South Carolina’s Trump-backed redistricting push fails in the state Senate amid GOP opposition
The Republican-led South Carolina Senate on Tuesday voted against advancing a new congressional map, ending the redistricting effort in the state for now.
The failed vote was a surprise rejection of President Donald Trump, who had urged lawmakers to pass a redrawn map that eliminated the state’s single majority-Black district, represented by longtime Democratic Rep. James Clyburn.
The South Carolina House approved the map last week in hopes of putting it into place for this year’s midterm elections. As part of the effort, lawmakers also sought to set another primary election for the affected districts in August. But after early voting began on Tuesday for the previously scheduled June 9 primary, some Republicans in the state Senate changed their tune, arguing it was too late to enact new district lines.
“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” said Republican state Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican who changed his vote because of the timing.
Following the vote, another prominent Republican, state Sen. Tom Davis, condemned the effort. An earlier redistricting process took nine months of consideration, he said, while this push moved forward over the course of a few weeks.
“We have completely outsourced our constitutional obligation to prepare a congressional redistricting map to a consultant in Washington, D.C. We have no idea, no idea how that map was created,” Davis said.
Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility, yet the facility opened about a year ago.
In February, twenty-five detainees at Delaney Hall signed a letter distributed by the national advocacy group for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha, as “Our Cry: A Letter from Inside Delaney Hall.” In the letter, they apologized “for the way we entered the United States,” explaining that “we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family.” They emphasized that they had surrendered to border authorities and continued to work within the system, attending check-ins, getting work permits, and paying taxes, before being seized by ICE agents.
They explained that they have not been afforded the legal hearings guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and are being pressured to self-deport under threats of being sent not back to their country of origin, but rather to third countries like Uganda. They noted that ICE agents have arrested children, the elderly, and people with medical issues and that the facility is overcrowded.
In a second letter, Delaney Hall detainees expanded their picture of their circumstances, noting that some of them have lived in the country for more than a decade, have citizen children, and were complying with legal requirements. They noted that detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions are not receiving proper medical attention.
In the second letter, signed by nearly 300 people, the detainees pleaded with “Senators, Congress members, foundations, and organizations that collaborate with immigrants” for help. In big letters at the bottom of the document they wrote: “S.O.S.,” the international distress call.
As Sophie Nieto-Muñoz of the New Jersey Monitor reported, about 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began a work and hunger strike on Friday over the conditions and treatment there. From inside, they called their family members outside, who shared their stories of worm-infested food, crowded conditions, and pressure to self-deport until guards cut their access to phones and tablets. Their goal, they said, was the immediate release of young detainees, the elderly, and those who are medically vulnerable, and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases.
On Saturday, Kim and Representative Rob Menendez Jr. visited the facility.
Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.
Kim concluded: “Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.”
On Sunday evening, dozens of protesters blocked the entrances to Delaney Hall after it appeared that guards were trying to move Martin Soto, one of those who announced the hunger strike. His wife, Gabriela Soto, has been organizing protesters on the outside. “The people inside Delaney Hall are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and members of our community,” she told Ryan Mancini of The Hill. “In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We have a duty to safeguard the rights, health, and well-being of everyone within our borders.”
On Monday, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was denied entry to the facility. She said that refusal raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Sherrill’s visit was “nothing more than a political stunt on Memorial Day when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside in the facility.”
DHS also insisted that Democratic lawmakers were “spreading smears” about ICE and Delaney Hall. It denied that there was a hunger strike underway, and claimed that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” although nearly 50 ICE detainees have died. It claimed Democratic concerns were “a political stunt” and insisted those it is detaining are “the worst of the worst.”
On Monday, Kim, Sherrill, and New Jersey representatives Nellie Pou and LaMonica McIver were back at the facility along with about 150 protesters when federal agents sprayed the crowd with pepper balls and pepper spray. In a statement, DHS said: “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” It then went on to call the protesters “dangerous rioters” and said their obstruction of the way out of the facility—preventing Soto’s removal—was “a federal crime.” It added that “assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”
In fact, far from being a dangerous rioter, then-representative Kim was caught on film in the evening of January 6, 2021, picking up the trash the actual rioters left behind in the Capitol.
On Monday afternoon, a DHS spokesperson said they had moved Soto to a different facility.
Representative McIver responded to DHS today, saying: “I was at Delaney Hall yesterday. Everything the detainees wrote in their S.O.S. letter is 100% correct. DHS is lying to keep their abuses from being exposed. And to make things worse, they pepper sprayed [Senator Andy Kim] and are lying about it to cover their tracks.”
The administration’s deportation policies were back in the news this weekend after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, announced sweeping changes to policies for obtaining permanent residency in the U.S. Before this administration, about 800,000 people a year applied for a green card, and half of them applied from within the U.S. Now those people apparently will have to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained that the new policy will “force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense,” decisions made at consulates are “virtually unchallengeable” in court, and backlogs will get even worse than they already are. He notes that about half of all green cards go to people applying from within the U.S.: “everyone from spouses and children of US citizens to skilled professionals getting a green card through an employer.”
Law professor Daniel Kanstroom told Rebecca Schneid of Time magazine that it appears “[t]his Administration is trying to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible to attain permanent resident status.” Referring to the spouses and family members of people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, he added: “We’re focusing now on the group of people who potentially have the strongest reasons to stay in this country legitimately.”
Schneid notes that in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress explicitly allowed people to change their residency status from within the U.S.
David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told Schneid that DHS has already slashed green card approvals in half simply by failing to process the applications.
On Friday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García. After wrongfully deporting Ábrego García to El Salvador, the administration facilitated his return only after securing an indictment against him for human smuggling, based on a 2022 traffic stop, saying he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
Ábrego García had not faced charges from the traffic stop initially, and Crenshaw said the Justice Department’s reopening of the old case to prosecute Ábrego García after he had successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador showed vindictive prosecution. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw said.
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán of NPR reported that DHS called Crenshaw’s decision “naked judicial activism” and vowed that “this Salvadorian is not going to remain in our country.”
In a statement, Ábrego García said, “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted today that he had just visited so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” which appears to be in the process of shutting down. He suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump haven’t wanted to admit it was closing because they have spent a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the site in less than a year.
But, Frost said, “we can’t allow this place to just shut down and then not talk about it anymore. That’s what they want because they used a billion of our dollars to enrich private contractors that built and operated the place. They want us to move on because they don’t want us to talk about the human rights abuses and civil rights abuses that happened there and in other facilities as well…. We have to continue to push for accountability and consequences for people who broke the law and misused our…money, meant for hurricane preparedness, to kidnap and cage our neighbors.”
US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace has no cash in its official Gaza reconstruction fund, despite member countries pledging billions of dollars, a source familiar with the board told AFP on Wednesday.
Trump first conceived of the board to rebuild Gaza, where Israel and Hamas agreed to a US-backed ceasefire in October in a bid to halt two years of devastating war.
But he quickly raised eyebrows by sending out wide invitations, including to Russian President Vladimir Putin and to countries far removed from traditional Middle East diplomacy.
Since the board was set up, its fund – administered by the World Bank and endorsed by the United Nations – has received no money from donors, the source familiar with the Board of Peace told AFP.
The source said money had not been deposited because the fund was designed for the reconstruction and development phase, which has not yet been reached.
Israeli military operations in Gaza have continued despite the ceasefire, with at least 910 people killed since then, according to the territory's health ministry.
Israel still occupies and controls more than 60 percent of the devastated Gaza Strip, including all entry and exit points, while the Palestinian population is concentrated on the coast.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that the board had received donations directly into a JPMorgan account, citing the board's spokesperson.
There are no "independent transparency requirements" in place for the JPMorgan account, the FT noted.
Major European nations have shunned the board, which is heavy on longstanding US partners in the Middle East, ideological allies of Trump and smaller countries eager for Trump's attention.
France and Britain refused to join.
The board is unambiguously led not just by the United States but personally by Trump, who holds the final say and can remain in charge past his presidency.
Trump previously said that the United States would contribute $10 billion to the board, while Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates each promised at least $1 billion.
Members of the board are required pay $1 billion for a permanent spot, according to its charter.
An EU-UN assessment published in April estimated that more than $71 billion will be needed over the next decade for the reconstruction of war-ravaged Gaza, where the UN says the humanitarian situation is "critical".
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator. President Donald J. Trump endorsed the scandal-ridden Paxton last week after Senate Republicans had dumped $90 million into the race to defend Cornyn. Democrats will now use their advertisements calling attention to Paxton’s many scandals against them.
As Philip Elliott of Time magazine noted, Republicans can look forward to dumping another $250 million into trying to get Paxton elected, money that they needed to flip Democratic seats elsewhere.
Trump backed Paxton because he didn’t think Cornyn was loyal enough to him, despite the fact that Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time. Trump preferred Paxton’s attacks on Democrats and his flaunting of his MAGA identity despite—or perhaps because of—Paxton’s many scandals.
As CNN’s Patrick Svitek explained, in 2015, shortly after he took office as Texas attorney general, Paxton was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud, a case ending in March 2024 with an agreement that Paxton would pay restitution and complete community service. In 2020, Paxton’s top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office. He fired four of them. A judge later agreed they were fired improperly and awarded them $6.6 million. In 2023 the Texas House, dominated by Republicans, impeached Paxton on a bipartisan vote; under pressure from Trump, the Texas senate acquitted him. And then, last year, his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”
Trump appears to see politics as a dominance sport, much like the mixed martial arts fighting promoted by Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose arena is currently going up on the lawn of the White House for the fights Trump will host on his birthday, June 14. Brian Wiechert of WBAL-TV explains that workers are putting up a massive 90-foot-tall structure called The Claw to loom over a temporary octagon fighting arena in a way that the White House and the Washington Monument will be framed for television during the event.
With his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving of the Rose Garden to create a patio that looks like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and now the framing of the White House through a UFC arena, Trump has asserted his dominance over the People’s House. Similarly, with his purging even of loyalists in favor of extremists, he is asserting his dominance over the Republican Party, turning it fully into the MAGA Party.
In a similar moment in the 1850s, elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.
Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.
Frustrated that the existing parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were not taking a strong enough stand against the demands of elite enslavers, those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery abandoned their old political allegiances and came together. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.”
As voters swung away from the Democrats in the 1850s, those Democrats left in office represented the most extreme districts and were themselves the most extreme members of the party. They tried to rally their base by appealing to racism, warning that Black Americans would murder white people unless they remained enslaved and insisting that anyone opposing the spread of slavery was endangering the country and that the U.S. had always been a nation of and for white men.
The echoes of that tactic today are blaring as Trump and MAGA Republicans try to cement their power through racism and culture war issues. Trump today insisted—completely falsely—that ethnic Somalis in Minnesota, almost all of whom are American citizens, are “all crooks.”
Media Matters yesterday reported that Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio said he expected those Trump supporters convicted of crimes for their actions around the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would use the money Trump has promised them from the $1.776 billion slush fund to spread “conservative culture” and to run for office to take over the system.
The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “
But Talarico seems to have gotten the memo. He welcomed Cornyn supporters to his campaign and responded to the Republican attacks by telling Ben Meiselas of Meidas Touch: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”
He has refused to take the bait and has stood firmly on the idea of a government that works for everyday Americans. To Meiselas, he made a point of suggesting that “many of my family members, my friends, my neighbors” voted for Trump because they thought he would lower costs, end forever wars, release the Epstein files, and “drain the swamp.” Instead, “he’s done the exact opposite.” Talarico said he wants to “speak directly to those Texans who feel disillusioned, who feel like the system doesn’t work for them, that it only works for billionaires and puppet politicians like Paxton and Cornyn.” If “we can bring those Texans together across all these divisions in our politics, if we can see past the distractions and the culture war tactics, I think we can do something extraordinary,” Talarico said. “We can end thirty years of one-party rule in Texas, and we can transform American politics in the process.”
Today his campaign announced a tour called “THE PEOPLE vs. KEN PAXTON.”
Unlike anti-Nebraska candidates in 1854, Talarico and other Democratic candidates this year have the advantage of running against a party whose leader is openly corrupt. In addition to the $1.776 billion slush fund, the fortune in cryptocurrency deals, and so on, David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported today that “the contractor given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being paid an inflated and excessive profit margin.” The government is paying $13.1 million for the pool work, seven times what Trump initially said it would cost.
Maxine Joselow and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times also reported today that Trump is using $7 million worth of the entrance fees visitors have paid to national parks across the country to pay for the work on the reflecting pool. He is also using nearly $60 million in those national park fees to repair nine ornamental fountains in the capital.
And the administration appears determined to hide what it’s doing. It proposed today in sweeping language that it will require federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement, a tool Trump has relied heavily on to protect him from potential exposure for wrongdoing. As Don Moynihan explained in Can We Still Govern, the new role would make it impossible for the American people to know what government officials are doing.
That secrecy is hurting the American people in obvious ways. Sarah Owermohle of CNN reports that the administration has barred key U.S. officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from talking to officials at the World Health Organization, from which Trump withdrew the U.S. This limitation has been relaxed slightly since the outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship with U.S. passengers and a breaking Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now U.S. officials can attend small virtual meetings “in a listening capacity.”
After a trip yesterday to Walter Reed Military Medical Center, after which Trump posted that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY” and the official White House social media account went further, posting, “PERFECT BILL OF HEALTH!” and, in even bigger letters, “PERFECT PHYSICAL.” Trump once again appeared to fall asleep today at a Cabinet meeting.
He did, though, threaten to “blow up” U.S. ally Oman if it doesn’t “behave” over Trump’s demands to open the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”
Yesterday the U.S. military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the number of boats struck in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean to fifty-eight. At least 194 individuals have been killed. The administration insists the boats are trafficking drugs but has produced no evidence for that accusation, and as Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today, “military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.”
Taking these patterns, along with others, into consideration, G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers assesses that although Texas voters haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in thirty-two years, the Texas Senate election is a toss-up.
In the midterm election of 1854, northerners tore through the ranks of congressmen who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected eleven senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North. Still disorganized in 1854, by 1856, those in the new coalition opposed to the Slave Power had turned to a new political party, the Republican Party.
By 1859, that new party found a champion, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who articulated a new vision of government that worked not for a wealthy cabal, but for the American people.
In things I write here in the Editors’ Blog, I am both critical of mainstream news conventional wisdom and also interested in it as a political artifact in itself. Whether it is accurate, fair, quality journalism, it is a fact of the political geography on its own. So it’s important to understand, and I spend a lot of time trying to analyze and place it on that basis.
On that front I wanted to return to a point I’ve alluded to a few times recently, which is that just in the last week or so there’s been a shift in that elite news conventional wisdom toward what we and others have been saying for a couple months. And that is a new focus on the disconnect, really the chasm opening up between Donald Trump’s political fortunes and his political actions. It’s not simply that Trump isn’t adjusting or repositioning as a more conventional politician might. Trump’s never been that way. It’s out of character. But he’s accelerating into the most toxic parts of his presidency. In addition to general discontent about the economy and the very unpopular Iran War, he’s pushed things like his ballroom and his slush fund to the very top of the political agenda, even short-circuiting or delaying other parts of his agenda to further them.
This is the big political fact and perhaps the big question of the political moment. Why is this happening? Does Trump simply not care? Does he have a trick up his sleeve? Is he so coddled and insulated at this point that he truly thinks he’s all-powerful?
The New York Times put the matter this way in the sub-headline of a news analysis piece on May 23: “President Trump continues to act like he’s politically all-powerful, even in the face of indications that he is not.” The headline of the same piece provided the context: Defiant After Bad Week, Trump Pushes Ahead on Politically Unpopular Ideas. It’s the piece two days later that further got my attention: Trump’s Self-Indulgence Deepens G.O.P. Fears in Midterms. Here the story is more clearly elaborated. Trump is doubling down on the most unpopular parts of his agenda — or things like the ballroom and slush fund that strain the term “agenda” — as his Capitol Hill majorities are going onto life support. A Politico PM piece that came out minutes before I published this post brought Trump himself in to make the point. “Trump: ‘I don’t care about the midterms’”. It is a feature of the moment that requires an extra-political explanation — either a secret election-gaming fix, as some imagine, or something within Trump himself or his perceptions of the world around him that has pulled him outside of the conventional math of political calculation.
We’re seeing this now because the evidence in front of us has become so overwhelming. On another level, though, his political weakness has taken the juice out of his constant razzmatazz of political domination — the stunts, the takedowns, the cartoonish public choreography, the ritual slayings of former allies. Trump has always used these spectacles of power to keep alive the idea that he always has the last say, that he’s always the strongest, toughest guy in the room. He punishes; others endure, as sure as gravity pulls objects down rather than up. But the scale of the unpopularity and political weakness is just too great. They’ve reached a critical mass where the whole carnival of power isn’t resonating in the same way, or maybe not at all. The change is both being driven by and driving his deteriorating hold on Capitol Hill. These stunts and antics are a kind of ideational gerrymandering, aimed at holding perceptions of Trump’s power — and thus to a real degree the reality of his power — in place. But like an electoral gerrymander, in the face of sufficient unpopularity they become brittle and can break suddenly. And that’s what appears to be happening.
It’s an excellent bet that future books and films made about the Trump Era will begin with an image of the White House this week. The world-famous Rose Garden has been replaced with a patio that looks like one at Mar-a-Lago. The East Wing is rubble. And on the sweeping South Lawn, right outside the front door of the White House, construction is underway on a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship arena for cage matches to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.
Now treating the nation’s capital as his property, Trump appears to be leaning on his past role as a real estate developer as a solution in Iran remains elusive, inflation in the U.S. climbs, and his popularity drops.
In addition to turning back to real estate, Trump seems to be lashing out to reassert his dominance over those who have hurt him.
Last night, Hannah Rabinowitz, Paula Reid, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that the Department of Justice under President Donald J. Trump has launched a criminal investigation into whether 82-year-old E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully sued Trump for defamation and for sexual assault, committed perjury in her testimony by saying she was not being paid to launch the lawsuit when it turned out later that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her legal fees and expenses.
Trump also refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its publication of an article describing a card for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. The card shows a crude sketch of a girl, bearing words that refer to “certain things in common” and saying, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump’s lawsuit says that the article damaged his reputation and that the card is fake, although it came from Epstein’s estate. The estate later provided a copy of the card to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which published it on its own website.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles tossed out the original lawsuit last month, saying that Trump came “nowhere close” to establishing that the article’s authors acted with “actual malice” to defame him, but said Trump could amend the lawsuit and refile it. Yesterday, he did.
On Tuesday, Alan Feuer of the New York Times noted that Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice means grand juries as well as judges appear to be losing faith in the department. Although it is a common saying that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, government prosecutors have had trouble getting the indictments Trump wants against his perceived political enemies.
In part this is because Trump has replaced career prosecutors with inexperienced loyalists, as Feuer notes, but it is also because of trumped-up charges against people like former FBI director James Comey and the six Democratic lawmakers who released a public video reminding military and intelligence personnel that they must not obey illegal orders.
Federal judges have been accusing prosecutors of misconduct, most recently in a case last week in Chicago in which a grand jury indicted six people, including a Democratic congressional candidate, for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a protest at a detention facility.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case after she discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. After making these maneuvers, the prosecutors then tried to hide evidence of them by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
Judge Perry said: “I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
If Trump can end the rule of law, he can do as he wishes.
At least some of what he appears to want is corrupt dealings that put money into the pockets of himself and his family members. Today Robert Faturechi of ProPublica reported that Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro personally pressured the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup company in which Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake.
Navarro and Don Jr. appear to be close, and a Pentagon official told Faturechi that “[t]he call came from the White House: We have to get this done.”
According to Faturechi, the Pentagon invested $620 million in Vulcan, a rare-earth magnet company, and another $80 million in its partner ReElement. The Commerce Department provided another $50 million in incentives, and the government took a $50 million stake in Vulcan.
When Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital invested in Vulcan in August 2025, the company was worth about $200 million. After the government investments, that valuation jumped to around $2 billion. Bloomberg reported last week that the investment in ReElement might not go through because of concerns over its ability to scale up its technology.
A spokesperson for the Pentagon told Faturechi that the Vulcan deal was sped up as defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”
And yet, despite their evident attempt to warp the U.S. legal system to their own purposes, Trump and his MAGA loyalists insist that they are the ones against whom the Department of Justice has been used. That is their justification for the $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off those who were convicted of crimes for their participation in Trump’s schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Last night, a group of thirty-five former federal judges took on that slush fund.
As Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post reported, the former judges, appointed by members of both political parties, asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization brought against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a “judicial review of the extraordinary—and historically unprecedented—circumstances presented by this litigation and by the collusive ‘settlement’ that invokes this litigation as the legal justification for its terms.”
Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization dropped the lawsuit after Williams appeared to question whether it was actually a legitimate lawsuit, since Trump was both the plaintiff and the person in charge of the IRS, then announced they had reached a “settlement agreement” with the Department of Justice. Williams was clear in her order closing the case that there was “no settlement of record” in it.
The judges expressed concern that the Trumps were manipulating the judicial system, “which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice.” They suggested that “this ‘case’ that the parties purport to have ‘settled’ is itself a fraud on the Court.” They also maintain that “this ‘settlement’ is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court,” and that “[f]raud on the court is established by clear and convincing evidence.”
“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a ‘commission’ controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.”
“To be clear,” the judges wrote, “the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified.”
This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:
“An old, but apt fable:
“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”
Cornyn appears to be firing a shot across the president’s bow, and now that Trump has alienated Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas by endorsing their opponents, there are six Republican senators who may be willing to stop moving in lockstep with him.
Trump’s war on Iran and the rising prices Americans are enduring in its wake are costing him support from all but his most fervent base, and there is no immediate solution that will make those problems go away. As Noah Berlatsky noted in Public Notice yesterday, no matter what he does in Iran, Trump will leave that situation with a loss. “If Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options,” Berlatsky wrote, “which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.”
There has been more noise today about how the U.S. and Iran are on the verge of an agreement, but so far it has come to naught. Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported today that Trump met with advisors for two hours today in the Situation Room to discuss the agreement but came to no decision about it. What did happen today is that officials from both Chevron and Exxon warned that oil inventories are dangerously low, raising concerns about dramatic price spikes.
As Americans sour on Trump’s economy, lawmakers are backing away from his self-aggrandizing plans for a new $250 bill with his face on it for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is touting the plan, Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the necessary congressional approval is not forthcoming as lawmakers recognize that releasing a $250 bill raises images of gilded ballrooms and extravagance at a time when Americans are having trouble paying for gas and groceries.
It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill. But, so far, only fifteen Republicans have cosponsored a bill to create the Trump $250 bill.
Trump’s other plans for demonstrating his power also took at least symbolic hits today.
Today Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to remove Trump’s name from the building, and from all official materials and signage, within fourteen days and blocked its plan to close for two years. As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, Cooper stood firm on Congress’s authority over the Kennedy Center. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” he wrote, “and only Congress can change it.”
Cooper also found that the board of the Kennedy Center agreed to close it for two years without advice of legal counsel and that Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer since Trump appointee Ric Grenell left, “had served in the role of Kennedy Center Executive Director for all of a few minutes before suggesting that the institution be shut down for years.”
Yesterday, Trump’s Freedom 250 organization, which he set up to compete with the bipartisan America 250 celebration of the nation’s birthday, announced that nine musical artists would perform at a sixteen-day “Great American State Fair” it was sponsoring on the National Mall. By today, most of the performers had pulled out after realizing that they had not been invited to be part of the nonpartisan America 250 but instead had been invited to Trump’s personal version of the anniversary celebration.
Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is working hard for a certain kind of vibe at another Freedom 250 event: his Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House for his 80th birthday on June 14. They reported that the Pentagon is trying to recruit hundreds of troops to show up to watch the matches in their uniforms. In addition to paying for their own travel, those military personnel must meet height and weight requirements.
U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia Leonie M. Brinkema temporarily stopped the Department of Justice from creating or operating the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, the $1.776 billion slush fund the administration created to pay off those convicted of committing crimes to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The administration cannot transfer money to the fund, consider any claims for payments from it, or pay out any money from it.
Louise Radnofsky and Lydia Wheeler of the Wall Street Journal report that those challenging the fund are people and entities prosecuted or threatened by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs say the government is not treating them on a par with Trump loyalists as worthy of compensation for government “weaponization.”
Brinkema has scheduled a hearing on the case for June 12.
This afternoon, yesterday’s request by thirty-five federal judges that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization had brought against the IRS bore fruit. Although the Trumps dropped the suit, the Department of Justice used it as justification for the establishment of the $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those who claimed the country’s legal system had been “weaponized” against them because they were convicted of crimes related to their actions to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Today Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond to the judges’ filing by June 12 and to address the judges’ claims that the two sides in the case—the Trumps on the one hand and the Internal Revenue Service, which Trump oversees, on the other—were not in fact adversaries in the case.
Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that more than a dozen Republican senators have privately asked Trump advisors to get rid of the slush fund, suggesting it will be hard to defend on the campaign trail before this fall’s midterm elections.
As the courts and the American people challenge Trump, he is lashing out. He responded to the judge’s order to take his name off the Kennedy Center with a long social media screed in which he insisted that he alone was “saving a dying Performing Arts Center” and said he would “transfer this failing Institution back to” Congress, although of course it was never his to command.
“There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country.” Then, in another long screed, he complained that the New York Times “is doing everything possible to criticize the magnificent restoration of the Reflecting Pool.”
But as Trump lashes out, his loyalists are working to consolidate their power.
The Office of Management and Budget, overseen by director Russell Vought, who was instrumental in the construction of Project 2025, has proposed a sweeping change in federal rules that would put Trump’s appointees in charge of billions of dollars of federal grants. According to Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed, the change would empower Trump’s appointees to kill grants that aren’t aligned with Trump’s priorities. That includes grants awarded to universities through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Earlier this month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth said that federally funded research at MIT is down 20% compared to last year. “That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” she said. The number of graduate students MIT takes on will also drop by about 20%, or about 500 fewer.
As Erica Orden of Politico reported yesterday, in the case of the firing of former FBI director James Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Karen Lesperance, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, told Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the government’s position is that Trump has the power to fire anyone, even if he is doing so for political reasons. When Furman asked if there were any limits to that power—could he fire people to create an “all-white executive branch? Or all-Black?” he asked—Lesperance avoided the question.
Comey’s lawyer said the Justice Department’s position was a “novel and breathtaking theory about the scope of” presidential power.
Trump and his loyalists have tried for months now to get control of state voter lists but have lost repeatedly in court, since the Constitution establishes that states run elections. Today the United States Postal Service has proposed that it will send mail-in ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.
As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket note, this “would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.”
