wrote Wednesday morning.

said in another post hours later. “So when observers say college grads in NYC are embracing communism this is not a home-grown phenomenon.”

saidagenda more tangible.

immediate ancestors were a part of.

wrote in response. “No one kidnapped him off the street or sent him to a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

chimed in. “Pay attention to your own leaders!”

biases loud and clear. Immigrants aren’t embracing communism—they’re voting for progressives and the Democratic Socialists of America because the cost of living is too high. Forcing people to speak English won’t change that.

toldcalled Cassidy a “lunatic.”

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SAVE America Actlimit Trump’s war powers, and remove U.S. military forces from the country.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy was one of four Republicans who voted with Democrats to pass the law. When Trump asked why these Republicans voted for the resolution, Cassidy reportedly responded, “Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really want to know the answer?”

Cassidy then berated the president for not being clear with Congress about his actions in Iran, and argued that until he got a fuller briefing of what was going on, he’d keep voting to limit Trump’s powers.

reportedlyjoked to CNN that he shouldn’t have lost his temper but that it was “the Irish in him.” However, the senator had no regrets.

told CBS. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

The white tarp attached to the front of the Kennedy Center blocks most of the building’s lettering. (The nameplate now confusingly reads “THE JOHN F. — ORMING ARTS.”) It was erected on June 13, along with some extra scaffolding, one day after the court deadline to remove Trump’s name from the prestigious theater.

Workers took down the letters spelling out Trump’s name in a “predawn operation,” reported Reuters, and installed the tarp immediately afterward. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper demanded the administration explain “the purpose and status of ​the tarp and scaffolding,” though he gave the White House a lengthy deadline, July 31, in which to do so.

Democratic Representative ​Joyce Beatty, a board member at the center, filed the initial lawsuit against Trump after he renamed the center after himself in December. Her lawyers have alleged that the tarp is the White House’s “effort to frustrate the ⁠restoration ​of the status quo as it ​existed prior to the renaming.”

Beatty herself called the new tarp an “act ​of petty defiance.”

The pettiness of this administration is indeed something to behold. Lest we forget, Trump also tried to close the Kennedy Center for two years for “renovations” after multiple artists canceled their performances in the public backlash to the name change. Cooper blocked the two-year closure, too, though the federal government has filed an appeal.

Pew Research Center released Wednesday shows home prices spiking tremendously in the beginning of the 2010s, and median home value rose 30 percent (from $269,600 to $350,000) from 2019 to 2024. This surge occurred at almost three times the pace of median income, which has risen very slowly.

Pew also noted that a whopping 89 percent of Americans under 40 think their parents had an easier time buying property—and that 60 percent of metro areas in the U.S. were classified as “unaffordable.”

21st Century Road to Housing Act on Wednesday—the largest bipartisan housing affordability bill in decades—to pressure Republicans into passing his anti-voting rights SAVE America Act. The housing affordability crisis seems to be on everyone’s list of priorities except the president’s.

Truth Socialrefusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the Senate passed his unpopular voting reform bill, the SAVE America Act, the president spoke to reporters on Capitol Hill before a lunch with Senate Republicans—and quickly veered off topic.

One reporter asked, “Buying a home is unattainable for so many Americans. Is this election legislation more important to you than resolving the housing crisis?”

responded. “They want a lot of Communists to come in.… The people that they’re pushing are Communists, and this country is not going to have Communists.”

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June 24, 2026

posting spree Wednesday morning, writing, “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” and “history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that [the Communists] will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Meanwhile, his decision not to sign this housing bill has sent his own party into a tailspin. As the midterms approach, Republicans are in dire need of a victory to show voters, and this housing package would demonstrate their commitment to making life more affordable for their constituents.

Truth Social the bill was “of minor importance” and that it “pales in comparison” to his SAVE Act, which would limit mail-in voting and require voters to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. As of now, it just doesn’t have the votes to pass.

A description of Luna’s National Defense Authorization Act amendment that appeared on the House Rules Committee website Wednesday was filed with a tell-tale indicator of the artificial intelligence assistant.

Squeezed in the middle of the text: “11:25 AM????Claude responded.” The language of Luna’s amendment description has since been revised.

Luna was quick to respond to the controversy on X, writing that her staff had used AI to “spell/grammar check the amendment SUMMARY, not the actual amendment text itself.

“Not a shocker. Most staff use it. I have told them to make sure they are double checking and more thorough,” she continued. “What dork planted this story?”

Luna added that she loves Claude, but Grok is “way more savage.” Elon Musk’s AI chatbot alternative has been riddled with a number of scandals, including instances in which it unquestioningly created nude images of underage girls and espoused Nazi beliefs.

In a separate post, Luna clarified that “NO legislation is ever drafted with AI.”

“All bill text from the House comes from the House Legislative Council which is prohibited from using AI,” she wrote. “The screenshot you’re referencing is an AI summary of the bill that’s also used for spellcheck, c’mon man.”

Nonetheless, it’s important to keep public officials honest about the issue. Federal and state officials alike have been caught leaning on artificial intelligence. In October, federal judges were accused of using AI to write court orders, resulting in serious factual inaccuracies. The year before, a Republican Arizona state representative was found to have used AI software to draft deepfake legislation that was later signed into law.

In response to a March executive order by President Donald Trump—which directed USPS to only provide mail-in ballots to voters on a federal list—the theoretically nonpartisan postal service is planning to implement a new rule forcing states to provide the Trump administration with a list of anyone who has requested an absentee or mail-in ballot. If the states refuse, their citizens wouldn’t receive their ballots.

Postmaster General David Steiner made the admission in a Senate hearing on Wednesday following questioning from Democratic Senator Gary Peters.

“If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposal?” Peters asked.

“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner replied.

PETERS: Yes or no, if a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposed rule?

POSTMASTER GENERAL STEINER: No.

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June 24, 2026

“This is basically a back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the U.S. Constitution,” Peters said later. “You’re telling the states, ‘Give the federal government this information—trust the federal government, trust the Trump administration, we’ll take good care of these—and if you don’t do it, you can’t mail absentee ballots.’”

Senator Margaret Hassan, another Democrat, said the USPS should “immediately” bin the new rule, labeling it “blatantly illegal.” Many postal workers have similarly spoken out against the idea, according to Democracy Docket.

Thankfully, the new rule can still be blocked in courts, and multiple lawsuits have been filed in order to do so. One Massachusetts lawsuit was allowed to proceed last week, after District Judge Indira Talwani stated the rule would hurt states’ constitutional right to run elections.

Steiner said the USPS would abide by whatever the courts rule. But it’s frightening to see, after years of trying to meddle with elections, that MAGA still isn’t done.

Chief Warrant Officer Rodney Bearman and Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks were both pierced with multiple pieces of shrapnel from the March 1 Iranian drone strike on their work station in Kuwait. Medical records show Bearman suffered a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and damage to his lungs. The Army has classified his condition as “not seriously injured,” even though he needed serious medical attention and days in the hospital.

Hicks suffered a traumatic brain injury, and his injuries were also listed as “minor,” even though he required multiple surgeries.

“That assessment is unacceptable,” Bearman’s wife, Amy, told CBS. “They told me that my husband’s injuries were classified as NSI, and they described that, or they defined that, as ‘not seriously injured.’ … He was treated and released back to duty.

“I could just hear him breathing and then he finally said, ‘I’m going to be OK.’ I waited a few moments and then asked if he returned to duty. It seemed like forever before he answered me, and then he said, ‘I can’t go back.’”

Doctors preferred that Bearman stay in the Kuwaiti hospital for a longer period of time, but that was denied by the Pentagon for “security concerns.” Being “cleared for duty” in this case means being cleared to begin recovering from injuries outside of a hospital, not that a soldier is prepared to return to active duty. Bearman returned to the U.S. on March 18 with shrapnel still in his body.

Hicks required multiple emergency surgeries in a Kuwaiti hospital after the strike. Even still, the Pentagon classified his injuries as “minor.”

“They said your husband was injured, he has a minor jaw injury, and he’s going to be returned to duty,” Hicks said his wife was told. Hicks told CBS News that he “absolutely” thinks the Pentagon has been downplaying the impact of the attack.

Hicks was still in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland at the time of this writing, almost four months after the attack, with a “pretty severe” traumatic brain injury. That is in no way minor.

The Army defended its classifications of Bearman and Hicks, saying that only someone at the risk of dying within 72 hours qualifies for a “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” designation.

“The care and well-being of our Soldiers is of the highest priority. Any assertion that the Army seeks to downplay a soldier’s injuries is simply not true,” an Army spokesperson told CBS in a statement.

“Our hope for the investigation is that an honest assessment by the Army will prevent this from happening again to other service members,” Amy Bearman said.

wrote on X about the CBS report. “Truly beyond the pale from the President who faked ‘bone spurs’ to avoid serving and combat.”

capitulated on a memorandum of understanding that allows Iran to maintain its missile arsenal and nuclear power program.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper permanently banned the administration Wednesday from implementing most components of the president’s 2025 order, which required individuals to provide “documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” before they registered to vote. In addition to lifting that requirement, the ruling also bans the president from requiring all mail ballots to be received by Election Day, even if they were postmarked by then.

Under Trump’s order, states that refused to comply would have been punished by having their federal funding withheld.

The government had argued that Democratic challenges to Trump’s executive order were premature and therefore illegitimate since the changes had not yet been implemented—but the Boston-based judge wasn’t having it. Instead, she noted that Trump’s office had effectively violated the necessary separation of powers, as only states and Congress are permitted to regulate elections.

The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Casper wrote.

Trump officials responded quickly to Casper’s decision, hinting online that the ruling would be appealed.

“I hope the Chief Justice understands the path these rogue judges have charted for the judiciary,” deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Trump has worked overtime to force his unpopular election reform proposals through the legislature, throwing confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings to the wayside while demanding Republicans prioritize passing the SAVE America Act.

The backlash to the bill—which was introduced months ago on Capitol Hill—has been grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have amped up their base over contrived claims of voter fraud, a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. For instance, a statewide audit out of Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s baseless theory, revealed in 2024 that just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, just 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

This story has been updated.

letter to the president obtained by HuffPost. “Under the guise of an ‘emergency,’ your Administration bypassed competitive bidding processes to rush a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool.… Today, the Reflecting Pool is a fluorescent green swamp of algae, and the expensive blue sealant is already peeling off the bottom in sheets.”

vandalslongtime Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor.

Even if mysterious assailants did take a knife to the reflecting pool’s peeling blue paint—something Trump has declined to provide any evidence of—that wouldn’t explain how the reflecting pool became a bright green, algae-filled swamp.

“This was not a result of vandalism, but your administration’s incompetence,” Hickenlooper wrote in his letter. “The bill for this fiasco should only belong to you, Mr. President.”

In order to fix what it broke, the administration is planning to spend even more money to re-drain the pool and conduct repairs. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” is starting to sound a lot more literal.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed both the House and Senate with flying colors—catching members of his own party off guard.

The bill would create new homes and limit corporate investors’ ability to buy single-family residences. Members of the GOP have used it as an example of their concern for working people ahead of the November midterms.

The stage was quite literally set for the signing in the Capitol before Trump threw his hissy fit. With little over an hour before the public signing ceremony, the president said he wants to push through the SAVE Act, Republicans’ faulty voter ID bill, before doing anything about housing.

rushed to remove the presidential seal from the podium, as Democrats began using the stage as a backdrop to highlight the president’s sudden flip-flop.

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June 24, 2026

Following Trump’s public refusal, House Speaker Mike Johnson attempted some damage control in a press conference.

“The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s gonna understand that it’s a good product, and certainly something that fulfills his promises,” Johnson said.

The SAVE Act has passed in the House but does not currently have the votes to pass the Senate. Nor should it—the bill will make it tougher for anyone lacking a paper copy of their birth certificate or passport to vote.

“The SAVE Act will make it exceedingly and unacceptably difficult for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans, to be heard,” Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock told Politico. “If all the people in the election can’t be heard, who are eligible to vote, then that’s something other than democracy.”

“I don’t think the American public knows what is in store for them if [the SAVE ACT] passes,” Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono added. “Millions of people are going to need to re-register.”

Kyle Griffin of MS NOW said the legislation was “designed to help rig elections.”

Despite the president’s refusal to sign the housing bill, it could still become law in 10 days if Congress remains in session.

charged with assaulting immigration agents outside the notorious Delaney Hall immigration detention center in New Jersey last May. On Wednesday, her case will be argued in a federal appellate court, and will be another test of the Trump administration’s power to go after political opponents, The New York Times reports.

arrest Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka for tresspassing, McIver was allegedly involved in a confrontation where she used her arms to “assault, resist, impede and intimidate” two federal agents, government attorneys say.

argue that the DOJ is coming after her because of her political views, citing the many pardons that the Trump administration gave to the January 6 protesters who actually did injure police officers in the 2021 riot.

rejected those arguments in November. McIver appealed the case, and it will be argued before a panel of three appellate judges Wednesday.

wrote a letter in support of McIver, arguing that a win for the DOJ would mean that the executive branch would be able to “behave in a more chaotic and unsafe fashion, and create new, unprecedented tools to block legitimate oversight.”

If she is convicted, McIver could face up to 17 years in prison, and $1 million in legal fees. She is currently running for reelection, and her baby is due in the fall.

Carrie DannCook Political Report,declining supportdeep unpopularity. The Senate will be much more challenging for the party, which must flip four seats in the chamber. She named Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio as the places Democrats are mostly likely to flip a seat, arguing that Texas and Iowa will be more challenging. She said Democrats were strongest in North Carolina, because of their candidate, former Governor Roy Cooper.

Arkansas Representative French Hill was already in a news conference when Trump axed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Hill unknowingly celebrated a dead proposal that Republicans had hoped would bolster their reelection efforts ahead of November.

Standing beside House Speaker Mike Johnson, Hill said it had been his “top goal” to lower the cost of housing.

“This bill does that, so I’m proud of the work that both chambers have struggled through,” Hill said Wednesday morning. “But it’s successful today, and I’m proud of the work of the House and Senate to get people to ‘yes’.”

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The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was drafted to address the U.S. housing crisis, which has entailed bottlenecked supply, stalled family growth, and surged home and rental prices across the country. The bill would have funneled resources toward increasing housing supply and streamlined environmental reviews, and would have forced the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address red-tape issues related to zoning and land-use that have historically posed barriers to housing development.

“This is a very rare occurrence to have successive bipartisan votes across both chambers on versions of this bill, and it finally seems to be reaching the finish line,” Francis Torres, housing and infrastructure director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told TIME earlier this week. “This bill is the most serious that Congress has gotten about housing reforms in a generation.”

The House passed the bill by a vote of 358–32 on Tuesday. The day before, the Senate had passed it by a measure of 85–5. It only needed the president’s signature to become law—but that apparently won’t happen unless Congress caves to his unpopular voter ID demands.

The Save America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

The Save America Act suggests numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure would also add a federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”

The chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Representative Richard Hudson, reportedly compared the primary wins to “a Bolshevik revolution” on Wednesday, in a meeting with GOP House members. The NRCC also made a slightly cringy X post referring to the progressive winners as “America-hating Socialists.”

A few MAGA House members spoke out individually against the election results, including Randy Fine and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.

“What is happening in New York tonight should scare every American,” Fine, who is no stranger to promoting hateful rhetoric, said. “The Democrat Party there no longer seeks to make America prosper. It seeks to destroy it.”

The fearmongering comes after New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, proved his November victory was no fluke on Tuesday. The three progressives Mamdani endorsed all won their primaries, knocking off establishment Dems and sometimes other progressives.

Former City Comptroller Brad Lander knocked off incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th district; Democratic socialist Claire Valdez, an artist and assemblywoman, defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the 7th; and in possibly the biggest upset of the night, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a little-known democratic socialist, bested incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat in the 13th.

“New York Democrats just elected three socialists in primaries,” raged the New York state GOP on X. “Their party has been taken over by radicals who support Islamic terrorism and want to dismantle the nuclear family.”

Centrist Democrats also felt a sense of foreboding on Wednesday upon seeing the success of leftists.

“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” Howard Wolfson, a Democratic strategist and adviser to former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, told The New York Times. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.”

Representative Greg Meeks, who chairs the Queens Democratic Party, was a bit more diplomatic. “It was a tough night,” he said.

wrote on Wednesday.

This is a very last-minute cancellation, as the signing presentation was set to happen Wednesday, an hour after his post.

wrote on X. “Trump has cancelled his signing of a housing bill … which truly jams up his fellow Republicans who wanted to campaign on it.”

Road to Housing bill, sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. The legislation aims to make housing easier to build and more affordable by blocking corporate entities from buying up single-family homes, among other methods. Trump, a former slumlord, has also downplayed the significance of this bill.

wrote, shortly before canceling his signing of the bill. “Get the bad Republicans to approve it or, better yet, Terminate the Filibuster and approve it, AND EVERYTHING ELSE REPUBLICANS HAVE EVER DREAMED OF.”

Potentially killing a massive housing bill in the midst of an affordability crisis to make it harder for Democrats to vote is a good example of where Trump’s priorities lie.

This story has been updated.

In a Truth Social post addressing the discrepancy, Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had directed the Department of Justice to investigate oil companies, accusing them of “gouging” customers based on the persisting inflated prices.

“The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for Oil,” Trump posted, just after midnight. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’

“I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” he added.

While crude oil and gas prices have both fallen since Iran and the U.S. signed a tentative peace deal last week, the drop in gas prices has been relatively minimal. Crude was down over 5 percent between June 18 and June 24, but gas was down by half of that—2.5 percent—in the same period, according to data from the AAA gasoline price tracker.

Trump had promised throughout the war that gas prices would plummet “like a rock” once the violence concluded, but that has clearly not been the case, much to the chagrin of his vulnerable Republican allies in Congress, who will have to rationalize the dampened economy to voters come November. Trump and his team have also promised that Americans could expect lower gas prices than the average from even before the war began—around $2.98 per gallon. At the time of publication, the cost of gas is $3.92 per gallon across the country, though some areas in California, such as San Luis Obispo, are still seeing prices around $5.78 per gallon, according to the AAA tracker.

Over the last month, crude oil prices have dropped by 27 percent while gas prices were down by just 13 percent, reported Yahoo Finance.

posted on X Tuesday.

dropping out, saying they didn’t know that the event would be politicized.

Now, instead of having performers Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & the Time, and Bret Michaels, the event will feature Wilkins—a country singer with 5,863 monthly listeners on Spotify.

fired back at critics questioning her dubious booking, saying, “I was invited to sing this anthem on my own accord, as I have been many other places throughout my career.”

SWAT teamjet-settingsuing MS NOW for defamation alleging that she abused federal resources.

Judge Justin R. Walker and Judge Neomi Rao, two Trump appointees, ruled in Trump’s favor, while Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, dissented. The Trump appointees argued that it was within the executive’s jurisdiction to decide which migrants to fast-track to deportation and that the Department of Homeland Security was not required to inform migrants that they could avoid an accelerated deportation if they could offer proof of residency for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” Walker wrote.

Wilkins noted in his dissent that the expedited removal process was usually reserved for people detained immediately at the U.S. borders, rather than immigrants who’d been in the country for some time.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” Wilkins wrote.

Stephen Miller. The DHS celebrated the ruling, claiming that it had “vindicated” Trump, according to The New York Times.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which President Trump was slated to sign Wednesday, was a collaboration between Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, and ranking member Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts. On Monday night, the bill passed the Senate handily with a vote of 85–5. On Tuesday, the House advanced it with a 358–32 vote. Mid-morning Wednesday, the president announced on social media that he would not be signing the bill until Congress passes the SAVE AMERICA ACT. But he also didn’t say he was vetoing the housing bill.

“The biggest win is we finally did something,” said Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, gesturing at Congress’s usual partisan gridlock. “In this world, the fact that you’ve got Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren and the entire U.S. Senate to support housing shows that we’re finally focusing on something that really matters to the American people. So I see it as a beginning.”

In terms of substantive victories, Warren emphasized a restriction on the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that own at least 350 single-family homes.

“For the first time ever, [we] tell private equity ‘no,’ they cannot mow through every neighborhood in America and turn us into a nation of renters,” she told The New Republic.

Warren also pointed to the bill’s efforts to increase housing supply, which housing policy expert Will Fischer of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the “central theme” of the bill. The bill removes some regulatory barriers and streamlines environmental reviews to accelerate the construction of affordable housing—including the first federal guidelines on zoning reform. The bill also creates an “Innovation Fund” that rewards communities that successfully build more housing.

removing the requirement that manufactured homes have a permanent steel chassis beneath them, the bill could bring down the cost of a new unit by up to $10,000, according to Warren’s office.

These provisions, Fischer said, are “part of what’s needed to address the housing crisis in the country to build more housing, but they are only a first step in order to really solve the affordable housing crisis.”

So what’s next? Fischer pointed to the need for more rental assistance programs that will help the lowest-income Americans afford a place to live. Increasing the supply of housing is critical, he said, but not sufficient to fix the issue. “No matter how much we build, that’s never going to be enough to make housing affordable to tens of millions of people with low incomes,” he said.

attempted to cut such programs through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s unlikely that the current Congress is going to take the kind of action that’s really needed to sharply reduce homelessness and evictions,” Fischer said.

statement.

Still, the message on Tuesday was one of optimism. “Let me put it this way,” Warren said. “The bill is not the one I would have written all by myself, but there are some really big wins here that made all the work and all the pain totally worthwhile.”

This article has been updated.

And after Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez won—all of whom have been vocal critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza—the biggest loser seemed to be MAGA world, which was left befuddled and irate that voters had turned away from candidates espousing the historically pro-Israel party line.

Appearing on Fox News, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller complained that the “Democrat Party has abandoned [centrism] and instead adopted this radical, revolutionary, and in many cases, violent ideology that wants to tear America down, and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom.”

Miller further used the trio’s massive win Tuesday to urge Democrats to vote MAGA in the midterm elections, claiming that progressive politics—which he said involved hating America, God, family, and gender—would be the country’s “death knell.”

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer was similarly disgusted by the political development, insisting that the Big Apple’s mayor is an Islamic militant and that Donald Trump needs to do something about it.

“I remember when Trump, who I love, said Mamdani isn’t a jihadi. I was shocked,” Loomer wrote on X late Tuesday, reacting to the race. “Mamdani is a jihadi and this growing threat of Islamic jihad and pro-Islamic terror candidates getting elected in America is a national crisis. It needs to be addressed by the Trump administration. Tonight should prove it to everyone.”

Meghan McCain, a conservative TV personality and daughter of former Arizona Senator John McCain, also added her two cents, writing directly to Jewish Americans via social media.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” McCain wrote.

Lander, one of the three Mamdani-backed candidates who cruised to victory Tuesday night, is Jewish.

“America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Many Communists running in badly failing Blue States. The votes seem to have them doing quite well against each other,” Trump wrote in another post. “The bad news is that history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that they will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Trump also lashed out at Democratic Representative Dan Goldman, who lost his seat to former city Comptroller Brad Lander, an ally of Mamdani.

“Weak and pathetic Congressman Dan Goldman just lost, BIG! I guess people didn’t like him illegally targeting President TRUMP. In any event, this jerk is finally GONE!” Trump wrote.

Representative Adriano Espaillat, the 71-year-old leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist who previously organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. And Assemblymember Claire Valdez, another member of Democratic Socialists of America, triumphed over the handpicked successor of outgoing Representative Nydia Velazquez.

“Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA!” Valdez said at the end of her victory speech.

resoundingly defeated incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in the 10th congressional district. A bigger sign of the mayor’s sway was the 7th congressional district victory of Claire Valdez, a first-term New York assemblywoman, who easily beat Antonio Reynoso, a former city councilman and longtime figure in the city’s politics. Reynoso had the backing of the district’s retiring incumbent, Nydia Velazquez. Lander could have won without Mamdani’s endorsement, but Valdez almost certainly would not have.

The stunner was the win of Mamdani’s third candidate, activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who narrowly defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district. Avila Chevalier had never run for office before, while Espaillat is a five-term congressman and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Avila Chevalier’s win was entirely about the political power of the mayor and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boosted Mamdani last year and his preferred candidates this year.

It’s not an exact parallel, but Avila Chevalier beating Espaillat echoes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win over then-Representative Joe Crowley in 2018. This is another sign of voter frustration with establishment Democratic politicians.

Three House primaries alone don’t change American politics drastically. But Lander is a progressive in the mold of Senator Elizabeth Warren and will likely be more supportive of left-wing causes than Goldman. And Valdez and Avila Chevalier are likely to be two of the most progressive members on Capitol Hill, constantly challenging party leadership from the left and perhaps forming an even more progressive “Squad” than the prior version. So Mamdani is building the left flank on Capitol Hill and in the Democratic Party. And Lander’s and Valdez’s wins will embolden other progressives to run in 2028 and try to knock off more moderate Democratic incumbents.

groused about him playing such a heavy hand in these primaries.

So why did he get so involved, with little personal benefit and considerable potential cost? Because Mamdani is deeply invested in the broader leftist/progressive/socialist movement, beyond his own ambitions. In the run-up to the House primaries, he openly expressed his hopes that progressives winning in New York could inspire a broader reckoning in the Democratic Party. He believes that the party should broadly adopt his populist economic views, focus on affordability and the working class, and skepticism of the Israeli government. While he’s a new figure, Mamdani is following in the footsteps of Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez, who have spent the last several years endorsing progressive candidates in races across the country in hopes of building a cadre that changes the party.

reported by CNN. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can, and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”

In a later part of the speech, he said, “People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer.”

saidbetter Democrats. When I look at these candidacies, I see in them a willingness to also put working people back at the heart of our politics.”

Those comments were remarkably direct, invoking this November’s elections but also the 2028 Democratic primaries (South Carolina and New Hampshire are likely to be early voting states), the 2028 general election, and the broader discourse about the party. I am skeptical that House primaries in New York City in 2026 tell us much about Democratic primaries or the general election in 2028. But Mamdani is arguing that what’s happening in New York is connected to the future. And more importantly, he’s trying to will that view into action.

While Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have been in national politics much longer than the mayor, his stunning and high-profile victory in America’s biggest city has given him a microphone that is perhaps as big as theirs. I wonder if Mamdani will endorse candidates outside of the New York area in the next few years.

There’s another reason Mamdani may be particularly interested in endorsements: He can’t run for president himself. The Uganda-born mayor is the rare powerful, popular figure in U.S. politics who isn’t plotting out his route to the White House. A politician as talented as Mamdani may be frustrated he can’t ever be president. But for the progressive movement, having a famous, charismatic figure who isn’t obsessing over Wisconsin swing voters (as Ocasio-Cortez seems to be doing these days) is very useful. Opposing the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is a gutsy move. But it’s less risky if being mayor may be your only political job. Mamdani can in some ways be president of the American left because he can’t be president of the United States.

Mamdani’s victory in last year’s New York Democratic primary for mayor seemed like the perfect combination of great candidate, flawed opponents, and ideal political environment. I thought it was a fluke, or at least a perfect storm. But Valdez and Avila Chevalier aren’t masters of viral video like Mamdani, and their opponents weren’t sexual harassers like Andrew Cuomo. Zohran Mamdani has it. He’s transferred it to other politicians in New York. The big question now is if Mamdani-ism can go national.

key to establishing its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

2. Harriet Tubman
lead a military raid. In later years, she was a committed suffragist.

3. Susan B. Anthony
An abolitionist and suffragist, Anthony advocated tirelessly to ensure that all Americans could exercise all of their rights. She was arrested in 1872 for the crime of voting while female. “Failure is impossible,” she once said of the suffragist movement.

4. Jane Addams
Chicago’s Hull House—the first U.S. settlement house—and helping to found the NAACP.

5. Frances Perkins
she pushed for landmark reforms such as the minimum wage, a maximum workweek, and child labor limits. She also helped draft the Social Security Act.

6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, Stanton penned its Declaration of Sentiments, making the then-extraordinary demand for equal rights. She “provided intellectual leadership to the first wave of the women’s rights movement,” Fordham Law’s Julie Suk noted.

7. Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“The Princess of the Press,” Wells-Barnett was born into slavery but went on to become a crusading journalist and suffragist. She focused especially on the scourge of lynching, writing A Red Record, a history and statistical record of such attacks.

8. Betty Friedan
“In the post–World War II period, when women had gone back to the home and were having large numbers of children, Friedan sparked a feminist movement with her critical, bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique,” said Amy Fried of the University of Maine (emerita).

9. Margaret Sanger
mother of birth control—she coined the term in 1914—Sanger was a driving force in contraceptive legalization and its technological advances. Her decades-long quest for a “magic pill” to prevent pregnancy culminated in the first oral contraceptive.

T-10. Ella Baker
was a key behind-the-scenes organizer at the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

T-10. Rachel Carson
Published in 1962, Carson’s Silent Spring helped launch the modern environmental movement. “Carson’s influence was reflected in the proclamation of the first ‘Earth Day’ in 1970, a few years after her death,” human rights activist Aryeh Neier said.

T-10. Hillary Clinton
She may not have shattered the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” but she built an extraordinary career as an advocate and exemplar for women in the United States and around the world, as a lawyer, first lady, senator, and secretary of state.

T-10. Phyllis Schlafly
The slayer of the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly mobilized “the housewife image to fulfill her deep political ambitions—a model for everyone from Ann Coulter in the 1990s to the tradwives of today,” wrote Vanderbilt University’s Nicole Hemmer.

T-10. Gloria Steinem
groundbreaking journalist, Steinem co-founded the seminal second-wave feminist magazine Ms. in 1971. A lifelong spokeswoman for women’s rights, Steinem founded a number of activist organizations and even originated Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

Declaration of Independence
The one that started it all—the reason we’re celebrating a semiquincentennial. The Founders “embrace[d] a world-quaking creed that values individual freedom and the rights of man over heredity, might, or wealth,” writer and historian John A. Farrell noted.

1787

The Constitution
10 Amendmentsslavery compromises), it was the result of a host of compromises that produced some epic arguments at the Constitutional Convention. Still, it created a flexible and enduring system.

1863

Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln’s declaration didn’t immediately liberate anyone, but it made “the U.S. Army into a force for liberation,” University of California, Davis historian Eric Rauchway pointed out. “Every step a U.S. soldier took into rebel territory afterward created free soil and free people.”

1865

Victory in the Civil War
The Union prevailed in what was not only an existential fight but also a contest to define the nature of freedom and start to expiate the nation’s original sin, slavery. It came at the price of more than 600,000 dead, and the assassination of our greatest president.

1865–1870

Reconstruction Amendments
ThirteenthFourteenthFifteenth Amendments to achieve their full potential (OK, we’re still waiting), but they ended slavery while dramatically expanding all Americans’ rights.

1920

Nineteenth Amendment
who think of it that way.

1945

Victory in World War II
The United States led the original forces of antifa, liberating the globe and establishing itself as the moral and political leader of the free world. Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States was considered by many to be a huge mistake. We made him pay.

1963

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
“I Have a Dream” speech, this August 1963 event attracted a quarter-million attendees and countless more watching on television. King’s moral and rhetorical might helped galvanize the nation.

1964–1965

Civil/Voting Rights Acts
Civil Rights Act Voting Rights Act (1965), laws that “actually began to fulfill the failed promise of the Union victory,” said Vanderbilt University political scientist John Sides.

2008

Election of Barack Obama
By becoming the first African American to achieve the nation’s highest office, Obama became a living embodiment of our Union bending toward greater perfection.

2. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
the vote was 7–2, so bravo to Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean.

3. Marbury v. Madison, 1803
In which Chief Justice John Marshall established judicial review—giving the court the power to declare a congressional law unconstitutional. Would be lovely if we could undo this today.

4. Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
seven-eighths Caucasian and tried to sit in a white railway car. Not in Louisiana, bub!

T-5. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010

quite literally, since one result of this decision is that we have no way of tracking how much corporations pour into campaigns.

T-5. Roe v. Wade, 1973

The landmark pro-abortion ruling. Interestingly, at first, the Jerry Falwells of this country weren’t up in arms about this one. Homeschooling was their big issue at the time.

7. Trump v. United States, 2024
The ruling that offered the president immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. One of the most annoying naïve-liberal guessing games of the Roberts court era: Maybe Gorsuch or Kavanaugh will save us here! No. They didn’t.

8. Bush v. Gore, 2000
noted it was “limited only to the present circumstances,” i.e., meant to install George W. Bush as president.

T-9. McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819
Unlike Marbury, this John Marshall ruling suits liberals today just fine: It declared the supremacy of federal over state law and would define the potential scope of the administrative state. Some conservatives would like to overturn it. At the rate we’re going, they won’t need to.

T-9. Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015
A rare victory for progress and decency in the modern era, thanks to Anthony Kennedy joining the court’s (then) four liberals to legalize same-sex marriage.

T-11. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022
clearly lied about their beliefs at their confirmation hearings.

T-11. West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, 1937
called it “the switch in time that saved nine.”

T-11. Baker v. Carr, 1962
nervous breakdown during deliberations.

T-14. Loving v. Virginia, 1967
The court here held unanimously that the marriage between the appropriately named Richard Loving, a white man, and his Black wife, Mildred Jeter, could stand.

T-14. Miranda v. Arizona, 1966
The bane of cops from the day it was decided, it ensured that people under arrest were made aware of their rights. Kind of amazing it hasn’t been reversed yet.

1. The moon landing
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and perhaps the defining image of U.S. history, a potent symbol of American ingenuity, persistence, and power.

T-2. Migrant Mother
became synonymous with the desperate poverty facing Americans during the Great Depression.

T-2. Raising the flag at Iwo Jima (at top)
postage stamp and Pulitzer Prize.

4. Washington Crossing the Delaware
Seventy-five years after the fact, German American painter Emanuel Leutze memorialized George Washington’s Christmas night raid across the ice-choked and storm-sieged Delaware River in one of the nation’s most famous paintings.

5. MLK leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The enduring image of a quarter-million people surrounding the reflecting pool and watching a Black preacher deliver a historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial celebrates the best of America.

T-6. Mushroom clouds over Japan
The explosive aftermath of the dropping of two atomic bombs by the United States over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is a fraught symbol of strength and terror, power and horror.

T-6. The Terror of War
Also known as Napalm Girl,captured the horror of the war the United States was waging in Southeast Asia.

T-8. The Scourged Back
This early 1863 photograph, which received broad attention when published in Harper’s Weekly, exposes the brutality of slavery in a way words never could.

T-8. The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World)
The 305-foot-tall symbol of America’s role as a beacon of democracy and freedom has welcomed countless immigrants to our shores since its dedication in 1886.

T-8. Emmett Till in his casket
Two white Mississippians kidnapped and savagely murdered this 14-year-old. Till’s mother elected to display his nigh-unrecognizable body in an open, glass-topped coffin—and then Jet magazine published photos of him. The nation could not look away.

T-8. Little Rock Nine photo of Hazel Bryan screaming at Elizabeth Eckford
The hate-filled Bryan and stoic Eckford instantly became the contrasting faces of school desegregation in 1957 Little Rock, Arkansas.

T-8. Ruby Bridges integrating New Orleans schools
photographically, and then in Norman Rockwell’s 1964 illustration for Look magazine, The Problem We All Live With.

T-8. Eugene “Bull” Connor releasing dogs on and fire-hosing civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama
images of the brutality to the rest of the country.

T-14. American Progress by John Gast
uses it as a recruiting tool?

T-14. 9/11 images
the scenes from September 11, 2001.

T-16. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull
masterwork took more than three decades to complete as he tried to get each of the Founders’ faces correct.

T-16. January 6
No amount of Trump revisionism will remove this stain from our history, as he rallied supporters to violently halt the peaceful transfer of power.

T-16. Kent State
Mary Ann Vecchio’s face captures the anguish and outrage that would sweep the country when Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 students, killing four, who were protesting the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

T-19. JFK in Dallas, November 22, 1963
That day in Dallas was a demarcation point for a generation of Americans—afterward, the country’s very path seemed to drift into darkness.

T-19. Bloody Sunday/Selma March
saw 600 marchers on their way to Montgomery, Alabama, attacked and brutalized by law enforcement officers after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, yet another shock to the nation’s conscience in the civil rights era.

2. William Jennings Bryan
many of his policies eventually became law.

3. John C. Calhoun
Vice president under both John Quincy Adams and his nemesis/successor, Andrew Jackson, the father of secession is remembered for his pro-slavery stances, especially through his discredited nullification doctrine.

4. Alexander Hamilton
Not just a Broadway legend, Hamilton helped write the Constitution and then, as the nation’s first treasury secretary, helped establish the U.S. financial system.

5. Barry Goldwater
transformed the GOP. A decade later, he was one of those who finally convinced Richard Nixon to quit.

6. Nancy Pelosi
first female speaker of the House was one of the most talented legislative leaders of any era. During her two tenures, she oversaw the passage the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

7. Earl Warren
A conservative California governor, Chief Justice Warren “ended up forging a progressive consensus that ended the Red Scare and decided Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, Miranda v. Arizona, and Loving v. Virginia,” NYU’s Cristina Beltrán noted.

8. Hillary Clinton
a lot more votes than he did.

T-9. Shirley Chisholm
People laughed at a Black woman running to be president in 1972. But she made history, and someday, a Black woman will win, and no one will laugh.

T-9. Jesse Jackson
For being on the Lorraine Motel balcony that fateful day; for his groundbreaking presidential campaigns, which gave voice to workers and farmers when doing so wasn’t cool.

T-9 John Marshall
The fourth, and arguably most influential, chief justice of the United States, Marshall secured the judiciary’s role as a coequal branch of the fledgling U.S. government.

T-9. George Wallace
won 46 electoral votes (including five states) in 1968, running on a segregationist platform.

T-13. Robert La Follette
A Wisconsin progressive, Fightin’ Bob La Follette pushed for reforms such as the direct election of senators and worker protections. And he was a Republican! He was named, in 1959, one of the chamber’s five greatest legislators.

T-13. Charles Sumner
Most famous for being beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor, he was also a man of unflinching principle (to a fault, according to some critics) and a passionate abolitionist.

1. The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith (film, 1915)
birth of modern filmmaking. “Thoroughly pernicious, but tremendously important … establishing the importance of film and helping to shape national consciousness about Reconstruction,” said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson.

T-2. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (poetry, 1855)
wrote in the preface to the first edition of this landmark poetry collection. He repeatedly expanded and revised the work until he died in 1892.

T-2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (novel, 1852)
Stowe’s slavery-condemnation novel sold more copies than any book in the nineteenth century, save perhaps the Bible. Credited with changing white attitudes toward slavery, it’s nevertheless not widely read today, due to its negative stereotypes of Black Americans, particularly that of the title character.

T-4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (novel, 1885)
said all modern American literature comes from Twain’s antebellum tale of a white Missouri preteen helping a slave find freedom. It was and remains controversial, but by this time in his life, Samuel Clemens was a staunch supporter of racial justice.

T-4. Moby-Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville (novel, 1851)
The classic tale of obsession and revenge was initially a whale of a flop. Melville lived another 40 years and had long passed into the great ocean beyond before his magnum opus took its place in the American literary canon.

6. Citizen Kane by Orson Welles (film, 1941)
crafted this dark tale, which still stands up, about a media mogul’s rise, withdrawal, and a futile search for what he’d lost along the way. Rosebud!

T-7. Beloved by Toni Morrison (novel, 1987)
banned books, but this story exploring the trauma of slavery in postbellum Ohio is probably her most acclaimed.

T-7. The Godfather Parts I & II by Francis Ford Coppola (film, 1972 and 1974)
The Corleone family’s embrace and corruption of the American dream is a classic tale of tragedy as triumph. And the cast is pretty good, too. (Yeah, our panel ignores Part III.)

T-9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (novel, 1925)
The American dream’s glory and tragedy unfold in this classic set in the Jazz Age that remains a staple of high school syllabi. Squint hard and you can just see the green light at the end of the dock.

T-9. “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol (song, 1939)
Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of Meeropol’s composition never directly mentions lynching, but its topic is clear. “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Timenamed it the song of the twentieth century.

T-11. “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe (song, 1862)
singing “John Brown’s Body.” She wrote new lyrics for it that were a hit in the North and loathed in the South. Oh well, the victors get to call the tune.

T-11. “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin (orchestral work, 1924)
later said.

T-13. Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (painting, 1942)
blackout restrictions in the early days of war.

T-13. Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin (architectural memorial, 1982)
center. Both Lin and the design were attacked by the usual suspects, but the public has always appreciated its understated genius.

15. Casablanca by Michael Curtiz (film, 1942)
The lightning dialogue. The flawless cinematography. The thrilling direction. The poignant message. The breathtaking ending. Oh, yeah—the acting wasn’t too bad either.

2. Martin Luther King Jr.
Not-so-fun fact: As a child, he was recruited to appear onstage, dressed in a slave costume, for the gala premiere in Atlanta of Gone With the Wind.

3. Barack Obama
You know that if you became the first African American president in U.S. history but still finished only third on this list, those other two guys must really be giants.

4. W.E.B. Du Bois
issued in 1905: “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”

5. Thurgood Marshall
absolute hero of American jurisprudence. If only he’d stayed on the court until he died—one week into Bill Clinton’s presidency—most Americans would still have no idea who this Clarence Thomas guy was.

6. Harriet Tubman
Union spy!

7. Dolores Huerta
labor leader and a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association. Been through countless struggles—and she’s still at it, at 96.

T-8. A. Philip Randolph
organized and went on to represent the first African American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He had the ear of presidents. He was co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Enough for you?

T-8. Booker T. Washington
For years the more accommodationist Washington was seen as Du Bois’s less radical and threatening antipode, which he certainly was. But the leader of the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University—who was also a gifted writer and orator—had a massive following in his day.

T-8. Malcolm X
The famed Black nationalist leader. Malcolm Little had plenty of reasons to hate America, but by 1964, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he’d begun to turn the other cheek. The next year, members of the Nation of Islam assassinated him.

T-11. Muhammad Ali
The rare athlete who transcended sports to become a cultural icon. As beloved as Ali became, it’s worth remembering that much of mainstream white society hated him into the 1970s for telling certain uncomforting truths, like: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me a n-----.”

T-11. Louis Armstrong
By the time he was 15, he’d been arrested for a firing a gun into the air and been stabbed by a prostitute. Ten years later, he was the most celebrated jazz trumpeter in the country.

T-11. Jackie Robinson
To understand the cultural impact of his breaking the color barrier in 1947 with the Dodgers, you have to understand that baseball was everything back then. The NFL barely mattered. Although football, too, considered wooing Robinson, a star UCLA running back, to break its color line.

T-11. Sitting Bull
he was killed in 1890 by Indian agency police under orders of the government.

2. Frederick Douglass
Born into bondage, he was King’s nineteenth-century precursor and the country’s conscience during the Civil War and after.

3. Eleanor Roosevelt
A first lady of many firsts (first to write a newspaper column, first to speak to a national convention), she also went on to a nearly two-decade career vigorously promoting both human rights abroad and reform politics at home.

4. Susan B. Anthony
She was decades ahead of her time in arguing and agitating for women’s suffrage. But she was equally committed to abolitionism.

T-5. W.E.B. Du Bois
His The Souls of Black Folk (1903), with its argument about “the color line” in American society, had a seismic impact. He helped found the NAACP but became disillusioned over time, finally moving to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.

T-5. J. Edgar Hoover
Not our favorite, but hard to deny his importance over five decades of American life. He intimidated presidents and hounded movements. But contrary to legend, he was apparently not a cross-dresser.

7. Henry Ford
The good: He famously paid his employees enough that they could buy the cars they themselves made. The bad: The Dearborn Independent,virulently antisemitic newspaper.

T-8. William F. Buckley Jr.
Erudite, supremely self-confident, full of charm, capable of making and keeping liberal friends. But it’s hard to forget his support for segregation and later suggestion that gay men with aids be tattooed.

T-8. Thomas Edison
contained “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle,” and a hell of a lot else.

T-8. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The lead organizer of the important suffragist Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the co-founder (with Anthony) of the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was also, like Anthony, a fierce abolitionist.

T-11. Rachel Carson
She wrote a 1951 bestseller about the ocean that won a National Book Award, but nothing touched the impact of 1962’s Silent Spring, one of the most influential books of the century. She died of breast cancer just 16 months later.

T-11. John Marshall*
He wasn’t the first chief justice; he was the fourth. But for good and for ill, Marshall is the one who made the court the final word on U.S. legislation and law.

T-11. John D. Rockefeller
refined oil in the United States. On the plus side, he did leave us the University of Chicago.

14. Benjamin Franklin*
Everyone knows about the famous kite experiment. But did you know he invented swim fins? When he was just 11 years old?

* Franklin and Marshall served in elected legislative office but are far better known for their accomplishments outside that realm.

This was the question we posed to our contributors: Which four progressive titans—elected officials, activists, thinkers, what have you—would you put on the famed mountainside? The illustration above tells you how it came out. King got the most votes, then FDR, then Douglass, and then Lincoln, a somewhat surprisingly distant fourth. We were disappointed no woman made the mountain. The closest competitors, just a couple of votes behind Lincoln, were Jane Addams, Frances Perkins, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Barack Obama, John Dewey, and Robert La Follette also came close.

whole idea of a Mount Rushmore. “On America’s 250th anniversary, it’s time to move from exceptionalism and hero worship to a politics of memory that embraces complexity, ambivalence, tragedy, greatness, and love,” argued NYU political scientist Cristina Beltrán. Fordham Law’s Julie Suk described a similar sentiment: “A democracy should not give immortal godlike status to four progressive ‘titans,’ but rather it should represent the masses of people who have invisibly built this country and sacrificed their lives to move it closer to its stated ideals of democracy, equality, liberty, and justice for all.”

We think hey, it’s fun to argue over.

Disciplined deregulation requires the sort of patience and intelligence that, happily, is in short supply within the Trump administration. Even White House budget chief Russell “Project 2025” Vought can’t summon it.

What this means is that, although Trump has reversed a lot of executive orders, fired a lot of people, and cut off a lot of funding (often, in the latter two instances, in violation of the law), he hasn’t killed a lot of major regulations. I count five thus far, according to a regulatory tracker maintained by the Brookings Institution, of which only one—an Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinding an Obama-era regulatory finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the nation’s health and welfare—is cause for serious alarm. And whether even these five regulations were crafted with sufficient care to survive court challenges remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term they usually were not. In a 2021 law review article titled “Tired of Winning,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, reported that where previous administrations had won 70 percent of all regulatory court challenges, the Trump administration won a mere 23 percent.

I can’t find a comparable tracker for quasi-judicial rulings at independent agencies, but the business lobby lost a couple of big ones this month at the NLRB. Both cases were about union-busting at Amazon, whose chairman, Jeff Bezos, kisses Trump’s ass so relentlessly that even Trump finds it a bit much. These NLRB rulings might have gone in Amazon’s favor had Trump not fired NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox (in violation of a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that the current high court is expected any day now to overturn) and then delayed giving the NLRB a quorum until this past December.

The first NLRB ruling, on June 15, rejected Amazon’s request to overturn an organizing victory by the United Food & Commercial Workers at a Whole Foods market in Philadelphia. Employees at the grocery voted to unionize in January 2025, and the NLRB certified the victory four months later. It was the first successful union drive in the 46-year history of Whole Foods. Amazon is hopping mad, and it filed no fewer than seven complaints to the NLRB about it, starting before the union election even took place. Amazon’s principal argument is that management was not permitted to compel Whole Foods employees to attend gatherings at which the company discouraged unionization because a Biden-era ruling (also involving Amazon) forbade such “captive meetings.” That decision, Amazon said, “imposed a flagrantly unconstitutional set of handcuffs on [Whole Foods management] in violation of the First Amendment.”

The board didn’t elaborate on why it rejected Amazon’s First Amendment argument, but one likely reason was that the board felt it lacked sufficient Republican members to overturn a Biden precedent. The NLRB did finally acquire a quorum in December, along with a Republican majority, with two Republicans and one Democrat. But the board has declined to overturn any precedents with fewer than three votes, and that would require one more Republican member. This is long-standing practice at the NLRB, not required by any law or regulation. It’s the kind of genteel tradition that one would expect a Trump appointee to flush down the toilet. But the current NLRB chair, James Murphy, worked as a staff aide at the NLRB more than 40 years, and the tradition matters to him; he recommitted to honoring it earlier this month at a House hearing.

It was Amazon’s hard luck that its case came before the board before the Senate got around to confirming Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant Republican slot on the board, James Macy. For his part, Trump didn’t get around to nominating Macy until this past April, even though the slot had been open since August 2025. Macy’s nomination is expected to get a Senate vote today.

The second NLRB ruling against Amazon’s union-busting, handed down by a regional administrative law judge, or ALJ, rather than by the Washington-based board, occurred earlier this week. The case was about Amazon’s refusal to bargain over a union contract with warehouse workers in San Francisco who voted, way back in October 2024, to affiliate with the Teamsters. This refusal violates a Biden-era ruling by the full board that said after a successful “card check” (in which a majority of workers sign union authorization cards), management must immediately start negotiating a contract or request a more formal NLRB-supervised union election. Amazon did neither. Once again, Amazon asked the NLRB judge to reverse a Biden precedent, arguing in this instance that it was at odds with a Supreme Court precedent. Amazon lawyers had to know that the ALJ lacked any power to overturn NLRB precedent, so it can hardly be surprised that it lost.

Amazon’s intended audience was never the ALJ, but rather the Washington-based board, or, failing that, an appellate judge. It seems likely that the Republican board will be willing to overturn the offending precedent if Macy is confirmed. I doubt the Democrats will try to postpone or kill Macy’s nomination, but that would be one way to prevent Amazon from winning this one. Too bad it isn’t up to the House, which has already demonstrated its willingness to compel management to negotiate union contracts. The pro-union Republican virus, alas, has not crossed over to the Senate side.

2. Thomas Jefferson
And at number two, the author of the American theory of law-based, anti-divine rule. A second hit: the Virginia statute on religious freedom. Slave ownership: more than 600.

T-3. Alexander Hamilton
The anti-Jefferson, the leader of the high-born Federalists, co-author of the vital Federalist Papers, architect of our financial system. Good life’s work.

T-3. George Washington
His decision in 1783 to stop off in Annapolis and resign his military commission stands as maybe the most important act in early American history. It made the United States a republic. Slave ownership: more than 300.

5. Benjamin Franklin
Stunning polymath, skilled (and randy) diplomat, committed abolitionist in his later years after benefiting from the slave trade earlier in his life; also the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Treaty of Paris.

6. John Adams
said: “I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise.”

7. Thomas Paine
The English-born Founder whose early pamphlets like “Common Sense” made the popular case for revolution. Also a vigorous foe of slavery and advocate for an early version of the welfare state.

8. James Wilson
also one of Washington’s original six appointees to the Supreme Court.

We have spent those years defining and redefining what America is and who Americans are. It has never been a clean or simple dialogue: Consensus is often fleeting, with answers’ clarity often varying according to the eyes of their beholders. At worst, it’s an argument that spurred a Civil War and underlies today’s bitterest disagreements. At best, it has generated a creative tension that has produced magnificent advances in art, science, and human liberty.

The American story is not uniform, neither all good nor all bad. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,” as Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our great theologians, once said. The American genius has been to create a blend toward progress. E pluribus unum: Out of many we are one. Our brief 250 years illustrate Niebuhr’s wisdom: Our achievements stretch from a declaration at a Statehouse in Pennsylvania to Stars and Stripes planted on the moon; our failures are tallied in tragedies starting with human enslavement and running through a bloody series of catastrophes and injustices, some self-inflicted, others perpetrated upon us.

series. Many answered all of the questions, some a few, and a handful answered different questions entirely. All were thoughtful and thought-provoking, and we are deeply grateful for their contributions.

We built these lists from their responses. Some results were predictable—yep, Abraham Lincoln was great—but many surprised. Taken together, they are our attempt to define our nation on its semiquincentennial. And we even gave a handful of conservative thinkers their say.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., my father, was fond of describing history as “an argument without end.” Bruce Springsteen, the nation’s music laureate, riffs along the same lines. “America was born out of disagreement,” he said at a May concert in Washington, D.C. “It’s an argument, an ongoing, blessed, sacred argument—an argument about what course the country should take to form a more perfect union.” We offer these lists in that spirit, as a fresh avenue for the great and ongoing discussion of where we have been, who we are, and what we may yet become.

—Robert Schlesinger, guest editor

Methodology

We reached out to scores of leading scholars and public intellectuals in fields such as history, the law, economics, political science, and media and asked them to offer their top-fives in over a dozen categories designed to capture our history in its fullness. We also asked the same of a smaller group of our friends on the right.

We received nearly 100 responses. Some respondents completed all 13 lists, some fewer. We made the lists in these pages by simply tallying up the votes. In some instances, we felt logic dictated that we group them thematically—for example, putting the Reconstruction Amendments together, rather than counting them individually. The final lists here are admittedly somewhat subjective, in that in each category we decided on a number that constituted a critical mass of votes; that number was different for each category, since the n of each category was different based on the number of responses (for example, many more participants made best/worst presidents lists than court cases lists). For each category, we chose a cutoff point that seemed to us to represent substantial sentiment favoring inclusion of that person or event.

Contributors

Jonathan Alter, author and columnist

Eric Alterman, Brooklyn College

William J. Antholis, University of Virginia’s Miller Center

Cristina Beltrán, New York University

David Harry Bennett, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (emeritus)

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School

David Blight, Yale University

Heather Boushey, University of Pennsylvania Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

Nadia Brown, Georgetown University

Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University

Brandon R. Byrd, Vanderbilt University

David Canton, University of Florida

Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

John Milton Cooper Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison (emeritus)

Robert Dallek, historian

Matt Dallek, George Washington University

William A. Darity Jr., Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy (emeritus)

Matthew Dickinson, Middlebury College

Robert E. DiClerico, West Virginia University (emeritus)

E.J. Dionne, Brookings Institution

Daniel Drezner, The Fletcher School at Tufts University

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University

James Fallows, writer

John A. Farrell, writer and historian

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University (president emerita)

Amy Fried, University of Maine (emerita)

Beverly Gage, Yale University

David Garrow, writer and historian

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

Roxane Gay, writer and cultural critic

David Greenberg, Rutgers University

Darrick Hamilton, The New School for Social Research

Michael Harriot, journalist

Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University

Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University

David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley (emeritus)

Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

David Kennedy, Stanford University (emeritus)

Randall L. Kennedy, Harvard Law School

Amna Khalid, Carleton College

Larry Kramer, London School of Economics and Political Science

Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University

Jennifer L. Lawless, University of Virginia Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University Journalism School

Margaret Levi, Stanford University (emerita)

Sanford V. Levinson, University of Texas at Austin School of Law

David Levering Lewis, New York University (emeritus)

Jen Manion, Amherst College

Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

Liza Mundy, journalist and author

Melissa Murray, New York University School of Law

George Derek Musgrove, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Aryeh Neier, Open Society Foundations (president emeritus)

Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)

Richard Parker, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government

Claire Potter, The New School for Social Research (emerita)

Andrew Preston, University of Virginia

Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh

Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis

Sam Rosenfeld, Colgate University

Miguel Schor, Drake University Law School

Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

John Sides, Vanderbilt University

Theda Skocpol, Harvard University

Candis Watts Smith, Duke University

Paul Starr, Princeton University

Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University

Julie Suk, Fordham University School of Law

Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs

James Tejani, California Polytechnic State University

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic

Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of Law

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Lynn Vavreck, University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Waldman, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU

Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

Maya Wiley, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Isabel Wilkerson, journalist and author

Brenda Wineapple, Columbia University

John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School

Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University

The Greatest Moments in American History
1. Constitution and Bill of Rights
2. Declaration of Independence
T-3. Victory in World War II
T-3. Abolition of slavery/Thirteenth Amendment
5. Lee surrenders at Appomattox
T-6. Moon landing
T-6. Victory in the Cold War

The Worst Moments in American History
1. 9/11
2. Pearl Harbor
3. Trail of Tears/Indian removal
4. Japanese internment
T-5. Lincoln assassination
T-5. Southern secession
T-5. Arrival and institutionalization of slavery

The Best Presidents
T-1. Abraham Lincoln
T-1. Ronald Reagan
T-1. George Washington
4. Thomas Jefferson
5. Franklin Roosevelt
6. Calvin Coolidge

The Worst Presidents
1. Andrew Johnson
2. James Buchanan
T-3. Joe Biden
T-3. Donald Trump
T-3. Woodrow Wilson
T-6. Warren G. Harding
T-6. Franklin Pierce

The Most Influential Founding Fathers
T-1. Alexander Hamilton
T-1. Thomas Jefferson
T-1. James Madison
T-2. John Adams
T-2. Benjamin Franklin
T-2. George Washington

The Most Consequential Politicians Who Never Became President
1. Alexander Hamilton
2. William Jennings Bryan
3. Henry Clay
T-4. Benjamin Franklin
T-4. Barry Goldwater
T-4. John Marshall

Most Important Americans in Public Life Who Never Held Elected Office
1. Martin Luther King Jr.
2. Thomas Edison
T-3. Frederick Douglass
T-3. Henry Ford
5. Jonathan Edwards

The Images That Define American History
T-1. Iwo Jima flag raising
T-1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
T-3. Moon landing
T-3. Statue of Liberty

The Most Important Court Cases
1. Brown v. Board of Education
2. Marbury v. Madison
3. Dred Scott v. Sandford
4. McCulloch v. Maryland
5. Obergefell v. Hodges

The Most Important Women
T-1. Susan B. Anthony
T-1. Eleanor Roosevelt
3. Sandra Day O’Connor
T-4. Frances Perkins
T-4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
T-4. Harriet Beecher Stowe
T-4. Harriet Tubman

The Most Important People of Color
1. Frederick Douglass
2. Martin Luther King Jr.
3. Barack Obama
4. Jackie Robinson
5. Booker T. Washington

The Most Important Works of Art in American History
1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
T-2. Casablanca
T-2. The Wizard of Oz
11-way tie for fourth place

The Liberal Mount Rushmore
1. Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. Martin Luther King Jr.
T-3. Lyndon B. Johnson
T-3. John F. Kennedy

Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt each received substantial support.

Conservative Contributors

Richard Brookhiser, National Review
Veronique de Rugy, Mercatus Center
Robert George, Princeton University
Allen Guelzo, University of Florida
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, American Action Forum
R. Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University
J. Michael Luttig, circuit court judge (ret.)
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University
Michael McConnell, Stanford University
Henry Olsen, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Amity Shlaes, Coolidge Foundation
Stephanie Slade, Reason
Eugene Volokh, UCLA (emeritus)

T-1. Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865)
created the national railroad and the land-grant university system, all while fighting the war!

T-1. Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945)
confidence, “bold, persistent experimentation,” and optimistic mien guided the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War, reimagining both the federal government role and the country’s place in the world.

3. George Washington (1789–1797)
His greatest achievement may have been something he didn’t do. “He could easily have become president for life and did not,” University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson noted.

4. Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969)
accomplishments at home, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, have come to overshadow Vietnam.

5. Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909)
An OG populist who used federal power for the general good. “When I am feeling blue or discouraged, I pick up a TR biography and read any random page—it gives a jolt of energy and hope!” said Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice.

6. Barack Obama (2009–2017)
Not only the first African American president but also the sole one since Eisenhower to twice win a popular vote majority. “Americans could believe that we were capable of living up to the promises of equality and liberty,” said University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan.

7. Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809)
his successors might have put it, a big effing deal.

8. Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961)
warned against the burgeoning “military-industrial complex.”

9. Harry Truman (1945–1953)
failed haberdasher.

10. John F. Kennedy (1961–1963)
One of the nation’s most rhetorically gifted presidents, Kennedy earned a place on this list for his inspirational words, and also for navigating the world’s moment of maximum peril, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Worst Presidents

1. Donald J. Trump (2017–2021, 2025–present)
Some experts voted for him twice—once for each term. “Much more corrupt and dangerous to the Constitution than all of the others on this list combined,” observed author and columnist Jonathan Alter. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

2. Andrew Johnson (1865–1869)
He sought, in the words of Richard Parker of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “to betray the sacrifice of 600,000 lives in combat, and the rights owed millions more.”

3. James Buchanan (1857–1861)
lobbied the Supreme Court on its odious Dred Scott decision. He was, one expert noted, the only president to finish his term with fewer states in the union than when he started.

4. Richard Nixon (1969–1974)
worse than the “second-rate burglary.” And despite his best efforts and those of his apologists, he is best remembered as the only president to resign his office—in a miasma of disgrace he could never shake.

T-5. George W. Bush (2001–2009)
His administration was a string of disasters and blunders, from 9/11 to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to the Great Recession. He exhibited a deadly blend of self-assurance and incuriosity.

T-5. Warren Harding (1921–1923)
Google “Teapot Dome”). Harding’s ghost must be grateful to Team Trump.

7. Andrew Jackson (1829–1837)

Jackson “exhibited a fairly consistent disdain for law and established the pernicious tradition of presidents who viewed themselves as ‘tribunes of the people’ … entitled to behave as they wished,” University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson argued.

T-8. Herbert Hoover (1929–1933)
The Great Depression started on his watch, and he flailed in its face.

T-8. Franklin Pierce (1853–1857)
wrote, “a servile tool of men worse than himself ... ever ready to do any work the slavery leaders set him.”

10. Ronald Reagan (1981–1989)
“With an affable demeanor, he laid the foundations for what the current snarling GOP has become,” noted James Fallows, who worked for and then fell out with Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter.

1619 (PREDATES 1776)

Establishment of slavery and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Supreme Court decision that called enslaved people property, but they were all saying the same thing: Slavery, while not a single “moment,” was our greatest shame.

1830–1850

Indian removal/Trail of Tears
now hangs in Donald Trump’s Oval Office.

1861

Firing on Fort Sumter/the Civil War
Lincoln had just been elected. South Carolina had just seceded and insisted that the U.S. Army abandon its military installations in the state. It refused. South Carolina’s militia attacked. The Civil War was underway.

1865

Lincoln’s assassination
John Wilkes Booth vowed that a speech he heard Lincoln give on April 11 would be his last. And so it was. An act that felled our greatest president—and gave us one of the worst.

1877

Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction
The political deal that ushered in the era of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws. Oh, and finagled the presidency away from the guy who got more votes. Sound familiar?

1921

Tulsa Massacre
mob violence that destroyed 35 square blocks and left 10,000 Black people homeless. And it took seven decades for the state to form a commission to acknowledge and study it.

1941

Pearl Harbor
Japan attacked a naval base in Hawaii and ended America’s neutrality in World War II. The “date which will live in infamy,” in FDR’s famous phrase. His first draft? “A date which will live in world history.” Most important speech edit in history?

1942

Japanese American internment in World War II
Without question, FDR’s low point—120,000 Japanese Americans (80,000 of them citizens) sent to 10 camps. The Supreme Court defended this in 1944’s Korematsu v. United States, which has gone down in history as one of its worst decisions.

1945

Dropping atomic weapons on Japan
Harry Truman said he never lost a night’s sleep over the decision to drop the bombs that ultimately killed nearly 200,000 people. It did shorten the war—but it launched a dark and paranoid era in human history.

2001

9/11
Three items on this list are not things the United States did, but things done to the United States. This one was awful: Four planes attacked the country, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. It was made even worse by our government’s overreaction.

2021

January 6
It’s still hard to believe that a sitting president led an insurrection against the United States of America and was at best indifferent to the idea of the mob killing his own vice president.

2024

Reelection of Donald Trump
Future historians will ask how the hell the American people decided to do this. Let’s just hope those historians are still living in a democracy.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

angry exchangetelling him the truth about his terrible economic numbers.

good new piece, time is not on his side. So we asked Nick to come on and explain it all to us. Nick, always good to have you back on.

Nicholas Grossman: Yep, great to be here, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent: Can you quickly sum up where we are on this fundamental dispute, Nick? Trump says Iran has agreed to high-level international inspections, and he’s even telling reporters that he wouldn’t have agreed to enter the talks at all without Iran agreeing to that beforehand. But all signs are that Iran has not agreed to it. What’s the story here?

Grossman: I think it’s pretty simple, in that Trump is lying, or at minimum heavily exaggerating and bullshitting. It’s possible that they brought this up as something that Iran could maybe agree to in principle, or suggested it. But all the signs show that there really hasn’t been any discussion of Iran’s nuclear program yet.

There probably won’t be, since Iran has more leverage in these talks. And that sort of thing would take a lot of details, a lot of the specific things that require nuclear physicists and engineers and other experts—there’s no way they could have possibly worked it out now. So simply, Trump is lying or trying to play up a minor, maybe discussion point as a big concession.

Sargent: Can I ask quickly before we move on from this, Nick—does Trump saying this undermine JD Vance? Is this a problem for JD Vance in these negotiations?

Grossman: It’s a big problem. I don’t think we’ve seen something like this before, that the president of the United States is actively lying about what is going on in the discussions. And that makes it very hard for Iran to be able to get their sense of what the United States is committing to. Just to make a deal—if I’m going to do something, I expect you to do something. There are usually trust-building measures. We take a few steps along the way.

And so if I say, OK, I’ll do X as long as you do Y, and then as soon as you get up from the table, the president says, no way, we’re never going to do Y, and I never would have agreed to that in the first place—then I can’t know what you’re going to do. I can’t do my trust-building steps, and it makes the negotiations very difficult. So the Americans are in this weird position where they have to say, pay no attention to what our national leader says, he’s just doing that as theater for domestic consumption—even as the Iranians can see the way that Vance and the whole Republican Party and a lot of conservative media kiss up to him so often and just go with whatever he says. So yeah, it greatly undermines America’s negotiating position.

Sargent:what happens.

Reporter (voiceover): The Department of War is asking for 80 billion more dollars for the Iran war. Do you think Americans support this at a time when so many are financially struggling?

Donald Trump (voiceover): “Who are you with?”

Reporter (voiceover): I’m with NewsNation, sir—

Trump (voiceover): Not a very good group. Not doing very well. Not only do they support it—not only do they support it, they demand it, because they won’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. You want to see trouble, let them have a nuclear weapon. We’re doing very well with Iran. They’ve been decimated.

Sargent: Nick, note how angry Trump gets at the notion that the American people are turning on him over both the war and the economy. And of course, the American people have turned on him over both. But he says the American people absolutely support spending $80 billion more dollars on the Iran war. Your thoughts?

Grossman: He says this about everything—that whether there is any public support or not, it’s kind of his way of trying to either bully reporters or bully the public into believing it, to create an aura of power, almost meme his way into more power than he actually has. And it’s really not going to work in this instance.

I mean, Congress will most likely fund the Pentagon’s requests, at least in significant part, because a lot of that is replacing munitions that the United States fired against Iran that is needed for a lot of contingencies, such as the event of a major war with Russia or China, war over Taiwan, anything like that. And so they will likely spend that money.

But selling it to the American people as some sort of positive thing—that’s not going to work at all. People can see the economic effects, and those are likely to get worse rather than better as the effects really reverberate out. And they never supported the war in the first place.

So there isn’t any particular reason why they would be excited to spend even more taxpayer dollars going there when they are more concerned about really many other issues, especially economic ones.

Sargent: So you’re really looking at a triple whammy for Trump. As you say, the public opposed the war at the outset, which is itself unusual. And then the public had a direct glimpse of the economic effects of the war when the Strait of Hormuz closed. With unusual clarity, Trump was directly tied to skyrocketing prices. And then on top of that, Trump is now asking for another $80 billion. That’s a triple whammy of sorts. I don’t think we’ve seen something like that before, have we?

Grossman: No, we haven’t. And you can add on top of that that the American public doesn’t like losing a war, doesn’t like backing a loser in a war, doesn’t want to throw good money after bad. So if there were perhaps some sort of actual threat to the United States, or there were some sort of national interest that he was achieving in the process of the war, then maybe there would be an argument for the American people to sacrifice in some manner. But there isn’t at all.

He’s in the process of surrendering and making concessions to the Iranians and giving them more than they had before the start of the war. So why would people be interested or say even excited or supportive of funding that war?

Sargent: It really is bad for him. this snippet from a Fox anchornew Marist poll showing that only 33 percent of Americans approve of Trump on the economy, his lowest ever in Marist polling, with 60 percent disapproving. Check this out.

Fox anchor (voiceover): We’ve only got a few months now until the midterms. This Marist poll shows that the president’s not exactly firing on all cylinders when it comes to approval of his handling of the economy. Thirty-three percent—disapproving 60 percent rather. His 33 percent approval rating is three points lower than Biden at his worst.

Sargent: Nick, did you catch how the anchor said that Trump is now lower on the economy than Joe Biden was at his worst? That has got to be the thing Trump hates to hear more than anything else. And this is coming from Fox News, making it even more pointed. I think this really illustrates very graphically the kind of pressure he feels to produce a deal.

The last thing he wants to be doing right now is asking for tens of billions more for the war when his approval rating on the economy is one-third of the country, right?

Grossman: Yes, and he needs something really fast, because the economic impact is very unlikely to turn positive in time for the midterms, in time to reduce that pressure. This was one of the things that got Trump to surrender in the first place. A good lesson of what is he actually afraid of, what can discipline him, what does he listen to—the answer has always been markets.

The oil market and others were on the verge of getting into a very serious crisis because of reserves running down and the ships not leaving the strait in time to replenish that.

And we still might see some of that, because as much as Trump tries to sell this idea that the strait is totally open, ships are flowing through, that Iran won’t be charging tolls for it—none of that matches the facts on the ground. And this is the type of big-scale supply-demand, hard physical reality that he can bullshit his way through for some time, kind of delay for a time, but cannot totally manage to hoodwink people when there are ongoing economic problems, when costs are rising, when we saw recently inflation numbers, in large part due to the war, getting back to levels that we haven’t seen in a few years.

All of that is the sort of thing that people notice. And he really seems desperate about it—where usually he’s able to either bully people into saying that it’s going well, or turn it into a domestic political he-said-she-said back and forth, or just somehow bullshit his way through it, change the subject. And this one is just stubbornly not doing it because the reality of it is too big.

Sargent: Well, here’s the kicker on the Marist poll. It finds his overall job approval at 36 percent, which is the lowest of his second term. Those are very bad numbers, Nick.

Grossman: Those are really bad. Those are the sort that lead to a midterm wipeout for a president’s party.

Sargent: And we should note here that this 36 percent approval, which is again dismal, is absolutely not an outlier. The New York Times polling averages, which if anything are conservative and take in a lot of data, have his approval at 38 percent. That means that his actual approval is very plausibly in the mid-30s—35, 36, 37.

Those are terrible numbers. And I don’t see them turning around, Nick. Do you? I mean, part of the problem here is that he’s built himself into a situation with Iran where time isn’t on his side, is it?

Grossman: I think you’re right that it is likely to get worse. And I can’t really see a way that it gets better. I can think of a few different ways. One is that with the strait still restricted, having been blocked for so long, a lot of supplies—not just energy, but things like fertilizer is another good one—we’re going to see over the next year or two the result of that supply crunch and higher prices reverberating through the economy. So the economy is more likely to get worse rather than better, at least in say the midterm.

With the war, it looks like it has driven more wedges into the MAGA coalition, into the GOP coalition, because it effectively broke some of the deal that various voting groups thought that they had with Trump when they were voting for him. So you had some lighter supporters who thought that he was good for the economy, that he was going to bring inflation down, that the economy was going to look more like, say, 2018, 2019 before COVID. And he didn’t do that. He made it worse exactly along those measures in a way that’s easy to link to the war.

And also there were the people who voted for him because they bought into the image of anti-war isolationism—which was always bullshit, which had to willfully ignore a lot of his first-term stuff, but nevertheless some voters bought into it. And here he went and started a new Middle East war that is causing all sorts of problems and is not making anything better for the United States or for its various allies or the world. And so some of them feel betrayed.

And so—I would be extremely wary of ever giving credit to Tucker Carlson, so this is not credit—but he is seeing an opportunity in taking this anti-war isolationist, anti-Israel lane. And that is creating these political problems for Trump that are very unlikely to reverse in time for the midterms, or who knows what after that. But I can’t see what miracle thing would come along that would somehow reverse his approval decline.

Sargent: I just want to underscore your point by saying that Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene just this week said that they’re leaving the Republican Party, or something to that effect.

Again, we shouldn’t trust these people even for a second or hail any sort of nobleness on their part at all. But there really is opportunity that they’re seeing. They would not be doing this unless they sense that there are large constituencies within the Trump-MAGA coalition that will agree with them on it, right?

Grossman: Right, exactly. They’re opportunities, a finger in the wind. It’s almost like they’re positioning themselves for a period of whatever happens after Trump, and that they want to be in the lane that says various MAGA stuff—like a lot of the racism, anti-immigrant stuff, for example, was good, but the Iran war and Middle East interventionism was bad—and try to capture a future of the right by doing that. But that also makes it an argument inside the Republican Party.

Because you also have another group that feels wronged by this—the arch-hawks, the ones who have been wanting an Iran war the entire time, the ones who are very strong supporters of Israel. They’re feeling betrayed by Trump surrendering and making all these big concessions to Iran, giving Iran benefits up front and not getting anything for the United States, leaning towards an absolute best-case scenario of something like a weaker version of the JCPOA, the Obama nuclear deal, which they hated and wanted to oppose in the first place.

So those are the sort of people who maybe didn’t love some other Trump stuff and bit their tongue about it because they liked that he was going to be so violently aggressive in the Middle East and so supportive of Israel and of Benjamin Netanyahu. And now Trump is doing something that goes against those interests. And you have the Tucker part of the coalition going in a different direction. It looks really difficult for anybody to possibly be able to hold that thing together.

Sargent: I mean, he’s losing three different groups if you really bear down on it, right? He’s losing the low-engagement young non-white working-class types who went to Trump because he’s the Apprentice guy or whatever they thought. He’s losing the die-hard MAGA types who actually seem to have real anti-interventionist views—I’m really skeptical of that, and I know you are as well, but still, people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene are speaking to some sort of constituency out there that thinks that. And he’s losing the Republican hawks, who thought Trump would basically be their tribune to crush whatever enemy rose up in their path.

Grossman: Yeah, I think he’s losing some of the manosphere tough-guy types also, in that he looked so weak. This was supposed to be some triumph of strength and it’s going terribly along those lines. And that’s the sort of thing that so many people, various experts on the issue, could have told them in advance—that you can’t just act like a reality show tough guy, do a bunch of bluster, do some bombs from afar, and expect a country to then capitulate to you. That’s not going to work.

But nevertheless, some people bought into that. And the embarrassment of it now, with being part of a loser—and one who is surrendering and flailing and kind of going back and forth on it a lot and just generally looks weak, and being seen by a lot of people in those areas as weak—just adds another chip against that coalition that he built that got him back into the White House in 2024.

Sargent:said at a rally in Pennsylvania, which I think shows again how angry he is at the media and everybody over all this. Listen.

Trump (voiceover): Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and they’ve agreed to that. But remember, this wasn’t easy. We had 47 years’ worth of presidents and other people—other countries too, we’re not the only one that never did anything. They were the bully of the Middle East. And now we’re leaving Iran with no Navy, no Air Force, no anti-aircraft, no missile capability, no nuclear program.

We’re leaving them without any nuclear capacity, and they’ve agreed to that. And we’re getting along quite well, although if you read the fake news, you’d never know! Think of it—the fake news. They have no army, they have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft. We can fly over Tehran just at will. Nobody’s going to do anything to us. And then I read the fake news that they’re doing quite well! They’re not doing quite well!

Sargent: Nick, note how Trump says Iran has agreed to having no nuclear program, when in fact all it has agreed to is what it has agreed to many times in the past, which is this boilerplate language about how it shall not buy or develop nuclear weapons. And note how he rages at the media for telling people the truth, which is that Trump has gotten little to nothing on this front.

What’s the basic dynamic here going forward? Does this change anytime soon? Does it just drag on for many months? How do you see it playing out?

Grossman: I think it’s probably dragging on for a while. Unfortunately, one of the really long-term problems with this is that Trump has given Iran this really powerful card, that they can threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz when they don’t like how things are going—either with negotiations with the United States or Israeli military activity in Lebanon or just about anything else. And they can stir it up as an issue. I bet we’re going to be hearing about this for years.

Iran is also setting up a toll regime—they’re building this out with Oman, they’re charging people special insurance and saying they’re going to have to pay. And Trump is lying about that and he’s trying to sell that lie, but that one looks like it’s moving forward also.

So he’s gotten the Iranian government a big new revenue stream. And they are not going to be giving concessions on their nuclear program, at least not ones that are more than in the MOU. What it specifically says—they even use the language “Iran reiterates”—basically it says its old statement that they won’t get nuclear weapons, which nobody really believed before, which is why there were all these sanctions and pressure on Iran in the first place.

So he’s going to keep on giving Iran these concessions. Just recently lifting sanctions on Iran, allowing a lot of Iranian ships to leave and sell at market, or unfreezing Iranian assets is something that the Iranians said they talked about when they were meeting in Switzerland on that one. I believe them.

We’ll see more economic concessions to Iran just to get Iran to keep the process of letting ships through the Strait of Hormuz, because that’s the real leverage that they have. Once they got a hold of that, they have had us. They have had the stronger hand and they have been playing it better than the United States has.

So while Trump will continue prioritizing trying to lie to the American people about what happened, the facts on the ground and the actual shape of the Middle East, of the international system that is coming out of this, is going to keep on likely getting more and more in the Iranians’ favor, with Trump lying and threatening and blustering along.

Sargent: The beauty of it all is that JD Vance inherits this whole mess next year when Donald Trump is utterly checked out and essentially leaving the scene and JD Vance is starting his presidential run. He deserves every bit of that. Nicholas Grossman, thanks for coming on. Always great to talk to you.

Grossman: Yep. Best of luck to Mr. Vance, I guess. And yeah, great talking to you too. Thanks for having me.

descendeddebunkedwhite genocideban on people who legitimately need asylum.

saidcalling Afrikaners a “long-persecuted minority group.”

The gift bags have yet to be finalized, according to The New York Times.

One of the books from PragerU, titled Lwazi’s Hard Lesson, details a Black South African rugby player who protects his white teammate from an angry Black mob, and describes South African freedom fighter and first post-apartheid President Nelson Mandela as a “South African lawyer and activist who sought to end apartheid with acts of sabotage.”

“Unlike South Africa’s Black population, the white population is declining in number,” the literature included in the package reads. “As an easy scapegoat for a failing government, more and more white South Africans are choosing to leave the country each year.”

Brown University historian Nancy Jacobs described that account to the Times as “selective in the extreme, and even inaccurate.”

75 percent of all farmland in the country, despite making up just 7 percent of the population.

At a speech in Macungie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump fell back on one of his favorite talking points: winning elections.

“We won it by a lot,” he said, referring (hopefully) to the 2024 election. “Maybe we should run again. Should we run again?”

continued, “I’d like to do it. I’d like to do it.”

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June 23, 2026

dozes offmurky at best.

not jokingdiscussed running again with his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who’s writing a book about that very scenario.

$55$50$4 billion since Trump’s second term.

said at a rally in Macungie, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. “We can fly over Tehran just at will. Nobody’s gonna do anything to us.”

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June 23, 2026

active naval units—they wouldn’t be able to control the Strait of Hormuz if they didn’t. Iran’s nuclear energy program remains intact, as does their capacity to develop it in the future. They also still maintain an aging collection of aircraft. Last month, The New York Timesreported that Iran still had “substantial missile capabilities,” including ballistic missiles. Trump admitted as much last week, much to the chagrin of war hawks both at home and in Israel.

said at the G7 summit on Wednesday. “I mean, they have to have some. Because other people have some. You gotta have some. Somebody said ‘You shouldn’t give them more … sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.’ … What am I gonna do? I’m gonna let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?”

decimated Iran’s entire military in Operation Epic Fury back in the spring, and that they weren’t a threat. Since then, Iran has continued to either use, hold, or develop every single thing Trump said he had taken away from them.

Adani is the second-richest Asian in the world with an estimated net worth around $88.6 billion, according to a Forbes analysis. In November 2024, Adani and two other executives at the Indian Energy Company were indicted in Brooklyn for allegedly bribing Indian government officials in order to secure large solar energy projects and lying to U.S. investors about it, according to a Justice Department press release.

Adani and his co-conspirators were charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an anti-bribery statute passed in 1977 that Trump paused for “national security” purposes in February 2025.

Adani’s fortune changed after he met with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in Ahmedabad, India, last November. What was discussed during the meeting is not known, but the meeting itself was not previously reported until Bloomberg got the scoop Tuesday.

Seven months later, in May 2025, the DOJ dropped its charges against Adani. In a brief filing, prosecutors wrote that the department had “reviewed this case and … decided, in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to these criminal charges against individual defendants.”

The billionaire’s sudden good luck was met by an excited market, which surged stocks in his companies and temporarily skyrocketed Adani’s wealth, pushing him into top spot as the wealthiest person in Asia.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. told Bloomberg that the meeting had “zero to do” with the DOJ’s decision to drop its case against Adani.

In one video shared by TMZ Tuesday, U.S. Marshals escorted an LVT Mobile Security Unit to the edge of the Reflecting Pool.

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June 23, 2026

In another video a day earlier, Daily Mail reporter John Michael Raasch witnessed a surveillance tower being towed in circles around the supposedly embattled landmark by U.S. Parks Police.

US Park Police have a mobile surveillance truck circling the Reflecting Pool after Trump said it was vandalized.

I’ve asked Park Police, National Park employees and local authorities about the 300ft gash Trump says is here.

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June 22, 2026

These towers do more than just record passersby: They automatically detect and alert so-called threats and use AI-powered audio alerts, strobes, and a powerful spotlight to deter crime. Most likely, they will just catch tourists.

The installation of security equipment is a significant escalation after several people, including a former U.S. Olympian, were arrested for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool. Trump has nonsensically claimed that vandals cut a massive slit in the bottom of the pool, but has refused to provide any evidence of the crime, which no one else has spotted. Now it seems that he doesn’t want anyone to get too close.

Trump has directed more than $16 million in renovations toward the Reflecting Pool, but just days before the country’s 250th anniversary, it was once again filled with algae and appeared to be literally falling apart.

posted on Truth Social that “vandals” had damaged the pool, and that they would now have to drain it in order to make repairs. He claimed it “worked perfectly” before it was attacked.

“They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work,” Trump wrote.

another postsaid that the cut was 350 feet long.

Q: You mentioned yesterday that the Interior Dept has video and photos. We reached out to them and they haven't shared it with us

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June 23, 2026

CBS News went and inspected the pool and found no evidence of the gash, whether it be 250, 300, or 350 feet.

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June 23, 2026

“One thing we still can’t find is any evidence of a gash along the floor of the pool,” said CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Tuesday morning. “Despite that, the Interior Department is taking steps to drain the pool again, and fix it again.”

over $16 million renovating the pool—who knows how much it will cost to drain and repair it all over again? American taxpayers continue to shoulder the financial burden of another of Trump’s slapdash vanity projects.

One design that President Donald Trump proposed for his $15 million glamor project involved placing an enormous fist atop the 250-foot Arc de Triomphe dupe, according to a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

The fist would have served as a visual reminder of Trump’s response to his attempted assassination at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.

“As the president showed off his models to a visitor one day in October, he puzzled over the details, including whether the arch should include a platform to take in the view,” Haberman and Swan wrote.

“Privately, he had also been asking confidants what he should have on top of the arc,” the section continues. “Should it be, he mused, a large replica of his ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ fist?”

The book also highlights the arch’s enormous size, which would “dwarf” both the original, 162.5-foot arc in Paris, which was built at the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte to commemorate the military achievements of the French empire, and the 200-foot Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, which was erected to commemorate the 70th birthday of North Korea’s totalitarian founder Kim Il Sung, as well as the nation’s resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II.

Other details on the project include a replica of Lady Liberty and a pair of eagles from atop the proposed arch, both of which were suggested for removal by a Trump-appointed commissioner on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.*

The project is still going through a review cycle, but Trump officials have indicated that they want the site up and running by July 2028, six months before Trump’s term is set to end.

Trump’s arch has faced enormous opposition. If it breaks ground, it will physically situate Trump’s legacy between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, interrupting a hallowed conversation between the president who ended slavery and the soldiers who sacrificed their lives in order to do so.

* This story has been updated to reflect current designs for the national arch.

“Ahead of the match in Seattle on June 26, the Iranian team will be allowed to come in match day minus two, so two days before the match. They’ll be asked to leave the day that the match wraps up, so the evening of the match,” a DHS spokesperson told NBC. “Again, the President wants to make sure that we’re talking about what actually happens on the pitch.… A lot of that is making sure that things are safe and secure, not just around the stadiums, but around base camps and training sites.”

deniedbooted from the country right after their matches in Los Angeles on June 15 and June 21, forcing them to stay in Tijuana, Mexico, rather than their abandoned base camp in Tucson, Arizona, as originally planned, or anywhere near the city they were playing in. The team also still has to go through hours of security checks each time they enter the U.S. from Mexico.

This constant back-and-forth is detrimental to both the performance and the morale of the players, who have nothing to do with America’s ongoing war on Iran.

said team captain Mehdi Taremi last week. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”

Iran qualified for the World Cup in the spring of 2025, months before the joint U.S.-Israeli attack that started the war in February.

A STAT report Tuesday found that one 79-year-old man had received special access to retatrutide, a powerful new weight loss drug—prompting speculation that the individual in question was none other than the president of the United States.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai publicly lashed out at STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence, who in her original report, noted that Desai did not explicitly deny that Trump was the patient in question.

“Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President,” Desai wrote on X Tuesday after the story quickly gained national attention.

“Thank you for clarifying. I asked you, the FDA, and HHS multiple times yesterday whether this application was for the President. No one answered my question directly,” Lawrence replied.

“We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this,” Desai wrote. “Are you going to now go ask this idiotic question to the ~4 million Americans in this age cohort and then speculate about them being the application?”

As a White House spokesperson, it’s Desai’s responsibility to respond to queries from the press. As TNR contributor Nina Burleigh pointed out on X: “If you don’t want to do your job, maybe stop taking taxpayer funds…”

Desai did little to dismiss the story when it first came across his desk and originally referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services, which didn’t offer a denial either.

In fact, Desai may have fueled further questions about the president’s health. When the 79-year-old patient requested “compassionate use” access to retatrutide in April, it was to treat refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension.

Asked whether Trump has obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai originally told STAT a White House memo on Trump’s most recent medical evaluation “covers this.” It does not.

Last July 4, activists set off fireworks at a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, and some of them vandalized cars, slashed tires, and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived and drew his weapon, one person shot him in the shoulder from the woods.

Texas Standard.

President Donald Trump and his administration have claimed that the activists were part of an “antifa cell” in north Texas, even though antifa is not one specific group or organization. Most of the protesters didn’t know each other well, and were connected through a local left-wing book club and gun group.

This case was the first time that federal prosecutors have attempted to convict protesters against the Trump administration on charges related to domestic terrorism. With the White House’s attempt to criminalize protest, it likely will not be the last.

The outlet that first reported the early access, STAT, speculated that the patient could be Donald Trump, in no small part due to the president’s unabashed support for weight-loss drugs, which has extended to suggestions that he and his staff should take what he calls “the fat drug.”

In January, the president told The New York Times that while he hadn’t yet taken Ozempic or Wegovy, he “probably should.”

Trump tips the scale at 224 pounds, according to his 2025 physical results published by the White House. At six-foot-three, that puts his body mass index in the overweight category. The data suggests Trump has slimmed down since his first term: In 2020, he weighed 244 pounds, which placed him firmly within the BMI’s obesity range.

Throughout his second term, Trump has expressed a keen interest in weight-loss drugs and has even directed his administration to lower their costs.

In April 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CBS Mornings that Trump had “ordered” his department to bring the costs of GLP-1 drugs down in the U.S. to compete with European prices.

Months later, in November, Trump announced that the prescription costs of Ozempic and Wegovy would come down by hundreds of dollars if purchased through his discounted prescription drug marketplace, TrumpRx.

Trump has even used his own officials as props to promote the drugs. During the White House event unveiling the TrumpRx arrangement, Trump said he was “thrilled” with manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and proceeded to conduct a fat-shaming round-robin of his underlings to determine who was already on the weight-loss drugs.

“Secretary Howard Lutnick. You take any of this stuff, Howard?” Trump asked his commerce secretary at the time.

“Not yet,” Lutnick replied.

“OK, good,” Trump said before going back to reading names of people on his team. “CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz—he doesn’t take it. Food and Drug Administrator, Commissioner Marty Makary, and Director of Medicare Chris Klomp. And we have Steve.… Where’s Steve? Is he here? Head of public relations for the White House? He’s taking it.”

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump bragged that the 19 million barrels of oil that flowed through the strait on Monday constituted “an all time RECORD.”

That’s a complete lie. Before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the strait every day, according to the International Energy Agency—more than Trump’s so-called “all time RECORD.”

Plus, Trump’s numbers don’t seem to add up anyway.

From Saturday to Monday, only 109 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times reported, citing Kpler, a global maritime data firm. That’s the largest three-day number since the war began in February—but still less than the nearly 140 ships that once passed through the strait on a daily basis. It seems unlikely that 19 million barrels could have passed through in one day with the strait still facing restrictions.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Trump pushed phony numbers about oil. Trump previously claimed that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to send more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz without anybody knowing—including his own energy secretary!

Trump’s latest lies were part of a larger meltdown Tuesday, as Iran denied having made commitments the Trump administration had touted as a done deal.

wrote just after midnight Tuesday on Truth Social. “CALL ME!”

Trump said the same thing out loud on Monday, calling the city of Chicago a “shooting field.”

said in the Oval Office.

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June 22, 2026

PritzkerBrandon Johnson since his return to the White House last year.

tenuousbest, as each city has had violent and negative experiences with the influx of federal agents and the National Guard.

Pritzker has yet to respond, while Johnson spoke out Monday after the president’s comments.

wrote on X.

cuts to housing, health care, and green energy programs.

Given that, it’s even more galling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been reportedly making his way around Capitol Hill, asking senators for an additional $80 billion to cover war expenses.

testifiedAP.

majority of Americans, and the Pentagon may struggle to get congressional support.

“You’re spending families’ hard-earned tax dollars on a war that many strongly oppose,” Democratic Senator Patty Murray told Hegseth last month.

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz hasn’t polled his fellow Democrats, but he told the AP, “I haven’t found anyone who wants to do this.”

But at the top of her mind was not just the undue budgetary pressures placed on her family, a latent anxiety for parents that children so often absorb. Habib’s community has faced harassment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; having a home to run to was the “first line of defense” when federal agents came knocking. “As a U.S.-born citizen who comes from an immigrant family, I am still afraid of ICE,” she told the board. “When ICE is detaining any person of color on the street, I fear being outside my home.”

Habib is a youth member of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, one of many groups organizing tenants to demand a rent freeze. This Thursday, June 25, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold its final public meeting and vote to determine whether this cornerstone of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will become a reality. The RGB regulates annual lease adjustments for rent-stabilized apartments, affecting 2.4 million tenants—arguably the most organized group of voters that helped lift Mamdani into power. A rent freeze was, for many, the campaign promise that elevated him beyond the likes of Andrew Cuomo. Today, however, those I spoke to say freezing the rent is all the more necessary, particularly for a sizable contingent of immigrant tenants facing threats from their landlords by ICE.

The overlap is hardly surprising; working-class New Yorkers, immigrant or not, rely on rent-stabilized housing to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. But immigrant tenants are particularly vulnerable right now, and to some landlords, that added vulnerability is an asset. It’s illegal in New York to retaliate against anyone who reports housing issues. Yet, for decades, the business model many rent-stabilized landlords have followed has relied on pushing longtime tenants out, often through neglect or overt abuse. To Irene Hsu, communications manager at CAAAV, ICE has become another tool in landlords’ tool kits: They “stand to profit from the displacement and deportation of working-class tenants.”

The RGB is a nominally independent body, though it tends to follow the proclivities of whichever mayor is in office. Just before exiting Gracie Mansion, former Mayor Eric Adams attempted to stack the board with pro–real estate members. Ultimately, Mamdani was allowed to choose six board members. Since then, he’s mostly kept mum on the RGB’s work; in early May, after its preliminary vote capping rent increases between 0 percent and 2 percent for one-year leases and between 0 percent and 4 percent for two-year leases, he only said he was “encouraged” to see them “taking seriously the data around affordability, operating expenses, and the pressures facing both tenants and small property owners as it sets this preliminary range.” For Mamdani, this was a notably cautious statement, a far cry from his campaign-trail pronouncements.

His tact is, frankly, necessary, if only to avoid drawing further ire from local real estate groups practically frothing at the mouth over a potential rent freeze. In mid-June, for instance, Gotham Housing Alliance hired 50 or so counterprotesters dressed as zombies outside an RGB hearing, warning that a rent freeze would mean more “zombie” properties—that is, empty buildings due to the landlord’s inability to maintain them.

But as J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College, recently showed, the “great majority” of residential properties generate income well above their operating costs, even with rents much lower than today’s. Under Mayor Adams, operating incomes actually rose by roughly 30 percent. The problem is that many landlords borrowed too much money at inflated prices, based on the hope that rents would increase faster than they actually have. If landlords are having problems maintaining their buildings, it’s because, by and large, their financial gambles didn’t pan out. “No matter what landlords say, the data supports a rent freeze, and the majority of New Yorkers support a rent freeze,” Sumathy Kumar, executive director of Tenant Bloc, said in a statement to The New Republic. “A blanket rent hike for 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants would simply reward landlords for long-term neglect.”

For rent-stabilized tenants like Parveg Hasan Dolar—a Bangladeshi immigrant in his early seventies, also a CAAAV organizer living in Astoria—this meant a roughly $400 rent increase within the past four years. Dolar, who worked in a halal cart until he required heart surgery in 2024, isn’t in a position to leverage his finances to own a building, let alone multiple buildings in New York like his landlord. But today, he and his neighbors carry the brunt of the responsibility to bail their landlord out. For his family, this means rationing food to accommodate rent increases; he says the stress of working additional hours to make ends meet is what contributed to his heart condition.

At a New York City Council joint oversight hearing on Housing and Immigration in April, officials heard testimony from tenants threatened with deportation for simply asking their landlord for repairs. One tenant in the Bronx reportedly refused to go to housing court because his landlord said ICE would be there. Since then, there have been multiple cases of management companies posting signs in the lobby encouraging tenants to report immigrants to ICE—“a pretty clear retaliation” against organizers, said Joanne Grell, a tenant organizer in the Bronx working with Community Action for Safe Apartments. But, she added, “the buildings we want to shame are never going to be secret.”

While New York isn’t seeing the kind of ICE occupations witnessed in Chicago or Minneapolis, a recent investigation by The City Reporter, a local nonprofit newsroom, showed street arrests clustered around Canal Street in Manhattan, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and Corona, Queens: immigrant neighborhoods with a sharp overlap of rent-stabilized apartments. When ICE recently visited Dolar’s building, knocking on the doors of tenant leaders at around 5 a.m., “none of us opened our doors,” he said. But the threat alone was enough to change the feeling in the neighborhood. “People are afraid.”

Tenants in New York have reached a high-water mark of mobilization not seen in decades, but the terrain is shifting. Suddenly, door knocking takes on a different valence: Many working-class immigrant households are no longer opening their doors, for fear of ICE. New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is already making efforts to help immigrants feel safer when answering the door for apartment inspectors. “When I got people to come testify at the RGB,” says Dolar, “I told them we would have marshals there to keep an eye out.… If I ever see cops in the neighborhood, I call my neighbors to see if anything happened.”

All of this combined is “making a crisis for working-class people,” says Dolar. A rent freeze would be “a good first step, but we know it’s not enough. I want to decrease my rent. I pay around $2,200 on rent, and all of that money is for my landlord’s luxury. We, as tenants, need so much more.”

Pulte, a housing regulator with no experience working in intelligence, has already begun implementing sweeping personnel changes in the intelligence community.

“The deep state firings have begun,” a source familiar with the matter told NBC News. Pulte formally assumed his new post on Friday, and the firings reportedly began Monday.

These are significant changes made by a temporary lackey. Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI, instead making his name by targeting the president’s political enemies while leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The day before Pulte started at his new post, he directed ODNI staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center in the coming weeks, another source told NBC News. The agency was previously headed by Joe Kent, who abruptly resigned earlier this year in opposition to Trump’s war in Iran. CNN reported that Pulte had requested a list of every employee at ODNI so he could determine who to purge.

Earlier this month, Trump selected Pulte’s permanent replacement: Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York responsible for the shoddy redactions in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The president then upended Clayton’s Senate confirmation hearing, messing up Republicans’ chances at renewing a key spy bill.

Millions of Americans are eagerly awaiting access to retatrutide, a powerful new drug from the pharmaceutical company. But one unidentified person has been able to gain premature access to the drug via the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” program, STAT reported Tuesday.

The FDA program is designed to prioritize access to experimental drugs for patients with grave or life-threatening medical issues. And while the name of the individual is not known, several signs indicate that they are likely very well connected.

A senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health, Ranganath Muniyappa, requested access to the drug for the unnamed patient in April. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening disease characterized by high blood pressure in the lungs. The request reportedly drew the attention of top health officials, which STAT noted was indicative of the patient’s influence.

Based on the vague parameters of the patient’s identity, STAT reached out to the White House to see if the recipient could possibly be Donald Trump, who similarly suffers from obesity and has publicly expressed interest in obesity drugs. The White House did not explicitly deny the patient was Trump.

When asked if Trump was the 79-year-old man in question, White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not say no, and instead referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services. (The president was 79 at the time of the request, and turned 80 earlier this month.)

When asked if Trump had obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai offered Trump’s latest medical evaluation as a counter, which he falsely claimed “covers this,” according to STAT. It does not—the memo makes no mention of either disease.

HHS did not address the issue of the retatrutide application or the patient’s identity.

“The FDA supports expanded access programs that can provide patients with serious or life-threatening conditions access to investigational treatments when no comparable or satisfying approved therapies are available,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told STAT. “Each request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis based on the clinical circumstances and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.”

In a public exchange with STAT over X later Tuesday morning, Desai specified that the application was “not for the president.” STAT reporter Lizzy Lawrence responded that she had asked several federal agencies multiple times on Monday but that no one had answered her question directly.

Whoever the patient is, they had been previously treated with other obesity drugs, such as tirzepatide, though sources who spoke with STAT indicated the patient experienced only moderate weight loss as a result. Muniyappa reportedly recommended against bariatric surgery because of the patient’s age and co-morbidities.

This story has been updated.

This was an extremely unprecedented decision that follows the all-too-familiar trend of weaponizing the DOJ against whomever President Trump is upset by that day.

Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima—who covers the security and intelligence community, including the war on Iran—was subpoenaed this spring. The Post was in the process of fighting Nakashima’s subpoena before the DOJ suddenly rescinded it.

“The unwarranted subpoena of our reporter Ellen Nakashima — a clear violation of constitutionally guaranteed press freedom — was another sign of the government seeking to compel journalists to become instruments of its investigations,” a Postsaid. “We will continue to stand fully behind the journalism of The Washington Post and fight all efforts by any administration that violate our First Amendment rights.”

Three Wall Street Journal reporters covering national security issues also received grand jury subpoenas from the DOJ, according to the Postsubpoenaed the Journal’s reporters over leaks from the Department of Defense related to the Iran war.

The DOJ has yet to comment on or explain its decisions to file and rescind the grand jury subpoenas.

“The potential of the government intruding into the newsgathering process is even greater when you are in the grand jury than it is for a subpoena for documents,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The administration has taken a number of extremely aggressive steps in respect to the press.… These are all aggressive attempts to target journalists reporting on the actions of the Trump administration. They are a dangerous intrusion of the independence of the press.”

In Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a new book by New York Timesreports The Daily Beast.

witnessing—and stays up late watching TV.

The president has grown even more erratic since his last term in office.

More than just gilding fireplaces and building ballrooms, the authors describe how Trump has fundamentally changed “the rhythms and structures and operations” of the White House. Where the president used to arrive predictably by 10:30 or 11 a.m., now it’s anybody’s guess. Sometimes he’s up in the morning making phone calls, and other times White House staff find him still asleep between 8 and 10 a.m.—a sign that he probably stayed up all night watching TV and scrolling.

Privately, aides told Swan and Haberman that, for the first time, Trump was “beginning to seem old.”

“Those who spent time with him could see the signs—the moments of fatigue, the cupped hand behind the ear.… The repeated bouts of drowsiness during mid-afternoon public events,” the authors write.

Regime Change also revealed that the president and his wife, Melania, sleep (or in Trump’s case, don’t sleep) in different bedrooms.

“Despite their protestations and false statements to the contrary, coupled with the drumbeat of the Fake News, which is doing everything possible to make the U.S. Victory as small and insignificant as possible, Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!). This will insure ‘Nuclear Honesty,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!”

Well, Mr. President, I have some bad news …

Speaking at a press briefing Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied the Trump administration’s claim that the country would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit its nuclear bombed sites.

“We have not had a meeting with the director general of the IAEA, nor do we have any plans for the agency to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged by the US and Zionist military aggression,” Baqaei said.

That also contradicts Vice President JD Vance’s claim on Monday that Iran had agreed to allow IAEA inspectors, who could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.”

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly assured U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

In the 14-point memorandum of understanding, Iran has only agreed to commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors. In return for that commitment, the U.S. has offered Iran unprecedented waivers allowing it to sell its previously sanctioned oil.

Trump also claimed that any “Money and/or Sanctions” released by the Treasury Department would be tightly controlled by the U.S. and used to purchase “food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American Farmers.” But Iran denied that too.

“Regarding Iran’s released assets, previously illegally blocked by the U.S., WE will decide how to utilize them as we deem fit; there are NO restrictions in this regard,” Baqaei said.

This story has been updated.

funded in partover $7 million$10 million in Bores’s race.

Bores, a former Palantir employee himself, might seem like an oddly small-fish target for one of the country’s richest, most powerful industries. His troubles with the PACs started with the Responsible AI Safety and Education, or RAISE, Act, an AI regulation bill he co-sponsored last year in the state legislature.

The act, Bores’s own team acknowledges, is merely a “first step” toward robust AI regulation. Yet it’s also one of the strongest AI oversight laws currently on the books in the U.S.

publish a yearly frameworkdisclose serious safety incidents within 72 hours of learning about them, and introduces an enforcement mechanism, empowering New York’s attorney general to bring civil actions against companies that fail to submit the required reporting or make false statements. Bores and State Senator Andrew Gounardes—the bill’s other champion—originally wanted the penalty for the first violation to be $10 million, with up to $30 million in fines for subsequent violations, but the lawmakers brought those fines down to $1 million and $3 million to better align with California’s law.

84 percentpassed handilyplans to target Bores in November 2025, before the bill had even been signed.

“They want to send a message to any member of Congress that the cost of trying to regulate the AI oligarchs is complete political destruction,” said Alyssa Cass, a communications strategist working with the Bores campaign.

executive order on AI regulation just eight days before Hochul signed the RAISE Act. The executive order directed the Department of Justice to challenge “onerous” state AI laws that it believes conflict with a “minimally burdensome” national AI policy. In the order, the administration specifically said that state AI regulation hampers the country’s ability to “win” its “race with adversaries for supremacy” and called state laws “cumbersome.”

Asked about the PAC’s heavy spending against Bores, a Leading the Future spokesperson provided a statement arguing that “Anthropic and its allies” started the spending war: “Their network of outside groups has spent $21 million across 5 dark-money super PACs to prop up Alex Bores’s campaign. Leading the Future is proud to stand against that unprecedented effort and for a transparent, national AI framework that serves workers, families, and the country.” The statement added that “any claim that we oppose regulation is flat wrong.”

less clear.

Asked about Public First’s involvement in Bores’s race, a spokesperson for Jobs and Democracy, a subsidiary of Public First Action, wrote that opposing PACs were trying to “end [Bores’s] political career” in retaliation for the RAISE Act. “We’re in this race because candidates who champion AI guardrails shouldn’t have to stand alone against Big Tech. The fact that this race has gone from a crowded primary to a two-way race between the author of the RAISE Act and a cosponsor is proof that Leading the Future’s plan has backfired.”

While Bores is betting that his strong stance on AI and public battle against AI PACs will win him the election, his opponents are focusing on other issues. Bores has three main competitors—State Assemblymember Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg of the Kennedy family, and the formerly Republican, anti-Trump crusader George Conway (once-husband of Trump 1.0 adviser Kellyanne Conway).

nerddisorganized, and the candidate seems to be banking on his family legacy to overcome his relative lack of political experience. Conway has framed his campaign as an effort to impeach Trump.

reportedly been used to identify military targets. To his supporters, though, a Bores loss would show that the AI industry has a powerful grip on our elections, and can push out any candidate it doesn’t like. And if that message gets around, Cass said, it will be that much harder to get politicians to stand up to the industry.

“Members of Congress are rarely known for their acts of political bravery,” Cass said. “And there is a really limited window, given how fast this technology is moving, for regulation.”

Viewership plummeted at CBS News weeks after its chief, Bari Weiss, fired numerous producers and correspondents from 60 Minutes, according to Nielsen ratings data obtained by Status.

Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.

The dip was short-lived, but nonetheless “alarmed some officials,” since morning shows typically produce the lion’s share of ad revenue for the major news networks, according to Status reporter Oliver Darcy.

Change at 60 Minutes, the network’s famed investigative weekly program, has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on Trump deportations to the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

But Weiss may not be running the place for much longer. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to some longtime 60 Minutes staffers.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Steve Kroft, a 30-year veteran of the show, told Variety earlier this month. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

paper published last year by American academic economists, chiefly at Stanford, compares the U.K.’s performance since the referendum with those of similar countries and reckons that the U.K. economy is 8 percent smaller than it would have been had we remained inside the EU.                                       

Our particular problems are a grossly inflated financial sector that produces a disproportionate amount of tax revenue but is particularly vulnerable to a crisis such as that of 2008, along with a larger postindustrial economy characterized by low education, low skills, low investment, low wages, low growth, and low productivity. These wouldn’t have been cured merely by remaining in the EU, but they have been patently aggravated by leaving.

One obvious and undeniable consequence of the referendum has been political chaos. In the 40 years from 1976 to 2016, there were in all six British prime ministers. In the decade since the referendum, there have also been six. And soon there will be a seventh, with Sir Keir Starmer having thrown in the towel on Monday. He will presumably be replaced by Andy Burnham in a kind of coup. It’s yet another in a series of coups, a Labour premier kicked out as a succession of Conservative premiers— Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss—were before him. This latest change cannot be justified by any serious belief in Burnham, whose political résumé is far from stellar—a member of Parliament for 15 years (when he loyally and repeatedly voted for Tony Blair’s criminal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq); a minister for a few years; an unsuccessful candidate for the Labour leadership not once but twice; and then mayor of Greater Manchester, where his achievements were genuine but quite modest, such as improving the bus and railway services. His only real selling proposition is that he’s not Starmer.

And all of this stems from that fateful day 10 years ago. The referendum campaign remains one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. To be clear, I say that as a Remainer, but not just because of that. One might sometimes feel like the American pol years ago who said, after losing an election, “The people have spoken, God damn them,” but one can accept defeat after a fair fight. But the Brexit referendum was anything but fair. It was a squalid exercise in demagoguery or plain mendacity.

Brexit: A Very British Civil War, is the latest in the long line of brilliant documentaries produced by Norma Percy, an American adornment of British broadcasting. Her oeuvre includes important additions to our knowledge of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and conflicts in the Middle East, but my favorite may be the Watergate series, made 20 years after Richard Nixon’s resignation, which is not least a comic masterpiece, as all the old burglars and bunglers revisit, and try to explain away, their malfeasance.

There is a certain similarity in the Brexit program, even if there’s nothing at all funny about the consequences. It all came about because of the internal politics of the Conservative Party. Once upon a time it was the Tories who were the Europhiles. One Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, made the first attempt to join what was then the European Economic Community, or Common Market, in 1963, before he was blackballed by Charles de Gaulle. Another, Edward Heath, did join in 1973. And as is often forgotten, it was one more Tory, Margaret Thatcher (yes!), who ratified the Single European Act in 1986 establishing the single market.

After her fall, a group of Tory M.P.s began a guerrilla campaign against further European integration, and they harried John Major during his troubled prime ministership from 1990 to 1997. When David Cameron became Conservative leader of the opposition in 2005, he told his party to “stop banging on about Europe,” but his words went quite unheeded. Every poll showed, over many years, that “Europe” was one of the least important questions for most British voters, although immigration, which was sometimes connected to the EU, mattered much more. And yet for the same gang of Tory M.P.s, the EU was the one subject that dominated their lives, and they were relentless in pursuing it.

Following the 2010 election, in which the Tories won a plurality of parliamentary seats but not an outright majority, Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the ardently Europhile Liberal Democrats, formed what someone called the Brokeback Mountain coalition. But then, as another observer pointed out, that movie does not end happily, and so it proved.

As his next move, or misstep, Cameron tried to quiet those colleagues who were still banging on by promising a referendum on continued British membership. But he made the promise hoping that he wouldn’t have to keep it. If the coalition held after the next election, he could plead the Lib Dems’ support as a way out. In 2015, to general surprise, the Tories won an outright majority, and Cameron was impaled on his promise.

Even then, having called a referendum he didn’t want, Cameron still expected to win it—and he wasn’t alone. He tried to gain concessions from the EU, but the other European leaders, while not wanting the U.K. to depart, had almost had enough of endless British plaints and special concessions. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to budge from the sacred principle of free movement of people within the EU. It was unfortunate, not to say disastrous, that this coincided with the bloody strife in Syria and the consequent huge flood of refugees trying to escape from that country and get into Europe.

All Cameron could do was fall back on saying that to leave would still be economically damaging for the country. Although plainly true, and amply justified by events since, that quite missed the point. “It’s the economy, stupid” must be one of the stupidest political slogans ever coined, but it underlay the Remain campaign’s great mistake. Dry economic arguments simply didn’t cut it.

Although I would never say that we Remainers were “the best” and that Leavers were “the worst,” the rest of Yeats’s line applies all too aptly: Remainers lacked all conviction while the Leavers were filled with passionate intensity. More than that, we Remainers forgot what Raymond Aron, the great French politicologue, said toward the end of his long life: It is a denial of the entire experience of the twentieth century to suppose that people will reject their passions in favor of their interests. 

And then there are the individual roles played 10 years ago. Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party at the time, or his gruesome sidekicks who made us shudder again as we saw them on the recent BBC show, they had always opposed British membership of the EU, so they can’t be accused of cynical calculation. And they were fighting wholeheartedly to win the referendum.

Not so some others. Important parts were played by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, the two most prominent Tories who deserted Cameron and campaigned for Leave. Both of them had been journalists before they entered Parliament as Conservatives. In 2004, Gove wrote an essay in the Spectator, where he is now editor, on what being a Conservative meant to him, which included the enjoyable line, “Rudi Giuliani is a conservative, and a hero to conservatives like me.”

Ten years ago, Gove wrote another long and supposedly weighty essay making the case against membership of the EU, while Johnson wrote not one but two columns, one making the case for Leave and the other for Remain. He claims this was to clear his mind before coming to his decision, which really means that he was weighing up which suited his personal ambitions better. The very idea of “a principled belief held by Boris Johnson” is what logicians call a closed category, like “a square circle.”

Above all, what the BBC program confirmed was what many of us suspected at the time—that both Tories supported Leave while expecting to lose, but hoping that the campaign would strengthen their own positions within the Conservative Party. That was made clear by Johnson’s and Gove’s respective former wives, Marina Wheeler and Sarah Vine. The latter has already told us, as a supposedly amusing story, that on the morrow of the referendum, she said to her then spouse, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” (a cinematic allusion: vide Michael Caine in The Italian Job).

And all this is what Osborne, the chancellor who was a leading Remainer, meant by Game of Thrones. It was all a struggle for advantage and position, quite unrelated to any serious consideration of the national interest, and when they won the referendum they didn’t know what to do next. 

Ten years on, and everyone is unhappy. Any election or referendum is potentially fraught and divisive, but that was peculiarly true of June 23, 2016, which divided the country in the harshest ways, between young and old, educated and “the poorly educated” whom Donald Trump says he loves. If the vote had been confined to citizens over 60, or those who had left school without qualifications, Leave would have won with a much larger majority; if to those under 30 or to university graduates, then it would have been an easy victory for Remain.

By what ought to be a contradiction—but then whenever has political life followed a logical course?—those who gave us Brexit with its lamentable consequences and ought to be execrated have surged ahead. That specifically means Reform UK, the latest iteration in a line of Europhobic parties led by Nigel Farage, which was recently polling around 25 percent, while the possibility of Farage becoming prime minister was seriously discussed. But the special election in Makerfield that sent Andy Burham back into Parliament saw the Reform vote collapse, and that bubble might have burst at last.

Even now the winners of the referendum are as baffled as the losers. A frankly risible ad in the right-wing Daily Telegraph has just announced a “Big Debate” to be held in London on June 29, with a panel of well-known Brexiteers, Daniel Hannan, Allister Heath, and Allison Pearson, on the question “How to Make Brexit a Success”—after 10 years! This is in itself an acknowledgment that it has been a failure so far, which is what most people now think, however they voted then. For some years past, a consistent and substantial majority in polls say that they regret Brexit, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Maybe we shall see the same panel discussing how to make Brexit a success in another 10 years’ time. Until then, amid economic decay and violent rioting in the streets, I keep thinking of the words “Referendums are the device of dictators and demagogues.” Who said that? Why, it was Margaret Thatcher, 50 years ago, and she never spoke a truer word.

That’s one of several key takeaways from a new poll commissioned by Working Families Power, an organizing, advocacy, and research group that partners with the Working Families Party. The survey, released exclusively to The New Republic, also shows that people are suspicious of data centers, particularly their impact on energy costs, and they support temporary limits or even moratoriums on new centers. That isn’t so surprising given the protests against data centers around the country, but it’s yet another reminder of the huge opportunity for the Democrats in the rising populist rage against Big Tech.

So far, they’re largely missing it.

Working Families Power partnered with the Justice Research Fund to contact 2,511 working-class registered voters, oversampling in swing districts. To identify those voters, they used a rigorous definition of working-class that includes family income, education level, type of work, homeownership status, and whether someone has financial security to fall back on if they lose their job. It’s a far more exacting definition of working-class than simply sorting out voters without a college education, as many surveys and analyses do, and one that identifies voters who are suffering most from the affordability crisis.

The poll shows that 73 percent are “concerned” that AI will lead to job losses in the United States, while 62 percent worry it could “affect their own job, household income, or jobs of people close to them”; 58 percent think it will hurt working-class families overall. Among the jobs that a majority said AI would hurt are truck drivers; retail and service workers; office and administrative workers; and writers, designers, and other creative workers.

Huge majorities, 80 percent and more, want government support for retraining and education programs for those who lose jobs due to AI. They want regulations requiring corporations to give notice before replacing jobs with AI, and to be taxed to contribute to these programs. They also want to share in any benefits from AI through increased pay, shorter workweeks, and stronger benefits. Seventy-three percent agreed with this statement: “AI should work for working people, not just make billionaires richer while everyone else worries about losing their job.”

“What we’re seeing from results like this is that AI might be the biggest political realignment issue of our lifetime,” said Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for Working Families Power and the Working Families Party. “It’s rare that you see numbers where there is 70, 80 percent agreement in a polarized country like this, and for the vast majority of people to agree that the government needs to step in and do something about AI job loss, that AI companies need to be paying for infrastructure and energy costs, and that there needs to be mass retraining, as well as benefits for workers who are laid off because of AI. That’s a level of agreement across politics that we don’t really see on anything.”

Mangla said Working Families Power doesn’t see enough candidates and officials addressing these widely held concerns. “[They] are not taking what is a political layup,” he said. “Neither party, right now, is rising to the occasion.”

Voters’ concerns extend to data centers. They’re worried that their growth would lead to increased utility costs, and 60 percent want a pause on construction to study their impacts. At the moment, only Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have released a comprehensive plan to address these concerns. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s New Affordability Agenda also addresses issues like AI-driven surveillance pricing, and its chair, Texas Representative Greg Casar, supports taxing AI companies to pay for a jobs program. But the anger at Big Tech over AI is more expansive, and largely untapped on the campaign trail.

Alondra Nelson, the founder and director of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said these results confirm what many in her field have been arguing for a long time. “The costs of AI transformation should not be passed on to the public while profits flow exclusively to shareholders and executives. That’s not innovation—that’s extraction,” she said in an email.

Nelson said we need transparency first, because we’re still not sure how AI is affecting business and hiring practices. She said she’s encouraged by new tax policy ideas from the Center for Shared AI Prosperity, which include new taxes on wealthy people whose fortunes derive substantially from AI industries and requiring more contributions from AI firms to help affected workers.

The federal government is not pursuing such protections, and in fact the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress have tried to block states from regulating AI at all. “State legislatures are moving faster than Congress on some of these questions,” Nelson said. “That experimentation matters—which is precisely why we should resist any federal preemption of state-level AI regulation. Ultimately, though, we need federal standards establishing a floor of protection for working families, regardless of zip code.”

That’s especially true because the potential benefits of AI remain unclear, as tech evangelists simultaneously promise unimaginable abundance and warn of potential doom. “Even the tech CEOs and AI CEOs can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” Mangla said. “They will say this might destroy civilization or humanity. They’ll say outright that this will cause massive job loss. They are actually conceding to the massive risks and potential faults of this technology, and yet they’re resistant to commonsense policies that will actually protect people and that will allow people to continue to live their lives and earn a decent wage.”

A lot of the potential solutions, such as regulating companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, taxing them more, and providing a safety net for workers, are traditional progressive asks. But Mangla said the polled voters don’t see these as partisan solutions—just necessary ones. Working-class Americans don’t want to halt AI innovation, as the the poll shows, but they don’t want it to come solely at their expense.

hear Nielsen v. Watanabe in the upcoming term, which starts next October. The case will give the court an opportunity to further narrow what are known as Bivens claims, which allow for people to sue federal officials for damages under increasingly narrow circumstances.

according to his brief for the justices. After the fight, he told multiple prison officials, including nurse Francis Nielsen, that he had suffered significant injuries and was in a great deal of pain.

Nielsen and other officials declined to obtain specialist treatment for Watanabe or to transport him to a local hospital for treatment. Instead, his filings said, Nielsen gave him over-the-counter pain medication. “Several months after the attack, Watanabe finally received an x-ray: It showed that he had a fractured coccyx and that bone chips had migrated to surrounding soft tissue areas,” his brief explained to the court.

Even after this diagnosis, Watanabe alleged, Nielsen and other officials refused to provide him with outside medical treatment and he did not obtain proper medical care until his release from prison three years after the initial fight. The Supreme Court has previously held that prisons have a duty to provide medical care for prisoners under the Eighth Amendment. Accordingly, Watanabe sued the officials in federal court for their alleged mistreatment.

What happens when a government official violates your constitutional rights in some way? If they are a state or local official, like a police officer in a major city, you might file a Section 1983 lawsuit in federal court for damages. That Reconstruction-era law allows people to sue state and local officials in federal court in their personal capacity for violating a federal constitutional right. (More on this later.)

If a federal official violates your constitutional rights, on the other hand, there are very few ways to hold that official personally accountable. Congress has not enacted a Section 1983–style law for suing federal officials, though there have occasionally been proposals to do so. Nor do other congressionally enacted remedies, like the Federal Tort Claims Act, allow people to pursue damages against specific officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Watanabe instead relied upon an implied cause of action rather than an explicitly created one. This approach became more common after the 1971 case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Most people just call the case Bivens for short. In Bivens, federal agents searched the home of a New York man without a warrant and arrested him on drug-related charges. Bivens sued the agents in question in federal court for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unconstitutional searches and seizures.

The narcotics agents argued that they could not be sued in their personal capacity because Congress had not created a cause of action to do so. The Supreme Court, led by Justice William Brennan, sided with Bivens. While Brennan acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment “does not in so many words provide for its enforcement by an award of money damages for the consequences of its violation,” he concluded that Bivens could rely upon an implied cause of action instead to vindicate his violated rights.

Between 1971 and 1980, the Supreme Court applied that reasoning to two other contexts: gender-discrimination lawsuits by congressional staff under the Fifth Amendment and, as relevant for Watanabe’s case, prisoner lawsuits over improper medical care by prison officials under the Eighth Amendment. The latter is grounded in the 1980 case Carlson v. Green. In Carlson, prison officials effectively killed an asthmatic prisoner by holding him in conditions over doctors’ protests, denying him treatment for an asthma attack for roughly eight hours, and then giving him substandard care until he died.

Since Carlson, the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative majority has gone out of its way to clip the wings of Bivens claims. Justices ranging from Warren Burger to Neil Gorsuch have argued that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is Congress’s responsibility to create causes of actions to vindicate constitutional rights, not the judiciary’s. To that end, they have effectively refused to extend Bivens to new contexts, while also—for reasons known only to the justices—declining to overturn Bivens altogether.

In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, for example, the justices imposed a new test on Bivens claims that required lower courts to consider whether they arose in a “new Bivens context,” which is highly disfavored, or if any “special factors” should deter courts from extending Bivens to that new context. In practice, this gives lower courts a variety of tools to block new Bivens claims and narrow the handful of existing grounds for them.

argued that the Bivens claim against them should be rejected under the Supreme Court’s recent tests. Watanabe’s experience is a far cry from the sustained and deliberate misconduct that led to Carlson’s death in the 1980 case that expanded Bivens to the Eighth Amendment context, they claimed. They claimed that Carlson was merely a “wrongful-death case” rather than an overarching cause of action for insufficient medical care. Alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms, the defendants argued, should also count as a “special factor” against expanding Bivens to this supposedly new circumstance.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saw things differently. “Watanabe alleged official action to the same degree of specificity as that alleged in Carlson—‘acts and omissions’ that were deliberately indifferent to Watanabe’s serious medical condition,” a three-judge panel concluded. “Such alleged official actions include the refusal to transport Watanabe to an outside hospital and the failure to provide him competent medical attention.” Accordingly, they sided with Watanabe.

Nielsen and the other prison officials have good reason to think that the justices will now side with them. If there is one word that sums up the Roberts court’s approach to power, it is impunity.greatly weaken Section 1983, the statutory analogue to Bivensavalanche of criticism for the judge-made doctrine by academics, lower court judges, and even a few members of the high court itself.

Taken together, the justices’ position is that Bivens is unacceptable because it is Congress’s responsibility, not the courts’, to create federal causes of action. When Congress does create those claims, however, the justices’ position is that the courts must sharply narrow them through judicially created doctrines like qualified immunity. Judicial power can only make it harder, not easier, for people to hold accountable those officials who violate their constitutional rights.

closed the doors of the federal courts to those disempowered by racial and partisan gerrymandering. They even ruled two years ago that presidents can commit crimes without fear of prosecution, in part because the Supreme Court had previously held that presidents cannot face civil lawsuits either.

overall effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings is a government where officials can often inflict incredible harms on people without any meaningful recourse—in the courts, at the ballot box, or through later prosecutions. Nielsen’s argument, stripped down to its barest essentials, is that prisoners under his care should only be able to invoke the Eighth Amendment against him if they die. I am skeptical that the Bill of Rights’ drafters went to the trouble of ratifying 10 amendments for such paltry protections.

In Bivens, Justice Brennan quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison to explain the fundamental reasoning of his decision. “The very essence of civil liberty,” he had written, “certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” The court may ultimately side with Watanabe. After all, it has maintained recently that Bivens and Carlson are still good law. But it is hard to not doubt that it will move further away from Marshall’s simple wisdom—and from the basic protections of the Constitution itself.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

growing angrierraged at a journalistfulminated that vandalism is the real problemhailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.

This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania, to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republica good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.

Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent:your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.

Tomasky: Sure. I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. Something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity, and putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.

So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.

So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. Now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.

He said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months? It’s going to go on and on.

Sargent: Where did the algae come from? Can you take us up to the present? I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “drain the swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear. Making the water crystal clear—transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that.

I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.

Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this: Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin.

The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. The water comes from the tidal basin, so there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.

Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting.

sayingafter taking a piece of paint out of the water.

Mike, these don’t seem like antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this? What does your gut tell you about what’s really going on with these arrests?

Tomasky: In the case of the first gentleman, that’s a guy named David Hearn. I wrote about his saga in my piece today—this got quite a lot of coverage over the weekend. He was out on a bike ride. He’s a former U.S. Olympic athlete—a canoe racer. He was out on a long bike ride. I saw it described variously as 50 miles, 64 miles.

I ride my bike sometimes on Saturdays, too. Fifteen is a good Saturday for me, a really good Saturday. And he’s 67 years old, so he’s in some kind of shape. And, you know, he was an Olympic athlete—I doubt he’s stealing pieces.

He said this [piece of the] rubberized liner was partially detached and he reached into the Reflecting Pool just to see how it felt. And the next thing he knew, he said, he was in handcuffs.

He also had the misfortune of this right-wing journalist named Emily Miller, who’s gone back and forth between One America News and The Washington Times and local Fox over the years, happened to be there, and videotaped him and maybe showed it to park police or something like that. I don’t know. It’s all, as you say, very opaque.

Why these people are being arrested—it’s just not clear yet. As far as I know, talking on Monday afternoon, the park police and the Department of the Interior haven’t commented on these arrests.

Sargent:reports that one of the people arrested was the same individual who Trump accused in one of his tweets of using a knife to carve a 250-foot gash into the facade. Mike, 250 feet is nearly the length of a football field. And the choice of the 250 number sure sounds suspiciously like an echo of the 250th anniversary that this Reflecting Pool is supposed to be a part of. It seems like maybe that number was rattling around in Trump’s head or something.

Now, again, maybe someone did do this. I can’t seem to find evidence of it. But does it seem likely to you that someone would try to carve something that long into the facade—like a 250-foot-long line?

Tomasky: It doesn’t seem likely, but you never know. I could believe that there are people who aren’t fans of Trump out there who might vandalize this thing because it’s become such a symbol to him. I can believe that. But if that’s true, tell us. Show us the evidence. Give us the names and tell us what they did.

I don’t support people damaging federal government property, especially historic landmarks like that. I’m sure you don’t either. I’m sure nobody listening to us does. If somebody did that, arrest them, charge them, prosecute them, sic Jeanine Pirro on them. But show us the evidence first.

And so when Trump tweets over the weekend about vandals, I’m sorry—the man has been known to make things up from time to time. So we’re going to regard that skeptically until there’s evidence.

Sargent:tweeted that, “Lightweight ABC reporter Jonathan Karl was seen sticking his hand into the pool and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” Jonathan Karl had merely been reporting on this whole fiasco.

raged that “radical left lunatics, most likely Dumocrats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this country”—he basically said they were more or less responsible for this thing.

tweeted that “disgraceful vandalism” has marred the project, calling this an affront to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while characterizing his handling of the whole thing as impeccably perfect.

said the only project of his that’s been vandalized is the Reflecting Pool. Then he talked about a “300 foot long gash” carved by vandals. So it’s apparently gotten 50 feet longer.

Mike, Trump really seems to be spiraling downwards with this stuff. What do you make of it?

Tomasky: He really is. And it’s such a perfect Trumpy obsession. It’s a minor thing that to him is a very major thing because it’s about his self-image, his self-regard, his monstrous yet very fragile ego. All these things that he puts on display before us, the American people, constantly, every day—about how he’s going to destroy a civilization, about how ICE is doing a magnificent job, how all his enemies belong in jail, about the personal vendettas that he’s pursuing through the office of the presidency, which are totally inappropriate and completely impeachable offenses.

All of these things are just about his ego, again, which is huge. But what’s important here is the fragility of it. That’s why he gets so defensive, and that’s how a gash grows from 250 feet to 300 feet. The Reflecting Pool, I believe, is about 600 feet long. So if he ever posts that it was a 700-foot gash, then we’ll know that couldn’t possibly happen—unless maybe the person went up and back. This is just his psychodrama that is bananas.

It’s the same thing at work when we watch those Cabinet meetings and they go around the Cabinet table and they all have to offer praise of him, each more effusive than the last, each saying, No, you deserve two Nobel Prizes. No, three Nobel Prizes. Four Nobel Prizes and two Pulitzers, sir.

It’s just a preposterous situation to be in in a democratic country. This is the point I’d like to make. This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. It’s not supposed to happen in a democratic republic. We’re not supposed to have this kind of a leader who is so fragile and breakable.

We’re supposed to have processes that are democratic, that give people input into what’s going to happen with the eastern side of the White House, that give people input into the renaming of a venerated cultural institution that’s been here in the nation’s capital for 60 years.

The people are supposed to have input into these things. They’re supposed to go through processes. And yes, experts, the much-reviled experts, are supposed to be able to weigh in on this stuff.

But Trump, of course, knows better than everybody. And that’s just not a small-d democratic impulse or way to go about doing things.

Sargent:your piece got at that really well, the larger importance of this whole thing. I just want to flag for people—what was telling to me was the way Trump talked about the project. I forget at which event it was, but he was essentially talking about the contractors on the project in almost precisely the same tone and with the same posture that he would about one of his own real estate projects.

That’s the essence of this, which is that Donald Trump doesn’t get on some very basic level that this stuff is not his. This is not an imperial capital. It is the capital of a republic. And as a result, he doesn’t own this stuff. He is a steward of it, a temporary steward. And as you say, there are processes. But in a way, this whole story shows somebody trying to dispense with that larger idea.

Tomasky: Right. He wants to be the czar. That’s probably the best historical analogy that we can come up with. I went to St. Petersburg once, in June. It was like 50 degrees there—anyway. I walked around the Hermitage, which of course is beautiful and magnificent—the art and all that stuff. But I walked around that place thinking—I asked my tour guide, How many people lived here? And she said, Six, the czar and his family.

It was as gilt-edged in gold as the Oval Office now is. But that’s how Trump thinks of himself. And that’s what he wants to be. He wants to be a czar. That’s what all these things that he’s trying to do to Washington prove. It’s really very, very distasteful.

And I only mentioned this very quickly and you just alluded to it, but we should spend a little bit more time dwelling on the no-bid aspect of these contracts. That’s sewer corruption. That’s just basic corruption 101. You can’t let out no-bid contracts.

One of them was, ironically, to a place called Greenwater, which is really funny. That’s the Gafaro guy from Ohio. Then the other one was the swimming pool people from Virginia who did the pool at his golf club in Virginia. These were both no-bid contracts.

And one of the two, I think the first one—David Fahrenthold of The New York Timesreported, he’s so good at this sort of thing—is charging a 20 percent profit margin into their contract when the normal profit margins on this kind of work for the federal government are six to 12 percent. But they just padded it. The guy’s a donor of Trump’s, a donor and a neighbor in Palm Beach, and he just padded it up to 20 percent and got the contract without any competitive bidding.

That alone is an impeachable offense right there. Boom. There’s just no question about it. I don’t know—if the Democrats take the House, what are they going to impeach him on? There’s 46 possibilities.

Sargent:Your piece really made the point very well that if this were just an ordinary moment, that would be a huge scandal. But since we’re in this really extraordinary moment, it isn’t.

I want to close on this thought, which pulls all this together, I hope. One of the consistent things in the reporting here has been that many people are just stopping by the Reflecting Pool to look at the algae and the peeling paint, to almost marvel at the spectacle of it. You did that too. You stopped by and marveled at the spectacle of it.

For a lot of people, what they’re actually marveling at is what Trump has done to our country—how all this didn’t have to happen, how it’s all just rooted in megalomania and incompetence and corruption and derangement.

I strongly suspect that this story, the Reflecting Pool, just like the ballroom, has immense symbolic importance to ordinary people in a way that we still haven’t gotten our heads around. I wanted you to talk a little bit about that.

Tomasky: The day I rode my bike down there, I took a couple photographs of it just for my own amusement. I posted one on Facebook and I said, Well, this looks pretty green to me—something kind of offhanded.

I post political-ish things on my Facebook feed from time to time. It’s interesting because it’s not my New Republic readership. This is old high school friends, many of whom are MAGA, many of whom have politics basically like mine. I get to see a mix.

Usually when I post a political thing on Facebook, 50 people either give it a like or have some kind of comment. Seventy, 80 people. This one—the last time I looked—870 responses.

Sargent: I really do think it has that sort of importance for people. It really represents this presidency and what’s happening to this country under this presidency.

Tomasky: Yeah, it really does. It’s just such an emotionally potent symbol for people. Most people have been to Washington when they were in eighth grade, or later they brought their families here. You’re sitting there right in the shadow of the beautiful, tasteful, grand but not opulent or self-regarding memorial to our greatest president—I mean Lincoln. The Washington Monument is up the way, but it’s a little farther away.

To our greatest president and to a very humble man, and to a man who probably, if he could come back, would say, You built that for me? Why? Donald Trump will want something three times that size. As indeed the arch—it’s not quite three times, but the Lincoln Memorial is about 130 feet high at its peak and this arch is twice that.

So this is really important. To conclude on a point that you often make in your writing and podcasting—this is why Democrats shouldn’t just let this one slide and just talk about affordability or whatever. No, you can walk and chew gum, Democrats. Talk about this stuff. People care.

Sargent: People really care about it. And just to underscore the point one last time, I wonder whether this sort of thing—the tearing down of the East Wing of the White House, the piles of rubble that are on everybody’s phones all across the country, the viral nature of the imagery of the algae in the Reflecting Pool—I do wonder whether people are in some deep sense reconsidering small-r republican governance and saying to themselves, That thing was pretty cool that we’ve lost.

Do you think that’s maybe going on? Do you think that’s what’s happening?

Tomasky: I hope so. I don’t know, but I hope so. Twenty-five percent of the country is always going to support him no matter what—maybe 30, maybe a little more. But I’d like to think that the people whose politics aren’t like yours and mine, but people who aren’t terribly political, have enough of a civic impulse running through them that this bothers them. And that even if they can’t quite exactly articulate to themselves why, they know something about this isn’t right—this isn’t how stuff’s supposed to go down in the United States of America. I think they do. Enough of them anyway.

Sargent: Really well said, Michael Tomasky. It was a pleasure having you on. Folks, if you want to read what Mike wrote about this—and you should—the piece is up at NewRepublic.com. It’s called “Vandalism at the Reflecting Pool? Yes, It Was Committed by Donald Trump.” Well said, Mike. Thanks for coming on.

Tomasky: Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

TheSanta Barbara Independent reported that three of the people detained were mariachi musicians, according to a spokesperson for an activist group that had been following the agents. The musicians may have been in the act of serenading fathers as part of a Mexican immigrant Father’s Day tradition, or on their way to do so.

As part of the action, ICE agents reportedly detained a U.S. citizen before releasing him at a nearby hospital. They also bear-sprayed a woman who was part of an ICE-monitoring organization through the rear window of her car.

Activists trailing ICE said that the agents didn’t just arrest people in the city but also sped down the streets in the early morning, and did donuts with their cars under the highway for 15 minutes. When they got on the freeway, the activists reported that the agents were going over 100 miles an hour.

Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara police chief, Kelly Gordon, had no idea ICE was in town. “We didn’t have any calls for service from 1 a.m. that were remotely close to what was being alleged on the Westside,” she said.

The nonprofit health care organization could regain access to federal funds as soon as July 4, exactly one year after the Senate parliamentarian allowed Republicans to pass a one-year ban on national funding for the program, NOTUS reported Monday.

Amid all the chaos related to the Iran war, economic fallout, severed alliances over Trump’s midterm election endorsements, and a lapsed federal spy bill, Republicans have been unable to galvanize their party to vote to extend the limited ban.

“I think at this point, it’d be unlikely,” Montana Senator Steve Daines told NOTUS.

One possible pathway to advancing the anti-abortion agenda item would be to find a vehicle such as a third reconciliation bill to pass the ban, though Daines recognized that such bills are “hard to pass.”

Anti-abortion groups are pushing GOP lawmakers to find a way to pass a reconciliation bill regardless.

“Budget reconciliation remains the only viable legislative path to continuing to defund Big Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, wrote in a letter to Senate Republicans last week.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that he intends to push for a third reconciliation bill in the near future, even as other top Republicans reject the idea. Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins have already said they don’t see it happening.

“I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill,” McConnell, the chair of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said during a hearing earlier this month.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy also said he didn’t believe a third round of budgetary efforts would garner much support from the party, considering the difficulty the party faced during attempts to muster a second bill. “It’s not looking real good,” he told reporters.

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but that’s not the only service it offers. The nonprofit provides critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, and it does not use public funds to provide abortion care. Performing abortions with federal funds is already illegal based on the parameters set by the Hyde Amendment, which became law in 1976.

Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have each declined to send a representative to the festival, which was meant to feature one 600-square-foot booth for each state, on the National Mall. The fair is set to begin Thursday, followed by 16 days of festivities. Notably, the six states that have dropped out all have Democratic governors.

told The Hill. Fair organizer Freedom 250 has claimed that there are no cost requirements per state.

Luke Harkins, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s press secretary, pointed to “growing concerns that the event in Washington, D.C., is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy proclaimed that “everybody’s bailing on” Trump’s fair, though fellow blue states California, Colorado, and New York will be present.

dropping outentire states now bailing, it’s becoming less and less clear what the event will look like. Nevertheless, Trump is insisting that the show must go on.

wrote on Truth Social last week. “Starting at 7 P.M. EST, this HUGE Celebration will honor our Country’s People, Spirit, Strength, Resolve, and Triumphs. With the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and surrounding the beautifully new Reflecting Pool, more than 300 Members of our strong and talented Military Bands, Orchestras, and Ceremonial Units, will perform Patriotic Melodies and American Classics, and my Playlist.”

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Monday sided with the League of Women Voters, who’d challenged Trump’s directive to expand the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

In order to update the SAVE database, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services obtained Americans’ Social Security numbers from the Department of Government Efficiency—where some employees were accused of misusing Americans’ sensitive information—and combined it with citizenship data that “they knew to be unreliable,” Sooknanan wrote.

“Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” she wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Sooknanan ruled that the Trump administration had violated protections enshrined in the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Since SAVE was updated, numerous voters have been falsely declared noncitizens, threatened with removal from voter registration rolls, and in some cases, referred to the DHS for possible criminal investigations. Sooknanan found that these misidentifications qualified as, at the very least, “a lesser form” of defamation, and said the administration’s arguments to the contrary “border on absurd.”

“The US Vice President’s claim regarding the return of [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors to Iran is false.… In the Swiss negotiations, there was no discussion about the presence of inspectors in the country,” an X post from the state-affiliated Fars News Agency said in Farsi on Monday, citing an unnamed “informed source.”

announced that as part of the ongoing peace talks between Iran and the U.S., Iran would allow IAEA inspectors back into the country for the first time since July 2025. Iran suspended cooperation with the agency after the U.S. bombed its nuclear enrichment facilities.

Alongside the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, allowing IAEA inspectors into Iran was a condition of the peace deal, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In exchange, the U.S. planned to temporarily lift sanctions on Iranian oil.

“In line with the ongoing productive talks in Switzerland, Iran has committed to free and open transit in the Strait of Hormuz and to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors into their country,” Bessent posted on X Monday morning. “As part of the framework, Treasury has issued a temporary 60-day general license authorizing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil.”

However, the White House and Tehran don’t seem to be on the same page. According to the “informed source,” inspectors were never on the table as part of the negotiations. Meanwhile, Iran may soon be able to finally reap the benefits of selling its oil at market price after years of U.S. sanctions.

pretty sweet for Iran—but if it doesn’t have to let inspectors in, it’s even more unbalanced. Isn’t it great to have such an accomplished dealmaker as president?

A Trump official and Texas venture capitalist, Thomas Dans, was identified by the Danish government as one of three Americans running private “influence operations” in Greenland, according to The New Yorker. (Dans is the twin brother of Project 2025 author Paul Dans.)

Dans was appointed by Trump in December to serve as the chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, a federal agency founded in 1984 to establish national policy as it relates to scientific advancement in the Arctic. Dans had previously held the position during Trump’s first term, as well.

In 2024, Dans founded American Daybreak, a nonprofit promoting U.S. business abroad. He continues to run the nonprofit, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has leveraged both positions to venture to Greenland numerous times.

But the take that Dans offered The New Yorker regarding the proposed foreign takeover was less than inspiring. In a predominantly off-the-record interview, Dans offered the potential commercial benefits to seafood franchises like Red Lobster as the primary reason to take over Greenland.

“My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China—and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster,” Dans said.

Dans has been a significant fixture in MAGA world’s Greenland agenda since before Trump returned to power. He was the organizer of a “tourism trip” that sent Donald Trump Jr., far-right political pundit Charlie Kirk, and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor to the island in January 2025, according to an analysis by Responsible Statecraft. That trek ended in several humiliating revelations, including reports from local media that Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food.

Two months later, in March, when Greenlandic outrage stumped his efforts to send Usha Vance to a dogsled race in Sisimiut, Dans was irate.

“American Daybreak, and I personally, were very disappointed by the negative and hostile reaction—fanned by often false press reports—to the United States supporting Greenland and hoping to learn about its culture, tradition, and people,” Dans wrote in an extended missive on X at the time. “These press stories and Greenlandic officials’ overreaction are harmful to the strong relationship, based on mutual respect, shared interest, and courtesy, that the United States has long enjoyed with Greenland and hopes to expand upon.”

Days later, Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action—particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take—is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote. “The only question, then, is whether the challenged subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes. The Court has no doubt that they were. On the other hand, the Department has struggled—without success—to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”

Somali Americans and immigrants.

wrote on X after the news. “The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations into the President’s political opponents. This case was just one example of that, but we are seeing daily reminders of this administration’s lawlessness—in Minnesota and around the country. We all must continue to seek justice and uphold the rule of law. I will never stop exercising my constitutional rights to stand up for Minnesotans and the American freedoms that we hold dear.”

said Frey.

The Trump administration has yet to respond to Judge Schlitz’s ruling.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a rule Monday that would raise the fee for a paper citizenship application by 75 percent from $760 to $1,330, and the fee for an online application by 80 percent from $710 to $1,280, according to Newsweek.

The proposed rule would also make it more expensive to seek a hearing challenging a denied naturalization. If adopted, the rule would raise the fee for an appeal from $830 to $1,475 by paper, and from $780 to $1,425 online.

Under the proposed rule, the government would scrap fee waivers and a reduced-fee option for individuals experiencing financial hardship. The changes would present a significant financial hurdle for lower-income immigrants, further transforming legal immigration into a privilege for the extremely wealthy and a moneymaking scheme for the federal government.

This proposed rule is yet another way the Trump administration is attempting to curb legal immigration. The government has stacked the deck by appointing immigration judges bent on denying asylum claims, curbed America’s refugee program, and imposed steep price increases on H-1B visas.

On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter data from Maryland.

“This Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an [statewide voter registration list] is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote in the ruling.

have been dismissed in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, and now Maryland.

And these dismissals aren’t just coming from Democratic-appointed judges. Five of the nine judges were appointed or renominated by Trump, including Gallagher.

The DOJ could still see a victory: It has sued 31 states and Washington, D.C. Outside of lawsuits, the DOJ has sent letters to all states asking for their voter rolls. At least 16 Republican-led states have complied, according to Democracy Docket.

reporting hints at its plans. Over the course of the Maryland lawsuit, DOJ officials refused to answer the judge’s questions about what the agency planned to do with the data.

Trump is demanding that states carry out manual election audits at the administration’s direction, use their preferred system to verify citizenship, and promise to gradually end the use of electronic ballots—all things that could lead to actual voter fraud. States that rebuff Trump would lose 20 percent of their grants, which could be millions of dollars in security funds.

These grants help states prevent terrorist attacks, support infrastructure, and ready themselves for natural disasters. DHS has granted this funding to states for years, no questions asked.

dangled funding above states’ heads to make them capitulate to its agenda, and it likely won’t be the last.

told CNN.

So far, Gabbard’s allies in the Trump administration have been largely silent about the report that the person they placed in charge of the CIA, FBI, and NSA may have been taking directives from a man many former followers view as a cult leader.

on X Sunday afternoon.

documents “exposing” Dr. Anthony Fauci for supposed actions taken during the Covid-19 pandemic on Friday, her last day on the job.

Reporter Jon Swaine gained access to a trove of emails that appeared to show memos from someone within the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIF, directing Gabbard during her time in Congress. When Swaine compared the directives to Tulsi’s voting record, legislative proposals, and media statements, he found “unmistakable parallels.”

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism known as Hare Krishna, and his politics when he founded SIF did not belong squarely in one political camp: “He inveighed against Muslims, homosexuality, gun control and public schools, but also promoted environmentalism and anti-capitalism,” the Post reported.

After two months with no answers from Gabbard’s office, Swaine informed Gabbard that he would be proceeding with the story. Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard would be stepping down from her position as director of national intelligence.

On her last days in office, a spokesperson gave a statement: “The attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false—they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.”

The president warned against vandalizing the monuments and statues that his administration has been trying to clean ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. In a Truth Social post, Trump pledged that anyone caught will face up to 10 years in prison.

“Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote Monday.

Federal law already stipulates that damage to federal property exceeding $1,000 is classified as a felony. As such, the penalties are steep, possibly including a significant fine, a prison sentence of up to 10 years, or both. Those charged with damaging federal property to the tune of less than $1,000 could face a misdemeanor and a one-year prison sentence.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In the same message, Trump claimed that the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had suffered a “300 foot long gash”—an inexplicable jump from the 250-foot-long damage he described Saturday.

He added that “chemicals have been illegally placed in the water” and complained about the “8647” etched into the National Mall. He further suggested that the damage was “probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey,” who was indicted by a federal grand jury in April for sharing a photo of seashells to his Instagram account that similarly spelled out “8647,” a tagline that Trump and his allies have claimed insinuates a desire for Trump’s death.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that the U.S. had issued a “temporary 60-day general license authorizing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil,” in return for the country’s commitments to maintaining “free and open transit” in the Strait of Hormuz and admitting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The sanctions waiver allows Iran to sell its oil at market rate, after decades of having to sell it at a reduced price to buyers willing to dodge U.S. sanctions. Shockingly, the license also allows U.S. refineries to import Iranian oil—reversing more than 40 years of strict sanctions, and giving Iran’s economy a much-needed boost.

Sanctions relief is a key component in the 14-point memorandum of understanding between the two countries. Iran has yet to actually deliver on any of its promises, however.

Over the weekend, the Iranian military briefly shuttered trade through the Strait of Hormuz, citing Israel’s continued ceasefire violations in Lebanon. While Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that mediators delivered “major progress” to end the fighting in Lebanon, neither Hezbollah nor Israel is an actual signatory to the U.S.-Iran peace deal. It’s still unclear how that conflict will resolve, meaning the future of the entire agreement, and the strait, remains unclear.

As for visits from IAEA inspectors, the memorandum of understanding asserts that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the agency’s supervision, but details on that process have been scarce. Notably, the supposedly major milestone is something the U.S. had already won—and then lost under Trump.

The former GOP whip described the instability fueled by the White House in a Semafor interview published Monday, lamenting about how talking with the president isn’t “particularly useful” because “he can and will” flip his opinion depending on whoever he last spoke to.

“The president seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about you, but I like to minimize the chaos in my life,” Cornyn told Semafor. “He just seems to revel in it. We’ve seen even recent evidence of it on the [Director of National Intelligence].”

Cornyn was referring to Trump’s sudden cancellation of a Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton—the president’s pick to run the Office of National Intelligence—via a Truth Social post mere hours before the hearing was set to take place last week.

Trump tapped Clayton earlier this month as DNI in place of acting Director Bill Pulte.

Pulte’s leadership had sparked a maelstrom in Congress. Democrats refused to renew FISA Section 702, a federal spy bill, until Pulte was replaced by someone with legitimate national security experience, as the position requires by law.

Clayton, unfortunately, does not satisfy that requirement either. The former law professor and corporate crisis management counsel has no national security experience to bring to the role.

Yet rather than quell the furor, Trump opted to make the stalemate even more difficult for his congressional allies by tacking his dead-in-the-water voter ID bill, the Save America Act, onto negotiations over the lapsed spy statute.

Cornyn has become a more vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to Trump’s preferred candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: One of the party’s most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races. The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November.

said on Newsmax Monday morning.

pic.twitter.com/33ruf7JNZt

June 22, 2026

As Vance met with Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and other Iranian officials in Switzerland, the president was firing off insults from miles away.

Truth Social Sunday.

close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon, which Iran claims is a violation of the 60-day ceasefire deal.

told Fox News journalist Trey Yingst Sunday morning that he spoke with Iranian officials over the phone about the closure, telling them, “You close it and you won’t have a country … you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

pic.twitter.com/RLi9bos14Q

June 21, 2026

In response to these comments, Iranian state media declared the talks had been paused.

PBS. “Our armed forces are prepared to respond to them in a different manner. They may keep talking, it is we who act.”

blamed the Iranians for the holdup. “There was a little bit of threatening, there was a little bit of whining, but at the end of the day the talks continued and we made great progress,” he said.

Speaking at a brief press conference about the “great progress” made in negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, Vance offered few details about the plan for inspections of nuclear sites.

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. He simply said that IAEA inspectors could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.” Iran has yet to confirm, according to Axios.

The 14-point memorandum of understanding doesn’t add much clarity: The agreement asserts that Iran can not produce or acquire a nuclear weapon, and that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors.

Vance’s supposedly major milestone is already something the U.S. had already won—then lost under Trump.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action included the “most comprehensive and intrusive IAEA weapons inspection system ever negotiated,” according to the Center for International Policy. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, allowing Iran to resume its enrichment program. In January 2020, Iran announced it would no longer place limits on uranium enrichment after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at Trump’s direction.

Following the U.S. and Israel’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the Iranian parliament passed a law suspending its cooperation with the IAEA altogether. In September, Iran agreed to allow the agency’s inspectors back into the country. Inspectors had previously visited Iran as recently as December 2025, but received limited access to the country’s nuclear sites.

It’s not even clear that Vance’s announcement was the product of the weekend’s negotiations.

Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly told U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

projection near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool depicts Senator Mitch McConnell as a turtle and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a crocodile crawling around in a swamp. Another shows White House adviser Stephen Miller as a bat hanging from the ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial. There’s Senator Ted Cruz depicted as a sex worker wearing “Trump” underwear, Vice President JD Vance as some kind of worm, and old footage of Trump and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein together at an event.

projected showing a mugshot of Epstein with the words “No one bends the knee like the GOP,” followed by images of Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled “guardians of pedophiles.” Another Kennedy Center projection showed the letters “Donald” being rearranged into the word “pedo.”

pic.twitter.com/jypEeszT7y

June 22, 2026

VJayBombs, who posted footage of the projections to its Instagram page, is said to be behind the display. The group gained attention earlier this year during Trump’s State of the Union address, when it projected a looped video satirizing the speech onto the Los Angeles Downtown Medical Center.

This isn’t the first time this term that D.C. has seen anti-Trump political art in its public spaces. The anonymous group Secret Handshake placed at least four statues around the city depicting Trump and Epstein together, and someone tried to cut “8647” into the grass on the National Mall last week.

In a series of posts on Truth Social Sunday, Trump ranted about the Times after it published an analysis of the president’s war in Iran: “What Changed After Almost 4 Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.” The article highlighted that Trump’s deal failed to achieve any of his war’s objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile stockpile, annihilating Iran’s navy and security infrastructure, and installing a new regime.

The president disagreed.

“Their Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE, their Launching Pads, Missiles, Drones and Manufacturing of same, is almost GONE, their top two sets of Leaders are GONE, their Inflation is at 250%, their Economy is BROKEN, their Soldiers aren’t being paid, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN, THE OIL IS GUSHING, and the U.S. Stock Market and Jobs are at record HIGHS,” Trump wrote. “That’s what’s CHANGED, you corrupt and unethical cowards, and MORE!!!”

In reality, Iran shuttered trade through Strait of Hormuz yet again over the weekend, citing Israel’s ceasefire violations in Lebanon.

But Trump didn’t care about any of that. Instead, he shared a post by Senator Lindsey Graham, who echoed the president’s claim that the reporting had revealed the outlet’s “bias.”

“The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS,’” Trump wrote in yet another post.

“I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”

In October, Trump refiled an abridged version of his dismissed $15 billion defamation suit against the Times, alleging that reporters at the paper had sought to undermine his reputation as an entrepreneur and reality television star.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In a post on Truth Social the same day, President Donald Trump said that the monument would likely have to be drained another time in order to address the damage, which he said included the use of a “knife or blade” to put a “250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade.” He also claimed that individuals that participated in the destruction poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the pool. He said that all those caught participating deserved “years in jail.”

“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote in a separate post on Sunday. “I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”

The White House has so far spent nearly $15 million to rid the Reflecting Pool of algae ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, but the multimillion-dollar project appears to be another dud. Within days of refilling the pool earlier this month, the algae was back.

The Department of the Interior blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes, which were apparently neglected during the cleaning process. CNN also found abnormally high phosphate levels in the pool after sampling its water. An algae researcher at the Smithsonian described the chemical imbalance as a “field day” for algal growth.

Park workers have tried to address the endemic issue with a smattering of different solutions. On Tuesday, park workers in hi-vis vests were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds. One dead baby duck was caught floating in the pool over the weekend, though the cause of death was unclear.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

crazed demandshis ballroom.

writing really wellexcellent Substackboth sidesof this divide, so we’re talking to him about how to make sense of it all. Paul, nice to have you back on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be back on, although I wish the times were better, but anyway.

Sargent:posted this:

“These fools who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran when the stock market just hit a record high and oil prices are tumbling down are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Paul, Trump is very angry that he’s not getting more worshipful praise for the world-historical triumph that was his ceasefire with Iran, which basically just put a stop to the disaster he created. So we might as well start here: What did you think of the quote-unquote deal?

Krugman: Obviously, it’s horrible. Iran won. Iran is in a much stronger position and the U.S. in a much weaker position than before the war started. And of course, the deal is vastly inferior to the Obama JCPOA that Trump ripped up in his first term—all of this at the cost of enormous outlays of money, depletion of weapons stocks, killed a lot of people. Basically, we’ve just shown the whole world that we’re maybe not quite a paper tiger, but a lot less of a power than we were supposed to be. So all of this is an enormous diminution of the United States.

The hawks are saying, Why is Trump giving in? Why isn’t he following up on his victory? But there was no victory. This is actually the best you could do given how the war has gone. He should have made this deal about a week in when it became clear that the whole premise of his enterprise was not going to work.

Sargent: He could have made a better deal before the war started.

Krugman: Of course. He could have just done nothing—that would have been better. Going back in time, he could have kept that Obama agreement, which was doing a much better job of containing Iran.

But it tells you something about where we are that there are apparently a substantial number of, at least until recently, pro-Trump people who really believe that we were winning the war or we had won the war. Which just shows you how detached from reality they are.

Sargent:another missive that was in all caps, saying this:

“OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE!), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY!). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ‘YOU’RE WELCOME!’”

OK, Paul. He got nothing significant on Iran’s nukes and our country is weaker, less safe, and less respected. But we should step back. He’s making a bigger argument there, isn’t he? It’s that in every way, the nation is booming, strong, and leading decisively in the world. What do you make of that bigger argument?

Krugman: So, the stock market is up. No question about that. Although the stock market rose a lot under Joe Biden, too—Trump would like you to put that down the memory hole. And stocks are up, by the way, around the world. There’s a stock market boom. I haven’t checked the numbers lately, but I believe that they’re up substantially more outside the United States than inside the United States. So this is stuff that is not really reflecting U.S.-specific developments and certainly not Trump-specific developments. Presidents do not control the stock market.

But leaving that aside, the economy—it’s not booming. We basically have had slower job growth than we did in the last two years of Biden, and basically flat unemployment. So that’s not great—it’s not a catastrophe, but it’s not great. Real wages are lower than they were when Trump took office because we’ve had a lot of inflation.

By the way, one of the things with this corruption of how we do stuff—click on pretty much any information site—I’ve been only looking at the ones that have to do with economic policy, but federal government information sites, which are traditionally just the facts, Here’s what’s happening, maybe discreetly touting administration policies—but if you click on any site, you get a pop-up that has a picture of Trump that says, Welcome to the Golden Age, which is all part of this incredible dingbat cult of personality.

Sargent: He corrupts everything. It just seeps into every last corner of public life.

Krugman: It’s worth pointing out that this incredible personalized cult of personality for Trump, while it’s at an absolutely ludicrous level now, actually started a ways back. There was a fair bit of it under Reagan, and let’s not forget George Bush and the flight suit.

This the-president-is-a-comic-book-hero thing is something that appears to go along with modern Republican governance. But it’s reached a level of absurdity with Trump, both because of the extremeness of the cult of personality and because the reality is—there has to be a better [way to put it]—he’s a fuck-up. Everything Trump touches turns to crud. So it’s really insane.

Sargent: There are a lot of dimensions to it. If you look at some of those late-night tweets, the tweets we’re talking about here, you kind of get hit by a real dose of somebody in very steep mental decline. It’s sort of two-layered.

On the one hand, it’s the sheer nakedness of the demand for adulation, which is just completely crazy. Somebody who’s sunsetting very plainly in plain sight, who knows he’s on his way out and is desperate to have something that he can call a legacy. That’s what we see there.

But at the same time, you also see him completely detached from the reality of what he’s actually done to us. What he’s done to you and me, to liberal America, to blue America, even to red America, even to MAGA country.

Krugman: In some ways especially to MAGA country.

Sargent: Two dimensions here of someone in steep mental decline, don’t you think?

Krugman: I’m not a psychologist, but it’s my understanding that when you’re sundowning, when you’re in this dissociation that does, among other things, tend to come with age, you in some ways become more like yourself. Those aspects of your personality that were disagreeable and unpleasant and dysfunctional, but which you were able to at least police when you were still more there, now just come out. It’s a little bit like getting drunk.

There’s a complete lack of a filter now. Presumably Trump always was a person who lived for external adulation. It must be awful to be him. There’s no inside at all. But 10 years ago he was canny enough to keep it somewhat under wraps. Now he’s just out of control. It all gets blurted out at 4 in the morning.

Sargent:video where you went very big picture, assessing where we really are right now. I want to try to summarize your argument briefly. Basically it’s that the United States is no longer seen by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation. Our military can’t do what we thought it could—can’t force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding, or Trump’s bidding. That due to Trump’s tariff fiascos, we have less leverage in trade wars than we thought. That China has unexpected leverage over supply chains and important goods and important resources. That in part due to our abandonment of Ukraine, our onetime allies are looking past us to a post-American world. Et cetera. Is that the basic argument?

Krugman: That’s the basic argument. Even things that I find somewhat encouraging, like the fact that Ukraine is holding despite Trump having cut them off completely—the United States just stopped sending money and basically stopped the flow of arms, we won’t even allow the Europeans to buy arms for Ukraine—and yet Ukraine seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is telling you that they don’t need us. The world doesn’t need us.

That’s part of what’s happened in Iran as well. It turns out that if there was one thing we thought America really had, it was the world’s greatest military and the world’s best weapons, and nobody else could manage without us. And it turns out that we were completely flat-footed in the face of Iranian drones and that Ukraine is holding its own without American weapons.

So who are we? We’re becoming bystanders in world events. America is a rogue power, it does crazy things, it can’t even impose its will on a third-rate military power like Iran, and we don’t seem to actually be necessary for the defense of Europe. We’re a kind of shadow of our former selves on the world stage.

Sargent: Is this inexorable decline, do you think? Can it be turned around?

Krugman: Some of it is probably irreversible, and some of it would have happened anyway. To a large extent, America as it seemed to be as Trump took office was an outmoded vision. We didn’t fully understand that. But there was still a reflexive tendency on much of the world to think, You have to accommodate, you have to give in, allow yourself to be bullied by an American president no matter what. The truth is the fundamentals had already shifted against the United States in the global power game.

But there’s a lot that has obviously been made much worse by Trump screwups. What the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from the stage, is who’s the next guy? How do we know that we won’t have another Trump-like figure? Does an agreement with America mean anything, since we’ve just seen an American president rip up every agreement that we had? Does a threat from America mean anything, because we’ve just seen that same guy cave totally? After all, this guy was—sorry to say—elected fairly by the American people. What does that say about America?

We don’t get that back. It took generations to build the reputation of America. You don’t get that back unless you give us three generations of good governance from here on in.

Sargent: I want to highlight another aspect of our self-inflicted wounds. You brought up Spain as an example of a country that weathered the energy shock from Iran well because it’s transitioning to renewables quickly. Here’s another area where Trump has set back our country tremendously. He’s on two fronts trying to strangle the transition to clean energy in every way he can. It’s like a whole-of-government approach to strangling the clean energy transition.

At the same time, he’s delivering a big oil shock with the Iran war. That’ll lessen a bit, but it’ll take time. But we have learned that being dependent on oil is a problem. The lesson here is that making this transition is even more imperative. At the same time, we’re lagging behind by choice. How bad is this self-inflicted wound? And what can be done about it?

Krugman: On Wednesday, the Interior Department announced that it was paying another $765 million to an energy company not to build wind farms. We’re not only refusing to follow pro–green energy policies, but actually spending taxpayer money to block it. The Pentagon is using spurious national security concerns to block development of wind farms. This is an aggressively anti–renewable energy administration. I will be talking shortly on Substack about the motivations.

At a fundamental level, this is one of these things where U.S. influence was fated to decline. The U.S. does have oil and gas in a way that other advanced countries do not. That gave us something of a special position. But with the incredible progress in renewable energy, that matters a lot less than it used to.

But on top of that, the U.S. is basically alone. Everyone else is marching towards an energy transition, and we’re trying to go back to coal. To the extent that countries might have wanted to rely on us a bit, it’s actually—even more than oil—liquefied natural gas. There was a possible future we seemed to be heading for in which, to a certain extent, the world would be relying on U.S. LNG as at least a transitional source of power on the way to the green revolution.

But if you were dependent on the United States for LNG, wouldn’t you worry that Trump might get mad at you because you won’t hand over Greenland or something, and cut it off? Are you sure that America won’t again be led by somebody like that? The U.S. is—on top of everything else—risky. We’re not trustworthy. Nobody is going to rely on us for energy.

Sargent:rampage about his ballroom. He insisted it’s coming along brilliantly and effectively demanded more adulation for how great it’s going to be—it’s going to be outfitted with all this powerful military security, et cetera. Then he raged about the legal travails he’s still facing over this, even though he tore down the White House East Wing unilaterally and probably illegally.

celebrated the gildingposted a picture of himself on the cover of a magazine in India, as if we’re supposed to marvel at that in some way: Look, Trump is the cover guy on a magazine in India.

you wrote about this, is just this relentless desecration and degradation of everything. He’s desecrating the ways in which our capital is supposed to embody small-r republicanism. He’s turning it into a crass imperial court, basically.

Krugman: Washington, D.C., was designed very much with classical models in mind. The Founding Fathers were very much into ancient Roman history—but they were into the history of the Roman Republic, not the Empire. We have all of this grand monumental architecture in D.C., but it’s all celebrating the people, the republic. It’s not personal glory. Certainly you would never exalt a currently living president that way.

I live in New York—there’s, along Riverside Drive along the west side of Manhattan, a series of monuments. There’s Grant’s Tomb, there’s the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and so on. They’re all very impressive. They’re kind of like Washington, D.C. in a way.

But notably, there’s no personal glorification. Even Grant’s Tomb—it’s not a monumental statue of Grant. It’s a celebration of defense of the republic. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument has the names of generals, but they’re in plain type. And names of battles which include the defeats as well as the victories, because this is the republic: We are stoic, we are modest.

Now we have Trump gilding everything, wanting to erect a gigantic arch of triumph in the capital, and filling the reflecting pool with algae—which is just showing that the gods have a sense of humor.

Sargent: Yeah, that is perfect. The “drain the swamp” guy is filling the reflecting pool with algae. I just want to pull this all together. I guess what really bothers me about this moment is that Trump and JD Vance don’t feel a shred of obligation to speak to the country with even minimal candor at all about what just happened. Everything is all about false glorification of Trump, and it’s always just about using the most cynical lies they can to insulate him from any accountability for this calamity.

It’s all about him, no matter what. There’s no sense of obligation on their part to function as real leaders or statesmen who care about the nation and its future and have a conception of what’s in the interests of the American people.

How do you put all this together in your mind?

Krugman: It’s about them, but the real question is, what has happened to us—or at least to the Republican Party, but maybe it’s even broader than that—that this can happen? There was a time when people used to think of Marco Rubio as a sort of reformist Republican, “reformicon,” whatever. Now here he is walking around in oversized shoes because Trump bought them for him and he’s afraid to take them off, and acting as a lickspittle for all of this crazy ego demonstration. My God.

There will probably be many future books written about the downward spiral that everyone who deals with Trump seems to go into. But we always knew that there were people like Trump. The idea that the world’s basically oldest republic—the nation that invented republican values and democratic norms—puts up with it, that’s what really shocks me.

Sargent: Let me just close out this way. It’s my feeling that Democrats—they’re functioning more as an opposition than they were at the outset of Trump’s second term, when they were clearly snakebit and terrified. On some level, Democrats had widely concluded that Trump had put his finger on some real popular sentiment that everybody missed. That was never true. He won by a point and a half, and it was at a time of inflation and post-Covid shock and so forth. But that’s where Democrats were.

Now they’re functioning more as an opposition. But still, I feel like there’s a smallness to their politics, Paul. You’ve been writing about the big problems here—the desecration plus the decline, those two sides that I talked about.

Should Democrats be making a bigger argument? What might something like that look like? Some argument which essentially says, Let’s be real about what this guy is doing to us? An argument that says, Let’s face reality about what this man and his movement have done to our country, and really setting forth a new direction. Is there some way to do that for Democrats?

Krugman: At some level, corruption is the theme. Corruption of various kinds, but that all ties together. And if we want to talk about kitchen-table issues, you can make that part of it: The reason that you can’t afford your electricity is because of the corruption. The reason that you can’t afford health insurance is because of the corruption.

And look, one of the happiest things politically that’s happened in the world was the overturn of the Orbán regime in Hungary, which was very much something that MAGA people viewed as a role model: This is how you subvert a democracy. And it turns out that with enough people mad enough, you can flood across all of the barriers they’ve created. The central theme of the Magyar campaign was corruption. These guys are corrupt.

There were zebras on the Orbán family estate in the countryside, apparently, and the zebras—stuffed zebras—became an image for the opposition. It was all about corruption. People may not think in terms of abstract—they certainly won’t think in terms of republican norms. But to make it, I can shave 15 percent off the price of gasoline if you elect me—that is not how to stop this horrifying situation. To say, These people are utterly corrupt, self-centered, and you are paying the price—that sounds like a movement that can work.

Sargent: Yes, and I like the idea of using corruption to open the door to an argument about moral corruption and degradation, which I think people sense is happening. The reflecting pool and the algae, the tearing down of the White House East Wing and the replacement of it with a ballroom, the arch—those are things that really resonate for people. And it’s because of what we’re talking about here.

There was a point at which Democrats said something like, The ballroom’s a distraction. But it’s clear that these things have profound resonance for people for these reasons—there’s a sense that our common life is just being fundamentally degraded at a very profound level. The corruption argument opens the door there.

I’d point out, by the way, to close out, that the Magyar campaign was also about what this man, Orbán, and his movement, Orbánism, did to us. Look what he did to us. You’ve been writing about what Donald Trump is doing to us. And it seems like some Democrats need to step up and grab that mantle in some way.

Krugman: Yeah. And fire some of the consultants.

I’m a numbers guy. I like to live—I view the world through spreadsheets. But it’s not about the numbers. If there’s $300 million of taxpayer funds going to the ballroom, whatever, in the scale of the federal budget, that’s not big. But it’s a symbol of this horrible thing that’s happening. And I think it’s something people can relate to.

Sargent:your Substack. I learn from it all the time, really. I’m not exaggerating. I learn from it every day. And Paul, thanks for coming on with us.

Krugman: Well, thank you.

Soon, an army of men with bulldozers are tearing out trees near your home and ripping up fields. Dump trucks careen around town, and the night sky is so polluted with light, you can’t see the stars. A year or so later, the data center is up and running. By then, the high-paying construction jobs have all but disappeared.

After months of digging, you finally have an idea of how much water the data center actually consumes. If you’re lucky, your area isn’t in a drought. You hope things won’t get dire. Meanwhile, the monolith is droning and hissing, wearing you and your neighbors down with constant noise. You hope the water you do have will be drinkable this time next year as you try to adjust to the unnatural heat the data center generates.

The militaristic drive to build the best chatbot and somehow “beat China” knows no bounds, including those of logic. This nightmarish iteration of the extraction economy was made possible by undemocratic processes and a national administration that sold us and our resources out to tech oligarchs. But people in these towns and cities are smarter and tougher than the plutocrats accounted for—and they’re putting up one hell of a fight. Told by people whose communities have been impacted, this is the story of unhinged data center expansion in America.

Jared Spann (Utah): It’s been the equivalent of a sucker punch. People have had no say in any of this.

Devan Jenkins (Mississippi): Nobody here wanted this. They didn’t let us know. We had to find out on our own.

Tracie (Texas): If you look at the board of directors at the very beginning, Bill Gates’s fingerprints are all over it. He had his own picked people on the board in a town like Abilene, Texas that isn’t really on the map. That set the stage for the sleight of hand.

Dan Caruso (Indiana):Project Rainier” now, but I have other names for it.

Our elected officials who were meeting with Amazon all signed NDAs for how much water it would use to cool their servers. They have open-loop systems here. My question to them was and still is: How are we supposed to know if they’re getting close to the limitations of our freshwater aquifer if we don’t know how much water they’re using? They just say, “Oh, we’ll know. Don’t worry.” Yeah, right. That’s what I’m worried about. I’m always asking them, what’s so “Colonel Sanders’s 11 secret herbs and spices” about how much water they use to cool their servers? We have a right to know.

Amazon has tried to win us over by doing “nice things” for us. Over the holidays, we have a town potluck banquet where everyone brings a dish, but this year Amazon brought all the food. On Facebook, people were saying, “Isn’t this wonderful? Amazon is bringing food to the banquet for everybody!” I guess all they had to do was feed people for them to forget everything they’re doing to us. That one really got me.

Racel Wurfel (Indiana): Meta has been allowed to go through so many tax loopholes that, even on the most basic economic level, this makes no sense for the state of Indiana. I’ve done so much research trying to figure out how much Meta paid for the land. We have no transparency.

When the project got rolling, our community was told it was a “technology campus.” We thought it would be a Meta office with software jobs. We had no idea what the intention was.

Jeffersonville Data Center Facebook page, they try to make it look like a place you can go and enjoy with cutesy community rooms with paintings on the walls. But if you drive over there, it’s like a military compound from a sci-fi movie. Everything is covered. You can’t see what’s actually going on.

Christine LeJeune (Wisconsin):CloverleafOracle and OpenAI.

The project was approved at a town hall. That was also when the transmission line company outlined how people’s properties will be impacted by the huge transmission lines needed to power the data center. Part of their playbook is to give the public piecemeal information. When we were focused on the data center itself, suddenly there’s the other issue of how it will be powered by gigantic transmission lines that will affect people across five different counties, running through protected areas and conservation easements.

It caught us all off guard. Since then, the mayor has kept repeating this phrase, almost like a mantra: “It’s a done deal. It’s a done deal.” I’m so sick of hearing that. They’re trying to infiltrate your psyche with this belief that there’s nothing you can do. And a lot of people accept that. People here are not used to having to stand up for themselves to corporations like this. It’s very new, complicated, and challenging for people.

LaTricea Adams (Tennessee): The only folks who knew were part of the deal: the mayor of Memphis; the president of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water; and the Chamber of Commerce. It really shows how this goes beyond a permitting issue and gets into a democracy issue.

Our local utility didn’t have the capacity to provide the power the Colossus 1 data center needs, so xAI brought in “temporary” gas turbines on semi trucks and parked them. The turbines weren’t fixed to the ground. They were on trailers.

In the same zip code as the Colossus 1 data center, there are over 17 other high-polluting facilities. Both of my parents are from that area. To make the environmental racism fully blatant, the Valero refinery is right next to MLK Park. So with the addition of the xAI data center, there’s a nexus of pollution—from transportation, the oil refinery, all the other heavy industry, and now the data center.

The community rightfully raised hell about the polluting, unpermitted turbines when they were in Memphis. The city decommissioned the turbines, but then xAI went right across the state line into Mississippi and set them up again.

Devan Jenkins (Mississippi): Musk came along and bought all the land around here that he could—and it’s a lot of land. He’s rushing it. I don’t know what contractors they have, or who exactly is doing what, but they have these huge dump trucks here on Windsor Road. It’s a residential street where my grandparents have lived for decades. The truck drivers violate this residential area that isn’t supposed to have industrial trucks driving through. I got the city to put up “No Trucks Through” signs, but they still drive down the road all day. They take up the whole road and drive crazy. They won’t be done building out the power plant until early 2027.

I’m having my wedding in my grandparents’ backyard in June. My husband and I will move into a little cottage on the property. I don’t want the peace of my wedding to get disturbed, or have the safety of my guests get compromised.

Dan Caruso (Indiana): There were problems with the Amazon people zooming past a school bus with its “Stop” arm out. They’d swing out into the other lane and fly past the school bus while the kids were about to get on or off. The bus driver took it on her own initiative to tell people not to send their kids to the bus stop at that intersection. She started driving to everyone’s door to pick up their kids instead.

Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin): When they first started 24/7 construction, it was land of the midnight sun. My streetlight went out, and I didn’t even notice because it was so bright. The light pollution from construction has since improved, but data centers are maximum security installations. The perimeter is lit up at all times. They want to keep it secure and surveil it constantly.

Christine LeJeune (Wisconsin): There has been a big dust issue because of the scale of the first construction phase, during which they tore up the majority of the 673 acres. It’s windy here because it’s near Lake Michigan. There’s a vortex of swirling air surrounding the lake. The dust, concrete stabilizer, lime—all that gets trapped in the air. Then the wind gets very strong very often, blowing it all in different directions.

People who drive past are shocked by the huge swales of dust. The way they build these things, they push up the soil into volcano-looking mounds throughout the site. It collects on people’s homes and cars, not to mention inside our lungs. There’s a lot of dump trucks driving around and carting the top soil away. They’re just carting away this wonderful, fertile soil that’s been cultivated by farmers for generations.

Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin):into the middle of construction. We call it the battlefield. Wherever you turn, it’s bulldozers, cement trucks, men. There are 5,000 workers coming in, and the total population of our town is 1,432.

Tracie (Texas):housing shortage is intense. Many people who own their homes are moving and setting their houses up as rental properties. My widowed daughter-in-law is completely out of a house. She couldn’t afford the rent hike. And it’s her own family who’s saying, “We want to make hay while we can.” All the apartments are full, and we have R.V. parks springing up all over the place.

Jane (Oregon): I’ve worked on multiple data centers here in Oregon. There’s something like nine or 10 Meta buildings, and then about four for Apple, just in this area where I live. They’re all over Oregon. It brings in a lot of people while they build them, but they don’t employ many people long term. One is a million square feet.

I’m a sheet metal worker. I run duct work for the big units to keep everything cool. Most of the data centers in Oregon are built by union workers. We’re the only ones who can man them. It’s trades-workers like sheet rockers, electricians, painters, and metal framers that frame the walls. It takes somewhere near a year to get one of them up and running, depending on the size.

They get their own Apple or Meta people running diagnostics and doing the high-tech jobs when it’s all online. One outfit I worked for keeps four or five people on at one of the Meta buildings, doing stuff like changing out filters, because there’s thousands and thousands of them in the walls. Outside air gets sucked in, cleaned, and then run down a long tunnel to keep the servers cool.

The jobs lately have all been for all this AI stuff, which is not my jam. But when we bid for the job and that’s what it calls for, we’re not necessarily thinking about how bad data centers are for the environment. This is just what I do for a living. Data centers are not all we build. We do schools, hospitals, libraries, all kinds of things. The data centers are good money for people in my trade, but they’re obviously not good for the world. If that work was replaced by something else, I would be all for it, 100 percent.

Dan Caruso (Indiana): The agreement between Amazon and St. Joseph County was that, upon completion of the 16 to 18 data center shells, they would have 400 full-time workers and then 600 on-call contractors for basic maintenance. The 400 permanent workers are spread among the 16 shells, working five shifts. So five workers per shift, per building. Each of those buildings is 216,000 square feet. These guys are going to need a cell phone just to communicate with each other across these huge buildings.

Rachel Wurfel (Indiana): There was a lot of blasting required during construction, and that’s done untold foundation damage to people’s homes. Every lawyer in this area who people contacted are under NDAs. They’ve been on retainer to Meta. People don’t know where to turn for help.

Within a year of Meta starting construction, we had multiple homes that needed major foundation repairs. My next door neighbor had to have it done. Part of the house has to get jacked up so the concrete can get repoured. It takes at least a few weeks. Some of the data center contractors have come out and said that heavy blasting can cause shifts in land—and they were doing massive amounts of blasting.

problems with our water. We’ve always needed water softener, because we’re on a rural water tank. But now you get this pink cast left behind if the water sits. It’s this sludgy residue. You have to constantly scrub your bath and shower, or else it looks disgusting. We strictly use bottled water to cook with now. There’s also a smell in the air. On hot days especially, you can feel a different heaviness.

Jason Haley (Mississippi): My neighborhood was nice and peaceful until the turbines and xAI power plant came in. I’ve been here 20 years. I’ve never had any major complaints with noise. Just typical neighborhood sounds. A dog barking, stuff like that. You’d sit outside at night on your back deck and not have many problems.

constant noise. I started hearing it when I was in my backyard or around my house—not super loud at first, but always present. My first thought was, “Hell, somebody’s got a leafblower going.” But it never stopped. Then I found out it’s the xAI powerplant causing the noise.

The noise kept getting louder. It became this terribly loud, high-pitched noise—and that’s along with the lower tone rumbling. I started reaching out to city officials. They’d say, “Yeah, we know it’s a problem. But it will be better next week.” That’s a phrase they kept repeating: “It will be better next week.” It’s never gotten any damn better.

It took a lot of speaking in public, going to meetings, and posting about it for city officials to even take it seriously. The mayor at one point said it was a priority, but there was never any pause with the noise. Today it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, but that could change any minute. From my understanding, the high-pitched sound has to do with the steam and releasing the pressure from the turbines, which they run wide open.

I hear it from inside my house. It’s torture, man. Some people say, “Well, just shut your door. Stay inside. Insulate your house better.” Blah, blah, blah. It was so damn loud in my house the other night that I could feel it. It felt like my house was vibrating. And I’ve had that happen several times—where I can feel it in addition to hearing it. There are a few days here and there when it seems bearable, and I start thinking maybe they’ve finally gotten something fixed. But within 24 hours or less, it’s back to, “Fuck my life.”

Elena Schlossberg (Virginia): “Data Center Alley” is in Loudoun County, about 30 minutes from my house. When that area of Loudoun County first became Data Center Alley, they were small data centers. But it’s metastasized.

When you go into the belly of the beast, you can see what unconstrained data center growth looks like—and how the digital world is crowding out our own. You come over this ramp and look in front of you. As far as the eye can see are sprawling buildings. Cranes everywhere. Substations, transmission lines. It’s a mechanical overgrowth. No matter what road you go down, there’s more and more.

Pratika Katiyar (Virginia): Actual communities could’ve been built there, but instead it’s one data center after another. It’s dystopian, especially compared to my memories of what it was like to grow up here, when there were so many parks and kids had so much space to play and ride their bikes. They can’t ride their bikes there anymore. Some of the data centers are surrounded by barbed wire fences. Some are right out in the open. So it’s these huge, alienating rectangles that clash with the area’s culture and history, as well as the land itself.

Jane (Oregon): Data centers are great for the CEOs and uppers like that, but it’s not good for us or our land. They eat a lot of water. It’s something like 1,300 gallons of water per minute for cooling. Oregon’s in a severe drought. Usually we get buried in snow. We got one inch one day this year. That’s it.

Dan Caruso (Indiana): In 2024, our board of commissioners committed to a 24 million gallon per day withdrawal cap from our aquifer to protect it. That’s for everyday users, like people taking showers, as well as the water needs of farmers and other businesses. But now we have contractors for the data center pulling 35 million gallons of water per day–and that’s in addition to our 24 million. And let’s be generous–the town could go down to 23 million if we had to. You’d still have 58 million gallons of water per day getting pulled. That’s exceeding the capabilities of our aquifer by at least 10 million gallons of water every day. They say it will only be for a period of two years. But it can’t be for one day. They’ll drain the aquifer.

Austin Dalgo (Tennessee): Memphis sits atop one of the purest aquifers in the country. It’s the size of Lake Michigan, just underneath Memphis. We have the best-tasting water I’ve ever had in any city, and that’s because of the Sand Aquifer.

xAI initially told us they were going to use gray water. About a month ago, the company turned around and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re using freshwater at the data center.” They’re feeding off this amazing natural resource we have, using something insane like five million gallons of water a day.

There’s no reason why they can’t use gray water. Musk said that using gray water was always supposed to be phase two of the plan—but that he “doesn’t have the money right now to do it,” which is absurd coming from someone who just became the first trillionaire in history.

Jared Spann (Utah): Water has been a sensitive subject for a while here. This year we had one of the worst snowpack years in Utah history. Almost all of Utah’s water comes from snow runoff. And now Kevin O’Leary wants to use two billion gallons of our water per year for his psychotic data center.

Not having the moisture we need, the temperatures are getting insanely hot. We’re getting well into the hundreds during the summer, and it’s lasting for longer and longer. Everything dries out, so then we’re also dealing with wildfires. As if that weren’t enough, the Great Salt Lake is evaporating and receding every year, which puts toxic chemicals into the air. Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front traps all those pollutants. Now they’re saying O’Leary’s data center will raise temperatures across the entire Wasatch Front. According to Governor Cox, somehow it will all be fine.

Paul Oblock (Utah): I never would’ve considered myself a climate activist in any way whatsoever. But there are some early estimates from ecologists that O’Leary’s data center could raise daytime temperatures in our region by five degrees, and then nighttime temperatures by almost thirty. So when they’re only 10 miles away from such an awesome ecological site as the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge—it doesn’t take an ecology professor to know that a thirty degree rise in temperature will not be good for any of the wildlife in that area or that marshland habitat. There’s going to be a lot of evaporation of that existing water at an accelerated pace.

If temperatures rise that much, it doesn’t seem sustainable for any amount of time. Imagine where we’ll be in 200 years if it goes on like that. My family and I love it here, but now I’m left wondering what my sons’ future will look like. If we don’t have water that’s easily accessible and we’re bleeding it all dry–I worry about the future for all of us, period.

Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin): I thought these were going to be my golden years. I thought it was going to be me and the raccoons. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t think I can sell my house at this point, but I don’t think I can live with this monster data center either.

I’ve never protested. I’m a 67-year-old lady. The only time I’ve been a menace to someone was when I took sailing lessons. I wanted to mind my own business, but suddenly I’m taking on towns and cities, and even the whole state. I’ve come to realize we’re all in this together, and we can do this together. Even though people are so trodden on and so defeated, there’s still this little voice that won’t go away. And that’s America truly being America.

For anyone who’s looking to get involved, remember that facts speak truth. A lot of people in suits are going to tell you that you don’t matter. They’ll say you’re small and you should crawl back under your rock. So you need thick skin.

But if this keeps you up at night, you should do something. Even if that just means going to a town meeting and telling people it’s wrong. And when you speak to government people, don’t be afraid to tell them like it is. I told our state senator to her face that she’s wishy-washy, and she got really upset. But the people who lead us need to be tougher than that.

Jason Haley (Mississippi): After some back and forth, an xAI representative offered me enough where I could get a nice house somewhere else. It was clear what they wanted, which was for me to shut the fuck up and go away. But it doesn’t feel right. That’s not who I am. What about everyone who can’t just pack up and move? I’m trying to have some integrity here and do the right thing.

Elena Schlossberg (Wisconsin): I was one of those residents who was hesitant to become involved. I was very aware of the situation, but I never thought it would come to this. Having access to more information than I did a year ago—my advice is for people to realize that, if you don’t do it, no one else will.

LaTricea Adams (Tennessee): This is a pivotal moment where the majority of the country has something in common that’s ticking us all off, and that’s data centers. So how can we harness that energy and take back our democracy? It’s possible. The elected officials who are just creating pathways for the tech bros—we need to remind them they work for us, not corporations.

most corrupt White House the U.S. has ever seen. But it would be a mistake to say that he and his White House are acting alone. Indeed, in the latest assault on America’s anti-corruption edifice—perhaps the most destructive effort yet—the White House is taking a back seat, and is instead looking to Republican allies in Congress to undo the single most important anti-corruption step the U.S. has taken in years.

center of the world of offshore finance. While places like Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other smaller locales got most of the headlines regarding offshore secrecy, in reality it was the U.S. that dominated the world of laundering illicit wealth, attracting billions (and potentially more) from narco-traffickers, arms dealers, kleptocrats, and others looking to wash their wealth clean.

Many industries accelerated America’s transformation into an offshore behemoth, including real estate and private equity, both of which enjoyed decades-long loopholes in basic anti–money laundering provisions. But there was one industry in particular that served as the bedrock for all of these laundering networks: shell companies. Thanks to America’s fractured corporate formation landscape, the federal government had no say in how U.S. shell companies were formed—or what kind of information was needed when setting up a shell company.

As a result, states like Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, and others provided all of the secrecy and legal protections that cartel heads, dictators, human smugglers, and others needed to hide their financial tracks. In a matter of minutes, anyone around the world could set up a U.S. shell company and immediately access their own bespoke U.S. money-laundering network—all of it perfectly legally. Time and again, investigators both domestic and foreign could track a dirty money trail, only to watch their efforts collapse in the face of a Delaware or Nevada shell company.

It wasn’t simply autocrats and their oligarchic proxies who benefited from these anonymous shells. Wealthy Americans, those looking to secretly influence American politics, those searching for ways to covertly inject finance into U.S. elections—all of them profited from this rank secrecy.

Efforts to bring the barest transparency to U.S. shell companies stretch back to at least 2008. But it wasn’t until the early 2020s that legislators finally passed something called the Corporate Transparency Act. The bill was hardly partisan; remarkably, a slate of legislators from both sides of the aisle passed the bill over President Trump’s veto. Nor was the bill onerous. Instead of a public registry of corporate owners, as seen in places like the United Kingdom, America’s new shell company database would remain private, accessible only to federal authorities and other officials tracking illicit and looted wealth.

It’s difficult to overstate just how momentous this new legislation was. For the first time in decades, the U.S. was no longer the leading font of anonymous shell companies. The best days of U.S. offshoring appeared behind us.

announcedannounced that it was destroying all of the filings the registry had compiled thus far, torching the database entirely.

Still, the law technically remained, as did the related statutes of limitations—and the potential for a future administration to go after malefactors still setting up anonymous shells. Trump could announce that the law was a dead letter, but that didn’t mean he could repeal it fully.

pushed through legislation by a one-vote marginintroduced similar legislation, aiming to attach it to the broader defense bill set to be passed later this year.

said, all of which “risks turning the United States back into a place where criminals and foreign adversaries can more easily fund their networks and hide dirty money in plain sight.”

It’s not difficult to see where this new momentum for effective repeal is coming from. Trump, saturated as he is in rampaging anonymity and international financing, has gone as far as he can to flip the U.S. from an opponent of corruption to a confederate of kleptocrats around the world. But he needs his allies in Congress to help him achieve all of his pro-kleptocracy aims—and to help all of their wealthy, oligarchic benefactors continue to benefit from anonymous U.S. shell companies, as well.

said.

All of which is to say: Trump may be the leading wrecking ball destroying America’s anti-corruption credentials. But he is hardly alone. Thanks to congressional Republicans, Trump—and corrupt actors around the world, salivating at the chance to turn the U.S. back into their own personal dirty-money laundromat, can finally restore an American kleptocracy in which only oligarchs, grifters, and criminal kingpins benefit, while everyone else pays the price.

suggestedclarified his position: “As I’ve said from day one, this reckless, illegal war was a mistake and it’s no surprise it led to a shameful deal. This war must end.”

poised to undermine any lasting peace deal between the United States and Iran. “I do still think there’s kind of a vestigial reflex among a lot of Democrats to oppose anything that’s good for Iran, to oppose anything Israel doesn’t like, and to oppose anything that suggests the U.S. is not all-powerful,” says Matt Duss, a former foreign policy staffer for Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. “Despite the multiple foreign policy failures of the last several decades, especially after 9/11, there is still this belief that American military power can do magical things—even for critics of this war,” he added.

wrotecalledfunds could be used to “end homelessness, fund cancer research for 40 years, and give every child free pre-K for over 7 years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran.”

The agreement states only that the U.S., “with regional partners,” will “develop a definitive mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 Billion.” Essentially, this amounts to a commitment to make a plan to create a fund. The MOU further clarifies that those funds will be dollars—not that the U.S. government will itself be providing $300 billion (or any amount) directly.

small portion of Iranian assets that have been frozen in foreign accounts. The deal, Batmanghelidj added, “makes very clear the promise to Iran that if diplomacy is pursued to the max extent possible, and a deal is reached, then Iran can achieve an end state where it’s no longer a global pariah.”

It’s arguably somewhat historic that the U.S. and Iran—after decades of tensions—have agreed to respect one another’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs,” per the MOU.

abruptly postponedbombing Lebanon on Friday after reports that the two countries had renewed a ceasefire. “Critics need to be really mindful that they are giving a lot of fodder to hard-liners in Iran who are not convinced about this deal,” Batmanghelidj said, “but also hard-liners in Israel and the Gulf states, who’ve so far been overruled by more pragmatic figures in their systems.”

If negotiations do proceed, the team that’s been leading those talks for the U.S.—namely Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—aren’t exactly ideal personnel to hash out the more technical details that will be required for any lasting peace agreement. “Iran and the other countries in the region are going to have to work very hard to make sure Trump doesn’t convince himself that it’s ‘mission accomplished,’” Batmanghelidj said.

told CNN. “I hope that most elected Democrats are smart enough to know that right now Donald Trump owns this war,” Duss said. “He owns this whole catastrophe. If Democrats are seen as doing anything to tank this ceasefire agreement—that leads to a resumption of the war—they will be co-owners of this war with Trump.”

ESPN, Hearn said that he “briefly touched a chunk that was still attached to the side of the pool, then let go shortly after a park worker told him to.” Unhappily, a conservative journalist named Emily Miller—surely you haven’t forgotten her 2013 classic Emily Gets Her Gun: But Obama Wants to Take Yours—was on the scene, and she took a two-minute video of the 67-year-old Hearn, a former U.S. Olympic team canoe racer. Before he knew it, Park Police officers arrested him and charged him with destruction of government property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn said. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

Trump posted on Saturday night about arrests of “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations [sic] magnificent Reflecting Pool.” The Post sought comment on this point from the Park Police but got no response.

You’d think a guy who just lost a war would have bigger matters on his mind, but to Trump, matters don’t come any bigger than the Reflecting Pool and the Kennedy Center, because they are about the thing that is most important to him: his monstrously large but porcelain-fragile ego. I don’t condone vandalism of government property, so if anyone did that, fine, arrest them (though it sounds like Hearn, whose hearing is slated for July 9, didn’t). But I submit to you that the real vandalism here is being committed by Trump.

Apparently, the Reflecting Pool had—still has—very serious drainage issues. So fine. Fix those. But the idea that the color of the pool was somehow inadequate never occurred to anyone until Trump came along. I’d imagine that over on Newsmax and One America News Network (Miller’s former employer, for what it’s worth), they’re selling the makeover as another shimmering example of Trump’s courageous patriotism that drives the woke liberals insane. But the design change is really chiefly about his vanity. He just aches to leave monuments to and reminders of himself across the nation’s capital. Or maybe, like Narcissus, he wants to visit the pool and stare endlessly at his own reflection.

Current records showoily Dick Tracy villain” should be his personal aesthetic.

Another no-bid contract went to a company that did work on a swimming pool at Trump’s Virginia golf club. That company, Atlantic Industrial Holdings, had never before received a contract from the federal government and, according to records obtained by The New York Times,charging a 20 percent profit margin, when such margins typically run 6 to 12 percent.

Rigged contracts, donors, ridiculous cost overruns. But that’s not even the worst of it. There are concerns that the workers who did the resurfacing may have been exposed to hazardous chemicals and that the masks they wore were inadequate to protect them from the tiny particulates in the air. The Guardianreported on this back in May, when an official from the union that represents the workers said, “The chemicals are hazardous. My concern is usually the level of risk when it’s rushed. Are workers taking the rightful steps to protect themselves?”

The next Democratic (God willing) president will have quite a lot on his or her plate, goodness knows, and there will be more “important” matters to attend to than what Trump is trying to do to our nation’s capital. But the Reflecting Pool and the Kennedy Center and the proposed arch at Arlington Cemetery and the White House ballroom—and don’t forget the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, formerly known rather boringly as the United States Institute of Peace, rebranded by the State Department last year—are plenty important. These are corrupt actions (remember that the ballroom went through none of the usual required processes), and they’re grotesque, third world–dictator moves that are completely inappropriate for a democracy.

So the Democratic presidential contenders will need to be asked at their candidate forums and debates: What are you going to do about the ballroom? The arch, if it’s being built by then? Will you tear these things down? Will you return the Institute of Peace to its old name? Will you pressure Congress to pass a law stipulating that the Kennedy Center will be named for John F. Kennedy, and for him only, for all time?

key litmus test for Democratic presidential contenders was ending the stranglehold of billionaires over our politics. That’s a big priority. Still, the Democratic candidates’ answers to these questions about Trump’s vandalism of the District is a test in itself. It will tell us a lot about their character, their disposition, and how hard they’re willing to fight on the big stuff. In the meantime, keep the Reflecting Pool green. And free David Hearn.

An examination of government documents, private-sector contracting records, and the little-noticed statements of military commanders suggests that the same artificial intelligence that allowed frictionless decapitation in Iran is now coming to the nuclear arsenal—with potentially world-altering consequences. While much noise has been made about protecting the nuclear command from AI, with constant reassurances of “human-in-the-loop” safeguards, a different escalatory threat has fallen by the wayside: what’s known as “left of launch” operations.

With worst-case scenarios of nuclear engagement, most people think of military planners fomenting support for a doomsday machine, as in the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove. During the Cold War, near misses occurred with terrifying frequency, such as the occasion when a flock of geese was mistaken for a Soviet nuclear bombing campaign. Most of these almost catastrophic errors revolved around mistaking things for missiles that had already been launched.

With the integration of AI into the nuclear command and control infrastructure, escalation may soon begin on the ground before the launch codes have been entered and the bunkers sealed. This new doctrine is called “left of launch,” and AI is increasingly being integrated into the systems used to predict when a nuclear weapon is being launched, as well as the assets that could be degraded to prevent a first strike.

As we have seen time and time again, the frictionless intelligence that led to a perfect exfiltration in Venezuela, or the targeted killings in Iran, may soon grease the wheels of preemptive strikes on nuclear capabilities, an escalation into untested terrain for both artificial intelligence and humanity.

What is left of launch? The first public use of the term appears to be a 2014 memo between Army and Navy chiefs discussing the need for new technologies for U.S. missile defense. That memo states, “Now is the opportunity to develop a long-term approach that addresses homeland missile defense and regional missile defense priorities—a holistic approach that is more sustainable and cost effective, incorporating ‘left-of-launch’ and other non-kinetic means of defense. The proposed strategy would serve as the capstone for the Department to balance priorities, inform resourcing decisions, and restore our strategic flexibility.”

This memo marked a strategic shift, putting an increasing focus on the idea of stopping adversaries’ nuclear missiles before they’re launched, a tactic that proved effective during the Obama era for degrading North Korea’s ballistic missile tests. Since the 2014 memo, cyberattacks and sabotage have been added to preemptive air or missile strikes on foreign missile launchers and facilities, under the umbrella of left of launch.

Five years after the term left of launch began cropping up inside the Department of Defense, the Trump administration commissioned and released a review of U.S. “policies, strategies, and capabilities … to counter the expanding missile threats posed by rogue states and revisionist powers.” The report called for an escalatory build-out of new capabilities. Among those was a new framework for advancing the notion that preemptive action is actually just another form of defense.

As Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote at the time, the report increased the escalation cycle with America’s enemies by “bringing attack operations into the overall missile defense posture as a triad along with active defenses, such as interceptors, and passive defenses, such as hardening and dispersal of potential missile targets.” This, according to Grego, created what amounts to “a kinetic version of left of launch” that no longer reflects traditional deterrence but instead is a first-strike capability.

Grego also pointed out that the report’s interpretation by other nuclear powers, namely Russia and China, will not abide by America’s framing that new satellites and hypersonic ballistic missiles are for defensive capabilities, something Russia quickly made explicit.

During the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was pushed from all sides, including by the joint chiefs of staff, to launch a preemptive bombing campaign against the Soviets to obliterate their nuclear capacity on the island. Instead, JFK opted for a passive blockade and diplomatic back channeling that resolved the issue without kinetic force or the potential for catastrophic escalation. But new AI technology being sold to the U.S. government may forestall a similarly de-escalatory approach in the coming decades.

In June 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then America’s top commander in Afghanistan, was forced to resign after a long string of incidents suggested contempt for civilian control of the U.S. military. First, he publicly called for tens of thousands of troops to surge in Afghanistan before a confidential document codifying his opinion leaked to the press, two breaches in protocol that resulted in accusations of subversion of the chain of command. Soon afterward, he and various other commanders and staff were revealed to have disparaged the president and vice president in an article for Rolling Stone. He prepared his resignation the same day it was published.

Now McChrystal is advising an AI technology firm that bills itself as being better at predicting the future of nuclear warfare than both civilian and military commanders. In a lengthy opinion piece penned in Foreign Policy, McChrystal wrote that the firm Rhombus, where he serves as an adviser, predicted the invasion of Ukraine by Russia better than the U.S. national security apparatus. “The quantity of data we analyze helps predict the next card in an opponent’s deck with previously unimaginable confidence.”

Rhombus CEO Anshu Roy cites Sun Tzu to summarize his firm’s premise: “Battles are won before they start.” Roy’s firm has won a $200 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for “an artificial intelligence platform for strategic decision making in defense and national security enterprises,” and has been sanctioned by the Communist Party of China for its work on behalf of the Taiwanese military. In 2024, Carrier management wrote that Rhombus Power also tracks North Korean missile launches for an unnamed government client, suggesting its potential for left of launch applications has been in motion now for some time.

As The New Republic reported last year, Rhombus’s Ambient product, described as a “digital nervous system, made approximately 32,000 predictions in 2023. Of those tens of thousands, 25,000 were accurate.” That’s a .780 batting average, which, while great for baseball, might not be high enough for initiating nuclear conflict.

In his article, McChrystal acknowledges that “while AI can make the picture clearer, it only makes decision-makers’ choices more complex”—an apparent nod to civilian control of the military. Nonetheless, there is a subtle untruth to the idea that AI integration into systems used to detect adversaries’ nuclear command and control infrastructure will be a merely passive tool to provide commanders options in the situation room.

As we’ve seen in the Trump administration’s use of incredibly powerful weaponry and detection technology, intelligence fueled by AI greases the wheels of the national security apparatus, whether the outcomes of kinetic action will have long-term beneficial impacts or not. In an interview with Politico, Rhombus officials countered this point by pointing to its having de-escalated a flare-up of hostilities between India and Pakistan by “identifying activity at Pakistani bases that could have been mistaken for nuclear arms escalation … but was not.”

But while the generals advising Rhombus about the promise of AI’s use on the battlefield are charging full steam ahead, not every retired general is in alignment. Prior to his retirement, Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan served as director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a Department of Defense component studying the integration of AI in the battlefield.

In an article for the Arms Control Association, Shanahan wrote: “One especially destabilizing scenario involves the widespread application of AI to detect and continuously monitor the ground, sea, and airborne nuclear forces of other states. Adversary integration of AI-enhanced systems … could erode confidence in a state’s assured retaliation posture. This loss of confidence could in turn increase incentives for preemptive strikes, weakening the logic of deterrence and undermining strategic stability. The problem becomes even more acute if such surveillance and tracking technologies are paired with AI-enhanced automation of decision-making or launch processes, heightening first-strike incentives during a crisis.”

His conclusion ultimately found that even small-scale errors at the input level of AI systems could “produce disproportionate upstream consequences once multiple AI models are embedded across interconnected platforms and decision-support systems.”

As AI integration into left of launch ramps up, job listings obtained by The New Republic show the extent to which AI is already being injected into United Strategic Command, which is responsible for maintaining and operating the nuclear arsenal. The command’s official remit includes overseeing Strategic Deterrence; Nuclear Command, Control, and Communication, or NC3, Enterprise Operations; Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations; and Global Strike and Missile Threat Assessment.

These job offers include a General Dynamics listing for an AI engineer to work at Stratcom to reduce the complexity of command and control through AI and machine learning, and an AI adviser to oversee AI integration into the Tomahawk weapon systems threat mission planning center.

Elsewhere, a contractor called DEFCON AI is hiring a subject matter expert to support the development of a modeling and simulation environment, who has “deep expertise in U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) programs to help model strategic capabilities, planning constructs, and operational decision frameworks” to “support analysis across the nuclear deterrence mission set.”

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin posted a listing for a staff AI research engineer based out of USSTRATCOM’s headquarters in Nebraska to work on integrating AI into the nuclear deterrence mission. Taken together, these postings show that AI is being increasingly integrated into both the nuclear command and control infrastructure and into the conventional weapons systems that could be used in a left of launch first-strike scenario.

AI integration across the DOD has ramped up with executive orders and a new AI-styled space race with great power competitors like China and Russia. But one development over the past two years has integrated AI into the left of launch framework with the result of escalating tensions with nuclear powers that claim a new “defensive capability” is an outright escalation on the nuclear battlefield.

In his second term, Donald Trump unveiled his plans for the Golden Dome, a network of space detection satellites, high-energy weapons, and ground- and sea-based interceptor missiles to shield the U.S. from missile threats. The program is expected to cost $185 billion, with an initial capability delivered by 2028 and the full system in place in 2035. (Some analysts have put the figure closer to $3.5 trillion.)

The U.S. Space Force has already handed out billions in contracts for prototype interceptor missiles. The escalatory potential for the system, however, is not found in explosive hardware but in the detection capabilities proposed for the system. Firefly Aerospace and its recently acquired SciTec have touted their products for the Golden Dome, including missile warning systems, surveillance and reconnaissance, autonomous command and control, all in addition to “AI-enabled systems designed for low latency operations to support advanced threat tracking and response across multiple domains.”

Also involved in AI, data processing, and command control systems for the Golden Dome are Palantir, Anduril, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The Space Force general in charge of the Golden Dome, Michael Guetlein, let slip in an interview to the Washington Examiner that “left of launch counterattacks” will also be a core component of the Golden Dome.

Russia and China have taken note, releasing a joint statement criticizing the integration of left of launch into Donald Trump’s new project, describing it as a “complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability. The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.” In other words, a new arms race is on.

Over the past year, members of Congress have introduced tepid legislation to curb the integration of AI into weapons systems and the nuclear arsenal. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Secure and Accountable Military AI Act. The bill would essentially mandate something that already exists: a human in the loop for AI targeting and control systems. This will accomplish little more than introduce a new button pusher into vast and allegedly omniscient AI systems.

Senator Elissa Slotkin introduced her own bill months before that sought not only to ban AI for the use in a first-strike nuclear launch but also to restrict the application of AI to domestic surveillance. But even if these bills were to pass, the full-scale AI arms race with China suggests there may be little hope of stopping the ever-present drift toward a frictionless DOD that moves toward strikes with a will of its own.

As left of launch capabilities are streamlined with AI, potential response times for action may decrease. The grace period for escalatory phone calls and meetings also becomes condensed. Both the U.S. and its enemies will have access to vast flows of satellite data, social media intelligence, internal communications from hostile actors, and even psychological profiling, all wrapped together into a blaring warning strobe. Maybe this technology really will make us safer, enabling first strike or cyberattacks to prevent and degrade a future launch. But maybe it won’t.

In Dr. Strangelove—the most famous on-screen critique of the nuclear arms race—the president asks the mad Dr. Strangelove about the contours of the doomsday machine, an ultimate deterrence mechanism that would bring about the total annihilation of the world. “How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?” he asks. “Mr. President,” Dr Strangelove replies, “it is not only possible, it is essential.” As AI creeps into left of launch operations, in addition to every other nook and cranny of the Defense Department, the logic underpinning this drive to replace human judgment with a tangle of AI algorithms sounds very Strangelove-ian indeed.

Sulzberger’s core argument when addressing the annual WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference on June 1 was that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s property and undermining democracy, and that the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. 

Big Tech’s “hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products—a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,” Sulzberger argued. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.” 

If such stealing is allowed to continue, he continued, we risk a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy—the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism—continues to dry up.… The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations] … is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits. (The Times, he noted, has spent $20 million on such lawsuits.)

In sum, the publisher of one of the world’s most influential newspapers has accused some of the richest, most powerful companies on earth of being criminals; of building their vast fortunes on a foundation of lies and theft at grand scale. And he urged the rest of the media to join the Times in fighting back, for the sake of not only their own commercial survival but the survival of a free press and the democracy it nourishes.

Le MondeVarietyPress Gazette for writing about the speech, and to The Seattle Times for publishing excerpts on its opinion page. But given the big names, enormous sums, and profound stakes involved, why has there been so little other coverage? Why are those outlets the exceptions?

Here’s a hint: The Times itself didn’t report on the speech. Instead, the business side of the paper issued a press release containing the text. But there was no mention of the speech in the news, business, opinion, or other sections of the paper. That absence reflects a view long held by newsroom traditionalists: We (almost) never report on ourselves. The corollary—nor do we report on our competitors—likely explains why the rest of the media has been silent.

Perhaps such coverage is still to come; certainly Sulzberger’s call to arms warrants the attention of any specialist outlet focused on the news media. And maybe there are executive conversations taking place right now that will result in other newsrooms joining Sulzberger’s movement. After all, his speech did invite journalists and news executives to get in touch, offer their own ideas, and explore possible collaborations.

Covering Climate Now welcomes this opportunity, and we urge fellow journalists around the world to consider pursuing it, as well. We find Sulzberger’s analysis of the dangers facing our industry and our society persuasive, and highly pertinent to our core concern of how journalism reports on the climate emergency and its solutions.  

lost 75%3,000 newspapers” over the last two decades. That’s 3,000 newspapers that will never tell the climate story. 

Even for news outlets that remain in business, shrunken revenues make it challenging to cover even routine subjects, much less a story like climate change. AI is no friend to a free press or a livable climate, and it’s time journalists grapple with how we respond.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered that “Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent FILE a declaration under the penalty of perjury that they will not take any action to create or operate the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,” issuing a preliminary injunction and giving the government a deadline of June 19.

The deadline arrived on Friday, and the Department of Justice responded by refusing to file such a declaration due to “serious separation of powers concerns.” The DOJ claimed that Blanche’s congressional testimony earlier this month that the fund is “not going forward, period” is enough, along with similar statements from other administration officials.

This raises questions as to whether the Trump administration is sneakily trying to keep the fund alive in some form. After Blanche’s congressional testimony, Trump was asked if he was ending his slush fund plans. “No, a court ruled against it,” Trump said, going on to argue that “these are people that have been decimated” and “they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

Last week, The Atlantic reported that White House officials were still telling President Trump’s allies that they would get some form of payment, even with Blanche’s public statements disavowing the fund.

Department of Justice lawyers also refused to declare the fund dead in writing to another federal judge, Richard Leon, more than a week ago. At the time, anonymous sources told The Atlantic that work was continuing on the fund inside the Trump administration in secret. With that in mind, Friday’s court filing from White House officials makes it seem like they are trying to skirt the law and create the slush fund anyway.

The DOJ claims that the other three million pages are either duplicates, unrelated to Epstein, or protected by legal privilege. But because of the administration’s lack of transparency in regard to Epstein, many are concerned that something is still being hidden.

CBS News analyzed the available files to try to figure out which documents appeared to be missing, and found a number of notable omissions: questionable redactions, missing emails from older accounts, lack of massage scheduling records after 2009, missing prison surveillance footage, and more.

Notably, most of the emails in the released files were from an email account created in 2008, around the time Epstein went to jail: jeevacation@gmail.com.

But Epstein had other, older email addresses that were mentioned in only a few, highly redacted publicly released files. One missing account, littlestjeff@yahoo.com, was from the early 2000s—the time when Epstein was most in touch with Donald Trump.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is innocent of all charges when it comes to his connection with Epstein. But, as this analysis by CBS reveals, we may still be missing major pieces of the puzzle.

The Washington Post, citing unnamed former and current U.S. officials, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to continue bombing and occupying Lebanon, even though the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding demands a “permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

“Continuing to occupy part of Lebanon is a recipe for disaster,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Post. “Without a full Israeli withdrawal, the likelihood of resumed hostilities between the [Israeli military] and Hezbollah is all but certain.”

ّIsraelis have publicly denounced the 14-point MOU, with media commentators in the country calling it a “catastrophic capitulation” and a “diplomatic Oct. 7,” referencing the Hamas-led attack from 2023. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Friday seemingly advocated for a genocide in Lebanon, posting on X in Hebrew that “for every tear shed by an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers should cry. All of Lebanon should burn.”

Netanyahu has used constant warfare, from relentless war crimes in Gaza to bombing Iran and Lebanon, to deflect against corruption charges and save his political fortunes. Any end to these conflicts would only hurt his chances in Israel’s October elections. He and his far-right, fascistic political allies in Israel are willing to slaughter countless innocent people across the Middle East to save themselves and continue their settler colonialism.

The filtration work of the Ohio firm, ironically called Greenwater Services, has come under scrutiny because … well. You’ve seen the pool.

Greenwater Services is owned by the J.J. Carafo Investment Trust, led by John J. Carafo. Carafo is a longtime Republican donor who Trump has described as a “fantastic man.” Carafo, who has previously skirted campaign finance law, also pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to bribe Democratic Representative James A. Traficant Jr.

The $1.7 million contract was directly awarded to Carafo’s company by the National Park Service, bypassing the usual competitive bidding process. Katie Martin, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, said the department did not know about Carafo’s political affiliation when his firm was hired.

“This company was selected because they had the expertise, work force and materials” needed to finish the job by the country’s 250th anniversary, she told the Times.

Carafo and Greenwater Services did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.

Because the president wants the reflecting pool “American Flag Blue” by July 4, other firms have been hired for their ability to complete jobs on a short timeline, like Virginia firm Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was given a no-bid contract of $14.7 million to put bright blue waterproofing material on the pool’s floor. That paint is already peeling.

At this point, it might just be easier to turn the flag green.

delivered an emotional speech at the Obama Presidential Center’s opening ceremony on Thursday. It offered a blistering indictment of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, all without mentioning the words “Donald Trump,” while offering his own ambitious rendering of the American story.

Yet in so doing, the speech also sent an implicit message to Democrats: Defeating Trumpism, MAGA, and the right-wing nationalist vision of America that animates them requires something more than small-bore politics and slogans about “affordability.” It requires a bigger and better story, a positive and aspirational vision, a full-throated declaration of what we liberals think the United States is—and should be—instead.

Obama has long been a spokesperson for the idea of creedal nationalism, which holds that American identity is defined by our founding ideals, versus a nationalism rooted in heritage or ethnicity or race. And so, Obama declared that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.” They include:

a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

Let’s be blunt: It’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and his movement simply do not accept any of those things. And it’s important that Obama used this moment to say so. Obama also lionized “the peaceful transfer of power” and called for a reaffirmation of “character, honesty, integrity” and “a sense of duty and honor” in public life. Guess who he was talking about?

But creedal nationalism was the main event here. To reinforce the idea, Obama also declared that these values are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the “framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.” Implicitly targeting Trump, Obama said that when we give up on these ideals:

we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies, and keep those who are different in their place. I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end.

Emphasis mine. That’s as close as I’ve seen any leading Democrat come to stating outright that Trump and MAGA fundamentally do not accept the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. This is where liberals should go in the battle over our 250th anniversary.

declared that “America is not just an idea.” Citing his own ancestors’ burial on a “mountainside in Eastern Kentucky,” Vance suggests that the “source of America’s greatness” is the “ancestral” bond Americans feel with the “homeland.” Vance mocks the “creedal nation” by insisting that its logic leads to an unacceptable conclusion: that all foreigners, everywhere, might instantly have a claim to U.S. citizenship merely by mouthing agreement with our founding ideals.

Few if any prominent Democrats or liberals believe anything like that last bit. The idea, rather, is that immigrants do have a claim to becoming Americans—they are “Americans in waiting”—provided they clear certain civic hurdles, including adherence to the nation’s founding ideals. Their rates of admission, and the conditions that shape their arrival and assimilation, are agreed upon democratically by our elected representatives in Congress and subject to revision over time. But yes, in the liberal vision, the idea that immigrants do have a conditional claim to belonging is fundamental to American identity.

Vance’s big claim, by contrast, is that fealty to our founding ideals cannot be the basis for American national identity. Blood and hereditary attachment to the soil are, to him, essential ingredients.

Jamelle Bouie notes, put all this together, and Vance’s vision of citizenship involves “tiers of belonging,” in which those with long ancestry—“heritage Americans”—hold a superior position in an imagined national hierarchy.

Or, as Obama put it, that vision sees “some groups as more equal than others.” In this sense, Obama’s speech is a rebuttal to this sort of Vance-MAGA nationalism. Along these lines, Obama also gave a shout-out to the people in Minneapolis, who

braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors, and sometimes look out for strangers, because they knew that was the right thing to do.

Among the “strangers,” of course, are all the immigrants—undocumented and legal—who were targeted by Trump for forced mass removals.

In this understanding, the “strangers” do not become Americans simply via support for the nation’s ideals. But they may well be on the road to becoming Americans, via a social process. Crucially, the ties Obama describes here are not purely cerebral or only rooted in “an idea,” as Vance puts it. These are moral, ethical, communitarian, and even cultural ties that develop over time. And this process is molded by majorities deciding—again, democratically—how to shape their political life together and who can share in it.

recent columnnew Liberal Currents Reconstruction Papers, for instance, suggest rebuilding such institutions to reinforce democratic cohesion.

Obama’s speech too makes this point. He says the American experiment relies on a sense of the “common good,” of “common humanity,” of social “trust,” and of “mutual respect,” and hails the role of community in helping create such conditions.

Michael KazinNoah SmithYoni AppelbaumAchieving Our Country, a canonical call for a positive patriotism that depicts our country as flawed but progressing toward realizing its ideals. Obama declares as much with his paean to each generation making our “union more perfect.”

delivered in 1858. In it, Lincoln declares that the immigrants of the day have no ties of heritage or blood to the founding generation. But once they reflect on the Declaration’s promise of equality, it allows them to claim such a bond:

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

In Lincoln’s speech, dedication to the proposition that all people are created equal is a substitute for ties of heritage and blood. So it is for Obama, and for him here’s the key: It’s no less strong for being so.

These bonds are not merely intellectual: They are deeply, powerfully rooted in “moral sentiment,” in a sense of common humanity and the mutual goodwill that arises from sharing a common political project. Obama’s speech tells us: If you’re looking for a rebuttal to Vance-MAGA nationalism, well, those ideas are a good place to start.