May 31, 2026 (Sunday)

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948 they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed on to the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.

On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”
“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

June 1, 2026 (Monday)

As we enter the summer months, we’re hitting the ground running. There is so much news today, I’m going to have to let some of it splash over into tomorrow to do it justice. For today, Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.

Over the weekend, there were what I’m going to have to call the usual reports of an imminent agreement between the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, with the usual outcome.

Last week the U.S. and Iran appeared to be making headway on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to continue the ceasefire and to establish a framework for further talks about Iran’s nuclear program. But President Donald J. Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place in these negotiations.

His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.

And Congress returns to work tomorrow, raising the possibility that lawmakers will pass a war powers resolution requiring Trump to withdraw American forces from the region. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent House members home a day early before the Memorial Day holiday out of concern such a measure would pass.

But Iran is in no hurry to throw Trump a lifeline. Their negotiators now maintain they have a right to control the Strait of Hormuz. They are demanding reparations for the damage inflicted in the country during the war, and they say they won’t negotiate over the nuclear program until there is a ceasefire.

But these conditions are all problematic for Trump’s negotiators. Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.

And then there is the nuclear issue.

So what has tended to happen in negotiations is that the teams come up with a framework, details leak to the media, and Trump’s base hears that Trump has weakened on some of his maximalist demands. They complain, Trump then posts something false about the talks or incendiary about Iran, and the negotiations fall apart.

And the cost of the war, in both lives and treasure, and the pressure on U.S. consumers and the economy continue to mount.

Last Friday, Trump and his advisors spent two hours discussing the latest round of negotiations in the Situation Room. According to Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi of the New York Times, that agreement included the release of about $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets and a postwar “investment fund” to rebuild Iran, with one diplomat telling the journalists the number on the table was $300 billion. Talks about Iran’s nuclear program would be deferred.

On Friday morning, Trump posted, once again, that the strait would be opened and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. But then he emerged from the Situation Room without the “final determination” on the agreement he had promised. On Saturday, Mohsen Rezaie, one of the advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, posted: “As predicted, the President of the United States is betraying diplomacy for the third time.”

Over the weekend, Trump’s social media account posted repeated attacks on Democrats and on the judges who have been deciding against him in legal cases. He posted long defenses of his alterations to monuments in Washington, D.C., and AI images of capital landmarks covered in trash and graffiti juxtaposed with ones gleaming and fresh, with captions that blame Democrats for the former and praise Trump for the latter.

His posts seemed designed primarily to reassure himself. By Saturday, so many of the musical acts his team had lined up to play at his Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” from late June through the beginning of July had bailed that Trump posted that he was “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” He continued: “Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

It was an odd echo of his December 19, 2020, tweet calling his base to Washington, D.C., in which he wrote: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Odder still was what followed: image after image of Trump as a great leader. There were images of Trump alongside first president George Washington, one of them showing the two presidents riding horses together in colonial garb beside a racecar with TRUMP across the hood, the White House in the background, and the Space Shuttle overhead. In an AI image, Trump is dunking a basketball over an exhausted New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat; in another image, he and Patriots football player Tom Brady stand talking, backlit, under a caption that reads “GOAT.”

There were pictures of Trump kissing the American flag; Mount Rushmore with Trump’s sculpture in line with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln (who looks somewhat alarmed); Trump apparently as a superhero admiral with armor on his chest that bears an American eagle; Trump standing near King Charles; Trump with China’s president Xi Jinping.

A series of AI images in the style of the 1950s Dick and Jane readers show a town parade festooned with flags and patriotic bunting, little girls laughing together at an old-fashioned town fair, and little boys in a suburb playing ball. All of the images read: “AMERICA IS BACK!” And in them, all of the people are white.

He posted an image of a white family from that era standing beside a Cadillac Coupe DeVille parked on a suburban street, with the caption: “BILLIONS WERE SPENT TO CONVINCE YOU THIS IS EVIL.”

Then Trump’s account posted a series of images contrasting his vision of Biden’s America versus his own. In his images, Biden’s world was one of theft, illegal squatting, violence, and illegal immigration. The images of Trump’s “solutions” to these problems showed people imprisoned, arrested, and deported.

At 1:02 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end—It always does! President DJT”

A minute later, his account posted: “Has anyone ever seen a happy Dumocrat???”

Then, later this morning, Iranian officials said they were suspending negotiations with the U.S. until Israel, which entered the war alongside the U.S., stops its strikes on Lebanon, strikes they say violate the ceasefire agreement. They warned they would close the Strait of Hormuz entirely—a few ships have been making the transit—and move against the Bab al-Mandab strait at the outlet of the Red Sea, as well. On CNBC, Trump told Eamon Javers that he doesn’t care if peace negotiations with Iran end. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. Negotiations were starting “to get very boring.”

But oil prices jumped sharply with the announcement of the suspension and the threat to the Bab al-Mandab, and at 1:43 in the afternoon, Trump posted: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” At 5:47, he posted on social media that he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and indirectly with Hezbollah, and that they both agreed to stop striking each other.

The Pentagon has been trying to control information coming out about its actions for months now, but that effort is now ramping up. This afternoon, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has designated its press office as a classified space—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—and even those journalists who have not had their press badges rescinded will require an appointment to talk to the press secretary.

Ta.

June 2, 2026 (Tuesday)

Officials in the Trump administration have worked hard to restrict the access of members of Congress to the detention centers it has established across the country. Although lawmakers have a constitutional duty to oversee executive agencies and courts have reiterated their authority to conduct unannounced visits to federal immigration facilities, officials have repeatedly tried to limit that access.

Last May they went so far as to arrest Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, for trespassing after he waited inside the gate of the privately operated Delaney Hall detention center where a staffer had asked him to stand after he accompanied three members of Congress to Delaney Hall, and then stepped outside when asked to leave. After they dropped the charges against Baraka days later, they charged Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with assault for her actions during a skirmish that broke out when immigration agents arrested Baraka.

On May 11, 2026, Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried again, issuing a memo that calls congressional visits “disruptive” and saying ICE will facilitate meetings of lawmakers with people in detention only if the lawmaker can specifically identify the individual in detention and provide “valid proof” that the detainee consents to a visit. Any such visit, they said, will require two days’ advance notice.

On May 22, after writing public letters to call attention to the crowded and unsanitary conditions inside Delaney Hall, the largest detention center in the Northeast, about 300 detainees began a hunger strike to demand the immediate release of young, elderly, and medically vulnerable detainees and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases, leaving them incarcerated.

While much of the protest focuses on the horrific conditions inside the facility, the detainees themselves have focused on their lack of access to the legal system. They wrote: “We see with deep helplessness and frustration that our due process, rights, and defense have been violated, disregarding benefits granted under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.”

“We are certain that we are not being processed equally under immigration laws and the Constitution….. We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases. We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court. We are witnessing how judges are disregarding decisions of federal judges, for example not honoring HABEAS CORPUS rulings decided by a FEDERAL judge, depriving us of our liberty.”

They asked for help from senators and members of Congress and said, “e trust in God and believe that justice will be done under the law of the United States of America, since it is a sovereign and constitutional country respected worldwide for upholding human rights.”

Since the Delaney Hall detainees began their strike, supporters outside have gathered to show support. Federal agents have clashed with them repeatedly, pepper-spraying Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) among others. MAGA activists went to the site to counter-protest, and Mayor Baraka established a curfew near the facility. Late last week, Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, deployed New Jersey state troopers after White House advisor Tom Homan—a former consultant for Delaney Hall operator GEO Group—threatened to send “tactical units” to New Jersey if the situation continued. The troopers arrested dozens of protesters.

Today New Jersey attorney general Jennifer Davenport sued the GEO Group for refusing to allow inspectors into the facility in violation of state law. “If the GEO Group—with a $1 billion government contract—has nothing to hide and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building,” Sherrill said. “The people of New Jersey deserve transparency and accountability, and I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.”

In a May 29 interview with me on American Conversations, Senator Kim said that “the detainees were actually very clear with me… they’re concerned about the conditions, but the main reason they’re pushing forward right now, on this hunger strike and broader protest, is about the lack of forward movement when it comes to their cases. I remember one of them ran out of the room when I was talking to them, to go grab a piece of paper off a bulletin board…. The paper, when they brought it back, was about the court docket for the following couple days. And it showed that…this past Tuesday, when the courts opened up after the holiday weekend, this one judge that they are put in front of has 74 cases before her in just that one day, just on Tuesday. She had 74 cases on her docket. You know, I did the…math. I mean, that’s roughly about five minutes per case, if that’s everything is perfectly aligned…. t’s just a…farce. This is not actual justice. This is not actual… legal proceedings as per our Constitution, and as per our laws.”

The destruction of the rule of law in Delaney Hall is part of the Trump administration’s destruction of the rule of law across the United States. This morning, Trump announced he is appointing the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, to become the acting director of national intelligence in addition to his job at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The director of national intelligence is the nation’s top intelligence official, and federal law requires that the director have “extensive national security expertise.” Pulte has none.

What he does have is willingness to use the power of the government to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. It was Pulte who came up with the scheme of going after Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and New York attorney general Letitia James by accusing them of mortgage fraud. He also advocated investigating then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell for alleged overruns in the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings.

Today, under pressure from Senate Republicans who recognize that the optics of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund will hurt Republicans in the midterms and demanded the removal of that funding from the budget reconciliation measure they are working on to fund ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Trump appears to have dropped that demand. But acting attorney general Todd Blanche told members of Congress today that he would not commit in writing not to proceed with the slush fund, and that the Department of Justice is not dropping the plan to provide Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization broad amnesty for any laws broken in past tax filings and a pass on future audits.

Just after midnight this morning, Trump posted that his criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records and the civil fraud judgement against him in New York for manipulating his financial statements to get better tax and insurance rates be dismissed, saying he was “an innocent man who has been horribly treated.” As Sophie Brams of The Hill noted, he also called for criminal charges to be launched against New York attorney general James and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the successful lawsuits.

Today the new secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, refused to assure a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would follow court orders. Repeatedly, he told Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law.” But he refused to agree that they would follow court orders. “If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Kyle Cheney of Politico reported last month that the Trump administration has lost nearly 10,400 court cases over DHS immigration detentions while prevailing in about 1,200. That translates to a 90% loss rate. More than 425 judges—an overwhelming majority of them—have decided against the administration. Cheney notes that even a majority of the judges Trump himself appointed have decided against the administration on immigration.
In February, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin explained away the administration’s dismal record by saying that “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”

But Judge Joseph R. Goodwin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia wrote: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process…. It is an assault on the constitutional order.”

Today, after Mullin wouldn’t agree to obey the courts, suggesting instead that “we’ll hold each other accountable” if ICE breaks the law, Senator Murphy said: “Listen, if you’re a Republican or Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out.”

Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who oversaw the operations during which federal agents shot and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, joined white nationalist Jared Taylor at a conference of far-right activists and influencers in Portugal over the weekend. As Marion Solletty of Politico reported, in an interview before the conference, Bovino embraced the white nationalism of the Great Replacement theory that says white Europeans and white Americans are in a fight to save their civilization from Black and Brown people.

He claimed that of the 342 million people in the U.S.—he said there were 420 million—100 million are undocumented immigrants who must be removed. But, he added, “our main battle is not with undocumented immigrants or unassimilated immigrants: it is with the bureaucrats of the status quo and the timid politicians, determined to suspend action or wait for the next election cycle.”

“If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method,” he said, “then fantastic.”

June 3, 2026 (Wednesday)

Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.

After handing down the Callais decision, the Supreme Court sent a case involving Alabama’s map back to the state. One lower court had ruled the 2023 map unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment and, in diluting Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, eliminated a majority-Black district in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

As Lawrence Hurley of NBC News reported, on May 26 a panel of three judges reaffirmed that the map showed intentional discrimination and was unconstitutional. The state took the case to the Supreme Court, and last night the right-wing justices allowed the state to use the 2023 map, saying it was likely to win its case that the map was lawfully drawn.
And so, Alabama will likely replace a Black Democratic lawmaker with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Republican lawmakers currently in power appear to be trying to grab as much power as they can as President Donald J. Trump deteriorates both personally and politically.

Today, a day after visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House said was a six-month physical that he said went “PERFECTLY,” the nearly 80-year-old Trump appeared in public for the first time since May 27. He seemed tired and vague.

In the House of Representatives, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s 2027 budget requests for the State Department, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Trump sleeping in two Cabinet meetings as Rubio was talking, and asked how the president could make good decisions about war if he couldn’t stay awake even during public events.

Rubio insisted he had never seen Trump asleep in a meeting, although in the instances Lieu showed, the president was sleeping in a chair directly beside him. Lieu accused Rubio of lying to Congress.

The weekend’s promises of an end to the war on Iran have fizzled, and the economy is slowing under the pressure of higher oil prices. The administration announced on Monday that it is dropping tariffs on imported farm and construction equipment from 25% to 15% to ease prices, proving—as critics have maintained all along—that the tariffs are in fact raising prices.

On Sunday, when Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel asked Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett about a Wall Street Journal report that delinquent credit card balances are at their highest level in 15 years as people use their credit cards for necessities, Hassett centered not the American people but the credit card companies. “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes, but for the most part…there’s not any kind of…financial threat to the credit card companies.”

Americans trying to navigate rising prices by putting necessities on their credit cards were not likely to be concerned about how their financial pain might hurt credit card companies.

As Trump and the administration falter, the MAGA leaders Trump has installed in the government are pushing their agenda as fast as they can. Russell Vought, the co-author of Project 2025 who directs the the Office of Management and Budget and who therefore has the power—although not the authority—to ignore the laws Congress has passed for the expenditure of money, proposed last Thursday, May 28, that political appointees in his office should have final say over research grants, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies.

The proposal promises to root out “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favor certain identity groups over others.” In addition to submitting scientific research to political approval, the new rules would also stop international research collaboration unless it was approved by political appointees.

Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.

Democrats have pledged to fight the plan to tear out the observation system.

While those empowered by his 2024 win are pushing through their agenda, Trump himself appears to have abandoned any pretense of governing and is focusing on his Ultimate Fighting Championship ring in front of the White House—today he suggested making it permanent—and the painting of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today he showed to reporters images of how the Reflecting Pool is longer than skyscrapers are tall and that he is having it painted “American Flag Blue.”

He is also trying to cement control over the government. Today Trump signed an executive order stripping nearly 10,000 career civil service workers of their protected status, making it possible for the president to fire them at will. This move was introduced late in Trump’s first term but rescinded under President Joe Biden, and was a key part of Project 2025.

Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) illustrated that he is willing to pervert one of the most important positions in the U.S. government to his own whims. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, but he has demonstrated a willingness to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. By making him an acting director, Trump can get around the requirement for Senate confirmation.

But lawmakers who will have to face the voters in November appear to be getting queasy at being tied to Trump’s actions. Pulte’s nomination could be a bridge too far. The nomination threatens the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on June 12. Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec has called for Pulte to take control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism as well as the international,” and Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.

Section 702 permits intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreigners operating outside the U.S. without a judicial warrant. But in the process of that collection, the communications of U.S. citizens often get swept up. As Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian notes, the FBI used Section 702 to investigate protesters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has led the charge against renewing FISA without significant protections for American citizens, warned that Pulte could use Section 702 as a political weapon, abusing surveillance powers for purposes of blackmail, smear campaigns, or attacks on lawmakers, nonprofits, or activists. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added that Pulte could use his position to seize ballots or election equipment. Wyden urged lawmakers to refuse to reauthorize FISA “without strong new safeguards for Americans’ rights.”

Mark Warner (D-VA), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the person who can deliver the necessary Democratic votes for the renewal of FISA, warned that Pulte’s nomination could doom the measure’s reauthorization. Even Republicans, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are objecting to Pulte, citing his lack of intelligence experience, which the law requires for a DNI head, as a deal-breaker.

House Republicans are also starting to balk at the administration’s actions.

Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor of Politico reported today that House leaders had to push back votes today when Republicans didn’t show up from their holiday week. The House has been at work 43 fewer days in this congressional session than the Senate has as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has avoided pushback against Trump in the House by keeping members away from Washington. The Republican majority in the House is so slim that attendance issues have forced Johnson to delay votes to prevent Democrats from defeating bills. Now that members don’t want to go on the record either against Trump or for him, the ability of the House to get through the work it needs to is in jeopardy.

Johnson’s slipping control over the House showed today when the House voted to pass a resolution, introduced by Democrats, telling Trump either to stop further strikes against Iran or to get congressional approval for them. Johnson sent House members home early before the Memorial Day holiday to keep such a measure from passing, but today it did, by a vote of 215 to 208. Although Johnson warned that the resolution was “very dangerous” and would “weaken” Trump’s ability to find a way out of the conflict, members passed it, likely noting that according to a recent New York Times–Siena College poll, 64% of registered voters think Trump’s decision to go to war was wrong, while only 30% approve of it.

Shortly after passing that measure, the House rebuked both Trump and Johnson a second time when it advanced a measure that would aid Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s invasion by a vote of 218 to 204. If the measure now passes the House and then the Senate, it will provide $8 billion in loans and $300 million in security aid.

Trump does not appear to be taking his loss of power well, retreating to the traditional Republican position that anyone who disagrees with him is a communist. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

June 4, 2026 (Thursday)

The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.

Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.

Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”

In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.

Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.

Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, When Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.

Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration.

They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”

He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”

And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.

“If we all work together and follow the animal treatment protocols and movement restriction guidance, there is no reason to believe that this incursion will result in an establishment of the pest in our country,” Rollins said last night.

Meanwhile, Jamie Smyth of the Financial Times reported yesterday that U.S. oil reserves are at their lowest level in twenty-two years. The administration has released them to try to control oil prices that are skyrocketing after Trump’s war on Iran prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passed before the war. Oil industry analysts warned that oil prices will shoot higher if the crisis isn’t resolved.

Today President Donald J. Trump appeared to fall asleep again at a meeting in the Oval Office.

But Trump’s interest in profiting off the presidency remains clear. Jonathan Edwards of the Washington Post reported today that 14 of the 27 known donors to Trump’s $400 million ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts totaling over $50 billion since they made their donations.

As the results of the Republican destruction of the liberal consensus become clear, Democrats are speaking up to defend it and to chart a different course for the nation. Today, for example, Democrats called out the $187 billion in cuts Republicans have made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in their budget reconciliation bill of last July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

House Democrats criticized Agriculture Secretary Rollins’s repeated boasts that she has pushed more than 3.5 million people off SNAP, claiming that such cuts are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program. Representative Craig noted that Rollins appears to confuse the program’s error rate, which measures underpayments or overpayments, with fraud. Craig noted that SNAP has “the lowest fraud rate in any program in America.”

Although Congress itself makes the same distinction between error rates and fraud rates Craig did, and says that “SNAP fraud is rare,” Sydney Carruth of MS Now reported that Rollins told Craig: “You can’t be serious.”

More and more, Democrats are anchoring their opposition to MAGA Republican governance in their opposition to its extraordinary corruption that siphons taxpayer money into the pockets of a small group of wealthy elites and their loyalists. On Sunday, Georgia senator Jon Ossoff reminded an audience of Trump’s deal with his appointees at the Department of Justice to establish a slush fund of $1.776 billion to pay his supporters for their claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the legal system against them by indicting them for crimes.

Ossoff called out Trump’s frantic pace of outlandish social media posts, then said, “hen not posting, he’s been trying to rob us. Have you seen it? He sued the U.S. government he commands for $10 billion. Then he settled the suit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund so he can cut checks to cronies and Jan 6 foot soldiers, the same men who sacked the Capitol to seize the presidency for Donald Trump, who beat police officers with flagpoles, built a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and hunted the vice president to lynch him. Donald Trump’s brownshirts. He pardoned them, and now he wants you to pay them.”

Ossoff continued: “He promised to bring down prices on day one. Instead, prices are soaring. Ground beef’s up 25% since Trump was sworn in. Coffee, 40%. The price of gas, 33%. Groceries, rent, health care, and the power bill hit their new all-time highs last month. And while you pay more for everything, Donald Trump wants your tax dollars for what many are calling the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called out how the corruption of the administration perverts the nature of government by stealing from everyday Americans for the vanity projects of a leader. She told Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News that “when people see a ballroom and they see at the same time their health insurance getting cut off, they know that they are paying for that ballroom with no healthcare, higher grocery prices, and increasingly impossible-to-afford housing.” “eople are pissed off about it,” she said, “and they should be. It’s wrong. This is a complete theft of our money.” Rather than paying for Trump’s ballroom or his splashy renovations in the nation’s capital, taxes should pay for “etter roads, healthcare, more affordable housing.”

And when the Texas Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, James Talarico, spoke to supporters in the home county of his opponent, Ken Paxton, he made it clear that the corruption of MAGA Republicans must not stand. He noted that “Paxton’s mugshot was taken just a few miles from here at the Collin County courthouse, where he was indicted for investment fraud. He convinced his own friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company. But what he didn’t tell them was that he was making a commission off their investments. He was scamming his own friends. If Ken Paxton will sell out his own friends for a quick buck,” Talarico asked, “what makes you think he won’t sell you out in the United States Senate?”

In a telling echo of a different sort of rally almost a decade ago, the audience began to chant, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

“Listen,” Talarico said. “Ken Paxton has escaped accountability, but accountability is coming on November 3rd.”

Ta.

“the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom”

I hope the press run with this so it becomes the normal way of referring to it.

buffy said:

“the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom”

I hope the press run with this so it becomes the normal way of referring to it.

:)

June 5, 2026 (Friday)

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.

The president pointed out that “it is…significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”

This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism. For all that the fascists boasted of the superiority of their form of government over democracy, in Italy “ur troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule,” FDR said.

But the president warned Americans that the fall of Rome was only the beginning. “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. “he victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly.”

FDR knew something his audience did not. On the other side of the Atlantic, paratroopers, their faces darkened with cocoa, were already dropping into France, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allies were on their way across the English channel.

The order of the day from their commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the evening of June 5 had read: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

“Your task will not be an easy one,” it read, but it assured the troops that the Germans had suffered great defeats and Allied bombing had reduced German strength, while “ur Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”

Eisenhower’s public confidence did not reflect his understanding that the largest amphibious invasion in military history was a gamble. The seas on the crossing were rough, and the beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers. On June 5, in pencil on a sheet of paper, he had written a message to be communicated in case the invasion failed.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” it read. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and dedication to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

But Eisenhower’s letter was never delivered.

On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from 8 countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD.

By the end of the day, more than 10,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed, but the Allies had established a foothold in France that would permit them to flood troops, vehicles, and supplies into Europe.

When FDR held a press conference later that day, his comment to the cheerful reporters highlighted the extraordinary weight of the past 24 hours. “I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome,” he told them, “that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”

Neophyte said:

June 5, 2026 (Friday)

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.

The president pointed out that “it is…significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”

This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism. For all that the fascists boasted of the superiority of their form of government over democracy, in Italy “ur troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule,” FDR said.

But the president warned Americans that the fall of Rome was only the beginning. “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. “he victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly.”

FDR knew something his audience did not. On the other side of the Atlantic, paratroopers, their faces darkened with cocoa, were already dropping into France, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allies were on their way across the English channel.

The order of the day from their commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the evening of June 5 had read: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

“Your task will not be an easy one,” it read, but it assured the troops that the Germans had suffered great defeats and Allied bombing had reduced German strength, while “ur Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”

Eisenhower’s public confidence did not reflect his understanding that the largest amphibious invasion in military history was a gamble. The seas on the crossing were rough, and the beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers. On June 5, in pencil on a sheet of paper, he had written a message to be communicated in case the invasion failed.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” it read. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and dedication to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

But Eisenhower’s letter was never delivered.

On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from 8 countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD.

By the end of the day, more than 10,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed, but the Allies had established a foothold in France that would permit them to flood troops, vehicles, and supplies into Europe.

When FDR held a press conference later that day, his comment to the cheerful reporters highlighted the extraordinary weight of the past 24 hours. “I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome,” he told them, “that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”

Thanks.

:)

It’s good to read something that is not DJT-centric.

:)

une 6, 2026 (Saturday)

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a measure to provide about $70 billion in additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. They did so without meeting any of the demands Democrats had made to reform ICE and Border Patrol in the wake of the violent sweeps that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

While Republicans tried to insist that Democrats who demanded reforms were starving immigration enforcement, in fact, the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July of last year—they one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—provided an astonishing $191 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security, with about $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP. According to Dominik Lett of the libertarian Cato Institute, those numbers were seven times ICE’s previous annual budget and four times the typical annual budget of CBP, and were designed to last through September 30, 2029.

Putting more billions behind ICE and CBP now will mean those agencies are funded through the rest of Trump’s term. Even if Democrats take control of Congress after the midterms, the funding will be in place, preventing Democrats from using funding to demand reforms.

How those tax dollars are being spent is a question. In February, twenty-one Democratic senators wrote to the Congressional Budget Office to note that there had been no public accounting of how that money was being spent. Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council reports that while the OBBBA gave ICE $45 billion for detention through September 2029, former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem decided to use $38 billion of it to buy warehouses and convert them to detention centers.

On May 29, Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler of NBC News reported that the new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, is considering selling a number of the warehouses. If he does so, Ainsley and Strikler report, there may well be scrutiny of the initial purchases. An Atlanta suburb has filed a lawsuit alleging that ICE paid more than five times the assessed value of a warehouse there.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office noted that funding for ICE and CBP has historically been made under annual appropriations bills, and the Republicans’ new policy of giving them a huge pot of money for years makes it hard to estimate the pace of spending.

Democrats had demanded reforms to ICE and Border Patrol actions, so to pass the measure, Senate Republicans used the budget reconciliation process. Not usually used for appropriations, budget reconciliation prevented a Democratic filibuster and enabled Republicans to pass the measure with a simple majority.

But anyone can amend a budget reconciliation measure, and Democrats used amendments to cause an 18-hour debate that forced Republicans to vote against a number of measures that are popular with the American people, showing how Republicans really stand.

Republicans blocked Democratic proposals to stop Trump from establishing the $1.776 billion slush fund with the complicity of the men he has appointed to the Department of Justice and to prevent any such fund from giving payouts to people convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar the use of federal funds or private donations for Trump’s ballroom unless Congress explicitly approved.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing and Finance Agency, from serving as the director of national intelligence by providing that no one could direct the Office of National Intelligence while heading a different agency. Trump has announced that Pulte will be the acting director of national intelligence, putting him in place through the midterm elections with the evident plan that he will weaponize intelligence against the president’s political opponents.

The Senate passage of ICE and CBP funding demonstrates a Republican worldview. In January 2024, then-candidate Trump convinced Republicans to abandon a strong bipartisan border bill to fix immigration issues because he wanted to keep the issue of immigration open as a way to win in 2024. Now it is clear that the assault on immigrants was a tool to enforce a right-wing vision of the country on the American people, much of which is happening under cover of darkness.

Yesterday Meryl Kornfield of the Washington Post noted a report from former senior executive at the Social Security Administration Jeremiah Schofield, who is now a whistleblower. Schofield says that officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hatched a plan to make immigrants self-deport by declaring 2.7 million of them dead. Some of those people on the list were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Being listed on the Death Master File cuts off people’s access to wages, banks and other financial systems, and other services. The idea appears to have been that such an erasure would force people either to leave the country or to go to a Social Security office where they could be arrested. While they ultimately did not implement the larger plan, officials did move 6,100 mostly Latino immigrants into that database.

On Thursday, Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post reported that ICE is abandoning a policy begun under the Biden administration in 2021 that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate the deaths of detainees who died within 30 days of their release. The policy was designed to make sure ICE could not pass off deaths caused by conditions in the detention centers simply by releasing severely ill people.

At least 18 people incarcerated in detainment facilities have died in the first five months of 2026. At least 30 died last year, the highest number in 20 years. MacMillan notes that a number of those deaths happened after detainees were taken to the hospital.

Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) went back to Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, to talk with detainees. Despite the established congressional duty of oversight, “ICE refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he said. “They restricted my ability to do my job.”

Kim reported that as he went through the women’s unit, “the women were trying to get my attention and flagging for me, waving their hands, and they were pointing into one of the beds. And I looked over, and I saw a woman curled up in a fetal position, clearly in some pain and agony. ICE and GEO Group told me that they cannot share with me what is happening. I’m very concerned about that woman…. They have only one full-time doctor in this facility that has hundreds and hundreds of detainees.”

“The American people deserve to know what is happening,” Kim said. “We deserve to be able to hear directly from the detainees. They are doing whatever they can to impede congressional oversight and oversight from the American people.”

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) notes that the $70 billion in tax money Republicans just gave to ICE and Border Patrol could provide free childcare for 1.3 million children through September 2028, cover the annual cost of groceries for about 10.7 million U.S. households, provide a year of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to 31 million Americans, expand the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits for at least a year, cancel about 31.5% of Americans’ medical debt, and end homelessness for about eight years.

But in France today, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth rejected the belief on which the United States of America was founded: that the government should act to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Instead, he perverted a commemoration of D-Day, when American soldiers fought with their Allies to defend democracy against fascism, into a call for the racial ideology on which fascism was based. Embracing the Great Replacement theory that says the culture of white Europeans and Americans is being undermined by people of color from Africa and Asia, he flipped the Allied and Nazi positions.

“Sadly, today,” he said in reference to the beaches of Normandy the Allies stormed in 1944, “different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

More to the point on the anniversary of D-Day 2026, is the speech by of Prime Minister Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940, promising that those who cared about freedom and human self-determination would never stop fighting the Nazis:

“We shall fight on the beaches,” he said. “e shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

What the Heck Just Happened?

Heather Cox Richardson and friend Heather discuss the historic echos of the events in America today and how to build a better future together. (Around the 30 minute marker for a better future).

Link 43 minutes

Thanks.

June 7, 2026 (Sunday)

Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped yesterday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.

Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.

As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”
Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”

One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “ country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.

Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.

Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.

But he wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”
Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.

Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”

As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”

In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.

Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.

Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.

Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.

They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”

Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Club (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”

The lawsuit notes that “ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.

The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.

Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.

Thanks for posting.

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

Cynic!

buffy said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

Cynic!

We must hope that the person assigned the role of ‘assassin’ is a Method actor, who carries his/her prescribed role to a convincing and realistic end.

buffy said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

Cynic!

Moi?? 😇

I just want to see Dr Liar-Liar-Pants-on-Fire note another fake scar from a fake attempt on Trump’s autopsy medical report.

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

They need to up the ante though perhaps use a rocket launcher

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

They need to up the ante though perhaps use a rocket launcher

Or a tactical nuke

Sir just think your magnificent frame silhouetted with a mushroom cloud in the background”

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.”

Perfect opportunity for yet another staged assassination attempt 👍🏼

They need to up the ante though perhaps use a rocket launcher

.50 M2 bullet.

Oh, the hydrostatic effects!

Neophyte said:

June 7, 2026 (Sunday)

Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped yesterday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged..

Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.

Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.

But he wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.

The impact on MSM (Main Stream Media) is severe and this is what we know about.

Heather Cox Richardson speaks on this as well.

June 8, 2026 (Monday)

On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison of Virginia stood up to address the House of Representatives in order to introduce a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Initially, Madison had been opposed to the idea of spelling out the rights on which the new government couldn’t intrude because he thought the document itself limited what the government could do. But he had come around to the idea of specifying the areas in which the new government could not intrude after voters opposed ratifying the Constitution until it included protections from government interference in their rights.

When Madison rose to introduce his amendments to the Constitution, ten of which would eventually be adopted and become the Bill of Rights, the Constitution had been ratified, but ratification had stalled. Two states of the original thirteen, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not yet ratified the Constitution. Others had done so only with the promise that a list of rights would be forthcoming.

One of the amendments Madison proposed was especially dear to him. It was, as he told his colleagues, that “he civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

That proposal was the basis for what became the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

With the wounds of religious persecution both in Europe and in the colonies still fresh, Madison cared deeply about keeping the government away from religion.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as the government of Virginia had itinerant preachers arrested for preaching against the established church in the state. By the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

The concerns about inequality behind the First Amendment are being illustrated right now in the twenty-first-century United States. Those concerns come from an unlikely direction.

On Thursday, June 4, 2026, Nick Mordowanec of Military dot com reported that under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense had removed about 180 faith traditions from its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems. As John Ismay, Alexandra E. Petri, and Aimee Ortiz of the New York Times note, of the 31 religions still recognized by the Defense Department, 22 of them are Christian denominations.

Left off the new list of Christian faiths was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known as Mormons.

MAGA has worked to impose the ideology of evangelical religion on America. In the military, Mordowanec notes, Hegseth has pushed Christian theocracy through extremist Christian-based prayers services with a Christian nationalist preacher who has said women’s suffrage was a bad idea and has defended slavery, has described Trump’s war on Iran as a holy war. Michelle Boorstein and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post add that Hegseth has urged chaplains to focus on scripture rather than psychology and has said those who disagree with him are God’s enemies.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is a Mormon and represents Mormons in Utah. Lee has been a staunch MAGA supporter to the point that he was a key figure in urging President Donald J. Trump to stay in office in 2021 despite the fact he had lost the election.

But on Friday, Lee—the ultimate MAGA insider—found his religion excluded from the “Christian” category that the Trump administration embraces, turning him abruptly into an outsider.

Lee spent the weekend posting angrily about the slight that suggested Mormons aren’t Christians, only to have other posters deride his faith. He posted 37 times on social media insisting that the Defense Department’s classification be expanded to include Mormons under the “Christian” category, recording and reposting a video saying “As of two days ago, the Pentagon recognizes every Christian faith in America as Christian. Except one. That’s not okay, and it needs to change—now.”

Finally, yesterday, he posted that he had “just got off the phone with President Trump We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list’ I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief Stay tuned”

Today the Defense Department edited its list of religions so that no group is labeled “Christian.” Lee posted that he was grateful to Hegseth “for correcting the error” and said he agreed with Hegseth’s statement that “he Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”

Madison and those who wrote, debated, passed, and ratified the Bill of Rights believed that making people’s religion—their right of conscience—depend on the approval of the president would destroy self-government.

A former U.S. Army chaplain told Mordowanec that the Defense Department’s limit to the religions it recognized was “horrible.” “When I raised my hand to become an Army chaplain, I swore that I would support and defend the Constitution. The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. That’s what I was buying into.” Referring to the revised list, the former chaplain added: “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a violation of the United States Constitution.”

On June 8, 1789, Madison urged his colleagues to pass the new amendments to demonstrate that those who had pushed the adoption of the Constitution “were as sincerely devoted to liberty and republican government” as those who opposed it, and that those who wanted a strong new government were not, in fact, trying “to lay the foundation of an aristocracy or despotism. “ It would be a good thing, he said, to cement support for the government by reassuring Americans that those in favor of the new government had no “wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”

June 9, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.

Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.

Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”

He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.

Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.

The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.

Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”

In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.

In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.

MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.

As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”
That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.

New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.

Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.

The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.

In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.

Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.

White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”

An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.

The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”

Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”

After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.

But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.

Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.

There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.

The Epstein saga plays out like sanctioned serial killers behaviour
The absolute disregard for the victims as people instead of disposable play things.

Thanks for posting, Mr N.

June 10, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April. The Federal Reserve likes to keep inflation at 2%. Energy costs are the biggest driver of that inflation, with fuel oil up 59% and gasoline up 41% over their costs last year. Airline fares have risen 27%. Fruits and vegetables are up 6% over their cost a year ago.

At a signing event for the budget reconciliation measure Republicans passed to add an additional $70 billion in funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protect (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald J. Trump if he was concerned about the inflation number. Trump answered:

“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”

And then his speech degraded into a fantasy rewriting of the history of his war on Iran and his decision to launch it.

Trump claimed that he was telling reporters—and Iran—for the first time that the U.S. was secretly taking oil from Iran. “Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?” he asked. “Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, ’cause they don’t have any radar, ’cause we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that why oil’s $85 a barrel.”

As Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report, Trump appeared to be referring to the well-known U.S. operation to help dozens of commercial vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz. So far, the journalists report, the U.S has guided more than 200 ships through in a little more than a month. Before the war, about 3,000 ships a month traveled through the strait. The reporters say they could not confirm Trump’s claim that the effort had enabled more than 100 million barrels of oil to reach the market.

Then Trump slid into a rewriting of why he started the strikes in the first place in order to suggest the dramatic hit the economy has taken from the war was part of his plan all along. He claimed he had deliberately made the choice to hurt the economy to stop Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed—contrary to his own intelligence officers’ assessments—it was going to have “very soon.”

“I said, look, the one bad thing will be, we hit the best economy we’ve ever hit,” Trump claimed. “And I said to my people, I had Scott , I had Howard , I had Pete , I had all—I had Todd in the room. I said, The one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history. Highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well, and I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran’s gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. We have to go and attack.”

In fact, in his video announcing the strikes and in comments in the early days of the war, Trump emphasized that the U.S. intended to end the Iranian regime, which he claimed had been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, and he urged Iranians to rise up against it. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions would come from the regime change he advocated.

In any case, he said today, oil was not nearly as expensive as the $250 a barrel people had said it could reach, so its current level is “pretty amazing.” And the stock market, he said, remains high. He went on to say that his strikes on Venezuela were “a great success” and that Venezuela has “become a happy country,” and that “we went to Iran and essentially we’ve done the same thing.” He claimed Iran’s military has been destroyed and all the Iranian leadership is gone.

When a reporter finally brought him back to the question about inflation coming down, he said that when the war is over, “it’s gonna come down like a rock.”

Meanwhile, John Knefel of Media Matters noted yesterday that Fox News hosts, many of whom supported the initial strikes on Iran, are now arguing that Trump should start bombing again. Their mantra is that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.

Trump’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news as New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have a book on the Trump presidency coming out, detailed how desperately worried the White House was last summer over the Epstein files. They searched desperately for a way to look as if they were being transparent to appease the MAGA base, while also making sure the files stayed hidden.

The write-up of the story distances Vice President J.D. Vance from the files, suggesting he was “panicked” by them and wanted them released. This position, attributed to him by White House officials, is good for him politically, as he will want to pick up MAGA voters unhappy about the Epstein cover up by 2028, at least—or before, should he need to take the mantle of the presidency from Trump, who will turn 80 on Saturday.

Vance is in the news this week as he seems to court MAGA in other ways, as well. On Monday he announced he would refer Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice for an investigation of criminal fraud. The claim that Somalis in Minnesota are engaging in social services fraud while Democrats look the other way is a driving factor behind MAGA politics.

Raquel Coronell Uribe and Tara Prindiville of NBC News report that Walz has called Vance’s attacks on him a “campaign of retribution” meant “to punish blue states like Minnesota.” Ellison told the reporters the allegations were “unfounded” and a “political stunt.” “It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” he said. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”

Vance has also jumped aboard the unfounded accusation of Trump and his loyalists that the slow counting of ballots in California suggests the election is insecure and the Republican candidate is being cheated. Election denialism is increasingly a hallmark of the MAGA Republicans as they argue any election they lose is fraudulent.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, when caught lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance admitted he felt it necessary “to create stories so that the…media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

Yesterday, an Iranian drone downed a U.S. helicopter, although a U.S. official told CBS News it was not clear that the strike was intentional. This evening, Trump launched new airstrikes against Iran, saying they were “self-defense strikes” “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” after the slow progress of negotiations for an agreement to end the war.

U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces “launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”

Christoph Koettl and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times confirmed reports from Iran that U.S. strikes destroyed what appears to have been a drinking water facility. They note that targeting civilian infrastructure can be a war crime under international law.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded to the U.S. strikes with their own strikes against U.S. targets in the region and announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz completely and would attack any vessels trying to cross it.

With the renewed strikes, the price of oil jumped more than $1 a barrel.

Tonight, Trump posted on social media a demand that Republicans in Congress give the U.S. military an additional $350 billion and pass the SAVE America bill that would suppress voting. “No games, no delays, and no weak compromises! Do this ASAP,” he wrote.

“This is a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s,” he wrote. The “$350 Billion Reconciliation Bill,” which could pass without any Democratic votes, “is the ONLY path to the full $1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR Military Budget our Warriors need in order to build THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM.”

He also demanded Republicans pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” requiring proof of citizenship to vote and an end to mail-in ballots “EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!” in order to “protect our Elections for Generations to come” and “to secure the NATION for our children and grandchildren.”

Then he added “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN,” then concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

June 10, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April. The Federal Reserve likes to keep inflation at 2%. Energy costs are the biggest driver of that inflation, with fuel oil up 59% and gasoline up 41% over their costs last year. Airline fares have risen 27%. Fruits and vegetables are up 6% over their cost a year ago.

At a signing event for the budget reconciliation measure Republicans passed to add an additional $70 billion in funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protect (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald J. Trump if he was concerned about the inflation number. Trump answered:

“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”

And then his speech degraded into a fantasy rewriting of the history of his war on Iran and his decision to launch it.

Trump claimed that he was telling reporters—and Iran—for the first time that the U.S. was secretly taking oil from Iran. “Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?” he asked. “Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, ’cause they don’t have any radar, ’cause we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that why oil’s $85 a barrel.”

As Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report, Trump appeared to be referring to the well-known U.S. operation to help dozens of commercial vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz. So far, the journalists report, the U.S has guided more than 200 ships through in a little more than a month. Before the war, about 3,000 ships a month traveled through the strait. The reporters say they could not confirm Trump’s claim that the effort had enabled more than 100 million barrels of oil to reach the market.

Then Trump slid into a rewriting of why he started the strikes in the first place in order to suggest the dramatic hit the economy has taken from the war was part of his plan all along. He claimed he had deliberately made the choice to hurt the economy to stop Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed—contrary to his own intelligence officers’ assessments—it was going to have “very soon.”

“I said, look, the one bad thing will be, we hit the best economy we’ve ever hit,” Trump claimed. “And I said to my people, I had Scott , I had Howard , I had Pete , I had all—I had Todd in the room. I said, The one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history. Highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well, and I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran’s gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. We have to go and attack.”

In fact, in his video announcing the strikes and in comments in the early days of the war, Trump emphasized that the U.S. intended to end the Iranian regime, which he claimed had been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, and he urged Iranians to rise up against it. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions would come from the regime change he advocated.

In any case, he said today, oil was not nearly as expensive as the $250 a barrel people had said it could reach, so its current level is “pretty amazing.” And the stock market, he said, remains high. He went on to say that his strikes on Venezuela were “a great success” and that Venezuela has “become a happy country,” and that “we went to Iran and essentially we’ve done the same thing.” He claimed Iran’s military has been destroyed and all the Iranian leadership is gone.

When a reporter finally brought him back to the question about inflation coming down, he said that when the war is over, “it’s gonna come down like a rock.”

Meanwhile, John Knefel of Media Matters noted yesterday that Fox News hosts, many of whom supported the initial strikes on Iran, are now arguing that Trump should start bombing again. Their mantra is that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.

Trump’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news as New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have a book on the Trump presidency coming out, detailed how desperately worried the White House was last summer over the Epstein files. They searched desperately for a way to look as if they were being transparent to appease the MAGA base, while also making sure the files stayed hidden.

The write-up of the story distances Vice President J.D. Vance from the files, suggesting he was “panicked” by them and wanted them released. This position, attributed to him by White House officials, is good for him politically, as he will want to pick up MAGA voters unhappy about the Epstein cover up by 2028, at least—or before, should he need to take the mantle of the presidency from Trump, who will turn 80 on Saturday.

Vance is in the news this week as he seems to court MAGA in other ways, as well. On Monday he announced he would refer Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice for an investigation of criminal fraud. The claim that Somalis in Minnesota are engaging in social services fraud while Democrats look the other way is a driving factor behind MAGA politics.

Raquel Coronell Uribe and Tara Prindiville of NBC News report that Walz has called Vance’s attacks on him a “campaign of retribution” meant “to punish blue states like Minnesota.” Ellison told the reporters the allegations were “unfounded” and a “political stunt.” “It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” he said. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”

Vance has also jumped aboard the unfounded accusation of Trump and his loyalists that the slow counting of ballots in California suggests the election is insecure and the Republican candidate is being cheated. Election denialism is increasingly a hallmark of the MAGA Republicans as they argue any election they lose is fraudulent.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, when caught lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance admitted he felt it necessary “to create stories so that the…media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

Yesterday, an Iranian drone downed a U.S. helicopter, although a U.S. official told CBS News it was not clear that the strike was intentional. This evening, Trump launched new airstrikes against Iran, saying they were “self-defense strikes” “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” after the slow progress of negotiations for an agreement to end the war.

U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces “launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”

Christoph Koettl and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times confirmed reports from Iran that U.S. strikes destroyed what appears to have been a drinking water facility. They note that targeting civilian infrastructure can be a war crime under international law.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded to the U.S. strikes with their own strikes against U.S. targets in the region and announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz completely and would attack any vessels trying to cross it.

With the renewed strikes, the price of oil jumped more than $1 a barrel.

Tonight, Trump posted on social media a demand that Republicans in Congress give the U.S. military an additional $350 billion and pass the SAVE America bill that would suppress voting. “No games, no delays, and no weak compromises! Do this ASAP,” he wrote.

“This is a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s,” he wrote. The “$350 Billion Reconciliation Bill,” which could pass without any Democratic votes, “is the ONLY path to the full $1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR Military Budget our Warriors need in order to build THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM.”

He also demanded Republicans pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” requiring proof of citizenship to vote and an end to mail-in ballots “EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!” in order to “protect our Elections for Generations to come” and “to secure the NATION for our children and grandchildren.”

Then he added “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN,” then concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Ta, ta. :)

June 11, 2026 (Thursday)

At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT. At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”

Later, he called into the Fox News Channel to say: “Look, my preference has always been take Kharg Island…. I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. You know, make a fortune, but I don’t know that America has the stomach, I think they’d like to see us come home, but we did it with Venezuela, Venezuela has worked out great for everybody. We’ve taken millions and millions of barrels of oil out of Venezuela. We brought them to Houston and various other places. Louisiana, uh, where, where, you know, refineries that we have that are incredible. They’re going 24 hours a day. Making a fortune, and, um, you know, I like that in this case, too, but I’m not sure that America has a long time, you know, it’s, uh, it’s a little longer process. Something that’s a guarantee if I want to do it…. I am not sure the country has the appetite for it.”

There’s a lot in this statement, even aside from the fact that Trump still has not gotten congressional approval for his actions in Iran, although the 60-day time limit for exercising military action against an “imminent threat” provided by the 1973 War Powers Act expired on May 1.

Aside from that—which is huge—experts assess that taking Kharg Island, an island in the Persian Gulf that acts as the hub of Iran’s oil exporting sector, would require sending in ground troops. That idea is, indeed, extraordinarily unpopular, even for a war that has been unpopular since it began and is becoming more unpopular.

But, as John Knefel of Media Matters noted Tuesday, Fox News hosts are urging Trump to increase U.S. military involvement in Iran, claiming that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.

In this morning’s conversation with Trump, host Ainsley Earhardt boosted Trump’s claims that he has destroyed Iran’s military, and then told him that when Iran sends missiles at U.S. targets, “we have to fight back. So when you say you don’t think America has the appetite to do what we’re seeing tonight, I think we do.”

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews reacted to Trump’s post by noting, “Normally you wouldn’t increase the likelihood of US casualties by announcing something like this ahead of time, unless you are bluffing to use it as a negotiating ploy, you are stupid, you don’t really care about the troops, or all three.”

Meanwhile, Iranian media affiliated with the state says that Iran is now including in its list of potential military targets “all interests associated with the economic holdings managed by Elon Musk in West Asia, including those located in Arab countries and the occupied territories,” in retaliation for the U.S. use of Musk’s Starlink and X to target Iran. It noted that Starlink has ground stations in Israel, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, while Abu Dhabi investment funds support Space X infrastructure.

Trump also told the Fox News Channel hosts that Iran has “no defense…. The only thing they have is fake news…. They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly…. They’re really in submission. They just don’t know it yet.”

Trump’s comparison of Iran to Venezuela is also important. Clearly, he intended his strike on Iran to mimic January’s rapid strike on Venezuela that enabled the U.S. to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving Maduro’s second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez to run the country. Rodríguez has been willing to do what the Trump administration asks, and the Trump administration has eased sanctions against her, allowing her to work with U.S. investors in Venezuela’s oil sector. Late last month, Joshua Goodman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Jim Mustian of PBS reported that the Trump administration quietly told federal prosecutors in Miami to back off on long-standing criminal investigations of Rodríguez for drug trafficking.

Although Venezuela’s high court ordered that Rodríguez could fill Maduro’s position for only ninety days, there is no sign that elections are happening any time soon.

Instead, as Trump suggested this morning, the U.S. appears to be controlling Venezuela’s oil exports. Sanctions expert Roxanna Vigil of the Council on Foreign Relations reported on June 3 that “almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.” Vigil notes that the Trump administration maintains this arrangement benefits both countries, but “it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds.”

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that the U.S. was using a “short-term” account in Qatar and that the administration would provide an audit of that account, but it has not done so, declining to report “how the funds were spent or what safeguards were in place to prevent corruption and money laundering.” Vigil adds: “The administration has also not released the written agreements it has entered into with the Venezuelan government, traders, buyers, banks, and other entities involved in the process.”

Vigil notes that this hidden arrangement involves not just oil, but also gold and other mineral exports.

Democratic lawmakers have sent a formal request to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asking for an audit of the system and have also introduced legislation, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, to require an independent GAO audit, but so far it has not passed in either Republican-dominated chamber of Congress.

Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious that the U.S. media and Iranian officials don’t view U.S. military action against Iran as powerful enough, and his threats now are designed to force Iranian leaders into a deal.

Dasha Burns and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that the mood inside the White House is “angry, insular, grievance-driven and increasingly shaped by a group of loyalists with direct access to the president.” Trump’s determination to force Republicans to do his bidding shows not just in his extreme demands last night that the Republicans pass an additional $350 billion for his military buildup and the SAVE America Act to suppress voting, but also in his insistence on making loyalist Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence for the time period spanning the 2026 midterms.

Pulte has no experience with national intelligence, which the law requires for a director, but he does have a track record of weaponizing the government to attack Trump’s political opponents. Putting him into the DNI position would enable him to use information from the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to undermine Trump’s political opposition.

Lawmakers are facing a deadline to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires tomorrow, but critics are concerned that the law currently does not have sufficient safeguards to protect American citizens. Putting Pulte in charge of it exacerbated their concerns, and Republicans asked Trump to nominate a permanent DNI rather than try to put Pulte in as an acting DNI. Instead, he doubled down on Pulte.

A MAGA operative close to the White House told Burns and Wren that as opposition to his slush fund, funding for his ballroom, and resistance to his demands for new laws mounts, Trump is “increasingly frustrated with everyone, from his own team to the Senate…. He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative said. “He does not like being put in a box,” the operative told Burns and Wren. “When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”

Today nineteen Republicans joined all but seven Democrats to reject a measure to extend FISA, suggesting they did not trust Pulte to oversee the program. Under the fast track House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) used, the measure would have required two thirds of Congress to agree to it, but it failed by 218 to 198, not even reaching a simple majority.

Both CNN and the Washington Post reported today that oil executives have warned the White House that U.S. oil reserves, which they have been releasing to keep oil prices down, are running dangerously low, despite Trump’s boast that
Venezuelan oil is flowing through the U.S. They say they expect prices to soar just as peak summer travel season kicks in.

This afternoon, Trump’s social media account posted: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others. The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.”

Later, Trump told reporters: “The strait is open. But the straits have been open for a number of months already and you just didn’t know about it.” This evening, Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham noted a CNN chyron that read: “TRUMP CANCELS STRIKES, CLAIMING FOR 39TH TIME THAT A DEAL IS NEAR.”

This afternoon, Trump said he would nominate Walter Joseph “Jay” Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to become the next director of national intelligence. Like Pulte, Clayton lacks national security experience. But he has another attribute that might be attractive to Trump: he has been part of the slow-walking of the release of the Epstein files.

Heather Cox Richardson on Oil Executives warning of fuel issues

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ms spock said:

Heather Cox Richardson on Oil Executives warning of fuel issues

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so why are they saying it, out of the ¿ goodness of their hearts

Heather Cox Richardson making the historical links

June 12, 2026 (Friday)

Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Donald Trump’s name to come off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center.

In his ruling of May 29, Cooper noted that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” and Congress stipulated that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.

As soon as he took office in early 2025, Trump replaced trustees on the Kennedy Center board and appointed himself a trustee as well. Now weighted with loyalists, the board elected Trump chair and then replaced the president of the Kennedy Center. Then the board voted to change the center’s bylaws to concentrate their own power. Then, in December, the board voted to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and the name went up over the Kennedy Center portico the next day.

Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who as an ex officio member of the center’s board had been sidelined, sued to stop the renaming and won. Cooper ordered Trump’s name to be taken off the building, all signage, stationery, merchandise, and so on, before midnight tonight.

At first, the Kennedy Center seemed willing to comply, removing Trump’s name from its website and YouTube page, but that cooperation changed yesterday, when the board voted to launch a last-minute appeal to the removal order. Hours later, the lawyers from the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal. They asked for a stay on the judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building, saying the board would be “forced to squander time and money” if the appeals court decides in its favor and that it “would be incredibly confusing for the public” if, in the end, Trump’s name went back up after coming down.

Cooper decided against them, saying they had not shown they would win their appeal on its merits. He said staying the order “would not be in the public interest, which is rarely served by the ‘perpetuation’ of ‘unlawful’ governmental action.”

Late this afternoon, the board of the Kennedy Center filed an emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, asking for a stay in the order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. It was, perhaps, hasty work. Legal analyst Liz Dye called it “bonkity-bonkers,” while lawyer Norm Eisen of The Contrarian went for “batsh** crazy” and noted that Trump “clearly wrote big pieces himself.”

For the first time, the board alleged that “The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally,” that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on it. Dye notes: “If the bylaws were amended, they were amended since Judge Cooper issued his order—prob yesterday. This is the Board choking off funds and saying ‘you have to let us break the law, or we’ll lose all the funds.’”

According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Washington National Opera, about $17 million of the money Trump appears to be claiming from the Kennedy Center belongs to the Washington National Opera. For fifteen years, the suit says, the opera and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship, in which the center managed donations to the Washington National Opera for the opera’s benefit.

“By the second half of 2025, the Kennedy Center stopped performing many of its obligations under the governing affiliation agreement, including marketing, fundraising, and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of WNO’s funds,” the suit says. “Despite repeated requests from WNO, the Kennedy Center did not remedy its non-performance. Instead, it proposed that the parties end their long-standing affiliation. That affiliation came to an end in January 2026.”

And then the Kennedy Center refused to return the WNO’s money, instead using it as collateral for its own line of credit.

Yesterday Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen did a deep dive into Trump’s determination to turn other people’s money to his own service.

They note that Trump and his allies seized the funds Congress appropriated for celebrations to honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and have “awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants…to politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies”—nearly 80% of the $126 million of funding for the semiquincentenary celebrations. Private funding, including from corporations with issues in front of the administration, has also poured money into Trump’s events.

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the administration is hoping to complete Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch before he leaves office. To do so, they are anticipating keeping work going 20 hours a day. They say they do not need congressional approval. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has asked officials from the National Park Service to explain and to justify why they are ignoring normal rules for federal contracting and instead handing out no-bid contracts, saying the project is “urgent.”

Yesterday Ashleigh Fields of The Hill reported that federal agencies and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) are putting at least $60 million toward the White House cage fight on Trump’s 80th birthday Sunday. That money has paid for the fighting arena on the South Lawn of the White House, as well as paying up to 900 workers since May 20.

A political activist and military veteran from Virginia tried to stop the fight from proceeding, calling it a “deeply corrupt” event that uses national monuments to shill for private businesses, in at least one of which—UFC’s parent company TKO Holding Group—Trump owns significant amounts of stock. They noted that although Trump used the 250th anniversary to justify ignoring environmental review and congressional approval, the event is clearly designed not for the nation’s birthday, but for his own.

Today Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the lawsuit, saying that the Virginians did not have standing to challenge the UFC fight and that the time and money invested in the event outweighed any temporary harm they suffered.

On social media today, Trump posted images of the horse statues behind the Lincoln Memorial being freshly gilded, and wrote: “Re-gilding of the massive Arts of War sculptures, located between The Lincoln Memorial and site of The Triumphal Arch, rapidly continues. The sculptures will be fully regilded by July 3. The photos were taken yesterday. The Gilders’ Studio has flown in Gilders from around the Country to perform this work!”

Yesterday Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times reported on how former prime minister of Hungary Victor Orbán used architecture to reinforce the idea that his government was rebuilding former glories, while new prime minister Péter Magyar is contrasting the palaces Orbán built to the crumbling hospitals and children’s homes around the country, where there was no money for toilet paper. The contrast between the gilded palaces of Orbán and his cronies and the poverty in which everyday Hungarians lived was key to the popular uprising that toppled Orbán’s government and put Magyar’s in place.

Today Elon Musk, who poured more than $290 million into the 2024 election to elect Trump and other Republicans, became the world’s first trillionaire—on paper, at least—when shares of his rocket company SpaceX were offered to the public.

Tonight the appeals court denied Trump’s emergency motion. Observers waiting at the Kennedy Center noted that a rainbow broke out over the building shortly after the decision. Although the letters for Trump’s name went up in hours, attached by workers on scissor lifts, taking them down involved so much scaffolding and so many hours that the United States government missed the court-imposed deadline.

The Department of Justice said the letters would come down “in the early hours of the morning of June 13,” presumably when there would not be the huge audience that has been watching the removal all day either in person or on livestream, and asked the court for twelve more hours to comply with the court order.

“forced to squander time and money“

As opposed to all the other time and money the administration has wasted?

Ta.

Corruption? What corruption.

Epstein files? What Epstein files?

Michael V said:

Ta.

Corruption? What corruption.

Epstein files? What Epstein files?

It’s gobsmackingly frustrating that he blatantly breaks laws every day and the things they get him on is relatively minor things like this. And that he still throws a tanty over it.

Just goes to show, do something wrong, get landed a tonne of bricks, do everything wrong, be world leader¡

SCIENCE said:

Just goes to show, do something wrong, get landed a tonne of bricks, do everything wrong, be world leader¡

Maybe Poorline should do some pussy grabbing to really boost her popularity. We can have The Pauline Hanson and Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre.

June 13, 2026 (Saturday)

Before noon on Saturday, June 13, Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” They had, he wrote, “emoved all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy,” updated the website, removed references to Trump from letterhead, promotional materials, and so on, and “ithdrawn any trademark application officially referring to the Kennedy Center as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center’…or any similar formulation.”

What they did not do was take down the tarp workers installed last night around the scaffolding they erected yesterday, hiding the portico wall. Through a crack between the tarp and the wall, photographers caught a few images of letters coming down shortly after 3:00 AM—Cliff Owen of the Associated Press got an iconic shot of a worker loosening the P from the wall—but so far the public has not seen the restored facade. The portico remained shrouded all day.

In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.” Tonight workers were back at the Kennedy Center, where they created passageways in the tarp to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the wall where Trump had put his name covered.

Last night, while workers were putting up scaffolding at the Kennedy Center, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters held a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the UFC cage matches to be held at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. Trump sent the United States Army Herald Trumpets, the U.S. Army ensemble chiefly responsible for playing the entrance and exit fanfares for the President of the United States, to open the event.

The fighters walked from Lincoln’s statue down the steps of the memorial through the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon, a pathway formed between two groups made up of sixteen service members in dress uniforms. This is the U.S. military’s highest ceremonial formation, usually reserved for heads of state, foreign dignitaries, senior officials, and funerals for military heroes.

This morning the weigh-in for the UFC fights at the White House also took place at the Lincoln Memorial. Heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit seemed to pretend to throw up, dribbling colored liquid from his mouth. “So what? Maybe I was drinking last night,” Hokit told the media there. “Who wouldn’t be? I’ve got a giant man who wants to knock me out,” he said, referring to his scheduled opponent Derrick Lewis, whom Alex Pattle of Yahoo! Sports identifies as Trump’s favorite fighter. “He has the most knockouts in UFC history.”

Today stunt performer Travis Pastrana performed a backflip on his dirt bike over the UFC octagon fight arena on the South Lawn of the White House. Other riders performed stunts as well. They were filmed on their bikes, flying across the facade of the White House.

On the eve of his 80th birthday, the president posted an image of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a homeless encampment. Then he posted an image of himself leaving his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in 2024, when a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, under the caption “Only Trump.” Then he posted an image from 2018 of himself walking with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Then he posted a picture of himself speaking at a lectern in front of Air Force One while he was campaigning for reelection in August 2020.

Then he posted an AI image of himself on a ship looking out at battleships from different eras, including a wooden sailing vessel, flying the American flag, with fighter jets in formation overhead; the back of his jacket is emblazoned with “COMMANDER IN CHIEF,” and the caption reads: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”

Then he posted an image of himself on the cover of Fortune magazine from December 8, 1986. And then he posted a black and white image of himself as a younger man in the same era, looking pensive, seated in a chair on an ice rink, with the caption: “Years ago after saving the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park—Long before I fixed The Reflecting Pool, and everything else in Washington, D.C. including, most importantly, CRIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Tomorrow night, the fighters will enter the ring from the Oval Office. The fight will be carried live on Paramount Plus, for a fee of $8.99 and up.

“ the president posted an image of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a homeless encampment”

What a baby

June 14, 2026 (Sunday)

On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved “hat six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates… each company, as soon as completed, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

And thus Congress established the Continental Army.

The First Continental Congress, which met in 1774, refused to establish a standing army, afraid that a bad government could use an army against its people. The Congress met in response to the British Parliament’s closing of the port of Boston and imposition of martial law there, but its members hoped they could repair their relationship with King George III and simply sent entreaties to the king to end what were known as the “Intolerable Acts.”

The Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 changed the equation. On April 19, British soldiers opened fire on colonists just as Patriot leaders feared they might. In the aftermath of that deadly day, about 15,000 untrained Massachusetts militiamen converged on Boston and laid siege to the town, where they bottled up about 6,500 British Regulars.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord made it clear the British government endangered American liberties. The Second Continental Congress met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, to address the crisis in Boston. The delegates overcame their suspicions of a standing army to conclude they must bring the various state militias into a continental organization to stand against King George III.

With the establishment of the Continental Army, a British officer, General Charles Lee, resigned his commission in the British Army and published a public letter explaining that the king’s overreach had turned him away from service in His Majesty’s army and toward the Patriots:
“henever it shall please his Majesty to call me forth to any honourable service against the natural hereditary enemies of our country, or in defence of his just rights and dignity, no man will obey the righteous summons with more zeal and alacrity than myself,” he wrote, “but the present measures seem to me so absolutely subversive of the rights and liberties of every individual subject, so destructive to the whole empire at large, and ultimately so ruinous to his Majesty’s own person, dignity and family, that I think myself obliged in conscience as a Citizen, Englishman, and Soldier of a free state, to exert my utmost to defeat them.”

After they established a Continental Army, the next thing Congress members did was to name a French and Indian War veteran, Virginia planter George Washington, commander-in-chief. To Washington fell the challenge of establishing an army to defend the nation without creating a military a tyrant could use to repress the people.

It was not an easy project. The Continental Army was made up of volunteers who were loyal primarily to the officers they had chosen, and because Congress still feared a standing army, their enlistments initially were short. Different units trained with different field manuals, making it hard to turn them into a unified fighting force. Women came to the camps with their men, often bringing their children. The women worked for the half-rations the government provided, washing, cooking, hauling water, and tending the wounded.

After an initial bout of enthusiasm at the start of the war, men stopped enlisting, and in 1777 Congress increased the times of enlistment to three years or “for the duration” of the conflict. That meant that the men in the army were more often poor than wealthy, enlisting for the bounties offered, and Congress found it easy to overlook those 12,000 people encamped about eighteen miles to the northwest of Philadelphia in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1778. The Congress had no way to compel the states to provide money, food, or supplies for the army, and the army almost fell apart for lack of support.

Supply chains broke as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant Congress did not appropriate enough money for food. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny, even as a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.

By February 1778 a delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and, understanding that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. The army survived.

By the end of 1778, the main theater of the war had shifted to the South, where British officers hoped to recruit Loyalists to their side. Instead, guerrilla bands helped General Nathanael Greene bait the British into a war of endurance that finally ended on October 19, 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, where British general Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington and French commander Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau.

The Continental Army had defeated the army of the king and established a nation based on the principle that all men were created equal and had a right to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In September 1783, negotiators concluded the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, and Congress discharged most of the troops still in service. In his November 2 farewell address to his men, Washington noted that their victory against such a formidable power was “little short of a standing Miracle.” “ho has before seen a disciplined Army formed at once from such raw materials?” Washington wrote. “Who that was not a witness could imagine, that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers?”

With the army disbanded, General Washington himself stepped away from military leadership. On December 23, Washington addressed Congress, saying: “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

In 1817, given the choice of subjects to paint for the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington’s resignation from the army. As he discussed the project with President James Madison, Trumbull told the president: “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success, and such irreproachable moderation.”

Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily walking away from the leadership of a powerful army rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the Capitol Rotunda.

“What the heck just happened?” with Heather and Joanne.

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SCIENCE said:

ms spock said:

Heather Cox Richardson on Oil Executives warning of fuel issues

Link

so why are they saying it, out of the ¿ goodness of their hearts

I don’t think so. I think they are saying it because of their potential loss of profits.

June 15, 2026 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump’s remaking of Washington, D.C., to reflect his personalized approach to power rather than the American people and their government has become a little too on-the-nose over the past week.

After weeks of hyping the idea that he would restore the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial to “SPECTACULAR” condition after it had been “destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump today reposted an article from the right-wing site Breitbart, titled: “‘Thank You President Trump’: Reflecting Pool in D.C. Wows After Trump Renovations.”

In fact, as Kinnia Cheuk of Politico reported today, the renovations Trump said would cost $1.5 million appear from federal contracting records to have cost almost $16 million, and the pool is now fouled with green algae.

But Trump and his cronies are simply telling the American people it’s a win. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the reflecting pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” a spokesperson for the Interior Department told Cheuk.

The alleged compliance of the board of the Kennedy Center with a court order requiring it to remove Trump’s name from the center illustrates yet another of Trump’s hallmarks: cheating the system. Trump packed the board with loyalists who made him chair and then changed the name of the building despite specific language from Congress that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.

The board missed the court deadline by twelve hours. Then Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the Kennedy Center, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.”

Their conclusion seems to have been that the court ordered them only to take down Trump’s name; it did not order them to show that his name was down, or to keep Kennedy’s name visible. Currently, the Kennedy Center portico facade is covered with a giant tarp through which workers have created passageways to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the portico covered.

Trump has made his career on the idea that there is always a way to cheat the system if you operate in bad faith, and he has carried that idea into the government. Famously, in 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said Trump was hiding his tax returns because he had paid no federal taxes in years, Trump answered: “That makes me smart.”

Now, after voters reelected him in 2024, Trump’s hand-picked acting attorney general Todd Blanche has agreed that the Department of Justice will not prosecute Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for tax evasion.

Both system-cheating and spectacle were on display in last night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the South Lawn of the White House. Trump got around restrictions on using the White House grounds for such an event by claiming it was in honor of the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, for which Congress has suspended normal regulations.

Then at 9:30 Friday night, as Aram Roston and Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian reported, the UFC issued a press release saying that the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, which emerged on Wednesday as an official sponsor of the event, would be the “Presenting Partner of a new $250,000 Performance of the Night bonus pool.”

World Liberty Financial is the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, overseen by Zach Witkoff, the son of billionaire Steve Witkoff. The elder Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and for peace missions, including to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin (apparently at Putin’s request).

Zach Everson of Public Citizen explained what this arrangement means. In addition to connecting World Liberty Financial directly to the White House, UFC is giving cash to World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial gives its crypto to the fighters. World Liberty Financial then invests the cash in U.S. Treasury bonds and keeps the interest.

The UFC fight on the White House lawn was also about spectacle, and not just about appealing to Trump’s base as fighter Josh Hokit did by echoing a right-wing conspiracy theory that smeared former First Lady Michelle Obama. MAGA influencers and administration officials hyped the event as representing the United States, but on June 11, Reuters reported that only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold UFC cage matches at the White House. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate. Even among Republicans, only 31% thought it was appropriate.

We are about to see if Trump’s focus on cheating the system for his own ends and distracting from his actions with spectacle will work over something as huge as the Iran war and Americans’ constitutional rights.

Shortly before he appeared at his birthday fight, Trump posted on social media: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

About an hour later, he posted: “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!”

It appears that Trump badly wanted to sign an agreement with Iran yesterday on his birthday before taking off today for Europe to attend the G7, an informal forum made up of leading industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and including the European Union (EU). Rumors about what was included in negotiations swirled all weekend.

While Trump is boasting that the agreement is a triumph, no one has yet seen any terms, and the agreement that is scheduled to be signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday appears to be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a 60-day ceasefire for continued negotiations, not a final agreement.

Zack Stanton of MS NOW notes the ways in which Trump’s version of the MOU and what Iranian officials say about it are quite different. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free” while Iranian officials say they will regulate the strait along with Oman.

Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets by saying “no money will exchange hands.”

But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction.

Discussion of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be put off for later.

In his remarks about the MOU yesterday, Trump thanked Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping for their help.

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that even without the details, “it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.”

Iran’s government is intact and now under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Strait of Hormuz is under Iran’s control, Iran has significant drone and missile stocks, Iran can continue to sponsor terrorism, and money will flow to Iran. Nichols points out that Iran leaves the conflict stronger than before. Any claims that Trump managed to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions is “silly,” Nichols notes: the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was working to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment before Trump tore the agreement up in 2018, and when Trump chose to start bombing in February 2026, Iran was “nowhere near getting a bomb.”

Nichols notes that Trump’s declaration that the strait is open is “terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision.” He concludes: “The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.”

That the terms of the MOU are unlikely to favor the U.S. showed perhaps even more clearly when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been a staunch advocate for using even more force against Iran, appeared to tee up blaming Vance for the terms of the agreement. He also suddenly fell back on the need for Congress to put its stamp on what seems likely to be an inglorious end to a war Trump and loyalists like Graham have insisted Congress had no role in approving.

“Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he wrote on social media. “I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress.”

But Trump will try to sell this as a win.

After their recent reporting that the Trump administration went into panic mode to cover up the Epstein files last summer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times today that the Trump administration came much closer to trying to get rid of the writ of habeas corpus than was previously known. That right prevents the government from locking people up arbitrarily; authorities must charge a prisoner with a crime and take the case into the legal system. The Constitution spells out: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Last spring, when the Supreme Court said undocumented immigrants had the right to challenge their deportations, according to Swan and Haberman, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller proposed simply suspending the writ of habeas corpus and throwing them out.

Warned away from the idea because of the outcry it would spark, the administration found a way to cheat the system: it changed longstanding policy concerning immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a long time. In the past, those caught on the border could be detained without a hearing, while those who had been here for a long time could request to be released on bond. The administration simply treated those who had been here for years as if they had just arrived, throwing them into detention without a bond hearing.

Judges have ruled against this new interpretation, but having found a way to cheat the system, the administration is simply ignoring them. As legal commentator Joyce White Vance put it: “The question inside Trump’s White House wasn’t whether they could suspend rights—it was whether they could get away with it.”

And then there was the idea of using spectacle to sell the Insurrection Act. Haberman and Swan report that Miller and, especially, Vice President Vance pushed the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to put down protests of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. They did so even after federal agents had shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. According to the reporters, Vance said the use of troops to put down Americans in the streets would be painful in the short term, but it would send a message that what he insisted were paid protesters—there is no evidence that either Good or Pretti was a paid protester—would never again disrupt ICE operations.

While the White House did not invoke the act at the time, the reporters conclude that for the proponents of invoking it, the Insurrection Act “would remain a loaded weapon in a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power.”

Early this morning, Trump posted on social media: “On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’”

How would this non nuclear proliferation treaty be enforced with Iran.
If anything all this nonsense would make it harder to enforce as they’d hide it even better.
Plus they have tested Israeli and US weapons and so can build weapons taking this into account
Could pass this knowledge onto China and Russia

Cymek said:

How would this non nuclear proliferation treaty be enforced with Iran.
If anything all this nonsense would make it harder to enforce as they’d hide it even better.
Plus they have tested Israeli and US weapons and so can build weapons taking this into account
Could pass this knowledge onto China and Russia

pretty sure especially some other country that has actually engaged in minimal active warfare for decades, is already plenty enjoying learning everything they need to learn from these proxy wars

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

How would this non nuclear proliferation treaty be enforced with Iran.
If anything all this nonsense would make it harder to enforce as they’d hide it even better.

pretty sure especially some other country that has actually engaged in minimal active warfare for decades, is already plenty enjoying learning everything they need to learn from these proxy wars

also agree this particular part won’t make fkal difference, as yous suggest enrichers going to enrich, and active wars in recent decades suggest warmongers going to hold up vials of chalk and warmonger, regardless of whether the substances in question actually exist

Thanks.

June 16, 2026 (Tuesday)

A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that even before a fighter launched a slur at former First Lady Michelle Obama, and even before the sight of the corporate branding at the event, only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight at the White House.

Today, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who has been in trouble with Trump over stories of his drinking, said the FBI discovered and foiled a plot to attack the UFC fight. The FBI alleged in an affidavit that nineteen attackers planned to target the fight with drones laden with explosives and then to shoot at the fleeing crowd.

Jude Joffe-Block, Lisa Hagen, and Audrey Nguyen of NPR noted in 2024 that Patel often peddled in conspiracy theories and, since taking on the directorship of the FBI, has tripped himself up in the past by announcing things that he later has to walk back. That history meant that social media users greeted the announcement with skepticism.

Tonight the Justice Department announced the arrest of five people in four states. Mark Berman, Amy B. Wang, and Victoria Craw of the Washington Post reported that Matthew C. Quinn, deputy director of the Secret Service, told reporters that the Secret Service had led the investigation and that the UFC fight “was never at risk due to the great investigative work.” In what appeared to be a reference to Patel, he added: “In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

Meanwhile, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee today issued a press release announcing they are launching an investigation into Patel’s alleged misuse of FBI funds. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the highest-ranking Democrat on the committee, says they have received information that Patel had directed more than $1 million in bonuses to agents close to himself. “These payments raise serious concerns that FBI funds are being used to reward political loyalty rather than merit and professionalism,” the Democrats wrote.

The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and it, too, is undergoing a crisis of confidence in its work.

In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.

As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “I have read hundreds—if not thousands—of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

Today U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel Rosen announced his office was charging fifteen people with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over their behavior during the federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis last year that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Rosen alleges that the defendants are part of two “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”

At the press conference about the charges, prosecutors introduced a Facebook post from one of the accused that said: “We need to become ungovernable.” Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Oh, so they have NOTHING nothing.” It’s actually even more embarrassing than that: Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 when its theme was “Become Ungovernable,” and stood in front of the banner bearing that slogan, so the idea that the phrase is part of a criminal conspiracy will be awkward to argue.

From Minneapolis, Matt Sepic of MPR News reported that Rosen said the people were “charged not for what they said but what they did.” But Rosen did not answer questions about whether any law enforcement officers were injured and said evidence would come out later. Sepic notes that federal prosecutors charged thirty-six people with assaulting or impeding immigration agents in December and January, but have now dropped eighteen of the cases entirely and eleven more through nonprosecution agreements. Sepic notes that Magistrate Judge David Schultz in April called one of the prosecutors’ charging documents a “false affidavit.”

At the time of the Good and Pretti killings, Open Measures, which tracks the spread of harmful social media activity, noted that right-wing social media personalities tried to redirect public outrage by claiming that community organizers using group chats on Signal were threatening the safety of federal officers. As those claims spread, right-wing media amplified old stories that those opposing ICE agents were “antifa” or part of a “radical left.” They demanded such chats be investigated. Today’s charges cited messages sent in Signal chats.

Reporter Christopher Mathias of MS NOW noted that while the Department of Justice is going after Minneapolis protesters, Greg Bovino, the commander-at-large of the Border Patrol during the Minneapolis crackdown that cost Good and Pretti their lives, has appeared on a white nationalist podcast as he teases a bid for the presidency.

Journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who is one of the Broadview Six, commented: “As the government raids “antifa groups” in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six, we need to be asking how they got this indictment. And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.”

But today’s charges have redirected at least some media energy from the details emerging about Trump’s “deal” with Iran. While the U.S. has declined to publish details of what appears to be a memorandum of understanding that participants hope will lead to a final agreement, Dov Lieber, Summer Said, Alexander Ward, and Rebecca Feng of the Wall Street Journal report that the agreement says the U.S. will waive sanctions to allow Iran immediately to sell oil and to access the banking, transportation, and insurance systems it will need to do so.

Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN report that U.S. negotiators are downplaying the significance of the language in the memorandum of understanding, claiming that language that seems to favor Iran is designed to give cover to Iranian officials back home.

But Philip Wegmann and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that the vagueness of the language of the agreement is not fooling Republican war hawks who stood behind Trump in his attacks on Iran. They are calling early reports about the deal “disturbing” and “utterly disastrous.”

There is other news the administration would likely prefer to cover up, as well.

Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that even as Trump was assuring the American public that private donors would pay for his ballroom, the White House had already approved tens of millions of taxpayer money for the contractor building the addition.

With access to project summaries, the journalists were able to show that “internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.”

And Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial is having the effect experts warned of. Because of the dark paint on the floor of the pool, the sun heats the water up even faster than it did before, and the resulting algae bloom has turned the pool bright green. Today, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try to kill the algae.

June 17, 2026 (Wednesday)

A senior U.S. official read the text of the fourteen-point memorandum of understanding with Iran over the phone to reporters today, and there’s a reason it has ignited a firestorm.

A memorandum of understanding is usually a nonbinding agreement outlining shared goals and intentions, but in this case, although there is much vague or confusing language in the text, what the White House says is an MOU actually has firm language in it.

First of all, after months of the White House insisting Trump does not need congressional approval for his strikes against Iran because they did not constitute a war, the MOU straight up calls the conflict “the current war.”

The MOU commits the U.S. and Iran “and their allies” to stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” a reference to Israel’s bombing of what it says are Hezbollah camps there. Israel has suggested it will not consider itself bound by any such agreement, but as Anton Troianvoski points out in the New York Times, the language will enable Iran to pressure the U.S. over Israeli attacks in Lebanon or Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in what Israel calls a “security zone.”

The MOU says the U.S. will “terminate all types of sanctions” against Iran, and it lifts the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, giving Iran the access to world trade the U.S. previously prevented in order to pressure the regime. It also permits Iran to begin selling oil immediately on the world market.

The MOU says Iran will use “its best efforts”—not a guarantee— “for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz “with no charge for 60 days only.” It continues: Iran and Oman will decide how to “define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz,” an indication that Iran intends to charge fees for transit of the strait.

The MOU says the U.S. will thaw frozen Iranian assets immediately and also “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran to repair the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. It says the U.S. will grant “ll required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions,” apparently readmitting Iran to full participation in world financial markets.

In exchange for these concessions, Iran “reaffirms” in the MOU that it will not try to develop or procure a nuclear weapon. That word “reaffirms” is important: it signals that Iran is simply reiterating what it said in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump tore up in 2018.

But, unlike the JCPOA, the MOU contains no language about a process to guarantee Iran’s promise not to pursue a nuclear weapon. When a reporter asked Trump about that absence, he said that what would guarantee Iran’s compliance is fear of renewed U.S. bombing. But Iran has shown it can withstand such attacks, and in any case, the U.S. has no stomach for them.

It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.

The costs to the world have been significantly higher in terms both of lives—beginning with more than 175 Iranian schoolchildren and their teachers—and of economies.

Journalist David Shuster reported that the Iranian government is declaring “total victory.”

Former secretary of state Antony Blinken posted: “By President Trump’s own terms, the war is a failure. The Iranian regime is intact and its military wing more empowered, while the Iranian people are more impoverished, repressed and desperate…. The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so…. Don’t expect a return to normal any time soon, if at all,” he warned.

In a press opportunity today in France, where he was attending the Group of Seven (G7) conference, an informal forum of industrialized democracies, Trump twice told reporters that he didn’t want to be like President Herbert Hoover. Although he got the history of Hoover’s role in the Great Depression wrong, Trump’s point seemed clear: he didn’t want to be the person to trigger an “economic catastrophe.”

And therein lay the rub for Trump in his war on Iran: so long as Iranian leaders could credibly threaten the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, they could throttle about a fifth of the world’s oil supply and much of its fertilizer, plunging the globe into crisis. The terms of the MOU heavily favor Iran, but the strait gives its leaders leverage over Trump and the U.S. This was precisely the scenario that past U.S. presidents sought to avoid by negotiating with Iran rather than bombing it.

Selling the MOU in the U.S. is going to be rough. When a reporter asked Trump today why he didn’t “stick around for the signing ceremony with this Iran peace deal,” the famously camera-courting president answered: “I might, but I’d rather, this is a memorandum of understanding. It’s very important, but it might not be the kind of a document that I should be signing.” The reporter responded: “There is some element to this where you send the vice president. If it works out, great. You look like a genius for sending him. If it doesn’t work out, it’s the vice president’s fault.”

Trump responded: “I like that idea…. This way, if it works out, I’m gonna take the credit; if it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D. He’s gonna turn his plane around and get the hell outta here. Yeah, I like that idea. I think that’s a good idea.”

MAGA lawmakers like Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) seemed willing to go along with the measure, saying: “I trust President Trump. I trust Vice President Vance. We don’t need to listen to anybody up here on Capitol Hill. Let’s trust these two.” But John Knefel of Media Matters reported that MAGA figures who have been all-in on the war on Iran are revolting against the MOU. “Trump’s Iran deal gives the Islamic Republic big wins upfront—and America nothing,” wrote the New York Post.

Journalist David Shuster reported that Republican senators are furious with Trump. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger a month ago, posted: “Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.

“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

By tonight, Trump loyalist Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) was defending the idea of Iran having missiles, despite the fact that ending Iran’s missile program was one of Trump’s stated reasons for starting the war in the first place. Marshall told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he preferred that they not have missiles, but that “the key issue” is that “they have to be able to defend themselves.”

National security scholar Joseph Stieb posted: “It’s like the last 40 years of the Republican Party’s foreign policy didn’t happen.”

After setting Vance up to take the fall for the deal, tonight at a dinner with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, Trump signed the MOU himself. It was a moment when a knowledge of history would have been useful. As MeidasTouch noted, it was at Versailles after World War I that the Allied powers forced Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, “one of the most famous surrender documents in modern history.”

Earlier in the day, asked by a MeidasTouch reporter about Trump’s cognitive decline at the G7, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said: “The president has been humiliated on the world stage, and many Americans are increasingly concerned about his stability and his capacity in the office. It’s deeply distressing to Americans across the political spectrum to see a president so incompetent and so incapable attempting and failing to represent the nation internationally.”

Over a GIF of James Bond saying, “He’s quite mad, you know,” national security scholar Tom Nichols called today “the weirdest and most astonishing day in US foreign policy in decades.”

Thanks.

“It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.”

But it’s not a war, remember? You can’t have war casualties if there’s no war!

Divine Angel said:

“It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.”

But it’s not a war, remember? You can’t have war casualties if there’s no war!

But it is run by the department of war.

roughbarked said:

Divine Angel said:

“It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.”

But it’s not a war, remember? You can’t have war casualties if there’s no war!

But it is run by the department of war.

special military operations are all the rage these days

Thanks for posting.

June 18, 2026 (Thursday)

Overnight, Ukraine launched its biggest attack on Moscow, the capital of Russia, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s waves of drone strikes on a major Moscow oil refinery have shrouded the city in flames and black smoke. Last week, Russia struck one of Ukraine’s most important religious and cultural landmarks, the thousand-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The ancient monastery, with its churches and bell towers, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, described by the United Nations agency as a “masterpiece of Ukrainian art.”

Russia denied responsibility for the strike. After the Moscow strikes, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky released a video saying: “If Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too.”

In the U.S., President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are trying hard to sell the administration’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran, which Trump signed yesterday at the Palace of Versailles in a scene that recalled Germany’s surrender after World War I. Trump is posting in all caps on social media that the deal is a triumph and that those who disagree with it “are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.”

Vance is in front of cameras saying that Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed—which is false—and that Iran gets nothing outlined in the MOU unless Iranian leaders change their behavior. The published agreement makes no such stipulation, and benefits, like the ability to sell oil on international markets and the lifting of sanctions, begin to flow to Iran immediately.

The leaders trying to dictate a new global order seem brittle and breaking, while in the United States the crowds jamming the streets in New York City in a ticker tape parade for the NBA Championship winners, the New York Knicks, suggested the momentum has shifted back to the American people. Celebrities like Mariska Hargitay, Timothée Chalamet, Mary J. Blige, Fat Joe, Spike Lee, and Ben Stiller joined the parade to celebrate the Knicks’ win.

At City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani blended the victory of the Knicks with the rising political power of the people. .

“Over these past weeks, as the Knicks kept winning, our city has come together as one,” Mamdani told the crowd. “Neighbors invited neighbors over. Strangers high-fived one another in the street. Subway conductors sang their announcements, and bus drivers danced behind the wheel.

“So often when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy, or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together. A city alive, a city overcome by happiness.

“But,” he said, “let’s not pretend that this was inevitable. If you will allow me, I want to travel back in time eight days. Game four. Nine minutes and 33 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Knicks are down 20. The analytics guys, the sports betting companies, the pundits who watch from far away, they do what they do. They run the numbers. They calculate the odds. They write the Knicks off. They give the Spurs a 99.6% chance of winning the game. A 99.6% chance of tying up the Series 2–2, of reclaiming the momentum with the next game in San Antonio. A 99.6% chance of silencing the Garden, of another year of watching and waiting.

“But there is one thing that the pundits just don’t get about this team, that they just don’t get about this city. It is in that .4% that we go to work. It is in that .4% that Jalen Brunson, the same guy that so many said was too small, proves that not only is he good enough, he is the new standard for greatness. It is in that .4% that OG Anunoby watches the ball float from the top of the arc and start running toward the basket, fingers reaching towards the heavens. It is in that .4% that Karl-Anthony Towns finds the strength to mourn his mother and still pull in rebound after rebound, make block after block. It is in that 0.4% that Jose Alvarado shows every kid growing up in public housing, that a son of Brooklyn and Queens can win for every one of the five boroughs. It is in that .4% that Mitch breaks his finger before game one and says, “Go get the tape.” It’s in that .4% that Josh Hart gets rebounds that break teams, that Mikal Bridges proves he was worth every single draft pick that Landry Shamet pulls up from downtown, that every one of these 18 players transforms the franchise, that Mike Brown keeps this team believing.

“Most of all, it’s in that .4% that the Knicks do what New Yorkers have always done when we are told something is impossible. We find a way. We win. Standing here, before what feels like the entire city, there is a Jalen Brunson quote I can’t stop thinking about: ‘You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, but you gotta go out there and do something about it.’

“Time after time, we thought about the worst possible scenario. And time after time, the Knicks went out there and did something about it. The Knicks did not just win for New York City. They won like New York City. What is New York, if not your back up against the wall? A dream that feels just out of reach. A rent payment you don’t know how you’ll ever make. What is New York, if not 99.6% of the world stacked against you?

“And who are New Yorkers, if not people who hear those odds and smile? Who look at a .4% chance of success and ask, ‘Why are you giving me a head start?’ This is our city. This is our team. For 53 years, we watched. For 53 years, we waited. Now we’ve won.”

The theme farther west, in Chicago’s Jackson Park, was the same: community, hope, and the power of individuals to create change. For the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, former first lady Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama welcomed living presidents and first ladies, except the Trumps, who were not invited: President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton, President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush, and President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.

The crowd at the center was packed to hear speeches by the Obamas and longtime friends and aides, and to hear performances by Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, Common, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Marsai Martin, The Roots, Bruce Springsteen, Tems, U2’s Bono and The Edge, Eddie Vedder, and Stevie Wonder.

Tens of thousands of people also packed the nearby Midway Plaisance Park to watch the event on jumbotrons. In both places, the mood was jubilant and warm. Comedians Stephen Colbert and David Letterman and Obama Foundation board chair Martin Nesbitt all showed up in tan suits, a reference to the tan suit Obama wore in the Oval Office in August 2014. Although past presidents including Ronald Reagan had also worn tan suits in the White House, as Jacob Gallagher of the New York Times noted today, Obama’s suit led to a right-wing meltdown about how the suit was too informal for the West Wing: then-Representative Peter King (R-NY) called it “a metaphor for his lack of seriousness.”

The story of the South Side of Chicago, from which the Obamas hail, is “a story of possibility,” a video introducing the center said. “e can come together and create the change we seek. ‘We.’ It’s the single most powerful word in a democracy: ‘We the people.’ We shall overcome. All things are possible. Yes we can. ‘We’ includes everyone.” The emphasis of the event was on new leaders shaping the future. “The future is now, and it starts with us.”

Mrs. Obama urged Americans to make a choice to change the future. “The Obama presidential center is a living testament to the power of choice,” she said, “the historic example that millions of you gave the world about what this imperfect democracy has strived for and achieved.” And, she said, it is “an urgent call to go out there and do it again.”

She said she hoped the center would remind people “of the power of choice. And the steady work of change. The arduous, unglamorous march up that mountain, one foot after another, day after day, generation after generation. But I…also hope you fully absorb the elation of achieving something together. You know, that feeling when you clear the tree line and see a vista that takes your breath away. A feeling that can never be erased.”

“I know that can be hard to grasp right now,” she said, “when everything feels so upside down. When fact and fiction run together, when folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history. When our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage.” She hoped the center “can reignite the optimism and empathy and ambition that has always powered this country’s greatest change.”

“e want you to come here and put away your phones and talk and laugh and cry…and make new friends,” she said. “Get your hands dirty in my garden. Push your baby on a swing in the playground. Have a romantic picnic on the great lawn. Because that’s the work of democracy too. Being neighborly. Taking care of public spaces. Having some fun enjoying each other. Shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.”

She championed the power of the people as she urged the center’s South Side neighbors “to make this campus a part of your lives. Be inspired by the world-class art. Check out the books from our beautiful public library—and bring them back on time. Drop some beats in the recording studio, hit some corner threes at home court, hold birthday parties, jump-start clothing drives. Host citywide cleanup dates here. Use this campus to show off this place we call home. This joyful place where Marian and Fraser Robinson taught their two kids to dream big. This hopeful place where an unknown guy with an unknown name took flight. This stubbornly optimistic place where family after family scrapes and claws and laughs and dances their way to a better tomorrow. That’s what this has always been about.”

She told Chicagoans they “have shown the world what we are capable of. You’ve proven that a lasting legacy isn’t an award or a name on a building or a number of zeros in a bank account, but the difference we make in one another’s lives. It’s about seeing each other, and showing up for each other, and carrying each other when we’re weary or faltering or losing faith. That’s how you build something that endures.

“And that’s what you all have done at every twist and turn of this extraordinary journey,” she said. “You have protected and proclaimed the hope that beats within the heart of this campus. You’ve rekindled and renewed this untameable, unpredictable, and unbreakable democracy. And I know that you all are gonna astonish us even more in the months and years ahead. Because you all have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when we truly see each other, when we strive to bring out the best in ourselves and one another, oh, there is no limit to how high we can go. Thank you all. I love you all. God bless you, and God bless this country we love.”

Professional sports are a good distraction from real world problems.
I shouldn’t say false camaraderie between your average Joe/Jill but still not quite friendship beyond the game.

Ta.

June 19, 2026 (Friday)

Today is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.

That announcement came as late as it did because while General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army on April 9, 1865, it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.

Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed in Texas. On that day, June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

Granger’s order referred to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.

Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.

But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.

In summer 1865, white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for a crime. But they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.

Congress refused to readmit the southern states with the Black Codes in place, and in December 1865, Americans added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Six months later, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate the anniversary of the coming of their freedom with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing.

By then, congressmen had turned to guaranteeing that states could not pass discriminatory laws against citizens who lived in them, laws like the Black Codes. In 1866 they wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That was the whole ball game, the one that would put teeth behind the principles in the Emancipation Proclamation. The federal government had declared that a state legislature—no matter who elected it or what voters called for—could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.

Rather than accept this new state of affairs, leading white southerners decided they would rather remain under military rule. So in March 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, calling for southern voters to elect delegates to new state constitutional conventions. And, for the first time in U.S. history, they mandated that Black men could vote in those elections.

Three months later the federal government, eager to explain to Black citizens their new voting rights, encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation. The next year, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution remade the United States of America.

In 1865, Juneteenth was a celebration of freedom and the war’s end. In 1866 it was a celebration of the enshrinement of freedom in the U.S. Constitution after the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. In 1867, Juneteenth was a celebration of the freedom of Black men to vote, the very real power of having a say in the government under which they lived.

Celebrations of Juneteenth declined during the Jim Crow years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as Black Americans from the South spread across the country during and after World War II, they brought Juneteenth with them. By the 1980s, Texas had established Juneteenth as a state holiday. Other states followed, and in 2021, thanks in part to pressure from activist Opal Lee, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday and President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.

But throughout our history, those determined to preserve a government that discriminates between Americans according to race, gender, religion, ability, and so on, have embraced the idea that true democracy requires skewing the vote toward the wealthy and white men. They have also insisted, as former Confederates did in the late 1860s, that any laws protecting the equal rights of minorities discriminate against the white majority.

Today, those voices are, once again, gaining traction. One hundred and sixty-one years after Juneteenth was established, we are in danger of losing the new nation that it celebrated— one that would honor the equality of all Americans.

June 20, 2026 (Saturday)
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a metaphor for the Trump presidency. Beginning in early April, Trump boasted he was going to fix the reflecting pool after what he claimed was gross neglect by former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He claimed the repairs, including sealing the pool and painting it “American flag blue,” would cost about $1.8 million and that it would all be finished by July 4, 2026, in time for the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Repeatedly, he bashed his predecessors over the pool, insisting that his skills would enable him to make it better than ever at minimal cost and that the repairs “could last for 100 years.”

The government declared the pool renovations complete on June 6, and water began flowing back into it. Trump immediately claimed it was a triumph. “Thank you President Trump,” he wrote on social media.

But the story was not over. David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported that the repairs had, in fact, run far over budget, to at least $14.2 million. The administration had awarded a no-bid contract to a company Trump first said he had chosen and then said he didn’t know, and had agreed to a 20% profit margin, although a National Park Service analysis found that margin “inflated.”

And then, just a day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.

Experts disagreed, saying that the darker bottom and the sealed seams meant the water would heat up faster than it had before and thus support more algae. By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.

By Friday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract, but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.

That no-bid contract went to a firm whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records. The name of the firm is Greenwater Services.

A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the White House was not involved in the choice of Greenwater Services and the department did not know of Cafaro’s political support for Trump when it awarded the contract.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”

Also on Friday, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, 67, stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material looked like. U.S. Park Police officers arrested him for destruction of government property, a misdemeanor. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats , who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll . Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”

Until his second term in office, Trump has always been protected from the fallout from his own actions, and it appears he has become accustomed to simply describing his fantasy world and expecting that others will agree they see it. If his “fix” for the reflecting pool failed, someone else must be responsible, and they must pay for it.

The pattern Walz identified with regard to the pool applies to Trump’s debacle in Iran. And not only is the reflecting pool defying his narrative, so are Iran and Israel.

Israel has said it does not consider itself bound by the memorandum of understanding Trump signed at Versailles on Friday. That MOU said the U.S. and Iran “and their allies in the current war” would immediately and permanently stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Israel has been attacking what it says are Hezbollah camps in southern Lebanon and has occupied parts of the region as a “security zone.”

On Friday, Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that a recent U.S. intelligence report assessed that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to continue striking Hezbollah despite the MOU. Hezbollah is funded by Iran and is continuing to strike northern Israel. David M. Halbfinger of the New York Times reported on Thursday that Israel was “stunned” by the U.S.-Iran MOU and sees it as “a cataclysmic disaster.”

Israel has continued to strike Lebanon, and after additional strikes last night, Iranian officials today announced that in the wake of these breaches of the MOU, they had, once again, closed the Strait of Hormuz.

This afternoon, Vice President J.D. Vance left for Switzerland to join the negotiations, but already Iran has indicated it intends to charge “insurance fees” for the ships going through the strait.

Trump appeared to try to pressure Iran by threatening to impose U.S. tolls on the strait if an agreement falls through. “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”

That Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is also refusing to go along with Trump’s narrative shows how Trump’s power is crumbling. A former ally, Meloni is now publicly contradicting Trump.

Earlier this week, Trump told an Italian television host that Meloni had “begged” for a picture with him at the G7 conference and that he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni said his comments were entirely “made up,” and the Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the United States over the flap.

Meloni highlighted the damage Trump has done to our alliances and indicated allies are done pretending his behavior is okay. “I don’t know why the US president behaves this way towards allies,” she wrote on Instagram. “I can only say it is regrettable he does not show the same determination towards the enemies of the West and towards the enemies of the US— whose leaders he instead appears to be far more accommodating with. But there is one thing he needs to remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg.”

But Trump couldn’t let it go. This morning, he posted: “Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni asked, over and over, for a picture with me during the G-7 meeting in France. She is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity, possibly because she turned down the United States of America, a Country that truly loves and protects Italy, when it came to denying Iran from obtaining or developing a Nuclear Weapon (But so did NATO, for that matter!). She wouldn’t even let us use Italy’s landing strips or runways, a great logistical inconvenience, and this despite the fact the U.S. contributes hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year to protect Italy, and other “so-called” NATO Allies. Now, after the United States defeated Iran militarily, she wants to be friends again in order to get her “numbers up.” No thanks!!!”

Using a vulgar colloquialism, the headline on the front page of the Italian newspaper Libero today translated to “Trump is an a**hole.”

Today it appeared that the National Guard is patrolling the area around the reflecting pool. Tonight, Trump posted that “any additional people have been arrested having to do with the disgraceful Vandalism of our beautiful Reflecting Pool.” The reflecting pool “worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish, perfectly reflecting the two Great Monuments, which it never had before! What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly.”

Although multiple cameras line the mall and no one has offered any proof either of additional arrests or of vandalism, and although we have all been able to see workers dumping chemicals into the pool to kill the algae, Trump claimed that vandals “took some form of a knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

“The Reflecting Pool was never so beautiful as it was just one week ago, even going back to 1922 when it opened,” he wrote. “We are very proud of what we have done with this magnificent structure, and we will get it repaired, quickly, to an equal level of Beauty.”

Thanks.

June 21, 2026 (Sunday)

I spent so much time in my friend Mike’s house growing up that I knew his parents as Mama and Papa. His father, Kenneth Edward Nyboe, was born in 1924 in New York City but spent his summers in Maine, where he knew my mother and my aunt and where he met, and secretly married, my aunt’s friend Helen Bryant just before he shipped overseas to be in the tank corps with Patton’s Third Army in World War II.

Papa’s war was not an easy one, although he came home without visible wounds. After the war, he went to the University of Maine on the GI Bill, spurred by Helen, who had never been to college herself but made it clear she expected him to live up to her faith in him by making it through school.

After college, he went to work for the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., insisting on the simplest solutions—the ones that worked—even when the rest of the team scoffed that they were too easy. For years, while Helen and their two sons were in Maine for the summer, he commuted between there and Washington, driving back and forth on the weekends because even though it was a 12-hour drive, nothing mattered more than driving down Carter’s Lane at the end of it.

Papa was away a lot, but when he was home, he always had time for us kids. He taught me how to shingle a roof and to sand a deck and to wire lights and to spell out the NATO phonetic alphabet and to count hours in military time and what to do if you cut an artery (which came in surprisingly handy after a kitchen accident many years later).

He took all of us out to the islands in his boat for hiking and picnics. On one special, brutally hot August day, when everyone else had gone somewhere and the tide was way too low to swim, he took me out into the sound to find deep, cold water so I could jump in. The heat made things waver; we saw mirages among the islands that day.

Papa Ken had a huge heart. He could whistle “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof loud enough to hear all the way across the harbor. And he always said there was nothing anyone couldn’t work out, so long as they talked to each other honestly.

Papa had a wonderful voice, a resonant baritone. When Helen was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their sons—these were the days when you stayed in the hospital for a week—she got lonely and scared. She called Papa in tears. “Say something,” she begged. “Just say something to me. I need to hear your voice.”

And in the middle of the night, Papa didn’t even say hello. He took a deep breath. “Four score and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

And he recited the Gettysburg Address until she could sleep.

Happy Father’s Day to dads and to those who fill the role.

Neophyte said:

June 21, 2026 (Sunday)

I spent so much time in my friend Mike’s house growing up that I knew his parents as Mama and Papa. His father, Kenneth Edward Nyboe, was born in 1924 in New York City but spent his summers in Maine, where he knew my mother and my aunt and where he met, and secretly married, my aunt’s friend Helen Bryant just before he shipped overseas to be in the tank corps with Patton’s Third Army in World War II.

Papa’s war was not an easy one, although he came home without visible wounds. After the war, he went to the University of Maine on the GI Bill, spurred by Helen, who had never been to college herself but made it clear she expected him to live up to her faith in him by making it through school.

After college, he went to work for the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., insisting on the simplest solutions—the ones that worked—even when the rest of the team scoffed that they were too easy. For years, while Helen and their two sons were in Maine for the summer, he commuted between there and Washington, driving back and forth on the weekends because even though it was a 12-hour drive, nothing mattered more than driving down Carter’s Lane at the end of it.

Papa was away a lot, but when he was home, he always had time for us kids. He taught me how to shingle a roof and to sand a deck and to wire lights and to spell out the NATO phonetic alphabet and to count hours in military time and what to do if you cut an artery (which came in surprisingly handy after a kitchen accident many years later).

He took all of us out to the islands in his boat for hiking and picnics. On one special, brutally hot August day, when everyone else had gone somewhere and the tide was way too low to swim, he took me out into the sound to find deep, cold water so I could jump in. The heat made things waver; we saw mirages among the islands that day.

Papa Ken had a huge heart. He could whistle “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof loud enough to hear all the way across the harbor. And he always said there was nothing anyone couldn’t work out, so long as they talked to each other honestly.

Papa had a wonderful voice, a resonant baritone. When Helen was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their sons—these were the days when you stayed in the hospital for a week—she got lonely and scared. She called Papa in tears. “Say something,” she begged. “Just say something to me. I need to hear your voice.”

And in the middle of the night, Papa didn’t even say hello. He took a deep breath. “Four score and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

And he recited the Gettysburg Address until she could sleep.

Happy Father’s Day to dads and to those who fill the role.

:)
🍀🍀🍀

June 22, 2026 (Monday)

It appears to be more and more clear that the Trump administration is mired in its own mistakes.

There is no way to spin the memorandum of understanding Trump signed last Friday at Versailles to advance peace talks with Iran as a win. Trump deliberately shut off both Congress and allies from the decision to go to war, making the conflict his own. That means the MOU, which achieves none of the goals Trump claimed while at the same time giving Iran access to hundreds of billions of dollars, belongs to Trump, too.

A wide range of U.S. commentators are calling the MOU a “disaster” and saying the United States lost the war. As Isaac Arnsdorf and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported, right-wing hardliner on Iran Mark Dubowitz said: “The actual MOU is deeply flawed. The administration needs to stop defending it beyond stating the truth: It’s a stopgap measure to resupply energy markets, lower gas prices, and help Republicans in the midterms.”

Today, after a quick trip to Switzerland for talks with Iranian negotiators, Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters that Iran had agreed to allow international observers periodically to inspect its nuclear program. Vance called it a “major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” and Trump heralded the plan.

In fact, such inspections were part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 under the Obama administration, the agreement that Trump tore up in 2018, and they continued at some sites until Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, a year ago today. After that, Iran refused inspections of the bombed sites. Inspections are good, but they basically just get us back to where we were before Trump took over.

The administration today also waived sanctions on Iranian oil for the period covered by the MOU as that document laid out, increasing the value of Iranian oil exports.

Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.

A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.

Officials are now trying to silence both those calling attention to their failures and political opponents.

Trump has reacted with fury at media stories that expose his failures in Iran. In response to a New York Times story saying analysts did not see that the war had accomplished much, Trump called the paper’s reporters “corrupt and unethical cowards” and appeared to object to the First Amendment, writing: “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.’ I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”

Trump is doing more than threatening media figures. He is increasing his effort to use the government against political opponents. In the face of bipartisan opposition, Trump has shoved loyalist William Pulte into position as acting director of national intelligence, overseeing the intelligence gathered by the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies. Pulte officially took office on Friday.

Pulte has no experience in intelligence, although such experience is a requirement for the position. What he does have is demonstrated willingness to use the power of the federal government to attack Trump’s political opponents: it’s Pulte who came up with the idea of harassing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, New York attorney general Letitia James, and U.S. senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) by accusing them of criminal mortgage fraud. He also pushed the ouster of then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell by claiming Powell had lied to Congress about renovations to Federal Reserve office buildings.

Last year, Gina Heeb, Josh Dawsey, and Rebecca Ballhous of the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte’s nickname in the administration is “Little Trump,” and when big Trump announced he would install Pulte as DNI, members of both parties balked. So Trump said he would instead nominate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, who helped slow walk the release of the Epstein Files, for the position. Despite Clayton’s lack of intelligence experience, the Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled confirmation hearings for June 17 to rush him into office before Pulte could step in.

Then, as The Guardian recounted, on June 17, just hours before the confirmation hearing was about to start, Trump posted that “we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today.” This meant Pulte would indeed become the acting DNI. He showed up at the office the next day—a day early—and ordered staff to list about 300 people to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center.

This follows cuts under former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who said in August 2025 she would cut 40% of the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Gabbard herself is under increased scrutiny today after an in-depth story yesterday by Jon Swaine of the Washington Post explored her ties to a religious leader of what observers describe as a cult. Swaine tracked the many parallels between what appear to be orders directed at her in conversations sent by email and her official acts when she was in Congress. In one 2015 memo, Swaine writes, the advisor told “TG” “that ‘your position in general’ should be to offer an alternative to other candidates in the ‘dishonest Democratic party.’”

On Friday, Erin Banco, Phil Stewart, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported that the ODNI is sitting on a report that identifies vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting machines. The machines’ software is outdated, leaving vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Gabbard began the report in order to investigate Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged, but the investigation turned up no evidence of such action. Neither did a second report by a government contractor, Mojave Research, which investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico. That report, too, recommended immediate updates to software systems, but it appears those plans have not been implemented.

The administration appears to be trying to intimidate voting rights groups. On June 11, 100 FBI agents and other federal officers raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group encouraging voter participation, especially by voters from groups that have historically been disenfranchised. Then the agents went to the homes of board members, staff, and volunteers, where they seized computers and phones, took documents, and questioned the people they found.

The search warrant said they were looking for voter fraud. As the Brennan Center—along with many others—has established, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. It is vanishingly rare.

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, which protects voting rights, notes that Project 2025, the right-wing plan for taking over the country after Trump took office, called for using the Justice Department to go after state election officials and voter registration groups to push the myth of voter fraud and make people afraid to vote.

Waldman explained that the leading voter registration group in Ohio is the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. In 2024, he says, it registered 100,000 voters, and it works to stop partisan gerrymandering in the state.

Republicans are working to undermine their opponents with subterfuge, too. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that a network of super PACs that claim to be progressive and are spending millions in Democratic primaries are actually funded by a Republican dark money group, the American Prosperity Alliance. New documents from the Federal Election Commission identify all of the funding for Lead Left PAC, Real Change PAC, and California Blue PAC as coming from Conservative Americans PAC, which is funded by the right-wing American Prosperity Alliance.
But the American people are pushing back on the administration, and it seems wobbly.

Outrage over the Iran deal has risen to such a fever pitch on the right that, as Josephine Walker of Axios reported, on Thursday, right-wing commenter Tucker Carlson announced on a podcast that he was leaving the Republican Party, adding: “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.” Carlson said he will not support the Democrats either, suggesting he is testing out whether MAGA voters, especially the antisemitic ones who embrace his attacks on Israel, will follow him if he splits from Trump.

Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool, either. Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted: “There is a 24/7 camera that shows the reflecting pool. If someone went into the pool and made a 250 foot gash, it would have been seen. trump is lying again. Everyone knows it, but the people at are randomly going after people to soothe trump’s fragile ego.”

And today the courts struck back at Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 vote. The Trump administration has tried to force states to turn over their voting rolls in order to run them through a query system that checks federal databases to make sure no immigrants are collecting benefits for which they’re not eligible. Confusingly, that system— the one used to make sure noncitizens don’t collect benefits for which they’re not eligible— is called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), making it hard to distinguish from the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (also SAVE) that Trump keeps pushing.

An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.

Today U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”

“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?”

The country is going to need so much cleaning and tidying after this presidency. I feel tired even considering what will need to be done to put the house in order.

buffy said:

The country world is going to need so much cleaning and tidying after this presidency. I feel tired even considering what will need to be done to put the house in order.

phyxt

SCIENCE said:

buffy said:

The country world is going to need so much cleaning and tidying after this presidency. I feel tired even considering what will need to be done to put the house in order.

phyxt

Affordable tariffs for all!

Heather Cox Richardson

Live now

ms spock said:

Heather Cox Richardson

Live now

She’s finished now. This link takes you to the replay.

She starts with a big sigh today.

🍀💚🍀

June 23, 2026 (Tuesday)

Trump continues frantically to insist that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the acts of vandals. As Rachel Kahn of The New Republic reported, Trump insisted on Saturday that the pool had “worked perfectly” before vandals attacked, putting “a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work.” By Monday, the “gash” was 300 feet. By Tuesday it was 350 feet, according to Trump. There is, of course, no evidence of any such sabotage, and there are cameras on the Reflecting Pool.

Trump’s stories have gotten more and more elaborate, about how vandals used “a very sharp knife or razors,” “probably in the dark of night,” then added “chemicals.” He warned there could be a “10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things.” Asked for evidence, he claimed “we have pictures.” He told reporter Ed O’Keefe of CBS News: “t the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.” Tonight the Interior Department began to place fencing around the Reflecting Pool.

The Reflecting Pool is not the only thing that’s falling apart.

This morning, Trump announced that “Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long in the future (Infinity!!!)…. If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!” Iran disagreed, saying it had made “no new commitments” on nuclear inspections although it would continue to work with the IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, as it has for years under a system less stringent than the one that operated under the JCPOA.

Today, after a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that only 23% of Americans thought the Iran war had made the U.S. stronger, the Senate passed a war powers resolution requiring Trump to get congressional approval to continue military actions against Iran. Four Republicans joined all Democrats but one to pass the measure. The House passed the measure earlier this month. It is unclear if Trump will honor the resolution, but its passage shows growing discontent with the president.

“Trump’s historic blunder in Iran will go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made, or any country has ever made,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said today. “The American people have seen skyrocketing gas prices, soaring costs, and, tragically, the loss of 13 service members, and the wounding of hundreds more, and meanwhile, Iran took Trump to the cleaners.”

Holly Baxter of The Independent noted that when Trump is stressed out, he throws a campaign-style rally in front of a friendly crowd. Today, after a poll from the American Research Group showed that 66% of Americans disapprove of his job performance while only 30% approve, he went to a factory in Pennsylvania to bolster his confidence. He did his usual greatest hits, claiming he won by a landslide in 2024 and calling Democrats communists. He even made it clearer than ever that he thought people applying for political asylum in the United States had been released from “mental institutions.” He flitted from subject to subject and after an hour and a half, audience enthusiasm seemed under control.

William Kristol of The Bulwark noted today that a “sense of impending mortality seems to be making our president even more unhinged than ever.” But, Kristol noted, there are “young men with a lean and hungry look in positions of authority and power in the executive branch who are committed to making his dream of power without limits a reality.”

Those lean and hungry men include Bill Pulte, now acting director of national intelligence, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, FBI director Kash Patel, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, and acting attorney general Todd Blanche.
And, of course, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is next in line should Trump become unable to perform the duties of the office of the presidency.

As Trump crumbles, it appears there is in the administration a drive to create unlimited power in the executive branch that will survive no matter who is in charge. That drive includes silencing political opponents while rewarding loyalists.

Last September, Trump announced he would designate “antifa”—a word that is short for “antifascists”—as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” calling it a “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER.” On September 22 he did so, claiming that protesters standing against administration policies are trying to “overthrow…the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” They are, the executive order said, working in coordination to riot, assault ICE agents and other law enforcement officers, and to dox “political figures and activists.”

Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center notes that even if antifa were a real group—which both Trump-appointed FBI director Chris Wray and the Congressional Research Office have denied—Trump has authority only to designate foreign terrorist organizations. Patel writes that he “has no authority to designate groups as domestic terrorist organizations, as is obvious from the failure to cite any statute or constitutional provision in support of the president’s action. There is none, and the purported designation has no legal effect.” Patel notes that the ability to formally assign the label of terrorists to political opponents would enable it to crush political opposition.

Nonetheless, three days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” that called for a National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate Americans engaging in protest and ordered the attorney general to prosecute protest as a federal crime to the maximum extent permissible by law.

After a protest against ICE at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, last July 4 led to a protester shooting a police officer in the shoulder, the government prosecuted nine of the protesters, some of whom did not know each other and one of whom was not at the protest, as part of an antifa cell engaging in terrorism. In March all nine were found guilty in what observers saw as a test of the administration’s power to use broad antiterrorism laws to prosecute protesters.

Today, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor sentenced eight of the Prairieland protesters to between thirty and one hundred years in prison.

In contrast, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes were sentenced to 22 years and 18 years in prison, respectively, for their roles in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that was intended to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and make Donald Trump president. When he took office in 2025, Trump pardoned Tarrio and commuted Rhodes’s sentence to time served, releasing both from prison.

June 24, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today, strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien gave a comprehensive review of the events and outcomes of Trump’s war on Iran. In his Phillips’s Newsletter, O’Brien noted that “the USA is now negotiating without much, if any, leverage. That really is extraordinary. The Trump administration has put itself in a position where it cannot go back to the use of military force, cannot put much if any real pressure on Iran, and therefore will have to concede most of the main points to the Iranians.”

“Personally,” he adds, “I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.”

O’Brien notes that “ecause the U.S. has no significant leverage over Iran, the Trump administration…will simply have to dissemble about non-existent Iranian concessions to try and make it seem that they have not been completely routed.”

They have been lying for months now, but as the magnitude of the loss becomes clearer, the lies will likely grow larger.
O’Brien adds that the Trump administration “seems utterly uninterested in achieving anything of substance and, instead, is desperately hunting around to win the narrative struggle in the USA itself.”

As if in illustration, Trump last night reacted to the Senate passage of a war powers resolution prohibiting him from further military action against Iran by posting: “So, I have Iran on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall, willing to give us practically anything, and for the first time in decades, respecting the hell out of the United States and its President, ME, and the U.S. Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act Vote, telling the Number One Sponser of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort the Enemy. Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, ‘what does that all mean?’ These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!”

Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away.

Last night’s primary results in New York, in which voters ousted established Democrats in favor of progressive candidates, is creating concern among Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections. The growing groundswell of support for a major reset of our political system suggests that maybe even Republicans’ unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to favor Republicans may not cement control of Congress.

Trump is clearly panicked.

Just after midnight this morning, he posted that the “big Oil Companies” are not dropping gas prices as quickly as they should and accused them of price gouging. He said he had told the Justice Department to “start looking into this” and warned that “asoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”

At 2:38 AM he posted: “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”

On Monday the Senate overwhelmingly passed a landmark bipartisan bill directed at making housing cheaper by boosting the national housing supply and homeownership and by stopping private equity from buying up single-family homes. By a similarly overwhelming vote, the House passed the measure yesterday. It was expected to cruise to Trump’s desk for a signature.

But this morning at 9:49, Trump suddenly announced he will not sign the bill into law until Congress passes the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, that he keeps pushing. There are various versions of that measure, but by requiring proof of citizenship—a birth certificate or a passport—to vote, along with requiring states to hand their voting rolls over to the federal government, it is expected to stop many legal voters from casting ballots.

At 10:17, Trump posted: “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN. THANK YOU!!!”
Then, at 10:26, he posted: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

That language is important. Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has used official emergency declarations at an unprecedented rate in order to claim emergency powers under which he can ignore laws. Although the Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning Trump could work with Congress to pass legislation, he and his advisors appear to be applying the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.

The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.

But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening.

Certain Republican-dominated states, like Texas, handed over their voter rolls. An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.

In addition to the system’s inaccuracy, the uploading of the files, Dye notes, was “a gross violation of the Privacy Act of 1974,” which prohibits the government from repurposing an individual’s data for a new use without notice and without providing for 30 days of public comment.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “he federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

The Trump administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to get their voter rolls. Courts have struck down Trump’s attempts to get his hands on those rolls in all nine of the cases on which there has been a ruling, and today the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s suit against Michigan. Also today, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston permanently blocked much of Trump’s March 2025 executive order trying to gain power over elections.

Undeterred, Trump is trying other ways to rig the vote. Over bipartisan objections, he installed loyalist William Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, turning the agencies responsible for keeping Americans safe away from international threats and directing them instead at Trump’s domestic opponents. As Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Jack Cocchiarella on Sunday, Pulte can simply claim that there’s a threat against the country and use that argument to place troops or immigration agents at the polls or to shut down the election.

And today, testifying at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing today, Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, the United States Postal Service will not deliver election mail in states that refuse to turn over their voting lists to the federal government.

Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) clarified: “So the proposed rule basically coerces states to conform to these new requirements and hand over their absentee voter rolls or face the consequences of not being able to vote by mail.”

Trump’s obvious panic at the idea that voters might take away the Republicans’ congressional majority raises a question: Why is he so worried? Journalist David Rothkopf noted that “his desperation about losing in November is at such a high level that it is revealing. He is petrified of being held accountable by a Democrat-controlled Congress, of investigations, of his crimes being revealed. He’s obsessed with his fear of losing.”

Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), who frequently records short videos explaining what’s happening at the Capitol, posted from Statuary Hall about today’s “completely bizarre chapter.” She explained as people began to take their places on the stage set up for the signing of the landmark housing bill, “he president tweeted he wasn’t coming because he’s having a temper tantrum that the Senate, and especially Senate Republicans, will not pass his voter ID law, which is basically designed to override state voting laws.”

“And so,” she observed, “in less than an hour we went from the signing of a historic housing bill to stop private equity from buying houses, and investing in housing infrastructure, and actually doing something good for the people of this country, and a ceremony that should have happened right here to…the president is not signing the bill.”

One senior Republican told NOTUS, “He’s having a f*cking tantrum.”