture to suggest an aesthetic conception of the world onscreen. Nolan brought far more visual intensity to such sci-fi tales as “Tenet” and “Inception,” but it’s notable that the world-building in those films was culturally continuous with the present day. By contrast, the plain realism of “The Odyssey” seems inextricable from Nolan’s effort to rationalize an irreducibly ancient sensibility.
The movie makes one think of what we have missed in real life with Trump having violated “Zeus’ law of hospitality”.
Hegseth Is Demanding US Households Pay $5,000 More Per Year to Fund the Pentagon, Economist Says
“Secretary Hegseth, you are asking for unlimited money for bombs when people can’t feed their families,” said one Democratic senator.
Degrading policies goes far beyond the Trump Cabinet.
Degrading policies are not confined to the U.S. — they reach into other countries as well.
Take, for instance, the American World War II cemetery in Margraten, in the Netherlands. This memorial is the resting place of over 8,300 U.S. soldiers who died liberating Western Europe. It was established there in the winter of 1944 because the U.S. Army was reluctant to bury its fallen soldiers on German soil. The cemetery is the second largest in Europe and is managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which was granted this right in perpetuity by the Dutch government.
The cemetery is officially called the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial — but apparently, the Dutch don’t have much of a say in how its policies or displays are decided.
About a year ago, a visitor center was opened there — one of ten worldwide operated by the ABMC — highlighting specific aspects of the site’s history. One section focused on the regiments who built the cemetery itself.
The identification and burial of the 8,300 soldiers were carried out by the 960th and 3136th Quartermaster Service Companies (QSCs), units composed entirely of African-American soldiers, except for their commanding officers.
Their task was harrowing — the entire village was said to smell of death — yet without their efforts, the Margraten cemetery would not exist.
The 960th QSC constructing the Margraten cemetery in winter 1944.
An informational panel honored their work and hardships. And then — it disappeared. According to the ABMC, the panel was “rotated out.” Another panel is also missing. This one commemorated George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old Black private who drowned a month after the war ended while trying to rescue a fellow soldier in Germany.
Both panels were removed shortly after The Heritage Foundation accused the ABMC of defying Donald Trump’s anti-diversity policy. The ABMC insists that the exhibition still includes references to African-American soldiers, but Dutch journalists, who went to check their story at the cemetery, found that claim to be false.
So yes — this goes much deeper than political disagreements in Washington. When history itself starts being rewritten, even in cemeteries on foreign soil, it becomes clear that these policies are not just “American” issues anymore.
They reach into the shared values we thought we were protecting together.
Green grant cancellations were ‘based solely’ on states’ political affiliation, Trump administration says in court
Federal green grants canceled last year were selected “solely” based on a state’s political affiliation, the Trump administration said in a recent court filing.In the filing, Department of Energy (DOE) lawyer Jeff Novak said the department came up with a list of 624 grants slated for potential termination.
Novak said the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) selected 284 of those grants to be included in a tranche of cancellations. He wrote that all except one of the 284 grants OMB selected had ties to states that voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic-caucusing senators. Novak noted that the other 340 grants have not been canceled.
“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” he wrote.
He added that the grants’ inclusion in the October cancellations was not “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”
White House Removed Immigrant Truckers and Wants Veterans to Replace Them
The administration that removed 56,000 truckers from the nation’s highways this year has now announced an emergency plan to find 56,000 truckers.
The solution is a campaign called Freedom Haulers, aimed at getting departing military members behind the wheel of a big rig. Veterans who recently drove large military vehicles can skip the commercial driver’s license skills test entirely. The GI Bill will cover 100% of CDL training, plus a housing allowance for some.
The vacancies did not appear by accident. About 26,000 drivers were pulled off the road this year for failing to demonstrate English proficiency, and the Transportation Department canceled another 30,000 licenses it said were issued illegally.
Immigrants make up about 20% of all truck drivers. The non-domiciled licenses under scrutiny account for roughly 5% of the total (200,000 drivers).
The federal government has tried to withhold highway funds from California and New York over their refusal to comply, and warned Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and North Carolina they’re next. Most of it is tangled up in court.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the crackdown is “restoring the integrity of America’s trucking industry.” Nobody has asked Duffy what integrity does for a shipment of frozen chicken sitting in Laredo.
Trump lies – There is no proof New Jersey registered 35,000 noncitizens to vote
A software error in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system mistakenly registered 6,600 noncitizens in one year, according to Gov. Mikie Sherrill.U.S. President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin inaccurately claimed that New Jersey has at least 35,152 noncitizens on its voter rolls.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill did announce that 6,600 noncitizens made it onto New Jersey’s voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 because of a software error that caused people who answered truthfully that they weren’t U.S. citizens to be improperly labeled as citizens.
Sherrill said fewer than 400 of these people, who were scattered across the state with different partisan affiliations, cast ballots. Neither Trump nor Mullin provided evidence to back the number in their claim.
In July 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, that the Department of Homeland Security found 35,152 registered voters in New Jersey who were not U.S. citizens. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also shared the claim earlier that day, saying that DHS released the number a week prior.
The two Republican officials appeared to be responding to a statement released by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announcing that a “serious software error” mistakenly placed 6,600 noncitizens who affirmed they were not U.S. citizens on the state’s voter registration list between June 2023 and June 2024. (Sherrill was not governor of New Jersey at the time — it was Phil Murphy, also a Democrat.)
The spokesperson for Sherrill’s office Darwin Pham said that the governor’s office did not know how DHS had arrived at its figure (35,152), and that the 6,600 figure Sherrill cited came directly from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, where the faulty software was installed.
Questioning the integrity of U.S. elections without providing evidence to support the claim is one of the core themes of Trump’s political career, and neither he nor Mullin provided evidence for their claim about New Jersey.
Trump Tries to Erase The Casualties of His War
1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Hawaii.
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas.
Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of New York.
Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of North Carolina.
These soldiers died in the past week in the war against Iran. Lt. Feehan, Sgt. Rampersad, and Pvt. Gonzales were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack in Jordan. Sgt. Swinton died as a result of the demolition of an Iranian drone in Iraq. Their service to our nation should be honored. It certainly should not be erased.
But Donald Trump’s Defense Department has tried to erase these four service members from its official list of Iran war casualties.
As the New York Times reported last night, on Wednesday, the Pentagon’s casualties website listed eighteen service members who had been killed during the war with Iran. By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number to fourteen—apparently excluding Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton.
Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list —three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq— because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
Trump’s Defense Department responded to the Times report on Thursday evening by claiming that the change was due to “temporary data disruptions” and that “these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”
But of Friday morning, the “anomalies” haven’t been “resolved.” The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website still lists only fourteen deaths as a result of the Iran conflict—even though the Pentagon’s press release earlier in the week in connection with the dignified transfer of the four soldiers’ remains stated, “The deaths are related to Iranian aggression.”
But the administration, from the president on down, has been preoccupied with trying to downplay the costs of Trump’s war. The president has been regularly posting and talking about how many fewer casualties there have been compared to prior conflicts. And he has gone out of his way to call the war an “excursion” or a “skirmish.”
And the administration does have a particular interest in pretending these latest deaths aren’t somehow part of the Iran war. At his appearance Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth was once again challenged about the lack of congressional authorization for the war. Then on Thursday, there were votes in both the House and Senate on war powers resolutions. One of many disingenuous arguments the Trump administration made to try to beat back demands for congressional authorization was that the clock for requiring congressional approval should restart after pauses in the war. The claim that these four soldiers’ deaths can’t be attributed to Trump’s Operation Epic Fury because they happened after the collapse of the ceasefire is part of the effort to avoid congressional accountability.
But it is also, of course, part of a broader phenomenon. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told the Times, “The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on—not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general.” And about much else besides.
The erasure of the deaths of Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton is only one of many, many instances of the dishonesty of the Trump administration—though it’s an extraordinarily petty and a strikingly callous one. It goes without saying that the administration’s dishonesty cannot diminish the honor due to these soldiers. But it does stain the honor of our country.
1. Federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades
Thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.
Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.
The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.
Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.
Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.
That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.
2. Americans would like to breathe air that isn’t giving their kids asthma and shortening everybody’s lives. The fossil fuel industry has hated the government’s clean air authority for decades. And then, after oil executives were asked for a billion dollars at a Mar-a-Lago dinner and the industry poured at least $75 million into electing Trump, his EPA moved to repeal the “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation underneath every clean air rule we’ve got. The money hit the GOP’s account, and the rules that keep the air breathable started disappearing.
3. You’d like the option of a clean, cheap electric car that never has to visit a gas station, the kind of thing that saves you money at the pump and doesn’t cook the planet your grandchildren have to live on. Detroit’s old guard and the oil patch preferred you keep buying gasoline forever. And then the same oil money that bought the air rules bought the car rules too, and the tax credits that made electric vehicles affordable, along with the tailpipe standards that were finally cleaning up our cities, were thrown straight into the shredder by the GOP.
4. Most of us would like to drink a glass of tap water without wondering about the forever chemicals that now even show up in the blood of newborn babies. And then the chemical industry hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal limits ever set on those PFAS compounds got weakened and pushed off into the distance before most people had even heard they existed.
5. Anybody who’s stood at a pharmacy counter would like their medicine to cost what it costs in every other wealthy country instead of three or four times as much. The drug industry spends more money lobbying Washington than any other business on Earth. And then all that money hit the GOP’s accounts, and the price relief that was finally within reach kept getting whittled down toward nothing.
6. Working families would like health coverage they can afford and actually keep. And then the money landed in the GOP’s money bin, the big beautiful bill took an axe to Medicaid, the subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable were allowed to lapse, and millions of people who did absolutely nothing wrong lost their doctor.
7. We’d all like the government to keep funding the research that cures cancers and catches the next pandemic before it becomes one. And then the checks to Republican politicians from billionaires who don’t want to pay their damn taxes cleared, the National Institutes of Health got gutted right alongside the disease trackers at the CDC.
8. Anybody with an aging parent would like to know the nursing home has enough staff on the floor to answer the call button before dawn. And then the private equity firms that have been gobbling up elder care hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal minimum staffing rule for nursing homes, the one that would have guaranteed a real nurse was actually in the building, got killed.
9. The people who cut and pack our meat would like to keep all ten of their fingers, and their children would like to stay out of the slaughterhouse. And then the giant meat packers wrote their checks to Republicans, the line speeds got cranked up faster, and the worker protections that were already threadbare got thinner still.
10. After a train hauling toxic chemicals derailed and poisoned East Palestine, Ohio, the folks in every town along the tracks would like the trains rolling through to be a little bit safer. And then the railroad lobby hit the GOP’s bank account, the bipartisan rail safety bill that came straight out of that disaster died quietly in Congress, and the industry went right back to running ever longer trains with ever fewer inspectors.
11. A person working full time would like to earn enough to cover the rent. And then the restaurant and retail lobbies hit the GOP’s checking account, and the federal minimum wage sat frozen at $7.25 an hour, exactly where it’s been since 2009, worth a little less with every year that passes.
12. Workers would like a fair shot at forming a union without getting fired for trying. And then the big corporate money poured into the GOP’s money bin, the National Labor Relations Board was stripped of the members it needs to so much as hold a vote, and the one referee working people had — the NLRB — was pulled off the field.
13. Young people would like an education that doesn’t come with a mortgage-sized debt hanging over them for the next thirty years. And then the for-profit college operators and the loan servicing big New York banks threw money at the GOP, the student debt relief got strangled in the courts, and the rules meant to stop predatory diploma mills got loosened all over again.
14. Regular taxpayers would like the morbidly rich to chip in something close to their fair share. But then the billionaires hit both Trump’s and the GOP’s bank accounts at once, the giant tax bill tilted even harder toward the top, and the IRS enforcement money that was finally going to audit the yacht and private jet crowd got stripped right back out, so they can go on not paying.
15. People who paid into Social Security their entire working lives would like it to be there, with the phone answered by an actual human being, when they finally retire. And then the big banks’ money landed in Republican campaigns, the Social Security Administration got hollowed out, field offices and phone lines went dark, and the same crowd that swears it’s protecting the program made it harder to reach someone at SSA than it’s been in generations.
16. A young person with a good idea would like to start a small, local business without a trillion dollar monopoly crushing them like a bug. And then the biggest corporations on Earth lined up to fund Trump’s inauguration, his new ballroom, and his library, and the antitrust cops who might have protected the little guy suddenly discovered they had somewhere else to be.
17. Ordinary investors would like a financial cop on the beat to guard against the next Ponzi scheme and the next collapse that wipes out their savings. And then the crypto industry assembled a war chest north of $193 million and became the single biggest corporate spender for Republicans in our elections as it made billions for Trump and his boys, and the SEC promptly dropped its fraud cases against Coinbase and Ripple while the GOP-controlled Congress rushed the industry’s own wish list into law.
18. You’d like some say over whether artificial intelligence takes your job, tracks your every move, and answers to nobody at all. And then the tech billionaires launched a hundred million dollar super PAC aimed at erasing the AI safety laws that thirty eight states had already passed, and Republicans in Washington got to work writing exactly the rules Silicon Valley ordered up.
19. We’d like our national forests and Arctic refuges to still be standing for our grandchildren. And then ConocoPhillips handed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration and got expanded drilling in Alaska for its trouble, and the public land that’s supposed to belong to all of us got auctioned off to whoever could cover the entrance fee.
20. Parents would like every kid, not just the wealthy ones, to have a good public school right down the street. And then the voucher and privatization money hit the GOP’s account, the Education Department got gutted, and public dollars started flowing to private and religious schools that answer to no one.
21. Americans once had a public broadcasting system and a genuine range of voices on the radio dial. And then the rightwing billionaire’s money landed in GOP pockets, Congress clawed back the funding for PBS and NPR, and the handful of billionaires who already own most of the rest of the media got a little less competition from the stations that were actually free.
22. This is supposed to be a country where the government doesn’t get to pick your religion for you. And then the hard-right so-called “Christian” dark money network that spent years quietly buying the federal courts hit its stride, and now the Ten Commandments are being ordered onto the walls of public school classrooms and somebody else’s faith is getting written into your children’s curriculum.
23. Women would like to make their own decisions about their own bodies, right down to whether and when to build a family through something like IVF. And then the same small circle of rightwing misogynist billionaires who bought the six Republicans on the Supreme Court got the ruling they’d paid for, and a right that had stood for half a century was simply gone.
24. Every American would like a fair shot in business and in the military based on what they can actually do, not on who they happen to know or the color of their skin. And then the white supremacist billionaire bigots’ money hit the GOP’s account, “diversity” got turned into a slur, and the programs that had pried open doors for people long locked out of them got purged from one end of the government to the other.
Underneath every last one of these sits a single machine. Americans would like their policies decided by voters, by actual human beings casting actual ballots, and not by whoever writes the fattest check.
25. And then, back in 2010, Clarence Thomas cast a deciding vote in Citizens United, the ruling that let unlimited corporate cash flood our politics, and the family of the Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire who’d been quietly showering him with luxury vacations for years went and increased their own political giving by 862 percent.
That money didn’t just hit one bank account. It bought the very door through which all the rest of it walked.
26. Each of us would like to have a reasonable cost of fuel, for our vehicles and for heating. Trump and his buddies decided to open up a can of whoop ass on the Iranians and make a bundle doing it. That backfired immensely. The cost of fuel almost doubled.
Every item on this list was a choice various Republicans made in exchange for money.
None of it was weather or fate or the natural order of things falling into place. Each time, a big majority of Americans wanted the better outcome, and each time a very small number of enormously wealthy people wanted the worse one, and each time the wealthy won, because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court turned dollars into speech and corporations into people.
The saving grace is that a check still isn’t a vote, at least not yet. November is coming
On Wednesday, the bombshell announcement that the Trump administration will allow Saudi Arabia to launch a nuclear program drew widespread condemnation from critics asserting it would fuel the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Then Thursday morning, President Donald Trump attempted to backpedal, claiming the deal was conditional on the Saudis normalizing relations with Israel. But according to sources, he’s about to learn the limits of his social media power.
This is according to veteran foreign affairs reporter Lauren Rozen, who on Thursday said that when asked about the new conditions Trump is trying to add to the deal, a Saudi source told her that “it was signed,” so there was “nothing to renegotiate,” adding, “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements.”
Loser
Trump now is trying to claw back $5 million award E. Jean Carroll already received
The money is in Carroll’s retirement account. The president wants to claw it back while he mounts a long-shot Supreme Court bid.
E. Jean Carroll already received the $5 million (plus interest) she won from President Donald Trump in one of the writer’s two civil cases against him. But the president is trying to claw back the money as he mounts a long-shot attempt to convince the Supreme Court to reconsider reviewing his appeal in that case, even though the justices recently declined review without any of them dissenting.
Opposing Trump’s bid in the meantime, Carroll’s lawyers summed up the long-running litigation like this: “Defendant has lost before a jury, the district court, a unanimous Second Circuit panel, the full Second Circuit, en banc, and the Supreme Court of the United States. He agreed — in a signed stipulation — that Carroll could collect her judgment once his certiorari petition had been denied. That happened.”
Carroll should not have to be in court any longer.
Trump gutted the agency built to stop election interference so he can contest the election
The Trump administration has cut or pushed out key election security workers helping states protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors.
President Trump says he’s worried about foreign interference in U.S. elections. That was the reason he gave when he released declassified intelligence documents last week which ended up undercutting his own baseless claims about “rigged” elections.
In his primetime address on July 16, Trump said the U.S. “must take urgent action” to protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors. But shortly after taking office last year, Trump gutted a key agency designed to protect America’s elections from exactly that.
It’s called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency created during Trump’s first term. CISA is one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick, regional support.
After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisers. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buy-outs.
Now, the Trump administration is telling states that they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful in its current form.
That database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate that could disenfranchise voters.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said CISA will release an “election infrastructure plan” in the next 30 days — barely three months out from the midterms that will determine which party controls Congress.
“If they participate in the SAVE program, we’ll provide the resources and training to support state election integrity,” Mullin said last week. “We’re not trying to change the outcome.”
‘They’re flying blind’
Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials told MS NOW that they could not recall a time when the federal government held back resources and money meant to secure America’s elections.
And multiple state election officials have said they are not receiving any briefings on possible foreign threats to election security from the federal government. Such briefings were once a regular occurrence, they said.
During the first Trump administration, “we were collaborative — carrots rather than sticks,” the former official said. The second Trump administration is “very much focused on sticks.”
One election official in a swing state said the difference from 2024 is stark, saying “it’s every state for themselves.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about retaliation from federal officials. Last cycle the state official had a regional federal cybersecurity expert “on speed dial” who could “see the whole puzzle.”
That doesn’t exist anymore and without it, the state election official said, “we’re less informed on the pattern of the attackers and are slower to respond.”
“I’ve literally never heard anybody effectively say ‘to keep you safe,’ you have to give me what I want,’” said the swing-state election official, referring to DHS threats to withhold resources if states don’t hand over sensitive voter data.
The risks compound at the local level. “Does [a clerk’s] laptop have the IT infrastructure to defend against an attack from Iran? That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Cait Conley, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who served as the Senior Adviser to the Director of CISA during the Biden administration, accused Trump of gutting the agency and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections in his speech last week.
“If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” said Conley, who is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat.
“His lies and misrepresentations are very clearly trying to lay the groundwork for calling this November’s election results into question when his party loses,” Conley said.
When asked about election officials telling MS NOW that they’ve received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats to election security, and have no access to regional cyber security advisers, DHS did not respond. They also did not respond directly to questions about the agency withholding resources unless states hand over voter data.
Instead, they provided a statement from acting CISA Director Nick Andersen, which said CISA “works with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s elections.”
July 21, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
The front page of yesterday’s New York Times featured some of the 440,000 Americans from Arizona alone who have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the deepest cuts to SNAP in its history, expanded work rules, and shifted costs to the states even as cuts to federal grant programs have forced Arizona to lay off a third of its caseworkers.
Those Arizona residents include Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds and skips meals to feed her three teenaged grandsons.
SNAP falls under the Department of Agriculture, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins celebrates the cuts, claiming the program is rife with fraud. Like other Republicans, she cites error rates. But error rates usually reflect mistakes in classification numbers by caseworkers, not fraudulent use of services.
Today Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters the federal government is withholding more than a billion dollars in Medicaid funding from California and Minnesota, saying they want to see proof that payments there aren’t fraudulent. Sarah Kliff of the New York Times notes that the administration was already withholding money from those two Democratic states. It has withheld $1.3 billion from California since May and $243 million from Minnesota since February. Now Kennedy says it will withhold more than $867 million from California and more than $200 million from Minnesota.
In the Denver Post today, Executive Director of the Association of National Park Rangers Bill Wade wrote that during his years as the son of a park ranger, and then as a park ranger himself, “I learned that these extraordinary parks belong to every American and that the people entrusted to care for them carry a sacred responsibility to protect our country’s breathtaking natural resources and key elements of our nation’s history.”
“But never—not once in decades—have I witnessed such systematic degradation, disrespect and dismantling of the National Park Service as I see today under the thumb of the President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,” Wade continued. Budgets go up and down and policies change as administrations turn over, but “what is happening now is an assault on the people, the mission and the values that have made the National Park Service one of America’s most valued institutions.”
The Trump administration has slashed staff, starved the service of funds, and imposed a political narrative on historical interpretation. “Recovery from these losses is likely to take years, if not decades,” Wade wrote.
At the same time that the federal government is cutting programs that benefit the public, it is also privatizing systems that the government has been managing. Yesterday Justin Doubleday of the Federal News Network reported that Des Moines International Airport and Tampa International Airport have opted into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) new privatization model for airport screening.
Congress created the TSA after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Before then, individual airlines contracted with private security firms to screen passengers and baggage, but the 9/11 attacks showed that this private system had dangerous vulnerabilities. Now the Trump administration is resurrecting that system.
While administration officials are slashing government programs that protect ordinary Americans, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine appeared on Capitol Hill today before the Senate Appropriations Committee to explain why the Pentagon is urgently in need of an injection of $67 billion to tide it over until the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Pentagon has sunk billions into the war in Iran. Hegseth told senators the war had cost $37.5 billion, but independent analysts estimate the true number is significantly higher.
Two congressional aides told Noah Robertson, Riley Beggin, and Jarrell Dillard of the Washington Post that both the Navy and the Air Force will run out of money provided for ongoing military operations in 2026 at the end of this month. The Pentagon is already moving money around to bridge the gap, diverting money budgeted for equipment and maintenance and limiting or canceling military exercises and training.
Yesterday Rose L. Thayer of Stars and Stripes reported on one such diversion: The Army is reducing the legal resources available to soldiers being evaluated for disability “as review boards determine whether they are fit to serve or should receive medical retirement benefits.” In the past, the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel has provided those services, but dramatic cuts have left personnel available only for an initial evaluation, rather than throughout the three-stage process. After the initial evaluation, soldiers must either represent themselves or hire private attorneys.
At today’s hearing, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) grilled Hegseth. “Mr. Secretary, early in the conflict, day three, you said one of those core objectives was to, quote, destroy the missile threat, and as you restated it on day five to, quote, obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones. Those were clearly and repeatedly stated core objectives of the campaign, which four months ago you declared had been completed victoriously with every single objective achieved. Were those objectives achieved four months ago?”
Hegseth answered: “No one ever stated that every single missile was gone. Ultimately, combat ineffective means they’re not able to dig them out of their UGFs [underground facilities] and shoot at us.”
Ossoff: “Had the missile threat been defeated four months ago?”
Hegseth continued over Ossoff: “It doesn’t mean they don’t have underground facilities where they put missiles in them and hold onto them because they’re the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. So we never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is, at scale, against an opponent like the United States of America, which went toe to toe with them in Iran, couldn’t….”
Ossoff continued: “You stated on March 8th, day nine of the war, on 60 Minutes, you assured the American people of Iranian surrender. Does that remain your prediction?”
Hegseth: “Ultimately, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States of America. That has been the objective, and it remains so.”
Ossoff: “So, just to review, you will not answer whether your statement made on the fourteenth day of the war that Iran’s military had been, quote, destroyed and made combat ineffective was a truthful statement to the American people, as you sit here and ask for tens of billions more for the conflict.”
The second Trump administration is forcing the American people to define how they think the United States government should spend their tax dollars.
Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced a proposal to expand Medicaid to all American children from birth to age 26. Kim noted that about 4.4 million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance and 23 million are underinsured. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make things worse.
Joseph Choi of The Hill reported that Democratic senators Alex Padilla of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois are co-sponsoring the bill. The legislation proposing “MediKids” has been endorsed by a range of organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Every child should have health care,” Kim said in a video. “Every child should have the ability to go to a doctor when they’re sick. Every child deserves to be healthy.” MediKids “would automatically enroll every child in health care coverage at birth. Because the system we have right now isn’t working. Because healthy kids make healthy adults, and that makes for a healthier, stronger future for our country. Because, as a parent, you deserve to be able to provide care for your kids without worrying about going into debt, emptying your savings, or straining the family budget. And because…we all have a responsibility to care for each other.”
Kim said Democrats need to bring new ideas forward while also opposing the Trump administration’s destruction. He told reporters: “I know that there’s overwhelming support from the American people for ideas like this, and there’s a hunger for ideas right now.”
Hurricane preparedness cut
FEMA gutted
And more and more….
Trump continuously breaks a 3,000-year-old sacred law — and triggers a nightmare for the world
When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey you’ll be bathed in the revelation that Trump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization.The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.
Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.
In the movie, it’s referred to as Zeus’ Law, and its violation is the thread that runs through the entire three hours. It honors Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, guests, and suppliants. In the Greek religion of that day, hospitality wasn’t mere courtesy but a sacred obligation, and Zeus himself stood behind it as both guarantor and avenger. Any stranger at your door came under his protection, so to mistreat a guest was to offend the king of the gods directly.
The Odyssey is built around this idea of xenia from end to end: you can read the whole poem as a ledger of good and bad hosts. The Phaeacians who bathe and feast the shipwrecked Odysseus without even knowing his name first are the ideal, while the suitors devouring his household in his absence are the great domestic violators, and their slaughter at the end reads as xenia enforced with a sword. The Cyclops Polyphemus is the ultimate anti-host, a creature who eats his guests and openly scorns the gods, which is why his punishment feels like cosmic justice rather than mere revenge.
Theoxenia also appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Iranian pre- and post-Islamic traditions.
Most people who’ve been through Bible School as kids remember how, in Genesis 18, Abraham sees three strangers approaching his tent in the heat of the day and rushes out to meet them, washing their feet, slaughtering a calf, and setting out a feast before he has any idea who they are. Only later in the encounter does it become clear they’re divine messengers, and one delivers the promise that Sarah will bear a son.
The very next chapter gives us the dark mirror image of that generation’s Trump-like behavior: the men of Sodom, who greet the same visitors with violence rather than welcome. In the Jewish tradition this pairing became foundational to hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests, and it’s why later rabbinic thought treats Sodom’s real sin as cruelty to strangers. The lesson drawn by these twin stories is that when you open your door to the stranger, you may be receiving God unawares.
When Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 25 that whatever they did for the least of these — the hungry, the stranger, the naked/homeless, the imprisoned — they did for him, he’s standing squarely inside that Abrahamic story, where the guest carries a hidden divine presence. His parable of the Good Samaritan works the same theme, making the despised outsider the only one who actually fulfills Zeus’ Law. And Paul’s letter to the Hebrews makes the connection explicit when he urges believers not to neglect hospitality to strangers, “for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it,” a direct reference to Abraham’s three visitors.
And it’s also intrinsic to both ancient and modern-day Iranian hospitality traditions. The ancient Persian counterpart to Zeus Xenios is Mithra, the Zoroastrian yazata or divine being whose entire jurisdiction is the law that strangers must be treated well because they could be divine beings in disguise. In living Iranian culture it’s known as mehman-navazi, which literally means “guest-cherishing” the deep-rooted tradition of treating guests with extraordinary honor, expressed in the elaborate ritual courtesy of ta’arof:
The guest is the beloved of God.
When Iranians first met with Kushner and Witkoff and then went to a February 28th meeting in Tehran to discuss the details of the deal offered, the compound where the meeting was taking place was bombed by the US and Israel, killing Ayatollah Khamenei, most of his family, and around 40 senior officials.
This was viewed by many in the region as a basic violation of Zeus’ Law. While the meeting with the strangers took place in Geneva, Switzerland, the US offer was brought — like the Trojan Horse — into the home of the Supreme Leader himself and arguably led straight to his slaughter.
On the Muslim street there was real popular fury at this violation, most sharply in Pakistan, where protesters tried to storm the US consulate in Karachi and at least nine people were killed, and in Iraq, as well as with rallies and vigils elsewhere.
Iranian MP Amirhossein Sabeti was explicit about the now-clear danger of continuing to have good-faith negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner:
“Didn’t war happen in the middle of negotiations before? So you want to negotiate again so war happens and our new leader gets assassinated too?”
Last week, veteran reporters Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill shared a shocking allegation they say was presented directly to them by Iranian officials: that the Iranians had informed VP Vance that Kushner and Witkoff, instead of negotiating in good faith, were simply moving the negotiations along in fits and starts that would send the price of oil up and down, all while betting on oil futures.
“In June, Iran calculated profits from such alleged manipulation had reached $9 billion and formally requested, in writing, that Iran should share in the proceeds.
“‘We have conveyed through intermediaries that $4.5 billion of this sum should also be allocated to the Iranian side,’ the Iranian official said. ‘The exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record.’”
Odysseus paid for his reluctant role in the pillage and rape of Troy — and his coming up with the betrayal idea of the Trojan Horse — by being punished by the gods for twenty years, ten of them a god-cursed wandering through storms, monsters, and the loss of his men.
And that event is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia.
The sack of Troy was not merely a victory but a desecration, a night when the Greeks butchered old King Priam at his own household altar, hurled the infant Astyanax from the city walls, and dragged Cassandra screaming from the temple of Athena, violating in a single evening every sacred bond the gods guarded: the suppliant’s safety, the altar’s sanctuary, the guest-friendship that had bound even enemies.
The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap.
And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning.
And, of course, with Trump it’s not just Iran. His betrayals of trust and tradition include Greenland, Cuba, Ukraine, NATO, Venezuela, Canada, and our own citizens. He even betrayed every one of his three wives, and now he is betraying our Constitution.
One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.
President Trump slapped an additional 50 percent tariff on certain Canadian goods
in response to what the administration said were “discriminatory” trade measures from Canada on Monday.
A senior administration official told reporters on a Monday press call that the impacted products range from “wine to hockey sticks to cement.”
The tariffs fall under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and will go into effect 30 days after signing, an administration official told reporters.
When we have wildfires, Canada sends help. When Canada has wildfires Trump fines US citizens by putting more tariffs on Canadian goods and grounds the smoke devices. Which is logical?
Trump Threatens to Tariff Canada Over Wildfires
We have moved on from taxing goods to taxing wind patterns.
Trump threatened to slap new tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke drifting into the U.S., accusing the country of “willful negligence” in forest management. On Truth Social, he called the air “filthy, polluted, and unhealthy” and said the costs “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”
What he didn’t mention: his own administration has spent the past year dismantling the government agencies that study wildfire smoke. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which operated the world’s only lab for controlled human-exposure studies on wildfire smoke, has been effectively shuttered.
A lung health scientist was reassigned to a finance office. An epidemiologist was told her new job is issuing hazardous waste permits. The Forest Service’s Seattle smoke lab, which developed tools to predict where smoke travels, is on a closure list. And a drone-mounted EPA sensor called Kolibri, designed to fly into smoke plumes and measure airborne pollution, has been grounded.
But the real question is what Canada plans to do about all this.
Trump’s Justice Department sued the State of Minnesota,
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Hennepin County and the county’s sheriff by arguing that their implementation of “sanctuary” laws and policies that restrict local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement violates the Constitution’s
Supremacy Clause. Chief Judge Eric Tostrud, who was appointed by Trump himself, dismissed the government entire case.
that the government could not prove that it should be able to preempt the Minnesota Constitution because its fundamental demands were too speculative; their accusation of a service-of-process defect against Minneapolis was characterized as a harmless delay; and every other claim was dismissed on their merits. Perhaps most importantly, Tostrud concluded that the government’s argument violated the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which has an anti-commandeering doctrine that protects state sovereignty.
Spain wins!
Trump trys to insert himself into the celebration of the Spanish team. they try to move him out, but he wants to be there in the picture! He is the picture of the demented old man here. Three times they tried to convince him to move but he stupidly stood there on the right in the picture with the soccer president Giovanni “Gianni” Vincenzo Infantino trying to pull him away.
It wasn’t his smoothest moment at a trophy ceremony, and it wasn’t his first. After Chelsea’s win over Paris St Germain, he lingered on the podium long enough that match-winner Cole Palmer admitted he was “confused.”
Trump had also publicly backed Argentina to win, which social media users gleefully filed under the so-called “Trump curse.” Earlier in the tournament, he’d bragged about calling Infantino to get U.S. striker Folarin Balogun’s red card overturned ahead of the Round of 16. The U.S. promptly lost to Belgium 4-1.
The loud boos that greeted him before kickoff and again during the ceremony were the one thing Spain couldn’t crop out.
Some cut the right side off to eliminate Trump! But you still csn see a touch of his black suit:
Only the world’s biggest loser would so compulsively attach himself to any winner in sight in hopes of some of the glory rubbing off on him…
What are some hilarious or cringe-worthy stories where someone failed to read the room, and what can we learn from them?
Imagine being at the World Cup finals and lingering when the winning team is pictured.
They’re all there, happy, grateful, this is the biggest moment of these men’s careers as athletes. The entire world’s eyes are on them! But you don’t like this. You want the world’s eyes to be on you… so you stick around. You linger, even when unwelcome.
Notice anyone out of place?
Eventually the head of FIFA has to come in and physically drag you out of the picture. He does it with an awkward smile, gently, because you’re 80 and he doesn’t want you to trip. But my goodness, how embarrassing…
Infantino dragging the President out of the picture so the Spanish team can have their moment
When a team has a great victory, a truly magnificent victory that has billions of eyes watching it, it is very hard for someone with strong narcissistic tendencies to leave. Still, leaving is prudent — to linger at such a moment makes you come across incredibly weird.
What can we learn from such moments? That it’s okay NOT to be the center of attention every now and then. That you don’t have to compulsively be in every photo, on every newspaper cover and on everyone’s lips. Sometimes, less is more. Reading the room means knowing when and where you’re wanted, and when your presence is an eyesore.
While Donald Trump was bizarrely trying to place himself in the center of Spain’s World Cup celebrations, it seemed to The Swamp that he had way more in common with the sore losers from Argentina.
At 80, Trump should know better. But he refuses to accept he lost the 2020 election fair and square, and now he uses the latest deaths of four U.S. troops as a pretense for doubling down on his strikes on Iran rather than a reason for seeking peace.
Time is running out for Trump to disentangle himself from the self-inflicted conflict. The midterms are fast approaching, and his MAGA base is as confused about his motivation as the rest of us. It is hard for them to see a way out of a war they were told would never happen under Trump.
Even loyal voices like Maria Bartiromo ask how Iran can keep fighting when their military is supposed to be “obliterated.”
The president should take a lesson from the World Cup Final. You can lie and cheat as much as you like, but you get found out in the end.
_______________________
Trump Ruined Spain’s World Cup Trophy Lift
Spain lifted the trophy. Trump lifted himself onto a stage nobody invited him to and simply refused to leave.
Spain beat Argentina at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, winning the nation’s second World Cup title. Trump attended, and the crowd let him know how they felt. He was booed during the national anthems. He was booed again when he walked onto the pitch alongside FIFA President Gianni Infantino. He was booed while handing out medals.
He handed Spain’s captain Rodri the trophy. Rather than let the team have its moment, Trump lingered at the end of the stage. Infantino had to jog over to him. Trump refused to move until he was eventually led away.
Players hoisted the trophy anyway and celebrated around the uninvited guest. The final score was 1-0, meaning Trump got booed more times than both teams scored.
If this sounds familiar, it is. He did the exact same thing a year ago at the Club World Cup Final, when Infantino tried to guide him offstage and he lingered instead.
FIFA’s next hire shouldn’t be a referee — it should be a bouncer.
The Pentagon’s info blackout
The public deserves transparency about the US war in Iran. But that’s not what we’re getting — not even close.
The Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing in two and a half months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members.
It’s all indicative of a larger effort to control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war.
Pentagon press briefings were held regularly during past US conflicts, and military leaders often expressed respect (even if begrudgingly) for the media’s role and responsibility to inform service members, their families and the rest of the country.
But that feels like a vestige of a bygone era now. Hegseth has picked fights with the media, including his former employer, Fox News; has pushed the press corps out of the Pentagon complex; and has markedly reduced the free flow of information. CJR compiled an excellent timeline of those actions.
You’ll recall that Hegseth’s public affairs office sought to replace (or at least supplement) experienced military beat reporters with MAGA media types last winter. But those Trump-aligned outlets aren’t getting access now, either. The most recent Pentagon press briefing was on May 5.
The public affairs office did not respond to my request for comment about the briefing drought.
Military beat reporters tell me they’re having to rely more heavily on anonymous sources — the same sources that Hegseth wants to prosecute. He announced a new anti-leaker task force last week.
“The chilling atmosphere has gotten worse since he launched his task force with DOJ,” a military reporter told me. “Sources feel like they’ll be prosecuted for simply speaking with journalists.”
Thankfully, though, some of these sources are still in touch:
Anonymous sources fill in the blanks
Most of what we know so far about the deaths of US service members in Jordan and Iraq has been attributed to anonymous “officials.”
This morning, the NYT’s Eric Schmitt revealed that Iran “carried out three other strikes” against US forces in Jordan in recent days, injuring dozens of service members and damaging several helicopters. “But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted,” Schmitt wrote.
Schmitt listed other examples of the government withholding info: “The Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.”
Over the weekend, The Washington Post cited an official “speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media” who said the US is planning for a wider war, but who “cautioned that the expansion of U.S. operations will be limited by dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because of battle damage.”
The official was quoted as saying, “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” Perhaps the person leaked to the Post in order to alert the White House?
High T, low transparency
“From its initial shots, this war has been under-explained by the administration,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson writes in this new analysis. “The return to something like full-scale aerial war after a ninth consecutive night of US air raids is no exception.”
Hegseth has said little about the US strikes. He usually just retweets the bare-bones CENTCOM announcements. But he hasn’t been altogether quiet lately.
As noted on CNN, he touted a new testosterone screening program for troops last week. He also announced that “joint task force to IDENTIFY AND PROSECUTE LEAKERS,” though when reporters asked for more information about it, the Pentagon did not engage.
Meanwhile, President Trump has continued to loudly boast about the US dominating Iran, and that’s causing some cognitive dissonance:
Trump’s war claims are confusing even Fox
This video of Fox’s Maria Bartiromo made the rounds yesterday: “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out… because the US has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”
Hasan Piker shared the clip on X and asked: “How do Trump cultists live like this?”
Trump has used the word “obliterated” dozens of times since the start of the war, so the people who automatically believe every word he says may genuinely be confused right about now.
Elsewhere on Fox, there has been some careful criticism of Trump’s apparent lack of strategy.
But this exchange, for example, hasn’t aired on Fox at all. Last night, AFP’s Danny Kemp asked Trump, “On Iran, Mr. President, you said at the start of the war it would be four or five weeks” — and Trump interjected, “This is a far bigger job that we’re doing” now. Oh?
There is intensifying criticism of Trump Media’s plan to sell faster access to President Trump’s posts.
This Fortune headline captures it well: “Trump monetizing his social media account is ‘odious’ and ‘brazen corruption’ — or an attempt to revive a 70% stock price crash since election.”
Selling early access to his posts is interesting/grift/astonishing/par for the course/amazing gall.
July 6, 2026 Ukraine Reached Omsk — 2,500km Deep Inside Russia and see what it does
🇺🇦 Read that again. 2500 km, 1553 miles.
In all 61 attacks, 24 refineries. Ukarain is hurting Russia.
Omak is closer to China than to Europe. And Ukrainian drones reached it anyway.
Omsk Oil Refinery — Russia’s single largest refinery. Processing 22 million tons of crude oil annually. Producing 5 million tonnes of gasoline — roughly 11% of Russia’s entire fuel output.
FIRMS satellite footage confirms — something is on fire in Omsk right now. 🔥
This is not just another strike. This is Ukraine hitting the bestest major refinery Russia has left standing.
Think about what this means. Ukraine has already hit.
🔥 NORSI Kstovo — 4.8M tons
🔥 Moscow Refinery — 2.9M tons
🔥 YANOS Yaroslavl — 2.6M tons
🔥 Ryazan NPK — 2.2M tons
🔥 Perm Oil Refinery — 2.0M tons
🔥 Kirishi Refinery — 2.0M tons
🔥 Volgograd Oil Refinery — 1.9M tons
🔥 Novo-Ufimsky — 1.2M tons
🔥 Novokuibyshevsk — 1.1M tons
🔥 Syzran Oil Refinery — 0.8 tons
And now.
boooooom🔥
the 5.07M tons gone . Omsk. The last big one. 🎯
Russia’s fuel crisis was already critical. Queues stretching 12 hours at petrol stations. Emergency state in Crimea. Military units running dry on the front line.
Now imagine what losing Omsk does to all of that.
Putin told Russians the fuel situation was “minor.” 🤡
Ukraine just made it catastrophic.
Please meet the President of the United States:
-He’s had MAGA bend the knee to him by gerrymandering red states to keep the GOP in control of the House and Senate!
-He’s planning to control our elections
So the next time someone tells you to relax and give him a chance, ask them how many more indictments, judgments, and shutdown records he needs to rack up before that chance runs out.
Higher costs for the US? Trump says Canada will face tariffs over wildfire smoke, claiming ‘willful negligence’
President Trump threatened on Friday to impose additional tariffs on Canada, accusing the country’s government of “willful negligence” in its handling of massive wildfires that have wafted heavy smoke and worsened air quality in parts of the Midwest and East Coast. “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. More than a dozen U.S. states are under air quality alerts as wildfires continue to burn across Canada and in northern Minnesota, with officials urging residents in some major U.S. cities, such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., to stay indoors or wear masks to protect against potentially hazardous air pollution. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, a fire protection service based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, reported 897 active fires as of Friday, with Ontario, Quebec and the Northwest Territories seeing the most activity. Fewer than 100 of those fires are considered “under control.” Trump said he planned to call Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday to “find out what they are going to do about it,” accusing the Canadian government of refusing to engage in “basic Forest Management” and debris removal. “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” the president added. Carney brushed off the criticism during a news conference in London, Ontario, Thursday, while also taking a subtle jab at the Trump administration’s environmental and energy policies. “Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States,” Carney told reporters in French, according to The Canadian Press.
Trump Wants the IRS to Audit His Enemies
There is a federal law that says the president cannot pick who the IRS audits. It comes with up to five years in prison. The Treasury official who mentioned this is now out of a job. Kenneth Kies, an assistant Treasury secretary and acting chief counsel of the IRS, is leaving in the coming weeks after clashing with the White House behind the scenes. In one recent meeting, he argued that a potential request would violate Section 7217 of the tax code. That’s the Nixon-era shield. It bars the president, vice president, and White House staff from asking the IRS to start or stop an audit of any particular taxpayer. IRS employees who get such requests must report them or face the same penalties. It couldn’t be determined what the White House wanted, or whether it plans to follow through now that Kies is gone. The taxpayers at issue could be individuals, corporations, or nonprofits. Trump’s team says the problem was Kies. After the story surfaced, administration officials and allies reached out to privately criticize him as difficult and insufficiently loyal to the president’s agenda. In fairness, Kies made a classic Washington mistake: he read the law.
“The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.”
Military recruiters once rejected David Brouillette because of his mental health diagnoses. Their solution, according to a relative, was to tell him to go off his medications for a year and reapply. He did.
Then ICE gave him a badge and a gun.
On Monday, Brouillette shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in his car near his home in Biddeford. He is one of at least 10 people who have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump relaunched his crackdown.
Several of Brouillette’s own relatives told the AP he never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets. They accuse him of attacking women in his life for years. One shared a voicemail from last winter in which he said someone should slit her throat.
The record is long. His first ex-wife says he threw boiling water at her while she held their child. Hundreds of family court records from Augusta detail years of alleged abuse: tackling his teenage daughter, smashing spaghetti into her hair, and dragging her around the house as she cried. A judge granted a protective order in 2021.
A relative said he was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and ADD as a child, attempted suicide twice at age 12, and was hospitalized multiple times. His daughter Madison said she once came home to find him telling her he’d been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.
PHOENIX (AP) — Video footage of two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tackling a man at the airport in Las Vegas drew public outrage and criticism from elected officials.
One video posted on social media showed a man yelling and crying on the ground in Terminal 3 at Harry Reid International Airport on Monday when a man and a masked woman, both in plainclothes, tried to control, handcuff and detain him. When the pair realized they were being filmed, they walked away, leaving the man with a handcuff attached to one arm.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police found no outstanding warrants for the man, removed his handcuffs and notified ICE.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE officers on Monday did not proceed with the arrest at the Las Vegas airport of Phu Nguyen, a 57-year-old citizen of Australia who overstayed his visa. ICE arrested him at his flight departing the Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said.
“ICE is continuing to act with impunity — instilling fear in our communities and scaring tourists, which hurts our tourism economy,” Democratic U.S. Senator for Nevada Jacky Rosen said in a statement. “Enough is enough. ICE must follow the same commonsense guardrails as other law enforcement agencies.”
The Nevada Latino Legislative Caucus and the Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Caucus are calling for a full investigation into the aborted arrest by ICE at Harry Reid International Airport, urging Gov. Joe Lombardo to explain the transparency and accountability for federal law enforcement agencies operating in Nevada.
Trump spending billions to stop Wind and Solar Power
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and vowed to unleash abundant energy that would meet surging demand for electricity “to power the next generation of technology.” A year and a half later, analysts say his administration has yet to deliver results by one of the metrics that matters the most: new gigawatts added to the electricity grid. A single gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of American homes, and more than nine gigawatts can be needed to power the largest data centers driving artificial intelligence. Electricity shortages across the United States have utility executives and power grid operators warning that the system is increasingly unstable and vulnerable to blackouts. Those worries were compounded this month when a record heat wave brought the power grid in 13 states and D.C., called PJM Interconnection, to the brink. Major customers were asked to cut their power use, and data centers were given a waiver to fire up their highly polluting backup diesel generators to avoid rolling blackouts. Days later, PJM revealed that at its annual auction, it had fallen several gigawatts short of securing enough power to meet forecasted need, further destabilizing that grid and underscoring how demand is rising much faster than new generation is coming online — in large part because of data centers. More renewable power would ease that strain. Yet analysts say the administration’s policies have undercut such projects. As a result, skyrocketing demand from data centers and Americans’ increasingly electrified daily life has added to consumers’ rising electricity bills and angered voters ahead of the midterm elections. Now, the administration is pouring billions into a strategy to block massive wind and solar projects while funding new fossil fuel and nuclear generation that has yet to make up for this clean power. Since March, the Interior Department has announced it will spend some $2.7 billion to buy back offshore wind leases!! Spending billions to stop wind power!!!! How sick!!
Trump acts like America is filled with idiot people
Thursday night on prime time, Trump called for bolstering election protections he has systematically and deliberately dismantled. Ask yourself why. He obviously thinks MAGA is stupid (“I love my uneducated voters”), but he’s acting like the whole country is full of idiots with no attention span and no memories.
Trump destroyed election integrity agencies on purpose
Trump spent the first part of his second term dismantling the entire election protection apparatus, the thing he now insists we need for accurate election results. He’s the boy who cried wolf, only he is the wolf.
Under Trump, the F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was shut down. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence got rid of the national task force that tracked foreign meddling in our elections. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted. After the Supreme Court told him he could fire anyone he wanted, he gave pink slips to the entire bipartisan federal agency created to help run fair elections.
And he has appointed a billionaire heir to a housing fortune with no relevant intelligence experience as the new director of “national intelligence.”
Trump’s attacks on election-security measures
The Cybersecurity Agency had been a lead federal partner for states on election security efforts since the 2016 election, sharing cybersecurity data, best practices and intelligence concerning foreign interference in U.S. elections. But because director Christopher Krebs validated the integrity (and thereby, implicitly, the results) of the 2020 election, Trump fired Krebs and significantly scaled back the agency’s workforce, funding, and core operations.
The F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was also disbanded, along with scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations spreading dangerous disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat. Trump curtailed criminal charges for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required people to register when lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation, directly and significantly aiding foreign interference in our elections.
Finally, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, lacks the ‘extensive national security expertise’ required by law under the federal statute that created the role. Clayton has scant national security experience; most of his career he’s represented big money/major investment banks in international deals. If there are conflicts between corporate financial interests and national security priorities, which side do you think Clayton will be on? Worse, Clayton has publicly defended Trump’s worst and least supported election initiatives, appearing on television airwaves to promote conspiracy theories about states’ primary election results, proving Trump chose him for loyalty, not expertise.
Trump keeps lying
The NY times reported on Friday that none of the documents Trump released during his speech to support his election claims say what Trump says they do. The documents were released during Trump’s primetime address to convince Americans that they should doubt the legitimacy of U.S. elections, but the print doesn’t match the hype.
He argued in his speech that China helped Biden win in 2020, even though US intelligence concluded it was Russia who interfered to help Trump. The documents he posted online show the opposite: that both China and Russia targeted former President Joe Biden’s campaign during the 2020 election.
Trump called for fixing vulnerabilities in our electronic voting system so that “we can never watch a stolen election again.” Perhaps he meant the 2024 results were stolen, because all of his legal challenges to the results of 2020 were laughed out of court due to lack of supporting evidence. Those courts told Trump the same thing he needs to hear after his absurd “stolen election” claims last night: Your personal opinions, Sir, are not evidence.
Trump plans to take over federal elections
To anyone following closely, the purpose of Trump’s speech was to sell a pretext. Trump is laying groundwork to declare a national emergency at or around the time of the midterm elections. He’s desperate to sow doubt around the security of our elections because he knows he will need a strong justification for sending in federal troops.
By now, analysts are warning that Trump will deploy ICE agents to polling places. Whenever asked, Trump has signaled that that is his plan. The National Guard is likely to follow suit. Asked directly, Trump himself refused to rule it out, saying he would “do anything necessary.”
Trump said in his speech, “If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states,” “And we are committing to fix it… before the midterm elections.”
There is no evidence that our elections are flawed, and Trump knows it. So he used his primetime speech to tell us that he is gearing up to put armed ICE goons at polling places to intimidate women and minorities into staying away. Let’s hope it backfires and keeps MAGA at home while everyone else turns out. If 90 million voters stay home again this year, we’ll get the Nazi government we deserve.
Trump just gave a huge gift to Russia that will upend global power
At the NATO summit in Turkey last week, President Donald Trump made an announcement that experts say will not only benefit Russia, but could change the balance of global power. This is according to international relations analyst Derek Grossman, who explained in Foreign Policy on Friday how Trump’s intention to sell F-35 fighters to Turkey weakens U.S. sanctions against Russia, emboldening its arms buyers to ignore restrictions and enriching the Kremlin.
For Trump to sell fighters to Turkey, Grossman explains, he “had to contend with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). Turkey was already under CAATSA sanctions for its purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system and needed Trump to lift these restrictions if it was to receive the F-35. He decided to do so — and that decision has implications far beyond Turkey.”
As Grossman elaborates, “Passed by the U.S. Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by Trump during his first term in 2017, CAATSA creates what is effectively a secondary sanctions regime. It allows the president to punish foreign governments, companies, banks, and individuals engaging in ‘significant transactions’ with Russia’s defense or intelligence sectors. The U.S. State Department maintains a list of entities in these sectors, including Rosoboronexport, Moscow’s principal state arms exporter.”
If a banned transaction is discovered, CAATSA offers a number of penalties that can be applied, “including U.S. defense export embargoes, asset freezes, and visa restrictions on foreign officials…Invoking CAATSA can thus jeopardize a government’s access to U.S. weapons, technology, and financing. Enforcement is not automatic but determined by the executive branch.”
Trump has previously leveraged CAATSA against Turkey and China, but according to Grossman, his “recent decision to lift CAATSA sanctions on Turkey will have wider consequences for Moscow’s strategic partners across the Indo-Pacific region. This primarily means India, which continues to purchase S-400 units and other Russian arms despite CAATSA…To be sure, neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration ever formally exempted India from CAATSA. Instead, they both deprioritized CAATSA enforcement in the interest of maintaining a strong strategic partnership with India in hopes that the latter would help the United States counter China.”
According to Grossman, the second Trump administration has “looked the other way” on CAATSA enforcement, such as when India received another S-400 regiment last month. Now Trump’s decision to remove CAATSA restrictions from Turkey will encourage India to continue pushing to see how much leniency the U.S. will extend.
And India is hardly the only example. “In Southeast Asia,” writes Grossman, “two governments must be breathing sighs of relief following Trump’s Turkey decision. One of them is Indonesia. Under President Prabowo Subianto, Jakarta has been pursuing a sweeping military modernization and professionalization drive that has involved diversifying arms imports, including from Russia. In 2018, Jakarta was negotiating the possible purchase of 11 Su-35 fighters, but by 2020, it had nixed the deal. It became clear that Indonesian concern about U.S. punishment under CAATSA was the primary reason.”
“Vietnam, too, must be happy about Trump’s CAATSA reversal,” asserts Grossman. “Since the Cold War, Hanoi’s military has become heavily dependent first on Soviet and then Russian arms. In recent years, it has sought to build a more diversified defense, including arms purchases from Washington. Some of this diversification away from Russia may have been fueled by CAATSA concerns. Nonetheless, Hanoi has tried to maintain defense procurement from the Kremlin and even devised schemes to circumvent potential CAATSA restrictions: In 2025, The Associated Press reported that Hanoi and Moscow had devised a backdoor payment scheme that would use profits from joint oil and gas ventures to pay off defense contracts, effectively shielding these transactions from the reach of Western financial institutions and their sanctions mechanisms. CAATSA enforcement has evidently been a concern, and Trump’s recent Turkey precedent should provide a sense of relief.”
Grossman raises more examples of country who subtly or overtly seek to circumvent the sanctions, writing, “Trump’s decision to back away from imposing CAATSA on Turkey gives these countries even more confidence to continue business as usual with the Kremlin… by signaling a more permissive approach to CAATSA enforcement, Trump has inadvertently reduced one of the few remaining political obstacles to future Russian arms sales in the Indo-Pacific.”
Trump’s reversal on Turkey, Grossman reasons, means that “Indo-Pacific governments will increasingly conclude that CAATSA is not a fixed rule but a policy tool for applying selective leverage according to Washington’s political priorities. That may release some of the pressure on U.S. allies and partners today, but it also risks weakening one of Washington’s most potent instruments for constraining Russia’s global military relationships.”
PUTIN DOUBLES DOWN-AND IGNORES THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Putin doubled down on Sunday.
We don’t know if it was in response to pressure from the oligarchs and military.
Or was a response to try to gain leverage for negotiations.
Many have given up on negotiations.
They perceive Putin has no interest.
Meanwhile Putin is desperately in need of negotiations.
Putin said yesterday that Russia will press ahead with its battlefield aim of fully capturing four Ukrainian regions.
In some cases it may be an issue of recapturing them since parts have already been lost.
Putin outwardly rejected what he said was a new proposal by Ukraine to rein in hostilities in the form of a ceasefire.
Putin was speaking to a Russian state television audience.
He told the audience that Russia needed to boost its air defence capacity to counter intensified Ukrainian drone attacks.
These drone attacks anre particularly focused on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure.
He said Russia was coping well in tackling fuel supply problems linked to the Ukrainian strikes.
Tell that to the Crimean and Russians waiting 14 hours in line for gasoline.
Putin said he met with ministers to address the gasoline problem. But failed to state how it had been addressed.
Only that Russia was dealing with them.
Putin said that Ukraine had proposed a mutual halt to long-range strikes this was presented as a first step towards peace.
But Putin rejected it. Putin claims, erroneously, that it is a means to relieve pressure on Ukraine’s forces.
He explained that Russia would not be distracted by it.
“It is clear why this proposal is being made, because our counter-strikes deep into Ukrainian territory are much stronger, have greater impact and are, frankly, more destructive,” Putin said. “Given their catastrophic shortage of personnel, the Ukrainian Armed Forces apparently believe this could be their salvation. But saving the Kyiv regime is not part of our plans.”
Zelenskiy did not immediately respond to Putin’s interview.
What can we deduce from this?
Putin does not believe he has the leverage for a settlement right now.
He claims he has a plan to stop the attacks on Russia oil and gas infrastructure.
But presented none and lacks the technology.
Putin will continue to spend his missiles on civilian targets while Zelenskyy focuses on military targets.
Putin provided no solution for the gasoline shortage.
It will only get worse.
Putin, importantly, did not address how his troops in Donbas and Southern Ukraine were being cut off logistically.
This is the real crises Putin is facing.
Soldiers in Southern Ukraine are out of nearly everything.
They have resorted to eating food meant for livestock.
And Ukraine is doing the same thing in Donbas.
This was the elephant in the room.
The gasoline lines are small compared to this issue.
And the crises that will cause all others to pale in comparison.
July 16, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.
Ossoff asked Clayton: “Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton responded: “Uh, you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna do this with you.
Ossoff: “This is a job interview. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee.”
Clayton agreed.
Ossoff: “Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton: “Like I said, I’m not I’m not gonna get into that with you.”
Ossoff continued to ask, and Clayton continued to refuse to answer the question, saying: “We can keep doing this,” and saying he was not going to “engage in the theater.”
Ossoff said: “You’re here asking for the support of senators to lead America’s intelligence community. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with this committee and with the American public, but you refuse to answer a simple matter of fact about the 2020 election. Is that right?”
Clayton: “No, that’s not right.”
Ossoff: “Then answer the question. Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton: “I have answered the question.”
Ossoff: “Answer it. What is your answer?”
Clayton: “I’ve given you my answer.”
Ossoff: “What is your answer?”
Clayton sat in silence.
Ossoff: “You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election? But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community? Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question, why can you not give it?”
Clayton could not answer because, although all of the claims of Trump and his loyalists that he won the 2020 presidential election have collapsed in court, Trump requires his cronies to claim that the election was stolen in order to have justification for rigging future elections. They know the truth—that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by 51.3% to 46.8% in the Electoral College. But they refuse to say so because if they do, they will lose Trump’s favor.
Those loyalists are the people Trump is putting in control of the American government. In his own confirmation hearing today for elevation to the position of attorney general—the person at the head of the country’s legal system, representing the American people—Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche slipped. When asked if he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself to say: “was his lawyer.”
Blanche was Trump’s criminal defense attorney and has openly used the power of the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political opponents.
The editorial board of the New York Times called out another problem with Blanche. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams questioned whether Blanche is fit to practice law at all. She found that the slush fund/immunity deal Blanche signed off on with Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, and their associates had been manufactured to give cover to a deal they did not want reviewed by a judge.
Yesterday we saw in real time how, with Blanche’s support, Trump is stacking the courts with loyalists. In Seattle, Washington, a panel of federal judges appointed by five presidents unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff, a former judge and longtime state and federal prosecutor as U.S. attorney. The judges appointed Rogoff to replace the Trump appointee whose 120-day interim position ended in February. By law, an interim U.S. attorney can stay in office for no more than 120 days, but Trump has tried to get around that law by changing the title under which his appointees operate, turning the interim U.S. attorney into an assistant U.S. attorney while leaving the top position empty.
The judges, to whom replacing an interim U.S. attorney falls if there is no presidential appointment, unanimously agreed to Rogoff. He took the oath of office at 8:00 in the morning and, within the hour, received an email telling him he was fired.
“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and [the president] can fire them,” Blanche posted on social media Wednesday.
Trump’s styling of himself as an authoritarian ruler showed yesterday in the announcement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the Treasury will issue a new commemorative $1 coin with Trump’s likeness on it this fall as “a lasting symbol of patriotism.” It is unclear if the coin will circulate as currency.
While living monarchs who are heads of state appear on coins, living political leaders who appear on currency tend to be those trying to make themselves indistinguishable from the government. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Idi Amin in Uganda, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq all put themselves on currency. The U.S. passed a law in 1866 barring living people from appearing on U.S. financial instruments.
According to Alice Gibbs of Newsweek, the Trump administration is getting around that law by relying on a law permitting the coining of collectible currency to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, as the country did with its bicentennial quarters in 1976.
Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez of the New York Times today did a deep dive on the helipad Trump is building on the South Lawn of the White House. They note that it’s usually very hard to get permissions to build a helipad because of zoning laws, airspace regulations, and impact on the environment. Trump himself has said there is “no harder zoning thing to get.”
But Trump is pushing ahead with the one he wants without permission from Congress and without any review panel. Construction began last month on the site where Trump had ordered an Ultimate Fighting Championship stadium built for a cage match on his birthday. Trump says Lockheed Martin, which is a major defense contractor and which makes the new, powerful helicopters Trump uses, is donating the money to build the helipad.
A spokesperson for the White House told the reporters that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.”
Trump did not get reviews or permissions to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool either, and when that went poorly he insisted that vandals had attacked it. His loyalists parrotted his claims, and the Department of Justice went so far as to arrest and charge 67-year-old cyclist David Hearn, who touched part of the pool’s detached lining, accusing him of vandalizing it.
Today Jarrett Ley, Meg Kelly, Klara Auerback, and Maura Judkis of the Washington Post reported that all of the peeling occurred at the seams of the lining and that experts said those failures were likely due to the way the lining was installed. They explained at length what those mistakes were.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers denied that this could be the case. “There were no missteps during the initial repairs to the pool,” Rogers said. “Unfortunately, deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool and destroyed over 300 feet of the pool’s siding. Once the necessary repairs to fix the vandalism are complete, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory.”
Trump’s conviction that he and his cronies should run the United States without input or check from Congress or experts and without reference to reality has brought us to a perilous place.
Trump yesterday told the Fox News Channel that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran’s bridges and power plants. Today, Parisa Hafezi, Samia Nakhoul, and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that Iranian leaders have asked the Houthis they back in Yemen to close the Bab el-Mandeb strait that commands the opening between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb are the two main routes for oil exports from the Middle East. The closure of the second strait would exacerbate energy shortages even as the U.S. oil reserve drops to its lowest level since 1983.
Despite the administration’s insistence that addressing climate change is a “scam,” the extreme weather caused by climate change has sparked more than 800 wildfires in Canada and at least a dozen in northern Minnesota. Smoke from the fires is exposing Americans from the Midwest to the Northeast to hazardous levels of air pollution.
CBS News reports that Detroit, Minneapolis, and Chicago today rank in the top five most polluted cities in the world, and that officials in New York City are distributing N95-type masks to commuters. Ben Noll of the Washington Post reported that more than 115 million people are in the plume of unhealthy to hazardous air quality and that conditions are expected to get worse.
At the same time, pouring rain in the Texas Hill Country is causing deadly floods. CNN reported that the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose more than 25 feet in an hour as the heavens dropped about half a year’s worth of rain in southern Texas.
Meanwhile, there are now nearly 7,000 known cases of food-borne illness from a parasite that is causing “explosive diarrhea” in patients in more than 30 states across the U.S. Brian Beutler of Off Message commented: “I feel like if Biden or Obama had turned America into a diarrhea splatter film, Republicans would’ve made it into a political problem for them.”
A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Trump has lost even many Republicans. Only 37% of those polled approve of his job performance, while 61% disapprove. The percentage who “strongly” approve of Trump has dropped to a new low of 15%. Only 26% of Independents approve of his job performance, while 71% disapprove. Sixty-six percent of Americans say groceries are unaffordable.
And so, with Trump scheduled to give a prime-time address tonight, apparently to argue for voter restrictions, Senator Ossoff told reporters: “Here’s what’s going to happen tonight: the world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”
The “huge reveil documents” Trump says are on Whitehouse.gov are not there! Another lie. Only old documents that show nothing of what he indicated!!
Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims about thousands of possibly even millions of undocumented immigrants voting in US elections. (He most famously claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016, by about two million votes, because of undocumented immigrants.)
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots. And the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice analyzed more than 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found an estimated 30 examples.
“Voter files in the United States are public”
After President Trump alleged China has accessed hundreds of millions of voter registration files, Center for Election Innovation & Research Executive Director David Becker noted that the data is publicly available — and there isn’t much that China can do with it to meddle in an election.
“It sounds bad when you hear about it,” said Becker, who is also a CBS News election law contributor. “The reality is: voter files in the United States are public.”
Some states — including Ohio and North Carolina — post the data online for free, Becker noted, and the state of California allows people to obtain it for $100. The data is widely used by political parties and campaigns for voter outreach and other purposes, and Becker says many election experts assumed that foreign states might have access, too.
Also: “There’s nothing that anyone can actually do with that information,” Becker added, noting that China would not be able to change voter registration data or vote on people’s behalf.
I just took a course in voting machines as a Machine Manager. Those DS300 voting tabulating machines are bullet proof and no one can access them to mess with them. The security protocals are amazing, it takes four keys to turn the D300 on and they are kept very safe under lock and key and tamper proof security locks as well. The Machine Manager holds 6 keys in all.
Each machine produces a tape of all the results which cannot be tampered with, the tape is ten feet long and a copy is placed where anyone can read it. Therefore to mess with any results you would have to access both the original (Kept undr lock and kay) and the public one, and replicate both of them. An impossible task as the public copy is always available.
The ballots can always be rescanned or hand counted and the results matched to the original. Do not believe anyone tha says the results can be tampered with, they cannot.
Experts said Reflecting Pool damage was probably caused by renovation flaws.
Exclusive: Experts told The Washington Post that the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool likely peeled away because of issues in how it was installed, not vandalism, as Trump has claimed.
More: By comparing locations of visible peeling with satellite imagery, photos and videos, Post analysis shows the peeling all occurred at the seams of the lining.
The Pentagon Just Declared War on the Free Press
Its new task force isn’t going to track foreign spies or enemy combatants. It’s going after reporters.
The Pentagon doesn’t want you to know what’s happening in Iran. Now that’s official policy.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Monday the creation of a joint task force between the Pentagon and the Justice Department to “identify and prosecute” anyone who shares sensitive information with journalists. He empowered the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel to demand records, communications, and cooperation from every office in the department, with a two-day deadline to comply.
This isn’t to track foreign spies or enemy combatants. The task force has one target: reporters’ sources. The people inside the government who talk to the press when something goes wrong.
“The American public has a right to know how their government is operating,” said New York Times attorney David McCraw. We think so too. But independent journalism doesn’t fund itself. Will you step up and become a paid subscriber today?
This isn’t a one-off investigation. This is permanent infrastructure. Days before Hegseth’s announcement, the Justice Department subpoenaed four New York Times reporters to appear before a federal grand jury. Not because they’re suspected of a crime, but because the DOJ wants to know who told them the truth about security flaws in a plane Qatar gifted to Trump.
In one case,
stopping him at the border and confiscating his equipment the way you’d treat a smuggler, not a reporter with a notebook.
What’s happening here isn’t a crackdown on classified leaks that endanger troops. If a federal agency can revoke every reporter’s credentials, bar them from the building, redesignate its own hallways as classified space, and then build a formal prosecution team to go after anyone who talks to the press, you don’t need to repeal the First Amendment. You’ve already made it impossible to use.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is in the middle of a war with Iran. NBC News has already reported that Iranian strikes caused “far worse” damage to American military bases than the public was told. The government’s response wasn’t to explain the discrepancy. It was to black out commercial satellite imagery so no one could verify the damage independently. The office that should be ensuring the American public knows what’s happening to its service members is instead building a machine to prosecute the people who might tell them.
This is what happens when press freedom becomes a security threat and reporting becomes a criminal act.
The New York Times is fighting the subpoenas. Press freedom groups are raising the alarm. But the reporters who refused to sign the Pentagon’s media policy already lost their access, and the task force isn’t going away. The question is what you do.
1984 movie coming to you today
1. Officials asked to turn over phones at the White House as Wiles, Patel lead intensifying leak probe
Chief of staff Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s closest aide, and FBI Director Kash Patel helped personally orchestrate a sprawling investigation last week at the White House aimed at determining who in the government leaked information about the security deficiencies of a Qatari-gifted airplane meant to be used as Air Force One – with some officials being asked to turn over their phones to investigators on White House grounds, sources familiar with the matter said.
Trump had fumed over disclosures about the new plane, sources said, and his government quickly stood up an intense leak probe that roiled the government. As the investigation unfolded, at least one federal agency emailed employees warning that if they were contacted by outside agencies requesting information and devices, they needed to immediately contact their own agency’s attorneys, one source said.
The sources said Patel — who had been preparing to travel to Chicago — was diverted to the White House on Friday to take a hands-on role in running the probe, which became public early the next morning when the New York Times reported that the Justice Department had issued subpoenas to four of its journalists who reported on security concerns surrounding the new plane.
Patel posted up in an office next to Wiles’ for roughly seven hours, as the two established what one source referred to as a “war room” in the West Wing.
In addition to asking for cell phones, investigators sought information from those who were traveling with Trump or had a role in the trip, including officials across various agencies. Not all officials who were asked to turn over their devices did so, one of the sources said.
The effort reflects the extent to which the White House was willing to exert control over a law enforcement investigation — a significant breach of the Justice Department’s historic independence, though one that has become somewhat common in Trump’s administration. Previous reports indicate that Trump also talked with Patel on the phone about the leak investigation.
Journalists and free press advocates have criticized the Justice Department’s move to subpoena the New York Times journalists as an affront to the First Amendment, and the Times has said it plans to fight them in court.
The concerns about the new, $400 million Qatari-gifted jet came to dominate the conversation in Washington last week when Trump abruptly announced he was sending the new plane ahead to England’s Mildenhall Air Force Base just before he departed a NATO summit in Turkey. Trump said in a social media post that the change in planes was simply to give US service members stationed at the base “a chance to tour the Aircraft.” He had previously touted the plane, which was remade and repainted to his tastes.
“Everybody is so excited, and we thought that they should be the first,” he wrote.
Trump departed on an older plane, then switched back at a secure US airbase in the UK. He downplayed the idea that security was the reason for the switch, though sources have told some outlets that it was.
“There wasn’t a security concern, except we sent it a little early, same line going back. We sent it a little bit early, so that we could let them see,” Trump said.
Sources said that after Trump traveled to Turkey for the summit, the security assessment changed, and Wiles briefed Trump that he would need to leave the country on an older vessel. The Qatari plane, sources said, had been quickly retrofitted with defense capabilities but was still not as secure as the older version, which had been built to protect presidents in overseas travel.
One official previously said that the 747 gifted by Qatar was largely seen by the military and Secret Service as having been “rushed” into service. By contrast, the official noted two new jets acquired as part of a deal Trump renegotiated during his first term have faced serious delays and aren’t expected to be ready until at least 2028. That’s partially due to the host of classified communication and defensive countermeasures that must be affixed, comprehensive design requirements by the military and the time required to train pilots on the unique aircraft.
The exact nature of the security differences between the old and new planes is not fully clear. Aviation observers studying pictures of the aircraft report that the new plane appears to lack external modifications to the tail cone associated with a type of directional infrared missile defense system. And the chaff also does not appear to have been installed. Chaff is a defensive countermeasure consisting of millions of ultra-thin, aluminum-coated glass fibers or plastic strips deployed to confuse and distract radar-guided missiles. When released from an aircraft or warship, these fibers bloom into a massive cloud that creates false radar returns, drawing the incoming missile’s seeker away from the actual target.
2. Hegseth announces annual testosterone screenings for service members
by Ellen Mitchell – 07/15/26 1:21 PM ET
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced a new effort to annually screen service members’ testosterone levels and offer testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), framing it as a way to keep troops on the “leading edge of lethality.”
The screening, added as part of war fighters’ periodic health assessment, will affect troops age 30 and older, though those under 30 can voluntarily choose to get the test, Hegseth said in a video message posted to X.
“While we invest heavily in our weapon systems, platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Hegseth said. “We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health.”
The Pentagon chief authorized the new screening program to ensure troops “have the right testosterone levels to operate at [their] absolute best because it’s well-established science that as we age, testosterone levels often naturally drop,” he said.
Should treatment be recommended following the test, service members have the choice to receive TRT.
“This initiative it’s not about artificial enhancement; it’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain and fight,” according to Hegseth. “We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world. And this program delivers on that obligation.”
Added to the video, Hegseth wrote: “The High-T Department of War.”
Traditional masculinity has been a fixture of the Trump administration. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy in January declared that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz had reviewed President Trump’s medical records and found that he had “the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70.”
And in April, the Food and Drug Administration moved to expand access to TRT after decades of recommending it only be prescribed to men with medical issues affecting testosterone production.
Hegseth, a former National Guard member and Fox News host, has imposed new, stricter fitness standards for the U.S. military that will require everyone to meet a “male standard.” He also has sought to highlight troops’ health by frequently working out with service members.
Last September, in a speech addressing several hundred high-ranking officials in Quantico, Va., Hegseth said he didn’t want to see overweight troops or “fat generals and admirals.”
Roughly 5.6 percent of men between 30 and 79 have testosterone deficiency, which can cause muscle loss, fatigue, weight gain and sexual dysfunction. It also is linked to other serious health conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and depression.
“By addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality and giving you the same level of support that you give this nation the absolute best,” Hegseth said.
3.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a church network affiliated with Pastor Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who has publicly advocated for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
4. Environmental Groups Sue to Stop Trump’s Rewrite of the Word “Harm.”
For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act defined “harm” to include the “significant habitat modification or degradation” that keeps a protected species from feeding, breeding, or sheltering. The Trump administration has now rescinded that definition, a change set to take effect September 14 that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed as restoring “common sense” for landowners. Within days, Earthjustice and more than half a dozen groups sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries in federal court in Seattle, and the Swinomish and Squaxin Island Tribes filed a separate suit citing habitat loss driving down Puget Sound salmon. The Supreme Court upheld the habitat definition in 1995’s Babbitt v. Sweet Home.
OUR MORALS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED
They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.
The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.
The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.
That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.
Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.
The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”
— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?
These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:
— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?
And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.
Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.
For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.
Today, we’re there.
The United States has suffered the largest and most embarrassing strategic defeat in its history.
This is not an overstatement, it is not clickbait. It’s just the most honest assessment of what President Trump signed less than 24 hours ago.
Here are the 14 Points of the MOU between the US and Iran:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/us-iran-memo-annotated-intl-vis
- Complete military disengagement and retreat by both sides. — Huge L for the US since the Iranians are already on their own soil. The Americans are the ones who will have to GTFO.
Strait of Hormuz reopens… but there’s no promise of a return to toll-free status. — This means that Iran will charge a toll, and the US has to accept it.- $300 billion USD in compensation paid to Iran by Gulf States — This is despite the Gulf States not having participated in offensive operations against Iran
- Termination of all American sanctions against Iran — Amazing loss
- Unfreezing of all Iranian assets overseas (estimates range to $124 billion USD) — another giant L
- Lebanon is covered in the ceasefire. — Israel is big mad.
- Iran promises not to acquire nuclear weapons. But it gets to keep all its current nuclear assets. The US gets nothing (not even the “nuclear dust”). — Keep in mind, Iran has always stated that it will not acquire nuclear weapons. It is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Agreement after all.
In other words… Iran gave up nothing that it didn’t already concede before the war, while the US has given up everything. There’s literally nothing more that the Americans could surrender at this point. This defeat could not be more total.
—
TOTAL VICTORY FOR IRAN
The worst part of this deal (from the American perspective) is that Iran gets $424 billion USD worth of goodies from it in the short and medium term, meaning that even if Trump or a future US president cheats on the deal, they still got $424 billion USD out of it, not to mention the billions that they will make in tolls.
Assuming this agreement goes through as planned, this will make Iran the most powerful country in West Asia, full stop. It has the 2nd largest population after Egypt, the largest arable landmass, the largest domestic arms industry, and the most highly educated population.
It will also have something that very few West Asian countries have: a highly centralized and powerful state governance structure thanks to the IRGC. This ensures a level of regime stability in Iran that few other West Asian countries can dream of.
I mean… what more is there to say?
Iran chose the sword. It refused to back down. And now it is has achieved total victory.
America at the breaking point as Trump’s issues warning voters can no longer ignore
Thom Hartmann July 14, 2026 | 08:22AM ET
[Long but worth reading]
Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”
Lafayette Square is where Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels stood through freezing winters demanding that Woodrow Wilson support women’s suffrage, and where peaceful protesters were gassed and beaten in June of 2020 so Donald Trump could stroll across the park for a photo op, Bible in hand.
For over two centuries, every president since John Adams has had to look out his window at Americans exercising their First Amendment right to tell him exactly what they think of him.
This administration proposes to end that tradition with steel pickets spaced four inches apart, and to have the whole apparatus ready as we head toward a November election that could break the GOP’s grip on Congress or see open corruption of our election by Trump’s goons, which would inevitably lead to mass protests.
Governments that trust their own people don’t wall themselves off from them; fortress states do.
And by a remarkable coincidence, this was the same week that one of the richest men in Russia gave the world a sixty-hour guided tour of life inside a mature fortress state, along with a warning about where that road ends that every American should know about.
The Economist just published an extraordinary profile of Andrey Melnichenko, whose fertilizer, coal, energy, and logistics empire accounts for roughly one full percent of Russia’s entire GDP, and who was the richest man in the country when Putin invaded Ukraine.
For twenty years Melnichenko lived the bargain Putin offered Russia’s oligarchs: stay out of politics and you can keep your fortune, your yacht, your villa in Switzerland. Then came the Ukraine war, the sanctions, and finally the shakedown.
In 2023, Putin’s prosecutors moved to confiscate one of Melnichenko’s Siberian power companies, and the case quietly evaporated two weeks later, right after he donated 32 billion rubles, about $335 million, to a school for gifted children that operates under Putin’s personal patronage.
In a fully realized oligarchy — like Putin has established in Russia and Trump is trying to create here with pardons and government contracts essentially for sale — that’s what legal property rights become: a subscription service, renewable at the pleasure of the man at the top.
Melnichenko told The Economist that he can see only four possible futures for Russia if it stays on the current course Putin is pursuing, every one of them grim:
— It can crawl back to a victorious West as a defeated vassal, which he predicts would provoke the same revanchist rage that the Versailles treaty incubated in Germany a century ago and that led straight to World War II.
— It can settle permanently into China’s orbit as a resource colony with a flag and faint appearance of independence.
— It can fragment into civil conflict, with warlords fighting over the pieces of a nuclear-armed state.
— Or it can finish its transformation into a continental North Korea, a garrison society sustained by rationing, repression, isolation, and what he describes as turning “external confrontation into a permanent instrument of domestic politics.”
That fourth scenario, which he says is under serious discussion inside the Kremlin, describes a government that identifies permanent enemies abroad and at home to justify permanent repression of its own citizens.
Anyone who’s watched masked federal agents disappearing people off American streets, or read this administration’s directives treating its domestic political opposition as a terrorist threat, or looked at the blueprints for that fence around Lafayette Square, has seen the early architecture of exactly that.
And Melnichenko’s preferred alternative for Russia against these four possibilities? He names it, with a candor you rarely hear from men of his class, as “oligarchy in the classical sense of the word.”
Rule by elites. Businessmen, technocrats, and nationalists would govern the country together, cutting deals among themselves because the four alternatives threaten their fortunes and their family dynasties, while ordinary Russians continue receiving what he frankly admits has so far been “a simulation of participation.”
Surprised that a billionaire’s best imaginable future for his nation is rule by billionaires?
Ours have been saying the same thing out loud for years about America. Peter Thiel, the money behind JD Vance’s entire political career, wrote for the Cato Institute back in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he and many of his morbidly rich colleagues have spent the years since funding politicians and projects built explicitly to act on that conviction.
Melnichenko is a useful analyst for this critical time in both Russian and American history precisely because he’s no cartoon villain, and he’s barely ideological at all.
Ammonia from his plants ends up in Russian munitions, he coordinates with Putin’s military and secret police to protect his factories from Ukrainian drones, and he explicitly avoids “moral judgments” about things like democracy because he considers them a “distraction” from “designing systems that work.” Sort of like when Elon Musk said:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.“
Honoré de Balzac gets credit for the observation that, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” and Melnichenko’s own history, which began with an illegal currency exchange run out of a Moscow State University dorm room and protected by moonlighting police cadets, fits the pattern comfortably.
His way of thinking is common among men who’ve accumulated billions: they deal in what works, what maintains stability, what’s most efficient, and who can be bought or brought along, while “esoteric” and “idealistic” concepts like democracy, individual rights, and “the pursuit of happiness” only enter the calculation as variables to be managed.
That same mindset built America’s modern oligarchy. Exxon’s own scientists, for example, predicted global warming with alarming internal memos starting in the late 1970s, and the company’s executives, having weighed the future of our planet and our children against their bottom line, spent the next four decades funding lies to keep us burning their product and filling their money bins.
It was nothing personal: they were simply setting aside empathy while optimizing their own incomes, and the habitability of our planet was simply a variable.
The blueprint for the larger project was drafted in 1971, when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, two months before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, sent a confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce calling on American business to organize, fund, and capture the universities, the media, the courts, and the American political system itself.
Out of that memo grew the think tanks, the “scholars for hire,” and the vast rightwing media machines that have spent five decades teaching Americans to distrust their own government, oligarchs arguing essentially that oligarchy is preferable to democracy.
Reagan’s functional suspension of our anti-monopoly laws in the 1980s then let a handful of men amass fortunes larger than any human beings had ever held, morbidly rich on a scale even the pharaohs never dreamed of, and today those men fund virtually every Republican in Congress along with a distressing number of Democrats.
Their wholly-owned toadies on the Supreme Court have spent the last half-century legalizing the purchase of the American government, a story I tell at length in my new book Who Killed the American Dream?
The foundation was a fraudulent headnote slipped into an 1886 Supreme Court decision falsely claiming the Court had ruled that corporations are persons with rights under the 14th Amendment; Citizens United built on that fraud in 2010 by declaring that corporate and billionaire money is constitutionally protected speech.
But it gets worse: in 2024 the Court’s six corrupt Republicans ruled in Snyder v. United States that officials who take payments after performing favors have merely accepted legal “gratuities” rather than bribes. Yeah, billionaires can now legally give tips to judges and politicians.
And just two weeks ago the same six on-the-take justices struck down the post-Watergate limits on coordinated party spending, freeing the morbidly rich to invisibly pour unlimited money through the parties directly into their chosen candidates’ campaigns, four months before the midterms. Justice Kagan warned in dissent that the RNC and DNC can now simply function as an oligarch’s or corporation’s secret checking account for their selected candidates and the public will never know who bought their election and owns their politicians.
Putin’s oligarchs and ours arrived by opposite roads: his through a state that swallowed its billionaires and ours through billionaires who swallowed their state, but the citizens of both countries ended up in the same place under either arrangement: on the outside, holding a “simulation of participation” while men like Musk buy our elections and the favors our politicians can bestow.
So Americans should ask the question Melnichenko asked about Russia: What futures are actually on our menu? I can count four, and the parallels are uncomfortable.
The first is aristocratic dictatorship. America completes its realignment away from the world’s democracies and toward Moscow, Beijing, and the Gulf monarchies that Trump and Vance so visibly admire, and the world gets run as a cartel of strongmen and sovereign wealth funds while our Constitution becomes a mere decoration. Much of our current foreign policy already points in this direction.
The second is civil conflict that tears our country apart. Prominent voices on the right have been openly fantasizing about civil war for years, and a government that expects to be loved doesn’t need a ten-foot fence around Lafayette Square or gates across Pennsylvania Avenue. Building permanent infrastructure to wall off protest four months before a national election shouts at us that Trump and Vance are planning for a coming confrontation with the American people.
The third is slow imperial decline, the road Britain walked after the two world wars: a once-dominant nation growing gradually poorer, shabbier, and more irrelevant while its aristocracy extracts whatever’s left. This is oligarchy’s default trajectory, the one we’re already on if nothing dramatic intervenes, and it ends with our grandchildren living in a country that used to matter but is now subject to the whims of its oligarchs and more powerful nations.
The fourth is democratic renewal, the road Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt opened and JFK and LBJ paved: breaking up concentrated wealth and power, taxing the morbidly rich, and building the healthcare, education, childcare, and retirement security that working people in Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world now take for granted.
Unlike the other three, this future has a living constituency and a vibrancy that’s been missing from the American political scene since the days of JFK.
Just three weeks ago, voters across New York swept young progressives and democratic socialists into Democratic nominations, toppling establishment incumbents despite millions in super PAC money arrayed against them, because ordinary Americans keep voting for economic democracy whenever somebody credible actually offers it.
Russia is probably too far down the road of tyranny to make a sudden transition like this back to democracy; its independent press is dead, its opposition leaders are in prison, in exile, or in the ground, and even its billionaire would-be reformer can’t imagine anything better than a politer class of elites running the place.
We’re not there yet. Our elections still mostly count, some of our courts still hold, our press is battered but breathing, and we still retain the right, for now, to stand in front of the White House and say, “No!” Every one of those things is on the ballot this November, and the people fencing off Lafayette Square understand that better than most.
Melnichenko offered one more observation that applies as much to Washington as to Moscow:
The Russian regime looked absolutely impregnable in 1913, and again in 1986, and both of those governments were gone within a few years. He quotes former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar’s line that, “Big changes come later than we think but earlier than we expect.”
That’s true of dictatorships, and it’s equally true of oligarchies as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
Working people get angry when confronted with an exploitative rule by the rich and then rise up in revolt. We can see this happening in Argentina right this moment.
At that point, a nation’s leadership must choose between abandoning oligarchy and going back to democracy — as we did with Lincoln taking on the oligarchs of the Confederacy in 1861, and FDR’s New Deal presidency in 1933 — or bringing down the iron fist and converting the oligarchy into dictatorship, as Putin did in Russia.
Oligarchy, as I detail in that book, is always a transitional form of government that either reverts to democracy or transitions to dictatorship. It rarely last more than a single generation.
Thus, which kind of sudden change America experiences — the hard snap into strongman rule or the breaking of billionaire power over our government, purging dark money, and a restoration of democracy — will largely be decided by what we all do between now and the first Tuesday in November.
Legal experts alarmed as Trump plans to claim Georgia’s Dem senators are illegitimate
President Donald Trump is reportedly planning on delivering a speech in the near future amplifying his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — and social media users on X are raising the alarm.
“Things are about to get very, very, very bad,” posted podcaster Chris Mowrey. Similarly Shannon Watts, the New York Times bestselling author of “Fired Up,” wrote that this means there will be “a Civil War instead of midterm elections.”
Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez struck an ominous note by pointing out that Trump also plans on declaring Georgia’s two senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to be illegitimate.
“If this is true it just shows that Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian, but the stupid kind of authoritarian who can’t even mask regime lies in a convincing way and so it’s obvious to everyone that he is terrified of his opponents (Ossof [sic] is a viable presidential candidate for Dems, one with more appeal than Vance) and also the average voter, which is why he keeps shamelessly pushing the SAVE America Act,” Gonzalez argued.
Policy consultant Adam Cochran also posted a lengthy analysis about the report, poking several holes in Trump’s arguments about supposed 2020 election fraud.
“Doesn’t work like that,” Cochran said. “First off, there was no fraud, but you seized the ballots and the paper back ups to make sure no one could question it.”
He added, “Second, the Constitution has no way to nullify a swearing in. Only peer expulsion. Third, this sudden ‘announcement’ is when Trump is down by two senators and desperate to pass a bill. Lastly, Trump had 64 court cases to try and litigate the election, including in Georgia. No case turned up any evidence, including after an audit of these ballots.”
Cochran concluded, “Trump’s own lawyers and advocates then admitted to making up the conspiracy about this county, and were charged for it. Part of the court evidence included their own email records of coming up with the plot.”
Melanie D’Arrigo, the vice president of legislative affairs for New York’s chapter of the National Organization for Women, was more succinctly than Cochran while likewise noting that his claims about Georgia had been litigated.
“The same Georgia election where Donald Trump was indicted by a jury of his peers for trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results?” D’Arrigo wrote. “That election?”
Meanwhile Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, simply said that the reporting if true would be “insane. INSANE.”
Trump has made a number of efforts to avoid losing the 2026 midterm elections, from unsuccessfully trying to pass the SAVE America Act to require voters to show proof of citizenship and likewise unsuccessfully attempting to get the US Postal Service to decide who can send by ballots by mail to purging voters from the rolls and threatening to send ICE to intimidate voters at the polling places.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post on Monday. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”
WASHINGTON, July 13 (Reuters) –
U.S. President Donald Trump signed orders on Monday that slashed the size of two national monuments in southern Utah by more than 90% to allow for grazing, motorized recreation, logging and other resource development in the region, the White House said.
The proclamations reduced the Bears Ears National Monument to 121,100 acres (49,000 hectares) from 1.36 million acres, and cut the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to 181,500 acres from 1.87 million acres.
Environmental group Earthjustice said it would take legal action “to maintain protections for these treasured landscapes.”
Trump made the announcement at the White House alongside Utah Governor Spencer Cox and the state’s two U.S. senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, all Republicans.
“We’re doing something very dramatic and very important for the people of Utah, and the people of our country, because many people use it,” Trump said.
Trump reduced the size of the monuments during his first term, and they were later expanded by former President Joe Biden despite opposition from Utah state officials.
Bears Ears was established by former President Barack Obama in 2016. The monument, named for twin buttes that resemble a bear’s head on the horizon, is home to cultural and archaeological sites that are sacred to several Native American tribes.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was established in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton. Numerous dinosaur fossils have been found in the monument, known for its colorful rock formations, over the last two decades.
Trump has previously dismissed the importance of environmental and cultural conservation projects.
Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat whose state, New Mexico, borders southern Utah, criticized the president’s move.
“Time and again, this administration has put the interests of billionaires and powerful industries ahead of America’s public lands and the people who own them,” Heinrich said in a statement.
“And once again, they’re ignoring Tribal voices, sidelining local communities, and threatening places that belong to every American.”
July 13, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Today began with yet another demonstration of the fact that the U.S. options for extricating itself from Trump’s war on Iran with conditions anywhere near as good as they were under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with a number of countries under President Barack Obama, or even as good as they were in February 2026 before Trump and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu launched air strikes on Iran, do not appear promising.
At 10:16 this morning, Trump announced on social media that the Strait of Hormuz
“is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately.”
In other words, the U.S. is restarting hostility—a blockade is an act of war—and, according to Trump, will protect the Strait of Hormuz but expects to be paid.
Trump has been clear that he considers the memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 no longer in force, probably not least because Iranian officials interpret the words of the hastily constructed deal as giving Iran control over the Strait of Hormuz. They have been clear they intend to charge fees for passage of the strait, a condition the U.S. rejects although Trump’s current claim that the U.S. will charge fees seems to undercut the U.S. position.
Crucially, officials in the Trump administration continue to deny that Congress has any role in declaring war, despite the clear language of the Constitution. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the president can respond without congressional input to an “imminent threat” so long as the president notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours of the beginning of hostilities. After that notification, the president has only 60 days before he must either end hostilities or secure congressional approval for them.
Trump got around this law first by overruling his own intelligence agencies to insist that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. Then when the May 1 deadline for either withdrawal or congressional approval approached, he claimed that hostilities had ended on April 7 with the declaration of a ceasefire, notwithstanding that both sides continued to shoot at each other and the U.S. maintained its blockade of Iranian ports.
Now they are claiming the power simply to start the clock again. On Friday, Trump formally notified Congress that the U.S. has resumed strikes on Iran, claiming the Pentagon has another 60 days to strike Iran before the timeline specified by the War Power Act runs out.
technology start-ups
Today Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgar, and Peter Jamison of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s sons “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have amassed a portfolio of defense technology start-ups that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes.” They have invested in more than a dozen defense companies that have collectively received at least $3.2 billion in business directly from the government since those investments, along with $3.1 billion in options for future contracts.
Tonight U.S. Central Command announced it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran.
(ICE) shot and killed 26-year-old Joan
At about 7:15 this morning, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. According to staff from the Portland Press Herald, Guerrero was from Colombia and was authorized to work in the U.S. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition said he had a Social Security number and was on his way to work.
Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, have not commented. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has called for “a full and impartial investigation,” but as her political opponents note, Collins voted just last month to give ICE another $70 billion. ICE and Border Patrol had become far less visible as Republicans worked to pass supplemental funding for ICE and Border Patrol through Congress. In the wake of that new funding, immigration sweeps are back in the news. Protests broke out today outside Collins’s Biddeford office.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) told Patrick Whittle, Leah Willingham, and Jack Brook of the Associated Press that Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told him Guerrero had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against officers, forcing the agent to shoot. This allegation has been a common one for agents trying to justify fatal shootings, including that of Renee Good in Minnesota. Witness Daniel Boucher said that in the aftermath of the shooting, he saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. He said: ‘I tried to stop.’”
This evening, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) said she had learned that the man ICE shot and killed was not the person they had an order to pick up. ‘
In a statement tonight the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the officer shot because he was “fearing for public safety.” David Bier of the Cato Institute and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council both called out that language, noting DHS was claiming not that the officer feared for his life, but that he had a vague concern for “public safety.”
The ICE killing of a man in Maine comes less than a week after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston, Texas. Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was close to obtaining legal status. His son told Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press that the homebuilder knew what to do when approached by ICE but may have feared that the men following him in unmarked SUVs intended to steal his tools.
ICE said the officers “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien” and that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” It added that an officer “discharged his weapon in self-defense.”
A lawyer for two of the people in the van with Salgado Araujo denied that he tried to ram officers. A source later told Dalia Faheid, Chris Boyette, Priscilla Alvarez, and Caroll Alvarado of CNN that ICE’s description of the events that killed Salgado Araujo as a “targeted enforcement operation” was misleading. While that may have been the case, Salgado Araujo was not the target. They saw him in his van near the target and thought he “resembled the target.”
José Olivares of The Guardian noted that Salgado Araujo was the tenth person shot and killed by federal immigration officers from either ICE or Border Patrol this year. Twenty-one more people have died in ICE detention this year.
This afternoon the Trump administration finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. That evidence includes statements, video from police body cameras, and Good’s badly damaged SUV.
Trump manufactured the so-called settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit
Today U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams said Trump, his lawyers, and the lawyers for the Department of Justice had manufactured the so-called settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. “[T]he Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact,” she wrote. They launched the lawsuit “as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review.”
The course of action they intended to take was to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump loyalists who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had been weaponized against them. While that part of the deal got most of the attention, probably more important to Trump was the addition to the “settlement” announced the next day: a promise that Trump, his family, his businesses, and even his “associates” would be immune from prosecution for any tax crimes revealed by audits of tax returns filed before May 19, 2026.
“No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates,” Williams wrote. After Trump dropped his lawsuit, thirty-five former judges had asked Williams to set aside her dismissal of the case with the goal of determining whether the claimed “settlement” was a fraud on the court.
In her opinion, she noted that the question before the court was simply whether there was a legitimate lawsuit, and the answer was no. The final disposition of the slush fund and the immunity were not questions before the court. “Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”
Williams recommended legal sanctions against some of the lawyers involved and said she was “extremely troubled” by the testimony of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”
Blanche used to be Trump’s personal defense lawyer and has said he believes he has a “continuing duty of loyalty” to Trump. The president has nominated Blanche to become attorney general. His confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday.
House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday.
It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.
In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation’s past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’
America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semiquincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.
But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250, via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play donations from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.
Defrauding the nation on its 250th birthday
The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.
After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year’s White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair. The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”
Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY”, making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million.
Millions for Trump’s cronies
A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.
Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the funding Congress allocated to America250.
Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization.
Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity
According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250’s banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President’s substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.
Trump converted America’s once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warnings about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.
Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.
Trump’s criminal immunity will be challenged after the midterms; even now, it only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and very likely exceeds any official, constitutional, or statutory authority. Trump billing our 250th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY sealed the deal.
Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250th birthday all about him. History books will likely oblige.
Trump embarrassed the US again at the July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
The world is watching—our enemies as well as our allies— which means it’s not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous. Here’s how White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the NATO summit: “President Trump delivered a marathon, high-energy performance at the NATO summit, holding four separate press availabilities plus a solo press conference and taking unscripted questions from reporters on a wide range of topics. The President commanded every room, gave our allies some much-needed tough love, and left the summit with a stronger NATO and more united free world.” Leavitt, Fox News, and rightwing media reported this fawning pablum and little else, which explains how 38% of the country still supports a corrupt felon who is openly robbing the country while he stives to start WWIII. To the rest of the world, Trump’s conduct was widely viewed as a highly embarrassing showcase of verbal stumbles, erratic behavior, and mental illness. What the rest of the world reported Trump tried to turn the NATO summit, like the nation’s 250th birthday, into a story centering around Trump. He committed repeated errors in the process: Trump said Spain is ‘worthless’ and he wants to “cut off trade with Spain.” We don’t trade with Spain, we trade with the EU, of which Spain is a member. Trump appears not to understand the difference, or what the EU trade bloc actually does. He called Zelensky President Putin. Twice. He referred to the Islamic Republic of Japan. He couldn’t recall the name of the Iran nuclear agreement hammered out and signed during the Obama administration, calling it “JC P,” even though he started a war over it. He trotted out, once again, his threat to take Greenland. Danish Prime Minister made it clear nothing of the sort would happen. He praised Turkey’s president, a fellow corrupt authoritarian, and China’s Xi, a communist, but pointlessly insulted previous presidents of the United States. He can’t stop attacking Biden and Obama, whom he has called O-Bum-A. Such a clever guy. He has no idea that these childish insults and jabs at former US presidents paint our nation in a negative light, hurting our standing among peers and adversaries alike. The worst and most dangerous thing is that Trump keeps demonstrating his fundamental ignorance of the NATO alliance. He has said, repeatedly, that NATO should have helped the US when he attacked Iran, because he is losing that ill-fated war and needs someone else to blame. Trump has called his requests to back his war in Iran a “loyalty test” in a fit of retaliation over their failure to join his attack. But NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one. It is meant to deter aggression, and defend members when someone attacks; it does not attack but exists to deter attacks and Trump can’t seem to comprehend the difference. Trump attacked Iran without consulting NATO allies, can’t understand why most refused to help, and now wants to punish them for his own mistakes even though our allies were following our own defensive charter. Insulting Italy’s Prime Minister Beyond the personal gaffes, Trump’s outbursts deeply strained diplomatic relations by insulting and frustrating America’s long-standing allies. Before he left for the summit, he posted a juvenile meme of Italy’s Prime Minster Giorgia Meloni, falsely depicting her looking up at him with adoring, fawning eyes. Above the photo he wrote, in all caps, “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED” as if Meloni is stalking him when in fact he makes her want to vomit. Trump is continuing the sophomoric spat he started with Meloni after she called him out as a lying liar who lies for claiming she “begged” for a photo with him at the G7 summit in France. Trump stated during an interview that Meloni “desperately wanted the picture” with him and that he only agreed to it because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni swiftly and strongly rejected that assertion as a lie. She fired back on Instagram that Trump’s account was “completely made up” and that, “I and Italy never beg.” Trump’s absurd dispute severely strained diplomatic ties with Italy and all of the EU, and prompted Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to cancel a planned official visit to Washington. Trump has turned most of the NATO alliance’s major meetings into chaotic spectacles by insisting that the cameras focus only on him, then stumbling over facts, history and strategy he delivers in third grade English. Global condemnation intensifies Although Trump later reversed his tone behind closed NATO doors to claim a state of complete “unification,” his bizarre statements and erratic performance left European heads of state visibly exhausted, and reinforced worry about his unstable approach to international diplomacy and his mental instability in general. Global condemnation has intensified across the world stage, with foreign leaders, foreign media, and mental health experts increasingly admitting that his erratic behavior is a direct threat to international security. International alarm had already spiked following previous high-stakes summits where he exhibited similar cognitive slips—such as repeatedly confusing Greenland and Iceland, and mistaking the nation of Iran for Japan. Diplomatic circles were further rattled when Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico openly shared his Trump anxiety with The New Republic regarding Trump’s volatile “psychological state.” Fico told European Union leaders that he was worried about Trump’s mental health, saying that the president came across as “dangerous” during a meeting the pair had in January at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fico made the comments at an emergency EU summit over Trump’s threats to annex Greenland. French far-right leader Jordan Bardella similarly described Trump’s foreign policy as “erratic” and “extremely unsteady” and “constantly shifting.’ As reported by global publishers like The Guardian and France 24, foreign media has stopped analyzing Trump’s ‘unorthodox political strategy’ and has instead pivoted to directly and explicitly questioning his mental acuity. The growing international consensus is that Trump’s escalating impulsivity, unnecessary public feuds with global figures like Meloni and the Pope, and cognitive confusion is not so much eccentric showmanship as a display of cognitive decline that endangers the world.Our president is unhinged. Praise be to ALLAH he says?
Trump’s new plane is a $400 million Boeing 747-8
gifted to the U.S. government by Qatar. Officially serving as part of the Air Force One fleet, it was refitted at a cost of $1 billion with advanced security and communication systems but-is not secure from a EM attack,
-does not have mid-air refueling capacity and
-does not have anti missle capability.
New York Times reporters wrote about it, now they are under attack from Trump!
One official, who declined to comment on the specific highly classified systems typically onboard Air Force One, noted the 747 gifted by Qatar was largely seen by the military and Secret Service as having been “rushed” into service.
By contrast, the official noted two new jets acquired as part of a deal Trump renegotiated during his first term have faced serious delays and aren’t expected to be ready until at least 2028. That’s partially due to the host of classified communication and defensive countermeasures that must be affixed, comprehensive design requirements by the military and the time required to train pilots on the unique aircraft.Trump demanded a bribe from CBS,
then criticized longtime 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley as “terrible,” “a stiff,” and part of a “gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country”.
“I think Scott Pelley’s [is] terrible,” Trump said of the longtime journalist. “Look, Scott Pelley’s a stiff and he’s afraid and he’s part of this, you know, gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”
Admin told Pelley to make the protesters look more violent and tells him to lie and say the murdered Good was trying to kill ICE as Trump wanted to portray. He did not, so he was fired.
Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members ahead of midterms
By Bo Erickson and Erin Banco
WASHINGTON, July 9 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday terminated the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission, the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide, the White House confirmed.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out of the commission on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two Democratic appointees were fired via an email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, according to one person familiar with the decision and two other people briefed on the terminations.
The fourth commissioner departed the commission in April.
The terminations follow the recent Supreme Court decision that granted the president more power to fire members of independent agencies, and a push by Trump for more federal intervention in voting processes, traditionally the purview of the states, as midterm elections approach in November.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the termination email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House confirmed the terminations.
“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” a White House official said in a statement, citing the Supreme Court decision as precedent.
The official added that the Trump administration has been “working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections.”
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration,” accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website.
The terminations follow advocacy from Trump and top administration officials to change vote-by-mail requirements ahead of the midterm elections, and investigations into the 2020 presidential election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
In his second term, Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged.
The election commission was established by Congress in 2002 through the Help America Vote Act. The four commissioners are appointed by the president, are required to be evenly split with two Democrats and two Republicans, and ultimately need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The three remaining commissioners who were forced out, Thomas Hicks, Benjamin Hovland and Christy McCormick, were all unanimously confirmed by the Senate.
The 2002 law states the president can appoint replacements to the commission, but it is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said in a Thursday social media post the terminations should “concern every American, regardless of party.”
“Removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections,” Warner said.
(Reporting by Bo Erickson and Erin Banco in Washington; Editing by Donna Bryson, Stephen Coates and Lincoln Feast.)
July 9, 2026
And yet in 2026, here we are.
One scenario by Peter F
If Trump loses the 2026 Congressional elections badly, and the Democrats look like they’re going to take control of Congress, and put him in jail, will he call out the military for “emergency” reasons, and declare the elections null and void?
I believe this is how it will go down..and aligns with the steps Trump has already taken…not as a blatant act of violence against duly elected representatives but more like a ‘boiling the frog’ strategy…
-ICE will be deployed to a few ‘purple’ voting sites to check ID’s of any non-white voters. Some token arrest will be made
Republicans will likely lose more than twenty seats in November in the House and five seats in the Senate setting up a Democratic control of Congress.
-mail-in ballots will be legally challenged in every ‘purple’ district.
-ICE will declare ‘suspicious’ behavior at a couple of sites, which will then be generalized as common across all voting locations.
-lawsuits will fly, clogging up the courts.
-Speaker Johnson will declare that he will not ‘seat’ or swear-in any representative where there are pending court cases to ‘resolve the voting issues’.
-this will result in heated protests, -some will cause damage and may even get violent, likely due to MAGA agitators.
-Trump will declare Marshal Law and send in troops to suppress the opposition ‘violence against the rule of law’.
-Johnson will continue as Speaker for the foreseeable future, Thune will continue to disrupt the Senate.
-Trump will demand new laws against voting, and ‘insurrectionists’ that amount to banning any social media he doesn’t like.
-FCC shuts down ABC and NBC, just as a precaution against inciting violence.
-Supreme Court reinterprets the 22nd amendment and grants Trump two consecutive terms.
-The US second civil war begins.
American Obliviot: As the United States celebrates is semiquincentennial, a new national survey from the Cato Institute reveals what Americans think about it: 46 percent of them don’t know it’s the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The survey polled 2,253 adult Americans, and found that 57 percent don’t know why the colonies declared independence from Great Britain — and only 61 percent even knew that was the country they were declaring independence from. A farther 25 percent said they weren’t sure, while other responses were divided between Europe, Canada, France, Spain, and Germany. “Many lack basic knowledge about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s purpose, and the structure of constitutional government,” Cato said. The report also noted the gap was wider among younger Americans “who are less likely to feel connected to the founding and more likely to be uncertain or skeptical.” (MS/London Independent)
‘Disaster’: Kennedy Center employee reveals venue’s ‘depressing’ decline under Trump
Since returning to the White House 17 and one-half months ago, President Donald Trump has pursued a variety of makeover projects in and around Washington, DC —including renovations for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which he wants to rename the “Trump/Kennedy Center” (a move that has run into roadblocks in the federal courts). Many of Trump’s critics believe that he has created a great deal of unnecessary chaos at the venue, and one of those critics is Christina Smart — a freelance music/entertainment journalist who works there part-time.
Smart details the Kennedy Center’s Trump-related woes in an article for Rolling Stone, noting how stressful things have been for employees.
“Prior to the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center, Saturday evenings were bustling,” Smart explains in Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t unusual to have 10 to 12 shows in a day — where all nine venues on the campus were in use and sold out — which meant more than 7500 people would move through its hallowed halls. The Saturday evening of this past Memorial Day Weekend was very different. I stood alone in the Grand Foyer of the Kennedy Center having just finished a shift at the box office — a part-time position I’ve held since September 2019…. The only show that evening, ‘Shear Madness,’ was being performed upstairs in the Theater Lab to a crowd consisting mostly of a school group. Other shows originally scheduled for that date had long been cancelled.”
Smart points out that her Rolling Stone piece is the first time she has written about the Kennedy Center since she started working there. Although she has done plenty of concert reviews, Smart won’t review any shows at the Kennedy Center — as she wants to “avoid any signs of favoritism” or conflicts of interest. But in light of the venue’s Trump-era problems, she wanted to speak out.
“To say the last 16 months have been rough for employees here would be a severe understatement,” Smart laments. “While the beauty of this massive hall can typically distract me from the never-ending nonsense of the new regime, the emptiness that night was only a reminder of it.”
According to Marione Ingram, a 90-year-old Kennedy Center patron, Trump’s second presidency has been terrible for the venue.
Ingram told Rolling Stone, “Now, there’s an atmosphere that’s really, really depressing. Everything that happened after (Trump) decided to take over was horrible.”
A Kennedy Center employee, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Rolling Stone, “I immediately knew that (the takeover) was going to be a disaster. I think a lot of people did.”
According to Smart, “sweeping dismissals” at the Kennedy Center “began almost immediately” after the Trump administration takeover.
“If an employee received a meeting request e-mail from human resources on a Friday that was also a payday,” Smart notes, “their time was up…. New appointees chosen by Trump or the newly named interim president Richard Grenell — typically, people with no prior experience connected to their new role — would arrive to fill those empty positions…. Our new boss, Richard Grenell, had been an ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term. He had no experience in arts management, concert promotion, or live entertainment — though he did state publicly that he was suited to the role because he was married to a former professional dancer.”
Smart is hoping that Congress will intervene with the Kennedy Center.
“For this slow desecration of the Kennedy Center to end,” the music journalist argues, “Congress needs to amend the charter with language that removes Trump along with his appointed board members and prevents presidential interference with the Kennedy Center from ever happening again. Only then can the hard work of repairing the Center’s reputation and restoring its artistic legacy — the one founded by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy — begin.”
JD Vance’s claims about a ‘pro-fraud party’ suffer from several flaws
While making the case that Democrats are indifferent to fraud, Vance highlighted an example in which DEMOCRATS indicted someone who committed fraud.
With four months remaining before Election Day 2026, several prominent members of the Trump administration are focusing on fraud in social insurance programs, apparently convinced that Democrats are somehow vulnerable on the issue. JD Vance, who’s leading a White House task force on the issue, has been especially outspoken on this lately, peddling a variety of highly dubious claims.
To that end, the vice president this week took his message to Wisconsin, where he tried to make the case that previous generations of Americans “would not recognize” contemporary Democrats.
“They would not recognize a party that rewards the fraudsters rather than sending them to prison,” the Ohio Republican said. “So, I ask you a very simple question: When you come to vote in November, are you going to vote for the pro-fraud party?”
It was Trump who launched a fraudulent “university” that led him to pay a steep out-of-court settlement,
who oversaw a fraudulent charitable foundation and had to pay $2 million in court-ordered damages, and
who ran a family business that was found to have engaged in systemic fraud.
It’s also tempting to remind the vice president that just five days before he delivered a speech about “the pro-fraud party” and “a party that rewards the fraudsters rather than sending them to prison,” TRUMP pardoned a convicted fraudster — an act of clemency that is merely the latest in a series of presidential pardons for others who have been convicted of fraud — while his administration simultaneously has abandoned cases against those accused of fraud.
But as important as the disconnect is between Vance’s rhetoric and Trump’s record, let’s put aside those details and consider a specific case the vice president highlighted during his remarks.
Partway through his event, he showed his audience a poster featuring a Wisconsin woman named Markita Barnes, who stole $2.3 million from a Medicaid program. She was caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.
There was, however, one element of this story that the vice president neglected to mention. As The New York Times reported, “Ms. Barnes was initially indicted in 2023, during the BIDEN administration.”
In other words, Vance could have picked anyone to prove his point, but in making the case that Democrats are indifferent to fraud in social insurance programs, he highlighted an example in which Democrats indicted someone who committed fraud in a social insurance program.
Immigration checkpoints are being set up
Immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.
That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.
It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.
In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.
ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.
They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”
When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.
And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”
One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.
Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.
If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.
Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.
After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.
It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.
It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.
There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.
Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups. Please, we are under attack.
ICE Is Investigating Americans for Sending Emails (I am waiting for the day theu come after me)
He sent a three-paragraph email criticizing ICE. Five months later, federal agents showed up at his front door.
If you’ve ever criticized ICE online (like I do every day), agents could be at your door next.
David Streever, a Rochester resident and father, sent a three-paragraph email criticizing ICE. Five months later, federal agents showed up at his front door, left his wife a formal warning that he may have violated federal law, and then tracked him to a New York City hotel where he’d stopped with his seven-year-old daughter on the way home from a vacation in Finland.
His sin: he called an ICE official a “monstrous human being” after federal agents shot and killed two Americans in Minneapolis.
This isn’t a threat investigation. This is a message, and Streever isn’t the only one. According to court documents, ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened 131 investigations into civilians between January 2025 and March 2026 for what they classify as “incidents of doxing and threats.”
In one case, agents confronted a poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea at a Syracuse polling place on primary day over an Instagram post that did nothing more than repeat a name a newspaper had already published.
What’s happening here isn’t a cautionary tale about angry emails or social media posts that crossed a line. If a federal agency can redirect its internal affairs division to track down, surveil, and intimidate ordinary citizens for constitutionally protected speech, you don’t need to repeal the First Amendment. You just make people too afraid to use it.
This is what it looks like in practice. Agents at your door. Agents at your hotel. Anonymous voicemails from “Homeland Security Investigations.” And when reporters ask DHS to justify it, they go quiet. ABC News and NPR both pressed the agency on its claim that Gonyea had doxxed an agent. DHS never substantiated it.
Meanwhile, someone in ICE custody has died every ten days under this administration. The number of detention facility inspection reports has been cut nearly in half. The office that’s supposed to be investigating those deaths is instead driving to Rochester because a man sent an email they didn’t like.
This is what happens when oversight becomes enforcement and dissent becomes a criminal file.