Today, strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien gave a comprehensive review of the events and outcomes of Trump’s war on Iran. In his Phillips’s Newsletter, O’Brien noted that “the USA is now negotiating without much, if any, leverage. That really is extraordinary. The Trump administration has put itself in a position where it cannot go back to the use of military force, cannot put much if any real pressure on Iran, and therefore will have to concede most of the main points to the Iranians.”
“Personally,” he adds, “I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.”
O’Brien notes that “because the U.S. has no significant leverage over Iran, the Trump administration…will simply have to dissemble about non-existent Iranian concessions to try and make it seem that they have not been completely routed.” They have been lying for months now, but as the magnitude of the loss becomes clearer, the lies will likely grow larger.
O’Brien adds that the Trump administration “seems utterly uninterested in achieving anything of substance and, instead, is desperately hunting around to win the narrative struggle in the USA itself.”
As if in illustration, Trump last night reacted to the Senate passage of a war powers resolution prohibiting him from further military action against Iran by posting: “So, I have Iran on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall, willing to give us practically anything, and for the first time in decades, respecting the hell out of the United States and its President, ME, and the U.S. Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act Vote, telling the Number One Sponser [sic] of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort [to] the Enemy. Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, ‘what does that all mean?’ These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!”
Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away.
Last night’s primary results in New York, in which voters ousted established Democrats in favor of progressive candidates, is creating concern among Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections. The growing groundswell of support for a major reset of our political system suggests that maybe even Republicans’ unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to favor Republicans may not cement control of Congress.
Trump is clearly panicked.
Just after midnight this morning, he posted that the “big Oil Companies” are not dropping gas prices as quickly as they should and accused them of price gouging. He said he had told the Justice Department to “start looking into this” and warned that “[g]asoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”
At 2:38 AM he posted: “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
On Monday the Senate overwhelmingly passed a landmark bipartisan bill directed at making housing cheaper by boosting the national housing supply and homeownership and by stopping private equity from buying up single-family homes. By a similarly overwhelming vote, the House passed the measure yesterday. It was expected to cruise to Trump’s desk for a signature.
But this morning at 9:49, Trump suddenly announced he will not sign the bill into law until Congress passes the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, that he keeps pushing. There are various versions of that measure, but by requiring proof of citizenship—a birth certificate or a passport—to vote, along with requiring states to hand their voting rolls over to the federal government, it is expected to stop many legal voters from casting ballots.
At 10:17, Trump posted: “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN. THANK YOU!!!”
Then, at 10:26, he posted: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
That language is important. Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has used official emergency declarations at an unprecedented rate in order to claim emergency powers under which he can ignore laws. Although the Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning Trump could work with Congress to pass legislation, he and his advisors appear to be applying the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.
The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.
But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening.
Certain Republican-dominated states, like Texas, handed over their voter rolls. An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.
In addition to the system’s inaccuracy, the uploading of the files, Dye notes, was “a gross violation of the Privacy Act of 1974,” which prohibits the government from repurposing an individual’s data for a new use without notice and without providing for 30 days of public comment.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “[T]he federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Trump administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to get their voter rolls. Courts have struck down Trump’s attempts to get his hands on those rolls in all nine of the cases on which there has been a ruling, and today the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s suit against Michigan. Also today, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston permanently blocked much of Trump’s March 2025 executive order trying to gain power over elections.
Undeterred, Trump is trying other ways to rig the vote. Over bipartisan objections, he installed loyalist William Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, turning the agencies responsible for keeping Americans safe away from international threats and directing them instead at Trump’s domestic opponents. As Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Jack Cocchiarella on Sunday, Pulte can simply claim that there’s a threat against the country and use that argument to place troops or immigration agents at the polls or to shut down the election.
And today, testifying at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing today, Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, the United States Postal Service will not deliver election mail in states that refuse to turn over their voting lists to the federal government.
Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) clarified: “So the proposed rule basically coerces states to conform to these new requirements and hand over their absentee voter rolls or face the consequences of not being able to vote by mail.”
Trump’s obvious panic at the idea that voters might take away the Republicans’ congressional majority raises a question: Why is he so worried? Journalist David Rothkopf noted that “his desperation about losing in November is at such a high level that it is revealing. He is petrified of being held accountable by a Democrat-controlled Congress, of investigations, of his crimes being revealed. He’s obsessed with his fear of losing.”
Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), who frequently records short videos explaining what’s happening at the Capitol, posted from Statuary Hall about today’s “completely bizarre chapter.” She explained as people began to take their places on the stage set up for the signing of the landmark housing bill, “[t]he president tweeted he wasn’t coming because he’s having a temper tantrum that the Senate, and especially Senate Republicans, will not pass his voter ID law, which is basically designed to override state voting laws.”
“And so,” she observed, “in less than an hour we went from the signing of a historic housing bill to stop private equity from buying houses, and investing in housing infrastructure, and actually doing something good for the people of this country, and a ceremony that should have happened right here to…the president is not signing the bill.”
One senior Republican told NOTUS, “He’s having a f*cking tantrum.”
CNN News Alert:
Senate votes to limit Trump’s Iran war powers in rare rebuke
The Senate adopted a resolution on Tuesday directing the president to remove military forces from the conflict
with Iran, a significant rebuke to Donald Trump and a strong message that the war lacks support in Congress.
yesterday, I wrote:CNN News Alert:
Senate votes to limit Trump’s Iran war powers in rare rebuke
The Senate adopted a resolution on Tuesday directing the president to remove military forces from the conflict
with Iran, a significant rebuke to Donald Trump and a strong message that the war lacks support in Congress.
News Alert:
Senate walks back rebuke of Trump over Iran war
One day after adopting a resolution aimed at removing US military forces from the conflict with Iran, the Senate walked back
its rebuke of President Donald Trump’s handling of the war, rejecting an attempt to advance a similar war powers measure.
Wednesday night, after President Donald J. Trump refused to sign a landmark bipartisan housing bill into law and melted down at a midday lunch at which he shouted at senators, Senate Republicans appeared to try to mollify him by voting against advancing a war powers resolution the Senate passed the day before.
The Republican senators’ apology for their brief flash of independence was not enough for House MAGA loyalists. Trump said he would not sign any more legislation until the Senate passed the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, to limit voting before the 2026 election. According to Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), members of the far-right Freedom Caucus said that if Trump wasn’t going to sign any measures into law, there was no reason to debate any more. They voted against procedural measures to enable the House to conduct business. Unable to accomplish anything, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent House members home on Thursday.
Stansbury noted: “[N]obody has ever seen a Congress like this before. It is truly a bizarre time here in Washington, DC…. This is not good. This is not good for our country. It is not good for our communities. It’s not good for our democracy. It’s not good, just for basic common sense and basic human dignity. Like, these guys need to get it together.”
The turmoil in Washington, D.C., reflects the changing world of American politics as the Republicans become a far-right party that embraces white nationalism while those Americans standing firm on the nation’s historic democratic principles jockey to create a political system that will represent their movement.
On June 25 the Supreme Court allowed Trump and his administration to end the legal status of more than 350,000 people who are in the United States under temporary protected status, or TPS, after fleeing wars and violence in Syria and Haiti. The six right-wing justices cited procedural reasons for their decision, but Trump loyalists read it as an endorsement of their white nationalism.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “This country doesn’t have a future if we don’t end birthright citizenship…. One way or another, this nation has to end birthright citizenship.”
Yesterday, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall in Washington, D.C., Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), the third-ranking Republican in the House, made the white nationalism of the Republican Party clear. He said: “Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re gonna call us a racist, you’re gonna call us an Islamophobe…. You know what? I would argue that I never did care, but I’m done being careful, even the least bit careful…. [Somalis] don’t assimilate. And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Eric Henderson of CBS News notes that Emmer has moved dramatically rightward in the past decade. In 2016, Emmer told NPR that the Somali community in Minnesota was among “the fastest-assimilating populations that we’ve had.” “I’m going to say it out loud,” he said, “when you move to a community, as long as you are here legally, I am very sorry, but you don’t get to slam the gate behind you and tell nobody else that they’re welcome. That’s not the way this country works.”
The once grand Republican Party has become a party of radical extremists, coalescing around white nationalism.
Meanwhile, voters in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in New York rejected two established Democrats in favor of newcomers with more progressive policies. In response, as Isaac Arnsdorf and Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported, Trump is trying out midterm messaging that calls Democrats “hard core, godless communists.” “They’re animals,” Trump said of his political opponents today in a speech to Christian conservatives at a convention of the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Washington. “We have to stop this, this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”
Trump’s rhetoric shows just how far to the right American politics have slid.
Communism is a political ideology that calls for public ownership of major resources as well as the means of production, so that the state, rather than private individuals or corporations, owns factories, farms, mines, and so on. In theory, although seldom in practice, the state then redistributes wealth according to need.
Communism has never been popular in the United States, and the only politician calling for state takeover of private industries is Trump, under whom the government has taken stakes in at least nine companies involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, costing at least $10 billion in taxpayer money.
Unlike communism, the sort of government both Democrats and Republicans embraced from 1933 to 1981 was very popular, and those opposed to the Trump administration appear to be starting to demand such a government again.
Their views are a response to the extremes of wealth in today’s United States. Mary Cunningham of CBS News reported in January that the third quarter of 2025 showed the top 1% of households in the U.S. owning 31.7% of all U.S. wealth. That’s the highest share they’ve had since the Federal Reserve started tracking household wealth in 1989. That means the wealthiest 1% held roughly as much in assets as the bottom 90% of Americans combined: about $55 trillion.
At the same time, according to a Gallup poll released earlier this month, fewer than half of Americans say they can afford health care. Since the Republicans cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds in last July’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 4.7 million Americans have lost food assistance, about 11% of those previously enrolled in the program.
“People are really unhappy,” former senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who is running for the Senate seat J.D. Vance vacated when he became vice president, told Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News today. “They believe the system’s rigged. They see corporations making more and more money,… corporate executives taking more and more of those dollars for themselves, stock buybacks, bonuses, compensation of all kinds. They know they’re working harder than ever…and they know that…more money’s going out than coming in.”
A Brennan Center survey released in early June showed that 92% of Americans worry about corruption in government. That number includes 90% of Republicans, 93% of Democrats, and 93% of Independents. Seventy-nine percent of those polled want a constitutional amendment to restore limits on money in elections. Sixty-six percent of Americans think the government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care versus 33% who say it does not.
The Democratic candidates Trump is railing against as “communists” actually argue that robust private enterprise cannot survive unless the government combats dramatic wealth inequality through regulation and taxation, and operates the segments of society that people need to survive, like transportation, utilities, and health care.
Across the country we are seeing Democratic candidates calling for an end to government corruption; the breaking up of monopolies that hurt workers, farmers, and consumers and shut entrepreneurs out of markets; protection for workers and consumers; universal health care; and an end to big money in politics. These policy demands are not radical; they are firmly within the political tradition not just of the Democrats, but also of the Republicans.
In 1956 the Republican Party platform approvingly quoted “the great truth first spoken by Abraham Lincoln” that “[t]he legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, Government ought not to interfere.”
The platform went on to affirm the party’s determination “that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land.”
It called for “unimpeachable ethical standards and irreproachable personal conduct by all people in government.” Honesty was “an indispensable requirement of public service,” party officials said.
The Republicans of 1956 also said they were “proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance—improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.”
They called for helping foreign countries strengthen their economies and supported “U.S. participation in an international fund for economic development.” “We shall continue,” they said, “vigorously to support the United Nations” and to maintain U.S. military strength “as a deterrent to aggression and as a guardian of the peace…for these objectives only.”
Then the Republican Party platform addressed the needs of workers. Quoting President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it said: “Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America.”
The platform noted that Republicans had worked to raise the minimum wage and to expand Social Security and unemployment, workers’ compensation, and retirement benefits. They supported the growth of labor unions, and collective bargaining.
They would, they said, “continue to fight for dynamic and progressive programs which, among other things, will: [s]timulate improved job safety of our workers; [c]ontinue and further perfect its programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems, such as older workers, handicapped workers, members of minority groups, and migratory workers;...improve the effectiveness of the unemployment insurance system;...[a]ssure equal pay for equal work regardless of Sex;” extend minimum wage laws; [c]ontinue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex;” and “[p]rovide assistance to improve the economic conditions of areas faced with persistent and substantial unemployment.”
“The Republican Party believes that the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the people is as important as their economic health,” the platform said. “It will continue to support this conviction with vigorous action.”
Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.
But a report by Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about Trump’s remodeling of the West Colonnade is perhaps an even better representation of the Trump presidency. In March, Trump tore up the light brown Tennessee flagstone that paved the walkway in the West Colonnade that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office and replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”
But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”
Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.
Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.
That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.
The administration appears eager to keep what’s happening in the national parks out of sight. Early this year, the Department of the Interior instructed its employees that they could not share information about serious injuries or deaths on public lands, instead redirecting all such information through the Department of the Interior’s Office of Communications.
As outdoors writer Wes Siler reports in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the Interior Department “manages the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Those agencies are responsible for about 20 percent of all land area in the United States, hundreds of millions of annual visitors, and spend annually $88.6 billion taxpayer dollars.”
As Jake Spring reported in the Washington Post, more than 300 million people visit America’s national parks each year, and about 350 of them die (not always from accidents). In the past, park service employees could identify deaths or injuries from unsafe conditions, warning others from the area. Now the communications team from the Interior Department controls that information and does not always release it.
It did not release the information that a 72-year-old man died of extreme heat on a popular trail in the Grand Canyon on June 12 of this year. NPS employees wanted to warn other visitors, but the Interior Department did not release the information. Four days later a couple aged 67 and 68 also died of extreme heat on the same trail.
The profligate use of our tax dollars for whatever Trump and his cronies want while the American people suffer is at least as representative of Trump’s reign as is the peeling, algae-filled, militarily guarded Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
This president and administration are turning the extraordinary resources of the American people—the things we the people have created over decades with our effort and our tax dollars—to their own ends. We are paying for their theft with a significantly diminished country, and even with our lives.
On May 29, 2026, the administration proposed dramatic changes to the awarding of federal research grants. Rather than continue awarding research grants on the basis of a merit system established through rigorous peer review, the administration proposes to base federal research grants on approval by political appointees.
It refers to an executive order Trump signed in May 2025 that said previous governments had “politicized” science with their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, concern about climate change, and incorporation of diversity, equity, and inclusion in scientific studies and called for a return to “a gold standard” of scientific research.
The lead driver of the proposed change is the Office of Management and Budget, directed by Christian nationalist Russell Vought. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, and the plan will empower his team in the executive branch to divert tax dollars to channels he approves, rather than those scientists support. The proposed changes limit foreign collaboration, and if the government decides a grant is failing to “effectuate program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest,” the OMB can yank the grant.
Americans created world-class research universities and institutions during and after World War II as it became clear that it was more cost effective for the federal government to award grants to those researchers doing work their peers recognized as the best in the country, rather than trying to create such labs for the government. Relying on businesses, they realized, would limit scientific and medical research to avenues that promised to produce short-term profits. So they developed a web of universities and scientific institutions where tax dollars could be allocated only to those doing superior work in areas that offered long-term scientific and medical advances.
In the process of doing that work, university researchers share their discoveries with each other and train the next generation of scientists, creating an extensive network of scientific advances that generate new products and new treatments, and that has made the United States a world leader.
The American people paid for that system with their work and their money. Now Trump’s hand-picked loyalists want to dismantle it to advance their own ideology. As economist Paul Krugman noted in February in his newsletter, destroying faith in science and experts leaves people open to the idea that they should reject “the establishment” and instead follow right-wing leaders like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Krugman also notes that, according to McKinsey, spending on wellness in the U.S. alone amounts to about $500 billion a year. Americans paid close to $70 billion for nutritional supplements alone.
And as the administration tears up the system, people die. An ardent supporter of Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, has urged parents to be skeptical of Vitamin K shots for newborns, which the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended since 1961. Right-wing figures pushed those concerns, and Kennedy has refused to recommend the shots, which prevent catastrophic bleeding in newborns.
In May, Duaa Eldeib of ProPublica reported that parents increasingly are refusing the shots and that newborn deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding are on the rise. Mercola has now publicly and strongly changed his previous stance.
It’s not just babies at risk. After World War I the so-called Spanish Flu decimated U.S. soldiers coming home from the war, and as Cristina Stassis of Air Force Times reports, since the 1950s the military has required that service members be vaccinated against the flu. In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the requirement “overly broad and not rational” and complained that it would “weaken our warfighting capabilities.”
Just two months later, more than 220 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas came down with the flu. One sick trainee died of a medical emergency; an investigation of the cause of his medical emergency is underway.
When Hegseth changed the requirement, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), an Air Force veteran, noted that “[t]he reason it was mandatory was to enhance readiness.” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who represents the district where Lackland is located, posted that Hegseth’s ending of flu vaccinations “was a reckless decision that put troops in harm’s way and undermined our military readiness.”
Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that after the outbreak, the Air Force required vaccines for all the recruits at Lackland.
Just as administration officials are tearing up the scientific research Americans have built over the last 80 years, Hegseth is also tearing up the U.S. military, which Americans have built with their blood and treasure since 1775.
Filip Timotija of The Hill noted that since he took over at the Pentagon last year, Hegseth has gotten rid of more than two dozen senior military leaders with little or no explanation. Those include General C.Q. Brown Jr., the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard; General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff; and General James Mingus, the vice chief of staff of the Army.
Last week, Hegseth added General Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, to that list. Donahue has had a storied career and commands wide bipartisan support in Congress. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the firing “yet another unforced error from a Secretary leading the Pentagon with bro-culture bravado rather than restraint, humility and careful stewardship of the finest fighting force in the world.” Hegseth “is more interested in purging people he perceives as insufficiently loyal than empowering proven patriots who can actually lead,” Tillis wrote. “It’s sophomoric. It’s unserious. And it’s bringing great harm to our Department of Defense.”
That lack of seriousness has given us Trump’s debacle in Iran, where the U.S. and Iran are trading strikes again over Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. Benoit Faucon, Summer Said, Costas Paris, and Robbie Grammar of the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Iran expects a payoff of $40 billion a year in payments for security, safety, and environmental services from vessels crossing the strait, leaving Iran stronger after Trump’s war than before it.
Tonight, Trump made apocalyptic threats against Iran, posting that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
Administration officials and their cronies are turning the country we worked so hard to build into a vehicle for building their own power and their own wealth, and Republicans in Congress have steadfastly refused to stop the looting or even to investigate. So lax have they been that last month, Emily Davies of the Washington Post reported that White House lawyers had begun private briefings for administration officials on how to prepare for congressional oversight in case Democrats win the midterms.
Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, warned a crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C.: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. Ok, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win the midterms.”
Quote:Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, warned a crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C.: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. Ok, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win the midterms.”
hcr
A wide range of Democratic voices are in the process of shaping new political language to move their party, and the country, forward. James Talarico is one of those new voices. On Friday, June 26, he delivered his official acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Texas at the Texas Democratic Convention held in Corpus Christi.
He began by invoking Barbara Jordan, a lawyer who in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Texas. A brilliant orator, Jordan delivered a statement on July 24, 1974, from her seat on the House Judiciary Committee during President Richard Nixon’s impeachment that is considered one of the most powerful speeches in U.S. history. “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total,” she said. “And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.”
After tying himself to both the state’s multicultural history and its defense of democracy through Jordan, Talarico used a different vision from Jordan to make his case for the future. He recalled that Jordan said “the soil and spirit of Texas” made her feel that she could accomplish whatever she wanted, “that there are no limits.” Talarico used Jordan’s embrace of the American dream to anchor his own new political vision for the twenty-first century.
It is a vision that resonates beyond Texas.
Talarico rooted himself firmly in Texas’s past and present. He emphasized that he is an eighth-generation Texan whose family arrived in the region when it was still Mexican. “We may not have always been wealthy or well educated,” he said, “but we always served our state.” His ancestor Elijah Stapp signed the Texas Declaration of Independence that declared the region free from Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna, risking everything, Talarico said, “to defy a tyrant.”
That independence cost Stapp dearly. Four months after he signed the document, Santa Anna’s army destroyed his home, leaving him, his wife, and their six children destitute. But Stapp was undeterred. He wrote to his neighbors, “Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
“Texans don’t like tyrants,” Talarico said, “And we don’t surrender easily.”
Bringing that theme to the modern era, Talarico told the story of his mother, “a seventh-generation Texan from Laredo,” who left an abusive relationship to make a life with her infant son. “That’s what it means to be a Texan,” he said. “We are strivers and builders and dreamers of all colors and creeds of all backgrounds and beliefs. It’s in our blood.”
“Texas is big,” Talarico said. “Big hair, big hearts, and big dreams. Our athletes are beloved across the globe. Cowboys, Astros, Spurs. Our musicians, our musicians are so iconic, they only need one name. Willie. Selena. Beyoncé.”
“But the current political landscape is too small for Texas,” he said. “Texas used to be known for our hospitality…. Friendship across tribes, friendship across divides. That’s what makes Texas so great. We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends. Think about, think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from northern Mexico. But you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants. This uniquely…Texan ability to welcome new friends and new ideas has made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country.”
“We’re the state that put a man on the moon,” Talarico said. “We’re the state that pioneered ranching and energy and computers. We’re the state that gave this country Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, LBJ, and the Great Society. We’re the state that put breakfast in a taco.”
Then Talarico turned to the present. “[T]oday, we face a new threat,” he said. “Our state is being taken over by a new kind of tyrant: billionaire megadonors. They’re not invading with an army. They’re just buying the system. The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they are turning neighbor against neighbor. Weakening that spirit of friendship that makes Texas so great. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer.”
“But,” he said, “Texas will not be conquered.”
Talarico accused “these new tyrants” of looking out of state “to find puppet politicians who were willing to do their bidding.” He said they picked his opponent, Ken Paxton, “the most corrupt politician in America,” who was “born in North Dakota, raised in California, and has a place in Hawaii.”
“Listen,” Talarico said, “I believe anyone can be a Texan.” That identity lives “not in the boots or in the truck,” but in people’s hearts. But the billionaires and “their puppets have the wrong state of mind. Their hearts and their dreams are just not big enough. We let these small men get their hands on our big state. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. The kind who make themselves feel big by making everyone else feel small.
“These men, they took all the money and power they could grab, and they set out to shrink Texas down to their size. They’re shrinking our Texas economy with job-killing tariffs. They are shrinking our Texas public schools with private school voucher scams. They’re shrinking our healthcare, so it covers less and less. They’re shrinking our paychecks and how much those paychecks can buy. And they’re shrinking our power by attacking our God-given rights at the ballot box and redrawing our districts to keep themselves in power. They have been shrinking Texas for three decades now. But that ends this year in this election.
“In November, we can make Texas big again,” Talarico said. “We can make Texas friendly again. We can make Texas, Texas, again. We have the chance to take back our state from those billionaire mega donors and their puppet politicians who stole it from us.”
“This isn’t a partisan thing,” Talarico said as he pointed out that Republicans and Democrats came together to impeach Paxton, and he reminded people that Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, told people to “do right, and risk the consequences.” “What would Sam Houston think about the small men who are shrinking Texas?” Talarico asked. “What would Sam Houston, who put Texas before himself, say about Ken Paxton, who puts himself before Texas? What would Sam Houston say to all of us at this critical moment in Texas history? I think he would say, do right, and risk the consequences.
“There’s an old country song by Gary P. Nunn, called ‘What I Like About Texas.’ In the song, he lists the rivers and the bluebonnets, the music and the food. But ultimately, he settles on one answer. He says it’s the spirit of the people who share this land. The spirit of Barbara Jordan. The spirit of my mom, the spirit that’s in this room. The feeling that we can accomplish whatever we want to….
“This election shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” Talarico said. “It should be about chasing a vision of what our state can be. Texas schools that are the envy of the nation. A Texas economy that is second to none, and Texas families that are stronger and healthier than ever before. It won’t happen overnight. But a giant state deserves giant dreams. We are— We are bigger than extremism. We’re bigger than partisanship. We’re bigger than corruption. Texas is bigger than all of those things. Because it’s not just a state. It’s a state of mind….
“Texans don’t like tyrants. And we don’t surrender easily. Tonight, standing before you, to accept your nomination for the United States Senate, I make the same commitment to you that my ancestor made 200 years ago. Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
“To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!” President Donald J. Trump wrote this afternoon. He continued: “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”
Political theorist Jacob T. Levy posted in response: “No, see, ‘overruled 90 years of precedent in order to expand presidential power’ is the way *critics* describe it. *Your* side says: resisting intrusion into core executive functions, protecting the sanctity of the separation of powers, and acknowledging that the precedent has been whittled away.”
But Greg Sargent of The New Republic countered that “Trump constantly and explicitly holds up his naked corruption *as a badge of honor* that his supporters are supposed to thrill to (and see benefit for themselves in). He thinks corruption is the highest form of winning.”
The case of Slaughter v. Trump began in March 2025, when Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935 the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.
This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.
The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C., “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.
Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
In hearings on the case last December, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
Today, in a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court decided the case in Trump’s favor. Now, even if the American people elect members of Congress who create agencies to protect our interests, the president can gut them and turn them to his own purposes.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. They noted that throughout our history, both Congress and the president have agreed that some of government’s functions should operate outside of party politics. Financial management, workplace safety, consumer safety, addressing environmental hazards, and managing nuclear energy, for example, should not depend “on who is in office—much less on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office—but also on judgment, expertise, and the public good.”
“Since the founding, Congress has created agencies that in various ways have embodied this goal of independence. Over the last 140 years especially, the political branches have done so by establishing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): bipartisan, multimember bodies with “for-cause” removal protections. This structure allows the agencies to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.”
“Today,” though, they write, “this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong…. [T]he Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) explains: “The FTC, or the Federal Trade Commission, is an independent government agency that is supposed to protect you, the American consumer. They fight fraud, ensure businesses are making accurate claims in their advertising, and enforce data privacy and security. The independence of the agency ensures that the FTC doesn’t make decisions at a whim of any one president or political party, but instead acts in your best interest. For example, the FTC put more money back into the pockets of Americans by banning junk fees for short-term lodging and live event activity.”
Kim notes that we’ve seen Trump “target, fire, prosecute civil servants, perceived as political enemies. We’ve seen him install members of his inner circle, including his own family, campaign donors, and people with personal loyalties to him. And we’ve seen him attack federal agencies and federal employees, gutting critical programs and firing the people who run them.”
With the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump now has “unchecked power to remove any head of any independent agency. Get the agencies to bend to his will, to play by his rules.”
As legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, Trump’s new powers will let him fire commissioners at agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Nuclear Safety Board. Federal employees have been free from political interference for 150 years, but now, she writes,“The spoils system is back, baby!”
The court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter gives Trump power he clearly has no inclination to give up. When asked today if he would sign the popular bipartisan housing bill that passed Congress with overwhelming support, Trump said he hadn’t decided and called the bill “a yawn.” He wants Congress to pass the voter ID law that will essentially guarantee that voters cannot turn Republicans out of office, making the United States a one-party state in which Congress simply rubber-stamps the actions of the president. It appears he is willing to hold the housing bill hostage until he gets it.
“To me,” he said, “compared to the Save America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.
What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.
That history certainly anticipates the Court’s current corruption. But I would argue they are qualitatively different. The idea that contract rights largely, if not entirely, trumped state regulation was not a novel doctrine. And the Court at least generally did not oppose the partisan interests of one party over the other, which is certainly the case today. What we have today as part of the openly partisan nature of the Court is that really every major exercise of power by Democrats comes up for review, in many cases where there is not even an existing Federalist Society/conservative legal movement doctrine in play. I would argue that this begins with the Obamacare decision in 2012. It followed a model which has now become entirely familiar. It generally begins with mouthing off and brainstorming on social media — comments that then gets picked up by a few generally obscure law professors who fashion it into an argument. This argument is initially treated as absurd before rapidly gaining traction on the right and then rapidly getting taken up by the Court.
At the time, the “surprise” decision to uphold the Obamacare individual mandate, largely the decision of John Roberts, was seen as a near miss or evidence of Roberts’ institutionalism. In retrospect, it is perhaps better seen as a latter-day version of Marbury v Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall cleverly rendered a decision that was of immediate benefit to his partisan opposition in order to entrench the general and empowering principle of judicial review. In the Obamacare case, Roberts allowed the individual mandate to remain (while striking down, on the basis of essentially nothing, Medicaid expansion) in order to lull constitutionalists into accept and even celebrating the purported institutionalism of a Court that would now sit in review of every law passed by Democrats. It is a classic case where the benefit of hindsight provides much greater clarity into what actually happened.
In today’s decisions, it’s certainly good that the Court didn’t reject states’ ability to accept mail ballots dated by Election Day. But the idea that it was even reviewed is absurd. There’s no possible constitutional deficiency in these laws. There’s not even any basis for it in the fraudulent menagerie of Federalist Society jurisprudence. It is purely the product of the short-term partisan interests of the Republican Party and far more so the whims of Donald Trump. All of these states’ laws require absolute evidence that a vote is cast by Election Day. The constitution doesn’t speak to the speed of counting (nor does existing federal law) and the long tail of counting has lasted past election day literally for centuries. Congress might pass a law banning accepting post-dated votes after Election Day. (Even in that case, I think there’d need to be at least some rational basis question for why such a law would exist given that the primary responsibility for election administration rests with states, subject to regulation by congressional statute). In any case, that’s a question on which reasonable people can differ. There is simply no basis on which this can be considered unconstitutional or in violation of existing statutes. At least with the anti-constitutional destruction of independent agencies, which is a war on the legislative branch, the conservative legal movement has obsessed and hungered for for decades. So you can at least grant them that it merely aligns with Trump’s demands rather than being the child of them.
There’s simply no future for real democratic self-government in the United States with this corrupt Court in place. That seems like a vast statement. But it’s accurate. What you have at the moment is a system somewhat — yes — on par with Iran in which you have the structure of democratic self-government but with a Guardian Council that assures that the bad people (i.e. non-Republicans) aren’t actually allowed to exercise power. This is not how even a maximalist judicial review system is supposed to work, and Democrats must break the Court’s corruption at the first possible moment. With some luck, that will come in January 2029.
