Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.
After handing down the Callais decision, the Supreme Court sent a case involving Alabama’s map back to the state. One lower court had ruled the 2023 map unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment and, in diluting Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, eliminated a majority-Black district in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
As Lawrence Hurley of NBC News reported, on May 26 a panel of three judges reaffirmed that the map showed intentional discrimination and was unconstitutional. The state took the case to the Supreme Court, and last night the right-wing justices allowed the state to use the 2023 map, saying it was likely to win its case that the map was lawfully drawn.
And so, Alabama will likely replace a Black Democratic lawmaker with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Republican lawmakers currently in power appear to be trying to grab as much power as they can as President Donald J. Trump deteriorates both personally and politically.
Today, a day after visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House said was a six-month physical that he said went “PERFECTLY,” the nearly 80-year-old Trump appeared in public for the first time since May 27. He seemed tired and vague.
In the House of Representatives, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s 2027 budget requests for the State Department, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Trump sleeping in two Cabinet meetings as Rubio was talking, and asked how the president could make good decisions about war if he couldn’t stay awake even during public events.
Rubio insisted he had never seen Trump asleep in a meeting, although in the instances Lieu showed, the president was sleeping in a chair directly beside him. Lieu accused Rubio of lying to Congress.
The weekend’s promises of an end to the war on Iran have fizzled, and the economy is slowing under the pressure of higher oil prices. The administration announced on Monday that it is dropping tariffs on imported farm and construction equipment from 25% to 15% to ease prices, proving—as critics have maintained all along—that the tariffs are in fact raising prices.
On Sunday, when Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel asked Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett about a Wall Street Journal report that delinquent credit card balances are at their highest level in 15 years as people use their credit cards for necessities, Hassett centered not the American people but the credit card companies. “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes, but for the most part…there’s not any kind of…financial threat to the credit card companies.”
Americans trying to navigate rising prices by putting necessities on their credit cards were not likely to be concerned about how their financial pain might hurt credit card companies.
As Trump and the administration falter, the MAGA leaders Trump has installed in the government are pushing their agenda as fast as they can. Russell Vought, the co-author of Project 2025 who directs the the Office of Management and Budget and who therefore has the power—although not the authority—to ignore the laws Congress has passed for the expenditure of money, proposed last Thursday, May 28, that political appointees in his office should have final say over research grants, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies.
The proposal promises to root out “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favor[s] certain identity groups over others.” In addition to submitting scientific research to political approval, the new rules would also stop international research collaboration unless it was approved by political appointees.
Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.
Democrats have pledged to fight the plan to tear out the observation system.
While those empowered by his 2024 win are pushing through their agenda, Trump himself appears to have abandoned any pretense of governing and is focusing on his Ultimate Fighting Championship ring in front of the White House—today he suggested making it permanent—and the painting of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today he showed to reporters images of how the Reflecting Pool is longer than skyscrapers are tall and that he is having it painted “American Flag Blue.”
He is also trying to cement control over the government. Today Trump signed an executive order stripping nearly 10,000 career civil service workers of their protected status, making it possible for the president to fire them at will. This move was introduced late in Trump’s first term but rescinded under President Joe Biden, and was a key part of Project 2025.
Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) illustrated that he is willing to pervert one of the most important positions in the U.S. government to his own whims. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, but he has demonstrated a willingness to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. By making him an acting director, Trump can get around the requirement for Senate confirmation.
But lawmakers who will have to face the voters in November appear to be getting queasy at being tied to Trump’s actions. Pulte’s nomination could be a bridge too far. The nomination threatens the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on June 12. Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec has called for Pulte to take control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism as well as the international,” and Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.
Section 702 permits intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreigners operating outside the U.S. without a judicial warrant. But in the process of that collection, the communications of U.S. citizens often get swept up. As Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian notes, the FBI used Section 702 to investigate protesters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has led the charge against renewing FISA without significant protections for American citizens, warned that Pulte could use Section 702 as a political weapon, abusing surveillance powers for purposes of blackmail, smear campaigns, or attacks on lawmakers, nonprofits, or activists. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added that Pulte could use his position to seize ballots or election equipment. Wyden urged lawmakers to refuse to reauthorize FISA “without strong new safeguards for Americans’ rights.”
Mark Warner (D-VA), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the person who can deliver the necessary Democratic votes for the renewal of FISA, warned that Pulte’s nomination could doom the measure’s reauthorization. Even Republicans, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are objecting to Pulte, citing his lack of intelligence experience, which the law requires for a DNI head, as a deal-breaker.
House Republicans are also starting to balk at the administration’s actions.
Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor of Politico reported today that House leaders had to push back votes today when Republicans didn’t show up from their holiday week. The House has been at work 43 fewer days in this congressional session than the Senate has as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has avoided pushback against Trump in the House by keeping members away from Washington. The Republican majority in the House is so slim that attendance issues have forced Johnson to delay votes to prevent Democrats from defeating bills. Now that members don’t want to go on the record either against Trump or for him, the ability of the House to get through the work it needs to is in jeopardy.
Johnson’s slipping control over the House showed today when the House voted to pass a resolution, introduced by Democrats, telling Trump either to stop further strikes against Iran or to get congressional approval for them. Johnson sent House members home early before the Memorial Day holiday to keep such a measure from passing, but today it did, by a vote of 215 to 208. Although Johnson warned that the resolution was “very dangerous” and would “weaken” Trump’s ability to find a way out of the conflict, members passed it, likely noting that according to a recent New York Times–Siena College poll, 64% of registered voters think Trump’s decision to go to war was wrong, while only 30% approve of it.
Shortly after passing that measure, the House rebuked both Trump and Johnson a second time when it advanced a measure that would aid Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s invasion by a vote of 218 to 204. If the measure now passes the House and then the Senate, it will provide $8 billion in loans and $300 million in security aid.
Trump does not appear to be taking his loss of power well, retreating to the traditional Republican position that anyone who disagrees with him is a communist. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The general counsel’s office at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts told employees in a memo on Thursday to “immediately” remove President Trump’s name from the institution’s branding on official forms and other documents. The mandate came days after a federal judge ruled that the board’s decision to add the president’s name to the building had been unlawful.
The memo gave staff at the center detailed instructions on the materials that needed to be updated, including social media accounts, email signatures and voice mail messages. The memo specified that indoor and outdoor signage with the barred name must be altered by June 12.
The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.
The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.
Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.
Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”
In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.
Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.
Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.
Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”
He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”
And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.
“If we all work together and follow the animal treatment protocols and movement restriction guidance, there is no reason to believe that this incursion will result in an establishment of the pest in our country,” Rollins said last night.
Meanwhile, Jamie Smyth of the Financial Times reported yesterday that U.S. oil reserves are at their lowest level in twenty-two years. The administration has released them to try to control oil prices that are skyrocketing after Trump’s war on Iran prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passed before the war. Oil industry analysts warned that oil prices will shoot higher if the crisis isn’t resolved.
Today President Donald J. Trump appeared to fall asleep again at a meeting in the Oval Office.
But Trump’s interest in profiting off the presidency remains clear. Jonathan Edwards of the Washington Post reported today that 14 of the 27 known donors to Trump’s $400 million ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts totaling over $50 billion since they made their donations.
As the results of the Republican destruction of the liberal consensus become clear, Democrats are speaking up to defend it and to chart a different course for the nation. Today, for example, Democrats called out the $187 billion in cuts Republicans have made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in their budget reconciliation bill of last July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
House Democrats criticized Agriculture Secretary Rollins’s repeated boasts that she has pushed more than 3.5 million people off SNAP, claiming that such cuts are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program. Representative Craig noted that Rollins appears to confuse the program’s error rate, which measures underpayments or overpayments, with fraud. Craig noted that SNAP has “the lowest fraud rate in any program in America.”
Although Congress itself makes the same distinction between error rates and fraud rates Craig did, and says that “SNAP fraud is rare,” Sydney Carruth of MS Now reported that Rollins told Craig: “You can’t be serious.”
More and more, Democrats are anchoring their opposition to MAGA Republican governance in their opposition to its extraordinary corruption that siphons taxpayer money into the pockets of a small group of wealthy elites and their loyalists. On Sunday, Georgia senator Jon Ossoff reminded an audience of Trump’s deal with his appointees at the Department of Justice to establish a slush fund of $1.776 billion to pay his supporters for their claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the legal system against them by indicting them for crimes.
Ossoff called out Trump’s frantic pace of outlandish social media posts, then said, “[W]hen not posting, he’s been trying to rob us. Have you seen it? He sued the U.S. government he commands for $10 billion. Then he settled the suit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund so he can cut checks to cronies and Jan[uary] 6 foot soldiers, the same men who sacked the Capitol to seize the presidency for Donald Trump, who beat police officers with flagpoles, built a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and hunted the vice president to lynch him. Donald Trump’s brownshirts. He pardoned them, and now he wants you to pay them.”
Ossoff continued: “He promised to bring down prices on day one. Instead, prices are soaring. Ground beef’s up 25% since Trump was sworn in. Coffee, 40%. The price of gas, 33%. Groceries, rent, health care, and the power bill hit their new all-time highs last month. And while you pay more for everything, Donald Trump wants your tax dollars for what many are calling the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called out how the corruption of the administration perverts the nature of government by stealing from everyday Americans for the vanity projects of a leader. She told Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News that “when people see a ballroom and they see at the same time their health insurance getting cut off, they know that they are paying for that ballroom with no healthcare, higher grocery prices, and increasingly impossible-to-afford housing.” “[P]eople are pissed off about it,” she said, “and they should be. It’s wrong. This is a complete theft of our money.” Rather than paying for Trump’s ballroom or his splashy renovations in the nation’s capital, taxes should pay for “better roads, healthcare, more affordable housing.”
And when the Texas Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, James Talarico, spoke to supporters in the home county of his opponent, Ken Paxton, he made it clear that the corruption of MAGA Republicans must not stand. He noted that “Paxton’s mugshot was taken just a few miles from here at the Collin County courthouse, where he was indicted for investment fraud. He convinced his own friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company. But what he didn’t tell them was that he was making a commission off their investments. He was scamming his own friends. If Ken Paxton will sell out his own friends for a quick buck,” Talarico asked, “what makes you think he won’t sell you out in the United States Senate?”
In a telling echo of a different sort of rally almost a decade ago, the audience began to chant, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”
“Listen,” Talarico said. “Ken Paxton has escaped accountability, but accountability is coming on November 3rd.”
Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions
[...]
The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.
Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.
As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.
... ... ...
Abstraxt
Ocean monitoring critically depends on the Global Ocean Observing System, which has provided upper-2,000-m temperatures with near-global coverage since around 2005 but is increasingly vulnerable to policy and economic pressures. Here we show that data reduction in the Global Ocean Observing System would substantially degrade its capability to monitor ocean heat content changes. We further highlight the shared responsibility of nations, through sustained international coordination and long-term national commitments, to maintain an adequate observing system.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.
The president pointed out that “it is…significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”
This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism. For all that the fascists boasted of the superiority of their form of government over democracy, in Italy “[o]ur troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule,” FDR said.
But the president warned Americans that the fall of Rome was only the beginning. “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. “[T]he victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly.”
FDR knew something his audience did not. On the other side of the Atlantic, paratroopers, their faces darkened with cocoa, were already dropping into France, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allies were on their way across the English channel.
The order of the day from their commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the evening of June 5 had read: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”
“Your task will not be an easy one,” it read, but it assured the troops that the Germans had suffered great defeats and Allied bombing had reduced German strength, while “[o]ur Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
Eisenhower’s public confidence did not reflect his understanding that the largest amphibious invasion in military history was a gamble. The seas on the crossing were rough, and the beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers. On June 5, in pencil on a sheet of paper, he had written a message to be communicated in case the invasion failed.
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” it read. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and dedication to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
But Eisenhower’s letter was never delivered.
On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from 8 countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD.
By the end of the day, more than 10,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed, but the Allies had established a foothold in France that would permit them to flood troops, vehicles, and supplies into Europe.
When FDR held a press conference later that day, his comment to the cheerful reporters highlighted the extraordinary weight of the past 24 hours. “I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome,” he told them, “that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”
No Russian thinker has worked harder than Aleksandr Dugin to rationalize the invasion of Ukraine. Long before it started, Dugin came up with a whole philosophical system, known as “neo-Eurasianism,” to explain why Russia, the country with the largest landmass in the world, would need to steal land from its neighbors and kill many thousands of people in the process. His books and lectures on the subject earned him the nickname “Putin’s brain.” That overstates his closeness to the Russian president. But his views reflect the mood among the war’s cheerleaders in Moscow, how firmly they support the conflict, and how they try to justify it to themselves (and everyone else).
Judging by Dugin’s most recent pronouncements, they have run out of cogent stories to tell. When Dugin attempted to explain the war’s rationale last week to Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian social-media influencer with millions of followers, he could not make any sense of it. Even a softball question—“What is worth fighting for today?”—led the philosopher down a spiral of inanity so bizarre that Sobchak, long rumored to be the goddaughter of Vladimir Putin, could not listen with a straight face.
Dugin’s description of Russia after the war sounded postapocalyptic. “First of all, it’s an image of life on the land,” he said. “It is an enormous exodus from the cities, an almost religious exodus, like the Jews from Egypt.” The cities of Russia, he continued, would turn into “neo-ancient ruins,” and the people would return to living in the countryside, communicating with one another through “an internet of Russian villages, closed off and guarded from the toxic incursions of the enemy.”
The Russian state has often forced its people into strange contortions of the mind. By law, Russians are prohibited from publicly calling the war a war rather than a “special military operation,” and Putin has urged them to believe that Ukraine started it. Still, the national capacity for self-deception has its limits, and recent developments suggest that Putin has found them.
Ukrainian drones now pummel industrial targets across Russia nightly, shutting down oil refineries, snarling logistics, and forcing airports to close for days at a time. More than 1 million Russians have been killed or badly wounded in the war, a toll too great to hide—almost every family has been affected. The gap between what Russians know to be true about the war and what the Kremlin says about it has grown so wide that even warmongers like Dugin struggle to bridge it. Instead, the ideologues of Russian imperialism have turned to random musings and belligerent hate speech, which seems intended to confuse rather than convince.
At various points during his interview with Sobchak, Dugin called the sport of surfing evil and said that its practitioners should be purged. He did not provide a coherent reason. He expressed similar hatred toward Russia’s favorite cartoon character, the jug-eared Cheburashka, who has repeatedly served as the mascot for the Russian Olympic Team. No political constituency exists for such views in Russia or elsewhere. They only allow Dugin to distract from the fact that he has nothing else to say, no way to spin the war he has championed for much of his career.
“It shows that everyone is beyond exhausted,” Mikhail Zygar, the author of several books about the Russian elite, most recently The Dark Side of the Earth, told me. “There is no one left who wants the war to continue, with the possible exception of Putin and Dugin.” A year or two ago, wealthy and powerful Russians tended to support the war, even in their private conversations, because they knew the dangers of losing it. “They would say things like: Yes, maybe it’s bad we started all this, but now we have no choice but to win,” Zygar said. “Nobody says that anymore. Now they just say the war has reached a dead end, and it needs to stop.”
The cracks in the Kremlin’s consensus became apparent this spring, as Russian advances in eastern Ukraine stalled. Commanders sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers a month, dead and wounded, without gaining any significant territory. Along the southern front, Ukrainian drones began to blow up military convoys on the main road from Russia to Crimea. Control of that highway had been one of Russia’s main achievements in the war, and now it stood littered with the wreckage of trucks full of weapons and supplies for Russian troops. Authorities in Crimea began to ration fuel as shipments from Russia ran dry.
Putin’s next humiliation came early last month, when he hosted the annual Victory Day parade. The threat of Ukrainian drone strikes forced organizers to scale back the parade’s size and cut a lot of military equipment from the program. With support from President Trump, the Kremlin called for a brief cease-fire to allow the festivities to proceed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky then issued a decree “allowing” Russia to hold its parade on Red Square.
The truce lasted only a few days. In the second half of May, Russia intensified its attacks against Kyiv, launching dozens of ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones in a matter of hours on some nights. Ukraine retaliated with strikes against Russia’s energy infrastructure, a strategy Zelensky took to calling “long-range sanctions.” All the while, Russian state TV continued to air the Kremlin’s talking points about the valor of its troops, the evils of Ukraine and its Western allies, and the approaching victory of Russia.
But social-media platforms showed a far gloomier picture, and their reach now exceeds that of television news. Some influencers began to call the war a dead end. Others demanded a cease-fire to allow the Russian military to prepare a new strategy. One video complaint to Putin about corruption and censorship attracted tens of millions of viewers, briefly turning its creator, the lifestyle blogger Viktoria Bonya, who lives in Monaco, into an unlikely face of opposition to the Kremlin. The state’s attempts to restrict internet access only deepened public anger, driving Putin’s popularity ratings to their lowest point since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, in 2022.
“They have no coherent message left,” Nina Khrushcheva, who studies propaganda at the New School, in New York, told me. Her grandfather Nikita Khrushchev served as the leader of the Soviet Union for more than a decade after Stalin’s death, in 1953. In those years, the Kremlin used ideology to justify its crimes. “Everyone knew the Gulag was terrible,” Khrushcheva said. “But the regime could explain it through the logic of internal enemies, traitors, and the rest of it. Now there is no explanation. No logic. No justification. The war simply does not stand up to any scrutiny at all.”
Even Dugin, who spent decades fetishizing the idea of a “civilizational war” between Russia and the West, seems to be having second thoughts. At the end of last month, he concluded a solemn post on social media with a warning that Russia could lose the war. “With the present elites,” he wrote, “our chances not only of achieving victory but simply holding the country together are critically low.”
Those elites arrived a few days later in St. Petersburg for an annual economic forum, a gathering of senior officials and business executives that Putin has hosted in his hometown for the past two decades. On its opening day, a fleet of Ukrainian drones attacked the city, damaging a warship in the nearby port of Kronstadt and setting an oil terminal on fire. Thick columns of smoke hung in the air on Wednesday morning as delegates arrived to pick up their badges.
The next evening, Zelensky published an open letter to Putin, announcing that the drones had traveled more than 600 miles to pay “a visit” to the forum. He promised more attacks on Russian cities unless Putin agrees to a cease-fire and begins negotiations to end the war. “We can all see that Russians are finally becoming less comfortable with this reality,” Zelensky wrote. “They do not like the fact that there is no end in sight to your war.” The letter ended with a subtle warning: “It is a fact of Russian history that you know well: when Russia grows tired, change comes.”
Putin and Dugin did their best to obscure that fatigue. The forum’s opening panel featured Dugin and several other hard-liners, one of whom enthusiastically predicted that Russia would remain at war for the next two generations. The “positive scenario” for Russia’s future, according to another panelist, would require the use of nuclear weapons to break the stalemate in Ukraine. Dugin, taking the microphone, had this to say: “We need an ideology, otherwise Russia is finished!” He recalled presenting his ideas for winning the war to a group of Russian generals recently, who told him, “No! We need an image! An image of victory, an image of the war, an image of the world we want to build.”
More than four years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s image-makers have failed at the basic task of explaining the war’s purpose to the Russian public. Putin did not come any closer to that goal during his speech at the forum yesterday. When a moderator asked him about Zelensky’s letter, Putin said that it contained “elements of rudeness.” He turned down the offer to negotiate a deal to end the war, appealing to Russia’s soldiers to continue fighting because, as he put it, “the whole country is watching you.”
But the consequences of the war, at least in terms of Russia’s isolation, are impossible for Putin to hide. Before the 2022 invasion, the St. Petersburg forum often attracted the leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, including China, France, Germany, India, and Japan. This year, Putin shared the stage with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Tanzania, the only heads of state who’d deigned to come. It was not the image of power and influence Russia wanted to project. But in the fifth year of his forever war, it seems to be the best that Putin can do.
Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped Friday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.
Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.
As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”
Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”
One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “[a] country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.
Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.
Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.
But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”
Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”
In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.
Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”
As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”
In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.
Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.
Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.
Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.
They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.
“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”
Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Club (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”
“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”
The lawsuit notes that “[f]ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.
The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.
Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.
Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.
The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.
Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”
In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.
In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.
MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.
As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”
That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.
New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.
Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.
The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.
In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.
Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.
White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”
An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.
The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”
Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.
But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.
Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.
There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.
Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April. The Federal Reserve likes to keep inflation at 2%. Energy costs are the biggest driver of that inflation, with fuel oil up 59% and gasoline up 41% over their costs last year. Airline fares have risen 27%. Fruits and vegetables are up 6% over their cost a year ago.
At a signing event for the budget reconciliation measure Republicans passed to add an additional $70 billion in funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protect (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald J. Trump if he was concerned about the inflation number. Trump answered:
“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”
And then his speech slid into a fantasy rewriting of the history of his war on Iran and his decision to launch it.
Trump claimed that he was telling reporters—and Iran—for the first time that the U.S. was secretly taking oil from Iran. “Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?” he asked. “Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, ’cause they don’t have any radar, ’cause we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that why oil’s $85 a barrel.”
As Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report, Trump appeared to be referring to the well-known U.S. operation to help dozens of commercial vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz. So far, the journalists report, the U.S has guided more than 200 ships through in a little more than a month. Before the war, about 3,000 ships a month traveled through the strait. The reporters say they could not confirm Trump’s claim that the effort had enabled more than 100 million barrels of oil to reach the market.
Then Trump segued into a rewriting of why he started the strikes in the first place in order to suggest the dramatic hit the economy has taken from the war was part of his plan all along. He claimed he had deliberately made the choice to hurt the economy to stop Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed—contrary to his own intelligence officers’ assessments—it was going to have “very soon.”
“I said, look, the one bad thing will be, we hit the best economy we’ve ever hit,” Trump claimed. “And I said to my people, I had [Treasury Secetary] Scott [Bessent], I had [Commerce Secretary] Howard [Lutnick], I had [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], I had all—I had [then–deputy attorney general] Todd [Blanche] in the room. I said, The one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history. Highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well, and I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran’s gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. We have to go and attack.”
In fact, in his video announcing the strikes and in comments in the early days of the war, Trump emphasized that the U.S. intended to end the Iranian regime, which he claimed had been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, and he urged Iranians to rise up against it. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions would come from the regime change he advocated.
In any case, he said today, oil was not nearly as expensive as the $250 a barrel people had said it could reach, so its current level is “pretty amazing.” And the stock market, he said, remains high. He went on to say that his strikes on Venezuela were “a great success” and that Venezuela has “become a happy country,” and that “we went to Iran and essentially we’ve done the same thing.” He claimed Iran’s military has been destroyed and all the Iranian leadership is gone.
When a reporter finally brought him back to the question about inflation coming down, he said that when the war is over, “it’s gonna come down like a rock.”
Meanwhile, John Knefel of Media Matters noted yesterday that Fox News hosts, many of whom supported the initial strikes on Iran, are now arguing that Trump should start bombing again. Their mantra is that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
Trump’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news as New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have a book on the Trump presidency coming out, detailed how desperately worried the White House was last summer over the Epstein files. They searched desperately for a way to look as if they were being transparent to appease the MAGA base, while also making sure the files stayed hidden.
The write-up of the story distances Vice President J.D. Vance from the files, suggesting he was “panicked” by them and wanted them released. This position, attributed to him by White House officials, is good for him politically, as he will want to pick up MAGA voters unhappy about the Epstein cover up by 2028, at least—or before, should he need to take the mantle of the presidency from Trump, who will turn 80 on Sunday.
Vance is in the news this week as he seems to court MAGA in other ways, as well. On Monday he announced he would refer Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice for an investigation of criminal fraud. The claim that Somalis in Minnesota are engaging in social services fraud while Democrats look the other way is a driving factor behind MAGA politics.
Raquel Coronell Uribe and Tara Prindiville of NBC News report that Walz has called Vance’s attacks on him a “campaign of retribution” meant “to punish blue states like Minnesota.” Ellison told the reporters the allegations were “unfounded” and a “political stunt.” “It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” he said. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”
Vance has also jumped aboard the unfounded accusation of Trump and his loyalists that the slow counting of ballots in California suggests the election is insecure and the Republican candidate is being cheated. Election denialism is increasingly a hallmark of the MAGA Republicans as they argue any election they lose is fraudulent.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, when caught lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance admitted he felt it necessary “to create stories so that the…media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”
Yesterday, an Iranian drone downed a U.S. helicopter, although a U.S. official told CBS News it was not clear that the strike was intentional. This evening, Trump launched new airstrikes against Iran, saying they were “self-defense strikes” “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” after the slow progress of negotiations for an agreement to end the war.
U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces “launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”
Christoph Koettl and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times confirmed reports from Iran that U.S. strikes destroyed what appears to have been a drinking water facility. They note that targeting civilian infrastructure can be a war crime under international law.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded to the U.S. strikes with their own strikes against U.S. targets in the region and announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz completely and would attack any vessels trying to cross it.
With the renewed strikes, the price of oil jumped more than $1 a barrel.
Tonight, Trump posted on social media a demand that Republicans in Congress give the U.S. military an additional $350 billion and pass the SAVE America bill that would suppress voting. “No games, no delays, and no weak compromises! Do this ASAP,” he wrote.
“This is a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s,” he wrote. The “$350 Billion Reconciliation Bill,” which could pass without any Democratic votes, “is the ONLY path to the full $1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR Military Budget our Warriors need in order to build THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM.”
He also demanded Republicans pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” requiring proof of citizenship to vote and an end to mail-in ballots “EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!” in order to “protect our Elections for Generations to come” and “to secure the NATION for our children and grandchildren.”
Then he added “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN,” then concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT. At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”
Later, he called into the Fox News Channel to say: “Look, my preference has always been take Kharg Island…. I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. You know, make a fortune, but I don’t know that America has the stomach, I think they’d like to see us come home, but we did it with Venezuela, Venezuela has worked out great for everybody. We’ve taken millions and millions of barrels of oil out of Venezuela. We brought them to Houston and various other places. Louisiana, uh, where, where, you know, refineries that we have that are incredible. They’re going 24 hours a day. Making a fortune, and, um, you know, I like that in this case, too, but I’m not sure that America has a long time, you know, it’s, uh, it’s a little longer process. Something that’s a guarantee if I want to do it…. I am not sure the country has the appetite for it.”
There’s a lot in this statement, even aside from the fact that Trump still has not gotten congressional approval for his actions in Iran, although the 60-day time limit for exercising military action against an “imminent threat” provided by the 1973 War Powers Act expired on May 1.
Aside from that—which is huge—experts assess that taking Kharg Island, an island in the Persian Gulf that acts as the hub of Iran’s oil exporting sector, would require sending in ground troops. That idea is, indeed, extraordinarily unpopular, even for a war that has been unpopular since it began and is becoming more unpopular.
But, as John Knefel of Media Matters noted Tuesday, Fox News hosts are urging Trump to increase U.S. military involvement in Iran, claiming that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
In this morning’s conversation with Trump, host Ainsley Earhardt boosted Trump’s claims that he has destroyed Iran’s military, and then told him that when Iran sends missiles at U.S. targets, “we have to fight back. So when you say you don’t think America has the appetite to do what we’re seeing tonight, I think we do.”
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews reacted to Trump’s post by noting, “Normally you wouldn’t increase the likelihood of US casualties by announcing something like this ahead of time, unless you are bluffing to use it as a negotiating ploy, you are stupid, you don’t really care about the troops, or all three.”
Meanwhile, Iranian media affiliated with the state says that Iran is now including in its list of potential military targets “all interests associated with the economic holdings managed by Elon Musk in West Asia, including those located in Arab countries and the occupied territories,” in retaliation for the U.S. use of Musk’s Starlink and X to target Iran. It noted that Starlink has ground stations in Israel, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, while Abu Dhabi investment funds support Space X infrastructure.
Trump also told the Fox News Channel hosts that Iran has “no defense…. The only thing they have is fake news…. They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly…. They’re really in submission. They just don’t know it yet.”
Trump’s comparison of Iran to Venezuela is also important. Clearly, he intended his strike on Iran to mimic January’s rapid strike on Venezuela that enabled the U.S. to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving Maduro’s second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez to run the country. Rodríguez has been willing to do what the Trump administration asks, and the Trump administration has eased sanctions against her, allowing her to work with U.S. investors in Venezuela’s oil sector. Late last month, Joshua Goodman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Jim Mustian of PBS reported that the Trump administration quietly told federal prosecutors in Miami to back off on long-standing criminal investigations of Rodríguez for drug trafficking.
Although Venezuela’s high court ordered that Rodríguez could fill Maduro’s position for only ninety days, there is no sign that elections are happening any time soon.
Instead, as Trump suggested this morning, the U.S. appears to be controlling Venezuela’s oil exports. Sanctions expert Roxanna Vigil of the Council on Foreign Relations reported on June 3 that “almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.” Vigil notes that the Trump administration maintains this arrangement benefits both countries, but “it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds.”
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that the U.S. was using a “short-term” account in Qatar and that the administration would provide an audit of that account, but it has not done so, declining to report “how the funds were spent or what safeguards were in place to prevent corruption and money laundering.” Vigil adds: “The administration has also not released the written agreements it has entered into with the Venezuelan government, traders, buyers, banks, and other entities involved in the process.”
Vigil notes that this hidden arrangement involves not just oil, but also gold and other mineral exports.
Democratic lawmakers have sent a formal request to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asking for an audit of the system and have also introduced legislation, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, to require an independent GAO audit, but so far it has not passed in either Republican-dominated chamber of Congress.
Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious that the U.S. media and Iranian officials don’t view U.S. military action against Iran as powerful enough, and his threats now are designed to force Iranian leaders into a deal.
Dasha Burns and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that the mood inside the White House is “angry, insular, grievance-driven and increasingly shaped by a group of loyalists with direct access to the president.” Trump’s determination to force Republicans to do his bidding shows not just in his extreme demands last night that the Republicans pass an additional $350 billion for his military buildup and the SAVE America Act to suppress voting, but also in his insistence on making loyalist Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence for the time period spanning the 2026 midterms.
Pulte has no experience with national intelligence, which the law requires for a director, but he does have a track record of weaponizing the government to attack Trump’s political opponents. Putting him into the DNI position would enable him to use information from the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to undermine Trump’s political opposition.
Lawmakers are facing a deadline to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires tomorrow, but critics are concerned that the law currently does not have sufficient safeguards to protect American citizens. Putting Pulte in charge of it exacerbated their concerns, and Republicans asked Trump to nominate a permanent DNI rather than try to put Pulte in as an acting DNI. Instead, he doubled down on Pulte.
A MAGA operative close to the White House told Burns and Wren that as opposition to his slush fund, funding for his ballroom, and resistance to his demands for new laws mounts, Trump is “increasingly frustrated with everyone, from his own team to the Senate…. He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative said. “He does not like being put in a box,” the operative told Burns and Wren. “When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”
Today nineteen Republicans joined all but seven Democrats to reject a measure to extend FISA, suggesting they did not trust Pulte to oversee the program. Under the fast track House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) used, the measure would have required two thirds of Congress to agree to it, but it failed by 218 to 198, not even reaching a simple majority.
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported today that oil executives have warned the White House that U.S. oil reserves, which they have been releasing to keep oil prices down, are running dangerously low, despite Trump’s boast that Venezuelan oil is flowing through the U.S. They say they expect prices to soar just as peak summer travel season kicks in.
This afternoon, Trump’s social media account posted: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others. The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.”
Later, Trump told reporters: “The strait is open. But the straits have been open for a number of months already and you just didn’t know about it.” This evening, Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham noted a CNN chyron that read: “TRUMP CANCELS STRIKES, CLAIMING FOR 39TH TIME THAT A DEAL IS NEAR.”
This afternoon, Trump said he would nominate Walter Joseph “Jay” Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to become the next director of national intelligence. Like Pulte, Clayton lacks national security experience. But he has another attribute that might be attractive to Trump: he has been part of the slow-walking of the release of the Epstein files.
LOS ANGELES, June 12 (Reuters) - As mixed martial arts fighters gather on Sunday on the South Lawn of the White House in a cage match to celebrate President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — a spectacle kicking off a series of events commemorating the nation's 250th anniversary — actor and activist Jane Fonda will sponsor entertainment of a different sort from New York City.
Fonda’s advocacy group, Committee for the First Amendment, will host a concert featuring actors, musicians and public figures appearing in support of free speech and democracy — principles that have come under attack during Trump's presidency, according to Fonda.
“This is our documentary moment,” Fonda told Reuters in an interview. “History is going to write about this, and I don't want to be on the side of people who said, ‘Oh my God, things are so bad, what am I going to do?’ No. I want to be out in the front.”
The "Rise Up, Sing Out" concert, which begins at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT) on Sunday, will include performances or appearances by Julia Roberts, Lily Gladstone, Bette Midler, Patti Smith and Rufus Wainwright. The event takes place at The Town Hall, a century-old landmark founded by suffragists, and will be available to watch via livestream.
... ... ...
