If you haven’t yet subscribed to The Downballot, which provides unparalleled coverage of the thousands of critical elections below the presidency, sign up below:

Subscribe to The Downballot

Chris explains:

• How John Roberts, who began plotting to destroy the VRA as a young lawyer in the 1980s, finally succeeded.

• What we can expect to happen next now that Republicans are free to dismantle minority voting districts without restraint.

• Why Donald Trump’s DOJ has descended into utter chaos, and what it means for litigants.

And much more. Folks who are paid subscribers to either of our publications can participate in our Q&A!

Nir & Rupar goes live every Friday at 2 PM ET. The easiest way to participate is by downloading the free Substack app.

You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode.

If you missed Friday’s livestream, you can watch it by clicking above!

The day after an alleged gunman tried to barge into the White House Correspondents Dinner, Todd Blanche — the nation’s chief law enforcement official — appeared on national television to denounce that act of political violence.

But during the very same news conference, Blanche also signaled the president may vacate the convictions of terrorists found guilty of scheming to attack the government of the United States on behalf of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.

“They were convicted, but President Trump, as is his right and duty under our Constitution, commuted or pardoned those individuals,” Blanche said.

This perverse contradiction epitomizes the era of Late Trumpism, in which the rewriting of history and systemic abuses of power are ramping up while Trump’s political power is collapsing.

Wishing for a Reichstag fire

Months after becoming Germany’s Chancellor in January 1933, Adolf Hitler took advantage of the burning down of the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s democratically elected house of parliament (likely by lone arsonist), to warn of a purportedly imminent communist coup. He successfully used the fire to push for passage of the Enabling Act, a law that formalized his dictatorship and ended democracy in Germany for the remainder of his rule.

Since his return to power a year ago, Donald Trump and his cronies have assiduously searched for their own Reichstag fire — something, anything, to substantiate their claim that a vaguely defined conspiracy (comprised among others of No Kings protesters, trans people, and elected Democrats) is scheming to undermine the president, thus justifying his oft-expressive desire for absolute power.

Trump entered office with some reason to be encouraged that an act of terrorist violence could be leveraged to cement his long-desired dictatorial status. After all, the near-miss Butler assassination attempt in July 2024 galvanized his supporters, many of whom bought into claims that he was saved by divine intervention.

The September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, a podcaster who built his profitable empire by piggybacking on Trump’s support among culture “warriors,” echoed yet another foundational myth of the Hitler State: The 1930 murder of Horst Wessel, a young stalwart member of the SA, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, who became the subject of the Nazi’s favorite song and the movement’s chief martyr.

For a while, it seemed MAGA might succeed in following the footsteps of other fascist movements by portraying the their regime as a dictatorship under siege, thus justifying ever more aggressive efforts to rule by force. But while many pundits seemed impressed by the purported success of Trump’s efforts to nullify democracy, most Americans remained unconvinced by his claims of victimhood.

In fact, contrary to his claim to popular appeal, Trump’s approval numbers began steadily ebbing shortly after he took office, a process he accelerated by embarking on his nihilistic tariff war, a move that (predictably) increased inflation and steadily weakened the economy. Then, after Trump sought to distract the country from his violent and incompetent governance at home through a series of increasingly reckless military adventures abroad, the bottom began falling out of his remaining support.

The Wolf’s Lair, at Mar-a-Lago

It is against that backdrop that Trump embarked on his own little version of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa (the failed invasion of the Soviet Union) by starting a war on Iran.

Characteristically, however, in contrast to Hitler — who managed his titanic war from a fortress near the front that came to be called the Wolf’s Lair — Trump declared his war while on vacation in his gated retirement community in Florida. In the two months since, he’s done very little beyond send social media posts to manage the conduct of his “military excursion.”

Like Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Trump’s Operation Epic Fury at first seemed to be successful. But just as Hitler’s dreams of glory collapsed with the siege of his forces at Stalingrad by Stalin’s mighty US-backed army, Trump’s dreams of conquest met its match when Iran used a few speedboats and some mines to lay siege to the Strait of Hormuz.

As the scale of the debacle and Trump’s lack of an exit strategy has become clear, he’s expressed his growing frustration with ever more unhinged “Truth” posts. It was probably inevitable that his increasingly bonkers middle of the night rantings would lead him to do what he’s plainly wanted to do for years: declare himself not only emperor, but the Messiah. On the night of April 12, 2026, Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus, apparently healing a sick man with rays emanating from his hands.

Trump has repeatedly played into messianic portrayals of himself with little blowback, including by appealing to members of the QAnon cult, which declared him to be a savior who was saving the world from the “globalists” (aka, Jews). And evangelical leaders had repeatedly assembled before him in what plainly amounted to worshipful arrays. But if he thought crossing the social media Rubicon by declaring himself to be the second coming of the Christian savior would be no big deal, he was quickly proven wrong.

The first political blows came from America’s Catholic community. American Catholics have long been a redoubt of conservatism (and even right-wing extremism) in a Church whose leadership in Rome has been moving markedly to the left. Trump, therefore, must have been blindsided when the church’s American bishops roundly denounced The Donald for dissing the Pope in the wake of Trump’s Messiah moment. More dismaying for Trump were the criticisms that almost immediately began emanating from Republican Catholic politicians.

But the really unprecedented and most potentially damaging criticism came from members of Trump’s most stalwart base — white Evangelical leaders — most of whom had long been willing to look the other way as evidence of his sinful ways piled up. Suddenly Trump was no longer immune from taking blowback even from those who days earlier had been worshipfully laying hands upon him in the White House, including from none other than that paragon of WASP extremism and pseudo religiosity, Tucker Carlson, who theatrically renounced Trump.

This turnabout cannot be explained simply by a bad choice of an AI image, which Trump in any event had deleted the day after he posted it. No, something more significant is afoot: The base of the would-be Trump dictatorship is cracking.

Germania on the DC Mall

Trump is clearly losing his mind — his cognitive abilities have been deteriorating in front of cameras with ever greater rapidity at least since the last presidential campaign. But the media personality in the White House retains his instinctual understanding of what plays, and what bombs, on TV. So it must be all the more frustrating for him to witness the now-undeniable fact that his show has jumped the shark.

Trump’s failed war heralded more than a historic military disaster, but also the end of any remaining hope he could be a dictator. The rejection of his Jesus audition made that reality resoundingly clear. But Trump has never been one to accept defeat with anything but defiance. Here the transit of America’s would-be fascist strongman once again bears a fateful resemblance to the fate of Adolf Hitler.

As Hitler’s war progressed, Allied bombing turned German cities into heaps of rubble. But a delusional Hitler claimed the destruction of Berlin was a good thing, because it would make it easier for him to rebuild the city as a Nazi showplace he called “Germania.” One of the centerpieces of his plan was a grotesquely massive arch. Sound familiar?

In the wake of the debacle of Stalingrad, the Führer began to blame the German people for his failures, a claim that conveniently justified his nihilistic choice to fight a losing war to the last child and retiree. And in another currently resonant note, as the Russians advanced toward the underground bunker Hitler had built under the Reich Chancellery, Hitler ranted about how history would vindicate his genocidal legacy.

While America, and the world, is lucky that Trump — a far, far lazier man than the quite lazy Hitler — seems to be running out of steam well before he can hope to work horrors anything close to those achieved by the Nazi dictator, the two share a late-regime obsession with rewriting history and building monuments to justify their utterly failed rule.

Hence the increasingly frantic effort of a crew of cronies, now being led by Blanche, to validate Trump’s victimhood thesis. The scheme, which began as soon as Trump re-took office with the pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists, seems about to culminate in a series of indictments against those Trump claims engaged in a “grand conspiracy” to hold him responsible for his own crimes — first and foremost among them former FBI Director James Comey, who was just indicted (again), this time for photographing an arrangement of seashells and posting it on Instagram.

The obvious (and almost certainly futile) goal of this effort is to use the next two years to invert the well-documented history of the last decade so as to render Trump into a victim of those who have sought to preserve the institutions of democracy, rather than the individual who has assiduously worked to destroy them. His desire to rewrite history offers the only cogent explanation of the increasingly bizarre and obsessive efforts to remake in his image not only the White House, but also much of Washington DC.

An emperor scorned is the most dangerous kind

While Trump’s effort to cover over his failures with a massive dose of gold paint will fail, the doomed nature of his endeavor won’t stop him any more than the bombing raids on Berlin caused Hitler to realize Germania was not to be.

Trump’s press appearance shortly after Saturday’s assassination attempt was as bizarre as it was pathetic. Only a deranged person would do what he did: use the occasion of his own brush with death to make yet another convoluted argument for the immediate construction of a massive Holiday Inn conference center next to the White House.

Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end.

Trump is a failed dictator — but he is still president, and he’s propped up by stooges like Blanche who are ready and willing to make good on his most rage-fueled and irrational desires. The next two years, therefore, may be among the most trying of the slow-motion disaster that has been the Trump Era.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of Nir & Rupar (featuring special guest Matt Gertz), but no special Saturday edition of the newsletter this weekend. The next edition of PN drops Monday morning.

If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🌊 Subscribe to PN 🌊

You’d think we’d be running out of ways to say that the Department of Justice is a careening, catastrophic, out-of-control mess, but every day, the Trump DOJ gives us new reasons to say that it is a careening, catastrophic, out-of-control mess.

On Tuesday, the DOJ beclowned itself even more mightily than during Lindsey Halligan’s reign of incompetence as the wannabe US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Halligan couldn’t make the first indictment against former FBI Director James Comey stick, and it got thrown out with her. But this DOJ is as resourceful as it is incompetent, so it found a way to indict Comey for something entirely different, in an entirely different jurisdiction, for the crime of … taking a picture of some seashells by the seashore in North Carolina and posting it on Instagram.

You’re forgiven if the news of this comically thin indictment overshadowed the other absolute travesty of a filing from the DOJ on Monday, the one where DOJ attorneys apparently just let President Trump write a Truth Social rant about his ballroom and filed it with the court.

But let’s get back to that Comey indictment, shall we? Go read it and come back. No, really. It will take you about 90 seconds, tops.

You’ll see that while there are two counts in the indictment, they’re for the same thing. Count 1 says Comey violated 18 U.S.C. § 871, which makes it a crime to threaten to “take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.” Count 2 says Comey violated 18 U.S.C. § 875 because, in posting the picture on Insta, that counted as transmitting “communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.”

It’s annoying even to have to treat this thing as legitimate, but for the purposes of argument, let’s pretend that this is an actual factual legal filing and not just an exercise of raw power on behalf of Trump and his pets at the DOJ. Would it stand up in court if we assume good faith?

Heavens, no. Come on.

Let’s run down why James Comey is not going to go to jail.

🌊 Subscribe to PN 🌊

Seashell-gate

First, there’s the actual meaning of “86,” which is not “to kill,” as literally anyone who ever worked at a restaurant knows.

You might say “86 the chicken parm,” which does not, you can likely infer from context, mean you want to murder the chicken parm. Rather, it’s restaurant shorthand for an item being unavailable. You might also talk about “86-ing” a patron. There, you are also not talking about murdering one of your customers. You’re saying that the customer was thrown out and should be refused future service.

There’s no world where “86” is inherently a violent demand that someone be killed. Is it used in that context sometimes? Sure, maybe. We could ask Jack Posobiec, conservative influencer, what he meant when he posted “86 46” on X during Joe Biden’s presidency. We could phone up Jeff Bezos and ask why you can still hop on Amazon and buy any number of items that, according to the DOJ, are open and obvious threats to murder Joe Biden.

Indeed, the whole thing sure looks a lot like the DOJ is just begging for Comey to bring a motion to dismiss the indictment on the theory that he was selectively and vindictively prosecuted. Comey had just such a motion pending in his previous case when Halligan was thrown out of her job along with his indictment.

But here’s the main reason James Comey isn’t going to jail even if we were to agree that when he knew full well he calling for for violence against Trump made his ill-fated Insta post. (Remember, Comey didn’t even arrange the shells! He literally just took a picture!) Broadly, the First Amendment protects most speech, including, at least before the current incarnation of the DOJ, popping off about the president. There is no protection for “true threats,” but that is a narrow carveout.

In Watts v. United States, Robert Watts was convicted by a jury when he remarked during a protest, “I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.”

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, saying Watts’s remarks were “political hyperbole,” where language is “often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.” Only “true threats,” which a later Supreme Court case defined as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals,” fall outside of First Amendment protection and can form the basis for a conviction. Everything else is just free speech, baby.

Fast forward several decades. Two weeks before the 2008 election, Walter Bagdasarian hopped on a Yahoo message board and wrote: (1) “Re: Obama fk the n******, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon” and (2) “shoot the n**.” Since Barack Obama wasn’t yet president, Bagdasarian was charged under 18 U.S.C. § 879, which makes it a crime to threaten a major candidate for president.

Bagdasarian was convicted by a jury, but the Ninth Circuit reversed, saying that though his statements were “particularly repugnant because they directly encourage violence,” they still weren’t true threats because the statute “does not criminalize predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the President.”

Only one federal appellate court, the Fourth Circuit, which includes North Carolina and is therefore binding law here, has held that inciting someone else to harm the president could constitute a crime. But even that would still be a high bar for Blanche to clear. Such threats fall outside protected speech only if they show the speaker had “a reckless disregard for the strong likelihood that his listeners would be incited to do harm to the President.”

So, Blanche isn’t lying as such when he puffs out his chest and says, “you are not allowed to threaten the president of the United States of America.” He’s just not telling you that the line is very, very far away from posting a picture of somebody else’s seashell art on Instagram.

The DOJ would essentially have to show that by taking a picture of someone else’s beach musings, Comey intended both that Trump would understand this as an imminent threat and fear for his life, and that Comey also intended to convey he was personally preparing to injure or kill Trump or recklessly whipping his audience into a froth where the mere reading of “8647” would send them racing to kill the president.

Blanche, for all of his faults, understands that the DOJ is not going to be able to prove anything close to this, and his lack of confidence is barely concealed in his public remarks.

Meanwhile, the prosecution of the alleged WHCD shooter, Cole Allen, has also already descended into a shambles.

Here’s Blanche on Wednesday, seemingly saying that the DOJ may have charged Allen with something despite not having any evidence for it.

Buddy. The whole point of charging someone with a crime is that you have assembled enough evidence to reasonably believe they did the crime. It’s not based on vibes. But Blanche is saddled with Kash Patel’s FBI, which doesn’t seem able to find the fragment of a bullet that pierced a Secret Service agent’s vest. It’s looking increasingly clear that Allen did not fire the round and that the incident was in fact friendly fire, even if Blanche and Patel refuse to acknowledge as much publicly.

Blanche wasted no time in undertaking the extremely, shall we say, unusual step of litigating via X, posting a letter he’d dashed off to the counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the plaintiff in the ballroom case, demanding they withdraw the suit or else.

When that move did not result in the Trust dropping their lawsuit — weird, right?! — the DOJ took a different tack: let Trump write a legal filing and have three high-ranking DOJ attorneys, including Blanche, sign off on it.

That sounds overblown, but it really isn’t. Hell, it even follows the Trump conventions for capitalizing words, which is to say that they are randomly capitalized:

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation” is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words “in the United States” to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not. In fact, the United States refused to continue funding it in 2005 because they strongly disagreed with their mission and objectives. They are very bad for our Country. They stop many projects that are worthy, and hurt many others.

Even if this embarrassment weren’t written in Trump-o-Vision, none of it has anything whatsoever to do with the core issue of the ballroom case: whether Trump has to get permission from Congress.

And it isn’t just that the filing is completely out of pocket, tone-wise. There’s also no legal basis for it. There are only six cases cited, three of which are just about the procedural aspects of this type of motion. Then, there are multiple citations to Trump appointee Judge Neomi Rao’s dissent in this very case from a previous trip up to the DC Circuit, but literally every first-year law student understands that a dissent is not law.

These sorts of antics are the whole reason why the DOJ has historically been kept independent of the president. Even if the president weren’t a malevolent toddler like Trump, the DOJ isn’t there for the pursuit of personal goals. There’s a White House counsel for that sort of thing, for one, and for another, the DOJ is supposed to work for us, not the president.

Blanche, however, knows that he’s only in his current role because he’s willing to say that Trump’s desires are the only law that matters. This is what weaponization of the Justice Department actually looks like, and Blanche knows that as well.

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.

🌊 Subscribe to PN 🌊

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🤖 Subscribe to PN 🤖

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are currently kicking the shit out of each other in a federal courthouse in Oakland. Two of the most destructive men on earth are each claiming to be principled humanitarians, and Musk’s customary chaos monkey litigation strategy is on full display.

The short version: Musk funded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing artificial intelligence safely, for humanity's benefit. Then Altman turned it into an $850 billion juggernaut for his own enrichment. Musk is suing to get “his” share of OpenAI back, or, as of three weeks before trial, to return the money to the charity — a share which he now values at $134 billion. And he’d also like to unwind the conversion of OpenAI to a for-profit company, for the good of humanity.

By sheer coincidence, this would massively benefit Musk’s own company xAI, whose chatbot Grok is prone to calling itself MechaHitler and will helpfully answer questions like “what are the good races?”

It’s only a shame they can’t both lose.

For the good of all mankind

In 2015, tech leaders sounded the alarm about the societal impacts and potential misuse of artificial general intelligence. Musk was one of the signatories to an open letter advocating thoughtful research “to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls” before unleashing this powerfully technology.

Altman, who was running the tech incubator Y Combinator (later rebranded YC), wrote that “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

Altman pitched Musk on a nonprofit research lab which would develop AI responsibly and deliberately, serving as a counterweight to Google, which had just acquired the British company Deepmind. They conceived of OpenAI as a charitable foundation which would nurture AI as an open-source, safety-focused project, with no pressure to maximize shareholder returns.

On December 8, 2015, OpenAI filed a certificate of incorporation in Delaware stating the organization’s charitable function: “The resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.”

Musk lent his name, his connections, his recruiting power, and approximately $44 million to the project. In a 2016 email to Altman and OpenAI’s CEO Greg Brockman, he wrote, “whatever it takes to bring on ace talent is fine by me. Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress. If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy.”

By 2017 the parties were locked in conflict. In part, this is because Musk was pushing to take control of the project, assume the title of CEO, and bring OpenAI into Tesla’s ambit. But Musk also suspected that Altman and Brockman were secretly plotting to convert OpenAI to a for-profit company with a major assist from Microsoft. And he was right.

“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Musk wrote in a September email. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup.”

Altman responded: “i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!” and Brockman immediately echoed his boss. According to Musk’s complaint, he continued to fund OpenAI based on those representations.

But at the same time, Brockman was taking personal notes that told a different story.

Brockman’s diary entries feature prominently in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s denial of OpenAI’s motion for summary judgment. (And recurring stress dreams for OpenAI’s lawyers … probably.)

At the same time he was assuring Musk that they were committed to running the company as a charity, Brockman was privately admitting that he was “not feeling so great about all of this. the true answer is that we want Elon out.”

“It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt,” Brockman worried, while simultaneously conceding that “it would be nice to be making the billions.”

They decided to make the billions.

After Musk resigned from the board in February 2018, Altman and Brockman forged ahead with the conversion. They would probably argue that it was Musk’s withdrawal that forced them into Microsoft’s arms, since OpenAI needed to replace the cash they were no longer getting from Musk. And they’ve claimed all along that Musk was fine turning it into a for-profit company — as long as he was the one running it.

But Microsoft clocked the bait-and-switch problem, too. Its Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott emailed Altman in March 2018, “I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans? Ideologically, I can’t imagine that they funded an open effort to concentrate [machine learning] talent so that they could then go build a closed, for profit thing on its back.”

In 2019, the for-profit subsidiary launched, padded with billions in seed capital from Microsoft, plus a massive subsidy in compute. The nonprofit’s intellectual property was transferred to the new entity, and the employees followed. What had been a publicly subsidized charity generating enormous goodwill and tax-advantaged donations became, in essence, a shell holding a stake in a company now valued at over $850 billion.

But for some men more than others

In 2024, Musk filed a 26-count law suit against Altman, Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft alleging fraud, breach of contract, antitrust violations, and RICO — the proverbial kitchen sink complaint, brought by the proverbial chaos agent.

By January of this year, Judge Rogers had whittled it down to five counts: unjust enrichment, constructive fraud, fraud, and breach of charitable trust against the OpenAI defendants, plus aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty against Microsoft. But Musk had several crazy cards yet to play.

For nearly two years he’d demanded that OpenAI pay him $134 billion, the figure calculated by his damages expert as the portion of the company’s current value attributable to Musk’s early contributions. But three weeks before trial, he informed the court that he was instead suing to return the money to the charity. He also wanted the entire 2025 restructuring unwound, with Altman and Brockman removed from their positions.

Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff raced to tell the Wall Street Journal that his client, the richest man in the world, was not demanding a 12-figure payout for himself, but for charity. Musk immediately posted the article to his 200 million followers on X.

OpenAI’s lawyers were apoplectic, accusing Musk of “sandbagging the defendants and injecting chaos into the proceedings, while trying to recast his public narrative about his lawsuit.”

But Musk wasn’t done. A week before the trial was set to start, he made a conditional offer to the court: if Judge Rogers would agree to go to trial on the breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims, he’d voluntarily dismiss the fraud counts. It’s not usual to play “let’s make a deal” with a federal judge, and the timing of the ploy ensured that OpenAI would waste millions of dollars in legal time and prepare for trial with the fraud counts front and center. But on Friday Judge Rogers granted the motion and dismissed the fraud counts.

The case will proceed in two stages. In the first, the jury, acting in an advisory capacity, will decide if OpenAI and Microsoft are liable. If yes, and if Judge Rogers agrees, the case will proceed to a damages phase under her supervision alone.

🤖 Subscribe to PN 🤖

Nine men (and women) in a box

The case got off to a rocky start, as potential jurors had strong opinions about the plaintiff.

But Judge Rogers refused to dismiss jurors just because they happened to notice that Musk is odious.

“The reality is that people don’t like him,” she said, according to The Verge’s Liz Lopatto. “Many people don’t like him, but that doesn’t mean that Americans nevertheless can’t have integrity for the judicial process.”

On Tuesday, the parties made their opening statements. Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo claimed that “the defendants in this case stole a charity.” OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt accused Musk of “sour grapes.”

“My clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him. Mr. Musk did not like that,” he told the jurors.

Musk took the witness stand and portrayed himself as the savior of humanity, although he did admit that the understood the project would require at least a partial for-profit component, since inputs for OpenAI’s training models are so wildly expensive. He’ll be back on the witness stand today to be cross examined by OpenAI’s lawyers.

The witness list includes Altman, Brockman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of four of Musk’s children. Discovery has already yielded a mountain of gossipy dirt, particularly about Musk. The court has ruled that he can’t be asked on the stand about using “rhino ketamine” at Burning Man in 2017, but can be questioned about his texts with Zilis that show her feeding him information on OpenAI after he left the company. There will be plenty of fireworks, although most lawyers rate Musk’s chance of unwinding the OpenAI conversion and banishing Altman from the company at close to zero.

Judge Rogers expressed reluctance to kneecap the AI industry, and, even if she were open to drastic remedies, the statute of limitations on the remaining claims is four years from the time the breach was discovered. To win Musk will have to convince a jury that he was unaware of a topic which was widely reported, even as he was tweeting about in realtime.

But Musk may not care if he loses. He’s a serial litigant with infinite money who harasses his enemies with pointless trollsuits to bleed them dry in court. He’s also the owner of a competing AI company that would greatly benefit from crippling OpenAI, or at the very least making Sam Altman look bad.

Of course, Musk can’t pants Altman without pantsing himself, too, and this lawsuit has laid bare the careless way these oligarchs handled a technology that they themselves believe might soon destroy humanity. If we do reach P(doom), it’ll be thanks to these feckless egomaniacs.

But at least they’ll give us lots of opportunities to point and laugh along the way.

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.

🤖 Subscribe to PN 🤖

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

Last week, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in disgrace amid accusations of drinking on the job, infidelity, and sexual harassment of staff by her husband.

It was an ignominious end to one of the few Trump cabinet appointments which began with some bipartisan hopes and an expectation of at least minimal competence.

Instead, Chavez-DeRemer became a lesson in the signal truth of Trump’s second term: He hires for spineless sycophantic loyalty, and anyone who is spineless and sycophantic enough to satisfy him is committed to grotesque fascism, corruption, or both.

Those who agree to work for Trump are, by definition, unqualified and evil. There are no exceptions, and, by this point, there is no excuse for pretending otherwise.

A brief hope

On paper, Chavez-DeRemer was one of the most potentially reasonable cabinet nominees of Trump’s second-term team of Nazis, scoundrels, cowards, and fuck-ups. She was elected to Congress in Oregon’s purple fifth district in 2022, and in line with her constituency she attempted to craft a moderate record.

During her term in Congress, Chavez-DeRemer introduced successful bills expanding healthcare services to veterans and funding overdose prevention programs — pragmatic nonpartisan measures. She lauded Biden’s infrastructure bill and the money it brought into Oregon, and joined Democrats in supporting federal transportation and bridge projects in the state.

Chavez-DeRemer was also unusual among Republicans in her support of labor. She was one of only a handful of GOP cosponsors of a bill to restore tax deductions for union dues and she signed a letter supporting the Teamsters’ right to strike at UPS.

She was also one of only three Republican cosponsors of the 2023 Protect the Right to Organize Act. The PRO Act would protect organizing in a range of ways — by allowing the NLRB rather than employers to set union election procedures, speeding the reinstitution of employees illegally fired for union activity, and holding corporate officials personally liable for violations of labor law. It would also block most right-to-work laws, which kneecap collection of union dues.

PRO Act passage has been a long term goal of labor, and Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the legislation helped her win labor support in her unsuccessful 2024 reelection bid. It also appealed to quisling Trump-friendly Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien, who pushed hard for her nomination.

During her confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer backed away from support for the PRO Act, specifically repudiating the anti right-to-work provisions; she also promised to implement Trump’s (very anti-union) agenda. Nonetheless, 17 Democrats joined all but two Republicans in voting to confirm her. Sean O’Brien treated her appointment as a triumph for labor power.

“The Teamsters thank the bipartisan coalition of senators who put the needs of working people ahead of politics,” he enthused.

The enthusiasm, you’ll be shocked to learn, was premature. O’Brien and every Democrat who supported Chavez-DeRemer today look like credulous fools. The secretary of labor did not take the position to fight for working people. Instead, she fed at the public trough in grotesque and abusive ways.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

A total toady

O’Brien’s plaudits started to fester pretty much as soon as they fell out of his mouth.

As part of Trump’s attack on the federal workforce, 20 percent of the Labor Department workforce, or 2,700 workers, were encouraged to retire or resign; one Bureau of Labor Statistics employee told The Guardian that the cuts were “catastrophic” and would leave the department “absolutely dysfunctional.”

In response to those concerns, Chavez-DeRemer had her chief of staff send an email to department employees warning them that if they talked to journalists about their concerns, they could “face serious legal consequences” including “potential criminal penalties” and “termination.”

As further acts of anti-labor subservience to the far-right regime, Chavez-DeRemer began the shutdown of the Job Corps program, a longstanding, popular, bipartisan initiative which provides career training, housing, and coursework towards a high school diploma or GED for tens of thousands low income 16-24 year olds. She also promoted Trump’s executive order encouraging 401(k) accounts to invest in crypto and private equity, refused to enforce a rule that prevented misclassification of workers as independent contractors, backed ending overtime pay for home care workers and domestic workers, and withdrew a rule to prevent sub-minimum wage pay for disabled people.

The labor secretary’s most despicable act of self-debasement, though, was probably her enthusiastic support for Trump’s petulant, dangerous decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer. Trump dismissed McEntarfer after the BLS released July jobs numbers that he didn’t like.

“I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes,” Chavez-DeRemer burbled on social media — suggesting, utterly without evidence, that McEntarfer had manipulated the data.

Cathy Creighton, director of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, delivered a brutal summary of Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure: “Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer sat by as her department’s budget was slashed, as worker protections for other agencies were dismantled, supported the Trump administration’s attempt to annihilate the federal workforces’ unions and placed a three-story portrait of the president on the building,”

As far as policy and the administration of her department goes, then, it’s fair to say that Chavez-DeRemer abandoned every vestige of bipartisan pretense to betray her staff, American workers, and common decency in typically repulsive MAGA fashion.

But there’s more.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

Bottomless scandals

This January, two of Chavez-DeRemer’s top aides — Chief of Staff Jihun Han and his deputy, Rebecca Wright — were put on administrative leave. A complaint to the DOL inspector general’s office alleged they had been organizing events so that she could use department funds to pay for personal travel.

In addition, the IG also reportedly investigated claims that Chavez-DeRemer and members of her staff drank on the job and that she was involved in an affair with a member of her security team (he resigned in March). Additionally, Chavez-DeRemer was accused of fostering an office culture that was bullying and demoralizing.

As one relevant data point about the demoralizing culture, in January, Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Shawn DeRemer, was barred from the DOL building after at least two women employees accused him of sexual impropriety and harassment.

More, the New York Times reported that the probe into the labor secretary found that her husband and father texted young female staffers in ways that certainly appear to border on the inappropriate. One text from Chavez-DeRemer’s father, Richard Chavez, suggested he could meet a female staffer in Oregon when she was there and urged her to “keep this private.” The Times also reported that Chavez-DeRemer had ordered her staff to “pay attention” to the two men.

Trump did not bother to announce Chavez-DeRemer’s departure himself — as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests, it’s quite possible he barely knows who she is. In any case, he delegated the task to White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. Cheung made no mention of the corruption and abuse investigations — which were also notably absent from Fox News’ bland, brief report about her dismissal.

Chavez-DeRemer, for her part, as befits a true MAGA, claimed she had been undermined by the “deep state.”

Still, it seems fair to say that Trump (or someone in his orbit) decided they could find a labor secretary to lick Trump’s boots while generating slightly fewer bad headlines.

Whether they can actually find such an unobjectionable boot-licker, though, is an open question.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

The death of dignity

Trump’s cabinet secretaries are a shocking bolus of venality and viciousness. He’s already fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, mostly for failing to defend his ugly, unconstitutional policies effectively, but also maybe in Noem’s case for corruption. Meanwhile, humiliating stories keep dropping about FBI Director Kash Patel’s excessive drinking and absences on the job, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy continues to be a terrifying public health disaster, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just lost a war in humiliating fashion.

Each of Trump’s cabinet picks is awful and evil in their own special way. But all of them have been, are, and will be awful and evil, no matter what their background (even those endorsed by Sean O’Brien). That is true for the simple reason that Trump himself is awful and evil, and he only appoints people who are willing to remove their souls, hearts, brains, and spines in his service.

The grotesque sacks of skin and vice that remain after that operation will stand up for no principles, personal or professional. They are either in it for what they can get or they are in it for who they can hurt.

That includes obvious bad actors like Vice President JD Vance and White House ethnic cleansing czar Stephen Miller. But it also includes people who, pre-Trump, appeared to be at least occasionally interested in governing or policy, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio — and like Chavez-DeRemer.

At one point, Chavez-DeRemer seemed to want to serve her constituents and to pass measures to help them. But when she agreed to work for Trump, she agreed to do absolutely nothing but harm the public and besmirch and humiliate herself. And so that’s what she did.

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.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

Four US presidents were assassinated while in office, and dozens of other times, someone has plotted to kill the occupant of the White House.

These would-be heirs to John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald have not been highly trained killers out of a thrilling spy novel; more often they are deeply unstable people whose attempt on the president’s life came only after their own fell apart.

But like everyone, they were affected by the world around them. It gave shape and direction to their beliefs, their delusions, and their rage. And given the age of chaos in which we live, it should be no surprise that violence has become a regular feature of our political life, some of it directed at the president.

Donald Trump is not the sole creator of that chaos, but he is the axis around which much of it revolves. He is to individual acts of political violence what climate change is to hurricanes: We may not be able to blame global warming for a particular hurricane, but we know it creates the conditions for hurricanes to be more common and intense. And while Trump surely doesn’t want anyone to try to kill him, when the attempts occur, he capitalizes on them to exacerbate the feeling that the world is spinning out of control and violence is not only inevitable, but often just what we need.

If the suspect from the White House Correspondents Association dinner turns out to have been coming for Trump, it will be the third such attempt on his life just since the 2024 campaign. Remarkably enough, the shooter who came closest to succeeding — 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who fired at Trump from a rooftop at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, before being killed by government agents — remains an almost complete mystery in his motives.

But it’s safe to say that neither Trump nor anyone around him really cares. The Butler incident was quickly made into a story of God’s intervention to save Trump, proof that he’s an instrument of divine intent and glorious destiny. Some similar myth will doubtless be crafted out of the event Saturday night as well. But in the meantime, Trump and his supporters have a much more pressing subject to deal with.

Ballroom dancing

In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s incident, Trump chose to focus everyone’s attention on his current obsession: the ballroom for which he demolished the East Wing of the White House.

Posting multiple times about it on Truth Social, he sent a message that everyone on the right, from politicians to pundits, seemed to receive: In the wake of this shocking event, we must talk about the ballroom.

“What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. It cannot be built fast enough!”, Trump posted.

If you don’t recall every president since the Civil War DEMANDING a large ballroom, you must not be a history buff.

Perhaps Trump deserves some credit for not letting the possible assassination attempt cause him to lose focus. Because this has been a curious feature of many of his recent appearances: An event starts out to be about a serious subject like the war in Iran, but before long, he starts rambling on about the ballroom.

But is the problem revealed by this event really that gala black-tie Washington dinners are held in insufficiently hardened locations? After all, security operated just as it was designed to do, and the shooter never even got to the same floor as the president. This reaction is reminiscent of the way Republicans always respond to school shootings, arguing that we certainly can’t examine our gun laws; all we can do is turn your local elementary school into a fortress.

Nevertheless, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has sprung into action. He sent a letter Sunday to the lawyer representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation, demanding that the group drop its lawsuit challenging the way the ballroom steamrolled over the normal process for such projects.

“Your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk,” Blanche wrote.

How we survived this long as a country without it is hard to fathom; the memory of the Founding Fathers will forever be tainted by their failure to include in the Constitution a ballroom provision.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!”

If you asked Trump and his movement to select one image to encapsulate everything important about him and his movement, it would be the photograph taken as he was led away from the stage in Butler, blood streaming down his face from a nick to his ear produced by the would-be assassin’s near miss.

Ever the showman, in that moment Trump knew all the cameras were on him, and he stopped to raise his fist to the crowd and shout (or at least mouth; the audio is unclear): “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

It’s impossible not to think of that image after Saturday, even if Trump’s exit from the dinner was rather less vigorous (he tripped and fell as Secret Service agents bodied him from the dais).

Immediately after Butler — and ever since — Trump and his supporters put that image everywhere. It hangs, poster-sized, in the Grand Foyer of the White House. The Treasury Department is considering putting it on a commemorative coin, without the blood but with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” around the perimeter. You can buy a “Fight Fight Fight” Trump-branded watch for $499, with payment accepted in the president’s now nearly worthless meme coin.

The message of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” is not that political violence has become a national crisis, or even that it is wrong. Speaking to reporters after returning to the White House on Saturday evening, Trump himself didn’t say so; instead he characterized this latest incident as one more testament to his greatness.

“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most ... they’re the ones that they go after,” he said. “And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.”

The message of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” is that violence must be met with more violence, and the moral valence of that violence is solely determined by the political affiliation of the perpetrators and victims.

So when a Trump ally is attacked or killed, the necessary response is to wreak a terrible vengeance. But when a liberal is attacked or killed, it is either ignored (as Trump did the assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband last June) or joked about (as Trump and other conservatives did about the near-fatal assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband).

Violence committed by MAGA itself, on the other hand, is heroic. The January 6 insurrectionists all get pardons, their attempt to overthrow the government recast as a patriotic “day of love.” Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people and wounded a third in Kenosha, is invited to Mar-a-Lago and held up as an example for others to emulate. An army of masked thugs is sent into every corner of America and given free rein to treat those they encounter with maximum brutality. And when some of those thugs gun down Renée Good and then Alex Pretti in the street for the crime of standing up for their neighbors, the immediate response from the administration, before the details are known, is to call the killings not regrettable but the brave actions of heroes.

The idea that violence is good when directed at those we hold in contempt is a signature of this administration, at home and abroad. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth literally prays to God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” and seems to take an almost erotic thrill at the killing, whether those being ripped to pieces by American missiles are Venezuelan fishermen (aka “narcoterrorists”) or whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Tehran.

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

The madness all around us

We cannot separate the violence Trump promotes from the campaign the administration has so enthusiastically waged against the federal government itself.

Trumpism combines authoritarianism with institutional degradation, in which so many of the worthwhile things the state used to do — scientific research, environmental protection, support for libraries and schools and economic development, the provision of health insurance and food assistance — have been reduced or eliminated, and the most visible expression of government is a masked ICE agent smashing a car window while his colleagues pepper-spray anyone raising an objection.

Meanwhile, Trump’s government ensures that the economy will increasingly run on scams, as it disempowers oversight and slashes away at any agency or regulation that might protect consumers. The world is awash in gambling apps and prediction markets and crypto schemes, just as MAGA wants it to be (especially since Trump himself and his family are so eagerly cashing in).

The social media so many of us imbibe every day make it seem like the world is a roiling cauldron of madness, an endless procession of things to be angry about and horrors to gawk at. Again, this is just as MAGA wants it; the White House employs its own army of hate-mongering edgelords to churn out a steady supply of AI slop and lib-trolling. Conspiracy theories have never had more routes to spread through the world, and no president has ever indulged and promoted them the way Trump has.

Even many young people have come to feel that the information sources they grew up on are making them feel terrible all the time. How many conversations have you had with friends and family in the last few years about how chaotic everything is? When politics, culture, and the economy are all so unsettled and anxiety-provoking, violence can come to feel like the inevitable outgrowth of a world gone mad.

There is no easy solution to that problem, even if Trump’s eventual departure may make the world feel calmer and saner for a while. But as experience has taught us, things can always get worse again.

Unless, of course, we build a big, beautiful ballroom. Then we will finally have the peace and security for which every American yearns.

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.

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

Gertz and I discussed the ways in which Fox News is even worse now than it was during Trump’s first term, the Ellison family’s ill-conceived takeover of CBS, why Trump hosting the White House Correspondents dinner is an affront to the Constitution, and much more.

Matt has been covering conservative media for nearly two decades now, and there’s nobody more knowledgeable about Fox-world and the role it plays propping up the administration. I enjoyed our conversation and hope you will too.

Nir & Rupar goes live every Friday at 2pm eastern. David was out this week but will be back next Friday. If you’d like to ask us live questions during the show, please sign up for a paid subscription to Public Notice if you haven’t already.

🔥🔥 Subscribe to PN 🔥🔥

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back with a new newsletter Monday morning. Until then, thanks for your support, and have a great weekend.

Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🔥🔥 Subscribe to PN 🔥🔥

Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was finally defeated in an election that took place on April 12.

Orbán led Hungary for 16 years, during which time citizens endured a crackdown on free speech, the free press, LGBTQ rights, and immigration. He cozied up with Putin and moved Hungary away from Europe. The MAGA movement saw Orbán as a model — the infamous Project 2025 was heavily influenced by his governance style — so his loss is not just important for Hungary or the European Union, but also in terms of the global fight against right-wing authoritarianism.

Orbán’s defeat offers some lessons for how democracy defenders could potentially win the fight against Trumpism here in the United States. One of the key takeaways is that the opposition, led by victorious Tisza Party candidate Péter Magyar, focused on Orbán’s corruption and what it meant for everyday Hungarians. And as we were reminded yesterday, there’s no leader in the world more nakedly corrupt than Trump.

To get some expert insight on the fall of Orbán and the reasons Magyar was able to beat him so resoundingly, we connected with Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international relations at Princeton University, who has worked in Hungary and actually met Orbán.

“It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on,” Scheppele told us, alluding to all of Orbán dirty campaign tricks and the structural reforms he enacted to entrench himself in power. “By the end, [Magyar] was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.”

“In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them,” she added. “People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there’s too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.”

A full transcript of the conversation between Scheppele and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

🔥🔥 Subscribe to PN 🔥🔥

Thor Benson

A lot of American commentators are attributing Magyar’s success to the fact his campaign focused on an anti-corruption message, and are drawing conclusions from that for US politics. Is that your analysis too, or is what happened more nuanced?

Kim Lane Scheppele

It’s a little more complicated than that, because “anti-corruption” is still pretty abstract to most people. But what Magyar was able to do was link Orbán’s corruption to people’s lives.

There was amazing investigative reporting exposing visible aspects of Orbán’s corruption. You probably heard the stuff about zebras — a drone discovered that there was this little gathering of them near Orbán’s property. It was this visible sign of how ridiculous and expansive the corruption had become.

Corruption became meme-able, and there were other scandals that were happening. These investigative reporters kept turning up one thing after another. The crucial thing that Magyar did was to say, “Orbán’s government is corrupt. Look at the zebras. That is why the hospitals don’t work. Because they’re underfunded. The transportation system is underfunded. The educational system is underfunded. They’re stealing the money.”

The key was linking Orbán’s corruption to Hungarians’ daily lives. “The National Health Service promised you healthcare, but it couldn’t deliver. It promised you an education, and it couldn’t deliver. All of the trains are falling apart, and they’re always late. How come if you travel in the rest of Europe, the trains are air conditioned, but not here?” The visible signs of a corroding social state were blamed on the corruption.

The next through line was that democracy has broken down. “They’ve created an autocracy in which they don’t have to listen to you anymore.” It was a package of things.

It wasn’t just democracy as an abstract issue or corruption or affordability. The Democratic Party in this country tends to run on checklists. “Here’s corruption, here’s another issue, here’s that issue.” They’re all important, but they’re not linked to an ideological framework. Magyar linked the issues to an ideology. “We need democracy back again.”

Thor Benson

In America, everyone understands that Trump is corrupt, but the challenge is linking it to problems people face. AOC strikes me as somebody who is good at that. She says, “You know why they’re taking away your health insurance? Because they’re using the money for Trump’s war.”

Kim Lane Scheppele

Exactly. That’s what Péter Magyar did. He stayed away from the hot-button issues of both the left and right. He said almost nothing about immigration. He said almost nothing about gay rights. He just stayed away from all those issues on which left and right are polarized, and which the Orbán government had used to divide people.

He said, “Look, we’re all in this together, and here’s what we share.” He said the reason we need democracy is because it prevents corruption and ensures that when the government provides things, it does so effectively and for everyone.

Thor Benson

How was Magyar able to deal with the fact that Orbán had totally captured the media?

Kim Lane Scheppele

Yeah, media rigging is a part of this story too. Orbán controls literally all the television stations and radio stations and newspapers of any serious circulation size. That whole block of Orbán media gave virtually no attention to the opposition candidate, unless it was negative. Magyar had no way to get his message out. He was not interviewed once by the public broadcasters.

In Europe, most countries have a public broadcaster, like the BBC or Deutsche Welle. And there was such a thing in Hungary, but it got taken over by Orbán, so they never gave Magyar a minute of time to explain himself.

How do you overcome that? That’s where the opposition basically turned to social media, a couple of independent journalism platforms funded by readers and viewers, and a YouTube channel. That was it.

One great thing about the zebras is that it worked really well on social media. Post a little zebra icon and then everybody knows what you mean. A YouTube channel actually started running news broadcasts, and because it’s YouTube, it was hard for the Hungarian government to take it down. Ditto with social media. We all think social media is the thing that destroyed democracy, but it could end up saving it.

Maybe social media platforms are all that’s left. That’s what the Hungarian opposition moved on to — YouTube and Facebook. The young people got mobilized in this campaign, and they were really good at memes. The Orbán government tried everything. They had a negative press campaign, but they also bugged Magyar’s phone and released snippets of conversations where he was saying negative things about people in his own party.

They sent a girlfriend to him. He had a divorce. He was looking for girlfriends. They sent this woman to him, and then she taped his phone conversations to create scandals around him. There was one point when the Orbán-dominated media got this photograph taken from above of a bed that was all messed up. And then it was like, “coming soon.” Everybody assumed there was going to be a Magyar sex tape. He said, “Look, I’m a healthy 45-year-old man. I have a sex life with consenting women.” He addressed it, then dropped it. The young followers of Magyar started creating these fake AI videos of stuff happening in that room.

The opposition spread pictures of Orbán in bed with Putin and Trump. By the time the Magyar sex tape was expected to drop, there were so many ridiculous things out there taking place in that room that it would have just joined them as yet another fake video. It was pretty brilliant.

There was this other problem, which was that the election system was rigged. Magyar faced the difficulty that votes from the countryside are worth up to three times as much as a vote in the cities. He knew he had the cities in his corner because they would vote for anybody who would take down Orbán, frankly.

But Magyar had to persuade Orbán’s voters. In the absence of the kind of media that they watch, namely television and radio, he would go around to all these villages. He spent two years doing six, seven, sometimes eight villages a day and meeting people and talking to them and asking about their problems and connecting it back to the state stealing their money.

Thor Benson

Wow. There were more dirty tricks in the campaign than I realized.

Kim Lane Scheppele

There were tons. Magyar, at the beginning of his campaign and before he developed extraordinarily steely discipline, got into a bar brawl with somebody. He could have been provoked by Orbán’s people. That’s kind of what I think, but we never could prove it. Somebody punched him, and then he got into this fight and threw somebody’s phone into the Danube River. The public prosecutor, who’s in Orbán’s pocket, came after him with criminal charges.

By this time, Magyar had been elected to the European Parliament, and no state can put a member of the European Parliament under criminal charges unless the European Parliament waives his immunity. The European Parliament refused to do so.

It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on. Orbán had intimidated everybody. You knew that if you stood up to Orbán, he would be able to come after you with whatever it was you needed from the government. Maybe your kid needs to get into college, and almost all the colleges are public colleges. Maybe your spouse is on the chopping block at their job. Orbán had such a reach that they could ensure that you lost your job, couldn’t get your social benefits paid, and couldn’t get unemployment insurance. They were using the power of the state to deny people every material thing that the state can provide.

People kept their heads down. They just said it’s not worth it. Magyar’s campaign was a campaign against fear. He said, “Look, of course they’re after me, but here I am. If I can do it, you can do it.” He brought out lots of people who would then realize, “Oh, my neighbor’s here. I’m not alone. Other people are standing up.” By the end, he was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.

In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them. People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there are too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of Nir & Rupar (featuring special guest Matt Gertz), but no special Saturday edition of the newsletter this weekend. The next edition of PN drops Monday morning.

If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

🔥🔥 Subscribe to PN 🔥🔥

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday.

Flanked by embattled FBI Director Kash Patel, Blanche announced an 11-count federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil rights organization which effectively brought down the Ku Klux Klan.

The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.

The SPLC spent five decades tracking white supremacists, infiltrating violent extremist groups, and dragging them into court. These are methods the FBI itself routinely employs — or did before it decided that racist militias were good, actually. In fact, the FBI coordinated with SPLC for years, relying on intelligence received from the organization to combat domestic extremists.

But now, as part of the project to undo Reconstruction, the Justice Department hopes to take out the SPLC using the very tools that group used to defeat the KKK. And along the way, they can exculpate every violent bigot who ever swung a tiki torch with murder in his eyes. Those boys weren’t bad, they were just stirred up by outside agitators from the SPLC!

The organization that bankrupted the Klan

The SPLC was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, as a civil rights litigation shop. Its strategy was to file tort suits against the Klan, holding the organization financially responsible for acts of violence perpetrated by its members.

SPLC’s most consequential case involved the 1981 lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. After a jury failed to convict Josephus Anderson, a Black man charged with the murder of a white policeman in Birmingham, members of the United Klans of America (UKA) snatched Donald off the street more or less at random.

“If a Black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man,” argued UKA Titan Bennie Hays, the second-highest Klan official in Alabama, at the weekly meeting of Unit 900.

Two Klansmen abducted Donald, beat him with a tree limb more than a hundred times, and hanged his body from a tree across the street from Hays’ own house.

“A pretty sight,” a Klansman remarked as he watched police gather evidence. “That’s gonna look good on the news.”

The SPLC represented Michael’s mother Beulah Mae Donald in a civil suit against UKA. In 1987, a jury awarded her $7 million in damages, bankrupting the UKA and forcing it to sign over the deed to its headquarters.

But litigation wasn’t SPLC’s only weapon.

In 1981, as Klan membership surged amid the backlash to the civil rights era gains of the previous decades, the SPLC launched Klanwatch to monitor white supremacist activity and organizations. The project was later rebranded as Hatewatch as white supremacy evolved beyond the traditional Klan into a broader ecosystem of neo-Nazi groups, militia movements, and online accelerationist networks.

The methodology was the same one used by law enforcement: place sources inside violent organizations, gather intelligence, and use it to build legal cases. The FBI, which had been running informants inside Klan organizations since at least the 1960s, knew exactly what SPLC was doing and even shared intel with the organization.

But SPLC made a lot of enemies in the rightwing ecosystem with its Hatemap of extremist groups, which included conservative mainstays like the Family Research Council, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, opponents of the SPLC’s mission, including Elon Musk, targeted the organization for criticizing their newly-martyred saint.

In October, Patel cut ties with the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group. In what was surely not a coincidence, he timed his announcement to fall on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for observant Jews.

But it’s one thing to sever ties with civil rights groups. It’s quite another to charge them for criminal conspiracy.

Fraud is whatever Todd Blanche says it is

The indictment returned Tuesday rests on the theory that SPLC defrauded its donors by paying informants inside hate groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's ("SPLC") stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.

Building on this supposed deception, the DOJ charged SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC. By the inescapable logic of its own complaint, the FBI itself funds all manner of criminal enterprises through its own network of paid, covert informants. Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the organization was illegally diverting donor money to fund hate groups via its informant network.

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public," Patel sniffed from the podium. "They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups, even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal, and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

Then, as if to demonstrate that the campaign against SPLC is a witch hunt, Patel went on Sean Hannity’s show last night to riff about an active case and preemptively declare guilt.

If the government has actual evidence of wrongdoing, it’s not sharing. There’s zero mention of self-dealing by SPLC executives in the indictment. If the SPLC were really trying to “manufacture” racism, devoting just $3 million over the course of a decade out of an annual budget that tops $120 million would be a pretty inefficient way to go about it. Moreover, the government’s theory of the case is that the informants took their SPLC bounty and plowed it back into the organizations they were spying on — something else which the indictment takes pains to assert elliptically without presenting any evidence.

And yet this bizarre theory undergirds the entire criminal case. The wire fraud and money laundering charges rest on SPLC donors having been tricked into turning over money. And the false statements to the bank — made to set up pass-through accounts to pay informants — are charged under 18 USC § 1014, a statute regulating “loan and credit applications generally; renewals and discounts; crop insurance.”

Clearly the government intends to replicate SPLC’s success shutting down UKA by suing SPLC out of existence. But it’s very hard to see how this dubiously cobbled-together indictment could produce the desired result.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

The retcon

Even if this case implodes on impact with a federal court, it will still serve the larger conservative goal of recasting perpetrators of rightwing violence as the real victims.

Just hours after MAGA rioters overran the Capitol, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz claimed on the House floor that facial recognition had confirmed the violent mob was really antifa goons. When that lie didn’t pan out, conservatives pivoted to blaming government “instigators,” even going so far as to brand a former Oath Keepers militia member Ray Epps as an FBI plant who incited the crowd so that MAGA patriots could be prosecuted.

On his first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned all the January 6 defendants, save for a handful of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who’d been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Now the Justice Department is moving to vacate their convictions on the theory that their prosecutions were politically motivated. (Ironically, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio actually was a government informant, so, by the DOJ’s own logic, the FBI funded his crimes.)

The SPLC indictment is part of the wider plot to retcon an organization that spent half a century tracking, infiltrating, and litigating against violent white supremacist groups into an organ for “manufacturing” racism where there was none. The informant program that fed intelligence to law enforcement for decades is reframed as a criminal scheme to deceive donors and launder money. The civil rights lawyers who bankrupted the United Klans of America are cast as the Klan’s secret patrons.

The indictment’s references to the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville are positively perverse. The DOJ claims that the SPLC’s paid field source “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” This implies, but does not state, that the SPLC paid for transportation to the event. The government is all-but explicitly blaming SPLC for those angry young men brandishing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the car that plowed into counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer.

This is nonsense! James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people who showed up to advocate for racial justice and killed Heather Heyer. The organizers of the event were white supremacists who planned a rally to advocate for white supremacy, and celebrated the death of a “fat, disgusting Communist.” And now it is the official position of the United States government that the civil rights group which walloped Klan is the real culprit.

Already the supposed “victims” of the SPLC are circling like vultures. The Family Research Council, designated as a hate group by the SPLC for linking homosexuality to pedophilia and supporting the criminalization of same-sex relations, demands restitution from SPLC’s endowment. This is surely not what SPLC’s donors had in mind, but it would certainly fit in with the inverted reality the Trump administration is trying to usher in.

If there is a silver lining, it’s that the SPLC seems ready for the fight.

From a legal standpoint, this indictment is crap. From a political standpoint, it’s an effort to avenge the KKK and enshrine white supremacy in America. Both should be dismissed with prejudice.

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.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🍻 Subscribe to PN 🍻

Late Friday, we were treated to a big story in The Atlantic about FBI Director Kash Patel’s unprofessional, self-destructive behavior, including allegations of alcohol abuse and absenteeism that would get anyone else fired.1

By Monday, we were treated to a big dumb lawsuit over it by Patel, because he has the impulse control of a toddler. So he’s ginned up a frantic legal filing accusing The Atlantic of actual malice and malicious malice and malice actualizing, or whatever is going on here.

Suffice to say that Patel seems to think he dropped a world of hurt on The Atlantic when all he really did was show that both he and his attorneys seem to have been struggling with hangovers during their first year of law school.

Frivolous lawsuits are a dime a dozen in Trumpworld, and there are so many times when it’s obvious that the person filing them should know better. In Patel’s case, as hapless a malicious doofus as the guy seems to be, he’s also actually a lawyer.

Not, like, a Lindsey Halligan lawyer. Patel actually practiced law for over a decade, first as a public defender in Miami and then as a line prosecutor at the Department of Justice, although his time at the latter seems to have engendered more resentment than experience. Or, as a former colleague put it to CNN after it was clear Patel would be President Trump’s pick for director, he’s “an opportunist who feels constantly aggrieved.”

Sounds about right.

Patel’s problem here starts with a little thing called actual malice, which, despite its name and how Patel’s attorneys mangle it, doesn’t actually refer to doing anything with malice or in a malicious fashion. Rather, it’s about the standard a public figure must meet to successfully prove defamation.

“A legal lay up”

For plebes like us, defamation broadly requires a plaintiff to prove four things: (1) the defendant made a false statement of fact; (2) published or communicated to a third party; (3) with at least negligence on the part of the defendant; and (4) the plaintiff incurred damages or harm to their reputation.

For plaintiffs who are public figures or public officials like Patel, things are a bit different regarding that third element. There, precisely because a robust free press is critical to a flourishing democracy, the United States Supreme Court, in 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, held that a public figure plaintiff must prove that the false statement was made with knowledge it was false or with a reckless disregard for whether it was false. Imposing liability for merely negligent statements about public officials created a chilling effect, leading the press to self-censor.

Unsurprisingly, right-wing public officials hate NYT v. Sullivan, particularly Donald Trump, who has been calling for its demise for at least a decade.

But for now, at least, Patel must meet the standard of actual malice, so his complaint must show both that the statements in The Atlantic piece were false and that the publication either knew they were false or recklessly disregarded whether they were false. Patel boasted, weirdly, that the “actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up,” which, unless he knows something about the state of libel law in the United States that literally nobody else does, is simply not true.

In reality, it’s quite hard for public figures to meet that actual malice standard, but Patel and his attorneys seem to think it is as easy as saying, quite simply, that the FBI told The Atlantic that the allegations weren’t true, but The Atlantic published them anyway.

That sounds like an unfair paraphrase or framing, but that’s all the complaint really does. Here’s a sample, addressing the allegations that Patel is frequently seen intoxicated at two specific bars, Ned’s in Washington DC and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, and that the drinking has caused concern within the government:

“Director Patel does not drink to excess at these establishments or anywhere else, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government. Prior to publication, the FBI expressly informed Defendants that each of these allegations was ‘totally false.’”

It doesn’t take a law degree to understand that if a powerful public official can stop the press from reporting something, on pain of an expensive defamation suit, simply by flatly declaring everything is false, the whole notion of a free press kind of grinds to a halt. Trump tried this approach when he sued the Wall Street Journal for reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, alleging that since he denied writing the infamous letter in the shape of a naked woman as a birthday treat for the convicted sex trafficker, publishing the story anyway was actual malice. It didn’t work there either.

Patel also contended that because he denied a similar allegation in an entirely different lawsuit, The Atlantic was therefore on notice that every last bit of their reporting was false. However, that case, where Patel sued Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official and MSNBC talking head, was about a one-off comment Figliuzzi made that Patel had been “visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.” Since MSNBC walked it back a bit the next day, saying it hadn’t been verified, Patel believes the existence of that one exchange means that the Atlantic should have decided all its detailed reporting was just plain false. 

Much like some of Trump’s media complaints, Patel’s has the flavor of counsel making the grave mistake of letting the client write the thing. So instead of sober statements of fact and law, you get stuff like “under Director Patel’s leadership, the FBI has achieved historic law enforcement results” and “these operational successes are inconsistent with a director who is “often away or unreachable” or too intoxicated to do his job.”

Even if Patel were the World’s Greatest FBI Director as far as law enforcement results, and even if The Atlantic shamefully ignored his great stats, none of that has anything to do with whether the allegations in article about Patel’s drinking, absenteeism, and impulsivity are true. Nor does Patel’s whining that he only got an “arbitrary two-hour window” to respond to the story’s allegations before they went to press have anything to do with actual malice.

By the time The Atlantic reached out to Patel, the reporter who authored the piece (Sarah Fitzpatrick) had interviewed over two dozen people, including “current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” Reaching out to Patel was a journalistic courtesy, not an opportunity for him to demand time to respond.

🍻 Subscribe to PN 🍻

The complaint also makes much of a “Pre-Publication Letter” that Patel’s attorneys say is chock-full of “substantive refutations” provided to The Atlantic yet shamefully ignored, therefore ipso facto actual malice. That argument might hang together a bit better if that Pre-Publication Letter were anywhere to be found, but it’s not part of Patel’s complaint or published anywhere else. Somehow, everyone is just supposed to take at face value that Patel’s attorneys wrote a detailed letter that proves, hands down, that The Atlantic knew they were printing lies, but we can’t see the letter because it lives in Canada and goes to a different school.

Next, Patel claims that the Atlantic not naming any sources shows that their reporting is just a crock of malicious lies. But whether or not someone was willing to put their name to something has nothing to do with whether what they said about Patel was true.

Finally, even Patel’s whining that The Atlantic was engaged in “advocacy against Director Patel” rather than journalism doesn’t have anything to do with defamation or showing actual malice. The test is whether The Atlantic printed something it knew, or should have known, to be false, not whether they feel appropriately fond of Kash Patel.

Doesn’t have the cards

Patel’s lawsuit is no less fictional than the myriad harassments disguised as defamation lawsuits that Trump has filed to secure 10-figure settlements from media companies. Patel, however, seems to have forgotten that Trump can force those settlements because broadcast media licenses and mergers are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, headed by Trump enforcer extraordinaire Brendan Carr. There’s no equivalent pressure point for The Atlantic.

Patel also seems to have decided that the ease with which his attorneys, the Binnall Group, recently obtained a seven-figure settlement for Mike Flynn would work in his favor too. But Flynn’s suit against the DOJ was even more of a sham than Trump’s anti-press lawsuits, as Flynn did not achieve a hard-won settlement against an actual opponent. Rather, Flynn and the DOJ colluded to figure out the best way to give Flynn over a million of your tax dollars to redress this “historic injustice.” Somehow, it doesn’t seem like The Atlantic will join hands with Patel’s attorneys to give him $250 million.

Patel would be luckiest if The Atlantic succeeds at getting this thing dismissed right away — no, really. Because if this case goes forward, he’s stuck with discovery.

Sure, Kash might be hyped to conduct his own discovery and unmask anyone still in the FBI who spoke ill of him, but The Atlantic’s reporting makes clear they talked to plenty of people who are out of his reach, such as hospitality workers. Patel’s attorneys can talk to some poor waiter who had the misfortune of dealing with a drunken Patel at the bar, but it’s not going to help much unless they can get them to say “I totally told reporters Patel was sober as a judge and the best employee ever.”

Additionally, discovery means, to put it in very precise legal terms, that The Atlantic’s legal team gets to crawl up Patel’s ass. For all of the complaint’s bluster about how the story’s allegations are so incredibly easily disproven by readily available public materials that they can be willfully ignored, it has to actually deliver on that. So, show us that Pre-Publication Letter! Show us those FBI calendars! Show us how The Atlantic was supposed to get its mitts on all this material about Patel from a relentlessly opaque and secretive administration.

Patel didn’t file this lawsuit to win. He filed it to show Trump that he’s not just a dilettante flying around on the FBI jet, but a loyal crony who’s fighting back against the fake news media. He filed it to send a message to other publications that he will make their lives hell if they report critically on him. But he did not file it because he genuinely believes he can show The Atlantic manufactured all of this out of whole cloth.

Come on, dude, we’ve all seen your little beer party with the US Men’s Hockey Team. A sober, serious, dedicated public servant you are not.

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.

🍻 Subscribe to PN 🍻

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

Last week, Analilia Mejia won her election in a suburban northern New Jersey district, narrowing Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority to a measly three seats. To celebrate, and before Mejia was even seated, Johnson went ahead and lost two crucial and embarrassing votes in a 24-hour period, solidifying his standing as one of the weakest leaders in House history.

Worse for Johnson, the losses were the result not just of defections from the right, but from what passes these days as Republican moderates. The right-wingers are just auditioning for Newsmax and can be counted on to cave. Moderates, though, are actually afraid of losing their seats if they don’t distance themselves from the more toxic aspects of the Trump/Johnson agenda.

Up to now, those moderates have seemed more scared of primaries and the wrath of Trump than of their own Trump-skeptical voters. But as midterms loom, and the president’s approval stagnates at historic lows, the calculus appears to be changing. That bodes ill for Johnson’s legislative agenda — and for his party’s 2026 prospects.

Inmates take over the asylum

Johnson’s first failure came last Thursday.

Trump’s white nationalist administration has been trying for months to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants so it can terrorize and deport them. The courts have blocked the move, but the community remains in limbo as the case plays out.

At the end of March, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley — a progressive Democrat — brought a discharge petition to the House floor to try to restore TPS for Haitians. Discharge petitions allow a majority of House members to force a vote on legislation that House leadership refuses to bring to the floor.

In the past, discharge petitions have been a rare occurrence. But Johnson has a slim majority — and perhaps more importantly, he regularly tries to ram through Trump’s priorities despite the wishes of his own caucus. As a result, there have been exponentially more successful discharge petitions this Congress than ever before in history.

Every Democrat and four Republicans from purple districts — Florida’s Maria Elvira Salazar, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, New York’s Mike Lawler, and Nebraska’s Don Bacon — signed the the discharge petition, getting it to the needed 218 votes. Six more Republicans later joined Democrats to pass the bill last Thursday.

Even though it has passed the House, it’s unlikely to become law because of the 60-vote threshold in the GOP-controlled Senate. Even if it somehow overcame that, neither chamber is likely to be able to muster the two-thirds vote required to defeat a presidential veto.

Nonetheless, Pressley’s legislation is an important milestone. As reporter Jamie Dupree noted, it’s the “first real immigration rebuke to Trump from the 119th Congress.” More, it is one of the few examples in years of a straightforwardly progressive immigration bill that doesn’t include any sort of sop for conservatives. It is not a “grand bargain” like the right-leaning Biden immigration reform measure which failed years ago in the Senate. Instead, it’s an uncompromising rejection of Trump’s anti-immigrant xenophobia.

That rejection, again, garnered bipartisan support. In related news, Trump’s approval is hovering around 38 percent (and 20 points underwater), and the politics of immigration is shifting.

Immigration used to be one of Trump’s strengths, but polls show that most voters now disapprove of his handling of the issue. Tellingly, immigration is one of the matters most cited by 2024 Trump voters who today disapprove of his performance, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris.

Swing district Republicans, then, have strong incentives to turn against Trump on immigration. It’s not a coincidence either that multiple representatives from Ohio and Florida voted with Pressley — those are both states with large Haitian communities. The vote, in other words, was inspired by members turning against the bigoted agenda of the president and his House lickspiddle.

That’s the kind of coalition which could well hold on other votes. And it provides a blueprint for a better immigration politics — one that could create a bipartisan consensus to fight for humane policies, breaking free of 20 years of escalating cruelty to assuage the right.

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

“They have no clue what they’re doing”

Johnson’s second loss of the day last Thursday was in many respects even more striking.

Trump and Republican leaders wanted to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was on the cusp of expiration. Section 702 of FISA is particularly divisive; it allows warrantless collection and surveillance of foreigners. But because those foreigners sometimes communicate with people in the US, it has also been used to monitor US citizens.

Democrats have opposed the program, and so have Republicans with libertarian inclinations who worry about government overreach. In the run up to the vote, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie both said that, in light of a classified and secret interpretation of FISA, the constitution required them to vote no on reauthorization.

Republicans frantically struggled to get their caucus together before the bill expired, promising some cosmetic adjustments, including strengthening penalties for misusing surveillance powers. Just past midnight last Friday they called a vote, prompting Democratic Rep. Christian Menefee to post that he was “rushing back to the Capitol at midnight to vote because Republicans control Congress and have no clue what they’re doing.”

House Republicans were eager to prove Menefee right. In the wee hours, 12 of them defected on FISA, more than offsetting four right-leading Democrats who voted for it (Jared Golden, Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez), and the bill was defeated by 20 votes.

Johnson wasn’t done with losing though. After he lost the five-year reauthorization, he tried to push through an 18-month clean extension with no changes — and lost 20 Republicans on a rule to even consider it. With no other options, the speaker managed to get the House to push the deadline to April 30. That gives him a week and a half to see how many more times he can trip over his own feet and clonk his smug mug on his gavel.

As with the Pressley vote, the mix of members that defied Johnson on one or both votes is as consequential as the defiance itself. Unsurprisingly, many members of the House Freedom Caucus took the opportunity to performatively distance themselves from House leadership so they can claim to be the real conservatives. They dominated the second vote against the 18-month extension.

The first vote, though, included an eclectic mix of members telling Johnson to pound sand. Brian Fitzpatrick and Mike Turner, both of whom had voted to protect Haitian immigrants earlier in the day, decided they enjoyed defying leadership so much they’d do it again. New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew was elected to Congress in 2018 as a Democrat and switched parties in December 2019; his no vote is a rare instance of him bucking leadership. Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks is from a swing district in a state that looks bluer this cycle. Zach Nunn, from the same state, is in a safer district, and like Van Drew is usually a reliable GOP vote. Tennessee’s John Rose is currently running in his state’s primary for governor.

The immigration vote shows how Johnson is struggling in the face of a growing bipartisan coalition. The FISA vote, in contrast, finds him losing votes on left, right, and even in the center of his caucus, in what seems to be a remarkably non-factional expression of no confidence in his leadership.

Johnson has such a small majority he can’t really afford to alienate anybody — and he has, nonetheless, somehow succeeded in alienating everybody. Democrats, meanwhile, look unified on the kind of national security issue that used to cut much deeper into their coalition a mere four votes.

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

Tired of winning yet?

The Freedom Caucus lives to cave, and the vote to extend the FISA deadline for a couple weeks suggests that there is a desire to pass it in some form. It’s difficult to know what a compromise might look like, but it’s more likely than not that leadership cobbles something together.

But while Johnson might stumble over the finish line on a version of FISA extension, there is every reason to believe this late-night failure will not be his last.

Trump’s approval seems unlikely to improve, Democrats are going to keep winning special elections, and the midterms are only going to get closer. Johnson has not built a reputation for honesty or competence and has done little to show vulnerable House members in his caucus that he cares about protecting them or their seats. The coming months should be brutal for him — and will, hopefully, end with his majority and speakership destroyed in a humiliating and titanic blue wave.

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.

🍃🍃 Subscribe to PN 🍃🍃

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one👇

📊 Subscribe to PN 📊

As the 2018 elections approached, President Trump found the perfect issue to reverse the usual pattern in which the president’s party suffers a midterm blowout at the polls.

Acting on the advice of his pollsters and his own infallible political instincts, he warned voters that a “caravan” of murderous immigrants was headed through Central America to the United States, ready to lay waste to our country.

“Every time you see a Caravan,” he tweeted two weeks before the election, “think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!”

It didn’t work. The election was a rout: Democrats won back control of the House (gaining 41 seats), flipped seven governorships, and netted hundreds of seats in state legislatures.

With midterm campaigning now in full swing, it’s worth remembering what happened eight years ago.

Despite the general chaos emanating from the administration in Trump’s first term, relatively speaking, things in the country at the time were going okay. Inflation was low, the economy was creating jobs, he hadn’t started any new wars, abortion was still legal in much of the country, and almost no one had ever heard the word “coronavirus.”

Yet voters still went to the polls in extraordinary numbers — turnout was higher than in any midterm election in over a century — to give Donald Trump a hearty smack in the face.

The difference between 2018 and 2026 is that not only has Trump become an even more repellent personality, his actions have made everything worse. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what more Trump could do to enrage the electorate and ensure his party’s defeat in November.

It’s enough to make a vulnerable Republican member of Congress ask if Trump wants them to lose. As one GOP operative told Politico, “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” But if it were just “nonsense,” it wouldn’t be so bad. What Trump has done is much worse.

📊 Subscribe to PN 📊

A comprehensive agenda to alienate voters

The simplest explanation for why the president’s party almost always loses in the midterms is what political scientists call thermostatic politics: Like an old curmudgeon constantly complaining about the temperature, voters are perpetually unhappy with what they have and want to adjust the thermostat. Whoever gets elected president, the next time they get a chance to vote, they say “Ech, I don’t like this, let’s go in the other direction.”

That tendency acts as a midterm election baseline; how intent voters are on reversing direction depends on all kinds of factors, including both the president’s policies and conditions that are out of his control. But the first year-plus of Trump’s term has been extraordinary in all kinds of ways, all of which have been unpopular.

Some of these are more substantive and some less so, but the list of things Trump has done to alienate the electorate is remarkably long. Here are just some of the key factors pushing midterm voters away from the GOP:

• Depending on how you look at it, the economy is somewhere from mediocre to bad. Trump’s tariffs have been both an economic and political failure, job growth has been weak, consumer confidence is at an all-time low, and while inflation is not high by historical standards, people are still upset about price levels and repeatedly cite affordability as their highest concern. Meanwhile, Trump mocks the idea that anyone should care about affordability, and insists that the economy is doing fantastic. Which is a great way to make people angry.

• He started a pointless war with Iran that has proven to be the most unpopular war in history. If the war itself weren’t bad enough, it has pushed gas prices up by over a dollar a gallon, which will further raise the price of almost everything. Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would likely take months before prices at the pump settled back to where they were before it started — and for now there isn’t much reason to believe the war will end tomorrow.

• Trump’s immigration policy has been not only a human disaster but a political one; in addition to the harm it is doing to the economy, most voters — even a quarter of Trump voters — are unhappy with how brutal his crackdown has been.

• Instead of trying to unify his party, Trump is lashing out at his Republican critics, exacerbating intra-party tensions and discouraging many in his fragile coalition from going to the polls.

• Speaking of petty beefs, Trump has gone to war with Pope Leo, reacting to every implicit criticism the Pope makes with a new round of Truth Social screeds, drawing attention to the conflict and creating more media coverage. But hey, it’s not like Catholics are a significant portion of the electorate. (“You really don’t want to do some unforced errors like this,” said the head of Catholic Vote, a conservative organization that worked to elect Trump.) And when he’s not alienating Catholics, he’s posting AI pictures of himself as Jesus, something so blasphemous that even his most stalwart supporters expressed their displeasure.

• And speaking of AI, Trump has positioned himself as the country’s biggest booster of the data center buildout and the best buddy of the tech billionaire class, which serves to make voting against Republicans a good vehicle for the increasingly potent backlash against the tech industry.

• Millions of Americans have either lost their health coverage or seen their premiums skyrocket as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump continues to tout as a boon to all Americans.

• Trump has fashioned a presidency so corrupt and awash in self-dealing that it defies all description, something that plays right into Democrats’ time-for-a-change message.

• The administration has utterly sidelined Congress, treating it as barely worth thinking about; he has no real legislative agenda, and no evident desire to come up with one. When voters don’t see Congress doing anything at all, much less anything worthwhile, it makes them more likely to want to throw the bums out and try something new.

📊 Subscribe to PN 📊

How midterms work

Tip O’Neill’s old dictum that “all politics is local” has been turned on its head, and now all politics is national. Constituent service, differences between candidates, and matters of ideology have receded in voters’ calculations; while it doesn’t hurt an incumbent to be good at her job, there’s little she’ll be able to do to stop a wave election.

That’s exactly why Republicans are getting so nervous. Any president has only so many tools he can use to help his party do well in a midterm, beyond just having a successful presidency that makes people pleased with the status quo. He can dole out some federal goodies and campaign for candidates in tight races — but that only helps if he’s popular. And Donald Trump is not.

At the moment, Trump’s approval in poll averages is around 38 percent. At this time eight years ago, it hovered around 40 percent (by election day, when Republicans suffered that sweeping loss, it was about the same).

Trump’s approval on the economy, which was once his strength, is just as low, if not lower; in a new NBC News poll, Americans disapprove of his performance on inflation by 68-32 percent. According to G. Elliott Morris, there is not a single competitive House or Senate seat where his approval is in positive territory.

There is one factor that can limit GOP losses: Because of aggressive gerrymandering, there are fewer swing districts in the House than ever before. There are only 30 districts that Trump won by 10 points or less in 2024; if Democrats won every one of them this year it would represent a spectacular victory, but they would only turn half as many seats as Republicans did in 2010.

Nevertheless, control of the House — which Democrats are now almost certain to take — is vital, and the Senate is in play as well (though to win it, Democrats will have to take every contested race). In addition, there are 36 governor races, as well as hundreds for offices including attorney general, secretary of state, and others, plus thousands of state legislative contests. All of them will be affected by what happens at the national level, not only because people increasingly see even local races through a national lens, but because a voter who goes to the polls to give the finger to Donald Trump is more likely to vote Democratic all the way down the ballot.

Every Republican vote, on the other hand, represents a voter saying “I’m pretty happy with how things are going.” That anyone at all could say that right now is depressing, but Trump almost seems determined to make sure as few people as possible will say it in November. And there are still six and a half months of foreign misadventures, ill-conceived economic policies, and juvenile social media beefs between now and the election.

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.

📊 Subscribe to PN 📊

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

This special Saturday edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one👇

⛽ Subscribe to PN ⛽

As a weekend bonus for subscribers, we’re publishing a Q&A we conducted this week with Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for Gasbuddy, about the market dynamics of rising gas prices, what Trump doesn’t understand about the economics of energy, how high fuels costs can change human behavior, and much more.

This piece is a rarity for Public Notice in that it’s paywalled. The newsletter is almost entirely free for everyone five days a week (and often six) thanks to paid subscribers. So if you’re a free subscriber who has been enjoying the newsletter but haven’t yet signed up to support our work, please consider doing your part to help keep almost everything we publish available to everyone. (And please email me if you’d like a paid subscription but can’t afford one — I’m happy to comp them to people on tight budgets.)

Without further ado, here’s our interview with De Haan.

Read more

If you haven’t yet subscribed to The Downballot, which provides unparalleled coverage of the thousands of critical elections below the presidency, sign up below:

Subscribe to The Downballot

David and Aaron discuss:

• How Trump’s attacks on the Pope are alienating Catholic voters, a constituency that had otherwise been warming to him.

• Trump’s extremely rare climb-down after posting AI slop portraying him as Jesus healing the sick.

• Pete Hegseth’s hilarious debacle in citing a made-up Bible verse found only in “Pulp Fiction.”

And much more. Folks who are paid subscribers to either of our publications can participate in our Q&A!

Nir & Rupar goes live every Friday at 2 PM ET. The easiest way to participate is by downloading the free Substack app.

You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode.

If you missed Friday’s livestream, you can watch it by clicking above!

This special Saturday edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one👇

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have picked a fight with the pope, and things are getting really weird.

It isn’t just the spectacle of Vance lecturing Pope Leo XIV about theology, though that is indeed a car crash you can’t look away from. It’s also that the man who declared he is “the most pro-faith and pro-religious liberty president in American history” is furious to find out that Catholics, a group he counted on as being not only reliable conservative voters but one that was completely aligned with his worldview, do not agree with his every move.

Now, both men are caught in a trap of their own making.

They’ve spent years attempting to shove religion into the public sphere, but only their violent, Christian nationalist version. Thus far, that’s been a relatively successful project, even as it openly excludes any religion outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Dismissing the views of Muslims or Sikhs or Buddhists is easy for Trump and Vance and their followers. But insisting that the pope is out of line is different, and requires Trump and Vance to twist themselves into knots.

While Trump has chosen to attack the pope in his traditional manner — all bluster on Truth Social, vague accusations of being a communist, antifa, whatever — Vance has taken another approach: the pope should shut up, because he knows theology better.

Better than the pope, that is.

Christ-splaining to the [checks notes] pope

Perhaps because he’s made his conversion to Catholicism such a central part of his public persona, Vance seems genuinely confused to learn that Pope Leo XIV’s understanding of Catholic theology does not align with his own. He’s tried so hard to get the pope to just hang with him, so certain that his status as a co-religionist would woo the literal head of a church with roughly 1.4 billion members worldwide.

What Vance and Trump don’t seem to grasp is that the pope’s statements are, to be frank, relatively bog-standard expressions of Catholic theology regarding immigrants and war. It just doesn’t happen to be the Catholic teaching that Vance likes.

An important caveat here: you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Catholic Church writ large, which has a lengthy history of harm, from covering up the rampant sexual abuse of minors by priests to the horrifying treatment of indigenous children in Catholic residential schools to spending vast sums to make abortion illegal to its continuing opposition to same-sex marriage. And there’s no question that the Catholic Church has been responsible for its share of violence around the world, from the Crusades to forced conversions to the Inquisition.

Another caveat: quoting the church’s teachings is in no way intended to mean that the church lives up to those words. Rather, it’s that the teaching exists, and Vance, as a Catholic, is obliged to take them seriously and live according to their precepts.

The administration was at odds with the Catholic Church and the pope well before Trump’s war of choice in Iran started. The ceaseless violence of Trump’s immigration scheme, grounded in his America First ethos, runs headlong into Catholic social teaching about immigrants. And this isn’t some new thing whipped up by wussy progressive popes like Francis or Leo. It was back in 2000, under John Paul II, that the US bishops issued Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity. It is, well, not subtle:

“We reject the anti-immigrant stance that has become popular in different parts of our country, and the nativism, ethnocentricity, and racism that continue to reassert themselves in our communities.”

The church doesn’t call for open borders, saying that while it respects the right of nations to regulate borders and immigration, enforcement must be done with both justice and mercy. So, mass deportations of the most vulnerable is not really something the church is going to sign onto. In 2004, the US Catholic bishops made immigration reform a priority, committing to “creating a culture of welcome in which all migrants are treated with respect and dignity.”

There’s a direct line from those statements to ones by the US bishops during Trump’s second term. And here’s where we get a taste of JD’s theological beef. When the bishops condemned Trump’s executive orders on immigration, Vance literally told them to do better:

“I think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for, and I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they’ll do better.”

Vance went on to speculate that the real reason the bishops were pro-immigrant and anti-Trump was money:

“I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

JD Vance, making friends everywhere.

There’s no world where Vance, as an ostensibly devout Catholic, should be surprised by or unaware of the church’s stance on immigrants. There’s also no world where the US bishops or the pope are going to back off and just ignore longtime Catholic social teaching.

The fight over whether Trump’s war in Iran is just or good or blessed by Jesus or whatever kicked off when the pope posted that “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Vance reacted to this by deciding it was time to school the literal global head of his faith: “When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory.” Vance also tut-tutted that Pope Leo really needs to do his Bible homework before he opens his mouth:

“If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to be sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and that’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson also waded in to tell the pope what’s what, despite not being, well, Catholic: “It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the just war doctrine.”

Boom, gotcha Leo. What about that just war theory?

For any Catholic, even lapsed ones, Vance’s invocation of just war theory likely brought back memories of confirmation classes and the catechism. Because, as confused as JD seems to be about it, it’s all right there at 2308-2039:

All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, “as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.”

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

You’ll note that Trump’s war of choice doesn’t resemble this at all. You’ll also note that there is nothing in here about belief. Believing the cause is just doesn’t even enter into this analysis. Rather, war, which is inherently bad and should be avoided, can only be undertaken when certain conditions occur, or it is not just.

Things got so stupid that the US Bishops had to issue a statement explaining the just war theory and also reminding Vance who the pope is, exactly:

“When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ.”

The use of the term “Vicar of Christ” is deliberate here, invoking the Catechism’s explanation of the role of the pope:

“The pope’s power of primacy over all, both pastors and faithful, remains whole and intact. In virtue of his office, that is as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the Church.

While Vance has approached this as a theological dispute, one in which he is smugly certain he is much smarter than the pope, Trump has approached it with his usual bluster:

“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

We’ve now hit what can only be called the “stick to sports” phase of things, with Trump going on to say: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.”

Vance also weighed in, saying that “in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.” Only in Vance’s mind could discussions of whether it is a good thing to go on a violent xenophobic deportation tear or start a war out of nowhere not constitute “matters of morality.”

All of this is rather, well, curious coming from the administration that touts how it is the greatest champion of religious freedom we’ve ever had. The problem is that Trump’s view of religious freedom is equal parts narrow and terrible.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

MAGA theocracy

Not long after taking office, Trump bragged: “While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares. And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God.”

You’ll notice that statement doesn’t offer any protection to non-Christians, which is its own big problem, but for Christians, it was an explicit statement that the government has their back.

We’ve also got high-level official government accounts posting explicitly Christian messages. On Christmas, in the very midst of overseeing violent detentions and deportations nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security posted “Christ is Born” and “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.”

And it’s totally fine for Trump to invoke religion when it comes to war, as he did when he launched a strike on Nigeria: “May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

And in the latest development, it also apparently means having Trump’s religious liberty commission, stuffed with hand-picked conservatives, deciding there is no separation of church and state and that any notion to the contrary a lie that has been perpetrated by evil humanists.

Trump and the people surrounding him have long pushed for a theocracy, an explicitly Christian nation. These folks are completely fine and happy when religious leaders weigh in … as long as they agree with what Trump is doing.

But that’s not religion. It’s a cult. Trump is treated as infallible. He is treated as wise. He is treated as if he speaks on behalf of all Americans. He is treated, apparently, as if he is just like Jesus or perhaps that he is actually Jesus.

No wonder he’s mad that the pope won’t sign on.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of Nir & Rupar and then with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

🧠 Subscribe to PN 🧠

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

📉 Subscribe to PN 📉

The irony is profound: Donald Trump, a man who craves adulation and perhaps deification, is the least-liked American president ever.

Trump’s approval ratings have reached historic lows. He’s polling lower than he did at the same point in his first term, and he suffers net-negative approval ratings in all but nine states. Americans overwhelmingly reject him, his policies, and his job performance as president. In fact, if the third of Americans who comprise his bedrock base of red-hatted MAGAs are held aside, the rest of the nation is now nearly unified in deeming Trump’s second term a failure, if not a disaster.

No matter the pollster or topic, no matter how questions are phrased nor the subgroup of Americans tracked, Trump and his policies are disfavored, even despised. His numbers were bad before he started his reckless Iran war and they have fallen further since. And most recent approval ratings came before Trump began circulating images that likened him to Jesus. (More on that at the end.)

Per pollster G. Elliott Morris, comparing Trump to other recent presidents 15 months into their terms confirms how badly the public rates him. At -21.6 net negative approval, Trump lags behind Joe Biden (-10.8), Barack Obama (+2.3), and a post-9/11 George W. Bush (+57.0) at comparable points of their terms. In fact, Trump already lags more than 8 points behind the 15-month mark of his own first term (-13.3).

Even if his current term is treated as a second term — when presidents tend to experience declining approval — the comparisons are still grim.

At the end of the first year of their second terms, only the Watergate-addled Nixon had a lower net approval number, -29.6, than the -16.2 net disapproval Trump had at the end of his fifth combined year in office. And that low rating came three months ago, before the ICE/CBP shootings in Minneapolis and the Iran war eroded Trump’s support by another five points and counting.

Strongly disapproved

Let’s start with Trump’s overall approval ratings.

A couple weeks ago, UMass-Amherst delivered Trump his worst approval/disapproval splits to date, with 62 percent disapproving his performance and just 33 percent approving, a net -29 approval rate.

Reuters/IPSOS has Trump doing slightly better at net -26, with 62 percent of Americans disapproving to just 36 percent approving, and a new CBS/YouGov poll this week came in at -22 net, 61 percent to 39 percent. The Economist’s latest results show a record low net negative approval of -20 for their survey. Even Napolitan News Service’s conservative-tilted pollster RMG Research pegs Trump at 58 percent to 40 percent, or -18 net disapproval. Overall, per Silver Bulletin’s weighted composite model, Trump is net -16, 56 percent to 40 percent.

More remarkable is that Nate Silver’s poll-of-polls shows that, of those 57%, fully 47% of Americans strongly disapprove.

In its February poll, NPR/Marist was the first to report an absolute majority of 51 percent strongly disapproving Trump’s performance. Even Scott Rasmussen’s RMG poll, regarded as conservative-leaning, found Trump’s strong disapproval rate at 46 percent.

Bottom line? Trump has lost the country. And half of Americans are beyond having soured on him — they’re sick of him.

Key demos and issues

Trump’s bottom-of-the-barrel support is shrinking among almost every demographic.

Pundits marveled at Trump’s ability in 2024 to cobble together a winning electoral coalition that eluded previous Republican presidential nominees — adding younger and non-white voters to his core strength among white working-class folks.

Now, he’s bleeding support among all three groups.

Among voters aged 18-34, he’s plunged from a mere -15 approval split the month after he took office in February 2025 to -60 now. After surveying data from seven polls, analyst Henry Olsen found that Trump’s support among Hispanic voters has returned to levels comparable to 2020, when Joe Biden carried the demographic by a comfortable 33-point margin, a huge swing relative to Trump’s small, 5-point margin of defeat among Hispanics in 2024.

Even the white working-class voters whom pundits declared dead to Democrats forever, have turned against Trump: The CNN/SSRS, Fox News, and NPR/Marist polls, all of which reported double-digit positive favorability ratings for him shortly after taking office in 2025, now show Trump slightly underwater with this key demographic subgroup. According to CNN’s Harry Enten, who computed a then-and-now composite rating of Trump’s approval with WWC voters, Trump has fallen 34 points, from +32 to -2, between February 2025 and today.

As for policy, Trump is net negative on almost every issue except crime and the border RMG shows Trump net negative on issues that won him the 2024 election, including inflation (-24), the economy (-21), and even immigration (-7). But RMG is a Trump-favorable outlier. The latest UMass poll has Trump faring far worse on similar issues: -25 on immigration, -36 on tariffs, -31 on jobs, and a whopping -47 on inflation. Fox News’ late March poll confirmed that “80 percent of respondents said they were concerned about gas prices, and 86 percent concerned about inflation and high prices.”

ICE and Iran

Trump’s handling of immigration and Iran obliterated almost all of his remaining non-MAGA support.

Before Iran, Trump began leaking support from citizens furious about radical use of masked DHS goons to terrorize citizens and non-citizens alike. The images and stories from Minneapolis this winter caused Americans to reevaluate their support for his immigration policies. By the first week of February, 65 percent of all Americans — including 71 percent of independents and even 27 percent of Republicans — told NPR that ICE’s enforcement actions had “gone too far.”

And then came the Iran war.

No other issue has so turned Americans, including many diehard Trumpers, against him. From social media influencers like Breck “Patriotic Blonde” Worsham to veteran conservative voices like “American Conservative” magazine’s Scott McConnell, notable Trump supporters have publicly rebuked him. Some admit they regret or are ashamed to have voted for him in the past three elections.

Initially low support for Trump’s Iran war has drifted still lower. Pew reports Trump’s Iran disapproval at 61 percent, with 44 percent strongly disapproving. CNN shows Trump’s Iran approval at just 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving, including 54 percent strongly opposed. The Fox News poll taken at the end of March showed Trump’s net Iran rating at -18, four points worse than the net -14 margin in Fox’s poll taken at the start of the war.

And the latest CBS/YouGov poll makes clear that Americans blame the Trump Administration specifically for the mess in Iran. Roughly three-fifths of Americans said the administration has “not clearly explained its goals” for the war (66 percent), has been changing “what they claim those goals are” (64 percent), and “does not have a clear plan” for what they’re doing in Iran (62 percent).

Americans also worry about endangering the lives of their fellow countrymen, whether in uniform or not. Overall, NPR reports that 86 percent of Americans are concerned American lives will be at risk, and three-quarters of citizens oppose sending troops into Iran. According to CNN, among non-MAGA Republicans, 56 percent oppose and 20 percent favor sending troops to Iran. Heck, even MAGA Republicans by a 7-point margin, 32 percent to 25 percent, object to putting boots on the ground.

More broadly, Trump’s incessant threats and aggressive actions against Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Canada, and now Iran have convinced three-fifths of Americans that he’s a reckless steward of US foreign and military affairs. In fact, “33 percent now say they approve of his handling of the role of commander in chief. That’s down eight points from a January poll taken in the immediate aftermath of US military action in Venezuela and five points below his previous presidential low,” writes CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy. “About six in 10 say he has gone too far in trying to expand America’s power over other countries, little changed since January.”

In short, trust in Trump to lead our nation and our troops has cratered.

Dragging down the GOP

Trump’s problems are now a political-electoral albatross hanging around the Republican Party’s neck.

Every three months, Gallup asks Americans if they “lean more” toward either the Democratic or Republican parties. Typically, about 10 percent of Americans say neither, with the other 90 percent split evenly between the two major parties. Parties tend to peak following a presidential win: Democrats led Republicans by nine points, 49-40, in the fourth quarter of 2020 after Joe Biden’s win, and Republicans led Democrats by four points, 47-43, in the last poll of 2024 following Trump’s victory.

The latest Gallup recent result, for the first quarter of 2026? It has the Democrats leading by 10 points, 49 to 39 percent.

With the midterms seven months away, Trump is clearly a liability for Republicans facing reelection. The recent CNN/SRSS poll showed a 10-point enthusiasm advantage for the Democrats: 84 percent of Democrats are enthusiastic to vote, just 74 percent of Republicans. Although they may be so disgruntled they stay home this November, so-called “double-haters” — Americans who dislike both parties — favor the Democrats by a whopping 31 points, 55 percent to 24 percent.

📉 Subscribe to PN 📉

Nowhere to go but down

Perhaps Trump has hit rock bottom, with nowhere to go but up. But history suggests otherwise.

Barring a major crisis to which Trump responds with dramatic leadership — not likely, given his poor response to covid and present misadventure in Iran — his public support at best will stabilize at his current, dismal levels. But his numbers may fall further, for two reasons.

First, Trump is saddled with the same economic problems he used to skewer Biden and then beat Harris in 2024. Trump won a second term in large part because incumbent parties in 2023 and 2024 across the free world — left, right, and center — were electoral casualties of persistent, post-covid inflation. Trump blamed Biden-Harris for high gas and grocery prices, then harvested votes from discontented Americans.

But Trump voters failed to notice that his two signature promises — removing the immigrant labor supply that keeps domestic prices low, and imposing tariffs that raise import prices — are inherently inflationary. And now crude oil prices are surging amid uncertainty about Trump’s Iran war and control of the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Days before he attacked Iran, Trump bragged during his State of the Union address about low gas prices. He wanted the credit, but now he owns all the blame for the surge in prices since. Because the trucking firms that deliver goods to grocery stores and retailers also pay more for gas, those costs get passed along to consumers. On cue, the OECD last week revised its estimate for the 2026 US inflation rate upward 1.2 points, from 3.0 percent to 4.2 percent.

“Bidenflation” is now “Trumpflation.”

The other reason Trump is unlikely to rebound is presidential fatigue, the phenomenon wherein voters tire of second-term presidents.

The fact that Trump’s second term is non-consecutive only exacerbates that issue: Although he’s technically only starting his sixth combined year in office, it feels like he’s been around longer because, well, he has been. Trump did not slink into retirement after leading the January 6 attack on the US Capitol: He has remained the central figure of American politics for a decade, including through Biden’s intervening four years.

In short, Americans are sick and tired of Trump. And with almost three years left in his second term, he is unlikely to gain strength in the months and years ahead — a reality that may make him more desperate and dangerous than ever.

As for the Jesus imagery he posted on Truth Social and then deleted? Well, the new CBS/YouGov poll asked Americans about that, too. Fully 47 percent strongly dislike it, and another 12 percent somewhat dislike it. At this point, even Jesus would have a hard time resurrecting Trump’s public approval.

Tom Schaller is professor of political science at UMBC, and author of five books, including New York Times bestseller White Rural Rage.

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.

📉 Subscribe to PN 📉

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

📖 Subscribe to PN 📖

Another day, another Trump trollsuit bites the dust.

This time it was his $10 billion defamation claim against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for an article describing a “bawdy” drawing he penned — allegedly! — for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

Just one day after the story was published, Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito filed suit in Florida alleging “overwhelming financial and reputational damages to President Trump, expected to be in the billions of dollars” and claiming that reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.” Two months later, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the birthday book compiled by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, with an image that matched the reporters’ description exactly.

On Monday, a federal judge in Miami finally dismissed the case for failure to satisfy even the most basic requirements of federal pleading.

“The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard,” wrote Judge Darrin Gayles. “Quite the opposite.”

This is not an isolated outcome. The world’s most famous vexatious litigant regularly spams courts demanding an eleven-figure payout. In addition to the Journal, he’s currently suing the New York Times, the BBC, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, the IRS, Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon and Schuster, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and (through his media company) the Washington Post. Previous targets include Hillary Clinton, CNN, ABC, the New York Times (again), the Washington Post (also again), CBS, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and E. Jean Carroll.

The complaints are various flavors of garbage. They lob accusations instead of facts, demand billions without identifying a single dollar of actual loss, and make their most serious allegations “upon information and belief” — the legal equivalent of “trust me, bro.” No court or jury has ever blessed these claims. In fact, Trump has been sanctioned multiple times for filing patently ridiculous lawsuits.

In 2023, a federal judge fined Trump nearly $1 million for a frivolous RICO suit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and half the Democrats in DC. Judge Donald Middlebrooks described the Trump litigation playbook: “Provocative and boastful rhetoric; a political narrative carried over from rallies; attacks on political opponents and the news media; disregard for legal principles and precedent; and fundraising and payments to lawyers from political action committees.”

With Trump back in the White House, the focus appears to be more on leveraging the power of the presidency to extort settlements rather than rallying the base. But he’s still tapping donor cash to fund his litigation. Trump’s Save America leadership PAC paid Brito PLLC nearly $300,000 in 2025 alone, logged as “legal consulting.” Brito’s firm also picked up $1 million in fees from the settlement with ABC.

This makes filing lawsuits effectively costless for Trump, at least initially. Not so for his enemies, who are forced to spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers, schlep down to Florida, and endure months of stress and uncertainty. And that is the entire point of this exercise.

Mugging Murdoch

Trump’s complaint against the Journal was classic Brito: indignant howls of grievous injury coupled with an exorbitant demand for cash, bolstered by the most cursory shrug in the direction of facts or cognizable legal argument.

To prove defamation, a plaintiff must show that the statement was: (1) published, (2) false, (3) harmful, and (4) made with negligence as to the veracity of the claim. Public figures have an additional burden to demonstrate “actual malice,” establishing that the defendant either knew the statement was false or spoke with reckless disregard for the truth. And federal pleadings must allege specific facts to support their legal claims.

Trump simply declared without elaborating that “Defendants possessed information and had access to information that showed their statements were false,” adding that “the statements were published by Defendants with actual malice, oppression and fraud in that they were aware at the time of the falsity of the publication and thus, made said publications in bad faith, out of disdain and ill-will directed towards Plaintiff without any regard for the truth.”

That’s both conclusory and sloppy as hell, conflating colloquial malice — you hate me — with actual malice under the law. Trump alleged zero lost income as a result of the story to substantiate his gargantuan damage demand.

The complaint was dismissed, albeit without prejudice, giving Trump until April 27 to take another swing at it. The Journal is out hundreds of thousands of legal fees, and, assuming Brito tries again, it’s only halfway through this dog of a case. And that’s front of a neutral jurist! When Trump lands one of his own appointees, he can really drag out proceedings to bleed his enemies.

Meet Judge Altman

If Judge Gayles, an Obama appointee, represents the ceiling for expeditiously disposing of a bad Trump lawsuit, Trump’s appointee Roy Altman represents something closer to the floor.

Judge Altman is presiding over Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC, as well as the Trump Organization’s suit against Capital One over the closure of hundreds of bank accounts in 2021.

The BBC case involves an inappropriately edited documentary which spliced together sections of Trump’s January 6 speech on the Ellipse to imply that he exhorted his supporters to commit violence. The complaint suffers the same defects as all the others, raging inchoately about “a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump” and alleging “specific, extensive economic harms resulted from these defamatory statements,” without actually pointing to a single dollar lost.

The case fails at the first hurdle, since BBC is a UK company that does not regularly conduct business in Florida. It also fails at the second hurdle, since the documentary in question never aired in the United States. If nobody in Florida saw the documentary, there’s nothing to litigate in a Florida court.

Brito blithely insists that Floridians with VPNs “must” have pirated BBC iPlayer and watched it anyway, therefore publication in Florida should be assumed. As evidence, the complaint cites a surge in Florida VPN usage in early 2025. Brito neglects to mention that said surge coincided with an age-verification law for adult websites that took effect that January 2025, implying instead that Floridians were simply horny for BBC documentaries.

The BBC requested to delay discovery until after its motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction was decided. Judge Altman refused, and even extended discovery into June, allowing Brito to run up BBC’s legal fees for this doomed endeavor.

The Capital One case follows the same pattern. The bank closed hundreds of Trump-affiliated accounts in March 2021, seven weeks after he attempted to overthrow the government. Trump filed suit nearly four years later, alleging the closures were politically motivated, and thus the banks’ marketing materials claiming that it did not discriminate represented a form of consumer fraud. The complaint offers zero specific facts in support of this theory, just a conclusory assertion “upon information and belief” that Capital One was acting on “woke beliefs.”

Judge Altman granted Capital One’s motion to dismiss, which would normally end the matter. Instead the judge permitted 90 days of pre-complaint discovery, telling Brito from the bench that he’d done “just enough” to allege political animus, but needed to “beef up” the allegations before refiling. Granting discovery before a viable complaint exists is frankly bizarre, and will only prolong a case which cannot possibly succeed.

But it will force Capital One to keep the meter running with its lawyers, and that’s a win for Trump. In fact, it’s the only win for Trump, who will never take any of these cases to trial.

📖 Subscribe to PN 📖

Bleeding ‘em

In 2023, Brito filed suit against Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, alleging breach of contract and attorney-client privilege. Four days before Trump was scheduled to be deposed, he simply dropped the case without explanation.

Just this week, Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, quietly withdrew its defamation suit against The Guardian. The paper reported in 2023 that federal prosecutors were examining $8 million in payments TMTG received from Caribbean-routed entities tied to a Putin ally. A spokesperson vows that the case would be refiled, which is exactly what the Trump PR goons said when they walked away from the Cohen suit.

In reality, Trump stays in these cases for exactly as long as he can annoy his adversaries on the cheap. But a plaintiff claiming $10 billion in reputational and economic damages from a story about an Epstein birthday card has to actually produce evidence of $10 billion in damages. He has to sit for depositions and explain under oath how the story cost him money. He has to open his financial records to scrutiny. For a man whose entire brand is built on the illusion of incomprehensible wealth, that is an existential threat. And so, the minute he has to do more than bleed his enemies, Trump executes the inevitable TACO trade.

These trollsuits aren’t designed to win. They’re designed to extort the targets into a settlement, or at the very least subject them to months of expensive, unpleasant litigation that will make them think twice before they publish that story, or refuse to do business with him. And every month of litigation is another month of legal bills for the defendant, another month of uncertainty, another line item that any reporter or editor or banker has to weigh before doing something Trump doesn’t like. The Journal has been litigating for nine months and the case was just dismissed without prejudice. The BBC is heading into its second summer of proceedings over a documentary that was never even broadcast here. Capital One is mired in discovery before there is even a viable complaint to answer.

Trump will never win these cases, and he doesn’t care. They’re a tool to bludgeon his enemies and chill free speech, and they’re supercharged now that he’s back in the White House.

“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he gloated in 2009 after losing a defamation case against the journalist Tim O’Brien. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

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.

📖 Subscribe to PN 📖

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

💥 Subscribe to PN 💥

Though it’s far from over, Donald Trump’s illegal war of aggression in Iran has dead-ended in disaster and failure.

Ceasefire negotiations could at least theoretically resume and the situation remains chaotic. But right now, it looks like the United States, in a war of choice with a regional power, has suffered arguably its most thorough and unambiguous strategic rebuke of the postwar era.

Losing a war — like waging one in the first place — can have ugly long-term consequences for the country as a whole. It can also, at least sometimes, lead to a healthy reassessment of foreign policy priorities and methods. That reassessment, though, depends in part on acknowledging the failure. A healthy democracy should be able to honestly assess past actions, hold bad actors accountable, and more forward to better solutions.

But the United States is not, unfortunately, a healthy democracy. The ability of the free press, much less regime propagandists, to grapple with the scale of the loss and its implications is very much in doubt. It’s worth, therefore, laying out the nature of the defeat, who’s unwilling to describe it as such, and why.

Incoherent flailing

There is broad agreement that the war has been very costly. Mark Cancian, retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR last week that US had spent about $28 billion during the first 40 days of the war. That’s about as much as it would have cost to extend ACA subsidies through 2026.

There is a heavy loss in lives as well as dollars. US human rights group HRANA estimates that more than 3,500 people have been killed in Iran so far, including more than 1,600 civilians and at least 240 children. Thousands more have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon and by Iranian attacks on other countries. Thirteen US service members have been killed in action; 365 have been wounded.

Trump and his cronies claimed the cost in life, equipment, and outlays would buy the US … well, it was never exactly clear what. Trump has suggested he launched his (again, illegal) war in order to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program and/or to force regime change and/or (in passing) as revenge for Iran interfering in US elections (which, to be clear, it never did). Reporting by the New York Times indicates that in internal deliberations, Trump toyed with various rationales — including simply killing Iran’s leader. He went ahead because he wanted to hurt Iran and because, as he told anti-war far right pundit Tucker Carlson, “It’s going to be OK …because it always is.”

Of course, it has not in fact been okay. The US and Israel did assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but his son took his place, and the regime was never in serious danger of collapsing. Rather than surrendering, Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, mining the waters and attacking merchant shipping. Per the New York Times, Trump, his advisors, and Israel had all dismissed the possibility that Iran could retaliate by closing the strait — a stunningly foolish miscalculation.

The strait is responsible for a quarter of global oil shipping; with it shut down, oil prices jumped to over $100 a barrel, fueling a dramatic inflation spike in the US. The war was already extremely unpopular, in part because Trump made little effort to sell it to the American people. Now his approval has plunged to new depths, hitting mid 30s in some polls. Support for the war among the half of Republicans who do not identify as MAGA fell 48 points in a month.

In response, Trump thrashed around, crawling to the allies he’d alienated to help him, and threatening genocidal war crimes and mass murder of civilians. Ultimately, though, he had no real ability to open the strait without a massive escalation for which he had no domestic support. So he begged Iran for a ceasefire.

Trump has variously said he has no plan to open the strait, suggesting instead that European and Asian countries should open it themselves, or they should buy more oil from the US, or that “the strait will open up naturally.” Meanwhile, Iran — which has suddenly discovered just how much leverage it has over the waterway — has started imposing a toll of about $2 million per tanker. If traffic resumes, the country could make some $100 billion a year, two times its annual budget and more than 25 percent of its GDP.

Oh, and Trump also said he no longer cares about whether Iran has enriched uranium which could be used in nuclear weapons asserting — with no evidence — that the country’s nuclear ambitions have been thwarted.

💥 Subscribe to PN 💥

A strategic debacle

Negotiations began last weekend, and have already broken down. Trump responded by saying the US would itself blockade the strait, which would prevent Iran from selling its own oil. Trump avoided doing that previously because it will put even more pressure on gas prices and on the world economy; he’s now essentially ramping up the pressure on himself that caused him to seek the ceasefire in the first place.

Trump’s confused strategy, and his lack of options, underline US weakness. This is why experts have already said that the US has suffered a stunning strategic defeat — a failure to attain objectives and the granting of long-term advantages to an opponent.

Political scientist Dan Drezner points out that Trump’s major goals — regime change, destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, destruction of its ability to arm terrorist proxies — have failed. That means “Trump has lost this war. The only question now is how bigly he loses it.”

That is not a controversial opinion. Authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder pointed to the removal of sanctions on Russian oil as a way to lower gas prices and concluded, “we fought and lost a war in Iran so that both the Iranians and the Russians could make far more money from oil.” Obama national security official Ben Rhodes said that American “standing in the world” had been “obliterated,” noting that US embassies and bases in the Middle East were damaged and munitions “badly depleted.” Political scientist Elizabeth Saunders added succinctly that “we are worse off than before the war.”

Even neocon hack Bret Stephens admitted that if Iran retains control of the strait, “Tehran would see it as victory and vindication. Of course Stephens believes this means that we should continue the war indefinitely, even if Trump, and for that matter Bret Stephens, have no idea how to win it.

💥 Subscribe to PN 💥

Why can’t we say we lost?

While the expert consensus is clear, mainstream news sites have been shy of acknowledging the defeat in such an unambiguous way.

Politifact, for example, confined itself to saying that, contra Trump officials, the US did not achieve “total victory.” The Hill similarly temporized, arguing that Iran could simply win by virtue of not losing. The Guardian argued that both the US and Iran were losers, without mentioning the massive bonanza the Iranian regime seems poised to reap in tolls. The Bezos-ified Washington Post insisted, inevitably, that the US could still win.

Democrats have been very critical of Trump’s war, of escalating gas prices, and of his genocidal threats. But they have mostly avoided characterizing the war as a loss for the US or a win for Iran. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, called the war “madness,” but not a defeat or a loss. Vermont senator and left-wing leader Bernie Sanders has emphasized similar themes. Democrats argue that Trump has damaged US standing and is unfit for the presidency, but Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has been somewhat of an outlier in making a case that “we are losing this war.”

There are probably a range of reasons for the reticence. Mainstream media prefers to cite sources on both sides of an issue rather than take a stand itself. Right now the US is saying it won and Iran is saying it won, and for those whose chief moral touchstone is neutrality, it seems safer to split the difference. Democrats, for their part, may worry that saying “we lost” would make them seem unpatriotic — or, even worse, that they could push Trump to prove that we haven’t lost by extending the conflict.

To some extent, Democrats don’t really need to come down hard on the message that this is a defeat. The war is, again, brutally unpopular already. And as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, voters don’t pay attention to foreign policy, and most are not all that aware of the nuances of the debate about the war. But they will undoubtedly notice the effects in higher prices and recession if Iran retains control of the strait and continues to either block shipping or demand tolls.

When you lose a war, things get worse, and voters blame the president when things get worse. At some point, though, the US will need to reckon with this loss as a loss if it wants to prevent such debacles in the future.

You would think that after Vietnam and Iraq, America would have recognized the danger of giving the president a blank check for foreign adventurism. But somehow the bipartisan appeal of more money for more guns and for equating “security” with “belligerence” never seems to get old. As recently as last October, with Trump in power and his approval already sinking, 48 percent of Americans believed the GOP was the party that could best protect the US, compared to only 41 percent who preferred Democrats on national security.

Trump’s Iran mis-excursion could be a chance to argue not just that the US needs to avoid intervention and regime change, but that allowing a president to declare war unilaterally, without congressional oversight or involvement, puts America in danger and makes us less secure and less safe.

We just lost a war. If Trump and the GOP have their way, we will lose more.

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.

💥 Subscribe to PN 💥

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️

🤝 Subscribe to PN 🤝

“The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” President Trump huffed on Truth Social on Friday. “The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!”

It was vintage Trump: Pathetic bluster, a pointless threat, a misunderstanding of the situation, and an inability to grasp what those on the other side might be thinking.

There may eventually be an agreement to interrupt or even end the Iran war, mostly because the president is so desperate to extricate himself from the conflict he blundered into. But it won’t be because Trump is such a terrific dealmaker. In fact, the man who made his reputation on “The Art of the Deal” remains the world’s worst negotiator, and we’re seeing the proof right now.

While he wasn’t present at the brief negotiation in Pakistan between Iranian and American officials (he went to a UFC fight instead), everything about it had Trump’s fingerprints.

The US was represented by charmless Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose talents for anything other than influence-peddling on a massive scale remain imperceptible. They apparently arrived insisting that since we are big and strong and the war has been a spectacular American success, Iran should make all the concessions. And when Iran failed to do so after a single day, Vance et al packed up and went home.

Trump still seems to believe that negotiations he has as president are basically the same as strong-arming a small business into giving him a better deal on some new curtains for one of his hotels. Preparation, understanding, and patience are for the weak; all he needs is to show is that he’s the dominant one, and his opponent will capitulate. Even when the strategy fails, he learns nothing.

Trump has always been a terrible negotiator

In his business career, Trump had a drive and ambition that allowed him to continue striving despite repeated defeats and bankruptcies. But he never seemed to take any lessons from his failures, and built up a belief that he had an innate talent for dealmaking that eluded ordinary mortals.

He always assumed that anyone with experience or substantive knowledge was actually an idiot. In 1984, the 38-year-old Trump, whose greatest accomplishments were a few developments and frequent appearances in the New York tabloid gossip pages, told the Washington Post that he should be the one to negotiate an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he claimed.

A few years later, he reportedly met diplomat Richard Burt, who would lead intricate negotiations for the START treaty, at a wedding and told him the key to achieving a complex nuclear deal with the Soviets.

“He said that he would initially be the gracious host and ask the Soviet delegation to get comfortable around the table,” Robin Wright reported in the New Yorker. “Then, Trump told Burt, he would stand up, shout ‘Fuck you!,’ and immediately walk out of the room.”

Why the Reagan administration failed to put him in charge of the negotiating team is a mystery.

It was around the same time that he published “The Art of the Deal,” the key artifact in the creation of his dealmaker myth.

“Deals are my art form,” his ghostwriter wrote in the book’s opening. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

But readers looking for insights and practical tips on negotiating were disappointed; the book is mostly a collection of anecdotes about fights with politicians and other developers. The advice he does offer is either real estate-specific (“Enhance your location”) or banal generalizations presented as profound truths.

“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward,” he says. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”

In dealing with Iran, Trump might have heeded this bit of wisdom from the book: “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.” Like, for instance, the unconstrained flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

When Trump got to the White House, his supporters expected a flurry of dealmaking the likes of which Washington had never seen. But it never materialized. In fact, unlike most of his predecessors, in five-plus years in office Trump has never negotiated a complicated piece of legislation. In his first term, he signed just one major law — a tax cut — and did the same in his second term. By all accounts he was barely involved in the crafting of those bills, and it’s no great feat to pass a tax cut in a Congress controlled by Republicans in any case.

Trump had no patience or energy for the difficult negotiations involved in legislating — understanding the incentives, desires and fears of hundreds of members; balancing the power of multiple factions in both parties; grasping the substantive policy issues at play. Whenever he tried, he would quickly get bored or frustrated, then retreat and forget about the whole thing.

In one emblematic moment early on, he briefly tried and failed to keep his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, and was flummoxed by the process.

“Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated,” he said in wonder, when in fact everybody knew it except him. Rather than trying to master the complexities, he spent years promising a “terrific” healthcare plan (which was always “two weeks” away) and never delivered — precisely because getting it passed would have involved negotiations he was utterly incapable of managing.

His foreign policy record was equally strewn with failure. The list of deals he promised in his first term that never materialized included one to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, a deal to have Mexico pay for his border wall, and, of course, a new nuclear deal with Iran.

🤝 Subscribe to PN 🤝

The Iran war is a product of incompetence

This war is a direct result of Trump’s failure as a dealmaker.

He came into office denouncing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program negotiated by multiple countries including the United States. But what seldom gets mentioned is not just that he wanted to abandon it, but that he promised that with his superhuman negotiating skills, he’d get a better deal in short order.

The JCPOA took over a year to negotiate, involving complex and sensitive issues around uranium enrichment, monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, sanctions relief, the release of Iranian funds frozen in American banks, and its access to the international financial system.

While Trump obviously hated it because it was negotiated under Barack Obama, his chief stated complaint was that it didn’t give the US everything it wanted while giving nothing to Iran. When he abandoned the deal in 2018 (against the advice of his national security team, which at the time included multiple sane officials whom he’d eventually fire for insufficient sycophancy), he insisted that the Iranians would come crawling back and give in to his every demand.

“They are going to want to make a new and lasting deal,” he said. Which, of course, didn’t happen.

That is precisely the position the US is taking in the current negotiations: The only acceptable resolution is that Iran makes all the concessions and the US makes none. As Vance said upon his departure from Pakistan, “They have chosen not to accept our terms.” Trump reiterated that on Sunday:

But who has the “cards” here? Trump seems to think the only card that matters is being the bigger and stronger country. But Iran, it turned out, had some extraordinarily potent cards to play, especially the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran plunged the entire world into an energy crisis, one that is hitting the US in the form of ballooning gas prices and spiking inflation. And for all the devastating violence Trump has inflicted on Iran, the regime is intact and its resolve seems undiminished.

And now, Trump is threatening his own blockade of the Strait, which might deprive Iran of the tolls it wants to collect and its ability to move its own oil, but will only extend the energy crisis. It’s tantamount to saying “Not only will I punch you in the face, I’ll punch myself too!”

All of Trump’s weaknesses as a negotiator are now on display: His refusal to comprehend the substance, his childish understanding of the nature of power, his inability to grasp the perspective of his opponents, and his belief that anything can be accomplished with sufficient threats and violence.

You’d have to be the world’s worst negotiator to think his approach will work. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Donald Trump is.

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.

🤝 Subscribe to PN 🤝

Thanks for reading, and for your support.

You can subscribe to Dan’s Substack right here:

Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area

The three discuss:

• How liberal Judge Chris Taylor ran up the score with an astounding 20-point victory in the marquee race for the state Supreme Court.

• How Democrats made major inroads into the once-impregnable GOP bastion of Waukesha County.

• What the results mean for Democrats’ chances of flipping the state legislature this November.

And much more. Folks who are paid subscribers to either of our publications can participate in our Q&A!

Nir & Rupar goes live every Friday at 2 PM ET. The easiest way to participate is by downloading the free Substack app.

You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode.

If you missed Friday’s livestream, you can watch it by clicking above!