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“Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter,” writes Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, in his recent piece headlined, “At Long Last, Americans Are Starting to See the Truth About the GOP.”

“For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies,” Tomasky adds. “Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it.”

One could quibble about the legacy of George H.W. Bush, but it’s hard to dispute that the last two Republican presidents easily rank among the worst in American history. Their successors have each been handed a flaming bag of economic and cultural ruin and did commendable jobs putting out the fire, only to hand the reins to the man who will unequivocally go down as our worst president of all time (so far!), Donald J. Trump — whose second term is shaping up to be even more disastrous than the one that ended with mass death amid a pandemic he badly mismanaged.

Tomasky argues Democrats are missing a golden opportunity by not campaigning more aggressively on the obvious truth that from the presidency on down, the Republican Party has a cataclysmic record when it has power, especially in the 21st century. But messaging aside, he says he’s heartened by recent polling showing voters may finally be seeing the light.

“Jobs are just one factor. The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater,” Tomasky told Public Notice. “The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.”

“Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president,” he added.

We connected with Tomasky to talk about why voters have harbored false illusions about Republicans for so long, how the wreckage of Trump 2.0 is causing voters to second guess them, the importance of Democrats becoming fluent with the economic data that shows how much more effective their policies are, and much more.

A full transcript of Tomasky’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

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Thor Benson

You point out that for the last few decades, voters have thought of Republicans as good stewards of the economy despite mountains of data showing exactly the opposite. What explains the disconnect?

Michael Tomasky

That perception exists for three reasons. The first is Republicans are just the party of business. They have been since the Industrial Revolution. Democrats were the party of labor. That’s pretty hardwired into people’s brains, and they see that most Wall Streeters and corporate honchos are Republicans and just take their cues from that.

The second reason is that Republicans talk a good game. They and their media allies say they’re pro-business and committed to free markets and all that stuff, and that sounds good to people.

The third reason, I think, is that Democrats do a terrible job of touting the kind of statistics that I talk about in my piece.

From 1989 to 2026, we’ve had Democratic presidents for 20 years and Republicans for 17.4 years. Care to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs created under Democrats vs. Republicans?

Answer: It’s 49.8 million versus 1.9 million. That isn’t a typo. Fifty million to two, basically. Democratic presidents have also done far better than Republicans on median household incomes, GDP rates, the Dow Jones index, and even deficit reduction. Dramatically so on deficit reduction.

I write in the column about speaking to a group of House Democrats a few years ago who seemed totally unfamiliar with these numbers. And jobs are just one factor.

The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater. The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.

Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president.

Thor Benson

But the economy was also bad at the end of Trump 1.0. Do you think voters are seeing this as a “fooled me once” situation?

Michael Tomasky

I think the perception that Republicans are the party of the economy is so ingrained in people’s brains that they just don’t connect the dots.

Look at the last three Republican presidents. One oversaw a double-dip recession with a savings and loans scandal that looted the Treasury. That was Bush I. Another oversaw the near meltdown of the whole global capitalist system. That was Bush II. And then the next presided over a pandemic-driven collapse. That was Trump I.

People just for whatever reason don’t see this pattern, or they think it’s a coincidence. But the problem is Democrats don’t point it out to them. I haven’t heard a Democrat say, “Look at this history.”

The last three Republican presidents have handed their Democratic successors an economic catastrophe, and the last three Democrats have had to do their best to clean it up. Why don’t Democrats ever say that? I think it would make a difference.

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Thor Benson

In addition to Trump’s economic mismanagement, he’s also making a mess of the military. Do you think it’s breaking through that the people who talk about supporting the troops are doing the opposite?

Michael Tomasky

The USS Abraham Lincoln story is definitely getting through to people, though it’s hard to say to what extent. But the facts are clear. When people are trying to jump overboard, that’s pretty alarming.

People saw that Hegseth is, to put it charitably, play-acting at being secretary of defense. And then came the war.

I’ll never forget my reaction that morning of February 28. It was a Saturday morning. What? War? I mean, even Bush 43 spent months preparing people for an attack on Baghdad. This was just completely out of nowhere.

I think most everyone turned on the news that day and said, why are we doing this? And now the goal is just to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened. It’s insane.

Thor Benson

It seems that across multiple issues — small government, rule of law — Trump 2.0 flies in the face of the principles Republicans say they value.

Michael Tomasky

Rule of law is a great example. Trump’s lawlessness should be glaringly obvious to most people, and I think that’s breaking through.

Even family values. They’re supporting Max Miller despite terrible abuse allegations, and it’s not just Trump — it’s the whole party. People got to know who he is over the last few weeks and it’s really ugly and shocking stuff.

And it’s even worse when Republicans defend someone like Miller because they’re the ones who prattle on about God and family.

Thor Benson

On economics, Trump is taking government stakes in companies, he’s putting tariffs — which are a tax — on everything. None of this feels like what people expect from a Republican.

Michael Tomasky

I think during the campaign most people kind of heard what they wanted to hear. They were mad at the Democrats and Biden for inflation, but also for refusing to drop out of the race.

I felt all that at various times myself. But the problem in people’s analysis, of course, was their very short, in some cases nonexistent memories.

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You do not, let us be clear, have to hand it to Greg Abbott.

After years of promoting his state as a terrific location for the tech industry to site its data centers, the Texas governor recently did an about-face of sorts, announcing a pause on permitting of new data centers until state regulators can conduct an audit to determine how they will affect the state’s electric grid, water supply, and local communities.

Abbott is nothing if not a shrewd politician, and he’s not the only one who has changed his position on data centers — and the tech industry in general — in response to a growing public backlash.

While the tech backlash isn’t the single most important issue in the midterm elections — the economy and affordability are still at the top of the agenda — it’s not far behind. States are already restricting the ability of the industry to place its facilities, and municipalities are facing a growing revolt against the license plate reading network built by Flock, which has been linked to a variety of abuses.

This may seem jarring to the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. They are probably asking themselves: Why aren’t people more appreciative of the glorious future their benevolent tech overlords are creating? Why are politicians pandering to all these ill-mannered luddites? Is all this unpleasantness going to produce real limitations on the ability of the tech industry to do whatever it wants as it pulls us toward an inevitable AI utopia?

The truth is that the tech industry never understood politics, but now it’s getting an education. As it finds itself under siege, it has no one to blame but itself.

The backlash is growing

Abbott is just one of the politicians who has changed their tune on data centers as anger among the population has begun to boil over.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had previously hailed the siting of data centers in his state, just issued a similar executive order holding back on permits and tax exemptions; he attacked “predatory developers” he said were steamrolling over local officials in the rush to build their facilities.

In Wisconsin, Republican Tom Tiffany calls his gubernatorial opponent David Crowley “data center David,” while Crowley counters that “Congressman Tiffany loves data centers.” In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown has been hammering incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted relentlessly on the issue:

In a memo recently obtained by news organizations, the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote to AI companies begging them to “fix how Ohioans see” data centers.

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the committee wrote. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”

That future is already here. In races all over the country, candidates are bashing their opponents as insufficiently antagonistic toward data centers, effectively competing to see who can be the most anti-tech-industry candidate.

It isn’t just a few NIMBY activists driving this development; the politicians are responding to a genuine groundswell.

As polling from the climate news site Heatmap shows, opposition to data centers has absolutely exploded. Just one year ago, 43 percent of people said they’d support a data center being built near where they live, while 42 percent were opposed. Today, 75 percent say they’d oppose it against just 15 percent support. Opposition runs across all demographic and political groups: “Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.”

There is one politician, however, who continues to insist that data centers are terrific and every community should want one: Donald Trump.

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A series of terrible mistakes

A hundred years from now, students of history will still be shown photos of Trump’s second inauguration, at which he was accompanied by a phalanx of Silicon Valley’s top leaders: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and more.

In the ensuing months, Trump hosted dinners and press conferences at which those executives and others showered him with praise, and he in turn expressed his administration’s commitment to ensuring that nothing will stand in the way of the fastest possible development of artificial intelligence, unfettered by pesky regulation and government oversight.

For the executives, it was both a business decision and a matter of personal preference. Cozying up to the president would surely be good for the bottom line, and just as important, many of them had taken dramatic ideological turns in the previous few years. Silicon Valley may never have been the liberal place many believed it to be, but it was impossible to ignore the seemingly sincere transformations of figures like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Marc Andreessen, who became not just more conservative but visible, vocal advocates for MAGA-inflected ideology.

For no one is that more true than Musk, who has become an increasingly toxic presence in politics and culture around the world.

Not only did Musk unleash vast destruction on the federal government with his DOGE catastrophe, he turned X into a sewer of hate and non-consensual porn, and has become by almost any measure the world’s most influential white supremacist. Much as Republicans need Musk’s money, his unpopularity is an ongoing drag on their political fortunes.

As for the rest of the tech elite, even if their rightward turn was an expression of their true selves (and in a tale as old as taxes themselves, these ultra-rich oligarchs believe that having to pay taxes is the most brutal oppression imaginable), in the long run it was a strategic mistake. Yes, the industry gained itself a powerful ally both at home and abroad, where the administration has tried to bully other countries out of tech regulation. But they also failed to realize that becoming so closely aligned with one party and one president posed a serious danger — especially if the public was bound to resist what they’re selling.

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What is the tech industry giving us?

Data centers bring some particular problems, only some of which are solvable.

They use huge amounts of energy, which can tax the local grid and raise energy prices, so developers are trying to reduce resistance by promising that they will produce their own power (often with fossil fuels, which creates another set of problems). The vast amounts of water needed to cool the chips can likewise strain local systems. Then there’s the incessant, maddening hum many residents report that emanates from all the equipment.

All of which could create a simple NIMBY-type opposition, one that says the data centers are fine, so long as they’re placed far away from where I live. But the opposition to data centers runs deeper, because they have become a stand-in for broader anger at the tech companies and unease about the future.

Even before the eruption in data center construction of the last few years, disquiet about the tech industry and its billionaire leaders was already growing. This collection of weirdos was amassing wealth on a scale unprecedented in human history by tracking our movements, selling our data, and using all their smarts and skill to keep us and our kids addicted to apps that feed us an endless supply of rage-bait and set us at each other’s throats. At a minimum, a gap opened up between the industry’s rhetoric about the wonders of innovation and the sour, exploitative world they seemed determined to create.

Then came AI.

Many industry leaders seemed to believe that the way to promote the technology (and keep the investments coming) was to play up its dangers, that it could threaten all our livelihoods (Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that it could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs), or worse. The regular news releases in which companies like OpenAI announce that their systems did something terrifying and unexpected may serve the hype cycle, but they don’t exactly make people optimistic about the technology’s future.

That gets to the core of what people are feeling about AI: The industry keeps telling us how transformative the technology will be, but we haven’t gotten anything positive from it yet. It’s pillaging our cultural heritage, drowning us in slop, making things less human, turning students into generations of cheaters who can’t write a coherent paragraph on their own, and oh by the way, it might take your job. If a tech leader says “But one day it will cure cancer!”, the natural response is: You keep saying that, but it hasn’t happened.

As Garrett Graff puts it, “AI has arrived in American life and communities across the country as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it’s been pushed and backed and cheerled by the absolute worst people in modern American life.”

In the face of what seems like an impossibly powerful industry with almost infinite wealth and political power at its disposal, fighting a data center coming to your town is a way for people to reassert their efficacy, to not just say “No” but actually do something about it. And if you aren’t going to organize with your neighbors, or if there doesn’t happen to be a data center planned for your town, at the very least you can vote against the candidates that are in alliance with the tech industry.

This has put Republicans in an awkward position. Not only is their default stance that business should be unfettered, their party has become linked to the tech industry through Donald Trump. They know they won’t get the benefit of the doubt from voters when data centers become an issue. So one after another, they’re racing to match their Democratic counterparts and present themselves as firm opponents of data center proliferation. The Washington Post analyzed politicians’ social media posts and found that “in the past six months, Republicans’ public statements about data centers have turned sharply negative.”

Greg Abbott is a perfect case study: When he was on a glide path to reelection, data centers were just one of the many kinds of development he was happy to encourage in Texas. But he has seen the backlash building, and a recent Fox News poll showed him ahead of his Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa by just one point. So now, Abbott is leading the charge to slow the data center boom.

Appearing last Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Abbott argued that the facilities were proliferating too quickly and with too little oversight (not that he could have done anything about that; he’s just the governor).

“They basically dug their own grave,” he said, “and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

To repeat, you don’t have to hand it to Abbott. But he certainly knows which way the wind is blowing.

That’s it for today

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Donald Trump spent the past week cozying up to North Korea and attacking Canada. Whatever claim the US had to be a beacon of free trade — not to mention moral leadership — has been demolished like the East Wing of the White House.

And so it was probably inevitable the president would dig the prototypical failed economic policy of the 20th century out of history’s dumpster and operationalize it against our closest ally.

Smoot-Hawley tariffs are back, baby! Sure, aggressive levies cutting off trade as a means of stimulating domestic industry never worked for those people. In fact, it effectively crashed the global economy and turned a recession into the Great Depression. But it may work for us!

It will not work for us. But it may make us so roundly despised that it galvanizes other countries to reimagine the world order so as to cut out the one, heretofore indispensable nation.

USMCA? Never heard of it!

Upon returning to office, Trump immediately took a Sharpie to “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country, with the most advanced protections for workers ever developed” — also known as the USMCA, which he himself negotiated in 2018 as a replacement for NAFTA

"We don't need anything that Canada has, we don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” he blustered in June. “We don't need their cars, we don't need their lumber, we don't need their energy, we don't need anything that they have."

This is self-evidently ridiculous.

Canada supplies roughly 80 percent of the potash American farmers use as fertilizer. Midwest refineries are built to run on heavy Canadian sour crude, and the pipeline infrastructure simply doesn't exist to swap in lighter, American-produced oil from places like Texas. Canadian hydropower fuels a significant share of the electricity supply in New York and New England. And the auto and auto parts trade between the two countries, already strained by Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, is about as integrated as two countries' economies get.

And yet Trump negotiated as if Canadians could never say no, even as he demanded crippling concessions and lobbed humiliating insults at our stalwart ally. Trade talks were at an impasse after 18 months of threats and taunts about annexing our northern neighbor. But in July the prospect of an additional 50 percent levy on a sprawling list of Canadian goods forced Canadians back to the negotiating table. And last week, with the major principles agreed, Trump congratulated both sides for striking “a very fair deal.”

"Our farmers are going to be thrilled; our manufacturers are going to be thrilled," he gushed. "And basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore."

Instead talks collapsed Friday night, when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending negotiations and recalling Canada’s negotiators to Ottawa.

By Saturday morning, the Trump administration had levied tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods — hockey sticks, building materials, beer, cheese. Carney promises dollar-for-dollar retaliation, hitting US steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp, paper, and electronics starting September 8.

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Art of no deal

The New York Times and Washington Post confirm that the deal fell apart because the Trump administration attempted to extract a fresh round of concessions at the last minute.

After domestic companies aggressively lobbied Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the US backpedaled on reductions in steel and aluminum tariffs. Plus Lutnick insisted on excluding Ontario-built heavy trucks (the Ford F-350, F-450, and GM Silverado) in hopes of forcing carmakers to relocate production to the US.

And if you’ve got a problem, that crank Peter Navarro can make it worse.

“Navarro and Lutnick were both yelling at Greer saying: ‘What are you doing? This is stupid. You know, we’re not giving these things away,’” a source told the Post.

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Canadians would never go for it, and he was right.

America’s last-minute demands included: dropping French language labeling and content requirements, an absolute non-starter for the country’s restive Québécois population; getting rid of “buy Canadian” government initiatives while leaving similar “buy American” measures in place; and restoring US-produced liquor to Canadian shelves. That last decision lies with each province, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford told Carney he wouldn’t go along with it.

Trump responded with a grotesque post comparing Ford to his dead brother, calling Carney “Governor,” and lying about Canada’s unemployment rate. (In reality, Canada has a higher labor force participation rate than the US.)

The president is currently shitposting about changing the name of Lake Ontario, “in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

But what actually killed the deal was a demand that Canada subordinate its independent trade policy to the ever-changing whims of the United States — specifically, that Ottawa agree in advance to match tariffs imposed by Washington, even when it would override Canada’s existing trade agreements.

Per the New York Times:

The United States wanted Canada to apply US tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.

American negotiators characterize this as a measure to prevent Canada becoming a passthrough conduit for goods excluded by US tariffs. But no sovereign country could voluntarily surrender its trade policy, much less yoke itself to an erratic neighbor whose maniac leader imposes a new tariff scheme every week.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen,’” Carney said Saturday. “We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away.”

This echoes a major speech Carney gave in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he exhorted middle powers to band together rather than rely on the United States to ensure their national and financial security.

“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he warned, adding that “hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”

And Canada is putting its money where its mouth is. Only two nations imposed retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s two prior rounds of levies: Canada and China. In fact, that response is now being cited as justification for the latest tariffs.

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As America reverts to naked suzerainty, Canada hopes to lead the international resistance movement — yet another reason the Trump administration was so insistent on blocking the country’s power to enter into its own international trade deals.

But a funny thing happens when a world leader actually puts in the effort to explain his policy choices. Carney’s approval rating is at 60 percent, and polls show that 76 percent of Canadians support his decision to walk away from trade talks with the US.

The fallout from these tariffs will absolutely hit Canadians harder than Americans, with potential job losses in the tens of thousands. But Canadians are gearing up for the fight, and a movement to boycott US-made goods is picking up steam. In contrast, Americans feel no patriotic support for Trump’s capricious levies. And as Politico points out, swing state voters really don’t like these tariffs. That may have an impact in November, with the midterms serving as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the economy.

Naturally Susan Collins is concerned. And with Trump’s tariffs about to increase costs for farmers, builders, and autoworkers, she’s got a reason to be — as do her fellow Republicans in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa. Because Canada’s leaders have done the work to ensure that their citizens are prepared to absorb the pain from this trade war.

Carney spent the past nine months making the case that Canada must fight back against the United States to ensure its survival. Trump spent that time posting AI slop and pretending that the US has nothing to lose. One of these men has a 30 percent approval rating 70 days before an election.

Looks like it’s time for Tariff Man to test his theories … again.

That’s it for today

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President Trump is catastrophically, comprehensively, wrecking our democratic order, but he couldn’t do it without the Worst Chief Justice of All Time, John Roberts, and the rest of the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority.

Trump should probably send the nation’s highest jurists a fruit basket or something as a wee bit of thanks for their latest gifts: the right to wreck the midterm elections and the right to keep building the bribe-funded ballroom.

The former is courtesy of the Court’s six conservatives, but the latter is a solo Roberts joint. Put another way, the mail-in ballots case is a shadow docket travesty, while the ballroom is an administrative stay travesty. Both are corrosive to democracy.

Up first: teeing up letting Trump screw with the midterms in an extremely unconstitutional fashion, because of course Trump will suffer immense harm if he can’t get his way.

First, let’s be clear about a smallish silver lining here: the mail-in ballots decision is both reprehensible and a mess, but it doesn’t quite do what some of the reporting says it does. It doesn’t mean that the US Postal Service Final Rule, promulgated last Friday, goes into effect. A different case, brought by the League of Women Voters, still enjoins the administration from implementing that rule, and as Steve Vladeck notes, the litigation on that is yet to come.

But that doesn’t really make things better, at least as far as the whole constitutional crisis part goes. That’s because the Court’s right-wingers continue to swallow the Trump administration’s laughable lies about what they are doing, lies that contradict both their own public statements and the dictates of logic.

The majority’s decision here pretends to be a narrow one based only on the technical concept of standing — whether the 23 states that sued to block this have the right to sue at this point. The majority decided they did not, agreeing with Trump that the executive order doesn’t do anything yet and can’t be challenged until it does.

To get there, they had to write nonsense sentences about how this executive order, which Trump has touted as critical to ensuring election integrity, is nothing but “an internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies. It neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the Executive Branch.”

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent points out what hogwash this is, because the administration is simultaneously arguing two wholly incompatible things:

“Yet even as the Government represents that it may not implement the Executive Order at all for purposes of defeating standing, it insists that it seeks to implement the Executive Order immediately for purposes of establishing irreparable harm. See Application 28–29 (’The irreparable harm is the government’s inability to implement the order as to the November 2026 election in the respondent States’). The Government cannot have it both ways.

Except, of course, thanks to this Supreme Court, it can. The states are essentially being told they have to wait around for Trump to implement a patently unconstitutional executive order and only then raise a challenge.

Because here’s the thing: there’s no world where it is constitutional for the executive branch to interfere with the conduct of elections in this fashion. As Chris Geidner pointed out at Law Dork, not even the majority here tries to say Trump’s executive order is constitutional. And that’s part of what makes it so maddening here. There’s not even a pretense that this conforms to the Constitution, only a smug little coda explaining they’re not deciding that at all yet:

The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.

So the states have to wait to see if Trump wrecks the constitutional order, 10 weeks before the midterms, before they can challenge Trump wrecking the constitutional order, 10 weeks before the midterms. But it’s also such an emergency that the Court had to step in. Got it.

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Roberts saves Trump’s ballroom

While the mail voting ruling was a shadow docket special, the fault of all the Court’s right-wing majority, the ballroom is a John Roberts decision, not a Supreme Court decision, though mainstream outlets that should really know better reported Roberts’s unilateral move as a ruling by the Court itself.

Here’s NPR: “The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump can — for now — move forward with construction of his ballroom.” Here’s the BBC: “The US Supreme Court has temporarily allowed construction of the White House ballroom to move forward.” Here’s Reuters: “The US Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to continue construction of his White House ballroom project for now.”

The Supreme Court, as such, didn’t do any such thing.

Rather, on August 21, the last day before a federal appeals court decision halting construction would have kicked in, Roberts issued a one-sentence administrative stay that allows Trump to keep building for, well, who can say, really.

In a normal world, with a normal president and a normal Supreme Court, there wouldn’t really be a need to get so pedantic about what types of stays the Supreme Court issues or who is doing the issuing. But in a world where that president routinely races to the highest Court for relief and a world where the highest Court often twists itself in knots to give Trump whatever his heart desires, it’s important to distinguish between shadow docket rulings and what Roberts did here.

In an administrative stay, just one justice can stop a case indefinitely. That’s because each justice is a “circuit justice,” and they handle emergency requests for the appellate circuit courts they oversee. An administrative stay issued by one justice is then, in theory, referred to the full Court.

As Steve Vladeck explained at One First, this is to give the Court slightly more time to consider whether to take the case and grant or deny emergency relief. And that’s not a bad thing, in theory. It allows for swift action in a genuine emergency, a way to stop the clock until the entire Court can meet and decide an issue. It’s used for death penalty cases, for example, where immediate relief is necessary as an execution date approaches.

For Trump, however, pretty much everything is an emergency, one which he demands immediate action on, but the “emergency” is typically simply that he wants to do what he wants, and as the president, he can do it. And the right-wing justices have used the administrative stay as a sort of one-person veto power to stall out cases in a convenient, inevitably pro-Trump way.

One of the most notable ones was letting Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter stand for months, even as lower courts had ruled against him. Then, after sitting on it forever, the conservatives on the Court finally threw out their own longstanding precedent and decided that Trump could fire anyone he felt like, except, of course, for Federal Reserve board members.

The Roberts Court has turned the very concept of a stay on its head again and again. In theory, a lower court order is stayed when allowing it to go into effect would cause great harm to the party requesting the stay. But in the Trump era, the standard instead seems to be that a stay is warranted if not granting one would make Trump sad.

We don’t know how long the administrative stay will last, but what we do know is that these administrative stays now often last longer than the sort of emergency temporary relief they are supposed to provide.

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There’s also the fact that it simply cannot be an emergency that causes Trump some sort of harm if he were forced to stop building his ballroom for a wee bit until the full Supreme Court could weigh in on the speedy shadow docket Trump and the Court’s majority loves so much. But we know that Trump is racing to get as much of the ballroom built as possible before any adverse decision comes down, all the better to declare that it is simply too late to stop now.

And it’s that part that leads to a very likely, and very depressing outcome here, one which is arguably more cynical than the Court’s conservatives simply greenlighting the ballroom construction. And that outcome has a lot to do with Roberts’s persistent self-regard as some sort of balanced, even-handed jurist — a stance that gullible news outlets fall for every time.

Blocking the lower court’s injunction while simultaneously also blocking the Supreme Court from acting means that right now, Trump can continue without any pesky interference. But Roberts has given himself an out, one where the full Court might decide at some undetermined point in the future that Trump didn’t really have the right to tear down the East Wing and build a giant gold monstrosity in its stead without ever checking in with Congress. But alas, the damage is now done, so Trump gets his ballroom anyway.

Even writing that feels conspiratorial, trafficking in the kind of nonsense usually reserved for QAnon adherents, where the actions of the deep state are those of a shadowy cabal we must remain ever vigilant against. But what else are we to make of a chief justice like John Roberts, of a Court like this? With narrow exceptions like the tariffs case and refusing to allow Trump to fire members of the Federal Reserve, Roberts has presided over giving Trump win after win after win.

Roberts was responsible for giving Trump immunity from any consequences of his criminal actions. Roberts signed on to the MAGA majority kneecapping the lower courts by blowing up nationwide injunctions. Roberts has used Trump’s racist zeal to substantially complete his life’s work of dismantling the Voting Rights Act. Yes, he’s had help from the other conservatives on the Court, but in the end, it’s the Roberts Court, and he owns it.

Roberts is antidemocratic to his core, and he’s been happy to help Trump hasten the death of the constitutional order. He should be forever reviled for it, especially because apparently we’re going to get a really ugly gold-plated ballroom as an eternal shrine showing just how far Roberts let things slide on his watch.

That’s it for today

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

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“If I endorse a person, they win,” President Trump claimed last year. “With the Republican Party, it’s like 399-0. Think of that.”

As usual, Trump was lying. He lost himself in 2020, and when he endorses other people they often lose too. That’s been especially true of late.

Last week, for example, his pick for governor of extremely conservative Wyoming, Megan Degenfelder, lost by a brutal 15 points to a resolutely un-Trumpy candidate who rejected personal smears and attacks.

Earlier in the month, election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell ran for Minnesota governor on a platform of the big lie and the Trump cult, including at one point boasting during a candidate forum that “I have an advantage over everyone up here. I can call up the president!”

But Minnesota Republican weren’t impressed. Lindell lost his bid by 11 points and then hilariously claimed the primary was stolen from him.

In fact, 10 candidates endorsed by Trump have now lost in this primary cycle. That’s as many Trump endorsees as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined. It’s only one shy of the Trump picks who lost in 2022.

Trump boasts about his primary wins, and wants you to forget his primary losses, because when you endorse and your candidate loses, it makes you look weak. And Trump is in fact weak and getting weaker.

The FiftyPlusOne aggregator has his approval at around 36 percent with 60 percent disapproving, which puts him 24 points underwater. An American Research Group poll pegged Trump’s approval at a dire 30 percent, his lowest number ever. Trump’s advisers are worried he’s going to sink into the 20s before the midterms.

These numbers are bad enough that they’re eroding Trump’s standing even with Republicans. The endorsement losses don’t just reflect his low approval, though — they also underline why it’s so low in the first place.

Trump loves corrupt sycophants and bounders because he is a corrupt sycophant and bounder. And, just maybe, the nation has had enough of rule by grotesquely evil fools who hate us.

No juice

Trump has racked up a string of embarrassing primary losses this season, and those losses have accelerated.

Six of his 10 failed endorsements came in the last two weeks. Three were last Tuesday, when Cory Mills and Catalina Lauf both lost House races in Florida and Degenfelder lost her bid for governor of Wyoming to state Sen. Eric Barlow.

The Wyoming race was not the only governor’s contest in which Trump picks have struggled — his endorsees also lost their gubernatorial contests in Iowa, Georgia, South Carolina, Minnesota, and Wyoming. Two other Trump picks lost House races in Minnesota and Tennessee, and Trump’s attorney general selection went down to defeat in Texas.

These developments demonstrate the limits of Trump’s hold over the party and its voters. The House loss in Michigan’s 8th district is a particularly stark example of Trump’s dwindling influence. In hopes of winning the R+2 district, Trump endorsed and rallied with Amir Hassan, an African American veteran with experience in federal law enforcement.

Hassan had solid fundraising and seemed poised to win easily. But while he is Christian, his name led racist Islamophobic Republican voters to reject him; he was crushed by double digits by Thomas Smith. Smith had dropped out of the race, but his name signaled Christian whiteness to voters, who considered that more important than the endorsement of a president whose standing has been sinking for months.

Trump’s loss in the Wyoming governor’s race was an even clearer indication of his waning influence. Degenfelder is a rabid right-wing culture warrior and bigot who centered her campaign on bashing trans people and the left. Barlow, in contrast, touted his support for public lands — a progressive position that is popular among Wyoming hunters — and promised to solve more problems and lob fewer partisan grenades.

Barlow’s victory was part of a wave of MAGA losses in Wyoming, where the legislature’s freedom caucus was decimated in primaries in both the House (losing 13 seats) and Senate (losing 6). Another nine freedom caucus-aligned candidates lost when they challenged incumbent Republicans — none in fact won. That rebuke followed corruption scandals and an extremely unpopular effort to sharply cut funding for the University of Wyoming.

Wyoming remains very conservative. But it seems clear that it is sick of Trump-aligned far-right policies and/or powerfully unhappy with incumbents. Given that environment, it’s possible Trump’s endorsement of Degenfelder not only didn’t help the cause but actively damaged her.

Trump’s personal unpopularity can be an anchor. So can his policies. Trump has embraced positions like support for data centers, tariffs, and his Iran War, all of which are increasingly unpopular even with Republicans.

Trump endorsees have tried to navigate these issues with various degrees of finesse. Lindell, for example, said he supported data centers that don’t involve “corporate welfare or secrecy deals that loot Minnesota’s resources for Big Tech cronies,” distancing himself from Trump’s position. On Iran, however, he was all in, declaring that the war was a “spiritual battle of evil and good.”

That bobbing and weaving did the Pillow Man no good though — if you’re running as a Trump sycophant, people reasonably conclude that you’re going to sycophant all down the line.

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Losing losers

Trump is unpopular; his policies are unpopular. But his endorsements also failed in many cases because he chose weak and grotesque candidates.

Rep. Cory Mills is a fine example. He is reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice for campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct; the House Ethics Committee is investigating too. Weeks before the primary, Mills refused to deny dating a 19-year-old while in Congress, insisting there was “nothing illegal” about doing so.

Mills hoped that constantly touting his Trump endorsement would overcome these scandals, but Florida Republicans worried he would cost them the R+13 seat. That’s why many of them — including Mills’s House colleagues Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos — endorsed his Republican opponent Ryan Elijah, citing Mills’s lack of character.

Trump himself seems to have lost faith — he left Mills off a list of final endorsements in Florida in an effort to distance himself. Trump didn’t actually rescind his endorsement though, and he didn’t repudiate Mills or call for him to drop out. That means that Mills’s 12 point loss to Elijah is Trump’s loss as well.

Lindell’s failed bid for Minnesota governor is another case in point. The founder of MyPillow has been one of the nation’s most indefatigable election deniers who is not named Trump. He’s been ordered to pay millions in restitution because of his lies, which have been repeatedly rejected by the courts.

In gratitude for his attacks on democracy, Trump enthusiastically and repeatedly endorsed Lindell, who was registered to vote in Texas, not Minnesota. Tragicomically, after losing decisively to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, Lindell did not accept the results, claiming nebulous voting irregularities. He’s demanding ballots be hand-counted which will cost $825,000. Trump has been silent as Lindell attacks his own party and possibly damages Demuth in the general election.

And there’s more. In the Oklahoma governor’s race, Trump has endorsed former Oklahoma state Sen. Mike Mazzei. Like Lindell and Mills, Mazzei seems very much not ready for primetime. In a recent debate, he mocked the moderator for a verbal stumble, and then awkwardly laughed to himself at a joke. The Oklahoma primary is next week, and perhaps Mazzei will win. But also he may lose because he comes across as mean, unfit, and weird, much like the president who endorsed him.

It’s important to underline that even when Trump’s endorsees win their primaries, they often create major headaches for the party. Most notoriously, Trump endorsed the almost unbelievably corrupt Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn; as a result Democrat James Talarico is currently narrowly leading in the polls for a seat that could end up being a huge loss for Trump’s party.

Trump also refused to withdraw support from Ohio Rep. Max Miller, who has been accused of physically abusing his toddler daughter and his ex-wife, herself the daughter of Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno. The deadline for choosing a different Republican candidate for the seat has passed; polls show Miller losing by double digits in a seat that Trump won by 11 in 2024.

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Trump is bad at this

Miller and Paxton and Lindell and Mills are all bad candidates on their own merits. They are the kind of scandal-ridden, incompetent self-dealing scumbags who most politicians don’t want to be associated with.

Party leaders usually try to be careful with their endorsements because if the candidate loses, the reputation of the endorser suffers. Presidents in particular have historically almost never endorsed in primaries. That’s both because they don’t want to be associated with losers and because they want to avoid looking like partisan factional hacks.

Trump, however, has no such compunction. He lies to himself as assiduously as he lies to others and therefore doesn’t seem able to consider the personal downsides of his actions, whether it’s fomenting a violent coup, attacking Iran, or endorsing Ken Paxton. Trump simply wades into any and every contest with flatulent assurance, endorsing anyone who most shamelessly flatters him. Not surprisingly, the candidates who are most shameless in praising Trump are candidates who are most shameless. And so Trump repeatedly finds himself blessing scoundrels, abusers, and liars — his own people, in other words.

Trump endorses as he governs — with reckless, narcissistic lack of concern for the consequences to the country, his party, or even really to himself. That’s why he keeps losing, in primaries as in all things. He remains his own worst enemy. With any luck his electoral stumbling in the primaries presages a historic comeuppance for his party in November.

That’s it for today

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Donald Trump is historically unpopular and only trending downward. But even at this late date, Republicans have to pretend the exact opposite is true because their big orange cult leader still has the power to turn their voters against them and end their careers.

To get some expert insight on how that dilemma will play out in the midterms and beyond, we connected with old friend of the newsletter Rick Wilson, the longtime Republican strategist who these days is best known as an always colorful Never Trump commentator as the co-founder of The Lincoln Project.

“The delusion, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption — it’s all adding up to an ugly picture for Republicans,” he told us. “If they’re through their primaries, the last thing they want is to hear Donald Trump say their name. It’s a very tough equation for them, because if Trump gets angry at them and he goes on Truth Social and starts blasting them, that still will have an effect on Republican voters.”

Wilson pointed out that Republicans ultimately have to “own his madness,” including his psychotic obsession with turning the White House into a tacky Mar-a-Lago clone while Americans feel deep dissatisfaction with economic conditions.

“His obsession with gold leaf in the White House and covering statues in gold and all the weird ballrooms and triumphal arches — it’s really disconnected with the American voter,” he said. “They’re suffering, and he’s worried about how much gold leaf is going to go on to the statues in Washington, or when is the reflecting pool going to be redone for the second time? None of that connects.”

Wilson and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson also discussed how Trump’s shambolic war of choice against Iran is a political anchor for Republicans, why Hispanic voters have already soured on MAGA, what Democrats should do on day one if they retake power, and much more.

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

Without further ado, here’s the interview.

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Thor Benson

The midterms are coming up, and Trump seems to be in a state of delusion. He thinks his poll numbers are high, the economy’s great, and we’re in the “golden age,” and yet at least some Republicans seem to be aware that not everything’s as rosy as he believes. How do you see that dichotomy playing out?

Rick Wilson

Republicans live in a world where they are always bifurcated, and that split is now colliding with political reality.

There was a long time where you could sort of look at Trump as a net positive if you were a Republican. If you were in a primary, his endorsement was decisive. If you were in a general, he could help you really turn out the Republican base. And sure, maybe Democrats hated him, but on net, you could have argued for a while that Trump provided a lift for a lot of Republican candidates.

You can’t make that same argument these days, because Trump is so deeply unpopular on so many issues. He is now a source of great political harm for Republicans and a drag on their ticket.

The delusion, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption — it’s all adding up to an ugly picture for Republicans. If they’re through their primaries, the last thing they want is to hear Donald Trump say their name. It’s a very tough equation for them, because if Trump gets angry at them and he goes on Truth Social and starts blasting them, that still will have an effect on Republican voters.

It’s a tough spot for Republicans. It’s a bind they don’t really want to be in, but there’s very little way they can escape it.

Thor Benson

I’ve seen people say Trump doesn’t really care about the results of the midterms, but he’s constantly talking about the SAVE America Act. He seems to care, but only insofar as it impacts him personally.

Rick Wilson

I think that’s right. The idea that Trump has any commitment to victory for the Republican Party is not true. He wants to protect himself. The one thing he really cares about is that Democrats don’t get a runaway election that accrues a big enough majority in the Senate to really screw with him. He knows if he can hold the filibuster line in the Senate and keep the Democrats from getting to 60 votes, he has a survival mechanism.

I don’t think that he’s got a deep understanding of what’s going on in the country or with the economy and why that’s hurting Republicans so badly. I don’t think he understands it. I really don’t. Trump has become a crazy old man yelling at the clouds. But I really don’t think he understands how bad it is for people in the country and how much political damage the war and tariffs have done to his own party.

Thor Benson

Speaking of the war, it’s going on longer than he wanted and he seems to be unable to end it. How much do you think that’s going to have an impact in the midterms?

Rick Wilson

Well, the war has been a military disaster, first and foremost, and made the country less safe. But the war has also had a meaningful impact on the economy that people have begun to directly associate it with.

Trump is waging a war, we’re not winning, and gas prices are higher. That’s a triple whammy for the candidates who blindly support him and who have to go out and say he’s a military genius so that he doesn’t turn on them.

We know that wars tend to decline in popularity with time. But the telling number here is that by the time we left Vietnam — this is in 1974 when the helicopters are coming off the roof of the embassy — the Vietnam War still had a 29 percent approval rating in the country. The Iran War is at roughly 26 percent right now and falling.

So Trump has gotten us to where we were at the end of Vietnam, which cost 58,000 American lives.

Read more

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Donald Trump is easily triggered. That’s hardly news.

He’s temperamental and emotional in a way that supposedly disqualifies women from serving in powerful political or corporate roles. He lashes out at critics, opponents, the media, even his own staff. Were it not so frightening, it would be Veep-level hysterical that the man atop the world’s most powerful government and military lacks the impulse control of a high schooler.

But the questions now swirling around Trump’s personal assistant Natalie Harp — and especially the way Sen. Jon Ossoff unleashed a media firestorm this week by invoking her name — offer a long overdue lesson for Democrats on how to successfully bait Trump and his MAGA cohorts for maximum effect.

Harp strikes a chord

Let’s start by unpacking what Ossoff actually said last Sunday, which was not nearly as salacious as the ensuing MAGA meltdown would have you believe.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” said Ossoff, of Trump. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

In just four sentences, Ossoff’s carefully crafted language shattered Trump’s curated image as a tough, tireless, troop-loving, America First warrior. The Georgia senator indicted Trump’s military misadventures and octogenarian stamina. He highlighted Trump’s sloth and greed. Ossoff depicted Trump as a detached, spoiled, soft, and vainglorious brat who could make Charli XCX blush.

But the kicker was these three words: “travel with Natalie.”

Ossoff’s statement would have delivered the same critique of Trump as an entitled, lazy lout had he omitted any mention of Harp. But he dropped her name — and only her first name, plus the first-person plural “their” for emphasis — to pair them and suggest a degree of interpersonal intimacy.

Ossoff’s gambit worked perfectly. Americans immediately wanted to learn who Natalie Harp is. Answer: a “platinum blonde geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough,” as the New York Times described the young aide who serves as Trump’s personal, 24/7 “security blanket.”

Media journalist Brian Stelter reported that searches for “who is Natalie Harp?” surged an astounding 5,000 percent, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters had to admit on air that his program had not mentioned Ossoff in six years but now his network was talking about the young senator nonstop.

The White House and conservative pundits lost their marbles, crying foul about attacks on the young staffer and veiled implications of her and Trump having an affair.

More amusing and hypocritical is how conservative apologists rushed to Harp’s defense, depicting her as a child immune to attention or attacks, and the victim of sexist “dehumanization.” (In fact, Harp is 35 — an adult more than twice the age of the Central Park 5 Black youths when Trump called for their execution before they were even tried for a crime that, it turned out, they never committed.)

There’s more: Harp is apparently so obsessed with Trump she’s happy to serve as his emotional support companion.

In 2023, Harp twice dodged presidential security protocols and wary Trump staffers to get close to Trump — once, by securing a maid’s room at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, and then by sneaking into an SUV trunk in Trump’s motorcade. She behaves like a rock band groupie, not a presidential adviser.

Harp has also skirted security clearance checks, a fact that suggests Trump is willing to sacrifice national security to maintain his emotional “security blanket.” That’s the term Ossoff used to describe Harp when, instead of apologizing or backtracking as weak-willed Democrats often do when facing backlash, he doubled down on his Trump attack during a Monday television interview with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki.

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Ossoff shows the way

But enough about poor Natalie — back to Ossoff.

The senator and his speechwriters clearly understand that powerful words do more than assert or indict: They create imagery.

Ossoff painted a picture of Trump flying in comfortable, Middle Eastern-supplied luxury, oblivious to the problems around him, his every need and indulgence fulfilled like some oleaginous sultan. That image contrasts sharply with his MAGA cult supporters’ rally flags depicting Trump as a bandana-wearing Rambo delivering rough justice.

Depicting Trump as Ossoff skillfully did generated paroxysms from Republican politicians and conservative talking heads.

The right-wing media narrative is lousy with depictions of liberals and Democrats living better than — and therefore condescending to — their lessors: those humble, hardworking, heartland Americans. Ossoff delivered this same appraisal of Trump in fewer words than a median-length William Faulkner sentence. The senator’s quip was a Thomas Nast cartoon sketched with four sentences.

And therein lies the key lesson of this episode: Trump can be weakened by policy attacks, especially on the economy and his foolhardy war with Iran. But politicians in the new media age who want to gain traction — no less run for the White House — need to talk less in stentorian policy tones, like a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and more like Jimmy Kimmel or Chelsea Handler.

The Georgia senator whom many believe to be a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination understands that Democrats need more than “affordability” policy messages to win in 2026 and beyond. They need to depict Trump as feeble, selfish, and tone-deaf.

By inserting Harp into the national political discourse, Ossoff inverted the national narrative about which side is politically soft and entitled. The 2028 presidential election is more than two years away, but this week Ossoff put his party and the punditry on notice that he will be a skilled and formidable contender.

A flustered Trump dismissed Ossoff as “Pee Wee Herman.” Weak tea.

Trump’s snide derogatories have lost their oomph. More to the point, like all bullies his feckless response proves he can throw a punch but can’t take one.

And the senator’s invocation of “Natalie” — leaving out her last name to imply some special intimacy between Harp and Trump — was the shiny frame that drew millions of eyes to the Trumpian imagery Ossoff so deftly painted.

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Troll bridge to 2028

Conservative media routinely dismiss Trump’s opponents by attaching the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” label to those who dare to criticize their MAGA champion. But nobody is more troll-able and deranged than the thin-skinned, fragile male egoist who currently occupies the Oval Office.

Narcissists like Donald Trump cannot abide criticism, and no critique is more effective with insecure narcissists than mockery. Making fun of Trump as a lazy, unpatriotic, and ineffective president cuts to his bone. Trump commits ample policy and political errors without provocation, but he is far more prone to blunder when under attack and on the defensive. And so are his allies.

Trump’s supporters warn that if Democrats recapture the House this fall, they will immediately impeach Trump for a third time. His self-dealing corruption, which makes Watergate look like a parking ticket, alone warrants his removal. But to paraphrase a time-worn maxim, if you try to kill a wannabe king you better succeed. Even if Democrats flip the Senate, they will not have enough Republican support to convict Trump on any House impeachment article.

The better way to impeach Trump is to rattle his confidence and destroy his heavily-curated image as a tough and competent patriot. This week, Jon Ossoff separated himself from the pack by providing liberals and Democrats a perfect formula for how to do so.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod, and a special Saturday edition of the newsletter will drop tomorrow.

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Whenever President Trump talks about the Iran War, one can feel his frustration that the public isn’t more enthusiastic about it — or at least unconcerned.

“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated,” Trump told a crowd last week, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

Perhaps realizing that reminding people (even in jest) of the waterway that has caused him so much trouble is not such a great idea, he then got serious.

“For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so a very evil country cannot have — a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world — we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon.”

It wasn’t exactly the stuff of “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds … we shall never surrender.” But Trump does not do stirring calls to sacrifice; instead, he tells the nation that while it may seem like you’re sacrificing if you listen to the lying media, you really aren’t. You’re just paying “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline.”

This reveals just how deeply he has misunderstood how the American public actually thinks about war, and why as the Iran conflict drags on, his effort to win the public to his cause has been as complete a disaster as the war itself.

The lessons Trump mislearned

While the Vietnam War was one of the defining events in his generation’s coming of age, Trump seems to have emerged from it with few ill effects.

Like many sons of wealthy men, he managed to finagle his way out of serving without too much trouble (the doctor who testified to little Donnie’s supposedly crippling bone spurs just happened to be one of Fred Trump’s tenants). When it was over, he learned not much more than that the war was bad and Americans turned against it because it went on for a long time and a lot of our soldiers died.

That analysis isn’t wrong, just woefully incomplete.

It’s true that the public was affected by seeing the endless stream of body bags arriving back home, young men (and some women) with lives cut short, and hundreds of thousands more with physical and psychological wounds they would carry for the rest of their days. But though support had been fading steadily over time, it wasn’t simply a matter of too many months and years.

That was evident in the way the Tet Offensive in January 1968 turned the public decisively against the war. It wasn’t because Tet was a defeat for the US and its South Vietnamese allies; it wasn’t. Instead, the offensive demonstrated that all the government’s assurances that the war would be over soon were lies. North Vietnam was not on the verge of being broken, and we were not seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” as military leaders had said so often.

When CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite told his viewers a month later that “it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” he gave voice to what most Americans had already realized.

Fast forward a few decades, when Trump ran for president in 2016. The Iraq War was over, but his party was still dragging it around like an anchor — and he alone among the primary candidates was untainted by it (even if his story about having publicly opposed it from the beginning was a ridiculous lie).

As Trump promised to turn away from that kind of adventurism, he seemed to take the same lesson from Iraq that he did from Vietnam: It was long and bloody, thousands of Americans died, and the public doesn’t like that one bit.

Trump’s rhetoric on Iran revolves around these two points: My war is short, he insists (so far anyway), and only a small number of Americans have died!

In May, he posted a chart to Truth Social comparing the length of other American wars to the current one (with the caption “Wow. Study this chart!”). The message was apparently that the war was no big deal because it was only in its sixth week.

Then in July, he followed up with another chart comparing the small number of deaths among US forces in this war to those of the past. This comparison is one he frequently makes in spoken remarks as well, often getting his facts wrong.

“In Vietnam, we lost 200,000,” he said not long ago (in fact, 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War).

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The shambolic sales pitch falls flat

Perhaps Trump might have done better to consider not just why the public eventually turned against those wars, but also why it supported them in the first place.

The truth is that watching your government wage foreign wars is part of what it means to be a American; seldom do more than a few years go by without us bombing, attacking, or invading some country or other. Many of those wars received ample public support — all, in fact, were more popular than the Iran War at their outset. That was because the public was told why the war was necessary, a story that always included some kind of threat to Americans.

Sometimes the threat was real (Germany and Japan in World War II) and sometimes it was phony (Iraq), but it made enough sense for Americans to feel that their safety was genuinely at risk. In Vietnam, the Cold War placed the conflict in a broader context in which America had something at stake. In Iraq, Americans were told not only that Saddam Hussein was about to attack us with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but that he was plotting with Al Qaeda and we could visit revenge for September 11 upon him and his country.

Eventually the public realized that the WMDs didn’t exist and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But it wasn’t until the war had been going on for a couple of years that a majority of Americans finally concluded it was a mistake.

Trump understood that history, but made the mistake of thinking it meant that he had plenty of time to carry out a splendid little war in Iran before the public would turn against it. The problem was that he never gave them a good reason for the war in the first place. There was no grand conflict of civilizations of which this was supposedly a part, and no dire threat to the homeland. The average American might think (accurately) that the Iranian regime is a bunch of nasty fellows who do nasty things, but they don’t fear that the Revolutionary Guard is going to kill their children any time soon.

In other words, Americans don’t like long wars and they don’t like casualties — but only when the stakes don’t seem to be worth it and we don’t seem to be winning. A short war with few American deaths won’t necessarily gain their support, especially if they’re going to be asked to pay an economic price for what appears to be a pointless escapade.

There may have been another factor at play: Trump loves little more than to do things other presidents didn’t do, to demonstrate his unique power and importance. But as Dalia Dassa Kaye wrote in March, as much as Trump’s predecessors would have liked to see the demise of the Islamic Republic, “there is a reason no previous president authorized a war against Iran … there is wide consensus — among previous US officials and the expert community — that overthrowing a regime through external military force, and certainly by airpower alone, is unlikely to work and risks unleashing dangerous consequences.” And here we are.

Where exactly is that? The war may not have gone on long by the standards of some previous disasters, but it’s getting longer every day.

In an echo of all those “light at the end of the tunnel” briefings in Vietnam, Trump and his aides tell us that everything is going great, and a few more threats of destruction is all it will take to convince the Iranian regime to capitulate — as if they haven’t been trying and failing with that very approach for months.

“The crushing sanctions and one of the most successful blockades in history have crippled Iran’s economy and has left Iran completely broke, and it would be wise for Iran to agree to a deal,” a White House official recently told Politico. “Otherwise, they know what will happen.”

Yes, they know exactly what will happen, and so does the American public: The US will drop some more bombs (maybe), and nothing will change.

Now it appears that since bombing hasn’t worked and we’re pretty much run out of military targets, and diplomacy hasn’t worked (no doubt having something to do with Trump’s impossible demands), economic pressure might do the trick. As Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reports, “In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy,” designed to convince the president “that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle.”

In other words, they’re trying to fool him, so he can fool himself, and he’ll then try to fool the public. It doesn’t seem like a strategy built on a very sophisticated understanding of what might be necessary to win the war or persuade Americans — which makes it much like all the other decisions that led us to this point.

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For over a year, ABC tried to appease the Trump administration.

It ignored constant abuse from the president and threats from his attack dog Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. It suspended Jimmy Kimmel during a conservative outrage flop cycle. It kept silent as its affiliates were squeezed into publicly disavowing The View. It fielded more than 600 document requests from the FCC, quietly handing over more than 13,000 pages of internal records.

That era is now over. On Tuesday, ABC, its parent company Disney, and eight ABC-owned stations sued the FCC, Carr, and his fellow Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty for grossly violating the First Amendment.

Nasty and rude

Trump has never hidden his loathing for ABC’s news division, or even bothered to pretend that it’s based on something other than the content of its programming — that is, First Amendment protected speech.

“David Muir should be ashamed of himself, as should Linsey Davis, who I never heard of, but both were nasty and rude when they were making statements that they knew were false,” he ranted after ABC moderated one of the 2024 presidential debates. “They have proven NOT WORTHY, and hopefully an investigation will be done as to whether or not they gave the Debate questions to Comrade Kamala, whose best friend is a top ABC Executive. If she did give the questions to Kamala, ABC’s license should be TERMINATED.”

In August 2025, he brayed that ABC “should lose their Licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans.”

In September, he congratulated the network when it briefly yanked Kimmel off the air.

“That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” he jeered.

A week later he raged over Kimmel’s return: “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers!”

All the while, Carr was regularly menacing the network on conservative media.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr mugged on shitposter Benny Johnson’s podcast.

And Kimmel is not the administration’s only target in the House of Mouse; Carr is also fixated on the journalists of ABC’s The View.

In February, he opened an investigation into Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico’s appearance on the show, suggesting the show’s failure to invite on his primary opponent Jasmine Crockett violated the Equal Time Rule.

In fact, the FCC ruled in 2002 that The View is excepted from that rule under the “bona fide news” exemption, as are Howard Stern and The Tonight Show. But in January, Carr unilaterally decreed that “a program that is motivated by partisan purposes would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent,” adding that “the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.”

Naturally, Carr himself will determine which programs are “motivated by partisan purposes.”

In a spectacularly devious maneuver, Carr went to the non-ABC-owned affiliates that carried the Talarico episode and demanded they report the program as a political appearance outside the bona fide news exemption — only to turn around and cite these reports as evidence that The View doesn’t qualify as news.

Carr’s threats spooked CBS so thoroughly that they canceled an interview with Talarico on one of Colbert’s last shows. Colbert responded by viciously roasting Carr on air and then posting the interview on the show’s YouTube channel, where it racked up a whopping 9.5 million views.

But unlike Trump, who exists in a permanent time warp where networks have “a license,” Carr understands that his leverage over the parent companies is limited.

The FCC’s remit is to manage the television and radio spectrum so as to promote competition that benefits consumers. His only real leverage against the parent company is to squeeze the local affiliate stations that use that public spectrum — particularly the small handful owned by the networks themselves. And he’s made clear that he intends to do just that.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” he wrote earlier this year on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

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Local leverage

On April 28, just a week after Kimmel pissed off Trump with a joke about Melania having “a glow like an expectant widow,” the FCC ordered all eight ABC-owned stations to file early broadcast license renewal applications.

The Commission hadn’t called for an early renewal at all in more than 50 years, and yet Carr gave the stations just 30 days to prepare applications that ordinarily take months.

If Disney needed a wake-up call, this clearly did the trick.

The company hired three heavy hitters to run its defense: Paul Clement, the former Bush solicitor general and legendary Supreme Court litigator; Beth Wilkinson, an incredibly accomplished trial lawyer who recently trounced the FTC’s bid to block Microsoft’s $75 billion acquisition of Activision; and Jennifer Tatel, the former general counsel of the FCC. They filed a blistering opposition that revealed the extent of Carr’s harassment over the past 18 months.

The campaign began in March 2025, when Carr fired off a letter to Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger informing him that the agency had opened an investigation “to ensure that Disney and ABC have not been violating FCC equal employment opportunity regulations by promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination.” Among the company’s supposed crimes of wokeness, Carr faulted Disney for requiring scripted programs to contain non-white characters.

Carr followed up with wave after wave of demands for documents, including internal communications among the staff at The View and itemized lists of the hosts’ political donations going back four years — a demand which was later extended to include donations by on-air talent and producers at Good Morning America, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir.

Perhaps hoping to avoid a public fight, the network mostly cooperated with the agency’s demands. ABC acknowledges that it did indeed censor itself preemptively, refraining from booking political interviews that might draw the administration’s ire and airing Trump’s July 16 rant on election security on ABC’s streaming platform when they’d otherwise have ignored it. But Carr’s order that the affiliate station’s renew their licenses effectively forced Disney’s hand.

The stations submitted their renewals on May 28, kicking off a public comment period that ended August 5. More than 150,000 people weighed in — 95 percent supportive, per ABC’s count.

On June 29, six right-wing groups, including the Center for American Rights, the Media Research Center, the Article III Project, and America First Legal, filed counter-petitions arguing that the licenses should not be renewed.

On July 29, ABC filed its opposition, the last step in the process.

If the FCC issues a Hearing Designation Order, the stations will be thrust into adjudicative proceedings which can last for years and will cast the stations’ viability into protracted uncertainty. And Bloomberg reports that the hammer is coming down imminently: “The anticipated FCC action, likely timed before the Labor Day holiday, would determine that The View is not a ‘bona fide’ news show, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Worse still, the FCC's only administrative law judge retired May 30, leaving Carr free to preside over the proceedings himself. Under the circumstances, Disney had no choice but to race to the courthouse to head this sham off at the pass.

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The mouse awakens

Yesterday, Disney, ABC, and the eight ABC affiliates sued the FCC, Carr, and his fellow commissioners in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Defendants have violated, and continue to violate, Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by launching pretextual regulatory investigations and threatening the Stations’ valuable broadcast licenses through early license renewal proceedings — all to punish Plaintiffs for content and viewpoints the Administration dislikes,” they argued.

They’ve asked Judge Loren AliKhan, a Biden appointee, to issue a declaratory ruling that Carr and the FCC are retaliating against them for exercising their First Amendment right — something the president and Carr have effectively shouted from the rooftops. And they want the court to immediately issue a temporary restraining order prohibiting the agency from issuing a Hearing Designation Order or from “taking any actions, formal or informal, to coerce or threaten Plaintiffs with sanctions in an effort to alter their exercise of editorial discretion.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone remaining Democrat on the panel, cheered Disney’s suit.

“I have long called on companies to push back against this kind of government intimidation, and I’m glad Disney has shown courage and stepped up,” she wrote yesterday. “I am hopeful that this will mark the beginning of the end of this administration’s disregard for the Constitution and the law, and that the coming months will bring the costly legal defeat this agency has been asking for since it started down this path.”

Carr was more circumspect — for once! — merely sending an unnamed flack to mumble that “the FCC has been examining claims that Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination for over a year."

“Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC’s proceeding, as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation as well as their decision to ask a court to stop the FCC from further pursuing matters,” the anonymous spokesperson snarked to NBC.

For his part, Iger’s successor, Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, seems ready for the fight.

“We’re going to stand up to what we believe is journalistic integrity. And we’re not going to be told how to run that side of our business,” he told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “And, again, our filings, I think, speak for that. I like what we do. We tell incredible stories. I think we do it well. We do it around the world. And we’re going to stay committed to that.”

That’s it for today

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When the Department of Justice indicted 15 Minnesotans earlier this summer, it was painfully clear that this was a cobbled-together mess, a transparent attempt to criminalize dissent. But boy, we didn’t know the half of it.

Now, thanks to those defendants prying loose some discovery from the government, we know just how far the administration is willing to go — and it’s really, really grim, even by Trumpian standards.

The indictment itself was jaw-dropping for how it strung together objectively legal, nonviolent actions like organizing protests or tracking ICE vehicles, somehow hoping if they stacked up enough of those, it magically added up to illegal antifa violence.

What we didn’t know at the time, though, was that the administration had engaged in utterly unprecedented surveillance in service of its theory that somehow everyone in Minnesota was engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to make ICE thugs feel sad. As part of these efforts, the government also demanded multiple years of records from trade unions and nonprofit groups for what it said was a financial investigation into “domestic terrorist financing.”

You honestly can’t get a sense of how unhinged this all was without looking at the little graphic Homeland Security Investigations put together showing this alleged web of conspiracy:

Even if we were to pretend this nonsense actually showed some meaningful joint effort by 18 different groups comprising hundreds of thousands of people nationwide to conspire to thwart ICE, none of that would explain the scope of the records HSI demanded.

For example, the administration used this theory, such as it was, to get several years’ worth of wire transfer records for the Service Employees International Union. It would be pretty intense if SEIU could be said to be part of this vast ongoing conspiracy, given that it’s a nationwide union with two million members. HSI also demanded donations and PAC spending information from the Communications Workers of America dating back to 2023. Yes, apparently CWA, which represents 700,000 workers worldwide, had actually been secretly funding nefarious anti-ICE terrorists, but somehow allegedly started some three years before ICE terrorized Minnesota.

If you’re wondering how the Department of Justice got these subpoenas past a federal judge, they didn’t.

Presumption of (ir)regularity

Normally, the FBI would investigate this alleged sprawling conspiracy, and after gathering enough evidence, the DOJ would go to a judge and get a warrant. But here, HSI was the investigating agency, and therefore they used administrative subpoenas.

Administrative subpoenas are a neat trick, a way for the most corrupt, most anti-American, most anti-First Amendment administration to avoid even the modest requirement of getting a judge to sign off. Instead, HSI just issued its own summons, requiring financial institutions to produce years of records with no real justification necessary. Oh, and those institutions were told that they couldn’t disclose anything “for an indefinite period of time” because “any such disclosure will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”

That language is actually standard for this sort of summons, but the way the Trump administration treats it is anything but. Its stance is that any opposition to the murderous antics of federal thugs is actually interfering with federal law. That was the justification for federalizing the California National Guard last year. Per the administration, Los Angeles anti-ICE protests were actually an organized, violent rebellion that prevented federal agents from enforcing the law.

You can trace the evolution of this strategy over the last year, where literally any opposition to the murderous antics of federal thugs is framed as a crime. And you can also see how every time the administration suffers a setback, it moves on to a new city, a new theory, a new line of attack, endlessly inventive.

After his success in federalizing the National Guard in California, Trump tried to replicate it in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, but to no avail. In October, a federal appeals court upheld the lower court’s decision blocking Trump from sending Guard troops into Illinois, saying there was no evidence the protests were a “coordinated assault by violent groups” that were engaging in “intimidation and sabotage” against ICE. And a month later, a different federal judge permanently barred Trump from deploying National Guard troops in Oregon because it was clear those protests were not a rebellion and weren’t hampering ICE.

Trump ran to the Supreme Court to whine about the unfairness of it all, but they handed him a rare loss on December 23 of last year when they left the lower court’s block in place.

Clearly, what Trump took away from this setback was that he couldn’t rely on roving federalized National Guard troops and he’d need to do something different to bring blue cities and states to heel. So his comprehensive assault on Minnesota was undertaken by flooding the state with federal agents rather than relying on the more complicated and dicey Guard scheme.

You might have forgotten how quickly ICE’s surge into Minnesota devolved into violence. On January 6, 2006, 2,000 ICE agents descended on the state. The very next day, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of people, in cold blood. Apparently, that somehow impeded federal law enforcement, because the DOJ then pushed to investigate Good and her widow for Good’s crime of getting in the way of an ICE agent’s bullets.

One week later, ICE agent Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, through a closed door, hitting him in the leg. Relying on lies from Castro and lies from the FBI agent ostensibly investigating the matter, US Attorney Daniel Rosen’s office charged Sosa-Celis and another immigrant, Alfredo Aljorna, for their non-attack on Castro.

That case fell apart so hard that not only did Rosen’s office dismiss the charges, but Hennepin County later charged Castro criminally when CCTV video showed there was no attack whatsoever, just Castro recklessly firing at a fleeing Sosa-Celis.

And then 10 days later, two CBP agents executed Alex Pretti as he lay defenseless on the ground.

Having federal thugs murder two people and shoot a third in under three weeks apparently caused a reckoning within the administration, but it was precisely the opposite of what it should have been. Rather than pulling back to regroup and figure out how to stop ICE agents from popping off and murdering people whenever they wanted, instead, just four days after Pretti’s murder, HSI kicked off “Operation Puppet Master,” the blindingly stupid name for this mass surveillance machine, premised on the idea that the ICE goons were the real victims here, victims of a deep-pocketed violent conspiracy:

“[V]iolent opportunists (VOs) have exploited the protests as cover to attempt breaches of federal properties and have perpetrated multiple assaults against federal officers tasked with protecting these facilities.... HSI St. Paul has identified an organized network of conspirators operating through online and in person who are providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators involved in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of Federal property and assaults on Federal agents and Officers.”

If any of that were true, the indictment of the Minnesota 15 would have contained far more evidence of this. But at best, what they were able to come up with is that one person brake-checked an ICE vehicle that was following her and another kicked an ICE vehicle and knocked an ICE agent’s notebook out of his hands.

On the one hand, murders. On the other, notebooks on the ground. Totally the same.

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The American Stasi

While this was always about criminalizing dissent, this mass surveillance scheme adds a new, distressing component.

All HSI has to do if it wants to go spelunking through years of union finances — or any other sort of left-leaning group — is to vaguely say that they support domestic terrorism and are part of a vast conspiracy.

Donated money to keep people safe while ICE was terrorizing the state? Conspiracy. Attended deescalation training specifically about, well, deescalating conflict? Conspiracy. Have a website that has articles about “ICE OUT”? Conspiracy. Attended No Kings protests? Conspiracy. Met at a church to talk with other anti-ICE activists for an art club event? Conspiracy.

At a church in Roseville, Minnesota, HSI captured license plates and used that information to obtain the names of all the attendees, then searched social media and compiled a full intel workup, all for being in a church meeting room talking about ICE.

Undercover agents also surveilled people at the University Baptist Church in Dinkytown, a neighborhood near the University of Minnesota campus. One problem? There’s an injunction barring DHS and other agencies from taking any “immigration enforcement action” against an alliance of Baptist churches of which University Baptist is a part. That order bans “arrest, seizure, search, interrogation, questioning, interview or investigation,” but that didn’t dissuade HSI at all.

It’s very tempting to whistle past the graveyard here, to say that, much like what happened to the Broadview 6, eventually the Minnesota 15 will crack open the grand jury testimony and have a path forward to get this thing tossed.

Indeed, what we do know about the grand jury already shows that it was chock-full of lies. HSI agent Desmond Garcia told the grand jury, “No one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for First Amendment-protected activities.” But HSI literally spied on people hanging out in a church parking lot. They decided that unions were somehow engaged in a crime if they support something Trump doesn’t like. This whole thing is an assault on the First Amendment.

The Broadview defendants eventually walked away, but they owed hundreds of thousands in legal fees for the several months it took. Sure, the DOJ says they are not opposing a fee request, an attempt to bring the case to an end without having to reveal more grand jury shenanigans, but that payoff, no matter what it is, doesn’t undo the months Broadview defendants spent in limbo, felonies hanging over their heads.

And unfortunately, after the verdicts in Dallas, where eight of nine anti-ICE protesters were found guilty of “providing material support to terrorists,” it just isn’t possible for defendants caught up in this sort of thing to be chill. Elizabeth Soto made zines and was part of a leftist book club, and that counted as “material support,” so she was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

And as far as nonprofits, churches, and unions? They run the risk of being the next Southern Poverty Law Center, indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering for doing the thing they’ve always openly done: paying informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other racist right-wing groups, dismantling them bit by bit.

This isn’t just meant to stop liberals from dissenting or engaging in anti-ICE activism. It’s meant to deprive people of vital connections, like their churches and union halls. The administration is making every interaction liberals and leftists have a fretful one, always shadowed by the worry that it will lead to criminal charges.

It’s meant to destroy trust among activists, who must now constantly worry about whether HSI has infiltrated them. It’s meant to drive out of public life anyone the administration disfavors. It’s meant to enshrine violence as a tool of the state, one which you cannot fight back against or even discuss in anything but a laudatory fashion.

It’s a world created by wreckers, gleefully tearing down institutions and people and cities in the name of nothing but murderous xenophobia. They may have the money and the power, but they’ll never have the joy and the fierceness to build something together. But we do.

That’s it for today

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The Navy Times reported last week, based on interviews with family members, that multiple sailors have recently tried to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln — a ship has been deployed for 250 days as part of President Trump’s war of choice against Iran.

Food is deteriorating and being rationed, there are water shortages, the laundry facilities are broken. And the psychological toll has been brutal.

Trump started a war without provocation and has prolonged it because he does not want to admit he lost. But when questioned on Friday about conditions on the Lincoln, he responded not with compassion or regret, but with callous vindictiveness.

Asked if the deployment had lasted too long, he replied, “No. Not nearly long enough.”

Trump also claimed that a carrier was moving to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. That appears to be true. Still, his belligerent denial of the suffering of service members is shocking.

“Shocking,” though, does not mean surprising.

Over the last decade, Trump has consistently insulted and mocked US troops. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has made clear that he sees service members as props in his endless battle to win culture war accolades from Nazi bloggers and right-wing talking heads.

The fact that real men and women are experiencing mental health crises and are dying in service of their ill-informed and vindictive whims doesn’t trouble Trump or Hegseth. It should more than worry everyone else though.

“Moldy showers, broken toilets”

According to reporting, the conditions onboard the USS Lincoln are grim.

The ship is home to around 5,000 sailors and Marines who have been deployed since November 21. The deployment was supposed to end in May but has been extended repeatedly. There is still no stated end date — though, again, pressure from the media and Democratic lawmakers appears to have forced the administration to take steps towards providing extremely overdue relief.

An MS NOW report from earlier this month provides details on just how badly that relief is needed. The ship crew has had only two days off in eight months. For one stretch it was at sea for 208 days, which is a record for a modern aircraft carrier.

These are not the sorts of records you want to break. Aircraft carriers — on which, as the name says, aircraft regularly take off and land — are dangerous places at the best of times. Extended deployments put potentially catastrophic wear and tear on equipment. One father told MS NOW his son saw holes worn through the flight deck.

Deployments also put stress on logistics. Sailors have reported that the army has had trouble supplying them with basic necessities. Families have shared pictures of meals on the ship consisting of tiny portions of inedible food. They also say the ship’s store has at times run out of toothpaste, soap, and deodorant. One service member said showers and laundry rooms have been locked.

Now there have been reports of multiple service members in mental health crises.

The Navy Times reported that Annabelle Loma was told by the Navy that her husband tried to jump overboard. She has only been able to communicate with him intermittently since.

“He’s scared,” she told The Navy Times. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right.”

Democratic Rep. Mike Levin excoriated the administration for conditions on the ship including “moldy showers, broken toilets … a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to Hegseth and the Navy secretary highlighting “water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care ​packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit ​for months.”

Pete Hegseth inevitably insisted that all these reports were “fake news” and said conditions on shipboard were “completely misrepresented,” to which one mother responded, “Go visit. If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself.”

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“A negligent lack of forethought”

Trump, of course, does not care about the wellbeing of soldiers. He has said as much, in so many words, over and over for the last decade plus.

In 2015, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, Trump attacked Sen. John McCain, a veteran who had been imprisoned in Vietnam for five and a half years.

“He’s a war hero, because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump sneered.

That wasn’t a one off. Trump’s first-term Chief of Staff John Kelly described Trump as "a person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.'"

Trump denied making those comments. But it’s hard to take his denials seriously since he lies all the time and has said similarly insensitive things in public.

In 2020, after Iranian missiles hit US bases in an exchange of hostilities, 11 US service members were flown to hospitals to be treated for brain injuries and concussion symptoms. Trump cavalierly dismissed their plight.

“I heard they had headaches and a couple of other things,” he said. “I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries I have seen.”

Trump downplayed that situation for the same reasons he downplayed covid and does not want to be seen with military amputees — he instinctively rejects any implication that he is responsible for any problems or negative outcomes resulting from his decisions.

People cannot be sick, because that would suggest Trump failed to prepare for a pandemic. Soldiers cannot be injured, because that would suggest Trump failed them. All Trump cares about is his own (self-)image. If other people’s traumatic brain injuries get in the way, the problem is obviously with the people who are injured, not with the infallible Donald Trump.

Pete Hegseth is Donald Trump’s creature, and he runs the military to please his patron. That entails a fixation on culture-warring and a complete indifference to the safety and humanity of the service members whose lives are in his care.

Hegseth has spent his tenure trying to terrorize and torment soldiers who don’t fit his bigoted vision of a white male cishet military. He’s forced thousands of trans service members into retirement. He’s systematically blocked the promotion of women and Black officers. He’s waged a ridiculous war on facial hair in the military — one that not coincidentally has disproportionately affected Black soldiers, who are more likely to suffer from pseudofolliculitis, a condition which makes shaving painful.

Hegseth has also embraced the idea touted by Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that people only get sick because they’re weak. In line with that eugenic ideology, he suspended the flu vaccine requirement for US troops. The result was a massive flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in which hundreds of recruits became ill. One died.

Trump and Hegseth have not just killed troops via virus. The most obvious demonstration of their lack of care for service members is their reckless and pointless war of aggression against Iran. Trump launched the attack thinking Iran’s leaders would fold quickly and not seize the Strait of Hormuz — assumptions characterized by one analyst as a “negligent lack of forethought.”

Trump has insisted on Truth Social that the war “will all work out well in the end. It always does!” But that blithe cheer deliberately erases the people for whom the war did not turn out well in a permanent and tragic fashion.

Estimates put the death toll so far as high as 18,000 people, including 18 US troops. Inevitably, and disgracefully, the Defense Department has attempted to obfuscate that last number, briefly removing four people from the list on the extremely unconvincing grounds that they were killed after Trump declared a ceasefire in April.

We’re all just props

US service members risk their lives out of a sense of duty to their country and its people. To throw their lives away to make a point about flu vaccines, or to satisfy a desire for manly carnage, is repulsive. To purge trans people, women, and Black people for the greater glory of a fascist leader’s white supremacist vision is simply evil.

What’s perhaps even more disturbing, though, is that Trump’s approach to service members extends to everyone.

Trump doesn’t see himself as a public servant with a duty to the Constitution and to American citizens. Rather, he sees himself as a king, entitled to the reverence, the awe, and the lives of everyone he surveys.

The press corps should be happy to serve as a human shield during an assassination plot. Ukraine should be grateful to the US while we flirt with letting a murderous dictator conquer them because he gave Trump illegal election aid. Women should let him sexually assault them because he is famous. Service members aboard the USS Lincoln should spend even longer at sea just to prove what a great job Donald Trump is doing.

For Trump, everyone, everywhere is just a prop to reflect glory on the star of the show, Donald Trump. That’s grim news for service members, who Trump can order to their deaths on a whim. It’s grim news for the rest of the country, and the world, too.

That’s it for today

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Once again, transgender athletes are in the news … despite the fact they don’t even play in the league at the center of the controversy.

This time, Sophie Cunningham of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever set off a firestorm when she was quoted by ESPN as saying, “I also think with that love is truth, [if I’m] being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Cunningham’s comments made her an instant Fox News star and MAGA cause célèbre.

Former NBA players Enes Freedom and Royce White have since declared that they now identify as women for the purposes of playing in the WNBA and will therefore declare for the 2027 draft. This is clearly being done as a trolling stunt meant to either force the WNBA to ban transgender women, or to work their way into the WNBA to prove a point about men being better than women.

Of course, Freedom and White didn’t consider the possibility that the WNBA could require them to do what every other NCAA, olympic, or professional transgender athletes had gone through to play prior to the bans: namely, chemical castration or undergoing gender reassignment surgery (i.e. physical castration plus vaginoplasty). They seemed to assume that transgender athletes could just declare themselves one day and play the next. Somehow, it’s doubtful either would be willing to socially transition and emasculate themselves for a WNBA rookie contract — but that was never the point.

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“Men in women’s sports came ravaging through our cities”

None of this discourse happened because there is a new high-profile transgender athlete in the news. In fact, there are no transgender players in the WNBA or on the verge of making the league. Nor is there one in the NCAA, Olympics, or FIFA.

Instead, Republicans are starting a culture war to rile up their base, co-opt Democrats into agreeing with them, and create precedents which push transgender people out of public life altogether.

Trump seemingly cannot go without talking about “men in women’s sports” in every speech he gives, even bringing it up randomly during completely unrelated pressers.

It’s a quick and easy way to score points, because trans people in sports polls very poorly. Democrats are afraid to talk about it because it would force them to explain and use nuance, and as the old adage goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Here are the facts about transgender athletes. First, they were exceptionally rare to begin with, so much so that transgender people were drastically UNDER-represented when they were allowed to compete. There were never enough competing to have any statistically significant effect on high-level women’s sports.

Between 2004 and 2022, almost 30,000 women participated in the Olympics. Two were trans, and they finished last and in 37th place. That works out to .015 percent of competing athletes, when the trans population is roughly .5 percent of the population. If trans people were proportionately represented you would expect there to have been about 150 in the Olympics.

Similarly, there were roughly 226,000 NCAA female athletes in 2022 alone. But over the 11 years that the NCAA allowed transgender athletes to compete, there were only 47 publicly known. In 2024, there were only 10, and many of them were transgender men. Assuming half were trans women, that works out to about .002%. If transgender women were represented proportionally, you’d expect for there to be about 1,100 competing in any given year.

People will point to Lia Thomas, who was the most successful transgender athlete in the past 40 years. She was a very good swimmer as a freshman before transitioning. When she came back after two years of testosterone suppression, she was still very good, but far from unbeatable. Her winning time in the national championships was slower than the winner of the event the previous year, and a good six seconds off of Katie Ledecky’s record. Riley Gaines rose to fame for tying for 5th with her, meaning four other cisgender swimmers beat both Thomas and Gaines.

The WNBA is one of the few leagues where transgender women have not been categorically banned. In its 29 years of its existence, no openly transgender woman has ever played in the league. There have been some that have tried out for WNBA steams, but were ultimately not good enough to even make a practice squad.

In short, the hypothesis that including transgender people will somehow destroy women’s sports has already been field tested for decades, and the evidence is pretty clear: trans athletes are a tiny and under-represented group in the sports they play, and they are far from dominant.

The idea that trans people should have their own separate but equal events has been tested and failed. After World Aquatics Swimming banned transgender women from competing in women’s event,s they created an “open category” for the Berlin World Cup 2023. But all of the “open category” events were cancelled because not a single person signed up for any of them. There simply aren’t enough transgender people, much less ones who are good at sports, to make “get your own league” work.

Ultimately, the gadflies don’t seem to actually understand how being a transgender athlete works. They have no idea that sports leagues enforce strict hormone therapy and testosterone-monitoring rules, preventing men from simply entering women’s teams based on self-identification. The idea that cisgender men would voluntarily undergo chemical castration to try to join the WNBA and make a minuscule rookie salary is farcical on its face.

But all of this is now effectively a moot point. Trans women are banned from just about everything, right down to women’s darts, billiards, and chess tournaments. The only trans girls and women left competing are little kids and high schoolers who will never have a shot at a scholarship or a pro career. None of the various state anti-trans laws distinguish between a kindergartner playing for a participation medal and Lia Thomas. They were designed with one purpose in mind: to punish and exclude transgender people.

Democrats should have the backbone to ask why that kindergartner shouldn’t be allowed to kick at a ball with her friends when nothing is at stake. Or why the trans girl on puberty blockers, who never went through male puberty, is banned from participating. Or why the trans girl who’s terrible at her sport isn’t even allowed to be on the JV team. Or why the trans girl running cross country, whose times count for nothing and who will never get a scholarship, can’t even run alongside her team for the sheer joy of feeling the wind in her hair and the road beneath her feet. Or why trans women can’t compete in sports where there’s no physical contact.

Ideally, Democratic lawmakers would have the cajones to turn the bad faith questions around and talk about how it’s Republicans who are actively working to destroy women’s sports and invade the privacy of girls and women, all in the name of preventing a tiny handful of transgender children from even participating in what amounts to recreational sports. And when we say a handful, we mean that in Utah the sports ban targeted exactly one child in the entire state.

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The real threat to women’s sports is Republicans

Democrats should ask why Republicans are pushing for genital inspections of every girl who wants to play sports, all the way down to kindergartners. They should be demanding to know why the Heritage Foundation, which swore up and down that they were banning transgender people to save women’s sports, has issued a policy paper calling to end Title IX and women’s sports. Instead, Heritage wants to steer women into less “demanding” activities like hiking and yoga, and “other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies,” in order to maximize their “fertility” and womanliness.

Democrats should talk about how right-wingers are offering millions of dollars to try and humiliate WNBA players, or are turning a blind eye towards the rampant sexual abuse of female athletes, 21 percent of whom report being assaulted. Or about how women abusing testosterone (doping) for competitive advantage is far more common than transgender athletes, whose hormone levels were very strictly regulated.

This was never about saving women’s sports. It was always about dehumanizing trans people and using them as a societal scapegoat and cudgel against Democrats, who still haven’t figured out how to effectively deal with this non-issue. In the end, this was just one of the first steps towards “eradicating transgenderism,” and most of the country fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

That’s it for this week

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It’s no secret that President Donald Trump doesn’t really believe in the justice system. For him, it serves only two purposes: protecting himself and hurting others. He doesn’t feel the least bit bound by orders or outcomes, but he isn’t just at war with judges.

He’s also at war with juries.

By now, everyone is familiar with Trump and the Department of Justice’s manipulation of grand juries to obtain felony indictments that fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. (Looking at you, US Attorney for the District of Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro.) Trump and the DOJ also have no problem misusing grand juries in an attempt to prosecute the innocent. (Looking at you, one-time Interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan.)

But when it comes to trial juries, Trump’s disdain manifests in exactly the opposite fashion. Convictions are tossed, regardless of what happened at trial, regardless of the careful work of juries. He’s making it extremely clear that views himself as judge, jury, and executioner.

Now, the president isn’t foreclosed from pardoning someone just because a jury of their peers weighed in and found them guilty. But we’ve never had one who decided to traipse through past convictions, discarding things based on personal whims and opportunities for profit, with no real justification.

In Donald Trump’s America, if you’re rich enough or corrupt enough, jury decisions simply don’t matter. Pardons are for sale and used to send a message that juries shouldn’t convict people of crimes that the president himself has committed.

This has, predictably, led to results that are both terrible and stupid from the standpoint of the rule of law.

Take Trevor Milton.

Scams upon scams

Milton started an electric vehicle company, Nikola, that was basically a scam from the jump. He claimed he was making hydrogen-powered trucks and investors threw tons of money at him to do it. But he wasn’t making anything of the sort, particularly because he was selling a technology that doesn’t really exist.

To cover that up, Milton pulled stunts like rolling a nonfunctioning semi truck down a hill to make it appear like it was successfully trundling along a desert highway.

Milton was convicted by a jury in 2022 after a trial that lasted nearly a month and later sentenced to four years in prison. He was also ordered to pay restitution of around $680 million to investors he duped and an additional $15 million to one of his wire fraud victims.

But Milton managed to get quite a bargain by donating about $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign in October 2024. That didn’t just buy him a pardon and get him out from under a criminal conviction — it also wiped out that extremely expensive restitution. And Trump did Milton another solid by killing a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

For Trump, saving Milton close to $700 million didn’t even merit a mention. Instead, he invented a world where what Milton was really prosecuted for was supporting one Donald J. Trump: “They say the thing that he did wrong was, he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked him. They persecuted him, they destroyed five years of his life.”

This fiction requires a lot of heavy lifting, even by Trump standards.

The insistence that Milton was persecuted because he supported Trump necessitates believing the jury that convicted him was either manipulated by evil prosecutors for a full month or that they, too, were in on the persecution. And what of all the victims of Milton’s fraud? Were they all just lying? Did an entire class of investors hate Trump so much they joined up with Joe Biden’s DOJ to demand millions from Milton? Did Milton really make a working hydrogen truck only to get sucker-punched by prosecutors eager to land a blow against Trump?

This isn’t to say that federal prosecutors never bring spurious charges or inflate the wrongdoing of defendants or deceive juries. But neither Trump nor Milton is really claiming that. In their telling, his conviction is just part of some vast anti-Trump conspiracy and therefore Milton, by definition, did no wrong. Milton’s explanation of his pardon even echoes Trump’s belief that he alone is the law: “The presidential pardon and dismissal of the SEC case demonstrate no laws were broken or violated.”

This is, obviously, not what a pardon means at all. A presidential pardon doesn’t magically mean Milton didn’t break the law. It just means he is going to suffer zero consequences for doing so.

Trump also doesn’t care about juries when he wants to reward some semi-famous reality TV people who are also scammy criminals, because like finds like.

So, he made sure to pardon Todd and Julie Chrisley of “Chrisley Knows Best” after a jury found them guilty following a multi-week trial in 2022. According to one of the Chrisleys’ attorneys, they were “prosecuted because they were celebrities” and “were treated more harshly because of their status, and that’s not the way our criminal justice system is supposed to work.”

Besides the fact that Trump’s pardon requires us to swallow the laughable lie that the American justice system is famously hard on celebrities, it also requires us to ignore that the initial indictment against Trump’s TV pals occurred in August 2019, during his first term.

The Chrisleys were charged with conspiracy, bank fraud, and wire fraud for spending 2007 to 2012 submitting fake bank statements and other financial documents to banks to get millions in loans.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s pretty similar to what Trump and his companies were found liable for in a civil fraud case in New York state. There, Trump also spent years giving banks and lenders financial statements that overstated his wealth so he could get more favorable loan terms.

Trump was outraged that a case was ever brought against him in the first place, even though the New York state appellate court inexplicably wiped out his massive fine. It didn’t, however, get rid of the underlying finding that Trump had engaged in fraud, and he continues to try to get the verdict tossed out entirely because he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with scamming banks in that fashion.

The Chrisleys reacted to their good fortune the same way Milton did: Not by being grateful for mercy, but by deciding that Trump’s pardon magically means they never broke the law. So, they’re now suing their criminal attorneys for $25 million for losing the case.

But wait, there’s more! Not only does it appear the Chrisleys no longer have to pay any more of the $17 million in restitution they were ordered to pay back to the banks they defrauded, but they also may be able to claw back whatever they already paid.

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Another way Trump has shown his profound contempt for juries is that he’s willing to grant clemency to a fellow fraudster twice, once in each term.

Meet Adriana Camberos.

Camberos was convicted in 2016 for selling counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinks, which sounds like no big deal until you learn it involved millions of bottles that were mixed in unsanitary conditions. Trump commuted her sentence in 2021, at which point she went on to do more crimes.

In 2024, Camberos was convicted of bank and mail fraud, funding her big-spending lifestyle with a new scam. This time, she purchased wholesale groceries at discounted prices, promising to sell them to needy people. Instead, she marked the groceries up and sold them to distributors. Trump pardoned her again earlier this year.

Rubbing our faces in it

The pardons of Milton, the Chrisleys, and Camberos aren’t about mercy, They’re about permission. And it’s no coincidence that those people Trump seems most inclined to rescue from the consequences of their own actions are the same things he himself has done.

Past presidents, of course, have also handed out pardons as a sort of reward or a sort of shield — think Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a financier whose wife was a big donor to the Democratic Party — but nobody has come anywhere close to Trump’s abuse of them.

While Republicans been perfectly happy to let Trump turn the pardon power into a treat machine, back when Barack Obama was president they thought pardons were bad because Obama dared to commute the sentences of people convicted of drug-related crimes. According to Republicans back then, Obama was engaged in a “blatant usurpation of the lawmaking authority of the Legislative branch” and an “unconstitutional practice of picking and choosing which laws to enforce and which to change.”

Hmmm. Republicans seem to have gotten over worrying about whether the pardon authority infringed on their lawmaking, as Trump’s stance is that any law he doesn’t like is, by definition, not one his pals should be convicted of.

Biden took a ton of heat for his preemptive pardons, but he absolutely wasn’t wrong to try to protect people from the vindictiveness of Trump once he retook office.

That was confirmed recently when rabid Senate Republicans voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for exercising his Constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment, as they are desperate to find something that would count as a new “crime” that wouldn’t be covered by Biden’s pardon.

Even Trump’s mass pardon of his January 6 insurrectionists isn’t akin to previous mass pardons. Jimmy Carter didn’t mass pardon people convicted of dodging the Vietnam War draft because the draft-dodger contingent had supported him in some violent fashion and he wanted to reward them. He didn’t mass pardon those folks because he himself dodged the draft — unlike Trump, who actually did. But Trump’s pardon of J6ers was both a gift to his treasonous supporters and a way of conveying that a violent insurrection in service of blocking the peaceful transfer of power is no big deal and you can’t be charged for it.

Trump has been running what can only be described as a pay-to-play presidency from the jump. If Congress were willing to do its job, it’s not as if they could reverse the pardons, but they could at least illuminate just how bad his actions are. Instead, the GOP is sitting on its hands, willing to let Trump make a mockery of both the pardon power and those who serve on juries.

It really isn’t surprising that Trump would think people fulfilling their civic duty are either suckers or part of some vast conspiracy to bring him and his rich pals down. And with every pardon and every transparent and risible lie about them, he sends a message that the rule of law simply doesn’t matter at all.

Programming note

Due to travel Aaron is doing this week, there will be no PN Pod this week. The show will return next Friday, August 21.

That’s it for today

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

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Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, is making his dreams come true: accelerating the arrest and removal of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant kids.

The man behind family separation in the first Trump term who once boasted that policy would “prove to be a migration deterrent” has now teamed up with another deadly threat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to attack the most vulnerable kids in our country: those here on their own.

By law, kids who cross the border alone are put into the care of the Office Of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In recognition of children’s vulnerabilities and need for protection, this system exists outside the confines of the Department of Homeland Security and therefore the clutches of ICE and Border Patrol.

Thanks to the Constitution itself and federal law, these children have the right to legal counsel, age-appropriate living quarters usually in state-licensed settings with prompt release to vetted sponsors, and fair hearings with special allowances to protect them from trafficking or other abuse.

But as The Guardian reported from immigration court in New York City, “the faces of migrant children — some as young as three — have been beamed onto a video screen throughout the summer as they faced deportation hearings.” These children did not have lawyers, in violation of aforementioned federal law, and thus faced interrogation by Trump appointee Judge Lisa Ling.

This is a scene taking place out of public view across the country, impacting 24,000 kids.

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In the shadows

HHS refused to renew the contract for the legal services to represent these children after stiffing lawyers seven months of pay to the tune of $65 million. The nonprofits successfully sued for and have received back pay.

Nevertheless, a $244 million contract went to Our Rescue, an NGO whose founder was accused of sex trafficking and abusing women and whose CEO had a tenure as a DHS agent lowlighted by setting up a fake university to entrap and then arrest foreign students.

As of June, legal experts report that around 1,800 unaccompanied kids are in so-called ORR “shelters.” These sites are intended to be child appropriate and focused on welfare, but spots in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina, for example, no longer have state licensing, exempting them from oversight and inspections. These kids are in captivity an average of 194 days, where the law demands a maximum of 20 and no more than 72 hours in DHS holds.

Last August, the Trump administration attempted to send children alone to Guatemala in the middle of the night, before judges halted the flights. But if there are no real lawyers present such eleventh hour rescues become impossible. And that appears to be precisely the purpose of the let’s-first-eliminate-the-competent-lawyers scheme.

Indeed, the regime has accelerated plans to build new or repurpose places to hold thousands more kids captive. They put out a bid for a 3,000 Texas child concentration camp — the legally designated term for a place where civilians are held without due process — and there are widely reported proposals to convert an ex-military base deemed toxic into a second site in Louisiana. At least for the time it takes to conduct the mass tribunals already underway, new beds are intended to be filled with kids who are then sent to other countries without adult supervision or loved ones to meet them upon arrival.

At every point along the way, speed and obscurity seem to be the objective. Thanks to state and local 287(g) agreements, local law enforcement is now kidnapping on ICE’s behalf with a $22,500 bounty offered per child. Across the country, police are coming to kids’ homes under the guise of wellness checks only to arrest and send them to ORR captivity and perilous next steps. Many of these children had been living with family or vetted sponsors and were alone only after ICE abducted these adults.

Republicans, attendant to their falling numbers in immigration and across the board, have spun their usual lies about what’s happening to immigrant kids and who’s to blame. In a turn even Orwell could not have scripted, the regime has announced a new HHS hotline that immigrant children can call to report abuse or exploitation. In other words, they’re aiming to get possible trafficking victims to trust and confide in the administration that previously issued $5,000 fines to kids who came to seek protection, coerced them to leave the US, and forced them to sign forms admitting to criminal liability if they came back to seek help.

Democrats have been terrifyingly inactive about all of this. Some have issued social media statements about the ending of the contract for legal counsel, and Sen. Wyden wrote a letter to HHS in June about the administration targeting 500 kids for rapid removal in defiance of “core humanitarian and child welfare mandates.”

We can only speculate about the reasons for this reticence. Perhaps it’s simply the deluge of all of the unrelenting horrors of this regime. Another disturbing possibility is that they’re tongue tied in the face of the standard Republican playbook: evade guilt for your crimes by making accusations.

But given that Republicans have been very public about protecting pedophiles and denying justice to survivors, it would seem fairly simple to drive the narrative that the Epstein Regime is trying to fast track a way to torture and traffic immigrant kids by doing away with the experienced lawyers who have long represented them.

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Hellbent on harm

The challenge with the crimes this regime is committing against these 24,000 unaccompanied children — as with family separation that went on for a year before there was loud, sustained, effective public outcry — is that they’re happening largely out of public view. But we cannot afford to wait any time at all to bring this out of the shadows. Every possible alarm must be sounded before even more kids are subjected to physical and psychological harms, if not worse.

The issue is in one way very complex: you’ve got to cancel the sham contract for Our Rescue, pay and reinstate the lawyers who actually care for children, halt construction or remodeling on the Texas and Louisiana camps, stop local law enforcement from running a trafficking ring, and demand children receive equal justice. And, in another, the issue is very simple: we must be the adults fighting for kids who have no one else to protect them from a regime hellbent on harming them.

Programming note

Due to travel Aaron is doing this week, there will be no PN Pod this week. The show will return next Friday, August 21.

That’s it for today

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

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Last month, President Trump used a planeload of reporters as an unwitting decoy during a real assassination threat, subpoenaed the journalists who reported that something was amiss, and then stood up at a black-tie dinner and told those same journalists how lucky they are that he tolerates them at all.

The episode highlights the grossly dysfunctional relationship between the president and the media, which puts up with ever-escalating abuses as the price of access, and routinely normalizes Trump’s erratic and even criminal behavior.

The old switcheroo

The saga began on July 8, when Trump was returning home from a NATO summit in Turkey.

Two days earlier, Trump flew to Ankara on his Qatari bribe jet, newly renovated using billions of tax dollars. But for the return trip home, he initially boarded one of the old blue-and-white Boeing 747s that ferried presidents around for the past four decades, only switching back to the bling jet during a stopover in the UK.

On July 9, the New York Times reported that Trump had taken the old jet “as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran,” which the US had resumed bombing during the summit. (Media reports of the war’s demise turned out to be greatly exaggerated.)

The following day, the paper followed up with a story asserting that the Secret Service had insisted on the swap due to concern that the new plane “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.”

This confirmed prior reporting by the AP that the Qatari jet (which Trump plans to take with him in 2029) “is not equipped with at least some of the same missile detection and countermeasure systems as the outgoing Cold War-era jets.” And in fact the Air Force admitted back in June the team that retrofitted the plane made “trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets.”

And yet the White House went berserk.

On the evening of July 10, FBI agents showed up at the homes of Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, and Eric Schmitt, three of the New York Times journalists bylined on those stories. The agents served subpoenas ordering the three to testify before a grand jury on the 15th about an “alleged violation of federal law.” (Apparently the FBI failed to serve reporters Adam Goldman and Tyler Pager.)

Later it emerged that the DOJ had also subpoenaed phone records for the reporters’ family members. One request sought records going back to January 1 — months before the articles were even published.

This is not a one-off. In January, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone and laptop. In February, the administration subpoenaed Times freelancer Matthew Cole demanding sources for a story about a failed top secret mission in North Korea in 2019. In March, it subpoenaed the Wall Street Journal over reports on the lead-up to the war in Iran.

All of these were challenged in court, and of course the Times moved to quash the July subpoenas as well.

Their motion cited binding Second Circuit precedent and federal regulations requiring the government to exhaust investigative steps before subpoenaing journalists — something which could not possibly have happened in the few hours between the story’s publication and the appearance of armed FBI agents on the reporters’ doorsteps.

The DOJ’s conduct here was beyond inappropriate — they clearly deceived the magistrate judge about the facts and the law. After a tense hearing before Judge Arun Subramanian on July 23, the government agreed to withdraw the subpoenas.

In light of this week’s reporting, these subpoenas look even more illegitimate now.

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Step out the back, jack

On Monday, the Washington Post published a four-byline story scooping that Trump did not fly out of Ankara on the old 747. Instead he boarded the plane and then immediately snuck out the back in a catering truck, which ferried him to a third aircraft.

Trump flew to Britain’s Mildenhall air base on a C-32A along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and then contrived to sneak back onto the 747 and get himself filmed exiting at 10:56pm local time.

Throughout the subterfuge, the White House press corps remained on the 747, where they had been instructed to close their window shades — presumably so that no one would notice the catering truck secreting the president off the aircraft.

As the New York Times put it: “Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.”

In short, the president made a choice to leave the flight crew, journalists, and members of his own staff in a position to be targeted by potential Iranian assassins as a means of avoiding that risk for himself.

Trump spent years calling the media “the enemy of the people,” “fake news,” and even “treasonous.” He’s filed dozens of garbage lawsuits against media outlets, forcing them to spend millions to fend off patently ridiculous complaints. And his own staff accused reporters of lying about this very event, with Steven Cheung calling MSNOW reporter Carol Leonnig “a complete fraud.”

All the while Trump was using those same reporters as human shields, happy to sacrifice them if it meant he could get away safely. And then, when they accurately reported his subterfuge, he sent armed FBI agents to their homes demanding that they reveal their sources.

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No lessons learned

After a decade of Trump’s attacks on the media, most observers were disgusted but unsurprised to see those same journalists fete the president at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The event had to be rescheduled after a deranged man tried to rush security in April, canceling the original dinner. Naturally the White House cited this as proof that anyone who opposes his illegal ballroom — which would anyway be far too small for the WHCD — is trying to get the president killed.

But on July 24, a little over 24 hours after the DOJ folded in Judge Subramanian’s courtroom, Trump addressed the assembled journalists as guest of honor.

“In this country, we believe in freedom of speech. We settle our differences not with bullets, but with open and vigorous debate, and no deranged loser with a gun will ever change that,” said the man whose FCC Chair spent months gunning for Jimmy Kimmel and the ladies at The View.

“Some of you are lucky that our last dinner was cut short, because I had brought with me what would possibly have been — I’m telling you, I had something. I was going to go after you,” he snorted, laughing at his own malevolence. “I feel so badly doing this. It’s got to be such a letdown.”

“You people have no idea how lucky you are when I’m gone. You’re all going to be broke,” he rambled.

CBS’s Weijia Jiang, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, delivered what passed in the room for a spirited rebuke.

“President Trump, I’ve covered you for a long time and so have many reporters in this room. When we ask questions, you push back, you give us answers, and we push back,” she said, beaming. “You have always been a deal guy. Well, that’s the deal. And the First Amendment is a done deal.”

But of course that’s bullshit.

(As was Trump’s rationale to reporters for why he was on the C-32A as this newsletter was being finalized last night.)

The First Amendment is only as “done” a deal as the government allows it to be. The Justice Department just staged a frontal assault on the First Amendment because journalists accurately reported that Trump’s bribe plane is less secure than the one it replaced. And it’s overwhelmingly likely that the newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche will try it again to figure out who leaked the story about Trump ducking out in a catering truck.

In these circumstances, it’s more than a little craven to rub elbows with Stephen Miller at nerd prom, even as he paints a target on the back of every journalist in the country. But that pales in comparison to the clanging impropriety of yucking it up with a man who uses reporters as a human shield and then threatens to lock them up for reporting on it.

You cannot speak truth to power when you’re sipping cocktails with it — and certainly not when that power is waiting in the parking lot with a subpoena and pair of handcuffs if you report something he doesn’t like.

That’s it for today

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

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Six days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington DC to send a message to the public that as the country prepared for what would become a decades-long Global War on Terror, Islam and Muslims were not the enemy.

“Islam is peace,” he said at a moment when Muslim Americans were experiencing a wave of intimidation and bigotry. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”

Given the way that long war was prosecuted both at home and abroad, one can question Bush’s sincerity on this point — and much of his party never agreed. Nevertheless, the fact that the president reinforced foundational notions of pluralism and religious liberty at such a fraught moment showed that a principled opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry still existed within the Republican Party.

Back then, supposedly serious people argued that radical Muslim terrorists represented a genuine threat to the safety of all Americans, something almost no one claims any longer. Yet today, naked statements of animus toward Muslims — all Muslims — are not only more accepted than ever within the Republican Party, they’re coming right from the White House.

Now the alleged threat is less about safety than about culture and power: Let American Muslims have truly full citizenship — including the ability to serve in public office — and the country’s character will be contaminated.

This latest wave of bigotry started when Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York last year, and has accelerated since Abdul El-Sayed won the primary for a Senate seat from Michigan. Whatever hesitation there was to tolerate the ugliest statements of racial and religious prejudice from Republican officeholders and advocates has disappeared.

But as shocked and disgusted as we should all be at what we are hearing, and as powerful as racism and religious hatred continue to be, there’s good reason to believe there are limits to the effectiveness of these attacks.

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The veil is off — if it was ever on

The mainstreaming of bigotry is one of the central pillars of Donald Trump’s political project, and has been from the beginning.

Trump turned himself from a gossip-pages fixture and reality show star into a political figure by becoming the nation’s foremost advocate of the racist “birther” theory which said that Barack Obama was not in fact an American citizen. Then he announced his presidential run with an ugly speech claiming that immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” and that the threat originated from non-white countries around the world.

There has barely been a day since when Trump was not working to destroy America’s commitment to pluralism, to not only make the country whiter by deporting and restricting immigration from non-white immigrants, but by dismantling any systems and programs that might even acknowledge racism, let alone ameliorate it. And here’s what he posted to Truth Social on Saturday:

On the left you see the president with his third wife, a model from Slovenia who somehow managed to acquire a green card on the exclusive EB-1 program, informally known as the “Einstein visa” since it is reserved for immigrants of extraordinary ability. On the right you see Abdul El-Sayed with his American-born wife, a psychiatrist from Michigan.

You’ll also notice that just as Republicans refer to “Barack Hussein Obama” when they want to make the former president sound alien and threatening, the party has decided in its official communications to use Abdul El-Sayed’s full name when referring to him. And while they deny that the purpose is to play on hate and fear, they can’t be bothered to come up with a plausible alternate explanation.

This new forthrightness about their efforts to promote hate is something of a reversal from a historical trajectory Republicans were on before Trump took over their party.

It was decades ago that GOP strategist Lee Atwater explained how the party’s language had moderated over time, from using the N-word to referring instead to “forced busing” and “states’ rights,” to “welfare queens.” The objective — activating racism to win votes — was the same, but the tools were altered to adapt to changes in the broader culture.

That evolution was necessary not only because of what had become socially unacceptable for candidates and parties to say, but because of a realization that voters needed to justify their own decisions to themselves. Do your race-baiting with a bit of subtlety, and voters would reject Democrats on racial grounds but tell themselves it was really about their concern for substantive issues — as though Willie Horton was just about criminal justice policy.

But there is no subtlety in the Trump era.

Just as his is a proudly white supremacist administration, MAGA Republicans are now saying straightforwardly that Muslims are not real Americans and no Muslims should be allowed to hold public office.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who is currently running for governor and favored to win, has said that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” When Mayor Mamdani hosted a Ramadan celebration, Tuberville posted a picture of the event alongside a shot of the 9/11 attacks, and captioned it “the enemy is inside the gates.”

Rep. Brandon Gill posted a picture of the Ramadan gathering and called it “Stomach churning. Truly repulsive.”

It goes on.

Earlier this year, Rep. Randy Fine of Florida tweeted “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X in March that “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” Asked about it, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that while Ogles had deployed “a different language than I would use,” nevertheless “there’s a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Shariah law in America is a serious problem.”

Johnson knows perfectly well that no one is trying to impose Sharia law on the United States, but built into this kind of hate-mongering is the idea that American Muslims are not really American, but are attempting to force an alien ideology on the rest of us. As Rep. Nancy Mace, who recently lost a bid to become South Carolina governor, tweeted last week, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

Late last year, far-right Republicans in the House formed the Sharia-Free America Caucus; it now claims at least 60 members. The recent Republican primary season in Texas turned into a frenzy of hatemongering in which conservative Republicans accused each other of being insufficiently hostile to Muslims in the state.

At a moment when the GOP’s leader is spectacularly unpopular and the public is losing whatever faith it might have had in its ability to govern effectively (especially on the economy), significant portions of the party clearly believe that fomenting anti-Muslim bigotry can help them mitigate their losses in the midterms.

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Does this stuff still work?

If he is elected, Abdul El-Sayed would be the first Muslim to serve in the United States Senate.

While a small number of Muslims have been elected to the House, they all hail from heavily Democratic districts, so they don’t offer much insight into how a Muslim candidate’s religion will affect their ability to win statewide. Obviously, there is plenty of prejudice still around — but it’s far more prevalent among Republican voters, most of whom won’t be voting for any Democrat.

One illustrative campaign just occurred in the closely divided 8th district of Michigan. One candidate, a Navy veteran, seemed on a glide path to the nomination when not only did he get President Trump’s endorsement, his opponent suspended his campaign. Trouble was, the Trump-endorsed candidate was named Amir Hassan, and the guy who all but dropped out was named Tom Smith. Despite no longer campaigning, Smith won 50 percent of the vote to Hassan’s 33 percent. Hassan is a Christian; it’s hard to believe he would have gotten Trump’s endorsement otherwise. But his name was clearly too much to overcome.

In that House primary, most voters had likely barely heard of the candidates, which will not be the case with Abdul El-Sayed. It would be foolish to assume that El-Sayed’s name won’t carry a penalty, but how big of one is unclear. One 2024 poll from the University of Maryland found that 57 percent of Republicans said they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim presidential candidate they agreed with on the issues, compared to 27 percent of independents and 16 percent of Democrats. But the combination of El-Sayed’s charisma and the fact that his populist message is perfectly timed for this moment may mean that he can overcome the hurdle.

There is also a possibility that the Republicans’ blatant bigotry will backfire on them — not among bigots, but among voters who are both uncomfortable with Muslims and uncomfortable with the idea that they’d vote against a candidate just because he’s a Muslim. If Republicans make the racism of their appeal impossible to ignore, at least some of those conflicted voters may react against the GOP’s campaign and convince themselves that El-Sayed is “one of the good ones,” and they can support him at least this once.

This campaign is the latest expression of the right’s eagerness to reject American pluralism — and their faith that the majority of voters share that goal and will respond to appeals to bigotry. They certainly have reason to believe that what worked before can work again. And they can be counted on to go too far — so far that even some voters who might otherwise have supported them are repulsed.

It’s worth noting that in the deep-red district in Tennessee he represents, Andy Ogles just lost his own primary to another Republican, one who is plenty conservative but not so flamboyantly bigoted. So while a Muslim name may carry a penalty, so does acting too much like Donald Trump.

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Last week, the Washington Post published a devastating account of internal conflict within the administration.

President Trump, the Post said, was furious at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had failed to inform him about a dangerous shortfall of munitions. Those shortfalls limit options for engagement in the current, grindingly endless, and pointless war with Iran. They also threaten US interests elsewhere — most notably in Ukraine.

In public, though, Trump has not reprimanded Hegseth, or, God forbid, fired his smug and useless posterior.

Instead, Trump praised Hegseth’s allegedly “extraordinary” work and raged at the Washington Post for reporting on his failures. On Truth Social, he bellowed that the story was false because “the US has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types.”

Somewhat contradictorily, Trump also attacked “’leakers of these treasonous statements” who he said would be “hunted down” and thrown in jail.

So is the story false, or did someone treasonously leak it? Trump can’t keep his own lies straight, not that he cares.

A was the case during covid, Trump’s main concern is not to actually fix problems, but to prevent anyone from pointing out that they exist. He divides the world into good people who flatter him and evil people who don’t. Whatever irritation he expresses with Hegseth in private, he knows his sycophantic defense secretary is fully on team flattery, and that’s all that really matters.

The cupboards are bare

Keeping up with the demand for missiles in various conflicts has long been a struggle; shipments to Ukraine were delayed under President Biden because of concerns about depleting US stockpiles.

Trump’s war, though, has exacerbated the situation badly, and analysts have been worried for months because the US has depleted stores of key weapons.

In late April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was already warning that in the conflict with Iran the US had expended more than half its pre-war inventory for munitions used in long-range ground attacks and air and missile defense. Now Reuters reports the “US has used ‘virtually all’ its long-range precision missiles.”

This is not a short term or easily resolvable crisis, because these missiles cannot be produced quickly. The Pentagon has asked Congress for a massive appropriations request — a record $1 trillion. But the war is extremely unpopular and it’s unclear whether the budget can pass.

Even if the Pentagon gets all the money it wants, weapons manufacturing takes time. A CSIS report suggested it would take three years to restore crucial weapons systems to pre-war levels. That would be well into the presidency of Trump’s successor.

To the extent that Trump has a strategy in Iran, the missile shortages have already undermined it. The US had counted on its ability to destroy Iranian missile and drone attacks against ships and against Israel and other countries in the region. But Iran has become better at avoiding interceptors. That, the depleted stockpiles, and the apparently endless engagement have eroded US capacity.

According to The Atlantic, defense officials say that “even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best.” This limits Trump’s ability to escalate since, “if the US were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.”

Without the requisite munitions, the US can’t intercept those Iranian attacks. Trump hoped to wear Iran down, but instead, thanks to Trump’s recklessness idiocy, the US has backed itself into a corner.

Nor is the strategic collapse limited to Iran. Ukraine uses US Patriot air defense systems to intercept Russian ballistic missile attacks. But the US has burned up those Patriots and other munitions in its war of choice. That means fewer missiles are available for Ukraine, and that in turn means more Russian missiles are pummeling Kyiv.

The BBC reported that Ukrainian missile interceptions have fallen to 44.4 percent this year from 66.7 percent in 2025. This coincides with a spike in Ukrainian civilian casualties. Last week, after a Russian attack killed 17 Ukrainians, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media that “ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today. It is very important that our partners understand that delays in supplying them, or an unwillingness to provide anti-ballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction.”

But when Trump was asked about Zelenskyy’s call for more aid, he responded with his usual gracelessness, saying “we want missiles too.”

The munitions crisis has also affected US policy in the Pacific. In May, the US paused arms sales to Taiwan in order to horde missiles for the Iran War. China certainly noticed. According to the New York Times, some analysts believe South Korea and Japan may start to explore nuclear weapons since the US can no longer supply a conventional deterrent.

“Cannot overstate the unreality of this situation,” political science professor and national security expert Elizabeth Saunders wrote on social media. “We are losing a war. Trump has rotted out the middle rungs out of the US escalation ladder so that his options are humiliating defeat or (likely futile) massive escalation. The stockpile problem affects allies/partners all over the world.”

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Getting mad that people noticed

As the US security position deteriorates across the globe, Trump is, of course, laser focused on whining and blaming the press.

Again, Trump personally declared the US has a lot of some missiles (which is true and also beside the point). He also called those in the administration who talked to the press about the shortfalls “treasonous.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called accounts of Trump lambasting Hegseth “FAKE NEWS” and insisted that “I was at Camp David with President Trump and Secretary Hegseth. This literally never happened.” Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the reports of weapons shortages and of tension between Hegseth and Trump “equally fictional.”

Trump also rushed to social media to insist that Camp David was a paradise of amity.

“I am extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing,” the president said on Truth Social, insisting that anyone who said otherwise was “spreading false and completely unfounded rumors.”

These protestations are a lot less comforting than Trump seems to think they are, since at this point anyone who has any confidence in Hegseth is a fool. The defense secretary should have been fired in March 2025 when he was caught using Signal group chats to share military attack plans. He should have been fired for pushing for war with Iran without, apparently, considering the possibility that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz. He should be fired for failing to provide sufficient food for sailors on the aircraft USS Lincoln. He should be fired for being a sexist asshole who refuses to promote women.

Trump likes Hegseth, though, because he looks good on TV — or as Trump said, “If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick him to play my lead.”

And Trump likes Hegseth because Hegseth is willing to tell him what he wants to hear. If Trump wants to invade Iran and drops lots of bombs, Hegseth assures him that invading Iran will be cool and manly and the bombs will go boom. If Trump wants to hear that the war in Iran is not like Iraq and won’t go on forever, Hegseth happily trots out in front of the camera and says the war “is not Iraq” and “is not endless.”

Trump is accustomed to surrounding himself with sycophants whose only skill is assuring Trump that Trump is the greatest. More, Trump is accustomed to relentlessly refusing to absorb or understand anything that contradicts his own fantasies of his own overweening awesomeness. Trump, in the mind of Trump, is always triumphing over unfair treatment, always executing flawless and brilliant phone calls and stratagems, always launching beautiful and perfect wars. Thus his hatred of the carping journalists who point out that outside his skull there exists a real pandemic, a real election, a real war.

But the sad truth is that when cannot lie your way into magical missile production. Unlike Republican voters and senators, adversaries like Russia, Iran, and China are not especially dazzled by Trump’s oozing narcissistic wounds. Trump may well fire Hegseth at some point, as he’s fired other bootlickers in hopes of a polling bump. But that won’t bring back the missiles spent on his useless war of choice.

Trump’s priority is his ego first with national security coming in a very, very, very distant second. That’s why he already lost the Iran war — and that’s why instead of cutting his losses, he’s pointlessly depleting US munitions supplies, leaving the country unprepared for future threats.

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On the same day his company won a $1.6 billion contract with the US military, Elon Musk’s political action committee announced it would spend $100 million to help Republicans win the November midterms.

In previous eras of American politics, such a development might have caused even some Republicans to question whether the billion dollar taxpayer payout to Musk’s SpaceX and the surge of campaign cash to help their party win an election was a quid pro quo. In the waning years of the Trump era, however, it was simply a Wednesday.

Musk needs government money to keep his company afloat. Donald Trump needs Republicans to win in November so they can retain power in Congress and stop Democrats from impeaching him. This is the very simple anatomy of how government operates under Trump: give him money and he will help you. Don’t give him money and he will harm you.

The nation’s largest companies are dumping cash into Trump’s various political action committees and helping to fund his ever-increasing portfolio of renovation projects in and around Washington DC. In return, those companies are benefitting from massive government contracts, favorable policy decisions from the Trump administration and the federal agencies it controls, and even Trump’s public pumping of stocks that he himself is invested in.

The line from giving Trump money to receiving favorable treatment from his administration is straight and short, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“If a company encounters an issue with the federal government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported on July 30.

The private sector money flowing into Trump’s vanity projects is also costing taxpayers. His ballroom is funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as well as private donations. In this way, we’re all forced to fund Trump’s corruption.

A Public Notice-American Doom analysis shows that Trump is spending nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund his many renovation projects. Meanwhile, Trump and his family’s digital currency companies have raked in more than $2.25 billion during Trump’s second term, including as much as $600 million from foreign interests, according to Democrats. Trump’s foreign licensing business has also exploded, bringing in $61 million last year alone. Another $50 billion in taxpayer dollars has gone to government contractors who are helping to fund Trump’s ballroom, Sen. Chris Murphy said last month when he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump administration corruption.

But the true cost to taxpayers for Trump’s construction projects — as well as the historic profiting off his presidency — are likely much higher than is currently known.

The values of mining deals tied to Trump family companies in Kazakhstan and North Carolina could be massive, if not entirely known. Taxpayers are helping to fund a mining operation in North Carolina benefitting a company tied to Donald Trump Jr., thanks to a $1.4 billion loan and contract with the Defense Department. Companies tied to Trump’s sons are also benefitting from roughly $1.6 billion in loans for a Kazakh mining operation that the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are also profiting from.

These are just a pair examples of corrupt deals made by Trump and his family whose profits simply aren’t known publicly. There’s also Trump Jr.’s investment company, 1789 Capital, which has seen unheard-of returns of 200 percent on investments in AI and defense companies benefitting from government contracts. In the past few years, the value of assets managed by 1789 has exploded, from a few hundred million dollars to more than $3 billion.

In addition to the $2.25 billion Trump and his family have made off digital assets and the $61 million in foreign licensing deals, a conservative estimate for the Trump family’s profits and asset growth in the first two years of Trump’s second term is around $5 billion, according to a Public Notice-American Doom analysis.

Democrats are now planning to dig into the Trump administration’s runaway corruption. Last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the formation of a working group to investigate Trump administration profiteering. The hint of accountability emanating from the possibility that Democrats will take power in the House (and maybe even the Senate) is part of the reason Trump is so aggressively pushing the SAVE America Act and other anti-voting measures.

“If people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself, then I fear there is no going back,” Sen. Murphy said last month, when he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump administration corruption. “The White House will just become a place to get rich.”

Trump himself has openly admitted he has made no effort to separate his private business interests from his presidency. Asked by the New York Times in January why he has continued his private dealmaking during his second term, Trump claimed that Americans simply don’t care.

“Because I found out that nobody cared,” Trump said. “I’m allowed to.”

Endless money pits

Trump’s ballroom (which suffered a setback in court yesterday) is costing taxpayers the most out of his many projects. Estimates vary, but taxpayers could be on the hook for as much as $800 million to complete the ballroom, bunker, and “drone port” that Trump says will be part of the complex.

Combined with other construction and vanity projects, our analysis shows Trump is spending as much as $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Trump’s spending includes:

• $250 million on the Kennedy Center

• $60 million for his White House UFC event

• $58 million for city fountains

• $40 million for a planned “Garden of American Heroes” at the West Potomac Park

• $17 million for renovations to Lafayette Park near the White House

• $16 million for the reflecting pool

• $7.5 million for Eisenhower Executive Office building

• $26 million for new exhibits and upgrades at the Lincoln Memorial

• $5.1 million for re-gilding of Washington statues

• $2 million for renovations to the Rose Garden

• $1.3 million for renovations to the White House West Colonnade, including $689,000 to import and install African granite

• $400 million to retrofit the new Air Force One, gifted from the Qatari government, with even more spent on pilot training equipment as well as an unknown amount of taxpayer funding from classified budgets

This $1.8 billion is simply the known cost to taxpayers for projects to feed Trump’s ego. The cost of the proposed Arc de Trump, the East Potomac Golf Course renovations, gold gilding and glued-on gold wall accents all over the Oval Office, as well as renovations to multiple rooms at the White House and columns there are not currently known.

In addition to costing taxpayers billions of dollars, many of Trump’s projects are also funded by private donors, adding yet another layer of corruption to the record profits he’s making as president.

Trump initially claimed the new White House ballroom would cost $200 million. That quickly changed to $400 million before the Washington Post found in June that the ballroom was estimated to cost $600 million, with over half paid for by taxpayers. The rest of the money has come from private donors taking advantage of a historic opportunity to fund a presidential legacy project while simultaneously having policy interests overseen by the Trump administration. In other words, a bribe.

Among the 37 donors funding Trump’s ballroom are the country’s biggest tech companies: Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google, as well as the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Palantir, crypto companies, law firms, and the global manufacturing giant, Caterpillar. Trump claimed in October that the ballroom is being “paid for 100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”

Donations to Trump’s ballroom have paid off: since giving Trump an unspecified amount of money, ballroom donors have benefitted from $50 billion in federal contracts, according to Sen. Murphy.

Private profits from public money

As Trump has blown $1.8 billion on construction projects, he’s also been busy profiting off the presidency through stock purchases that reek of insider trading, foreign licensing deals, crypto sales, and even the stocking of Trump wine and cider in stores run by the Coast Guard.

While it’s not known how much Trump has truly made during his second term, Democrats estimate the range of profits to be from $2.25 billion to nearly $10 billion. Trump’s foreign licensing business also reportedly made $61 million in 2025, a 900 percent growth since 2023.

Trump began this year by purchasing as much as $5 million in Dell Computer stock. In May, the Department of Defense awarded the company a $9.7 billion contract to provide software to the military — directly benefitting Trump’s sprawling investment portfolio. Trump has repeatedly urged Americans to buy stock in Dell, occasionally causing the company’s value to spike.

Trump’s investments in Dell are among a stunning 21,000 individual trades made by him during his first year in office. Trump and White House officials regularly claim that his investment portfolio is managed by a “blind trust,” but that’s not the case. Instead, Trump’s sons have control over his investments.

Trump has said that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. can’t be blamed if they make trades on his behalf with the benefit of insider knowledge thanks to their proximity to the president.

“Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they want to buy, you know, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information,” Trump said following news of his historic second-term profits came out in June. “So it’s pretty tough in that sense.”

One of Trump’s brokerage accounts also purchased between $15 and $50 million worth of stock in TKO Holdings, UFC’s parent company. The purchase was made in March, two weeks after the fight card was revealed for the UFC Freedom 250 fights on the White House lawn, and three months before the event took place. TKO president and COO Mark Shapiro called the event “the greatest earned marketing tool of all time.”

Purchasing and pumping stocks for companies that have business with or are regulated by the federal government is par for the course in Trump’s White House. Immigration hardliner and senior White House official Stephen Miller is directly profiting off the massive expansion of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdowns through his investment in Palantir. Miller, who constantly pushes to make life harder for immigrants, owns as much as $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, which in 2025 was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE.

Trump is also making money off his draconian immigration policies, owning stock in both GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s two largest private prison companies who have seen profits soar thanks to contracts with ICE and other immigration agencies.

Trump’s sons are also profiting from the public money that funds government contracts. Companies that the Trump boys have invested in have, within a short time of those investments, been awarded government contracts worth more than $6 billion. Trump himself has been helping out his sons with their schemes, intervening to ensure that a company in which Eric and Don Jr. are invested was awarded a $620 million Pentagon loan.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has also been busy making incredibly well-timed investments in AI and defense sector stocks whose value has tripled in mere months, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company run by Eric and Don Jr., pocketed $187 million after selling a 49 percent stake to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a UAE government official and brother of the country’s president. The sale took place just days before Trump’s inauguration, raising ethics concerns among both Republicans and Democrats. The deal also scored $31 million for the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who are co-founders of World Liberty.

If these deals weren’t enough, there’s more conflicts of interest to be had: the $5 billion in on-paper wealth accumulated by World Liberty in recent years is propped up by a $2 billion investment from convicted Chinese money launderer Changpeng Zhao. Upon taking office, Trump pardoned Zhao of his crimes, which allowed the crypto platform Binance to become a hotbed of money laundering activity for the international criminal set.

The next generation is getting in on the grift as well: both Trump and Lutnick’s sons are profiting from a $1 billion mining deal with Kazakhstan after their fathers helped to secure the agreement in September. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that overshadow his dual roles as private sector real estate developer and White House peace negotiator.

With Trump’s corruption so blatant, Democrats have framed at least some of their midterm messaging around holding the president accountable.

Democratic senators have already begun laying the groundwork for congressional investigations into Trump’s corruption in 2027, with Schumer and Sen. Alex Padilla introducing legislation that would create a federal agency called the “Anti-Corruption Bureau” to investigate corruption by the executive branch. The law would also allow for states and individuals to sue to recover money earned through corruption committed by presidents, executive branch officials, and government contractors. (The bill faces long odds even if Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in November.)

In promoting the legislation, Padilla said he favored the creation of an entire government agency to address Trump’s corruption instead of special counsels, like those used in the wake of Watergate and other presidential scandals, because Trump’s corruption is so vast.

“Watergate was about a president trying to hide corrupt activity,” Padilla said in remarks on July 30. “Donald Trump isn’t trying to hide his corruption, like Richard Nixon was — far worse, he’s normalizing it, or trying to. He and people around him are trying to convince the American public, this is just how it is.”

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