Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Donald Trump’s name to come off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center.
In his ruling of May 29, Cooper noted that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” and Congress stipulated that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.
As soon as he took office in early 2025, Trump replaced trustees on the Kennedy Center board and appointed himself a trustee as well. Now weighted with loyalists, the board elected Trump chair and then replaced the president of the Kennedy Center. Then the board voted to change the center’s bylaws to concentrate their own power. Then, in December, the board voted to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and the name went up over the Kennedy Center portico the next day.
Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who as an ex officio member of the center’s board had been sidelined, sued to stop the renaming and won. Cooper ordered Trump’s name to be taken off the building, all signage, stationery, merchandise, and so on, before midnight tonight.
At first, the Kennedy Center seemed willing to comply, removing Trump’s name from its website and YouTube page, but that cooperation changed yesterday, when the board voted to launch a last-minute appeal to the removal order. Hours later, the lawyers from the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal. They asked for a stay on the judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building, saying the board would be “forced to squander time and money” if the appeals court decides in its favor and that it “would be incredibly confusing for the public” if, in the end, Trump’s name went back up after coming down.
Cooper decided against them, saying they had not shown they would win their appeal on its merits. He said staying the order “would not be in the public interest, which is rarely served by the ‘perpetuation’ of ‘unlawful’ governmental action.”
Late this afternoon, the board of the Kennedy Center filed an emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, asking for a stay in the order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. It was, perhaps, hasty work. Legal analyst Liz Dye called it “bonkity-bonkers, while lawyer Norm Eisen of The Contrarian went for “batsh** crazy” and noted that Trump “clearly wrote big pieces himself.”
For the first time, the board alleged that “The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally,” that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on it. Dye notes: “If the bylaws were amended, they were amended since Judge Cooper issued his order—prob[ably] yesterday. This is the Board choking off funds and saying ‘you have to let us break the law, or we’ll lose all the funds.’”
According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Washington National Opera, about $17 million of the money Trump appears to be claiming from the Kennedy Center belongs to the Washington National Opera. For fifteen years, the suit says, the opera and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship, in which the center managed donations to the Washington National Opera for the opera’s benefit.
“By the second half of 2025, the Kennedy Center stopped performing many of its obligations under the governing affiliation agreement, including marketing, fundraising, and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of WNO’s funds,” the suit says. “Despite repeated requests from WNO, the Kennedy Center did not remedy its non-performance. Instead, it proposed that the parties end their long-standing affiliation. That affiliation came to an end in January 2026.”
And then the Kennedy Center refused to return the WNO’s money, instead using it as collateral for its own line of credit.
Yesterday Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen did a deep dive into Trump’s determination to turn other people’s money to his own service.
They note that Trump and his allies seized the funds Congress appropriated for celebrations to honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and have “awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants…to politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies”—nearly 80% of the $126 million of funding for the semiquincentenary celebrations. Private funding, including from corporations with issues in front of the administration, have also poured money into Trump’s events.
Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the administration is hoping to complete Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch before he leaves office. To do so, they are anticipating keeping work going 20 hours a day. They say they do not need congressional approval. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has asked officials from the National Park Service to explain and to justify why they are ignoring normal rules for federal contracting and instead handing out no-bid contracts, saying the project is “urgent.”
Yesterday Ashleigh Fields of The Hill reported that federal agencies and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) are putting at least $60 million toward the White House cage fight on Trump’s 80th birthday Sunday. That money has paid for the fighting arena on the South Lawn of the White House, as well as paying up to 900 workers since May 20.
A political activist and military veteran from Virginia tried to stop the event from proceeding, calling it a “deeply corrupt” event that uses national monuments to shill for private businesses, in at least one of which—UFC’s parent company TKO Holding Group—Trump owns significant amounts of stock. They noted that although Trump used the 250th anniversary to justify ignoring environmental review and congressional approval, the event is clearly designed not for the nation’s birthday, but for his own.
Today Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the lawsuit, saying that the Virginians did not have standing to challenge the UFC fight and that the time and money invested in the event outweighed any temporary harm they suffered.
On social media today, Trump posted images of the horses statues behind the Lincoln Memorial being freshly gilded, and wrote: “Re-gilding of the massive Arts of War sculptures, located between The Lincoln Memorial and site of The Triumphal Arch, rapidly continues. The sculptures will be fully regilded by July 3. The photos were taken yesterday. The Gilders’ Studio has flown in Gilders from around the Country to perform this work!”
Yesterday Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times reported on how former prime minister of Hungary Victor Orbán used architecture to reinforce the idea that his government was rebuilding former glories, while new prime minister, Péter Magyar is contrasting the palaces Orbán built to the crumbling hospitals and children’s homes around the country, where there was no money for toilet paper. The contrast between the gilded palaces of Orbán and his cronies and the poverty in which everyday Hungarians lived was key to the popular uprising that toppled Orbán’s government and put Magyar’s in place.
Today Elon Musk, who poured more than $290 million into the 2024 election to elect Trump and other Republicans, became the world’s first trillionaire—on paper, at least—when shares of his rocket company SpaceX were offered to the public.
Tonight the appeals court denied Trump’s emergency motion. Observers waiting at the Kennedy Center noted that a rainbow broke out over the building shortly after the decision. Although the letters for Trump’s name went up in hours, attached by workers on scissor lifts, taking them down involved so much scaffolding and so many hours that the United States government missed the court-imposed deadline.
The Department of Justice said the letters would come down “in the early hours of the morning of June 13,” presumably when there would not be the huge audience that has been watching the removal all day either in person or on livestream, and asked the court for twelve more hours to comply with the court order.
Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.
But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.
One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.
Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones. As public disillusionment has grown, politicians have been rotated swiftly in and out of power, abruptly terminating whatever policies they had started. Six different prime ministers have governed since the 2010 general election. They do not seem to be getting more talented over time. Less than two years after Starmer’s Labour Party took power, his net approval rating has plunged to minus 42 points. He is widely expected to resign this year, and may have done so by the time you read this.
The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.
In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.
But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.
The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still. Funding for day-to-day NHS operations was maintained, for instance, but only by cannibalizing the capital budget. A 2024 government report found that, as a result of austerity, Britain has “crumbling buildings, mental health patients being accommodated in Victoria-era cells infested with vermin with 17 men sharing two showers, and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins.”
After austerity cuts to welfare benefits took effect, the share of children who grew up in long-term poverty, meaning half their childhood or more, shot up from about 14 percent to 23 percent. Nutrition appeared to suffer, and doctors reported increased cases of diseases stemming from vitamin deficiencies, such as rickets and scurvy.
Local governments, called councils, saw their grants from the central government fall by 40 percent from 2010 to 2020. In 2023, Birmingham City Council, which is responsible for more than 1 million residents, effectively declared bankruptcy. One-third of all English councils could do the same within five years.
Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending.
Settling the formal Brexit deal took almost four years of negotiations between Britain and the EU. The resulting uncertainty took a toll on British businesses even then. In 2018, one year before his ascension to prime minister, Boris Johnson was asked by a European diplomat about these adverse effects. He replied, “**** business.” And indeed, something like that happened. A recent paper on “The Economic Impact of Brexit,” by five economists, calculated that Brexit caused business investment to drop by 12 to 18 percent, productivity and employment to decline by about 3 to 4 percent, and, most striking, GDP per capita to fall by 6 to 8 percent—twice as much as earlier estimates. The harms weren’t all immediately visible. As with austerity, they accumulated over time.
Outside London, the consequences of almost two lost decades are unignorable. Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands, about 150 miles north of London, was once the ceramics capital of Britain, and quite probably the world. It was geologically blessed by rich seams of both coal and clay; its wares were transported by canal to Liverpool for export. The whole area became known as the Potteries. Stoke once held some 2,000 bottle kilns—huge, bulbous structures in which crockery from companies such as Wedgwood were fired.
Today only 47 remain; the industry employs perhaps 5,000 people—down from some 300,000 in 1984. And because of Britain’s extraordinary energy costs, this number is still declining. Depleted oil drilling in the North Sea and a failure to invest in alternative energy sources have left the country reliant on imported energy, staggering consumers and industry alike. From 2004 to 2024, electricity costs for British businesses more than tripled (even after adjusting for inflation), and are now the highest in the world.
black-and-white photo of large bottle-shaped buildings along canal, with homes and smokestack in background
In March, I visited Middleport Pottery, the last remaining ceramics factory that has operated continuously since the Victorian era. A charming elderly guide named Phil Knott showed me around, pointing out the ceramics and crockery that the company supplies to the private residence of King Charles III. In most rooms we entered, he introduced me by saying, “This man here is from Washington to write an article about the ceramics industry.” Though the factory once employed some 400 workers, it now has only 18. Middleport uses smaller gas ovens today, but its last bottle kiln (there once were seven) still sits outside, a vestige of a bygone time. All along the kiln’s exterior—where heat and smoke and ash once escaped—small trees and plants have taken root in the dormant structure.
The deindustrialization of Stoke began a long time ago. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in her “supply side” revolution, emphasizing privatization and breaking the trade unions. This improved the country’s fortunes, but not those of all its parts. Thatcherism hit Stoke hard, causing closures of factories, steelworks, and mines. Lisa Healings, who runs the charity Voluntary Action Stoke-on-Trent, lived through that as a young girl. VAST works with a network of charities to provide food, job training, and counseling, but the group is fighting economic gravity. “There’s now a third generation almost coming through,” Healings told me, whose “parents were unemployed, their grandparents were unemployed, and they don’t see any future for themselves other than living on benefits and being unemployed.”
Austerity was particularly brutal to places like Stoke, where a large share of the population was already dependent on government benefits. Two out of every five children in Stoke live in poverty, one of the highest rates in Britain, and in 2022, the city had one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country.
Since the turn of this century, successive governments have tried and mostly failed to correct basic problems. In 2003, John Prescott, Blair’s deputy prime minister, started a policy called “Pathfinder,” which aimed to demolish and replace worn-down housing in postindustrial places such as Stoke. Cameron’s government abruptly defunded it in 2010, leaving empty eyesore lots where demolition had finished but building had not yet begun. In 2019, Johnson promised that a new economic-revitalization plan called “Leveling Up” would “answer the plea of the forgotten people and the left-behind towns.” But few specifics were forthcoming until three years later, only months before Johnson resigned. The funding it provided was a pittance compared with the support withdrawn from local governments under austerity.
It is in places like Stoke where discontent with London and Brussels is highest. During the 2016 referendum, 69 percent of residents voted to leave the EU—the highest share of any city in the country. Afterward, Stoke was branded “the capital of Brexit.”
My train north from London was, like many, seriously delayed—in this case because of a loose panel on a front car. “Hopefully it’ll hold on until we get to Manchester,” the conductor announced. This information left me, rather like the panel, flappable, but it had no discernible effect on my fellow passengers. Although Americans should generally not cast aspersions on the rail services of other countries, the episode was yet another reminder of Britain’s degraded state.
Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040.
In Birmingham, a local named Gerry Moynihan walked me from the city center to the benighted HS2 terminus. Moynihan—a pleasant, white-haired former lawyer with a dyspeptic X account often focused on his hometown’s troubles—was eager to show me what had gone wrong. He pointed out a large site called Smithfield, formerly the location of grocery wholesalers whose warehouses had been vacant for many years. We passed a few film studios along the canal, some of the more promising businesses that have sprouted up in recent years. Moynihan admitted that their existence poses some challenge to an oft-repeated remark of his—“I see nothing of merit in this city”—but then redirected my attention to the gargantuan potholes in the road, gouged so deep that you could see the Victorian-era cobblestones below; to the trash piled up in vacant lots; and to the discarded boxes for extra-large canisters of nitrous oxide, which is routinely abused in Birmingham.
To get to the HS2 terminus, at Curzon Street Station, Moynihan and I walked along the route of an attempted Birmingham-metro-rail extension, which has itself been beset by delays and cost overruns: a localized version of the HS2 debacle. I could see crawler cranes and excavators moving busily around; huge Y-shaped piers that will, perhaps in a decade, hoist the high-speed rail stood disconnected from each other. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition. “If you’re a developer, why would you invest here? The only reason is HS2, and it is moribund,” Moynihan said.
Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes. The government spent 32 years and £179 million planning a tunnel beneath Stonehenge to relieve traffic, only to officially scrap the plan this year. Even basic tasks, such as obtaining power, can be nightmarish. “In the U.K., you can be waiting for five years to get any kind of energy-intensive project connected to the grid,” Sam Bowman, a founding editor of the magazine Works in Progress, told me. These failures are all self-imposed. Parliament, by design, could exercise broad authority over these matters—yet rather than wielding this power to confront Britain’s problems, it has chosen instead to smother the state with veto points, proceduralism, and endless reviews.
Britain suffers from a housing crisis significantly worse than America’s. The problem cannot even be blamed on zoning, because Britain does not have a zoning regime to speak of. Rather, every attempt to build is a painful, ad hoc negotiation with local government councils and NIMBY residents. As a result, housing costs per square foot are among the highest in Europe. In the words of one report, “Our housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.” France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes. And yet, since the financial crisis, the U.K.’s rate of housing production has only fallen.
Britain’s building problems are not limited to the periphery. In London, the typical house sold in 2024 cost 11 times median earnings. And although London remains an alluring global city, it, too, is stagnating—since the financial crisis, worker productivity there has been essentially flat. Even so, London today is almost 50 percent more productive than the West Midlands, which includes both Stoke and Birmingham. Anna Stansbury, an economist at MIT, told me that the gaps between London and other British cities are comparable to those between cities in West and East Germany. In regional terms, the problem of the past two decades is essentially that London has hardly grown, yet Britain’s smaller cities remain so far behind it.
There are some exceptions to the general pattern of British malaise: Oxford and Cambridge, world leaders in science for centuries, are belatedly becoming hubs for start-ups, though they are close enough to London to share its housing afflictions. The most optimistic place I visited outside London’s orbit was Manchester, where growth has consistently been double the U.K. average. Downtown Manchester was once almost totally depopulated; today, approximately 100,000 people live there. After working hours in the city’s pubs, you will hear conspicuous southern accents: In 2024, more Londoners moved to Manchester than vice versa.
Manchester has succeeded in part because it gained some independence from the shambolic central government in London. In an experiment in devolution begun in 2011, London granted the city more power over taxes and transportation. The bus network was brought under public control, and a local £1 billion “Good Growth Fund” was set up to distribute investments across the city. Manchester, as a result, is now better able to set its own economic course. “You can’t order growth from the top down,” Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017, told me. “The U.K., for most of our lives, has been an overly centralized country.”
Many Labour supporters wish that Burnham, rather than the hapless Starmer, was prime minister. But for that to happen, Burnham would first need to return to Parliament (where he had previously served for 16 years). He attempted to do so in January, when a parliamentary seat became vacant in Greater Manchester, but he was blocked by Starmer’s allies, who did not want to elevate a potential rival (already called the “King of the North”). In May, after Starmer’s grip on power had loosened even further, a Labour member of Parliament in Makerfield, another Manchester seat, voluntarily resigned to offer Burnham another avenue to challenging the party leader. He will not be blocked this time.
Yet Burnham’s path to power is not guaranteed. Even Manchester is not immune to the country’s anti-establishment mood. In Makerfield, recent elections have seen significant improvement for the Green Party, the populist left party on the rise in Britain. The Greens are run by Zack Polanski, a former hypnotherapist and a self-described “eco-populist” who wants to legalize drugs and implement a wealth tax. But the strongest performance has been put up by the Reform Party, the populist hard-right party that’s rising nationally even faster than the Greens.
Both of these parties, once relegated to the fringe of British politics, have done exceptionally well in recent national surveys. Reform has in fact been out-polling all the others for months—the first time in more than 40 years that neither Conservatives nor Labour has led. No matter who in the Labour Party replaces Starmer, presuming he resigns, Britain must hold another general election within the next three years. The odds-on favorite to be the next prime minister after that election is Reform’s leader. His name is Nigel Farage.
How could the prime instigator of Brexit now find himself in a position to be promoted to prime minister?
Farage is ascendant because he has an enticing answer to the question “Who broke Britain?”: the feckless elites, the ineffective civil servants, and the unwanted immigrants. Even if the country’s problems are beyond his capacity to solve, he at least can promise their reckoning.
I met Farage in March, right before he took the stage at a campaign rally in Milton Keynes, a commuter town outside London most famous for its many roundabouts. He and his merry band of insurgents were touring the country ahead of the local elections in May, in which Reform would gain some 1,400 municipal-government seats (30 percent of the total seats contested), while Labour would lose about 1,400 and the Tories about 500. Farage was in character: besuited, with a pink-and-purple tie immaculately matched to his shirt, and sporting his trademark Union Jack socks. When he leaned forward, I smelled tobacco and possibly a faint whiff of the pint of lager that he is so often pictured holding. He sunnily told me how he was preparing, upon his election, to wrest power from the deep state and deploy it to enact the will of the people. “We have to make sure within the civil service that we have people who are not willful obstructors,” he said: His government would not be like Donald Trump’s first administration, initially unsure of how to wield power, but like the second, ready to go from the start.
Several hundred people had come to see Farage speak. Political rallies in England are more civilized than the American ones I am used to: People drink pints before the event, sit patiently in chairs during it, and leave in an orderly queue afterward. After everyone took their seat, Farage delivered his speech, which was a rhapsody of declinism. “It is a period of complete political failure; economically, we’re going down the drain,” he said. Every current and recent political leader was to blame. The Conservatives had delivered Brexit too slowly, allowed mass migration anyway, agreed to net-zero-emissions commitments. Labour was responsible for Britain’s humiliation on the world stage, through its weak response to the war in Iran and its general dithering. The message was clear: Only Farage could fix it.
Farage’s plans to consolidate power, through a defanged civil service and constitutional reform, are detailed. Cuts to the civil service are not just being promised in a general way; a “Project 2025”–style ministry-by-ministry road map is being discussed by Reform’s allies. Quasi-constitutional laws that have restrained the power of the central government, such as the 1998 Human Rights Act and the 2010 Equality Act, will be redrafted. So will the 2008 Climate Change Act, which enshrined Britain’s net-zero commitments. Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP who defected to Reform last year and is now a part of its brain trust, told me that fixing the country’s problems requires first restoring parliamentary sovereignty. That would mean limiting the ability of independent government bodies to direct policy, and of courts to exercise judicial review on acts of Parliament.
Greater power for Parliament could indeed enable needed reforms. The accumulation of legal clutter is in no small part responsible for the country’s inability to build housing, infrastructure, and industry. And Parliament’s ability to self-govern, after decades of delegation to EU committees, has atrophied. Even after Brexit, a sort of learned helplessness has prevailed within the political class, Fred de Fossard, a former Tory political adviser now at the Prosperity Institute, told me. If Farage is elected, perhaps that will change. But Brexit proved that a sweeping assertion of sovereignty is by itself insufficient to ensure growth—and, indeed, can be self-harming.
Many of the details about how Farage would restore Britain’s place among wealthy nations, and a sense of opportunity for its people, are hazy. I asked him how he would spur the kind of strong economic growth that the Conservative and Labour Parties had failed to achieve. He answered by saying that he and his future ministers were successful businesspeople, unlike the current lot, and would therefore do better. The Reform Party has promised to slash government spending and national deficits, though it has promised to cut some taxes too. Farage told me that shock therapy for the British state would be necessary. “There is no question the state has to shrink in size, and this is going to be very, very tough,” he said, adding that he anticipates protests when he unveils plans to cut welfare benefits. “But if we don’t do it, we are going to go bust.”
Because of such statements, Reform is often accused of being austerity rehashed, or Thatcherism rewarmed. But Reform’s most specific economic pronouncements have largely been of the crowd-pleasing, non-Thatcherite variety: cutting fuel taxes, keeping the NHS free at the point of service, and preserving the “triple lock”—a policy effectively ensuring that state pensions increase faster than ordinary wages.
Being cryptic about hard economic choices is electorally advantageous, particularly when the general election could be years away. This was in fact the strategy that Starmer employed in his election campaign, repeating the word growth like a mantra without revealing how he would achieve it. His political capital proved fleeting. Reform may ascend to power only to find itself snared in the same trap. Still, even well-connected Westminster types who served in prior governments told me they did not really dread a Reform government. Reform, in their view, is the only party iconoclastic enough to attempt major structural repairs on the foundations of the British state and economy. “To believe that something is broken doesn’t mean that it’s irretrievably broken,” James Orr, a Cambridge theology professor who leads policy for Reform, told me. “But we think it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’re the only political movement with a chance.”
The most detailed plans released by Reform involve immigration—the one issue that evokes as much anger among voters as living standards do. The Conservatives broke their pledges: Johnson promised to reduce the net inflow of migrants, but his policies, meant to bolster health-care staffing and stabilize falling university enrollment, led to the legal arrival of more than 3 million non-EU immigrants, who now amount to one out of every 25 people in Britain. Later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggled to deal with the arrival of more than 150,000 migrants who’d crossed the English Channel on small boats. Even the current Labour government, sensing the anger in the electorate, has pledged to reduce migration.
It is on immigration that Farage offers the starkest choice. He has put Zia Yusuf, a wealthy businessman and the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, at the helm of his immigration agenda. Yusuf’s major policy pitch is “Operation Restoring Justice,” which calls for the deportation of all unauthorized migrants in Britain (through a new ICE-style agency called UK Deportation Command). Yusuf is the kind of zealous and paradoxical convert whom Reform, and other parties of the global New Right, revel in—a practicing Muslim who strenuously campaigns to keep churches from being converted to mosques. He is to Farage what Stephen Miller is to Donald Trump: a hard-faced nativist, always aware of the latest heinous offense committed by an immigrant and always warning of impending civilizational collapse—next to whom the boss looks moderate and relaxed. “Never again will British people be a second-class citizen in their own country,” Yusuf declared in a speech on the night I saw Farage in Milton Keynes. “Under a Reform government, His Majesty’s Parliament will be sovereign once again, and the rights of the great British people will reign supreme!”
Given the anger over broken border promises, it’s no surprise that Reform’s clearest message has been on restricting migration. It resonates because Britain’s economic failures have contributed to a growing cultural precarity, too. But unwinding migration is unlikely to solve Britain’s deepest woes—most of which are domestically manufactured, not imported.
With every disappointing year, with the failure of every backfiring government policy, the nostalgia for British exceptionalism has grown stronger. Restoration to global hegemony is impossible. Stabilization is achievable, but only if Britain’s next ruling class does something that its governments over the past two decades have not managed: stop choosing the self-harming option. Arresting the current trajectory of decline will require the recognition of a hard truth. What broke Britain was not Brussels, bad luck, or bankers. The British broke Britain. To mend it, they must first stop breaking it further.
Before noon on Saturday, June 13, Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” They had, he wrote, “[r]emoved all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy,” updated the website, removed references to Trump from letterhead, promotional materials, and so on, and “[w]ithdrawn any trademark application officially referring to the Kennedy Center as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center’…or any similar formulation.”
What they did not do was take down the tarp workers installed last night around the scaffolding they erected yesterday, hiding the portico wall. Through a crack between the tarp and the wall, photographers caught a few images of letters coming down shortly after 3:00 AM—Cliff Owen of the Associated Press got an iconic shot of a worker loosening the P from the wall—but so far the public has not seen the restored facade. The portico remained shrouded all day.
In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.” Tonight workers were back at the Kennedy Center, where they created passageways in the tarp to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the wall where Trump had put his name covered.
Last night, while workers were putting up scaffolding at the Kennedy Center, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters held a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the UFC cage matches to be held at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. Trump sent the United States Army Herald Trumpets, the U.S. Army ensemble chiefly responsible for playing the entrance and exit fanfares for the President of the United States, to open the event.
The fighters walked from Lincoln’s statue down the steps of the memorial through the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon, a pathway formed between two groups made up of sixteen service members in dress uniforms. This is the U.S. military’s highest ceremonial formation, usually reserved for heads of state, foreign dignitaries, senior officials, and funerals for military heroes.
This morning the weigh-in for the UFC fights at the White House also took place at the Lincoln Memorial. Heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit seemed to pretend to throw up, dribbling colored liquid from his mouth. “So what? Maybe I was drinking last night,” Hokit told the media there. “Who wouldn’t be? I’ve got a giant man who wants to knock me out,” he said, referring to his scheduled opponent Derrick Lewis, whom Alex Pattle of Yahoo! Sports identifies as Trump’s favorite fighter. “He has the most knockouts in UFC history.”
Today stunt performer Travis Pastrana performed a backflip on his dirt bike over the UFC octagon fight arena on the South Lawn of the White House. Other riders performed stunts as well. They were filmed on their bikes, flying across the facade of the White House.
On the eve of his 80th birthday, the president posted an image of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a homeless encampment. Then he posted an image of himself leaving his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in 2024, when a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, under the caption “Only Trump.” Then he posted an image from 2018 of himself walking with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Then he posted a picture of himself speaking at a lectern in front of Air Force One while he was campaigning for reelection in August 2020.
Then he posted an AI image of himself on a ship looking out at battleships from different eras, including a wooden sailing vessel, flying the American flag, with fighter jets in formation overhead; the back of his jacket is emblazoned with “COMMANDER IN CHIEF,” and the caption reads: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”
Then he posted an image of himself on the cover of Fortune magazine from December 8, 1986. And then he posted a black and white image of himself as a younger man in the same era, looking pensive, seated in a chair on an ice rink, with the caption: “Years ago after saving the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park—Long before I fixed The Reflecting Pool, and everything else in Washington, D.C. including, most importantly, CRIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Tomorrow night, the fighters will enter the ring from the Oval Office. The fight will be carried live on Paramount Plus, for a fee of $8.99 and up.
Tomorrow, on Flag Day, President Trump and the White House will host U.F.C. — the Ultimate Fighting Championship — for a set of fights in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary, as well as to mark the president’s 80th birthday. To hold this event, the president has transformed the White House grounds into a pay-per-view spectacle — a carnival designed and built for the biggest display you can imagine.
It suffices to say that this is out of the ordinary for a celebration of the nation’s founding and independence.
At the Jubilee in 1826, for example, President John Quincy Adams watched a parade from the steps of the White House and later listened to a reading of the Declaration of Independence.
The Centennial was a more extravagant affair — centered on a monthslong exhibition in Philadelphia. President Ulysses S. Grant opened that exhibition on May 10, 1876 in a joint appearance with Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil. In his official proclamation, Grant called on Americans to mark the centennial with “some public religious and devout thanksgiving to Almighty God for the blessings which have been bestowed upon us as a nation during the century of our existence, and humbly to invoke a continuance of His favor and of His protection.”
At the Sesquicentennial in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech in Philadelphia on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. “At the end of 150 years,” said Coolidge, “the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgment of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the pre-eminent support of free government throughout the world.”
And on July 4, 1976, for the Bicentennial, President Gerald Ford traveled to key sites of the American Revolution — Valley Forge, Philadelphia and New York City — before returning to the White House for a final public celebration. While at Independence Hall, he also delivered a nationally televised address in which he called on the country to continue the work of the founders: “Liberty is for all men and women as a matter of equal and unalienable right. The establishment of justice and peace abroad will in large measure depend upon the peace and justice we create here in our own country, where we still show the way.”
In each celebration, we see how presidents treat the moment as a chance to exercise national leadership — to lead the American people in a collective appreciation of the nation’s highest values. None of them — not Adams, not Grant, not Coolidge, not Ford — turned the spotlight on themselves.
This is obviously a sharp contrast with the aesthetics of the current celebration, which are first and foremost about the president’s ego and vanity. But there’s something else as well.
To put the country and its people at the forefront of the occasion is to honor the democratic spirit of the founding of the United States. To put oneself at the forefront, as Trump has, is to discount and strip away that democratic content.
Sunday’s U.F.C. fight is not just a garish spectacle; it is an expression of the president’s contempt for the ritual and symbolism of American democracy — which is just another way to say, his contempt for democracy itself.
Donald Trump demanded that Congress expel Jamie Raskin, and Raskin's response was to offer him a way out:
Stop committing impeachable offenses.
The Maryland Democrat, a constitutional law professor who helped lead Trump's second impeachment, was asked on MS NOW about the president rage-posting at him. He did not flinch. He gave the president homework.
The meltdown came Thursday afternoon. Trump fired off a 195-word screed on Truth Social calling Raskin "a Loser in Life" who "worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably."
He claimed that without Joe Biden's pardon Raskin "would be in jail right now," echoed a Fox host's call to "expel the bum," and accused the congressman of suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
What set him off was nothing Raskin had done. It was what Raskin might do.
The congressman has said for months that Democrats will have the votes to impeach if they take back the House in November, which every forecast says is likely, and the prospect is clearly living in Trump's head.
So Chris Hayes asked Raskin about it on air. The president, Hayes noted, is rage-posting about you, calls you a loser, is mad you wanted to impeach him.
Raskin barely blinked. Trump, he said, is "obviously having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment."
Then came the part that traveled. "I'd like to tell the president, since he apparently is listening to me this week, there's a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Don't go to war and usurp the powers of Congress to declare war. Don't spend money in a way different from how Congress appropriated it."
Then the professor graded him. "So the president needs a basic constitutional primer."
Here is the part Trump's tantrum could not change. Expelling a member of the House takes a two-thirds vote, and it has happened five times in the history of the country, the last time to George Santos for fraud.
There is no motion to expel Raskin, there is no math to expel Raskin, and Republicans control the chamber by a margin that gets thinner every month.
The president of the United States called for a punishment he has no power to deliver, against a man whose only offense is naming what impeachment is for.
Raskin did not take the bait, did not match the volume, did not pretend a Truth Social tantrum was a constitutional crisis.
He just reminded the most investigated president in American history that the cure for impeachment has always been in his own hands.
Stop breaking the law.
...as the Trump administration continues to deploy emergency oil to minimize the damage from the war with Iran.
President Donald J. Trump’s remaking of Washington, D.C., to reflect his personalized approach to power rather than the American people and their government has become a little too on-the-nose over the past week.
After weeks of hyping the idea that he would restore the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial to “SPECTACULAR” condition after it had been “destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump today reposted an article from the right-wing site Breitbart, titled: “‘Thank You President Trump’: Reflecting Pool in D.C. Wows After Trump Renovations.”
In fact, as Kinnia Cheuk of Politico reported today, the renovations Trump said would cost $1.5 million appear from federal contracting records to have cost almost $16 million, and the pool is now fouled with green algae.
But Trump and his cronies are simply telling the American people it’s a win. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the reflecting pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” a spokesperson for the Interior Department told Cheuk.
The alleged compliance of the board of the Kennedy Center with a court order requiring it to remove Trump’s name from the center illustrates yet another of Trump’s hallmarks: cheating the system. Trump packed the board with loyalists who made him chair and then changed the name of the building despite specific language from Congress that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.
The board missed the court deadline by twelve hours. Then Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the Kennedy Center, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.”
Their conclusion seems to have been that the court ordered them only to take down Trump’s name; it did not order them to show that his name was down, or to keep Kennedy’s name visible. Currently, the Kennedy Center portico facade is covered with a giant tarp through which workers have created passageways to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the portico covered.
Trump has made his career on the idea that there is always a way to cheat the system if you operate in bad faith, and he has carried that idea into the government. Famously, in 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said Trump was hiding his tax returns because he had paid no federal taxes in years, Trump answered: “That makes me smart.”
Now, after voters reelected him in 2024, Trump’s hand-picked acting attorney general Todd Blanche has agreed that the Department of Justice will not prosecute Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for tax evasion.
Both system-cheating and spectacle were on display in last night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the South Lawn of the White House. Trump got around restrictions on using the White House grounds for such an event by claiming it was in honor of the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, for which Congress has suspended normal regulations.
Then at 9:30 Friday night, as Aram Roston and Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian reported, the UFC issued a press release saying that the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, which emerged on Wednesday as an official sponsor of the event, would be the “Presenting Partner of a new $250,000 Performance of the Night bonus pool.”
World Liberty Financial is the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, overseen by Zach Witkoff, the son of billionaire Steve Witkoff. The elder Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and for peace missions, including to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin (apparently at Putin’s request).
Zach Everson of Public Citizen explained what this arrangement means. In addition to connecting World Liberty Financial directly to the White House, UFC is giving cash to World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial gives its crypto to the fighters. World Liberty Financial then invests the cash in U.S. Treasury bonds and keeps the interest.
The UFC fight on the White House lawn was also about spectacle, and not just about appealing to Trump’s base as fighter Josh Hokit did by echoing a right-wing conspiracy theory that smeared former First Lady Michelle Obama. MAGA influencers and administration officials hyped the event as representing the United States, but on June 11, Reuters reported that only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold UFC cage matches at the White House. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate. Even among Republicans, only 31% thought it was appropriate.
We are about to see if Trump’s focus on cheating the system for his own ends and distracting from his actions with spectacle will work over something as huge as the Iran war and Americans’ constitutional rights.
Shortly before he appeared at his birthday fight, Trump posted on social media: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”
About an hour later, he posted: “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!”
It appears that Trump badly wanted to sign an agreement with Iran yesterday on his birthday before taking off today for Europe to attend the G7, an informal forum made up of leading industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and including the European Union (EU). Rumors about what was included in negotiations swirled all weekend.
While Trump is boasting that the agreement is a triumph, no one has yet seen any terms, and the agreement that is scheduled to be signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday appears to be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a 60-day ceasefire for continued negotiations, not a final agreement.
Zack Stanton of MS NOW notes the ways in which Trump’s version of the MOU and what Iranian officials say about it are quite different. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free” while Iranian officials say they will regulate the strait along with Oman.
Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets by saying “no money will exchange hands.” But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction.
Discussion of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be put off for later.
In his remarks about the MOU yesterday, Trump thanked Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping for their help.
In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that even without the details, “it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.”
Iran’s government is intact and now under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Strait of Hormuz is under Iran’s control, Iran has significant drone and missile stocks, Iran can continue to sponsor terrorism, and money will flow to Iran. Nichols points out that Iran leaves the conflict stronger than before. Any claims that Trump managed to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions is “silly,” Nichols notes: the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was working to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment before Trump tore the agreement up in 2018, and when Trump chose to start bombing in February 2026, Iran was “nowhere near getting a bomb.”
Nichols notes that Trump’s declaration that the strait is open is “terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision.” He concludes: “The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.”
That the terms of the MOU are unlikely to favor the U.S. showed perhaps even more clearly when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been a staunch advocate for using even more force against Iran, appeared to tee up blaming Vance for the terms of the agreement. He also suddenly fell back on the need for Congress to put its stamp on what seems likely to be an inglorious end to a war Trump and loyalists like Graham have insisted Congress had no role in approving.
“Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he wrote on social media. “I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress.”
But Trump will try to sell this as a win.
After their recent reporting that the Trump administration went into panic mode to cover up the Epstein files last summer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times today that the Trump administration came much closer to trying to get rid of the writ of habeas corpus than was previously known. That right prevents the government from locking people up arbitrarily; authorities must charge a prisoner with a crime and take the case into the legal system. The Constitution spells out: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Last spring, when the Supreme Court said undocumented immigrants had the right to challenge their deportations, according to Swan and Haberman, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller proposed simply suspending the writ of habeas corpus and throwing them out.
Warned away from the idea because of the outcry it would spark, the administration found a way to cheat the system: it changed longstanding policy concerning immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a long time. In the past, those caught on the border could be detained without a hearing, while those who had been here for a long time could request to be released on bond. The administration simply treated those who had been here for years as if they had just arrived, throwing them into detention without a bond hearing.
Judges have ruled against this new interpretation, but having found a way to cheat the system, the administration is simply ignoring them. As legal commentator Joyce White Vance put it: “The question inside Trump’s White House wasn’t whether they could suspend rights—it was whether they could get away with it.”
And then there was the idea of using spectacle to sell the Insurrection Act. Haberman and Swan report that Miller and, especially, Vice President Vance pushed the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to put down protests of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. They did so even after federal agents had shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. According to the reporters, Vance said the use of troops to put down Americans in the streets would be painful in the short term, but it would send a message that what he insisted were paid protesters—there is no evidence that either Good or Pretti was a paid protester—would never again disrupt ICE operations.
While the White House did not invoke the act at the time, the reporters conclude that for the proponents of invoking it, the Insurrection Act “would remain a loaded weapon in a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power.”
Early this morning, Trump posted on social media: “On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that even before a fighter launched a slur at former First Lady Michelle Obama, and even before the sight of the corporate branding at the event, only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight at the White House.
Today, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who has been in trouble with Trump over stories of his drinking, said the FBI discovered and foiled a plot to attack the UFC fight. The FBI alleged in an affidavit that nineteen attackers planned to target the fight with drones laden with explosives and then to shoot at the fleeing crowd.
Jude Joffe-Block, Lisa Hagen, and Audrey Nguyen of NPR noted in 2024 that Patel often peddled in conspiracy theories and, since taking on the directorship of the FBI, has tripped himself up in the past by announcing things that he later has to walk back. That history meant that social media users greeted the announcement with skepticism.
Tonight the Justice Department announced the arrest of five people in four states. Mark Berman, Amy B. Wang, and Victoria Craw of the Washington Post reported that Matthew C. Quinn, deputy director of the Secret Service, told reporters that the Secret Service had led the investigation and that the UFC fight “was never at risk due to the great investigative work.” In what appeared to be a reference to Patel, he added: “In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”
Meanwhile, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee today issued a press release announcing they are launching an investigation into Patel’s alleged misuse of FBI funds. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the highest-ranking Democrat on the committee, says they have received information that Patel had directed more than $1 million in bonuses to agents close to himself. “These payments raise serious concerns that FBI funds are being used to reward political loyalty rather than merit and professionalism,” the Democrats wrote.
The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and it, too, is undergoing a crisis of confidence in its work.
In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge 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. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “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.”
Today U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel Rosen announced his office was charging fifteen people with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over their behavior during the federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis last year that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Rosen alleges that the defendants are part of two “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”
At the press conference about the charges, prosecutors introduced a Facebook post from one of the accused that said: “We need to become ungovernable.” Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Oh, so they have NOTHING nothing.” It’s actually even more embarrassing than that: Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 when its theme was “Become Ungovernable,” and stood in front of the banner bearing that slogan, so the idea that the phrase is part of a criminal conspiracy will be awkward to argue.
From Minneapolis, Matt Sepic of MPR News reported that Rosen said the people were “charged not for what they said but what they did.” But Rosen did not answer questions about whether any law enforcement officers were injured and said evidence would come out later. Sepic notes that federal prosecutors charged thirty-six people with assaulting or impeding immigration agents in December and January, but have now dropped eighteen of the cases entirely and eleven more through nonprosecution agreements. Sepic notes that Magistrate Judge David Schultz in April called one of the prosecutors’ charging documents a “false affidavit.”
At the time of the Good and Pretti killings, Open Measures, which tracks the spread of harmful social media activity, noted that right-wing social media personalities tried to redirect public outrage by claiming that community organizers using group chats on Signal were threatening the safety of federal officers. As those claims spread, right-wing media amplified old stories that those opposing ICE agents were “antifa” or part of a “radical left.” They demanded such chats be investigated. Today’s charges cited messages sent in Signal chats.
Reporter Christopher Mathias of MS NOW noted that while the Department of Justice is going after Minneapolis protesters, Greg Bovino, the commander-at-large of the Border Patrol during the Minneapolis crackdown that cost Good and Pretti their lives, has appeared on a white nationalist podcast as he teases a bid for the presidency.
Journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who is one of the Broadview Six, commented: “As the government raids “antifa groups” in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six, we need to be asking how they got this indictment. And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.”
But today’s charges have redirected at least some media energy from the details emerging about Trump’s “deal” with Iran. While the U.S. has declined to publish details of what appears to be a memorandum of understanding that participants hope will lead to a final agreement, Dov Lieber, Summer Said, Alexander Ward, and Rebecca Feng of the Wall Street Journal report that the agreement says the U.S. will waive sanctions to allow Iran immediately to sell oil and to access the banking, transportation, and insurance systems it will need to do so.
Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN report that U.S. negotiators are downplaying the significance of the language in the memorandum of understanding, claiming that language that seems to favor Iran is designed to give cover to Iranian officials back home.
But Philip Wegmann and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that the vagueness of the language of the agreement is not fooling Republican war hawks who stood behind Trump in his attacks on Iran. They are calling early reports about the deal “disturbing” and “utterly disastrous.”
There is other news the administration would likely prefer to cover up, as well.
Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that even as Trump was assuring the American public that private donors would pay for his ballroom, the White House had already approved tens of millions of taxpayer money for the contractor building the addition.
With access to project summaries, the journalists were able to show that “internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.”
And Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial is having the effect experts warned of. Because of the dark paint on the floor of the pool, the sun heats the water up even faster than it did before, and the resulting algae bloom has turned the pool bright green. Today, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try to kill the algae.
Federal Tort Claims Act, over which DoJ has total discretion, provides workaround to Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund
While the “anti-weaponization fund” appears to be on ice for now, FTCA claims and lawsuits could provide another avenue for payouts.
