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Something historic happened in May: For the first time in American history, more electricity was generated in the United States with solar power than with coal.

While natural gas remains our largest electricity source, the crossing of the lines between solar and coal — one representing the future and one the past — is something we may look back on as one of the key moments in the planet’s transition to green energy.

We don’t know whether someone told Donald Trump about this milestone, but if they did, he wouldn’t have been happy. Since taking office, he has waged an all-out war against renewable energy, not just making it more difficult to create and use clean power, but pouring taxpayer money into fossil fuels.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that though Trump has done significant damage to America’s green energy industry — and given us more pollution, higher costs, and more insecurity in the bargain — that industry continues to grow.

There is a global energy revolution underway, and Trump’s efforts to slow it down are destined to fall short.

What happened to “all of the above”?

After years of Republicans arguing that they favored an “all of the above” energy strategy, they’ve essentially dropped the facade and made clear their vision for the future is one in which we get all of our energy from fossil fuels.

Trump’s rhetoric is almost comically anti-renewable — “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” — and the policy has followed.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was a climate horror, rescinding loans for the development of green energy and rolling back tax credits for energy audits, heat pumps, and more. Perhaps the most visible element was the repeal of subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles, which were helping to drive interest in EVs that for the moment are usually more expensive than internal combustion vehicles.

The result has been the near-destruction of the American EV industry. Without the subsidies, demand leveled off, and the car companies that had made huge investments on the presumption of future growth found themselves holding the bag. So GM, Ford, Stellantis and now Honda pulled back on their EV manufacturing plans for the US and Canada, costing thousands of jobs and forcing Americans who want EVs to buy imports (unless you’d like to support the white supremacist trillionaire on a mission to wreck the world by buying a Tesla, which most of us don’t want to do).

Then there’s wind. Because many years ago Trump got in a fight with Scottish authorities over whether offshore wind turbines would mar the view from one of his golf courses, he developed an almost deranged loathing of wind power, and his administration has made it all but impossible to get permits for new wind farms, especially offshore. They are paying companies with new wind projects in the planning stages to abandon them, and even claim that wind power is a national security risk, supposedly because sneaky enemies could launch drones through a wind farm without being detected by radar.

Administration officials, even ones like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum who in their former lives were sensible people — Burgum proudly touted North Dakota’s wind power sector when he was governor — are forced to go out in public and cry that renewable energy doesn’t work when the sun goes down or the wind lessens, as though batteries don’t exist.

In some ways, this holy war against renewables has succeeded; investment in new clean energy projects has been throttled. As Grist reports, according to a recent analysis from a clean energy think tank, “for every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.”

What was that about “so much winning you’ll get tired of winning”?

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At the same time, Trump is trying to save coal, a decrepit industry on a relentless decline.

During the first week of June, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to direct $700 million in taxpayer funds to coal plants, just the latest in a series of moves the administration has made to put money in the pockets of coal companies. In its desperation to force Americans to keep burning coal, the administration has used its authority to order utilities against their will to keep open coal plants slated to shut down — even though doing so will likely cost customers billions of dollars. And Trump still promises voters in Appalachia that he’ll bring back all the lost coal jobs — a lie he’s been telling them for a decade, but one they seem to still want to believe.

The green revolution can’t be stopped

The other side of this story is that the entire world is undergoing a green energy revolution.

Solar is now the cheapest type of energy available, which is why more and more countries are looking to it as the foundation of their energy future.

In the last few years, Pakistan, the world’s fifth-largest country, underwent a stunning boom in the spread of rooftop solar; solar now generates a third of the country’s electricity. According to the Yale School of the Environment, India is “on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy.” Among its new projects is the Khavda Renewable Energy Park in Gujarat, a gigantic facility of solar and wind intended to produce 30 gigawatts of electricity (one gigawatt is roughly enough to power a mid-size city).

Even though it continues to burn huge quantities of fossil fuels, China is at the center of the green energy boom, with huge projects like the Talatan Solar Park, which produces 17 gigawatts of power and growing. It has become far and away the leading manufacturer of renewable energy equipment. According to the Climate Action Tracker, “China is the powerhouse of the global energy transition’s supply chain, manufacturing over 80 percent of solar panels, 60 percent of wind turbines, and 75 percent of electric vehicles (EVs) and their batteries worldwide.”

We are also in the midst of a worldwide battery boom, with new technologies enabling grid-scale storage that drives more wind and solar development. And yes, China is leading the way there too, in both production and deployment. All told, the country invested $625 billion in renewable energy in 2024; the renewable energy sector made up 11.4 percent of its GDP in 2025.

The weakness of the American EV market isn’t slowing development around the world. Despite the pullback from American EV makers, there are now 70 different EV models available to buy in the US, dramatically more than there were a few years ago — which doesn’t include any from the Chinese manufacturers that are coming to dominate the market. While demand may be rising slowly here at home, it’s ballooning around the world: In 2025, 10 percent of new car sales in the US were EVs, compared to 27 percent in the European Union and 53 percent in China. Overall, global EV sales grew by 20 percent percent in 2025 from the year before, with over 20 million new EVs sold.

Americans are pushing ahead with green energy wherever they can whether MAGA likes it or not. In Georgia, the largest solar cell factory in America — one that will make every part of the solar panel — just began operating. Almost all the new generation capacity being added to the grid comes from renewables. Half the states have either passed or are considering bills to allow “balcony solar,” small modular kits that allow people to get the benefit of solar power without the complication and expense of a rooftop system — and even renters can use them.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts, investments are being made that will bear fruit in the future. Consider the story of EV charging stations.

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The Biden administration poured billions of dollars into a long-term plan to spread charging stations across the country, since “range anxiety” is one of the main reasons people hesitate to buy EVs. That funding required a lengthy process of approvals, with the money routed through states and localities. So the early stages of the rollout were slow, and when Trump came into office, he tried to simply withhold the money that had already been appropriated.

Twenty states and a collection of organizations sued over one $5 billion program, and earlier this year they won their case, meaning the money will continue to flow. The administration is still trying every bureaucratic trick it can think of to slow the installation of charging stations, but meanwhile, states and counties are creating their own charging station programs, and private companies are installing charging stations in their parking lots.

You may have noticed it yourself. Stores like Walmart, Sheetz, 7-Eleven, Kroger, and Costco all feature charging stations in some of their parking lots and have plans to significantly expand the number — not because the government told them they had to, but because it’s good business. Today there are over 253,000 charging ports at over 82,000 publicly available locations, with more being added every day.

None of that is to minimize the damage that this administration has done and will continue to do for the next two and a half years. But Trump can’t bring back coal, which is destined to wind up as a niche energy source limited to certain industrial applications. He can’t make EVs illegal or stop people from buying them as the cars get more appealing and affordable. He can’t stop the explosion of solar power, both here and around the world.

The transition to green energy is happening too slowly, but it is happening. And it will outlive Trump.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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News broke yesterday that the United States and Iran have reached some sort of agreement that may or may not end President Trump’s disastrous war.

Details remained scant as this newsletter was finalized Sunday evening, but significantly, Trump wasted no time moving the goalposts on when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen.

Trump, of course, has claimed to be on the verge of a peace deal dozens of times before, only to back away when he realizes that ending the war inevitably means admitting the US lost.

It’s notable that the administration has been very leery of revealing the actual details of the agreement to the public. But it appears to involve the United Arab Emirates unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, which is especially humiliating since Republicans have raged for more than a decade about the Obama administration releasing a measly $1.7 billion in Iranian assets to secure a nuclear agreement.

To add insult to injury, it’s unclear that Iran will commit to ending its nuclear program; it has agreed to continue to talk about it over the next 60 days, but nothing more. All Trump seems to really be getting is a pinky swear that the Strait of Hormuz will open at some point in the future — which was open before the war started, and which Iran can now close again whenever it’s threatened or wants concessions.

Iran’s victory has been a disaster for the US. The shuttering of the strait has pushed gas and fertilizer prices into the stratosphere and inflation hit a three-year high this month. US credibility globally has been shredded.

But the worst effects of Trump’s viciously erratic foreign policy have been born by those subjected to it overseas. Americans are, like everyone, mostly focused on their own worries — worries which now include a seemingly endless fascist assault on our liberty and lives. But the bloodiest and most painful costs of fascism are inflicted on the fascist’s neighbors, and when you’re talking about a global power like the US, “neighbors” here means “everyone on earth.”

Authoritarians disregard the voices and needs of their own people, but they are even less constrained when they deal with people that are not their own. If you want to see what Trump would like to do at home, you have only to look to the misery he has unleashed in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Africa. It’s a bleak and terrifying picture.

War crimes in Iran

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran is itself an illegal war of aggression under international law. In addition, the war has been conducted with breathtaking disregard for the rules of war and little concern about civilian casualties.

The war began in February with a horrific bombing of an Iranian girls’ school. More than 160 people, most of them children, were killed. US officials have tacitly acknowledged American responsibility, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump refuse to admit it publicly.

Experts estimate that Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran war as led to as many as 10,000 deaths and more than 48,500 injuries across the Middle East. These have mostly occurred in Iran and Lebanon, where Israel launched simultaneous (and ongoing) attacks.

Trump has sporadically promised much worse — in April, he blustered that Iran’s “civilization will die tonight” and again last week promised to (somehow) annex Iran’s entire oil industry. Even his ostensible announcement of a peace deal over the weekend included a threat to nuke the country.

These sweeping, often genocidal threats are in themselves a form of terror aimed at the civilian population. And while Trump has thankfully not dropped nuclear bombs, has continued to attack non-military targets. Last week for example he reportedly ordered strikes on two southern Iranian water storage facilities, attacks that likely constitute a war crime.

War crimes in South American waters

The evidence that military leaders ordered war crimes in Iran, and that troops carried out illegal orders, is disturbing. It is not, however, exactly surprising.

Since the fall of last year, the US has been carrying out unprovoked strikes on boats in South American and Caribbean waters. As of earlier this month, 200 people have been killed.

Trump claims these strikes are designed to prevent drug trafficking. But when you are shooting boats from the air, you are obviously not taking care to determine that the people you’re murdering are actually drug traffickers. And even if they are drug traffickers, international and US law does not allow for summary executions without trial. As Human Rights Watch explains, “the US boat strikes constitute extrajudicial killings — unlawful killings carried out by state authorities without any legal justification or process.”

The more information we get about the boat strikes, the more ugly and evil they are revealed to be. In the first strike in September, US personnel struck a ship, watched two survivors crawl desperately onto the foundering boat — and then struck them again, murdering them. Last week, The Intercept reported that according to a Pentagon official, those survivors, and the nine other people killed during the assault, may have been victims of human trafficking.

The strikes have done little to halt the flow of cocaine into America. They have underlined the fact, though, that US commanders are willing to order illegal war crimes, and that US soldiers are willing to obey those illegal orders. There will likely be more murders, since no one — not Congress, not the courts, not the military — seems willing or able to stop Trump from committing however many murders he wants.

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USAID and Cuba

Trump’s shooting adventures are dramatic, illegal, and ugly. But he has done even more damage by demolishing US soft power might in other ways.

The first example here occurred at the beginning of Trump’s term. Trump allowed Elon Musk and his supposed efficiency experts at DOGE to illegally shut down USAID programs that provided nutrition and healthcare resources around the globe. By November of last year, experts estimated that the withdrawal of aid had already resulted in 600,000 deaths, of which 400,000 were children. That number is expected to balloon to 14 million dead if aid cuts are not reversed by 2030.

Not content with that stunning, genocidal death toll, Trump in February of this year launched a brutal fuel embargo against Cuba, which gets 60 percent of its oil from abroad. The US is hoping to overthrow the communist regime, but the results for the people of Cuba have been devastating.

Cuba was already in an economic crisis, but every shortage and hardship has been immeasurably exacerbated by the US, which has turned back oil tankers and threatened Cuban trading partners with sanctions, tariffs, and the freezing of assets. At least half of all international flights into and out of the island have been suspended for lack of fuel. Nationwide blackouts are common — which means crops can’t be harvested, there’s no way to get food to market, and no way to store it as refrigerators don’t work. Child malnutrition, almost eliminated in Cuba ten years ago, is spiking.

Medical infrastructure has been badly damaged too. Hospitals don’t have power; for some vital obstetric surgeries, nurses hold cell phones while doctors operate. Medicines are unavailable except on the black market, where only the wealthy can afford them. Vaccines for infants are delayed.

The entire island is experiencing a cascading series of crises, not all of which are caused by the US, but which the US is remorselessly exacerbating in the hopes that torment of men, women, children, and infants, will force the regime it hates from power.

“It’s the collective punishment of a population, particularly targeting the poor Black communities, pregnant women, children and the elderly,” journalist Ed Augustin told Democracy Now.

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A danger to us and to the world

Trump’s use of US power to indiscriminately target and immiserate civilians has a huge range of potential downsides for Americans.

Experts worry that Iran War may lead to an increase in terrorism in the US — such as a shooting at Old Dominion University this March by a man with ties to Islamic State. Cuts to global disease control have made the US less safe; the recent screwworm infestation in Texas, for example, may have been caused in part by cuts to USAID, which funded screwworm detection and prevention at the US-Mexico border.

And when Trump pushes the military to follow illegal orders and accustoms them to participating in war crimes, the domestic threat is very clear.

Trump’s ICE security forces have already committed multiple extrajudicial killings that led to massive pushback and a public relations disaster for the GOP. But the steady murder of people in South American waters, and the targeting of Iranian and Cuban civilians, demonstrates that Trump remains enamored with the idea of using massive state terror to advance his aims. There’s little doubt that he would use the military against US civilians too if he could get away with it.

These are all very serious dangers; they are all, individually and collectively, reasons to impeach Trump and remove him from office if at all possible. But even these horrendous possible harms pale beside the actual carnage Trump has already accomplished abroad.

Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, vast swathes of Africa — the whole world waits to see who Trump will target next, and how many civilians he and his war-crime-drunk cabinet will murder in their next pointless, sadistic campaign.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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The Trump regime’s new proposed rule that would force federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements doesn’t just expose the absurdity of their “most transparent administration ever” talking point, it also strikes another blow on our teetering democracy.

So argues Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and a longtime friend of the newsletter who we’ve chatted with numerous times over the years about MAGA’s assault against the institutions of government.

“Trump is, on the one hand, placing a curtain over the inner workings of the administration,” Moynihan told us. “At the same time, he’s making one of the few sources of that information, which is civil servants, more and more vulnerable to punishment. What that means is we’ll see less and less about abuses of power being publicly reported.”

Moynihan recently explained the new rule, which is currently in its public comment period (you can leave one here), on his highly recommended Substack. We connected with him to go deeper on why the Trump regime wants to silence whistleblowers and the potential impact of the new rule.

“The other parallel is Trump’s private businesses, where, since the early ‘90s, he’s had everyone around him sign NDAs,” he said. “That included ex-wives, people who work for him, people who appeared on The Apprentice, and porn stars he wanted to hush up.”

“Now he’s applying that model to the public sector.”

A transcript of Moynihan’s chat with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are the only reason I’m able to keep everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.

Thor Benson

Read more

But before that, we got into this weekend’s UFC fight at the White House, how the whole thing seems like a deleted scene from Idiocracy, and why Trump prefers bloodsport to sleeping through NBA games. We also talked about war crimes becoming official US policy and what it says about the direction of the military (spoiler alert: nothing good).

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If you’d like to support the podcast and ask us questions during future episodes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Public Notice if you aren’t one already.

The PN Pod goes live every Friday at 2pm eastern. We’ll be back at the same time and same place next week. Until then, we hope you enjoy the show!

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Until recently, it seemed Donald Trump would cement the GOP’s status as the political home of “faith”-driven voters that it took on decades ago.

But since returning to power, Trump and his celebrations of corruption and debasement have begun tearing away at that foundation. It presents Democrats with an opportunity to seize the mantle of the party of faith-based morality, or at least share it with Republicans in a previously unanticipated way.

To understand how the GOP became the political party for white Christians, we have to go back to the Reagan administration. The first evangelical Christian president was on the ballot during 1980 — Jimmy Carter. Yet it was Reagan who would cement the Republican Party’s hold over not only white evangelicals, but a large swath of white Catholic voters too. The alliance was both transactional and performative.

While Reagan was a Hollywood actor who rarely set foot in a church and signed legislation liberalizing California’s abortion restrictions, as a child of rural Illinois, he knew how to appear devout on TV. He managed to come across to many voters as the true embodiment of Midwest “Christian” values, despite running against a deeply committed born again Christian.

Reagan’s appeal was politically calculated.

In the wake of the Roe v. Wade ruling less than a decade earlier, a growing cohort of anti-reproductive rights activists had become the fulcrum for a nascent conservative Christian movement. For the first time, suburban Midwestern Catholics became allies with right-wing Southern Evangelicals who, not so many years earlier, would have been deriding them as “Papists.” Reagan’s calls from the Oval Office to “March for Life” rallies in DC during the 1980s marked the beginning of the merger of the Republican Party with what not long before had seemed to be a marginal crew of religious extremists.

While women gaining control over their own bodies was the initial catalyst for the movement, it reflected the rise of a broader and deeply reactionary “cultural” political conservatism — one deeply opposed to growing diversity. The movement is grounded on the claim that the United States needs to reclaim its purportedly foundational “Christianity,” often serving as a code word for the “threat” posed by women and Black Americans receiving civil rights (just this week, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly voted to reiterate its opposition to women pastors).

Republicans’ effectiveness over the ensuing years in convincing many observant evangelical and Catholic voters that the Democratic Party was a threat to their religious institutions and values goes a long way toward explaining how they could be so successful defining Democrats — even those who were devoted people of faith, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as avatars of moral decay.

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A merger of convenience reaches its apotheosis

After the 2024 election, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency marked a new era in the GOP’s identification as the party of faith. Trump, despite his own ostentatious irreligiousness and amorality, was far better even than Reagan in tapping into the apocalyptic fear of moral decay that powers many right-wing Christian movements.

For a time, Trump’s increasingly hyperbolic adoption of culture war tropes, particularly his portrayal of children under assault by “Democrats” intent on changing their genders, seemed remarkably effective. In 2024, he managed to add a material number of Hispanic and even Black voters to his base of white evangelical and Catholics despite a candidacy grounded in racism and xenophobia.

But as soon as he retook office, Trump began gratuitously testing the limits of the tolerance of key parts of his “Christian” coalition.

Trump’s full-bore assault on the nation’s immigrants, including targeting family members and neighbors of many Hispanic Americans who voted for him, almost instantaneously destroyed any hope that his presidency heralded the addition of substantial numbers of observant Hispanics to the GOP’s “faith” coalition, particularly from the growing cohort of Hispanic evangelicals.

Then, perhaps inevitably, Trump’s moral obtuseness and pathological egoism took him further. He started taking increasing umbrage at those faith leaders who had the temerity to challenge some of his avidly sadistic actions — not the least among them being the pope.

While conservative Catholics have had their own tensions with the last two popes, seeing the president of the United States lobbing juvenile insults at the pontiff was a bridge too far for many of them. And recent Catholic convert Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to lecture the pope on theology seemed to come off even worse.

Yet an increasingly unhinged Trump went on to further test the limits of the core of his evangelical base by posting a picture of himself as a risen Jesus Christ. Trump’s suggestion that he is a secular messiah was not new and indeed is the thesis of the Qanon movement he increasingly embraced over the years. But Trump’s move into overt apostasy was a measure of how far he was willing to go in pushing boundaries with even the evangelical Christians who had been key to his own political resurrection.

To the extent Trump engages in political calculation these days, he — probably correctly — calculates that Christian extremist leaders have nowhere else to go at this point. They certainly are not about to break with Trump at this time, when they anticipate relying on him to add as many as two like-minded justices to the Supreme Court, or as Pete Hegseth seeks to infuse the military with a debased form of “Christian” nationalism many of the most extreme among Trump’s evangelical supporters champion.

But Trump’s nose-thumbing at many of his own supporters, along with the descent of his presidency into an increasingly overt celebration of cruelty toward the poor and vulnerable, has clearly started to take a toll on the GOP. His championing of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas exemplifies the problem.

Trump embraced Paxton over the the far more politically rational choice of incumbent John Cornyn because Paxton has modeled his career on Trump’s most repugnant attributes, including his ostentatious marital infidelities and the history of allegations of misconduct that led to his impeachment. Through his patronage of Paxton, Trump is betting that a majority of Texas voters will embrace the proud debasement they share, regardless of how entirely it may contradict their stated moral principles.

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Can there be a new party of faith?

Paxton’s Democratic opponent is James Talarico, a state legislator and seminarian who has chosen to make faith a centerpiece of his campaign. This is a relatively unusual strategy for a Democratic candidate — but one that could well prove to be a harbinger of what’s to come for the party during the run up to 2028.

While a raft of self-described progressives are presenting themselves as challengers to the “establishment” in primaries, there is actually remarkably little in the way of major policy disagreement within the Democratic Party. (In fact, there is a growing consensus on the need for structural change to increase economic fairness and reclaim and preserve democratic institutions.) Most every successful Democratic politician advocates taxing the rich, protecting the environment, expanding health care in the face of GOP assaults, and so forth.

But some progressive politicians may distinguish themselves in other ways, including by bringing appeals to faith into Democratic politics.

Like Talarico, some prospective Democratic presidential candidates are signaling they intend to run campaigns based on messages of curing the moral rot that Trumpism has wrought upon the nation, albeit with different approaches — some more openly rooted in religion than others.

Sen. Chris Murphy — a longtime progressive opponent of Trump — has released a pre-campaign book titled “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” Murphy argues the Trump era has left much of the nation not only materially weakened, but also spiritually broken. (Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky also has a book about his faith coming out later this year.)

Pete Buttigieg discusses his Christian faith in conjunction with his commitment to public life, stating that “God does not belong to an American political party. But moral frameworks are essential for fashioning a conscience that can stand up against injustice.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, has long drawn a connection between his faith and his politics — to remarkable success, somewhat surprisingly, given that he does not belong to the religion of most Pennsylvanians. As he begins to formulate a nascent campaign message, Shapiro argues that Trump has failed a “morality test” by repeatedly seeking to divide Americans. While emphasizing pragmatism, Shapiro also contends there must be a moral repair of the nation in the post-Trump era, a cure Shapiro suggests could be inspired by the faith of believers of different religions.

As those examples demonstrate, while the next Democratic standard bearer may appeal to religious faith in a way Democratic leaders have often shied away from in the past, that appeal will almost certainly be quite different from that of Reagan — and certainly from that of Trump.

For over 45 years, Republicans have effectively focused their appeals to “Christian” Americans on sectarianism, and melded them with messages designed to enhance fears of demographic and social change. In the process, as some emerging Democratic leaders contend, they have left Americans with a society that is morally, spiritually, and materially broken.

It is just possible that Trump — whose appeals to a certain cohort of the religiously observant have morphed into an almost gleeful celebration of amorality — may have, entirely unintentionally, opened the door to a new kind of faith-inspired politics. Time will tell.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod (featuring co-cost Paul Waldman), and then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter.

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The Trump administration has spent the last 18 months gutting funding for scientific research, forcing out nonpartisan experts, and elevating the most alarming conspiracy theorists in their stead. Now, a new rule proposed by the regime is threatening science itself.

Normally, changes to rules about how the federal government awards research grants would probably be a somewhat sleepy topic, impactful to people who do that research for a living but not a five-alarm fire for the rest of us. But we live here now, so we all get to worry about a world where people like Russell Vought, the anti-science freakshow who heads the Office of Management and Budget, would have complete veto power over federally-funded scientific research.

That sounds like an overstatement, but it really isn’t.

A new proposed rule puts OMB atop science, despite not being a science agency staffed by scientists. Actually, it’s worse than that. What OMB proposes is to take its existing authority to promulgate general guidance on financial management for government agencies and transform that into rules every agency must follow for every discretionary grant of any kind.

Political appointees would have complete authority over funding decisions, rather than career experts. Grants would be evaluated based not on how they advance science or the nation’s goals, but against how well they push President Trump’s personal policies. Grantees would be muzzled from discussing anything the administration considers a “divisive” ideology and could be revoked at any time without explanation if a political appointee feels like it.

This isn’t remotely how things have worked in the past.

(Rancid) vibes-based science

For decades, decisions about how federal research dollars get spent have been made by an interlocking community of experts both in and outside government. Career scientists at federal agencies work extensively with independent advisory committees staffed by experts. Evaluations were made by actual experts, not unhinged anti-vax weirdos like the ones Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. installed on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Agency personnel held dozens of study sections each month to evaluate grant proposals.

This process helped ensure scientific rigor, but it also insulated science funding from the whims of political appointees. The problem now, of course, is that this administration doesn’t care about scientific rigor at all and also desperately wants political appointees, not scientists, to make funding decisions. So OMB recently dropped 400 pages of nonsense to try to make that happen.

In this topsy-turvy world, a senior political appointee would have to approve every single discretionary grant — science and otherwise. And just to make sure they don’t let any actual expertise sneak in, they would be prohibited from deferring to the peer review process and “must instead use their independent judgment when evaluating Federal award proposals.”

What metrics, exactly, would these political appointees be required to use instead? They have to ensure “that discretionary awards advance the president’s policy priorities.”

That gives away the game. Grant decisions aren’t the result of priorities established by Congress or scientific necessity — just whatever Donald Trump wants. With that, it isn’t really surprising that the proposed rule bans any research on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as anything related to “gender ideology.” This is necessary, per the rule, because Joe Biden made everything woke.

“Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public,” the rule reads.

The authority for this sweeping assertion that Joe Biden spent three years forcing DEI down people’s throats with no oversight or accountability is an August 2025 Trump executive order about grantmaking that basically says the same thing the proposed rule does: Biden made stuff too woke. But there’s nothing in that executive order highlighting specific concerns with oversight or any specific improper grants. It’s just a Trump rant about forbidden DEI, racist stuff about China, and transphobia galore.

But here’s the thing: even if that executive order were chock full of examples of Biden’s woke malfeasance, it still wouldn’t be actual legal authority to upend science. That’s because executive orders are not law, no matter how much Trump wishes otherwise.

OK, well how about this from the rule: “Federal programs and funding opportunities were designed to advance unlawful identity-based ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies and preferences across the country.” Surely that has some sort of relevant citation attached to it, right?

Oh, you sweet summer child. The so-called authority for that is a citation to a 5,000-word rant from the Heritage Foundation published in May 2022. And it’s not a citation to any particular thing in that rant. Apparently you need to just read the whole thing to see if it says what the administration says it does.

And reader, it does not say any such thing.

Heritage shoveled this article out the door a month after the Biden administration announced its “equity action plans” for multiple agencies as part of an effort to support racial equity and underserved communities. So, at the time Heritage was whining about this, literally nothing had happened save for an announcement. There were no federal programs or funding opportunities at all yet, much less any “unlawful” ones.

Well, surely there must be some support for the part of Trump’s proposed rule that says Biden violated the Constitution with all this wokeness run amok: “These policies were inconsistent with basic American values and civil rights laws, including the equal protection principles of the US Constitution.” Nope! Not one, not two, but three Trump executive orders, all of which are racist, are cited here, but nary of which has any actual law.

Now, even this administration knows that it can’t ram through this huge a change based only on Trump’s feels. Agencies need specific statutory authority to enact regulations. Put another way, Congress must say, when passing a law, what, if anything, agencies are allowed to do to implement it. This proposed rule, therefore, must cite laws that give OMB the authority to tell every other federal agency how to evaluate every last bit of discretionary federal grant funding.

According to the proposed rule, if you go read no fewer than nine major federal statutes in their entirety, covering everything from audit requirements to federal procurement to human trafficking, you will somehow see that OMB has unfettered authority to do whatever it wants.

Needless to say, this is also not how this works. Rule-making authority is specific, not general. Put another way, as the Supreme Court already said nearly 50 years ago in Chrysler v. Brown, “there must be a nexus between the regulations and some delegation of the requisite legislative authority by Congress.” Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it smugly, Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes.” The executive branch can’t say it has somehow divined a right to do whatever it wants by finding One Weird Trick that no one else has ever noticed, discernible only by the brain geniuses at Trump’s OMB after reading a gazillion words in scores of statutes.

But that’s exactly what is happening. The administration isn’t pointing to some specific grant of authority to do this, some way in which Congress has given OMB the go-ahead to completely alter every rule and regulation about how federal grants are awarded and overseen at every agency. It’s just saying that you can sorta make an inference if you squint.

The administration is also engaging in a massive amount of sleight of hand here, hoping people won’t quite catch it as they move the goalposts so far that they now live in Canada. OMB does have authority to promulgate guidance on fiscal management, which agencies may adopt and modify as preferred. But the new rule purports to shift all that guidance to be binding regulations for every agency. Worse, going forward, future changes would apply to every agency with no discretion. Put another way, it would give OMB near-total control of government grants.

This Rube Goldberg contraption serves another purpose.

The administration previously ran into trouble when it attempted to stealth-install OMB as a sort of super-regulator over all other regulatory agencies. Immediately after Trump retook office, OMB issued a sweeping spending freeze on all federal assistance programs, which courts repeatedly blocked by saying it didn’t have the authority to do so. But the new rule is a backdoor way around that, essentially. If all agencies have to follow OMB’s lead on everything in lockstep, then it can’t be said that OMB is exceeding any authority by telling agencies what they can do with their funding regardless of congressional priorities or agency expertise.

Even if everything about this proposal were aboveboard in terms of authority, what the rule would do would be catastrophic. Sober-minded science types are the ones banging the gong here, and they are uniformly freaked out.

Buckle up, because it wouldn’t just be that political appointees get to decide science funding based on the most rancid vibes, or that every grant applicant would have to pledge allegiance to no DEI. The rule also bans US scientists from collaborating with foreign researchers, prohibits grantees from using federal money to publicize their research in any way (such as attending conferences) without prior government approval, and tells researchers that grant money cannot be used for publication costs when they are routinely several thousand dollars a pop.

Also forbidden? Any communication that the government thinks is impermissible “issue advocacy.” Voter registration activities are out, period. And given that, as former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi points out, the rule’s preamble itself says that climate science and public health research are “divisive ideologies,” it’s pretty clear what type of communication would be forbidden.

Finally, remember how the early era of DOGE mass-terminating grants led to endless litigation over whether it had the authority to do so? This solves that problem too, because the political appointees with authority to grant or deny funding would also have the authority to terminate any existing grants based on those eternally rancid vibes.

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It’s not too late to fight

So, to recap: Trump issues executive orders that are nothing but memorializations of his bigotry. OMB then pretends that these things are actually law and therefore apply to the entire executive branch and, by extension, the entire country. Then OMB pretends it has divined a cool secret new way to see that Congress actually wanted it like this all along. And in the end, we’re right back where we started in January 2025: an administration asserting that Trump’s election meant he has the right to completely dictate all government policy and spending unilaterally.

It’s monstrous, but it’s also so weedy and tangled and hard to follow that it can get lost.

One last procedural bit: the administration is trying to ram this through as quickly as possible, with the comment period closing July 13. Multiple science organizations have asked to extend it given what a huge change this is, but that’s almost guaranteed not to happen.

As of this week, there are over 14,000 comments about the rule, and everyone is forgiven the temptation of just heading over and banging out a howl of rage. However, some comments are more effective than others — well, at least in a normal world.

You don’t need to be a scientist or a policymaker to offer a good comment, nor do you need to write a treatise. Effective comments can be short and do not need to be some sort of legal argument, but they should be specific: point to something in the proposed rule or explain a specific harm that can arise, for example. Don’t copy and paste someone else’s. There’s a real temptation to pump up the numbers that way, but the government treats getting 1,000 identical comments as one single comment.

Stand Up For Science has a good guide on how to draft a useful comment, one which, in a grim irony, relies extensively on a guide created by OMB itself during Trump’s first term. We never thought we’d look back on that first term as a high point, but here we are.

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Reality show influencer Spencer Pratt won’t be getting clobbered in November by Karen Bass, and MAGA is psyched.

It’s a golden opportunity to scream about fraud in race Republicans were always going to lose, demonizing California and pre-planting seeds of doubt about the results in its newly-drawn congressional districts this fall. Win, win, win!

In the June 2 Los Angeles mayoral primary, Pratt slipped into third place behind City Council Member Nithya Raman, meaning he won’t advance out of the jungle primary to appear on the November ballot. Voters performed exactly as pollsters predicted, rejecting a candidate who had zero chance of ever becoming mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city.

Time for some performative flopping!

Honestly, they ought to send Pratt a basket of fruit to thank him before they completely forget about him 10 minutes from now!

#Rigged

The result of last week’s mayoral election wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted.

The final UC Berkeley-LA Times poll showed Bass, the incumbent mayor, garnering 26 percent, with Raman and Pratt taking 25 and 22 percent respectively. Ten percent of voters were undecided, and 14 percent opted for other candidates.

In the end, the majority of voters opted not to waste their ballots on doomed candidates. Support for Democrats Huang and Miller dropped to less than four percent each, and, as of this writing, the tally stands at roughly 34 percent for Bass, 28 for Raman, and 26 for Pratt.

On election night, though, it looked like Pratt was going to edge out Raman for the number two spot. This was a terrific relief to Bass, who looked forward to facing off against a MAGA dilettante instead of a young progressive. And it was holy providence for Pratt, a figure so addicted to attention that he filed for divorce from his wife Heidi Montag as a publicity stunt, telling Life & Style: "Divorcing was the only way to keep Heidi's career going because everyone hated me so much. Look at Sandra Bullock — her divorce from Jesse James was the best thing to happen to her image."

A similar shift took place in the gubernatorial race, where former Fox News host Steve Hilton was running ahead of former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra on election night, but moved into second place as the votes were tallied.

There is no universe in which Hilton was ever going to be governor — Becerra and third-place finisher Tom Steyer (both Democrats) took 50 percent of the votes between them, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one statewide.

The final Emerson College poll had Becerra at 28 percent, Steyer at 22, and Hilton at 21, which would have locked the GOP out of the November governor’s race as well. But Republicans nonetheless cited the vote tally as further proof of Democratic chicanery.

On Sunday, Trump went on Meet the Press and told anchor Kristen Welker that the results were “crooked just like you’re crooked,” insisting “there’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.”

When Welker her pressed, he stormed out, snorting “you’re either crooked or you’re stupid. I’ve had enough. Thank you darling.”

“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Trump ranted Monday on Truth Social. “Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”

Mediate catalogued the chorus of howls from Republican media influencers about the supposedly obvious fraud in the Golden State.

As election law expert Richard Hasen points out, the shift toward Democrats as votes were counted was entirely foreseeable. That’s because California mails out ballots to all 23 million registered voters, and roughly 80 percent of the ones who cast a ballot do so outside of election day.

Thanks to Trump’s constant screeching about the dangers of mail-in ballots, Republicans tend to vote in person. And since same-day votes are tallied first in California, before the canvass of absentee ballots even begins, Republicans are always overrepresented in early tallies. The disparity is exacerbated by the state’s (small “l”) liberal policies of accepting ballots postmarked by election day, even if they arrive a week late, and allowing voters to come in and cure defective ballots.

This phenomenon is not theoretical. It was confirmed by a 2021 Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project paper analyzing more than a million individual voter records from Orange County across multiple elections. The result was even more pronounced in precincts with high numbers of young and non-white voters, who tend to return their ballots last.

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Past is prologue

All of that is familiar — not to say triggering — to anyone who followed the 2020 election.

Biden led in every swing state poll and was heavily favored to win both the popular vote and the electoral college. Every news outlet in the country (including the publisher of this newsletter) predicted a “red mirage” and “blue wave,” particularly after Trump’s bungling of coronavirus made showing up to breathe on your fellow voters a MAGA cultural signifier. And still, as Trump’s election night margins surrendered to arithmetic inevitability, he and his supporters pointed to supposed “vote dumps” as evidence of massive fraud.

This outrage, too, was predicted. A week before the 2020 election, Steve Bannon told a room full of supporters that Trump would preemptively declare victory before the votes could be tallied.

“At 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'” Bannon boasted.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened, and six years later, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen has become an article of faith among Republicans.

And so it’s worth paying attention when Trump and his supporters start making the same provably false claims about the upcoming midterms — particularly because the guardrails that stopped Trump from succeeding in his coup in 2020 are now gone.

Six years ago, Attorney General Bill Barr quit rather than launch unfounded investigations of vote fraud as Trump demanded. He was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen, who, along with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, deputy AG Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, refused to weaponize the Justice Department to overturn the election.

But now those positions are held by: Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche; David Warrington, who filed baseless election challenges on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2020; Stanley Woodward, the former lawyer for Trump’s co-conspirators in the stolen documents case; and T. Elliot Gaiser, who previously supported the effort to get Mike Pence to discard swing state electoral votes in 2020 and who currently churns out legal memos justifying everything from murder on the high seas to destruction of government records.

At the state level, Trump was thwarted by honest prosecutors. In Georgia, he pushed out US Attorney Bjay Pak after the prosecutor said there was no evidence of vote fraud in the state. Pak was replaced by another Republican lawyer, Bobby Christine, who agreed that there was nothing to charge. Today, First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli, who was never confirmed by the Senate and yet still runs the US Attorneys Office in the Central District of California, insists that there are "multiple election fraud investigations underway" and points to California’s slow tabulation as evidence of criminal activity.

This is more than a little ironic, since Republicans’ proposed solution for election “fraud” is to hand count the ballots. The only proof of concept they can point to is the recount in Maricopa County, Arizona after the 2020 election. It took six months, and a subsequent audit revealed that the methods were so shoddy that the result — finding a few additional votes for Biden and confirming his victory — was essentially meaningless. (With a name like Cyber Ninjas, whodathunk?)

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You gotta have faith

The beauty of election fraud claims is that the absence of evidence is no impediment.

Trump routinely claims to have won all 50 states, California included, “if we had an honest count.” Proof is irrelevant to a convenient dogma masquerading as civic concern, and of course, the point of this exercise isn’t to prove anything.

Voter fraud is far more useful as a bogeyman running riot, allowing Republicans to propose massive disenfranchisement as a needed corrective. After Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that “everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here” — pointing to belief in the conspiracy theory his party trumpets as proof of its veracity — he articulated the real goal: to allow Republicans to arbitrarily cut off tabulation and declare any outstanding votes to be invalid.

“What a concept!” he bloviated, with practiced sanctimony. “Let’s have an election the day of the election. That’s what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”

Presumably, voters in Louisiana would take just as much notice of election advice from a California politician as Gov. Gavin Newsom took of Johnson’s prescription. But with control of the House of Representatives potentially riding on a few close races in California, Democrats must push back hard against the rampant lies about fraud.

The good news is that this time Democrats are prepared for the fight. Litigation teams will be in place to fight the effort to steal the midterms. And while Trump’s second Justice Department would almost certainly go to court to advance bogus fraud claims, the public disintegration of the DOJ under Todd Blanche guarantees that courts will treat those claims with extreme skepticism. Put simply, courts are no longer willing to take the DOJ’s word for it — no matter what it is.

The solution is to be prepared, not panicked. Fraud theories that can't survive a Meet the Press interview will wither under cross examination. The fight will come, but we can win it.

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President Trump likes to say that thanks to him, the United States is now “the hottest country in the world.”

Were that actually true, the World Cup, which begins this week, would be an extraordinary showcase to attract people from all over the globe, show them the wonder of America, and leave them with even more admiration and affection for us than they had before.

Alas, that’s probably not what will happen. The soccer will surely be exciting and the international rivalries intense, but Trump will hover over the event like a noxious cloud, turning things sour wherever his influence is felt. He may not manage to ruin it completely, but he’ll make it worse in every way he can.

At the heart of the event lies a dispiriting contradiction: The World Cup is supposed to unite the world in a spirit of brotherhood and joy, yet it’s being hosted by a xenophobic, bigoted president who has done everything in his power to shut America’s doors to the world.

For the first time, the tournament is being held across three countries, the US, Mexico, and Canada. But it’s mostly America doing the hosting: 11 of the 16 venues are in the US, and three-quarters of the games — including all those from the quarter-finals on — will be played here. And while some of the less appealing features of the world’s most important sporting event are familiar — including corruption and profiteering — others have a distinctly Trumpian cast.

Everyone cashes in

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which governs the sport, had been beset by corruption scandals when the current president, Gianni Infantino, took over as president a decade ago. While he stabilized the organization’s finances and the sport is more popular and profitable than ever, critics argue that Infantino rules soccer like a dictator. Which makes him a kindred spirit to our president.

So it wasn’t really a surprise when Infantino came to the World Cup draw event and presented Trump with the “FIFA Peace Prize,” an award they made up to win Trump’s favor. (Watch below.)

Playing off the president’s petulance over not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it was about as subtle as over-indulgent parents presenting their bratty child with “The 2026 Donny Is a Very Special Boy Award.”

In addition to the gold trophy, “there is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you go,” Infantino told Trump, who clearly loved it. Infantino has become a close Trump ally and informal foreign policy advisor; he has traveled with Trump in the Middle East, showed up at the first meeting of Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza (donning a MAGA hat!), and even rented office space for FIFA in Trump Tower.

Meanwhile, those who want to attend the World Cup will be paying through the nose. Ticket prices have been shockingly high; prices for the cheapest nose-bleed ticket at a first-round game now range from the mid-hundreds for a matchup between two small countries up to a couple thousand to see the most popular teams like France or Spain. If you want to see the first US game in Los Angeles, there’s almost no seat available for less than $1,000.

After the group stage, in which four teams play a round-robin and the top two proceed to the knockout rounds, tickets will get substantially more expensive. Attending the final in MetLife stadium in the Meadowlands will cost you anywhere from $8,000 to $57,000.

Fans will have every spare dollar squeezed out of them even after they’ve bought their tickets. Last week, FIFA announced that attendees would be barred from bringing water bottles into stadiums, despite worries about extreme heat that could affect players and spectators alike. Could this benefit the Coca-Cola corporation, sole vendor of drinks at all World Cup events? Perish the thought.

After an immediate backlash (New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it “concerning,” and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said it was “a pure money grab”), FIFA backtracked slightly, saying fans in the US and Canada (but not Mexico) can bring one soft-sided, sealed water bottle of no more than 20 ounces. Getting to games may also be pricey: NJ Transit is charging $98 to take a train from Penn Station in Manhattan to the Meadowlands for a match, a half-hour ride that usually costs $12.90. You could park at the mall a mile’s walk away — but you’ll have to pay $225 for that privilege.

All that nickel-and-diming can’t be laid at Donald Trump’s feet; it’s familiar to anyone who has attended a large concert or sporting event in the last few years. But he is having an effect on the tournament, largely through the way he has dampened the willingness of people from around the world to come to America, even for this.

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A diminished nation

When the Pew Research Center surveyed people in 24 countries last year, it found that in 15, the number of people expressing favorable opinions of the United States had fallen significantly from the year before. There’s little doubt about why; a median of 62 percent of respondents across the nations said they had no confidence in Trump to do the right thing in foreign affairs. And that was before he launched a disastrous war in Iran that has spiked energy prices across the globe.

More relevant to the World Cup is the fact that Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have made news across the world, with the unmistakable message that America doesn’t want people to move here and might even prefer if they didn’t visit (unless you’re a white Afrikaner from South Africa). We’re forbidding travelers from some countries, and telling others we want to scrutinize their social media to see if they’ve expressed opinions the administration doesn’t like (you know the ones). The result is inevitable.

“I’ve never known Europeans — or a world — as anti-American as they are today,” the Financial Times’ Simon Kuper recently wrote.

Unsurprisingly, fewer tourists want to come here. In 2025, we suffered the largest decline in international tourism in over two decades, with four million fewer visitors than 2024 and $8 billion in lost income for American businesses.

Particularly notable was the steep drop in visitors from Canada, who make up a quarter of all tourists to the US. This was a direct result of Trump’s insanely counterproductive hostility to our northern neighbor, expressed in both policy (i.e. tariffs) and rhetoric. It is simply impossible to overstate how offensive all Trump’s talk of making Canada the “51st state” was to Canadians, for whom independence and distinctiveness from the United States is a central part of national identity. Many of them responded by deciding to spend their tourism dollars elsewhere.

Despite the harm to the American economy, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care; in fact, one sometimes gets the sense they’d be happy if nobody ever came to our shores. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently threatened to stop customs processing of international flights to all “sanctuary cities,” which could mean no international travel to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Boston.

Think that might put a damper on tourism?

Now there are signs that fewer foreigners are coming to the World Cup than expected. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Airbnb owners and some ticket buyers hoping to resell their seats aren’t getting the demand they expected around the games taking place just outside San Francisco. A Chronicle review showed “plenty of rooms available for roughly $200 a night within walking distance” of the stadium.

It’s not just San Francisco. A report released in May from the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that most of the members they surveyed in cities with World Cup venues were seeing bookings below what they had forecasted.

“Visa barriers and broader geopolitical concerns are significantly suppressing international demand, cited by close to 70 percent of respondents across most markets,” the report said.

Thanks to dynamic pricing, the astronomical cost of some of those tickets will likely drop as the games approach — since many of the games haven’t sold out. Prices on the resale market are already dropping.

The truth is that once the competition begins, the spirit that makes soccer the world’s most popular sport will kick in; even Trump can’t dampen fans’ enthusiasm for watching their countries compete. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was sullied by evidence of corruption and exploitation of migrant workers, yet interest was undimmed; the global audience for the final between Argentina and France was estimated at 1.4 billion. But this time, many have already decided to watch at home rather than make the trip.

Late last year, Infantino brought the World Cup trophy to the Oval Office and gave it to Trump to hold.

“Can I keep it?” Trump said. “We’re not giving it back. It goes very well on the wall right over there.”

Everyone laughed, perhaps a little uneasily. We’ll see if the World Cup will be just one more thing Trump manages to spoil.

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Pam Bondi has a strong claim to being the most corrupt and subservient attorney general in US history. So when Trump fired her in April, there was an outpouring of bipartisan celebration. Everyone from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu to bottom-feeding MAGA influencer Matt Walsh rushed to say that Bondi was incompetent and compromised, and that the nation was better off without her.

Unfortunately but predictably, Trump did not fire Bondi for being corrupt and subservient. He seems to have fired her, instead, for not being corrupt and subservient enough.

Trump’s choice to replace her is not a more independent or accomplished attorney. Instead, he selected as Bondi’s successor his own former lawyer, Todd Blanche — a man who has spent the period since Bondi’s departure attempting to show that he can, somehow, contort himself into even more humiliating postures of drooling obedience than his predecessor.

Whether Blanche can get confirmed given the current mutinous spirit in the Republican-controlled Senate is uncertain. But one thing is clear; Bondi’s failures were failures that Trump wanted and indeed demanded. If a minimally competent and principled attorney general is appointed during Trump’s term, it will be despite his furious efforts. That’s because one of the absolute core goals of his presidency is the perversion of justice and the destruction of the rule of law.

Job description: Do boss’s bidding

Trump does not want an attorney general who will administer the law in a free and fair fashion. He does not even want an attorney general who shares his policy preferences and will pursue them aggressively. He wants an attorney general who will act as his personal advocate and henchthug, putting his goals, grudges, cashflow, and whims above the good of the country.

Bondi knew the assignment, and she was eager to crawl on her belly and kiss ass in the wormlike manner Trump requires.

During her tenure, Bondi aggressively worked to end cases against those who Trump believed would be political allies (like then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams) and to prosecute those Trump believed to be his personal and political enemies (like Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and former FBI Director James Comey). She gutted white-collar criminal enforcement to benefit the wealthy oligarchs who Trump sees as his core constituency.

Bondi performed for Trump on television, spewing rabid partisan talking points to try to discredit congressional Democrats to whom, under the Constitution, she was supposed to be accountable — like when she called Rep. Jamie Raskin a “washed up loser lawyer.”

That attack on Raskin came in a hearing on the Epstein files — the issue that more than any other led to Bondi’s downfall. Much of the right believed that the release of the Epstein files would implicate Democrats like Bill Clinton. But Epstein was in fact besties for years with one Donald Trump. One woman has accused Trump of raping her in Epstein’s home when she was 13.

Congress passed legislation requiring complete release of the files relating to Epstein. But the Department of Justice under Bondi control failed to release some 2.5 million files, and 3.5 million released pages were heavily redacted. It looked like a coverup, and it destroyed her reputation across the political spectrum. When Bondi stepped down, erratic right-wing South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who had pushed for the release of the files, expressed hope that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, a former congressperson with nominally more stature than Bondi, would become the next AG.

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Why not worse?

But Zeldin was not Trump’s pick. Instead, Trump appointed Blanche as acting attorney general, and last week he asked the Senate to confirm Blanche as AG.

Blanche is not the attorney general you select when you want a sharp break with Pam Bondi. He is the attorney general you choose when you want an attorney general who is more Pam Bondi than Pam Bondi.

A former attorney for the Southern District of New York, Blanche oozed into Trump’s orbit in 2019 when he began to defend his campaign flak Paul Manafort from New York state charges. By 2023, he was defending Trump himself in his hush money payment trial, and eventually in all of the high profile cases against him.

Blanche claimed prior to the 2024 election that he was not representing Trump in pursuit of a government job. Either he reconsidered or he was just lying; either way, soon after entering office, Trump moved to find a place for his loyalist lawyer. Blanche was confirmed as deputy attorney general in March 2025, and quickly went about helping Bondi turns the DOJ into Trump’s personal plaything.

Blanche personally put federal prosecutors involved in the Eric Adams corruption case on leave. He fired pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she refused to sign off on restoring gun rights to actor, Trump-supporter, and domestic abuser Mel Gibson. He ordered the arrest of Mayor Baraka after Baraka attempted to conduct an oversight visit at the Delaney Hall ICE concentration camp. And in a perhaps more personal move, Blanche gutted cryptocurrency enforcement while he himself held more than $150,000 in crypto investments.

Blanche was also up to his puckered lips in the DOJ’s Epstein file manipulations. In her testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week, Bondi claimed Blanche was in fact the one with “oversight” of Epstein files releases and redactions. Bondi insisted she was praising Blanche’s work. But the upshot is that Blanche, according to Bondi, was ultimately responsible for the most controversial and despised aspect of her much despised tenure.

It’s not exactly a revelation that Blanche was closely involved with the Epstein scandal. Last summer he orchestrated a much-reported meeting with Epstein’s convicted and imprisoned accomplice in child abuse, Ghislaine Maxwell. In preparation for that conversation, he allowed her attorney to read grand jury transcripts, even though those might help her with her appeal.

After Maxwell and Blanche chatted, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison; Blanche claimed this was done in order to protect her from unspecified “threats.” Others were skeptical. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, said that it looked like Blanche was offering Maxwell favors and special treatment as part of a “corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump.”

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Audience of one

Since his appointment as acting attorney general two months ago, Blanche has doubled down on his efforts to show Trump that he is the loyalest of all possible loyalists, a MAGA hat of a man with neither spine nor heart nor soul of his own.

Under Blanche the DOJ opened an investigation into former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified about Trump’s disgraceful efforts to stage a coup on January 6. It also opened an investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, a venerable civil rights organization.

And Blanche has said he’s working on setting up “roadblocks” to prevent Democrats from prosecuting Trump after his term is over.

Blanche’s most extreme and embarrassing acts of self-debasement, however, have involved Trump’s coup slush fund.

As Liz Dye reported in Public Notice last week, the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” would transfer $1.776 billion from the Treasury Judgment Fund to a private entity controlled entirely by Blanche. The fund could then be used to provide payouts to people who believe they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration.

Trump has made it clear that he particularly wants to reward people involved in the January 6 coup. As an extra bonus, the IRS has pledged not to audit the tax returns of Trump and his family, and to drop pending litigation — possibly saving Trump from paying a $100 million penalty.

Blanche — who again, would be in charge of the coup slush fund — has been its most vocal public proponent. He’s defended the fund publicly before the Senate Appropriations Committee and refused to rule out that payouts might go to Trump donors or to January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police. He also fought for it to be included in the GOP’s reconciliation bill funding ICE and Border Patrol. His advocacy led to a bitter, dramatic private meeting in which Republican senators yelled that he was advocating for open corruption — and pushing them to take votes that would damage them badly in the midterms.

The revolt of the GOP caucus, and key court losses, have derailed the fund — at least for the moment. But Blanche’s eagerness to abandon any pretense of ethics has done its work in that it has secured him the nomination he coveted.

The contortions involved in Blanche’s abasement may ultimately backfire; the senators who were dressing him down are the same ones he needs to vote for his confirmation. John Fetterman, the furthest right Democratic senator, has already said he won’t vote for Blanche. John Cornyn, a usually reliable MAGA vote on the Judiciary Committee, has said that Blanche “needs to answer some questions for me.” Other Trump nominees have been forced to withdraw from lack of Senate support, so Blanche’s confirmation is by no means assured.

Whether he becomes attorney general or not, though, Blanche has made clear what qualities Trump prizes in his appointees — complete loyalty, open corruption, contempt for any principle superseding the brain burps of God Emperor Trump. MAGA wants attorney generals who are unfit to be attorney generals. Only hollowed-out, lawless fascists need apply.

That’s it for today

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“He doesn’t sleep and it’s actually a problem,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during Senate testimony this week.

Rubio was trying to make the point that President Trump is a dynamo — a near-superhuman leader who works deep into the night on the complex issues facing the nation and world. But Rubio inadvertently made the opposite point: Trump’s lack of sleep, evidenced by his frequently manic, late night Truth Social posting sessions, is a problem for the president’s clearly declining mental and physical abilities.

The signs of this decline are available for anyone who chooses to see them.

On Wednesday, after six days out of the public eye, Trump bumbled through a ceremony in which he signed a handful of executive orders, marveling at his own signature — “Oh, that’s a good one” — and asking aides to explain to him what the orders being placed in front of him actually did.

After listening to a lengthy explanation of an order that would expand the number of federal employees who can be fired by him, Trump still didn’t quite understand.

“And the reason for this was, what? Whose idea was that?” he said.

Then on Thursday, Trump sat in his chair dozing as members of his cabinet lavished him with praise.

Thursday’s embarrassment of an appearance in the Oval Office would be devastating for any other president. For Trump, it was just Thursday. And before that, it was just another Wednesday.

The on-camera dozing sessions that Rubio was being pressed about are one sign of Trump’s growing physical weakness — which is certainly not helped by staying up until the early morning hours voraciously consuming a Truth Social algorithm feeding him a steady and unhealthy diet of Trump-worshipping AI slop, election fraud conspiracies, and Boomer meme garbage.

Other signs of Trump’s body falling apart: swollen ankles, difficulty walking in a straight line, and unexplained bruising on both hands.

The garbage social media diet probably isn’t helping Trump’s declining cognitive abilities either. The president frequently appears unable to discuss complex matters like peace negotiations with Iran in any competent manner. (The peace deal has been just around the corner or days away, Trump has repeatedly said for several months. He now says the whole matter is “boring” to him.)

All of this madness is plainly viewable for anyone willing to look. And yet, Trump continues to be covered as if he’s a rational actor. “Trump optimistic on Iran deal,” read the chyron on Fox News on Thursday morning — as if the president is deeply involved with the complexities of negotiations and not clearly concentrating on things he actually enjoys, like White House renovations and preparations for his rally there later this month.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress have turned themselves into punchlines by never hearing or seeing anything Trump says or posts, or insisting they would need to hear the full “context” of his statements to conclude whether he’s actually losing his mind. But the reality is the signs of mental decline are obvious and abundant.

Trump has even struggled to recall things that he said.

In an interview on May 10, Trump was asked about a plan he made with Elon Musk early in his second term to travel to Fort Knox to “make sure” the US supply of gold bullion remains secured there. Trump clearly did not even remember much if anything about the episode.

“What happened to the audit of Fort Knox?” interviewer Sherryl Atkinson asked.

Trump blanked, looked to the side, and pursed his lips before responding.

“Which one are you talking about?”

Atkinson then explained to Trump his own plan to visit Fort Knox.

“Well we wanted to go knock on the door at Fort Knox, very thick door, and to see whether or not we have any gold in there, you know? Because, uh, we take a look at it … It’s a very interesting question, yeah.” Trump said. “We played with that, uh, I wonder if they left the gold in Fort Knox, ‘cause they steal a lot.”

“No need to really do that, though?” Atkinson followed up.

“Well, I don’t know, I think we … it’s, uh, I do want to go to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, which I’m sure it will be.”

Trump’s comments were sanewashed by Forbes and other publications as “Trump says he still wants to visit Fort Knox to see if gold is there.” But the moment was telling and just one of many recent episodes in which the president has been confused, incoherent, and nonsensical.

Throughout his second term, Trump’s inability to understand basic math has been on display whenever he boasts of his administration’s efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Trump repeatedly claims he has reduced those costs by as much as 1,000 percent, of course is mathematically impossible. (Such a reduction would mean that Americans would be paid by pharmaceutical companies when accessing those drugs.)

Never one to admit he was wrong, Trump has continued to claim mathematically impossible reductions in prescription drug costs. At an event touting his TrumpRx program last month, he claimed his administration has “slashed the price of dozens of commonly used prescription drugs by differences of 400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

Similarly, Trump has repeatedly uttered the made-up word “mutilization” as part of his smear campaign against transgender people.

These examples and more — the manic posting of delusional AI garbage on Truth Social, the falling asleep in meetings, the unexplained ailments, the strange slurring that often occurs during his speeches, the fixation on the 2020 election, the seeming inability to focus on anything for very long that doesn’t concern a monument to himself, the constant contradictory statements and positions on the war in Iran — cannot lead any objective observer to conclude anything other than that the president is, quite literally, losing his mind.

That’s why, in late April, a group of 30-plus neurologists, doctors, and scientists from all political persuasions who represent some of the country’s most renowned institutions wrote a letter to Congress warning that Trump’s accelerating cognitive decline represents a danger to the public. The letter barely made a blip in the national political press, just as the issue of Trump’s health and mental capabilities are rarely mentioned even by Democrats, but the conclusions reached by the authors of the letter are gravely serious.

Assessing that, prior to being elected in 2024, Trump was already experiencing serious cognitive decline, the scientists and doctors who authored the letter concluded his condition has only worsened.

“We are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public,” they wrote.

The authors — who are employed or were trained as neurologists, psychologists, physicians, and mental health experts at Harvard, the Tufts University School of Medicine, Columbia University, George Washington University, and many more — cited a long list of Trump’s behaviors, traits, and even social media posts that portray a man who is routinely displaying a “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.”

The letter referenced some of Trump’s more insane Truth Social posts, including the one where he portrayed himself as Jesus Christ, as evidence of “grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility.” The letter also cited Trump’s threats against Iran, domestic political opponents, and American citizens as evidence of his growing inability to control his own thoughts and statements — a symptom of cognitive decline called “disinhibition.”

The authors warn of Trump’s “significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications — e.g., 150 social media posts in one night — fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas, and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions.”

This letter, of course, came before the last few days, when Trump has been busy posting AI slop depicting everything from oil tankers arriving in New York City, to him commanding military vessels and sitting behind a Star Trek-like command desk, to Gov. Gavin Newsom in a padded cell, and, for some inexplicable reason, Trump walking alongside an alien who is apparently under arrest, or perhaps being deported.

“It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater,” the authors of the letter wrote. “It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.”

With Trump representing a “clear and present danger to our country and to the world,” they said, “steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.”

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Trump’s decline is finally in focus

Almost since his first day in office last year, Trump’s right hand has shown bruising that he has attempted to cover up with makeup. The White House has never offered a plausible explanation for the bruising, instead insisting that it’s due to Trump constantly shaking hands. But in recent weeks, Trump’s left hand has shown similar bruising and attempts to conceal it with makeup. To believe the White House, Trump now must be engaging in handshakes with both of his hands.

Other recent signs of both physical and mental failings include Trump telling on himself by saying people with whom he discusses his administration’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug traffickers in international water have confused “the sea” with “vision,” a near stumble while exiting his presidential limo in China, and routine instances where he can be heard slurring his words.

One of the more notable recent instances of Trump’s unexplained slurring came during a visit from King Charles II, when he attempted to note that the monarch would be the first to address a joint session of Congress.

Trump fumbled the word “address,” mangling it into “adrist.”

In the last month, Trump’s has slurred his words and struggled to read during a Bible-reading event for Christian nationalists, when introducing Energy Secretary Chris (“Kiss”) Wright at a Rose Garden event where he called the White House a “shit house,” when he struggled with the letter “S” while describing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies as “low IQ,” and again when he struggled with “S” during an event where he said he’d never heard of the term “corner store.”

After years of unhinged behavior indicating cognitive decline as well as voluminous evidence of physical ailments, Trump’s inability to perform the most important job in the world is finally coming into focus. A growing chorus not just of medical professionals like those in the April letter to Congress, but even former and current Trump supporters like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have openly questioned Trump’s mental prowess as his second term has continued to descend into chaos and incoherence.

Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein and former presidential candidate and longtime American progressive leader Ralph Nader recently wrote their own letter to Congress, urging lawmakers to consider invoking the 25th Amendment. (Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has introduced a bill that would create a commission to examine Trump’s fitness for office.)

Fein and Nader noted that Trump’s Truth Social ravings have only gotten more bizarre, including his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

“Every day Mr. Trump remains in office is a roll of the dice with the survival of the species,” Fein and Nader wrote, warning that Trump could deploy nuclear weapons “against Iran in a fit of rage.”

And yet, none of the Americans who are charged with acting as a check on the vast power of the presidency seem to be doing anything about it. No one in the Trump administration has offered a remotely plausible explanation for Trump’s physical ailments, and any questions about his clear cognitive challenges — the reading flubs, the obvious confusion, the strange slurring, forgetting what he was talking about, flitting from one subject to another for seemingly no reason — are met by the White House with disdain, denial, mockery, and lies.

Anyone questioning why the US can’t seem to find a resolution to Trump’s war in Iran, rising healthcare costs, inflation, and so much else that plagues the nation has to look no further than the president himself for the answer. If you don’t believe us, spend a few days listening to him and reading his Truth Social feed. Doing so will make the primary cause of our troubles undeniably obvious.

That’s it for this week

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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

We had a lively conversation about why Trump’s insurrectionist slush fund went bust and corruption as the dominant narrative of the ‘26 cycle. We also talked at length about whether Graham Platner’s personal foibles are sabotaging Dem efforts to pick up a key Senate seat in Maine, and also got into Trump’s Iran debacle and why President Deals has been unable to negotiate his way out of it.

If you’d like to support the podcast and ask us questions during future episodes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Public Notice if you aren’t one already.

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The PN Pod goes live every Friday at 2pm eastern. We’ll be back at the same time and same place next week. Until then, we hope you enjoy the show!

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One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.

Perhaps the best known example of this is the “God’s Not Dead” series of movies, and the latest instance is the movie “By Dawn’s Early Light,” which promotes the findings of Trump’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

The central narrative of these white (frequently southern) Christians is that they are the real victims in the story of American history. This builds on their belief that their ancestors were the victims of the Civil War, rather than the people they enslaved and fought to keep enslaved.

This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?

History has some awful examples of governmental oppression of groups before the victims of it are carted off to “re-education” centers, labor camps, or simply dragged into a field and shot. Let’s take those historic examples and imagine them happening to Christians, and see if they line up with anything happening in the US today.

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“End Christian insanity forever”

Let’s start with universities and schools eliminating all material relating to Christians and Christianity.

Christian teachers and professors would be forced out of their positions by a variety of means, and at a minimum are barred from even alluding to their faith, including the wearing of crosses. Laws banning Christians from using public facilities used by non-Christians means that a Christian teacher has to leave campus to go to the bathroom, effectively forcing them out of the profession. Parents’ groups and social media influencers storm school board meetings and send constant death threats to push Christian instructors out of classrooms.

At the same time, the government passes laws that would prohibit any federal funding from schools and universities that allow any mention of the Bible or Christianity on campus, including banning students from receiving loans to attend institutions that violate this edict. Christian students are banned from meeting on campus, and school officials are prohibited from taking action when Christian students are harassed or beaten, because the position of the government is that there is no such thing as a Christian student.

Christians would also largely be forced out of the workplace, by laws declaring that the comfort of non-Christians outweighs the needs of Christians (who don’t exist as citizens). Thus, Christians are banned from using bathrooms, pools, and any other facility that might be used by non-Christians, and employers are not required to provide alternate facilities for a group of people that does not exist, per government policy. The result is that most Christians are forced to work from home, or only for themselves.

The government isn’t subtle about their intent to eradicate Christianity either. The self-proclaimed dictator promises to “end Christian insanity forever.” Government aligned actors tell cheering audiences that they will eradicate Christian ideology from public life. Government officials make banning circumcision their number one talking point and accuse every Christian of mutilating children and conspiring to rape “good” non-Christian women.

The incumbent party uses Christians as a rhetorical device: a symbol of everything wrong with the country, that can only be fixed by elimination of them and their beliefs. Christians themselves are portrayed as disgusting, weak, but dangerous perverts who will destroy the nation and the people if they are not eradicated first.

The courts would strip Christians of even their most basic protections, ruling that Christianity is a choice and not protected by the first amendment, and therefore subject to only rational basis scrutiny. This allows the government to implement virtually any law or policy targeting Christians to pass constitutional muster, so long as it can offer an excuse of any sort. Laws and policies targeting Christians would pass at the state and federal level by the hundreds at a rate that would make post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws look slow.

The government would declare that “Christian ideology” is one of the most dangerous terrorism threats facing the country, and use this excuse for enhanced surveillance. It begins raiding churches and using the courts to subpoena all their records to build government lists of known Christians. Every time a Christian commits a crime it is national news, and government media runs stories on it every hour for days. Calls for disarming Christians grow. There are also increasing demands to declare them mentally incompetent and dangerous for believing in supernatural beings that control everything.

Christians are banned from the military under the auspices of keeping “mental defectives” out. They are ruthlessly hunted down using government lists, and discharged with papers that ensure they will never hold a job in national security ever again. The hearings for Christian troops are a sham where no one is allowed to challenge the legality of the order, the evidence against them, call witnesses, or conduct cross-examinations. There is only one possible outcome, despite many of the troops having fought and bled for their country. The Overcommander of the Military constantly makes speeches mocking and deriding the Christians he is kicking out, but the courts do not consider this obvious animus relevant: the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is effectively a dead letter for Christians.

The media dog-piles on Christians and Christianity as well. Nearly every mainstream media outlet runs hundreds of fear-mongering anti-Christian articles per year, because they generate clicks and the government grants them increased access as a perk for siding with them on the “Christian question.” Actual Christians are almost never interviewed for any of these articles, and pro-Christian materials that speak with self-identified Christians are limited to low budget Christian outlets that have very little reach and are banned at most libraries and universities anyway.

Christians would be cut off from medical care too. The government declares that no doctor, facility, or hospital will be eligible to receive federal funds if they treat Christians, leading to a “no Christians policy” with many medical providers and hospitals. Those few that still do will segregate Christian patients from the rest of the population. They are often treated with contempt, disgust, and outright neglect by staff.

Even entertainment is affected. Christians are banned from sports at all levels, all the way down to kindergartners and chess tournaments. (The government graciously allows them to have their own inferior leagues, however.) Christian content is deemed adult content or offensive and is largely banned from broadcast. Anything containing Christian content must carry a warning, and Christian performers are largely blacklisted. Media companies that violate this are threatened and punished economically by The Leader.

As conditions worsen and the government solidifies absolute power, Christians grow increasingly anxious. Many of them try to either move to friendlier areas of the country or flee abroad. But the governors of the friendlier areas of the country are largely unwilling to enforce laws protecting Christians. Nor are they interested in fighting a federal court system that has been effectively rigged.

Escaping the country is deliberately made more difficult. The government changes passport rules such that Christians are required to either legally renounce their faith or submit to having a “special” passport that identifies them as Christian. This rule comes at a time when most countries are unwilling to grant Christians asylum or refugee status, much less let them emigrate. For Christians, there is no escape from this new Reich: they can only pray that it expires before it makes them expire instead.

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It’s happening here

None of it is happening to Christians in the United States. Nor is there any danger whatsoever of it happening in the United States ... to Christians. It is simply a paranoid fantasy that facilitates a victimhood mindset.

But all of this has happened before, in Germany between 1933 and 1938, and is happening right now. Every single action described above has been taken against transgender people in the United States and the UK. And who are the loudest, most influential voices supporting this actual oppression and discrimination? These same Christians who are convinced it’s being done to them.

It’s often written that straight men are afraid of gay men because they are afraid of being treated the way they treat women. Similarly, it seems that most American Christians are afraid of transgender people because they’re afraid of being treated they way they treated African Americans decades ago, and transgender people today.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the rebranded PN Pod (featuring co-cost Paul Waldman), and then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter.

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Donald Trump frequently demonstrates a level of malignancy that still manages to shock. He doesn’t try to hide it, but unfortunately, the mainstream media covers his disordered thinking as a colorful “quirk” — Trump being Trump — rather than a serious, escalating threat to the nation.

This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president. He shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his name.

After even half of Milli Vanilli refused to perform at his America 250 event, Trump posted this gaping wound of narcissistic injury:

I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am 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.

Until an appearance before cameras yesterday in which he seemed extremely tired and nearly comatose, Trump hadn’t been seen in public since May 27 — the day after his most recent trip to Walter Reed — so while these posts were technically “proof of life,” they were hardly a reassuring statement of mental stability.

Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post, even though there’s a direct line between them and the administration’s ongoing disaster in Iran. After all, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to determine, based on the president’s online crashout, that the Trump administration is no closer to a resolution of the war.

White House officials keep insisting that they’re just a “couple days” away from a deal with Iran. It’s almost become like the running joke in the 1986 Tom Hanks film, “The Money Pit,” where corrupt contractors keep telling Hanks’ character that repairs will just take another “two weeks.”

Nonetheless, mainstream media outlets dutifully report the administration’s claims of an impending deal. Their continued credulity is especially unwarranted considering that the person ultimately in charge of any resolution, the actual commander in chief, is the same man who gloated over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” with an AI-generated post depicting Trump hurling Colbert into a dumpster and dancing gleefully.

The rate of Trump’s manic posting on social media accelerated in May, just as Iran became more of a no-spin scenario for the president. Unable to dig himself out of his deepening hole, he spent most of Memorial Day weekend mentally unraveling online. He resumed his unprecedented threats against a US ally with two Truth Social posts that depicted his massive face looming sinisterly over Greenland. He posted an AI image of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in a sheep costume with vampire teeth, witing, “A Dumocrat! Don’t allow this lying sleazebag on FoxNews!”

Trump posted an image of a fighter jet seemingly about to drop a bomb with the words “Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter” written on its side. He shared an image of himself holding a shotgun over a slain rhinoceros with the menacing caption “NO RINOS” (a term for “Republicans In Name Only” that Trump commonly uses to describe any Republican who crosses him).

Anyone who saw these posts could reasonably conclude Trump is better suited in a mental institution and not at a negotiating table.

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The breakdowns aren’t a ‘distraction’

Legacy media might wish to avoid taking the apparently bold moral position that the US president shouldn’t behave like a crazy person, but in the process they’re ignoring the bombshell story that the sitting one is deranged.

The social media screeds and public meltdowns don’t simply demonstrate Trump’s low character. They show a president who’s mentally and morally incapable of effective leadership. In a sane world, every manic posting spree would generate wall-to-wall coverage demanding his resignation or forced removal from office.

Yet, instead, the press seemingly covers the president as though he’s two distinct personas — the petty, bigoted shitposter and an otherwise normal if slightly unconventional commander in chief. But the sad reality is that the unstable shitposter is the only Trump, and unfortunately, that’s the one who’s in the room where the “dealmaking” happens.

If Nixon’s irrational paranoia destroyed his presidency, Trump’s presidency, especially during his second term when he’s surrounded himself with nothing but sycophants, exists only to further his personal grievances and vendettas. Nothing matters more to him than callow displays of dominance.

Even if we buy the media-enabled GOP narrative that Trump is merely a fun-having jerk who enjoys “trolling” his opponents, it clearly gets in the way of business. Trump’s gross behavior isn’t a wily strategy. It comes off like a psychotic compulsion.

Consider that Trump spent the first year and a half of his second reign of terror alienating America’s allies. He launched vindictive, petty global trade wars. He threatened both Greenland and Canada with annexation — churlishly calling Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future Governor of Canada.” (Last week, Trump shared an article about Canada’s economic challenges with the words “51st State!”) Trump has minimized the contribution our NATO allies have made to the global order. He gutted critical foreign aid and abandoned US soft power.

Other leaders of the actual free world have expressed doubt that America is still on their side. To the extent you could call isolating America from the free world an actual strategy, it all blew up in Trump’s face after he started a war of choice in Iran and desperately needed our allies’ support.

It’s not just that Trump’s incompetent — because he very much is — he’s fundamentally incapable of restraining his worst impulses. So he replaces complex diplomacy with thuggish rants on social media. When US allies weren’t rushing to bail him out of his self-inflicted Iran disaster, Trump whined in March: "Because of the fact we have had such Military Success, we no longer 'need,' or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of US, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!"

That last all-caps sentence in particular reads like a clarion cry for help.

Peter Baker at the New York Times wrote in April that Trump’s “erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” But what’s “crazy” is that the Times would even frame this as a debate.

Trump is not “crazy like a fox,” unless the specific fox is also mentally unwell. Both the economy and Trump’s approval rating are in free fall. There is obviously no method to his unchecked madness. Last week, Trump casually threatened the Middle East nation of Oman, one of America’s staunchest allies in the region, if it didn’t bend to his shambolic will: “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.”

It’s frightening how much the public Trump sounds like his most bonkers social media rant.

After noting that Trump obsessively posts “disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements” that threaten war crimes against Iran or personally attack the Pope as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Baker made this bizarre comparison: “While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such profound consequences.”

This is maddening, as Trump and Biden simply don’t belong in the same conversation about a president’s deteriorating mental state. As amply covered in the press, Biden was in fact old and thus experienced age-related decline, but the worst-case scenario with him at the wheel was not a potential nuclear holocaust. Even when Special Counsel Robert Hur gratuitously described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur conceded that Biden otherwise presented as “sympathetic“ and “well-meaning.“

Biden on his worst day was emotionally stable. Trump, on every day, is outright sadistic, and his resulting behavior is increasingly reckless. Biden’s diplomacy united allies against Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. He successfully negotiated bipartisan bills in Congress. But Trump has blown up longstanding alliances while purging dissenters and weaponizing government against his foes.

During Trump’s first term, Republicans would often say they wished he would post on social media less and govern more. This promoted the myth that Trump was actually competent, the dysfunction limited to his smartphone. Now, Republicans don’t even bother. They accept Trump’s madness, but that’s no reason we should ever ignore it.

Trump’s increasingly obvious unfiltered mental instability is the true original sin that should headline every news article until he’s finally out of office.

That’s it for today

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Yesterday the Trump administration made it known that it’s tapping out on the “weaponization” slush fund … maybe.

First Axios and then every other news outlet simultaneously reported that the $1.776 billion payout to Trump’s pals is “dead for now.”

As for the administration, though, they’re putting nothing in writing.

And not even Trump’s fellow Republicans will take his word that this theft of taxpayer dollars won’t rise from the dead.

Trump v. Trump

In theory, the slush fund was created to settle a lawsuit Trump filed in January against the IRS.

Back in 2020, a contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked more than 400,000 tax returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica and the New York Times. As a victim of the leak, Trump was entitled to recover his actual damages under the Privacy Act, codified at 5 U.S.C. § 552a, and the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 7431. But the statute of limitations is two years from the date of discovery, and Trump absolutely knew about the leak years before that.

In fact, Trump sent his lawyer Alina Habba to represent him at Littlejohn’s plea hearing in October 2023. Nevertheless, Trump demanded $10 billion — a number totally unmoored to any claim of actual harm suffered — insisting that he didn’t find out about the leak until 2024.

Everything about this case suggests that it was a collusive effort between Trump and the government he controls. No lawyer for the Justice Department ever entered an appearance, and the requests to delay the government’s answer to the complaint were docketed “jointly,” but signed by Trump’s lawyers alone.

Smelling a rat, Judge Kathleen Williams ordered both sides to brief the threshold question of whether she had jurisdiction to hear the case at all. Article III courts can only hear live cases and controversies, and a president suing the an agency he controls doesn’t look much like a real dispute. Trump himself confirmed as much on Air Force One, telling reporters “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

The briefs were due May 20. But on May 18, Trump’s private lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if the Trump administration had filed an answer to the complaint, Judge Williams would have had to approve the settlement. But because the parties made sure that the no DOJ lawyer ever entered an appearance, Trump could just walk away without subjecting the settlement to judicial scrutiny. Judge Williams had no choice but to dismiss the case.

The same day, DOJ announced the Anti-Weaponization Fund, transferring $1.776 billion from the Treasury Judgment Fund to a private entity controlled entirely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Under the aegis of five commissioners named by Blanche and removable by Trump, the fund would secretly dole out cash with zero judicial or congressional oversight.

Here again, Trump’s lawyers inside and outside of government colluded to situate this payout in ways that are legally self-contradictory. They captioned it as a settlement of the lawsuit, even though it also purported to settle unrelated claims arising from an administrative complaint that Trump filed alleging abuse of process in the the stolen documents case.

Normally legal settlements are taxable income to the prevailing party, but Trump certainly doesn’t intend to pay taxes on $1.8 billion in income. And the Treasury Judgment Fund can only pay monetary judgments; it cannot be used to fund administrative overhead to run what is effectively a federal agency dispensing cash to randos.

The next day, Blanche signed a separate addendum immunizing Trump and his family for any tax crimes they might previously have committed. Trump has been arguing for more than a decade about a dodgy tax filing back in 2010, so this amnesty is potentially worth $100 million for him, according to the New York Times.

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Sh*t sandwich fails to please diners

The backlash was intense, and not just from Democrats.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick joined Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi to propose legislation blocking the slush fund. Over in the Senate, Sen. Thom Tillis called the project “stupid on stilts” and a “payout for punks,” according to CNN.

“Utterly stupid, morally wrong – take your pick,” Sen. Mitch McConnell scoffed.

Even Sen. Ron Johnson, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, called it “a galactic blunder.”

Blanche’s steadfast refusal to promise that no money would go to J6-ers who beat cops did not help matters.

Republicans in Congress were already furious at being asked to fund Trump’s ballroom — the one that was supposedly being donated by all his pals who just happen to have business before the federal government.

The Senate Parliamentarian saved the GOP from having to walk that particular plank by stripping the ballroom out of the reconciliation bill Republicans have been trying to pass to fund ICE and CBP without Democratic votes. But DOJ funding is still part of it, which gave Democrats a hook to propose endless amendments to the reconciliation package barring distributions to Trump’s slush fund. Voting to fund the project would be politically embarrassing for Republicans, and there’s good reason to think enough of them would cross the aisle that the amendment would pass.

PBS reports that Sen. Ted Cruz dished the dirt on his podcast, describing a Republican caucus meeting where senators screamed at Blanche and told him that he need to make this problem go away, or else.

Meanwhile the courts were also throwing sand in the gears.

In Florida, 36 retired federal judges filed a motion asking Judge Williams to reopen the case, arguing the entire transaction amounted to a fraud on the court. They make a case that the judgment fund is only available for actual settlements, and, if there was never a real adversarial case to settle, then the money transfer was illegal. Judge Williams responded by suggesting that she might reopen the case to investigate the fraud and impose sanctions on the lawyers who participated in it. Whacking the lawyers wouldn’t undo the slush fund, but it would likely force someone from DOJ to step forward and answer a lot of uncomfortable questions.

In Virginia, a coalition of plaintiffs who claim they were targeted by the Trump DOJ and will be locked out of the “weaponization” fund sued to block it for illegally discriminating on the basis of viewpoint in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Leonie Brinkema entered a temporary restraining order barring any transfer of funds, acceptance of claims, or disbursement of payments pending a hearing set for June 12.

Several similar lawsuits have already been filed, with more on the way. And so, dogged by Congress and the courts, the Trump administration seems to have realized that a course correction was inevitable.

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Rumors of demise exaggerated?

Initially, the only official public statement came from the DOJ’s twitter account, which vowed to abide by Judge Brinkema’s ruling.

That’s obviously not going to cut it with Democrats.

But Trump’s prodigious lying has finally convinced Republicans that nothing is official until it’s actually official.

“It’s pretty clear that the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley told Politico.

“If it means it’s completely pulled, then that would satisfy me, but I haven’t heard anybody say that that is actually what is happening,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski agreed.

On Monday, even after the news of the “settlement” was reported, Senate Majority Leader John Thune moved to strip DOJ funding from the reconciliation bill entirely, in an effort to separate the issue of the slush fund from the reconciliation bill.

And Trump’s most ardent supporters are sure that they’ll get their money, one way or the other.

In testimony yesterday before a House appropriations subcommittee on oversight of the Justice Department, Blanche agreed that “we’re not moving forward with the fund. Period.”

But Blanche refused to put that in writing, suggesting that the money may still be moving to Trump, but not the slush fund. (Sorry, Enrique!) And he insisted that the tax amnesty was non-negotiable.

“There’s a settlement that the IRS entered into with President Trump and others in his family and his companies,” Blanche simpered. “As part of that settlement, as is customary in IRS settlements, there is a separate AG order.”

The slippage here is that this wasn’t an IRS enforcement action — it was a civil suit filed by Trump himself under the Privacy Act and the Internal Revenue Code. Blanche may be right that it is “customary” for the IRS to settle all a taxpayer’s outstanding issues in a dispute over back-taxes. But here, if Trump had actually won in court, he’d have been entitled to monetary damages and nothing else. His own tax liability is totally irrelevant.

On the plus side, the continued existence of this settlement means that Judge Williams’s inquiry into potential attorney misconduct will probably continue — and she’s not going to get flimflammed with a deliberate obfuscation about tax settlements and tort suits.

And neither will Congress!

“We will do whatever we can to force a vote during the budget reconciliation process on this monarchical outrage and further plunder of the people,” House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin told The New Republic.

This thing isn’t over … not by a long shot.

That’s it for today

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Last week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and xenophobic racist Stephen Miller attacked Democratic Texas US Senate candidate James Talarico with the level of class and dignity typical of MAGA.

Responding to a boilerplate Talarico campaign announcement posted by the Democrats’ account on X, Miller responded, “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” Miller later doubled down on Fox News, claiming that Talarico was “transitioning into a female.”

Miller is lying; Talarico is cis, not trans. It’s also grotesquely bigoted; Miller is attempting to smear Talarico by suggesting that being trans should be disqualifying from participating in public life.

But this ugly attack is very much in line with the GOP strategy in Texas which has centered obsessively, and repulsively, on attempting to feminize and misgender Talarico. Rather than talk about issues, records, or even personalities, Republicans have simply started bellowing “WE ARE MEN! THEY NOT MEN! MEN GOOD! NOT MEN BAD!” over and over again in a toxic masculine fugue of bile and sweat.

It’s a repulsive spectacle. But it’s also a clarifying one. Republicans could not make it much clearer that their party is entirely given over to bigotry, rage, and bullying. There are no issues to compromise on, no middle ground to occupy. The only question is whether women, queer people, non-white people, and indeed Democrats as a whole are human beings with a stake in democracy, or if non-Republicans are all simply vermin to be subjugated.

Faced with that stark choice, the Talarico campaign, and Democrats in general, have responded by standing firm rather than folding. That’s a welcome change from early in Trump’s term — and it’s also a hopeful sign that Democrats are starting belatedly to realize that the only way forward is fighting back.

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Everything is gender

Last week, Republicans held their run-off primary election. Incumbent John Cornyn lost; the GOP’s candidate is instead the disgustingly corrupt state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is so obviously unfit his own party tried to impeach him.

Talarico, a member of the Texas House, is, by contrast, a talented communicator who has made his progressive Christian faith a center of his campaign.

Texas is very red; Democrats have not won a statewide office there since 1994, more than 30 years ago. But Paxton is a weak candidate in a building blue wave year, and Talarico hasn’t trailed Paxton in a poll since March. A poll conducted after Paxton clinched the primary found Talarico up by three points. Analyst G. Elliott Morris has made an extensive case that the election at this point is a toss-up — emphasizing, in particular, that Trump’s approval is a brutal -20 in the state.

Paxton and the entire GOP have responded to this tough electoral situation by turning hard right and spiraling into semi-incomprehensible smears and conspiracy theories centered on the fantasy that Talarico is not a man or is doing manhood wrong.

The big Republicans scandal moment of the campaign so far came a couple weeks ago when Talarico ordered a potato, egg, and cheese taco.

An innocuous moment, you say? Well, yes. But every Republican with access to a keyboard rushed over to X to declaim that ordering an egg taco meant that Talarico was a vegetarian (he is not) and/or a vegan (vegans don’t eat eggs!).

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said that Talarico “was not beating the vegetarian allegations” (why are they allegations?!). Donald Trump said, “You can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.” Ken Paxton called his opponent “Tofu Talerico.” And on and on.

Other similar nonsense followed. Dan Weldon, a Florida congressional candidate, popped up to say that Talarico didn’t look like he could name “a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s.” And in his first general election add, Paxton claimed that Talarico was “low-T.” This is a common insult on the manosphere right, where testosterone is conflated with strength, resolve, and virtue.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein makes a convincing case that for too much of the Texas electorate, attacking someone for being vegan is “very possibly incomprehensible” and a “waste of campaign resources.” Still, for those who have been paying attention to the right, the dogwhistles aren’t that hard to parse. Vegan/low-t/not a football fan/trans attacks are all explicitly misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic. They are an attempt to delegitimize Talarico by claiming he isn’t sufficiently masculine or male.

Not coincidentally, Democratic representatives, and Democratic voters, are often not straight men. LGBT voters and women both disproportionately support Democrats, which of course is the party that broadly supports abortion rights and LGBT rights. In contrast, Republicans are viciously opposed to both — and are even flirting with the idea of trying to disenfranchise women altogether.

The attacks on Talarico are not, then, simply attacks on one politician. They are an attack on the Democratic coalition, and on the idea that women, queer people, or anyone who supports women and queer people should have any role in government or public life. Paxton’s campaign is saying that Democrats are illegitimate because they are not manly men, and that women and LGBT people are illegitimate because they are Democrats. Only manly Republican bullies are fit to rule.

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The Democratic response has been effective

Democrats in the Trump era have sometimes struggled to figure out how to respond to open bullying and bigotry.

During the 2024 campaign, VP candidate Tim Walz made Republicans squirm by calling them “weird.” But Kamala Harris’s advisors shut down that attack line, probably because they worried it would alienate centrist voters or would make Democrats look mean or unprofessional. That probably didn’t win or lose the election. Still, pulling punches in that way can dishearten allies, who want to see their representatives fight back rather than roll over when they’re attacked.

Things have changed since 2024, though. In the current electoral environment, and after a year and a half of Trump’s horrific second presidency, Democrats seem more willing to throw some punches.

When a CBS interviewer asked Talarico how he would respond to Ken Paxton calling him “Tala-freako,” he answered, “if Ken Paxton is worried about freaks he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.” That’s a reference to the case against Texas lawyer Adam Hoffman, who was indicted on felony sex abuse charges but only served 30 days in jail after a hung jury led Paxton to negotiate a plea deal.

In a similar vein, when Miller claimed Talarico was trans on X, the Democrats’ twitter account responded, “Shut up you ugly fuck.” Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife, lashed out on behalf of her hateful spouse, outing the poster behind the account — Democratic content creator Paulina Mangubat. Katie posted a picture of Mangubat, claiming, “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like.”

Boosted into the spotlight, Mangubat posted to her own account that she was not unhappy and that she was in fact preparing for her upcoming wedding. She also used the heightened visibility to display a cake referring to Miller as “Temu Hitler” and called him “ugly, evil, cruel, and bald.”

In an interview with Greg Sargent of The New Republic, Mangubat added, “What [Miller’s] doing is ugly — siccing federal agents on civilians, applauding when families are separated. It is ugly behavior.” Thanks to all the publicity, the tweet calling Miller ugly now has more than 40 million views — which means a lot of people tuned into the political message that Miller is a gross weird transphobic bully who lies about Democrats like Talarico.

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Go further

Democrats have belatedly but thankfully concluded that the way to deal with bullies is to hit back harder. They’ve decided that the way to deal with vaunting toxic masculinity is to point out that it is ridiculous and repulsive, and to connect it to abuse and corruption.

This is all to the good. In addition, though, Democrats could take the Talarico campaign as a moment to recognize that there’s little point in trying to meet Republicans halfway, either on policy or on candidate selection.

Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have tried to find common ground with far-right bigots like Charlie Kirk on discriminating against trans athletes. Many in the party have also expressed worries about nominating a woman for president again, after losses by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and by Kamala Harris in 2024. When Jasmine Crockett ran against Talarico in the Texas Democratic primary, some argued she couldn’t win statewide as a Black woman.

Marginalized people and woman, the argument goes, are less popular and are not seen as leaders. The Democratic Party, some believe, needs to distance itself from its core demographics if it is going to win. That is part of the logic behind elevating white male straight Christian candidates like Talarico.

Talarico is in fact an attractive candidate in many respects, irrespective of his identity. But the Paxton campaign is already making clear that his whiteness and maleness and straightness will not stop the GOP from talking about him as if he were a woman. The GOP is all in on misogyny, and any candidate, or political party, that supports women to any extent at all will be targeted with misogyny. It is all in on hating trans people, and anyone who does not embrace othering trans people wholeheartedly will be targeted for transphobia.

Rather than cowering and apologizing in the face of these attacks, Democrats should be proud of their diverse coalition, and of the fact that the misogynist bullies hate them. Talarico can win, not despite being in coalition with women and trans people and non-white people, but precisely because multi-racial democracy is stronger than fascism. After all, Ken Paxton and Stephen Miller are ugly fucks, and they are going to lose.

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It was going to be so beautiful: A spectacular concert to celebrate 250 years of freedom and democracy, featuring some of the greatest musical acts this nation has produced.

Okay, maybe not the greatest, but they were definitely musical acts! Depending on whether you count Milli Vanilli, or more accurately, one of the two guys who pretended to sing in Milli Vanilli. Along with a guy who was in C+C Music Factory. And Bret Michaels of Poison. For anyone itching to stand outside in the baking Washington summer sun to hear some guys in their 60s wheeze their way through “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” the disappointment must be crushing.

It now appears that this concert, part of the Freedom 250 celebration and the most awe-inspiring assemblage of talent since your local middle school’s last Battle of the Bands, will not be taking place after all. One after another, the 1990s-era performers pulled out, many saying that when they booked the event they didn’t know it was going to be political.

In other words, once they realized the event was all about Donald Trump, most of them wanted nothing to do with it.

Despite the fact that Vanilla Ice was still planning to perform, Trump announced on Saturday that he was pulling the plug, and would instead make the event just another Trump rally:

The president then had an epic crashout over the imploded concert, posting later Saturday that “we should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it.” (Why Trump would have wanted to book such “boring” musical acts in the first place remains unclear.)

So Trump’s long-held dream to take over American culture in the same way he took over American politics remains unfulfilled. For all the ways he has affected the country, he is not a tastemaker or an avatar of coolness; when the culture speaks of Trump, it’s mostly to rail at him and reject him.

But this is not a fight he and his supporters will give up easily.

A multi-platform president, always in search of cultural cachet

It is to Trump’s credit as a self-promoter that he always thought expansively about how to achieve his goals. To get rich in the real estate business, he’d have to create an image of wealth and success, and to do that he had to become a celebrity. Get in the gossip pages, opine on current events, do a movie cameo, buy a football team — Trump became a presence that crossed cultural boundaries long before he ran for president.

Maybe it was smart business, or maybe he just yearned to be famous as so many others do, seeking the gaze of the crowd to fill some other void (perhaps the one left by a stern father who by all accounts was not exactly generous with affection). Whatever his motives, he got the renown he sought — but there was always something missing.

Again and again, Trump’s success in pushing himself in front of America’s eyeballs either flamed out in failure or was greeted with as much contempt as praise. His efforts to expand his business beyond real estate often crashed and burned — the Trump Shuttle, the USFL football league, the casinos he bankrupted — and even when he succeeded, the reviews were terrible.

“The Apprentice” made him millions, but it was also widely derided as trash, and he knew it. Everyone in New York knew him, but they knew him as a figure of comedy and scorn, the “short-fingered vulgarian” (in Spy magazine’s memorable phrase) yearning for a cultural acceptance he could never buy.

It’s not just that he has terrible taste, though of course he does. It’s unclear how many people are splashing their own homes in hideous gold-painted appliqués to mimic his Russian-gangster-meets-Saddam-Hussein aesthetic, but there can’t be all that many. Trump’s musical tastes run from show tunes to perfectly adequate pop numbers to one particular ‘70s song about gay men cruising for sex — but the last thing you’d call him is cool.

This is the problem Trump faces: He wants validation and support from the culture in all its forms. He wants to be embraced by the lowbrow and the highbrow, rock stars and athletes, but also by elite cultural institutions — and when he can’t get it, he lashes out.

That’s why he slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, as though he could absorb its high-culture cachet; instead, the very fact that his name is now nailed to the building’s facade has defiled it, and its reputation will take a long time to recover. And Trump finds that when he tries to lure artists to him using the capital and the White House as bait, more often than not they recoil in disgust.

He’ll always have Kid Rock, though. That’s who will stay by his side: the third-rate, the washed-up, the one-hit-wonders and laughingstocks. And not even most of them.

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The culture war goes on

Complaining about pop culture has been a conservative pastime pretty much forever; one of the things that defines one as a conservative is a distaste for how things are now and a desire to return things to how they used to be.

Music, TV, movies, video games, the internet — it’s all too liberal, too modern, too young, too diverse, too messily American for their taste. And they know that screeching about the latest “woke” outrage, no matter how contrived, is good for ratings and good for their politics, which depend on keeping the base in a state of perpetual agitation.

But they’re not wrong when they say the culture is dominated by liberals. That’s just how artists are; right-wing art usually has to be imposed from above. But there is a market for right-wing culture. So in response to liberal dominance of Hollywood, conservatives have invested time and money in building their own alternative culture, with some success.

They have Angel Studios, a movie producer and streaming service that pumps out a huge volume of Christian and conservative content. You wouldn’t call it good art, but at least the production values are solid.

There’s the Taylor Sheridan extended universe, with high-rated shows including “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” the latter of which features Billy Bob Thornton delivering lie-filled rants against renewable energy that conservatives clip and retweet madly to own the libs. There are a hundred mediocre right-wing country singers putting out mediocre right-wing songs, always angry that so many of the genre’s most talented artists lean left.

But whenever Trump or his supporters try to pull people into MAGA-land with some kind of ostensibly non-partisan cultural event, it inevitably falls flat.

When they got mad about Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl, Turning Point USA put on a dreadful alternate concert featuring Kid Rock lip-synching badly and the debut of “Country Nowadays,” in which C-lister Lee Brice bitches about how nobody will let him fish or drive his truck because “It ain’t easy bein’ country in this country nowadays.” When Trump wanted a military parade on his birthday, after the predictable backlash it was reconceived as a tribute to the Army — and wound up being dull and poorly attended. There are already signs that his xenophobic policies are driving away fans from the upcoming World Cup, and who knows what damage he’ll do to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Donald Trump may be a showman, but he doesn’t really know how to put on a show — at least one that anyone but his most rabid supporters will want to attend (and even they’re getting tired).

Don’t be surprised if whatever he has in mind to replace the Has-Been-Palooza for Freedom 250 winds up getting cancelled entirely, or at least scaled back to an embarrassing size, even if Trump imagines himself bigger than Elvis. Perhaps, as he did in one of the most surreal moments of the 2024 campaign, he’ll go up on stage and sway awkwardly to his favorite songs for 39 minutes. It couldn’t be much worse than what they originally had planned.

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As a weekend bonus for subscribers, we connected with Donald Sherman, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), for his take on President Trump’s most corrupt move yet — the theft of nearly $2 billion from taxpayers for an insurrectionist slush fund he can operate with impunity.

Sherman characterized Trump’s self-dealing “settlement” with his own government as “corruption on a scale without precedent in America,” and argued its purpose is to incentive political violence.

“It’s an effort to absolve himself and his supporters from the insurrection he incited and to signal to the violent element of his base that if you engage in violence in support of him, you will not just be safe from prosecution, but made whole and then some,” he said. “So it’s not just backward-looking, it’s forward-looking. And it follows his pardoning of the January 6ers, which was another signal.”

A transcript of Sherman’s chat with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are the only reason I’m able to keep everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.

Thor Benson

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We had lots of laughs while discussing topics like the increasingly debased state of Fox News during Trump 2.0, the moments of Fox programming that have made Juliet want to throw her computer into a dumpster and walk into the ocean, why people find Trump’s voice and visage so triggering — and I even got Juliet to do her legendary Judge Jeanine impersonation.

We also reacted to comments and questions from viewers. If you’d like to partake in the discussion during next week’s episode, which will feature the debut of co-host Paul Waldman, please sign up for a paid subscription to support Public Notice and have full access to our live broadcasts.

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The Department of Justice used to be insulated from the whims of the president. It also used to be staffed with experienced, non-political career attorneys. And those attorneys used to enjoy a level of deference from the federal courts, a default presumption that is pretty much gone now.

Perhaps no case traces this fall better than that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Last week, US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. granted Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss his criminal indictment based on vindictive prosecution. It’s incredibly difficult to win these motions, but the administration’s treatment of Abrego Garcia has been so flagrantly unethical and cruel that he managed to prevail.

To understand why Judge Crenshaw tossed the charges, we need to go back to 2025 and revisit the DOJ’s abysmal behavior in Abrego Garcia’s separate immigration case. Indeed, Crenshaw’s decision shows that the DOJ landed on the genius idea of ginning up charges against Abrego Garcia as soon as it became clear their antics in his habeas case would not work.

“Vindictive” doesn’t do it justice

Last March, the administration deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s horrific Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) despite a withholding of removal order barring him from being sent back to his home country, as he’d shown a credible fear that he would be persecuted there. He filed a habeas petition challenging his detention, and then the government played a bunch of stupid games, like admitting he was removed in error but then refusing to bring him back.

This went all the way up to the Supreme Court and back down again, but by April 17 of last year, the administration was running out of road after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied its request to pretty please stay the lower court order requiring Abrego Garcia’s return.

Now, thanks to Judge Crenshaw’s decision dismissing the indictment, we know that plans to indict Abrego Garcia began that same day.

That extremely non-coincidental timing matters. Winning a vindictive prosecution motion requires a defendant to show that the government prosecuted them in retaliation for exercising their legal rights. It’s what is typically called a “but-for” test: But for Abrego Garcia filing his habeas petition demanding that the government bring him back to America, the DOJ would not have prosecuted him.

Getting to this point took a lot of time and a lot of fights with the government. A vindictive prosecution claim has to proceed in stages. Defendants can allege both actual and presumptive vindictiveness, as Abrego did here. The former, however, requires direct evidence of retaliation. Unless you have a prosecutor saying something like “we opened this prosecution to punish you for a constitutionally-protected right,” you are out of luck.

Most often, defendants prevail by showing presumptive vindictiveness, which is established by indirect evidence. A defendant has to show that the prosecutor had a stake in deterring them from exercising their rights and that the prosecutor’s conduct was unreasonable.

Here’s the catch: the defendant has to make that showing before obtaining any discovery materials from the government related to the decision to bring charges. But thanks to the cavalcade of bad behavior in broad daylight from the DOJ, Judge Crenshaw ruled last October that Abrego Garcia had met that burden.

Once Crenshaw found that Abrego Garcia had made a preliminary showing of vindictiveness, the burden then shifted to the government, which has to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness to keep the indictment alive. Crenshaw also granted Abrego Garcia’s discovery request, which unlocked the internal communications about his prosecution and hoooooo boy, where to begin.

First, there’s the timing. Crenshaw even included a helpful little chart so you can see how the government swung into action as soon as it was clear that Abrego Garcia would be returning to the United States. The government’s attempt to explain that away was comical. You see, Homeland Security Investigation agents in Tennessee just decided on their own, no pressure from Main Justice, to reopen an investigation into a traffic stop from 2022. And the then-acting US Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Rob McGuire, just independently decided to start drafting a criminal complaint. Total coincidence!

Yeah, not so much. Assistant Attorney General Aakash Singh, one of then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s worst minions, directed everything and was in constant contact with HSI personnel and prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in the Middle District of Tennessee. The then-chief of the criminal division in that office, Ben Schrader, wrote a formal memo advising against prosecuting and quit the day Abrego Garcia was indicted.

The government also tried to say that it wasn’t being vindictive — it had just found brand new evidence of Abrego Garcia’s life of crime. Crenshaw rapped the DOJ’s knuckles on that one, pointing out that some of the alleged new evidence dredged up had been available to the government since the traffic stop and that other bits of alleged new evidence were obtained after the decision to prosecute happened.

There’s also the part where then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went on Fox News the day Abrego Garcia was arrested to say that the government began “investigating” Abrego Garcia only after “a judge in Maryland” questioned the government’s decision to deport him and that he was only returned “to face justice” in the criminal case. Way to say the quiet, illegal, vindictive part out loud, Todd.

The government could have put Blanche on the stand to rebut the presumption that this was vindictive, but they didn’t. The government could have put Singh on the stand to rebut the presumption that his actions in directing the investigation were vindictive, but they didn’t. The government could have put HSI Special Agent John VanWie on the stand to rebut the presumption that he reopened the investigation at the behest of the DOJ, but they didn’t.

What Crenshaw’s decision really brings home is that Blanche and Singh had control of this prosecution from the start:

Notwithstanding McGuire’s purported belief that he was the sole decisionmaker, this Court cannot ignore the chain of command that McGuire reported to: Singh, Blanche, and then Bondi. Blanche’s statements directly tie Main Justice to the reopening of the investigation in response to Abrego’s successful [habeas] lawsuit. Together with Singh’s oversight of the indictment process, the credible objective evidence shows that, “but for” Abrego’s successful lawsuit, the Government “would not have” indicted Abrego.

Honestly it doesn’t get much clearer than this: political appointees demanding career investigators and prosecutors figure out something, anything, to hurt Abrego Garcia with because they were furious that he won his habeas case.

Unfortunately, the government can appeal the dismissal and has already said it will. This actually isn’t a situation where the government would be pushing the envelope. There’s a federal statute that governs which types of lower court rulings in criminal cases are appealable, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Tennessee, has case law on it as well.

The lawfare never ends

This probably feels a little counterintuitive and gross. What about double jeopardy, right?

Here’s the thing. Double jeopardy only comes into play at the trial stage. The government can’t put you “in jeopardy of life or limb” twice for the same offense. But dismissals for vindictive prosecution have nothing to do with whether a defendant is guilty or not. Instead, it’s a constitutional due process challenge. Abrego Garcia wasn’t asking the court to find him innocent of the charges. Instead, he was asking the court to find that the charges were brought for an improper reason and therefore his due process rights were violated.

Also unfortunately, this does nothing to protect Abrego Garcia from the administration’s attempts to remove him to random African countries rather than send him to Costa Rica, which has agreed to take him and is where Abrego Garcia has requested to go. He’s still fighting that in his habeas case. At the moment, he is protected from removal to anywhere thanks to an order in that immigration matter, but the government is relentless.

The amount of time, money, and resources that the government has expended on this is absurd. The government could have been entirely rid of Abrego Garcia back in August 2025, when he designated Costa Rica as his removal choice. But they want to punish him far more than they want him gone. And if you put yourself in the vile mindset of Blanche and the like, it makes a sick sort of sense.

The Trump regime isn’t targeting Abrego Garcia for punishment because they think he is some sort of master criminal. They want to punish him because he’s an everyday guy who somehow managed to force the US government to bring him home. They can’t bear the thought of just letting this go and letting him go on with his life in a country of his choice. And what’s more vindictive than that, really?

That’s it for today

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On May 18, President Trump posted some fan fiction about his ill-fated war against Iran and got pre-mad at the “Fake News Media” for not covering his imaginary victory in a sufficiently fawning manner.

Eight days later, still locked in the same spiral of self-pity and spite — and with an actual Iran peace deal apparently no closer — Trump posted the exact same thing again.

Did Trump just forget he’d posted his self-aggrandizing thought experiment and pull it out of drafts to post it again? Was he so impressed with his own flight of whimsy and penetrating sarcasm that he just wanted to see it on his screen again? There’s no way to know.

But whatever his reason for repeating himself, one thing is clear: the reiterated nonsense posts accurately reflect Trump’s current Iran policy, which is locked in a doom loop of stasis and failure.

You lost a war. Now what?

Trump, as PN has discussed before, launched a war of aggression against Iran without clear goals, without building domestic political support, without coordinating with allies, and without logistical preparation.

This was not a formula for success, and sure enough, when Iran seized and closed down the Strait of Hormuz instead of capitulating immediately, Trump and his team of dunderheaded and cowardly fascists hesitated briefly and then gave up. Ever since, the president has been searching for a way to back out of his enormously unpopular war in a way that doesn’t make him look like the cowardly dunderheaded fascist he is.

Unfortunately for Trump, though, the people who won the war (that is, Iran) have little to no incentive to let him set terms to make himself look good, or even adequate. Neither do other leaders in the region. As foreign policy scholar Elizabeth N. Saunders explains, Trump has two choices: “Humiliation or (increasingly futile) escalation.”

Escalation is a terrible option for Trump. The US has already shown that bombing alone cannot defeat the Iranian regime. That leaves a ground invasion as the only possible path to something like victory. But a YouGov poll at the end of March found that only 14 percent of US adults support sending ground troops into Iran. Among independents, nine percent support ground troops against 66 percent who oppose, and even among Republicans an invasion is a loser, with 30 percent support against 37 percent opposition.

These figures are dismal enough to suggest that significantly ramping up the war could actually cause Trump’s terrible overall approval to fall even further — especially with Republicans (73 percent of whom support the war), and especially if significant numbers of US service people are killed in combat.

So that leaves accepting humiliation.

Unfortunately for Trump, taking the L is also a bad option, because while analysts and experts recognize that he’s lost the war, most of the public hasn’t yet gotten the message. In a poll last week, 32 percent believed that the US is winning the war, while only 16 percent thought the US was losing; 37 percent believed the US would eventually win. That is a significant number of people who are going to be startled if Trump negotiates a “deal” and there are weeks of headlines about how the US lost.

Alas, the status quo is also bad for Trump; Iran’s control of the strait, and the uncomfortable truth that they are likely to continue to control it for the foreseeable future, have together sent gas prices spiking to an average of almost $4.50 a gallon. That in turn has pushed consumer sentiment to an all-time low. That’s not likely to be good for Republicans in the midterms.

To sum up, if Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options, which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.

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The cavalry isn’t coming

Trump is a giant orange bag of entitlement and grievance who believes other people exist solely to cater to his ego. Iran is supposed to fall to its knees and surrender because that would be convenient for Trump; the media is supposed to praise him for winning no matter what he does. When other people fail to do what Trump wants (as in the 2020 election) he spins fantasies and conspiracy theories and/or whines endlessly about how he is being treated unfairly.

This is why ever since the ceasefire on April 8, Trump has repeated a cycle over and over of announcing a vague deal, then vowing to escalate, then backing down, then announcing a vague deal again.

“In many cases he has made claims of major diplomatic progress that later proved unfounded, fueling criticism that he is trying to calm markets and relieve political pressure,” The New York Times observed drily.

It’s quite possible that Trump is trying to manipulate markets or shore up polls by lying. But there’s also reason to believe he has trouble distinguishing his own fantasies from reality. He wants there to be a deal; he wants there to be some way out so he can go back to focusing on his real love, his expensive and unpopular White House ballroom construction project. And so he says the Iran war is over, and expects everyone else and reality itself to play along.

Reality hasn’t played along, though. You can see that very clearly in the most recent round of Trump’s Iran deal that wasn’t.

Over the weekend, Trump claimed to be close to a settlement. Iran, supposedly, had agreed to open the strait, clear it of mines, and charge no tolls. It had also agreed maybe to some sort of promise to not develop nuclear weapons. In return, the US agreed to lift sanctions on Iranian oil (which would be a financial bonanza for the regime) and to a ceasefire between Israel and Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. Oh, and Trump also told Arab leaders they should join the Abraham Accords and unilaterally recognize Israel as a gesture of gratitude for his awesome Iran peace deal.

No sooner did details of the deal start to leak, though, than the deal itself started to sink. Iran said it made no concessions on nuclear development. There was media speculation that Trump might be considering unfreezing Iranian assets to the tune of $100 billion — a huge humiliation if true considering how often Trump has criticized Obama for offering $1.7 billion to cement his nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations are, unsurprisingly, completely uninterested in rewarding Trump for embroiling them in his disastrous military misadventure. Israel’s warmongering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pushed hard to get Trump into the war with Iran, of course does not want to stop his war in Lebanon, and escalated strikes there, in part it seems in an effort to derail the US-Iran peace process.

The unkindest, and deepest kick in the self-regard for Trump, though, was delivered by his own ostensible domestic allies. Sen. Ted Cruz panned the deal; so did Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said it would empower Iran and “over time will be a nightmare for Israel.” Sen. Roger Wicker, chair of the Armed Services Committee, warned that the deal would mean “everything accomplished” in the war “would be for naught!”

But nothing really was accomplished by the US in the war, which had the result of strengthening Iran. This is part of what it means to lose a war.

Again, Trump doesn’t want to be perceived as losing a war. But he doesn’t want to escalate either. So he is stuck insisting that his deal will be awesome and then scurrying away when details emerge that reveal the truth that he lost a war. That’s why, after getting pushback, he retreated into his safe space on on Truth Social to burble: “I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal.” He also dropped more bombs because he wants the Cruzes and Wickers of the world to think he’s tough and to stop telling everyone that he lost a war.

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It’s over, but it’ll never be over

Trump has trapped himself in a cul de sac of humiliation with no feasible way out. He may well keep posting his same delusional grievances (“If Iran surrenders … ”) once a week, every week, until his term ends or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

But no matter how often Trump posts the same whiny bilge, no matter how often he claims he is making the best deal ever, and no matter how deeply he spirals into his own narcissistic orange skull, he can’t change the facts on the ground.

He lost. Iran won. His polls are going to keep dropping because he is a loser and everyone hates losers. There is no solution — only a singularity of bluster, rage and failure dragging Trump, the country, and the world inexorably towards the next disaster.

That’s it for today

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