Trump MELTDOWN during Iran briefing got so bad his own aides were forced to remove him from the room.
The Wall Street Journal — owned by Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump’s most loyal media ally — just published one of the most damning portraits of a president in crisis ever to appear in the American press.
According to senior administration officials who spoke to the Journal, when Trump learned that two American airmen were missing after their F-15E was shot down over Iran, he went into a “frenzied state” that lasted for hours. His tirade became such a distraction — such a hindrance to the people actually managing the crisis — that his own aides physically removed him from the situation room and opted to brief him at intervals instead.
Let that sink in: the commander-in-chief was kicked out of his own war briefing by his own staff.
While his team worked to rescue two American airmen in hostile territory, Trump was “wailing throughout a nearly empty West Wing” about gas prices and European allies who wouldn’t join his war. He was obsessed with one thing above all else — not the safety of the airmen, but his own political fate. Specifically, he was terrified of becoming Jimmy Carter.
“If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter… with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” Trump had said in March. “What a mess.”
So, as two American pilots were missing in Iran, the president’s primary concern was whether this would cost him politically — the same calculation he made when he ignored his generals’ advice and launched the war in the first place.
The pilot was rescued later that day. The second crew member took two more days to recover. Hours after learning of the successful rescue, Trump celebrated Easter Sunday by posting a profanity-filled Truth Social message demanding Iranians “open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy Basterds, or you’ll be living in Hell” — and signed it “Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
When advisers expressed alarm, Trump explained he was deliberately trying to seem “unstable and insulting” to scare Iran to the negotiating table. Then — in perhaps the most revealing detail in the entire story — he immediately asked: “How’s it playing?”
He threatened a civilization. Signed it with a religious salutation on Easter Sunday to provoke his own Christian base. And his first question was about his ratings.
Then on Tuesday, he posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he backed down for the fourth time. Then he told reporters Iran “had agreed to everything” and declared “a great victory.” Then, less than 12 hours later, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard ship fired on a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Trump “remained a steady leader our country needs” — that is, of course, if you think the country needs a leader who was kicked out of the briefing room by his own aides.
Fifty-one lawmakers have introduced legislation to invoke the 25th Amendment. Marjorie Taylor Greene called his civilization threat “evil and madness.” Alex Jones called it a war crime. And now Rupert Murdoch’s own newspaper is publishing accounts from senior officials describing a president in hours-long freakout, removed from crisis management by his own staff, asking “how’s it playing?” while American pilots were missing in Iran.
How much longer can we stand this? How much longer can Trump last? With behavior like this, our country is in severe danger.
JD Vance cut out of Iran negotiations as Trump hands control to Kushner & Witkoff in STUNNING shake-up.
But he was added back?!
It was already one of the cruelest things a president has said about his own vice-president on the record: “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.” Trump was, of course, referring to the negotiations to end the war in Iran, which he had put his vice president in charge of. Now, Trump has removed Vance from the negotiations entirely. In a moment so chaotic it unfolded during a commercial break on MS Now — with a host literally calling the president on the phone between segments — Trump confirmed that JD Vance would not be leading the next round of Iran talks in Islamabad. Instead, real estate developer Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner would handle it. The official reason? Security logistics. The Secret Service didn’t have enough time to set up. Sure. Right. The humiliation was compounded by the fact that nobody told U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz, who went on ABC’s This Week the same morning and told the world that Vance would absolutely be leading the Islamabad talks.
Minutes later, Trump called a different host and said the opposite. The vice president of the United States was publicly benched, and his own administration didn’t even get the memo in time to coordinate the story. “JD is great,” Trump later told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. That’s apparently the presidential equivalent of “bless his heart.”
Let’s zoom out on what has actually happened here. Vance reportedly opposed this war from the beginning — telling people privately it was “massively expensive” and “a huge distraction of resources.” He was right. The war has cost nearly $30 billion, killed at least 15 American troops, wounded hundreds more, sent gas prices over $4 a gallon, driven oil to $100 a barrel, and produced four consecutive broken deadlines without a single concrete concession from Iran. Vance spent 21 hours negotiating in Pakistan last weekend and came home with nothing. Trump called him multiple times during those 21 hours to check up on him — and then asked other people to weigh in on the VP’s performance. Like a micromanaging boss sending someone into a job interview and then polling the receptionist about how it went. Now Jared Kushner — the man who received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia after leaving his last government job — is back at the negotiating table. Along with Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer who has been deployed to solve Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza simultaneously, apparently because Trump’s foreign policy is a real estate deal that just needs the right closer. Vance flew to Pakistan. Failed to get a deal. Got blamed preemptively. Got replaced by his boss’s son-in-law. And Trump went on Truth Social to threaten to knock out “every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran” while adding “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” This is the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. A Truth Social threat. A commercial-break phone call. A vice president benched mid-war. And Jared. Yeah, “JD is great.”
Trump: tweet about Iran closing the Strait
…We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END! President DONALD J. TRUMP
IRAN RESPOSE: GFY
And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours.
Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”
Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”
Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.
According to diplomatic cables obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.
The president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.
Trump ranted about a poll
Trump’s targets in a rent included MAGA blogger Candace Owens, who responded to his taunting saying: “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.”
Another Trump MAGA target, Alex Jones responded by calling Trump “a rotting husk” of his former self.
The number of exclamation points in Trump’s post suggest the president considered the poll results a much welcomed boost after all the bad surveys dogging him and showing him underwater with nearly every demographic, except for a shrinking pool of dedicated Republican loyalists.
But even that poll was far from good news for Trump, reports Mass Live. Just 39 percent of 1,000 respondents said they approved of the president’s job performance. And 57 percent said they believed their lives had become somewhat or much more difficult over the past six months.
Additionally, that same poll identified that 65 percent of respondents believed the U.S. is spending too much on Trump’s war with Iran, and an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — support pursuing criminal investigations of American individuals named in the Epstein files.
Trump’s name peppers the Epstein files, with more than 38,000 total references through the documents.
Trump’s refusal to address his failed ‘ceasefire’
Adam Lynch April 19, 2026 | 06:15AM ET
President Donald Trump said Friday night that the Iranian/U.S. ceasefire is underway and that both nations are making progress toward a long-term agreement, but critics are calling out Trump for ducking questions suggesting otherwise.
CBS News Olivia Larinaldi asked Trump during a Saturday press event to comment on a U.K.’s Maritime Trade Operations Centre report that Iranian gunboats are firing on oil tankers. But rather than address the question, Trump smugly muttered to her “out.”
Social media critics expressed skepticism about Trump’s claims regarding the Iran ceasefire and U.S. military operations.
“Out,” repeated CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennen.
“I thought Trump said the war was over, we won, the strait was open, and they were giving up their uranium,” posted another critic.
“When Donald Trump refuses to answer while ships are under fire it only raises more questions about what Washington already knows and what comes next,” commented still another.
Trump declared at a Friday TPUSA event that Iran had agreed to virtually all of his demands to end its nuclear program forever, and that “No money will exchange hands in any way, shape or form” to assure the ceasefire.
However, on Saturday, Iran’s military operational command, Khatam Al-Anbiya, derailed Trump’s victory lap by calling the ongoing U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “piracy,” and declaring the region back under the strict control of Iran’s armed forces.
Some critics appeared miffed at Trump’s self-satisfied face as he blew off legitimate questions about the status of his so-called ceasefire.
“What a thin-skinned little s——,” one commenter said after viewing CBS News’ side-by-side video of Larinaldi’s inquiry and Trump’s expression of indifference.
Inside the reckoning Trump didn’t see coming
Robert Reich April 19, 2026 | 07:31AM ET
You can almost feel the change in the air we breathe.
It’s not just that Dems are winning special elections by wide margins (and even where they’re not, they’re “overperforming” in ruby-red areas by an average of 16 points).
Nor just that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was overwhelmingly defeated after 16 years of authoritarian rule, with almost 80 percent of eligible voters turning out. (The victor, Peter Magyar, overcame Orbán’s rigged system by focusing on Orbán’s corruption and linking it to the economic difficulties facing average Hungarians.)
Or that Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, revealing his God complex and causing even evangelical Christians in his MAGA base to question his religiosity and mental stability.
Or that Trump and Vance were dumb enough to pick a fight with Pope Leo, who has used it to explain his (and, for Catholics, Jesus’s) objections to war and to tyrants everywhere.
Or that Trump’s major ally in Europe (and the only European leader to attend his inauguration), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Malone, described Trump’s attack on the pope as “unacceptable” (Trump responded by attacking her for “lacking courage” in refusing to join his war on Iran).
Or that Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization — prompting even Tucker Carlson to call Trump’s threat “vile on every level,” Candace Owens to demand that the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove him from office, conspiracist Alex Jones to accuse Trump of threatening “genocide,” and Megyn Kelly to concede that Trump’s coalition is “completely fractured and in smithereens.”
Or that Trump’s war has been such an abominable failure that it’s demonstrated his dangerous ignorance and diminishing mental capacity.
It’s all these, together.
Add in Trump’s legal failures to prosecute his political enemies, to target universities and law firms, to impose his tariffs, and to mount defamation lawsuits — and you understand why the air around us is beginning to feel different.
I hesitate to say we’ve reached a turning point in this horrific time. But something profound seems to be changing.
America and the world’s democracies are beginning to win this overriding fight — against the forces of authoritarianism, corruption, bigotry, ignorance, lies, greed, and violence.
We are starting to win because Trump and the forces he’s unleashed are so deeply repulsive to the consciences of most Americans and much of the rest of humanity.
The more Trump and these forces reveal themselves for what they are, the more that decent people — whether they call themselves Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, right or left, American or non-American — are recoiling from them.
We have not yet prevailed, of course. But, my friends, we are making progress. And we will prevail.
Trump represents a threat to us all
“You shall have no other gods before me.” —Exodus 20:3
“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in Spirit and in truth.” —John 4:24
There are times that compel people of faith to speak, servants of Jesus to speak, proclaimers of the gospel to speak and engage in truth-telling and forms public exorcism rooted in deep radical love with the hope of repentance and a commitment to faithful witness—without fear of what any man or woman administration can do to us.
Two weeks ago the Moral Monday movement held Moral Monday gatherings in Washington, DC, 16 states, and Canada to denounce this war and the President’s declaration that if another country didn’t do what he said, he would “reign” down Hell on them and wipe out their entire civilization.
Why has he been talking about “reigning” down hell? Why does he write “reign,” not “rain”? What authority is he claiming to serve?
Why was he so threatened by Easter that he had to try to make it about him?
Why is the Pope teaching what Jesus and the church have always taught getting under his skin? The religious nationalist movement for so long has been saying he is an imperfect instrument being “used by God.” But he’s not satisfied with that. He wants to be God.
The AI image of him as Jesus is so bad that some of his own people have called it blasphemy. So now he’s trying to walk it back and say he thought it was a portrayal of him as a doctor.
This is exposing the madness that we’ve seen in policy. He wants to be some kind of God like messianic figure—to decide who lives and who dies; who gets citizenship and who doesn’t; which parts of the Constitution still matter and whose rights have to be respected.
Just 10 days ago, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, Trump told Russell Vought, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars.”
And then during Holy Week, he went to the Supreme Court to seemingly intimidate them to support undoing birthright citizenship for babies.
Not only is war unholy, but when any human or president acts in word and deed as though they can determine who lives and who dies—who has citizenship and who can “reign” down hell and wipe out an entire civilization—assuming God-like authority, represents a war on divinity.
We live in a nation that has declared some things are inalienable, endowed by our Creator. And for people of faith, even if the nation didn’t say it, we believe and know that some things are only God’s authority, and to violate them is sin because the gospel of Jesus says so.
This AI pic represents idolatry—a false image offered for us to bow down to, and it is blasphemy and heresy and an affront to Jesus Christ. To do it represents a kind of demonic madness, no matter who would do it—Democrat or Republican. To equate Jesus with a person, a flag, bombs and war planes—and to say that’s what heals us and saves us: this is sin and attempts to exalt a person above God. It is a dangerous war on divinity that is a turn from the God of the gospels, the truths of the gospel.
This is why Pope Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the gospel.”
And he said this even after the reports of the Trump administration calling the ambassador of the Vatican to the Pentagon earlier this year.
I’m not Catholic, but Pope Leo is my pope.
But we must be careful in this moment to act as though this is the first moral and spiritual violation by Trump and religious nationalism. His embrace of a Messianic-type role has been pushed by the delusion of Franklin Graham and others.
When he allows people in his administration to say empathy is the cause of the decline of Western civilization.
These are deep, sinful contradictions of the gospel which says a nation will be judged by how it treats the least of these.
His constant demeaning of other nations and cultures and his constant claim that no one ever did anything as great and wonderful as him before him—the constant self-congratulation and adoration—is idolatry that, when unchecked, has led to where we are now.
Some of the church must repent of far too much silence in the public square confronting these thing public sins and idolatries and other policies with the truths of the gospel and our response to this image and his ridiculous attacks on the Pope cannot be one off.
This must be a moment of entering the public square with the truths of the gospel, with love, the truth of the prophets, and the courage to say we are not afraid of this administration or any, and we won’t be silent any more. We must lift a clear call that this nation and any nation in its words, deeds, and policies must work to have good news for the poor, healing of the broken hearted, deliverance to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and a declaration of acceptance to all who have been marginalized if we even hope to be pleasing to God.
“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. This is why when we as people enter into the public space, we do so not with partisan facts and focus, but with truth.
We have a responsibility to help the nation make this choice and build a movement that can take back our government and insist that it serve all the people.
Trove of documents shed rare light on Supreme Court’s secretive affair with poison
Adam Lynch April 18, 2026 | 07:32AM ET
The conservative U.S. Supreme Court increasingly relies on the secretive shadow docket to derail clean air standards and remove guardrails on a Trump White House, but the New York Times managed to nab confidential correspondence from 2016 that provides insight on the furtive court’s effort to dismantle an EPA crackdown on poisonous airborne mercury.
“Over five days in the winter of 2016, the justices of the Supreme Court exchanged an extraordinary series of confidential memos about how the court should address an ambitious climate change initiative from President Barack Obama. The debate yielded an order halting the program by a 5-to-4 vote — without any explanation,” reports the Times. “Legal scholars have called the episode the birth of the modern shadow docket, in which the court has used truncated procedures cloaked in secrecy to block or allow major presidential initiatives in terse rulings.”
The Times reports these confidential papers are normally not disclosed until after a judge’s death, meaning the “public might not learn what happened, and why, for decades” after a decision.
In an effort to unravel new clean air standards by the Obama administration, the communications reveal Chief Justice John Roberts sought to invoke the “major questions doctrine” to block federal regulations seeking to shut down dirty coal plants in favor of newer, cleaner energy tech. His argument was that agencies can’t make decisions of vast “economic and political significance” if Congress explicitly grants them that power. The Times notes that the conservative court has increasingly relied upon that argument to discourage energy evolution and cleaner air standards.
Among some of Roberts’ correspondence are claims that “solar plants are not built in a day” but that renewable energy facilities are virtually here to stay once constructed and do “irreparable harm” to Congress’ power to kill or discourage them.
Roberts also accuses the Democrat-led E.P.A. of sidestepping the court overturning an Obama administration rule limiting coal plant mercury emissions — which are a proven neurotoxin according to President Donald Trump’s own EPA. The Times also reports that the fact that most power plants were already in compliance “or well on their way” to reducing mercury emissions appeared to anger the chief justice all the more.
Further private correspondence reveals liberal justice Elena Kagen was “not buying” Roberts’ insistence that immediate action by the court was necessary to save power companies the costs of upgrading or shutting down dated technology, while a third liberal justice asked the court to slow down its EPA rollback, while conservative Justice Samuel Alito is already prepared to rule in favor of continued mercury poisoning.
The “shadow papers,” according to the Times, represent the inner workings of a conservative court that has become increasingly mysterious within the last decade and it prefers to render decisions without argument or public scrutiny.
4/18.2026 10:30 PM
tRump is worried. He has posted 56 times in the last two hours. Patting himself on the back, trashing others, claiming everyone is after him, playing the victim.
Hoping no one will notice that he has failed.
Trump’s Ridiculous Story About The Iranian Negotiations Crashes And Burns, And The Strait Of Hormuz Is Closed Once Again
Our country is on an unsustainable path, and must change course
Simon Rosenberg
Apr 18
Morning all. Yesterday, Donald Trump, once again, tried to sell the world a wildly implausible and false story about the peace negotiations with Iran, a story that made it appear that Iran had made major concessions to our STRONG and MIGHTY leader. The Strait was open we were told. The Iranians had agreed to give up their nuclear program our addled leader told the world. Essentially what Trump sold to us was yet another imaginary Iranian surrender, which as the Iranians have made clear over the last 24 hours, did not happen. They have not agreed to end their nuclear program, not agreed to re-open the Strait while Trump maintained his blockade. Here is an Iranian statement this morning:
Just as there is no longer a path for Putin to win in Ukraine, there is no path for victory for Trump in Iran. Both Putin and Trump have lost. But they cannot accept the humiliation that will come from admitting defeat and so the exhausting fighting, the gaslighting, the threats, continue.
I have offered a lot of commentary in recent days about the dark place America finds itself in now; how the Trump regime and Greater MAGA are unraveling, crumbling, and falling apart; and why we should be optimistic that the spectacular historic failure and Olympian awfulness and madness of Trumpism will weaken oligarchical and autocratic forces and bolster pro-democracy forces around the world, as we saw in Hungary this week.
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The Trump Regime Is Rotting, Decaying, Crumbling, Unraveling, Falling Apart
Imagine If This Moment Was Not About The Ascent of Authoritarians, But About A New Birth Of Global Freedom. Just Imagine…..
More Ugly Economic Data, More Evidence Of What A Historic Failure Trump And His Presidency Have Become
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What caused Trump to lie to the world about the negotiations? Impatience, lack of impulse control, desperation, a negotiating tactic, another act of self-enrichment? I don’t know. But we do know, as we discussed yesterday, that Trump is now facing repeated, open rebellion from Republicans in both the House and Senate. His hold on the Capital has weakened, significantly, and defiance, even on that things that really matter to the White House, is becoming routine. There has to be tremendous pressure on him coming from inside his own party, and from his Gulf Arab business partners, to fix this incredible mess he has made in the Middle East. But he can’t. For fixing it would require him to admit failure, and to leave Iran in a stronger position in the region. And so we are, with the addled, vainglorious idiot in the White House screaming victory, again, and praying that somehow by summoning these words it would all magically become true; and he would be the STRONG and MIGHTY God-Emperor again that he sees in the mirror when he wakes each morning rather the failed, pathetic, buffoon the whole world knows him to be.
Trump Wanted an Easy Win. He Created a New Superpower Instead
The president can no longer hide how much he is willing to give up to make his war go away.
Just imagine if Joe Biden or, indeed, any past president had released $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds, alienated our oldest allies, handed Tehran control over the Strait of Hormuz, and dropped U.S. oil sanctions against the regime.
All while fighting a war that some experts believe may cost American taxpayers more than $1 trillion.
Donald Trump would be the first to call it a catastrophe.
But as the president rushes to make a deal to end a war that never should have begun, we are fast coming to understand the consequences of this disastrously thought-out venture to bolster one man’s ego.
Trump has not rid us of a threat—he has created a global superpower from the one enemy that is most fundamentally opposed to the United States.
And the world is in much greater jeopardy as a result..
Interesting Iranian response:
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TRUMP LIES
Speaker of Iran’s parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said that seven recent claims that US President Donald Trump made regarding Iran “were false”, and warned that the Strait of Hormuz “will not remain open” if the US blockade of Iranian ports continues.
US extends waiver allowing countries to buy Russian oil
The US Treasury Department has extended a waiver to allow countries to buy sanctioned Russian oil and petroleum products at sea for about a month, as the Trump administration looks to boost oil supplies due to the global disruption caused by its war on Iran.
The Treasury allowed purchases of the oil loaded on vessels as of Friday through to May 16, an extension of an original waiver that expired on April 11, according to a document posted to the department’s website.
Russia’s presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev had said the first waiver would free up 100 million barrels of Russian crude, equal to almost a day’s worth of global output.
Heather Cox Richardson
War is over?
With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.
He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
Not so fast: Trump lies
But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.
Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”
When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
While being able to announce the end of the Iran war—at least for now—relieves Trump’s immediate crisis, there are many others in the wings.
“we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
This evening, an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security. Fitzpatrick notes that Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks “fierce” has made officials think “we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
Self dealing
Writ even larger than the behavior of the director of the FBI is the growing focus on corruption in the Trump administration. On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they have created a task force to reinforce ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s self-dealing when in office. The task force is made up of members from across the country and from different caucuses in the Democratic Party. Representative Joe Morelle, a fellow New Yorker and close ally of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, will lead the task force along with Kevin Mullin of California, Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Nikema Williams of Georgia.
Also on the task force are the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Robert Garcia of California, and the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, as well as Congressional Progressive Caucus members Greg Casar of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the head of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, Brad Schneider of Illinois.
They will be looking into self-dealing like Trump’s current negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service to settle the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it after an IRS contractor during his first term leaked some of his tax information, along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers, to two news outlets during Trump’s first term. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, said the leak caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
Peter Nicholas of NBC News noted in February that $10 billion is more than 80% of last year’s IRS budget.
Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press notes that several watchdog organizations have filed briefs challenging Trump’s lawsuit. Democracy Forward argued that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and that “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public [treasury] in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”
On Wednesday, Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dave Min of California, along with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to ban presidents and vice presidents from stealing taxpayer money.
Pointing to the Department of Justice’s recent settlement of $1.2 million with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians before Trump took office, after he sued for $50 million on the grounds that the criminal case against him was malicious prosecution, Raskin warned of an “emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as a ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”
“Over the past 15 months, we have seen unprecedented corruption from this administration, but this new abuse of power of providing huge cash payments to ‘settle’ baseless lawsuits brought forward by Trump and his allies is a new low. The bill that Senator Warren, Leader Schumer, Ranking Member Raskin, and I are bringing forward would stop this backdoor bribery and bring some accountability back to the federal government,” said Representative Min.
In February, when the lawsuit came to public attention, Trump noted that it seemed odd for him to be negotiating with himself over the issue, but told reporters that he would give whatever monies he was awarded to charity. “We could make it a substantial amount,” he said. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
Trump NRA snub fuels questions about key GOP ally’s influence
President Trump is skipping the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual convention this weekend, his second snub in as many years of an organization long seen as a key political ally for Republicans.
The move marks his second consecutive absence from the NRA’s annual meeting — held this year on April 16-19 in Houston, Texas — after attending every convention since 2015.
Some critics say it underscores the NRA’s waning influence in Washington after years of financial and legal turmoil.
Oh – you thought I was done writing about Melania’s surprise Epstein press conference and the Amanda Ungaro situation?
And NOW The Strait is Closed Again!, Iran Has Closed It.
President Trump went to war on Feb. 28 pledging to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, destroy its missile capability, break its regional proxies, eliminate its navy and create an opening for regime change.
After five weeks of bombardment and $40 billion, Mr. Trump agreed to a cease-fire with none of those goals accomplished.
In his social media post on Tuesday announcing the end of U.S. bombing, for now, if Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, Mr. Trump said that “we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday that the United States had achieved a “historic and overwhelming victory” because Iran’s military had been rendered “combat ineffective for years to come.”
Still, even supporters of the president’s decision to go to war voiced doubts that Iran had in fact been defeated. Mark Levin, the Fox News host whom Mr. Trump often praises, lamented in prime time on Tuesday night that the Iranian regime was “still surviving.” Laura Loomer, the far-right activist close to the White House, posted online that “we didn’t really get anything out of” the cease-fire talks “and the terrorists in Iran are celebrating.” Lindsey Graham, the hawkish Republican senator from South Carolina, warned that Congress would need to review any deal.
The hand-wringing from the president’s staunchest backers highlighted the disconnect between the vast firepower of the U.S. military on display over the last month and the war’s more complicated consequences for U.S. security and influence. It was an indicator of the discomfort with the outcome of a war that, for now, has left the Middle East looking markedly different from the ambitions that Mr. Trump laid out when he announced the start of “major combat operations” more than a month ago.
“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces,” Mr. Trump said in that overnight video message on Feb. 28, wearing a “USA” baseball cap.
But Iran does challenge the United States, even as the U.S. military struck more than 13,000 targets, according to figures released by the Pentagon on Wednesday. Iran attacked U.S. partners in the Middle East and closed down shipping out of the Persian Gulf.
The result: While Mr. Trump said at the war’s start that “we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he declared the cease-fire with hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium still in Iran’s possession. The president said on Wednesday on social media that there would be “no enrichment of Uranium,” and that the United States would be “working with Iran” to “dig up and remove” its stockpile. But there was no indication that Iran had agreed to such terms, first an agreement for 5 years, and an agreement for 20 years, but then the Strait was closed again!.
Mr. Trump also promised to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Wednesday that the U.S. bombs had hit “more than 450 ballistic missile storage facilities” and 80 percent of Iran’s missile production facilities. Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, estimated that as much as one-third of Iran’s missile arsenal remained intact, and cautioned that “we either get dismantlement or we don’t.”
The United States did, by all accounts, succeed in sinking much of Iran’s navy. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that 97 percent of Iran’s more than 5,000 naval mines had been destroyed, and that the country now had “zero submarine vessels.”
But the cease-fire has gone into effect with Iran retaining maritime power where it matters most for the world economy: in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has been able to re shutter with small boats, drones and missiles fired from shore. Mr. Trump had insisted that Iran reopen the strait as part of the cease-fire.
The strait’s status was not clear on Wednesday, as Ms. Leavitt contended that the waterway had seen more vessels getting through but shipping monitors did not show an increase in traffic. Now on Friday it is closed again. Either way, Iran appeared to retain the ability, if it chose, to continue harassing commercial ships and deterring them from passing through.
When it comes to Iran’s network of proxy forces, Ms. Leavitt said that Tehran “can no longer distribute weapons to its proxies in the region” and that Iran’s ability to fund those groups had been “greatly reduced.” But they still pose a threat. The Houthi militia in Yemen signaled in recent days that it could still join the fighting.
And Iran’s theocratic regime remains in power, potentially with even greater military control over the country. The U.S.-Israeli air campaign killed numerous senior officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. But there is no clear evidence backing up Mr. Trump’s assertion that the leaders who replaced them are “very reasonable.”
Ms. Leavitt told reporters that by weakening Iran’s military capabilities, the United States and Israel had removed the “shield” that Iran was trying to erect around its nuclear weapons program.
“Their murderous and evil plans have been blown up quite literally and figuratively,” Ms. Leavitt said.
But the last few weeks have shown that Iran still has other ways of punching back.
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said it was true that the war had put U.S. military power and sophistication on display, reducing Iran’s missile and drone arsenal and decimating its navy. But he noted that Iran’s military was already weak before the war, and he compared U.S. claims of victory to “Muhammad Ali going in and saying he’s beating up a teenage boxer.”
“The real threat that Iran continues to pose is asymmetric,” Mr. Katulis said, referring to capabilities like Iran’s cheap one-way attack drones, its lingering proxy network and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. “The ledger does not look great.”
Trump Faked His Assassination Attempt, His Supporters Say
Countries are going it alone – without the US.
Western-led world order may be fracturing beyond repair.
What they’re talking about in… Istanbul
The alliance you didn’t know about
Sophia Yan
Senior Foreign Correspondent
There is a deliberate rhythm to Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan’s diplomacy – aimed at playing the long game, with a slow-burn approach that does not usually capture the headlines.
This weekend, he and other senior Turkish officials – including the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself – will host a major diplomatic confab under the high ceilings of a vast convention center in Antalya, a breezy resort town on the Mediterranean.
The guest list released by the Turkish authorities is long – more than 20 heads of state, along with dozens of foreign ministers and senior officials from a wide range of countries, including Azerbaijan, Austria, Egypt, Georgia, Iraq, Libya, Lithuania, Moldova, Nigeria, Ukraine, Singapore, Syria and South Korea.
But the buzz here isn’t just about the attendees. Instead, it is about a developing partnership: Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
These countries’ foreign ministers are due to meet on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, in their third gathering after earlier meetings in Riyadh and Islamabad.
The plan? To form a new regional security platform, perhaps more urgent than ever, with the US-Israel war against Iran approaching a critical ceasefire deadline next Wednesday.
Turkey has tried to stay out of the war – despite Iranian missiles buzzing in its airspace at least four times, possibly targeting the joint US-Turkey air base in Adana.
But Donald Trump’s sudden decision to attack Iran has made it clear to many countries, including Turkey, that the Western-led world order may be fracturing beyond repair.
tRump is one sicko.
“Victims or Whatever”
Melania Trump went to the White House podium last week to declare that the lies linking her to Jeffrey Epstein “must stop today.” She called on Congress to let survivors testify publicly, asking abuse survivors to do the work her husband’s DOJ has refused to do for two years.
Then Trump got in front of cameras and, somehow, made it worse.
Asked about his wife’s call for survivors to come forward, the president called Epstein’s victims “victims or whatever” and suggested the real problem was that they had “refused to go under oath, which was a little surprising.” (More lies)
There is no evidence for this. There is, however, a letter from a group of survivors pointing out that they have already filed criminal reports, testified in court, and shown what they called “extraordinary courage.” Asking more of them now “is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.”
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee noted they have been requesting public hearings for months, including testimony from Pam Bondi and acting AG Todd Blanche, and have been ignored every time. Blanche went on Fox News this week and said Melania’s statement “rings true” to him. He did not announce any hearings.
Trump publicly questioned whether the survivors wanted justice at all, which is what you say when you need them discredited, and then boarded a plane to Las Vegas.
“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters!”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
-Pope Leo XIV, Thursday speaking to thousands in Cameroon
Read the above thunderbolt again and again, and share it widely.
We are watching history unfold as the Catholic Church publicly makes it clear as day that it stands against anybody who will prostitute the name of God for his own sick, and ill-gotten gains as the morbid Donald Trump continued to do this past weekend with his sickening image.
This is but one example, of course, of this detestable man’s disregard for humanity, religion, and all that must be held as decent in this world. For more than a decade the good and righteous have watched with rage and horror as Trump burned the contents of the Bible to ashes with his grotesque actions and “filth” and it is about time people of moral standing like the Pope are standing with us to put this evil down once and for all.
One cannot recall a time in recent world history when more loaded words have been spoken by a person of such global repute. Leo’s words were shot out of a cannon and aimed directly at the lawless, immoral men like Trump across the globe who are busy trying to drag us all into the “darkness and filth.”
There was no nuance here, because these devils must be stopped dead in their tracks, before it is too late. And as many of us know “too late” is menacingly banging at our doors.
It cannot be overstated how important it is that this Pope from Chicago has injected himself to the front of this battle for what is so clearly good against what is so clearly evil.
You do not have to be a religious person to understand the importance of this history-making moment.
-Either you believe we are in a life-or-deaf struggle against good and evil or you don’t.
-Either you believe our democracies around the world, and certainly here in America, are under extreme threat or you don’t.
-Either you believe our rights as citizens and people are under extreme threat or you don’t.
-Either you believe that everything has to be done to preserve our human freedoms or you don’t.
-Either you believe people like Trump are moral vandals and “filth” or you don’t …
We now know without a shadow of a doubt what the Pope thinks, and he is shining his powerful light across lands and seas as he calls for this public reckoning with evil.
The Vatican was rocket-quick to clarify. From AP reporting:
“Vatican officials have made clear that on this trip, he is preaching the Gospel message of peace that surpasses borders and continents, and is meant for all those responsible for the wars and exploitation ravaging the Earth.”
The Catholic Church has now come out strong against the Trump regime and drawn a line in the sand. Now we watch to see how the 55 percent of Catholics who supported Trump in the 2024 elections respond.
The battle has been joined against the maniacal Trump by his countryman Pope Leo XIV, and as a righteous man and warrior for what we believe is good and right, the world welcomes him with open arms.
On Thursday Leo only intensified his warning that the course we are on is simply not sustainable, and he intends to make good and damn sure everybody knows it.
Perilous times call for leadership and courage, and too damn many of us have been left alone to fight the evil on the lawless political Right that wants to end us.
The patriotic phonies and racists who have propped up this orange Antichrist have been put on notice. You can abandon this evil man and join the rest of us democratic crusaders who are standing up for what is good and right, or your reckoning might be coming.
“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
Pope not letting go! 4/16
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned its citizens Thursday not to travel to the U.S.
Especially through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and to be cautious of traveling to the states altogether.
The government agency said 20 Chinese scholars were traveling to attend an academic conference with valid U.S. visas, but were denied entry after being subjected to “unreasonable questioning” by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers at Sea-Tac, according to Reuters, who translated the foreign ministry’s notice.
Chinese citizens were advised to “strengthen safety awareness, avoid entering through this airport … and make all necessary preparations,” due to “repeated incidents of malicious questioning and harassment targeting Chinese scholars” at Sea-Tac.
The ministry advised citizens to respond calmly and rationally if they are questioned by U.S. law enforcement officers.
Funny that not being Christian is now being treated as being a terrorist when it is our government that is terrorizing the Pope and taking grants away from the Catholic church – and provoking harassment of the Pope’s brother!
Why Trump Fears the Pope
by William Kristol
Does might make right?
It’s an age-old question, and there’s no great mystery about the Trump administration’s answer. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller articulated it clearly a few months ago, in the course of defending President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland:
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.
According to Miller, in the real world, it’s power—not justice—that matters. The “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” rule, and the essence of those iron laws is that might makes right.
This is the worldview of the Trump administration, and not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy. It’s also the worldview of the president, and not just for public but for private life (“when you’re a star . . . you can do anything”).
That Trumpist view—that power is to be worshiped, that might makes right—can be dressed up in religious garb, whether through the unctuous sophistry of JD Vance or the grotesque weaponization of faith by Pete Hegseth. But the costume clearly doesn’t fit. The claim that we have no choice but to follow “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” indeed that we should exult in doing so, is fundamentally at odds with a Judeo-Christian world view. After all, if Miller is right, if those iron laws from the beginning of time are unchangeable and unchallengeable, then there is no God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t matter.
Of course, if the Trumpist claim is right, if those iron laws since the beginning of time are all-powerful, then the Declaration of Independence doesn’t matter either. Whatever human rights we may think we should respect don’t matter. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
And that’s why the Trump administration and its surrogates have chosen to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV. They’re attacking Pope Leo not simply because he’s the pope but because he’s the first American pope. He’s a threat to their ambition to change the meaning of America.
And he’s popular here in America.
A poll last month found that 42 percent of Americans had a positive feeling about the Pope, while only 8 percent had a negative view. Half said they were neutral or not sure. If you’re Trump, and you see a critic with those numbers, a critic who can command attention and who shows no signs of being afraid of you or of shrinking from a fight, you want to weaken him. You want to try to drive up his negatives and to drag him down into the polarized political mud in which all other American public figures exist. So you try to reduce him to just another political actor—to a radical leftist who’s “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Trump claimed that Leo only got elected “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” Trump may be wrong to ascribe his own kind of political thinking to the College of Cardinals. But he’s not wrong to sense that their choice of Robert Prevost as the first American pope posed a kind of threat to him. After all, the first Polish pope helped liberate his home country from authoritarian rule. Trump and the Trumpists are worried that the first American pope could contribute to such a development here.
And they should be. The view Pope Leo is upholding—that right matters, not just might—is an American one. It’s the view not just of Augustine but of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln attacked the heresy that might makes right. Lincoln in his great 1860 Cooper Union speech reversed the equation: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
The Trumpists fear Pope Leo not simply because he’s defending the views, and speaking to the communicants, of his church. They fear him because he’s defending the principles, and speaking to the citizens, of his country. Of our country.
Trump’s Powell Paradox
by Andrew Egger
Well, would you look at that: Donald Trump is threatening Jerome Powell again. The president said yesterday that he plans to fire the Fed chair next month, should he not step down from his post “on time.”
“I’ll have to fire him, okay?” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve held back firing him. I’ve wanted to fire him, but I hate to be controversial.” {but he cannot just fire him}.
Such threats are nothing new: Trump has long seethed over what he sees as the Federal Reserve chair’s intolerable reluctance to lower interest rates, and has pursued many fruitless strategies to jawbone him into doing so. What is new is how apparent it’s become that here, far from holding all the cards, Trump is caught in yet another negotiating trap of his own making.
Powell’s term is up on May 15. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: He would hand the role off to his successor without fuss. But right now Powell has no successor. Trump’s nominee for the position, financier Kevin Warsh, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. By law, Powell will stay in his current role unless and until the Senate confirms Warsh—or someone else.
But why hasn’t Warsh been confirmed? Because of the determined opposition of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Why won’t Tillis advance Warsh’s nomination? Because he has sworn not to allow any Fed nominees to move ahead in the Senate until the Trump administration calls off its ludicrous criminal investigation of Powell over supposed cost overruns during the renovation of the Fed headquarters in D.C.
And why is Powell under investigation in the first place? Because Powell, as head of an independent agency, has legal protection against being fired except for cause. All along, the Fed renovation “investigation” was a transparent attempt to get more leverage on Powell—either to twist his arm a little more on his interest-rates decisions, or to provide the legal predicate for Trump firing him after all. The president has barely tried to deny this: Last year, asked what Powell could do to assuage his concerns about the renovation-cost overruns, Trump replied that “well, I’d love to see him lower interest rates.”
But it didn’t work. Powell refused to be bullied. In January, he publicly accused Trump’s Justice Department of threatening him with criminal indictment over a pretext. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions,” Powell said in a direct-to-camera video, “or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
Last month, a federal judge agreed, invalidating a pair of subpoenas sent by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office to the Federal Reserve. There was “abundant evidence,” Judge James Boasberg wrote, that the “dominant (if not sole) purpose” of the subpoenas was “to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.”
Their legal legs cut from under them, Trump and Pirro have been resorting to sillier, more thuggish tactics: Prosecutors from Pirro’s office made an unannounced visit to the Fed building yesterday, seeking to “check on progress” via a “tour” of the renovations.
The Fed, having declined to buckle under more dangerous pressures, practically laughed this one off. “As you know, Chief Judge Boasberg has concluded that your interest in the Federal Reserve’s renovation project was pretextual,” Robert Hur, the Fed’s outside legal counsel, wrote to Pirro’s office after the incident. “Should you wish to challenge that finding, the courts provide an avenue for you; it is not appropriate for you to try to circumvent it.”
Trump, then, is stuck. His investigation was supposed to give him the means either of bending Powell to his will or of getting the irritating Fed chair out of his hair. Instead, it has been completely thwarted—first by Powell’s courage, then by the courts. But the ongoing existence even of such a feeble and impotent investigation is enough to keep Sen. Tillis from giving his permission for the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh. Far from accelerating Powell’s departure, then, the investigation now seems likely to prolong his stay.
Okay, so: Why not just end the investigation? Many of Trump’s allies, no longer seeing much merit in pretending the Powell investigation is some righteous, apolitical action by Pirro that Trump has nothing to do with, are asking exactly this. “You want Jay Powell out of the way,” Bartiromo said during her interview with Trump yesterday. “Isn’t the easiest way to get him out of the way to end the probe?”
And here we arrive at the most fascinating part of the whole business, at least when it comes to the president’s personal psychology: because Trump does not agree with this assessment. “Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s gonna cost maybe $4 billion?” he blustered. “Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?”
Trump wants Powell gone. If he dropped his probe, Tillis would drop his objection to Warsh’s confirmation, and Powell would be out as Fed chair in thirty days. But Trump remains dispositionally incapable of such a tactical retreat. Either he has become so high on his own supply that he has genuinely convinced himself Powell has committed vile crimes as part of the Fed renovation, or Powell has simply become so irksome to him that he cannot bear to see him go unpunished, or he just isn’t willing to give Powell the win. For whatever reason, he finds himself unable to make the one move that everyone save him can see would solve his problem immediately.
Trump is a ratchet that turns only one way—toward further threats and more intimidation. Who cares if Powell won’t leave voluntarily or by law? Trump will just fire him, he insists—notwithstanding that his for-cause predicate has gone up in smoke. And who cares that Tillis will gum up the works? “That’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump scoffed.
Either Tillis will have to blink, or Trump will. Until then, Powell’s not going anywhere.
Trump axes Catholic Charities funding amid Pope feud
David Badash April 15, 2026 | 02:38PM ET
Amid President Donald Trump’s escalating feud with Pope Leo XIV, the Trump administration has canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities in Miami, Florida, to shelter and care for migrant children who enter the U.S. unaccompanied, a relationship that dates back to the 1960s, the Miami Herald reports.
“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski wrote, according to the Miami Herald. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”
Catholic Charities was contracted to operate a full-service child welfare program in the Miami-Dade area.
“Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months,” Archbishop Wenski noted.
The Trump administration is citing a reduction in unaccompanied minors crossing the border, which the archdiocese acknowledges. But that population still exists, and it is unknown how many children will be uprooted and relocated, or where they will go.
The Department of Health and Human Services described the daily population of unaccompanied migrant children in the agency’s care as “significantly lower,” than it had been under the Biden administration.
Health and Human Services’ press secretary Emily G. Hillard suggested that the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s closure of unused facilities “continues efforts to stop illegal entry and the smuggling and trafficking of unaccompanied alien children.”
But Wenski called it “baffling that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” shown by the church.
Describing being moved as “incredibly psychologically harmful” to the children, Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami Law School’s Children and Youth Law Clinic, “said any relocation to a new foster home or shelter likely would be traumatic for children who already have suffered uncertainty and loss.”
“For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be” from day to day, he said.
“God does not bless any conflict,” Pope Leo wrote on social media. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”
The Guardian called it a “rebuke” over the Iran war, and noted that while the Pope did not name names, his post criticized attempts to use religion to glorify the U.S. war in the Middle East.
Trump responded to the Pope’s remarks, saying that he had “nothing to apologize for,” and stated that the Pope was “wrong.”
The pope has continued his opposition to the Iran war.
On Tuesday, he wrote, “God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies. But our Father’s heart is not with the wicked, the arrogant, or the proud. God’s heart is with the little ones and the humble, and with them He builds up His Kingdom of love and peace day by day. Wherever there is love and service, God is there.”
Just days ago, Trump told reporters, “We don’t like a pope that’s gonna say that it’s okay to have a nuclear weapon. We don’t want a pope that says, crime is okay in our cities. I don’t like it. I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. He’s a very liberal person, and he’s a man that doesn’t believe in stopping crime. He’s a man that doesn’t think that we should be toying with a country that wants a nuclear weapon so they can blow up the world.”
Trump also recently described the Pope as “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.”
Trump effect: World Cup to cut ‘tens of thousands’ of hotel reservations
The World Cup isn’t bringing in the kind of tourism that hotels appear to have thought it would, and now they’re starting to panic.
Room rates are being drastically reduced, anti-American sentiment is prompting people to stay away from the big events. Last year, hotel company executives thought that the World Cup would bring in millions of international visitors and give local economies a $30.5 billion economic boost.
It hasn’t happened, and now FIFA is canceling tens of thousands of reserved hotel rooms across the U.S.
Speaking to The Financial Times, Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at hotel operator HRI Hospitality, said that the Trump administration is to blame.
“Obviously, people’s desire to come to the United States right now is down,” she said. She referred to the unpopular war in Iran that has sent gas prices soaring all over the world. Another issue is Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
In February, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons refused to commit to pausing Trump’s arrests of immigrants during the World Cup. Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.) asked Lyons about the games that will be in her district at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.
Visitors’ “confidence is plummeting and jeopardizing the World Cup,” she said, asking him to pause arrests around FIFA events, The Guardian reported.
Lyons refused.
“ICE, specifically Homeland Security Investigations, is a key part of the overall security apparatus for the World Cup,” Lyons said. “We are dedicated to securing that operation and we are dedicated to the security of all of our participants as well as visitors.”
A large number of legal visitors will be coming to the U.S. for tourism. However, there have already been tourists caught up in the deportation efforts. The Guardian reported on Karen Newton, who traveled to the United States for a “trip of a lifetime.” Her visa was valid and she looked forward to sunshine. Then she was detained by ICE. She wasn’t charged, but remained in custody for six weeks, even though she had a valid British passport and a valid visa that had never expired. She had no criminal record.
“I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she told The Guardian. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally, and I had everything I needed to be there.”
She sounded the alarm to travelers worldwide that this could happen to anyone coming into the United States.
ICE agents are given a bonus every time they detain someone. The fear is that it incentivizes arresting anyone, so agents can make extra money and the courts can sort it out from there.
FIFA said it expects a record 5.5 million fans to attend World Cup games, with at least 1.5 million coming to the U.S. from other countries, the New York Times reported this week.
If World Cup attendees aren’t safe to come to the games, the turnout could be a lot less.
This week, outlets reported that FIFA was weighing whether to ask Trump directly to pause the ICE raids during the tournament. Whether or not they do, it appears they’ve already accepted that fewer people than anticipated will come to the games.
There are 11 cities in the U.S. scheduled to host matches for the World Cup from July 11 to July 19. There are also teams coming from countries that are currently banned from travel to the United States.
It will be the first test before the 2028 Olympics, whether or not the U.S. under Trump can bring in travelers and tourists without pausing the mass deportation campaign.
US-China tensions flare over Iran war
China is breaking from its mostly quiet stance on the Iran war amid the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, placing a strain on relations just weeks ahead of a planned meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Xi railed against the breaking of the international rule of law Tuesday during a reception in Beijing with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, an outspoken critic of the war himself, saying their two countries should work together to “oppose the world’s retrogression to the law of the jungle.”
“Maintaining the authority of international rule of law means not using it when it suits us and abandoning it when it doesn’t,” Xi said during a meeting with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, also on Tuesday.
The comments are the most direct that the Chinese leader has offered about the U.S.-Iran war since it began at the end of February. China is a major importer of Iranian oil, which the U.S. is seeking to cut off with the blockade that began on Monday.
Even before the blockade, Beijing appeared to be getting more involved militarily. China is preparing to deliver new air defense systems to Iran in the next few weeks, CNN reported Saturday, citing U.S. intelligence. Beijing denied the report. That follows Iran reaching out to China and Russia for intelligence support during the war.
On the diplomatic front, Beijing has played a key behind-the-scenes role in trying to help reach a settlement in the conflict, calling for an end to hostilities on both sides.
Trump credited China with helping to establish the two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran and getting them to the negotiating table in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Saturday.
Iranian officials told The New York Times that a last-minute push from China ultimately helped convince Tehran to diffuse tensions.
Beijing’s involvement in securing the ceasefire and Xi’s comments denouncing the blockade reflect China’s interest in seeing the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz come to an end soon.
Nearly half of China’s crude oil imports pass through the strait. While China’s economy is more diversified than many countries in Asia and Africa, it can’t avoid the economic costs of the war for long, CNN reported.
“With more Chinese interests at stake, the US may be able to get China more involved in pushing Iran toward a negotiated solution,” Yun Sun, the director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., told CNN. “China will resort to diplomatic pressure, including bilateral and multilateral to push for the speedy lifting of the blockade.”
Sánchez, during his meeting with Xi, praised China as the only major world power that could end the war in Iran and other conflicts such as in Ukraine.
“I find it very difficult to find other interlocutors, beyond China, who can resolve this situation in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
On Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pressed his Pakistani counterpart to help “preserve the hard-won momentum” of the talks it hosted over the weekend. On Tuesday, China called the U.S. blockade a “dangerous and irresponsible move.”
Trump suggested Tuesday another round of peace talks could happen in the next two days in Pakistan. He told the New York Post talks are “happening” but have been a “little bit slow.”
Trump met with U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue on Tuesday to prepare for the summit with Xi next month, which is focused on striking a trade deal. A tariff truce has largely held since their last meeting in October, but Trump threatened new 50 percent tariffs if China supplies arms to Iran.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL. The GOP is REFUSING to do their job. They’ve blocked FOUR attempts to rein in Trump.
Congress is failing to act.
Tammy Duckworth “we cannot let this chaos continue unchecked. As our troops continue to sacrifice whatever is asked of them, we senators need to do the absolute minimum required of us,” Duckworth, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot.
Congress has the sole power to:
- Declare War: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
- Authorize Use of Force (AUMF): Congress can pass an AUMF allowing the President to deploy troops within parameters.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
- War Powers Resolution of 1973: The President notifies Congress within 48 hours of sending troops to hostile action, who must be removed within 60 to 90 days unless Congress extends.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
- Power of the Purse: Congress appropriates funds to pay for or, stop wars.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
- Raising Armies: Congress raises , funds, creates rules for the military
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
- Oversight: Through hearings and reports, Congress monitors military, to ensure they align with legal, strategic, and financial constraints.
EPIC FURY/EPIC FAIL
Trump’s Iran *boondoggle* has
- No Congressional APPROVAL.
- No Congressional OVERSIGHT.
- No Congressional CONSTRAINTS.
- No Congressional funding LIMITS.
- No CLEAR OBJECTIVES!
THIS IS AN *ILLEGAL* WAR IN EVERY WAY
Meanwhile, the spineless GOP is enabling:
• A GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS
• A war with bullshit justifications
• 19+ countries pulled in
• Global economic shock (Hormuz closure)
• Americans stranded overseas without warning
• 160+ children killed in a U.S. strike
• Rising terror threats against Americans
• $200B more requested while saying “it’ll end soon”
And the GOP response?
“We feel pretty good about it.”
They don’t even know the plan—but they’re funding it, defending it, and refusing to stop it.
John Thune:
“I think the administration has a clear objective, a clear plan, and if they can execute on it, hopefully, that question won’t be a necessary one that we’ll have to answer,”
Translation: Trump has no objective and we’re cool with that. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.
That’s not leadership. That’s COWARDICE.
The Trump administration is pushing countries around the world to sign a joint declaration that calls for “trade over aid” and explicitly rejects America’s history as a leading provider of humanitarian assistance and other support to the developing world.
In a cable sent Wednesday to all U.S. embassies and consular posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered American diplomats to issue a démarche — an official call to action — to foreign nations no later than Monday that asks for their backing before the U.S. initiative is introduced at the United Nations at the end of April.
The “trade over aid” push is an opportunity, Rubio’s directive says, to use the U.N. system to “promote America First values and create business opportunities for U.S. companies.”
The move comes as the Trump administration has sought to dramatically remake the global aid system, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and pulling back funding from multilateral efforts at the United Nations.
Other major donors of foreign assistance, including France, Germany and Britain, have followed the Trump administration’s lead and scaled back their efforts, leading to what some have called a “great aid recession.” Studies have suggested that such a sweeping rollback of funding could result in 9.4 million deaths by 2030.
The Trump administration’s approach will allow for-profit companies to exploit poorer nations.
“It’s solidifying our stance on dropping aid completely and letting companies enrich themselves on newer markets,” said one State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the news media.
A spokesperson for the State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some aspects of the “trade over aid” declaration were first reported by Devex, which published a report Tuesday disclosing that the U.S. proposal was being circulated at the United Nations.
The push to encourage countries to sign on could be an indicator that other nations are skeptical of the Trump administration’s efforts.
Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the initiative may be received poorly at the United Nations, particularly as the Trump administration advances other efforts — such as the Board of Peace, an international body set up by the United States with President Donald Trump as its chairman — interpreted in some foreign capitals as undermining the global body.
“Having been on the driving end of many démarches over my time, I would not see this being well received because it comes across as undermining the U.N.,” said Vigersky, who previously served as senior humanitarian adviser to the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
Mike Waltz, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, attends a U.N. Security Council meeting last week. On Tuesday, he told a Senate committee that “on the development side, we are heavily engaging the private sector.” (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
The Trump administration also has faced pushback as it seeks to negotiate with countries that receive U.S. global health funding. Its “America First” approach in this space has led to accusations that the State Department is conditioning crucial funding for HIV prevention and treatment on foreign governments’ acceptance of commercial side deals related to critical minerals and other natural resources.
Rubio’s cable offers talking points for U.S. diplomats to help them make the administration’s case to their counterparts, beginning with the statement that “under President Trump, America has entered a new Golden Age built on a booming economy fueled by pro-business policies: deregulation, lower taxes, and a liberated energy industry.”
It takes direct aim at destroying the current global aid system.
OIL
Due to tRump’s “excursion”. the International Energy Agency announced the biggest emergency oil release in its 50 year history. 400 million barrels. Pooled together from 32 countries. America, Japan, Germany, UK, France, South Korea, the lot. And you MAGA lost your collective minds like daddy just saved the world.
So let’s do the math that none of you peanuts can do.
The world uses about 105 million barrels of oil a day. Not a week. Not a month. A day. That means your big beautiful 400 million barrel release is less than four days of global supply. Four. Days. That’s not a solution, that’s a long weekend.
And here’s the thing. The entire IEA strategic reserve across all 32 countries is only 1.2 billion barrels. So this one release just burned through a third of the whole planet’s emergency safety net in a single go. One crisis. One third of the cupboard. Gone.
But it gets dumber. Keep up.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Twenty percent of the world’s oil flows through that strait and right now none of it is moving. Citigroup estimates somewhere between 11 and 16 million barrels a day is being choked off the market. So even if you’re just trying to plug the gap from the strait, 400 million barrels buys you roughly a month. Maybe.
But it gets even dumber. I know, hard to believe.
America’s share of this is coming from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which only holds 415 million barrels right now. That’s 58 percent of capacity because your guy tRump never actually refilled the thing despite telling you he did. If the US shoulders the biggest chunk of this release, which everyone expects it to, your tank is basically empty. And then what happens when the NEXT crisis hits? Because there’s always a next one. Try to think ahead for once.
And the US can only physically pump oil out of the reserve at 4.4 million barrels a day. It takes 13 days from a presidential order before a single barrel reaches the market. So even if they turned the taps on right now, the cavalry doesn’t arrive for two weeks and when it does it can’t keep up with the shortfall.
Meanwhile the bloke who started the war that closed the strait is on local TV in Cincinnati going “we’ll reduce it a little bit then fill it up again” like he’s talking about the fuel tank on his golf cart. And you clapped. You actually clapped.
This isn’t a rescue plan. It’s a press release designed to keep the stock market calm for 48 hours. A band aid on an arterial bleed. Thirty two countries just torched a third of the world’s emergency oil supply because your president started a war he can’t finish, and if this drags past summer, the cupboard is bare, prices are in triple digits, and there is no plan B.
Governor of California, Gavin Newsom our next President of the United States?
Trump says presidents should not have learning disabilities, criticized Newsom.
Gavin has dyslexia, Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson~ ALL HAD DYSLEXIA
I believe Presidents should not have Personality Disorders. Such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid Personality Disorder. They should also not be Sociopaths or Pathological Liars. And they definitely should not have late-stage dementia. Also, I would prefer that the presidents not be a felons, or adjudicated rapists.
One pretty crazy military move that actually worked came out of the recent US-Israel and Iran conflict.
On March 4, 2026 the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) posted a video on their X handle showing infrared footage of a missile strike on what appeared to be a military helicopter, possibly a Mi-17, sitting on the ground in Iran, destroyed.
However, after carefully examining the footage frame by frame, many users and independent analysts pointed out that the helicopter remained intact after the strike, the target showed no debris, no movement. The rotor blades in particular showed no bending or breaking from the explosion.
They concluded that the IDF had struck a decoy, an “anamorphic painting”, which is essentially a life sized painting of real military equipment that appears to be real only from the top down view.
Demented lunatic plans to divert $15M in taxpayer funds for massive self-named independence arch.
First, that’s a fraction of what he will steal from the American taxpayer for the arch once it’s all said and done. Second, I don’t think it ever gets built. We can hope it never is. Trump proves daily he is not mentally stable. Certainly not a fiscal conservative by any stretch of the imagination. If we are in a fiscal crisis, and I believe we are, why are we even talking about vanity projects???
A proposal to move $15 million away from the National Endowment for the Humanities and into a construction project on the National Mall raises an obvious concern: it shifts money away from education, research, libraries, museums, and cultural preservation to fund a single, symbolic structure. Public funds should strengthen institutions that serve the entire country, not be diverted into projects that don’t meet those goals.
There is something terribly wrong with a person desperately wanting to immortalize himself like this. It’s pitiful and pathetic— and costing us a lot in the process.
And not just in dollars and cents.
Why, why would anyone in their right mind think this unnecessary arch is a good idea? And to think the taxpayers should pay for it? Even if some how he gets away with it, he will make it as cheap looking as possible as he has done inside the white house with all the horrible, tasteless gold accents. So, he builds that thing and someday it will probably get torn down with a rope and a truck.
In the world of federal budgeting, $15 million is modest.
In the world of social services, it’s transformative.
Iran keeps saying they do NOT want to talk to USA. They don’t trust USA. IRAN wants reparation.
Trump still lies about everything….and suddenly it’s a war again, not just an “operation”
Keep the oil…take the oil……blasting out “God bless America” on a loop from the WH. Thats totally mad.
Hegseth raves about uncontested air space. Negotiating with bombs.Totally free.! Trump claims that USA can roam free over the skies.
So Iran shoots down two fighters and hits two helicopters, just like that. ………And then Trump claims USA can’t pay Medicare etc….they need the money for war. Meanwhile Rubio says Iran should look after their people instead of spending money on wars…….ooooops! They really need to co ordinate their comments better.
This regime is totally nuts, like kids playing video games.
And then there are the Lego videos, complete with rap……can it get any more embarrassing?
tRump loves to keep digging the hole deeper.
JD Vance
JD Vance said Tuesday that Pope Leo XIV should “be careful” when he talks about theology, rebuking the pontiff over his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy.
A political affair comes to an end as the Meloni-Trump love-in falls apart
Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni’s relationship was rock-solid. She was the only European leader at his inauguration and, in October, he called her a “beautiful young woman”. That has all changed with Iran. She has upset Trump by refusing to send warships to secure the Strait of Hormuz and defending Pope Leo XIV in a war of words over the Iran conflict. Falling out of favour with Trump, however, may not be such a disaster for the Italian premier.
Xi’s ‘wait-and-see’ approach
Xi Jinping discussed the war in Iran when he met with Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain
Xi Jinping, China’s president, has spoken for the first time about the war in Iran. The world must not return to the “law of the jungle”, he said during a Beijing summit with Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain. He also welcomed Sheikh Khaled bin Mohammed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. The Chinese president’s tone, according to China’s state media, was pointed but not panicked.
In parts of Washington, Donald Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is seen as an attempt to force China’s hand. The theory works like this: before the war, nearly half of Beijing’s crude oil imports, around 4 of 11.5 million barrels per day, came through the Strait. That supply is now almost entirely cut off. Starved of oil, might Beijing lean on Iran to accept the terms of Trump’s peace offer? Chinese intervention, after all, was reportedly critical in securing the two-week ceasefire.
For a moment yesterday, it looked like a sanctioned Chinese tanker might try to escape the blockade. But the Rich Starry, which often broadcasts a fake signal to collect oil from Iranian ports, made an about turn after it crossed the Strait. So far, Beijing has not felt it necessary to push Washington too hard. It appears China would rather go without Gulf oil – at least temporarily – than provoke a confrontation.
That owes to long-term thinking. In the past decade, Beijing has built the world’s largest stockpile of emergency oil supplies, holding more than one billion barrels. It has also rapidly developed renewable energy sources. That means it can take a “wait-and-see” approach, rather than press for a ceasefire. As anger in the Gulf grows, Xi hopes to forge new alliances, presenting China as a pillar of stability in a world thrown into chaos by Trump.
Note the two guests in Beijing. Spain leads the European Union’s efforts to deepen ties with China. The United Arab Emirates has long relied on America for security, but its leaders appear quietly open to fresh partnerships in a newly shaken world order.
Joe Rogan
Rogan shifted from backing Trump in 2024 to criticizing him after the Iran war, immigration crackdowns and other issues he views as reckless. He has called MAGA supporters unintelligent.” After he abandoned Trump, Rogan called himself “politically homeless,” and argued that Trump betrayed voters by promising “no more wars” and then taking the U.S. into another Middle East conflict.Rogan has called Trump’s mass deportation effort “insane,” and openly questioned whether the Iran war was a distraction from other issues, like the files for the investigation of trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
While Rogan hasn’t bought into being a Democrat, the broken promises from Trump sent him over the edge.
“It’s so stupid. Neither one of them make any sense to me. We need like, a logical, centrist government that, like, just says there’s a lot of things that we should do to make this country a better place,” Rogan said, complaining about both parties.
The MAGA base has been similarly divided between Trump loyalists and those who bought into the “America First” principle that promised a withdrawal from all U.S. funding being sent to other countries. One of Elon Musk’s big reasons for supporting Trump was the idea of reducing the national debt, but additional conflicts have already prompted Trump to ask Congress for the funds to continue the war.
The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America
Trump’s chief bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
Bullshit. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
Trump becoming ‘a grievance-fueled failure’ — and he hates it
Trump was president for some of the cases!!
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department produced a report Tuesday in which it claimed that President Joe Biden’s DOJ disproportionately targeted anti-choice activists. At least two legal analysts noticed a pretty significant problem with the report, however: Trump was president for some of the cases they used to justify their thesis.
The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic, who writes about the law, has been sifting through the specifics of the 800-page exhibits in the report and noticed that on page 11, the Justice Department cites three cases of the Biden administration targeting activists on the right. All three are from 2020.
“At [DOJ prosecutor Sanjay] Patel’s request or encouragement, [of the National Abortion Federation] NAF provided the Biden DOJ with substantial information that aided in identifying investigation targets and substantiating warrants and prosecutions,” the report claims, referencing footnote 53. The email that it cites in that footnote was between Patel and Megan Healy on Nov. 16, 2020/
“NAF alerted Patel to social media posts that made violent threats against clinics and concerns about protest activities that could constitute blockades in violation of the FACE Act,” the report also said, citing footnote 55. That refers to an email from Aaron Fleisher at CRT to Patel. CRT is how the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is generally abbreviated.
It was about activist Lauren Handy, who has been arrested a number of times for violating the FACE Act, which prohibits protesters from blocking access to women’s clinics. After being arrested in 2022, police discovered five fetuses in her home. She was pardoned by Trump in 2025.
In a Dec. 8, 2020 email, Patel asked NAF’s security director: ‘I can’t recall if you ever shared anything with me (either through an attachment or via Dropbox) about Jonathan Darnell’s arrest … If you did, can you resend that to me?”
All of these contacts came from the Trump administration, not under Biden, as Biden didn’t take power until Jan. 20, 2021.
Jurecic needled the report, saying, “In its ‘weaponization’ report on the FACE Act, DOJ once again struggles to answer the most difficult question of all: who was president in 2020?”
Lawfare’s Anna Bower joined in the mockery, writing, “This report on the ‘Biden Administration’s Weaponization of the FACE Act’ repeatedly cites conduct that occurred…during the first Trump administration.”
In her mentions, folks joked about how much Trump blames Biden for what happened under his watch in 2020. Someone posted a photo of MAGA fans storming the U.S. Capitol, calling them “Biden supporters” as a joke. Another explained that electing someone in 2020 and having them sworn in the following year was too complex for some to understand.
Lawfare’s Eric Columbus pointed out, “The FACE Act is the basis for DOJ’s dubious prosecution of Don Lemon and dozens more regarding a January protest in a St. Paul, MN church.” He’s written in detail about why that might be a difficult case to make.
Heather Cox Richardson
Apr 15
There are signs the political game has changed in the United States since Hungarian voters rejected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership on Sunday, April 12. His party’s loss of control of the government to a supermajority of its opponents undermined the belief that right-wing authoritarianism was an unstoppable force in world politics.
Since MAGA Republicans had tied themselves to Orbán and his movement, his loss also weakened their own claims to inevitable victory over those trying to protect democracy.
On Sunday night, President Donald J. Trump appeared to melt down on social media. In The Atlantic today, Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s “emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.” Nichols notes that after Trump attacked the Pope and portrayed himself as Jesus, he posted an AI version of a Trump Tower on the moon. (“Sure,” Nichols writes. “Why not?”)
Then Trump posted a meme of how senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former president Joe Biden all look old—unlike Trump—and then posted clips from Newsmax. The postings continued throughout the night. “This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader,” Nichols writes. “The American people must not look away…. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.”
Trump has tried to explain away the AI image he posted on social media on Sunday depicting himself as Jesus, clothed in robes, bathed in radiant light, and apparently healing a man in bed. After an extraordinary outcry over the image from his evangelical Christian followers, he took the image down, telling reporters “I thought it was me as a doctor” and claiming that “only the fake news” could suggest the image showed him as Jesus. He added: “I do make people better.”
With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.
“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation,” Raskin said in a statement.
Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.
Today, when asked if he were comfortable with Trump’s threat of last week that an entire civilization would die if it did not meet his demands, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) changed the subject by saying: “You’ve got to…look at what the president is doing, and I think right now he’s trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, which…we are all supportive of.” The strait was, of course, open before Trump attacked Iran.
The Lincoln Project accused Republicans of “ignoring Trump’s sharp mental decline the same way they’ve ignored his crimes.”
Trump’s erratic behavior has led the U.S. into disaster by striking Iran, which in turn attacked its neighbors and closed the Strait of Hormuz. After unsuccessfully bullying other nations to force Iran to reopen the strait to all ships, not just to those of certain nations, Trump last week declared a ceasefire and a framework for an agreement, then suggested the U.S. and Iran would together manage the strait. When Iran continued to maintain control of it, Trump announced the U.S. would blockade the strait to make sure no ships at all could cross through it, with the idea that the U.S. can withstand the economic pain that closure will cause for a longer time than Iran can.
Data released today show that wholesale inflation has risen to 4%, the highest annual rate in three years. Today Marta Pacheco of EuroNews reported that the last of the vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran have reached Europe. Analysts expect a new surge in energy prices. In Talking Points Memo today, David Kurtz points out that the economic mess in which the U.S., and the world, finds itself is entirely Trump’s fault. The trade wars, unjustified war in the Middle East, and attacks on U.S. science, universities, and immigration that are throttling economic growth are all a product of Trump’s personal choices.
As the war enters its seventh week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that Senate Democrats will repeatedly force votes on war powers resolutions designed to force Trump to get congressional authorization before any further military action in Iran. “Forty-five days into this war, Congress has been sidelined because our Republican colleagues refuse to take a strong stand against this war and duck it completely because they’re afraid of Trump,” Schumer said today.
Thune and other Republicans countered with the belief that the war won’t go on much longer, and they support Trump’s actions.
Today former attorney general Pam Bondi was scheduled to testify under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the Department of Justice’s handling of the release of the Epstein files. The DOJ has released only about half of those files despite a law requiring it to produce them all no later than December 19 of last year. Many of the records it did release are heavily redacted, despite the very few and very specific conditions under which Congress allowed such redactions.
Bondi did not show up.
The Department of Justice is taking the position that since she was subpoenaed as attorney general and no longer holds that position, the subpoena was no longer in force.
Democrats on the committee disagree.
Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who was a prosecutor before she entered the House, posted: “Pam Bondi refused to show up for today’s Oversight deposition—defying our lawful subpoena. We couldn’t care less that she was fired from her job as Attorney General. She is responsible for leading the White House cover-up of the Epstein files. Since she didn’t show up, Oversight Democrats will move to hold her in contempt of Congress. The survivors deserve justice—and we will get answers. Enough is enough.”
Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told the Weeknight: “People have to be held accountable for the laws that we pass in the Congress and the subpoenas that we put in place.”
Trump gets caught in a HUMILIATING lie by every single one of our ex-presidents!
Trump’s impulsive and irrepressible urge to lie all the time has got him in trouble once again. Perhaps he didn’t think anyone would bother following up after he declared that an ex-President had called him up to thank him for starting a needless, disastrous war with Iran and to tell him that he was doing the right thing, but they did, and it turns out – shocker – Trump made the entire thing up.
“Look, for 47 years, no president was willing to do what I’m doing,” said Trump. “And they should have done it a long time ago. It would have been a lot easier. There’s no president that wanted to do it. And yet every president knew. I’ve spoken to a certain president, who I like, actually — a past president — former president,” Trump added. “He said, ‘I wish I did it. I wish I did.’ But they didn’t do it. I’m doing it.
Reporters took note of this and started reaching out to representatives for our four surviving ex-Presidents.
CNN White House correspondent Samantha Waldenburg reported that “all four living former US presidents have not talked to President Trump about Iran, aides tell @jeffzeleny and I, raising questions about about whether such a conversation actually took place.”
OF COURSE IT DIDN’T TAKE PLACE! He made it up, like he makes up everything, because he is a pathological liar who is also immensely insecure and constantly in need of validation.
In this case, he’s feeling such insecurity and regret over starting an illegal war of choice with Iran that is wildly unpopular, sending gas prices through the roof, and getting Americans killed, that he’s felt the need to invent praise from his predecessors, who were all not stupid enough to do this.
This is beyond pathetic and yet another reminder of just how unfit this senile old pervert is to lead our nation.
That would require that he has *humility*, *conscience*, or any sense of actual decency.
People are turning on him; but I really doubt that Trump has been “humiliated” as media claims.
That would require that he has *humility*, *conscience*, or any sense of actual decency.
He has none of those things. Now that the GOP and the SCOTUS have decided to treat him as a dictator with unquestioned power, he is acting out his most base instincts, which is to be a total psychopath that inflicts pain on people because he enjoys it.
Trump does not care if he has the support of the American people. This isn’t a President for the People. He’s going to keep doing exactly what he wants regardless. He doesn’t need any of the MAGA screamer votes any longer.
He’s using the position to enrich himself, his family and BENEFACTORS. No other President has ever BROADCAST decisions that will cause MARKET MOVES the way this man has. And everyone knows its PURPOSEFUL.
He only cares how much money he & family can make off his deals, screw the little people, which exactly what he’s doing.
He also scammed his very poor loyal voters, and doing the opposite of campaign promise. Anyone still sticking up for him doesn’t have independent thought process.
Is that Epstein? That germaphobe laying hands on Epstein?
Trump sees himself as a deity, but it’s “all in his own mind.” Because in the brief window between Ramadan, Passover, and Easter, Trump has managed to “alienate every major religious group on the planet”—mocking Muslims with his “praise be to Allah” remarks and calling any Jew who doesn’t support him an “idiot.” It’s not just political suicide; it’s “bizarrely self-destructive, narcissistic, megalomaniacal lunacy,”
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The “Worst Idiot in History”: a rather convincing—and terrifying—case for why Trump earns the title of history’s “most powerful idiot.” “it’s not that he’s playing 4D chess; it’s that he’s eating the pieces.” The danger lies in the power he wields despite a total lack of intellectual or moral depth. From fumbling the Iran deal to his bizarre rants about the Pope, Trump is a man who’s constantly tripping over his own ego. He seems to have a unique “talent” of destroying everything he touches while convinced he’s winning a Nobel Prize for it.
Trump stole this from Nick Adams a Christian Nationalist.
Kennedy has a fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause harm
The Trump administration’s assault on vaccine science has taken a predictable turn. Bombshell reporting from the Washington Post just revealed that Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has secretly blocked publication of a report that concludes COVID-19 vaccines are a significant boost to public health.
Two CDC scientists, speaking to WaPo anonymously out of fear for retaliation, said the report found that COVID vaccines drastically minimize risk of hospitalization after catching the virus. According to the study, healthy adults who received a jab reduced their risk of urgent care visits by 50 percent, and their risk of a hospital stay by 55 percent, compared to those who went unvaccinated.
The report had been slated to run on March 19 in the CDC’s research journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Bhattacharya, however, delayed the piece, arguing that there were concerns with the study’s methodology.
“Dr. Bhattacharya wants to make sure that the paper uses the most appropriate methodology for such a study,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told the paper.
As WaPo notes, a similar report using the exact same methodology to study the common flu vaccine ran in MMWR a week earlier.
The episode is incredibly fishy, following the playbook of HHS secretary and infamous vaccine skeptic RFK Jr, who previously called the COVID shot the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” In 2025, the Food and Drug Administration, a sub-agency of the HHS, moved to greatly limit access to the vaccine.
“The secretary has already taken steps to try and remove the availability of the vaccine from children and others,” former CDC safety director Daniel Jernigan told WaPo. “So if you’re putting out an MMWR that the vaccine is effective at preventing hospitalizations and medical care visits… that message is not line with the direction you’ve been taking with the removal of the vaccine.”
It’s only the latest in a laundry list of antivaxx moves by the HHS since Donald Trump appointed RFK to his current role.
Late in 2025, it was revealed that RFK’s HHS was planning a monstrous vaccine study which would have intentionally withheld hepatitis B vaccines from 7,000 newborn children in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The purpose for the trial, medical experts argued, was for Donald Trump’s political appointees to make a “spurious association” between a well established vaccine and vaguely defined neurological problems.
“He [RFK Jr] has a fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause harm,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told the Guardian at the time. “He will do everything he can to try and prove that.”
tRump as a doctor??
https://x.com/i/status/2043731872757493835
If it was just him as “a doctor” why did he take it down? Idiocy.
Which is it? A BLOCKADE? or “34 ships went through”?
President Trump’s new blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, during which the U.S. military will block Iranian ports and stop some ships looking to enter the key waterway, took effect Monday as talks with Iran faltered over the weekend.
Upset Iran closed the waterway, tRump is closing it himself???
These posts are insane.
There comes a time where someone needs to step in.
More idiocy from “Dear Leader”, no he is NOT God, or Jesus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/13/trump-jesus-religious-conservatives/
This, America, is your president. The “ stable Genius who works 24/7 for the country”. In the middle of the night he rages on Social media. threatens the Pope and the Vatican …..( is he actually threatening the Vatican with the military?) …..and posts images of himself as Jesus Christ. He posts fake pictures of Bruce Springsteen.
What, however, offends me to the core, is the image of Trump as Jesus Christ. Whether you are religious or not, whether you believe Christ was the son of God, whether you are Muslim and believe he was a prophet, or if you are an atheist and believe Christ was just a historical figure, a man who did good deeds, but just a man, this should offend you. Trump, the most selfish, corrupted , narcissistic individual in the world, seeing himself as a Christ like image, is too ugly for words.
Worse still in the background of that image are fighter jets, eagles, soldiers . He thinks God is on his side. That creep is completely , obviously and undeniably stark raving batshit crazy, and unfit to be president
Short answer: No — he did not end up purchasing it.
Here’s what actually happened:
- In 2008, Donald Trump announced he would buy Ed McMahon’s Beverly Hills home to help him avoid foreclosure and let him keep living there.
- However, the deal never went through.
- McMahon instead found another buyer, and although Trump later said he was still willing, he never completed the purchase.
- Trump publicly offered to purchase the home and lease it back to McMahon.
- But:
- The deal appears to have been more of a public gesture than a finalized contract
- Another buyer stepped in
- The foreclosure situation moved forward quickly
👉 So the common story that Trump “bought Ed McMahon’s house” is partly a myth — he offered to, but did not actually buy it.
Sources have confirmed that the CIA planned to arm Iranian groups opposed to the fundamentalist regime, and they were supposed to launch an uprising after Trump launched his first wave of strikes on Iran.
Trump himself admitted the operation went awry. “You know we sent some guns,” the president said in an off-guard moment at Monday’s White House Easter Egg Roll. “But the group that was supposed to give, which I said would happen to my people, I said it, I called it exactly.
“We sent guns, a lot of guns,” Trump continued. “They were supposed to go to the people, so they could fight back against these thugs. Know what happened? The people that they sent them to kept them. Because they said, ‘What a beautiful gun. I think I’ll keep it.’ So I’m very upset with a certain group of people, and they’re going to pay a big price for that.”
The revolution never happened. Instead, the Iranian people were told their entire civilization would be sent back to the Stone Age. Now they have to worry about their own government and the Americans who were supposed to save them.
As “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth said at his Pentagon press briefing yesterday. “We wish them the best.”…
NATO was there when we asked at 9-11. They will be there if we need defense, tRump does not want NATO to exist, but it will be there, we did not need defense this time, and NATO is not there to help a bully kill people and ruin other countries.
What is it with tRump and Greenland???
Yesterday, Trump posted the above
Now, I ask you: If you were in the Iranian regime, would you be: (1) frightened by this post or (2) relieved that you were finally causing Trump to melt down?
I’d guess (2). You’d see his post and figure that Trump — posting on Easter Sunday — has finally gone utterly and definitively bonkers. You’ve done it. He’s mad as a hatter.
I was bullied as a kid. The way I knew I was winning against the bullies was when they started to scream and swear and rant and rave at me. That’s when I knew they felt powerless. They’d done everything they could to beat me down, and yet they couldn’t. I was tougher than their fists. They went nuts.
Is there any other explanation for Trump’s outburst? Many of Trump’s posts are really intended for domestic consumption. Perhaps he wanted to sound tough for his American followers?
That’s unlikely. Just Wednesday night he told America that the U.S. doesn’t “need” the strait to be open. If we don’t need it open, why threaten to blow up Iranian power plants (most likely war crimes) if Iran doesn’t open it?
The easiest explanation is the simplest: Trump is cornered, and he’s going stark-raving mad.
No less an expert on the workings of Trump’s brain than Marjorie Taylor Greene had this to say about Trump’s post:
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”
I’ve never agreed with Marjorie Taylor Greene on anything, until today.
Sleep well.
Robert Reich
IRAN JUST OFFERED EUROPE A HORMUZ DEAL. YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY JUST TRIGGERED.
On the surface: Iran offered the EU transit access through the Strait of Hormuz. Sounds like a small diplomatic move. It is not.
This is a goddamn financial nuclear bomb.
💀 The Hormuz Strait carries 20% of ALL the world’s oil
💀 Europe’s energy bill jumped $16.2 BILLION in just 30 days
💀 Natural gas in Europe is up 100%. Oil up 60%. Diesel at $200/barrel
💀 Dollar reserves have already fallen from 70% to 56.9% in 25 years
⚠️ If Europe takes this deal, they pay in euros — not dollars
⚠️ One major non-dollar oil deal is all it takes to show the world it CAN be done
The petrodollar is the most powerful financial system ever created. Born in 1974. It forced every nation on Earth to hold dollars just to buy oil. That’s the entire basis of US financial dominance.
If that system cracks — BRICS accelerates, Gulf states reconsider, dollar demand collapses, and America can no longer fund its $34 trillion debt on easy terms.
ECB board member Panetta said it on April 2: “Even if the Iran war ends, the damage has been done.”
They’re showing you a war about nuclear weapons and regional security.
They’re NOT showing you that the REAL war is over who gets to print the world’s reserve currency.
→ Iran blocks Hormuz for the US. Opens it for EU with a deal.
→ EU, desperate and bleeding, seriously considers taking the deal.
→ Deal gets done in euros or yuan. Not dollars.
→ Every country watching — BRICS, Global South, Gulf states — sees it happen.
→ “If the EU can bypass the dollar, so can we.”
→ Dollar demand falls. Reserve share collapses. US inflation rises.
If America is so powerful, why is the EU considering a deal with the country America is bombing?
Complete silence.
This is no longer just a Middle East war.
This is a direct attack on the petrodollar. And the US.
Sad that we have to get our news from others
Report: Downed US airman couldn’t make contact at first because he was concussed; US destroyed own rescue planes to avoid Iran taking them5 April 2026, 9:44 pm
A handout photo, provided by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official website Sepah News on April 5, 2026, shows smoke billowing reportedly from the site of smashed US aircraft in central Iran.
Quoting unnamed, apparently Israeli sources, Channel 12 offers specific details of how the rescue of the second US F-15 crewmember played out, including high drama when the two main US rescue planes ($2,000,000 loss) got stuck in the sand and were blown up by American bombs.
The weapons systems officer was unconscious and lightly concussed from his landing, and therefore was unable to make initial contact with US forces after ejecting and landing in Iran on Friday morning, the report says.
At noon, Israel time, he made contact from the highest point he could find to avoid being captured.
He then walked 10-12 kilometers (6-7.5 miles), hid in a crevice, and on Friday night sent a specific location, the report says.
Israel refrained from attacking in that area and helped with specific intelligence, the sources said. This contradicts American accounts, which say Israel provided only general intelligence assistance.
Over Friday and Saturday, Israel was asked by the US to assist in ensuring air supremacy in the area, and attacked “relevant targets.”
Ahead of the rescue, the Americans took control of some kind of mini-airfield or agricultural field and secured it, according to the report. Two US C-130 planes with Little Bird helicopters landed there.
The helicopters then flew to extricate the crewman from his hiding place and returned with him, in “exhausted” condition, to the secured field.
When the aircraft were taking off, there was “real drama” when the C-130s got stuck in the sand and were unable to lift off. Three lighter aircraft were called in and they evacuated the crewman and the rest of the 90-strong rescue team, the report says.
US warplanes then blew up the C-130s, as later seen in Iranian propaganda pictures, so that they would not fall intact into Iranian hands.
China is dumping US dollars, buying gold.
China is dumping US dollars. That we’ve known for a long time, but now it’s entering a new phase. China is now taking a 10% loss on the sales, and that can only mean that China is getting ready to completely exit all of its USD assets so that it can’t become a hostage to seizure by the Americans or the EU.
Better to lose 10% than to lose 100%. Much like what happened to Russia when the Ukraine war started, the cash might become frozen. If China wants to work on Taiwan, then it’s guaranteed that these foreign assets will be frozen. It’s not buying other currency, it’s buying physical commodities, like gold, copper, lithium, etc.
In the meantime, the American vassals, er, allies are being forced to buy up the bonds that China is dumping, to keep the value of the USD high. Do you think China is getting ready to act on Taiwan, that’s why it’s dumping the US bonds?
Follow the Money
From Robert Reich:
Friends,
It’s important that we demonstrated against Trump’s assertion of royal powers.
It’s at least as important to follow the money — and learn the identities of America’s billionaire royalty who crowned Trump in the first place. They’re now spending another regal fortune to keep Congress under his control.
Today I’m going to name names.
As of March 1, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness, the 50 biggest-spending billionaires in American politics had already contributed over $433 million to the upcoming midterm political campaigns.
Not surprisingly, 80 percent of this haul is in support of Republican candidates or conservative issue groups.
Given how early we are in the process, and how contributions tend to accelerate closer to Election Day, 2026 will almost surely set a new record for billionaire money in midterm elections. (Because of our current pathetically weak campaign finance laws, courtesy of the Supreme Court, fat-cat contributors are funneling huge sums through super PACs. While such spending is supposed to be independent of the campaign being supported, rules against coordination are now going largely unenforced.)
WHO THEY ARE
MUSK
The single biggest contributor is, of course, Elon Musk — the world’s richest person — who has plunked down almost $71 million into Republican midterm campaigns so far.
Musk contributed a total of $278 million in the 2024 election cycle, mostly for getting Trump reelected. His “investment” has paid off nicely. Musk’s net worth has grown 220 percent since Trump won in 2024.
Musk’s latest cash infusion to Republicans came after his short destructive stint as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” where he helped place his cronies into high-level positions throughout the federal government.
Yes, I know. Musk and Trump had a falling out. But since then both have realized they have more to gain as political partners. And now that Musk’s SpaceX satellite system is integral to Pete Hegseth’s Department of “War,” Musk has filed for an initial public offering, seeking a valuation over $2 trillion and potentially raising $75 billion, which would make it the largest IPO in history.
The New York Times reports that Musk participated in a phone call on Tuesday with Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. Musk’s companies have taken on significant investment from sovereign wealth funds from Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and he has long coveted a greater commercial presence in India.
YASS
Musk is followed in the billionaire-spending-on-politics sweepstakes by Wall Street financier Jeff Yass, who has contributed more than $55 million so far in this midterm election cycle. He’s donated $16 million to MAGA, Inc., Trump’s super PAC, dedicated to supporting candidates he backs.
The Yass donations came as Trump was deciding whether to delay the forced sale of the social media app TikTok, in which Yass was a major investor. Trump repeatedly delayed the sale, saving Yass’s lucrative investment.
In addition, Yass has donated $10 million apiece to the anti-tax Club for Growth PAC; to another PAC that wants to drain funds from public schools to support private ones; and to a PAC that supports the political ambitions of former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Yass has also donated $7.5 million to a PAC dedicated to supporting House members of (and House candidates aspiring to belong to) the radical-right Freedom Caucus.
BROCKMAN
In third place is San Francisco AI tech mogul Greg Brockman, who has given $25 million in midterm money so far — mostly to Trump’s super PAC, presumably because Brockman wants to dismantle state-level AI regulations through federal preemptive action and thinks Trump will help him.
As president of OpenAI, Brockman recently agreed to let the Pentagon use his company’s AI technology — which his competitor Anthropic publicly refused to do over concerns about mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
UIHLEIN
Packaging titan Dick Uihlein has long been a major donor to right-wing candidates and causes. (Among the beneficiaries of his largesse have been many politicians who denied Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.)
The biggest recipients of Uihlein midterm money so far are two super PACs for which Uihlein and his wife are the principal backers: $5 million to Restoration of America, supporting conservative political candidates; and $3.5 million to Fair Courts America, which the Uihleins founded to support conservative candidates for judicial office.
SCHWARZMAN
Private equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman has long been a major Republican Party megadonor. As CEO of the giant investment management company Blackstone, Schwarzman has built a career on predatory business practices and disregard for the public good, while leveraging his immense wealth to rig the system in his favor.
So far in the midterms, Schwarzman has spent: $5 million for Trump’s super PAC; $5 million for the Republican Senate Leadership Fund; $1 million for the Republican Congressional Leadership Fund; and $1 million to a super PAC exclusively backing Republican Senate Whip John Cornyn.
***
As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence from the British monarchy, it’s more important than ever to commit ourselves to getting big money out of American politics.
As I’ve noted, here’s a potential way to do this without waiting for the Supreme Court to reverse its Citizens United decision or amending the Constitution. Another is through small-donor financing. The two aren’t mutually exclusive; indeed, we should push for both.
Billionaires are not singularly responsible for corrupting our system of government, of course — and not all billionaires are doing this.
But as wealth continues to concentrate at the top, America finds itself in a doom loop in which giant campaign donations from the super-rich buy political decisions that make them even richer.
This doom loop is the power behind the throne on which Trump (shits) sits.
Last fall, Donald Trump signed a terrifying new order called NPSM-7, directing federal law-enforcement agencies to investigate progressive activist organizations as “domestic terrorists.”
Now the Trump regime has scored its first conviction under NSPM-7.
A Fort Worth, Texas, jury just convicted eight anti-ICE protestors for providing “material support for terrorism” because — and I swear we’re not making this up — they wore black to a protest.”
The Incident: Prosecutors characterized the July 4, 2025 event not as a peaceful protest but as an ambush, alleging defendants were dressed in black tactical gear and used coordinated tactics to assault federal agents.
Evidence and Accusations: Reports indicate evidence included evidence of a planned attack, with allegations that suspects used fireworks, and had weapons, body armor, and signal jammers. One individual was also convicted of attempted murder.
Legal Precedent: This case was heavily scrutinized as a potential turning point for using federal anti-terrorism statutes against domestic activists. The Guardian The Guardian +6 The defendants, identified in some reports as Song, Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Megan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto, face up to 15 years in prison on the material support count.
The assault must not have been bad because no one was hurt.
tRump’s administration has collected “the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system.”
Trump’s administration has collected the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system,” saying this occurred because of his various travel bans and other anti-immigrant policies.
“The State Department is actively instructing consular officers NOT to tell applicants they’re banned, even as those applicants pay fees and attend interviews,” “The government is cashing those checks and then doing nothing. That’s fraud not delay.”
“The people said trade officials in the Commerce Department and U.S. trade representatives believed the tariffs were hurting consumers by raising prices for goods”
This Was the Moment Donald Trump Lost His Mojo
He’s forgotten the thing that first got him elected: more daycare, no cuts to Medicare or other programs.
Jonathan Cohn
Apr 05, 2026
Donald Trump on April 1, 2026
DONALD TRUMP LAST WEEK gave an unexpectedly low key but candid riff on his governing priorities—and, in the process, revealed that he’s losing one of his most important political skills.
It happened on Wednesday, during a private Easter luncheon at the White House. Here’s what Trump said:
“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay—they’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them, to make up for—but we—it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [basis]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
Typically, Republican leaders try very hard to deny they are starving social programs to fund the military, leaving Democrats to make the case on their own. Yet here was Trump coming right out and saying it. And while the president frequently blurts out statements that have no bearing on reality, in this case his description of how he’d like to rearrange federal spending priorities was pretty much on the nose.
In fact, just two days after he made those remarks, his administration released its budget for fiscal year 2027. It envisions a $1.5 trillion increase for defense, then proposes to offset that cost with a 10 percent reduction in domestic spending. Among the casualties would be a program that helps low-income Americans pay for heating and cooling—yes, right at a time when electricity prices are on the rise.
Not that it takes a new budget to see Trump’s priorities in action. It’s been less than a year since he worked with Republicans to pass historic cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, while refusing to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies holding down insurance premiums for more than 20 million people.
None of this has been popular. Most Americans are opposed to the Iran war, according to polling, just as most Americans opposed the Medicaid cuts and wanted to see those “Obamacare” subsidies stay in place. That’s going to hurt in the midterms, as my Bulwark colleague Catherine Rampell observed last week.
But Wednesday’s riff and the governing record it matches threaten to undermine Trump’s appeal in another, more fundamental way—one that requires thinking back to 2015 when he was first seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE—more than ten years!—so it’s easy to forget the extent to which Trump presented himself as a different kind of Republican, one who was willing to buck his own party’s establishment.
A lot of this was about trade, war, and immigration—how, as Trump told it, Republican elites had bankrupted the country with foreign interventions and sold out working Americans by shipping jobs over to China, all while allowing the country to be overrun with dangerous immigrants stealing everyday jobs. But Trump went out of his way to say he disagreed with the GOP establishment on matters of the welfare state as well.
“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he told the Daily Signal in 2015, making a promise he’d repeat many times over the course of the campaign.
And while Trump from day one was pledging to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he repeatedly told audiences, interviewers, and anybody else who would listen that he would replace it with something better, so nobody had to go without health care.
“Everybody’s got to be covered,” Trump told 60 Minutes in 2015, adding, “This is an un-Republican thing for me.”
Trump, in making this pitch, sounded a lot like a political archetype familiar in Europe, where some right-leaning parties have long opposed immigration while supporting government programs that provide generous health care, childcare, and other benefits. There’s even a term in the political science literature for this type of appeal: “welfare chauvinism.”
But anybody following Trump closely had good reason to question whether his pledges would translate to actual policy. His campaign rarely released formal policy proposals, and when they did they were comically devoid of details. During debates, he served up gobbledygook. Word got around that (as Trump more or less admitted) he strongly preferred memos keep to no more than a single page, preferably with graphs and visual cues, suggesting he was either uninterested or uninformed or both—and that, in office, he’d defer to congressional leaders who were precisely the old-style Republicans he said he was rejecting.
Which is just what happened, especially during his first year in office. Trump embraced congressional plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have wreaked havoc with coverage for tens of millions of people, slashing Medicaid and private insurance subsidies to pay for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans. And while he didn’t succeed on repeal, he did get the tax cut.
Through it all, however, Trump talked a good game on standing by the welfare state, including during the 2018 midterm campaign when he accused Democrats of attacking the big entitlement programs. “They’re going to hurt your Social Security so badly, and they’re killing you on Medicare,” he declared at one rally. “Just remember that. I’m going to protect your Social Security.”
Trump also made a high-profile effort to show he was prepared to help families dealing with the strains of work and raising children, most memorably in 2019 when he convened a White House summit on the subject. “With more women working today than ever before, we now have a historic opportunity to enact long-overdue reforms,” Trump said. “It’s time to pass paid family leave and expand access to quality childcare.”
THAT CHILDCARE AND PAID LEAVE EFFORT was supposed to be led by Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, who back then was both a visible administration spokesperson and a regular presence in the West Wing. But it never got a real push from the White House.
Ivanka isn’t part of this new Trump administration, and neither is warm presidential rhetoric about providing struggling parents with help getting time off or paying for childcare. In fact, it’s hard to think of a single meaningful thing Trump has said on the subject—except those comments this past Wednesday, when Trump said the federal government couldn’t afford it.
Probably the closest Trump has come to channeling his first-term self on social welfare has been when he talks about prescription drug prices. He has put a lot of energy into negotiating deals with pharmaceutical manufacturers that—in the White House’s telling—are right now producing dramatic drops in the prices of prescription drugs.2 But the savings are mostly illusory, and hardly enough to offset the big price hikes for the more than 20 million Americans who had been getting assistance from those lapsed Affordable Care Act subsidies.
And that effect is hitting already. New data compiled from HealthInsurance.org shows that 10 percent of people who bought insurance this year shifted from “silver” to less generous “bronze” plans, almost certainly because they couldn’t keep up with rising premiums. That’s on top of people who are just eating the cost increases, or going uninsured altogether.
Whether that registers politically is a separate question. It depends on whether voters link their hardship to decisions that Trump and his Republican allies have made, which depends in part on whether Democrats can show the link exists. But Trump’s daycare riff on Wednesday makes that easy. Democrats can just run ads playing his remarks, verbatim.
The president gave them a gift. The one who occupied the Oval Office ten years ago never would have made that mistake.
Although snippets of video from Trump’s comments are easy to find online, the full video of the event he was speaking at does not appear on the White House homepage or YouTube channel. It turns out that Trump’s staff took down the video—reportedly because at one point Paula White, his spiritual adviser, compared him to Jesus.
Trump on Thursday announced new tariffs that would apply to the drug companies yet to reach deals with the administration. But it’s not clear what impact they will have.
Easter was banned in early America.
Public worship at Plymouth by the Pilgrims
Author Michael Nordine
March 26, 2026
“They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday,” the Puritans liked to say, which helps explain why Easter was banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (It also wasn’t widely celebrated in other parts of colonial America, including Jamestown, where it was observed with little fanfare.) The Bible didn’t mention holidays, the Puritans reasoned, so even one like Easter — which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ and is perhaps the holiest day in all Christianity — was verboten.
The Puritans likened such celebrations to paganism, to which they wanted to remove all references. Christmas was banned alongside Easter in 1659 in Massachusetts, with the law stating that people caught observing the holidays “either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”
The Puritans first arrived in New England in the early 17th century, settling around what’s now Boston. They believed that only “the elect” would be chosen for salvation and that most people would be damned, leading them to be as stringent as possible in their religious practices. Because Easter is always observed on a Sunday, banning it caused a problem for preachers delivering sermons on what would have been Easter Sunday — a pickle often solved by simply talking about something else
The no celebrations (Easter, Christmas, birthdays, etc.) is still practiced by some, including my daughter’s husband. I was brought up to believe only 144,000 people were going to heaven and I strived to become one of them by reading the Bible four times, cover to cover. But that only uncovered many doubts!
tRump claims to be a Christian, but he is not
Besides Christianity is based upon an older religion Zoroastrianism !
The most important people in religion could be named Jesus Christ, Muhammad, or the Buddha. But there is an important religious thinker from a very remote time who is the basis on the fundamental beliefs of all the major western religions. This is Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks). He was a mystic, poet, and revolutionary living in ancient Persia (modern Iran) between 1500-1000 BC. When he lived there was much chaos in the world, with many gods (polytheism), and many sacrifices made to these gods as well as by humans due to the fate of existence being controlled by the god of fate. The world being created and controlled by many gods and randomness was not what Zoroaster was talking about, and he came up with an incredibly different view of the world.
He was able to describe a single Supreme God who had created everything, and Zoroaster offered the existence of a cosmic war between good and evil. He also discussed a place for the good in heaven and the bad in hell. He spoke about a future time when all mankind would be judged and punished for their actions, a messiah would come to save mankind, and there would be a resurrection from the dead.
The ideas of Zoroaster were to become the core beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The staggering number of similarities, which can be found in the Gathas (Zoroastrian hymns) and those that developed in the Abrahamic religions, illustrate the emergence of universal spiritual ideas throughout time and across cultures.
Persia, the home of the most powerful religious thinker of all time. His central idea (the absolute requirement of personal moral responsibility) is a very viable practical philosophy.
The One and the Two
Prior to Zoroaster’s time, the ancient Iranian religion was closely aligned with the Vedic religion found in India. The ancient Iranian religion represented a world filled with gods (daevas), complex rituals, and a realization that the universe actually operated based solely on the forces of nature, rather than upon moral forces.
According to legend, at age 30 Zoroaster experienced a mystical experience when he was taken into the presence of Ahura Mazda, the “Lord of All Wisdom.” During this experience, Zoroaster came to understand that Ahura Mazda was not simply another god among many; rather, he was the only uncreated, ultimate Creator of the universe. He was completely good, completely just, and completely light-giving.
However, this led to another philosophical problem: If the Creator was wholly good, what is the origin of evil? Zoroaster’s response to this question was profound and revolutionary. He developed the idea of cosmic dualism. The opposite of Ahura Mazda, he taught, was an independent, destructive being called Angra Mainyu (later called Ahriman). Angra Mainyu was the catalyst behind darkness, decay, disease, and deception.
Thus, evil was born. For the first time in history, evil has been identified as an immensely intelligent force acting to destroy God’s creation, not just a natural force, nor just a manifestation of a whimsical god’s emotions.
The Cosmic Battle and the Power of Choice
According to Zoroaster’s version, the universe as a whole is in a continuous battle between Light (Ahura Mazda) and Darkness (Angra Mainyu). But Zoroaster’s belief is that, since Ahura Mazda created us, we are not to be passive victims of this battle; rather, we are to be active partners with Ahura Mazda.
Zoroaster taught that all human beings possess free will and therefore are not beholden to predestined fate or to the whims of the gods. Every day, every hour, every minute, and every second, we are confronted with the choice to support either the forces of Light or the forces of Darkness. Simply stated, the most basic idea of Zoroastrianism is that we must always choose:
“Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds”
(Humata, Hukhta, Hvarshta)
By making positive moral decisions to choose truth over lies, construct kindness instead of cruelty, or create as opposed to destroy etc., you are giving power to the side of Light and aiding Ahura Mazda in winning the battle.
This creates an opportunity for humans to elevate their lives to a level of universal significance. Each human being’s choice is of great importance, as their moral choices are connected to their assistive participation in redeeming the universe.
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The Babylonian Connection: A Convergence of Ideas
How was it possible for the teachings of an ancient Persian prophet to have so much in common with the teachings of both Judaism and Christianity? One of the major historical times when these two disparate cultures crossed paths was when a new nation arose in Babylon: the Babylonian exile. During the Babylonian Exile in 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians were victorious over the city of Jerusalem (destroying the First Temple) and took many of the Jewish leaders into captivity in Babylon. Fifty years later, the Persian King Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and released the Jews at that time by permitting them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.
When Jewish scholars and priests lived within the borders of the Persian Empire, they were also living very close to the Persian people and their Zoroastrian beliefs and practices. Prior to the Babylonian exile, most of what we define as early Jewish texts/Scriptures were not preoccupied with cosmic adversary or fiery hell, but rather viewed the afterlife as an unknown and therefore, a lowly space, called Sheol, a shadowy realm.
Following the Babylonian Exile, during the Second Temple Period, Jews became increasingly concerned with the theological tenets that would have parallels to those of Zoroastrianism. Satan’s role in Jewish theology changed from being a prosecutor in the heavenly court (Book of Job) to serving as a cosmic adversary of God. Many of the major theological themes (final judgment, resurrection from death, separation of souls into heaven and hell) became core to the Jewish understanding during this time.
Many scholars do not see these theological developments as a simple process of copying from one culture to another, but rather as a profound convergence. The presence of Zoroastrianism may have acted as a catalyst or common language that allowed Jewish thinkers at that time to better understand/clarify and adapt their present understanding of spiritual truths that were already emerging within their own tradition. These important concepts of moral choice, divine justice and ultimate redemption have found their fullest development in Christianity and Islam.
Three Zoroastrian Practices for Modern Life
Zoroaster’s teachings offer a powerful, action-oriented philosophy for living with purpose and integrity today. Here are three ways to apply his wisdom:
1. The Daily Alignment (Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds):
When you wake up in the morning, make an effort to create a mental connection with the forces of Creation. Then make a commitment to yourself that you will do your best to have good thoughts, good words, and good deeds today. When you have to make a decision, think about how this will affect your life and ask yourself if it is constructive or destructive. Ask yourself if it is true or false. By focusing on these three basic forms of morality, you establish a set of guidelines for how to live during the day.
2. The Rejection of Fate:
When Zoroaster refused to accept the determinism of the world, he declared that people are not at the mercy of fate. Therefore, he believed in free will and that every person has the power to control their own life. While we cannot control events in our lives, we can control how we respond to them. Many of us live our lives as passive participants. To live your life as an active participant, reclaim your power and become an active creator of your own life.
3. The Practice of Light:
Fire and light are the ultimate symbols of purity and wisdom from Ahura Mazda. You can use fire and light to create a small home ritual. When you use a candle to help light your way in the dark, you are not just creating a visual effect. It is also a reminder of the presence of truth and goodness. You can also use the candle to reflect on the moral choices you have made during the day and as a commitment to make more moral choices tomorrow.
The Ultimate Triumph
According to Zoroaster, while there will be a cosmic conflict that lasts until the end of time; he also predicted that there would be a time when the Light would prevail over Evil (Angra Mainyu) and all darkness would cease to exist, and the world would one day return to its original state which is known as Frashokereti (making wonderful). The victory of the Forces of Light does not rest solely on God’s promises but is dependent upon the participation of mankind through courage and action.
For over three thousand years, Zoroaster has offered mankind his teachings and a challenge to each individual. His teachings serve as both a historical record and an appeal for all individuals to accept the responsibility of fighting evil and doing their part in bringing heaven to earth. The battle between good and evil exists in every human being as a battle for the heart, and as every decision affects this battle, each person has the power to contribute to bring about the victory of good over evil.
Trump’s new budget proposal is historic — in one of the worst ways possible
By Bobby Kogan
On Friday, the Trump administration submitted its annual budget request to Congress. The document called for dramatically reducing what the United States government does for Americans. The budget called for steep cuts to funding for education, housing and health, funneling resources toward the military as the war in Iran reaches its fifth week. This shift would leave the portion of the budget known as “nondefense discretionary,” or NDD funding, which accounts for most domestic activities aside from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and SNAP, at its lowest level since at least Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency.
When Trump signed the “big, beautiful bill” last July, he enacted the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history. The same law provided enormous tax cuts that disproportionately further enriched the very rich. Taken together, it instituted the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. The new budget proposal would double down on his legacy of cutting programs that ordinary Americans, and especially those already struggling to make ends meet, rely on.
Budgets are always partially aspirational, but every other president in my lifetime has tried to keep at least most of the discretionary part of their budget requests within reality, specifically to influence the outcome. Trump is not doing that.
April 3, 2026
Hegseth Has Been Quietly Purging Black and Women Officers Across the Entire Military
By now you’ve heard that Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s top general this week and replaced him with his personal aide. What you may not have heard is that the firing was just the most visible piece of a much larger operation.
Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and women senior officers across all four branches of the military. The officers have been targeted because of their race, gender, or perceived affiliation with Biden administration policies, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process.
This isn’t one branch, one list, or one bad week. As one of those officials put it: “There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth.”
A list of naval officers selected to be promoted to one-star admiral has been sitting on Hegseth’s desk for more than a month, with officials expressing concern that some of those officers could be removed because of their race or gender. None are under investigation. Their branch recommended them. Hegseth just won’t sign off.
When former Army Chief Gen. Randy George asked to meet with Hegseth specifically to discuss the promotion blocks, Hegseth refused to meet or discuss his decisions. George was fired this week without explanation.
Pete Hegseth declared war on DEI so the military could finally reward the most qualified. The most qualified person he found to lead the entire United States Army was, it turns out, the guy who used to carry his bags.
The Pastors Who Helped Elect Trump Are Watching Their Churches Empty Out
Evangelicals turned out for Trump in historic numbers. They prayed at his inauguration. Some of their leaders were photographed laying hands on him in the Oval Office. And now, in congregations across the country, the pews are emptying.
Not because people lost their faith. Because they’re afraid to leave their homes.
Amid ICE arrests and detentions, attendance has dropped and churches have closed. In some immigrant-heavy congregations, church attendance has dropped between 35 and 70 percent as parishioners fear leaving their homes amid enforcement activity.
One of the largest Latino churches in one state, which previously held four Sunday services, is now down to one, at roughly 60 percent capacity. Pastors across the country have told reporters the same story. A Latino evangelical leader put it as plainly as it can be put: “You’re deporting the future of American Christianity.”
The administration says it’s only targeting dangerous criminals. The pastors say their dangerous criminals were running the bake sale and hadn’t missed a Sunday in twenty years. Someone is lying and it’s not the people holding the casserole dishes.
Trump Paid a French Company a Billion Dollars to Not Build Wind Farms
After having lost every single court case over its attempt to halt East Coast offshore wind projects, the Trump administration announced it will simply pay one of the companies roughly $1 billion to abandon ship.
The company is France’s TotalEnergies. In exchange for walking away from planned wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, TotalEnergies will redirect that billion dollars into oil and gas development in Texas, including a liquefied natural gas export facility in Brownsville.
Together, the two abandoned projects could have generated enough electricity to power nearly one million homes. The Interior Department called this an “innovative agreement.” Environmental groups had a different name for it.
One group described it as a “billion-dollar bribe” to kill clean energy, saying that after losing again and again in court, Trump had found another way to strangle offshore wind: pay them to walk away.
Trump’s personal hatred of offshore wind reportedly dates back to a wind farm built near his golf course in Scotland that he found unsightly. A billion dollars of taxpayer money, redirected to a French oil company, to protect the view from a golf course. Truly, a government that works for the people.
April 2, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Apr 3
This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media a video of the theme song of the Davy Crockett TV series from 1954–1955 starring Fess Parker. Over the clip, he wrote: “Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative of Jasmine Crockett, and a very High IQ Frontiersman, would be proud of the legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine’s Great Success as a Politician from the Great State of Texas! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The Walt Disney Studio designed the Davy Crockett western series for children when Trump was about nine, an age that put him in the right demographic to have been part of the Davy Crockett craze that put “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the Hit Parade and spurred the sale of $300 million of Davy Crockett merchandise as little boys begged their parents for raccoon caps that would make them look like a western hero.
Jasmine Crockett is a current Democratic U.S. representative from Texas. There is no evidence she is related to David Crockett, who served as a U.S. representative from Tennessee from 1827 to 1835 and who died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Trump mused about their possible relationship before, in 2025.
It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s as those eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the western hero as the true American. Trump is trying to bring to life a right-wing political fantasy of the 1950s, and Americans in the present are making clear they reject it.
After World War II, Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933, one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy of an independent white man on the frontier who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.
In 1960 a ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who wore a cowboy hat and boasted of his family’s ties to the Old West although he himself grew up with a live-in maid and a chauffeur, articulated this right-wing vision.
The Conscience of a Conservative maintained that even if Americans liked the new government that had stabilized the country since the Great Depression and World War II, the Constitution’s framers had deliberately written a document that would prevent “the tyranny of the masses.”
In place of a strong federal government, the book said, power should go back to the states to restore true freedom to Black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong military.
At an Easter lunch reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” he said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but we, it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”
Trump is expected to release his 2027 budget plan tomorrow, in time to use it to shape Republicans’ argument for the midterm elections in November. Like Trump’s budget requests for 2026, it calls for an enormous boost to the nation’s military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic programs. But members of Congress recognized that domestic spending is popular, and their 2026 appropriations bills kept domestic spending relatively flat.
The popular pressure to fund domestic programs showed today when House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) backpedaled on the Senate’s plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the parent agency for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. Far-right House Republicans opposed the Senate’s bill, and bowing to them, Johnson called the Senate’s bill “a joke” and sent House members home until April 13 without voting on it. Today Johnson said he would bring the bill forward to pass it with Democratic support and that Republicans would then try to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through a budget reconciliation measure that does not need Democratic votes.
Racism was central to the rhetoric of cowboy individualism, and the institutionalization of that racism in the mass deportations and incarcerations of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has created a backlash. A poll last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration while 61% disapprove.
An analysis of DHS records by Ali Winston and Maddy Varner of Wired revealed today that DHS has used agents from special units accustomed to dealing with high-risk warrants, armed drug cartels, and manhunts for civilian immigration sweeps. Agents from Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR), are part of what the journalists call “a secretive, tightly knit world” in which their identities “are typically excluded from official documents and shielded from public records requests.”
The journalists’ analysis shows that these agents are “as a group, the most violent of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago.” Following the use-of-force guidelines rewritten by former leader Gregory Bovino—himself a member of BORTAC—their use of force there “included punching and kicking protesters, throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepperballs and 40-mm foam rounds into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them [Silverio Villegas González, shot at “close range” as he fled from officers after a traffic stop].
The county medical examiner yesterday declared the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a visually impaired Rohingya refugee from Myanmar whom Border Patrol agents dropped off in the parking lot of a coffee shop on a frigid February night in Buffalo, New York, a homicide. Rather than releasing him to his family or lawyer, CBP officers offered Shah Alam what they called a “courtesy ride.” He was found dead five days after agents left him at the closed shop.
A DHS spokesperson told Sydney Carruth of MS NOW that the homicide ruling was “another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.”
Those who oppose government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”
The fallout from that concentration of power is showing now in Trump’s disastrous adventure in Iran, undertaking to attack the country without consultation either with Congress or with allies.
Yesterday evening, Trump commandeered time from television networks to deliver what officials billed as a major announcement on the Iran war. But rather than announce anything new in his first address to the nation about a war that has gone on now for more than a month, Trump rambled for 19 minutes, reiterating what he has put in social media posts. He said the war was almost over but also that military operations were going to intensify, said its purpose was to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities—despite his claim in June 2025 to have obliterated those capabilities—and said the rise in oil and gas prices would be only a “short-term increase.”
Sounding tired and speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim that the U.S. doesn’t need the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz and demanded that other nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it. In reality, the U.S. is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising.
One Republican strategist from a battleground state texted Lisa Kashinsky and Alec Hernandez of Politico: “What the hell did he just say?” The strategist called the speech “nonsense.”
As Trump spoke, U.S. stock futures plummeted, erasing about $550 billion in 25 minutes.
Today forty nations, led by Britain and France, discussed ways in which they could work to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited to participate.
In the midst of this crisis, the tension between the Army’s leadership and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew up today when Hegeseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George. The Army chief of staff is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, the top military advisor for the Secretary of the Army, overseeing planning, training, and policy. George was appointed to his position in 2023 and worked closely with former defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the four-star general who preceded Hegseth. Recently, George refused to remove four officers—two women and two Black men—from a promotion list at Hegseth’s insistence.
A source who spoke to Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta of CBS News said that Hegseth “wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and Hegseth’s vision for the Army.” Two other Army leaders were also removed: General David Hodne, leader of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Major General William Green, head of the Army’s Chaplain Corps. Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel.
And finally, Trump today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi by posting her dismissal on social media. He was apparently angry that she has not adequately punished his enemies and that her botched handling of the Epstein files has stoked rather than calmed the story. For the present, her replacement will be Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before joining the Department of Justice.
It was Blanche who met privately with Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, as the outcry over the Department of Justice’s apparent cover-up of the Epstein files grew. After their meeting, Maxwell was moved from the prison where she was being held in Florida, to a less restrictive, minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas.
Pointing to the Iran war’s cost, Trump abandons his pre-election promises about day care
“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of day care,” the president said. Trump touted a very different position in the run-up to Election Day 2024.
Apr. 2, 2026, 9:59 AM EDT
By
Steve Benen
During Donald Trump’s remarks at an Easter lunch reception at the White House, the president wasn’t asked for his position on helping American families cover the costs of day care, but he took some time to pontificate on the subject anyway.
“I said to [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care.’ That has to be up to a state,” the Republican said. “We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay.”
He went on to say that it’s just “not possible” for the federal government to help defray the cost of day care, adding, “You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
Taken at face value, the rhetoric probably didn’t strike many observers as surprising. The setting might have been unusual, but that Trump made the case for investing in wars instead of day care at an Easter Lunch reception is largely consistent with the president’s MO.
It is, however, worth taking a brief stroll down memory lane and looking back at the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
In September 2024, for example, Trump fielded questions at the Economic Club of New York, and one voter asked what he could do to help address the cost of child care. He began by describing it as a “very important issue,” and said specifically of day care, “In this country, you have to have it.”
As part of that exchange, Trump appeared to suggest that he expected his trade tariffs to generate so much revenue that it could help cover day care costs. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” he concluded.
A month later, with early voting underway across most of the country, Trump also participated in a town hall event on Fox News with an audience made up entirely of women voters, one of whom talked about how difficult it was for her family to afford day care costs.
The candidate conceded that the existing system is “really not fair” and pledged to help families cover debilitating child care costs if elected to a second term.
That was just a few weeks before Election Day — when the Republican candidate was still talking about “putting America first” and avoiding costly foreign interventions. Seventeen months later, Trump hasn’t just forgotten about those assurances, he’s also turned his ostensible priorities inside out.
The Iranians I have known have all been outstanding people.
Iran’s response to tRump:
tRump on his rant:
“Conservatives have long warned that unchecked birthright citizenship fuels chain migration, strains resources, and rewards lawbreaking“.
Lets see, his wives and their relatives.
His multiple lawbreaking convictions.
Who is he to criticize or belittle?
From a friend:
Trump must be the world’s worst gunslinger. Every time he takes aim at a target, he shoots himself in the foot.
Scenario
- Your neighbor is being threatened by someone, You go to help.
- Your neighbor without provocation gets his gun and heads out to kill someone.
Do you have to go get your gun and help him terrorize another?
Trump and Hegseth are mad at NATO and other countries not helping us terrorize Iran and kill people there. Trump just needs any excuse to stop sending money to NATO. Trump needs to be GONE!
Trump Threatens Jaw-Dropping Revenge Against Allies Who Humiliated Him
The president’s explosive comments came ahead of an address to the nation.
Ewan Palmer
Apr. 1 2026
Donald Trump has floated the possibility of pulling the U.S. out of NATO as countries in the military alliance refuse to join in the Iran war.
Speaking to the British newspaper The Telegraph, the 79-year-old president accused NATO of being a “paper tiger” for not helping the U.S. in the Middle East conflict or reopening the Strait of Hormuz and said U.S. membership will not just be “reconsidered” but is “beyond reconsideration.” “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Vladimir] Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump said.
Donald Trump has also called NATO countries that do not help with the war in Iran “cowards.”
Tensions between Trump and the rest of NATO escalated this week after Italy refused to allow American bombers to use the country’s military base enroute to the Middle East.
France has blocked Israeli planes from flying weapons through its airspace, while Spain said it would close its airspace to American aircraft involved in military operations and would not allow the U.S. to use its military bases for the war.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Trump said he believes that NATO helping the U.S. in conflicts should be “automatic,” even though NATO is intended to be a defensive alliance and therefore has no real need to assist Trump with his war in Iran.
“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem,” Trump said. “It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”
Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also suggested that the U.S. will need to “re-examine” its position with NATO when the Iran war ends, as several countries refuse to help Trump in the Middle East conflict.
“Unfortunately, we are going to have to re-examine whether or not this alliance that has served this country well for a while is still serving that purpose, or if it has now become a one-way street where America is simply in a position to defend Europe, but when we need the help of our allies, they’re going to deny us basing rights and overflight,” Rubio told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
“I think these are very legitimate questions that we need to be asking.”
NATO has firmly stated it has no intention of getting dragged into the war in Iran since it broke out on Feb. 28.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and President of Argentina
Marco Rubio claimed that the U.S. is “very, very close to achieving our objectives” in Iran.
Trump also lashed out at top U.S. allies such as the U.K. and France on Tuesday for not helping end the Strait of Hormuz crisis he is responsible for starting.
In an unhinged Truth Social post, the 79-year-old president suggested countries affected by the oil crisis stemming from the closure of the shipping route should “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”
“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!” Trump added.
Plastic is the hidden cost of the war in Iran
By
Julian Torres
May 19, 2025.
Experts are warning that consumers will see a rise in prices for a variety of plastic consumer goods due to the war with Iran.
Plastic products are partly made out of oil, which has gone up more than 40% since the start of the war in late February. As a result, products like disposable cutlery, bottled drinks and garbage bags could be among the first to rise in the coming weeks, said Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University.
But plastics are used across supply chains, from packaging to manufacturing, meaning it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where the costs come from in a product’s final price tag.
“It’s one of those things where you shake your head at the store. You don’t know if it’s more expensive due to general inflation, rising rents, but you are paying for this,” Joseph Foudy, a professor of economics at the NYU Stern School of Business, told CNN.
Higher packaging costs may drive up food prices in two to four months as companies work through existing inventory, Penfield said.
Why plastic prices are rising
Behind these increases are rising oil and natural gas prices, which have surged in part because of the Iranian threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway plays a critical role in global energy and petrochemical supply chains.
The strait is a conduit for a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply.
Since the war began, crude oil has risen from $67 a barrel to above $98 at its peak on March 20, while benchmark natural gas prices in Asia and Europe have jumped more than 60% in the same period.
Over 99% of global plastics are derived from fossil fuels, according to the Center for International Environmental Law.
That means higher energy prices don’t just raise manufacturing costs, but also the cost of the materials themselves. That includes polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene, two of the world’s most widely used plastics.
Low-density polyethylene resin pellets at a factory in Klang, in Malaysia’s Selangor state, on October 9, 2024.
Low-density polyethylene resin pellets at a factory in Klang, in Malaysia’s Selangor state, on October 9, 2024. Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
The Middle East is a major supplier of plastic raw materials. The region accounts for roughly a quarter of global polyethylene and polypropylene exports, according to S&P Global Energy data.
“Approximately 84% of Middle East PE capacity relies on the strait for waterborne exports,” Harrison Jacoby, director of polyethylene at Independent Commodity Intelligence Services, a global chemical and energy information provider, told CNN.
Prices for plastic resins have already surged by double digits across most manufacturing categories in the past 30 days, according to the Plastics Exchange, an independent clearinghouse that tracks transaction data for the resin market.
“In my 25 years (in the plastics industry), I’ve never before seen a (monthly) PE increase this large,” said Michael Greenberg, CEO of the Plastics Exchange and its market intelligence platform, Resintel.
Few alternatives
Plastics are deeply embedded across industries, from packaging and construction to auto manufacturing and healthcare. Switching to alternatives made from paper or glass is often expensive and time-consuming, requiring changes across entire manufacturing processes.
In the short term, “there are not a lot of substitutes for plastics,” Foudy said.
Packaging companies are more likely to adjust existing designs and use thinner plastics or make them less expensive, Penfield noted.
Products made mostly of plastic, like trash bags, are likely to see sharper price increases compared to more complex goods like automobiles, where plastic is just one of many inputs.
But if high oil prices are sustained for even three or four months, consumers can expect to pay higher prices for potentially another year or two, Foudy added.
“Even if the war ended tomorrow, there’s still going to be a fairly long amount of time before the (plastic) supply chain normalizes itself,” Greenberg said.
A new investigation has backed up evidence given by a woman who has accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her when she was 13, according to a report.
The woman conducted four interviews with the FBI in 2019 in which she detailed alleged abuse by Trump and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Her interviews referencing Trump were initially withheld by the Department of Justice.
Erkki Forster
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 18:
A report from South Carolina newspaper The Post and Courier released on Sunday has now corroborated key personal details given by the woman about a third man she claims also sexually assaulted her—named Jimmy Atkins. Those details are not directly related to her accusations against Trump, but suggest that she was truthful about other matters she raised with the FBI.
Dementia?
Trump posted 10 times (all at 10 PM 3-29-26) that the DOJ targeted New York AG Letitia James because she insured both of her houses!
Bank fraud charges against James were dismissed late last year, and a grand jury in Virginia later refused to re-indict her.
Trump is Russian Agent
Many nations offered to send oil to Cuba, but Trump said no, he blockaded Cuba to force them to change the regime.
U.S. President Donald Trump has effectively blocked all oil shipments to Cuba in an attempt to pressure the government in Havana.
Separately, the U.S. temporarily eased sanctions on Russia to help improve the flow of oil that has been restricted by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
In the meantime, the Russian ship Anatoly Kolodkin has been making its way to Cuba. The vessel departed from Russia’s Primorsk port carrying some 650,000 barrels of crude, LSEG ship-monitoring data also showed.
But now there is an exception, Russia is going to be allowed to sell oil to Cuba!
Karolying Leavitt thinks we had a regime change in Iran.
“Has it not? Their entire leadership has been killed. Wouldn’t you say there’s been a change in the regime”?
We made the regime worse.
We swapped out an 86-year-old hardline leader for a young hardline leader.
Regime change is NOT swapping out names.
It’s changing the goals, values, principles, laws and governance.
listen to Trump tell you what the Declaration of Independence means.
Trump:
of course you have the Declaration of Independence
Moran: What does it mean to you?
Trump:
Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love. Respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special.
Hegseth injects combative Christianity into America’s military
by Ellen Mitchell – 03/29/26
During his briefing on the Iran war last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that Americans take a knee and pray to Jesus for the success of U.S. forces in the Middle East. A few days later, he read out a sermon praying that “wicked souls” be “delivered to the eternal damnation” in the fight against Iran.
Trump said bitcoins were bad for the country, until he figured out he could make tons of money off of the coins – which are used to move money stealthily by criminals.
On Jan. 15, 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron said France was now providing two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence.
Ukrainian intelligence officials suspected the U.S. had leaked information to Russia, causing Ukraine to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S.
Shortly after, a rumor gained traction that Ukraine relied so heavily on French intelligence because Ukraine had allegedly given the U.S. false intelligence that the U.S. then leaked to Russia, uncovering the U.S. as an unreliable intelligence partner for Ukraine.
Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran, officials say, as thousands of U.S. troops arrive in Middle East
If President Donald Trump approves the plans, such an effort would mark a new phase of the war that could be significantly more dangerous to U.S. personnel than the first four weeks. Any potential ground operation would fall short of a full-scale invasion and could instead involve raids by a mixture of Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, said the officials.
Trump announces, in a speech , that he will no longer support NATO members. Who didn’t see that coming? And, could it get any sillier, he wants to rename the strait of Hormuz the Trump strait?
Trump accidentally sabotaged his own party
REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
John Stoehr March 28, 2026
The Democrats in the Congress held the line and won. So far, that’s the story of the fight over the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Republicans said no to two proposals for weeks, during which time airports nationwide descended into chaos. Employees at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were working without pay.
The mess was getting so messy that last weekend, Senate Republicans went to the president with a deal. The Democrats would fund all of DHS but not ICE. Airports would return to normal. The GOP would get a chance to secure ICE funding later. But Donald Trump said no. He said he would agree if the Democrats supported unrelated legislation called the SAVE Act.
But the president didn’t stop there with his unrealistic demands. To create what he believed was leverage over the Democrats, he dispatched ICE agents to airports around the country. It was reported that they were “assisting” the TSA, but in reality, Trump was trying to bully the Democrats, especially Chuck Schumer, into giving him everything he wanted.
Senate Democrats made clear their intention to restore order at airports by funding all of DHS, except for ICE.
Kremlin has outlawed the “ideology of childlessness.”
As Russian men die off and Russian women give birth less often, the country faces a “demographic crisis,” so the Kremlin has outlawed the “ideology of childlessness.” Russia’s Health Ministry has approved updated guidelines for doctors:
The women’s edition of a medical-history questionnaire should inquire into the patient’s reproductive plans. And if she isn’t planning to reproduce, the guidelines say, she should be sent to therapy “for the purpose of fostering positive attitudes toward childbirth.”
(AC/Moscow Times, London Times) …If Russian women don’t have kids, who is Putin going to send to die in Ukraine 18 years from now?
high price of gasoline
Economists say the high price of gasoline is because refineries base their pricing for gasoline on the cost to replace their inventory of foreign crude (Despite producing significant amounts of light sweet crude, many U.S. refineries are traditionally configured for heavier, more sour imported crude), so costs for gas stations go up immediately. But when the price of oil drops, they don’t lower the cost of their gasoline until they have refined all the sour crude they have already purchased.
This often leads to accusations of price gouging — not just from you but from lawmakers, too. But legislation to combat that has failed in the past because of “concerns they will discourage U.S. firms from ramping up production when it’s needed most, further constricting supply and leading to even greater shortages.”
Gas prices are expected to continue climbing over the next few days, and consumer sentiment is falling, The Post reported yesterday. The global benchmark price for a barrel of crude oil was above $112 yesterday — up 50 percent from last month.
Houthis enter missile fray as Israel hits nuke sites
2026-03-28 HKT 16:32
Iranian media reported Israeli strikes on Friday on three Iranian nuclear facilities and two steel plants, with officials saying there was no radioactive release.
Gulf countries and Israel came under missile fire and Israeli forces struck Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday as the Middle East conflict raged into a second month.
In a sign that the conflict may be expanding further, Israel’s military said air defenses responded to a missile launched from Yemen – the first since the start of the war on February 28 and after threats from Iran’s Houthi allies to launch attacks.
The conflict, which began a month ago to the day, showed no sign of ending, with Israel announcing fresh strikes on Tehran and reports of around 10 intense blasts and a plume of black smoke.
Emirati authorities said debris from a missile interception started fires at an Abu Dhabi industrial zone, injuring five Indian nationals.
Saudi Arabia said it had intercepted a missile and several drones, and Bahrain said a blaze caused by the “Iranian aggression” had been brought under control.
In Israel, repeated air raid sirens sent people to shelters, including in Tel Aviv where a man was killed and two others wounded, and in the country’s north, where media reported a simultaneous attack from Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
An Iranian missile and drone attack on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia wounded at least 12 American soldiers, two of them seriously, according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified officials.
G7 foreign ministers, meeting near Paris, expressed the “absolute necessity to permanently restore safe and toll-free freedom of navigation” in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been in a state of near closure as a result of Iranian and called for “an immediate cessation of attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure”.
Israel confirmed it had struck the Khondab heavy water complex and a uranium processing plant in Ardakan, while the UN nuclear watchdog said Iran had informed it of another strike on the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi threatened retaliation “for Israeli crimes” in a post on X, saying the attacks contradicted Trump’s “extended deadline for diplomacy” while the country’s Revolutionary Guards warned they would strike industrial sites across the region, having earlier issued similar warnings for US military bases and hotels hosting American troops.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels had warned on Friday they would join the war if US-Israeli attacks on ally Iran continued or if more countries joined the conflict.
The Houthis have in the past attacked shipping in the Red Sea in response to regional conflicts, but had so far not intervened in the latest war. “We affirm that our fingers are on the trigger for direct military intervention,” the group said in a statement. (AFP)
Update: Israel’s military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel early Saturday, the first time it had faced fire from that country. The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack, which calls into question whether the rebel group backed by Tehran will again target commercial shipping traveling through the Red Sea corridor.
Hello, Boomer? It’s me, Zoomer!
Haters like to say Gen Z can’t make phone calls, but a very wholesome phone experiment is forging friendships between Zoomers and Boomers living thousands of miles apart. Researchers recently stuck a payphone on the street near Boston University, no doubt confusing Gen Z students who’d never seen one in the wild. There’s only one number this phone dials, and it connects to a Nevada nursing home. Total strangers can pick up the phone and start chatting with someone 50 years their senior. What a lovely way to bridge generational divides and teach the youths about extinct methods of telecommunication.
England
It has been announced that the Future Homes Standard (FHS) will mandate that most new homes built from 2028 must include on-site renewable energy generation as standard.
While it has been on the cards for some time, the government has now published details of its FHS, moving new regulatory requirements from policy into implementation.
Under the FHS, all new homes – with some exceptions such as high-rise buildings – must include on-site renewables, mainly rooftop solar, along with low-carbon heating such as heat pumps and heat networks.
This higher standard for new homes will come into force from 2028, a year later than anticipated.
“If this policy is to succeed, the focus must go beyond what is installed in homes to how the grid is operated. Making better use of existing infrastructure through active voltage control can reduce bills and unlock capacity, while improving flexibility and resilience. Scaling clean power will only work if the network beneath it is ready to support it.”
Diabetes: There’s an app for that
Sam Glassenberg’s daughter was diagnosed with diabetes when she was 5, and Glassenberg felt totally unprepared for the whirlwind of medical information he’d need to internalize to keep her healthy. So he turned diabetes management into a game, literally, with “Level One,” a video game he designed that looks like “Candy Crush” but teaches players of all ages how to manage their diagnosis. Who knew it was possible to gamify dosing insulin and tracking ketones? It’s worked so far for Glassenberg’s daughter, who’s now 11 and thriving.
Even as a Stanford-trained computer science engineer, Glassenberg found it confusing and frustrating, especially with the high stakes involved.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s horrible because for those first few months, you’re learning through play, but that play is trial-and-error on your own kid.”
So, he did what game designers do best. He built a video game — called “Level One: A Diabetes Game” — a free mobile app that has had about 50,000 downloads since its launch last April.
Meet Moon Mascot ‘Rise,’ the zero-g indicator for NASA’s Artemis II mission
In its “Missions” blog, NASA explains that zero gravity indicators are plush items that are small and provide a visual indication of when the spacecraft and its crew reach space. Submitted by a 2nd grader.
Abbreviations
Even everyday abbreviations may boggle the mind: For example, why is “pound” abbreviated as “lb”? Maybe you memorized the term in school, or maybe one day you asked the deli manager what that “LB” on the sticker meant, but it’s not an easy one to decipher on its own, because the word and its abbreviation don’t share a single letter. There is an answer as to why it’s shortened that way, though, and it dates back to ancient Rome.
The Romans used a basic unit of weight called a libra (~0.722 pounds), derived from the Latin for “scale” or “balance.” Libra pondo is a Latin phrase that translates to “a pound by weight.” When these terms reached Britain, they became the standard for weighing gold and silver. The abbreviation “lb” is a shortening of libra that was carried over to the English word “pound.” The British currency is also called the pound, and the £ symbol represents libra.
Another concept worth mentioning is the Roman uncia, a Latin word that translates to “one-twelfth.” It was used by the Romans as a unit of measurement for one-twelfth of a libra, and it became the inspiration for the English word “ounce.” So, where did that “z” in the abbreviation “oz” come from? On the journey from Latin to English, there was a detour with the Italian word onza.
President Donald Trump is toying with renaming one of the world’s most critical shipping routes after—who else—himself.
Speaking at an investor forum in Miami on Friday night, Trump casually referred to the Strait of Hormuz as the “Strait of Trump,” before quickly correcting himself, then insisting it wasn’t a slip.
“Excuse me, I’m so sorry. Such a terrible mistake,” he told the crowd.
Donald Trump stands on stage at a lecture with his arms stretched out.
Speaking at an investor forum in Miami on Friday, Trump casually referred to the Strait of Hormuz as the “Strait of Trump.”
“The Fake News will say, ‘He accidentally said.’ No, there’s no accidents with me.”
The remark drew laughs in the room, but behind the scenes, it’s not entirely a joke.
Trump has reportedly privately floated renaming the waterway the “Strait of America,” or even after himself, if the U.S. succeeds in wresting control of it from Iran, according to The New York Post.
Moscow Goes (Digitally) Dark
Russia has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and lost much of its influence in the region. This month, the capital went weeks without Internet
By Andrew Ryvkin
March 28, 2026
Moskvichka, a lifestyle publication run by one of the Kremlin’s most notorious propagandists, Kristina Potupchik, just published a review of Ava, a new restaurant overlooking Red Square that serves crab doughnuts, a scallop-and-strawberry salad, and a white-chocolate-and-sour-cream cake wrapped in edible gold. What the magazine failed to mention is that the view from Ava has changed drastically in the last couple of weeks.
F.S.O. (Russia’s secret service) officers in full military gear are stationed around the Kremlin. A masked gunman is perched on Lenin’s tomb. First-time diners who have trouble finding the restaurant will have to ask directions from the drivers of armored cars and pickups with mounted guns that have recently appeared on every road leading to the Kremlin. Because, for three weeks, the Russian capital has had no mobile Internet or G.P.S. Here, Google Maps—along with every other app that needs an Internet connection—is nothing but a blank screen.
Ironically, Russia’s command-and-control structures suffered a massive blow when SpaceX turned off the country’s Starlink terminals and the Kremlin blocked Telegram, which its troops used to coordinate. Even the Ministry of Defense considers Max an insecure means of communication for the military, and there’s talk of unblocking Telegram on the front lines only.
Having seen the president of Venezuela captured and the supreme leader of Iran killed, Vladimir Putin feels anything but safe.
Putin’s personal paranoia may also be a major factor. The F.S.O. is, essentially, an army created to protect one man. Its assets are stationed specifically to defend the Kremlin and Putin’s many dachas, and the security perimeter around these sites keeps expanding; Putin’s Black Sea residence now has a two-mile no-go zone around it. Having seen the leader of Venezuela captured and the leader of Iran killed, Putin feels anything but safe—even with the U.S. offering Russia major concessions to end the war in Ukraine.
Heather Cox Richardson
Mar 27, 2026
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, put in bald language the change in the world order instigated by President Donald J. Trump.
“For 80 years,” Balakrishnan explained, “the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality.” That system “heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities.
“The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.
“But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended…. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”
In its place, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder said to me in a YouTube conversation yesterday, Trump is aligning himself with international oligarchs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), and China’s Xi Jinping. Because of his position as the president of the United States of America, this means he is aligning the United States of America with this oligarchical axis as well, abandoning the country’s democratic principles and traditional allies.
The fallout from the Iran war has also benefited Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Despite reports that Russia is aiding Iran in the fight, the Trump administration dropped sanctions on Russian oil that was already at sea, giving Russia an injection of up to $10 billion a month into its cash-strapped war effort against Ukraine.
Today Trump reposted Russian propaganda claiming that Ukraine discussed funneling money to Biden’s reelection campaign. Also today, four Russian lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first such visit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to talk with lawmakers and officials, “part of the normalization of relations with the United States of America,” as one of the Russians told the Russian press.
Trump declared he was determined to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine, but this week, according to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, administration officials said the U.S. would not guarantee Ukraine’s security unless Ukraine withdraws from its own land in Donbas. Ceding the region to Russia would essentially give Putin what he launched the war to grab. It is the same region that was at stake in 2016, when Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager they would help Trump’s presidential candidacy if he would look the other way as Putin installed a puppet over the region.
This afternoon, Noah Robertson and Ellen Francis of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is considering diverting weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East. They also noted that on Monday, Pentagon officials told Congress that it was going to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine to restock military weapons in the U.S. instead. About allocating weapons, Trump told the reporters, “we do that all the time. We have them in other countries, like in Germany and all over Europe. Sometimes we take from one and we use for another.”
Last week, the U.S. eased sanctions on banks in Russia’s ally Belarus, and today Trump announced he would ease further sanctions on Belarus to try to get fertilizer into the U.S. since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stopped the transportation of about 20% of the world’s fertilizer. Also today, Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko signed a treaty with another of Putin’s allies, North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un, announcing a “fundamentally new stage” of the relationship between the two countries as they “oppose undue pressure on Belarus from the West.” Both Belarus and North Korea support Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Trump has openly endorsed Orbán for reelection in Hungary’s April 12 elections, posting on social media yesterday: “Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation.” Urging Hungarians to vote for Orbán, Trump continued: “He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement.… I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”
The framers of the Constitution tried to set up a system that would make it impossible for a president to go to war for private interests or the benefit of other countries, establishing that Congress alone can declare war. The framers wanted the American people to weigh in on whether they wanted to dedicate their lives and their fortunes to a war.
But Trump simply began the Iran war without consultation with Congress, and administration officials have refused to appear at hearings, instead briefing Congress behind closed doors. At an annual fundraising dinner for Republican members of Congress, Trump appeared to acknowledge he was violating the Constitution. He spoke of the “tremendous success” of what he called his “military operation” in Iran. He continued: “I won’t use the word war ’cause they say if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do. They don’t like the word war because you are supposed to get approval. So I will use the word military operation.”
Now, as the war costs at least $1-2 billion a day and Trump’s declarations fluctuate wildly from saying the war is over to suggesting he is considering deploying ground troops to posting this morning that Iranian negotiators “better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!” even Republicans are starting to have misgivings. The war has pushed Trump’s approval rating down to just 36%, while a new Reuters poll shows that only 25% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living. Today the stock market, which has generally trended downward since the invasion, dropped sharply as traders apparently recognized that the cost of oil is not coming down anytime soon.
Yesterday, after a classified briefing, House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL), who backed the Iran strikes, told reporters that Congress members “want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” adding, “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.” Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) commented: “I can see why he might have said that.”
Morelle noted that even if the White House or the Pentagon did start to provide specifics, “I’m not sure it would matter anyway because the president changes his mind so frequently. He might say something and literally without exaggeration, a half hour later say something completely different, or even sometimes within the same press conference, give two wildly different answers.”
Morelle told Walker and Kovensky: “They fight us on things that will help American families be able to pursue dreams, take care of the food, housing, and healthcare needs of millions of families that they can’t afford”—precisely the things that, as Minister Balakrishnan noted, the post–World War II international order enabled people around the world to attain. “But,” Morelle said, “they can go into an ill-conceived military action that has neither the support of Congress nor the support of American families, which has no clear objectives, shifting goals, and has alienated our allies and made us less safe.”
TACO Trump #234
Trump Backs Section 702 Reauthorization After Once Calling To ‘KILL FISA’
The president is much more concerned about the law’s potential now that he’s in charge of the government wielding it.
For the world there is no longer any such thing as American credibility
In the years after Barack Obama’s presidency, it became an article of faith that one of his central errors in foreign policy was the Syria “red line.” He had said he would attack Syria if it used chemical weapons — but when evidence emerged that it had used those weapons, he pushed the question of intervention to Congress, which declined to act.
“A disaster,” Donald Trump called it at the time. A cause of “generational and reputational damage,” said then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida). Part of “an incoherent maze” of foreign policy, Pete Hegseth argued a few years later. In ignoring a red line that he had drawn, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) explained, Obama had risked squandering American credibility around the world.
Obama’s red line flip flop looks like the model of careful policymaking compared to what we have witnessed since the Iran war began. Last week, President Trump posted on social media that “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.”
The rest of the story is well known. Iran refused to be cowed by this threat and continued its attacks and its closure of the strait. Trump’s response? To quickly climb down and announce that he had postponed any action on energy infrastructure for five days, claiming that — suddenly, overnight — Iran and the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” toward a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” The Iranians denied any such talks were taking place. Now Trump says he’s extending the pause by another week and a half.
It is by now clear that Trump is being graded on a curve. When he says he will raise tariffs to 130 percent or that he will blow up Iran’s biggest gas field or that “the war is very complete, pretty much” none of these statements mean much. They could be actual American policies or not, or they could stand as policy for a day or a week after which they will change. After saying that the war was pretty much complete, that same day Trump asserted that “we haven’t won enough” and that “we’ll not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.” He’s said that he agreed to negotiate with Iran’s leaders but then couldn’t because they keep getting killed — though it is of course his own military (and Israel’s) which is doing the killing. All clear?
Trump’s supporters claim this incoherence is strategic genius, that he is keeping people off guard. Except that policy seems to change for a variety of reasons: Maybe the stock market falls, or maybe the target country lavishes praise on Trump and gives him a gold bar. Trump’s superpower is that he is flexible enough to turn on a dime and has a base that will accept anything he proposes. Once unalterably opposed to Middle Eastern wars, many of his MAGA followers now believe in this Middle Eastern war with the zeal of converts. And while Trump has made clear that he would like to end the hostilities, the problem this time, unlike with tariffs, is that he cannot stop what he started. Iran gets a vote. And it is currently voting to keep fighting, calculating that though weakened, it has enough military power to do damage to the world economy, thereby inflicting pain on the U.S.
For the world there is no longer any such thing as American credibility, just a strange reality television show in which the main actor swerves, bobs and weaves his way through crises, hoping that what he says today will solve the crisis caused by what he said yesterday. The day before he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants, Trump had claimed that the US was considering “winding down” its military operations against Iran and implied that protecting the Strait of Hormuz was not his problem and could be dealt with by other nations whose imports passed through the strait. At another point, he said he didn’t need any other country’s help. Businessmen used to rail against previous administrations because of policy uncertainty. Now they line up to praise Trump as his carnival of chaos roils markets almost every week.
Trump has gotten used to playing with the U.S.’s massive power, punishing those who don’t bend the knee and rewarding those who do. In doing this, he is squandering credibility built up over decades to extract short-term goodies — sometimes to the benefit of his own family’s business interests. But in Iran he seems to have come up against an adversary that won’t play by his rules.
Trump loves to make up stuff (LIE)
At a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, President Donald Trump told a lengthy story about negotiating the creation of a personalized Sharpie pen. The only problem: the company that produces Sharpies denies it ever happened.
Theoretically, Trump’s tall tale was an attempt to prove his skill at saving money. It started with complaints about cost overruns tied to the renovation of the Federal Reserve building, but then the pen he was holding caught his attention, and it was tangent time.
“This pen is an interesting example,” before relating a presumably improvised story in which he called “the guy” and told him, “I’d like to use your pen, but I can’t have a great thing with a big S on it saying Sharpie as I’m signing a $1 trillion airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets.”
“The guy,” said the President, offered to provide personalized black pens with “the White House” written in gold free of charge, until Trump insisted on paying $5 a pen.
Setting aside that this story does not, in fact, prove Trump’s thrift — were it authentic, he would have successfully negotiated the price up from free to $5 — it also turned out that it simply wasn’t true. According to a spokesperson from the manufacturer of Sharpie, “We don’t have any information about the conversation described.”
So with another Trump whopper in the news, here are five of his biggest and most baffling lies from the past several years.
1. “They’re eating the dogs.”
Who can forget when, at a presidential debate against Kamala <ahref=”https://www.rawstory.com/tag/white-house” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Harris, Trump claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the city’s pets? Apparently voters forgot, and fast, because they elected him president shortly thereafter.
2. Wind energy is “driving whales crazy.”
Earlier this week, the Trump Administration agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to stop the construction of wind farms off the U.S. coast. He’s given all manner of justifications for his hatred of wind turbines over the years, but arguably the most nonsensical is his assertion about their effect on whales.
3. Impossible drug prices.
Over the past year, Trump has frequently claimed that his administration would cut drug prices by “900, 600, 500, 1,200” percent, and many other numbers. These numbers are, of course, impossible because math doesn’t work that way. If drug prices were reduced by 100%, they’d be free, and anything more than that, and they’d be paying you to take them.
4. His uncle knew the Unabomber.
Last year, Trump boasted that his Uncle John was a professor of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski at MIT, but it was quickly pointed out that that couldn’t be possible. First off, Kaczynski never went to MIT. Second, Uncle John died in 1985, and Kaczynski wasn’t revealed to be the Unabomber until 1996, so there was no way Unk could have spoken to Trump about the terrorist a decade before he was found to be one.
5. He warned us all about Osama bin Laden.
Just recently, Trump brought back a lie he’s told before: that the book he published in 2000 contained a warning that Osama bin Laden was going to commit a major attack. “I wrote it in a book. You can even check — about a year before the World Trade Center came down.” Indeed you can check, and people have, finding no such prediction.
Trump is TACO again, now 10 days!
A good start to my feelings:
Trump just threatened to commit a crime
Trump just threatened to commit a crime — and nobody stopped him
Kevin Lamarque
Sabrina Haake March 26, 2026 | 06:38AM ET
On March 21, at 7:44 pm, Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. He posted his threat on social media (so transparent! so strong!), promising that if Iran didn’t open the Strait “within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time,” the U.S. “will hit and obliterate” their power plants. And, because the world is his subordinate, he thanked it for its attention to this matter.
Iran relies on 130 thermal plants across the country for more than 95% of its electricity. Targeting all those plants would be a war crime. Intentionally bombing any non-military infrastructure essential to the survival of civilians, like power plants, is a violation of international humanitarian law.
Why? Because when power plants collapse, water pumping and desalination stations stop functioning. With no water, civilians die from dehydration and organ failure, some within days, some within hours. Children and the elderly die first. When hospitals lose power, life-support machines shut down, and surgeries are cancelled. Food production and distribution also collapse without power. Amnesty International observed that, “By threatening such strikes, (Trump was) effectively indicating willingness to plunge an entire country into darkness, and to potentially deprive its people of their human rights to life, water, food, healthcare and adequate standard of living, and to subject them to severe pain and suffering.”
IRAN JUST THREATENED UKRAINE
Not the Middle East. Not a military base in Iraq. Not Israel.
UKRAINE.
A country already 3 years deep in a war with Russia — already bleeding, already broken — just became a “legitimate target” for IRAN.
Let that sink in.
Iran says Ukraine helped Israel shoot down Iranian drones
So a country fighting for its OWN survival helped an ally defend THEIR survival
And Iran’s response? Declare every inch of Ukrainian territory fair game for strikes.
But here’s the part nobody is connecting:
Iran and Russia have a military cooperation pact
Iran has been supplying Russia with Shahed drones TO USE AGAINST Ukraine
Now Iran is threatening to strike Ukraine DIRECTLY
Russia is already bombing Ukraine from the north, east, and south
Iran just offered to open a threat from the SOUTHEAST
They’re showing you Iran lashing out at everyone.
They’re NOT showing you that this isn’t random — it’s COORDINATED.
→ Russia wants Ukraine destroyed
→ Iran has been helping Russia destroy Ukraine for 3 years with drones
→ Now Iran has a “reason” to threaten Ukraine directly
→ Ukraine is forced to split its attention between TWO hostile nations
→ NATO is forced to split resources between TWO theaters of war
→ And that’s EXACTLY what both Russia and Iran want
One country fighting one war is survivable.
One country fighting two wars against two allies who WANT the same outcome?
That’s not a war. That’s an execution.
Prepare accordingly.
Among the classified records taken to Mar-a-Lago by President Trump were documents so sensitive that one had been distributed to just six people, while another set was relevant to his business interests.
The disclosure, made to the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the probes into Trump, offers new details about the types of records the president took with him to Florida after losing the 2020 election.
The public is still barred from seeing former special counsel Jack Smith’s report surrounding the investigation that prompted him to bring Espionage Act charges against Trump after 300 documents with classified markings were discovered at his Florida estate.
The files shared with Congress include a January 2023 memo of work on Smith’s team. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also shared them on Tuesday.
In it, agents are seen discussing the need to secure permission to show the classified documents at trial, arguing that Trump’s business interest in the documents indicates his motive, while the closely held documents show the highly sensitive nature of the materials. The memo does not provide further specifics about the contents of the classified documents.
“Most damning is what these documents, cherry-picked by your own DOJ for disclosure, show about President Trump’s conduct,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, going to quote from the memo from Smith’s team.
The “FBI has also found that certain classified documents President Trump improperly retained ‘would be pertinent to certain business interests.’ DOJ prosecutors further assessed that these ‘classified documents pertinent to his business interests’ established ‘a motive for retaining them,” Raskin wrote.
“The memorandum further specifies that the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”
At another point in the memo, prosecutors discuss Trump showing a classified map to passengers traveling with him aboard a flight, including his now chief of staff Susie Wiles.
According to the panel’s Democrats, it’s possible the Justice Department disclosure may violate an order from U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who sided with Trump in barring the release of Smith’s report.
Cannon’s order barred Bondi from sharing the report or “any information or conclusions” from it.
Great, now we are going to have to breath SMOG
TRUMP is an idiot
US suspends anti-smog fuel rules in bid to ease pump prices
By Jarrett Renshaw
March 25, 2026
High gasoline prices at a Mobil station in West Hollywood
A gas pump is inserted inside an Audi vehicle at a Mobil gas station in Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood, California, U.S., March 10, 2022. REUTERS/Bing Guan/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
HOUSTON, March 25 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Wednesday it will temporarily suspend federal anti-smog regulations on seasonal gasoline blends to combat higher pump prices since the start of the war on Iran.
The move by the Environmental Protection Agency will allow retailers to sell less expensive formulations of gasoline, including mixtures that include 15% ethanol – known as E15 – that are typically not permitted during warmer months.
Iran dismisses US ceasefire proposal: State news agency
by Max Rego – 03/25/26 7:52 AM ET
Iran has dismissed an initial 15-point ceasefire proposal from the United States, according to the state-run Fars news agency.
“Iran does not accept a ceasefire,” an “informed person” told the outlet. “Basically, it is not logical to enter into such a process with those who violate the agreement.”
Pakistani officials confirmed Wednesday that the Islamic Republic had received the proposal, according to The Associated Press.
The Iranian military launched more strikes on Israel and the Persian Gulf region overnight, including an attack that sparked a massive fire at Kuwait International Airport.
Pakistani officials told the outlet that the peace plan centered on sanctions relief, civilian nuclear cooperation, missile limits, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program and monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
It also includes opening up shipping access through the Strait of Hormuz. Since U.S.-Israeli strikes began on Feb. 28, Iran has significantly limited vessels traveling through the key passageway used to transport oil, resulting in an increase in global energy prices.
President Trump said Monday that previously threatened U.S. strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure would not occur for five days after “productive conversations” with Tehran. He also told reporters that same day that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spoke with their Iranian counterparts on Sunday.
On Tuesday, the president told reporters that he, Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in addition to Witkoff and Kushner, are also involved in negotiations with Iran.
Even amid the alleged talks, the Pentagon is preparing to deploy roughly 2,000 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, a source familiar with the matter told The Hill on Tuesday.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, earlier this week denied that negotiations between Tehran and Washington were taking place.
“No negotiations have been held with the US, and [fake news] is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” he wrote on the social platform X.
Western powers were unable to secure shipping in the Red Sea. Hormuz will be harder
By Lisa Baertlein and Jonathan Saul
March 25
Summary
Red Sea efforts failed despite billions spent and military involvement
Iran’s military capabilities surpass those of the Houthis
High stakes for global oil supply and energy prices
The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipping face a stark reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen’s Houthis.
The costly Red Sea experience – four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and a route that the shipping industry still largely avoids – looms over the more complex Strait of Hormuz, the shipping artery used by roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply and now blocked by Iran, a more formidable adversary than the Houthis.
Iran’s threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations have sent oil prices soaring in the worst disruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Absent the strait’s reopening, shortages will become more acute, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide.
“There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz,” Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said in a fiery video call streamed to the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. “It is the world’s strait, under international law and practical reality.”
U.N. Security Council members on Tuesday were negotiating resolutions for protecting the strait, with some nations, such as Bahrain, taking a forceful stance that would authorize the use of “all necessary means” to protect the strait – which could mean the use of force.
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Reuters interviewed 19 security and maritime experts who described the myriad challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has far more advanced military forces than the Houthis, an arsenal of cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous coast to the narrow waterway.
“Defending convoy operations in the Strait of Hormuz is significantly more challenging than in the Red Sea,” said retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, who in 1988 was involved in U.S. tanker escorts through the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq war.
That’s a big concern for U.S. President Donald Trump as he seeks to justify the Iran war ahead of the November midterm elections to inflation-weary American voters now facing gasoline at nearly $4 a gallon. The spike in energy prices is not expected to fully reverse until the waterway opens, analysts said.
Trump has been noncommittal about U.S. involvement, first saying the U.S. Navy will escort ships when needed, then more recently saying other nations should lead the effort. Iran has blocked most ships from the maritime chokepoint since joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began February 28.
Iran is considering a proposal to levy fees on vessels that want to use the strait, a Iranian lawmaker told state media last week.
THE HORMUZ QUAGMIRE
The U.S. mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers now largely avoid the passageway, once home to 12% of world trade, opting for a much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa.
Global trade is in danger of losing steam
Global trade is in danger of losing steam due to the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran, the World Trade Organization warns.
Growth in world trade in goods will grow just 1.9% this year, down from 4.6% growth in 2025 and could slow even more if the Middle East conflict keeps energy prices high and disrupts global transport, according to a WTO report.
If oil and liquefied natural gas prices remain high throughout 2026, growth of global trade in goods could drop to as little as 1.4%, while a prolonged blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, choking one-third of fertilizer urea imports, risks hitting major producers like India, Thailand, Brazil, fueling food security risks, the WTO says.
But even as the flow of Middle Eastern oil remains restricted, new trade lanes are opening. Australia and the European Union have finally inked a free trade deal after eight years of negotiations, removing tariffs on almost all goods and annoying both farmers on both sides. Here are the highlights of the deal.
The deal follows intensified talks amid sharply higher U.S. tariffs under the Trump administration and growing worries about China’s dominant position in rare earths and other critical minerals. The two sides also agreed to deepen security and defense cooperation.
ICE without masks at the Airport
Trump deployed ICE agents to major airports on March 23 amid mounting TSA callouts and travel delays. Their usual masked presence — often associated with aggressive sweeps of pedestrians in cities like Minneapolis — gave the public a rare, unfiltered look at the men and women actually behind the mask.
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